The Daily Dad

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...

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 , Faceboo...

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...

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 See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https...

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...

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 See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://...

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 See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do...

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 See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Pri...

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:...

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 In...

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 , Ins...

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: Daily...

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: Twitt...

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 See...

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: Dai...

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 See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com...

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...

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 See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Not...

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.co...

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 See Privacy Policy at https://art19.co...

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...

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 w...

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:...

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 See Privacy Policy at https://art...

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: Dail...