The Daily Dad

General Jim Mattis has talked about his idyllic childhood in Pullman, Washington. There he spent time outdoors, explored, got in trouble, and had an all-American childhood. He talks lovingly of a house filled with books—as we’ve said, a house without books is not a home —and parents who not only encouraged their children to read them, but questioned and interacted with them.  “They introduced us t...

Nobody wants to see their kid make a mistake. That’s why we spend so much time teaching them right and wrong, why we try to be a good example , why we try to catch and stop them when we see them going down the wrong path.  Since the beginning of time fathers have been doing this...and since the beginning of time have had, at best, only minimal success. In the novel Siddhartha , the title character...

Do you know the story of the 300 Spartans? Maybe you do. It was first immortalized by Herodotus, and then has been passed down through the ages from Simonides to Plutarch. Most recently, it was the basis for the awesome Zack Snyder movie by the same name, and Steven Pressfield’s beautiful novel, Gates of Fire .  If you don’t know the story, here’s what happens: the Ancient Greek King Leonidas led...

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.   All lies. All excuses. All holding the potential to cause terrible pain In his beautiful and vulnerable memoir ,...

Douglas MacArthur was a complicated man . He was ambitious. He was vain. He made many mistakes. It’s very unlikely that he was a perfect father. In fact, it’d be incredible if he had been, given his demanding, seemingly perfect father (a Civil War hero) and controlling, overly involved mother (who was actively involved in her son’s career up until her death in 1935).  But it is surprising that, gi...

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 adv...

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...

Ernest Hemingway was not a great husband or, as often as he should have been, a great father. He had four wives, at least one affair, and was often absent in his family’s life, preferring to spend his time when not writing on big-game hunting, deep sea fishing, bullfighting, and so on. But he was a great writer and a great observer of the human condition. There are few scenes in literature that ca...

In early January, Kobe Bryant got a note from a reporter at ESPN. She was working on a story about a moment in Lakers’ history and she wanted to feature Kobe in the story. It’s one of those requests that public figures get all the time. It’s part of their job—in fact, it’s kind of one of the things that attracted them to the job in the first place. To be in the news, to have people want to hear th...

There is a type of parent out there. Career-wise, they are killing it. They have a good marriage to an income-earning spouse and together they make good money. They live in a great neighborhood in an awesome house. They have good educations. They have smart kids. They go on nice vacations.  And yet, they are constantly worried. Worried about money. About whether their kids will get into the right...

If you ever hear yourself uttering these words, “How could you have been so stupid?” to your kids—because they just got escorted home by a police officer, because they lost that expensive iPad you gave them, because whatever... Here’s an answer: The same way you were so stupid when you were their age. Think about all the dumb stuff you did when you were 10. Or 15. Or 30. Or yesterday. How could yo...

Dr. Edith Enger’s son was born with athetoid cerebral palsy. A diagnosis like this would be scary whenever one gets it, but getting it decades ago was scarier still. Dr. Enger (then not a doctor) and her immigrant husband, who had both survived the Holocaust, were frustrated and confused and overwhelmed.  One day, at a visit to the doctor’s office, Edith Enger expressed some of these fears and wor...

Your kids should be grateful. Not to you and mom, of course, you’re just doing your job. You’re legally and biologically obligated. Your kids should be grateful for everything. We all should be. 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.  So it’s important that you teach your kids about gratit...

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 w...

There is so much to do. Your kids have to be dressed. They have to eat. They have go to school. They have to do well in school. They’ll need jobs. They’ll need to figure out finding a home, finding a spouse, navigating the difficulties of the world.  There is so much to do...and they are so bad at all of it. So where does a parent draw the line? How do you know where to help, what to handle for th...

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 to beat other kids in sports, we want our kids to be cuter than other kids, we want our house...

A few weeks ago, there was a fascinating piece about the controversial NFL receiver Antonio Brown . Of course, anything about Antonio Brown is fascinating—his behavior in the last several months has cost him something like $40M in guaranteed money and taken the best wide receiver in the game out of the game, possibly forever.  But what’s worth taking note of in this piece, for any dad or stepdad,...

The writer Thomas Sowell once noted, sardonically, how sad it is that editions of Frederick Douglass’s memoirs , when provided for high school students, were forced to provide annotated definitions of many words. What does it say, he asked, that a slave in the 1800s was able—under the penalty of severe violence—to teach himself a vocabulary that privileged high school students cannot manage after...

In 2009, after winning two National Championships as the head coach of the Florida Gators football team, Urban Meyer stunned the nation by announcing his retirement. The self-admitted workaholic, Meyer made the decision to step down due to a health scare. He woke up in the middle of the night with severe chest pains, lost consciousness, and was rushed to a hospital in an ambulance.  He said that w...

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. This was Claudia Williams...

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. But...

Pretty much every parent wants to raise kids who turn out to be good people. Almost no father thinks: I’d love for my son to be rich, but awful. Or I’d love for my daughter to be famous, but vapid and cruel. It’s a given.  And yet, when you look at most of what we do and say as parents, especially as our kids get older, it’s clear that what we’re actually encouraging and incentivizing is for our k...

One of the things Napoleon advised his generals against was “forming a picture” of the battle. What he meant was that your preconceived notions, your predictions, were a dangerous liability in something as fluid and fast-paced as a battle.  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 t...

Rules and regulations are important. A child needs to learn what behaviors are acceptable and which ones are not. They need structure and guidance. They need to learn about responsibility and accountability; about how actions have consequences; about respecting authority.  Sensible, hardset rules can help with a lot of those things. But arbitrary rules that we make up simply for our own convenienc...

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?  Not long ago, kids were taught Latin and Greek so they could read the classics...in their original languages. Think of Aesop’s Fables . Think of children being read Plutarch’s Lives by their parents. This...