Scott Dittman drove about 50 miles wearing a T-shirt that read “Free Dad Hugs”.
It was June 2019, and this married father of two from Pennsylvania was heading to the Pittsburgh Pride parade with a simple plan: offer a dad hug to anyone who might not have received one at home. He had bought the T-shirt online and was inspired by Free Mom Hugs. He said he thought rejection from fathers might be even greater than rejection from mothers.
In two and a half hours, he gave more than 700 hugs. Many ended in tears.
A young man told him that his parents had kicked him out of the house at 19 for being gay and that they had never spoken again. He clung to Scott and cried in his arms. A woman crossed the street with tears in her eyes, hugged him for a long time, and kept thanking him. Scott doesn’t even know her story.
Later, he wrote a message to parents on Facebook: never make your children feel they have to give up your love for being who they are. It was shared more than 231,000 times. To this day, Scott repeats the same thing: “It was life-changing”.
Do you think every parent should remember that their love must be greater than any differences?