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.

Teach the why.

It's so quietly become the norm that you may have missed it, but it's a real and profound shift.

Instead of teaching kids through reading, today schools teach reading skills.

Instead of teaching math is a tool to use in your actual life, schools teach math concepts, ideally math concepts that are easy to measure on tests. For really smart or curious kids,

this is not really a problem. They're able to translate these skills into their lives.

But many kids struggle because they're bored, because they don't see the point,

because they lack the knowledge and the context necessary to even understand how to learn these skills.

A 2019 piece in the Atlantic tells of a study that measured kids' reading ability when it came

to a short piece of writing about baseball. It turned out that kids who liked and understood

the game of baseball were able to better read and comprehend more than the kids who didn't.

Context, it turned out, was king.

Even the kids who struggled to read were able to read above their level if they were

actually interested in what they were reading about.

They could get their bearings inside it.

So the writer concludes, what if the best way to boost reading comprehensions is not to drill kids on discrete skills, but to teach them as early as possible, the very things we've marginalized, including history and science and other content that could build the knowledge and vocabulary they need to understand both written texts and the world around them. It's obvious, but of course,

not very common, which is why, as parents, we must adjust. Instead of drilling your kids on historical

dates, take them somewhere where they can understand that history is a thing that actually

happened, that it has an actual physical footprint. Don't pester them about

their homework. Do math with them as you pay the bills or calculate the tip on a dinner check

or work on a project in the garage. Show them the why and the how because they are more important

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