Chris Rodack: Why Strong Fathers Are Needed in Today's Society

Full transcript of the Tom Rowland Podcast, Episode 747, with guest Chris Rodack, founder of Rising Father.

What Is Rising Father

Chris Rodack: Hi, I'm Chris Rodack with Rising Father, and this is the Tom Rowland Podcast.

Tom Rowland: So, Rising Father. Tell me about Rising Father.

Chris Rodack: It's a men's fatherhood brand and community that I started about two years ago. I'm a teacher, and I wanted to invest my extra time and passion into something that helped me grow as a person, and something I could share what I think about all the time. Ever since my son was born — I've got a little redheaded boy, you've probably seen him on social media — I remember holding him at the hospital. He had this deep stare into my eyes, like he was piercing me. Ever since that moment, I've been obsessed with being the best dad I can be and spending as much time with him as I possibly can.

Chris Rodack: I'm on social media like everyone else, and I see a lot of fatherhood brands out there, brands like Fatherly and others, and a lot of them weren't really expressing what I was feeling. So I thought there was an opening for me to express myself and help other dads understand that they need to make the most of their time right now, because it goes so fast.

Tom Rowland: I have three kids myself — two boys and a girl, twenty-six, twenty-four or twenty-five, and nineteen. When you talk about holding your little redheaded boy, I think about doing that myself. In some ways it feels like five minutes ago, and in other ways it feels like two lifetimes ago. There are times when you're in the middle of it and it feels like a dark tunnel with no light at the end — you think you'll be changing diapers forever — and then the next thing you know you're at a high school graduation. People told me growing up how fast it goes, and now I sound like an old person myself because they were right.

Chris Rodack: I feel like an old person too, and I'm only thirty-five with a nine and a seven-year-old. We had our kids early and unplanned, and I try to tell people your career and your business are important, but the worst thing that can happen is your kids go off to college and you look back and think you should have spent more time with them, been more intentional. That's the one regret I refuse to let myself have. So the message I try to share is: make the most of your time right now, because these are the best days of your life. Enjoy your kids, because the effect you have on them every single day has an infinite impact.

A Message That Cuts Against the Grain

Tom Rowland: You mentioned that other brands weren't saying the same things you were feeling. What's different about what you're saying?

Chris Rodack: When I first started, a lot of brands were catering to a pop-culture narrative — the typical sitcom dad, not the most masculine, not the wisest, not a leader you'd put your life in the hands of. I see fatherhood as a sacred duty. The bond you make with your kids is spiritual — it can never break, and it should never break. I wasn't seeing anyone talking about it on that level. It felt like the father role had become an accessory to the mother-father partnership, or the father was the foolish drunk guy in the funny meme accounts. There's more to being a father than being the joke of the whole thing. If you take your role seriously, you can impact that kid forever if you turn yourself into the person you need to be.

Tom Rowland: A lot of that isn't exactly popular opinion right now, with the pushback around toxic masculinity. Have you run into resistance, or are you mostly drawing in the people who really need it?

Chris Rodack: I've had it from both ends of the spectrum, and honestly both ends are equally repulsive to me. The toxic-masculinity crowd will comment or message, and that's just what happens when you put yourself out there online — could be bots, could be real people, it doesn't really matter. Then on the other end you've got the super alpha-male crowd who think that if you say anything positive about a woman, you're somehow less of a man. I don't want to fall into either camp.

Chris Rodack: If I had to summarize the message, it's build yourself to build your family. We have a men's group completely focused on building ourselves physically and mentally through daily habits and discipline. It's simple: actions speak louder than words. You can't tell your kid to eat healthy if you're drinking beer and eating junk every night in front of him.

Chris Rodack: I remember the first time my son repeated something sarcastic I'd said — he was three, and it was something I'd said to my wife probably six years before that stuck with him. I thought, did I really say that? Because I'd also said something similar just the day before, and it took him three weeks to repeat it. They're soaking in everything we say and do — they're a mirror of our actions and words. And when I'm unorganized or sloppy in some area of my life, I see the same thing show up in him, and I realize I don't need to fix him — I need to fix myself first. I can't be a father and affect him at all until I've owned up to my own problems.

