I’m a relatively new parent.  I have two daughters.  My older daughter is 2.5 years old and my younger daughter is 1.5.  I suspect I’m not alone when I say that I’ve been very interested in being involved in my childrens’ lives since I found out my wife was pregnant, both times.

The day I found out we were going to have our first daughter, my wife and I went immediately to a local bookstore to stock up on reading materials.  I also happen to be pretty tech-savvy and feel very at home on the Internet so I spent a ton of time reading whatever I could get my eyes on.

It wasn’t long into this adventure that I realized that almost everything written in regards to parenting (at least that I could find), particularly for people expecting babies or people with young children, was written for women.  It was all written for mommies.  That’s great…for them.  I always felt a little dirty reading that stuff but I felt it was important to get as much information as possible.  I remember reading specific articles and thinking, “I hope none of my guy friends find out what I’m reading.” We get various parenting magazines from time to time and almost everything is written for mom.

I recently saw a cover story on one of them that was about disciplining your children.  That sounds interesting.  I have a 2-year old after all.  When I get to the article, it has a series of stories from different couples on how they handle discipline with their kids.  They all start with some sort of quote that goes something like this:

“I tend to be the tough one.  My husband is too soft on the kids.”

Then there’s a whole story about how they deal with it and it’s essentially written by the mom.  Ok, fair enough, I’m sure the next example will be from a dad’s perspective…

“I tend to be too soft on the kids.  My husband is usually the tough one.”

Fine.  The rest of the article followed suit.  Not even 1 perspective from or for the dads.

There must be something out there for us right?  I’m not so pretentious to think I’m the first to come up with the idea of a place for dads to go to talk shop.  I guess I just haven’t found one I liked and decided there needed to be a new resource.

Now, this isn’t a blog just for me.  The goal is to have different authors offering different perspectives on parenting, from the dad’s viewpoint.  How to deal with tantrums while you are bra shopping is really interesting to me, but not for the right reasons.  How to deal with a tantrum while the game just went into sudden-death overtime?  Now we’re talking.

I think society has changed.  I had a great upbringing.  Nothing to complain about.  That being said, I think it’s fair to say that the parental role expectations, might be different than they were 20 or 30 years ago, and that’s for all the right reasons.  I would get weird looks in the mall when I would sit on a bench with my daughter right after she was born while my wife went into a store.  It would be that look as if the person wanted to come and pinch my cheek like it was so cute that a guy is holding the baby.

I love every second of being a daddy.

I’d like to think I’m very involved in the parenting process.

I know there are more dads out there like me.

I am daddy.  Hear me roar.

Welcome to Daddaism.