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.

Their feelings are their feelings.

Some of the things your kids think are ridiculous, products of their

imagination or their fears. Some of the things they like are hilarious and weird, the products

of their own uniqueness, products of just not knowing better. Some of the feelings they have are not

your fault. Again, they have imaginations and fears. and some of their feelings are products of mistakes

you've made and flaws you have.

But as we've talked about here time and time again, what you have to figure out how to do

is to respect this, how to understand this.

Joan Didion's daughter struggled to comprehend her adoption, her place in the world.

She asked an overwhelming number

of questions about it. She had all sorts of angst about what it meant to have been given up,

what it meant to not be biologically related, and all the things that kids would struggle to

come to terms with such an emotionally overwhelming part of life. And Didion, in turn, struggled with that struggle,

with the fact that she couldn't just magically take her daughter's pain away. Since I had no

adequate answer to these questions, she writes in Blue Nights, I refused to consider them. We wrote

recently about an exchange between a mother and a daughter and the mother's

rejection of her daughter's feelings about her childhood, a refusal to accept that she didn't have

the same fond memories about the experience that they shared. Didion, after she lost her own daughter,

...