“Dad, How Am I?” the Guy Answers Your Basic Life Questions
There is a joke in my family about the time when I – all 19-20 years old and for the first time living in an apartment with my own kitchen – emailed my father to ask him: “What is a marinade?” To this day, I still have a copy of the very kind, very detailed instructions he sent me on how to make mashed potatoes.
“If they seem too tough (like pasta), add some milk,” he wrote to me. “By that I mean no more than a couple of caps — just enough to get it wet. Add some milk with care, because once it’s there, you can’t get it and you don’t need runny potatoes. “
This is an important part of parenting that can often be overlooked – we need our parents to educate us to be able to go out on our own and act in this world, but as soon as we leave the house to do just that, we understand that there are tons of little skills we still need to learn. What do you do if your tap is leaking, your car battery dies, or your first time hand washing your shirt? If you’re lucky, like me, call your mom or dad. But if that’s not an option, “Dad, how am I?” the guy is trying to fill the gap.
Rob Kenny told Shattered Magazine that his own father left him decades ago when he was a teenager. He began his “ Daddy, how am I? YouTube channel in April as a way to help and support young people whose parents are absent from their lives:
“My goal in life has been to raise good adults,” Rob said. “I never wanted to be rich. I never wanted to be necessarily successful. My goal in life was to raise good adults – not good children, but good adults, because I had a turning point in my childhood. ”
Having achieved this goal in his 50s, Rob realized that he still possessed a lot of wisdom, knowledge and insight – useful tools for the younger generation. Rob has always wanted to shoot a series of videos detailing important lessons not taught in high school, like ironing a shirt.
Kenny has published about a dozen short video tutorials on topics ranging from personal hygiene to minor car and home repairs. Here are some of my favorites:
- How to tie a tie
- How to shave your face
- How to change a flat tire
- How to iron a dress shirt
- How to clean your sink
- How to fix most working toilets
Kenny also likes to throw up good daddy jokes on occasion, such as during theHow to Use the Producer Finder video, which he opens with the phrase, “Okay, today I’m going to show you how to use a search engine. If you came here for help finding a boyfriend, it would be a different stallion seeker. ” Great dad’s joke, this.
He’s also disarmingly sincere, which is probably why the comments under each video are filled with touching stories of appreciation from viewers who lost their parents at a young age – or grew distant from them – and never learned some of Kenny’s basic skills. trying to share. One commentator called him “Mr. Rogers for adults we never knew existed.”
Kenny is releasing a new How To Video every Thursday and has announced that he will soon be starting the Tools Tuesday segment in which he will explore the different tools and how to use them.