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.

This is what they want. Speaking of the last years after her sexual assault,

one of Jeffrey Epstein's many victims offered a haunting recollection.

She'd struggled to get her life back on track.

She'd struggled with shame and grief and fear and depression and anger.

But just as difficult, she said,

what I really wanted was my parents to come and ask me

what was wrong. Of course, no parent is to blame for the crimes of a monster like Epstein. And this woman

isn't blaming her parents for what Epstein did to her, just to be clear. This poor girl's words are

devastating because they could so easily apply to even the

best parents, whose children are suffering silently from things their parents couldn't guess

were going on in a million years. What's so difficult from a parent's perspective is that we believe

we're on top of this stuff. We're on the lookout. We're paying attention. We think we know the signs. We've read about the dangers. And yet we're so busy. So, so busy. And if we're

being honest, our attention is divided. We miss the rhythms of the day to day where the suffering

is most likely to present itself. Instead, we focus on outcomes, school, grades, sports,

whether they're getting their life together. Because as long as the games are played in one and the

tests are being taken and a-st, we can reassure ourselves that whatever little stuff we've been

missing can't be that bad. And of course, if something was truly wrong, they'd come to us,

right? This is what we allow ourselves to assume. And of course, if something was truly wrong, they'd come to us, right? This is what we allow

ourselves to assume. And when we do, we miss. We miss that something has changed for the worse.

...