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.

Make sure they're reading this stuff. The world around us is dark. It's filled with awful people doing awful things.

You can't protect your kids from that. But what you can do is steep them in stories and history

and myths that let them see that they don't have to succumb to it, that they may well be able

to change things. As a young boy, Abraham Lincoln read everything he could get his hands on.

One of the first poems he

ever read in his life as part of a compilation reader he had picked up was this poem The Task by

William Cowper. Years later, Lincoln could still remember and recount these lines. I had much

rather be myself the slave and wear the bonds than fasten them on him. Not long after Lincoln, who grew up

in a free state, would first encounter slavery in the flesh. He would write in horror watching this

caffle of slaves of the sight of seeing men chained together like so many fish upon a trot line.

It was here that his high-minded reading intersected with brutal reality.

It was the first stirrings of the activist he would become the politician who changed the world.

It's wonderful that our kids like to read comics and funny books about animals, but we have to make

sure that we're exposing them to literature that elevates them, that challenges them,

that opens their minds and hearts. We have to plant the right seeds so that their experiences

bear the right fruit. We have to encourage them to see the humanity and others. We have to

encourage them to see the importance of their own moral choices.

It was reading that made Lincoln great, and it's reading that will make your children great,

or not so great. Not only is reading a fundamental way to instill a habit of lifelong learning

...