“The Daily Dad: 366 Meditations on Parenting, Love, and Raising Great Kids” by Ryan Holiday
It is rare to have read and understood a book before we even read the introduction, but this is what the Daily Dad is for me. I’ve been a keen follower of the Daily Dad mailing list since day one, and I have read every single entry until today. But there’s just something different when reading it in a book format, neatly organized into chapters and topics, and of course with mostly new materials.
Indeed, they say that knowledge is an organized information, and true to Ryan Holiday’s style of writing, this book provides us with parenting lessons from a wide range of discipline, from history to sports, from politics to business, which are broken down into 366 days of the year.
Lessons such as spending time with them, playing with them, on reaching out to them, how our behaviour will set the standard for them, how to set up good examples (because their little eyes are always watching us), about what we all need as a parent: patience and discipline, that our house shouldn’t be a neat and spotless place but instead a place where it looks like kids are living there.
It is also about the balance between supporting and pushing our kids, creating a relationship where they can talk their feelings openly, how to raise readers, how to be an ancestor and not a ghost, about our casual remark on them that could stick with them, about the inner thought that we instil in them, what’s really going on behind a tantrum, how to support them no matter what even when they screw up, teaching them how to handle winning and losing properly, how to teach them resilience, and so much more.
As Holiday remarks, “parenting is a topic that every philosophy and religious tradition has spoken about. We can find lessons on how to control our temper in front of our kids from Plato. Lessons on how to cultivate a peaceful home for our kids from Marcus Aurelius. Lessons on how to not spoil our kids from Seneca. Lessons on how to support our kids from Queen Elizabeth II. Lessons on how to inspire our kids from Florence Nightingale.”
Holiday then continues, it is also “Lessons on how to cultivate curiosity in our kids from Sandra Day O’Connor. Lessons on how to cherish time with our kids from Jerry Seinfeld. Lessons on how to balance our careers and our kids from Toni Morrison. Lessons on how to believe in our kids from the life of Muhammad Ali. Lessons from mothers who survived the Holocaust, fathers who led the civil rights movement, sons who became war heroes, and daughters who won Nobel Prizes … the Stoics and the Buddhists, the moderns and the ancients. We can learn from them all.”
As the saying goes, everyone can be a father, but it takes someone special to be a dad. And this is the perfect book to help us learn how to be a great dad.
THE CHAOS THEORY 