The cliche of the good father is playing catch in the backyard with their boy. Let’s put aside the gender stereotypes of this for a second because as a metaphor it’s still good—at least according to the Stoics, who believed that playing ball was the most important skill a person could have. Only they were…

It would be wonderful if we could get our kids everything they needed. If we could teach them all they needed to know. If we could provide every bit of support, every lesson necessary. But of course we can’t. Because we are limited. There are things we don’t know. Flaws we have. Topics we don’t…

When he was a little boy, Harry Truman’s father gave him an incredible gift. In one sense, it was a physical and financial thing. The Truman family saved their dimes in the 1890s and sent away for a copy of Plutarch’s Lives. It had a bright red cover, and his father would read it aloud…

Fifty years after he helped his father build a fence around their house in Mountain View, Steve Jobs took his biographer Walter Isaacson to see it. Jobs skimmed his hand along one of the fence panels and told Isaacson the lesson his father instilled in him that day all those years ago. “He loved doing…

Steven Rinella began taking his kids hunting and fishing as soon as they were old enough to hold a rifle or a rod. Why? Well, for starters, because it’s his job (as an outdoorsman and author) and he, like all parents, tries to find ways to balance work and life. But the other reason is…

It would be wonderful if your kids shared all your interests…but unless you get extremely lucky, that’s probably not going to happen. The writer Rich Cohen, for instance, loves hockey. Sadly, his second born does not. As he writes in his wonderful book Pee Wees, “getting him into the gear was like getting a dog…

Steve Hollonzine’s parents saw him on television, marching in a funeral procession for Harvey Milk, the San Francisco city supervisor who had been killed in cold blood just a few days before. It’s what spurred the terrible phone call that shattered their family. “Are you a sodomite?” his parents demanded to know. All he could…

It would be easy to give them all the answers. It’s even fun to give them the answers. It would make things go faster, smoother and let you get back to what you were doing. But you can’t. You just can’t. We’ve said before that the goal is to try to raise kids who know…

You love your kids more than anything. You think they’re God’s gift (which they are, to you!). You want them to know how you feel about them, and you feel bad when they feel bad about themselves. These are all perfectly healthy and laudable feelings. At the same time, we have to make sure we’re…

Our kids, like us, are utterly unique. Inside each person is a combination of DNA that has never before and never will exist again. On top of that, each person’s experiences, their interests, their unique moment in time–all of it adds up to something very, very special. And what do we encourage our kids to…