📚 Pick up a copy of Good Inside by Dr. Becky at The Painted Porch👟 To learn more about the kid's Mach 6 shoe, visit www.hoka.com✉️  Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube 

📰  Check out the Daily Dad article on helicopter parents: Don’t Be That Guy—Or That Guy✉️  Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube 

📚 Pick up a copy of Essaysby Michel de Montaigne at The Painted Porch📕 Learn more about Michel de Montaigne’s life in Sarah Bakewell’s biography of him, How to Live: Or a Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answercarried at The Painted Porch👟 To learn more about the kid's Mach 6 shoe, visit www.hoka.com✉️  Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube 

📚 Pick up a copy of Die with Zero by Bill Perkins at The Painted Porch🏛 All time can be quality time. Get your own Tempus Fugit Medallion to remind yourself of this at The Daily Dad Store: https://store.dailydad.com/👟 To learn more about the kid's Mach 6 shoe, visit www.hoka.com✉️  Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

📚 Looking for stories to teach your kids about Stoicism? Check out Ryan Holiday’s books: The Boy Who Would Be King and  The Girl Who Would Be Free: A Fable About Epictetus🎟 Ryan Holiday is going on tour! Grab tickets at ryanholiday.net/tour🩺  Get a Medical Emergency Kit for your family: TWC.health/dailydadUse promo code DAILYDAD for 15% off!✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube 

🎟 Ryan Holiday is going on tour! Grab tickets at ryanholiday.net/tour💪 Go to livemomentous.com to get up to 32% off your first subscriptionorder or get 15% off all of my favorite products with the code DAILYDAD15✉️  Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube 

📚 Grab a copy of Booth by Karen Joy Fowler at The Painted Porch: https://www.thepaintedporch.com/🩺  Get a Medical Emergency Kit for your family: TWC.health/dailydadUse promo code DAILYDAD for 15% off!✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube 

💪 Go to livemomentous.com to get up to 32% off your first subscriptionorder or get 15% off all of my favorite products with the code DAILYDAD15✉️  Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube 

🏛 All time can be quality time. Get your own Tempus Fugit Medallion to remind yourself of this at The Daily Dad Store: store.dailydad.com/🎟 Ryan Holiday is going on tour! Grab tickets at ryanholiday.net/tourThis episode is brought to you by BetterHelp - Get 10% of your first month at https://betterhelp.com/dailydad✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

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👟 To learn more about the kid's Mach 6 shoe, visit www.hoka.com🎟  Ryan Holiday is going on tour! Grab tickets at ryanholiday.net/tour✉️  Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube 

📕 Pick up your own Premium Leather Edition of Meditations - Marcus Aurelius (Gregory Hays Translation) at the Daily Stoic Store: https://store.dailystoic.com/👟 To learn more about the kid's Mach 6 shoe, visit www.hoka.com✉️  Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube 

💡 Take the first step towards a calmer future by checking out our course: Taming Your Temper: The 11 Day Stoic Guide to Controlling Your Anger over at the Daily Stoic: https://dailystoic.com/anger👟 To learn more about the kid's Mach 6 shoe, visit www.hoka.com🎟  Ryan Holiday is going on tour! Grab tickets at ryanholiday.net/tour✉️  Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube 

🏛 All time can be quality time. Get your own Tempus Fugit Medallion to remind yourself of this at The Daily Dad Store: https://store.dailydad.com/✉️  Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

🎟  Ryan Holiday is going on tour! Grab tickets at ryanholiday.net/tour👟 To learn more about the kid's Mach 6 shoe, visit www.hoka.com✉️  Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube 

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📚 Pick up a signed copy of Stillness Is The Key by Ryan Holiday: https://store.dailystoic.com/🎟 Order tickets to Ryan's tour dates at ryanholiday.net/tourBespoke Post | Get 15% off your first box when you sign up at BoxofAwesome.com and enter the code dailydad at checkout!✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

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This episode is brought to you by BetterHelp - Get 10% of your first month at https://betterhelp.com/dailydad✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

🩺  Get a Medical Emergency Kit for your family: TWC.health/dailydadUse promo code DAILYDAD for 15% off!✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube 

🏛 All time can be quality time. Get your own Tempus Fugit Medallion to remind yourself of this at The Daily Dad Store: store.dailydad.com/This episode is brought to you by BetterHelp - Get 10% of your first month at https://betterhelp.com/dailydad✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

👟 To learn more about the kid's Mach 6 shoe, visit www.hoka.com✉️  Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube 

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📚 Pick up a copy of Opposite of Spoiled: Raising Kids Who Are Grounded, Generous, and Smart about Money at The Painted Porch✉️  Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube 

🏛 All time is quality time. Get your own Tempus Fugit Medallion to remind yourself of this at The Daily Dad Store: store.dailydad.com/✉️  Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube 

📓 Pick up a signed edition of The Daily Dad: 366 Meditations on Parenting, Love, and Raising Great Kids: store.dailydad.com 👟 To learn more about the kid's Mach 6 shoe, visit www.hoka.com✉️  Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube 

📚 Grab a copy of Fortune's Children: The Fall of the House of Vanderbilt 👟 To learn more about the kid's Mach 6 shoe, visit www.hoka.com✉️  Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube 

🎙️Listen to Topaz Adizes’s interview on The Daily Stoic | Wondery, Spotify, & Apple Podcasts🎥 Check out Topaz’s YouTube Channel: @TheSkinDeepCheck out Topaz’s card game aimed to help you connect deeper as a family: head hereFollow Topaz: X and IG: @topazadizesHiya Health | hiyahealth.com/dailydad ✉️  Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube 

💪 Go to livemomentous.com to get up to 32% off your first subscriptionorder or get 15% off all of my favorite products with the code DAILYDAD15✉️  Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube 

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🏛 All time can be quality time. Get your own Tempus Fugit Medallion to remind yourself of this at The Daily Dad Store:https://store.dailydad.com/💪 Go to livemomentous.com to get up to 32% off your first subscriptionorder or get 15% off all of my favorite products with the code DAILYDAD15✉️  Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube 

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📚 Grab a copy of The Wright Brothers at The Painted Porch: https://www.thepaintedporch.com/ ✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube  

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📚 Pick up a copy of Death Be Not Proud by John J Gunther at The Painted Porch👟 To learn more about the kid's Mach 6 shoe, visit www.hoka.com✉️  Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube 

📕 Right Thing, Right Now  is out now! To purchase your own copy, head here: https://store.dailystoic.com/✉️  Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube 

📚 Pick up a copy of The Seven Storey Mountain by Thomas Merton📕 Right Thing, Right Now  is out now! To purchase your own copy, head here: https://store.dailystoic.com/👟 To learn more about the kid's Mach 6 shoe, visit www.hoka.com✉️  Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube 

👟 To learn more about the kid's Mach 6 shoe, visit www.hoka.com📚 Grab a copy of The Wright Brothers at The Painted Porch: https://www.thepaintedporch.com/ ✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube  

📕 Pre-order Right Thing, Right Now and get exclusive bonuses! To learn more and pre-order your own copy, visit dailystoic.com/justice ✉️  Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube 

🎙️ Tune in to Dr. Michael Gervais on The Daily Stoic: Part 1 & Part 2💪 Go to livemomentous.com to get up to 32% off your first subscriptionorder or get 15% off all of my favorite products with the code DAILYDAD15✉️  Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube 

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📓 Father’s Day is just around the corner, gift a leatherbound signed edition of The Daily Stoic! Check it out at the Daily Stoic Store: https://store.dailystoic.com/This episode is brought to you by BetterHelp - Get 10% of your first month at https://betterhelp.com/dailydad✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

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📕 Pre-order Right Thing, Right Now and get exclusive bonuses! To learn more and pre-order your own copy, visit dailystoic.com/justice💪 Go to livemomentous.com to get up to 32% off your first subscriptionorder or get 15% off all of my favorite products with the code DAILYDAD15✉️  Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube 

This episode is brought to you by BetterHelp - Get 10% of your first month at https://betterhelp.com/dailydad✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

👟 To learn more about the kid's Mach 6 shoe, visit www.hoka.com ✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube 

📕 Pick up a copy of The Daily Dad: 366 Meditations on Parenting, Love, and Raising Great Kids at The Painted Porch: https://www.thepaintedporch.com/ ✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube  

📕 Pre-order Right Thing, Right Now and get exclusive bonuses! To learn more and pre-order your own copy, visit dailystoic.com/justice👟 To learn more about the kid's Mach 6 shoe, visit www.hoka.com ✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube 

👟 To learn more about the kid's Mach 6 shoe, visit www.hoka.com📚 Grab a copy of All the King’s Men at The Painted Porch: https://www.thepaintedporch.com/ ✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube  

👟 To learn more about the kid's Mach 6 shoe, visit www.hoka.com ✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube  

📚 Grab a copy of Same as Ever by Morgan Housel at The Painted Porch: https://www.thepaintedporch.com/✉️  Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube 

✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube 

📕 Pre-order Right Thing, Right Now  and get exclusive bonuses! To learn more and pre-order your own copy, visit dailystoic.com/justice🩺  Get a Medical Emergency Kit for your family: TWC.health/dailydadUse promo code DAILYDAD for 15% off!✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube 

💪 Go to livemomentous.com to get up to 32% off your first subscriptionorder or get 15% off all of my favorite products with the code DAILYDAD15✉️  Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube 

📖 Looking for a Father’s Day gift? Check out Storyworth and save $10 on your first purchase here: storyworth.com/dailydad✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube 

🩺  Get a Medical Emergency Kit for your family: TWC.health/dailydadUse promo code DAILYDAD for 15% off!✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube 

💡 Looking to set a better example as a parent? Sign up for the 10 day course: The Stoic Parent: 10 Commandments For Becoming A Better Parent today at the Daily Stoic Store: https://store.dailystoic.com/ ✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube  

📚 Grab a copy of I’d Like To Play Alone Please by Tom Segura at The Painted Porch: https://www.thepaintedporch.com/👟 To learn more about the kid's Mach 6 shoe, visit www.hoka.com ✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube  

👟 To learn more about the kid's Mach 6 shoe, visit www.hoka.com ✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube  

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📕 Pick up a copy of The Wright Brothers by David McCullough at The Painted Porch: https://www.thepaintedporch.com/👟 To learn more about the kid's Mach 6 shoe, visit www.hoka.com✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube  

📕 Pick up a copy of Letter to the Father by Franz Kafka at The Painted Porch: https://www.thepaintedporch.com/✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube  

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Prioritize your health with HIYA at hiyahealth.com 📺 Visit The Daily Stoic YouTube channel to watch Ryan's full interview with Adrian Grenier.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube 

Visit livemomentous.com to unlock your best with Momentous.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube 

Prioritize your mental health with BetterHelp at betterhelp.com today.📔 Grab a copy of Good Inside: A Guide to Becoming the Parent You Want to Be at The Painted Porch. ✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube 

Visit livemomentous.com to unlock your best with Momentous.📘 Grab Die with Zero: Getting All You Can from Your Money and Your Life at The Painted Porch. ✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube 

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Grab the Tempus Fugit Medallion at store.dailydad.com✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

📚 Check out Evelyn McDonnell's The World According to Joan Didion. And grab your copy of and The Baby on the Fire Escape at ThePaintedPorch.com.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

Visit Bespoke Post today at www.bespokepost.com✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

Visit Bespoke Post today at www.bespokepost.com📕 Grab a signed copy of The Daily Dad: 366 Meditations on Parenting, Love, and Raising Great Kids at store.dailydad.com✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

📔 Visit The Painted Porch to grab a copy of Dr. Becky Kennedy's Good Inside: A Guide To Becoming The Parent You Want To Be👟 To learn more about the kid's Mach 6 shoe, visit www.hoka.com ✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

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📕 Grab your copy of  The Daily Dad: 366 Meditations on Parenting, Love, and Raising Great Kids at The Painted Porch.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

📕 Grab your copy of  The Daily Dad: 366 Meditations on Parenting, Love, and Raising Great Kids at The Painted Porch.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

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📖 Grab a copy of Mike Erwin's Leadership is a Relationship: How to Put People First in the Digital World. X: @erwinrwb IG: @erwinrwb🎧 Check out Ryan's full interview with Mike Erwin.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

📕 Grab your copy of The Daily Dad: 366 Meditations on Parenting, Love, and Raising Great Kids at The Painted Porch. ✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

📘 Get your copy of Dr. Becky Kennedy's Good Inside at The Painted Porch.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

To learn more about the HOKA Mach 6 shoe, visit HOKA.com and check it out.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

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To learn more about the HOKA Mach 6 shoe, visit HOKA.com and check it out.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

Grab a signed copy of Same as Ever and The Psychology of Money from The Painted Porch!Morgan Housel is a partner at The Collaborative Fund. His book The Psychology of Money: Timeless lessons on wealth, greed, and happiness is a deep dive into the psychology of money and investing, especially how personal history shapes one’s view of economic risk, the implications of not understanding the future, being rich vs. being wealthy, how we measure success, the problem with social comparison, and much more. It has sold over 1.9 million copies and has been translated into 46 languages. Morgan is a two-time winner of the Best in Business Award from the Society of American Business Editors, winner of the New York Times Sidney Award, and a two-time finalist for the Gerald Loeb Award for Distinguished Business and Financial Journalism. He serves on the board of Markel and has presented at more than 100 conferences all over the globe.Website: morganhousel.com Twitter: @morganhousel  

Go to livemomentous.com to get up to 32% off your first subscription order. And if you don’t feel like subscribing, you can still get 15% off all of my favorite products with the code DAILYDAD15.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

Redefine learning with play—explore projects that build confidence and problem-solving skills with KiwiCo! Get 50% off your first month on ANY crate line at KIWICO.COM with promo code DAILYDAD.  That’s 50% off your first month at KIWICO.COM, promo code DAILYDAD.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/dailydad and get on your way to being your best self.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

Go to livemomentous.com to get up to 32% off your first subscription order. And if you don’t feel like subscribing, you can still get 15% off all of my favorite products with the code DAILYDAD15.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

“This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/dailydad and get on your way to being your best self.”Get a copy of Dr. Becky Kennedy's "Good Inside" at the Painted Porch: https://www.thepaintedporch.com/products/good-inside-a-guide-to-becoming-the-parent-you-want-to-be✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

Ryan and Sam Holiday talk about the tips that they gave to Whitney Cummings as she has her first kid. ✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube   

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Click here to check out the new Hoka Mach 6 and the brand new KIDS Mach 6 shoes!✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

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Ryan and Sam Holiday talk about what would have actually prepared them for having children.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube   

So why on earth do we so often signal the opposite? Literally and figuratively, we send the message that they’re bothering us, that they’re a distraction, a burden, annoying. As Evelyn McDonnell writes in her fascinating book The World According to Joan Didion, Didion’s daughter Quintana Roo once wrote down a list of her mother’s sayings. They were: “Brush your teeth,” “Brush your hair,” and “Shush, I'm working.”Only later do we realize what we’re saying to them—as Didion did tragically in her haunting book Blue Nights—how this hurt them, how it contradicted what we felt deep down inside. We were just busy in that moment! We just needed to finish something real quick! We didn’t mean anything by it!Of course, we have to make a living. Sometimes we do have to finish things. Some things are important. We just have to make sure that we value what really is important, that we remember, as we say in the March 22nd entry in The Daily Dad: 366 Meditations on Parenting, Love, and Raising Great Kids, our kids aren’t a distraction from our work, they are our work.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube   

Being a kid is tough. It’s tough because they’re learning—often by painful trial and error—an endless number of lessons about life. What they’re allowed to do and not. What happens when you touch something hot. How other people act. What feels good and what doesn’t. Plus they’re also in school learning academic knowledge too—math and science and reading and history.Well, here’s a piece of advice from the great Dr. Becky (from her amazing book Good Inside) that we can translate to our kids, but also to ourselves:Things are tough, things are frustrating because we’re learning, we as parents, them as kids. It’s fun to learn but it’s also exhausting. It’s supposed to be this way, just as lifting weights is supposed to make you sore. It’s the price you pay to get the thing you want—which is to learn, to be smart, to be capable, to get the hang of this life thing.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube   

We have so many things we need to do as parents. There’s the logistics of it. The survival aspect of it (food and shelter). There’s the education we have to give them. There’s the experiences we want them to have. There’s the values and character we know need to be instilled.We’re not trying to raise well-behaved kids. **As we’ve said before, we’re not trying to raise kids at all. The whole point of parenting is to raise our kids into adults, it’s trying to raise these little people into good human beings.Of course, behavior matters but it’s not the end all be all. Tantrums aren’t great. Kids are sometimes going to be crazy. But as parents we need to remember that our primary job is teaching our kids how to manage and regulate their emotions and urges—it’s not to stamp them out because they embarrass us. ✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube   

It’s important that we look for examples of people who have done great things as a result of their parent’s ability to believe in them, support them, and make them feel secure. We’ve talked about Jim Valvano many times here and tell the story in Daily Dad about how his dad packed his bags and told his son he was ready to watch him coach in the Final Four. We posted a great video of the comedian Andrew Schultz recently. Andrew told his father that his dream was to perform at Madison Square Gardens someday. Everyone else laughed or dismissed it. His father just looked at him and said, “I can see it.”We think this idea—that you have to be your kids’ biggest supporter—is so important that in The Daily Dad book, the entire month of August is on the theme. The month of August in The Daily Dad: 366 Meditations on Parenting, Love, and Raising Great Kids is titled, “Always Be A Fan”—it is, as we’ve said, the greatest gift you can give your kids.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube   

“Connection first,” is Dr. Becky’s advice in Good Inside. Connection as opposed to shame, to criticism, to questions, to doubt, to consequences. There will be time for all that (except shame) later. “Now, to be clear,” Dr. Becky writes, “connection does not mean approval…Connection is an opening that allows for movement. Connection is when we show our kids, ‘It’s okay to be you right now. Even when you’re struggling, it’s okay to be you. I am here with you, as you are.’” Let’s start by slowing down. Let’s start by letting them know that this doesn’t change how we feel about them. Let’s start by letting them know that we’re here to help, that we’re on their team. Let’s start by letting them know that we love them (which, as we’ve said, you really cannot ever say too much). Once this is established, then we can get to work. Connection is not at odds with accountability, with learning a lesson, with consequences or even criticism. In fact, it makes the chances of all these things landing even higher. Because they’ll be listening, they’ll be less on guard, they’ll see it not as part of the problem, but part of the solution. ✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com 📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

On this episode of the Daily Dad Podcast, Ryan Holiday and his wife Samantha dive into the nuanced art of raising well-adjusted adults rather than merely well-behaved children. Drawing from their own experiences as parents, they emphasize the importance of fostering independence, resilience, and critical thinking skills in young minds. ✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com 📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

As Claire Tomalin writes in her book Jane Austen: A Life, we can trace the beginnings of Jane Austen’s greatness to her father’s library. “Their father’s bookshelves were of primary importance in fostering her talent,” she writes, “given that the first impulse to write stories comes from being entertained and excited by other people’s.” And her father had quite a library, **some 500 volumes.It’s a crime, we’ve said, to raise a kid in a house without books. Our job is to surround our kids with great ideas, great writers, great art. We can’t expect it to turn all of them into groundbreaking creatives, but it will have that effect on some of them. In every case though, it will give them windows into other worlds, it will teach them empathy, it will entertain them and teach them lessons about life and human nature.And more than just surrounding them with books, we have to demonstrate what being a reader looks like. Not on our phones, not on audiobooks, but good old fashioned reading.We think this idea—that you have a responsibility to make reading a part of your children’s life—is so important that the month of September in The Daily Dad: 366 Meditations on Parenting, Love, and Raising Great Kids is all about it and titled “Raise A Reader.” It’s 30 days full of stories and lessons in learning, curiosity, and how to raise a reader.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

All that did happen. It shouldn’t have. It’s not ok that it did. But before you do anything, can you try this? Can you say to yourself, as Dr. Becky writes in Good Inside (a great book!), “Ok, one second. Let me take a breath. Let me see if I understand what’s happening here…”In a sense, can you be a Stoic about it? Can you put your first impressions to the test, as Epictetus tells us, not be overwhelmed by the moment, as Marcus Aurelius said, and see what’s really happening? Because what’s really happening is that they are frustrated after being prodded and provoked by their siblings for days on end. What happened is that they’re overwhelmed by school, and they need help. What happened is that they’re desperate for connection. What happened is that they’re having bigger feelings than they’re equipped to deal with.Talk to them, talk it through. Don’t be distracted by what’s on the surface, what is frustrating or inappropriate, but go to what’s really happening and help them there.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube  

It doesn’t matter how driven you were. It doesn’t matter how much money is on the table. Having kids humbles you. We said recently that having kids changes you because it brings you up close and personal with something that actually means something and all your other worldly stuff naturally pales somewhat in comparison. As the writer Stephen Marche describes (he has a great little book on writing and life), “the physical changes that occasionally transpire with women after birth—eczema disappearing, once intractable allergies going away—have a psychological equivalent. The flesh of little children is the cure for self-importance. Everything matters less. Having children does not necessarily make writing harder, but it makes it a lot harder to pretend that writing matters.”It makes it harder for that business trip to matter. Not when your son is struggling in school. It makes it harder for that big exit for your startup to matter…now that pursuing it has made your spouse contemplate an exit from your marriage (and now you’re staring down the heartbreak of shared custody). You thought it was all so important. You thought you were so important.Click here to check out the new Hoka Mach 6 and the brand new KIDS Mach 6 shoes!✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube  

Why is your house so stressful? Why is everything such a fight? It doesn’t need to be. Sure, school is important. Rules and respect and basic cleanliness matter. But these things aren’t that important. Indeed, most conflicts that pop up while getting ready for school or sitting down to dinner or finishing household tasks aren’t that important.Here’s a magical phrase worth thinking about as a parent. It’s from that great Lionel Richie song (and Faith No More cover): Easy like Sunday morning…What if more of your days were like that? When you had less you were trying to force through? When you were slightly more relaxed? If you understood that it was your kids’ day too, that there was nothing that really had to happen?P.S. If you’re looking to avoid falling back into bad habits when stress inevitably announces itself, consider checking out our Daily Stoic Spring Forward challenge. We all think of March as the month we tend to get started on our spring cleaning, but how many of us spend the time to get our whole houses in order? Not just our physical spaces, but our minds, our routines, our assumptions? The challenge is designed to push you to examine those parts of your life, your choices, your relationships, and move you closer to living your best life. Become the person you aspire to be and enroll at dailystoic.com/spring today!✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube  

It had been a long day. He was tired. He just wanted his teenage step-daughter Tegan, from the indie pop duo Tegan and Sara, to stop blasting the same album over and over. Besides, he hated Nirvana, which was just then about the biggest band in the world. So he told her to turn it off. He told her the music was driving him insane.He was well within his rights…up until the point that he made a joke about Kurt Cobain’s sexuality. He should have known better. As Tegan explains in her fascinating book, High School (a must read for any parent with artistic children), she was just then coming to terms with her own identity. She went ballistic at her father. She was inconsolable. It was clearly not about the music at all.Finally, after many apologies, her dad was able to talk to her. She played Nirvana’s Unplugged album for him. A fan of David Bowie, he was surprised by their cover of “The Man Who Sold the World.”✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

On this episode of the Daily Dad podcast, best-selling author and renowned stoic philosopher, Ryan Holiday, shares an insightful and heartwarming story about a profound parenting conversation he had with a driver on his way to the San Diego airport. In this engaging narrative, Holiday reflects on the importance of being your child's biggest fan.  ✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com 📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube   

“This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/dailydad and get on your way to being your best self.”Dr. Becky (read Good Inside already!) says she tries to repeat it to get kids as often as possible: “You’re the only one in your body, so only you could know what you like.” She probably repeats it as much for her kid’s benefit as theirs. Because of course, they know what they like. The problem is that we tend to assume that we know better. And how could that be true? We’re not inside them, we’re not the same as them, as much as they sometimes seem like us.  As we’ve said before, ‘knowing better’ is a corrosive thing, because it becomes less true over time and it’s hard to turn it off once you’ve internalized the assumption.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com 📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube   

