This summer, Zach Watson (best known as RealZackThinkShare on Instagram) posted his 234th Reel on the “mental load” — contemporary shorthand for the organizational and emotional work of parenthood that disproportionately falls to mothers. Walking around his house, he pointed out items that he hasn’t bought in years — trash bags, toothpaste, toddler snacks, toddler clothes — because his wife, Alyssa, stocks them. “I don’t think I’m a crappy husband that I haven’t bought those things,” he says to the camera. “If I were unwilling to see the invisible labor that is required to do those things, I’d have a bone to pick with myself.” The video garnered almost 2,000 likes on Instagram, where Watson, who looks like a cross between Justin Bieber and a young Kiefer Sutherland, has more than 400,000 followers. Watson is a Fair Play method facilitator, and he tells me he’s on a mission to show straight men how to take a more active role in their families. He tries to reach them via one-on-one online coaching sessions and his social-media posts. There’s just one problem: Dads, for the most part, refuse to watch any of his stuff.
Watson says that about 92 percent of his followers are women across platforms. Of his limited male following, he says that “95 to 99 percent are there because their wife has shown them a video.” One man who became a coaching client told Watson he used to hate seeing Watson’s face, loaded, as it was, with his wife’s judgment. Earlier this year, Watson rebranded his Instagram bio from the “recovering manchild” (referring to his former life as an aloof husband and father) to “your favorite invisible labor coach.” He hasn’t seen more dads come aboard since the adjustment, but he has noticed that women are less hesitant to pass his posts along. “I’ve gotten a lot of feedback from my women following that they feel much more comfortable sharing ‘invisible labor coach’ versus ‘recovering manchild,’” he says. “It can be really easy for guys to be like, ‘I’m not that fucking guy. I’m not a recovering man-child, fuck this guy.’”
Instagram dad influencers tend to embody a cultural shift away from the traditional, somewhat hands-off father (the man-child, if you will) toward an aspirational (and arguably, corny) role model who is an engaged parent, an expert in certain areas of child care and household upkeep, and an equal partner to their spouse. In a sense, they are the male version of the Instagram moms who have enthralled a generation of women with a combination of instruction (lunch packing, organizing, imaginative play) and relatability (tearful confessionals that they haven’t slept or showered in days). Among the current stars are Diary of an Honest Mom’s Libby Ward and Kylie Katich. Their forebears — Glennon Doyle, Cup of Jo’s Joanna Goddard — are now running their own media empires, or have been corporatized. In 2015, blogger Jill Smokler sold her site, Scary Mommy, to Some Spider Studios, which Bustle Digital Group (BDG) bought in 2021 for $150 million in stock.
Dad media, on the other hand, has seen stunted progress. According to Pew Research, a higher share of women than men say they use Instagram and TikTok (59 percent versus 39 percent, and 40 percent versus 24 percent, respectively, on the platforms). “Moms are the apex consumer,” explains John Pacini, co-founder of the influencer summits Dad 2.0 and Mom 2.0. While dads have been established as a viable marketing channel, “there needs to be that consolidation and that apparatus for those guys to monetize.” The last Dad 2.0 summit concluded in Washington, D.C., on February 29, 2020. There hasn’t been one since.
Educator and father of three Tyler Moore is charting his own path on social media. He started his account, Tidy Dad, as a way to channel his enthusiasm for the show Tidying Up With Marie Kondo. His endearing brand of domestic superdad quickly gelled almost exclusively with moms; his audience is 90 percent female. “Toxic masculinity, as we know, is so pervasive,” he says. “I wanted to show, here’s a dad who loves his kids, who loves his wife, who isn’t just involved at home, but is inextricably connected to the inner workings of home and family while also balancing career.”
These days, he posts Instagram videos of himself bringing order to his home and his family’s schedule — organizing his kids’ closets, sharing his weekday cleaning routine, and maximizing the tiny Astoria apartment he, his wife, and their three daughters (ages 4, 7, and 9) share. “I always get the, ‘I’m telling my husband to follow you,’” he says of the moms who view his content. His impact on dads mostly occurs in his real life when he’s engaging in small talk and the conversation turns to his work. At that point, men often tell him about various domestic tasks that they don’t know how to perform. “I will often reply that there’s this wonderful medium called YouTube that can teach you how to do anything that you want to do,” he says.
