As a stay-at-home dad, caring for three young children while my wife works, I need some help. So once a week, I attend a fathers’ support group to check in with other dads who, like me, want to be good fathers. I grew up without a dad, and that absence has driven me to be present for my children. Nowhere did I feel this void more than on the baseball field, where other boys always seemed to have their dads to practice pitching a fastball. So, for me, daydreams of being a great dad for my kids—Lucinda, 5, Lucien, 4, and Lucas, 2—include throwing around a baseball. Lately baseball has been sidelined by tennis—the new family sport. I’m on the court most days, and so is my oldest, Lucinda. In fact, everyone in the family is a tennis fan—except Lucien. The only thing he’s interested in practicing on the court these days is throwing tantrums. Recently, as I was unloading the kids from the car before one of my daughter’s tennis lessons, Lucien lost it—again. And in the middle of his full-out fit that only a 4-year-old can throw, I lost it, too. Shouting ensued as I told the kids to get back in the car. In this moment, I thought my job was to teach Lucien how to behave on a tennis court. But when I brought the incident up to my fathers’ group, one dad asked: “What’s underneath your son’s crying? What’s he telling you he needs?” Defensively, I thought, What about what I need? Like a chaos-free morning! But after a beat, I said, “He was angry, frustrated and hurt.” He wanted to connect with me, and that wasn’t happening each time Lucinda stepped onto a court. So how to handle a child’s “explosion” of emotion? With a little help from the group, I came to see that I could judge it, even condemn it, but really, I have a duty to understand it. The next day at breakfast, Lucien, dressed in his Baltimore Orioles uniform, announces he wants to play catch. “I want to throw on a real baseball field,” he says intently. The list of things I’ve got to get done floods my mind. But instead I ask myself: What does Lucien need? The same thing I did as a 4-year-old—a dad to field my fastball. That’s when a lesson from group comes back to me: Parenting doesn’t need to be about deprivation. It can be about indulgence—indulging the  opportunities we get to give love to our children. So I drive not to Lucien’s preschool but ten miles in the opposite direction to a real field. He wants me to “call the game.” Lucien kicks the dirt in front of the rubber, and I get down into my catcher’s crouch and begin: “Toeing the rubber this morning for the Baltimore Orioles, and coming in with a 9–1 mark and a 1.92 ERA, is the sensational rookie right-hander, making a rare appearance before his hometown crowd.” Twenty minutes later, after he’s finished off the final batter, my son and I high-five in the space between the mound and home plate: We’ve won!