The Daily Stoic - Ask Daily Stoic: Ryan and Dr. Harvey Karp Talk Preparation, Patience, and How to Be a Great Parent

Episode Date: July 18, 2020

Ryan speaks with Dr. Harvey Karp, a parenting expert and inventor of the SNOO Sleep System, about how people prepare for parenthood, the benefits of seeking out parenting expertise, and more.Dr. Harvey Karp is a pediatrician and the creator of the SNOO Sleep System. Dr. Karp is a fellow of the American Academy of Pediatrics and teaches pediatrics at USC’s Keck School of Medicine. He has achieved renown for his methods that help infants quickly and safely go to sleep.Get the SNOO Sleep System: https://www.happiestbaby.com/Sign up for Daily Stoic’s parenting course, The Stoic Parent: http://dailystoic.com/stoicparenThis episode is brought to you by Felix Gray, maker of amazing blue light-filtering glasses. Felix Gray glasses help prevent the symptoms of too much blue light exposure, which can include blurry vision, dry eyes, sleeplessness, and more. Get your glasses today at http://felixgrayglasses.com/stoic and try them for 30 days, risk-free.This episode is also brought to you by LinkedIn Jobs. LinkedIn Jobs is the best platform for finding the right candidate to join your business. And right now, LinkedIn is helping companies like yours find the essential workers that they need in these trying times. Visit http://linkedin.com/stoic to post your healthcare or essential job for free, or to post another job for your business.***If you enjoyed this week’s podcast, we’d love for you to leave a review on Apple Podcasts. It helps with our visibility, and the more people listen to the podcast, the more we can invest into it and make it even better.Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: http://DailyStoic.com/signupFollow @DailyStoic:Twitter: https://twitter.com/dailystoicInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoic/Facebook: http://facebook.com/dailystoicYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/dailystoicFollow Dr. Harvey Karp: Twitter: https://twitter.com/drharveykarpInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/happiest_baby/See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hey, prime members, you can listen to the Daily Stoic podcast early and add free on Amazon music. Download the app today. Welcome to the weekend edition of the Daily Stoic. Each weekday we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoic, something that can help you live up to those four that can help you live up to those four stoic virtues of courage, justice, wisdom, and temperance. And here on the weekend, we take a deeper dive into those same topics. We interview stoic philosophers, we reflect, we prepare. We think deeply about the challenging issues of our time. And we work through this philosophy

in a way that's more possible here when we're not rushing to worker to get the kids to school. When we have the time to think to go for a walk to sit with our journals and to prepare for what the future will bring. Hi, I'm David Brown, the host of Wunderree's podcast business wars. And in our new season, Walmart must fight off target, the new discounter that's both savvy and fashion forward. Listen to business wars on Amazon music or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, it's Ryan.

Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. As you know, I have two children, I have Clark who's knocking on the door four years old and I have Jones who is about 13 months now. My first son, Clark, did no sleeping whatsoever. It was a harrowing about two and a half years. And so somebody suggested that we check out this new, which sounded insane, it sounded expensive, it sounded like, you know,

another one of these things that doesn't do anything. And, you know, what we were so at the end of our rope and not looking forward to repeating the first go round that we ended up buying one for my son, Jones. And it was just unreal. It's not cheap, but in my experience, it was worth every penny. And you basically just strap your baby in,

they lay on their backs, they can't roll over, and it rocks them, and they've tracked something like 100 million hours of baby sleep through the app over the years. And so they can tell sleep patterns, it knows how to rock them just perfectly based on what they need, and it's almost a challenge to let it do what it does, but you'll hear it in the middle of the night sort of picking up when they're starting to wake up

and it rocks them back to sleep. It was just a life-changing thing for us. We've now loaned ours to two different friends. And actually the inventor of this new is today's guest on the podcast. Dr. Harvey Carp, he's an American pediatrician and an expert on babies and toddlers. He's written a wonderful book called Happiest Baby on the Block and is just a fascinating guy. And I actually, I happen to know his daughter, my wife and I met his daughter many years ago, before we even knew that the snoo existed. And so I wanted to know his daughter, my wife and I met his daughter many years ago, before we even knew that this new existed.

