Adam Coleman Wants To Make Fathers Great Again (#37)
11 September 2025
With Adam Coleman
Global
Adam Coleman, author and founder of Wrong Speak Publishing, joins the podcast to examine how paternal absence shapes boys' emotional development — and what that means for broader social trends, including the rise in gender-distressed young people. Drawing on his own experience of growing up without a father, Coleman argues that fathers are the primary teachers of emotional regulation, and that boys who never acquire this skill become men who seek identity and worth in dangerous places. The conversation is a counterpoint to the cultural narrative that fathers are optional.
Adam Coleman came to understand fatherlessness from the inside. Growing up without a father himself, he worked through homelessness, depression and suicidal ideation before identifying what his father's absence had cost him. He has since written two books on victimhood culture and family breakdown, and founded Wrong Speak Publishing, a platform for perspectives routinely excluded from mainstream media. It is from that lived and researched position that he joins Stella O'Malley, Mia Hughes and Dr Bret Alderman to examine what happens to boys when fathers disappear. Coleman's central argument is biological as much as cultural. Fathers who are not present in their infants' first months — who do not hold their babies, who do not accumulate the day-to-day contact that builds attachment — never develop the bond that keeps men reliably present over the long term. The implications extend across generations: absent fathers produce sons who have never been shown how to manage difficult emotions, and daughters who have never seen a stable male model close up. The consequences, as Coleman describes them, are measurable. Boys without fathers tend toward emotional dysregulation — moving from calm to explosive over minor provocations, unable to locate the internal resources required for proportionate responses. The overrepresentation of fatherless men in prison populations is one data point he draws on; the relentless pursuit of external markers of worth — status, money, sexual conquest — is another. Where a present father might teach a son that his value is intrinsic, the fatherless boy learns instead to audition for worth wherever an audience can be found. Coleman devotes part of the conversation specifically to the connection between paternal absence and what he terms the trans trend. His argument is that young people who have not developed a secure sense of self through stable family relationships are more susceptible to identity frameworks that promise a community and an explanation for their distress. This is not a fringe position: clinicians working with gender-distressed adolescents have increasingly noted disrupted attachment histories among presenting patients, and the hypothesis that unresolved family difficulties may underlie some gender-distress presentations is now discussed openly in the clinical literature. Coleman is also a pointed critic of the manosphere and figures such as Andrew Tate, which makes the conversation more nuanced than a standard fatherhood-advocacy script. His argument is that Tate and his imitators are symptoms of the same problem: young men with no internal compass reaching for hyper-masculine performance as a substitute for genuine self-worth. The needs for brotherhood and male community are legitimate; the manosphere, in his view, meets those needs with a counterfeit that deepens the original damage.
