When Rob Kenney was a teen, his father walked out of his and his seven siblings' lives. To say there was a void is an understatement.
After a nasty custody battle, which his father won, one day his father up and decided that he didn't really want children anymore. His informed his eldest kids that he'd be giving them all up, and they were destined for the foster system. While Rob did live with his freshly married 23-year-old brother, it was a painful experience to be abandoned.
When he grew up, Rob was set to become a father himself when he "found God," and started believing in forgiveness.
Ultimately, he ended up forgiving his father, and went on to try to be the best father he could be to his own children.
"My goal in my life was to raise good adults," Rob told Shattered magazine. "I never wanted to be wealthy. I never wanted to be necessarily successful. My goal in life was to raise good adults — not good children but good adults — because I had a fractured childhood."
And now that he has "successfully" done that, Rob's committed to being a positive presence in other fatherless kids' lives.
It's why he started Dad, How Do I? -- a YouTube channel dedicated to showing people how to do the basic things dads traditionally teach kids to do.
Every Thursday he uploads a new video in hopes to "provide useful, practical content to many basic tasks that everyone should know how to do."
His first video featured a simple instructional on how to tie a tie.
The video is full of little tips like choosing a tie that picks up a color in the shirt, and how to avoid a "dorky" looking knot.
The videos now range from things like how to change a tire, how to check tire pressure, and how to hang a shelf.
Each video is basic and simple to understand, and truly feels like a dad is talking right to you. And while his goal was to merely help people feel a little more confidence around the home, he ended up touching a lot more lives than he ever expected.
"Never knew my dad, my mother lost her parental rights when I was 11," wrote one subscriber. "Just closed on my house 2 weeks ago, I'm so happy that I found this via Twitter because I'm certainly not very handy."
The dad is now nearly at 1 million subscribers and has been flooded with warm messages.
Thousands of people wrote in to Rob, pouring their hearts out about the fathers who either left them or died when they were young, and how meaningful his channel is to them
"The pain is pretty real in our world," he said in a recent "thank you" video. "Hopefully this will help alleviate some of it by trying to reach out to you."
Suffice to say, it really has.
