A sense of humour is a father’s ultimate survival tool. On a bad day, life with young kids can feel like you’re being pinballed between frustrations, setbacks and cups of milk deliberately upturned into washing-baskets full of fresh laundary. Laughter can help preserve your sanity. Or at least make you marginally less dependent on daytime drinking.
That’s why you need to make an ally out of WTFDAD who operates under the Twitter handle @daddydoubts. He’s a Brooklyn guy with a three-year-old son who shares his observations from the frontline of fatherhood. So far, so unremarkable – except that luckily, he’s also very funny.
WTFDAD’s tweets feel like a wink of recognition for the indignities of daily family life. In essence, they’re funny because they’re true.
Laughter, of course, is a well-documented form of stress-relief. It decreases your heart rate and blood pressure to help you relax.
But the way these missives invariably hit the parental bullseye also have another important effect: they offer a sense of solidarity.
Fatherhood can prove a lonely business at times. The time-consuming nature and sheer effort of parenting small kids often serves to isolate you from your mates. To stave off the doldrums, sometimes you just need a nod of empathy and some black comedy. Or just a tweet from WTF Dad.