And so I wanted to talk to him about the challenge of parenting, but also what you learn as a parent, as a metaphor for some of the ideas in stoicism. We talk about patients. We talk about empathy. We talk about domesticating our emotions. And we talk about how you teach kids to domesticate their emotions. Dr. Carp has all sorts of interesting theories and metaphors that he applies is he talks about in the thing for him. It's all about the metaphor. Where is your kid metaphorically at five

months old where they metaphorically at two years old where they metaphorically at 15 and 20 and 40? Where are you metaphorically? And so it's really interesting. We talk about all this in the episode. And then I bounce through with him some of the commandments we've been doing the 10 commandments for being a great parent, calling that the stoic parent. And you can check out that challenge

at dailystoke.com slash parent. It's been one of our most popular challenges so far. I'm really proud of it. It's been really helpful for me. So I run some of those things by Dr. Carp. I wanted to get his opinion. And then obviously the Stoics talk about parenting. It's the most important job, I think,

that a human being ends up having. And so I wanted to talk to him about some of those strategies and theories, how he thinks they check out based on the science. So it's an interesting conversation. I hope you enjoy it. Listen to Dr. Carp. And of course, if you want to check out our challenge, if you want to, you know, epictetus

says, like, no one can tell you what to do, but they can make you adaptable to circumstances. That's how we've built this challenge. The Stoic parent, 10 commandments for being a great parent, can check out at dailystoak.com slash parent. So Dr. Carp, it's amazing to talk to you. I thought we'd start with something the UNI had briefly touched on on the phone last time we talked, which is one of the things that I have found so sort of humbling and inspiring,

but also just unusual about being a parent. And it's this idea of instosism. It's just, it's this connection to this sense that you're a part of something that has happened for as long as there have been people. And that we are descendants of an unbroken line of other fathers and mothers, or we wouldn't be here. And this is sort of the theme you see in the Stoics talking about all the time,

just that history is the same thing happening over and over again. And I don't know, when I read ancient history, I'm just struck always by, you know, it's like Socrates talking about troubles at home. And like the theme of trying to be good at this really hard thing is maybe the most human thing that there is. Yeah, it's beautifully put, Ryan. I think that you don't even realize that until you have a child. It's very kind of abstract for people in our culture today because unlike every other generation of humanity in history and prehistory up until 100 years ago, you would have spent a lot of time with little kids. You would have helped raise your siblings and been with your cousins and run around in the play yard and big kids take care of the little kids and you just intuitively learned this stuff. Parents today very often have never even touched a baby before they

have their own child. And so they have all sorts of impressions of what it's going to be like being a parent. It's rather rosy and two-dimensional. And of course, in many ways, it's the most rewarding experience you can have. And it's truly the purpose or one of the greatest purposes of why we're here. But if you look at now your life being the next link in that chain that goes all the way extended back to the beginning of humanity and now your children are the next link in that chain. In the past those links have been have been put through the fire. They've been hardened and formed by all the experiences that you have in your early life. And we in our link in the chain are maybe weaker links than have been in the past. Unfortunately, not that we can't strengthen ourselves, but you do have to go out of your way as a

parent to try to develop those skills, which may not have been part of your upbringing. No, that's interesting. And something we've've been I've been thinking about too is like like if you told someone they were starting a new job or that they were going to become a professional athlete and we sort of approach other things in our life as a thing to master and to to really study and immerse ourselves in and And with parenting, it's sort of like there's two, it almost feels like in our culture, another sort of two paths that people go, either they're just completely winging it,

or they see it as like a thing that you win, you know? And it strikes me that both of those are the incorrect directions to go down. Yeah, you know, and I think that reflects the way you have lived your life, right? If you've always just kind of, you know, done your work and you get your job and all that kind of stuff and you just naturally have confidence in yourself, you don't want to be told by egg heads how you're going to be raising your children.

And maybe you have a strong family tradition, which you can lean upon. Other people really grade themselves, literally and figuratively, according to how they've done in school and how they've done at work. And it's a very kind of linear, success-oriented type of an approach to life. And children, of course, are much more of an adventure

into the wilderness. You know, there's a lot of rough terrain and changes and open meadows and it's something that we need to approach with a certain sense of humility and open mind to, as so many parents will tell you as they go through the process, they learn as much as they teach. I don't know if that's been your experience as well.

