The Daily Dad

What Are You Playing For?

Jan 10, 2024

02:40

Snipd AI

The podcast discusses the challenge of balancing parenting responsibilities with future aspirations, using a baseball player's example. It emphasizes the importance of decision-making and building connections with children.

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Quick takeaways

Balancing short-term and long-term goals as a parent is crucial, ensuring one's availability for their children's future.

Investing in relationships and connections with our children is vital, measuring the success of parenting by the quality of time spent and the strength of bonds built.

Deep dives

Balancing short-term and long-term goals

In this podcast, the importance of balancing short-term and long-term goals as a parent is emphasized. While it's natural to be consumed by the day-to-day tasks and responsibilities of parenting, it is crucial to also consider the future. An example is given of the baseball player Anthony Rendon, who not only focuses on his professional career but also plans for being present in his children's lives as they grow older. The podcast encourages parents to make choices and decisions that align with their long-term goals, ensuring that they are physically and emotionally available for their children in the future.

Balancing the Present and Future: A Parent's Challenge

3min

It can be hard in the moment to think of anything else. You have lunches to make. Practices to get to. Birthday parties to plan. Work to do. Childhoods to survive.

Having kids is so overwhelming that your ability to conceive of two weeks from now, let alone the future, is severely compromised. This isn’t entirely a bad thing—it’s good to be in the moment, to not get too far ahead of yourself.

But at the same time, you do need to make sure that you consider more than just this moment.

The baseball player Anthony Rendon has talked about how he’s needed to balance optimizing not just for his professional career but his goals as a parent. “Even if the season doesn’t work out or the next four years don’t work out,” he said recently, “I’m planning for taking care of my kids when they get older. Hip surgeries, wrist surgeries, ankle surgeries … I want to play with them when they are 10, 12, 15 years old.”

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