By BETSY FLAGLER

For Father’s Day, publishers offer a variety of books and CDs to help dads care for and connect with their children.

Let’s start with a first-person funny one about a dad in his early 50s grappling with his 3-year-old named Max: “Dadditude: How a Real Man Became a Real Dad” (Da Capo, $19.95, 2007) by Philip Lerman, former co-executive producer of “America’s Most Wanted” and former National Editor of USA Today.

Lerman quit his TV-producer job to take on full-time fatherhood with both seriousness and a sense of humor. A lesson for dads: “Understanding that everyone else knows more than you.”
Another lesson for fathers, he says: Learning to just be there for their kids. “To just stop — stop teaching and doing and taking and going and fixing, and just be there. That’s what I learned from Max: If I can clear my mind enough to just plop down on the floor with him, and pick up a car, and roll it around the floor and make the car sound — that’s the real music to Max’s ears,” he writes on his Web site at www.dadditude.com.

Lerman also found that years of management experience meant next to nothing at home. “A 3-year-old takes that belief and stuffs cheese balls in its ear,” he writes.

A later-in-life dad with ‘tude

The Associated Press; Spencer Rumsey; Caryn Eve Murray

Mix a generous helping of rock and roll trivia, the sex lives of cavewomen and the batting stances of the New York Yankees and you may attain a blessed state of fatherhood that Philip Lerman calls “Dadditude.” In his funny new book, “Dadditude: How a Real Man Became a Real Dad” (Da Capo Press), appropriately timed for Father’s Day, the former co-producer of “America’s Most Wanted” tells other males of the species how to find that balance between “strict discipline and compassionate unconditional love.” Three quick tips: Never play Candyland. Never curse around the kids – especially if you’re losing at Candyland. And even though kids don’t come with an owner’s manual like a new car, they do require preventive maintenance.

A successful TV executive, Lerman decided in his late 40s that he was finally ready to have a kid with his very patient wife, Rachel, who had a daughter from a previous marriage. After a series of entertaining – and most revealing – misadventures, the happy result is Max, now 3, who has taught his dad what it takes to gain that special paternal ‘tude.

– Spencer Rumsey

Dadditude: How a Real Man Became a Real Dad 
The strength of print and television reporter Lerman’s funny and insightful look at full-time parenthood has almost nothing to do with being a “real” man and everything to do with being an older dad. At 44, Lerman hits his self-imposed age deadline for fatherhood and being able to attend a child’s marriage “without the aid of a portable oxygen tent.” His account of what older parents-to-be go through to get pregnant will be immediately familiar to any couple who has experienced what Lerman correctly calls “the promising, terrifying, and enormously embarrassing world of Baby Science”—including Clomid fertility treatments, sperm tests and in vitro fertilization—and it adds a sweet and thoughtful edge to the many adventures over four years after his son, Max, is born. While Lerman’s Dave Barry–style humor doesn’t always work, he is far more successful—and funny—recounting his struggles with lack of sleep, changing diapers and “full-fledged neurosis” about forgetting Max somewhere. More important, he captures the many ways fathers work hard at establishing their “own special relationship” with babies and toddlers, concluding with a beautiful definition of “Dadditude” as “being in the moment” and experiencing the “closeness beyond words and before words” that can be felt between parent and child.