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.

What if you didn't hear it again? It drives us nuts. We told them to stop. It's something that they just have to grow out of.

They have to stop. The annoying baby voice they do, the screaming for no reason, the curse word they picked up at school, the insult they're hurling at a sibling, the extremely loud heavy metal band they've taken over the garage with.

The noise we ask them to just please,

for the love of God, stop making. If I hear it one more time we threaten. But here's a thought,

what if that was the last time you heard it? As we talked about here, many, many times there is an end

to everything as a parent. Yes, in the morbid mortality sense, a reality that should hover over

us, as we've said, but also in a much more practical and subtle sense that our kids do grow up

and out of things. All of it ends at some point. And how will we feel when we're sitting in a funeral

or in an empty playroom or dropping them off from college, we will feel so terribly, terribly sad.

We'll miss it.

We'll actually miss this very thing that's currently driving us insane.

You should be so lucky to hear it one more time.

Or if you can't quite get there, you can remind yourself that none of it lasts forever and that

slowly over time your feelings about this noise or that thing will

soften. The volume will get turned down in your own mind. It won't seem so obnoxious. And eventually,

inevitably, you'll feel nostalgic for it. So maybe you give yourself and them, because they're

just having fun, just being a kid, just trying stuff out. Maybe you give them a little bit of that

grace now. And credit to my

wife who threw this out the other day. I've been thinking about a lot. I think she's totally right.

...