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.

Spare them either extreme. We don't want them to be lazy. We don't want them to be entitled. We don't want to spoil them.

That's why parents have always tried to make their kids work for things. It's why they wrestled.

In the ancient world, just as we do today, about which desires to indulge and which hills to

die on when to say yes and when to say no. The idea is that we're trying to raise self-sufficient kids,

adults who take pride in effort, who are driven and ambitious, and have the grit to go after

what they want in life. But just as we're concerned about our kids having too little of this,

we ought also to consider if we're giving them too much. It's not just entitlement that

we ought to occur, but also the tendency towards obsession, burnout, and the belief that their

worth is measured only by their productivity. A recent profile of Sarah McNally, the owner of

New York's amazing book chain, McNally Jackson, focused on her tough childhood.

Sarah never got an allowance as a kid.

She had to earn every penny she ever got to spend.

I had my first job at eight, she recalls.

I had to wake up before school and deliver newspapers.

You can't imagine, she said.

It was so cold that your eyelashes froze shut because of the

condensation from your eyeballs, which are tearyant. This was not her only job as a kid either. It was a

grind, an exhausting grind that taught her many positive lessons, but also wore her down.

It's a grind she sought to mitigate with her own son, despite complaints and judgment

...