Tom Rowland: That's a great message — leading by example. In my experience, the best thing has been to notice something in yourself that isn't going well, name it out loud to your kids, and say, this is something I'm working on. Kids respond to that a lot better than being told they shouldn't be sarcastic while you're being sarcastic all day long. Leading by example is powerful.

Building the Men's Group

Tom Rowland: When you're working with the group, do you have a set program, or how does that work?

Chris Rodack: First there's a filtering process — I talk to guys and ask why they're interested. If it's to get a six-pack, it's not a good fit. If it's so they can show up better for their family, then let's talk. We want guys who are in it with a service mentality. Once you're in, it's high accountability every day. I tell guys, if it's Friday and you want to start Monday, you're going to be living a new way on Monday — you'll be on a macro plan, a training program. Everyone gets an individualized nutrition and workout program, and everyone has daily habits they check in on for their marriage, their parenting, and themselves. We all post screenshots of our wake-up times, and we have multiple Zoom calls a week.

Chris Rodack: It's a bunch of guys willing to suffer together and build a bond in community. The most powerful part is when someone says, I wasn't feeling good today, I snapped at my wife, I couldn't control my emotions — and someone else says, yeah, I did that too, here's what I did to fix it. Through sharing those experiences you build power within the group. A lot of our inner circles of friends and family aren't always people who want the absolute best for themselves, but when you're surrounded by people who do, you feed off their energy.

Tom Rowland: How did you learn to build the nutrition and workout plans and everything else?

Chris Rodack: I'm in my own men's groups that do something similar, and through them I'm connected with nutritionists, physical trainers, and other experts, so we all work together to create individualized programs for our members. The guys in our group aren't in one city — we've got a guy in Canada, a guy in India, a guy in Germany, people all over the U.S. It's all virtual.

Tom Rowland: So the idea is that when you improve the father, you improve the whole family.

Chris Rodack: Exactly. If I want to be the best father I can be, I have to try to be the best version of myself. But the focus can't be on looking good or making more money — it has to be that I go to the gym so I can live longer and have more energy to play with my kids. If I can force myself to get up at three forty-five every morning when it's cold and dark and push through that discomfort, then when I get home from work tired and my kids are being crazy, it's a lot easier to say no to just sitting down with a beer and to push through that instead. Mastering myself physically every morning transitions into every other part of my life.

Morning Workouts With His Son

Tom Rowland: I believe that too. I've got a group of guys I work out with in my driveway every morning, and it's a huge part of my life. It doesn't have to be misery — it can be something you look forward to, and it's also a place with great relationships. My kids used to come down and watch, and now my nineteen-year-old daughter has her own daily exercise routine and eats well, because she saw that exercise could be fun even when it's hard.

Chris Rodack: My answer for guys worried about workouts taking time from family is simple — wake up earlier. It's not going to be fun, but you get it done in the morning and then you have the afternoon and evening for your family. I do that, and I also work out with my son every single morning. I go to the gym first, then he wakes up and does kids' CrossFit with my wife a couple times a week. One day he came home from CrossFit really fired up, and while we were playing basketball he said, Dad, I want to work out every day for a year. I said, I'm not saying no to that, so we shook on it — we did a spit-shake on the basketball court — and that was about two hundred days ago. We've worked out together every single day since, doing burpees, push-ups, squats, sit-ups. He's motivated most days; some days he's not, but he still shows up.

Chris Rodack: One day he didn't feel like it in the morning, so I told him we'd work out in the evening instead, and I forgot I'd said that. He was at home with my wife, almost in tears, thinking I'd forgotten about our workout. That's how special that time together has become for us. I started rotating which exercises we do based on what he wants — for the last fifty days or so, he's the one designing the workout.

