In one of F. Scott Fitzerald’s funniest short stories, “ Head and Shoulders, ” a certifiable genius falls in love with a showgirl. The plot and moral of the story aren’t relevant for today’s email—though the story is highly recommended—instead there is a little passage in it that introduces a concept that is worth thinking about: ✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com 📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter , Instagram , Facebook , YouTube...
“Your kids are not keeping score on your career. They just want a parent who’s emotionally present and supportive of them.” -Ben Stiller David Letterman was the king of late night. His shows ran for thirty-three seasons, making him the longest-serving late-night talk show host in the history of American television. At its peak, he was making something like $30 million a year, watched by an audience of many millions every week. ✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com 📱 Follow Daily Dad:...
There is a joke about a kid who, not liking the ‘No’ he got from one parent, asked the other, in order to get a ‘Yes.’ “Never come between your mother and I,” the father says, “we sleep in the same bed together.” ✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com 📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter , Instagram , Facebook , YouTube...
We spend a lot of time looking at the absolute worst parents. Not just because so many leaders and celebrities and artists seem to put their families absolutely last in order to achieve their success, but also because artistically, flawed and tragic figures quite naturally fill up the most pages and screentime. As Tolstoy opens Anna Karenina , all happy families resemble each other but unhappy families are unhappy in their own way. ✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com 📱 Follow Daily...
Of course, this parenting thing is hard . It’s expensive. It’s an enormous amount of work and responsibility. And yet, we are the luckiest people in the world, aren’t we? Not just because, as we’ve said before , it took a black swan of black swans for any of us to be here, for us to even have our kids (especially those parents who struggled with fertility or adoption). We have been given an incredible gift with this opportunity to be parents. ✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com 📱 F...
On this weekend episode of the Daily Dad, Ryan sits down with author Amy Morin in talks on how to find agency in your everyday life, overcoming mentally challenging situations by gaining perspective, and the cost of success when it comes to parenthood. ✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com 📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter , Instagram , Facebook , YouTube...
Relationships are tricky. Especially the ones we have built the modern world around. Monogamous. Long term. An equal partner in parenting and in professional pursuits. Oh and our partner is supposed to be our best friend too. It’s a lot to ask of someone. Harder still when you throw in the craziness of kids and the current state of the world. But you deserve a partner like that, and they deserve a partner like you. We deserve happiness and fulfillment and love, together. ✉️ Sign up for the Daily...
“As we bring up our children, we have to remember that we are caretakers of the future. By improving their education, we improve the future of mankind, the future of this world.” -Immanuel Kant Adam’s father wanted nothing but for his son to go to college. John Adams wanted to do anything but go to school. He often skipped class to go fishing or hunting or to fly his kite. He didn’t like his teachers. He didn’t think he was learning anything useful. He had no interest in furthering his education...
We all know that confidence is important. Most of us wish we had more of it. We spend a lot of time trying to build it up in our kids . By encouraging them. By reassuring them. By seeking out activities that will develop it in them. ✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com 📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter , Instagram , Facebook , YouTube...
We say we’d do anything for our family. We’d like to think if we were tested, if we had to make some terrible choice, if it really was a matter of life and death, or if we were struggling to subsist, we’d come through. Would we though? ✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com 📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter , Instagram , Facebook , YouTube...
As a society, we have very attuned ears for what words are offensive. There are words that religious people find offensive. There are the words that collectively we have decided are hurtful…as well as the words various groups are trying to get people to understand are potentially hurtful. ✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com 📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter , Instagram , Facebook , YouTube...
Ryan talks about being role models to our kids by showing respect, dignity and empathy for others aside from our personal opinions. ✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com 📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter , Instagram , Facebook , YouTube
It can be easy to question your parenting. To feel like you’re not doing good enough, that you’re not nearly enough. You see what other parents are doing, or hear what other fathers say they are doing, and it can seem like you’re the worst parent ever: The food you give them isn’t healthy enough, their education isn’t good enough, you’re not patient enough, you’re not dedicated enough. ✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com 📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter , Instagram , Facebook , YouTube...
The odds of any of this happening is literally incomprehensible. Some scientists have estimated that the chances of any one person being born are somewhere in the realm of one in four hundred trillion. ✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com 📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter , Instagram , Facebook , YouTube...
Everyone says that becoming a parent changes you . The responsibility. The stress . The unconditional love. The cuteness. This is big stuff. But as the comedian Tom Segura observes in one of his great Netflix specials, it’s wrong to say that it changes people–that’s just not the right language. It’s that having kids should change you. If it doesn’t he says, if you’re still the same person? If you have the same routines, the same behaviors , the same priorities afterwards? That’s a big problem! Y...