No, absolutely. And it's like, we have these sort of virtues of what we think a good person is, is someone who's patient, someone who's kind, someone who can figure things out, someone who is cool under pressure, then you have a kid and you realize you thought you were good at those things, but you've really never been tested the way that you're being tested right now. And that strikes me as a theme in your work of all the sort of virtues that come across. It feels like patience seems to be the theme of good parenting in your philosophy.

I would say that's one of your five fingers, but I wouldn't over stress that. Listen, a lot of people are impatient, they blow up, and actually you can learn from that, and kids can learn from that too. Listen, I can be loving, and I can lose my patience, and I might even say things I regret, but if I can come back and apologize, and kind of write the wrong and show my love,

actually that's not such a terrible experience to have. In fact, it's probably not the sanitized view that we have. Sure. But I think that that's probably more livable. But there are two things I want to say. One thing about the idea that you said about practice and skill building. One thing is, we talk about the 10,000 hours, you know, Malcolm Gladwell talks about the book about an outliers. And yet, we assume that we can just parent without doing any training whatsoever. This most important and complex job and really the whole purpose behind our purpose in many ways is something that we kind of have a lot of hubris in believing

that we just can do it. And I like to joke with people that when they have a lot of hubris in believing that we just can do it. And I like to joke with people that when they have a baby, many people buy baby books, maybe even five or six or seven baby books, not that they'll read all of them, but just buying them is a it's a marker of your diligence as a parent. But once you get past that baby period, people don't buy books. It's as if there's, you know, they're just winging it. Number one is time, but number two, they think that, well, I know my kids better than anybody else.

What do I have to learn? I just wish people would spend five hours less watching Game of Thrones and invest five hours in just learning about how toddlers brains work and how to speak with them. Because just as in my work with babies, there's some very specific counterintuitive techniques that are very helpful at mastering those first six months of life with your child. Between eight months in and five or six or 78 years of age because all of us really

become emotional like toddlers depending on how upset we get, there are some very specific techniques that can help you be super competent and skilled and a master of talking with little kids and helping them get through their feelings and ultimately being a successful parent. So patients, of course, but there's very much a body of skills to learn that are not only not necessarily intuitive

but oftentimes counterintuitive. Yeah, the epic teedis quote that I love, and I've used it on this podcast a bunch of times. He says, it's impossible to learn that which you think you already know. And I catch myself bumping up against that, and then I see other parents do it where you just kind of assume you know you go like, I have good instincts,

or like I was a kid once, I have parents, where I read two books. So obviously I know how to do this extremely difficult thing that by the way, making a mistake here there could have big, enormous implications in the course of someone's life. So it's the wing it seems to be almost connected to a kind of arrogance or ego that like,

I got this, how hard could it be? Right. And of course, that's fed into by the whole Instagram world where you see everybody else succeeding. And so I like to think of this as we should on ourselves. I should do this, I should be honest. I should, you know, all of those things and that, just assuming that you know as you, as you quoted, is an impediment. What's the quote by Mark Twain? It's not what I don't know that gets me into the most trouble. It's what I know that isn't true. Sure. Yeah. So, for example, everyone knows, you know, Tipto, the baby's sleeping completely wrong. If you take a baby to a noisy party or a basketball game or some kind of sporting event

that's really noisy, your new baby will fall asleep almost immediately. You would never sleep there, but babies can do it. The idea that, well, listen, baby's just don't sleep well in the beginning. You gotta wait several months for them to learn day night differentiation. Sounds right.

And yet, at the same time, we know if you drove your child all night in the car, they'd sleep an extra hour or two. And so it does require us to not just hesitate before we assume that we know all this stuff, but also reach out to the people who maybe do have an expertise and can give you specific actionable advice. And I want to tell you one thing about toddlers,

because people are struggling with toddlers more than anyone else. You know, if you have older kids or high schoolers, you know, there's all sorts of stuff on social media that they can help with their learning, you know, they wear in the days of COVID right now. And for babies, there's, you know, media that they can help with their learning. We're in the days of COVID right now. And for babies, there's supports that you can get.

And we're trying to help people out with this snooved, which is a response. Which I love. Thank you, thank you. We're really excited. We now make, I mean, we've shown that we add one to two hours of baby sleep. We keep babies safely on the back.

