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.

The real key to happiness.

As we said recently, no parent has ever successfully shielded their child from negative feelings or distress.

No parent has done it and no grown adult has ever looked back at their childhood and been grateful that their parents tried.

I'm so glad mom and dad kept me in a bubble of sunshine and kittens.

That really set me up and now I'm on my own.

Gaslighting someone about their feelings is not and never has been a service.

Dr. Becky writes about this and good inside her wonderful book about parenting, which again we can't

recommend enough. She says that adults whose childhood was focused mainly on happiness are not only unprepared for

tough moments. They experience more discomfort in those tough moments because deep down they think

they're doing something wrong if they can't find the happy and get themselves to a better place.

We've talked before about Seneca's consolations, his essays

where he works his friends and family through the awful grief that they're experiencing.

It's important that we understand that this is how the Stokes and hopefully your kids learn to

deal with their strong emotions, period. You don't stuff it down. You don't mask it with smiles.

You don't seek out pleasures to counterbalance it. In fact, the more you do those things, the harder

time you will have in the future, if even more serious or distressing things happen.

We can't make our kids happy, but we can teach them to process. And in this processing,

they will learn to possess not only the secret to resilience,

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