The Daily Dad

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They’re Doing What They Do Jan 12, 2024

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The late Paul Woodruff told a wonderful story in his episode on the Daily Stoic podcast. Before he died, he loved birdwatching and had a bird feeder in his backyard. But the squirrels kept stealing the birdseed he was putting out. This was frustrating and annoying and he found himself growing angry.

But then he remembered a passage from Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations about how we should accept when things are doing what their nature demands. The squirrels were not trying to give Paul a hard time, they did not mean any harm. The squirrels were simply doing what they do. They were doing what their nature demanded.

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Help Them Become Who They Are Jan 11, 2024

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Bruce Springsteen has three children: Evan, Jessica, and Sam. One of them is an Olympic-level equestrian (which can not have been a cheap or easy interest to encourage, nor always a fun one to watch). His son, Sam, recently became a New Jersey firefighter (a scary thought for any parent). Clearly, Bruce and his wife Patti have figured out how to help their children become who they are, and to realize their potential.

“I wanted them to see people that did a lot of other things,” Bruce once said in an interview, “be around people who would shape them and they would have a lot of options.” Perhaps his inclination to encourage them to pursue their dreams comes from his own experience. In his autobiography, Springsteen takes us back to when he was 7 years old and watched the controversial rockstar Elvis Presley’s appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show. When Elvis walked off the stage, “I sat there transfixed in front of the television set, my mind on fire. I had the same two arms, two legs, two eyes; I looked hideous but I’d figure that part out… so what was missing? THE GUITAR! The next day I convinced my mom to take me to Diehl’s Music on South Street in Freehold. There, with no money to spend, we rented a guitar.”

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What Are You Playing For? Jan 10, 2024

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It can be hard in the moment to think of anything else. You have lunches to make. Practices to get to. Birthday parties to plan. Work to do. Childhoods to survive.

Having kids is so overwhelming that your ability to conceive of two weeks from now, let alone the future, is severely compromised. This isn’t entirely a bad thing—it’s good to be in the moment, to not get too far ahead of yourself.

But at the same time, you do need to make sure that you consider more than just this moment.

The baseball player Anthony Rendon has talked about how he’s needed to balance optimizing not just for his professional career but his goals as a parent. “Even if the season doesn’t work out or the next four years don’t work out,” he said recently, “I’m planning for taking care of my kids when they get older. Hip surgeries, wrist surgeries, ankle surgeries … I want to play with them when they are 10, 12, 15 years old.”
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Rich Is How Much You Get To See Your Kids Jan 09, 2024

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There are lots of different trappings of wealth. A big house. A nice car. Exotic vacations. First-class flights? Private flights? Not everyone can afford these things. In fact, that’s sort of the point—they are considered fancy and elite because of how elusive they are.

But is this really wealth? Or is this just materialism?

On Christmas (and it’s the Dec 25th entry in *The Daily Da*d book, too), we quoted Paul Orfalea, the billionaire founder of Kinkos, who defined ‘success’ as having kids who come home for the holidays. He was saying that there are lots of wealthy people out there who don’t have that, who are estranged from their family. But what’s interesting about this idea is that it is largely focused on where you and your kids end up later in life, when they have a choice about how much they see you.
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Don’t Send Them In Defenseless Jan 08, 2024

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Your kids are going to face stuff in life. Big stuff for sure–failing tests, being made fun of, getting fired, losing something important to them. We may wish we could prevent that from happening, but we can’t. We teach them resilience instead.

But our kids are also going to face little situations too. The TV is going to have to be turned off at some point, and they’re not going to like it. They’re going to have to get up early for school tomorrow. Their routines are going to change. They’re going to have to try new things. They’re going to be out of their comfort zone.

This is going to bring up strong emotions: Frustration. Fear. Anger. Annoyance. Sadness.

The answer to this is also resilience, but in a more specific way. Dr. Becky talks about this in her fantastic book Good Inside, referring to a strategy she calls “emotional vaccination.”
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Ryan Holiday And Dr. Becky Kennedy On Emotional Vaccination (PT 1) Jan 06, 2024

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On this weekend episode of the Daily Dad Podcast, Ryan talks with clinical psychologist Dr. Becky Kennedy on how we emotionally vaccinate, the ability to cope through stress, educating our kids on emotions and her new book Good Inside

Dr. Becky Kennedy is an American clinical psychologist who is founder and chief executive officer of the Good Inside company, an online parenting advice service. She has been called the "millennial parent whisperer" by Time Magazine and is a number one New York Times bestseller for her book Good Inside. As a mom of three, when she was first starting out, she practiced a popular behavior-first, reward-and-punishment model of parent coaching. But, after a while, something struck her: those methods feel awful–for kids and parents. She put together everything she knew about attachment, mindfulness, emotion regulation, and internal family systems theory, and translated those ideas into a new method for working with parents.

www.GoodInside.com

IG: (drbeckyatgoodinside)

Podcast: Good Inside with Dr. Becky

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Show Them What They’ll Get Out Of This Jan 05, 2024

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Most schools and most parents teach reading all wrong. They bully kids into doing it. They pressure them. They tell them, “Reading is what smart and successful people do.” Then they’re surprised when kids who struggled with reading don’t think they’re smart, and they wonder why kids almost wear illiteracy as a badge of honor. They wonder why people say things like, “I haven’t read a book since I was forced to in high school.”

No, the way to teach a kid to read is not to talk about how wonderful literature is and force them to read fancy or pretentious novels. You teach a kid to love books by—as the great lover of books Robert Greene has said—appealing to their self-interest. *Show them what they will get out of books.*Tangibly. Immediately. Show them that quote from Warren Buffet, where he says the single best investment he ever made was buying a copy of Benjamin Graham’s The Intelligent Investor.
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This Is What We Have To Try To Get Better At Jan 04, 2024

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We spend so much time at the office, trying to get better at our jobs, trying to make a little more money, trying to climb further up the ladder. We spend hours in the gym over the course of a life, trying to get into better shape, trying to hit personal records. We spend mountains of time online, trying to help our fantasy football teams, trying to find discount codes to save money shopping, trying to stay abreast of our friends’ and families’ lives (or so we tell ourselves).
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You Have To Know How These Things Land Jan 03, 2024

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It doesn’t feel like they listen. In fact, we have pretty visible evidence that they don’t. We tell them not to do this or that and then we watch them do that exact thing. We warn them, remind them, advise them…and then they come to us crying or complaining or in trouble, having heeded none of that guidance.

So you can be forgiven for missing the fact that not only are they listening to what you say, but that your words have an enormous effect on them. So much so that you have to really, really be careful.

Think about your own life. Are there not things that your parents said that still weigh on you? The way your father would call you lazy. The comments your mother made about food or your weight. The way they would tease you. The things they said about your grades. The tone they used when they were disappointed or angry.
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This is What It Costs Jan 02, 2024

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We’ve been quoting recently from the old children’s story The Velveteen Rabbit, about a toy that’s so loved by a young boy that it becomes real. This is a great metaphor for parenting in a way. Because that’s what’s happening to us. We made a decision to have kids many years ago and then for years that decision works on us, shaping, changing, transforming us. No part of that is more powerful than the love and energy of our children—whose joy, whose innocence, whose pain, whose growth is working on us always…even as it takes so much out of us.
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