This episode is sponsored by Better Help. 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't fault them for your hypocrisy.

The author Rinker Buck, he has this amazing book called Life on the Mississippi, where he travels the entire river in a homemade flatboat.

He remembers vividly what would happen when his father came home each day.

We talked recently about what kind of feeling the sound of a parent at the door springs up for you.

Well, for him it was partly fear because he knew he was

going to get punished, usually for unfair, contradictory reasons. Ah, shit, Rinker, my father would say.

He writes, you said shit in front of your mother. Why this was a problem was hard for a child to

understand. Dad, I say shit in front of you, Rinker remembers

replying. You say shit all the time. Why can't I say shit in front of mother? His father's

explanation didn't exactly clear things up. Ah, shit, son, he said. It's different. You said

shit in front of your mother. Go upstairs and pick out your belt. A version of this scene appears not just in the

classic movie, a Christmas story, but also in the memories of many people from that era.

And it's still happening in its own way and houses all over the world. We hold our kids to

standards that we don't hold ourselves to. We fault them for things they learned from us.

In one sense, the cruelest part of Rinker's story is not actually the corporal

punishment, although as we talked about, that's unacceptable. The hypocrisy is the cherry on top.

The illegitimacy of it makes it all the more shameful. It's saying, yeah, it's different when I do it.

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