Plutarch recorded the story that Socrates went to the fanciest neighborhood in Athens and called out, “What are you doing, men? You are giving all possible attention to acquiring money, but small thought to your sons to whom you are to leave it.”As Socrates pointed out, money is just one piece of the legacy puzzle.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

Those white shoes your parents told you to keep off the grass, the khakis they wanted you to keep clean on Easter. The car they didn’t let you eat in, the walls they told you not to mess up with your posters.Where is all that now? The shoes are long since thrown away, the pants outgrown, handed down and then finally tossed by someone. The walls have been repainted many times over. Even the car, by this point, is probably a squashed metal cube in a junkyard–and if it isn’t, the person driving it has long since given up trying to make sure it’s ‘nice.’✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

However much they seem to be prioritized by other parents, by certain cultures, perhaps by your own parents, or your instincts, in the end, it doesn’t matter.It doesn’t matter what color they dye their hair…it doesn’t matter how clean their room is…it doesn’t if they’re gay or straight or anything on any spectrum…it doesn’t matter where they go to college…it doesn’t matter what field they enter…it doesn’t matter how dark or strange or profane the music they like is…it doesn’t matter whether they abandon the piano✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

We parents are collectors. We have the photos from the day they were born. We have the first drawing they did. Their first pair of shoes, the tickets to that first flight. We have their high school diploma and their baseball t-shirts. We have their trophies and ribbons. Our garage, we’ve said, is a graveyard of strollers and high chairs and bikes and boxes of outgrown clothes and toys.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

On this weekend episode of the Daily Dad,  Ryan talks to CBS Morning in depth on applying stoicism, Garbage Time versus Quality Time & unforgettable family  moments during a rainy weekend in NYC. ✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

​None of us will be perfect parents. Our children will not agree with and understand with every choice we make–now or later. We are going to make mistakes. We are going to do things we regret. We are going to find out later just how the decisions we made affected them.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

“Only later,” Joan Didion wrote of her daughter, “did I see that I had been raising her as a doll.” Grieving, heart broken over the sudden and tragic loss of her family (detailed in the moving books A Year of Magical Thinking and Blue Nights), she was almost certainly being too hard on herself, yet…Aren’t we all a little guilty of this?✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

They are so like you. So like their mother. They have the same affect. They have the same bad habits. The same hopes, the same fears you did when you were their age. This helps you be patient with them, helps you connect with them, helps you get them what they need.You understand.Or so you think.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

Look, when you were young, you could get away with it. You could spend more than you had–knowing you’d figure things out later. You could be selfish because you were the only person that really counted in your life. You weren’t expected to have it together, you were expecting to make mistakes and learn by trial and error.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube    

There is a famous line we have posted many times here at Daily Dad, one that’s always popular on Instagram whenever it goes up. The most important thing you can do for your kids, it reads, is love their mother. While the quote could be made to be more inclusive (for both genders and for modern, blended families) the overall wisdom is spot on: Kids thrive when their parents not only get along, but love each other. A good marriage is a critical part of a happy home.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube