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.

They must be surrounded by this.

Do you know Lewin's equation?

Well, you're experiencing its implications as you read this.

Behavior is a function of a person and their environment.

That's the equation.

Our habits, our actions, our lives are determined largely by our surroundings.

What does this mean for us as parents? Well, we're largely the architects of our kids' environments.

We all have different means and ends, of course, but within those means we control what we

surround our children with, the influences, the colors, the moods, the people, the interactions,

and of course, the most important thing there is to a child's intellectual development, the books.

As Horace Mann once put it, a house without books is like a room without windows.

No man, he said, has a right to bring up his children without surrounding them with books.

Further back, Aristotle filled his house with so many books that Plato named it the house of the

reader. If you want your kids to be a reader, and as we talk about, that's one of the commandments

in our daily stoic parenting challenge, you have to design the environment of a reader like an architect.

You have to build them a house of a reader. You have to surround them with books, good ones,

silly ones, short ones, long ones, used ones, new ones. You have to display them prominently in

your house. You have to take them to libraries and independent bookstores. If they aren't surrounded by books, how else could they possibly become a reader?

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