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Ask a new father what worries him and you get logistics: sleep, money, whether he's holding the baby right. Ask a father with grown kids what he wishes he'd known, and the answer turns out to have nothing to do with any of that.
For Father's Day week, HuffPost put that question to a group of older dads. The throughline was almost unanimous, and it wasn't about diapers. It was about words — the ones men assume their kids already hear, and then never actually say.
The quiet part, out loud
"A lot of dads love their kids deeply, but assume their kids already know it," said Mark Papadas, a father of three. "They don't."
That's the whole regret, restated a dozen ways. Papadas's fix is almost embarrassingly plain — three-sentence lines a kid can carry: "I love how kind you are." "I noticed how hard you tried." "You're braver than you think." His warning to younger fathers is that "a father's voice becomes part of a child's inner voice," so you may as well choose what it says.
Rachid "Rush" Wehbi, also a father of three, offered the line that lands hardest: "Not every child knows that their parents enjoy them." Enjoyment, he argues, is a signal a kid has to actually receive — you laugh at the goofy story, you ask about the hobby, on purpose. His other rule: "A father's calm is the safest place in the house."
Barry Cooper, who runs a fatherhood foundation, put the active version of it bluntly: "You say, 'I love you' first, without waiting for them." And the part nobody warns you about: "Fatherhood will surface everything you have not dealt with."
What it actually looks like
None of them are describing grand gestures. The moments they name are small enough to miss — washing a kid's hair, sitting on the edge of the bed asking about the day, being interested out loud. Tom Dahlborg's tool for the hard moments is a "7-second pause" before you react, so the thing you say isn't the thing you'd take back.
The bottom line, up front, from men who've already run the experiment: the thing you'll wish you'd said more is the exact thing you keep assuming doesn't need saying.
The Receipts
BL:UF doesn't ask you to trust us. Check our work:
Older fathers' advice to new dads, gathered by HuffPost (Mia Taylor), June 19, 2026 — HuffPost
