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.

It's all a tricky balance. Parenting is an exercise in finding the balance in a never-ending

string of tricky situations. It's not good to be an absent parent, of course, but it's also not

good to be a helicopter parent. It's not good to do everything for them. It's also not good to be

beaned at. It's not good to scream at our kids. It's also

not good to let them walk all over us. It's not good to spoil our kids, but it's also not good

to give them no affection. Indeed, parenting is full of situations that illustrate Aristotle's

famous metaphor of the golden mean, the idea that virtue usually sits in between two vices.

Courage is somewhere between cowardice and recklessness, generosity between giving too much and too

little, and being a good parent, well, it's somewhere in between not being too involved and

always being too involved. And it should comfort you that Aristotle talked about how difficult it is to find

these halfway points. Finding the right amount, he said, is a high art. It takes work and study and

practice to figure out what the right thing to do in the right amount, the right time,

in the right way. It's obviously something I've been thinking a lot about,

considering I just wrote this book about discipline. In fact, that's why I wrote the book.

Discipline is destiny, which you can pre-order now at dailystoic.com slash pre-order,

is a book on the power of and the path to balance, moderation, finding the right amount.

That's what temperance means. How to pursue your

ambitions and win at life without abandoning your kids or your spouse. How to hold yourself

to high standards without unfairly setting expectations that others can't meet. How to care for

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