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. Eleanor Roosevelt had a rough childhood.

She was born to a rich family, but her father struggled with addiction and died young.

Her mother was always difficult and judgmental, but she was still her mother and Eleanor

was devastated when she died at age 29, and then devastated again just months later when

her father died.

She was sent to live with her grandmother, a woman who it became very quickly, was also the

source of Eleanor's mother's emotional issues and judgmentalness. It was a dreary, painful

existence that didn't change until Eleanor was sent to school in London. There, at a special

school for girls, she met her teacher, who finally saw an Eleanor not a plain, shy girl, but

someone special, someone with talent and ambitions, with the ability to make a difference in the

world. Attention and admiration were the things throughout all my childhood that I most wanted,

Eleanor later reflected, because I was made to feel so conscious of the fact that nothing

about me would attract attention or bring me admiration.

Of course, none of us subject our kids to the kind of experience that young Eleanor endured,

which was clearly child abuse. But her

relief at finally being given attention and admiration is still something we can learn from.

Don't we want that ourselves and our jobs and our communities and our marriages? Why wouldn't

our kids want the same things in their own young, fragile lives. And who could it possibly be more meaningful to

come from than us? As we've said, it's hard to be a kid. Kids are uncertain. They're overwhelmed.

...