Nothing takes up space in a parent’s head (or heart) quite like a kid who is struggling. “You’re only as happy as your unhappiest child,” the expression goes, and it’s true. If one of your kids is struggling–with reading, with adjusting to a new school or city, with becoming a teenager, with the divorce, with some health issue–it’s hard to focus or think about anything else. Even if you’re crushing it at work, even if one of your other kids just made honor roll or the varsity team.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

You’re upset because you just blew it in that meeting. You’re kicking yourself because you meant to get up early and ended up sleeping through your alarm and missing a flight. You’re stressed about the business, you wish your marriage was better, you hate the way your house looks from the street. You can’t watch the news without being disgusted or outraged or worried.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

You notice it one day–the garage is full. Of strollers no longer used–first the single, then the double and the jogger. The chair you and your spouse spent so many wee hours of the morning in, rocking the baby back to sleep in. There is the balance bike. Then the first one with pedals. It’s next to the trailer you used to strap them in and tow them behind your bike.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

It’s important to remember that everyone was a kid once…and that no child is perfect. For instance, as a child Gandhi once stole some money from his brother. The boy was wracked with guilt, terrified of the consequences–from his parents, from the law, from God. Ultimately, he went to his father and confessed, laying out every aspect of his crime in great detail in a long, self-flagellating note, offering himself up for some extreme punishment he felt he deserved.✉️ 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 KIND Snacks Founder Daniel Lubetzky about the importance of being kind, culture and values in a successful company & the steps on making the world a better place.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email:DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

In one of F. Scott Fitzerald’s funniest short stories, “Head and Shoulders,” a certifiable genius falls in love with a showgirl. The plot and moral of the story aren’t relevant for today’s email—though the story is highly recommended—instead there is a little passage in it that introduces a concept that is worth thinking about:✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

“Your kids are not keeping score on your career. They just want a parent who’s emotionally present and supportive of them.”-Ben StillerDavid Letterman was the king of late night. His shows ran for thirty-three seasons, making him the longest-serving late-night talk show host in the history of American television. At its peak, he was making something like $30 million a year, watched by an audience of many millions every week.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

There is a joke about a kid who, not liking the ‘No’ he got from one parent, asked the other, in order to get a ‘Yes.’ “Never come between your mother and I,” the father says, “we sleep in the same bed together.”✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

We spend a lot of time looking at the absolute worst parents. Not just because so many leaders and celebrities and artists seem to put their families absolutely last in order to achieve their success, but also because artistically, flawed and tragic figures quite naturally fill up the most pages and screentime. As Tolstoy opens Anna Karenina, all happy families resemble each other but unhappy families are unhappy in their own way.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube

Of course, this parenting thing is hard. It’s expensive. It’s an enormous amount of work and responsibility. And yet, we are the luckiest people in the world, aren’t we?Not just because, as we’ve said before, it took a black swan of black swans for any of us to be here, for us to even have our kids (especially those parents who struggled with fertility or adoption). We have been given an incredible gift with this opportunity to be parents.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Dad email: DailyDad.com📱 Follow Daily Dad: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube