The Daily Dad

Kids have always been like this. They’ve always been crazy. Always had trouble sleeping at night. Always liked to play and explore. They’ve been overwhelmed by hormones. They’ve been driving their parents crazy a long time.

​We talked a while back about Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s Children’s Games painting which depicts a loud and raucous scene of kids playing outside. It’s 463 years old and yet, with a few exceptions, it resembles almost exactly what the kids in your neighborhood were doing last weekend.

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It’s easy to forget it when you see them hitting a sibling. Or when you catch them in a lie. When you hear them say something mean. When the call comes in from school, or worse, the police station.

It’s easy to forget that our kids are good. That they have good morals. A good heart. That they are still that same innocent and pure little thing we brought home from the hospital. It’s easy to forget because we’re so worried, so worried that our sweet innocent and pure thing will end up like most of the people we meet in life–which is to say not so innocent and pure.

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We used to need so much to be happy, as we talked about recently. We needed things to go well. We needed excitement and success. We needed people to like us. We needed people’s approval.

But now? Now, not so much.

Conan O’Brien, who like any performer has some part of him that craves attention and validation, has explained how his insecurity has lessened as he got older and had a family. “Oh as long as they’re alright,” he has said of his kids, then basically everything is right.

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On this weekend episode of the Daily Dad,  Ryan talks with his wife Samantha on staying consistent to the system,  the results to bad decision making, and comparing ourselves against ourselves.

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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.”

Sometimes it can feel like being a dad is just an endless series of errands. It’s the call from the bedroom that they need a glass of water. It’s the call from college for you to come to take them shopping for something they need for their apartment. It’s the running around town getting soccer cleats, or picking up concert tickets, or bringing them the homework they forgot. 

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We talked recently about some of the folks who comment on the Daily Dad Instagram (do follow us!) or reply to these emails. Sure, some of the responses are nice, but so many of them are self-righteous and hectoring, judgmental and superior. There is something profoundly sad about these commenters too. Because, whether they know it or not, they are the punchline in that famous old cartoon, “Sorry, honey, I can’t come to bed right now, someone is wrong on the internet!”

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Gandhi was a saintly man, but he was not a particularly great father. He was too demanding of his children, too controlling, too quick to push them away when they were not exactly what he wanted them to be (which was impossible).

It is sad that the man who was so kind and patient and forgiving, such a father figure to so many, could not be those things for the people who loved him the most, who most deserved that from him. But this is why we study the lives of the greats and not-so-greats–they provide us lessons, both inspiring and cautionary.

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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.”

The author Rinker Buck (he has an amazing book called Life on the Mississippi where he travels the entire river in a homemade flat boat) remembers vividly what would happen when his father came home. We talked recently about what kind of feeling the sound of a parent at the door springs up for you. Well for him, it was partly fear–because he knew he was going to get punished, usually for unfair, contradictory reasons.

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The thing about parenting is that it’s always thrusting us into situations we have to deal with, we have to solve, we have to correct, we have to stop. Our kids aren’t listening. Our kids did something dangerous. Our kids failed a class. Our kids are drifting in a direction that worries us.

Of course, there are some parents who are oblivious to all this, just generally hands-off. But the rest of us, who are just doing the best we can, struggle with these situations. We don’t want to yell, but that’s what we end up doing. We want to teach and instruct, but it somehow devolves into a power struggle. We fail to reach them, fail to teach them.

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On this weekend episode of the Daily Dad,  Ryan speaks with organizational psychologist and book author Adam Grant on seeing things in the context of where they actually sit, learning to be pleased but not satisfied, current sports culture, perfect parenting and his new book Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things.

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