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.

There's a reason you're so raw.

Well, there are certainly people out there who the pandemic or our

political environment has brought out the worst in, the rest of us have started to feel something

different. We're raw. We're vulnerable. We tear up when we hear about someone losing someone.

We tear up when we hear about families struggling to make ends meet. Have you seen some of the

videos we've

posted on the Daily Dad Instagram, for example, of step-parents adopting their children, of a dad

finding out he was going to have a little girl of a father surprising his son at a school rally

home from a deployment. It's like instant waterworks. What is that about? One of the great

things about having kids, the comedian Michael Ian Black recently said, is that they force you into an

active practice of love, whether you're ready for it or not. I wasn't emotionally prepared for

parenthood after spending the 30 previous years in a coterized emotional state.

You're raw because having kids has opened you up. It's forced you to engage in the world in a more active way.

Forced you to engage with yourself and your own emotions in an active way.

Was it easier to go through the world all closed off?

Is there something tribal and reassuring about just focusing on yourself and your problems?

Of course.

But that's less and less possible these days because this parenting thing has changed you.

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