Dads Get It Done - Dads Out and Proud - Heavy Lifting: Grow Up, Get a Job, Raise a Family, and Other Manly Advice (2015)

Heavy Lifting: Grow Up, Get a Job, Raise a Family, and Other Manly Advice (2015)

PART V

Dads Out and Proud

22

22

Dads Get It Done

You would not have expected a commercial for Peanut Butter Cheerios to be a groundbreaking statement about modern fatherhood.

It started out as a Canadian ad for Peanut Butter Cheerios, and was changed to a Honey Nut Cheerios ad for U.S. audiences. The U.S. version ran on Sunday Night Football on NBC. It is two minutes in length—way longer than the usual thirty-second ad—and contains more dialogue and action than some half-hour sitcoms. It is better seen than transcribed, but for those who missed it, this was the dialogue:

[A sleeping man awakens to a child with a horse’s head mask jumping on his chest.]

Dad: HUH!

Son: You awake?

Dad: Yeah, of course I’m awake. Is that a new mask?

Son: Oh yeah.

Dad: I love it. It’s really creepy.

Son: I know, right?

Dad: Yeah, good stuff.

Son: Thanks.

[The dad tosses his son off his stomach.]

Dad [to camera]: Hey. Let me introduce myself. My name is—

Daughter: DAD!

Dad: And proud of it. And all dads should be.

[The dad gets out of bed and begins walking through the house, offering a monologue to the camera while getting his kids ready for the day.]

Daughter: Dad! Dad! Dad! Dad! Dad!

Dad: Why? You know why. Kids think we’re awesome. We get our hands messy. We tell hilarious jokes.

[to sleeping son]

Hey, Nolan. We got to get up, buddy.

[to camera]

We never say no to dress up. We build the best forts. We do work-work and we do homework. We lead by example and we blow their minds.

Son: I can’t believe he’s his father!

Dad: [to son] I know! That is called a “plot twist”!

[to camera]

Being awesome isn’t about breaking rules. It’s about making them.

Hot stuff coming through!

[He hands his wife a coffee.]

Dad: [to camera] Wife and the coffee.

And breakfast is for breakfast.

[to teenage son]

Hey, Nolan, give me a look here.

[He adjusts his son’s cap.]

Dad: Suggestion, that’s a boy, that’s a man.

[back to camera]

But it’s also for lunch, dinner, and midnight snacks.

Scraped knees aren’t boo-boos, they are badges of bravery on the playground.

[to teenage daughter]

Hey, Victoria? That profile pic? Awesome.

[He heads outside.]

Dad: When you’re a dad, hugs can be bear hugs, but they can also be high-fives, fist-bumps and next-level handshakes.

[lifts son from backyard swingset]

Kids. They’re our best friends. They’re our greatest fans.

[pats son]

Buddy, you’ve been gaining muscle mass, nice!

[back to camera]

And they look to us the same way we look at superheroes. Up. Because we’re taller. Now, dad-hood isn’t always easy. When a rule is broken, we’re the enforcement.

[to son]

Hey, buddy, it’s garbage day.

[back to camera]

But when a heart is broken, we’re the reinforcement. And we wouldn’t have it any other way. Because being a dad is awesome. Just like new Peanut Butter Cheerios is awesome. That’s why it’s the official cereal of dad-hood.

[He pauses in the driveway of his house.]

Dad: And this? This, my friends … [long pause] This is how to dad.

[He raises two fingers in either the peace sign or Churchill’s victory sign, and we see a montage of him dancing with his family, holding the Cheerios box.]

The ad received a roaring, enthusiastic response on Facebook. As of this writing, the ad has 1.6 million views on Facebook. The National Fatherhood Initiative raved, “The new commercial on YouTube reveals exactly what we at NFI hope other brands will do … show a dad as a fully functioning and capable parent … without degrading anyone in the family.” The Parents Television Council saluted it: “This commercial bucks the unfortunate media trend of depicting dads and bumbling, clueless, incompetent, lazy men.” AdAge stated that “it’s about time” commercials moved beyond buffoonish portrayals of fathers.

Fascinatingly, the marketing firm that made the ad said they hadn’t aimed to tap into the sentiment at all:

Josh Stein, executive creative director for Tribal’s Toronto office, says that while portraying an empowered dad was always at the back of his mind, he didn’t set out to buck the traditional “bumbling dad” stereotype, which has been the fodder for much of the social media discussion surrounding the ad. “I’d be lying if I said that the goal of this work was to generate an international conversation around the portrayal of dads, but our work seems to have aligned with that parallel conversation,” he says. “Our goal was just to do the best campaign to launch this new product in the slowing cereal category, with dad as our primary target.”*

Molly Soat, “Cheerios Leverages the Power of ‘Dadvertising,’” Marketing News Weekly, January 13, 2015, https://www.ama.org/publications/eNewsletters/Marketing-News-Weekly/Pages/cheerios-how-to-dad.aspx.

