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 will make your life and your kids better.

Look, it's not easy this thing we're trying to do.

You'd think parenting would be simpler or more natural. I mean, billions of people have done it

through history and the survival of our genes literally depends on it. But we're all struggling.

We're all in need of as much help as we can get. That's obviously the premise of the Daily Dad email.

Seneca's line was that we ought to try to acquire one thing a day, a quote, a story, a relationship, an insight that makes

us better. And we try to deliver that in the emails. But in today's episode, I wanted to bring you

some of my favorite things, some recommendations as we go into the holidays that I think will make

you and your kids better. The first is a book by Melinda Wener-Moyer called How to Raise Kids

Who Aren't Asholes. Melinda's an author after my own heart. She's putting aside most of

the classic parenting questions, what kind of sleep training, formula, breastfeeding, screen time,

and instead focused on how do we make sure that our kids aren't jerks, that they're not spoiled, who are kind, who work hard, or respectful, or empathetic. And I think this book is a wonderful set of answers to that questions. I'll link to all the stuff in today's show notes, but I can't recommend enough how to raise kids who aren't assholes. I'm a little biased. I would recommend two other books, the boy who would be king and the girl who would be free. Obviously, a question I get that I think about a lot myself is, you know, how do you teach your kid's stoicism? How do you introduce them to it? Because we all wish we'd heard it earlier. Well, I tried to write the boy who would be king and the girl who would be free as two fables building around the insights, the ideas of stoicism.

So your kids can see the ideas. It's a show, don't tell, kind of a book. They can see the ideas,

inculcate them. And I found with my own kids, like, you know, my son was accusing my other

son of cheating at something the other day or hurting him in some way. And I, you know, I said, what does Marcus really say in the boy who would be king, right? He says, the best revenge is to not be like that. And he gets it because he saw it in this kid's book. So that's what I tried to do. I think you'll like that.

I'll link to them in today's show notes,

but you can also just go to daily stoic.com slash king

and daily stoic.com slash free. This is another recommendation. This is my Tempest fugit

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