But the slow-to-warm dad market can take a toll. Moore says he often fields sexist, emasculating comments on his posts. And while Watson quit his job in software to become a full-time influencer and coach, he recently went 44 days without selling an online-coaching session and soon after, uploaded an emotional post-cry video about his own vulnerability as a struggling content creator with maxed-out credit cards. Soon after, he updated his LinkedIn avatar to “#OPENTOWORK.”
Dads are hard to engage because there are more boundaries surrounding their emotional connection to and involvement in parenting, posits Taylor Calmus, better known as “Dude Dad” on TikTok and Instagram. (These boundaries may not be a bad thing as far as their kids are concerned: “Absorbing too much advice can be counterproductive because it can make parents feel more anxious. Having a parent who’s more sanguine about development is probably really positive for kids,” says Darby Saxbe, Ph.D., a clinical psychologist and author of the forthcoming book Dad Brain.) Calmus is a father of four in Fort Collins, Colorado, and has been fairly all in on his account since he and his wife, Heidi, learned they were expecting their second child. He was working as a set builder, auditioning for acting roles, and posting one Dude Dad video a week, when he had what he calls a “breakdown.” Heidi encouraged him to quit his job and focus on content creation full time. “She could have very easily told me to go get a real job, but she never did,” he says.
Calmus and Heidi now lead a team of six who handle Dude Dad’s scheduling, merchandising, brand sponsorships, and live events. Recent posts include a mix of fun builds (a Rube Goldberg gender-reveal machine) and parody skits where Calmus poses as the mom in a ratty wig. The Dude Dad account puts up about four posts a week, and has a roughly even female-to-male split across platforms, but he says those stats don’t capture the number of men who see the content. “We have a lot of ghost viewers. Their wife follows me, but they also watch enough of the videos with her that they know who I am,” he explains. “At Lowe’s, the dads will stop me and be like, ‘Hey, my wife loves you.’”
The dad creators talk to each other online. Tired Dad knows Tidy Dad who is friends with Modern Dad. The Dumb Dads know Dude Dad and Dude Dad teamed up with Build-It Dad to create a life-size game of Operation. “This is the coolest thing I’ve ever watched!!! 🙌 I need to come over and play it!” commented Dad Social. And within the online-dad ecosystem, a few have managed to beat the demographic odds. One of those men is Jon Gustin, who runs The Tired Dad. He has a roughly 75 to 25 male-to-female ratio among his followers, and says the secret is to “just get vulnerable and talk about the deep, deep stuff.”
A recent “creative concept” the Tennessean posted started with him lying on some railway tracks with the caption: “POV: you’re a dad who bottled it up and refused to heal yourself.” The vibe was Evanescence music video. Guston has taken inspiration from Brené Brown’s vulnerability gospel, and has sold thousands of Tired Dad baseball caps and T-shirts to fans around the world. “Tired Dad is any dad that’s shown up for their family,” he says. “Tired Mom [the account run by Guston’s wife, Jessica] is any mom doing her best.”
Over in Los Angeles, comedians and stay-at-home fathers Kevin Laferriere and Evan Berger watched other influencers attempt to craft posts that dads would like, and evolved with the trends — opting for humor and escapism over advice. The pair post as the Dumb Dads on social and podcast channels. He and Berger modeled the account name on the boorish stereotype of the hapless dad whose house turns into a tornado the second Mom leaves. They post skits like a defeated “dad press conference” and “Dumb Dad Hotline,” and share listener fails on their podcast. They have also created skits about the mental load, but warn that “if you’re preachy about it, people are like swipe,” says Berger.
Their following is currently 51 percent male. Like other influencers I interviewed, they say they would love to reach more men, but feel grateful to the moms, who are their most loyal followers. “It’s always women in the comment section like, ‘Yes, my husband,’ or just tagging their husband,” says Lafferriere. Adds Berger: “Moms followed us first. When couples are laying in bed before they go to sleep and a mom comes across one of our videos, she goes, ‘Here watch this,’ and he watches and goes, ‘Oh, yeah, okay.’ It’s like, just give us the follow! It’s worth it.”