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 while my wife went through breast cancer, and how my son handled emergencies when we weren't home. I also make the case that time alone with your wife is one of the best things you can do for your kids.

We also hit 1,300 streams. Thank you for listening and sharing. If you know a dad whose story other dads could learn from, I'd love to hear about him.

Don't sleepwalk through fatherhood. Be Dadical.

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 jail, the streets, and now investigations. And the through-line he keeps finding is the same one: a missing father.

In this conversation, Davin shares what it was like to manage 120 men at 18 years old and the lesson that changed everything -- that those men weren’t bad guys, they were just humans who’d never been given the right tools. He talks about what fatherlessness actually looks like up close, why men without a male role model treat authority as a threat, and the juvenile wing moment that made it impossible to call it coincidence.

He also talks about his own dad -- a shift-working single father he calls the closest thing to God he knows -- and what it meant to always be able to look up in the stands and find him there.

If you’ve ever wondered what the data on fatherlessness looks like in real life, Davin has seen it. And he’s doing something about it.

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. Because something is shifting. Dads are more present than they’ve ever been, and the ones showing up to do this right aren’t bumbling idiots -- they’re deliberate, purpose-driven fathers who understand what’s at stake.

In this solo episode I walk through my four biggest takeaways from the first year of the Dadical Podcast: why loving their mom is the most universal theme I’ve encountered, what it actually means to be present versus just being nearby, why protecting your kids from struggle is one of the worst things you can do for them, and why the most important question you can ask yourself as a dad is -- what am I helping them become?

You want to change the world? It starts in your own home.