The Daily Dad

These are the Cardinal Virtues, which Zeno laid down in the 3rd Century B.C. as:

Courage

Discipline

Justice

Wisdom

We need these virtues and we need to teach these virtues to our children. Their life…and the future hinges on it. So memorize these four virtues. Act on them. Live them. Parent by them. And keep them close to your heart always.

If you want to carry the Four Virtues around like a compass,, over at Daily Stoic, we created the Four Virtues Medallion.

INSERT 4V MEDALLION PIC

The front of the Four Virtues Medallion features a custom-designed seal with four elements representing the Four Virtues: a lion (Courage), a man sprinkling water into a jug of wine (Temperance), a set of scales (Justice), and an owl (Wisdom). On the back is an admonition not to exchange the Four Virtues for others—for there is no other set of virtues that will serve you better than these.

As with all our other coins, the Four Virtues Medallion is handcrafted in the United States by a custom mint operating in Minnesota since 1882. Each coin is shipped with an accompanying information card, explaining the Four Virtues to its fortunate recipient. Each coin has a unique finish and character.

✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com

📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

While on tour for his new book The Daily Dad: 366 Meditations on Parenting, Love, and Raising Great Kids, Ryan met up with his longtime friend and occasional running partner Casey Neistat for a live interview at Barnes & Noble in Union Square during which they shared the story of how they met, reflections and wisdom they have gleaned from their journeys through parenthood, the work and life habits that have led to their success, their advice for new parents, and more.

Casey Neistat is a YouTube personality, filmmaker, vlogger, the co-founder of the multimedia company Beme, and the founder of the creative and collaborative space for creators 368. His main body of work consists of dozens of short films he has released exclusively on the Internet, including regular contributions to the New York Times critically acclaimed Op-Doc series. His online films and videos have been viewed over three billion times. You can find his work on his website www.caseyneistat.com and on his social media channels: YouTube: CaseyNeistat, IG: @caseyneistat, Twitter: @Casey.

✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com

📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

“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.”

When our kids mess up we say: Aren’t you a little old for that? And we have all sorts of rules of thumb for what things are age appropriate or not—what age they should stop having accidents, what age they should stop throwing a tantrum just because they’re tired, what age it stops being okay for other people to have to pick up after them.

“We ought not willingly add to old age, which has many of its own problems, the shame of misbehaviors.” That’s Cato the Elder, who seems to have really lived up to that second part of his name.  You’re too old to act out. And even if you weren’t, remember your kids are always watching—a little fellow follows you—so act like the adult that they believe you are.

✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com

📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

There’s an interesting passage in Evelyn McDonnell’s fascinating biography of Joan Didion (who we have written about many times and we also just had Evelyn on the Daily Stoic podcast), that points out another about the difference between how the public saw Didion and her husband John Gregory Dunne, also a great and successful writer. One was clearly identified as a parent and the other was not, even though Dunne actually wrote a whole book about the topic! As we’ve said before, by talking about the joys and the struggles of parenting you are helping other parents. You are putting things out in the open.

✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com

📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

We all feel a little self-conscious about it. Our kids don’t behave as well as we’d like. They make a mess. They make an incredible amount of noise. Perhaps this is why we keep them at home, why we’re always apologizing, preparing people in advance for the hurricane that may or may not come through. Maybe some of us fear being overshadowed by our kids or judged for having them with us—that it will undermine our image as professionals.

Don’t apologize. Do your best to clean up, to teach them how to behave, but bring the brats with you. You won’t regret it in the long run…even if on occasion you do.

✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com

📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

“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.”

The great John Wooden would practice his team hard through the week. He’d run through the plans over and over and over again. Yet as they left the locker room and headed out onto the court for the game, he would say to the team, “Well, I’ve done my job.” He wasn’t going to be micromanaging them from the sideline. It was their turn to do their job.

And so it goes for us as parents. At some point, we have to leave them at the entrance to the school. At their job. With their own finances. With their own children. We can’t solve every problem. We can’t prevent everything from going wrong. That’s their job.

Jessica Lahey’s wonderful book The Gift of Failure (pick it up at The Painted Porch) reminds us that by not giving them this chance, by not letting them try and struggle to do their job, we’re actually harming them. We’re setting them up for more failure down the road…and less ability to deal with it.

Giving children the space to struggle because we believe in them, because we believe even more in what will come out the other side, isn’t always easy—for us or them. That’s why one side of our Luctor et Emergo medallion features the mantra, “good, not easy,” surrounded by three other reminders we parents need each day: “let them struggle,” “show them support,” “help them grow.” Get one to carry around with you at the Daily Dad Store today! 

✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com

📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The tantrum. The whining about going to school. The punch that’s thrown. The slipping grades. The sneaking out. The lie. The shouting. The moping around the house.

These are not things you like to see your kids do. Maybe these are things you’ve talked to them about before, maybe a million times. But maybe that’s the problem. You’re seeing the wrong thing. You’re talking about the wrong thing.

In her wonderful book Good Inside (yes, we love it), Dr. Becky Kennedy writes that “on the surface we see a behavior, but underneath we see a person.” We’ve said before that your kids are always talking to you—just not necessarily with words. “Throwing the cereal box wasn’t the main event,” Dr. Becky explains. “It was a window into the main event. Behavior, in all its forms, is a window: into the feelings, thoughts, urges, sensations, perceptions, and unmet needs of a person. Behavior is never “the story” **but rather it’s a clue to the bigger story begging to be addressed.”

What a wonderful gift it would be to your family, to everyone you met, if you could start seeing behavior not as a thing to be upset about but a window into how someone is doing, what is going on with them. We’ve said it many times—they’re telling you that they’re hungry, that they’re tired, that they’re scared, that they’re lonely, that they’re overwhelmed or stressed. But they don’t know how to say that…so they lash out, so they hide in their room, so they call you something mean.


✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com

📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

On this weekend episode of the Daily Dad,  Ryan talks to creator, author, designer, and the founder of ConvertKit Nathan Barry  on  having kids earlier in their career, their interest in farms and outdoors, and the process of Emotional Vaccination.

IG, and, X,

✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com 

📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

These are challenging, uncertain times, no question. What’s at the root of it? How did we get here? And what can fathers do about it?

The answer comes to us, as it often does, from an ancient prescription: Character is fate. Who a person is determines what will happen and what they can do. It should surprise no one that a culture that has put character at the absolute bottom of the list of requirements for its leaders—below whether they tell us what we want to hear, below how clever their tweets are, below how they look on television, below whether they’ll pass short-term measures that benefit us financially, below whether they belong to this party or that one—would find itself in crisis after crisis.

✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com

📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Rich is how much you get to see your kids, we said recently. We were redefining wealth away from material items and salary—although these things are nice as far as they go—and towards a thing that pretty much everyone wishes they had more of: time with the people you love most. 

Is it really a rich life if you are missing out on something so priceless? 

Perhaps it’s worth also taking a minute to do some similar considerations about power. There are the obvious trappings of power: The corner office. The gatekeepers. The influence you have over world events or an audience. The presidency. The title. 

✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com 

📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.