Father yourself first, p.1
Father Yourself First, page 1
Note to Readers
This ebook contains the following accessibility features which, if supported by your device, can be accessed via your ereader/accessibility settings:
Change of font size and line height
Change of background and font colours
Change of font
Change justification
Text to speech
Page numbers taken from the following print edition: ISBN 9781400252558
Copyright
Father Yourself First
Copyright © 2025 by Glen Henry
All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, scanning, or other—except for brief quotations in critical reviews or articles, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
Published by Nelson Books, an imprint of Thomas Nelson, 501 Nelson Place, Nashville, TN 37214, USA. Nelson Books and Thomas Nelson are registered trademarks of HarperCollins Christian Publishing, Inc.
Published in association with Yates & Yates, www.yates2.com.
Thomas Nelson titles may be purchased in bulk for educational, business, fundraising, or sales promotional use. For information, please email SpecialMarkets@ThomasNelson.com.
Unless otherwise noted, Scripture quotations are taken from The Holy Bible, New International Version®, NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.® Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide. www.Zondervan.com. The “NIV” and “New International Version” are trademarks registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office by Biblica, Inc.®
Scripture quotations marked nlt are taken from the Holy Bible, New Living Translation. © 1996, 2004, 2015 by Tyndale House Foundation. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., Carol Stream, Illinois 60188. All rights reserved.
ISBN 978-1-4002-5398-2 (ePub)
ISBN 978-1-4002-5255-8 (HC)
Without limiting the exclusive rights of any author, contributor or the publisher of this publication, any unauthorized use of this publication to train generative artificial intelligence (AI) technologies is expressly prohibited. HarperCollins also exercise their rights under Article 4(3) of the Digital Single Market Directive 2019/790 and expressly reserve this publication from the text and data mining exception.
HarperCollins Publishers, Macken House, 39/40 Mayor Street Upper, Dublin 1, D01 C9W8, Ireland (https://www.harpercollins.com)
Library of Congress Control Number: 2025014571
Epub Edition OCTOBER 2025 9781400253982
Dedication
Dedicated to the Chocolate Babies:
Theo P, Uriah Beau, Anaya Zai, and Uzi;
to my incredibly beautiful and patient wife, Yvette;
and to all the men who have held me accountable—don’t stop!
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Note to Readers
Copyright
Dedication
I Never Wanted to Be a Father
Becoming Chapter 1: Father Yourself First
Chapter 2: An Expert on Your Children
Expectations Chapter 3: Proof Is Power
Chapter 4: They’ll Throw Up in Your Mouth
Legacy Chapter 5: The Biggest Stage You’ll Stand On
Chapter 6: The Voice They Need to Hear
Engaging Chapter 7: Becoming Childish Again
Chapter 8: The Gift of Presence
Adventure Chapter 9: Tornadoes, Trampolines, and the Art of Adventure
Chapter 10: Fatherhood on the Fly
Family Chapter 11: Your Family’s Song
Chapter 12: These Are My People
Acknowledgments
About the Author
I Never Wanted to Be a Father
When I was growing up, I never wanted to be a father. Bringing kids into this world seemed inconvenient, even irresponsible. I couldn’t imagine myself ever having kids or being a dad.
That seems ironic considering my career today is based on showing people the truth about fatherhood, but it makes sense if you know about the way I grew up. My parents had me as teenagers—my mom was sixteen and my dad, nineteen—and were not in a committed relationship. Nineteen was an interesting age in Baltimore, Maryland. Living in a rough neighborhood, being an immigrant, and having no direction mixed with that age left my dad open to a certain kind influence from the streets. A lot of his friends died or went to jail, and he didn’t have only me to think about. My dad had a choice to make: stay in Baltimore with his son and tough it out in the streets or move to San Diego with his expectant fiancée and start over. I’m sure the decision wasn’t easy, and from what I understand, the plan was to take me with him. But I ended up in Maryland with my mom, and my dad moved to San Diego with my soon-to-be stepmom, Sherry, where they had my little sister, Britni.
Though those events happened forty years ago, they have shaped my life in ways I’m still unpacking. My dad made the right decision for him; in a sense I’d say he fathered himself through that choice. But leaving me with my mom meant I was without the daily guidance a young man needs from his father.
I would visit California every summer after I turned five years old. I had to adapt to the push and pull of plane rides back and forth with chaperones and learning the rules of two homes, like being fairly independent in one home and limited in another. The ripple effects of bicoastal, multicultural joint custody created a level of code switching that should be studied. However, the message was clear: Kids are inconvenient. My mom and dad’s parenting—both the presence of it and the lack of it, the good of it and the bad of it—affected me deeply. That’s not an accusation or an excuse, but simply a reality—a reality that every child experiences and one that follows them into adulthood.
