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 will your kids see? The great suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst had two childhood memories

that stood out to her beyond any others. The first, perhaps her earliest, was of her parents

taking her to a fundraiser in England for newly freed slaves across the ocean in America.

The second was as she walked by a prison near her school in Manchester,

where she saw the disassembled gallows that had just recently been used. They were two demonstrations

of the far ends of the human experience. One, charity and mercy, the other, violence and cruelty.

Both these scenes changed her profoundly, putting her on a path to political activism and

progressive causes. As she writes in her memoir, Suffragette, these incidents illustrate to her the

fact that the impressions of childhood often have more to do with character and future conduct than

heredity or education. I tell it also, she said, to show that my development into an advocacy of

militancy was largely a sympathetic process. This lesson, which we built the whole first month

of the Daily Dad Book Round, is simple. Children learn by example. It doesn't matter so much what

adults tell them, what ideology we try to teach them. What

matters is what children see, and that children are far more perceptive than we might think.

As she walked by those gallows, Pankhurst felt intuitively and instantly there was something deeply

wrong with the death penalty, especially delivered in such a cruel and crude fashion. She saw

through the hypocrisy and the rhetoric and saw it for what it was.

Our children see that now.

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