Of course, it was too good to be true. When University of Michigan professor Scott Hershovitz heard his young son screaming for a “philosopher,” he should have known there was some mistake. “Hank, Hank!” Scott (who wrote a delightful parenting/philosophy book Nasty, Brutish and Short) cried back, “I am a philosopher, what do you need?”…

On their deathbeds, fathers think about a lot of things. They think about the world they’re leaving to their sons and daughters. They think about how they parented. They think about the mistakes they made. They think about what they did right. They are warmed by the thoughts of their children, and, if they are…

We all have some version of this memory: We didn’t feel well. We fell awkwardly on our wrist. We hit our head. We told our parents, but they didn’t believe us…they told us we’d be fine. They told us we’d feel better soon. Then a few days later it turned out that we had scarlet…

Aristotle wrote his famous Nicomachean Ethics for his son, Nicomachus. Seneca was given a philosophy teacher by his father. Cato too, was given the philosophical education his parents felt the promising boy deserved. Marcus Aurelius tried to give Commodus a group of philosophical advisors, and we can imagine that one of his great disappointments in…

Being a parent is terrifying. Joan Didion’s famous line, as we talked about recently, is that once you have kids you are never not afraid. We are hostages to fortunes now, always worried that something could or will happen to our kids. And it’s true, something could happen. We all know parents who have found…

You are not perfect. Nobody would argue that–least of all your kids. But are you better? Better than you were when they were younger? Better than you were a couple years ago? Better than yesterday? Rinker Buck wrote a fascinating book about traveling the Mississippi River on a flatboat (an amazing story you can pick…

Your kids are going to make bad decisions. They are going to do things you disagree with. They may well grow up into someone you don’t understand. What are you supposed to do? Well, first, as the great Taylor Swift tells us, you need to calm down. You need to remember that, again as she…

Maybe someday, you’ll get there. It’ll probably be too late–your teenager will be grown up, the phase will be over, things will have calmed down. You know this things you seem to have strong opinions about…the tone of your kid’s voice. Whether the music they listen to is any good. How they want to style…

It’s a noisy world out there… and most of us add to the din. We chatter on social media. We chatter on the phone. We chatter over email. Even as parents, we tend to do a lot of talking. There are all the things we tell our kids. The things we remind them about. The…

It happens so often that you hardly even notice it anymore. Your kids said they weren’t hungry and now of course they are. You told them to go to the bathroom before you left (they ignored you), and now they want you to pull the car over so they can pee. You knew they’d like…