My mom had a few long-term relationships but never married. When I was nine, my brother, Blease, was born. As I entered my preteen years and began to look more like a man instead of a little boy, my mom’s treatment of me seemed to grow more intense, for whatever reason. Maybe in her mind she was trying to “correct” or “teach” me, but I remember lines often being crossed. At the time, I recall wishing I had a father present in the home who could help parent me. I love my mom deeply, and I understand it’s tough to be a single parent. But the reality is that those years and experiences were deeply damaging to my inner child and to my concept of fatherhood, and it’s a big part of the reason why I’m so passionate about fatherhood and family today.
For example, tensions were often high around my house. Everyone, me included, seemed to be defensive and on edge all the time. My mom was always yelling about something. By the time I was a teenager, I couldn’t wait to get out of the house—and I definitely never wanted to be a father.
I started wilding. Tripping. I got kicked out of the house a lot, and I’d go sleep at my aunt’s place or my grandmother’s. I finally left home at seventeen and went to live with my grandmother in her one-bedroom apartment. A year later, my mom and Blease moved into my grandmother’s place too, so I went to live with my aunt. That didn’t last long either. After that I moved in with my girlfriend and her family.
By age twenty, I wasn’t in a good place mentally or emotionally. I remember calling my dad and telling him I was planning to kill myself. He started crying on the phone. He asked me to fly out to where he lived in Escondido, California, so on August 31, 2005, I moved in with my dad.
In California, my life slowly got more stable. I loved hip-hop, which I had been introduced to early on by Uncle Jahson, my stepmother’s brother. So I took a job as a roadie for Thoughts Aloud, a local hip-hop group. I didn’t love the job, but I started to enjoy being part of something. That would eventually lead me into a career as a hip-hop artist, including recording several albums and going on countless tours.
I grew up attending church a few times a year, but in California, a childhood friend of mine named Garrett invited me to his church. Soon I began going regularly. My faith became (and remains) a vital part of my life.
That church is where I met the person primarily responsible for changing my view of fatherhood. His name was Patrick Lynch, but we all called him Pat. He was the high school pastor. I’ll talk more about Pat and a few other mentors later on, but for now I’ll just say he was the person who helped me believe in fatherhood. There wasn’t any one moment or conversation that flipped a switch in me. It was mostly just seeing fatherhood modeled in a way I had never experienced before. Pat’s home was proof that family could work. I was amazed by the peace, by the way they got along, and by how welcoming their home felt. Suddenly I saw what family could look like, and for the first time ever, I could see myself in the role of a father.
A couple of years later, I met my wife, Yvette. We got married in 2010, and two and a half years after that, our son Theo was born. Whether I was ready for it or not, I was now a father.
Today, I can honestly say I love fatherhood. I don’t love certain parts of it—such as the whining, the battles over eating vegetables, and all the parts having to do with bodily functions and odors—but I realize now I was born to be a father, called to be a father, and blessed to be a father. Fatherhood has changed my life, and I’ve watched it do the same for many other men. I’ve come to see the incredible power it holds not just to shape, serve, and bless our children but to create a better world.
Proving Great Fathers Exist
Sometimes people use the word example to describ e my family, and I hate it. I literally have a physical reaction to that word because it’s the opposite of what I believe myself to be. I’m not an example for anyone to imitate, and I can’t tell you how to live or what to do. I’m not you, and I’m not parenting your kids. Instead of an example, I want to be proof that fatherhood works. That’s why the tagline of my organization is “Proving great fathers exist, one day at a time.”
This book is part of that goal, but it goes beyond it: I am inviting you to be part of the process. Your family can be proof of fatherhood for other people to be inspired and encouraged by.
I believe there are a lot of strong families out there, but they’re not necessarily accessible to people. Instead, whether on the news or in the gossip rounds, we mostly hear about dysfunction: who got divorced, who cheated on whom, who walked out on their family. I’m not shaming anyone who has experienced those things, but if we can so easily listen to and repeat the negative things, we should also be able to repeat the positive things. We should be willing to let the beauty of family and fatherhood shine.
If you don’t think you fit the “ideal” definition of a father, that’s okay. Honestly, none of us fits it because we all have our quirks, traumas, weaknesses, and mistakes. For the love of our kids, though, we need to be willing to step into our roles and grow into the fathers we’re created to be. You might be a single father. You might be an experienced father, a first-time father, or an expectant father. You might be divorced and sharing custody of your children. You might be a grandparent or an uncle who has a close relationship with kids who need a father figure. You might be a spiritual father or a mentor to other people. All those roles are not only valid, they’re vital. So while I’m going to speak from my very unique experience as a married, Black father of four who lives on a farm in the California desert, works from home as a content creator, and homeschools his kids, I hope you can find a lot here that speaks to you.
