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.

You can make a break. It's been this way a long time. Parents who ignored their kids, parents who were too busy working, surviving to be there emotionally. Parents who drank. Parents who pushed too hard, who asked too much. It's been generations of this. It is the human story written in the private lives of families, written in the history books explaining so much of why we are the way we are.

It may well have been generations of this in your family. Your great-grandparents did it. Your

parents did it to your parents who did it to you. Maybe they didn't know they were doing it.

Maybe they were trying their best to do the opposite. The reason doesn't really matter.

What does matter is that it happened because it was painful.

But the past does not have to be prologue, or rather the ending of the book, can take the story

in a very different direction. Arnold Schwarzenegger recently gave an interview about his attempts to

rise above the trauma of his own childhood, to get away from the example of his abusive father

and the man's failings.

Generations can be different, he said. I don't need to do the same thing that my dad did. I don't

need to be prejudiced. I don't need to be an alcoholic. I don't need to beat my kids. I can make a

break. Each of us has the power to make a break. It may not need to be as severe as,

but we can do better than our own parents did.

We can make a mark as a new and independent generation.

Arnold's kids will have the opportunity to do better than their father did,

breaking from the behaviors that cost him his marriage, for instance.

And you have the opportunity to break from the habits or the mindsets

that pains you about your own childhood

or your parents' childhood.

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