VOL. 7 · JUNE 20, 2026

Father's Day weekend. This one's for the men who made us — and the ones we're becoming. Coffee first.

THE RESEARCH — Most of the Job Is Just Being There

For more than a decade, researchers wrestled with an uncomfortable question: when kids fall apart after a father leaves, is the absence itself doing the damage — or just the poverty and chaos that tend to ride along with it? In 2013, a Princeton-led team reviewed the most rigorous studies ever run on it (McLanahan, Tach & Schneider, Annual Review of Sociology) — the kind that compare siblings and use natural experiments to separate cause from coincidence. The verdict held: father absence does real, independent harm, with the clearest and most consistent effects on finishing high school, emotional stability in childhood, and mental health into adulthood.

The sharpest single study is grimmer still. Ellis and colleagues followed 762 girls across the U.S. and New Zealand from kindergarten to age 18 (Child Development, 2003). The earlier a father left, the higher his daughter's odds of early sexual activity and teen pregnancy — a clean dose-response — and the effect survived even after stripping out poverty, conflict, and every other usual suspect. The father's absence wasn't a stand-in for other problems. It was the problem.

The takeaway: You don't have to be a perfect dad. You have to be a present one — at the dinner table, at the games, in the house, in their corner. The grim list we file under "fatherlessness" — the dropping out, the acting out, the drinking and using, the daughters grown up too fast, the sons never growing up — keeps tracing back toward the same empty chair. A present father is one of the most protective forces in a child's life. So show up. Then keep showing up.

McLanahan, Tach & Schneider, 2013 (Annual Review of Sociology, 39, 399–427); Ellis et al., 2003 (Child Development, 74(3), 801–821)

WORTH REMEMBERING

Wisdom that stands the test of time is often the kind you should cling to. Two thousand years old and a warning all dads should take to heart.

Some context to help you understand why this should hit home. Paul wrote this to the church at Colossae as part of a short rulebook for the whole household — wives, husbands, children, fathers, workers. And when he got to fathers, consider who he was talking to. In the Roman world, a father ran his home like a small kingdom; his authority over his children was nearly absolute, backed by both law and custom. Nobody needed to tell those men to take charge. They already held all the power there was.

So Paul doesn't tell them to seize control. He tells them to restrain it. The word translated "provoke" means to needle, to exasperate, to keep poking until something gives — and the result he warns against, being "discouraged," describes a child whose spirit has been worn down until he simply quits trying. That's the real danger. Not one hard moment, but a steady grind of harshness that teaches a kid he'll never measure up, so why bother.

Read in its own time, it's almost radical: the most powerful man in the house, told to wield that power gently or lose his children's hearts. It still is. There's a way to lead a child that hardens him and a way that strengthens him — and the dividing line, almost always, is patience, love, and putting our ego to the side.

TRY THIS WEEK — Write the Letter

If your father is living, call him this weekend — not a text — and tell him one specific thing he got right. Be specific. "Thanks for everything" is a just a box being checked. "Thanks for showing up to every game even after a 12-hour day" lands forever.

If your father is gone, or was never there, write the letter anyway. Write what you'd say or merely reflect on the reality of it all. Be honest. You may find it's less for him than for you.

This one hits home for me. By the end, ALS had taken my dad's ability to write by hand — so the note was typed, which only makes it feel heavier, not lighter. He left instructions that I open it when I graduate from college which was nearly nine months after he passed away. The morning I got my "congratulations you have completed all requirements for your degree", I sat down at my desk in my dingy second floor apartment and opened that letter. The tears ran down.

I still have that letter, and without exaggeration it's one of my most prized possessions on this earth: a single page I'd trade almost anything to keep.

He didn't live to see me graduate, get married, or have kids of my own. He never saw the career I went on to build. And we'll never share the glass of bourbon and the stogie on the back porch that I always pictured we would. That typed page is the last of his words I'll ever have, and they are precious to me.

So if you're a father, do this now, while you can. Write a note to each of your children telling them the one thing you love most about being their dad. Then pick a day for them to open it — graduation, their eighteenth birthday, the day they hold their own first child, the morning they get married. The date doesn't matter. That it exists, in your hand, does. One day it will be among the most valuable things they own.

FROM THE BOOKSHELF — The Road by Cormac McCarthy

A father and his son walk through a burned, gray, post-apocalyptic world toward a coast that may hold nothing. There is no plot beyond that, and it is one of the most powerful books ever written about being a dad. Some of you may have read it in high school, but many — like myself — found this book later in life.

McCarthy got the idea on a 2003 trip to El Paso with his four-year-old son — standing at a dark hotel window while the boy slept, imagining the city a century into a ruined future and thinking about how he'd keep him safe in it. He dedicated the book to that son, John Francis, and called having a child late in life something that "forces the world on you." This isn't a man imagining fatherhood from the outside; it's a father putting his own fear and love on the page — which is exactly why it reads the way it does.

McCarthy strips fatherhood down to its irreducible core: keep the boy alive, carry the fire, don't let the dark win while you still breathe, show him how to be a man through action not just words, and that not a day goes by without him knowing you love him.

This book had me emotional at the end and for those who have had read it, you will know why. Add it to your collection of fiction that brings real fatherhood to the forefront.

A fair warning before you pick it up: it's bleak, and a few scenes are genuinely hard to shake. That darkness is the point; it's what makes the father's love and effort read like defiance. In a world where everything is broken and hope seems lost, a father finds a way.

Truly a beautiful piece of literature.

CLOSING THOUGHT

Here's what I want you to carry into Father's Day: it was never about being the perfect dad who never screws up. That man doesn't exist, and your kids would learn nothing useful from him if he did. It's about being a dad who keeps pursuing better — not for his own ego, but for the people he loves.

Let them see the hard work. Let them see the patience. Let them see you keep going when quitting would be easier. And most of all, let them see all of it on the days you get it wrong — because the man who can get down on one knee, look his child in the eye, and say "I was wrong, and I'm sorry" is showing a strength that being right never could.

It's not about being macho. A father is absolutely meant to lead his house — but he leads it by serving it, not by ruling it. Go serve yours.

Happy Father's Day, brother. See you next Saturday.

If this meant something to you — or you know a man who'd benefit from it — please share this link with them: The Saturday Standard​