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 have to be proud. You're an adult, so we assume that you can handle this email. But imagine

you're in the middle of the biggest moment of your career. Suddenly, someone starts attacking and

criticizing your son. They're not completely wrong. Your son has made mistakes. Your son has

struggled with addiction and bad decision-making. Those decisions have cost your family

money maybe. It's caused you untold stress personally. It's made you sad. It's made you angry.

And it certainly caused problems for you at work. What do you do? It's definitely not what you want to be

talking about. It's not a position you asked yourself to be in.

And it's not fair that you find yourself there.

So what do you do?

You could express some of those feelings.

You could distance yourself.

You could deflect, obfuscate, change the subject.

You could even lie and deny.

Wouldn't be the first time a parent did that. But no, there is only one

response. It's the response that Joe Biden gave in the first presidential debate where Donald

Trump evoked the name of his son Hunter. Biden took a breath. He calmed himself. He fought back a wave

of pain and frustration and said, my son,

like a lot of people, had a drug problem, he's overtaken it, he's fixed it, he's worked on it,

...