Some Fatherly Advice

My dad has taught me a lot. Some of his best teachings have been the less serious lessons.

Jun 15, 2025

When I was in fifth grade, my teacher assigned our class a straightforward writing assignment. All the boys were tasked with writing about a man who inspired them, and all the girls were to do the same except with a woman. Our teacher told us she would then hang the essays around the room for our middle school’s open house, which was a night when students brought their families to see what they had accomplished throughout the year.

As a ten-year-old boy, the most important thing in my life at the time was Little League baseball. The year was 2008, which was also the apogee of Major League Baseball’s Steroid Era. As a pre-teen, I hardly understood what steroids were, but I knew that cheating was bad and many of my favorite baseball players were being accused of taking steroids to cheat.

Not Albert Pujols, though. Arguably the best position player of the 2000s, Pujols was in the midst of his second Most Valuable Player award-winning season when Mrs. Hanley told me to write about a male source of inspiration. He was also squeaky clean, subject to not even a whisper of impropriety at the time.1 The dots practically connected themselves in my fifth-grade brain.

Imagine my surprise when, on open house night, nearly all the other boys in my class had written about their fathers or grandfathers. My mother was aghast, chastising me when we got home for not also writing about my dad. To my recollection, Dad was unfazed, but he graciously reads all my posts and will be sure to let me know how he felt at the time — or if he even remembers this incident.

My logic at the time was simple: of course my dad was a source of inspiration. He was — and is — a pretty great father! But, I figured, writing about your dad as your male role model was too obvious, too direct. Mrs. Hanley surely wanted us to wrack our tiny, undeveloped brains for creative responses like Albert Pujols.

In retrospect, it is clear that even as a ten-year-old, I was prone to overthinking things. But in the many years since, Dad has continued to serve as a role model and source of inspiration, while I stopped watching baseball once I was old enough to play other sports because baseball is, frankly, quite boring. Take that, Pujols.

Many of the lessons I have learned from Dad are fundamental to how I view myself and my goals for myself. As my mom suffered through the many ups and eventually continuous downs of life with cancer, not once did my dad waver in his commitment to his wife and his kids. Despite growing up in an era where mental illness was stigmatized if it was acknowledged at all, my dad has made a continuous effort to understand and support me through my various struggles with anxiety and depression.

My very understanding of what manhood means stems directly from my dad. The fact that this is such a positive is something I grow more appreciative of each time the “manosphere” discourse begins anew on social media and I realize how many young men are aimless at best, wayward followers of scumbags like Andrew Tate at worst.

But Dad is also the source of numerous lighthearted principles to live by, edicts which may not rise to the level of “how to be a man” but are no less fundamental to how I live my life. In honor of Father’s Day, I am sharing three of these lessons with you all to enjoy.

If you can’t poke fun at yourself, you aren’t living life the right way

My mom always said that the first thing that attracted her to dad was how he could make her laugh. This was a role he took seriously. As in many families, we have a lot of running jokes about each other. Many of those related to Dad concern his long-standing near-baldness and his Boomer-tier names for technology and pop culture.

But while my siblings and I are liable to lash out at one another the moment we feel as though a joke at our expense has moved from funny to played out, Dad never complains. Instead, he leans into the humor, making us all laugh when he continues to refer to our family group chat as happening on “The WhatsApp” despite knowing the correct name or disarming us with bald jokes that top anything the four of us have come up with ourselves.

And Dad is also a strong proponent of prop humor, having never once turned down an opportunity to pose for a goofy photo. He is quick to don the silliest headwear available if he thinks it will make one of us smile.

My dad wearing a turkey hat in Wegmans — A photo I received unprompted a few Thanksgivings ago.

This is a man who knows when it is time to be serious, and when it is time to be silly. Everyone he has ever made laugh is better for it.

Video games are a valid hobby

I cannot remember a time in my life without video games. My dad had owned Nintendo systems since his college days, and the first console I played on was his Nintendo 64.

As I grew older and developed a video game taste of my own, I branched out and used money saved from doing yard work around the neighborhood to buy my first console, the Xbox 360. By this point, it had been about 15 years since the N64 was released. Dad could have opted out of learning a new console or limited his exposure to the occasional virtual football game in Madden and no one would have second-guessed his decisions.

A few weeks after buying my Xbox 360, I was doing my homework one night and heard the sounds of Spartans dying over and over to Elites in Halo 3: ODST. I opened my bedroom door, mouth half-open in a pre-yell at who I assumed was my younger brother messing with my save file. Instead, I was greeted by my dad, who grinned at my sheepishly and told me he was having a hard time figuring out how the grenades worked.

His skills improved over time, and he went on to play through a lot of the Halo campaigns on his own, sharing updates with me as he made halting progress. Whether he played these games because he enjoyed them or because he thought it would bring him closer to me and my siblings matters far less than how he demonstrated to me from childhood that there is no age limit on your hobbies. You simply change how you engage with them as you age.

There is always time for a baked good

My family group chat has a running thread where we share snack announcements shared in our workplaces. Emails about retirement parties, vendor showcases featuring catered lunch, and board meetings complete with pastry carts are exchanged back and forth in an effort to see who gets the best free snacks at their job.

This practice started with our dad, who makes sure to never turn down the opportunity for a baked good or three. And while I may have developed a refined donut palette, Dad’s taste in sweets is both wide and deep. He can steer you to the best places in Syracuse for cannoli, baklava, or cookies without batting an eye.

A few years ago, my dad decided he wanted to get in shape. He threw himself into exercise and eating well with aplomb, often working out twice in the same day. And while he adjusted his diet to match his newfound love of exercise, he still shares screenshots of exciting office catering opportunities with us. In my dad’s eyes, the world has so many pastries to offer us, it would be a shame not to try them all.

Love you, Dad. I hope you have a tasty pastry or two to celebrate today.

Things I Recommend This Week

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We’re Really Just Going Through With All This, Aren’t We | Aftermath
Exposing the Honey Influencer Scam | MegaLag (YouTube)
If We Were in Hell, Would We See More Children Burn Than We See in Gaza? | Forever Wars
Stefon Diggs Fixed Buffalo Before We Could Fix Him | Defector

Happy Father’s Day to all the dads and father figures in your lives. What are some of the smaller lessons you have taken away from your own dads? Let me know in the comments.