Modern Love · The New York Times

I Tried to Toughen Up My Son. He Had Other Ideas.

January 21, 2026·56 min·4 clips

Sam Graham Felsen calls himself 'a predestined victim' as a kid — and traces his fear of fighting all the way to an inability to ask a girl out, dance, or believe he could pass a math class.

The episode starts with a father explaining why he wanted to take his son to Theodore Roosevelt National Park. He is attracted to it as a place of toughness, discipline, and masculine myth. He thinks of it as a father-son road trip that might mean more than an ordinary vacation. He wants to see what happens when his son is asked to take on harder hikes than he has before. He also admits he had fantasies that were more about his own idea of manhood than his son's comfort. At first, he imagines a rough, old-school version of the trip. That means horses, dirt, and the kind of hardship that sounds noble from far away. Then it dawns on him that this would not actually be a very fun vacation for his son, and probably not for him either. So he scales the plan back to something more practical. He wants his son to do something difficult without sending him straight into misery. The first hike he tries is three miles long. That feels like a lot for a child who once thought a hike meant a short walk around a pond. He does not really tell his son how long it will be. Instead, he uses the same parental shortcut his own father once used on him. The story lives in that space between ambition and honesty. It is about wanting a child to grow, but also wanting to control the terms of that growth. Basketball, hero worship, and small rituals of toughness all drift through the conversation. The father's thinking keeps circling back to what kind of man he wants his son to become. The son, meanwhile, remains eight. The episode leaves room for the fact that children do not always cooperate with the lessons adults build for them. That is what makes the trip feel real.

As heard by us

A funny, tender Modern Love episode about fatherhood, toughness, and a son quietly resisting the script.

Modern Love follows Sam Graham-Felsen as he tries to turn a father-son road trip into a lesson in toughness, with Teddy Roosevelt, basketball, rough country, and longer hikes all folded into his idea of boyhood.

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Why you'd press play

You want a father-son road trip where the hikes get harder and the questions get bigger.

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