The Daily Dad

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!...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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:...

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 📱...

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,...

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

This is just my personality, we say. I just don’t have any energy when I get home from work, we complain. I’m in a bad mood today, that’s all. My parents weren’t any different, and I turned out ok. It’s just a stressful period right now. They’re young, they won’t remember any of this. ✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com 📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

It can seem like parenting is a rather perilous thing, right? The statistics come at you like daggers to your heart–how many kids die each year in this kind of accident or that one, how many kids are injured doing this and that. The world feels so dangerous, so terrifying. ✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com 📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

It’s pretty widely agreed that too much of anything spoils a person. We read the cautionary tales of the rich families whose inheritance wrecks generations of offspring. We hear the sad stories of brothers and sisters torn apart trying to distribute their parents’ estate. Perhaps we look back on a childhood of our own, one where we wanted little in the material sense, but could have used a mom or a dad who was around more, who was tired less, who seemed to be so important to other people...