Naturally, Salon.com hated it, continuing their Cal-Ripken-esque record-breaking uninterrupted streak of consecutive wrong takes. (I’m really looking forward to Salon’s review of this book.)

“When you define dad as the cool one, as the one who can get his hands ‘messy,’ you are firmly pigeonholing mom in her role as the lame one,” lamented Salon contributor Hayley Krischer.**

Hayley Krischer, “I Hate When My Husband Tries to Be a ‘Cool Dad’: Why You Shouldn’t Believe the New Cheerios Commercial,” Salon, July 28, 2014, http://www.salon.com/2014/07/28/dont_believe_that_new_cheerios_commercial_why_i_hate_the_myth_of_the_cool_dad/.

Oh, FFS, as they say on the Internet.***

For you-know-what’s sake.

Pardon my reference to the F-bomb, but it’s a good segue to a fascinating documentary released in 2010, entitled The Other F Word, showcasing the lives of punk-rock stars of years past in their current lives as fathers. Produced by Cristan Reilly and directed by Andrea Nevins, the film reveals what some dads may have long suspected: sooner or later, every man ends up in a minivan singing, “The wheels on the bus go round and round” to his child—even Art Alexakis of Everclear.

To many audiences, the punk-rock stars depicted in the film—Black Flag’s Ron Reyes, Mark Hoppus of Blink 182, pro skater Tony Hawk—embodied everything cool, revolutionary, anarchic, and hedonistic, a vehement, uncompromising rebellion against all forms of authority … and now they find themselves the authority. The film is funny and sweet, and a bit more serious when the rockers discuss their own painful childhoods and often absent-fathers, and how this motivates them to be such dedicated fathers.

Flea, bassist for the Red Hot Chili Peppers—known for anarchic antics such as performing completely naked at the 1999 Woodstock concert—declares, “The classic parent attitude to a kid is like, ‘I brought you into this world. I gave you life!’ It’s like, I just think completely opposite. My kids gave me life, you know. They gave me a reason.”

Jim Lindberg, frontman of the punk-rock band Pennywise who wrote a book in 2007 entitled Punk Rock Dad that largely inspired the film, says at one point, “When we were younger, we were all nihilistic, and didn’t care. Live for today. Live fast. I thought we were going to change the world.” Lindberg concludes at the end of the film: “Maybe the way we change the world is by raising better kids and being more attentive to those kids.”

If these men can adapt to the demands of fatherhood, any young man can. These rockers’ self-image and sense of identity revolved around opposing everything traditionally associated with being a father—responsibility, stability, commitment, devotion, discipline—perhaps even the concept of lifelong love. Maybe all of those concepts didn’t need such an across-the-board rejection. Maybe they just needed a little refinement, an adjustment to make a little room for what remains of that youthful anarchic spirit.

One rocker who didn’t show up in The Other F Word but would have fit in quite well is Duff McKagan, formerly the bassist of Guns N’ Roses, perhaps the most notorious hard-rock band of the late 1980s and early 1990s. The era of Guns N’ Roses’ musical world domination epitomizes every VH1 Behind the Music cliché—infighting, rivalries, runaway egos, rampant drug use and addiction, promiscuity that would make Hugh Hefner blush. McKagan describes drinking ten bottles of wine per day until his pancreas burst and he nearly died in emergency surgery.

That rather intense wake-up call from his body—and perhaps his soul—dramatically altered the trajectory of his life, and in the following years, he completed an amazing transformation: he got sober, went back to school, learned how to manage his money, fell in love, became a father—oh, and formed a new band, Velvet Revolver.

One of the fascinating confessions is that even when he was at the heights of rock and roll success, living a life of debauchery and hedonistic excess that could tempt any man, a part of his heart ached to be a stable, trusted, loving father:

Even during my times of trial and extreme drug and alcohol abuse, I held out hope that one day I’d be that guy who was the head of a family—the steady guider, the calm and strong voice. As a consequence, I am a hopeless romantic when it comes to my wife and two daughters. The imagery that has been forever ingrained in my head by It’s a Wonderful Life will never leave. My girls think I am totally corny, but I don’t care. I am who I am. I can get bummed out sometimes when things don’t work out like they did for George Bailey, but waiting for my family at the airport filled me with joy …*

Duff McKagan, How to Be a Man (Boston: DeCapo Press, 2015), 26.

All that glitters is not gold. Maybe you’ll reach the heights of fame and fortune—but will it be worth it without someone to share it with and leave it to? Who do you want to come home to when the cheering crowd gets into their cars and leaves?

In 2010, a quartet offered a gangster rap video entitled “Dad Life,” with seemingly menacing lyrics about their suburban lives of creased dockers, large lawnmowers, work in the yard garden, minivans, backyard barbecues, and watching Disney videos with their daughters.

