Podcasts

A psychiatrist, a psychologist and a child therapist all walk into a parenting group, and… it’s a good set-up for a joke, but it’s the…

Creating a wellbeing platform for a large, multinational company like PwC, the professional services firm, has been a decade in the..

J.R. Havlan got an offer he couldn’t refuse: come work as the communications director at sleepaway camp. The eight-time Emmy…

Doug Patton is an inventor with over 200 products to his name, ranging from a biomedical device used worldwide for eye surgery to an…

It’s all or nothing. Harvard or bust. A’s may not be enough. This is achievement culture and it’s hurting kids. Jennifer Wallace, …

In one year, Chris Michalak lost his marriage, his job and his dog. He became a single Lead Dad with custody of his sons. He kept it…

How do our kids change as they age? All fathers observe it in real time but Jay Rosenblatt recorded it. Starting when his daughter was…

The three cords are work, family and self. And author Rocco Carreiro said all three need to be bound together for men to be happy and…

Do babies really bond better with moms? Do dads sacrifice less than moms? Are dads less empathetic, less compassionate, and less skilled…

A Naval Academy graduate, David is an associate Professor at the Johns Hopkins Carey Business School where he focuses on inclusive…

Reshma Saujani is an amazing force for working parents, an advocate for girls and a thinker on work today. She founded the nonprofit…

Jeff Zaugg is the founder of DadAwesome, a nonprofit that’s all about helping fathers embrace their role as dads and be more present….

Justin Breen is a communications innovator from Chicago and the author of Epic Life: How To Build Collaborative Global Companies While…

Brooks Barron was destined for a high-achieving corporate life. He graduated from Princeton University as his father had and went on to…

There is no shortage of books on parenting but they’re written for mothers – only to be read by the rare father. Todd Detwiler set out…

Shawn and Brent are fathers who have had professional success and family success. But like many men, they’ve also had mental health…

Kevin Olmsted wrote the book “Scared Dad Feeding: How My Daughter’s Anorexia Took Me To Hell and My Guidebook for How I Got Back” about…

The Band of Sisters are six senior female executives who have seen it all and not all that they’ve seen has been good. They’ve written…

Balancing the competing pressures of modern work and caregiving roles is hard for everyone. Professional couples fall into three…

Parental burnout is only recently a topic that is getting talked about openly. All parents can struggle with it but Lead Dads and…

Being a father is loaded with expectations – many stemming from how society pushes men into a certain way of being a father. Jeff…

What do you do when you want to entertain your toddler with something educational but you don’t know where to go or whether the resource…

What comes first: Gender equity at work or at home? In this week’s podcast, I discuss the issue with Sara Madera, founder of Plan…

Brett Edwards plays tough guys on screen. He was in American Sniper, the film based on a Navy Seal’s life. He’s been in CSI, Narcos and…

Alison Graham, a native Australian, came to the States 25 years ago and has had a remarkable career in tech – Unisys. Computer…

Work too much? Struggle alllocating time to home, work, your community, yourself? This was Travis Perry, a father of seven, who had a…

Eve Rodsky is changing the way working couples coexist. Starting with her bestselling book “Fair Play: A Game Changing Solution for When…

Fathering Together is a nonprofit that works to make fathers agents of positive change. One of its missions is to give dads the tools to…

Lead Dads need examples at work. They need to see senior leaders being Full Parents at Work – not Event Dads who leave early for a game…

Colin Haupt was always a Lead Dad. When his children were young and he was a rising HR executive, he was the one to leave work when his…

When his first child was born, Stew Friedman, then a young professor, started researching how companies could think differently about…

Bill Masters is a comedy-writing legend. He parlayed stand-up into writing for “Seinfeld”. He created “Caroline in the City” and…

All the myriad questions that parents have about their children can be boiled down into one, single issue: expectations, says Sue…

Before coaching Dads, Drew Soleyn was a sports coach turned corporate coach. Coaching executives was important but what if the the…

Congressman Jimmy Gomez, who represents Los Angeles in the House of Representatives, put his 4-month-old son Hodge into a baby sling and…

Companies are starting to give men paternity leave at work. It’s a start. But there’s still a macho culture that can make taking that…

Trevor Kempner, assistant district attorney, a cappella singer, thirtysomething Lead Dad, is a fascinating study of human complexity. He…

Deborah Porter is an influential voice on parenting. She runs Porter Systems and is a consultant to organizations and businesses to…

We launched The Company of Dads in February, and our Paul Sullivan has told the story of how he came up with the idea many times. Now,…

Welcome to The Company of Dads year-end review. The majority of our podcasts focused on Lead Dads and their stories. But we also sought…

