If I Were a Boy Dad

Thoughts on raising a hypothetical son, plus a free gift for subscribers

Hi everyone! 👋 We’ll be into today’s main topic in a moment. But first…

It’s true that you’ll never truly be prepared for becoming a first-time parent.

Having said that, I’m a firm believer that candid, shared experiences and knowledge from real parents is invaluable in your preparation for life as a new mum or dad.

That’s why I’ve written a short ebook called 30 Things You Need to Know About Becoming a Parent—and it’s free to all subscribers of Some Other Dad!

Inside, you’ll get a whistle-stop tour of every aspect of first-time parenting: from planning to have a child, pregnancy, childbirth and beyond.

I don’t profess to be a qualified expert on parenting—I’m just a dad passionate about being open and honest about sharing my experiences about the ups and downs of parenting, and starting conversations that benefit us all.

I know some of you are already parents, so the advice in here will be like teaching you to suck eggs. But I really want to reach more new parents and parents-to-be with this ebook, and with this newsletter.

With that in mind, if you know anyone who falls into one of those two camps, why not share this with them? Better yet, use your referral code and when your friend signs up, you’ll get a month’s paid subscription!

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Now back to your regular programming!

I sat staring at the inky black swirls on the screen, as if I actually knew what I was looking at.

I was holding my wife’s hand, anticipating the news we’d been waiting for since those double lines had shown up about 20 weeks previously.

“All the anomaly scans are done; everything looks great,” the sonographer said.

“That’s great,” we said in that high inflection that’s asking subliminally for more. “Any idea about the gender?”

The sonographer gave us a knowing glance. “Let’s take a look,” she said. As if she doesn’t already know.

After a minute of pretend looking around, the proclamation comes.

“Those three lines there look like a vulva—it’s a girl.”

I was never one of those dads who was desperate to have a boy. In fact, I knew that I definitely wanted to have a girl—it felt as though it was written in our future.

Obviously you’re delighted with whatever you have (even though that’s not true for everyone), we always knew we’d have two kids; it’s just neither of us could see ourselves with two boys. So when our first was a girl, it was almost like the second was a free shot. I could genuinely say that I would be equally happy either way.

Coming out of the hospital after learning that I was a #girldad4lyfe was a maelstrom of emotions and feelings that took a couple of days to properly process.

I settled on this position: on one hand, I felt a little bit of grief. Every now and again I’d pictured what a little mini-me would look like. Seeing that vision of that little boy fade away like in Back to the Future made me a bit sad. On the other hand, I was relieved. My relationships with other males are complicated, and so the prospect of actually raising one filled me with a bit of dread pre-scan. But on the other other hand, in the days that followed what I thought was my closure on the issue, there was a small part of me that wondered…what if?

I’ve mentioned before (both in the first issue of Some Other Dad, and literally in the paragraph above), how I’ve struggled to develop and sustain meaningful friendships and connections with other males. A mix of lack of consistently present and positive male role models in my early years, some difficult experiences with a group of former friends in my teens, and having to mould myself into friendships with stereotypical “lads” just so I didn’t feel completely isolated in university have all contributed to a sense that with other men, I’ve never really found my tribe—and has left me wary of other males. This has a knock-on effect whenever I have to interact with other dads at the school gates, at the swings or by the snack table at a kid’s birthday party. More so, I’ve noticed it start to affect how I interact and perceive the behaviour of boys my daughter’s age.

Maybe it would have been beneficial for me to have had a son, to confront these hang-ups head on. But would that have been fair on the boy, who didn’t get a chance to choose a dad without this emotional baggage? Perhaps not; any child shouldn’t have to be an experiment for remedying their parents’ own personal issues.

You might be thinking at this point: Brad—you said you weren’t one of those dads who’s desperate for a son, so why are you writing about it?

I was at a kid’s birthday party last month; a little boy who’s the son of a family friend, and has regular play dates with our eldest. He’s a really lovely boy; innately kind, gentle and sensitive—traits which both his parents have done a great job of nurturing.

He starts out playing in the usual way with my daughter. But then, as he gets more involved with playing with some slightly older boys that I presume he knew through family, he starts playing rougher. Not that that’s a problem—believe me, my daughter’s a fucking scrapper in a play fight; she takes me down on a regular basis. So she holds her own with the rougher games they’re playing on the bouncy castle, even with boys a year older than her.

Then these two older boys start singling her out more. They snatch a party hat from her that she’s wearing. She thinks nothing of it and goes to do something else. When they drop it moments later, she picks it back up and comes over to show us it. At this point the boys—including my daughter’s usually mild-mannered friend—storm over, swarm around her and forcibly grab it from her, gleeful smiles on their face as they do it. Obviously this upsets my daughter greatly—and me.

