The Daily Dad

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This Is the Main Lesson Apr 24, 2020

Show notes

"There is so much we want to teach our kids—so much that fathers are expected to teach their kids. How to ride a bike. How to swim. How to throw a punch. How to tie a tie. How to read. How to get up the guts to talk to someone.

All of this is important, of course. All of this must be done.

But there is a lesson underneath all these lessons that matters more."
Find out the lesson in this week's episode of the Daily Dad podcast.
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Character Is Fate. Never Forget That. Apr 23, 2020

Show notes

"These are challenging, uncertain times, no question. What’s at the root of it? How did we get here? And what can fathers do about it?
The answer comes to us, as it often does, from an ancient prescription: Character is fate."
Listen to learn more about why character is so important in raising your children into amazing adults—and how to do it.
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How Will You Use This Time? Apr 22, 2020

Show notes

"Right now, most of us are stuck with what you might call dead time. We’re trapped indoors. We’re working from home… or not at all. Kids are out of school, and who knows when it will be back in. We’re in the snow day of all snow days, except we can’t go outside and take advantage of the time off because the snow might make us all sick."
What ways can you convert this experience, from "dead time" that leaves you no better off than you were before, to "alive time" that enriches your life and helps the best version of you leave quarantine for the final time, however many months in the future that may be?
***
If you enjoyed this week’s podcast, we’d love for you to leave a review on Apple Podcasts. It helps with our visibility, and the more people listen to the podcast, the more we can invest into it and make it even better.

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You Have To Treat Them The Same Apr 21, 2020

Show notes

"Does your dog’s gender matter to you? Like have you ever once thought about whether they were capable of this task or that task because of their sex? Has your understanding of their gender changed how you play with them? Do you think about whether to get them this toy or that toy based on its color? Or its name?"
Ryan discusses how you should treat your child depending on their gender, i.e. exactly the same.
***
If you enjoyed this week’s podcast, we’d love for you to leave a review on Apple Podcasts. It helps with our visibility, and the more people listen to the podcast, the more we can invest into it and make it even better.

Follow Ryan:

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Never Make Fun Of Them For This Apr 20, 2020

Show notes

Your kids will do all sorts of ridiculous things. They will trip and fall, and yes, you will sometimes laugh. You will tease them about this and that. They’ll make hilarious mistakes. They’ll look back on their own childish ridiculousness with bemusement. Your family will have all sorts of inside jokes. This is fine. This is wonderful.

It’s what binds people together—the ability to bust each other’s balls, to share memories and experiences.

But there is one thing you should not tease your kids about, as the now famous (anonymous quote) goes: “Never make fun of someone if they mispronounce a word. It means they learned it by reading.”
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They Must Learn How To Compete Apr 17, 2020

Show notes

It wasn’t until many years into his coaching career that Pete Carroll really settled into his philosophy—the system by which he built his teams, and his athletes around. It seems simple but it’s actually a profound one. As he describes it: Always compete. Compete.

Isn’t that what sports are about? Where’s the innovation there?

According to Carroll, competition isn’t about beating someone or something. It isn’t some contest between two opposing individuals, groups, or teams. It isn’t a zero-sum game. It isn’t something you do on Sundays. Competition, Carroll says, is all about doing your best. It’s striving to reach your potential. It’s focusing on doing “things better than they have ever been done before.” That’s the mentality a competitor approaches every day with: Am I better today than I was yesterday? Yes? Then I won.

Your job as a dad—whether you coach one of their teams or not, whether they play sports or not—is to help instill this mindset in your kids. They have to learn how to compete. Every day. In everything. We’ve talked about Jeannie Gaffigan and her husband Jim, how they started competing as parents, seeing who could get the kids to bed fastest, or get up earliest to make breakfast. We’ve talked about how your kids will rise to the level of your expectations—and that’s true for their expectations of themselves too.

No one gets better just because. Getting better takes work. Improvement requires drive. Winning requires competing. Well, are you teaching them that? More importantly, are you modeling that?

Kids need opportunities to compete. They need contests to better themselves in—whether it’s trying to memorize every state capitol faster than they did yesterday or running across the yard more times than they did last time. They need to grow up in a house where everyone is trying to grow somehow, in something. Where everyone is expected to perform at their best.

If you can make that happen, they’ll be a winner.

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You Must Find The Stillness Apr 16, 2020

Show notes

This change we’ve made, this decision to become dads—it has uprooted everything. It’s like we were hit, suddenly, with a crossfire hurricane. The house is a mess. The schedule is grueling. There is never enough sleep, never enough time in the day.

Even the cool, quiet dark is pierced by the shriek of a man who has stepped on a pile of Legos… and the shriek is coming from your mouth. Yet to be good at our jobs, to be good at this fatherhood thing, we need stillness. We need time to reflect. We need focus. We need calm to restore and reboot us.

