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 sell them on this.

As you've gotten older, it's been harder to deny.

People can be awful. Institutions let you down. The world will break your heart. There is such a thing as evil. There is too much of it out there. How do you raise kids in a world like that? How do you raise them when you have come to these inescapable conclusions.

According to the beautiful poem by Maggie Smith, the answer is simple.

You keep it from them.

You don't tell them about all the awful things or all the awful people.

I am trying to sell them the world, she says.

Any decent realtor walking you through a real shithole chirps on about good bones. This place could be beautiful, right? You could make this place beautiful. It's not that we lie, it's that we choose to

focus on the potential. We don't allow our cynicism to dampen their expectations. We don't allow our experiences to color theirs.

After all, we're not going to be the one living in the house. They are. Our job is to sell them on hope,

to imbue them with a sense of agency and confidence and duty, a belief that they can make a difference,

an obligation to be the change they want to

see in the world. We have to sell them on this, sell them on the good bones, sell them on what they

can do with it. I think one of my favorite things about being a parent is sort of made me a kid again in a weird way.

So every night my wife and I have a bowl of Magic Spoon cereal.

It's the dessert we have.

We try to generally eat healthy, but you know you have these cravings, having all the kid's stuff around the house.

What I love about Magic Spoon is there's no gluten, basically no carbs,

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