The Daily Dad

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 An...

“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 wh...

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...

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...

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 ov...

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...

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 pare...

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 jok...

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  ...

“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,...

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...

“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.” 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 adul...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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 g...

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 bu...

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 wh...

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 ,...

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...

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 childr...

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, overtu...

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,...