At These Magazines, Father’s Day Comes More Than Once a Year

You’re making love to your wife with uncharacteristic passion when your 9-year-old daughter enters and asks what all that noise is. You are trying to explain school shootings to your 7-year-old son, whose toy chest is filled with a plastic arsenal. Your 14-year-old daughter, who says you’re an idiot and whose name you have noticed scrawled on bathroom walls, wants a nose ring.

Children have changed your life, and suddenly you are seriously considering two unsettling possibilities, a minivan and vasectomy, wondering which might be more unpleasant.

These are issues addressed by two new publications with almost identical names: Dads, a bimonthly based in New York, and Dad’s Magazine, a quarterly based in Glen Ellyn, Ill.

Both aim to help men become better dads in an era when they seek more meaningful relationships with their children than they have with their bosses, their remote controls and their own fathers.

“We hope to be a steppingstone in connecting and reconnecting fathers with their children,” says Dad’s Magazine publisher and Chief Executive Jonathan Scott. “Research has shown that if you are able to reconnect the father with the children, the children are less likely to become involved with drugs and crime activities.”

Eric Garland, editor of Dads, says his publication hopes to help men find balance in their lives.

“We work longer hours, I think, than even our fathers did and have a chance for great success and rewards, but . . . there’s a hollow victory in that the more you achieve in your business career, the less time you have with your family, and the whole point of your business career is to provide for your family. What we’re trying to tap into is that there has to be more balance.”

Nina Link, president and chief executive of Magazine Publishers of America, says that while the general topic of parenting has been of great interest to magazine readers, time will tell if “dads will read dad magazines.”

“Certainly fathers are out there, and they’re more involved with their children,” she says. “The question is: What is the content formula that will draw them into the magazine?”

Dads

Based on the premier issues, Dads is the slicker, more substantial of the two. Unlike Dad’s Magazine, which relies heavily on a question-and-answer format, it features established magazine writers and photographers such as Mark Hyman, a contributing editor at Business Week and a columnist for Street & Smith’s Sports Business Journal, who wrote a cover story on Baltimore Oriole Cal Ripken.

Garland, 43, former senior editor of Money magazine, says the magazine responds to the evolving roles of men and women in American society.

“This is not my father’s magazine. The difference is that most of us men in our 30s and 40s, our wives are working. This magazine will be read primarily by professional men with two-career households. Because our wives are working, rightfully so, there is more emphasis on husbands now to share more of the parenting.”

But more involved parenting is not merely something men are being forced into, Garland says. It is something they want and need in their lives. The problem for many is that the path leading there is not well marked. Garland speaks of his own life as an example.

“My father [a nuclear engineer] was a wonderful father,” Garland says. “He was cut from the same mold as most men from that generation where their primary role was breadwinner and provider. They left emotional development and communicating to the mothers. I think that’s the key difference today for most men. We want to be more emotionally connected.”

The cover story about Ripken describes how, on Sept. 6, 1995, he drove his daughter to her first day of kindergarten and that evening broke a long-held Major League record, playing in his 2,131st consecutive game.

“We knew that Ripken was someone who, in many ways, men could identify with,” Garland says. “The guy’s turning 40 this year, he’s got kids. How does he balance the demands of his family and job, which pays him very well but forces him to be on the road and away from his family much of the time?”

Former football great Boomer Esiason, a regular columnist and minority owner in the magazine, writes about coping with the death of a loved one. Other familiar names include author Frank McCourt, who offers this: “What I learned is that if I don’t know something, I just shrug my shoulders and admit it. Doctors don’t know everything. Neither do teachers. Or dads.”

From the trivial to the serious, the magazine’s premier issue also includes a story about how an African American father who grew up during the civil rights movement reacts to use of the “N word” by teenagers. There also are articles on traveling with children, investing, how to talk to children about school violence, the challenges of being a single father.

The magazine is expected to be online this week at https://www.edads.com.

Dad’s Magazine

Jonathan Scott worked in television for 20 years, producing a video magazine in airports called “Host Air Travel Network.” He also publishes Cigar Smoking magazine.

While Dad’s Magazine has been online since 1998 (at https://www.dadsmagazine.com), it didn’t come out on paper until this spring.

“We want to be warm and friendly, and our main mission is to get fathers more involved with their children so we like to show activities for fathers to do with their children, whether it’s cooking or playing ball or reading,” says Scott, 45.

The first issue offers “10 reasons to read aloud to your child,” an article about the Montessori education system. There is an interview with author and behaviorist Thomas Phelan, and a piece on the importance of encouraging your child’s imagination.

Actor-comedian Joe Piscopo talks about his relationship with son Joey, who now performs with him on stage, describing how it felt to lose custody of his son in the mid-1990s.

“It was awful,” he says. “the worst thing that ever happened to me in my life. People don’t understand. I dropped everything and followed Joey 2,200 miles away down to Florida, where his mother was living. So I was down there for birthdays, first day of school, Halloween, we did the whole thing. He was 8 years old.”

Scott says the magazine, which is affiliated with the National Fatherhood Initiative, a nonprofit agency promoting responsible fathering, will address issues of divorce and custody in future issues.

“We’ll talk about single dads dealing with visitation and how to get along better with your ex for the sake of the children. Those are issues that we pay attention to and we have to pay attention to. A lot of dads want to be more involved with their kids, but they don’t understand the law, and they’re afraid, and they’re curious, and they don’t want to keep paying the attorneys.”

Scott says there has been a strong response to the magazine . . . from women.

“We hear from a lot of women who want to send the magazine to their ex-husbands because they want to help their ex-husbands become more involved with their children when they spend what little time they do spend with them.”

Like Garland, Scott is a father. He says that he has become more patient and tolerant with his two children since starting the magazine and thinking more seriously about his role in their lives.

“I try to spend every minute that I’m not working with my kids. You can’t very well be publisher of a dad’s magazine and not be there for your kids.”