The Mama of our family is what William Irvine (author of “A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy”) might call a Congenital or Natural Born Stoic. With no formal training in Stoicism, Ahmie developed some of the techniques to cope with serious health setbacks in adolescence including chronic pain & severe fatigue. With those skills in hand, she went on to attend college where she met her life partner Garvin and graduated with a B.A. in Psychology & Sociology with her interests focused on child development & socializtion processes. Ahmie began to rely on a wheelchair most of her time outside the house around the time she started working on her Master’s degree and got pregnant with the family’s 3rd child. The family now has five children born into it (and countless “bonus kids” that we love & nurture up at every opportunity). Our eldest son, William, is developing into a community leader and self-identified Stoic in his own right as he simultaneously finishes high school and a Bachelor of Arts in Organizational Leadership at the age of 17 – a feat we hope to help enable more young people to accomplish. Our younger children will likely also make appearances, if recordings are confined to after their bedtimes or when they’re in school. As of this writing, the youngest is 5 years old.
Ahmie has noticed a lack of accessible Stoic content available that includes the experiences of children, so she is endeavoring to create that. The links from this page do not necessarily represent information that is all-ages appropriate but it is generally tween and up.
Here’s a link to one of William Irvine’s articles that discusses “congenital Stoicism”: https://www.williambirvine.com/stoic-essay-17 (a note about his “Stoic Challenge” book – some of the stories in there are quite extreme and nightmare fodder for people who haven’t processed traumas – proceed with caution and I definitely think that work is too mature for non-adult Stoics, it was a bit much for our adolescent sons in the graphic descriptions of what some have lived through and thrived after)
We often start our day by listening to the Daily Stoic podcast: dailystoic.com (generally relatively kid-friendly, but there are a lot of sponsorship adverts that may annoy impatient youngsters and the episodes with interviews are generally over an hour long so we skip those)
Mama also enjoys the Stoic Coffee Break podcast from stoic.coffee, that has occasional swears in it so we generally don’t put it on when the “featherless parrot stage” youngest is around, it’s pretty tween-and-up friendly and the short break style of it is pretty inspiring. We’ll likely be doing some responses to content from that podcast.
As time goes on, Mama hopes to create content around the book “A Handbook for New Stoics: How to Thrive in a World Out of Your Control—52 Week-by-Week Lessons” by Massimo Pigliucci and Gregory Lopez (which you can access for free as an ebook or audiobook if your public library system gives you access to HooplaDigital, in case you want to jump right in to getting started). That book is pretty kid-safe (we’d recommend going out of order or even skipping the Momento Mori – mortality contemplation – sections if you are still very fresh in grief & mourning, particularly with younger children) but the examples really don’t speak to experiences before mid-life and we feel – particularly after the shared trauma of the pandemic disruptions to our society – that children need access to this framework to help them grow into the best versions of themselves they can be in our shared world.
There may also be Stoic-alligned dancing to music that happens. We are joyful, often silly people here.