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've got to give them access.

We want to make sure our kids have opportunities in life.

We want to make sure that they're not excluded or kept out. We work hard to try to make money,

to try to invest, to try to get ahead in our careers and in life so our kids can have a head start.

All good. But sometimes for all this hustle and ambition, we neglect one of the easiest ways to help

them get ahead. As Doris Kearns Goodwin writes, Theodore Roosevelt certainly came from a privileged

family. They were rich. They were social elites. They had a mansion in Manhattan. Yet his main

advantage, she says, is actually pretty simple. Few children read as broadly or had such access to books as young Roosevelt.

He had only to pick a volume on the shelves of the vast library in his family's home or expressed interest in a particular book, and it would magically materialize.

During one family vacation, Teddy proudly reported that he and his younger brother and his sister

Elliot and Corrine had devoured 50 novels.

Theodore's father read aloud to his children in the evenings after dinner.

Above all, he sought to impact didactic principles of duty, ethics, and morality through

stories, fables, and maxims.

So yeah, it would be wonderful to hand your kids a famous last name, a legacy admission to Harvard or a trust fund, but that is difficult

to do. What you can do must do is give them access to a library, to unlimited amounts of books,

bring them up in a house that if without a rich heritage of fame or noble lineage

is at least rich in a love of reading. The best thing we can do is pass them those didactic

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