COVID, Screen Time, and the Loneliness Epidemic

Tom Rowland: One thing we talked about before we started recording was how COVID affected kids, parents, and everybody. As a teacher and someone running these groups, how do you see it having affected kids?

Chris Rodack: It affected them all differently, mostly based on how their parents handled it — and whatever you think about the policies, it doesn't matter to me, I'm just describing what I observed. Some kids were masked up for two years straight and never got to interact with their friends. Other kids barely wore a mask at all — our jiu-jitsu gym stayed open the entire time, and as long as you were healthy you could go train, so our kids never stopped seeing other kids and never stopped doing play dates. They flourished and grew socially during that stretch. But kids who were very restricted for those years are, in a lot of cases, permanently affected.

Chris Rodack: If you were two years old at the start of COVID, by the time the mask came off you were four, and you don't remember being two — so as far as you know, that's just who you are, someone who doesn't communicate with people that way. It's easy for a thirty-three-year-old to force himself to wear a mask for two years because he has thirty-three years of memory to fall back on. Young kids don't have that. Some of them may be permanently socially handicapped without some kind of intervention — and I think that intervention would have to be like ripping off a band-aid, putting them in social situations every single day until they get better at it. There's a famous experiment with baby monkeys — one group raised by a caregiver whose face was covered, and another by a caregiver whose face they could see and who was affectionate. The group that couldn't see a face suffered physically, mentally, and emotionally and didn't develop correctly, while the other group flourished and grew stronger and healthier.

Tom Rowland: Now that most people aren't wearing masks anymore, kids seem to be assimilating back pretty well. What concerns me more than the mask issue is the screen time — everything became Zoom, online classes, video games. There's communication happening through a screen, like we're doing right now, but it's not really the same as sitting next to somebody. Even with my older kids, the amount of screen time during that stretch was startling.

Chris Rodack: I think it's the same thing — a screen is a barrier to human interaction, just like a mask is. There was a huge increase in screen time, and if I had my way every kid would learn outdoors in a forest classroom with no screens at all. A lot of tech CEOs actually do that with their own kids. Most schools now are one-to-one with an iPad for every student, which is convenient and brings schools money, but I think it can harm kids developmentally to get used to interacting that way all the time.

Tom Rowland: Do you get into these kinds of topics with your group?

Chris Rodack: Not really — mostly we talk about the inner resistance everyone faces when they try to improve themselves. Anytime you try to change something, whether it's losing twenty pounds or doubling your sales this year, resistance shows up. I compare it to a video game — you have to beat the level-one boss before you move to a harder level with a harder boss. What we talk about most is how to stay aligned with who you want to be when the chaos comes, because it always comes. If I have five sales calls fall through and then come home to my kids running up for a hug, I still need to have a smile on my face — that control has to come from the inside. A lot of guys carry that stuff internally and never share it, and it spirals. We try to pull it out into the open.

Chris Rodack: There's a common theme among the guys in the group — fathers who think they're failing, who feel like they've wasted time or haven't been a good model for their kids. My message is: today, prove to yourself that you are who you say you want to be. Write down what a great father does — hugging your kids, telling them you love them, tucking them in, reading to them, being fully present with no screens — and that's your checklist for the day. It only takes a couple of days of those non-negotiable habits before you start feeling like you're crushing it again. I have guys in the group do a daily act of service for their wife that they never mention — doing the dishes, a chore that's normally hers — out of pure love, not to get credit.

Chris Rodack: When you actually do these things day after day, you become that person. It's not this far-off fantasy — do the things today, and you're already him. It's not a twelve-month program with an endpoint; if you want to be a father with an unbelievable connection to your kids, it's a lifetime deal. There's no magic pill — you can say it until you're blue in the face, but until you live it and accept that this is who you are now, nothing changes.

Tom Rowland: How do people find you, all over the world like that?

Chris Rodack: Mostly social media, Instagram. I probably get around twenty-five people a week reaching out, and from there we talk and figure out who's a fit for the group.

