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.

What are you even fighting about?

There's no family immune to conflict, whether it's about shoes left out or

tattoos or politics. Families fight. Siblings argue. Parents punish rule breaking. Kids,

rebel. Spouses disagree, fail to communicate and struggle under stress. It's not fun, but it is

inevitable. The real problem then, it's not that conflicts happen.

It's how we handle them when they occur, how we can let these disagreements and miscommunications

take on a life of their own. We've talked about Bruce Springsteen many times in this email and how his home growing up

was damp with tension and resentment, which occasionally exploded into outright conflict. And in one of

his more recent songs, he sings of the trouble we can get ourselves into in any kind of relationship.

We fought hard over nothing, he said.

We fought till nothing remained. I've carried that nothing for a long time. We have to be so

careful that nothing doesn't become something, something our kids end up carrying for a long,

long time. So much of the things we get upset about doesn't even

matter. And then because we get upset about them, we end up saying things that do matter and can never

be unsaid. We fight over nothing and then destroy everything we care about most. You will want a crowded

table when you're old, we've said. Well, that's going to

require some delayed gratification now, some restraint now. It means letting things go now. It means

admitting when you're wrong. It means telling your kids, your spouse, your own parents,

...