There’s a story about Queen Elizabeth, told in Discipline is Destiny. After a long day of travel with her late husband, Prince Philip, the Queen found him worked up and in an argument with someone who was organizing an event. What wouldn’t have worked in that situation with Prince Philip was the Queen coming over and telling him to get control of himself. It wouldn’t have helped for her to come in and pile on or take over the situation either. He was stuck in a loop, and she helped pull him out. While it’s not our job to parent our spouses, this was a wonderful example of fantastic parent energy. When our kids are upset, we can help them with a simple redirect, an interruption, a distraction, we can give them an off-ramp. We can provide calming energy as opposed to amping things up, to adding more tension or stress to a situation by reprimanding them or telling them to shape up. P.S. “Most powerful is he who has himself in his own power,” Seneca said. If you’re looking to gain a little more temperance, for both your sake and your family’s sake, check out Ryan Holiday’s Discipline is Destiny. Developing a practice of discipline not only makes it more likely you’ll be successful, it ensures that whatever happens, you are great, both for yourself and those around you. Grab a copy today!✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com 📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube   

In his fantastic book Outlive, Peter Attia (we carry the book at The Painted Porch and did a fantastic 2-hour interview with him on the Daily Stoic podcast) looks at this idea literally and figuratively. Will you want to be able to go skiing with your adult children? Will you want to be able to travel to see your grandkids? Will you want to live long enough to maybe get to see them get married or bring you great-grandkids? Just as important as whether these things are physically possible is will you have the kind of relationship that allows for this? Will your kids want to do those things with you?These are the questions you have to be thinking about. Not just thinking about, but making decisions and investments about and in. If you eat whatever you want, let your weight balloon, smoke, drink to excess—it doesn’t matter what dreams you have for your twilight years. You are making a powerful statement in reality about the actual value of those things to you. The same goes for how you balance work and life, whether you have put in the work on your issues, whether you’ve improved at repairing with your kids, whether you support and root for them or whether you judge and criticize them. Again, you can fantasize about family trips when you’re retired, but if, while you’re working, you’re a self-absorbed, miserable jerk—that’s never going to happen.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

As she writes her memoir Suffragette, these incidents illustrate to her “the fact that the impressions of childhood often have more to do with character and future conduct than heredity or education. I tell it also to show that my development into an advocate of militancy was largely a sympathetic process.”The lesson, which we built the whole first month of The Daily Dad book around, is a simple one: Children learn by example. It doesn’t matter so much what adults tell them, what ideology they try to teach them, what matters is what children see. And that children are far more perceptive than we might think.P.S. “Thou Shall Teach By Example” is the 1st Commandment in The Stoic Parent: 10 Commandments For Becoming A Better Parent. If you want to take your parenting to the next level, or just looking to set a better example as a parent, The Stoic Parent course is 10 days of the most important things that you can do to become the best parent you can be. Sign up today at the Daily Stoic Store!✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

As we said recently, no parent has ever successfully shielded their child from negative feelings or distress. No parent has done it and no grown adult has ever looked back at their childhood and been grateful that their parents tried. “I’m so glad Mom and Dad kept me in a bubble of sunshine and kittens, that really set me up now that I’m on my own.”Gaslighting someone about their feelings is not, and never has been, a service.Dr. Becky Kennedy writes In Good Inside, her wonderful book about parenting (can’t recommend it enough), that “adults whose childhood were focused mainly on happiness are not only unprepared for tough moments, they experience more discomfort in those tough moments because deep down, they think they’re doing something wrong if they can’t ‘find the happy’ and get themselves to a ‘better place.’”We’ve talked before about Seneca’s Consolations essays where he works his friends and family through the awful grief they are experiencing. It’s important that we understand this is how the Stoics—and hopefully your kids—learn to deal with strong emotions, period. You don’t stuff it down. You don’t mask it with smiles. You don’t seek out pleasure to counterbalance it. In fact, the more you do those things, the harder time you will have in the future if even more serious or distressing things happen.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

On this weekend episode of the Daily Dad Podcast, Ryan shifts to the basketball court as he attends both of his son's game, unveiling profound lessons about team sports for kids and the essential role of adults in shaping their experiences. Amidst the cheers and competitive spirit, Holiday reflects on the delicate balance required in fostering a positive environment. He observes that, while skill development is crucial, the paramount lesson lies in the importance of having fun. As an engaged parent and spectator, Holiday underscores the significance of adults maintaining perspective, encouraging sportsmanship, and emphasizing the joy of the game over mere victories. This insightful episode serves as a reminder that, ultimately, the true victory in youth sports lies in the smiles, camaraderie, and personal growth experienced by the young athletes on the court.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

Look, we get it: the iPad is a magical device. It can quiet even the craziest kid. It can take them into a world of learning and exploration that is literally miraculous. Best of all, most of this content is free!Books on the other hand are not free and they take up so much space. Lugging them around can be a pain. You’re a grown-ass person. Do you really have to read about why dragons love tacos again? Or what Frodo is going to do with that stupid ring? And read it with the excited tone of a voice-over actor?Yes. The answer is yes. Your house and your life must be filled with books. Good ones. Silly ones. Annoying ones. Used ones. New ones. Reading is part of the job. “A house without books is like a room without windows,” Horace Mann once said. “No man has a right to bring up his children without surrounding them with books, if he has the means to buy them.”✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube   

We all have our issues. We had trauma from childhood. We have bad habits we picked up in college. We have scripts we learned, patterns we’ve repeated, coping mechanisms we’ve developed.We prefer not to die with them, to carry them always. But when exactly are we planning on dealing with them? In a perfect world, we would have gotten serious about it before we had kids. In the next best world, we’d deal with them now.“All I know is that as we age the weight of our unsorted baggage becomes heavier,” Bruce Springsteen explains in his spectacular autobiography Born To Run, “…much heavier.” We talked before about his strange and disorienting childhood, which was warped by the grief of his grandparents and their inclination to spoil him, along with the distance and demons of his father. He related that, like a lot of us, “the defenses I built to withstand the stress of my childhood, to save what I had of myself, outlived their usefulness…” When the bill comes due, Springsteen says, the payment is in tears.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube   

In her book Good Inside, Dr. Becky Kennedy shares something that a mom wrote to her. “I feel guilty for all those years I punished my daughter and gave time-outs,” the woman wrote. “I always thought, ‘It’s too late, I messed up my kids forever.’” But of course, as we’ve been talking about, it’s never too late—never too late to change, never too late to repair. That mom decided she wasn’t just going to feel guilty, she was going to talk to her kids about it. “I told my 8-year-old that I’ve learned more about what kids need and that I wish I hadn’t given her so many time-outs in the moments she needed me most. I saw her body soften. I really did. We hugged. It felt really important.”Well, we can’t make our parents do that. We can’t change what happened then or in the early days of our own parenting journey. But we’ve learned some stuff since then, we’ve gotten better. And so we can repair. Nothing is messed up forever—not if we choose to be vulnerable enough, loving enough, brave enough to try to address it. We can do that. We must do that. Watch what happens when we do.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube   

There’s even an expression (one we’ve rebutted before) about how a stroller in the hall is the enemy of great art. Parenting comes with so many obligations, so many stresses—it is so all-consuming, it can’t help but be a distraction. But the writer Stephen Marche (who has an amazing little book on writing), once explained that “Being a writer and being a parent, I have found, are in conflict but not for the reasons most believe—the loss of time, the sleeplessness, the responsibility for another life, the fixedness in place, the need to make money to support them. Having children, like losing your virginity, changes the nature of meaning.”You have seen something, finally gotten something that people tried to tell you but you just couldn’t understand. Happiness is not in achievement, it’s not in stuff, it’s in people—specifically, it’s with these people. It’s in the stillness. The presence is the present, the gift that never gets old. And once you get this, you can still succeed and achieve, to be sure, but you can never go back to how you were before.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube   

Only when it’s over will we realize it. Only when it’s all been stripped away will we be able to see.How not present we were. How much we took it for granted. How often we prioritized the wrong thing. How needlessly strict or harsh we were.For Joan Didion, whose beautiful (but haunting) books A Year of Magical Thinking and Blue Nights, we have been learning from and talking about, this came when she lost her husband and her adult daughter in short order. The books she wrote were about grief sure, but not just grief at what had disappeared but also grief at the unavoidable realizations that came from that loss.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube   

On this weekend episode of the Daily Dad,  Ryan talks to creator, author, designer, and the founder of ConvertKit Nathan Barry  on  having kids earlier in their career, their interest in farms and outdoors,  the process of Emotional Vaccination and applying stoicism in our parenting routine.IG, and, X,✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com 📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

When we say “our own” we don’t think Americans or whatever country we live in, we think race. Or we think our blood relatives. That’s awful. This system we live in demands that we think of ourselves as more than just parents to our own kids. We have to think generationally. We can’t just think about getting ours, or protecting ours. We have to think like a village, like a group.The Stoics remind us that we are “made for each other.” Marcus Aurelius spoke dozens of times about the “common good.” He didn’t just care about his kids. He cared about everybody’s kids. Because that’s what justice—what doing the right thing—demands of us.It’s better to think of “our kids” as everybody. We’re all in this together, every single parent. We’re all better if we’re doing better, together.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube  

Seneca knew from experience. In one of the most dreadful periods of his life, he lost his livelihood, his home and then his young child. He was exiled on false charges. He buried an infant.Fortune…she can be cruel.As Seneca wrote to Marcia, the daughter of a prominent Roman historian, in his beautiful and moving “Consolations” essays:“Snatch the pleasures your children bring, let your children in turn find delight in you, and drain joy to the dregs without delay; no promise has been given you for this night—nay, I have offered too long a respite!—no promise has been given even for this hour.”Two thousand years later, that hard-won reminder holds true. Nothing is promised. The future is not certain. It’s a scary world—one we’re hostages to, as we’ve said. But we can’t dwell in sadness or fear.All we can do is hold our children tight. We must snatch the pleasures they bring us and bring them pleasures too. Drain joy to the dregs together. Enjoy the hour…because not one second more is guaranteed.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube  

We talked about Lincoln recently, who used to bring his “brats” to the office, in the words of William Herndon, Lincoln’s law partner. As much as he hated the noise, Herndon actually seemed to admire Lincoln’s ability to deal with this. “The boys were absolutely unrestrained in their amusement,” he noted. “If they pulled down all the books from the shelves, bent the points of all the pens, overturned inkstands, scattered law papers over the floor or threw the pencils into the spittoon, it never disturbed the serenity of their father’s good nature.”The lesson here is twofold. First off, it’s a reminder that you’re not alone in raising absolute hellions. That’s just what kids are—and they never really stop being them (they find new ways of stirring stuff up when they’re older!). Two, really the only part of this that reflects on you is how you respond to it. If it turns you into a monster, if it makes you mean or nasty or makes you throw a fit in response to their fit? Well that’s the real problem.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube  

Nobody likes it when their kids are sad. It breaks our hearts when they feel lonely, ashamed, or frustrated. We’d like to just make this all go away, to protect them from all this, so they can feel happy all the time.But that’s not possible (nor is it, as we’ve talked about, actually a recipe for happiness).In Good Inside, the great Dr. Becky writes, “I don’t know one adult who has ever said, ‘Wow, my parents really got all those uncomfortable feelings out of me! The disappointment and frustration and envy…they convinced them all out of me! They successfully distracted me so much that now, as an adult, I never feel these things! I am happy all the time!’”You can’t—just as your parents couldn’t—tell them to stuff their feelings down. You can’t gaslight them into thinking the negative feelings aren’t there. You can’t make life so wonderful and fun that they’re never sad or angry or jealous or frustrated.We can’t do it. We shouldn’t try to do it.Instead, we have to try to raise and cultivate kids who know how to deal with those feelings. We can teach them how to deal with frustration. We can inform them that, sadly, frustration is an inevitable part of life—that things don’t always work out, that stuff breaks, that obstacles arise. We can empower them to understand their feelings, to be aware of them, to process them, to find healthy outlets for them.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube  

It’s hard to be a kid, as we’ve said many times. It’s hard to make transitions between worlds. It’s hard to come home after a long day of behaving and not misbehave. They want personal space. They want some freedom. What they need is some empathy and understanding. You want and need these things and you’re an adult who has a lot more practice, has a lot more resources and a lot more maturity.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube  

Ryan speaks with his longtime friend fellow father Austin Kleon during a stop along his book tour for The Daily Dad: 366 Meditations on Parenting, Love, and Raising Great Kids. They discuss the life habits that they maintain in order to help fuel their creative success, why the most effective form of parenting is indirect, what parenting skills they are working on right now, how adopting a daily journaling habit vastly improved their lives, and more.Austin Kleon is a writer, author, artist, speaker, and blogger whose work focuses on creativity in the modern world. Although he is most known for his five New York Times bestselling books Steal Like An Artist:10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative, Show Your Work!, Keep Going, Steal Like An Artist Journal, and Newspaper Blackout, Austin has spoken for organizations such as Pixar, Google, SXSW, TEDx, and The Economist. He lives in Austin, Texas with his wife and sons. You can follow his work at austinkleon.com, Instagram @austinkleon, and Twitter @austinkleon.You can listen to a few of Austin’s other appearances on The Daily Stoic YouTube channel:Ryan Holiday & Austin Kleon Discuss Stoicism, Creativity, Journaling & MoreRyan Holiday and Austin Kleon On How To Increase Creativity With Stoicism ✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com 📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube  

When we think teacher, we think classroom. When we think leader, we think the corner office or the lectern or a general in front of their troops. But the truth is that a teacher can do their job anywhere and in many forms, just as a leader can.Plutarch would say of Socrates that he “did not set up desks for his students, sit in a teacher’s chair, or reserve a prearranged time for lecturing and walking with his pupils. No, he practiced philosophy while joking around (when the chance arose) and drinking and serving on military campaigns and hanging around the marketplace with some of his students, and finally, even while under arrest and drinking the hemlock. He was the first to demonstrate that our lives are open to philosophy at all times and in every aspect, while experiencing every emotion, and in each and every activity.”As with teaching and with leadership and with philosophy, so too with parenting. You can be a parent anywhere. It’s not just on fishing trips or at family dinners. It’s not just about carrying them around in a baby bjorn or going to back-to-school night. It’s not about punishments or incentives, or rules or life lessons, though of course it’s also about all these things too.Remember what we’ve talked about with quality time vs. garbage time? It may just be that the most impact you’ll have as a dad will come while joking around, it may come on a walk, it may come with how you do your job (and show them your work), it may come on a family vacation or it may come while you’re watching TV and make some passing comment that lands in exactly the right way. It may come—god forbid—on your deathbed, as you depart from this life with courage and compassion, showing them that they don’t need to be afraid, that you love them and that they’ll be okay without you.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

Bruce Springsteen’s childhood was a strange one. His mother worked to support their family. His father was distant and harsh. He spent a lot of time with his grandparents, who spoiled him, in part because they were grieving the loss of their own daughter years earlier.“His Majesty, the Baby,” is how his childhood is described in the fascinating book Deliver Me From Nowhere (incredible book, by the way). Springsteen would admit that this kind of attention and celebration “seems to a kid like a great thing, but it’s exactly what a kid doesn’t want. Very problematic, it caused me a lot of trouble. To this day. It destroyed me and it made me. At the same time.”As we said before, nobody likes a spoiled child…especially the spoiled children. It warps their sense of reality. It makes them both entitled and strips them of pleasure—because they come to take it for granted. The attention ceases to have meaning because it feels like a birthright. It suffocates and isolates. They are deprived of skills they need, confidence and character they need.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

Marcus even wrote a testament to his love for his wife and their life together in a letter to his tutor Fronto. “I call the gods to witness,” he wrote, “that I would I were now living in exile with [Faustina] rather than without her on the Palatine.” Sure, the palaces were nice and so was power. He had an important job. But none of it was better than spending time with his lovely partner.It’s a wonderful sentiment, but is it true? Marcus Aurelius spent years away from Rome, fighting wars, visiting the provinces. He spent time in Greece, as all students of philosophy considered a must. He had cases to adjudicate, dignitaries to receive, things to write. No doubt he spent a lot of time reading, a lot of time training, a lot of time committed to serving the people of Rome.It means putting the time on our calendar, scheduling play time, and sticking to it. Because you may be able to deceive yourself, but at the end of the day, your calendar doesn’t lie.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

It’s not easy for lots of reasons. Gay Talese, who knew the Didion family (who we’ve been talking about a lot recently), speculates in Evelyn McDonnell’s biography of Joan Didion (signed copies here) what it must have been like to be Quintana Roo, their adopted daughter.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

These are the Cardinal Virtues, which Zeno laid down in the 3rd Century B.C. as:CourageDisciplineJusticeWisdomWe need these virtues and we need to teach these virtues to our children. Their life…and the future hinges on it. So memorize these four virtues. Act on them. Live them. Parent by them. And keep them close to your heart always.If you want to carry the Four Virtues around like a compass,, over at Daily Stoic, we created the Four Virtues Medallion.INSERT 4V MEDALLION PICThe front of the Four Virtues Medallion features a custom-designed seal with four elements representing the Four Virtues: a lion (Courage), a man sprinkling water into a jug of wine (Temperance), a set of scales (Justice), and an owl (Wisdom). On the back is an admonition not to exchange the Four Virtues for others—for there is no other set of virtues that will serve you better than these.As with all our other coins, the Four Virtues Medallion is handcrafted in the United States by a custom mint operating in Minnesota since 1882. Each coin is shipped with an accompanying information card, explaining the Four Virtues to its fortunate recipient. Each coin has a unique finish and character.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

While on tour for his new book The Daily Dad: 366 Meditations on Parenting, Love, and Raising Great Kids, Ryan met up with his longtime friend and occasional running partner Casey Neistat for a live interview at Barnes & Noble in Union Square during which they shared the story of how they met, reflections and wisdom they have gleaned from their journeys through parenthood, the work and life habits that have led to their success, their advice for new parents, and more.Casey Neistat is a YouTube personality, filmmaker, vlogger, the co-founder of the multimedia company Beme, and the founder of the creative and collaborative space for creators 368. His main body of work consists of dozens of short films he has released exclusively on the Internet, including regular contributions to the New York Times critically acclaimed Op-Doc series. His online films and videos have been viewed over three billion times. You can find his work on his website www.caseyneistat.com and on his social media channels: YouTube: CaseyNeistat, IG: @caseyneistat, Twitter: @Casey.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

“This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/dailydad and get on your way to being your best self.”When our kids mess up we say: Aren’t you a little old for that? And we have all sorts of rules of thumb for what things are age appropriate or not—what age they should stop having accidents, what age they should stop throwing a tantrum just because they’re tired, what age it stops being okay for other people to have to pick up after them.“We ought not willingly add to old age, which has many of its own problems, the shame of misbehaviors.” That’s Cato the Elder, who seems to have really lived up to that second part of his name.  You’re too old to act out. And even if you weren’t, remember your kids are always watching—a little fellow follows you—so act like the adult that they believe you are.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

There’s an interesting passage in Evelyn McDonnell’s fascinating biography of Joan Didion (who we have written about many times and we also just had Evelyn on the Daily Stoic podcast), that points out another about the difference between how the public saw Didion and her husband John Gregory Dunne, also a great and successful writer. One was clearly identified as a parent and the other was not, even though Dunne actually wrote a whole book about the topic! As we’ve said before, by talking about the joys and the struggles of parenting you are helping other parents. You are putting things out in the open. ✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

We all feel a little self-conscious about it. Our kids don’t behave as well as we’d like. They make a mess. They make an incredible amount of noise. Perhaps this is why we keep them at home, why we’re always apologizing, preparing people in advance for the hurricane that may or may not come through. Maybe some of us fear being overshadowed by our kids or judged for having them with us—that it will undermine our image as professionals.Don’t apologize. Do your best to clean up, to teach them how to behave, but bring the brats with you. You won’t regret it in the long run…even if on occasion you do.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

“This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/dailydad and get on your way to being your best self.”The great John Wooden would practice his team hard through the week. He’d run through the plans over and over and over again. Yet as they left the locker room and headed out onto the court for the game, he would say to the team, “Well, I’ve done my job.” He wasn’t going to be micromanaging them from the sideline. It was their turn to do their job.And so it goes for us as parents. At some point, we have to leave them at the entrance to the school. At their job. With their own finances. With their own children. We can’t solve every problem. We can’t prevent everything from going wrong. That’s their job.Jessica Lahey’s wonderful book The Gift of Failure (pick it up at The Painted Porch) reminds us that by not giving them this chance, by not letting them try and struggle to do their job, we’re actually harming them. We’re setting them up for more failure down the road…and less ability to deal with it.Giving children the space to struggle because we believe in them, because we believe even more in what will come out the other side, isn’t always easy—for us or them. That’s why one side of our Luctor et Emergo medallion features the mantra, “good, not easy,” surrounded by three other reminders we parents need each day: “let them struggle,” “show them support,” “help them grow.” Get one to carry around with you at the Daily Dad Store today! ✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

In her wonderful book Good Inside (yes, we love it), Dr. Becky Kennedy writes that “on the surface we see a behavior, but underneath we see a person.” We’ve said before that your kids are always talking to you—just not necessarily with words. “Throwing the cereal box wasn’t the main event,” Dr. Becky explains. “It was a window into the main event. Behavior, in all its forms, is a window: into the feelings, thoughts, urges, sensations, perceptions, and unmet needs of a person. Behavior is never “the story” but rather it’s a clue to the bigger story begging to be addressed.”✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

The tantrum. The whining about going to school. The punch that’s thrown. The slipping grades. The sneaking out. The lie. The shouting. The moping around the house.These are not things you like to see your kids do. Maybe these are things you’ve talked to them about before, maybe a million times. But maybe that’s the problem. You’re seeing the wrong thing. You’re talking about the wrong thing.In her wonderful book Good Inside (yes, we love it), Dr. Becky Kennedy writes that “on the surface we see a behavior, but underneath we see a person.” We’ve said before that your kids are always talking to you—just not necessarily with words. “Throwing the cereal box wasn’t the main event,” Dr. Becky explains. “It was a window into the main event. Behavior, in all its forms, is a window: into the feelings, thoughts, urges, sensations, perceptions, and unmet needs of a person. Behavior is never “the story” **but rather it’s a clue to the bigger story begging to be addressed.”What a wonderful gift it would be to your family, to everyone you met, if you could start seeing behavior not as a thing to be upset about but a window into how someone is doing, what is going on with them. We’ve said it many times—they’re telling you that they’re hungry, that they’re tired, that they’re scared, that they’re lonely, that they’re overwhelmed or stressed. But they don’t know how to say that…so they lash out, so they hide in their room, so they call you something mean.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

On this weekend episode of the Daily Dad,  Ryan talks to creator, author, designer, and the founder of ConvertKit Nathan Barry  on  having kids earlier in their career, their interest in farms and outdoors, and the process of Emotional Vaccination.IG, and, X, ✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com 📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

These are challenging, uncertain times, no question. What’s at the root of it? How did we get here? And what can fathers do about it?The answer comes to us, as it often does, from an ancient prescription: Character is fate. Who a person is determines what will happen and what they can do. It should surprise no one that a culture that has put character at the absolute bottom of the list of requirements for its leaders—below whether they tell us what we want to hear, below how clever their tweets are, below how they look on television, below whether they’ll pass short-term measures that benefit us financially, below whether they belong to this party or that one—would find itself in crisis after crisis.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

Rich is how much you get to see your kids, we said recently. We were redefining wealth away from material items and salary—although these things are nice as far as they go—and towards a thing that pretty much everyone wishes they had more of: time with the people you love most. Is it really a rich life if you are missing out on something so priceless? Perhaps it’s worth also taking a minute to do some similar considerations about power. There are the obvious trappings of power: The corner office. The gatekeepers. The influence you have over world events or an audience. The presidency. The title. ✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com 📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

