Like any author, when I opened the box with Darby Saxbe’s book, “Dad Brain: The New Science of Fatherhood and How It Shapes Men’s Life,”, I flipped to the index to see if I’d made it in.
Saxbe is a psychologist at USC, and she’d interviewed me, as the founder of The Company of Dads, for her book.
There I was, pages 215-217, with my own subhead – “Care shifts and lead dads”. I flipped right to it, of course, and was thrilled that those pages captured perfectly what I’d set out to do to help Lead Dads – those men who are the go-to parents in their home and open at work about their roles, even if dumb movies like Nate Bargatze’s “The Breadwinner” still cast dads as idiots.
I’m in a good chapter. It starts with Robert Kelly – aka BBC Dad, who rocketed to fame and mockery while talking to the BBC in 2017 while his children – gasp – came into the room. If Lead Dads had a patron saint, like dogs have St. Francis, Kelly would be canonized.
Eric Ries – founder of The Lean Startup and former entrepreneur-in-residence at Harvard – is in there. He’s a Silicon Valley force who splits the domestic labor with his wife Tara.
I love the I share pages with Adam Fishman, who runs the Startup Dad podcast, which was one my favorite podcast appearances of the past four years.
And then an appearance by Stew Freidman, an organizational psychology professor at Wharton who risked tenure decades ago by researching work-life balance when it was NOT fashionable. Stew, who came on my podcast fresh from a jog, is a remarkable academic leader in helping companies – who can be reluctant – think differently about how people work and what their other responsibilities might be.
But then I flipped to the introduction and read the story of how Saxbe’s own father became a Lead Dad after a sudden divorce from her mother. To read what her dad – a surgeon in western Massachusetts – did to change completely how he parented when he was awarded full custody of his four children hit me in the feels.
And I just kept reading.
Saxbe may be an academic with a Ph.D. and a lab doing research no one else has done on fathers. But to me, a lifelong journalist, she’s a very compelling writer and storyteller. Like scary good at how she weaves research and stories together. I’m looking forward to a plane flight this week to keep reading her great, new book.
