Books
Book Club: How To Be A Dad
Book Club: How To Be A dad
A few books to help you navigate the world’s hardest job.
First thing you learn when you become a dad: Youtube tutorials are only useful up to a point. Sure, you can learn to swaddle your baby from some dude who is grinding away at his passive income scheme, but that’s only going to take you so far.
Luckily there are books! Some of these are more useful than others (and none of them will actually help you put your baby to sleep, because babies are cruel like that) but nonfiction classics like On Becoming Babywise can offer a wealth of tips and tricks on the practical aspects of raising an infant.
But ‘tips and tricks’ are just one part of parenting. A lot of it actually deals with much harder questions, like ‘Why do I feel this tremendous sense of existential doom?’ or ‘How do I prevent raising a kid who disappoints everyone?’ Those are much harder to solve.
That’s where the less conventional books come in. Fiction, essays and memoirs have the magic ability to pull you from everyday concerns (i.e. how to remove mashed carrot stains from heirloom furniture) to the big, abstract conundrums that fatherhood is all about, questions about love, duty, and legacy.
Can the books below guarantee that your kid won’t eventually become a carny? No. But we can promise that you’ll gain a deeper understanding of the challenges, joys, and—most importantly of all— the overwhelming, soul-crushing, god-I-can’t-breathe love that you never knew you were capable of.
Hey, it’s a start.
Little Labors
Recommended by Brendan Leonard
Have you ever wondered how the 47 Ronin might play into how you raise your children? Brendan Leonard has a book for you! Of all the books on this list, Rivka Galchen’s is likely the hardest to categorize. Each section is completely different; some are lists, some essays, some just a sentence or two, but each is offered as a way to think a little differently about the baby that just landed in your house.
“There were so many amazing observations in that book,” says Leonard. “It’s a collection of little snippets inspired by a Japanese book, The Pillow Book by Sei Shōnagonu, and it’s one of the books that was the most meaningful to me.”
On Becoming Baby Wise
Recommended by Brad Christian
You know that project at work that has just completely run off the rails, the one where no one knows what they’re doing, the client is impossible, and the stakes are life and death? Yeah, that’s raising a baby.
Brad Christian has been there and has returned with the solution: On Becoming Babywise. This classic (now in its 30th Anniversary printing) is a godsend when it comes to imposing order on chaos. “It’s all about scheduling and the whole process of creating structure,” says Brad.
“I’m a creative space cadet who doesn’t love structure, but I’ve found that building discipline and routine from the time they were born enabled me to actually have a creative life. It enabled adventure and creativity because I knew a bit more about what to expect.”
The Comfort Crisis
Recommended by Jamaal Lemon
It’s never too early to start rucking with your baby! Just pop him in a backpack and carry him up a hill, and voilà, you’re getting ripped.
If you’ve read The Comfort Crisis, Michael Easter’s exploration of ‘embracing discomfort to reclaim your wild, happy, healthy self,’ you may wonder why Jamaal Lemon chose it; babies are notoriously bad at being uncomfortable. But the lessons here are so universal that you might want to get a head start on applying them.
“We don’t have to worry about things like sabertooth tigers anymore, so in that sense this is the best time in human history to be alive,” says Jamaal. “But it also affords us a certain level of laziness because we’re not spending hours outside, don’t know how to catch our own food, not sleeping because we’re connected to these devices. I read this book from a father’s perspective and I decided to put these habits in my son’s life very early.”
Honorable Mention: Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging by Sebastian Junger
The Dangerous Book For Boys
Recommended by Sinuhe Xavier
Danger is relative and, if Ben Stiller’s character in The Royal Tenenbaums (as Chas Tenenbaum, the man who makes his kids run regular emergency drills) is any indication, having kids might shift your perspective a bit.
But the truth is that, without any danger, we’re not really living. Managing risk (and having fun while doing so) are essential to what it means to be human. That’s one of the reasons that Sinuhe Xavier is a huge fan of The Dangerous Book For Boys. According to Sinuhe, this book is filled with “activities that give you real-world lessons about how to live a less ordinary life.”
“It’s my go-to gift for new moms and dads, along with The Daring Book for Girls,” says Sinuhe. “It’s for kids who are a little bit older, but I’ll be reading it with Coop [Sinuhe’s son] and it has all these inspirational ideas. He’ll say ‘Dad, what are these?’ and I go, ‘Oh, those are knots. I’ve got cordage, let’s learn how to do it.” Knots don’t seem dangerous enough to you? I’d recommend you put down your Wes Anderson box set and watch the opening scene of the Sylvester Stallone classic, Cliffhanger instead.
After Visiting Friends
Recommended by Clayton Chambers
We don’t want to be a huge downer, but you’re going to die. (Hopefully not anytime soon!) Grappling with tragedy is also a part of fatherhood, and being equipped to confront hard things—and ideally passing those hard won lessons on to your own children—is a responsibility that simply can’t be avoided.
That’s one of the reasons that Clayton Chambers recommended After Visiting Friends. “This book by Michael Hainey, a former editor of GQ and Esquire, is one of my favorites,” says Clayton. “It unpacks Michael’s story of grappling with the pain of losing his own father when he was young, how he grew up never knowing what actually happened, how family secrets influenced the way he made life decisions, and the lessons he ultimately learned from it.”
This Boy’s Life
Recommended by Arlo Crawford
Editor Arlo Crawford has recommended the book This Boy’s Life in other Journal posts because it’s one of his absolute favorites, but it’s also a particularly valuable as a book about being a dad. The author Tobias Wolff had a notoriously difficult relationship with his dad, a man described in another book (this one by Tobias’s brother, Geoff Wolff) as the ‘Duke of Deception.’
“This is just a great story about a kid moving to a town called Concrete in Oregon and navigating boyhood, but it’s really about the responsibilities we have as fathers,” says Arlo. “The absent father in Wolff’s book is dashing and heroic, and his kids idolize him. But eventually they see that he’s so self-centered and selfish that he’s willing to hurt anyone—his children included—to maintain his freedom. It’s a hard lesson but a really important one: Once you have a kid, you’re not the protagonist of the story anymore.
Honorable mention: Outdoor Kids in an Inside World by Steven Rinella