Maybe you did before, but you can’t now. Before you could afford to get sucked into drama, to gossip, to get into long arguments with your buddies, to be petty, to hold grudges, to follow the latest breaking news or celebrity.But now? Now, you need to remind yourself: I ain’t got time for that.Because you don’t. You have kids now. You have people you’re responsible for. You have a big enough struggle on your hands.Your crazy coworker is their own problem. That actor who cheated on their spouse is in their own mess. Your dumb neighbor with the flag for the political cult they’ve joined…Your sibling’s poor financial choices…That person who is embarrassingly wrong on the internet…You ain’t got time for that.Not one second. You ain’t got one second for that anymore.TEMPUS FUGIT✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

We’ve said before that it’s never too late. It’s never too late, as a parent, to follow your dreams—to show your kids that they can too. It’s never too late to start showing up. It’s never too late to deal with your demons. It’s never too late to change. Sooner is better of course, but it’s never too late.It’s also never too late to do that thing we’ve been talking about a lot recently—repair. “Repair can happen ten minutes after a blowup, ten days later, or ten years later,” Dr. Becky Kennedy writes in Good Enough. “Never ever doubt the power of repair—every time you go back to your child, you allow him to rewire, to rewrite the ending of the story so it concludes in connection and understanding, rather than aloneness and fear.”✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

It’s a wonderful state—being in flow. Getting caught up in your work. Getting caught up in the moment. And before you had kids, you lived for this…in fact, you may well have lived in it.Life was simpler then. You would get lost for days at a time in a project. You could spend years, it would seem in retrospect, in the building stages of a company, in the pursuit of a dream, in finding yourself, in exploring the world.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

On this weekend episode of the Daily Dad,  Ryan talks with his wife Samantha on how Sam prepares for writing Ryan,  Integrating his routine in a well adjusted life,  how this year is going to be different, all while protecting their headspace.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

There is a great story about a young Spartan woman, Gorgo, who would one day become queen. Despite her royal status, like all Spartans she was raised to be self-sufficient, and without any frills or needless luxury.  So imagine Gorgo’s surprise when she witnessed a distinguished visitor to Sparta have his shoes put on by a servant. “Look, father,” she said, “the stranger has no hands!” ✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

We have emotions. We experience stressful situations. We have intrusive thoughts. So really what we have to teach our kids, Dr. Becky writes in her incredible book Good Inside (must read!), is how to differentiate urge from action. “Having the urge to bite is okay,” she explains, “biting a person is not. Having the urge to hit is okay; hitting a person is not okay.” We know this to be true in our adult lives—that there’s a big difference between being angry and then doing something rash or irresponsible or hurtful out of anger. We know that we can type the email and not send it. We know that we can want to quit on the spot but think better of it. ✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com 📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

Our parents weren’t everything we needed. Maybe it was more time we needed. More understanding. More kindness. More support. More love. More just them having their act together.But they weren’t this. Sadly, they also weren’t what the world needed either. Few generations have been. They kicked problems down the road. They started wars that cost blood and treasure to little purpose. They abused the environment. They averted their gaze, turned their hearts away from sufferings and injustice.In a recent interview on Marc Maron’s podcast, Arnold Schwarzenegger talked about how his own life, as a parent, as a politician, as a person was largely driven by the desire to go in a different direction than the example of his father and his father’s generation. His father had been a Nazi, his father drank too much, his father smacked his kids around.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

George Dewey was a kid who got in trouble a lot. His father was always bailing him out. Finally, as a last ditch effort, he secured his son entrance into the U.S Naval Academy in 19XX.“George, I’ve done all I can for you,” his father told him as he dropped him off. “The rest you must do for yourself.” We talked a while back about how you have to let your kids fail, you have to let them struggle. As we’ve said before Luctor Et Emergo—from the struggle they emerge (we have a cool challenge coin as a reminder for parents).✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

The bike was nice. So was the trip to Disneyland. So was being able to graduate from college without student debt. They appreciated the presents. They appreciated the clothes that fit. Or maybe they didn’t. Maybe they took for granted what it cost for you to buy a house where they could have their own room. Maybe they didn’t understand what it took out of you to give them a better life than you had, to pay for all this stuff, to pay to go to all these places. Maybe they didn’t understand because that stuff wasn’t really what they wanted, even if they said they did. Because—and you know this already, you do—all they really wanted was you. They wanted you to be present, more than they wanted presents. They wanted your love, your attention, they wanted your acceptance. They wanted your support. They wanted you to be proud of them. They wanted you to apologize. They wanted you to understand them. ✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com 📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

On this weekend episode of the Daily Dad Podcast, Ryan talks with clinical psychologist Dr. Becky Kennedy on how we emotionally vaccinate, the ability to cope through stress, educating our kids on emotions and her new book Good InsideDr. Becky Kennedy is an American clinical psychologist who is founder and chief executive officer of the Good Inside company, an online parenting advice service.  She has been called the "millennial parent whisperer" by Time Magazine and is a number one New York Times bestseller for her book Good Inside. As a mom of three, when she was first starting out, she practiced a popular behavior-first, reward-and-punishment model of parent coaching. But, after a while, something struck her: those methods feel awful–for kids and parents.  She put together everything she knew about attachment, mindfulness, emotion regulation, and internal family systems theory, and translated those ideas into a new method for working with parents. www.GoodInside.comIG: (drbeckyatgoodinside)Podcast: Good Inside with Dr. Becky✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

The career opportunities are hard to turn down. It’s hard in the moment, as we’ve talked about, to be able to think too far into the future. It’s hard to make much in the way of long term investments as a parent because you’re so overwhelmed by the responsibilities of the present.But we have to remember what we’re after, we have to keep in perspective that this is a marathon we’ve signed up for. We quoted the baseball player Anthony Rendon recently about how he was having to weigh painful but career-elongating surgeries and the grind of continuing to play against the kind of shape he wants to be in as his kids get older and the kind of relationship he can have with them. “Right now, it looks like we are only playing for these next four years of baseball,” Rendon said, “but I’m trying to hang out with my kids for the rest of their lives.”✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

You didn’t like rules when you were a kid. Your parents had too many. Your school was a prison of pointless, arbitrary ones—how you could dress, when you could go to the bathroom, how you had to hold the pencil.So it makes sense that you’re averse to them now. It’s good that you question how many of them matter and don’t want to make the same mistakes as adults did in your own childhood.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

There are lots of ways to read, ways that have improved the experience and opened up the world of literature to people who otherwise would have missed out. Ebooks are awesome. Audiobooks are spectacular. They let you read anywhere. They let you read faster. They let you read while you’re multitasking. All from the convenience of a device in your pocket smaller than the smallest book. But that’s sort of the problem isn’t it? Your kids have no idea that that is what you’re using your phone for. To them, you could just as easily be on Twitter. You could be answering emails and working like you always do. You could be betting on sports. ✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com 📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

You know your kids are good. You’ve seen their sweetness, their cuteness since the beginning. You’ve seen them try. You’ve seen them feel shame when they’ve messed up.You also know how hard it is to be a person, let alone a kid, in this world. Life is frustrating. Life is tough. It’s full of temptations. It’s easy to make mistakes. It’s easy to get overwhelmed.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

“This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/dailydad and get on your way to being your best self.”How flexible you were then. How much energy you had. What you could eat without consequence. The innocence. The earnestness. The sweetness. You had it once and now, it’s gone, disappeared beneath the years and the experiences and everything else.When Taylor Swift sang ‘being this young is art,’ she wasn’t talking about your kids, about kids generally, but she may as well have been. And it’s high time we appreciate it. Because it’s something special, something irreplaceable, something that one can only do for a short time, at a very specific time.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

On this weekend episode of the Daily Dad,  Ryan talks with his wife Samantha on Their word for 2024 being systems, designing the system around people instead of people around the system, and creating plans before they happen instead of during the chaos. ✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

The late Paul Woodruff told a wonderful story in his episode on the Daily Stoic podcast. Before he died, he loved birdwatching and had a bird feeder in his backyard. But the squirrels kept stealing the birdseed he was putting out. This was frustrating and annoying and he found himself growing angry.But then he remembered a passage from Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations about how we should accept when things are doing what their nature demands. The squirrels were not trying to give Paul a hard time, they did not mean any harm. The squirrels were simply doing what they do. They were doing what their nature demanded.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

Bruce Springsteen has three children: Evan, Jessica, and Sam. One of them is an Olympic-level equestrian (which can not have been a cheap or easy interest to encourage, nor always a fun one to watch). His son, Sam, recently became a New Jersey firefighter (a scary thought for any parent). Clearly, Bruce and his wife Patti have figured out how to help their children become who they are, and to realize their potential.“I wanted them to see people that did a lot of other things,” Bruce once said in an interview, “be around people who would shape them and they would have a lot of options.” Perhaps his inclination to encourage them to pursue their dreams comes from his own experience. In his autobiography, Springsteen takes us back to when he was 7 years old and watched the controversial rockstar Elvis Presley’s appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show. When Elvis walked off the stage, “I sat there transfixed in front of the television set, my mind on fire. I had the same two arms, two legs, two eyes; I looked hideous but I’d figure that part out… so what was missing? THE GUITAR! The next day I convinced my mom to take me to Diehl’s Music on South Street in Freehold. There, with no money to spend, we rented a guitar.”✉️ Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail🏛 Check out the Daily Stoic Store for Stoic inspired products, signed books, and more.📱 Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, Facebook

It can be hard in the moment to think of anything else. You have lunches to make. Practices to get to. Birthday parties to plan. Work to do. Childhoods to survive.Having kids is so overwhelming that your ability to conceive of two weeks from now, let alone the future, is severely compromised. This isn’t entirely a bad thing—it’s good to be in the moment, to not get too far ahead of yourself.But at the same time, you do need to make sure that you consider more than just this moment.The baseball player Anthony Rendon has talked about how he’s needed to balance optimizing not just for his professional career but his goals as a parent. “Even if the season doesn’t work out or the next four years don’t work out,” he said recently, “I’m planning for taking care of my kids when they get older. Hip surgeries, wrist surgeries, ankle surgeries … I want to play with them when they are 10, 12, 15 years old.”✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

There are lots of different trappings of wealth. A big house. A nice car. Exotic vacations. First-class flights? Private flights? Not everyone can afford these things. In fact, that’s sort of the point—they are considered fancy and elite because of how elusive they are. But is this really wealth? Or is this just materialism? On Christmas (and it’s the Dec 25th entry in *The Daily Da*d book, too), we quoted Paul Orfalea, the billionaire founder of Kinkos, who defined ‘success’ as having kids who come home for the holidays. He was saying that there are lots of wealthy people out there who don’t have that, who are estranged from their family. But what’s interesting about this idea is that it is largely focused on where you and your kids end up later in life, when they have a choice about how much they see you. ✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com 📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

Your kids are going to face stuff in life. Big stuff for sure–failing tests, being made fun of, getting fired, losing something important to them. We may wish we could prevent that from happening, but we can’t. We teach them resilience instead. But our kids are also going to face little situations too. The TV is going to have to be turned off at some point, and they’re not going to like it. They’re going to have to get up early for school tomorrow. Their routines are going to change. They’re going to have to try new things. They’re going to be out of their comfort zone. This is going to bring up strong emotions: Frustration. Fear. Anger. Annoyance. Sadness. The answer to this is also resilience, but in a more specific way. Dr. Becky talks about this in her fantastic book Good Inside, referring to a strategy she calls “emotional vaccination.” ✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com 📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube   

On this weekend episode of the Daily Dad Podcast, Ryan talks with clinical psychologist Dr. Becky Kennedy on how we emotionally vaccinate, the ability to cope through stress, educating our kids on emotions and her new book Good InsideDr. Becky Kennedy is an American clinical psychologist who is founder and chief executive officer of the Good Inside company, an online parenting advice service.  She has been called the "millennial parent whisperer" by Time Magazine and is a number one New York Times bestseller for her book Good Inside. As a mom of three, when she was first starting out, she practiced a popular behavior-first, reward-and-punishment model of parent coaching. But, after a while, something struck her: those methods feel awful–for kids and parents.  She put together everything she knew about attachment, mindfulness, emotion regulation, and internal family systems theory, and translated those ideas into a new method for working with parents. www.GoodInside.comIG: (drbeckyatgoodinside)Podcast: Good Inside with Dr. Becky✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

Most schools and most parents teach reading all wrong. They bully kids into doing it. They pressure them. They tell them, “Reading is what smart and successful people do.” Then they’re surprised when kids who struggled with reading don’t think they’re smart, and they wonder why kids almost wear illiteracy as a badge of honor. They wonder why people say things like, “I haven’t read a book since I was forced to in high school.”No, the way to teach a kid to read is not to talk about how wonderful literature is and force them to read fancy or pretentious novels. You teach a kid to love books by—as the great lover of books Robert Greene has said—appealing to their self-interest. *Show them what they will get out of books.*Tangibly. Immediately. Show them that quote from Warren Buffet, where he says the single best investment he ever made was buying a copy of Benjamin Graham’s The Intelligent Investor.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

We spend so much time at the office, trying to get better at our jobs, trying to make a little more money, trying to climb further up the ladder. We spend hours in the gym over the course of a life, trying to get into better shape, trying to hit personal records. We spend mountains of time online, trying to help our fantasy football teams, trying to find discount codes to save money shopping, trying to stay abreast of our friends’ and families’ lives (or so we tell ourselves). ✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com 📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

It doesn’t feel like they listen. In fact, we have pretty visible evidence that they don’t. We tell them not to do this or that and then we watch them do that exact thing. We warn them, remind them, advise them…and then they come to us crying or complaining or in trouble, having heeded none of that guidance.So you can be forgiven for missing the fact that not only are they listening to what you say, but that your words have an enormous effect on them. So much so that you have to really, really be careful.Think about your own life. Are there not things that your parents said that still weigh on you? The way your father would call you lazy. The comments your mother made about food or your weight. The way they would tease you. The things they said about your grades. The tone they used when they were disappointed or angry.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

We’ve been quoting recently from the old children’s story The Velveteen Rabbit, about a toy that’s so loved by a young boy that it becomes real. This is a great metaphor for parenting in a way. Because that’s what’s happening to us. We made a decision to have kids many years ago and then for years that decision works on us, shaping, changing, transforming us. No part of that is more powerful than the love and energy of our children—whose joy, whose innocence, whose pain, whose growth is working on us always…even as it takes so much out of us.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

We talked recently about what Dr. Becky Kennedy always tells parents: it’s never too late. We’ve talked about Nell Painter’s mother, who became an author late in life (and Nell Painter herself, who went back and was Old in Art School) We’ve talked about Bruce Springsteen’s father finally telling Bruce what he needed to hear. We’ve talked about other parents who got their act together late. We should be inspired by these examples. We should be inspired to be this example for our kids. We should show them, it’s never too late. It’s never too late to lose weight, to change, to find a new career, to quit a longtime vice, to try something new, to invest in yourself, to repair or apologize or make amends. ✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com 📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

On this weekend episode of the Daily Dad,  Ryan talks with his wife Samantha on  finding common ground and learning to empathize after they had kids, the value of to do lists,  pros and cons from the pandemic & the importance of routine.If you want to spend time with more dedicated Stoics, if you want to join a culture full of people rising together, we invite you to join the 2024 Daily Stoic New Year New You Challenge. We did the first New Year New You Challenge in 2018, and year after year, we’ve realized more and more that one of the core benefits of the challenge is the community dynamic. Change and improvement comes fastest through culture, results through accountability, and wisdom through exposure to new people and new ideas.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

We’ve said this before, but one of the things we need to constantly remind ourselves of as parents is that our kids are just being kids. If we’re being honest, what’s closer to an accurate description of a kid: those behaviors listed above or being a perfectly quiet, perfectly obedient, perfectly well mannered and well behaved? You know that kids do these things, you know that it’s normal, you know that it’s largely harmless, you know that they have very little control over it, that it’s all part of a process of learning and growing and figuring things out.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

You weren’t the parent you wanted to be in 2023. You weren’t the person you wanted to be in 2023. Almost no one was. Anyone who thinks or says they were is lying…and for most of us, this truth goes back further than a calendar year.None of us are perfect. We all screwed up. We all back-slid. We all picked up bad habits. And as a parent, that means our kids picked up those bad habits too. Because, as we’ve said before, behavior is the language of children.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

We do so much for our kids. We drive them around. We provide for them. We entertain them. And of course, there are parents who do even more. Parents who packed up and moved across the world for a better life for their kids. Parents who gave their lives for their kids.How much do children understand these sacrifices? How much do they appreciate it? Not fully, that’s for sure. But that’s OK—because it’s not theirs to understand, it’s not theirs to appreciate. As we’ve said before, we owe our kids everything. We’re the ones that brought them into this world. They don’t owe us anything except to be themselves.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

Every parent wishes they could have done some things differently. Maybe you wish you were around more when they were a toddler. Maybe you wish you were more patient when they were a teenager. Maybe you wish you said I love you more.In her amazing book Good Inside: A Guide to Becoming the Parent You Want to Be, Dr. Becky Kennedy writes that that’s what she hears all the time:✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

Today we wanted to run our favorite entry from The Daily Dad: 366 Meditations on Parenting, Love, and Raising Great Kids, a helpful reminder on this day of celebration.When you were younger, for Christmas, all you wanted was presents.Now that you’re older, now that you have kids, all you want is presence. All you want is for your kids to be present over the holidays.Our New Year New You Challenge is all-new content, guided by thousands of responses and reactions to our previous challenges, courses, videos, and emails. It’s a whole new challenge based on painstaking research and timeless science, for an all-new, life changing experience.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

“This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/dailydad and get on your way to being your best self.”On this weekend episode of the Daily Dad,  Ryan talks with his wife Samantha on the emotional neglect that comes with using kids for social media,  the culture of Christmas being stressful,  not letting work or expectations become the main thing along with self awareness and communication.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

​Theodore Roosevelt lived an incredible life. He was an author. A naturalist. A rancher. A police chief. A cowboy. A hunter. A governor. A soldier. A president. An explorer. A philanthropist. And that’s probably not even close to an exhaustive list. His life was full of activity. It was full of adventure. It was marked by triumph and adversity to overcome.It’s worth telling your kids the story of Theodore Roosevelt to inspire them for the same reason that Theodore Roosevelt’s parents made sure he knew about the fascinating and inspiring lives of history. As one biographer observed, “the story of Theodore Roosevelt is the story of a small boy who read about great men and decided he wanted to be like them.”So we’ll leave you today by putting a challenge in front of you. For the last four years, we have been doing what we call the Daily Stoic New Year New You Challenge—a set of 21 actionable challenges, presented one per day, built around the best, most timeless wisdom in Stoic philosophy. These aren’t pie-in-the-sky, theoretical discussions but clear, immediate exercises and methods you can begin right now to spark the reinvention you’ve been trying for. We’ll tell you what to do, how to do it, and why it works.From these challenges, you will:✓ Learn to stop procrastinating and avoiding the change you truly desire✓ Build new habits that form a strong foundation for change✓ Abandon the harmful habits that are dragging you down✓ Strengthen your character, becoming a more virtuous version of yourselfAnd above all: You will find out just how much you are capable of.Every morning, the email arrives in your inbox, and it presents you with a choice. You can do the harder thing, you can do the challenge. Or you can follow the drift of least resistance—you can open the email and leave it at that. Or worse…you can ignore this call right now and not sign up at all. Which way will you go?The 2024 New Year New You Challenge officially begins on Monday, January 1st. Stop delaying. Head over to dailystoic.com/challenge and sign up NOW! Let’s go.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube   

Theodore Roosevelt lived an incredible life. He was an author. A naturalist. A rancher. A police chief. A cowboy. A hunter. A governor. A soldier. A president. An explorer. A philanthropist. And that’s probably not even close to an exhaustive list. His life was full of activity. It was full of adventure. It was marked by triumph and adversity to overcome.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

There is a beautiful passage in The Velveteen Rabbit where the young rabbit asks one of the seasoned old toys in the playroom whether ‘becoming real’—the process of being changed by the love of a child—is something that has to do with how a toy is made. Is it about having certain parts, he asked? Does it require a certain makeup?"Real isn't how you are made," says the toy horse. "It's a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real."So yes, it’s a choice, but an unusual type of choice. It’s the decision, as we’ve talked about, to accept this process. To open yourself up to it. To let it change you.We choose to have kids, and they choose to give us their love, to really love us. We play with them, we connect with them, we open ourselves to them and they to us. And then this process changes, transforms both of us in the most wonderful and magical of ways.For those ready to accept the process, to open yourself up to it, we created the 2024 New Year New You Challenge. It’s a set of 21 actionable challenges—presented one per day—built around the best, most timeless wisdom in Stoic philosophy. Our goal is to help you and your family make 2024 your best year yet.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

Beauty to the Stoics was far deeper than appearances. “If your choices are beautiful,” Epictetus said, “so too will you be.”It’s simple and it’s true. You are what your choices make you, nothing more and nothing less.Isn’t this what we try to teach our kids? That, yes of course, we love them unconditionally and unequivocally, and have since the moment they were born, but they have this incredible power to choose what kind of person they’re going to be. The reason we read to them, the reason we tell them things, the reason we have rules and punishments and incentives in our house is to try to instill in them a good compass for making good choices.We created the 2024 New Year, New You Challenge for that person and for that reason—to help you create a better life, and a new you in 2024. It’s 3 weeks of actionable challenges, presented in an email per day, built around the best, most timeless wisdom in Stoic philosophy. It’s 3 weeks of waking up each morning, opening the email, and making a beautiful choice. And it will require 3 weeks of discipline and sacrifice and following the process.But when you see the results? Well, it will take your breath away. So sign up NOW to join us in the 2024 Daily Stoic New Year New You Challenge!✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube   

Each of us is responsible for what we do as parents, but we’re also responsible for the dynamic that exists in our homes and in our relationships. Just because you’re the nice one, just because you do the repairing, just because you’re not as hard on your kids—that doesn’t mean that you’re not complicit in the stress or strain that’s being inflicted. It’s our job to create a safe and loving and supportive home. We can’t make excuses—Oh, he’s just under stress at work. Oh, that’s what she learned growing up. And this pertains to more than just punishment. It’s our job to get on the same pages as our spouse, our co-parent, their step-parent, our ex, whatever, and figure out how to do this right. If we’re struggling, if we sense something’s wrong? Well, we can’t deny it. We can’t make excuses for it. We can’t just leave our children to fend for themselves with it. Because what they’ll end up doing is blaming themselves…and eventually, inevitably, you too. For those tired of making excuses, we announced last week the 2024 New Year New You challenge. This set of 21 actionable challenges—presented one per day, built around the most timeless wisdom in Stoic philosophy—is really a set of 21 choices. Every morning, the email arrives in your inbox, and you have to choose. Will you take the easy way or the hard way? Will you read the email and leave it at that or will you take on the challenge? Will you get better this year? That’s the question. That’s the choice. That’s the responsibility you can accept. 

There’s no question Hemingway was a great writer. He was the voice of a generation—The Lost Generation. He redefined prose style in the English language. His books have sold millions of copies. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.He wrote beautifully on love and family (A Farewell to Arms). He wrote beautifully on struggle and perseverance (The Old Man and the Sea). He was also a pretty awful husband and father. As one of his sons said, to Hemingway “family life [was] the enemy of accomplishment.” It was a thing that interfered with his greatness, his craft, his books. “On several occasions,” Patrick Hemingway recounted that Hemingway “said being a a good husband, being a good father…all of [these things were] not recognized by a reviewer when he reviewed his book.”✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube 

On this weekend episode of the Daily Dad,  Ryan talks to American stand-up comedian, actress, writer, director, producer, and podcaster Whitney Cummings on self-awareness, the ability to update the script, and the impressions we leave on our children.IG, X, and Tiktok: @WhitneyCummingsTo follow her on OnlyFans @Whitney✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com 📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

It can be hard to express your feelings as a father sometimes. Not so much because men are expected to bottle up their emotions, but because the emotions that come with being a dad can be so overwhelming and complex. It’s a rush of a million feelings: love, joy, fear, absurdity, exhaustion, responsibility, motivation, and primal attachment.No one prepared you for any of this…and it’s unlike anything you’ve ever dealt with before. How do you express it? How do you let your family know what they mean to you? How they have you wrapped around their finger, how they are your everything?Maybe the line from The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse will suffice. “Sometimes I want to say I love you all,” says the mole, “but I find it difficult.” “Do you?” says the boy. “Yes, so I say something like I’m glad we are all here.”✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

A parent is only as happy as their unhappiest child, goes the expression. And even if that wasn’t true, even if it didn’t directly impact our own happiness, would any of us want our children to be unhappy? Of course not. We love them so much. The last thing we want is for them to feel pain.We want their lives to be wonderful. We want them to have fun. We want them to have a great life. We want them to be happy!There’s nothing wrong with this…except that oftentimes trying to make someone happy is a recipe for failure. “Happiness is not my ultimate goal for my own kids,” Dr. Becky Kennedy writes in her amazing book Good Inside (which we continue to rave about). “Unhappiness certainly isn’t my goal for them, but here’s a deep irony in parenting: the more we emphasize our children’s happiness and ‘feeling better,’ the more we set them up for an adulthood of anxiety.”

