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.

Send them a postcard.

Maybe you have to travel a lot for work. Maybe you take an occasional vacation,

or you're on the road a lot with one of your older kids for sports or school or whatever.

The point is, you're away from your kids. What should you do? Yes, you should FaceTime. Yes,

you should text if they're old enough. But what you should also do,

even if it feels a little old fashioned, is send them a postcard or send them a letter from the

stationary and envelope that for some strange reason hotels continue to provide without asking.

Of course, if you need a razor or a toothbrush, you have to ask the front desk.

But write your kids a postcard about where you are, what you're doing, what you're thinking about, how much you miss them.

Give them some glimpse into your life while you're away.

Let them know that they're on your mind.

More importantly, do it in this form, the physical form, so that they'll have a record of it.

Years in the future, when they think back to their childhood, they won't remember the phone

calls, but these postcards discovered tucked away in a photo album or thrown in a box,

will remind them about how much you cared. It will remind them of the connection you had,

the one that couldn't be severed by time

zones or distances, the one that took the effort to scrawl a few words and stick on a stamp

and find a mailbox, even when every other form of communication was far easier and more instantaneous.

...