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 easier than you're making it. You spent weeks planning

this vacation to Disneyland. You got them tickets to an

NBA game. You're taking the whole family to the dessert place you loved as a kid. You waited in line

for an hour to get them a new bike, spent a week assembling a new trampoline for the backyard.

These are the things we do for our kids because we love them, because we'll do anything for them.

Of course, parenting is also stressful. Yes, we have yelled at them at the airport because they keep

running away. Now we nag them for how much or little they ride that bike we got them. And now they're

a wreck from the sugar rush of the ice cream. It's almost as if the things we try so hard to do, right, the things we wanted

so badly to be special, the quality time we wanted to make the most of, turned out to be more

pain than pleasure. But here's the real crazy part. We kill ourselves to do these difficult things.

Meanwhile, on an ordinary afternoon when our son comes over to ask us an innocuous question

that he is genuinely curious about, can barely look up from our phone. We'll drive a thousand miles

for the hope of a fun family memory at a resort pool, but we'll turn down repeated requests to jump

in the one in our own backyard. Maybe later we say, I don't want to have to

change my clothes. We build them the trampoline as if they wouldn't be just as happy to run and

jump around in the grass if you join them. We plan that nice dinner with our teenager so we can talk

as if there weren't plenty of opportunities to do that on the way to school each morning.

Yet here you are turning on a

podcast. Your kids don't want, let alone need very much, except for you. They need you to be present.

They need you in the garbage moments. They appreciate the big things, of course, but they're

just as happy with the little ones. And more importantly, they are much less likely to

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