This show is sponsored by BetterHelp. 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.

Lift them up, don't hold them back. Family is wonderful. None of us would be here,

the writer Aaron Thayer once put it, if people hadn't taken care of us when we were small.

Somebody birthed us, raised us, drove us to school, and kept us safe. So naturally, we feel an affinity

and an obligation to our family as we hope our own

children will. Being around them is comfortable, it's familiar, it's primal, but it's also important

that we realize as we get older as parents, that we always remember that our job is to lift our

children up to push them forward and never to hold them back.

That's why we have to work on ourselves.

That's why we can't get complacent or selfish.

For all the talk amongst the privilege about all the pressure on high school students to go to

college, the reality is that many, many kids are held back by their parents.

Because their parents are afraid of losing

their kids because they don't value education because they don't believe their kids can actually

make something of themselves. Plenty of other people lose out on opportunities to better themselves

by moving, by breaking old patterns of behavior, because their own parents are inflexible,

stubborn, and self-involved. Too many marriages are taxed and burdened by the parents of one or

both spouses who still can't seem to get their act together, whose issues and baggage spill

...