"Don't Worry Be Happy". Bad Advice For a New Dad

By Steve Slater, Girl Dad & Editor.

The American singer Bobby McFerrin had a catchy song in 1988 telling everyone: “Don’t Worry be Happy”. It had a relaxed and jolly vibe and melody, so for a while everyone tried to embrace the message and it even won McFerrin a Grammy for Song of the Year.

But it shouldn’t be on any playlist for new dads. And I wish someone had told me that 23 years ago when I was about to become a dad for the first time.

Because although Dadhood will be filled with fun and laughter, it will come with big and regular doses of worrying. About whether that cough is colic, about why they are playing on their own, about how they are getting home from the nightclub. Most of it (hopefully) in hindsight will be trivial, but it won’t seem it at the time.

And so best to be warned in advance: Dadhood will probably involve a simmering worry about a random issue for, well, most of your life. So get used to it.

Of course, I’d had worries through life, especially those awkward teenage years. About tests, about sporting success, about girlfriends, about sex, about a career, about getting a job - all at the time pretty troubling. But I definitely wasn’t a worrier. Maybe because I told myself there wasn’t much I could do about most of it - and Shit Happens. There’s clear truth to the old maxim that worrying about things you can do nothing about is a waste of time, energy and sleep.

But easier said than done when a new kid or two comes bundled up with a bunch of new and arbitrary worries that had never been on your radar, and you had only heard other people talking about. From the serious to the sublime: that colic may have just been wind, but what about that new rash on her legs? OK the rash has gone, but why is she walking funny? She’s six and walking fine, but she’s not laughing at my jokes – do you think her hearing is OK?

Through the years, that will continue to take in illnesses, friendships, school choices, sporting success and failures, art projects and hobbies and the dreaded relationships. And through those difficult teenage years: Is she happy? Why is she sullen? Why doesn’t she have many friends? Are they drinking too much? Where the heck are they?

And whereas in the past it was ‘Shit Happens’, now it has morphed into: ‘Has Shit Happened to my Child?’

I can’t recall ever being warned about that. Because, of course, there’s nothing to be done and it doesn’t detract from Dadhood. Bobby McFerrin may have thought that being happy and not worrying were mutually exclusive, but in the real world it’s often a multiplier. That stupid worry about your kid’s sporting prowess certainly disappears quick enough when a ball bounces off a shin and trickles over the goal-line. Or without you realising it, your teenager has become a funny and independent person while you were stressing about that dodgy friend and the serial earrings.

And as for that nagging worry. What can you do? Embrace it - it’s part of Dadhood. It’s out of your hands.