Parenting Tips: Young Dad Podcast · Jey Young

260: Healing the Father Wound- Drew S.

·54 min·3 clips

Drew says a Thursday phone call turned into child-welfare involvement and a three-and-a-half-month separation from his children.

1. Parenting Tips: Young Dad Podcast focuses on Drew S. and his path from childhood abduction to fatherhood and DadCentral leadership. 2. Drew S. is the guest, and Jay hosts the conversation because Drew leads DadCentral and Jay keeps asking about the personal events behind his work. 3. The episode asks what happens when a father’s earliest trauma becomes the reason he fights to be present for his own children. 4. Drew says his biological father abducted him at age 3 and that the next four years took him through New York City, Jamaica, and St. Louis, Missouri. 5. He says his mother worked with lawyer Bonnie Miller and a police constable named Tom to change Missouri law and bring him back. 6. Drew describes being taken by police to foster homes, then to a courthouse, and finally reunited with his mother in a room he could not fully understand. 7. He says that after age 10, his mother remarried a man who remains her husband and became a positive influence in his life. 8. Drew also points to sports coaches as male mentors who gave him examples of fatherhood and leadership. 9. He says DadCentral is built on research showing that a positively involved father improves a child’s mental, emotional, social, and physical outcomes. 10. Drew says the organization now works to bring fathers into family-support conversations that often ignore them. 11. He says becoming a father in 2013 with twin daughters pushed him to tell only a handful of people about the abduction story. 12. He says he wanted his children to have a different experience and to grow up in a home built on love, kindness, compassion, gentleness, strength, honesty, and faith. 13. Drew compares adversity to football training camp and says pressure can turn coal into a diamond. 14. He keeps a poster from his parents that says, “champions are rarely chosen from the ranks of the unscarred.” 15. Drew says his son’s birth brought heavy stress, including his wife selling her business, several deaths in the family, and a move to a new house. 16. He says those pressures triggered old pain, and he responded by becoming impatient, intolerant, and sometimes angry. 17. Drew says a counselor told him in 2017 that he had a relationship problem, not just an anger problem, and warned him that divorce was possible if things did not change. 18. He says the tone of the conversation is candid and reflective, with Jay interrupting often to connect the story to his own divorce and parenting experience. 19. Parents navigating trauma, divorce, or fatherhood wounds will get the most from this conversation. 20. Listeners wanting light banter without family trauma may skip it.

As heard by us

A plainspoken fatherhood conversation about divorce, false accusations, and what presence asks of dads.

The conversation stays on fatherhood under strain: divorce, false accusations, co-parenting after trauma, and the effort to remain present after family life has already split.

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

If fatherhood feels heavy and your margin is gone, this one meets you there.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

Listen to the show on

Apple Podcasts Spotify

Play clips from this episode More from Parenting Tips: Young Dad Podcast