Welcome to the Daily Dad podcast where we provide one lesson every day to help you

with your most important job being a dad. These are lessons inspired by ancient philosophy,

by practical wisdom, and insights from dads all over the world.

Thank you for listening, and we hope this helps.

It's all about the specifics.

It's funny how we talk about the most specific and singular thing in the world as if it is the

same for everyone.

Sure, people have been having children for thousands of years, but every kid is an utterly

unique piece of DNA, never before and never to be seen again.

We talk about parenting as if we're all in the same boat going through the

same things on the same collective page about wants and needs and priorities. Of course, this is

nonsense. As the writer Elizabeth Brunig recently wrote in a piece for the New York Times,

one of the things they don't tell you about having babies is that you don't ever have a baby.

You have your baby, which is to you don't ever have a baby. You have your

baby, which is to you the err baby, the sum of all babies. We have to remember this because it

affects all sorts of things. First off, much of the advice you hear about parenting is general,

and therefore potentially worthless or in dire need of adjustment to our particular

circumstances. We have to understand that as aligned as having kids should make us with our fellow

parents, there are strong evolutionary forces at work. That kid in your kid's class is somebody

else's most precious thing in the world. In fact, to them, that slobbering goober is the world.

What you feel about your family, how you do anything for them, how nearly everything else and

everyone else pales in comparison, that's how they think about their kids, too.

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