7 Dad hacks every modern dad should know
-
Loading... - Kenneth Mathew
- 14 Jun 2022
- 251 Views
- 0 Like
- 0 Comment
You were warned. You were warned long ago that parenthood is a gauntlet of emotional and physical toil.
Friends, family, strangers… they all assuredly told you that having kids is a real bitch. They come at you like haunting gypsies, foretelling of dirty diapers and colicky infants.
Stroll around in public with a pregnant woman and you will be both congratulated and cautioned that you will never sleep peacefully again.
But what they often won’t tell you about are the more subtle, modern annoyances of modern daddying. All the baby spit-up and Legos left on the floor for you to step on: those are the givens. But there are so many MORE awful things about being a dad these days.
And so the people at GQ asked me to come up with a rundown of lesser-known problems that will occur to you, the current dads and the dads-to-be.
Because I am not a sadist—and because I cope with dadhood by bestowing tales of dad woe upon others, even those who do not have kids—I have also generously included my solutions to these problems.
Will my advice work? Eh….50/50 odds at best. But being a parent means trying anything in the hopes that it works, so you really have no choice but to heed my bullshit. Commiserate with me now:
1. “Help! The kids keep screwing with my Spotify account!”
Getting your kid into music is not only wonderful for them, but also great for you, because music shuts them up real good.
The problem is that, if you use a streaming service like Spotify, children will fall for it immediately and commandeer your account.
My youngest son has his own playlist on Spotify that includes two different versions of the Power Rangers theme song. It is the playlist from hell. And it’s blowing up my recs.
The Solution: A family account. It’s only $16.99/month (R273.29 pm in SA) that gives you five separate accounts that, blissfully, have nothing to do with one another.
Please note that each of these secondary accounts requires an email invite and, like so many other tech entities, Spotify hasn’t given a ton of thought as to how much aggravating online labour is needed to send invites to your own junk mail accounts to set shit up for kids.
I still have one membership left I haven’t activated because I just don’t want to make the effort. Still, I am happy to not see ten different Parry Gripp albums in my “Recently Played” section—it’s shitty ’80s music and some Carly Rae Jepsen, just the way I like it.
2. “Help! All I do is drive now!”
Sports give children purpose and direction, and all it costs you is thousands of dollars and the personal freedom to drive places you actually want to go.
You could try to make plans with another parent. Go ahead. Try it. You will fail. All you’ll get in response is an hour-long sigh and, “We have baseball that day.”
The number of nights I have lost driving to some gym tucked behind an office park to pick up a kid at 9 pm is STAGGERING. I could have been drinking and playing phone games, man.
Carpooling doesn’t even help because coordinating a carpool is more labour than just doing all the driving yourself.
The Solution: One sport per season, that’s the rule. You people who have your kids do more than one sport at a time? You are crazy people. Everyone just settle down. This needn’t be an arms race where families compete to see which one is the sportiest.
Do not have your kid do baseball, soccer, lacrosse, tae kwon do, a DIFFERENT lacrosse league, and diving all at once. The downtime it gives you and your kid is healthy-ass downtime. Read More…