There’s so much we have to teach our kids . How to tie their shoes. How to drive. How to do math. How to throw a football and hit a baseball. How to put up and down the toilet seat. How to clean up after themselves. These are the practical skills of life. But they are worthless without other intangible personality traits–the ones we’ve talked so much about here: Kindness . Self-discipline . Work ethic . And most of all, courage . ✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com 📱 Follow Daily D...
It’s good that your kids participate in sports. It gives them confidence . It keeps them active. It shows them the value of teamwork. It gives them the thrill of victory. These are all things we hope they’ll carry with them in life. That was Theodore Roosevelt’s view. He loved “manly sports.” Football. Wrestling. He took his kids, as we’ve said , on daily adventures, on long hikes and through obstacle courses, coming up with contests to keep it all competitive. ✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email...
Ryan talks about the highs and lows of parenting and how to remain grateful for the time that you have with your kids. ✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com 📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter , Instagram , Facebook , YouTube
Have you ever heard your kids say something that just stops you cold? One of those remarks that instinctually makes you do a double take? It can be an unexpected curse word, or some preposterous old-timey expression, or one of those heartbreakingly earnest statements about love or happiness. ✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com 📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter , Instagram , Facebook , YouTube...
Eva Amurri had a privileged childhood. Her mother is movie star Susan Sarandon, and her father is Italian director Franco Amurri. She spent her early days on the sets of blockbuster movies. She got to travel to beautiful places. She never had to want anything that could be bought with money. ✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com 📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter , Instagram , Facebook , YouTube...
Early in his career, the neuroscientist Andrew Huberman worked mostly in isolation. In his lab, he kept a list of the scientists he loved and admired. “I would read that list over and over,” he said. “I didn’t realize it at the time, but this is what is called introjection.” ✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com 📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter , Instagram , Facebook , YouTube...
One of the great things about kids is that they keep you on your toes. Not just because you have to worry about them all the time , but because they give you so many more things to notice. As we talked about a long time ago , if you have a son that likes helicopters or a daughter that’s obsessed with birds, there’s suddenly a reason for you to be a lot more aware as you go through the world. There’s stuff for you to look for, to point to, stuff that you would ordinarily have a kind of adult’s bl...
There’s a meme that features the characters from the movie The Sandlot that says “At some point in your childhood, you and your friends went outside to play together for the last time, and nobody knew it.” It’s not a quote that’s actually in the movie, but a line parents should understand just as well as their kids. ✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com 📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter , Instagram , Facebook , YouTube...
Ryan talks to his friend and writing partner Nils Parker about the fine line between setting boundaries and getting upset about trivial things. ✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com Check out the Daily Dad Store https://store.dailydad.com 📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter , Instagram , Facebook , YouTube...
In 1982-83, Jim Valvano coached the North Carolina State basketball team to a National Championship title. The Wolfpack was a mid-ranked team that entered the NCAA tournament looking like anything but a title contender. It was improbable that they’d win their first two games, and even if they did, no one in the world would have put even a dollar on them upsetting #2 ranked Virginia. No one, except Coach Valvano. He believed he and his guys could do it. Even when his guys didn’t. ✉️ Sign up for t...
We’ve talked before about Jimmy Carter’s father. James Sr. was a flawed man, to be sure. He was strict and stern, often unaware of the way he loomed over his quiet, bookish son. The elder Carter was a figure of old time values –hard work, stoicism , decency–as well as old time vices– a smoker , a racist. He was also capable of moments of great kindness and he put his son on a straight and narrow path that the boy is still walking nearly 100 years later . ✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: Daily...
Sure, it’s a trend these days that parents are overprotective. We’ve got helicopter parents and snowplow parents and risk averse, paranoid parents. This is true and it harms kids . But you know what’s responsible for way more harm to kids? Parents who aren’t thinking about this stuff at all. Parents who don’t take basic safety precautions because they’re either not aware or not clued into very real, very common worst case scenarios. ✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com 📱 Follow Dail...
In the classic novel, Bright Lights Big City by Jay McInerney the narrator flashes back to the scene of his mother’s deathbed. Battling cancer, aware the end is near, she takes just enough pain medication to be uninhibited but still lucid. The walls between parent and child fall away. They talk openly of the things they never managed to broach in life without embarrassment. They talk about sex. They talk about love. They talk about their fears and worries. They shared their insecurities, their f...
You do many things for your children because you love them. You work hard to provide for them. You manage their education. You teach them the things they’ll need to know in life. You protect them–from others and themselves. ✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com 📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter , Instagram , Facebook , YouTube...
Ryan talks about the stresses of parenting and how to remain grateful for the time that you have with your kids. ✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com Check out the Daily Dad Store https://store.dailydad.com 📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter , Instagram , Facebook , YouTube...