As my daughter cried and we sat with her as she let out her feelings, I saw her friend glance over. Conflict was etched all over his young face, and it hit me right in the gut—because I know what that felt like. And honestly, I’ve got no clue how I would have reacted if that was my son getting swept up in behaviour like that, because it would have triggered me quite badly.

I’ve been the boy who‘s gone along with friends acting in a way that I would never have done if I was acting alone—but felt compelled to in order to keep up appearances, to fit in and not be seen as a wimp or a pussy. I don’t doubt for a second that this still happens to teenage boys today. I’ve come to learn through therapy that this denial of one’s authenticity is as commonplace as it is dangerous to one’s mental health and sense of self-worth.

You’ll no doubt have heard of the “bro code”—dress it up however you want, but it’s essentially an unwritten pact between a group of males to never divulge details of shitty behaviour exhibited by one or more of those involved. This was around when I was a teenager, and I still hear it parroted today when I eavesdrop on my wife watching Love Island. I don’t for one second think that this kind of toxicity is solely getting passed down by parents. So where does it come from?

I can’t help but conclude that misinformation and the numerous breeding grounds for misogyny dispersed across all corners of the internet are quite a bit to blame. A lot of things that teens see and interact with online are things that most parents won’t even know exist. I know from experience of MSN Messenger, MySpace and the early days Facebook that my parents didn’t have a clue what they were or who I was speaking to on them—and that’s not even touching on the various gaming forums I’d end up frequenting.

I know these grubby corners of the World Wide Web used to exist, so I can only imagine how many more there are now—and it doesn’t take a genius to work out who they’re targeted at, and what they’re talking about. Just look at how many of these banned subreddits discuss misogyny in some form or another. Then when you realise that the people spouting misinformation and hate online now have access to methods of viral marketing for spreading their bile, you start to fully understand the scale of the problem. It’s so hard to combat messages and content like this when you often can’t get to the impressionable boys who get to it first.

With all of this combined, being a parent of boys these days comes with a constantly evolving set of challenges. Given my own experiences growing up around other boys and knowing how peer pressure and not wanting to be seen to deviate from the prevailing groupthink at any point, I can see how easy it is for the type of misinformation, misogyny and hate spewing by people like Andrew Tate ends up on the algorithm’s or otherwise tolerant young boys.

Having been the type of kid that might have ended up in this kind of situation, I thought a lot about how I’d go about combatting this if I was the parent of a boy today. These are, for the most part, lessons I wish had been imparted to me.

My son would be made to feel as though every emotion was safe, necessary and normal to experience. There are no “good” and “bad” feelings, and speaking from my experience I feel that boys get told that the expression of sadness, for instance, is something that isn’t for them.

My son would not just be told about what equality meant; he would see it every day in action inside the home. I’ll speak until I’m blue in the face about the blueprints for parenthood that were written for us by our parents through their actions, rather than just their words.

My son would not experience the conscious division that took place in my childhood between girls and boys. He would hopefully come to understand through play that there are more that boys and girls have in common than not—and he would respect and understand whatever differences made themselves evident in the coming years.

My son would—like my daughters—learn that he is in charge of his own body, and likewise others are in charge of their own.

My son would know that the “bro code” is bullshit, and only exists to let shitty people get away with shitty behaviour. I would make sure they’re not afraid to call out other men when they’re in the wrong.

When I read the kind of falsehoods that teenage boys are hearing online and happily repeating to their parents, such as “58% of rape accusations are false” (the article claims this is more like 4-8% at the most), I worry what kind of male role models the boys that will be growing up around my daughters will have.

I hate the notion that girls and women have to adapt their behaviour—like avoiding certain parts of cities after dark and carrying keys clenched between their fists when walking alone—instead of men, like, not stalk, harass, assault, rape or murder women.

Having said that, something I’ve learned in therapy is that we can only affect things within our sphere of control. No matter how idealistic the lessons I’d teach my son are, they’re not my lessons to teach. It’s not for me to choose what the next generation of boys will be taught.

So instead, I will do two things. I will raise my daughters to breathe fire. They will know their voices, and will know how to speak out against injustice and wrongdoing. They won’t be cowed or silenced.

And they will speak with the authority of knowing what masculinity should look like, because I will endeavour to show them every single day. I’ll show them my emotions. I’ll own up when I fuck up. I’ll show them what equality is, so that they know it when they see it.

Therefore as I alluded to last week, I will continue to raise my daughters to know how to use their voices, be comfortable speaking out against injustice. They will be secure in themselves and understand, from what they’ve been modelled and shown, what is right and what is wrong with how people of all genders should behave.

Previously on Some Other Dad