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 we hope this helps.

Anything less than nurturing. You provide them clothes and shelter. You feed them. You don't neglect them.

You don't hit them. You send them to school. You don't make them work in a factory or a coal mine.

You don't do drugs or smoke around them. You're better, no question, than generations of parents.

You're better than many parents alive right now. But this, of course, is only the beginning. It's the minimum. They need

more. They deserve more. The addiction specialist Pia Melody, she has some great books like

Breaking Free and the intimacy factor, she has a pretty lofty, even impossible standard. She says

anything less than nurturing is abuse. Having seen tens of thousands of addicts, families of addicts and trauma survivors,

she's seen every type of emotional wound a person can have. Not all of them are severe who would

make for an episode of law and order. Many of them are closer to the things we talk about here,

or rather they resulted from the absence of what we talk about here. Parents who failed to encourage their kids,

parents who didn't give their kids enough space, parents who didn't give enough affection to their

kids, parents who didn't help their kids learn how to regulate their emotions, parents who never

admitted they were wrong, parents who were too busy, parents who didn't communicate, parents who

didn't know how to say, I love you. Their kids needed them

to be kind, needed for them to be patient, needed them to repair, needed them to love unconditionally.

Their kids got a lot of important stuff. They had many of their basic needs mets. They might even

describe their childhoods as fun and loving, but they needed nurturing they didn't get, and it still haunts them.

You're doing your best, and no parent is perfect. No one can be perfectly nurturing all the

time because we're humans who ourselves didn't get everything we need, but we can still aspire.

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