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 don't even realize how much you say it. We love our kids.

What's more?

We want them to know that we love them.

We want them to understand how important they are to us, how they're the most important

thing in the world to us that we drop everything for them, do anything for them.

So why on earth do we so often signal the opposite?

Literally and figuratively, we send the message that they're

bothering us, that they're a distraction, a burden, annoying. As Evelyn McDonald writes in her

fascinating book, The World, according to Joan Didion, Didian's daughter Quintanauro once wrote

down a list of her mother's sayings, they were, brush your teeth, brush your hair, and

shush, I'm working, Donald writes.

It's the mantra of the mother who works from home of the writer trying to hold on to a thought.

It's the kind of thing a parent says in the moment, in lots of moments, but doesn't quite grasp

the cumulative effect of it. We are oblivious to the subtext, but our kids hear it loud and

clear. We are saying, the phone is more important. We're saying, I'm not interested. We are oblivious to the subtext, but our kids hear it loud and clear. We are saying

the phone is more important. We're saying, I'm not interested. We're saying you're not as

interesting as. Only later do we realize what we're saying to them, as Didian did tragically

in her haunting book Blue Nights, how this hurt them, how it contradicted

what we felt deep down inside. We were just busy in that moment. We just needed to finish

...