Welcome to The Company of Dads Christmas highlights from five podcasts this year – Mike McGee, husband of famous golfer Annika Sorenstam…

David Newson has risen to the upper echelons of the marketing world. He’s a leader in his field. As a husband and a father, he does…

Inflation may be tough on the family budget but it’s a remarkable time to talk to your kids about money. Take the grocery bill and show…

Eric Arthrell, a long-time management consultant, was the lead author on Deloitte’s “The Design of Everyday Men Report” – a look at how…

Mark Tamhane is a father of six in Melbourne, Australia. His children are 24, 21, 18, 7, 5, and 4. Australia had one the world’s…

Businesses are starting to emphasize parental leave for fathers as well as mothers. No complaints there – as long as the corporate culture makes men feel that taking leave won’t be a penalty. But what many companies are not doing is helping fathers (an …

Marvin Avilez’s story to be a father to his daughter continues. The former counter-intel Marine turned technologist became a father in 2015…

Marvin Avilez has one of the most captivating stories about becoming a Lead Dad I’ve ever heard. A former counter-intel Marine turned…

Dan Kadlec was a Lead Dad when silence about his role was the way to maintain his ability to work remotely and parent his children as his…

When Michael Cohen’s first daughter was born, some 20 years ago, he was afraid to take paternity leave. Not super shocking in the early…

Splitting up work at home equally doesn’t mean you do the dishes and I take out the trash. It means both partners share the mental load of…

Andrew Jensen was an elite athlete all through the junior and university ranks. Handsome, fit and charming, he nearly reached the pinnacle of his sport, falling just a few notches short of playing on the PGA Tour. Throughout it all, Andrew was struggli …

For our first joint podcast, Paul Sullivan, founder of The Company of Dads, and Brian Page, founder of Modern Husbands, come together to…

Han-Son Lee, the founder of Daddilife, a parenting website for fathers in the United Kingdom, is working to change the way companies treat…

Mike McGee was a sports marketing guru in his own right before going to work for Annika Sorenstam, one of the greatest golfers of all time…

Bruce Feiler is best-selling author, sought-after speaker and contemporary thinker on fatherhood, family and work. He may be best known as…

Men far outnumber women in tech, but Dads have the ability to even the playing field for working moms, says Paula Ratliff, president of…

What’s a big lesson for fathers? Having patience – and the understanding that none of us can do it all, says Kenneth Braswell a leader in…

Gary Barker is a leading global voice in engaging men and boys in advancing gender equality and creating a positive view of masculinity. He is the CEO and founder of Equimundo, which has worked for 20 years in more than 40 countries – starting in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. He’s…

Carrie Schwab Pomerantz is an absolute expert in family finance. She has served two White House administrations. She advised the Council on Financial Literacy under President George W. Bush, and was later appointed by President Barack Obama to the President’s Advisory Council…

Dana Suskind is an acclaimed pediatric surgeon at the University of Chicago and the author of “Parent Nation: Unlocking Every Child’s Potential, Fulfilling Society’s Promise.” What’s a parent nation? It’s a group that values and supports the labor and love of raising the next…

Jay Lauf is the co-founder and president of Charter, a news site going deep on the future of work. He’s had a great career in magazines and media. He was the chairman and publisher of Quartz, the publisher of The Atlantic and the publisher of Wired. But for 20 years, the…

Parenting is some combination of exhausting and exhilarating. Making healthy meals can fall into the exhausting category. And it’s complicated: if Daddy is drinking a rum punch and attacking a basket of fried seafood, can he really tell his kids to skip the Shirley Temples and…

Jeff Forte is special education attorney in Connecticut and advocate for parents and children. He runs one of the few law practices in the state dedicated entirely to helping families navigate the state’s special education laws to insure their children get an appropriate…

How have husbands and wives balanced working, parenting and being together throughout history? Stephanie Coontz, the director of research and public education at the Council on Contemporary Families, says it’s generally not how most of think about it today. If anything, the…

A New Hampshire guy originally, Chris Bell has called Austin, Texas, home for almost two decades. A classically trained musician, he used to teach but now he is, what he calls, a ‘stunt guitarist’! He and his wife knew each other since they were kids but they reconnected 20…

Today my guest is Nick Brophy, father of five children, ages 7 to 24. Nick played football at Princeton and the team won the Ivy League championship his junior year. Then he took a traditional path to Wall Street. He loved it and excelled at it for nearly 20 years. His wife…

