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 the one thing you cannot do. We can mess up a lot as

parents. In fact, we will mess up a lot. We will work too

much. We will have issues from our own childhood bubble to the surface. We will lose our tempers.

We can push too hard or not hard enough. But there is one thing we cannot afford to do.

As Brandon Bullware explains in recent moving testimony that went viral about his

experience as a parent of a transgender daughter, we cannot silence their spirit. It doesn't matter

who our kids are. It doesn't matter what we've been through or what our beliefs are. It doesn't

matter if it's over a big issue or

little ones. We can't let our fears, our cynicism, our baggage, our desire to protect them, our

interest in their success, our hope for their happiness. We cannot let this silence their spirit.

We cannot try to make them something they don't want to be. We talked about this before, but Alanis

Morissette puts it perfectly when she sings about keeping the light in her son's eyes ablaze. For every parent and

every child, that light will be different. For one kid, it might be a love of art, making it, consuming it,

studying it, any or all of those really. For others, it might be a love of art, making it, consuming it, studying it, any or all of those, really.

For others, it might be a spiritual practice very different from our own. For another, it might be

gender or sexuality. It could be a precocious questioning. It could be a world-changing ambition.

It could be a quiet introversion. Their spirit is their spirit. Our job is to protect it, to cup our hands around it

when the fickle winds of judgment blow at their fiercest to keep that fire ablaze, to help them carry it

when they struggle. Our job is not to change them. It's not to bully them. It's not to know better.

It's not to be realistic. Don't silence to know better. It's not to be realistic.

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