Sometimes the best role models can be … cartoon dogs.

Or, at least, that’s what Joseph Gidjunis, host and director of the forthcoming show Grown Up Dad, thought to himself over the pandemic while watching the hit animated series Bluey with his son.

Bandit, the lovable, ever-present cartoon father to Bluey, was so different from the dads that he grew up watching in the media. “I grew up with this idea that fathers are drive-by parents, you know, they’re not really there for the important things,” Gidjunis laments. “I was feeling like I didn’t know how to do this [fathering].”

So he, along with Grown Up Dad senior producer Joshua Kagi, flew across the world from Philadelphia to Australia, where Bluey is produced, to interview the show’s creators. The two originally hoped to create a feature film highlighting the differences between dads in the U.S. versus Australia. Their travels taught them that, in Australia, being a father is taken much more seriously in research, policy, and daily conversation — there is even a hotline men can call to ask for tips about fathering.

Meanwhile, in the U.S., fathers spend 6.7 hours a week taking care of their children, while mothers spend nearly double that number doing the same. More than 1 in 4 U.S. children live without a father in their home at all. A 2024 Surgeon General’s report named parental stress as a significant national public health issue.

Gidjunis and Kagi, who both have backgrounds in photography and production, quickly realized that there was so much they wanted to cover about fatherhood that a feature film wasn’t going to cut it. In Australia, Kagi notes, “families and policymakers have that language and that experience” around fatherhood that he thinks most parents, especially dads, here in America lack.

TV to the rescue

With the problem diagnosed, they got to work. In just 13 weeks, the two made a pilot (“my family refers to it as the ‘lost summer’” Kagi cracked) for a show that would ultimately become Grown Up Dad. The first season of 5 episodes is now streaming on PBS Passport and YouTube. WHYY streams the first episode June 15 at 5pm — Father’s Day.

Each 26-minute episode has a different theme applicable to fatherhood today, ranging from teaching children media literacy to male loneliness and finding friendship/solidarity as a father. Gidjunis, as host, spends each episode interviewing family experts (like Penn professor Dr. Vivan Gadsden, and former U.S. Representative and dad Patrick Murphy, a Citizen contributor) as well as real-life dads and their kids.

As the two worked on the show, they learned much more about themselves as fathers too. Gidjunis was struggling with getting his son off of video games, and so he turned episode 2 of the show into one about screen time limits.

“Honestly society really hasn’t given us a lot of opportunities to learn this stuff growing up,” he reflects. “It’s important to have these conversations because parents find themselves in a bubble. So often they don’t know who to reach out to.”

More than anything, working on the show brought the two a sense of community that they realized had been missing from their lives. “I think [the show] has given me permission to realize, like, I don’t have to have all the answers,” Kagi says, adding that now he knows, “I can seek out help from friends.”

Father’s Day pre-party (and contest)

On Saturday morning June 14, the day before Father’s Day, the two will be putting fathering into action in Gidjunis’s neighborhood (Manayunk) with an open-to-the-public “Dadcathlon.” What’s a dadcathlon, you ask? It’s an all-in-fun in-person contest Gidjunis and Kagi dreamed up to celebrate some of the small things modern dads do (and endure) in their role as parents.

At the North Light Community Center, eight local dads (all friends of Gidjunis and Kagi, including some they met while coaching their kids’ sports teams) will compete in a series of challenges ranging from a LEGO Walk — how fast can a dad cross a floor scattered with notoriously painful-to-step-on plastic bricks? — to a PB&J Crust-Off, where the dad-thletes will have to make as many kid-approved crustless sandwiches as they can in two minutes.

With free water ice and pretzels (“we’re Philly-based” after all, Gidjunis jokes), they hope that the event will draw people “aged 2 to102” who “think dads are awesome … and want to support them and cheer them on.”

Community doesn’t stop just at the Dadcathlon though. In researching and interviewing for Grown Up Dad, Gidjunis and Kagi had so many great round table discussions that they are planning to roll out a program they call The Dad Collab after the show airs. These are going to be small virtual chats that bring dads together to build trust and bounce ideas off of each other.

Growing up, Gidjunis says that he never was given the message that being a great dad would bring any fulfillment to his life.” Today, it’s a message that he says, “I wish every dad would hear because I think they only hear the opposite in society. And it really is the best thing that ever happened to me.”

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