He was a young man fresh out of the Naval Academy and a stint in the submarine service. He was being interviewed by Admiral Hyman Rickover for a coveted spot in the nuclear program. Then he got the question that changed his life.“How did you stand in your class at the academy?” Rickover asked. “Sir, I stood 59th in a class of 820,” future president Jimmy Carter answered. “But did you do your best?” Rickover asked. And when Carter could not honestly answer that he has always done his best, Rickover simply said, “Why not?” and then ended the interview.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

We wanted it so badly and we never got it. We still haven’t got it. Dad was withholding, dad was hard to please—we wanted to make him proud, but we just couldn’t. That’s partly why we’re working so hard today.There’s some part of us that thinks if we can just accomplish enough, make enough money, win enough awards, surpass him then maybe, finally, we’ll get that begrudging pat on the back. We’ll get him to acknowledge us. He’ll let us know he respects us, loves us, and appreciates us. But somehow it never seems to be enough.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

There are things you would have never done before. You’d never have sung a crazy song in public. You’d never have painted your nails. You would have vomited before you sucked snot out of someone’s nose (as Hasan Minhaj did). You’d have rather starved than put on a McUniform and work extra hours at some job you hate.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

“This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/dailydad and get on your way to being your best self.”On this weekend episode of the Daily Dad Podcast, Ryan reminds us to raise a resilient child by resisting the urge to intervene,  helping them manage their emotions, showing them that everything thing can be figured out, and lastly leading by example. ✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

We’ve talked about this before: Being a father is a second chance. It’s a fresh start. It’s an obligation to work on yourself so your kids pick up where you’ve left off, benefiting from the struggle and progress you have made. You can’t pass them the baton of your weaknesses and flaws.You cannot let them be worse than you.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

No one is the parent they want to be. That’s the bad news. The good news is that most of us are better parents than we were.​We’ve talked a lot about the big choice we all have to make. Are we just somebody who has kids? Or are we a parent? And while this is a choice, it’s also more of an aspiration. You don’t magically, suddenly become the perfect parent. How could you? There’s so much you don’t know, so many lessons you haven’t learned, so many gifts you haven’t been given yet. So much stuff hasn’t happened yet.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

Most times, we’re in need of all the help we can get. We read parenting books, or watch parenting videos, trying to find those keys to make our lives just a little bit easier. That’s why we created the Daily Dad email, after all. Seneca said that we ought to acquire one thing per day – whether that’s a quote, a story, a relationship that makes us better, it doesn’t matter. We try to deliver that one thing in each email. But of course, we couldn’t do it alone. When trying to deliver that one thing to you each day, we often need one thing ourselves to inspire us, to help us become the best people and parents that we can be. Some of these things are books. Some are items to carry with you, or to keep on your desk. Some make for great holiday gifts. Some you might want to share with new or expecting parents. In any form, check them out…and pass them along if they work.  The Daily Dad: 366 Meditations on Love, Parenting, and Raising Great Kids by Ryan Holiday In each of his letters to his friend Lucilius , Seneca would include a quote, something to chew on, a thought to guide the day. “Each day,” he told Lucilius, you should “acquire something that will fortify you against poverty, against death, indeed against other misfortunes, as well.” Just one thing. Good Inside: A Guide to Becoming the Parent You Want to Be by Dr. Becky Kennedy When we talk about parenting books that completely change your perspective about raising your kids, we’re probably talking about this one. We’ve talked about it plenty of times before (like here, here, and here), and will inevitably keep returning to it, not only because it’s a book about becoming a better parent, but it’s also about simply becoming a better person. It’s about building empathy. How to Raise Kids Who Aren’t Assholes by Melinda Wenner Moyer At some point, we’ve all been scared that our kids will be bad people, that they won’t be the respectful and hard-working person we thought we raised them to be. ✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube   

We’ve been talking about Dr. Becky’s wonderful book Good Inside recently (a must read!), and she has a great little section where she’s talking about a parent who ends up having to pick up and physically remove their child from a situation where they are hitting their younger sibling. There’s guilt and frustration and fear and so much that comes up in these situations.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube   

It’s dark stuff. It’s not pleasant. We wish it wasn’t true.But that doesn’t mean we can hide it from our children. Because it did happen. And it can easily happen again if we’re not careful.John G. Burnett knew this. That’s why on his birthday in 1890, he finally told his children what happened when he was in the army in 1838. He told them what he saw at what’s become known as the Trail of Tears.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

On this weekend episode of the Daily Dad,  Ryan talks with his wife Samantha on understanding the alternatives later and making the decision, while teaching our children the correct instincts while their away from home.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

It does work. We have to concede that. For generations, some parents have tried withholding praise, withholding pride, withholding approval so that their kids don’t feel entitled to it. The idea is that this will make them hungry, make them really work for it. No participation trophies here! You’ve got to earn it in my house!✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

Harry Truman was not a good businessman. The clothing shop he opened with a friend was a disaster—and he was paying off the debts through his senate career and into his presidency. Most of his investments were flops. He had to sell off chunks of his mother’s farm when they couldn’t pay the mortgage. After he left office, the only safety net he had was his army pension.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

We know what we want our kids to say about us when they grow up. We want them to say that we were great parents, that we did our best. We want them to say that they knew they were loved. We want them to say that they love spending time with us–especially now that they’re older and they have a choice.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

We want happy kids, obviously. But as we talked about recently, you can’t make your kids happy. Certainly, you can’t always keep them happy.So what do you do?There’s a great exchange between Epictetus (we recommend his Discourses) and one of his students. The student is asking Epictetus to show him what to do so he can be wise and successful. This is the wrong request, Epictetus says. It would be better to ask how to be adaptable to circumstances.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

Being a parent doesn’t mean you give up on your dreams. We’ve talked about this many times. What kind of message would it send to your kids to see their parents quit on themselves? What kind of house is it to grow up in where Mom or Dad aren’t growing, changing, aren’t taking risks, aren’t fulfilled?And yet, we also understand that it’s not about us anymore. Before, sure, we could take every risk and pursue every opportunity. But things are different now. There are people counting on us, people affected by our decisions.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube   

On this weekend episode of the Daily Dad,  Ryan talks with his wife Samantha on breaking constraints,  finding the solution to the problem, and the impacts on their household reflecting through parenting.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

It’s a world with too many problems. It’s a world with too much suffering. It’s a world with too much selfishness. We can’t fix all of this as people nor as parents. But we can try to help a little.We’ve talked before about Ron Lieber’s clever description for the goal of most parents. We’re trying, he says, to raise kids who are “the opposite of spoiled.” (he has a book of the same name). That is to say, kids who are not just self-sufficient, but have energy and resources left over to help others.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

Things could be so much better. This could be a world that takes care of parents and families. It could be a world with a better safety net. It could be a world where we don’t shrug after a school shooting, or as democracy is dismantled by fanatics and nut-jobs.We could use more support. Inflation could come down. Your spouse could get their act together. Things could be better, they should be better.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

Kids have always been like this. They’ve always been crazy. Always had trouble sleeping at night. Always liked to play and explore. They’ve been overwhelmed by hormones. They’ve been driving their parents crazy a long time.​We talked a while back about Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s Children’s Games painting which depicts a loud and raucous scene of kids playing outside. It’s 463 years old and yet, with a few exceptions, it resembles almost exactly what the kids in your neighborhood were doing last weekend.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube   

It’s easy to forget it when you see them hitting a sibling. Or when you catch them in a lie. When you hear them say something mean. When the call comes in from school, or worse, the police station.It’s easy to forget that our kids are good. That they have good morals. A good heart. That they are still that same innocent and pure little thing we brought home from the hospital. It’s easy to forget because we’re so worried, so worried that our sweet innocent and pure thing will end up like most of the people we meet in life–which is to say not so innocent and pure.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube  

We used to need so much to be happy, as we talked about recently. We needed things to go well. We needed excitement and success. We needed people to like us. We needed people’s approval.But now? Now, not so much.Conan O’Brien, who like any performer has some part of him that craves attention and validation, has explained how his insecurity has lessened as he got older and had a family. “Oh as long as they’re alright,” he has said of his kids, then basically everything is right.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

On this weekend episode of the Daily Dad,  Ryan talks with his wife Samantha on staying consistent to the system,  the results to bad decision making, and comparing ourselves against ourselves.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

Sometimes it can feel like being a dad is just an endless series of errands. It’s the call from the bedroom that they need a glass of water. It’s the call from college for you to come to take them shopping for something they need for their apartment. It’s the running around town getting soccer cleats, or picking up concert tickets, or bringing them the homework they forgot. ✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com 📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube   

We talked recently about some of the folks who comment on the Daily Dad Instagram (do follow us!) or reply to these emails. Sure, some of the responses are nice, but so many of them are self-righteous and hectoring, judgmental and superior. There is something profoundly sad about these commenters too. Because, whether they know it or not, they are the punchline in that famous old cartoon, “Sorry, honey, I can’t come to bed right now, someone is wrong on the internet!” ✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com 📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

Gandhi was a saintly man, but he was not a particularly great father. He was too demanding of his children, too controlling, too quick to push them away when they were not exactly what he wanted them to be (which was impossible).It is sad that the man who was so kind and patient and forgiving, such a father figure to so many, could not be those things for the people who loved him the most, who most deserved that from him. But this is why we study the lives of the greats and not-so-greats–they provide us lessons, both inspiring and cautionary.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube  

The author Rinker Buck (he has an amazing book called Life on the Mississippi where he travels the entire river in a homemade flat boat) remembers vividly what would happen when his father came home. We talked recently about what kind of feeling the sound of a parent at the door springs up for you. Well for him, it was partly fear–because he knew he was going to get punished, usually for unfair, contradictory reasons.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

The thing about parenting is that it’s always thrusting us into situations we have to deal with, we have to solve, we have to correct, we have to stop. Our kids aren’t listening. Our kids did something dangerous. Our kids failed a class. Our kids are drifting in a direction that worries us.Of course, there are some parents who are oblivious to all this, just generally hands-off. But the rest of us, who are just doing the best we can, struggle with these situations. We don’t want to yell, but that’s what we end up doing. We want to teach and instruct, but it somehow devolves into a power struggle. We fail to reach them, fail to teach them.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube   

On this weekend episode of the Daily Dad,  Ryan speaks with organizational psychologist and book author Adam Grant on seeing things in the context of where they actually sit, learning to be pleased but not satisfied, current sports culture, perfect parenting and his new book Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

What gives you the right? What’s your purpose on this planet? Why do you work so hard, why do you fight for the causes you fight for, why do you put up with all the crap you have to put up with in this life?✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube   

You think it’d be pretty non-controversial. Over on the Daily Dad Instagram (you should follow us!) we’ll post something about having fewer opinions and judgements when it comes to your kids. We’ll talk about loving them unconditionally–even when you don’t understand, even when you disagree. We’ll put up a video about letting your kids be who they are, not trying to make them into something you think they should be.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

You give your kids a lot. You pay for everything. You sacrifice so much–parts of your career, your health, your hobbies. You drive them around, you build your schedule around them. And you give them your most precious resource–time, so much time. No one is questioning that. It’s indisputable.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube   

“I do it all for them,” we say. We tell ourselves that’s why we’re getting on the plane, that’s why we’re spending another long night at the office, why we’re taking that big risk, why we’re starting that next venture.It’s for them, we’re doing it all for our family…those people we rarely see.It’s a good motivation to be sure, and it’s also a very flattering one. It’s ironically, a rather self-serving one too. Because by dressing our actions up in selflessness, we don’t actually end up thinking much about anyone but ourselves.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

It sort of sneaks up on you, doesn’t it? For years, you literally fell asleep next to this person. They fell asleep on you. You were the last thing they saw, the last person they talked to, the one they begged for one more story, one more kiss, to do the blankets right one more time. And then suddenly, they’re like “Goodnight, Dad.” “Goodnight mom, close the door on the way out, will you?”✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

On this weekend episode of the Daily Dad,  Ryan talks with his wife Samantha on the difference between expressing pride and relief, and practicing motivated intrinsically  vs extrinsically with our kids.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

Stoicism 101: Philosophy for Your Actual Life It’s an awesome, accessible, and practical two-week deep dive into philosophy that every parent (and even older kids) can benefit from. We’re teaching the Stoic secrets to success, resilience, and productivity, as well as how a Stoic masters their emotions (something useful for both parents AND kids!).The course includes 2 live Q&As with Ryan Holiday where you can ask all your Stoicism related questions. And you will have access to a private discussion board to ask questions, share thoughts, and interact with other people taking Stoicism 101.Why don’t you join us?This LIVE course begins in just two days on MONDAY, NOVEMBER 6TH. Sign up at dailystoic.com/101.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

On their deathbeds, fathers think about a lot of things. They think about the world they’re leaving to their sons and daughters. They think about how they parented. They think about the mistakes they made. They think about what they did right. They are warmed by the thoughts of their children, and, if they are lucky, they find themselves surrounded by them, the hospital bed serving as the final crowded table we have talked about here.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube   

We all have some version of this memory: We didn’t feel well. We fell awkwardly on our wrist. We hit our head. We told our parents, but they didn’t believe us…they told us we’d be fine. They told us we’d feel better soon. Then a few days later it turned out that we had scarlet fever or shingles. Our wrist was broken. We’d sustained a concussion.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube   

Aristotle wrote his famous Nicomachean Ethics for his son, Nicomachus. Seneca was given a philosophy teacher by his father. Cato too, was given the philosophical education his parents felt the promising boy deserved. Marcus Aurelius tried to give Commodus a group of philosophical advisors, and we can imagine that one of his great disappointments in life was that his philosophy and his example didn’t seem to rub off on his son.Stoicism 101✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

Being a parent is terrifying. Joan Didion’s famous line, as we talked about recently, is that once you have kids you are never not afraid. We are hostages to fortunes now, always worried that something could or will happen to our kids.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

You are not perfect. Nobody would argue that–least of all your kids. But are you better? Better than you were when they were younger? Better than you were a couple years ago? Better than yesterday?✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube   

On this weekend episode of the Daily Dad,  Ryan talks with his wife Samantha on the unexpected things in life we can’t prepare for, the anticipation of things often being worse and solving the problem first.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

Your kids are going to make bad decisions. They are going to do things you disagree with. They may well grow up into someone you don’t understand.That means calming down. It means trying to see their perspective. It means giving them space. It means asking questions and withholding opinion. It means offering help. It means providing resources. It means acceptance. It means unconditional love.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube  

It’s a noisy world out there… and most of us add to the din. We chatter on social media. We chatter on the phone. We chatter over email.Even as parents, we tend to do a lot of talking. There are all the things we tell our kids. The things we remind them about. The lessons we try to teach them. The books we read to them.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube  

Maybe someday, you’ll get there. It’ll probably be too late–your teenager will be grown up, the phase will be over, things will have calmed down. You know these things you seem to have strong opinions about…the tone of your kid’s voice. Whether the music they listen to is any good. How they want to style their hair. What they want to major in. Who they marry.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

It happens so often that you hardly even notice it anymore. Your kids said they weren’t hungry and now of course they are. You told them to go to the bathroom before you left (they ignored you), and now they want you to pull the car over so they can pee. You knew they’d like this movie, you knew they’d have fun, you knew that other kid was trouble.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

Here’s a test of your own childhood: Imagine you’re sitting on the couch watching TV. You’re in the kitchen making a snack. You and a friend are hanging out upstairs. And then you hear the garage door going up. Or you hear keys in the front door. The car pulling into the driveway.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

On this weekend episode of the Daily Dad,  Ryan talks with his wife Samantha on starting with the idea that your kids are good inside,  what truly is our role in helping our children instead of whats wrong, and more parenting tips from Dr. Becky Kennedy and her book Good Inside: A Guide to Becoming the Parent You Want to Be✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

Family is wonderful. None of us would be here, the writer Aaron Thier once put it, if people hadn’t taken care of us when we were small. Somebody birthed us, raised us, drove us to school, kept us safe.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

We had this idea of what we wanted, needed our lives to be. How much money we wanted to make and through what career path. We wanted a new house. We wanted to go on trips. We wanted to live somewhere exciting and interesting. We wanted to do cool stuff, we demanded a lot out of life.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube  

Yeah, some people won’t get it. Yeah, some people think it’s weak.But you? You know it isn’t.Which is why you make no secret about your other life–about your kids, about what being a good parent demands of you, how it competes for your time (and interest) at work.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

There was that moment after they were born that you found yourself looking forward to when they could crawl. It will be so fun, you thought…right up until they started crawling away and getting themselves into dangerous situations.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

We all want better for our kids. We want them to have a better life than we had. We want them to have better parents than we had. That’s why we’re trying so hard. That’s why we wrestle with our demons–going to therapy, reading books, putting in the work.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

On this weekend episode of the Daily Dad,  Ryan talks to Steven Rinella about the sense of wonder, respect & adventure for nature, spending time with family, and his new book  catch a crayfish, count the stars: fun projects, skills, and adventures for outdoor kids .✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com 📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

There is so much we want to teach our kids—so much that fathers are expected to teach their kids. How to ride a bike. How to swim. How to throw a punch. How to tie a tie. How to read. How to get up the guts to talk to someone.All of this is important, of course. All of this must be done.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube  

The last book you read was Goodnight Moon. The last series you binged was Harry Potter. You know more about the latest scandal at your daughter’s high school than the 2024 primary candidates. You’ve spent so much time in the sun at soccer games and baseball practice that you might be fried inside.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

The two boys who look just like you. The daughter who lights up when you pick her up from school. The teenager who wears your old band t-shirts. The mischievous prankster who makes you roll your head back in laughter. The nerd who plays video games with you. The foodie who loves to cook with you. The kid going off to college. The one sitting behind the store counter of their first job.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

“She’s not good at hearing people,” the musician Mikel Jollett writes of his mother in his haunting memoir Hollywood Park. “If we tell her we’re hungry, she’ll say, ‘No you’re not. You ate earlier.’ If one of us says ‘I’m sad,’ she tells us that it’s not true, that we’re happy now because we’re with her.”✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

When they’re grouchy, when they’re glass-eyed, when they’re stuck, when they’re making choices that don’t quite make sense…there could be many reasons why your kids are acting this way. They could be tired, as we’ve said before. They’re almost certainly hungry–as we said, that’s at the root of most problems. They could be depressed, they could be going through something and just not understand what it is.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

“This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/dailydad and get on your way to being your best self.”On this weekend episode of the Daily Dad,  Ryan talks with comedian Christina Pazsitzky on balancing work and life, and raising kids while being a good parent.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

You knew it that day in the hospital. You felt it the first time they threw their arms around you. You are reminded of it every time they do something decent and kind and good.You were given something very special. You have been entrusted with something very special. A bundle of genes and circumstances that will never exist ever again in history, that’s never ever existed before–something, someone totally unique and wonderful. Someone with gifts, someone with something to offer, someone who needs to be protected, taught and helped to become everything they’re meant to be.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

When your teenager sits you down to come clean to you about something…When you’re on vacation and wondering whether you should try to squeeze one more thing in…When your adult kid decides to get divorced…When you’re frustrated and resentful about something with your spouse and decide to have a talk, there is something you should keep in mind.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube   

“This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/dailydad and get on your way to being your best self.”It’s fitting that one of the most important things you can do as a parent requires you to think about something that’s very nearly impossible for a parent to consider. It comes to us from Marcus Aurelius by way of Epictetus.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

If you want to spend more time with your kids, as we said recently, the important thing is that you don’t drive them away. Yet that’s what so many of us do, isn’t it?Because we worry, because we care, because we can’t quite strike the right balance, our efforts end up backfiring. Think of John O’Connor’s mom whose smothering tendencies drove her son to move from California to Arizona just to get some distance. There’s no way she wanted that to happen, but she made it happen all the same. Think of Tim Hardaway Sr., whose drive to make his son a great basketball player, nearly made Tim Hardaway Jr. quit the sport altogether. As so many of us do to our kids in our own ways.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

Imagine you’ve come to the end. You’re leaving this world, leaving your kids behind. Or worse, more unthinkably, your kids are leaving you. They’re off to college. They’re moving across the country. Time or distance or conflict separates you. They’ve been in an accident. You’ve both lived to ripe old ages, but they go first.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

On this weekend episode of the Daily Dad,  Ryan talks with his wife Samantha on stepping outside of our own upbringing and challenging the conversation more as parents when it comes to the freedom of our children.  ✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

This change we’ve made, this decision to become dads—it has uprooted everything. It’s like we were hit, suddenly, with a crossfire hurricane. The house is a mess. The schedule is grueling. There is never enough sleep, never enough time in the day.Even the cool, quiet dark is pierced by the shriek of a man who has stepped on a pile of Legos… and the shriek is coming from your mouth. Yet to be good at our jobs, to be good at this fatherhood thing, we need stillness. We need time to reflect. We need focus. We need calm to restore and reboot us.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube   

You weren’t wrong. You did have some experience on the matter. You only wanted what was best for them.You wanted them to stay in school. You didn’t want them messing around with something that could cause them trouble. You wanted them to be safe. You wanted to make sure they stayed the good and innocent and promising kid you used to carry around.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube   

They see you disheveled and groggy. They see you busy and preoccupied. They see you argue with your spouse. They see you burned out after a long week. They see regular old, normal you.But what about some of those peak career moments? When you sold your company. When you were invited to that special reception at the fancy place downtown. The first day of shooting for your new screenplay. When you were interviewed for that big morning show. When that raise finally came through.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube   

The amount of choices we have today is not normal. Certainly, it’s quite new. When you were a kid–which was not that long ago–there were how many channels on TV? Even cable, which radically expanded that number, was still finite and nothing compared to streaming. There was no infinite scroll…YouTube only rolled out autoplay at the end of videos in the last decade. And this is only discussing what we watch–there is essentially an unlimited choice in what we listen to, who we date, where we travel, what we eat.In a recent episode of the Daily Stoic podcast, the filmmaker Casey Neistat was talking about how in his family, they’ve taken to watching movies on a big television in their family room or bedroom because the iPads were overwhelming and causing problems.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

When they’re young, when they’re asleep, when they’re older, when you’re old, when you’re on vacation, after a big Thanksgiving meal, early in the morning before school, in the afternoons when you’re visiting their new family, there’s one thing you should do with your kids:We’ve talked about John Adams (the great McCullough bio is at The Painted Porch) and his fascinating relationship with his brilliant son John Quincy.Ryan Holiday dedicated a chapter to the value of walking in his best-selling book Stillness is the Key. You can grab signed and personalized copies here. ✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

On this weekend episode of the Daily Dad,  Ryan talks with his wife Samantha on being the model for our kids and the ultimate skill on the ability to handle frustration.  ✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

By now, you’ve almost certainly lost count of how many questions you’ve been asked by your kids. From the moment they can talk, that’s what fatherhood is—answering questions. Some you can’t wait for them to ask, some you hope they’ll never ask (or ask their mom), some so absurdly, brilliantly child-like you never could have guessed they were coming in a million years.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

In 1940, as Nazi bombs rained down on London, an observer noted the contrasts between the “natural splendor and human vileness.” This idea (which inspired Erik Larson’s wonderful book The Splendid and the Vile) would be born out over the next several months–not just the bombs falling in one of the world’s great cities, but also the human resilience and heroism in response to such villainy and evil.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

