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.

They listen better than you.

Jim Lawson, the civil rights activist, knew Martin Luther King, Jr. personally.

King was his hero, his mentor, his brother in arms in those dark and trying days of the movement.

So you can imagine how devastated he was when in 1963 King was murdered in cold blood.

Yet as a Christian and a true practitioner of the

philosophy of nonviolence, Lawson felt called in time to meet and forgive King's assassin, James Earl

Ray. In the years after the murder, Lawson spent a considerable amount of time with Ray,

even coming to meet the man's fiance.

But for all this incredible forgiveness and restraint, Lawson understandably struggled when

Ray took the astounding step of asking him to officiate his prison wedding. It felt like too much.

It was too painful. Was it unethical? Did it send the wrong

message? So Lawson asked his family at dinner one day what they should do. It was a short conversation

and almost before he could finish, Lawson's 17-year-old son was answering. Well, his son said,

not even need him to look up from his food. If you believe all the stuff you've been preaching all these years, then you'll do it.

And it's a reminder that for all the things our kids need to learn,

sometimes they understand the things we've taught them even better than we did.

It's a reminder that they're listening more than we think they are.

It's a reminder that sometimes out of the mouths of babes come back our most deeply held

...