“I roll hard in the yard with my 60-inch cut, zero turn radius, my neighbors say what?”*

You would not have expected a commercial for Peanut Butter Cheerios to be a groundbreaking statement about modern fatherhood.

It started out as a Canadian ad for Peanut Butter Cheerios, and was changed to a Honey Nut Cheerios ad for U.S. audiences. The U.S. version ran on Sunday Night Football on NBC. It is two minutes in length—way longer than the usual thirty-second ad—and contains more dialogue and action than some half-hour sitcoms. It is better seen than transcribed, but for those who missed it, this was the dialogue:

[A sleeping man awakens to a child with a horse’s head mask jumping on his chest.]

Dad: HUH!

Son: You awake?

Dad: Yeah, of course I’m awake. Is that a new mask?

Son: Oh yeah.

Dad: I love it. It’s really creepy.

Son: I know, right?

Dad: Yeah, good stuff.

Son: Thanks.

[The dad tosses his son off his stomach.]

Dad [to camera]: Hey. Let me introduce myself. My name is—

Daughter: DAD!

Dad: And proud of it. And all dads should be.

[The dad gets out of bed and begins walking through the house, offering a monologue to the camera while getting his kids ready for the day.]

Daughter: Dad! Dad! Dad! Dad! Dad!

Dad: Why? You know why. Kids think we’re awesome. We get our hands messy. We tell hilarious jokes.

[to sleeping son]

Hey, Nolan. We got to get up, buddy.

[to camera]

We never say no to dress up. We build the best forts. We do work-work and we do homework. We lead by example and we blow their minds.

Son: I can’t believe he’s his father!

Dad: [to son] I know! That is called a “plot twist”!

[to camera]

Being awesome isn’t about breaking rules. It’s about making them.

Hot stuff coming through!

[He hands his wife a coffee.]

Dad: [to camera] Wife and the coffee.

And breakfast is for breakfast.

[to teenage son]

Hey, Nolan, give me a look here.

[He adjusts his son’s cap.]

Dad: Suggestion, that’s a boy, that’s a man.

[back to camera]

But it’s also for lunch, dinner, and midnight snacks.

Scraped knees aren’t boo-boos, they are badges of bravery on the playground.

[to teenage daughter]

Hey, Victoria? That profile pic? Awesome.

[He heads outside.]

Dad: When you’re a dad, hugs can be bear hugs, but they can also be high-fives, fist-bumps and next-level handshakes.

[lifts son from backyard swingset]

Kids. They’re our best friends. They’re our greatest fans.

[pats son]

Buddy, you’ve been gaining muscle mass, nice!

[back to camera]

And they look to us the same way we look at superheroes. Up. Because we’re taller. Now, dad-hood isn’t always easy. When a rule is broken, we’re the enforcement.

[to son]

Hey, buddy, it’s garbage day.

[back to camera]

But when a heart is broken, we’re the reinforcement. And we wouldn’t have it any other way. Because being a dad is awesome. Just like new Peanut Butter Cheerios is awesome. That’s why it’s the official cereal of dad-hood.

[He pauses in the driveway of his house.]

Dad: And this? This, my friends … [long pause] This is how to dad.

[He raises two fingers in either the peace sign or Churchill’s victory sign, and we see a montage of him dancing with his family, holding the Cheerios box.]

The ad received a roaring, enthusiastic response on Facebook. As of this writing, the ad has 1.6 million views on Facebook. The National Fatherhood Initiative raved, “The new commercial on YouTube reveals exactly what we at NFI hope other brands will do … show a dad as a fully functioning and capable parent … without degrading anyone in the family.” The Parents Television Council saluted it: “This commercial bucks the unfortunate media trend of depicting dads and bumbling, clueless, incompetent, lazy men.” AdAge stated that “it’s about time” commercials moved beyond buffoonish portrayals of fathers.

Fascinatingly, the marketing firm that made the ad said they hadn’t aimed to tap into the sentiment at all:

Josh Stein, executive creative director for Tribal’s Toronto office, says that while portraying an empowered dad was always at the back of his mind, he didn’t set out to buck the traditional “bumbling dad” stereotype, which has been the fodder for much of the social media discussion surrounding the ad. “I’d be lying if I said that the goal of this work was to generate an international conversation around the portrayal of dads, but our work seems to have aligned with that parallel conversation,” he says. “Our goal was just to do the best campaign to launch this new product in the slowing cereal category, with dad as our primary target.”*

Molly Soat, “Cheerios Leverages the Power of ‘Dadvertising,’” Marketing News Weekly, January 13, 2015, https://www.ama.org/publications/eNewsletters/Marketing-News-Weekly/Pages/cheerios-how-to-dad.aspx.

