Every year around Father’s Day, we celebrate dads. We buy the cards, we make the brunches, we post the throwback photos. But what if this year we gave dads something more useful — a real, honest conversation about what showing up as a father actually looks and feels like from the inside?
That’s exactly what happened in this week’s episode of Kids These Days, when Dr. Courtney sat down with Bryce Giron Mathern, a Denver-based licensed counselor and dad coach at Wholehearted Dads. Bryce works exclusively with fathers, and he brought equal parts clinical wisdom and personal honesty to the conversation. He’s also a dad himself — to nine-year-old twin boys he had in his 40s via IVF — and he doesn’t pretend it’s been easy.
1. The Shift Happening in Fatherhood Right Now
Something is changing in the way dads are showing up, and Bryce calls it a silent revolution. More and more fathers are walking into therapy, into coaching, into conversations like this one, and saying the same thing: I want to have a real relationship with my kid. Not just to provide. Not just to be present at the games. A genuine, warm, connected relationship — the kind where, decades from now, they can call up their adult child and go for a hike together.
That desire is newer than we might think. And it’s also harder than it looks, especially for dads who weren’t modeled that kind of fathering themselves.
2. The Framework: High Limits AND High Connection
One of the most clarifying things Bryce shared in this conversation was a simple framework he uses both personally and with his clients. Good parenting, he says, requires two things held simultaneously: high expectations and limits, and high connection. Take away one or the other, and you end up somewhere less helpful.
Drop the expectations and limits, and you slide into passive parenting — where kids don’t have the structure they need to feel safe. Drop the connection, and you slide into authoritarian parenting — where compliance is enforced through control and fear. Decades of psychological research backs this up. Kids thrive when they feel both held and seen.
Bryce illustrated this with a story about his son, who refused to take a shower and ran outside to the trampoline instead. Rather than issuing a command or threatening a consequence, Bryce went outside, stood by the trampoline, and simply acknowledged his son’s experience. I get it. You don’t want to do this. I totally understand. But here’s why we have to. He asked his son what he thought they should do. He brought his son into the problem rather than imposing a solution from above. Ten minutes later, his son climbed on his dad’s back and they walked inside together.
Same outcome. Completely different relationship.
3. Your Nervous System Is the Parenting Tool You're Overlooking
The thread running through the entire conversation was this: we cannot show up for our kids’ emotional experience if we are not aware of our own. Bryce is direct about this — regulation is a skill, and for many dads, it’s a skill they were never taught.
When a child won’t comply, our nervous system reads it as a threat. Not a conscious one, but a biological one. The fight response kicks in. The jaw tightens. The chest gets heavy. The energy in the body wants to move outward, toward control, toward force, toward volume. And if we’re not aware of that process happening, we act on it — and put our emotional experience onto our kids.
The work, Bryce says, is learning to notice the signals. Not to suppress them, not to shame yourself for having them, but to name them. I feel tight in my chest. My breathing is shorter. There’s a wave of anger coming. That awareness alone — that simple act of turning attention inward — is what begins to settle the nervous system down. And once you’re even slightly more regulated, your behavioral options multiply. Suddenly you can sit next to the trampoline instead of issuing a command. You can ask what your child needs instead of demanding compliance.
This is especially important for dads, Bryce notes. Cultural messaging around masculinity has historically shamed men out of their emotional experience, which means many fathers have less practice noticing what’s happening inside them. And given that men are typically physically stronger, the stakes of acting from an unregulated place are higher. That’s not a judgment — it’s an honest reason to do the work.
4. The Shame Spiral and How to Find Your Way Out
A lot of dads carry significant shame about their parenting. They remember the moments they lost their temper, the times they shut down, the ways they’ve repeated patterns from their own fathers that they swore they never would. Bryce sees this regularly in his practice, and his approach is simple and compassionate: he challenges the story.
That can’t possibly be the whole story. There is no dad who has never had a warm moment with his child, never made his kid laugh, never showed up. The shame narrative is selective. It highlights the worst moments and edits out the rest. Bryce’s work is to gently widen the lens — to help dads see the full picture, own the hard parts without drowning in them, and ask a more useful question: How do I show up better today?
Guilt, he notes, can be useful. It points at specific behavior and says: I want to do that differently. Shame is something else entirely — it says I am bad, and it tends to lead to either paralysis or avoidance. Neither is useful. What is useful is showing up to the next moment.
5. Two Tools You Can Use Tonight
Bryce ended the conversation with two practical tools he shares with the dads he works with — both simple, both immediately applicable.
The first is the 30-second rule. When your child doesn’t comply with a request, don’t escalate. Count silently to 30. Give them the space to process and move toward what you’ve asked. Bryce observes that kids will often find their shoes, put down the toy, start moving — if we give them the seconds to do it without a power struggle. And those 30 seconds, as Dr. Courtney pointed out, are also time for the dad to breathe and regulate.
The second is filling the bucket. When you come home after a long day and your kids want to play and you have nothing left, you don’t need to give them two hours. Give them 10 to 15 minutes of fully engaged, genuinely curious presence. Get on their level. Ask about the Lego. See the thing they’re showing you. Fill their play bucket — and then take your break. That’s enough. That’s more than enough.
The Bigger Invitation
The deepest message of this conversation is one that runs through everything Bryce does: your kids didn’t just come into your life to be raised. They came into your life to grow alongside you. Fatherhood is a developmental experience for the parent, not just the child. The dads who thrive — who build the relationships they actually want — are the ones who commit to growing. Not because they read every book or listened to every podcast, but because they stayed curious about themselves, repaired when they got it wrong, and kept showing up.
This Father’s Day, that might be the most meaningful gift you can give your kids — not perfection, but presence. Not control, but connection.
Resources & Links:
- Bryce Giron Mathern’s practice: wholehearteddads.com
- Follow Bryce: @wholehearted_dads
- Follow IBH: @integratedbh