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.

Teach them to be bigger.

A 10-year-old Jim Lawson was walking down the street when as he passed a car, a small child looked at him, called him the N-word.

Stunned by the hate and the meanness of it, Lawson reached into the car and slapped the boy in the face.

When his mother found out about this, she was understandably worried. In the then

segregated and racist South, the actions of a young black boy could so easily lead to something

terrible and tragic at the hands of awful and unaccountable adults. But more than that, she wanted

her son not to be defined or changed by all the hate of the world around him. What good did that do,

Jimmy? His mother asked him, we all love you, Jimmy, she said, and God loves you. And we all believe

in you and how good and intelligent you are. We have a good life, and you are going to have a good

life. She said, with all that love, what harm does one stupid insult do? It's nothing, Jimmy. It's empty.

Just ignorant words from an ignorant child who has gone from your life the moment it was said.

It was a life-changing experience, David Halberstam explains in his book, The Children.

And it put Jim Lawson onto his world-changing path of nonviolence.

It helped him to realize that he was above the horrible things that other people said and did,

and that what mattered, as the Stokes would say, was what he said and did. What mattered was responding

with kindness and love. What mattered was knowing that he was good and that he was loved and that nothing

anyone else thought could change that. Lawson's parents gave him the gift of teaching him after

that understandable lapse that he was bigger than the small people that lived around him, that he could

be the bigger person and do bigger things. And as we talked about recently, Lawson would in turn do that for his own children.

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