By Ian Dinwiddy, Thriving Parents Coach and Founder of Inspiring Dads.

As I remember it, 2020 started pretty well. Our two children turned 10 and 7 in January, flights were booked to celebrate my father in law’s 70^th, and plans were coming together to travel to Italy in the summer to celebrate my brother-in-law’s 40^th. A big piece of work was lined up….

But trouble was brewing on the horizon. Despite the initial warnings in January of a strange flu like infection on the other side of the world, at that stage I don’t think many of us really “got it”.

Full steam ahead into the new year.

Like the telegraph room on the SS Titanic, the warnings of severe trouble ahead were clear in hindsight. Far eastern countries with experience of SARS took the warnings seriously. Europe, it is fair to say, was less quick to grasp the enormity of the potential impact.

At my kid’s school there was worry about a dad who had just come back from a work trip to Singapore, who had he seen and when?!

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By Ian Dinwiddy, Thriving Parents Coach and Founder of Inspiring Dads.

You might be wondering how you’re going to survive the emotional upheaval of becoming a new dad.

I know exactly how you feel. 

In fact, I felt the same way when my daughter Freya was born in 2010.

It can be a really brutal learning curve, especially first-time round. In fact, I think it’s worse than most people believe it’ll be. In hindsight we Dads are painfully ill equipped to deal with the emotional and practical complexity of fatherhood.

Of course it doesn’t help that almost as soon as we’ve got used to creating a family, we’re plunged back into work as if nothing has happened in our lives.    

My name is Ian Dinwiddy, I‘m a Thriving Parents coach, I specialise in supporting dads, and I know what it is like be a stressed new dad. 

I wasn’t always a coach – when my daughter was born, I was a management consultant, a workstream lead on a software implementation project. Fortunately I had been given a local ...

The last few months during lockdown have been life-changing, and we do not say this lightly. For working parents, it has been both a challenging and enlightening experience. 

There has been a lot of much deserved praise and appreciation given to the key workers who kept us fed, nursed those who were sick, and provided essential care during this time. 

But we have even more to be grateful for as working parents. 

Side note: We are painfully aware that not all of these thanks are owed by some working parents, but this is a positive article about the things many of us are grateful for. If you have a comment you’d like to share about your personal experience (good or bad) please email [email protected]. 

To our children…

You have proven that young people really are the most resilient of us all. We underestimated you. Your lives were turned upside down, you could no longer see your friends or close relatives, and there was a lot to be fearful of. And yet, you adapted. You bro...