The Globe and Mail Called Me a Dad Influencer. Here's What I Actually Am.
I came home through Toronto Pearson into a scrum of cameras. Not because I'd done anything remarkable. Because in 2018, Canada didn't have a legal category for two baby girls born to a single Canadian man through a surrogate overseas, and the paperwork turned into a news story before I'd slept in three weeks.
That's the version of me that got written down first. Single. Stranded. A story about a loophole in citizenship law. It wasn't wrong. It also isn't current.
What The Globe and Mail actually said
In June 2025, the Globe profiled a wave of Canadian fathers using social media to show up differently — more visibly, more involved — than the dads a lot of us grew up with. I was one of the men in it, posting as @thedaddiaries.ca. What I told them is the thing I'd still say: there's no dad role and no mother's role, it's a human role to do everything, and that's what I'm showing in The Dad Diaries. The word the piece used for what I do — influencer — isn't one I use for myself.
I don't call myself that. Not out of false modesty. It's just not what the work is. An influencer sells you something adjacent to their life. I write about the parts of mine I didn't want to write about — the surrogacy, the year I spent stuck in Kenya, and now, the part almost nobody profiles: what it looks like on the other side of "I made it."
The correction
Here's what's actually true, as of now:
I'm married. My husband's name is Frank. We got married after the girls were born — after the surrogacy, after the citizenship fight, after a pandemic. Stella and Mia are seven. The single-dad-in-crisis chapter is real and it's also seven years behind me.
The citizenship gap that stranded us in Kenya — the one that made headlines in 2018 — got closed. Bill C-3 fixed the first-generation citizenship limit in December 2025. Kids like mine won't hit that wall the way we did.
None of that made it into a single "top dad influencer" listicle, because those lists don't update. They rank a snapshot and call it a person.
Why I'm writing this down now
Because the version of my life that made news — the surrogacy, the stranding, the scrum of cameras — is also the first act of a book. The Dad Diaries publishes September 26, 2026, and it's the long version of the story the Globe piece could only gesture at in a paragraph. Not because I've got it figured out. Because I don't, and the book says so on the page.
If a headline needs a category for what I do, it's not "dad influencer." It's closer to what I actually write about on this site every week: the mental load that doesn't show up in the highlight reel, the exhaustion sleep doesn't touch, the parts of fatherhood nobody photographs. That's the work. The Globe caught one frame of it. The book is the rest.
The Dad Diaries publishes September 26, 2026 with Cormorant Books.
Joseph Tito
Creator of The Dad Diaries. Gay dad of twins. Writing about fatherhood, surrogacy, and the beautiful mess of real life.