#43 Jordan Shapiro: The 21st Century Father Figure

It doesn’t really matter if you’ve seen a single episode of the 1950s sitcom Father Knows Best to understand the template for what a TV dad is supposed to be like. He works hard all day and inevitably serves as the family’s main source of some combination of three things: tough love, gentle fatherly insight or bumbling but endearing ineptitude.

Jordan Shapiro is out to help break the mold. A father of four, senior fellow at the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at the Sesame Workshop, and former New York City restaurateur, Shapiro is the author of the 2021 release Father Figure: How To Be A Feminist Dad. On this episode of Paternal he weighs in on the psychology of fatherhood and why some dads today are struggling to reconcile the kind of father they want to be - open-minded, responsive, inclusive, and (gasp) feminist - with the template of what a dad is supposed to be, often rooted in the examples set by their own fathers or by those TV dads we still see on our screens today.