And we're hoping by the end of the year that the FDA will recognize it as the world's first sits prevention bed. We think we're dramatically reducing the risk of infant sleep death. And it really is a 24 hour caregiver. So really, anyone can have their own 24 hour helper for the cost of a Starbucks a day, because we rent it all across the country. But anyway, that's the baby stuff. And it turns out, you think when you have a baby, that that's the hardest thing you've

ever done, until you have a toddler. And you can throw this now. You have a toddler and then you have another baby. And you go, geez, the baby is the easy part. You know, toddlers are much more complex. So I wanted to just mention one of the greatest misconceptions that parents have, which seems completely right, but actually is not only incorrect, but is actually undermining a parent's interactions with their young child. So we're all taught to acknowledge feelings.

That's what respectful and pathic communication is about when you have, when you have a normal conversation, it doesn't really matter that much. You go back and forth, like we're going back and forth, it's kind of like a tennis match, you know, serve and, and volume return and things like that. And that, by the way, is the rule that governs communication in all cultures of human beings around the world. It's called reciprocity or turn taking. But when someone becomes emotionally upset or emotionally engaged, let me say, because it can be happiness as well. The rule of reciprocity changes.

We no longer take even turns back and forth, but whoever is most upset gets to go first and they get an extra long turn. And our job before we, the listener, give our opinion about what's being said, our job is to acknowledge the information that was handed to us. In my books, I have a book called,

the Happiest Toddler on the Block, for kids eight months to five, six years of age. And this is called the fast food rule, meaning whoever is hungry is for attention gets to go first. And the way you respond, and this is what parents get confused about, is not rooted in the words you say. It's rooted in the way you say the words.

There are three steps actually. I call it toddleries or translating into your toddler's language, but it's short phrases, repetition, and mirroring a third into your toddler's language, but it short phrases, repetition, and mirroring a third of the person's emotion in your ton of voice and gestures. Now, this gets to brain physiology. This is really a neurophysiologic phenomenon. Again, this is universal. This is a human basis of communication with someone who's upset. The way the brain works is, you know, if you opened up the top of your skull and you looked at the brain, it's like looking at two halves of a walnut. And the right half is emotionality, musicality, kind of immediate recognition of face and place.

And also the nonverbal parts of your communication, your ton of voice gestures. The left side of your brain is the so-called adult side or executive function is there, so patients' verbal capability, problem solving, the late gratification, things like that. Needless to say, toddlers are not so great with the adult side, and they're much better with the right side of the brain, the more reactive side of the brain. It turns out that all of us turn off our left brains when we get upset. We become less logical, less reasonable, less eloquent, less patient. And we have a term in our culture, we call that going ape, right? I mean, you literally become less developed, less sophisticated in your approach.

And we go down this evolutionary elevator and we become more like cavemen. So the key thesis less developed, less sophisticated in your approach. And we go down this evolutionary elevator when we become more like cavemen. So the key thesis of the happiest toddler in the block is toddlers are not little children. They are knee-and-earthals. They are unsiphylized, unsiphysticated, and the more upset they are, the more like that they are.

So here's the bottom line. When you're talking to an upset toddler, number one, you try not to get upset yourself, which is not so easy. So don't judge yourself if sometimes you lose it because that's just normal. But if you can hang on to your presence of mind, you want to respond to them using toddleries, short phrases, repetition, and mirror a third of their emotions. So when your child says, you're so stupid, you gave him the candy and you didn't give me any candy. You know, you were framed from saying,

you know, that's not nice to talk to your mother like that. But rather, you narrated back saying, oh, you're mad. You're really, really, really mad. You want the candy and you're mad at me. You said, you're so stupid. You're so mad because you want the candy and you're mad at me. You said, you're so stupid. You're so mad because you want the candy and you're mad at me that I didn't give you any candy.

And now your face is sad and you're even not looking at me because you're really mad at me right now. That is six or seven or eight times of repetition for a one year old or an 18 month old or is even more immature. You might just point and gesture and go, you, you want, you want, you want, you want, you want, now, you want, now, you say, mine, mine. Now that sounds weird. It sounds like it's baby talk or it's like, you know, the wrong way to do it. And yet, when your child is very happy, that's exactly what you do.

