The Daily Dad

We want our kids to read. We want them to read instead of watching so much TV or playing with the iPad. So we make up rules or create incentives to motivate them to pick up a book (I’ll give you a dollar for every book you finish this year).  What we don’t do enough is actually the easiest and clearest form of teaching: We don’t provide a good example. How often do your kids catch you reading? How...

Even if it wasn’t such a relief for overworked dads and moms, it’d hurt a little to think about how much our kids love their grandparents. It almost seems like they prefer grandma and grandpa sometimes, don’t they? Why is that? It’s pretty simple. Because grandparents have outgrown most of their baggage. They have let go. Even a lot of grandparents who were demanding and exacting parents seem to f...

You’ll hear other dads talk about the need for “quality time” with their kids. It’s sort of a strange phrase, if you think about it. Because it implies a kind of hierarchy of time that nobody has ever really bothered to define. There’s a judgement to it too, that maybe the time or experiences you—the busy, ordinary, doing-the-best-you-can dad—give your kids is not enough.  The comedian Jerry Seinf...

In her wonderful book On Looking , Alexandra Horowitz takes a series of walks in different environments. What does a geologist see on a city block? What does a naturalist see walking through a park? What does a dog see on a short walk around the block? But the most interesting walk was the one Alexandra took with her 19-month-old.  The idea was that she would take her young son and really try on h...

The economist Russ Roberts is a guy who understands how the world works. He knows about the laws of the economy and government. He knows about philosophy and he knows about history. He lives his life by a number of rules and rituals . He keeps Shabbat, for instance, and he commits to regularly tithing a portion of his income. He has another rule, specifically for dads, that is worth thinking about...

As we’ve said before, Seneca was a father and a father figure to many people. Even today, through his writing, he remains an inspiring, patient, and firm father figure through the advice he wrote thousands of years ago.  We don’t know what kind of father he was, but we can imagine that his kid (and the kids he tutored) were taught the lessons of sportsmanship, an essential skill for athletes and f...