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.

Are you teaching them gratitude? Your kids should be grateful. Not to you and mom, of course, you're just

doing your job. You are legally and biologically obligated. Your kids should be grateful for everything.

We all should be. This is a wonderful time to be alive. Even if it wasn't, it's amazing that any of us

are alive at all. The odds are astronomically small

that we would be. So it's important that you teach your kids about gratitude, because it's easy

to take life, to take the gifts we have been given for granted, especially when we're stressed,

when you're a kid with homework or acne or a room to clean.

Jason Harris, the CEO of Mechanism and award-winning ad agency, and the author of The Soulful

Art of Persuasion, has an interesting practice for how to persuade your kids to have a more

grateful outlook about life. As he writes, as I tell my boys, you've got to be great, but you've also got to be grateful.

Every Sunday night, we write down in our book three things for which we are individually grateful.

I know this is not an earth-shattering idea, and I'm not the kind of guy who loves

shouting out my intentions in a yoga

class, but this practice has made a world of difference for me and my kids. It resets you and gets you

prepped for the week ahead. The things they write down can be big ticket items like a place to live

or just the fact that they are alive and kicking, but they can also be

little things like something good that happened at school or a play in a game. What's helpful

about writing these reflections in a notebook is that you can consult previous entries and jog your

memory on truly trying days. It helps them go back and tap into those feelings when they may seem lost and hopeless.

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