Tom Rowland: That seems like a lot, especially for something that takes real work. I do notice that theme everywhere — a lot of men's groups pushing back toward being strong, being a provider, being responsible, rather than the unattached, disconnected version of manhood.

Chris Rodack: There's a huge movement in that direction. Men's groups are taking off, and I don't think anyone's really in competition — everyone should have a group of men that builds them up, whether that's guys you work out with in person or guys you connect with virtually because you don't have that in your area. It's not something you'll see on a commercial, but among the guys actually talking to each other online, it's all about being strong, being a servant to your wife and kids, showing up, and working on yourself. I've seen a massive movement that way over the past couple of years.

Tom Rowland: I've seen studies saying a lot of men have zero friends — genuinely zero. One study asked who you'd call to take you to a doctor's appointment, and a huge number of men said they wouldn't have anyone to call.

Chris Rodack: I've run polls in my Facebook group, which has about nine thousand people in it, asking how many of us have real friends, and something like ninety percent said no. It's bad. I'm lucky — a lot of my friends live in the area, we grew up together, we're in a golf league now, we still hang out, but I also make an effort to maintain those friendships. Whenever I post about the importance of guys having friends, I'll get comments saying, I don't need friends, I have my family — like it's some noble virtue. I'm completely opposed to that. We have to have time with our friends to be mentally healthy. I encourage my wife to hang out with her girlfriends, and she encourages me to hang out with my guy friends. We've never made each other feel guilty about it, and I think that's pretty rare.

Tom Rowland: The trick, especially for a young father, is figuring out when that friend time comes from without taking away from your family. For me it's the morning — everyone else is asleep, and it's my time to do whatever I want with, whether that's being alone, being in a group, or working out. A lot of guys default to stopping at the bar after work instead, which is a sacrifice of family time that isn't sustainable if your family's home eating dinner and doing bath and bedtime without you. A lot of new dads end up in this in-between place — they've lost touch with their old friend group because those friends don't have kids yet, and they haven't found a new group with kids either.

Chris Rodack: We were always the family that had kids early while our friends didn't, so we'd just tell people to come over and hang out anyway — we'd be passing the baby around and it wasn't a big deal. I think it's healthy for kids to see you hanging out with friends, as long as it's not every day at the bar until six-thirty or seven. In a couple weeks I'm starting a nine-hole golf league — I'll be out once a week for two hours with my friends, and my kids know I do it. If I miss it, they'll ask why I'm not at golf league. I think that's an education for them — they'll be happier and more successful if they're good at making friends, and I have to model that for them. Last summer we went on a friends' vacation, four of us guys just bantering and hanging out, and my son stayed up late with us the whole week, just watching. That's a memory he'll have forever, and it's teaching him what it might be like to have close friends himself someday.

Tom Rowland: How does a guy who's in no-man's-land, with no friends, get from there to what you just described?

Chris Rodack: You have to be willing to be uncomfortable and go join something — a group, a rec league, pickup basketball at the Y on the weekend. Nobody there is good at basketball either, but you have to walk in and say, I'm new, can I play. Join the Masons, join a church, join any new community. At our church, if you're lacking friends, you'd have a hundred friends by the end of the week just by being willing to show up and put in a little work. If you want anything, including friends, you have to go get it, and that includes real work. If my friends and I had stopped putting in effort for each other over the past thirty-five years, we wouldn't have any friends left either. If I notice we haven't talked in a few days, I'll send the message and make the call, because if you miss a week it turns into five weeks, and before you know it that friendship is gone.

Fishing, Hunting, and Father-Son Rites of Passage

Tom Rowland: If your kids want to be around you as adults, when they have their own money and their own time and still choose to spend it with you, that's the biggest compliment they can pay you. My daughter recently asked me to take her fishing for a whole week over spring break, and she didn't even realize what a gift that was to me — to her it was just what she wanted to do. If your kids want to be with you once they're grown and have every other option, that's the definition of success.

