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.

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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! You’re doing something wrong!


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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.

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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.


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Ryan talks about the highs and lows of parenting and how to remain grateful for the time that you have with your kids.


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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.

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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.

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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.”

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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 blindness too.


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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.


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