A new breed of dad

Millennial fathers have different priorities than the fathers that came before them

Father and Son, Linghui Wang | Courtesy: BoldBrush

“How many people do you think are out here? 50 at best,” said a dad friend of mine as we stood on the frozen river watching our kids learn to skate on the bumpy, snow dusted ice. “There are 140,000 people in this city. What are they all doing? Inside watching football?”

“It’s the playoffs, so ya. Probably,” I laughed in response.

All around us fathers and mothers (but mostly fathers) were playing on the ice with their children; some as young as two, some in their early adult years. Off to the side, children enjoyed the fire we started by roasting marshmallows on sticks they pulled off felled trees. A couple of our half-empty beer cans were stuffed into the snow on an embankment to keep them cold as we skated. Geese and mallards flew overhead like an airshow of fowls. It was a wintry afternoon straight out of a movie. The type of scene that people would watch and lament that life used to be so beautiful.

We’re not perfect fathers. None of us are. But perhaps more than any living generation of fathers, millennial fathers are most aware of how important their role is in the lives of their children. Millennial fathers — at least the ones I hang around — are more interested in being great fathers than anything else in life. In the case of almost all of these fathers, they came from broken homes, homes with absent fathers, homes with angry fathers, homes with emasculated fathers, or homes with a smattering of any of the above.

We’ve known for some time that want to be better fathers.

What does that mean though?

Well, it’s mostly a reordering of priorities. You could also call it moderation.

We’re OK with watching sports, but not all day.
We’re OK with working overtime, but not regularly.
We’re OK with driving to work, but we don’t want to drive far.
We’re OK with going for drinks, but only after the kids are in bed.
We’re OK with eating out, but we place a high value on at-home family meals.
We’re OK with our kids playing sports, but we don’t care if they take it seriously.

There are things we’re far less OK with as well. Crippling debt, a big home for the sake of having a big home, and how a two car and two income household is seen as a given.

You can summarise all of these points by saying the millennial father’s highest priority is the welfare of his family.

I’m painting with a broad brush here, I realise that. Every generation has had great fathers and this generation has horrible fathers. I get how averages and outliers work. My point is that there is something different about large swaths of millennial fathers and I am sure this trend will continue— and improve — with Gen Z and Gen Alpha fathers as well.

The millennial father also seems to understand that he has the mandate to lead his family. If you get yourself involved with men at your church or in your town or city, you will quickly realise there are thousands of men in your community who are working with one another to be leaders in their home and they’re doing it quietly.

Take this Instagram Reel as an example:

The Homer Simpsonification of the modern father is dead.

Maybe this new breed of father is the obvious result of the spike in divorces in the 1980s and 1990s (when we were children) combined with the affordability crisis of the modern era.

It created a whole generation of young men who despised divorce and didn’t see the sense in missing their childrens’ lives because of work or getting drunk. Money and lust and hedonism lost their appeal and instead, we focused on being the best fathers we can be. A blow to GDP but a win for humanity.

We have so much work to do, make no mistake. A Sisyphean task if there was any, especially in the current climate of global chaos in which we live. But this is the whole hard times make strong men meme playing out in front of us. Our beloved plastic army toys of yesteryear have been replaced by a new soldier: a man in khakis and a three-quarter zip holding his children in his arms while his wife rests her head on his shoulder. Luckily for us, there’s never been a stronger, more capable soldier in any war, ever.

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It was G.K. Chesterton who wrote, “The most extraordinary thing in the world is an ordinary man and an ordinary woman and their ordinary children.” My only goal with Smell the Roses is to capture the sentiment of that quote in everything I write and share. If that piques your interest, please consider subscribing.