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 main thing we have to teach them. We talked recently about Michael Schur's fun book of moral

philosophy, how to be perfect. He ends the book with a meditation on what might be the toughest

job for even the wise and best of us, as Marcus Aurelia showed, how we pass these lessons on to our kids. But this passage,

which reminds us of the great children's book, Here We Are, captures perfectly what we have to

teach our kids. You are people on earth. You are not alone here, and that means you owe the other people on earth certain things.

What you owe them more or less is to live by the rules they wouldn't reject as unfair,

assuming that they're decent and reasonable people. And he has a great little exercise for his kids to

remember, too, as you go through life and are thinking about doing something, he says, ask if your brother or sister would think it was a good idea. Then keep going. Ask if a friend would think it was a good idea or a teacher, even a kid you don't like, but think is smart. Ask, he says, explaining Kant's categorical imperative to a five-year-old, would it be okay if

everyone did this? Would the world be okay if every single person would be allowed to do what I'm

about to do? As we've said before, we're not just trying to raise successful kids or smart kids.

We're trying to raise decent and kind human beings. And the way to do that is to teach

them how their actions affect other people and what their obligations to other people are. You don't

have to be a philosopher to pull that off, just a good and decent person yourself and a good

and decent parent, too. Hey, thanks for listening to the Daily Dad podcast.

You can get this via email every day as well at Daily Dad.com.

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Thanks.

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