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.

Have you given them the right priorities?

It must have been an enormous relief or perhaps even a surprise then for young Theo Roosevelt to hear from his father when he was entering Harvard to, quote, take care of

your morals first, your health next, and finally your studies.

Because pretty much every parent for all time has accidentally emphasized very different

priorities day to day. Of course, we all love our kids and want them to be safe and healthy and

happy more than anything, but these things are hard to measure and monitor. It's far easier to

check in on grades to see if they're following rules to reward them for how they do in

sports or nag them for not keeping their room clean. Our children could be forgiven then for

getting a very skewed sense of our priorities. My parents don't care about how I feel. Kids can so

easily think they care about how well-behaved I am, whether I'm doing well in school or not.

Based on how often they hear about it, why wouldn't they presume that not making a mess in the car means more to us than

taking care of themselves? Based on how animated we get, why shouldn't they think that we care more

about them being a good athlete than a good person? What we talk to our kids about, what we

demonstrate to them with our actions, it says

volumes about what we care about. And when we focus so much on stuff that they suspect deep down

matters more to us than their health or happiness or figuring out what they were meant to do in

this life, they end up feeling so much pressure and so alone. All we really care about is that

they're safe and happy and good people, but our

actions, our daily interactions have to reiterate that. And we have to be careful that we aren't

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