In the moment, it seemed like a big deal. In the moment, you just needed them to understand your concerns. In the moment, the phone was ringing. In the moment, you were overwhelmed. In the moment, you were worried something might happen. In the moment, you had other plans.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

Wouldn’t it be nice if everything was simple and straightforward? That’s what we’d like the job of a parent to be. We’d like there to be a blueprint that laid out exactly what we have to do and when we have to do it in order to guarantee that all our parental i’s are dotted and t’s are crossed.Of course, life isn’t remotely like that.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

There are parents who pay for music lessons so their kids can play an instrument. There are parents who tutor their kids in a foreign language. There are parents who teach their kids how to do all sorts of things–to start a campfire, to change a flat tire, to sew a button.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

On this episode of the Daily Dad Podcast, Ryan talks to Paul Kix about enjoying the time we do have with our kids, while being self-conscious of what we call work during family settings. ✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

F. Scott Fitzgerald knew the long term damage of being spoiled rotten. Not only was he a prime and painful example himself—as we’ve written about—but as he observed and studied the rich men and women of the Jazz Age, he saw how indulgent people quickly became the “careless” monsters that he portrayed in The Great Gatsby.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

Your kids ask for a lot. Money. Patience. They ask for toys and games and attention. They demand chicken nuggets after you hand them the hamburger they told you they wanted. They ask for forgiveness, and they ask for trust.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

Study any great leader, artist, athlete, or parent, and you’ll find that they had a hero, a mentor, or a model. Some were lucky enough to study directly under that person. But for most, this studying happened remotely—by reading books, watching documentaries, listening to interviews, and so on.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

They’re scared there’s something under their bed or in their closet. They tell you they don’t want to go to school today. They tell you they feel depressed. They tell you that they think somebody hates them. They tell you that they hate playing this sport or practicing that instrument.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube  

They were traveling with their three-year-old son. They boarded their flight in Boston. They were heading back to Los Angeles after visiting family in Cape Cod. They could not have anticipated that just 49 minutes into the trip, their plane would be hijacked and driven into the south tower of the World Trade Center in Lower Manhattan.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube 

On this weekend episode of the Daily Dad,  Ryan talks with his wife Samantha on experiencing parenting versus taking the advice and understanding the phases of parenthood.  ✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

As we’ve said before, each of us as parents have to try to give what we didn’t get as kids. The attention. The support. The understanding. Whatever it is, we have to try our best to be better for our kids.That can be encouraging them to become who they are–even if you don’t agree or understand. Or making sure to give them space to fail, while showing them support and encouragement to try again. Or maybe it’s choosing to be an ancestor, not a ghost.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

Before, you were a glutton for punishment. You were tolerant. You were accepting. If the boss wanted it, if the customer needed it, if it could help you in your career, you were up for it.Long hours. Long flights. Calls at 2 a.m. Quick trips into the office on the weekends.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

“This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/dailydad and get on your way to being your best self.”It’s scary. It’s especially scary for women, whose careers are almost invariably set back by having kids in their prime working years. But it’s scary for men too. Because when we say “work/life balance” what we’re really talking about is tradeoffs.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

Even a hundred years ago, it was an argument at plenty of dinner tables. They didn’t have TVs then, let alone iPads, but families were still fighting about what was happening at meal time, what was allowed to happen at the table. Parents were still comparing themselves against what they thought the neighbors were doing, what kind of behavior they were letting their kids get away with.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

The pressure to do is one that rests heavy on all parents. We plan that big family vacation to Disneyland. We put everyone in the car and drive like a madman through traffic to make it to that special dinner on time. We put everyone in their least comfortable clothes and pose them for that awkward photo.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

On this weekend episode of the Daily Dad,  Ryan talks with his wife Samantha on men having the conversation and creating the proper space for fatherhood.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

You send them to great schools. You make sure they do their homework. You drill them on their flashcards. You are saving for college. You are not going to let them set their sights low like you did, or maybe you won’t accept them getting into anywhere less prestigious than you did.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

There are a lot of things that don’t age well. Tattoos done late at night, on impulse. Trendy haircuts. Lots of things we think are important, that we chase hard will turn out not to matter much to us later. Things we fought about, argued about will seem silly in retrospect. Fears, you find, don’t age well either–the things we worry about will become smaller the further we get from them.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube   

The house is noisy. It is messy. It is expensive, and not easy to maintain. It’s filled with toys, and sharp Legos that you step on in the middle of the night. It’s dirty. It’s got one obligation after another.And yet it’s wonderful…so, so wonderful. The whole job of it. The whole mess of it. “We must think of ourselves as ministers and priests in our own house as in a temple,” the Stoic philosopher Hierocles once said, “chosen and consecrated to nature itself.”✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

Your career used to be the only thing you had. It was just you. You had your ambitions. You had as many hours as there were in the day. And you were willing to work–incredibly hard, do anything–to get ahead.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

If you had an early flight, you’d get up no problem. If you had a chance to go see old friends or your favorite band, you’d stay up late without even thinking about it.But your kids wake you up early or cut into sleep? Ugh! You’re full of complaints.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

“This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/dailydad and get on your way to being your best self.”Visit mylifeforce.com and receive $200 off your membership today.On this episode of the Daily Dad Podcast, Ryan talks to Casey Neistat about the discipline you have after having kids and building better parenting routines through stoicism. ✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

Each of us, no matter how old or successful, has things we wish we knew how to do. We wish we could speak another language, or change the oil in our own car, or play the guitar. It’s not that we aren’t up for learning these things now—more so even than when we were young—but it’s hard to teach an old dog new tricks, as they say, even when the dog wants to learn.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

“This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/dailydad and get on your way to being your best self.”Yes, it’s not good to be late. Yes, you’ve got places to go. You’ve got emails to respond to. You were hoping to get a workout in today. You were hoping to have a few minutes to relax on the couch.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

After having kids, every parent quickly realizes just how much less freedom they have. Your schedule is different. Your sleep is different. What you can watch on TV is different. Where you can live is different. Kids are, as we’ve said, a dose of unavoidable reality–a reality where you are indisputably, almost laughably not in charge.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

You hear people talk about “mom guilt”–the feeling that moms get for not being perfect, not measuring up to their own impossible standards, or the impossible standards they think other moms have. Of course, there’s dad guilt too–all good parents feel like they’re falling short, like they’re not doing enough, like they’re not good enough.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

Visit mylifeforce.com and receive $200 off your membership today.We talked recently about the Spartan who pointed out that it wasn’t right to say that “the better man won” at the Olympic Games. The better wrestler had won, he said. And it’s an important point: there are lots of winners out there who are actually losers. A lot of achievements that turn out to be costly victories because of the means used to achieve them.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

On this weekend episode of the Daily Dad,  Ryan talks with his wife Samantha on the skill set  that comes with exploring curiosity, and teaching our kids how to build courage.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

Sometimes it’s good to acknowledge our biases. And one of the biggest biases in our lives is our kids. Not just a bias in the sense that we prefer them, but a bias like one of those ones that cognitive behavioral scientists point out that prove we’re totally and utterly irrational.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube   

We all sit up at night and wonder if we’re doing a good job, if we’re failing our kids, if we’re raising them right. We kick ourselves for what we feed them, whether we’re meeting all their needs, whether we’re learning…whether they’re learning.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

It doesn’t matter how many decades old you were. It doesn’t matter what you’d experienced, what you knew, how smart or powerful you were. A turning point was reached when you had kids.The Parent-To-Be: A Daily Dad Parenting Challenge✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube   

You have a very important job. You have so much going on. That’s the terrible part about having kids, for both men and women–for most of us, it comes right in the prime of our careers, in the prime of our lives. Can we afford to slow down? To stop? Do we want to?✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

It was Seneca who said that a wise philosopher doesn’t just study in their particular school of thought, but surveys widely, taking and absorbing ideas from any and all thinkers. He would say he read like a spy in the enemy’s camp, and that he’d quote even a bad author if the line was good.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

On this episode of the Daily Dad Ryan talks on the importance of illustrating different  versions of ourselves while away or on vacation, and how you carry those moments back to your actual life. ✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube   

Visit mylifeforce.com and receive $200 off your membership today.You have to give them space. Not just space right after school or soccer practice, as we’ve talked about, but making sure you don’t bombard them with questions or instructions. But your kids need literal space too. A room of their own, literally and figuratively.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube   

Imagine that you’re gone and able to look down now and see your kids from above. Or imagine that somehow you had magical powers and could see inside their heads and read their thoughts. What is it that you would never want them to witness? What is it that you would never want them to feel?✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube   

“This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/dailydad and get on your way to being your best self.”The thing about having kids is that it’s so fleeting. They grow up so fast, as we’ve said before. They are in a constant process of leaving you, leaving who they were. And scarier still, as the last few years have shown, is that life is unpredictable and even tragic.No one is here forever. Things can change in a tragic instant.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

​Marriage is hard. Perhaps yours is especially hard. You both work very hard…or maybe only one of you works hard and that’s the problem. Perhaps one of you has worked very hard on this relationship and the other hasn’t. Perhaps it’s been a very long time, perhaps you’ve drifted very far apart. Maybe you’re bored. Maybe you’re just tired.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

“This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/dailydad and get on your way to being your best self.”There’s all these things we want to make sure our kids learn. We agonize over which school to put them in, what their grades are. We try to interest them in the right career, try to fire up their ambition. You push them to play sports, you teach them an instrument, you send them to summer camps. You read a thousand parenting books, you try all the latest strategies.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

On this weekend episode of the Daily Dad,  Ryan talks with his wife Samantha on unavoidable reality, flexibility within their household, and creating space in your life for your love ones. ✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com 📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

Today’s episode is brought to you by LifeForce.Visit mylifeforce.com and receive $200 off your membership today.If you’re in your 30s, then your parents raised you through the global financial crisis, SARS, the bursting of the tech bubble, and 9/11. They saw two wars in Iraq, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and Black Monday. If you’re in your 40s, they experienced that and the crack epidemic, the AIDS epidemic, stagflation, Chernobyl, and the final saber rattling of the Cold War. If you’re in your 50s, then your parents raised you through Vietnam and Watergate and the Berlin Wall. If you’re in your 60s, they raised you through the Civil Rights movement, the counterculture revolution, the draft, Vietnam, the Kennedy assassinations, MLK’s assassination, and the Cuban Missile Crisis. If you’re older than that… well, now we’re getting into even headier territory: the war in Korea, the Iron Curtain, the Second World War, the Marshall Plan, and god knows what else.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

It’s been this way for a long time. Parents who ignored their kids. Parents who were too busy working, surviving, to be there emotionally. Parents who drank. Parents who pushed too hard, who asked too much. It’s been generations of this, it is the human story, written in the private lives of families, written in the history books, explaining so much of why we are the way we are.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

Sometimes just a title, just a concept can be enough. Wherever You Go There You Are is a great book…and a great mantra. The Obstacle is The Way, and Ego is the Enemy were intended to have a similar effect. Even if you don’t crack the covers, just the concept is enough to provide a little guidance.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

Visit mylifeforce.com and receive $200 off your membership today.Nothing keeps us up, nothing haunts us like the thought that something could happen to our kids. We dread even the good things that take them away from us, moving out, going to college, that job across the country.But there is, in this fear, a certain ingratitude, isn’t there? Not just for the present moment in front of us that we are neglecting, but for all the wonderful things we’ve already gotten to do–with our kids, with our spouse, with all of us together.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com 📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

There are a lot of kids out there. There are fewer parents. Not just because most families have more than one child, but because unfortunately, tragically, not everyone who has a kid decides to be a parent.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

On this weekend episode of the Daily Dad,  Ryan talks with actor Matthew McConaughey about his new course: Roadtrip – the Highway to More,  the importance of being close to the ones you love and how “You Are The Toy” when it comes to your children.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube   

Seeing your own parents now, as an adult, is stressful. There’s a great Ram Dass line that the comedian Pete Holmes has used in relation to his own parents: You think you’re enlightened—go spend a week with your family.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

We say we’re trying to raise kids who are kind, who help others, who are generous, who are not selfish, who are not cruel, who treat everyone equally, who hold themselves to high ethical standards. We say that virtue, that doing what’s right is more important than anything else, than money or success or getting ahead.But what do we show?  What do we show?✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

Yes, it’s true you only get so much time with them. Yes, it’s true you flew halfway around the world for this trip, you took time off work. Yes, it’s true that it’s convenient, that it will only take a few minutes, and save you a lot of trouble. Yes, it’s true that it could be a special experience they remember forever.But you know what else it could be?✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

In some ways, the ancient world seems so remarkably similar to ours. Marcus Aurelius has a passage in Meditations pepping himself up to get out of bed early in the morning. His name was Marcus–maybe your name is Marcus today. People liked sports then, they fell in love, they liked eating olives. There’s a passage in Seneca’s Letters where he talks about getting impatient as he waits for his table before dinner, and then sits frustrated as they stick him with a bad one.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube 

Health matters. Wealth matters. These things matter not just to us, but to our families. You only have to look around to see people who don’t optimize for these things and the way that ripples through not just their own life, but the lives of their children–children who see dad not taking care of themselves, mom who never quite realized her potential.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

On this weekend episode of the Daily Dad,  Ryan talks with his wife Samantha on a second round of doing less and seeing the results, and how self-awareness impacts our families in the end.  ✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com 📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

You’re wondering if you’re doing something wrong because your kid can’t ride a bike. You’re wondering why they’re not more athletic…or more academic. You feel like a failure because they dropped out of college or because your divorce has been hard on them. And all of these feelings are more pronounced when you look across the street or across the parking lot at school and see other families nailing it in all these areas.Visit mylifeforce.com and receive $200 off your membership today.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube   

The hot button political issue of the day is “parental choice.” In Florida and D.C., Chicago and California, parents of differential political persuasions are fighting with their school boards, their librarians, their universities over a host of culture war issues and their right to choose what their kids learn about (or don’t learn about). Some of the issues are serious. Some of them are made up.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube   

There is an inherent tension, a conflict of visions even, at the heart of every family. They want to live happy, fulfilling, interesting lives, and as the parent…you want nothing bad to ever happen to them. Sure, you want them to be happy and have fun, but most of all, more than anything, you want them to be safe.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

It was a timeless scene, one that might have happened in your house just this past afternoon. The kids are playing with bubbles. They are laughing and yelling. Blowing and darting around trying to pop them. Finding the most wonderful joy in the simple magic of soap and air.Visit mylifeforce.com and receive $200 off your membership today.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

Do you know the story of Cincinnatus? He was a Roman general who had retired to his farm until he was called to rescue his country from an invasion. Made dictator in these desperate times, he had unlimited power, which he used to save the empire… only to immediately relinquish the power and return to his farm.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube   

On this weekend episode of the Daily Dad,  Ryan shares an article from a Father's Day read from The Free Press on the upstream choices we have to make and continuing to do less as parents with discipline and trade offs.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

Being two minutes late to school. The fourth discussion about cleaning up before company comes over. The grouchy tone. The broken vase. The mischief with their friends. The I told you to turn off the iPad and come help me downstairs!!!!✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

It’s a good reminder, one that we can zip past too easily because we’re busy, because we have so much on our plate: You only get 18 years with your kids. It’s a reminder not just to soak in the time you have with them, but to make sure you’re really parenting in those 18 years. Because soon enough they’ll be gone, they’ll be living with someone else, listening to someone else.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube   

Almost every talented and successful person can remember their introduction to whatever it was that became their thing. In Mastery, Robert Greene explores countless examples of this beautiful process by which some of the world’s most notable experts discovered their “life’s task.” He talks about Martha Graham’s first time watching a dance performance, for example, and he tells the story of the compass that Albert Einstein’s father gave him as a present when he was five years old:✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

As a society, we have very attuned ears for what words are offensive. There are words that religious people find offensive. There are the words that collectively we have decided are hurtful…as well as the words various groups are trying to get people to understand are potentially hurtful.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

It would be wonderful if it ever eased up, but it doesn’t. You worried when they were in the womb, and here you are all these years later, still worrying. Are they doing ok? Are they getting enough nutrients? Is something going to happen to them? Are they happy?✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

On this weekend episode of the Daily Dad,  Ryan talks about the straw that breaks the camel's back and relaxing the impulse to force things.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

Your job today as a father is to do one thing. It’s to read this poem, which dates back to 1895, and then to think about how to incorporate its lessons into how you raise your kids. Ignore the gendered language (it was written as advice to the poet’s son) because it doesn’t matter. ✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

We try to inspire our kids. We try to motivate them. We try to incentivize them. We want them to care about winning–that’s why we push them into sports. We want them to go to a good college–that’s why we reward them for their grades. We want them to succeed in this world–that’s why we tell them stories of the greats (that’s the idea behind The Girl Who Would Be Free and The Boy Who Would Be King, for instance).We want our kids to be ambitious.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

It’s clear some parents take things too far. They push their kids too hard in sports. They push them too hard in school. They solve every problem for them, indulge every whim and desire, shelter them from discomfort and the slightest independence. They celebrate the most minor of accomplishments, they encourage the most unusual of behaviors.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

When a young Florence Nightingale began making moves toward volunteering in hospitals, her aristocratic parents were horrified. It had been difficult enough raising a precocious child. Now she wanted to debase herself with work below her station? They were embarrassed. What would their friends think? How would it look? Like a lot of parents with determined, independent children, they felt rejected. They thought her choices rebuked theirs.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube  

We watch sports with our kids. That’s greatness, we say of some 4th quarter comeback win. They’re the G.O.A.T, we explain–the greatest to ever do it. We talk to our kids about the work that went into that success, the practice, the sacrifice. Maybe we even talk about the incredible rewards that follow such greatness. But it’s important that we also remind them where this skill sits in the overall scheme of things.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

On this weekend episode of the Daily Dad,  Ryan talks with his wife Samantha on doing less by saying no, physically being present and the cost of every opportunity.  ✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com 📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

Because you’re in charge, because you’re so much bigger and stronger and smarter, it’s easy to get trapped into a battle of wills with your kids. Don’t do that or else! Because I said so. Oh, you think it’s like that, do you? We put our foot down. We tell them how it’s going to be. We argue. Sometimes, at the very, very end of our rope, we lock them in their room.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

Is there anything better than the feeling of your kid’s head on your chest? Them running towards you at pick up time? Seeing their name pop up as an incoming call on your phone? Them asking for advice? Them asking to show you something?✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

Tom Brady has always been relentless about trying to get better. Trying to get his passes out quicker. Trying to get his spirals a little tighter. Trying to optimize his diet. Trying to recover from games faster.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

We know the world throws a lot at our kids. We know it’s noisy out there and there are competing influences. We know they’re pretty forgetful too. These are kids that can barely remember where their backpack is…how are we supposed to communicate the most essential and important truths of life? How do we get them to remember what we tell them?✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

One thing we know for certain is that our kids will go through things. They’ll have a crisis of identity, of faith, of social status. They’ll be overwhelmed. They’ll be confused. They’ll have questions. They’ll doubt themselves.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

On this weekend episode of the Daily Dad,  Ryan talks with one of his favorite writers Austin Kleon on Parenting strategies before and after writing a book, and Creativity within your household.  ✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

We know that our kids want to feel good, feel safe, feel loved. We know they want to feel that someone is proud of them, that they’re talented, that they’re worth something. We also know that they’ll want to have fun, take risks, mess up, be crazy, and feel the pleasures of the world.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube   

It matters far less what a person does in life than how they do it. An exploitative corporate executive might have an expense account and a fancy title, but we all admire the hardworking and selfless teacher more. And we certainly acknowledge that, whatever the differences in salary, one contributes far more to society.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube  

Unless you are currently in line for a hereditary throne, it’s unlikely your children will ever be a king or a queen. This is a good thing, as it seems like both a thankless and toxic job–to say nothing of its effectiveness as a form of government.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

Few of us felt completely understood as kids. At a young age, our parents didn’t quite understand what we were saying, what we wanted, how much we missed them when they were gone, how scared we were when we were alone. When we got older, they didn’t seem to remember just how hard it was to be a teenager, how overwhelming the world was, how different we felt from others, how behind we sometimes felt (as we wrote recently). And now as adults, we struggle too–maybe our spouse doesn’t fully get us. Maybe our parents are incapable of seeing or listening to us when we try to communicate about wounds we carry from the past.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

We put our family first. That’s what we believe. That’s what we say. That’s the first commandment in the Daily Stoic Parenting Challenge. That’s the advice we give other parents. That’s effectively what we tell our kids too: You’re the most important thing in the world to me.And then almost every single day, in countless ways, we fail to live up to those words.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

Happy Father’s Day to everyone!It’s pretty incredible how concise Marcus Aurelius is throughout Meditations. There are nearly 500 passages throughout, and rarely is a passage longer than a few sentences.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

On this weekend episode of the Daily Dad,  Ryan talks with his wife Samantha on setting our kids and ourselves up for success, creating space by doing less and building the confidence to remain consistent.  ✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com 📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

The point is not to get good grades. The point is not a good score on their SATs. It’s not about what college they get into. College is not about what kind of job they can snag. Success in school is not succeeding in school.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

Think of all the stuff you know. The skills you have. The movie quotes you can throw out there mid-conversation.It’s interesting, isn’t it? You remember more from a two-hour movie than from the museums you were dragged to. You learned more from Wikipedia rabbit holes you fell down than you do from a couple decades in school. What’s that about?✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

Of course, her father would have preferred to be powerful, to be wealthy, to hold some prestigious position. He didn’t want to dig sewage canals or wait on entitled aristocrats. He didn’t want to be at the bottom of Rome’s social hierarchy. Nobody would choose that life.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

Some of the things your kids think are ridiculous–products of their imagination or their fears. Some of the things they like are hilarious and weird–the products of their own uniqueness, products of just not knowing better. Some of the feelings they have are not your fault–again, they have imaginations and fears. Some of their feelings are products of mistakes you’ve made, flaws you have.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

Nobody would have wanted Joseph Kennedy to be their dad. He was an avaricious businessman. He cheated on his wife. He had his daughter lobotomized and sent away. He was controlling and manipulative. He saw his kids as extensions of himself. As we wrote recently, one of the only reasons Robert F. Kennedy turned out differently than his siblings is that he was mostly ignored and left alone by his parents, saving him from the ordeals of some of his brothers.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

On this weekend episode of the Daily Dad,  Ryan talks with his wife Samantha on screen time & the differences in parenting moods in the morning.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube   

When your kids mess up, what’s your reaction? Do you freak out? Or are you calm? Do you make the situation better...or worse?​Can you actually listen?​Or are you halfway through a solution before they’ve even gotten two words of explanation out of their mouths? ✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

It was a long time ago. It was in a pretty conservative place, in a less understanding era. And even if it wasn’t, even in different circumstances, no parent wants to walk in to see their teenager making out with someone in their room. But in this case, a mom had been stunned to find her daughter on top of the covers with her daughter’s best girl friend.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

There’s something that strikes us as a little gross, the way politicians trot out their families to win elections, to humanize themselves or get sympathy when they screw up. There’s something exploitative about the way celebrities use pregnancy announcements or events in their kids’ life to get publicity. And there’s something plain weird about the way that some influencers turn their kids into content.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

Sometimes it feels like it would be easier if they just did what we wanted. If they could sit there for a second, as we try to handle something. If they could just pose for the photo. If they could keep the clothes we got them nice and clean. If they would play the role we hoped for, fulfill the dreams we have for them–go to the school, get the job we pick, have the wedding we plan for them in our fantasy.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

Education these days seems to be about signals. What did you get on your SATs? How many AP classes did you take? What schools did you apply to? What extracurriculars did you practice? Even some of the modern strain of political correctness, critics have said, is really just a way for people to prove that they are more educated than other people–that they were taught the right words for this and that.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

On this episode of the Daily Dad Podcast, Ryan talks to Sam Gwynne about new parenting advice, the youth building a community around mental health, and the pressures of matching the expectations.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

There are different kinds of rich families. There are families that have lots of money. There are families that have lots of time together. Sometimes these families are the same…too often they are not.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

We’re always losing our kids. In fact, we’re raising them to lose them–every minute, every interaction is building towards that moment when they will leave and live their own life. We’re raising them knowing that one day we will leave them for good too. Plus there is the fact that, as the Stoics says, we’re constantly changing, ceasing to become who we once were–and nowhere is this truer than with our children, who will never be 1 or 2 or 3 or 13 ever again.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

