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Ladies and Gentlemen: Introducing the Advertising World's Very First Competent Dad

By Dustin Rowles | Videos | September 4, 2016 |

By Dustin Rowles | Videos | September 4, 2016 |


A few months ago, TK wrote about his immense frustration with the way that not only the media treats fathers, but the way reality treats fathers: As though we were a blessing to humanity if we can even manage could muster the competence to tie our kid’s shoes in the morning. And if we take our kids to school in the morning without incident, we apparently deserve standing ovations.

This paragraph is key:

I’m often out with my son by myself, I cannot count the number of times where I’ve encountered people who tell me how nice I’m being for giving my wife a break.

Giving. My wife. A break. Because fathers clearly wouldn’t otherwise be out with their kids, and moms certainly aren’t allowed a life away from their child. Look, I’m not giving her a break and I am sure as goddamn hell not babysitting, because YOU CAN’T BABYSIT YOUR OWN CHILD YOU DUMB BASTARDS. I’m parenting, like my wife does, like we all do, and to reduce it to anything else is to make it all to easy for families to backslide back into another century and smother us in our own stupid stereotypes.

And yes, while women nearly always get the short-end of the stick when it comes to unfair depictions in advertising (see, for instance, every beer commercial ever), Dads have been portrayed as beer-swilling, lazy, no-good layabouts who are only good for watching those beer commercials for as long as I’ve been alive.

Well, Cheerios is here to change the conversation about fathers. We CAN be competent, and we don’t need your f**king condescending applause for being so.

The only problem with the ad? A competent Dad wouldn’t actually feed Peanut Butter Cheerios to his children (but he would eat the sh*t out of them himself, as I will be doing because Peanut Butter cereals are my kryptonite).

Hat Tip: JoRo