Mission
My name is Matthew S. Rosin [he/him/his], and I’m an essayist, songwriter, and stay-at-home dad. For me, fatherhood means the courage to reflect and learn what kind of man my kids need me to be, so I can respond to them fully as they are—and as they wish to become.
Fatherhood Is Learning is a place for learning together about what it takes to cultivate a mindful, connected, and just practice of parenthood and masculinity, for ourselves and the people we love. May we devote ourselves to all that wholehearted engagement with our loved ones—and especially with our children—can teach us. We’re in this together.
To that end, you’ll find two big sections of the website:
THE BOOK: The text of Fatherhood Is Learning, my 2021 memoir-in-essays, free to read as a suite of serialized posts.
THE NEWSLETTER: Subscribe to the Fatherhood Is Learning newsletter to get periodic blogs and short essays, reflection prompts, songs, videos, and some curated reflections on interesting books, studies, music, organizations, and the like. Down the road, I also hope to interview other dads and masculine-of-center parents about how parenthood has changed their understanding of themselves.
Throughout, I’ll tackle topics like:
Reflection, mindfulness, and moving from automatic reaction to curious response.
Navigating raw feeling in the moment and understanding mistakes and conditioned reactions, so we can live out our higher values more effectively.
Vulnerability as an act of loyalty toward our kids.
Mental health and healthy masculinity.
Friendship.
Why subscribe?
Subscribe to get full access to the newsletter and website. You’ll never miss an update: every new edition of the newsletter goes directly to your inbox.
With time, we’ll turn Fatherhood Is Learning into a true learning community.
A little more about me
My reflective essays on fatherhood as a learning process—many of which appear in revised form in Fatherhood Is Learning—have appeared in STAND Magazine, the On Being blog, and Fatherly Voices. Before staying home with my kids, I was a writer and researcher in the education non-profit sphere, and I hold a Ph.D. in Education from Stanford University.
I write fiction, too. My short stories has appeared in KYSO Flash, The Luxembourg Review, r.kv.r.y. quarterly, and Shotgun Honey, and I’ve also published a novelette, The Honeydrop Tree.
I’m also a recording composer and songwriter of music that blends popular and experimental genres.
To find out more about the company that provides the tech for this newsletter, visit Substack.com.
Book cover and logo imagery rendered from a photo by Todd Rafalovich, who also took the photo of the author.