Antoninus Pius, Marcus Aurelius’ adopted father and predecessor, was not a Stoic. He didn’t identify as, nor did anyone call him, a philosopher. He left behind no writings. There are no anecdotes of him dropping in on lectures in Greece or studying under some guru.And yet, of all the people in Marcus’ life, Antoninus was the most Stoic. He was cool under pressure. He quietly went about his business. He was hard-working, self-sufficient, and never got worked up. He was a beloved leader. His mere presence put other people at ease.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

From his dad, Bruce Springsteen learned about shame, about broken pride, and struggling with demons that you can’t quite conquer. It’s an all too common story, unfortunately. The lack of a strong role model leaves a void that haunts a kid forever, even long after they leave the house. You can hear that pain in Springsteen’s songs today.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

Once, on an imperial tour in some distant province, a woman darted out from the crowd and blocked the path of the Emperor Hadrian, asking for help with some now-forgotten issue. Hadrian tried to put her off. “I haven’t got the time,” he said, attempting to move past her. “Well stop being emperor then!” the woman shouted after him. Hadrian paused, turned back and helped her.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

On this weekend episode of the Daily Dad,  Ryan talks to Tamron Hall about his new book release, more wholesome moments while in NYC, and how "Sharing Sucks" when dealing with two year olds. ✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

It happened again. Your kid screwed up. They did something stupid—from drawing on the walls to getting caught drinking. They hurt someone or they lied. They failed a test or broke something important. You’re pissed. You want to yell.But before we do that, stop and think: Have you raised a good kid? Have you taught them right from wrong? Have you taught them to care about other people and the truth?Yes, yes you have.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

Plutarch recorded the story that Socrates went to the fanciest neighborhood in Athens and called out, “What are you doing, men? You are giving all possible attention to acquiring money, but small thought to your sons to whom you are to leave it.”As Socrates pointed out, money is just one piece of the legacy puzzle.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

Those white shoes your parents told you to keep off the grass, the khakis they wanted you to keep clean on Easter. The car they didn’t let you eat in, the walls they told you not to mess up with your posters.Where is all that now? The shoes are long since thrown away, the pants outgrown, handed down and then finally tossed by someone. The walls have been repainted many times over. Even the car, by this point, is probably a squashed metal cube in a junkyard–and if it isn’t, the person driving it has long since given up trying to make sure it’s ‘nice.’✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

However much they seem to be prioritized by other parents, by certain cultures, perhaps by your own parents, or your instincts, in the end, it doesn’t matter.It doesn’t matter what color they dye their hair…it doesn’t matter how clean their room is…it doesn’t if they’re gay or straight or anything on any spectrum…it doesn’t matter where they go to college…it doesn’t matter what field they enter…it doesn’t matter how dark or strange or profane the music they like is…it doesn’t matter whether they abandon the piano✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

We parents are collectors. We have the photos from the day they were born. We have the first drawing they did. Their first pair of shoes, the tickets to that first flight. We have their high school diploma and their baseball t-shirts. We have their trophies and ribbons. Our garage, we’ve said, is a graveyard of strollers and high chairs and bikes and boxes of outgrown clothes and toys.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

On this weekend episode of the Daily Dad,  Ryan talks to CBS Morning in depth on applying stoicism, Garbage Time versus Quality Time & unforgettable family  moments during a rainy weekend in NYC. ✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

​None of us will be perfect parents. Our children will not agree with and understand with every choice we make–now or later. We are going to make mistakes. We are going to do things we regret. We are going to find out later just how the decisions we made affected them.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

“Only later,” Joan Didion wrote of her daughter, “did I see that I had been raising her as a doll.” Grieving, heart broken over the sudden and tragic loss of her family (detailed in the moving books A Year of Magical Thinking and Blue Nights), she was almost certainly being too hard on herself, yet…Aren’t we all a little guilty of this?✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

They are so like you. So like their mother. They have the same affect. They have the same bad habits. The same hopes, the same fears you did when you were their age. This helps you be patient with them, helps you connect with them, helps you get them what they need.You understand.Or so you think.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

Look, when you were young, you could get away with it. You could spend more than you had–knowing you’d figure things out later. You could be selfish because you were the only person that really counted in your life. You weren’t expected to have it together, you were expecting to make mistakes and learn by trial and error.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

There is a famous line we have posted many times here at Daily Dad, one that’s always popular on Instagram whenever it goes up. The most important thing you can do for your kids, it reads, is love their mother. While the quote could be made to be more inclusive (for both genders and for modern, blended families) the overall wisdom is spot on: Kids thrive when their parents not only get along, but love each other. A good marriage is a critical part of a happy home.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube     

On this weekend episode of the Daily Dad,  Ryan talks to his wife Samantha about what their learning as parents and when to enforce the better safe than sorry rule. ✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

For thousands of years, humans have been expressing wisdom to each other through fables. Whether it’s Aesop or the Bible or Leonardo da Vinci or Hans Christian Anderson, smart writers have been packaging moral lessons in the form of quaint little stories or parables.And, for just as long, parents have been passing these fables onto their children.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

There seems to be this concern, particularly on the right and from older generations, that kids are just way too soft these days. Everyone is sensitive. Everyone is easily triggered. Everyone seems to have some sort of mental illness or trauma.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

No vacation, no special experience, not even a family outing, just happens on its own. There is planning. There is time off work. There is the expense. There is the intention–to spend *quality* time together.And this is wonderful and it should be celebrated, soaked in when it happens. Just be sure not to give yourself too much credit because you booked a trip to the beach or got them excited for ice cream or the movies.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

Nobody likes confrontation. Nobody likes having to enforce our boundaries. Nobody likes having to have an awkward conversation with their parents. Or the boss. Or the mechanic who is working on your car.But you know what we should like even less? Being burned out when we get home. Not having patience or energy left for our kids. Not having a shred of slack left to deal with the inevitable stresses that will occur in the course of picking them up from school, getting them dinner, getting them to bed.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

We talked recently about the fleetingness of happiness. The way that happiness changes and evolves, the way that it tends to ensue rather than exist as something to pursue. A happy family is not one where everyone is happy all the time, Ursula Le Quin said. No, it’s closer to something we cycle through.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube   

On this episode of The Daily Dad Podcast, Ryan talks in depth about empire, philosophy, and natural feelings when it comes to our kids, as well as the connection we make with them through the opportunities and obstacles of life. ✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube 

These kids have changed your life. There are so many things you used to do that you no longer can. Traveling with no notice. Staying out all night. Sleeping on an airplane…sleeping in at all.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube   

Joan Didion was bored. She was four or five. She was bothering her mother. She was asking for something to do.Her mother could have sent her away. Told her to stop. Told her to figure it out for herself. Instead, she went over to a drawer and pulled out a notebook. Here, she said, if you’re bored “then write something. Then you can read it.” The little girl was taken aback. “I had just learned to read,” she later explained, “so this was a thrilling kind of moment. The idea that I could write something–and then read it!”✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube   

We parents are like field goal kickers. Just like if a certain shirt or a pair of socks brings a kicker luck, Were always looking for something,  Anything that will give us an edge. Just like a free throw shooter going through a preposterous routine, were religious about ours to.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube   

Sure, you become a parent when you have a kid. It’s a biological thing. It’s a legal status. It’s codified on a piece of paper. But we all know that being a good parent is something much more than that.There is no one moment, one benchmark, one thing that makes you a parent–just as there is no single moment that one becomes a writer or an entrepreneur or a wise elder. Even ‘turning pro’ as the great Steven Pressfield has written, is not something that happens with the signing of a contract or being drafted by a team.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube  

Think of all the things you’ve pretended to be interested in on a date. Think of all the hours you’ve spent at the office, what you’ve committed to and sacrificed to get ahead. Think of the bosses you’ve put up with at that job, the obnoxious colleagues. Think of the hours you’ve spent pouring over your finances, investing and saving and growing. Think of the time you set aside to go to the gym, think about the willpower you summon to slide into the cold plunge.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube  

Ryan talks to Scott Hershovitz about the Adventures in Philosophy with Kids, the common misconceptions about philosophy,  how to apply philosophy to actual life, and more.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube 

Do You Really Care?“A key point to bear in mind…You’re better off not giving the small things more time than they deserve.-Marcus AureliusIt seems like it’s really important to you. That the door not be slammed. That the chores be done a certain way. That everything be put away immediately. That feet go on the ground, not the furniture.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

Ryan Holiday’s latest book, The Daily Dad comes out May 2. Preorder your signed and numbered first edition before they sell out! There are going to be moments where we’re not sure we can keep going. We hit a plateau in our career. We hit a wall on mile 19 of our first marathon. Our marriage is struggling. Our attempt to lose weight has stalled out. Going back to school has turned out to be a lot more than we expected.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

Ryan Holiday’s latest book, The Daily Dad comes out May 2. Preorder your signed and numbered first edition before they sell out![COUNTDOWN CLOCK]None of us come from families that were perfect. None of us got everything we needed. Our parents were not perfect. Indeed, they may have been quite flawed. Perhaps they were not loving enough, understanding enough, accepting enough. Maybe they just weren't there enough.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

Parenting doesn’t have to change a person. As we said recently, plenty of people remain the same selfish, immature, irresponsible people they were before they had kids. Which is why it’s worth making the distinction between having kids and being a parent.There are lots more of the former in this world than the latter.People who just have kids are still living the lives they had before. Parents live a different life. They become different people with different priorities, different capacities, different standards for themselves.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

Too many of us have the wrong idea about what happiness is. We confuse it with pleasure or fun. We confuse it with some sort of permanent state or an accomplishment to pursue. But happiness is more subtle and supple than that. It is something that ensues, as the great Viktor Frankl says in Man’s Search for Meaning.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

On this weekend episode of the Daily Dad,  Ryan talks to his wife Samantha about what their learning as parents, and the importance of making time for your children.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

You Will Want A Crowded Table“What a great spectacle it is when a husband or wife with many children are seen with these children crowded around them!”-Musonius RufusIt’s helpful to sit back and really think about what parental success looks like.First, of course, it’s having healthy kids who survive to adulthood—that’s obvious.But second, when you flash way forward into the future, what is it? It’s that beautiful phrase captured in the title of the Highwomen’s hit “Crowded Table.” At Thanksgiving. On birthdays. At some summer house on the beach you all rent as a family. That is, having kids whom you get to see, whom you have a good relationship with, whom you want to spend time with . . . for the rest of your days.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

Nothing takes up space in a parent’s head (or heart) quite like a kid who is struggling. “You’re only as happy as your unhappiest child,” the expression goes, and it’s true. If one of your kids is struggling–with reading, with adjusting to a new school or city, with becoming a teenager, with the divorce, with some health issue–it’s hard to focus or think about anything else. Even if you’re crushing it at work, even if one of your other kids just made honor roll or the varsity team.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

You’re upset because you just blew it in that meeting. You’re kicking yourself because you meant to get up early and ended up sleeping through your alarm and missing a flight. You’re stressed about the business, you wish your marriage was better, you hate the way your house looks from the street. You can’t watch the news without being disgusted or outraged or worried.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

You notice it one day–the garage is full. Of strollers no longer used–first the single, then the double and the jogger. The chair you and your spouse spent so many wee hours of the morning in, rocking the baby back to sleep in. There is the balance bike. Then the first one with pedals. It’s next to the trailer you used to strap them in and tow them behind your bike.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

It’s important to remember that everyone was a kid once…and that no child is perfect. For instance, as a child Gandhi once stole some money from his brother. The boy was wracked with guilt, terrified of the consequences–from his parents, from the law, from God. Ultimately, he went to his father and confessed, laying out every aspect of his crime in great detail in a long, self-flagellating note, offering himself up for some extreme punishment he felt he deserved.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

On this weekend episode of the Daily Dad,  Ryan talks to KIND Snacks Founder Daniel Lubetzky about the importance of being kind, culture and values in a successful company & the steps on making the world a better place.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email:DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

In one of F. Scott Fitzerald’s funniest short stories, “Head and Shoulders,” a certifiable genius falls in love with a showgirl. The plot and moral of the story aren’t relevant for today’s email—though the story is highly recommended—instead there is a little passage in it that introduces a concept that is worth thinking about:✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

“Your kids are not keeping score on your career. They just want a parent who’s emotionally present and supportive of them.”-Ben StillerDavid Letterman was the king of late night. His shows ran for thirty-three seasons, making him the longest-serving late-night talk show host in the history of American television. At its peak, he was making something like $30 million a year, watched by an audience of many millions every week.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

There is a joke about a kid who, not liking the ‘No’ he got from one parent, asked the other, in order to get a ‘Yes.’ “Never come between your mother and I,” the father says, “we sleep in the same bed together.”✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

We spend a lot of time looking at the absolute worst parents. Not just because so many leaders and celebrities and artists seem to put their families absolutely last in order to achieve their success, but also because artistically, flawed and tragic figures quite naturally fill up the most pages and screentime. As Tolstoy opens Anna Karenina, all happy families resemble each other but unhappy families are unhappy in their own way.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

Of course, this parenting thing is hard. It’s expensive. It’s an enormous amount of work and responsibility. And yet, we are the luckiest people in the world, aren’t we?Not just because, as we’ve said before, it took a black swan of black swans for any of us to be here, for us to even have our kids (especially those parents who struggled with fertility or adoption). We have been given an incredible gift with this opportunity to be parents.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

On this weekend episode of the Daily Dad,  Ryan sits down with author Amy Morin in talks on how to find agency in your everyday life, overcoming mentally challenging situations by gaining perspective, and the cost of success when it comes to parenthood.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email:DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

Relationships are tricky. Especially the ones we have built the modern world around. Monogamous. Long term. An equal partner in parenting and in professional pursuits. Oh and our partner is supposed to be our best friend too.It’s a lot to ask of someone. Harder still when you throw in the craziness of kids and the current state of the world. But you deserve a partner like that, and they deserve a partner like you. We deserve happiness and fulfillment and love, together.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

“As we bring up our children, we have to remember that we are caretakers of the future. By improving their education, we improve the future of mankind, the future of this world.”-Immanuel Kant Adam’s father wanted nothing but for his son to go to college. John Adams wanted to do anything but go to school. He often skipped class to go fishing or hunting or to fly his kite. He didn’t like his teachers. He didn’t think he was learning anything useful. He had no interest in furthering his education.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

We all know that confidence is important. Most of us wish we had more of it. We spend a lot of time trying to build it up in our kids. By encouraging them. By reassuring them. By seeking out activities that will develop it in them.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

We say we’d do anything for our family. We’d like to think if we were tested, if we had to make some terrible choice, if it really was a matter of life and death, or if we were struggling to subsist, we’d come through.Would we though?✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

As a society, we have very attuned ears for what words are offensive. There are words that religious people find offensive. There are the words that collectively we have decided are hurtful…as well as the words various groups are trying to get people to understand are potentially hurtful.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

Ryan talks about being role models to our kids by showing respect, dignity and empathy for others aside from our personal opinions.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

It can be easy to question your parenting. To feel like you’re not doing good enough, that you’re not nearly enough. You see what other parents are doing, or hear what other fathers say they are doing, and it can seem like you’re the worst parent ever: The food you give them isn’t healthy enough, their education isn’t good enough, you’re not patient enough, you’re not dedicated enough.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

The odds of any of this happening is literally incomprehensible. Some scientists have estimated that the chances of any one person being born are somewhere in the realm of one in four hundred trillion.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

Everyone says that becoming a parent changes you. The responsibility. The stress. The unconditional love. The cuteness. This is big stuff.But as the comedian Tom Segura observes in one of his great Netflix specials, it’s wrong to say that it changes people–that’s just not the right language. It’s that having kids should change you. If it doesn’t he says, if you’re still the same person? If you have the same routines, the same behaviors, the same priorities afterwards? That’s a big problem! You’re doing something wrong!✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

There’s so much we have to teach our kids. How to tie their shoes. How to drive. How to do math. How to throw a football and hit a baseball. How to put up and down the toilet seat. How to clean up after themselves.These are the practical skills of life. But they are worthless without other intangible personality traits–the ones we’ve talked so much about here: Kindness. Self-discipline. Work ethic. And most of all, courage.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

It’s good that your kids participate in sports. It gives them confidence. It keeps them active. It shows them the value of teamwork. It gives them the thrill of victory. These are all things we hope they’ll carry with them in life.That was Theodore Roosevelt’s view. He loved “manly sports.” Football. Wrestling. He took his kids, as we’ve said, on daily adventures, on long hikes and through obstacle courses, coming up with contests to keep it all competitive.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

Ryan talks about the highs and lows of parenting and how to remain grateful for the time that you have with your kids.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

Have you ever heard your kids say something that just stops you cold? One of those remarks that instinctually makes you do a double take? It can be an unexpected curse word, or some preposterous old-timey expression, or one of those heartbreakingly earnest statements about love or happiness.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

Eva Amurri had a privileged childhood. Her mother is movie star Susan Sarandon, and her father is Italian director Franco Amurri. She spent her early days on the sets of blockbuster movies. She got to travel to beautiful places. She never had to want anything that could be bought with money.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

Early in his career, the neuroscientist Andrew Huberman worked mostly in isolation. In his lab, he kept a list of the scientists he loved and admired. “I would read that list over and over,” he said. “I didn’t realize it at the time, but this is what is called introjection.”✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

One of the great things about kids is that they keep you on your toes. Not just because you have to worry about them all the time, but because they give you so many more things to notice. As we talked about a long time ago, if you have a son that likes helicopters or a daughter that’s obsessed with birds, there’s suddenly a reason for you to be a lot more aware as you go through the world. There’s stuff for you to look for, to point to, stuff that you would ordinarily have a kind of adult’s blindness too.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

There’s a meme that features the characters from the movie The Sandlot that says “At some point in your childhood, you and your friends went outside to play together for the last time, and nobody knew it.” It’s not a quote that’s actually in the movie, but a line parents should understand just as well as their kids.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

Ryan talks to his friend and writing partner Nils Parker about the fine line between setting boundaries and getting upset about trivial things.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com Check out the Daily Dad Store https://store.dailydad.com 📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

In 1982-83, Jim Valvano coached the North Carolina State basketball team to a National Championship title. The Wolfpack was a mid-ranked team that entered the NCAA tournament looking like anything but a title contender. It was improbable that they’d win their first two games, and even if they did, no one in the world would have put even a dollar on them upsetting #2 ranked Virginia. No one, except Coach Valvano. He believed he and his guys could do it. Even when his guys didn’t.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

We’ve talked before about Jimmy Carter’s father. James Sr. was a flawed man, to be sure. He was strict and stern, often unaware of the way he loomed over his quiet, bookish son. The elder Carter was a figure of old time values–hard work, stoicism, decency–as well as old time vices–a smoker, a racist. He was also capable of moments of great kindness and he put his son on a straight and narrow path that the boy is still walking nearly 100 years later.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

Sure, it’s a trend these days that parents are overprotective. We’ve got helicopter parents and snowplow parents and risk averse, paranoid parents. This is true and it harms kids.But you know what’s responsible for way more harm to kids? Parents who aren’t thinking about this stuff at all. Parents who don’t take basic safety precautions because they’re either not aware or not clued into very real, very common worst case scenarios.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

In the classic novel, Bright Lights Big City by Jay McInerney the narrator flashes back to the scene of his mother’s deathbed. Battling cancer, aware the end is near, she takes just enough pain medication to be uninhibited but still lucid.The walls between parent and child fall away. They talk openly of the things they never managed to broach in life without embarrassment. They talk about sex. They talk about love. They talk about their fears and worries. They shared their insecurities, their feelings of inadequacies.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

You do many things for your children because you love them. You work hard to provide for them. You manage their education. You teach them the things they’ll need to know in life. You protect them–from others and themselves.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

Ryan talks about the stresses of parenting and how to remain grateful for the time that you have with your kids.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com Check out the Daily Dad Store https://store.dailydad.com 📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

This is just my personality, we say. I just don’t have any energy when I get home from work, we complain. I’m in a bad mood today, that’s all. My parents weren’t any different, and I turned out ok. It’s just a stressful period right now. They’re young, they won’t remember any of this.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

It can seem like parenting is a rather perilous thing, right? The statistics come at you like daggers to your heart–how many kids die each year in this kind of accident or that one, how many kids are injured doing this and that. The world feels so dangerous, so terrifying.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

It’s pretty widely agreed that too much of anything spoils a person. We read the cautionary tales of the rich families whose inheritance wrecks generations of offspring. We hear the sad stories of brothers and sisters torn apart trying to distribute their parents’ estate. Perhaps we look back on a childhood of our own, one where we wanted little in the material sense, but could have used a mom or a dad who was around more, who was tired less, who seemed to be so important to other people that they missed how important they were to us.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

It never looks good when it comes to us via an ESPN headline or a viral tweet. Ja Morant’s dad getting into a fight at one of his son’s games. OBJ’s dad causing drama for his son’s team via Twitter. LaVar Ball making ridiculous pronouncements about his sons’ promise as athletes…and as entrepreneurs.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

In 1929, William Alexander Percy’s favorite cousin died. Then just a few years later, he lost his mother. Then his cousin’s wife died and he lost his own father. He had wanted to be a poet. He had hoped to spend his days traveling the world, practicing law, enjoying his family’s wealth. Yet the confirmed bachelor found himself compelled by circumstances to adopt his cousin’s three boys: Walker (14), LeRoy (13) and Phin (9).✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

Ryan talks to his friend and writing partner Nils Parker about why it's important to say no to things that you don't need to do, how important the time that you get to spend with your kids is, and more.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

Jimmy Carter was a pretty buttoned up guy. He was known, even under the stress of the Oval Office, to be remarkably poised. The angriest an aide ever saw him though, came over a last minute scheduling change. It wasn’t the poor communication that bothered him. It wasn’t that he was going to be late–something the ever punctual Carter despised. It was because the secretary had bumped Carter’s plans to take his daughter to the circus.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

It’s one of the most beautiful and haunting songs ever recorded. The version written and recorded by Sting is pretty good, but the Johnny Cash version? It’s like he was meant to put that track down.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

The things we say to our kids matter. The tone we use, the rules we enforce, the standards we hold them to–they feel it. They feel it profoundly. Kids always have and always will.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

As we said recently, the wonderful thing about parenting is that it opens you up. It expands your heart to a new capacity, a level you didn’t think possible. The problem, of course, is just how exposed this makes you feel.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

The comedian and actor Rob Delaney’s son Henry was healthy and beautiful, but then he got sick. Delaney and his wife Leah didn’t know what to do, so they took Henry to the doctor. It took a long time but eventually, the doctor found that Henry had a brain tumor. They operated on it, and he got better. But sadly the tumor took Henry’s life at just two years old.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

David M. Rubenstein is a successful entrepreneur and an innovative philanthropist.He is the co-founder and co-chairman of The Carlyle Group and host of “The David Rubenstein Show: Peer to Peer Conversations” on Bloomberg TV. He is the the author of several books, including the best seller How to Lead: Wisdom from the World's Greatest CEOs, Founders, and Game Changers, and most recently, How to Invest: Masters of the Craft. ✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

In his book, The Vanishing American Adult, then-U.S. Senator Ben Sasse pondered what might strike a person from the distant past as odd about our modern society. Aside from the technology, he said, they’d notice the extreme age segregation. Invariably today we spend time almost exclusively with people our own age.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

If you’re one of those kids who didn’t get everything you needed from your parents–and let’s face it, pretty much everyone is–you probably carry something with you as an adult today. Maybe you’re angry or sad. Wounded or resentful. You wonder what could have been, who you’d be, if they’d been around more…or been more patient…or loving…or understood you.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

Of course, we want our kids to have class. That is to say: A strong sense of decency and taste, restraint and grace, with a set of values that have become virtues by virtue of having consistently lived those values. The question is: How do you teach this? How do you pass on this sort of ineffable, effortless sense of self?✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

When we have to go to the doctor, we make the time. If the check engine light comes on in our car, we get it to the shop. When we have some lucrative business opportunity, we find time to make it happen. Kids take up so much of our time, but there’s room–we always manage to make room.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

