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 brave of them. Maybe your kid is a little weird. Maybe they do stuff that you don't get.

Maybe they do stuff that makes other kids look at them strangely. It's the kind of stuff that would have gotten you bullied when you were at school that you remember judging other kids for. This worries you and that's reasonable. We want our kids to be safe. We want them to be accepted. But you know what we also want to have to want for them?

We want them to be themselves. We want them to be brave enough to be themselves. We talked recently about Michael Chabin and his son Abe. It's also a story I tell in the June 17th entry in the Daily Dad book.

His son became obsessed with fashion. It became his thing in a way

that stood out quite a bit in the town they lived in. As parents, they supported this, but it also

concerned them. I couldn't fathom the impulse driving my kid to expose himself, he wrote,

every day to mockery and verbal abuse at school. That's why we worry.

That's why we want to tell them to tone it down, to be normal.

But this isn't what Chabin did.

I admired him for not surrendering, Chabin writes.

Isn't that a nice way to think about it,

to consider how much bravery takes for them to pursue their interests and be themselves?

Isn't that what we should

encourage, what will serve them well in life? And then he started pulling strings to take his son

to fashion shows, getting the double benefit of writing some articles about it. He helped him find

his people, as we talked about in the Daily Dad book. That we've said is our role.

Our job isn't to help our kids fit in.

It's not to crush their earnest enthusiasm with our fears and cynicism.

It is to encourage and cheer to get behind, to admire and respect.

...