'Fatherhood Restored My Faith' — Glen Henry Talks Grace, Growth and Getting It Wrong

The "Beleaf in Fatherhood" creator discusses his new book, resisting stereotypes, and how parenting helped him re-envision his relationship with God. | Note: This article includes video clips.

For a man who has built a million-follower movement around fatherhood, Glen Henry’s starting point may be a shock: “I never wanted to be a dad.”

That’s because the popular “Beleaf in Fatherhood” YouTuber began his public journey from a place of deep personal pain.

Raised by his mother in Baltimore, Maryland, Henry also spent summers with his dad in California. “So I went from this like single-parent home to this semi-stable two-parent home with my father and his wife and my little sister,” he told Faithfully Magazine in an October interview.

In Baltimore, things were less than ideal.

“I saw the pressures of life with my mother, who was a very young mother,” Henry said. “She tended to take a lot of her anger out on me. I don’t think she knew better, but it definitely wore down on my spirits as a young man.”

The experience left him with an aversion to ever wanting to be a parent himself.

But that all changed when he was 20. A youth pastor let him hang out at his house, and for the first time, Henry saw a “harmony to a family.” He saw proof of good fatherhood. “Ever since then,” he said, “I believed I could be a father, and then I wanted to be proof for other people.”

Now, Henry’s sharing his journey and taking his mission beyond YouTube with his debut book, Father Yourself First: Everything You Need to Become the Father Your Family Deserves. More than a parenting guide, Father Yourself First is a personal reflection on the internal work Henry believes men must do to effectively lead their families.

He and his wife, Yvette, have four children: Theo, Uriah, Anaya and Uziah. For the past decade, they’ve documented their family’s journey on YouTube, where their hundreds of videos have drawn more than 336 million views.