Casey Palmer, Canadian Dad

Alright—so now that the pleasantries are out of the way, it’s time that we get into some practical information about fatherhood, and where better to start than the very beginning of the journey?

2013—the year we had our first child through induced labour in November—is admittedly a bit of a blur, with me doing as much as humanly possible to get things off of my to-do list before my life changed forever.

See—what you don’t fully understand about parenthood before you have kids yourself is that while everything changes once you have a kid in tow, it doesn’t just stop. You just find new ways of doing the things that you would’ve before if they still prove important to you.

But try telling that to 2013 Casey, convinced that his world was crashing down around him, trying to do everything he could before it was too late.

Once upon a time, I tried to write a post on why more of my fellow thirty-somethings should want to have kids and join the ever-bustling ranks of parenthood just like me. Recently becoming a father myself, it changed my world entirely, giving me someone demanding more of my attention than anything else in my life, yet also insisting that I love him while he did it. But I’ve said it a thousand times before and I’ll say it a thousand more—I’m a much better man for having my kids in my life, and I want the people around me to experience that, too.

And so I wrote. I wrote the intro several times over. And after two lines and multiple attempts, I ultimately decided to scrap it.

What I realised was this—you can’t fully explain parenthood to anyone who hasn’t experienced it themselves, and at a few years in to parenting—heck, even right now if I’m honest—it’s still too early for me to fully understand why I became a parent.

Who Wants to be a Dad? Figuring Out What Makes Fatherhood Appealing, If ANYTHING.

I mean, sure, there’s humanity’s biological imperative to produce the best possible offspring for the next generation. The societal expectation that having kids is just what you’re supposed to do. Fatherhood’s so often characterized by all the negative associations surrounding it—a loss of freedom; financial burdens; and in some cases, building a permanent connection to someone you only planned to see for a night—that you’d wonder why anyone would want to do this in the first place.

But what I can tell you is this—there’s a reason why we don’t remember much of the lives we led before we had our kids.

It’s because so little of it really mattered.

Last updated on May 16th, 2021 at 01:30 am

One thing I’ve love to see from my fellow dads this Father’s Day is for all of us to learn to communicate better.

I know—it might be the last thing on your mind with everything else you’ve got going on, but it’s because we keep so quiet about our experiences that the world’s so slow to change.

By the numbers here in Canada, moms and dads aren’t all that different, with 5.5 million moms to the 4.5 million dads we have. But even without doing exhaustive research to validate this, we only have dozens of dad creators sharing their stories as opposed to the thousands of mom creators doing the same.

The difference is that while moms are great communicators, establishing communities for advice, support and safe spaces to share their stories, it’s taken us much longer to do that for ourselves. And even when we do, it’s only in private groups of our peers, so the world can’t see every side of ourselves instead of just the positive aspects we want the world to see. It’s a bit better than what we were taught—to bottle our thoughts and feelings up inside—but we still have a long way to go before we represent ourselves with any justice.

Why Fatherhood Stories Are So IMPORTANT.

I get it, though—I almost didn’t become a dad blogger myself, thinking that parenthood would make me too busy to keep up with a blog. But when some forward-thinking friends helped me see that the Canadian market sorely lacked fatherhood content, I kept writing about my experiences, and nearly eight years later, here we are.

But things won’t change based on my stories alone.

Last updated on May 16th, 2021 at 01:02 am

WHAT is a father, ANYWAY?

When people ask “what is a father”, that’s something I’ve struggled to adequately answer for years.

Through my many years spent as a dad blogger, I’ve tried repeatedly to create work that explains how I see myself as a dad. I’ve floundered over and over again in the process, never seeming to find the right words to fit, but it’d eventually be my newfound love for search engine optimization that’d give me some guidance on the kinds of things that people want to know about being a dad. Not all the questions go super deep, with many just at the beginning of the journey, but those questions gave me the building blocks I needed to tell my story in a way that others would understand.

And I think it’s important that I do—we have this oversimplified idea of what a father’s supposed to be, force-fed to us by a society who saw the dad as one thing. The father as the silent, grumpy disciplinarian, meant to be respected and feared. The one-dimensional dad who can throw a ball or barbecue a steak, but has little to offer by the way of household or emotional support.

But in 2021, I think we want to strive for a new standard, finding ways to show the world what the #DadLife’s really about instead of the stereotype we keep clinging to.

I’m Casey Palmer, and I’m a dad. Let me tell you a little of what that’s all about.

Last updated on May 16th, 2021 at 01:02 am

Forty Days to Father’s Day: Why I Decided to Write a Fatherhood Series

With Mother’s Day come and gone for another year, I’ve started thinking about Father’s Day and everything around it.

Many might think it’s too early for that—especially since we’re only days after the marketing onslaught that Mother’s Day always brings with it and we’d all like time to recover—but let me tell you a bit about how fathers see Father’s Day and why I’m already talking about it almost six weeks out.

Compared to Mother’s Day, Father’s Day is a bit of a joke. Despite a growing number of men who are taking fatherhood very seriously, trying to change how the world sees us, there are a lot of past transgressions we need to overcome before dads are seen as people to be celebrated instead of simply tolerated.

It was something I’d notice as I started doing research for my book—a look at how the world saw its fathers:

“Why is my dad so angry?”

“Why do dads leave?”

“What is it like to have a dad?”

Compared to mothers, it feels like the world’s view on fathers can be overwhelmingly negative, and that has a whole lot to do with why Father’s Day feels like more of a concession than the celebration that we’d like it to be.

You hear it often, though, when it comes to raising kids—when faced with problems that feel so insurmountable because we see them wherever we look, there’s only one thing we can do to try and make things better:

We need to create the world we want to live in.