What do I have to know before having my first child? What should I do before they arrive? What conversations do my partner and I need to have? How can I make sure I am ready?
We created this course, The Parent-To-Be: A Daily Dad Parenting Challenge, to answer all those questions and more.
If you wanted to become a great guitar player, you couldn't do better than training under a master guitarist. If you wanted to become a great surgeon, you couldn't do better than getting direct guidance from a surgeon who has clocked their 10,000 hours in the operating room. If you wanted to become a great chef, you couldn't do better than apprenticing in the kitchen of a master chef.
As the philosopher-king Marcus Aurelius wrote in Meditations,
"Mastery of reading and writing requires a master. Still more so life."
Or as another translation has it,
"Where literacy is concerned, you can't be a leader until you've been a follower. This principle is even more relevant to life."
We believe this principle is even more relevant to parenting because, before guitar players or surgeons or emperors or readers and writers, there were parents.
This is the wonderful thing about parenting as a learnable discipline: its timelessness. From the ancient world to ours—parenting is parenting. And if you want to become great at it, you couldn't do better than learning from the great parents who have come before you.