When she was 68 years old, Jimmy Carter’s mother joined the Peace Corps. She asked to be sent somewhere far away where they could use a nurse’s help, and she ended up in India for 21 months. She had spent nearly all of her life on a small farm in rural Georgia…and now she was thousands of miles away in the most foreign of lands, volunteering, serving others.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

On today's episode Ryan talks about a recent winter storm that came through Texas, how him and his family thought about it, how success changes your obligations to the common good, and more.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

Have you ever watched someone sit and play with a little kid for hours? Like totally engrossed, never checking a phone, never rushing, never getting bored or frustrated, never pulling the adult card? Maybe your spouse can do this, maybe you’ve seen a grandparent do it, maybe you’ve pulled up and watched the teachers at a daycare do it (or maybe you’ve watched them calmly, quietly put 10 kids down for a nap at the same time).✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

We talked recently about the costs of selfishness. Ego, narcissism, self-centeredness–it’s not only a recipe for inevitably overreaching in the professional world, it is a death sentence to personal relationships.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

Maybe you had a rough day with the kids. Or a tough day at the office. It’s in one of those moments you doubt whether you’re doing enough of this or that, or you’re left feeling jealous or unsatisfied. It’s in these moments you need to remember: “There are people who have seen their children die,” Mary Laura Philpont writes in her book Bomb Shelter.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

Of course, we try to tell our children we love them. Sometimes they receive it. Sometimes they roll their eyes. Sometimes–depending on how we grew up and what we saw from our parents–even just saying ‘I love you’ can be difficult or a stretch for us.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

Parenting and stress seem to just go together. Anxiety, concern, they follow too. There’s always something we are tracking, something we’re worried about. If our son’s grades don’t get better, it could mean he won’t get into college. It could be confirmation of that learning disability we’ve been told about. Your daughter was tired yesterday and now you just heard her sneeze–is she sick? Oh no, we cannot afford to get sick right now.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

On this weekend episode of  the Daily Dad Ryan talks about how as parents we can get so caught up in raising the kids we forget to appreciate the little things. There will be a last time you get a call from the principal, the last time you pack a lunch, or drop them off at school; everything must come to an end. It is important to remain present and make the most of these moments, you never know when it will be the last time.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email:DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

You can’t prevent your kids from making mistakes. Nor, honestly, should you really want to. You have to let them learn on their own. And you have to give them the space to do it. Knowing that you’ve instilled the character, the awareness, and the willingness to ask for help that they will need in order to bounce back from the mistakes they will inevitably make.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email:DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

We’d love to give our kids everything they want. We’d love to fulfill every wish and eliminate every inadequacy. We can’t. So we must focus on what we control, we must point them to what they control, what they can change, where their effort matters most.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email:DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

We can tell them now, we can tell them early, that we’d rather them develop themselves as people, find their project, find their people, than optimize themselves to win such a deranged competition. And we can remind them of that timeless Bible verse–the one that asks what good it is to gain the whole world (or anything)if you lose your soul in the process.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email:DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

The good thing is that our kids are smarter and more resilient than we think. With time, they’ll come to understand that hey, we struggled with our issues too as parents, as adults. The fact that we weren’t always there or perfect? Hopefully they’ll realize and come to accept that it wasn’t because we didn’t love them.It was because we’re human! Just like them.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email:DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

Even when our kids get up early, we have, at most, a couple hours with them before school and work. Then after school or sports and work, we have what, maybe a couple more hours? Soon enough they’re asleep. It’s pretty sad when you think about it…which is probably why we don’t think about it.So little time is left for us. Don’t waste it. Seize it.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email:DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

On this weekend episode of the Daily Dad, Ryan sits down with Scott Hershovitz to discuss how we can become model parents. Rather than getting angry with our kids for acting out we can identify where our kids learn this behavior or why they're behaving in such a disruptive manner, ultimately this leads to our kids teaching us a lot about ourselves. ✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email:DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

We need to deliberately let all the craziness and mundane tasks of life to fall away. Because all of those things that we allow to stick around, even if just in the background or further down the list, will inevitably steal from those few things we care about most.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email:DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

It’s not that you don’t think they’re great or talented. You’re a big fan. You always have been. You know they can do it. You just worry. You just want them to be safe. You just want them to find what is actually best for them.Maybe they can make it. Maybe they can’t. All we can say for certain is that they’ll never know for sure if we don’t let them figure it out for themselves and support them along the way.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email:DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

From the outside, we can admire people. We can acknowledge and be inspired by their heroism, but we must still strive to learn from their failure to be great and be more than a good parent at the same time.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email:DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

There’s no question that becoming a parent has stretched you beyond limits you ever thought possible. You are busier now than you ever were in your life. You manage to survive on less sleep than you ever thought humanly possible. You have been stressed, worried, upset in new ways and to new heights.Your kids have given you so much. They have quite nearly given you a heart attack on many occasions…but they compensate for this by giving you a much bigger heart. They stretch you, they expand you, they make you better.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email:DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

Remember: A little fellow follows you. Your kids are always watching. They’re the ones you should want to impress. They’re the ones you should never want to let down. They’re the ones you’re not only fighting for, but whose standards—whose natural admiration and love—you should always be fighting to live up to.They are the only ones whose opinions matter.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email:DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

On this weekend episode of the Daily Dad, Ryan sits down with writing partner Nils to talk about the work life time management and how to balance their expectations to ensure they can get the most out of the moments they spend with those they love most. ✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email:DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

A little fellow follows you, remember that. The decision to shut down emotionally doesn’t just impact you. The decision to overcommit. The decision to be gone. The decision to hold onto resentments. The decision not to take care of yourself. The decision to hold them to unfair standards, to belittle or to be mean.All of this matters. It matters more than anything.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email:DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

You missed them while they were away at school. You want to hang out with them. You want to be an attentive, interested parent. You want to make sure they’re alright–that there isn’t something they need to tell you. Let them decompress. Give them something to eat. Put on some music. Just be there. If you want to talk, maybe share with them something from your day or your life.Let them come to you.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email:DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

We want such big things for and from our kids. Because we know what they’re capable of. Because we have worked so hard to provide a better childhood for them than we had. Because we know the mistakes we made in our lives and want them to learn from them–to pick up where we left off. We also know what has served us well, what we are capable of.But the problem with that is this: Our kids are not us. It’s that simple. As much as they are like us in so many ways, they are their own people. They are so different from us.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email:DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

Think about the life of Randolph Churchill, who we have talked about. Think about the life of Claudia Williams, the daughter of Ted Williams, who we’ve talked about. Think of Commodus, the son of Marcus Aurelius. These children were privileged in many ways—they had wealthy, powerful parents who gave them access to so many wonderful things.But surely if you’d have asked them, they’d have told you *just how hard it was* to be the child of someone like their parents.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email:DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

Out in the street, the kids are playing and screaming. They’re throwing balls and sharing toys. It’s noisy and insane, sweet and overwhelming. It’s always been crazy and hard and baffling. Yet people have figured it out, they’ve survived.And so will you.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email:DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

On this weekend of episode of the Daily Dad, Ryan shares a compilation of emails that help parents understand the importance of our time with our kids.  ✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email:DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

Douglas MacArthur seemed relatively accepting of his quiet, sensitive boy. It was undoubtedly MacArthur’s dream to see his son graduate from West Point and enter the service. That was never going to happen. So MacArthur had to adjust, like all fathers he had to accept “undeniable reality,”—something that could not have been easy for a man used to getting his way on a global scale.✉️ Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email at https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail🏛 Get Stoic inspired books, medallions, and prints to remember these lessons at the Daily Stoic Store: https://store.dailystoic.com/

Each of us has dreams and demons, goals and baggage. Sometimes in equal measure, sometimes not–and not always in favor of the good stuff. We have trauma from our own childhood, things that we’re hooked on, bad habits, personality flaws. We have issues. At the same time, we have big, new, important things we want to do in this life–which we only have one of by the way.✉️ Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email at https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail🏛 Get Stoic inspired books, medallions, and prints to remember these lessons at the Daily Stoic Store: https://store.dailystoic.com/

We’re always asking our kids questions. How was school? How did baseball practice go? Did you stay out of trouble? What did your teacher say about your math grade? Did you have fun with your friends?We ask these questions because we want to have something to talk about. We ask these questions because we’re concerned. We ask these questions because the answers matter to us. Our kids realize this.✉️ Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email at https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail🏛 Get Stoic inspired books, medallions, and prints to remember these lessons at the Daily Stoic Store: https://store.dailystoic.com/

We do our best to be good citizens. Good colleagues. Good people. We don’t freak out like some demonic Karen in a viral video when something goes wrong at the supermarket. We follow the law. We help others when they need it. We try to practice the golden rule.Good. Good. Good. ✉️ Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email at https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail🏛 Get Stoic inspired books, medallions, and prints to remember these lessons at the Daily Stoic Store: https://store.dailystoic.com/

It would be nice if the work we did at home was as clear as the work we do at, well, work. At the office, the number of hours matters. At the office, you have metrics to hit. You have a quantifiable output. You have someone who can tell you–the boss, your customers–whether you’re doing a good job or not.But at home? With our kids? It’s so much trickier.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email:DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

On this weekend episode of the Daily Dad, Ryan shares a story from his Family trip to Hawaii over the holidays! Through this experience Ryan draws a lesson on the importance of Justice.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email:DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

What schools are your kids attending? No, not what college or prep school. This is more of a “school of life” question. Charis Denison, a relationship development and organizational specialist who works with a lot of young people, recently observed “At one time or another, every young man will get a letter of admission to ‘dick school.’ The question is, will he drop out, graduate, or go for an advanced degree?”✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email:DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

These apps are designed to make you feel vulnerable, hook you, and sell you stuff. While that is great for the social media platforms, it’s not so great for your family. And it’s definitely not great for your mental health.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email:DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

Don’t be sad. Don’t be delusional. Adjust. Accept. Appreciate. Because, as Lindbergh perfectly puts it, “in our breathless attempts we…miss the flowering that waits for afternoon.”✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email:DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

If we want kids who know their own space, know what’s appropriate and what isn’t, what will hurt other people and what brings a smile to someone’s face, then we’re going to have to show them. ✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email:DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

If the Stoics have taught us anything it is that we should focus only on the things we can control. We can control what kind of parents we are. We cannot control the outcome of our actions, of course, but we can control how we talk to our kids, how we raise them, how we discipline and reward them, what we expect from them, and what they can expect from us.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email:DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

On this weekend episode of the Daily Dad Podcast, Ryan sits down with former actress and stoic Karen Duffy to discuss her latest book stoic inspired parenting book Wise Up  and the importance of valuing people and relationships. ✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email:DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

There are few scenes in literature that capture love and loss and the terrifying but also inspiring moment of becoming a father quite like the end of A Farewell to Arms. And nothing quite captures love like this quote from it:“When you love, you wish to do things for. You wish to sacrifice for. You wish to serve.”✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email:DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

It seems like it would be easy but as we have found out in the course of our own lives, it’s one of the hardest things in the world: Figuring out who you are, figuring out what your purpose is.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email:DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

You’re at the store and you see a parent talking rudely to their kids. Or letting them run around like it’s their house. You read some news story about some terrible parenting strategy that drives you nuts. Or maybe it’s closer to home and you don’t like how much time your spouse is spending on their phone.You know what you should do about this? You should focus on being a better parent yourself.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email:DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

It won’t be the recitals. Or the graduations. Or the expensive trips to theme parks. Or the birthdays or the Christmas mornings. When you think back on your life, the moments that fill you with nostalgia and love will be rather ordinary.We are just there. We don’t need it to be anything other than what it is…which is ordinary and extraordinary at the same time.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

Some people’s houses look like they don’t even have kids. You see it on the Instagram accounts of the picture-perfect influencers. Or you go to a dinner party at a house that seems way nicer than yours. Where is the evidence of the kids? The mess. The piles of toys. The smudges on the windows and the walls. You know these people have kids, but somehow it looks like regular people live there instead of feral animals.Maybe this makes those parents proud. Maybe this makes you jealous or insecure.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

On this weekend episode of the Daily Dad, Ryan sits down with writing partner Nils to talk about how parents can get things wrong when it comes to maintaining a relationship with their kids and how they can end up driving them away when all they want is their presence. ✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube 

It’s important that you teach your kids about gratitude. Because it’s so easy to take life, to take the gifts we have been given, for granted. Especially when we’re stressed, when you’re a kid with homework or acne or a room to clean.This is a wonderful time to be alive. Even if it wasn’t—it’s amazing that any of us are alive at all. The odds are astronomically small that we are.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

Regardless of what some people say, it never hurts to give your kids a positive word, or to tell them that you love them and are proud of them. In fact, that’s our job. Our job is to encourage and support and believe–not minimize or cut down to size. It’s to help them be what they are. They need that, from you most of all.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

Every parent knows that kids make a great excuse. When people ask us to do something we’d rather not do, if we need a way to get out of a commitment we mistakenly agreed to, we have the perfect out: Sorry, something came up with the kids. Sorry, I can’t, I have to grab the kids.If we’d actually wanted to, we’d have found a way. But they don’t know that!✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

This is that weird time of year where we start to think about how we want the following year to go. We start thinking about what we call “resolutions”—the promises we make to ourselves about what we’re going to do in the next 12 months.Why is it that we wait to demand the best for and of ourselves?✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

It can sometimes feel like everything is falling apart. No one is behaving. No one is listening. Everyone is yelling. Causing problems. Making messes.In exasperation you find yourself shouting What is going on? Why is everyone giving me such a hard time today?✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

Here on Christmas, and throughout this holiday season, take some time to think about what it will take to have that. Think about the choices you’re making with your kids now so that they’ll choose to fly from their homes to yours when they’re older and have families of their own. Think about the gifts you have to give them today—your love, your support, your presence—to receive the gift of a crowded table in the future.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

On this weekend episode of the Daily Dad Podcast Ryan shares a compilation of his best thoughts on how to form the best habits from this past year. Ranging from journaling, rules and expectations, and how to cultivate good physical and mental health, Ryan provides these excerpts to help prep you for what parenting in 2023 will bring you.  Sign Up For New Year New You Challenge Here!✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

When we think teacher, we think classroom. When we think leader, we think the corner office or the lectern or a general in front of their troops. But the truth is that a teacher can do their job anywhere and in many forms, just as a leader can.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

Nobody wants to be like their parents…or like the adults they remember growing up. The ones who were clueless…or uncool. The ones who seemed to forget what it was like to be a kid. The ones who rhapsodized about the good old days and the way things used to be.But here’s the cold hard truth: You’re not different.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

You weren’t the parent you wanted to be in 2022. You weren’t the person you wanted to be in 2022. Almost no one was. And anyone who thinks or says they were is lying.None of us were perfect. We all screwed up. We all back-slid. We all picked up bad habits. And as a parent, that means our kids picked up those bad habits too. Because, as we’ve said before, behavior is the language of children.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

Nobody’s listening. Everyone is grouchy. Grades are slipping. Siblings are fighting. What is happening, one spouse says to another. Why are the kids such a mess today?The answer is there in plain sight: The kids are a mess because *things are a mess.*✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

We encourage our children. We want to set them up to succeed. But we can’t merge their glory into our own. We can’t let them think they have to impress us, make us proud, or worry that they have let us down or failed us.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

On this weekend episode of the Daily Dad, Ryan speaks with Susan Cain about parental relationships, not just with their children but their own parents and how past grievances can influence your role as a guardian.Susan Cain is a long time friend of Ryan, she also is the author of the bestsellers “Quiet Power: The Secret Strengths of Introverted Kids,” and “Quiet: The Power of Introverts in A World That Can't Stop Talking,” which is in its eighth year on The New York Times bestseller list and was named the best book of 2012 by Fast Company.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

Way too many parents are competitive. They see the car their neighbor is driving and they want to get a better one. They hear that a friend’s kid got into a fancy school and they think, “My kid is smarter. I’ve got to get them in there too.” We want to make more money than other parents, we want our kids tobeat other kids in sports, we want our kids to be cuter than other kids, we want our houses to be cleaner.Needless to say, this is mostly toxic and negative. Where should we channel it?📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

Epictetus said that the root of beauty was beautiful choices. “If your choices are beautiful,” he said, “so too will you be.”It’s simple and it’s true. You are what your choices make you, nothing more and nothing less.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

We’re rightfully disappointed when we hear about a kid getting caught cheating. Whether it’s on a test or a violation of some NCAA policy, it’s good that we take these things seriously. The problem, of course, is the lack of self-awareness–on our parts. We must ask ourselves where did they learn this from?✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

We all know how hard our home life is, we know how it affects us–weighing on us, distracting us, making us act out. Well, we can safely assume that the same is true for everyone else. So we should then act with the corresponding empathy and understanding.Everyone is going through something. They don’t need more crap from you.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

It’s a haunting thought that, in the busyness and day-to-dayness of parenting, we can so easily forget the little things. The chubby hands of our toddler. The squeaky voice of our teenager. The clear skin of our little boy or girl. The days when we could easily pick them up and carry them. The days when they needed us to drive them around or make their Halloween costumes.That will soon be gone.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

On this weekend episode of the Daily Dad Podcast, Ryan talks to Steven Rinella about his new book Outdoor Kids in an Inside World: Getting Your Family Out of the House and Radically Engaged with Nature (which you can pick up at the Painted Porch), making sure your kids aren't spending too much time on screens, and how to find the right balance between pursuing your purpose and spending time with family. Steven is a conservationist and host of his own show MeatEater. ✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

It’s a story as old as fatherhood itself. The son or daughter kills themselves to win the approval of their dad, which never seems to come. There is pain, resentment, bewilderment. I have worked so hard to make you proud, am I just not enough? Only at the end, or after the parent’s death, is it revealed: The child had the thing they wanted all along. They just never knew.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

You’re just trying to keep them safe. You’re just trying to help them. You’re just trying to look out for them. So you say or scream or text.Be careful!But you know what you’re really doing?✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

One thing that hits you from the very first moments of being a parent is the noise. Your children come out screaming and they don’t stop. It makes you realize how quiet life was before—a quiet you will never know again, except for those few odd hours in a hotel room on a business trip and the precious evening hours between their bedtime and yours.  However, we must hear every one of these wonderful sounds. We must appreciate what each one represents and says to us. We must listen to them.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

You work hard. It keeps you busy. You are trying to provide for a family after all–to keep them safe and secure, so they never have to want or go without. That’s why you come home late, after they’re all asleep. That’s what has you rising early and heading to the airport, before anyone has stirred.It’s beautiful. It’s inspiring. It’s your job. It’s also sad. Very sad. And very easily the sign of something very broken.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

It’s not easy, this thing we’re trying to do. You’d think it would be: Billions of people have done it through history and the survival of our genes literally depends on it…yet here we are struggling. In need of all the help we can get.Today, we wanted to put together a list of stuff that has been of use to us here at Daily Dad over the years. Some books. Some items to carry with you or to keep on your desk. Some make for great holiday gifts. Some you might want to share with new or expecting parents.Check them out…and share them if they work.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

On this weekend episode of the Daily Dad Ryan compiles advice from his Daily Dad newsletter, podcasts, and interviews to share a highlight reel of  5 Parenting Don'ts. ✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

The Stoics remind us not only to focus on what’s in our control, but specifically in regards to aggravating people, they tell us that the best revenge is to not be like them. Don’t be angry. Live well. Don’t get sucked into a negative world, commit more deeply to a positive world that you do control–the one you live in with your family. The one where your children will not exist forever—so enjoy it now while you can.Put that energy where it counts. Put it where it makes you better.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

We’ve said before: kids do well when they can. When you give them the opportunity, kids generally do the right thing. You don’t have to scream. You don’t have to force them to do their homework. You just have to give them the opportunity to show you they know what’s right…sometimes they just need one more chance to get there.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

When our kids mess up we say: Aren’t you a little old for that? And we have all sorts of rules of thumb for what things are age appropriate or not—what age they should stop having accidents, what age they should stop throwing a tantrum just because they’re tired, what age it stops being okay for other people to have to pick up after them.You’re too old to act this way. It’s time to grow up.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

It’s strange. The things we’re upset about–with our spouses, with our children, with our siblings. They feel like they matter so much in the moment. With time or distance though, these feelings always fade. And what’s left when we’ve acted on them? When we let them get the better of us in the moment? Sheepishness. Regret. Damage that cannot be undone.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

It’s the moment we dread. Our son is dating someone we know is bad for them. Our daughter is about to change college majors and throw away years of work. Our toddler has started biting or hitting or shouting some curse words.We have to think about correcting behavior as nudging our children, not forcing them. We have to persuade, not overpower.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

On this weekend episode of The Daily Dad Ryan talks about being an "activity addict" and how he and his wife balance knowing when it's time to just rest. ✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

You want to raise kids who aren’t entitled. Who are self-sufficient. Who are decent and kind, part of the solutions not the problems of the world and of their generation. Successful or struggling, you want your kids to be generous. With their time, with their money, with their talents. Rather than let the Black Friday spirit of materialism and selfishness infect us, let us contribute to something bigger than ourselves. Let us be good Stoics today, just head over to dailystoic.com/feeding—together we can contribute a small amount to help fight a big problem.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

Today and always we should be grateful. To choose resentment or envy, bitterness or fear, anxiety or anger–because your flight was delayed? Because your band teacher is a jerk? Because your marriage fell apart? This is to spit in the face of so many people who have so much less.Gratitude, always. That is the way.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTubeWe are thankful today and every day for all of you. Thank you for being a part of the Daily Dad community!

