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.

Let them write their own scripts.

It seems like it would be easy, but as we have found out in the course of our own lives,

it's one of the hardest things in the world.

Figuring out who you are, figuring out what your purpose is.

Even now, with decades on this planet as parents and professionals,

we are still figuring it out, still trying to get closer each day.

And yet, as a culture, we continue to expect our kids to already know the answers to questions

that we're still struggling with. We pressure them to make enormous decisions at a preposterously

young age, what their hobbies and passions will be, what college to go to, what to major in, whether

they should take on debt to do it, whether to start saving to buy a house or a ring and how much?

Never mind that we apply this pressure without giving them the space to consider whether any of

this stuff is for them in the first place. Our kids have so comparatively little experience, so little wisdom, so little

confidence. It's insane. It's more insane still that we confuse and disorient them with our own

expectations and projections, even though we know how much our own parents confused us in this

regard. Some of us are only now waking up to realize that we have

been doing stuff our whole lives because we thought it's what our mom and dad wanted us to do.

And this is so terribly unfair. Finding one's role at 17 is problem enough, Joan Didion would

write, reflecting on her trials of picking a college without being handed somebody else's script.

Well, our job is not to write a script for them. It's to help them right there, is to help them

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