Dad Strength.

A post crossed my timeline this week that really made me think.

It was a clip of Chris Williamson (a popular podcaster in the men's self-improvement space) sharing his "nuclear" sleep stack with neuroscientist Andrew Huberman. This personal optimization genre is interesting: elaborate sleep rituals, precise wind-down protocols, supplement stacks, cold plunges, mouth-taping, morning sunlight exposure all in the relentless pursuit of peak performance. It's a lot of effort.

But then a guy named Jacob Edward chimed in to point out that neither Chris nor Andrew are married or have kids. His point was sharp:
“There is nothing impressive about a single man with no kids sleeping well and being fit. Show me a man with young children, a full time job, disrupted sleep, who works out regularly, eats healthy, trains Jiu Jitsu, with a muscular body... THIS is impressive. THIS requires extreme discipline.”

Each year that goes by, I have grown more convinced by this point. My journey with discipline took on an entirely new dimension when I had kids. It changed in a way that made everything before it feel like a scrimmage.

I might have been grinding, waking up early, hitting PRs, reading books, building habits, and that was great. But the moment I brought my first child home from the hospital, I entered a completely different arena.

Every priority got re-sorted. Every hour got re-weighed. Every dollar got re-assigned. And the version of discipline I practiced as a twenty-something with full autonomy over my schedule suddenly looked quaint.

This new season required something I’ve come to call Dad strength.

Money

When you’re single or married without kids, a frivolous dollar is just a frivolous dollar. An impulse buy feels like a small regret at worst. But the moment your first child arrives, the math changes completely.

Every dollar you spend carelessly is a dollar that affects the kind of wedding you can give your daughter. It’s a dollar that determines whether she graduates with student loans or without them. It could be the margin that gives you and your wife the flexibility later in life to be fully present as grandparents. A surprise bill that used to be an inconvenience now has the power to destabilize the security of your home.

When you bring your first child home from the hospital, your view of money completely changes. Disciplined stewardship of your finances stops being a personality trait and starts being an act of love.

The Power Hours

Here is the part that no optimization podcast can prepare you for.

What used to be a multi-hour post-work gym session, your chance to decompress, listen to a podcast, hit the weights, sit in the sauna, grab a late dinner with your wife, suddenly vanishes. Those hours between 5:00 and 8:00 PM get swallowed whole. This block of time has come to be called the power hours around my house. They are the most grueling three hours of the day. You walk through the door already running on fumes, and you are immediately called upon to stay awake, play with the kids, wrestle on the floor, help clean up dinner, manage bath time, and read a book without falling asleep in the chair.

Post work quickly becomes the most expensive hours of the day. If I am giving them to anybody, they better be worth it. And my workouts were certainly not worth taking from my family.

So where do the workouts go?

They go to the morning. Now the least expensive hours of the day are between 5:00 and 7:00 AM, when the house is completely quiet, the kids are asleep, and you can get a workout in and prepare for your day without anyone paying a cost for it.

Each day now comes with tension: sleeping through those hours means your workout has to come from somewhere else and that somewhere else is almost always family time. On the other hand, sleeping through those hours and never working out at all means your family pays a different price losing years with you because you refused to take care of your body.

Bottom line: get out of bed.

Work

Traveling to cool new cities for work used to be exciting. You’d think, how awesome is this? Now you think, how many nights away is it?

Your relationship with work fundamentally shifts. You begin to think in terms of freedom and flexibility. What do I need to do to become so valuable within my organization (or so valuable to the market) that I have the freedom and flexibility to protect my family, provide for my family, and be present for my family?

Protect. Provide. Be present. These become the primary goals as your world shifts away from acquisition and success for success’s sake toward something beyond yourself, something bigger. Career ambition doesn’t die it just transforms. You stop climbing for the view and start climbing because people are depending on you at the top.

Faith and the Transmission of Values

Then comes the part that really shakes you.

You watch your children grow up awash in cultural messaging. You hear horror stories from other families… kids abducted by ideologies that would have them deny the goodness of their own bodies, infected by anti-natal sentiments that tell them the greatest thing they could do for the world is not bring another life into it. And you realize something that hits like a freight train: your grandchildren depend on the successful transmission of your faith and values.

Fighting for and promoting life, marriage, the permanence of the family and ultimately the source of all of this wisdom and truth, which is faith in Christ becomes an urgent mission. You realize you need to know culture’s arguments. You need to know what you believe. And you need to get good at teaching it to your children, because the transmission of your faith becomes one of the primary ways you protect them throughout their entire lives… even after you are no longer with them.

Discipline as a single man might mean reading your Bible regularly in the morning. Discipline as a father means knowing it well enough to hand it to your children as armor.

Marriage

Before kids, you don’t even realize how little you depended on each other daily. You don’t really have to coordinate schedules. It doesn’t much matter when one of you leaves the house in the morning or when you’re getting back. You get to preserve a great deal of your independent identity. It feels like freedom.

Kids expose all of that.

The minute you have children, you see how ill-equipped you are to be true teammates. To get on the same page about parenting. To tag each other in and out of daily tasks and chores. To defend one another while enforcing discipline. To stay unified as new decisions crop up that affect the little people you love more than anything in the world. If you have a genuine disagreement about something that affects your children, you had better know how to solve that problem, quickly and humbly.

And you’ve got to do all of this while not losing your romantic connection. Something that becomes incredibly difficult as you walk through seasons of sleeplessness with young children, passing like ships in the night through bedtime routines and stacks of kid’s books, exhausted beyond words.

But you know, looking into your children’s eyes, how devastating it would be for them to endure the breakup of your union. Splitting time between two houses. Watching their world fracture. If the two of you ever devolve into just teammates and stop being lovers, you’ve lost something your kids desperately need. The discipline to choose each other first, to invest time and money into your marriage even when you are completely exhausted, to protect the romance through the chaos that is one of the hardest things a man will ever do.

Dad Strength

I call all of this Dad strength because I really do believe God delivers a new kind of strength to you when you become a father.

I’ve always thought about it like daily bread, like the manna the Israelites gathered in the wilderness. They couldn’t stockpile it. They couldn’t save a two-day supply. They had to trust that it would be there again in the morning.

In my eight years of having kids (four total now) I have never had a two-day supply of dad strength. I’ve only ever had enough energy for the day ahead of me. And honestly? That dependency on God is good.

Whether I think it’s good or not, it’s all I’ve got.

The burden and mantle and blessing that it is to lead a family is only ever made lighter by walking with Jesus and asking Him each and every day for provision and rest.

Now, am I as fit as I was in college? No.
Am I as well-rested? No.
Does my car look as cool with french fries ground into the seats and car seats strapped in the back? Absolutely not.

But this is a new season and a new challenge. Learning to embrace these intense years by being ruthlessly efficient with your time, incredibly disciplined with your sleep, diligent with your workouts, frugal with your funds, and intentional with your wife… these are the new challenges. It is a different kind of hard than the disciplined, intentional life you pursued at twenty years old.

But don’t overlook that dad falling asleep at 8:02 pm, having put his children down after three books and a bath. That legend, nodding off on the couch, has far more grit than the twenty-year-old gym rat will ever know.

-JW

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About the Author:

Currently, I serve as the Executive Director of Them Before Us, advocating globally for the rights and well-being of children.

I am also the co-founder of All The Good, a leadership organization helping non-profits do all the good they are called to do.

I studied Cross-Cultural Ministry and Humanitarian and Disaster Leadership at Messiah and Wheaton. I read a lot and sleep less than I probably should.

My wife and I live in Charlotte, North Carolina with our 4 kids.