Daily Dad

You must find the stillness.

As Longfellow wrote, Lives of the great men all around us We can make our lives sublime, And, departing, leave behind us Footprints on the sands of time

2026 plans: ambitious. Reality: kids sick, school closed, plans destroyed. Every family lives in a completely different universe. Parenting is chaos.

"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

Your story is the compass and the map to the journey that will lead them to realism, optimism, skepticism, cynicism, or fatalism. Which will it be?

Make sure they spend time around old people.

"How could youths learn to live than by at once trying the experiment of living? Methinks this would exercise their minds as much as mathematics" -Henry David Thoreau

Parenting experiment idea from @RyanHoliday Switch roles for a day. Track heart rate. Compare notes. You might think you’re better at what your partner does… until you actually do it.

Make books a central part of your house...and your lives.

"He who cannot put on ice should not enter into the heat of dispute." -Friedrich Nietzsche

practice walking away from conversations

Stop thinking about giving them all the answers and start thinking about stories to tell that make the answers self-evident.

Let them know about your battles.

Can you relate?

You make them tough by toughing things out, together.

Agree or disagree with this parenting advice?

Teach them that they decide the end of every story.

"There is a select group of writers who are accessible to anyone, at whatever age or stage of life-Homer, Shakespeare, Goethe, Balzac, Tolstoy-and then there are those whose significance is not properly revealed until a particular moment" -Stefan Zweig

Whatever your children's ages, you have to be ready to make adjustments.