Yeah, you did it. You did it. Well, you did it. Good job. Good job, honey. Well, look at you. You're with this is how we speak to people when they have strong emotions because the left half of the brain is turned off. So when you want to teach patients and you want to teach cooperation and you want to

teach the leg gratification, which we can talk about why those are so important to teach our kids and for us to learn ourselves. And what are the techniques for doing that? The very first step parents have to learn and understand is how to reign in their own emotional response and how to help their child reign that in because that ultimately becomes the way that they learn to be able to dominate and control their emotions.

And I don't mean dominate in this bad way. We just good we have emotions, but you have to be able to dominate and control their emotions. And I don't mean dominate in this bad way. We'd screw it, we have emotions, but you have to be able to know when to express them and how not to be dominated by them, which I think is really one of the bases of stoicism. No, I was just going to say that, yeah, people think, you know, stoicism is the absence of emotion, but it was nesting to lab. He said, it's better to find us sort of the domestication of the emotions. And so, yeah, the idea that we're these sort of wild, the endotholiser, we have these urges and impulses that that's true. And then we go, but in a civilized society, that's not okay.

And so I love that phrase. And you talk about that a lot. The idea of sort of like your job as a parent is to help civilize your child. And that's, to me, such an interesting way of redefining the job. And it's not to be, you know, kind of in any way, criticizing young children or kind of labelling them. They are uncivilized.

And your job is to teach them the rules of civil life. How to say, please, and thank you, wait in line, share your toys, speak your turn, you know, with your utensils. That ultimately is a big part of it. But here's the thing, which has been the either or, and I'm trying to be in the middle of the road here, which is that it's not all about behaving well. It's about understanding that none of us always behave well, and that's part of the beauty, to have passions, to have emotions is a great thing, and to learn how to balance them and channel them

when the situation is appropriate. I mean, you're seeing people protesting in the street screaming and yelling, hey, that's appropriate, you know, when you have great injustices, that's not necessarily the time. Of course, yes, you want to sit and have rational dialogue, but sometimes you have to wave the flag, you have to make big gestures to get attention. And so ultimately, you want to be able to play all of the instruments of your brain, right? You want to be able to play all of the instruments of your brain, right? You want to be able to use your emotionality and your reason. And one is not superior to the other. They're really all assets that we have and need to learn how to use appropriately.

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Follow Dissentel wherever you get your podcast. You can listen ad-free on Amazon Music or The Wondery App. I was just gonna ask you about one thing that I think goes to the core of what you've been talking about and is an interesting idea in your work, which is like, and it's certainly something that I've struggled with as a parent, but has made me, I think, better as just a human in the world,

which is you're saying like, the toddler is acting the way that they're acting for some underlying reason, right? They're tired, they can't articulate what they're trying to say, they're frustrated, they're confused, they don't know how to handle this. Whatever it is, instead of addressing the behavior, although the behavior is important, you try to understand the root underlying cause. So you go, oh, you're throwing a, you're having a meltdown right now, not because you're a bad kid, you're having a meltdown. And not because I'm a bad parent, you're having a meltdown because we skipped nap or because I thought you ate and then you didn't eat or whatever, like you're tired,

hungry, scared, that's why you're acting the way that you're doing. It's interesting how we can get there with toddlers, but I do feel like we struggle understanding that other people, our fellow adults, are also always acting for a reason or our spouse is acting for you. You know what I mean? Yeah, absolutely. This is really, even though, you know, there's the word toddler in this book, it could be the happiest teenager on the blog, or the happiest adult on the blog, or the happiest grandmother on the blog, because these are universal human styles of communication. We all become toddlers if we get upset enough. We literally turn off our left brains

and we become much more embedded in our right brains. We become an brain equivalent of a toddler. And again, that's not to be disparaging at all. That's just the reality. And so most of us intuitively know how to handle that. So listen, if your best friend is grieving something and they're crying right there in front of you, you could say, you know, I see you're upset, but you really have to think about it this way. But probably more likely what you're going

to do is say, oh my God, oh my God, I'm so, so sorry. I mean, I don't even know what to say now. It, it's terrible. You're going to repeat something with almost a blabbering words. The words don't even matter. You could just say, oh, oh. And that is as eloquent as using words. Once you've joined with that person,

this is one of the things about parents, you're not going to solve all your kids problems or all of your spouse's problems for that matter. And you don't need to. That's not your job. Your job is not to figure it all out. Your job is to be a companion. Your job is to say, you're not alone in this. And I trust you to figure it out. And if you want my help, I'll try my best to help you along. But I have confidence in you. And I believe that you know what? You keep trying to open up that jar.

