Happy Sunday, dads.
Andrew here. I’ve been thinking about something lately that’s a little uncomfortable.
How is it that I can be patient in a meeting, focused on a problem, helpful to someone who needs me, and completely composed when something goes sideways at work…
…and then walk into my own house with half the patience and twice the irritation?
I can explain something three times at work without losing it. Handle pressure. Solve problems. Laugh with people even during a stressful day.
Then I get home, somebody asks me the same question three times, there’s noise everywhere, something spills, and suddenly my patience has a two-minute expiration date.
Not because my family did anything wrong, but because they got me after everybody else already took a piece.
Work got the focus. Clients got the patience. Problems got the energy. The gym got the discipline. And by the time I walked through the door, the people I care about most were sometimes getting whatever was left.
That’s a hard thing to admit. But I also think a lot of dads know exactly what I mean.
There’s a version of you that exists out in the world that your kids might not always get to see. The calm one. The patient one. The guy who finds another gear when something important needs to get done.
Your kids don’t know how good you were in that meeting today. They only know the version of Dad who walked through the door.
This week isn’t about pretending you can give everyone 100% of you all day long. You can’t. It’s about paying attention to where your best energy is going, and making sure your family isn’t consistently living on the leftovers.
Let’s get into it.
And if you’re new here, welcome to The Dadder Dispatch. You picked a good weekend to show up.
This week’s pillar is Strength. But not the kind that means pushing harder, doing more, or pretending you’re never tired.
Sometimes strength is knowing what’s draining you before you walk through the door. Sometimes it’s having enough control over yourself to sit beside your kid in a hard moment without immediately trying to fix it.
If we’re talking about giving our families more than whatever we have left, that starts with being more intentional about what gets our energy in the first place, and how we use it when the people we love need us.
Today, take a 24-hour break from one non-essential screen activity. Social media. News. Streaming. Games. Pick one and go 24 hours without it. Not all screens. One specific activity. Then pay attention to what fills the space.
Maybe you read. Walk. Have an actual conversation. Maybe you get bored long enough for your brain to come up with something better to do. A lot of us say we’re drained by the end of the day without noticing how much energy we’ve handed over in five-minute chunks to things we never consciously chose. Today, one of those things doesn’t get a piece of you.
Today, when your kid struggles with something, whether it’s a game they lost, a task that didn’t go well, or just a bad moment, don’t rush them through the recovery. Don’t immediately tell them how to fix it. Don’t hit them with “you’re fine” because you want the hard feeling to disappear. Sit with them in it. Let them be disappointed. Frustrated. Angry. Whatever they need to feel.
Then, when they’re ready, help them think about what comes next. One of the strongest things you can do as a dad is resist the urge to make every uncomfortable moment disappear. Recovery is a skill. Today, you teach it by staying beside them while they practice it.
The DadderUp app drops a fresh Dad Flex daily, built for the kind of dad who doesn’t wait for the new year to level up. Download it and start tomorrow.
From our conversation with Bret Suffis, president and owner of Lil Athlete Sports, a youth sports program built around helping kids develop confidence, teamwork, and a love for play.
Bret and I got into something that every working dad probably knows a little too well: trying to be Dad and the guy responsible for everything else at the exact same time.
Bret has four kids, runs a business, coaches, and spends a lot of time on fields and sidelines. His approach is to create actual windows for work. He’ll answer emails and texts before the kids are up or after they go to sleep, especially when he knows there’s a game or something important later in the day.
Because once you start blending everything together, it gets messy fast. Trust me, I know that firsthand.
I told Bret about being at one of my daughter’s soccer games, getting a work call, taking it, and missing her goal. And that’s the tension. If I ignore the call, maybe I lose the business. If I take it, I might miss a moment with my daughter that I don’t get back.
For a long time, I called my solution “organized chaos.” Be at the game, take the calls, handle the work, watch the kids, somehow keep all the plates spinning.
But here’s the problem with organized chaos: sometimes you’re technically doing everything while not really giving your best to anything.
You’re half on the work call. You’re half watching the game. And both sides are getting a watered-down version of you.