Rob Kenney came up for the idea for “Dad, How Do I?” during the pandemic. He wanted to provide what he calls “Dadvice,” to kids who didn’t have a dad. He knew that role personally, growing up without a father – his mom died and his dad left the family when Rob was 14. Little…

A funny thing happened on the way to J.R. Havlan using his college degree to get a job on Wall Street: the stock market crash of 1987. With every offer evaporating, he did the next logical thing and went into comedy. While he surely would have been the funniest guy at the…

Lara Bazelon is an attorney and author of the book Ambitious Like A Mother: Why Prioritizing Your Career is Good for Your Kids. Her book is about this moment in time, when we’ve come out of the pandemic where whole groups of people have been able to work from home, and that…

Franco Finstad is a dad-at-home in Manhattan, as he calls it on his LinkedIn profile. He has twins, a boy and a girl. Before they were born, he was a software engineer and a musician – trumpet being his instrument. But a funny thing happened on the way to being the Lead Dad to…

Kamau High is a senior editor at The Baltimore Sun, where he helps shape the news agenda and manages a team of reporters. It’s been an interesting path to get where he is. He married his high school sweetheart. They moved to New York, they had fun, they worked – she is a…

Famed chef, Tony Maws was a central part of the Boston food scene for more than two decades. He won a slew of chef honors, including the highest – a James Beard Award. One of his restaurants, Craigie on Main, attracted a loyal foodie following who gathered around his famed…

David Weinstein has delivered nearly 11,000 babies in the New York area—most at Stamford Hospital in Connecticut. He’s one of the all-time greats. Stories of his grace and coolness under pressure are legion. High-risk pregnancies? No problem. Record deliveries in a day? 12…

After the September 11 attacks, Max Rivera knew he wanted to be a New York City firefighter. It’s not an easy job to get but he was determined to do it. It took him over a decade to accomplish his goal. But he made it and was assigned to a storied fire house in Flatbush…

Keegan Albaugh readily admits that his wife, a grad student and stand-up comic, pushed him into starting what became Dad Guild. But after he gathered with a handful of other new fathers in Burlington, Vermont, he realized what he was striving to do was no joke. Normalizing…

Michael Teager is a renown saxophone player with multiple recordings who was gigging several times a week before his son was born. His wife, a musician and teacher, needed to return to work fairly quickly, so he stepped up to take over childcare duties. He felt he could make it…

Nikola Gasic believed his employer when it offered him paternity leave when his son was born: take it, someone else will cover for you, your job will be here when you return. He took paternity leave to spend time with his son but he also took it because his wife’s job was more…

Jamie Ladge, an associate professor of management and organizational development at Northeastern University, comes at the work-life debate with a lot of questions. Why is it hard to be both a good parent and a good worker? Can fathers be competent dads and professionals? Will…

Alex McKenzie was the Emperor of Ice Cream, a life-long food lover who created an ice cream business (named for a Wallace Stevens poem) that was thriving pre-pandemic. He’d done many other things in the food world. He’s worked in the fields and in restaurants. The fish…

Nathan Richardson was a New Yorker, and the community in his neighborhood allowed him to be a single Lead Dad to twins, a boy and a girl, and still work at the top of his profession. He had time to volunteer and be with each of his kids alone, knowing his neighborhood network…

When the pandemic began, Tino Ricci’s wife was an emergency room nurse outside of Ft. Worth, Texas. She was seeing first-hand how devastating the virus could be – and worried about bringing it home to her family. Tino stepped up, shifted his schedule, and took the lead on…

What holds some men back from becoming Lead Dads – or at least openly embracing the role? It starts with traditional perceptions of masculinity, of being the higher earner, of being the provider, of not engaging as much with parenting and family tasks. But it’s not something…

Flying was Dave Andrews’ dream. As an officer in the Royal Canadian Air Force, he flew military operations and supported humanitarian aid missions; he also flew the prime minister under the call sign, CanForce One. He went on to fly for Air Canada where he was just as likely…

Talking to kids about money and financial responsibility isn’t easy. What might matter more is what your kids see you doing, not what they hear you saying. “Whatever I preached, they had to see me doing it,” said Steve Israel, who was drafted by the Los Angeles Rams and played…

The former linebacker for the Philadelphia Eagles has sacked Tom Brady and intercepted him. He started a company, Veepio, that seeks to change the financial landscape for college athletes. Now living in Jacksonville, Florida, Najee is the lead dad to his two daughters, 5 and 4…

The pandemic changed parenting and relationships overnight. Kids were forced home from school. Parents were sent into remote work or forced to juggle shifts with parenting. Into this chaos, stepped Kristen Shockley, a professor at the University of Georgia, who wanted to know…