The Daily Dad

The ancient writer—and father— Plutarch tells us of a parenting strategy he discovered in the works of Plato . “Young people must be taught from childhood,” he said, “that it is not right to wear gold on their bodies or to possess it, since they have their own personal gold intermixed into their soul, hinting (I think) at the virtue that is part of human nature and received at birth.”  It’s a beau...

The late ESPN broadcaster—and father of two girls—Stuart Scott, was once sitting in a restaurant with some friends and their respective children. Everyone was having fun, and it was one of those delightful scenes where you see parents bonding with their kids. The kids were behaving. The dads were present. All was well. Until a mom walked by and, recognizing Scott, tried to pay him a compliment for...

Right now, you’re thinking about what all the other parents are doing. What schools they’re getting their kids into. What the best strollers are. You’re thinking about how to get them to do their homework or how to keep their rooms clean. How to manage your life and career and staying in shape. It’s overwhelming and you’re stressed. Every dad is.  So maybe it’s helpful to sit back and really think...

A couple weeks ago, we talked about the sobering exercise of trying to observe other people getting upset or losing their temper at their kids. Nothing wakes you up quite like catching a reflection of yourself in other people, especially when it comes to our anger problems. But this exercise of looking in the mirror through people-watching can be used to address other bad habits and parenting flaw...

We’ve talked before about David Epstein’s wonderful book  Range , which advises against premature specialization—in athletes, in kids, in intellectual development. It tends to be better, he writes, to pursue a wide variety of activities and build a base of competence than it is to be like Tiger Woods--or rather like Earl Woods--and dedicate yourself or your child to golf at two years old.   But it...

Ted Williams was not a good father . We’ve written about this before, but it bears restating for our purposes here that while he was the greatest hitter to ever play baseball, he was quite literally the opposite as a father, totally neglecting the responsibilities of being a dad...until eventually his hardened exterior cracked. With time, and mostly due to the persistent efforts of his children, h...

When you read parenting books, it’s hard not to get the distinct sense that there is a right way to parent. That being a dad (or a mom) means following a set of processes—backed up and confirmed by research—and that to do anything else is to deviate and fail. We think the same thing about teachers too: Here is how the best teachers operate, so be like that.  But the truth is that it’s all relative...

You’ve told them a million times. You told them why they need to study before their test, and they didn’t and they came home with a D. You told them about how their effort is the only thing they control in sports, and here they are, complaining—after refusing to take their training seriously—about why their friend gets more playing time. You’ve told them about manners. You’ve told them about not h...

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 on...

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 h...

Kids are crazy, right? When they’re hungry, they are rude and difficult to manage. They are demanding and seem incapable, most of the time, of doing anything for themselves. They are totally ungrateful for what people do for them. In fact, a lot of the time they are completely unaware that anyone exists in the world but themselves.  This is not new, obviously. In the 1600s, the French satirist Jea...

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....

We talked before about how MacArthur had a kind of scheduled morning craziness with his son Arthur, who would enter his room promptly at 7am and pummel his father awake. Then together they’d sing songs—old army songs Douglas had taught him—with Arthur still slurring his R’s—while dad shaved and got ready for work. As William Manchester observes in his amazing biography of the complicated man, MacA...

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 th...

If you haven’t seen the fascinating Netflix documentary about Rachel Dolezal, a troubled woman who pretended to be black when she’s actually white, you should. It’s not worth getting into the controversial racial issues that the documentary brings up, but it’s worth watching them in the documentary, since it shows them in all their very human complexity and contradiction. What is worth noting here...

You might not think of Tom Hanks as a father, but he is one. He had four kids, two from his first marriage, Colin and Elizabeth, and two from his second, Chet and Truman. You might not think of Tom Hanks as someone who messes up, or someone who would struggle at something as wholesome as being a dad, but again, you’d be wrong. A recent New York Times  profile spent some time talking with Hanks abo...

A while back, we talked over at Daily Stoic about one of Seneca’s remedies for a hot temper. Try to catch a glimpse of yourself in the mirror some time when you’re upset, he said, and you’ll be appalled at how you look. We talk about this exercise a bit in our course on anger , but the logic is worth considering for any dad. Anger might feel deserved or appropriate, but it almost always looks awfu...

One of the things you have trouble adjusting to when you first have kids is the crying. Not just because it’s loud, but because it feels like you’re being stabbed in the heart. We are not meant, evolutionarily, to be good at ignoring crying babies—especially ones we are related to. It provokes us in a very deep place, and that’s a good thing.  But, as they get older, you’ll have to learn how to ma...

It’s fitting that one of the most important things you can do as a parent would require you to think about a thing that’s very nearly impossible for a parent to even consider. It comes to us from Marcus Aurelius by way of Epictetus :  As you kiss your son good night, says Epictetus, whisper to yourself, “He may be dead in the morning.” Don’t tempt fate, you say. By talking about a natural event? I...

Douglas MacArthur was a man of routine, most military men are. So it shouldn’t surprise us that he built a family life around routine. But unlike far too many fathers who make routine a form of control, MacArthur’s morning routine was about fun—it was about starting the day off right. As the peerless William Manchester details in his book American Caesar , the morning time was one of the best time...

Cato the Younger was not an easy man to get to do something. If he felt it went against his conscience or that it was illogical, you’d have an easier time convincing a fish to climb a tree. That’s just how he was. All his life. So, as you can imagine, Cato was not an easy student. He resisted anyone and everyone who tried to tell him what to do. Plutarch, one of his biographers , observed that “to...

One of the best lines from Seneca is that while we can’t choose our parents, we do have the ability to choose whose children we will be. In ancient Rome this was even more true than it sounds, because it was common for people to be adopted into families. Seneca’s brother, Lucius Annaeus Novatus, for instance, was adopted by a man named Gallio, whose name he eventually took (and if that name sounds...

It’s a sad sight when you see a dad who has clearly stopped trying. He puts on weight. He checks out of his marriage . Maybe he starts drinking more. He resigns himself to the fact that he hates his job. He accepts whatever grades his kids bring home from school. He makes their behavior somebody else’s problem.  We see that dad and we think, “I never want to be that guy.” Good. Ok. But what steps...

It’s hard to picture Fred Rogers as a parent. Of course, we can easily recall him as Mr. Rogers, patiently and lovingly explaining things to generations of young viewers at home. But that was his work. Could he have really been like that at his home? Or was he much less perfect there—losing his temper, stressed about money, involved with himself? Obviously no one really knows the answer to this bu...

We’re always in a rush. We have to get them ready for school. We have to get them off to bed. We have to get to the airport. We have to get back inside. We have to finish up dinner.  We are, as parents, it seems, perpetually short of time and always eager to get to the next thing. But it’s worth stopping and thinking this morning, what we are actually rushing to and what we are rushing away from ....