Pretty much every parent wants to raise kids who turn out to be good people. So it's important to show them that moral excellence is what matters. That being a good person is not just what you pay lip service to, but what you are always thinking about.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

We sweat so much. Whether we’re on our phone too much, when we could (and should) be playing with our kids. Whether their lunch yesterday was perfect. Whether we attend every dance recital and graduation. Whether we’re doing enough. Whether they’ll hate us forever for not letting them go to this school trip or that sleepover. Whether they’re scarred forever because we lost our temper or forgot something they needed or couldn’t afford something they wanted because everyone else has one.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

Your son failed a test. He hit his brother. Your daughter forgot to do her homework. She scratched your car and lied about it. They are acting insane and you need it to stop. You just desperately want them to grasp the stakes of what’s happening.So you yell. You threaten timeout. You threaten to ground them. You don’t hold back. But it doesn’t work. Of course, it doesn’t work.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

On this weekend episode of The Daily Dad Ryan riffs about how he handled his kids outgrowing their stroller and his clever way to get them excited about exercising. ✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

As it happens, this is good advice for fathers as well. It’s easy to go into it thinking that you know. Because you’ve read the books. Because you’re on your third kid now and have it handled. Because you and your spouse have a plan for how to do it all right. And then guess what? Unavoidable reality quickly humbles anyone with this kind of certainty.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

Across cultures, across generations, across politics and moments in time, this having kids thing–it just cuts through everything. You probably know very little about the Easter Uprising in Ireland. You don’t have to know who Michael Mallin was. You don’t have to know what motivated him to join an armed revolution against the British. You don’t have to know what he did as one of its leaders.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

You’re pretty sure you know what’s best for your kids. You’re sure something they are considering is a bad idea. You’re sure they shouldn’t drop out of school. You’re sure they shouldn’t hang out with that kid. You’re sure they should take this job instead of that one. And usually you’re right. Usually, you know better.But do you know best? Really? How can you be so sure?✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

It can feel like there is never enough time as a parent. And it’s true, there isn’t…yet part of this is our fault. As Seneca would say, it’s not just that life is short, it's that we waste a lot of it.As parents we have to look for opportunities to save time…so we can spend more of it with the people we love.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

We’ve said before that parenting is a grind. It’s exhausting. It can all seem so humdrum, even a burden. Staying up with an overtired toddler. Staying up until curfew to check on a teenager. There will come a time that you’ll look back on even the most difficult moments of this journey and be nostalgic for it.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

On this weekend episode of the Daily Dad, Ryan recaps his trip to Disneyland with his family and how he was able to teach his kids about the importance of gratitude. ✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

It’s interesting to think about the steady decline in expectations for our kids when it comes to reading. Sure, we want them to be able to read earlier than ever, but what about what they read?✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

You wouldn’t think of Meditations by Marcus Aurelius as a parenting book.The former Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao said all entrepreneurs, economists and politicians should read Meditations (and several American presidents have too). General James Mattis said every soldier should read Meditations. Actors recommend it to others in show business. Athletes recommend it to others in sports. Writers recommend it to other writers. Founders recommend it to others setting out to start a business.But every parent should read it too.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

This seems like such a fraught moment in time. There was a pandemic. There’s been civil unrest. It feels like institutions are falling apart. Naturally, this scares us as parents. We’d like to look at the world before us is with fear and anger. But there's another way: gratitude, and determination.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

Today is Election Day in America (and countries all over the world will have theirs sometime soon). If you don’t vote, if you can’t be bothered to participate, then how can you say you really want your kids to have a better life? How can you really say you’d do anything to protect them?Do this for them. It’s literally the least you can do.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

Each of us goes into this with opinions–so many opinions. Not just about parenting but about other parents. Parents who let their kids have lots of screentime. Parents of kids with “ADHD.” Divorced parents. Parents who ply their kids with soda and sugary cereals to get them to behave. Because we think we know better, or at least we’re confident that we know “the right way” to do things.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

Ryan talks about a recent chaotic travel week when he was reminded about how easily life can take you away from what actually matters.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com Check out the Daily Dad Store https://store.dailydad.com 📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

You’re not a babysitter. You’re not some lesser figure in your kids’ lives. When you are with them—and when you are not with them—you’re their father. That matters. It’s an important job, one that you should take seriously and never demean (and not let others demean, either). You’re doing it because you love it, because you get something out of it, and you know what kind of impact it has.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

The famous screenwriter’s maxim is “show don’t tell.” Marcus Aurelius said it’s a waste of time to speculate or argue about what makes a good man, a good athlete, a good teammate, a good parent. Our job, he said, was to be one. We can have great conversations. We can give them a great lecture. But what matters is what we model.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

Not every parent is a public figure, but each of us are constrained by the same amount of finite energy. And it could be argued that in a world of social media, we do have a presence on platforms with the potential to expose us to endless amounts of people who disagree or dislike us.The question is: Are you going to get bogged down by this or ignore it?✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

It’s impossible to do this all, isn’t it? We have all the tasks, responsibilities, and aspirations we’ve always had–eating and sleeping and working and paying our taxes and taking out the trash and following our dreams–but now we have little people to care for on top of all that. Little helpless people with infinite needs. How can we do it all?✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

Michael Lewis tells the story of a coach named Jack Kenney who changed his life. One morning at an overnight tennis camp, all the campers stormed the dining hall to try to get their favorite box of cereal. The options ranged from Froot Loops every kid likes to the dark bran stuff no kid likes.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

On this weekend's episode of Daily Dad Ryan chats with his writing partner Nils Parker about different parenting topics and how to respond to outsider opinions and parenting expectations. ✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

The great physicist Richard Feynman had a father who instilled his brilliant son with an interesting perspective about the world. Sitting down, he would lay the newspaper out on the table and ask his boy questions about what they saw and read. Once, when they came upon a photo of the Pope blessing a group of believers, Richard’s father asked his son if he knew the difference between the Pope and his followers. And then, before Richard could answer, he said, “The difference is the hat. He is wearing a hat.” His dad would repeat the same exercise whether it was a photo of a general with stars on their collar or a wealthy executive with an expensive suit.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

Your job is to be a fan of your kids. We’ve said this before. Your job is to help them become who they are. We’ve said that too. Your job is to help them find “their project,” their “life’s task.” We’ve said all that, and hopefully you’ve gotten the message.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

We talked recently about this choice we have as parents–about what we choose to see. Just like everyone has the choice to see the cup as half full or half empty, as parents we have a lot of power over the lens that we bring to each parenting situation, each crisis, each potential frustration.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

Any parent can tell you, the maddest they ever got at your kids is not because they did something to pissed you off or hurt your feelings. It was because they scared you. By running away in a parking lot. By getting caught with some dangerous drugs. By not coming home at curfew. By playing with something you told them they could never touch without an adult present.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

We must take two seemingly contradictory facts seriously at the same time. The first is that many parents are way too risk averse, overwhelmed by anxieties and worries about incredibly rare or unlikely dangers. The second is that, to paraphrase the writer Morgan Housel, things that never happen, happen all the time.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

On this weekend's episode Ryan shares his youngest son's reaction to his book making the New York Times Best Seller list, diving into what kids truly care about when it comes to your role as a parent.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

We live in a world awash with ego. We see it every day. We can see the ego of our boss, and how it has turned the office against them. We can see ego in politicians and professional athletes. We can see it in our kid’s teacher, perhaps, when they get in some pissing match with another parent or are threatened by a precious student. As they get older, we can even see ego in our own kids—thinking they can ace a test without studying or advance in sports without practicing.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

In 2021, in the midst of a terrible storm that not only killed hundreds of Texans but left millions without power, U.S. Senator Ted Cruz fled the state for the warmer weather of Mexico. It was, of course, a shameful abdication of leadership and responsibility that surprised absolutely no one who knows anything about Ted Cruz, especially members of his own party. If that wasn’t enough, Cruz would then break another cardinal rule of parenting: He threw his kids under the bus, trying to make the whole thing sound like it was his young daughters’ idea.📕 Ryan Holiday's new book "Discipline Is Destiny" is out now! We’ve extended the pre-order bonuses for the next week—among them is a signed and numbered page from the original manuscript of the book. You can learn more about those and how to receive them over at Dailystoic.com/preorder. ✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

We would love for our kids to be perfect. To not just be born with ten fingers and ten toes, but flawless genetics and impeccable luck so nothing bad ever happens to them, so they are never sick and never in pain. However, the inevitable is true: everyone has something.  📕 Ryan Holiday's new book "Discipline Is Destiny" is out now! We’ve extended the pre-order bonuses for the next week—among them is a signed and numbered page from the original manuscript of the book. You can learn more about those and how to receive them over at Dailystoic.com/preorder. ✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

The story of George Washington and the cherry tree is not a true one. It is also, as we’ve written here before, not a story whose moral is about lying. It’s actually about the complex relationship between a parent and a child, one where the child trusts the parent enough to tell the truth, even when they have done wrong, and a parent who respects their child enough not to punish this kind of honesty.📕 Ryan Holiday's new book "Discipline Is Destiny" is out now! We’ve extended the pre-order bonuses for the next week—among them is a signed and numbered page from the original manuscript of the book. You can learn more about those and how to receive them over at Dailystoic.com/preorder. ✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

There’s so much we don’t control as parents. We don’t control what’s happening in the world. We don’t control what our kids are going through. We don’t even really control what they do–not as much as we’d like to think anyway. But the one thing we do control, the Stoics would say, is how we choose to look at things. We choose what handle we grab in each situation, the story we tell ourselves about it.📕 Ryan Holiday's new book "Discipline Is Destiny" is out now! We’ve extended the pre-order bonuses for the next week—among them is a signed and numbered page from the original manuscript of the book. You can learn more about those and how to receive them over at Dailystoic.com/preorder. ✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

Daily Dad on Staying Present with the Kids When Traveling for WorkRyan talks to his friend and writing partner Nils Parker about the impact traveling for work can have on the relationship with your kids and spouse. ✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com Check out the Daily Dad Store https://store.dailydad.com 📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

Ted Williams was not a good father—at least not for most of his life. He was a great baseball player, but for a long time, he was a really selfish and ruthless person. He came from a horrible, abusive childhood himself and struggled to find the ability to love and care about anyone, including himself. It was like his own childhood prepared him to be a kind of lone wolf, a machine designed to do one thing really well (and caring about other people was not that thing).📕 Ryan Holiday's new book "Discipline Is Destiny" is out now! We’ve extended the pre-order bonuses for the next week—among them is a signed and numbered page from the original manuscript of the book. You can learn more about those and how to receive them over at Dailystoic.com/preorder. ✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

📕 Ryan Holiday's new book "Discipline Is Destiny" is out now! We’ve extended the pre-order bonuses for the next week—among them is a signed and numbered page from the original manuscript of the book. You can learn more about those and how to receive them over at Dailystoic.com/preorder. ✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTubeWe do all sorts of things for our kids. We make grand gestures and do small favors. We clothe them and make sure their favorite pants are clean for Spirit Day. We feed them and make sure their favorite snack is in their lunch box. We get up in the middle of the night to go pick them up if they call, and we stay up into the night when they don’t. We’d sell our kidney if they needed it, and we’ll mortgage our house for their college tuition.

By now you might have already seen the viral obituary that a son published in Jacksonville, FL earlier this summer. “Lawrence H Pfaff Sr. was born in Belmont, NY, on April 16, 1941,” it reads. “He passed away on June 27, 2022, living a long life, much longer than he deserved.” The searing obituary goes on to describe a philanderer, a liar, a flake, a disgraced cop, a narcissist, an abusive drunk, and an absentee father.📕 Ryan Holiday's new book "Discipline Is Destiny" is out now! We’ve extended the pre-order bonuses for the next week—among them is a signed and numbered page from the original manuscript of the book. You can learn more about those and how to receive them over at Dailystoic.com/preorder. ✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

Kids are curious. Most adults aren’t. How does that happen? Most kids stop being curious because the adults around them weren’t curious. The trait wasn’t encouraged…so it disappeared.📕 Ryan Holiday's new book "Discipline Is Destiny" is out now! We’ve extended the pre-order bonuses for the next week—among them is a signed and numbered page from the original manuscript of the book. You can learn more about those and how to receive them over at Dailystoic.com/preorder. ✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

Yes, it is terribly difficult. And stressful. And expensive. And overwhelming–physically, emotionally, even sonically. Noises. Demands. Unfixable problems. Not nearly enough sleep.📕 Ryan Holiday's new book "Discipline Is Destiny" is out now! We’ve extended the pre-order bonuses for the next week—among them is a signed and numbered page from the original manuscript of the book. You can learn more about those and how to receive them over at Dailystoic.com/preorder. ✉️ Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email at https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail📱 Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, and Facebook 

On today’s episode of the podcast best selling author Robert Greene explains the importance of setting a good example for your kids. 📕Pre-order Ryan Holiday's new book "Discipline Is Destiny" and get exclusive pre-order bonuses at https://dailystoic.com/preorder ✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

Who among us is not insecure? We look around and see people who make more money. Who have bigger houses. Who have accomplished more than we have. This insecurity is compounded by social media, but it is also timeless. There’s a story that Julius Caesar once stood in front of a statue of Alexander the Great. At the age Caesar was at that moment, Alexander the Great had already conquered the world. By comparison, Caesar had done almost nothing.📕 Ryan Holiday's new book "Discipline Is Destiny" is out now! We’ve extended the pre-order bonuses for the next week—among them is a signed and numbered page from the original manuscript of the book. You can learn more about those and how to receive them over at Dailystoic.com/preorder. ✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

A young Kwame Onwuachi was cooking with his mother in their apartment in The Bronx when suddenly the apartment was overwhelmed by a strange smell. As he would write in his memoir, the, “thick fragrant smell of curry came on so strong both of us stopped what we were doing and looked up.” But it wasn’t actually the smell that he remembered. It was what his mother did next.📕 Ryan Holiday's new book "Discipline Is Destiny" is out now! We’ve extended the pre-order bonuses for the next week—among them is a signed and numbered page from the original manuscript of the book. You can learn more about those and how to receive them over at Dailystoic.com/preorder. ✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

All good things come to an end. The same goes for some things you might not think of as good. Your kids waking up in the middle of the night. The fights between siblings. The call from the police station about your teenager. The financial dependence.📕 Ryan Holiday's new book "Discipline Is Destiny" is out now! We’ve extended the pre-order bonuses for the next week—among them is a signed and numbered page from the original manuscript of the book. You can learn more about those and how to receive them over at Dailystoic.com/preorder. ✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

In the 1960s, the young poet Diane di Prima was at one of those legendary Beat parties that movies are made of. Everyone was there. There were drugs and ideas and romances. Jack Keroauc was there, holding court. And yet, di Prima got up to leave and go home early.📕 Ryan Holiday's new book "Discipline Is Destiny" is out now! We’ve extended the pre-order bonuses for the next week—among them is a signed and numbered page from the original manuscript of the book. You can learn more about those and how to receive them over at Dailystoic.com/preorder. ✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

📕 Ryan Holiday's new book "Discipline Is Destiny" is out now! We’ve extended the pre-order bonuses for the next week—among them is a signed and numbered page from the original manuscript of the book. You can learn more about those and how to receive them over at Dailystoic.com/preorder. ✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

On today’s episode of the podcast Ryan talks to author Austin Kleon about how to balance being creative with being a parent.📕Pre-order Ryan Holiday's new book "Discipline Is Destiny" and get exclusive pre-order bonuses at https://dailystoic.com/preorder ✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

📕 Ryan Holiday's new book "Discipline Is Destiny" is out now! We’ve extended the pre-order bonuses for the next week—among them is a signed and numbered page from the original manuscript of the book. You can learn more about those and how to receive them over at Dailystoic.com/preorder. ✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

📕 Ryan Holiday's new book "Discipline Is Destiny" is out now! We’ve extended the pre-order bonuses for the next week—among them is a signed and numbered page from the original manuscript of the book. You can learn more about those and how to receive them over at Dailystoic.com/preorder. ✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

📕 Ryan Holiday's new book "Discipline Is Destiny" is available now! We’ve extended the pre-order bonuses for the next week—among them is a signed and numbered page from the original manuscript of the book. You can learn more about those and how to receive them over at Dailystoic.com/preorder.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

📕 Ryan Holiday's new book "Discipline Is Destiny" is available now! We’ve extended the pre-order bonuses for the next week—among them is a signed and numbered page from the original manuscript of the book. You can learn more about those and how to receive them over at Dailystoic.com/preorder.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

📕Pre-order Ryan Holiday's new book "Discipline Is Destiny" and get exclusive pre-order bonuses at https://dailystoic.com/preorder ✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

Ryan talks to his friend and writing partner Nils Parker about the importance of personal awareness.Ritual is a multivitamin that delivers high quality nutrients, including Vitamin D3, in just 2 daily pills. Get key nutrients without the B.S. - Ritual is offering listeners 10% off during your first 3 months. Visit ritual.com/DAILYDAD to start your Ritual today.Hiya is the pediatrician-approved superpowered chewable vitamin created by two dads tired of children’s vitamins that cause more problems than they solve. Daily Dad listeners receive 50% off your first order. To claim this deal go to hiyahealth.com/DAILYDAD or enter code DAILYDAD at checkout.​​Melin is giving our an exclusive offer of 20% off your first order! Go to melin.com/DAILYDAD and use code DAILYDAD for 20% off If melin doesn’t become your new favorite hat, send it back for a full refund.LinkedIn Jobs helps you find the candidates you want to talk to, faster. Did you know every week, nearly 40 million job seekers visit LinkedIn? Post your job for free at LinkedIn.com/DAILYDAD📕Pre-order Ryan Holiday's new book "Discipline Is Destiny" and get exclusive pre-order bonuses at https://dailystoic.com/preorder ✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

📕Pre-order Ryan Holiday's new book "Discipline Is Destiny" and get exclusive pre-order bonuses at https://dailystoic.com/preorder Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

📕Pre-order Ryan Holiday's new book "Discipline Is Destiny" and get exclusive pre-order bonuses at https://dailystoic.com/preorder Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

📕Pre-order Ryan Holiday's new book "Discipline Is Destiny" and get exclusive pre-order bonuses at https://dailystoic.com/preorder Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

📕Pre-order Ryan Holiday's new book "Discipline Is Destiny" and get exclusive pre-order bonuses at https://dailystoic.com/preorder Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

Of course no one likes it when their children misbehave. Whether it’s the defiant toddler in the grocery store or the teenager speaking to you rudely, not only do we not like these behaviors, we take them as indictments of our capacity as parents. Clearly they don’t respect us. Clearly they don’t listen. Clearly we’re failing.📕Pre-order Ryan Holiday's new book "Discipline Is Destiny" and get exclusive pre-order bonuses at https://dailystoic.com/preorder Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

Ryan talks about the stresses of parenting and how to remain grateful for the time that you have with your kids.Ritual is a multivitamin that delivers high quality nutrients, including Vitamin D3, in just 2 daily pills. Get key nutrients without the B.S. - Ritual is offering listeners 10% off during your first 3 months. Visit ritual.com/DAILYDAD to start your Ritual today.Bespoke Post has a huge number of collections no matter what you’re into: the great outdoors, style, cooking, mixology, and more. Get 20% off your first monthly box when you sign up at boxofawesome.com and enter the code DAILYDAD at checkout.This episode is sponsored by BetterHELP. BetterHELP will assess your needs and match you with your own licensed professional therapist and you can start communicating in under 48 hours. Get 10% off your first month at betterhelp.com/dailydad📕Pre-order Ryan Holiday's new book "Discipline Is Destiny" and get exclusive pre-order bonuses at https://dailystoic.com/preorder ✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

📕Pre-order Ryan Holiday's new book "Discipline Is Destiny" and get exclusive pre-order bonuses at https://dailystoic.com/preorder Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

📕Pre-order Ryan Holiday's new book "Discipline Is Destiny" and get exclusive pre-order bonuses at https://dailystoic.com/preorder Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

📕Pre-order Ryan Holiday's new book "Discipline Is Destiny" and get exclusive pre-order bonuses at https://dailystoic.com/preorder Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

📕Pre-order Ryan Holiday's new book "Discipline Is Destiny" and get exclusive pre-order bonuses at https://dailystoic.com/preorder Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

📕Pre-order Ryan Holiday's new book "Discipline Is Destiny" and get exclusive pre-order bonuses at https://dailystoic.com/preorder Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

On this episode of the podcast Ryan reads his recent article about picking up trash on the beach and the reward that comes from it.Hiya is the pediatrician-approved superpowered chewable vitamin created by two dads tired of children’s vitamins that cause more problems than they solve. Daily Dad listeners receive 50% off your first order. To claim this deal go to hiyahealth.com/DAILYDAD or enter code DAILYDAD at checkout.Munk Pack makes the best Keto Granola Bars that contain just a single gram of sugar and 2 to 3 net carbs—and they’re only 140 calories. Get 20% off your first purchase of ANY Munk Pack product by visiting munkpack.com and entering our code DAILYDAD at checkout.Magic Spoon is an adult version of what you loved as a kid—without the sugar, carbs, or guilt. Go to magicspoon.com/DAILYDAD to grab a custom bundle of cereal and start your New Year off right! And be sure to use our promo code DAILYDAD at checkout to save five dollars off your order.📕Pre-order Ryan Holiday's new book "Discipline Is Destiny" and get exclusive pre-order bonuses at https://dailystoic.com/preorder ✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

📕Pre-order Ryan Holiday's new book "Discipline Is Destiny" and get exclusive pre-order bonuses at https://dailystoic.com/preorder Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

📕Pre-order Ryan Holiday's new book "Discipline Is Destiny" and get exclusive pre-order bonuses at https://dailystoic.com/preorder Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

📕Pre-order Ryan Holiday's new book "Discipline Is Destiny" and get exclusive pre-order bonuses at https://dailystoic.com/preorder Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

📕Pre-order Ryan Holiday's new book "Discipline Is Destiny" and get exclusive pre-order bonuses at https://dailystoic.com/preorder Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

📕Pre-order Ryan Holiday's new book "Discipline Is Destiny" and get exclusive pre-order bonuses at https://dailystoic.com/preorder  Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

Ryan talks to his friend and writing partner Nils Parker about the impact of consumer culture on family life.Munk Pack makes the best Keto Granola Bars that contain just a single gram of sugar and 2 to 3 net carbs—and they’re only 140 calories. Get 20% off your first purchase of ANY Munk Pack product by visiting munkpack.com and entering our code DAILYDAD at checkout.Bespoke Post has a huge number of collections no matter what you’re into: the great outdoors, style, cooking, mixology, and more. Get 20% off your first monthly box when you sign up at boxofawesome.com and enter the code DAILYDAD at checkout.This episode is sponsored by BetterHELP. BetterHELP will assess your needs and match you with your own licensed professional therapist and you can start communicating in under 48 hours. Get 10% off your first month at betterhelp.com/dailydad📕Pre-order Ryan Holiday's new book "Discipline Is Destiny" and get exclusive pre-order bonuses at https://dailystoic.com/preorder ✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

Munk Pack makes the best Keto Granola Bars that contain just a single gram of sugar and 2 to 3 net carbs—and they’re only 140 calories. Get 20% off your first purchase of ANY Munk Pack product by visiting munkpack.com and entering our code DAILYDAD at checkout.📕Pre-order Ryan Holiday's new book "Discipline Is Destiny" and get exclusive pre-order bonuses at https://dailystoic.com/preorder Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

📕Pre-order Ryan Holiday's new book "Discipline Is Destiny" and get exclusive pre-order bonuses at https://dailystoic.com/preorder Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

📕Pre-order Ryan Holiday's new book "Discipline Is Destiny" and get exclusive pre-order bonuses at https://dailystoic.com/preorderAthletic Greens is going to give you a FREE 1 year supply of immune-supporting Vitamin D AND 5 FREE travel packs with your first purchase. All you have to do is visit athleticgreens.com/DAILYDAD. Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

📕Pre-order Ryan Holiday's new book "Discipline Is Destiny" and get exclusive pre-order bonuses at https://dailystoic.com/preorder Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

📕Pre-order Ryan Holiday's new book "Discipline Is Destiny" and get exclusive pre-order bonuses at https://dailystoic.com/preorder Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

Ryan talks about the vacation that he and his family recently went on in Florida, the protective measures that you should take to make sure your kids are safe, and more.Hiya is the pediatrician-approved superpowered chewable vitamin created by two dads tired of children’s vitamins that cause more problems than they solve. Daily Dad listeners receive 50% off your first order. To claim this deal go to hiyahealth.com/DAILYDAD or enter code DAILYDAD at checkout.Munk Pack makes the best Keto Granola Bars that contain just a single gram of sugar and 2 to 3 net carbs—and they’re only 140 calories. Get 20% off your first purchase of ANY Munk Pack product by visiting munkpack.com and entering our code DAILYDAD at checkout.Athletic Greens is going to give you a FREE 1 year supply of immune-supporting Vitamin D AND 5 FREE travel packs with your first purchase. All you have to do is visit athleticgreens.com/DAILYDAD.Ritual is a multivitamin that delivers high quality nutrients, including Vitamin D3, in just 2 daily pills. Get key nutrients without the B.S. - Ritual is offering listeners 10% off during your first 3 months. Visit ritual.com/DAILYDAD to start your Ritual today.Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.comFollow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

LinkedIn Jobs helps you find the candidates you want to talk to, faster. Did you know every week, nearly 40 million job seekers visit LinkedIn? Post your job for free at LinkedIn.com/DAILYDADSign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

Munk Pack makes the best Keto Granola Bars that contain just a single gram of sugar and 2 to 3 net carbs—and they’re only 140 calories. Get 20% off your first purchase of ANY Munk Pack product by visiting munkpack.com and entering our code DAILYDAD at checkout.Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

Bespoke Post has a huge number of collections no matter what you’re into: the great outdoors, style, cooking, mixology, and more. Get 20% off your first monthly box when you sign up at boxofawesome.com and enter the code DAILYDAD at checkout.Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

Ryan talks to his friend and writing partner Nils Parker about the vulnerabilities that parenting opens you up to.Pair Eyewear’s base frame and magnetic top frame combination makes it easy to switch up your style. Go to paireyewear.com/DAILYDAD for 15% off your first purchase.Munk Pack makes the best Keto Granola Bars that contain just a single gram of sugar and 2 to 3 net carbs—and they’re only 140 calories. Get 20% off your first purchase of ANY Munk Pack product by visiting munkpack.com and entering our code DAILYDAD at checkout.Bespoke Post has a huge number of collections no matter what you’re into: the great outdoors, style, cooking, mixology, and more. Get 20% off your first monthly box when you sign up at boxofawesome.com and enter the code DAILYDAD at checkout.LinkedIn Jobs helps you find the candidates you want to talk to, faster. Did you know every week, nearly 40 million job seekers visit LinkedIn? Post your job for free at LinkedIn.com/DAILYDADSign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.comFollow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube