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 works, just not how you think. It was probably annoying. It was probably a whole thing that had been

escalating for weeks. Maybe he was just plain tired. Maybe it was a joke or a lesson gone horribly awry.

It doesn't matter, though, because it scarred young Franz Kafka for life. He had been crying for water

at bedtime. His father asked him to stop, kept going and going, and finally his father

picked him up and put the boy outside in his pajamas. It worked in the sense that Kafka immediately

stopped crying, but it came at a very high price, as losing our temper with our kids often does.

I subsequently became a rather obedient child, Kafka writes in his beautiful and haunting little book,

Letter to the Father, which every parent should read, he says, but I suffered inner damage as a result.

Kafka's father had always been brusque and authoritarian. He did not seem to appreciate that his son was

sensitive, that the boy desperately wanted his approval, and most

of all his love. As Kafka writes in letter to the father, he said, I kept being haunted by this

giant of a man, my father, the ultimate judge, coming to get me in the middle of the night,

and for almost no reason at all, dragging me out of the bed onto the balcony. In other words,

that as far as he was concerned, I was in absolute nothing. What Kafka's father did work, it quieted his son,

it ended the begging. It just did some other work on the boy caused trauma that was still working

on his psyche decades later. As parents, we can all relate to that place of being done. We all make mistakes.

We are ourselves products of our own parents. Which is why more than relating to Kafka's father,

we must relate to what it must have been like to be that little boy manhandled and put outside

made to feel so small and vulnerable. What Kafka needed in that moment was love and affection and patience.

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