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 sharing this? We talked before about Jimmy Carter's father. James Carter Sr. was a flawed man, to be sure. He was strict and stern, often unaware of the way that he loomed over his quiet, bookish son. The elder Carter was a figure of old-time values, hard work, stoicism, decency, as well as the old-time vices, a smoker,

a racist. He was also capable of moments of great kindness, and he put his son on the straight

and narrow path that the boy was still walking nearly a hundred years later. There is a power

that Jimmy would write about that captures what children

really ate for, something that his father struggled to do. Even the title of Carter's poem is a powerful

epigram that should help us be better. I wanted to share my father's world. That's what he called it.

And that's what they want, why they look up to you, why they ask questions, why they emulate you, even preemptively push you away. This is a pain I mostly hide, Carter writes.

This is a pain I mostly hide, but ties of blood or seed endure, and even now I feel inside the hunger

for his outstretched hand, a man's embrace to take me in the need for just a word of praise.

I despised the discipline. He used to shape what I should be, not owing up, that he might feel

his own pain when he punished me. I didn't show my need to him since his response to an appeal

not have meant as much to me or been as real.

For those rare times when we did cross the bridge between us, the pure joy survives.

I never put aside the past resentments of the boy until with my own sons, I shared his

final hours and came to see what he'd become or always was the father who will

never cease to be alive in me.

They want to connect with you.

They want to be understood by you.

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