We all have our issues. We had trauma from childhood. We have bad habits we picked up in college. We have scripts we learned, patterns we’ve repeated, coping mechanisms we’ve developed.

We prefer not to die with them, to carry them always. But when exactly are we planning on dealing with them? In a perfect world, we would have gotten serious about it before we had kids. In the next best world, we’d deal with them now.

“All I know is that as we age the weight of our unsorted baggage becomes heavier,” Bruce Springsteen explains in his spectacular autobiography Born To Run, “…much heavier.” We talked before about his strange and disorienting childhood, which was warped by the grief of his grandparents and their inclination to spoil him, along with the distance and demons of his father. He related that, like a lot of us, “the defenses I built to withstand the stress of my childhood, to save what I had of myself, outlived their usefulness…” When the bill comes due, Springsteen says, the payment is in tears.

But the tragedy of not dealing with your shit is that you’re not the only one who has to pay that bill. Springsteen had to bear the burden of his grandparents and parents, just as many of us are stuck dealing with issues that could have stopped a generation or two earlier. We can’t help that…but we can do our best to make sure it stops with us. We can give our kids the gift of a debt-free life, or at least, a less crippling one.

And we do that by dealing with our issues. By going to therapy. By processing our pain. By healing. By coming up with new patterns, new scripts.

Funny enough, it was another idea from Springsteen’s memoir Born to Run that set up one of the most important themes in The Daily Dad book—his question of whether you’re going to be an ancestor or a ghost to your kids. His book is a haunting demonstration of what happens when our parents make the wrong call. Check out Born to Run and, of course, The Daily Dad: 366 Meditations on Parenting, Love, and Raising Great Kids.