Let me emphasize that I’m going to speak from my experience as a father—but that in no way implies motherhood is less important! I could not do what I do without Yvette. I honor her, respect her, and love her beyond what I can put into words. Much of what I’ll say in these pages applies equally to mothers and fathers, but this book is about fatherhood, so please don’t get upset when I don’t qualify everything I say by adding “and mothers too!” That’s a given.
Also, if I can be so bold: Please don’t get offended on behalf of our children. We take our responsibility to protect them incredibly seriously. They appear on my channel all the time, but they are not forced to participate, and they enjoy it. We have regular family consent meetings where we make sure they are okay with how they’re being portrayed. They also earn money from the videos, which is both a great opportunity for them and really good training.
I remember Yvette asking me once, “Is this a family business, or is our family a business?” At first I was like, “Who cares? What’s the difference?” But then I stopped and thought about it. Our family is not for sale. While we have built a business based on the family we are blessed to parent, the family comes first—not the business. This never became clearer to us than a couple of years ago when Theo asked me to take down the videos he was in because he wasn’t comfortable with people knowing so much about him. I removed seven hundred videos. It was a significant hit to our income, to the point we had to sell our house. But now he’s realizing the power of storytelling to build his own future, and he’s comfortable appearing in the videos again. Without question, though, our kids come first, and they always will.
The word BELEAF, which I’m using as an acronym to structure this book, is my rap moniker as well as the name of our organization, Beleaf in Fatherhood. I chose the name Beleaf rather than Belief because I’m passionate about authenticity and honesty—and there’s no lie in what I’m saying. Because of that passion, I’m not going to sugarcoat fatherhood in this book. As I’m sure you’ve already discovered, carrying out this role is going to cost you a lot of money, and your furniture will have some dents in it, and your car will be full of sand and crumbs, and at times you’ll be creeped out by tiny humans staring at you when you wake up.
It’s worth it though. Your kids need to experience great fatherhood, and society needs proof of great fatherhood.
Welcome Black
While I’m not only writing for Black men, I am writing as a Black man. I have a deep desire to see Black men and Black families become visible proof of the power of family. That’s why I start many of my videos with the phrase “Welcome Black.” I want to embrace the value of my identity and inspire others to do the same.
A while back a friend I’ve known for years, a white guy, came up to me at church and said, “Thank you for posting all those videos. It gives us a window into your family. I didn’t know how you guys lived.”
That last phrase was so weird to me. What did he mean he didn’t know how we lived? Did he think we were eating our children? Practicing voodoo? It almost made me mad. But it also reminded me that a lot of people don’t know what we (Black families) are like because they haven’t seen very many.
One of the problems is that other people have been telling our story for too long, but it’s the wrong story. It’s the story of the absent Black father, the angry Black man, the broken Black family. If you look back over history, this narrative is not new, and it often feels intentional.
Consider slavery in America. Enslaved people were not allowed to marry, and if they did so secretly, they were often separated. Any children from their union were the legal property of their parents’ owners and were frequently taken from one or both parents. The “right” of slave owners to sell off individual family members was enshrined in law in the infamous Slave Codes. Why would they do that? I think that in large part, it was because slave owners were afraid of the power of family. They didn’t want families growing and multiplying, because they would become strong.
Think about that for a moment. If Black families were such a threat that slave owners intentionally fragmented them, how much power could a family have in society today? How much strength could your home and my home provide for a society that desperately needs a new narrative around fatherhood, especially Black fatherhood? There is power inherent in our families—power not just to change our own future but to change the lives of those around us and even society itself.
Slavery was abolished long ago, but even today, forces still target Black families. Think about the War on Drugs, which disproportionately affected Black men and damaged countless families. Think about redlining and other housing and education policies that made it more difficult for Black families to prosper. Think about massacres that targeted Black businesses and destroyed generational wealth, such as the Tulsa Race Massacre. Think about police brutality toward Black people, including young boys and teenagers. Think about how often and how loudly news outlets broadcast the crimes of Black men and tell society we are to be feared and controlled, not loved or trusted. Think about politicians who dehumanize us, who propagate stereotypes, and who rely on fearmongering to gain political clout.
The sad reality is that in America, many people have a built-in, subconscious fear of Black people. I have Black children, and I cannot sleep well at night knowing that people are going to fear my kids and view them as threats. I will fight to change that narrative. We all must fight to change it.
History and current statistics point to a harsh reality: Black men—and Black fathers, in particular—are often working from a deficit. We’re playing from behind, and we have one arm tied behind our backs. Society breaks our families apart, then blames us for being broken, and finally uses our brokenness as an excuse to break us even more. If we stay silent, the injustice continues; if we speak up, we’re labeled whiners or agitators. It often feels like a lose-lose.
Don’t get me wrong: I’m not playing the victim here. I’m proud of the strength of Black people, and I believe with all my heart that the future is ours to step into with faith and courage. But I’m also very aware of the systemic, systematic attacks on Black fatherhood, and I’m pissed off.