Bret’s advice was simple: have a time and a place for everything. When you know your kid has something that afternoon, get ahead of the work in the morning when you can. Create the space instead of hoping the space magically appears.
That doesn’t mean work stops being demanding. It doesn’t mean you’ll never have to take the call. It means you stop treating your family like they automatically get whatever energy survives the rest of your day.
The strongest version of you isn’t the guy who somehow does everything at once. Sometimes it’s the guy who decides what deserves all of him right now.
“Why is it that I can keep my cool with clients and coworkers all day, but the smallest thing my kids do can set me off when I get home?”
— Mike, dad of two, DadderUp community
I think part of the answer is that you’ve been using that patience all day.
At work, you’re regulating yourself constantly. A client says something frustrating, you stay professional. A meeting runs long, you deal with it. Somebody makes a mistake, you figure it out. There are consequences to losing your cool, so you find a way to keep it together. Then you get home.
You’re tired. Your brain has been making decisions for ten hours. You’re hungry. There’s noise. Somebody needs something from you before you’ve even put your stuff down. And the filter you’ve been using all day is running on fumes. That explains it. BUT, it doesn’t excuse it.
Because your kids don’t know that you handled twelve frustrating things really well before you walked through the door. They just know they asked Dad a question and he snapped at them.
One thing that’s helped me is recognizing that I need a transition between the two versions of myself. Even five or ten minutes can matter. Finish the call in the driveway. Take a few deep breaths. Change your clothes. Walk around the block. Whatever helps you mentally close one part of the day before walking into the next.
And on the days when you do lose your patience, own it. “I was tired, and I snapped at you. You didn’t deserve that. I’m sorry.” No excuse. No blaming them for being loud or asking the question at the wrong time. Just own your part and reset.
The goal isn’t to somehow arrive home every night completely recharged. That’s not real life. It’s to stop assuming the people who love you most should automatically absorb the version of you that everybody else wore out.
For a long time, I thought I was doing a pretty good job as a dad. I provided. I showed up. I loved my girls more than anything. In my head, that meant I was checking the important boxes. Then my oldest daughter called me out.
She told me I was on my phone so much that it made her feel like she and her sister weren’t worthy of my time. Like whatever was happening on that screen mattered more than they did. That one hurt. Because I wasn’t intentionally choosing my phone over my kids. But intention doesn’t change what they were experiencing.
I thought I was showing up as a great dad. My daughter was telling me there were parts of me she wasn’t getting. And once I was honest about that, I started looking at everything else.
Presence was an obvious one. I could physically be there while mentally being somewhere completely different. But strength was another.
I had spent so much time thinking, “I’m going to live my life for my daughters. I’m going to give them everything,” that somewhere along the way I started putting myself last. My health. My fitness. My energy. The things that actually help me show up as the dad I want to be.
That’s when I realized something. Living for your kids doesn’t mean running yourself into the ground for them. Because if you’re constantly depleted, distracted, unhealthy, or running on fumes, your kids eventually get that version of you too.
Becoming what I call a “real dad” started with being honest enough to look in the mirror and admit where I wasn’t doing as well as I thought I was. Not beating myself up. Not chasing perfect.
Just asking a harder question: Are my kids actually getting the best version of the dad I know I can be?
Sometimes the strongest thing you can do for your family is work on yourself first. Because taking care of yourself isn’t taking something away from your kids. It’s making sure there’s more of you left to give them.
What would help your family get a better version of you this week?
Bret and I get into the reality of trying to run a business, manage everything life throws at you, and still be fully there when it’s time to be Dad. We talk about why separating work time from family time matters, what happens when you try to give both your attention at once, and how patience, presence, and learning from failure show up both on the field and at home.
My daughter telling me how my phone use made her feel forced me to take a harder look at the version of myself my girls were actually getting. This is about the areas I realized I needed to work on, from presence to strength, and why taking care of yourself is part of showing up better for your kids.
We’ll keep showing up with the emails. All we ask? If this week made you think about which version of yourself your family gets at the end of the day, send it to a dad who might need the same reminder.
