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. You cannot let this happen. You know, your parents weren't

always like this. They were young ones, hopeful, open-minded,

even adventurous. They weren't always so conservative, so stuck in their ways. Your grandparents,

too, they were idealistic ones. They were, especially compared to their own parents,

downright revolutionary. They were the generation that rebuilt the world after the Second World War.

And the same goes with our peers. None of them set out to be those calculating unethical parents

in the college admissions scandal, as we've talked about. But one day they found themselves

ruthlessly scheming to screw over their kids' classmates to secure their not-so-golden

child a spot at USC.

And many of them did so without a second's thought.

So what happened?

It's true that life always has a way of showing us how things really are, disabusing us of our

naive, simplistic understanding of things.

We also come to tolerate, even condone this process where people harden as they get

older. We assume that it's inevitable. If you're not a liberal when you're young goes the expression,

then you have no heart. But if you're not a conservative when you're old, then you have no brain.

It's not the political implications of this that matter. It's the idea that when we have kids or

become parents, our compassion, our sense of collective responsibility, our understanding of what's

fair, gets subsumed beneath our needs and our family. It's the idea that you should only have

compassion when you're young, that you should abandon ideals as you go, as if youthful

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