Dadical

Ben Puzzuoli is a Canadian dad of three, a serial software entrepreneur, and the creator behind Not a Pour Decision. His life started out like a lot of fairy tales do. Then the curve balls started to hit. Two divorces later, Ben hit rock bottom and had to rebuild his self-worth while still being the dad his son and twin daughters needed. We talk about co-parenting without ever bad-mouthing your ex...

A TikTok dad says any parents-only trip longer than three nights is selfish. I disagree, and in this episode I explain why. I think the job of a parent is to raise kids who can eventually live without us, and that means letting them feel some discomfort instead of rescuing them every time. I share what the Army taught me about "embracing the suck," what our kids learned while I was deployed and wh...

Davin Woodard grew up in Baton Rouge, raised by a single father who scheduled his vacation days around his son’s football games. At 18, Davin walked into the largest parish jail in Louisiana and spent the next several years learning more about human behavior than most people absorb in a lifetime. Now a detective and TikTok creator at Save Fatherhood, Davin has seen the pipeline from every angle --...

The numbers don’t lie. In 1960, 5% of children were born outside of marriage. By 1990 that number was 30%. The number of kids growing up without a father in the home has essentially doubled in one generation. And somewhere along the way, we decided that was progress. 12 episodes and 900 streams in, I wanted to sit down and share what I’ve actually learned from the conversations I’ve been having. B...

You’ve heard Aaron Brooker as a guest on the Dadical Podcast. This week, the tables are turned. I had the chance to sit down with Aaron on his show, @attadad, and answer some of the same questions I ask my own guests. We talked about what it’s like to parent a 19-year-old while still raising teenagers, why survival mode is so easy to stay stuck in, and what it actually looks like to keep life norm...

Aaron Brooker (@attadad) spent 14 years teaching middle schoolers in the toughest part of Omaha before moving into disability insurance. What he learned in those classrooms shaped everything about how he parents his three boys — Elias, Jonas, and Ari. In this episode, Aaron and Seth dig into the frameworks Aaron has built and shared for free on his site: his cell phone contract, family meetings, a...

Nav Prasad's dad left Fiji at twenty years old with no high school diploma, no connections, and no plan. He worked hotel kitchens and theater jobs, battled racism, found his way into car sales, and became one of the top ten car salespeople in the country competing from a small town against people from New York and Florida. He brought his siblings over and helped them build lives. He is now seventy...

Some stories are hard to hear. This is one of them. Jason Miller grew up without a father. As the product of a one-night stand, he was raised in an abusive home with no father figure and very few positive influences in his life. His grandfather was murdered when he was ten. He was abused by the son of a pastor who was supposed to protect him. And by the time he reached high school he had run out o...

Most of us picture fatherhood on a fairly predictable timeline. Finish school, start a career, meet someone, start a family. Chris Stream's path looked nothing like that. Chris spent his twenties and thirties building his career and searching for the right person to build a life with. He did not get married until his late forties. And when he did, it came with more moving pieces than most people n...

The last few episodes of the Dadical Podcast have been heavy. Stillborn children. Military deployments. Infertility. The loss of a spouse. The loss of a father at twenty years old. This one is different. Scott Schlofman is a financial adviser and father of four in Phoenix, Arizona. He has senior twins, a freshman, and a seventh grader. By his own admission he is just a regular dad. He is wrong abo...

Every day you pull into the garage after a long day at work. You're worn out. You have emails to return and tasks that slipped through the cracks. And you have a decision to make before you walk through that door. Burke Williamson knows that decision better than most. Burke grew up in a small town in southern Utah as the youngest of four boys. His dad was a state champion wrestler, an all-state fo...

What does a father give his son that he doesn't even realize he's giving? Mike Williams has a family motto. Three words his grandfather used to yell from the baseball dugout. Three words etched on his grandfather's tombstone. Three words that became the way Mike raised his four kids and the way his oldest son Skyler now lives his life. Run it out. Skyler Williams lost his wife Kimber to cancer two...

Jordan Phillips didn't have a traditional path to fatherhood. Married at nineteen, he joined the military four months later and spent three of his first five years of marriage overseas on two deployments. When he and his wife Amy finally started trying to have kids, the doors kept closing. Years of infertility. Consultations, surgeries, and procedures. A failed round of in vitro. And a growing que...

Most men, when they go through something devastating, put on a mask. They push it down, tell themselves they dealt with it, and keep moving forward. Taz Harding did exactly that. And for six years it cost him more than he realized. In this episode Taz shares one of the most honest accounts of grief, marriage, and fatherhood we have had on the Dadical Podcast. Ten months into his marriage, he and h...

What does it look like when life hands you fatherhood before you feel ready? For Clayton Bowen it looked like calm. Clayton became a dad at twenty seven in circumstances nobody would have planned. Unexpected pregnancy. COVID lockdown. Doctor visits over FaceTime. A C-section during a global pandemic. Three kids in five years. Career changes, a historic Texas freeze that displaced his family from t...

Here you go: What if fixing your kids weaknesses is the wrong strategy as a dad? Dave Cameron spent his career leading consumer segmentation for the Nielsen Company and teaching predictive analytics at the University of Chicago. He applies that same analytical thinking to fatherhood, and the results might surprise you. Dave grew up in a blue collar neighborhood outside Detroit where most of the me...

What does it actually mean to be a father? Not just to show up, but to show up with intention? In the inaugural episode of Dadical, host Seth Stoker sits down with Mike Lamb, a father of four and soon-to-be retiree from San Antonio, Texas, for an honest and deeply personal conversation about what fatherhood has taught him over the last three decades. Mike opens up about growing up with a complicat...