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.

Are you good at hearing people?

She's not good at hearing people. The musician, Michael

Jolette, writes of his mother in his haunting memoir, Hollywood Park. If we tell her we're hungry,

she'll say, no, you're not, you ate earlier. If one of us says, I'm sad, she tells us that

it's not true, that we're happy now because we're with her. Tragically, even in that observation, Michael Jolette,

was illustrating the consequences of narcissism and emotional immaturity on children.

It's strange for someone to tell you your own feelings, he would say, but maybe she knows better

than we do. His mother could hear perfectly fine. She just couldn't handle what she didn't like.

Hopefully most of us aren't this far gone, but many parents struggle with some version of this.

We talked about this a while back when it comes to our children's pain or their memories.

They tell us something that upset them or that they didn't like something that happened to them

in their childhood, and because that indirectly indicts us, because it says we didn't do enough that we weren't perfect that maybe we messed up, well, instead of hearing them, we argue. We tell them that their feelings are wrong. We tell them that they don't get it. Well, this is gaslighting. Even if it comes from a good place, it's wrong and it's deeply disorienting.

Your children's feelings are their feelings.

You have to let them have their feelings.

And that starts by hearing them when they express it, repeating it back to them,

letting them know that we registered it, that we're doing our best to understand what it means and not minimizing it, not coming up with excuses, not even

reassuring them that everything's fine and that everything is going to be okay.

We don't do that until they know that we heard them and cared. That comes first.

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