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.

Kids have always been like this. They've always been crazy. They've always had trouble sleeping at night.

They've always liked to play and explore. They've always been overwhelmed by hormones.

They've been driving their parents crazy a long time.

We talked a while back about that famous painting called Children's Games, which depicts a loud and raucous scene of kids playing outside.

The painting is 463 years old,

and yet with a few exceptions, it resembles almost exactly what the kids in your neighborhood

were doing last weekend. It's also weird to think about how long kids have been

vibing with, connecting with the same stories. Good Night Moon has been putting kids down to bed

for 76 years.

The Velvet Teen Rabbit, which we've been talking about recently, is written in 1921.

Hans Christian Anderson wrote the Emperor's New Clothes, The Little Mermaid, and the Princess and the P.

And parents have been reading them to their kids ever since.

Aesop's fables have been teaching timeless moral lessons to kids and adults since the 6th century BC. And kids have been laughing at Odysseus' trick on the Cyclops. Nobody

poked out my eye for even longer than that. It's a surreal and edifying part of the tradition,

isn't it? The same stories, the same lessons, the same sense of

humor, the cunningness of the Trojan horse still catches our attention. The idea of sour grapes

is still true. The father telling his kids a story to pass time on a long journey, a mother's

reassuring voice as they drop off to sleep. Their nature, our nature, human nature, it's a mostly timeless

eternal thing, a thing we're part of continuing. I'm trying to continue this myself, obviously. This is

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