Having kids can be hard, sleepless work. But it can also be lots of silly fun. Forgotten how? How to Dad’s Jordan Watson can be your blokey guide

On the How to Dad YouTube channel, a shaggy-haired, bearded Kiwi bloke in a cheap branded black T-shirt, tatty blue shorts and bare feet offers “instructional” videos on how to be a parent – with the help of his two young daughters.



How to Hold a Baby – which delivers on its promise with 17 child-holding options including the baby Jesus and box of beers – has had 2.6m views. How to Make a Baby Clean the House has 1.6m. His videos now cover every aspect of parenting: from dressing a baby, changing a nappy and putting a baby to sleep, to How to Be a Kiwi Dad (“Always blow on the pie”).

That How to Dad bloke is 28-year-old Aucklander Jordan Watson. Mila, now three and a half, and Alba, one and a half, are his co-presenters. The project began – as such things often do – with a dopey idea. A mate at work had a baby on the way, so when his partner went out with their eldest daughter and left him with their four-month-old, Watson – a one-time landscaper who now works in TV production – grabbed his camera. He posted How to Hold a Baby online, tagged his friend on Facebook and went to bed.

The next morning, he says, the YouTube notifications kept arriving on his phone: 50k, 100k, 150k. So he made a few more videos – and now there are dozens. The How to Dad Facebook page is heading towards a million fans, a 160-page book is due out this week, and a web video series is being developed.

“I’m just a typical Kiwi dad. Kind of taken to the extreme in the DIY style,” says Watson, on a recent Sunday family walk, with the girls asleep in the stroller. “People have just connected with it.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest How to Dad presenter Jordan Watson with his daughters, Mila and Alba. Photograph: Jordan Watson

You can’t plan these viral videos, he says. “I just think if I find it funny and it’s a laugh for parents, it ticks the right boxes.”

There’s a fine tradition of the deadpan absurd in the New Zealand comic psyche, from Melbourne-based John Clarke’s 1970s character Fred Dagg, to Flight of the Conchords, to the films of Taika Waititi (Hunt for the Wilderpeople). For Watson, it started with Billy T James.

Growing up in Te Kauwhata in the Waikato dairy farming district south of Auckland, Watson’s Maori father – “a true MacGyver” who refuses to take anything to a professional to get fixed – had a collection of comic strip books. One series was by James, who is still regarded as one of the country’s greatest comedians 25 years after his death. He was famous for his unschooled but shrewd singlet-and-shorts characters. His father also had copies of the long-running farming comic strip Footrot Flats, which was subsequently made into a movie and musical.

But when Watson is making a video he’s not thinking of anyone other than that archetypal, rough-around-the-edges, DIY dad. “It’s ingrained in all of us now,” he says. “As soon as the camera turns on I must be just doing that classic Kiwi humour.”

His wife, sensibly, is staying out of it. “She’s all for it, but she’s all for not getting in front of the camera as well.” Her absence from the clips, however, could inadvertently be encouraging commenters’ admiration of Watson’s dark good looks: “You look like if Kit Harrington and James Franco had a baby,” one said.

Chill out, parents. You don’t have to take it so seriously. They’re made of rubber; they’ll be fine Jordan Watson

Watson hoses down these comments, noting that one person thought he looked like “a chubby Ryan Gosling”. “Ladies must like the old bush shirt and messy hair,” he says.

Although How to Dad reveals the odd honest truth (in the book under Dadvice: “Sleep? Parents don’t sleep”), most of it is, of course, of rubbish practical use. As he told a New Zealand television channel, people sometimes privately message him asking for real parenting tips: “If anyone’s taking this advice seriously, I’m worried for you.”



Watson agrees it is often a tough job: “90% of it as a parent you’re making it up, and my videos make it look like fun, very carefree. But I’m filming when my kids are in the best mood possible. I’m like every other parent, having sleepless nights or trying to grit my teeth when they’re trying to draw on the walls. But the videos, I remind myself and they’re there to remind all parents, that you’ve got to sometimes step back and have a bit of a giggle.”

Too many parents these days want to wrap kids in cotton wool, he says. Listen to How to Dad: “Chill out, parents. You don’t have to take it so seriously. They’re made of rubber; they’ll be fine.”

He’s not rich yet, but Watson is working hard on building How to Dad into a global brand. Companies are coming forward to work with him and he has hired a local agent. He told a New Zealand television channel that a million views might earn him only $100. Product placement could be the way to go. “The more people that like the page, the more a company like Huggies might say, ‘Hey mate. Hold up this packet in your next shot and we’ll give you this,’ and I’m away laughing,” he told the presenter with a grin.

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Actually, he’s not joking. Watson has posted videos from his sponsored trip to Singapore, and on his How to Dad Tips Facebook page is a video on “dad data” in which he mock-awkwardly reads a piece of paper: “Thanks to my mates at Virgin Mobile.” Watson had no grand plans when he posted that first video, so why shouldn’t he cash in a little?

Right now, How to Dad is unstoppable. There’s the book, and the web series How to Dad: Legend of the Gumboot (paid for by YouTube and the broadcasting funding agency NZ on Air) is likely to be out by March to coincide with the Gumboot Throwing Competition in Taihape (home of Fred Dagg). There’s also the constantly updated Facebook page, and Watson says he is in talks with a US production company on a TV show idea. He’s even looking to do merchandise for Christmas: How to Dad T-shirts and the like.

A blokey empire awaits: “The world is How to Dad’s oyster at the moment.”

• How to Dad by Jordan Watson is out 28 October through Allen & Unwin