Dress like the father you want to be

The modern world is a busy place — especially if you’re a father.

On top of your regular job, you’ve got all the different jobs that come with having kids: chauffeur, chef, waiter, teacher, doctor.

Your average mother and father in 1964 dressed better than your average mother and father in 2024. The fertility rate was higher then, too. Coincidence?

To stay on top of all this, a lot of dads put family first — and themselves a distant second. Any time we spend doing something for ourselves that doesn’t seem absolutely necessary feels selfish or frivolous.

Don’t sweat it

Often one of the first things to go is regular exercise. Hence the term “dad bod.” The irony here is that in the long run, taking care of your health is one of the best things you can do for your family.

Clothes take a back seat as well. Look respectable for work, if you have to. But dressing for dad duty should be strictly utilitarian. And yet, like exercise, taking pride in your appearance can also make you a better father.

Sure, you’ve got more important things to do than shop or agonize over which shade of khakis to wear. And setting aside selfish concerns is an important part of growing up and becoming a parent.

But you can still get your kids to their 11th sports practice of the week and put a little effort into what you wear.

Certain expectations

The past is a helpful guide for discerning what is, and isn’t, frivolous. What did parents do in the not-so-distant past? What was normal?

Well, dressing decently was certainly normal. Your average mother and father in 1964 dressed better than your average mother and father in 2024. The fertility rate was higher then, too. Coincidence?

Men shaved every morning, wore pressed shirts, leather shoes, and sport coats. Women wore makeup, did their hair, wore dresses and heels. Not every single day, of course, but far more often than not.

Proper grooming was the minimum standard for functioning adults. Society had certain expectations, and it was your job to meet them, and in meeting them, you ended up better off yourself because looking good makes you feel good.

Hair shirt

I talk to other fathers and something I hear a lot is guilt at the prospect of spending time and energy on clothes. Prioritizing dressing well — something that feels less necessary for the good parent — feels wrong.

It may only take an extra 20 to 30 minutes a day to make a massive change in your personal appearance, but those 20 to 30 minutes can seem utterly indispensable when the 2-year-old is barreling toward the white couch with a fistful of crayons or the 6-year-old just gouged a big hole in the drywall getting his bike out. It feels like taking that time for yourself is selfish or wrong.

That feeling isn’t right. It’s not selfish or wrong to make yourself presentable for the day. But many good parents still feel it anyway.

A big part of getting over this unreasonable guilt trip is reframing, and correctly understanding, what the bare minimum actually is.

Slob story

The bare minimum isn’t doing nothing and looking like a slob all day. No. The bare minimum is 20 to 30 minutes getting ready for the day. The bare minimum is looking decent.

That comes close to what the norm was until just a few decades ago. That time allowance every morning would not be shocking to our grandparents. You can take that time as a parent.

One of the great struggles of being a parent is balancing our love for our children with the obligations we have to ourselves.

On the job

That sounds all hippy-dippy, I know, but it’s really not. If you are pointlessly miserable, you are not going to be the best parent you can be. If you look like a slob, you are not going to feel good about yourself. Some amount of misery and unpleasantness is expected in life. That’s the nature of this world. But unnecessary misery is another thing. It’s pointless.

Being a parent means you have an important job. It doesn’t mean you aren’t allowed to care about yourself anymore.

You are allowed to dress nicely even when surrounded on all sides by tiny marauding savages. In fact, you might say that’s when it’s most important to do so. Being able to roll up your sleeves and roughhouse while also serving as a beacon of civilized adulthood — isn’t that the essence of fatherhood?