Welcome to the Daily Dad podcast, where we provide one lesson every single day to help you with your most important job, being a parent.

I'm Ryan Holiday, and I draw these lessons from ancient philosophy, modern psychology, practical wisdom, and insights from parents just like

you all over the world. Thank you for listening, and I hope this helps. There is an inherent

tension, a conflict of visions even at the heart of every family. They want to live happy, fulfilling, interesting lives,

and as a parent, you want nothing bad to happen to them ever. Sure, you want them to be happy

and have fun, but most of all, more than anything, you want them to be safe. As we've said before,

our job as parents, is to root for them. It's to encourage them to become what they are, to fire them

with ambition, to be useful, to stretch and reach their It's to encourage them to become what they are, to fire them with

ambition, to be useful, to stretch and reach their potential, to let them fail and learn,

to help them develop courage and resilience. This is difficult to do under ordinary, even the

most perfect of circumstances, and it's harder still, though, when we face the facts of what

this means in practice.

Letting them jump off something into a lake, play some dangerous sport, dropping out of college to pursue a long-shot opportunity, moving in with someone they've fallen in love with.

In Morgan Wade's new song, she has a line about how all of your dreams are your parents' fears.

This was as true when you were a risk-taking hard-headed,

not-so-bright kid yourself, and it's true with your own kids, the things that light them up that are worth pursuing in life. None of them come without risks. It's worth saying the good life is on

the other side of risk. No one gets it by playing it perfectly safe or protecting them from anything that can hurt

them. Your perfectly normal desire to protect your kids is inherently at odds with this. And it won't be

an easy tension or paradox or torture to navigate. But you have to figure it out.

Getting to know yourself could be a lifelong process, especially because we're always growing and changing. Therapy is a way of deepening your self-awareness and your understanding

because sometimes we don't know what we want or why we react the way that we do until we talk

through things.

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