Where will we find it? It won’t be, as Seneca and Marcus Aurelius remind us, in fleeing to the country or to the sea. It won’t be those measly two weeks of vacation or by cutting and running. No, we must find the stillness within the chaos. It might not feel like these moments of quiet can exist with all the crying babies or arguing teenagers, but they can.

We must go within. We must find it, early in the morning before the house is awake. We must drink in those minutes after the kids are in bed—really drink it in, don’t defer it in favor of Netflix. We must take time with a journal. We must enjoy that cute, but preposterously slow, walk from school to the car, or from the car back into the house. Soak up the garbage time. Soak up the quiet. Store these moments in your soul so you can have them always.

You must find the stillness. So much depends on it.

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Why Don’t You Know? Apr 15, 2020

Show notes

By now, you’ve almost certainly lost count of how many questions you’ve been asked by your kids. From the moment they can talk, that’s what fatherhood is—answering questions. Some you can’t wait for them to ask, some you hope they’ll never ask (or ask their mom), some so absurdly, brilliantly child-like you never could have guessed they were coming in a million years.

Samuel Edison, the father of Thomas Edison, once remarked of his son—who few thought was a genius as a child—that Thomas was “forever asking me questions and when I would tell him I didn’t know, he would say, “Why don’t you know?”

Out of the mouths of babes. What a perfect indictment expressed so innocently. Your kid is 5. Or 13. Or 30. But you’re much older. It makes sense that they don’t know things. But you? You don’t have an excuse! Too many of us let our curiosity atrophy as we get older—we close our minds the minute we close our last textbooks. Kids are a great reminder that our learning should never cease, that we should never be satisfied not knowing the answers to things—or at the very least knowing where to find the answers.

If we want our kids to have an “everything is figureoutable” mentality, we’re going to have to model it ourselves. We have to show them that we’re curious, that our education is still ongoing, that we’re constantly questioning and discovering and exploring too.

Why don’t you know? There’s no good answer. So keep learning. Keep thinking. Ask yourself that question. If you want to raise a “why child” you’re going to need to be a “why adult.”

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It’s Your Fault They’re This Way Apr 14, 2020

Show notes

F. Scott Fitzgerald knew the long term damage of being spoiled rotten. Not only was he a prime and painful example himself—as we’ve written about—but as he observed and studied the rich men and women of the Jazz Age, he saw how indulgent people quickly became the “careless” monsters that he portrayed in The Great Gatsby.

In Fitzgerald’s stories, the rich are always expecting life to be easy, expecting their money to exempt them from consequences; they’re selfish, naive, insufferable, and superficial. As the subjects of his stories, this makes them fascinating heroes and anti-heroes, but Fitzgerald also wanted us to know who the real villains were: the parents and the families that raised them. As he depicts in one memorable exchange in The Offshore Pirate, a story about a young, beautiful girl who refused to listen to her guardians:

“You’ve grown unbearable! Your disposition—”

“You’ve made me that way! No child ever had a bad disposition unless it’s her family’s fault! Whatever I am, you did it.”

This truth applies to all of us, not just fathers and families whose incomes put them in the 1%. We must blame ourselves or no one, remember? If our kid’s not a hard worker, that’s on us. If our kid’s a bully or acts like they have an advanced degree from “dick school,” that’s on us. If our kid has an attitude or gets into trouble, that’s on us. They’re kids. It’s our fault for not teaching them better… and it’s even less excusable if we throw up our hands and say, “That’s just the way they turned out.”No, whatever they are, we did it. And it’s not too late to make improvements.

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They Need You To Be Calm Apr 13, 2020

Show notes

The world is a scary place right now. Your retirement accounts have taken enormous hits. Events are getting cancelled. Government officials are failing, publicly and embarrassingly, to protect us. Nobody knows quite what the next few weeks or months will look like.

But one thing that is certain? Your kids need you to be calm. They need this as much as they need anything right now. Because this wasn’t their fault. Because they haven’t been through stuff like this before. Because they are looking to you for guidance, for an example of how to be and behave.

If you’re freaking out, if you’re letting your anxiety run wild, what will they think? More importantly, how is that helping them in any way? People in the sway of their passions or fears don’t make good decisions. They don’t inspire confidence. They are not their best selves.

Well, this is a moment that requires the very best of you. It requires you conquering your fear, discarding your anxiety, and focusing on the task at hand. It requires you to truly be there for your kids. To make good decisions, in the calm and mild light of good philosophy. This is where you teach them what leadership and citizenship look like. This is where you teach them how to be strong and calm precisely when a situation most calls for it.

They need you to be calm. So step up.

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