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.

This is when it matters. The Europeans pioneered some weird parenting practices. Montaena's parents sent him to live with

villagers as an infant. Jane Austen's parents did something similar. Her mother breastfed each of

her kids for the first month and then handed them off to someone else. Today, something like that

would be seen as fringe or unconventional. But for centuries, aristocratic parents in Britain had little involvement

in the development of their children. They handed them over to nannies and tutors and governesses

until the kids were old enough to participate in adult conversations. What most of us understand now,

either culturally or intuitively, is that every minute you have with your kids matters.

But the younger they are, the more those minutes matter.

There's an old expression, give me the first six years of a child's life, and you can have the rest.

Imagine generations of parents who did the exact opposite of this.

No wonder the past was so horrible.

People did such horrible things to each other.

The first thing their parents did to them was horrible. They severed the first and most important

bond a child has, the familial bond. And while we would never do such a thing and to even suggest

it as a form of productive parenting is a kind of crime. It is strange how busy

we allow ourselves to be while our children are young. We work extra long hours because we're in

the prime of our career. Try to have it all cramming in all the things we used to do before we had kids

while we ask our parents to watch our children for us. We tell ourselves that when our kids are old, we'll make more time for them.

We'll have more freedom, and besides, they'll appreciate it more when it's older.

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