I see how you're like twisting it with your hands and you're really trying hard. Good for you. You're really making an effort rather than going right in and say, honey, can I help you with that? I mean, you will get to that point where you'll say when your child's starting to get frustrated, you know, would you like a

little help? But you don't start there. And that's part of the point. It's really how to learn how to dance with people who have emotions. And it's not being in a rush to solve the problem because in trying to solve it, you're assuming that you know better than the person, and you're trying to move them off of their feelings when right now they need to be expressed in their feelings. Freud said that unexpressed feelings never go away. And we all live with that. If we had a disappointment or a shame in the past and we get into a similar situation, we naturally kind of duck down a little bit more.

We kind of curl in a little bit to protect ourselves. We see that of course with phobias. When you're in a situation that's similar to your prior phobic situation, you'll automatically anticipate that, trying to protect yourselves. And so it's important to understand that the role is not to save the person that we love. It's to be accompanying them. Does that make sense? No, it totally does.

I'm curious, I know your kids are a little bit older, but being that you were a doctor of their whole lives and now you're a startup entrepreneur and an author, you do all these things. I'm curious what advice we've done this thing for daily dad and one of the sort of the laws is about putting your family first, but it's a balance, right? Because to put your family first, you have to work.

And yet to be really good at your work, it has to be a priority. How do you think about that sort of that work life balance thing? How do you make your family a priority, but still go out and try to do things in the world? I think you have to ask my family that. I'm sure, well, I'm in a mea culpa, right?

I mean, I can definitely learn to do that better. I'm in a challenging situation where I'm a bit older. I've had some health problems and I have a job that I'm trying to accomplish, which is really a service to this end more grandiose than I wanted to sound, but there's something that I'm trying to accomplish that is going to help a lot of people. I live my life really with the sense of service. I feel like that's the most important thing that I can do is try. If I die and some people say that their lives have been helped

by me, you know, then that is a life worth living. And I'm fortunate that my wife and my stepdaughter have one child who's 36 and actually works in our company and my wife is that my co-founder and she works as intensively as I do. We're all deeply committed to mission and to a certain degree we have to sacrifice or we have sacrificed some of the vacation time or some of the other fun things in life perhaps as we all try to accomplish this mission. And there's no perfect there, right? Perfect is the enemy of good.

I'm sure we could do things better. And but we're working as hard as we can to try to make a difference in the world. And so we're probably getting a C-plus in that work-life balance situation. No, no, I mean, I think it's an interesting tension, right? And for the Stoics, there was this idea of service, of servicing what they called the public good or the common good and yet also You know the importance of family and how do you match those things up and you know

It's fascinating in Stoicism is is you have some some Stoics who had great kids a Kato's daughter Portia It is famously this you strong, inspiring, powerful woman who sort of almost outshines her father. And then on the other hand, you have Comedis, Marcus Aurelius' son, who Joaquin Phoenix probably underplays in the movie Go Hadiator, just in terms of how awful he was. And so, yeah, I'm just curious. It's attention, I think we're all dealing with, and maybe just the first step is admitting that it's attention and then finding some way to work inside of it.

I think you're right. I think frame of mind is incredibly important. Having the paradigm, when I wrote the happiest baby on the block, on the block, rather, the idea that the post it that I had on my computer was it's the metaphor stupid. You know, it's like Bill Clinton's it's the economist's stupid.

Because metaphors allow us in a single swipe to really capture broad concepts. And so for babies, the key concept is that they're born three or four months too soon. The idea of the fourth trimester. If you understand that, then you understand what your job is for those first four or five months of your baby's life, your one big walking uterus. For toddlers, the key encompassing metaphor is that they're cavemen, they're primitives, they're uncivilized, and there are two things that happen when you recognize

that. Number one, you have different expectations of your child, right? You know that if you have a good day, it's just a good day. It doesn't mean that, you know, just because you're 14 months old, said, thank you, you know, it doesn't mean they're going to do it every day. And it also changes your expectations of yourself as a parent. You know that you're dealing with an uncivilized person, and the more upset they get, the more uncivilized they are. And so you have a little bit of distance to be able to have a point of view recognizing that you're not in the fight, right?

