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Ryan and Sam Holiday talk about the tips that they gave to Whitney Cummings as she has her first kid.  ✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com 📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube   

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Ryan and Sam Holiday talk about what would have actually prepared them for having children. ✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com 📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube   

So why on earth do we so often signal the opposite? Literally and figuratively, we send the message that they’re bothering us, that they’re a distraction, a burden, annoying. As Evelyn McDonnell writes in her fascinating book The World According to Joan Didion, Didion’s daughter Quintana Roo once wrote down a list of her mother’s sayings. They were: “Brush your teeth,” “Brush your hair,” and “Shush, I'm working.” Only later do we realize what we’re saying to them—as Didion did tragically in...

Being a kid is tough. It’s tough because they’re learning—often by painful trial and error—an endless number of lessons about life. What they’re allowed to do and not. What happens when you touch something hot. How other people act. What feels good and what doesn’t. Plus they’re also in school learning academic knowledge too—math and science and reading and history. Well, here’s a piece of advice from the great Dr. Becky (from her amazing book Good Inside) that we can translate to our kids,...

We have so many things we need to do as parents. There’s the logistics of it. The survival aspect of it (food and shelter). There’s the education we have to give them. There’s the experiences we want them to have. There’s the values and character we know need to be instilled. We’re not trying to raise well-behaved kids. **As we’ve said before, we’re not trying to raise kids at all. The whole point of parenting is to raise our kids into adults, it’s trying to raise these little people into...

It’s important that we look for examples of people who have done great things as a result of their parent’s ability to believe in them, support them, and make them feel secure. We’ve talked about Jim Valvano many times here and tell the story in Daily Dad about how his dad packed his bags and told his son he was ready to watch him coach in the Final Four. We posted a great video of the comedian Andrew Schultz recently. Andrew told his father that his dream was to perform at Madison Square...

“Connection first,” is Dr. Becky’s advice in Good Inside. Connection as opposed to shame, to criticism, to questions, to doubt, to consequences. There will be time for all that (except shame) later. “Now, to be clear,” Dr. Becky writes, “connection does not mean approval…Connection is an opening that allows for movement. Connection is when we show our kids, ‘It’s okay to be you right now. Even when you’re struggling, it’s okay to be you. I am here with you, as you are.’”  Let’s start by...

On this episode of the Daily Dad Podcast, Ryan Holiday and his wife Samantha dive into the nuanced art of raising well-adjusted adults rather than merely well-behaved children. Drawing from their own experiences as parents, they emphasize the importance of fostering independence, resilience, and critical thinking skills in young minds.  ✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com  📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

As Claire Tomalin writes in her book Jane Austen: A Life, we can trace the beginnings of Jane Austen’s greatness to her father’s library. “Their father’s bookshelves were of primary importance in fostering her talent,” she writes, “given that the first impulse to write stories comes from being entertained and excited by other people’s.” And her father had quite a library, **some 500 volumes. It’s a crime, we’ve said, to raise a kid in a house without books. Our job is to surround our kids...

All that did happen. It shouldn’t have. It’s not ok that it did. But before you do anything, can you try this? Can you say to yourself, as Dr. Becky writes in Good Inside (a great book!), “Ok, one second. Let me take a breath. Let me see if I understand what’s happening here…” In a sense, can you be a Stoic about it? Can you put your first impressions to the test, as Epictetus tells us, not be overwhelmed by the moment, as Marcus Aurelius said, and see what’s really happening? Because what’s...

It doesn’t matter how driven you were. It doesn’t matter how much money is on the table. Having kids humbles you. We said recently that having kids changes you because it brings you up close and personal with something that actually means something and all your other worldly stuff naturally pales somewhat in comparison. As the writer Stephen Marche describes (he has a great little book on writing and life), “the physical changes that occasionally transpire with women after birth—eczema...

Why is your house so stressful? Why is everything such a fight? It doesn’t need to be. Sure, school is important. Rules and respect and basic cleanliness matter. But these things aren’t that important. Indeed, most conflicts that pop up while getting ready for school or sitting down to dinner or finishing household tasks aren’t that important. Here’s a magical phrase worth thinking about as a parent. It’s from that great Lionel Richie song (and Faith No More cover): Easy like Sunday...

It had been a long day. He was tired. He just wanted his teenage step-daughter Tegan, from the indie pop duo Tegan and Sara, to stop blasting the same album over and over. Besides, he hated Nirvana, which was just then about the biggest band in the world. So he told her to turn it off. He told her the music was driving him insane. He was well within his rights…up until the point that he made a joke about Kurt Cobain’s sexuality. He should have known better. As Tegan explains in her...

On this episode of the Daily Dad podcast, best-selling author and renowned stoic philosopher, Ryan Holiday, shares an insightful and heartwarming story about a profound parenting conversation he had with a driver on his way to the San Diego airport. In this engaging narrative, Holiday reflects on the importance of being your child's biggest fan.  ✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com  📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube   

“This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/dailydad and get on your way to being your best self.” Dr. Becky (read Good Inside already!) says she tries to repeat it to get kids as often as possible: “You’re the only one in your body, so only you could know what you like.”  She probably repeats it as much for her kid’s benefit as theirs. Because of course, they know what they like. The problem is that we tend to assume that we know better. And how...

There’s a story about Queen Elizabeth, told in Discipline is Destiny. After a long day of travel with her late husband, Prince Philip, the Queen found him worked up and in an argument with someone who was organizing an event.  What wouldn’t have worked in that situation with Prince Philip was the Queen coming over and telling him to get control of himself. It wouldn’t have helped for her to come in and pile on or take over the situation either. He was stuck in a loop, and she helped pull him...

“This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/dailydad and get on your way to being your best self.” In his fantastic book Outlive, Peter Attia (we carry the book at The Painted Porch and did a fantastic 2-hour interview with him on the Daily Stoic podcast) looks at this idea literally and figuratively. Will you want to be able to go skiing with your adult children? Will you want to be able to travel to see your grandkids? Will you want to live long...

As she writes her memoir Suffragette, these incidents illustrate to her “the fact that the impressions of childhood often have more to do with character and future conduct than heredity or education. I tell it also to show that my development into an advocate of militancy was largely a sympathetic process.” The lesson, which we built the whole first month of The Daily Dad book around, is a simple one: Children learn by example. It doesn’t matter so much what adults tell them, what ideology...