The Daily Dad

The career opportunities are hard to turn down. It’s hard in the moment, as we’ve talked about, to be able to think too far into the future. It’s hard to make much in the way of long term investments as a parent because you’re so overwhelmed by the responsibilities of the present.

But we have to remember what we’re after, we have to keep in perspective that this is a marathon we’ve signed up for. We quoted the baseball player Anthony Rendon recently about how he was having to weigh painful but career-elongating surgeries and the grind of continuing to play against the kind of shape he wants to be in as his kids get older and the kind of relationship he can have with them. “Right now, it looks like we are only playing for these next four years of baseball,” Rendon said, “but I’m trying to hang out with my kids for the rest of their lives.”

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You didn’t like rules when you were a kid. Your parents had too many. Your school was a prison of pointless, arbitrary ones—how you could dress, when you could go to the bathroom, how you had to hold the pencil.

So it makes sense that you’re averse to them now. It’s good that you question how many of them matter and don’t want to make the same mistakes as adults did in your own childhood.

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There are lots of ways to read, ways that have improved the experience and opened up the world of literature to people who otherwise would have missed out. Ebooks are awesome. Audiobooks are spectacular. 

They let you read anywhere. They let you read faster. They let you read while you’re multitasking. All from the convenience of a device in your pocket smaller than the smallest book. 

But that’s sort of the problem isn’t it? Your kids have no idea that that is what you’re using your phone for. To them, you could just as easily be on Twitter. You could be answering emails and working like you always do. You could be betting on sports. 

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You know your kids are good. You’ve seen their sweetness, their cuteness since the beginning. You’ve seen them try. You’ve seen them feel shame when they’ve messed up.

You also know how hard it is to be a person, let alone a kid, in this world. Life is frustrating. Life is tough. It’s full of temptations. It’s easy to make mistakes. It’s easy to get overwhelmed.

Dr. Becky Kennedy - Good Inside

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“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.”

How flexible you were then. How much energy you had. What you could eat without consequence. The innocence. The earnestness. The sweetness. You had it once and now, it’s gone, disappeared beneath the years and the experiences and everything else.

When Taylor Swift sang ‘being this young is art,’ she wasn’t talking about your kids, about kids generally, but she may as well have been. And it’s high time we appreciate it. Because it’s something special, something irreplaceable, something that one can only do for a short time, at a very specific time.

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On this weekend episode of the Daily Dad,  Ryan talks with his wife Samantha on Their word for 2024 being systems, designing the system around people instead of people around the system, and creating plans before they happen instead of during the chaos.

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The late Paul Woodruff told a wonderful story in his episode on the Daily Stoic podcast. Before he died, he loved birdwatching and had a bird feeder in his backyard. But the squirrels kept stealing the birdseed he was putting out. This was frustrating and annoying and he found himself growing angry.

But then he remembered a passage from Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations about how we should accept when things are doing what their nature demands. The squirrels were not trying to give Paul a hard time, they did not mean any harm. The squirrels were simply doing what they do. They were doing what their nature demanded.

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Bruce Springsteen has three children: Evan, Jessica, and Sam. One of them is an Olympic-level equestrian (which can not have been a cheap or easy interest to encourage, nor always a fun one to watch). His son, Sam, recently became a New Jersey firefighter (a scary thought for any parent). Clearly, Bruce and his wife Patti have figured out how to help their children become who they are, and to realize their potential.

“I wanted them to see people that did a lot of other things,” Bruce once said in an interview, “be around people who would shape them and they would have a lot of options.” Perhaps his inclination to encourage them to pursue their dreams comes from his own experience. In his autobiography, Springsteen takes us back to when he was 7 years old and watched the controversial rockstar Elvis Presley’s appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show. When Elvis walked off the stage, “I sat there transfixed in front of the television set, my mind on fire. I had the same two arms, two legs, two eyes; I looked hideous but I’d figure that part out… so what was missing? THE GUITAR! The next day I convinced my mom to take me to Diehl’s Music on South Street in Freehold. There, with no money to spend, we rented a guitar.”

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It can be hard in the moment to think of anything else. You have lunches to make. Practices to get to. Birthday parties to plan. Work to do. Childhoods to survive.

Having kids is so overwhelming that your ability to conceive of two weeks from now, let alone the future, is severely compromised. This isn’t entirely a bad thing—it’s good to be in the moment, to not get too far ahead of yourself.

But at the same time, you do need to make sure that you consider more than just this moment.

The baseball player Anthony Rendon has talked about how he’s needed to balance optimizing not just for his professional career but his goals as a parent. “Even if the season doesn’t work out or the next four years don’t work out,” he said recently, “I’m planning for taking care of my kids when they get older. Hip surgeries, wrist surgeries, ankle surgeries … I want to play with them when they are 10, 12, 15 years old.”

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There are lots of different trappings of wealth. A big house. A nice car. Exotic vacations. First-class flights? Private flights? Not everyone can afford these things. In fact, that’s sort of the point—they are considered fancy and elite because of how elusive they are. 

But is this really wealth? Or is this just materialism? 

On Christmas (and it’s the Dec 25th entry in *The Daily Da*d book, too), we quoted Paul Orfalea, the billionaire founder of Kinkos, who defined ‘success’ as having kids who come home for the holidays. He was saying that there are lots of wealthy people out there who don’t have that, who are estranged from their family. But what’s interesting about this idea is that it is largely focused on where you and your kids end up later in life, when they have a choice about how much they see you.

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