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 part is your fault. It's the thing that keeps parents up at night. What if their kid

turns out bad? Not like doesn't

succeed bad, but hurts people is not a good person bad. This is the nightmare captured in the

bad seed or in Gladiator. Comedus came from Marcus Aurelius. How? It's also a subplot in Patrick

White's The Tree of Man published just two years after the bad seed.

Stan and Amy Parker's son Ray is a dark side. He harms some of their pets. He steals. He ends up a gambler and a

criminal. Do you think it was in him anyway? The parents say all this badness? Or was it his upbringing?

Or is it something he has got from us? It is like the

cattle. Two goods can make a bad. Of course, we know now that there is such a thing as psychopathy

and various personality disorders that can make someone do bad things, no matter how good their

parents were. But one of the under-explored themes in the Tree of Man is how what was so admirable about

the Parker family, their stoicism, their reserve, their old-fashioned values were so ill-suited

to help their son.

Their son had emotional problems.

He had frustrations and needs.

His parents were good people, but their own stuntedness

compounded their problems. They never talked to him about any of this. They swept his troubling

behavior under the rug. They pretended everything was perfect, not just with their son,

but also with problems in their own marriage. I've never known what to do, his father said in response to his wife's

...