The Daily Dad

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? Not failure, obviously, because you know that’s a part of life. Not suffering—within reason—because that too...

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, th...

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. There isn’t any child, boy or girl, at any age who won’t benefit from this wisdom.  If—  BY RUDYARD KIPLING If you c...

These are strange times to be a father . Fathers have never been expected to do more—around the house, in their children’s lives. This is wonderful. It’s also challenging and confusing because societal expectations and the actual process for preparing new dads for doing these things are not quite in alignment. At the same time, the word “masculine” is not indelibly connected to that idea of “toxic...

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. The point is, having Mom and Dad come stay with you is few people’s idea of a relaxing weekend. It’s stranger still once you have kids, because suddenly you start to see and think...

People are freaked out. Events are cancelled. Schools have been let out. You’re working from home, or, at least, not going out like you used to. Money is being lost. The elderly and vulnerable are at risk. We are seeing, laid bare, what incompetent leadership looks like...and how fragile our institutions are.  Is there any good that can come of this? On a large scale, no. But there is one silver l...

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.  Is the story true? Does it matter? George Washington knew this story—it was almost cert...

It’s in moments like these—a pandemic or a hurricane or a terrorist attack—that we fathers are thrown back into a more primal role. Yes, there are so many things we are expected to do as dads these days: Teaching them to love to learn . Teaching them how to be vulnerable and kind. Raising them to question things, to pursue mastery, to follow the four virtues .  All of these things are important… b...

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 co...

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.  Maybe we think this is what auth...

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.  As the person in charge, as the person who wants them to be successful in life, it may come to pass that you are...

There has never been a father—a good one anyway—that did not at least occasionally look at what was happening around them and question the world they were bringing up their kids in. This is worth remembering today, as you watch the news or the stock market, whether you’ve got adult kids or just found out you’re having your first. Yes, it looks scary out there...but it’s always been scary. Just thr...

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? The answers to these questions matter if, like a good dad, you want to be the kind of father who your kids turn to when they have a proble...

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 . As unlucky as Bruce was to be dealt that hand, he was also i...

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 tru...

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. But for whatever reason, this form of storytell...

When Kobe Byrant took off in his helicopter from downtown Los Angeles on January 26th, he was a 5 time NBA champion. He was a 2x Finals MVP. He was a 2x Olympic Gold Medalist. He had won an Emmy and was a New York Times bestselling author. He had earned hundreds of millions of dollars in his career and raised a venture capital fund of more than $100 million, with stakes in companies like Cholula H...

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.  You used to have so much more energy for your job, for your friends. You used to have time to do lots of things. And now it’s a real crapshoot whether you will get a shower in today...let alone keep up wit...

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.  What should you do? How can...

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: “I was a ‘why child. I wanted to see the wheels go around. My father...

We’ve all done it. It’s happened to almost all of us. We see a thing. We want to try it. It’s hard. And…we give up. Whether it’s karate, business, piano, reading, learning another language...every new skill has a “pain period” and, most of the time, we never get over it. Because we lack encouragement or any visible progress, we quit. In a way, this is a kind of costly cognitive error. In his book...

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.  But it’s i...

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.  Where did that come from, you think? Where did they hear that? Of course, you know. They heard it from you...

In his book, The Vanishing American Adult , 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.  Our kids go to school with other kids. We work with other adults. Our own parents and grandp...

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...