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.

Don't try to make them happy.

A parent is only as happy as their unhappiest child, goes the expression.

And even if that wasn't true, even if it didn't directly impact our own happiness, would any of us want our

children to be unhappy? Of course not. We love them so much. The last thing we want is for them to feel pain.

We want their lives to be wonderful. We want them to have fun. We for them to feel pain. We want their lives to be, we want

their lives to be wonderful, we want them to have fun, we want them to have a great life. We want

them to be happy. There's nothing wrong with this, except that oftentimes trying to make someone

happy is a recipe for failure. Happiness is not my ultimate goal for my own kids.

Dr. Becky writes in her amazing book Good Inside, which I've been raving about, of course.

Unhappiness certainly isn't my goal for them either, she says, but here's a deep irony in parenting.

The more we emphasize our children's happiness and feeling better, the more we set

them up for an adulthood of anxiety. What she means is that if we focus too much on the end

state, making them feel happy, and not on the process, giving them the tools and resilience

to deal with life, we end up making a very fragile, precarious kid. It means we're depriving them

of the ability to solve their own problems. We end up raising kids incapable of being

responsible for their own happiness. So yes, in the end, we want happy kids, but the way to get

there is not by focusing on their happiness, but on so many of the things

we've talked about here, giving them purpose, cultivating resilience, teaching them how to

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