In Search of Fatherhood

Kevin Renner, a Portland marketing consultant and former journalist, turned his crisis of confidence as a father into a personal crusade. Renner interviewed 50 women from around the world, to understand their life stories and how they were shaped by their fathers—good, bad, and in between. He wanted to understand fatherhood from the receiving end, as a daughter, so he could bring it home to his own daughters, then 9 and 13.

That crusade became In Search of Fatherhood: A Mother Lode of Wisdom from the World of Daughterhood. At the time, Renner asked himself if he was giving his daughters what they needed, and if he even knew what that was. No, he admits, he didn’t. So after work and on weekends, he conducted interviews in a private therapist’s office he’d leased, women’s homes, and even hotel suites of women who traveled from around the country to share their stories.

Renner says the insights he took from spending a year hearing women’s stories has made him a profoundly more insightful father. Among his biggest lessons, he says, were the importance of tough love, and how everything that he does as a father, and that every father does, communicates in subtle yet lasting ways.

“Take your daughter to your workshop, your office, the bowling alley, the movies,” he says. “Little things make the big difference. They message that she’ll take away is that she matters—not just to you, but in the world at large.