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.

There's enough to worry about already.

Being a parent is terrifying. Joan Didion's famous line,

as we talked about recently, is that once you have kids, you are never not afraid. We are hostages to fortune now, always worried that something could or will happen to our kids. And it's true,

something could happen. We all know parents who have found this out.

In fact, for generations, it was the norm that something would happen to one of our kids.

So it's natural that we're concerned, that we're hyper aware that we try not to take chances.

But Halloween is a good opportunity, however, to look at the cost and the propensity that all societies

have to giving into overblown fears.

How many of us remember are parents checking their Halloween candy for razor blades?

What was that all about? It turns out that a 1983 column from Dear Abbey speculated that there

might be poison in candies or a razor blade in an apple. And in fact, the only known case of a kid dying from

poison Halloween candy is when one man laced pixie sticks with cyanide to purposely kill his own

son for insurance money. There are all sorts of urban legends and moral panics that parents can

that parents can fall prey to. A more recent one you might have heard about is dry drowning.

The idea is that your kids can slowly swallow water during an afternoon in the pool and then seem

fine, but then suddenly drop dead. Ernest and serious warnings go viral about this every summer.

The good news, though, at least according to emergency room doctors, that this is basically not

actually a thing or not anything close to what parents online are talking about. And the same goes for

...