You can kind of float above it a little bit, so you can be emotionally distanced, which sometimes you have to do, so that you don't get pulled into it. Because when someone spits in your face and screams at you, you know, it's natural to get emotionally pulled into it. This is not just a metaphor by the way, it is honestly, I believe, the way that our children grow is an echo of where we've

been in the past. And when you go to a playground with your kids and you look at a one-year-old next to a two-year-old next to a three-year-old next to a four-year-old, you're literally looking at a six million-year-old person next to a two-million-year-old person next to a four-year-old, you're literally looking at a six million-year-old person next to a two-million-year-old person, next to a four-year-old is like probably a 4,000-year-old person in terms of the capabilities that they have. And then you understand differently how to speak to them and you have the wherewithal to kind of knock it pulled into it. When you have that frame of mind that allows you to be a little bit more emotionally pulled back. So last question and I've talked to a bunch of guests about this and it's something I sort of struggle with but if gotten a lot of value out of the stokes don't talk too explicitly about parenting but in epictetus is writing and then we find

it repeated in Marcus Aurelis is writing and he gets it from epictetus. There's this sort of stoic exercise the stoics talk about sort of momentum, mori, meditating on our mortality. And what epictetus says a parent should do and I'd be curious I've done I've thought this as I as I strap my son into into this new although obviously I know it has certain health benefits as you were mentioning with Sid's. But Epic Titus says, you know, you you took your child in at night and you say you should be said you should say to yourself or think very briefly like they may not make it to the morning that they this may be the last time that you ever see them.

And he says the reason you do this is is I think one, they were saying this because infant mortality in the Roman Empire must have been horrendous. And Marx really did lose, you know, many children at a way too many children for for anyone human. But to me, the point of that exercise is to slow down to become instantly and undeniably present to sort of soak that moment in and to really be there for it. Like I catch myself going like, you know, we gotta get bedtime wrapped up, you know, and then I go,

but what am I gonna do after this? I'm gonna go watch Netflix or respond to emails, right? And the idea that you only get so many bed times and you don't know when the last one will be, to me is a very powerful parenting exercise and I'd just be curious if you're either horrified by this or if you like it. Oh no, I think it's a very important exercise but it is just an exercise. And what I mean by that is there's a temptation for again in our culture maybe more than others, but it's like this all-or-none phenomenon

Anyone who's had serious illness and I had I had to one time a serious illness and then The sky never looked more blue, you know, once you get over that and you're you're so happy to have your abilities But you don't you really can't live your life just in the moment Sure, you do have to be able be able to switch hit and be present, and yet also be a planner. And so it's important, I think, to always appreciate our mortality and to when you're eating the orange to stop and smell the orange peel and taste

the sweetness of the orange, be in the moment, and meditation or mindfulness is a wonderful way of doing that. And there are practices with children to help them do that as well. Magic, there's different techniques that I talk about in the book. But the point being that you want to practice those exercises as well as knowing that you have to plan for the long haul and make that optimistic assumption that everything's going to work out. plan for the long haul and make that optimistic assumption that everything's gonna work out.

No, that's both said. It like a work life balance is also attention that attention between planning and presence. Exactly, Ryan. Yep, totally agree. Dr. Carp, thank you so much. And seriously, thank you for this new. I, you saved me many, many hours of sleep,

so I appreciate it. I'm so glad that that worked out. Ryan, thanks so much for the time, and thanks so much for bringing up these provocative discussions. I really enjoyed it. My pleasure. Take care. We invite you to check out our newest course, The Stoic Parent. To give you tools and support that you need to become the parent you want to be,

it's ten actionable, practical meditations and prescriptive commandments for parenting. Rules you can live by and teach by for as long as you are lucky to have this job. So check out dailystoic.com slash parenting. Hey, prime members. You can listen to the daily Stoic early and ad-free on Amazon Music, download the Amazon Music app today, or you can listen early and ad-free with Wondery Plus in Apple Podcasts.