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 taught to do this.

Floyd Patterson was a talented boy.

He was athletically gifted, and yet he was also

incredibly sensitive. He didn't get what he needed from his impoverished parents, and certainly America

failed him too. A single anecdote from his youth told in his incredible autobiography,

victory over myself, will break your heart.

My mother tells me that when I became a little older, Floyd recounts, I used to tell her

over and over again as I pointed to a picture of myself, I don't like that boy.

It was a picture of him, his brothers, and a relative at the Bronx Zoo.

One day his mother returned home and found that he'd drawn

several X's over his own face in the photo. I guess maybe Floyd reflected, I liked myself so little

that I wanted to eliminate myself completely from that photo. Somehow, somewhere, Floyd Patterson

was taught to hate himself. With the distance of history and our

better understanding of childhood trauma, this story probably indicates that some kind of abuse was

happening. Racism and poverty played a part too, as they always have. And yet, does his story not

also have an eerie similarity to the stories that Pete Buttigieg

would tell about his coming to terms with his sexuality as a young man, how he hated himself,

how he would have given anything to be anyone or anything different?

Our children have to be taught to love themselves.

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