Chris Rodack: That doesn't happen overnight — you've clearly been building that intentionally for years. Fishing is a whole other topic for me. We went on a friend's vacation to Maryland, and my buddy there is a big fisherman — I know absolutely nothing about it, but it looked calming and great. My son caught his very first fish on that trip and fell in love with it, so as soon as we got back to Pittsburgh I got some rods and we went to the local park lake catching minnows. He got about ten of them and loved every second of it. For me, I need to go into research mode — I want to actually learn about fishing so I can teach him properly, because right now I'm severely lacking in that department.

Tom Rowland: That's okay — that's the journey you get to take together, and with your daughter too, if you have one. Girls like to fish just as much as boys, and honestly they're often better anglers, because they actually do what the guide tells them instead of trying to do it their own way like a lot of guys do. What I love about fishing and parenting together is all the built-in rites of passage — the day you hand your kid a genuinely sharp hook because they've proven with a keychain at home that they can tie a good knot, or the day you teach them to hold a fillet knife and eventually let them fillet the fish themselves. Then it's driving the boat, backing the trailer down the ramp — it's a lifetime of these little milestones, until one day your kids are grown and picking you up in their own truck with their own boat and their own system, backing it down themselves, and you get to watch them do everything you taught them.

Tom Rowland: Hunting has the same thing. I think that's part of what the Boy Scouts used to offer, though the one thing I never liked about Scouts is that the rites of passage happened away from your dad. My dad and I had a great relationship and he took me to do all of that himself, so I'd rather have done it with him than with a troop. But if Scouts is somebody's outlet to the outdoors, that's great too. You'll see the same thing show up with fishing if you get into it at all — showing your kid how to read a map, letting them choose which lake to go to. For me, that's where I've spent most of my time with my kids, on the boat, fishing.

Chris Rodack: It's going to happen for us as soon as it's not freezing outside — we've got a little two-person kayak, and we're going to learn it together, the same way we learned jiu-jitsu together. Same thing with hunting — I don't have anyone in my immediate circle who hunts, so I need to make an extra effort to find someone who actually knows how to work a rifle and hunt to teach me, rather than experimenting in the woods on my own.

Tom Rowland: Guides are probably a little more common in fishing than in hunting, though both exist. Going out with a guide can be really good, but eventually you just have to learn enough to knock around on your own, because that's where the real learning happens — making mistakes, not catching anything some days, catching plenty other days. The days you don't catch anything make the days you do catch fish that much more valuable. Fishing has been fantastic for me, so if I can help you out with any of that down the road, let me know.

Where to Find Rising Father

Tom Rowland: If people want to learn more about your group, hang out in the Facebook groups, or take the next step and join the program, where do they find you?

Chris Rodack: The large open Facebook group is just called Rising Fathers — you can search it and join. If you want to talk about joining our men's program, find me on Instagram at Rising Father and send me a message — I'll talk to you all day.

Tom Rowland: Very cool. Well, Chris, I appreciate you coming on and sharing your purpose and your mission with us. I think it's really good, man — I think you're on the right track.

Chris Rodack: Appreciate that. I had a blast, thank you.

Tom Rowland: Alright, cool. Check him out, Rising Father on Instagram and Facebook. Do you have a podcast too?

Chris Rodack: Yep, it's called the Rising Father Podcast, on all the social media channels, just Rising Father. It comes out at least once a week — right now I'm trying to do a short solo episode and then have a guest on. I'm trying to branch out a little beyond just self-improvement and fatherhood content — I had a father on who's really into cooking, I've got a pizza guy coming on, and I had Steve Eckert from the Modern Day Knight project on as well. I'm trying to stay varied in the men's space for the podcast.

Tom Rowland: Nice. You should have Ray Cash Care on there too — he's a good dude and part of that same project. I've had Pedro, Sam, and Ray on this podcast, and they all have good messages.

Chris Rodack: Absolutely.

Tom Rowland: Alright, man, well, thanks for doing this, I appreciate it. And if you're a new father or a struggling father or somebody looking for advice or friends, check it out, Rising Father. Alright.