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.

How long can they hold out? We all want better for our kids. We want them to have a better life than we had. We want them to have better parents than we had. That's why we're trying so hard. That's why we all wrestle with our demons, going to therapy, reading books, putting in the work. Here at Daily Dad, we've talked about Bruce Springsteen's critical choice, you know, the one

where he says, are you going to be an ancestor or a ghost to your children?

Are you going to guide them and support them or haunt them and menace them the way that past

demons did for previous generations?

Another great musician who we talked about recently, Michael Jolette, he wrote a fascinating

memoir, which begins with him growing up in a cult that his mother had joined.

Even though she eventually got out, he and his brother were still subjected to his mother's profound issues and inadequacies.

Our parents were like ghosts in Sinanon, he writes in Hollywood Park, haunting us and then disappearing again,

leaving us to wonder what their connection to us was supposed to mean. And then he adds a kicker

which illustrates the stakes of what Springsteen was trying to communicate, given that

Springsteen was similarly haunted by a distant and blocked parent. How long can you live with

ghosts, he asks, before deciding to become one.

All of us are working hard at doing and being better, and it's never too late to change and improve, as we

said recently, but we should also be aware that the clock is ticking, that the windows are closing.

While we have our kids with us, while they're young, while we're still young

now is the time. We have to do this work. We have to make this progress. We have to try to solve

our issues before that choice gets made. We want them to have a better experience than we had.

So let's give them that experience. Show them what it's like before they too are possessed with

the demons that we met in our childhoods.

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