Naturally, Salon.com hated it, continuing their Cal-Ripken-esque record-breaking uninterrupted streak of consecutive wrong takes. (I’m really looking forward to Salon’s review of this book.)

“When you define dad as the cool one, as the one who can get his hands ‘messy,’ you are firmly pigeonholing mom in her role as the lame one,” lamented Salon contributor Hayley Krischer.**

Hayley Krischer, “I Hate When My Husband Tries to Be a ‘Cool Dad’: Why You Shouldn’t Believe the New Cheerios Commercial,” Salon, July 28, 2014, http://www.salon.com/2014/07/28/dont_believe_that_new_cheerios_commercial_why_i_hate_the_myth_of_the_cool_dad/.

Oh, FFS, as they say on the Internet.***

For you-know-what’s sake.

Pardon my reference to the F-bomb, but it’s a good segue to a fascinating documentary released in 2010, entitled The Other F Word, showcasing the lives of punk-rock stars of years past in their current lives as fathers. Produced by Cristan Reilly and directed by Andrea Nevins, the film reveals what some dads may have long suspected: sooner or later, every man ends up in a minivan singing, “The wheels on the bus go round and round” to his child—even Art Alexakis of Everclear.

To many audiences, the punk-rock stars depicted in the film—Black Flag’s Ron Reyes, Mark Hoppus of Blink 182, pro skater Tony Hawk—embodied everything cool, revolutionary, anarchic, and hedonistic, a vehement, uncompromising rebellion against all forms of authority … and now they find themselves the authority. The film is funny and sweet, and a bit more serious when the rockers discuss their own painful childhoods and often absent-fathers, and how this motivates them to be such dedicated fathers.

Flea, bassist for the Red Hot Chili Peppers—known for anarchic antics such as performing completely naked at the 1999 Woodstock concert—declares, “The classic parent attitude to a kid is like, ‘I brought you into this world. I gave you life!’ It’s like, I just think completely opposite. My kids gave me life, you know. They gave me a reason.”

Jim Lindberg, frontman of the punk-rock band Pennywise who wrote a book in 2007 entitled Punk Rock Dad that largely inspired the film, says at one point, “When we were younger, we were all nihilistic, and didn’t care. Live for today. Live fast. I thought we were going to change the world.” Lindberg concludes at the end of the film: “Maybe the way we change the world is by raising better kids and being more attentive to those kids.”

If these men can adapt to the demands of fatherhood, any young man can. These rockers’ self-image and sense of identity revolved around opposing everything traditionally associated with being a father—responsibility, stability, commitment, devotion, discipline—perhaps even the concept of lifelong love. Maybe all of those concepts didn’t need such an across-the-board rejection. Maybe they just needed a little refinement, an adjustment to make a little room for what remains of that youthful anarchic spirit.

One rocker who didn’t show up in The Other F Word but would have fit in quite well is Duff McKagan, formerly the bassist of Guns N’ Roses, perhaps the most notorious hard-rock band of the late 1980s and early 1990s. The era of Guns N’ Roses’ musical world domination epitomizes every VH1 Behind the Music cliché—infighting, rivalries, runaway egos, rampant drug use and addiction, promiscuity that would make Hugh Hefner blush. McKagan describes drinking ten bottles of wine per day until his pancreas burst and he nearly died in emergency surgery.

That rather intense wake-up call from his body—and perhaps his soul—dramatically altered the trajectory of his life, and in the following years, he completed an amazing transformation: he got sober, went back to school, learned how to manage his money, fell in love, became a father—oh, and formed a new band, Velvet Revolver.

One of the fascinating confessions is that even when he was at the heights of rock and roll success, living a life of debauchery and hedonistic excess that could tempt any man, a part of his heart ached to be a stable, trusted, loving father:

Even during my times of trial and extreme drug and alcohol abuse, I held out hope that one day I’d be that guy who was the head of a family—the steady guider, the calm and strong voice. As a consequence, I am a hopeless romantic when it comes to my wife and two daughters. The imagery that has been forever ingrained in my head by It’s a Wonderful Life will never leave. My girls think I am totally corny, but I don’t care. I am who I am. I can get bummed out sometimes when things don’t work out like they did for George Bailey, but waiting for my family at the airport filled me with joy …*

Duff McKagan, How to Be a Man (Boston: DeCapo Press, 2015), 26.

All that glitters is not gold. Maybe you’ll reach the heights of fame and fortune—but will it be worth it without someone to share it with and leave it to? Who do you want to come home to when the cheering crowd gets into their cars and leaves?

In 2010, a quartet offered a gangster rap video entitled “Dad Life,” with seemingly menacing lyrics about their suburban lives of creased dockers, large lawnmowers, work in the yard garden, minivans, backyard barbecues, and watching Disney videos with their daughters.

“I roll hard in the yard with my 60-inch cut, zero turn radius, my neighbors say what?”*