On Being a Dad - Derek Thompson

Derek Thompson

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On Being a Dad<br>A personal reflection on fatherhood

Derek Thompson<br>Mar 04, 2026

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Photo by Justin on Unsplash<br>1. Loving strangers

One month after my first daughter was born, a younger friend from work asked me to explain what parenthood was like.<br>I can’t do that, I said. Wisely, she appealed to my vanity, reminding me that my professional identity was based on explaining complicated ideas, and so wouldn’t it be a little sad actually, a little bit pathetic even, if I couldn’t explain something as basic as fatherhood? I took the bait.<br>This Substack is reader-supported. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

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People tend to explain parenthood by comparing it to other real-life experiences, I said. But parenthood isn’t conceptually combinatorial in a way that benefits from that exercise. You can’t multiply I have a puppy with My 2-year-old nephew pooped on me once and it was funny to arrive at the experience of parenthood.<br>“Have you been to Paris?” I asked. She had not. Paris is my favorite city, I said. You might tell me that you’ve practically been to Paris, because you’ve been to London and Montreal, and what more could the city of Paris offer beyond some blend of Major European Capital and City That Speaks French And Serves Buttery Sauces? But those travel experiences aren’t additive in a way that captures the experience of being in Paris. So, in this narrow respect, I said, parenting is like Paris.<br>But, much more to the point, parenting is nothing like Paris. Imagine that every day you wake up in your left-bank apartment, and the city has meaningfully morphed into some magically strange variant of Paris. On Tuesday, the streets and boulevards no longer meet at their old familiar intersections. On Wednesday, the Louvre moves to another arrondissement. The Arc de Triumphe turns upside-down on Thursday and floats in the sky on Friday. Now we’re talking. Now that is more like parenting. To be a parent is to be a permanent tourist in a constantly evolving foreign city, which also happens to be your home.<br>The baby you bring home from the hospital is not the baby you rock to sleep at two weeks, and the baby at three months is a complete stranger to both. In a phenomenological sense, parenting a newborn is not at all like parenting “a” singular newborn, but rather like parenting hundreds of babies, each one replacing the previous week’s child, yet retaining her basic facial structure. “Parenthood abruptly catapults us into a permanent relationship with a stranger,” Andrew Solomon wrote in Far From the Tree. Almost. Parenthood catapults us into a permanent relationship with strangers, plural to the extreme.<br>When you become a parent, you meet your child. And then you meet your child again. And again, every day after that. You will never stop meeting your child. That is one reason to become a parent: To have a child is to fall in love with a thousand beautiful strangers.<br>2. Ride the rides

One thing they don’t tell you about parenthood is that your daughter might turn you into a monster. It’s 8am, and the coffee is getting cold, and you find yourself stalking around the kitchen island table, fingers curled into claws, lower jaw extended, teeth bared, foot stomps heavy, voice roaring and phlegmy, an ogre hunting prey, and your two-year old daughter is squealing as she tries to escape. You catch her by the leg, swing her into the air, fling her upside down, pretend to gnaw at her tummy. You set her down and let her do the thing where she sort of pretends to run away without running away. “More! More!” she demands, but the “r”s are soft, and it sounds more like “Mo’ah! Mo’ah!’” The response is automatic: The prey requests, the ogre obeys. The face of the father melts away. The face of the monster reappears.<br>My daughter and I have played this game approximately one thousand times. Nothing in my life could have anticipated this hunter-prey pageantry or the joy I get from it. I’m not a monster guy, generally speaking. Friends who had kids before me never once pulled me aside to whisper, “oh, another thing, you will have to pretend to be a monster all the time.” But I’m struck by the sense that I was born to play this game just as she was born to play it.<br>Parenthood is everything you’ve heard: confusion, panic, joy, sadness, anxiety, boredom, and anxiety again. Beneath these passing moods is a deeper feeling for which there is no good word. It is the feeling of suddenly finding yourself playing the oldest game in the world, a game you know that billions of people have played before you. There is nothing about being a parent that isn’t a cliché. This is a terrible inconvenience for the suckers out there who try to write essays about it. But I also find this to be an existential balm: I was built for this, and it was built for me.<br>One way to think about life is that you are...