The Daily Dad

This Is The First Step

Mar 15, 2024

03:05

Snipd AI

The podcast discusses the importance of surrounding kids with books, teaching empathy and life lessons. It emphasizes the responsibility of parents to make reading a part of their children's lives. Additionally, it touches on the significance of children witnessing parents' career successes.

AI Summary

AI Chapters

Episode notes

Podcast summary created with Snipd AI

Quick takeaways

Exposing children to parental success outside regular hours can inspire them and shape their view of achievement.

Encouraging kids to witness professional accomplishments instills admiration and respect, promoting deeper parent-child connections.

Deep dives

Importance of Showing Your Professional Success to Your Kids

It is crucial for parents to let their children witness their professional achievements and successes, not just their everyday routines. The podcast highlights how children often miss out on seeing their parents excel in their careers due to the nature of these events happening outside regular family hours. Encouraging parents to bring their kids to these significant moments, the podcast emphasizes the impact it can have on children, citing examples like Bruce Springsteen's changed perspective on his mother after witnessing her succeed at work. By exposing children to these experiences, parents can instill a sense of pride and inspiration in them, creating lasting memories and shaping their perceptions of success.

Let Your Kids Witness Your Career Successes

3min

As Claire Tomalin writes in her book Jane Austen: A Life, we can trace the beginnings of Jane Austen’s greatness to her father’s library. “Their father’s bookshelves were of primary importance in fostering her talent,” she writes, “given that the first impulse to write stories comes from being entertained and excited by other people’s.” And her father had quite a library, **some 500 volumes.

It’s a crime, we’ve said, to raise a kid in a house without books. Our job is to surround our kids with great ideas, great writers, great art. We can’t expect it to turn all of them into groundbreaking creatives, but it will have that effect on some of them. In every case though, it will give them windows into other worlds, it will teach them empathy, it will entertain them and teach them lessons about life and human nature.

And more than just surrounding them with books, we have to demonstrate what being a reader looks like. Not on our phones, not on audiobooks, but good old fashioned reading.

We think this idea—that you have a responsibility to make reading a part of your children’s life—is so important that the month of September in The Daily Dad: 366 Meditations on Parenting, Love, and Raising Great Kids is all about it and titled “Raise A Reader.” It’s 30 days full of stories and lessons in learning, curiosity, and how to raise a reader.

✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com

📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube