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.

This is all an invention.

This didn't used to exist, you know.

Kids had it way harder before, not just a hundred

plus years ago when they were valued most for their labor on the farm, but back further. Kids got

married when they were still kids. They were exposed to the horrors of the world when they

were still kids. They were forced to fight and fend for themselves while they were still kids.

Neil Postman points out in the disappearance of childhood that even this idea of

childhood is a social construct. Genetic expression makes no distinction between who is a child

and who isn't. Children, as we understand them, have only existed for less than 400 years. The idea of

childhood is one of the great inventions of the Renaissance, he writes, because it allowed

children to develop. It allowed them to learn to have a safe space to play and explore and discover

themselves. It's funny today we're concerned about how our kids are coddled and

sheltered, and that is a real problem. We're also missing the fact that the gap between adult and

child is narrowing rapidly. What has caused this depression of childhood, this disappearance of

childhood? Childhood as a social structure and psychological condition worked when literacy and critical thinking

marked being an adult. But when things like long-form writing and reading are in decline,

the gap between child and adult shrinks. And we are seeing what it does to a society today with our

own eyes. It's no coincidence that nearly all the emergent social media platforms and mobile apps that have taken over our phones derive so much of their market value and user loyalty from how little they make you read, write, communicate, or frankly think.

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