Child Attachment Expert: We're Stressing Newborns & It's Causing ADHD! Hidden Dangers Of Daycare!

one in five children will not leave childhood without developing a serious mental illness anxiety depression ADHD

behavioral problems and what pisses me off it's that we're not really educating or telling parents the truth as to why

why is it that what you say is so troubling for some people sometimes facts are An Inconvenient Truth but

everything I'm going to say is supported by research Erica Kamar is a parenting expert and psychoanalyst who uses over

30 years of research to challenge the societal norms on parenting and Early Child Development there's some myths

that really have to be debunked about how to raise a healthy child and the first is dayc care is good for children

for socialization no it is so bad for their brain and it's been known to increase aggression behavioral problems

attachment disorders because babies need their mothers SP the first three years for emotional security can a father do

that so fathers are important in a different way and I'll go through all of that but they're both critical because

if you're raised without one you are missing a piece and then there's quality versus quantity time myth you need to be

there a quality of time as well as a quantity of time you can't have a fabulous career and then come home and

be present for your child on your time it needs to be on their time and there's more and we're going to go through all

of them but are there any areas of privilege that you need to acknowledge maybe someone who doesn't have a partner

there or someone who is in an extremely difficult economic situation they do but there are ways to creatively deal with

it and I'll go through each of them so there's this has always blown my mind a little

bit 53% of you that listen to the show regularly haven't yet subscribed to the show so could I ask you for a favor

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make sure that this show is better for you every single week we'll listen to your feedback we'll find the guest that

you want me to speak to and we'll continue to do what we do thank you so much

Erica you're clearly on a mission and I get that energy from you

that there's really an idea that you believe that much of the world doesn't believe or is struggling to accept in

some way but it's an important idea what is the mission that you're

on I like to think of it as three PS presence prioritization and prevention

and I'll go through each of them um my mission is to educate parents and

uh policy makers and clinicians and Educators about the the fact that for

children to be mentally healthy in the future you have to be physically and

emotionally present for them throughout childhood but particularly in the two critical periods of brain development

which are 0 to3 and 9 to 25 which is adolescence so in those two critical

periods of brain development uh particularly 0 to3 um

much of a child's development depends on their environment and you are their environment so I run around the world

talking about the importance of physical and emotional presence attachment security attachment security is the

foundation for future mental health prioritization we prioritize everything

today other than our children we prioritize our work our careers uh our

material success our personal desires and Pleasures but what we're not prioritizing is children um and you know

that's a problem because if we don't prioritize them they break down they may break down at three they may break down

at 8 or they may not break down till they're in adolescence but eventually they break down and prevention there's

so much that we can do we have a mental health crisis now in the world it varies

to a certain degree in America one in five children will not leave childhood without breaking down at some point

without developing a serious mental illness anxiety depression ADHD

behavioral problems um Suicidal Thoughts so uh we have a problem in the UK it's 1

in six in America it's one in five it's around the world it's about one in five

that is a shocking figure and so and and the truth is we can do a great deal to

prevent that the idea that we are trying to put out fires without talking about

what is the origin of these issues the way that the mental health care system works now it's like what I call cutting

the grass uh children are medicated which is basically just pain management

um they're given CBT therapy which again is just pain management but why aren't

we asking the important questions which is where does emotional regulation

originate where does it come from from when does it start how do we Foster

development in children from a very young age to promote resilience to stress and adversity in the future and

so those are my three missions and for someone who doesn't know your work and doesn't isn't aware

of you they might be thinking how would you know Erica how would you know the answer

so I'm a psychoanalyst um I'm also a social worker I started out as a social worker and then became a psychoanalyst I'm also

an author of books on parent guidance and parents education um and I've been in practice

seeing patience so the majority of my work is still seeing patience I have a fulltime job of seeing patience and uh

as someone who is also a parent I have three children of my own um and so as a

parent as a clinician uh as an author who has for the past 20 years been

researching and what I did is I collected research in epigenetics and attachment Theory and

Neuroscience and uh wrote my first book being there because what what happened

is I was seeing this uptick and mental illness in children and this is really how I got into it um about 30 years ago

I started practicing about 36 years ago but I was probably 5 years into my

practice and I was seeing that the families that were coming to see me had younger and younger children that were

being diagnosed with very serious mental illnesses and being medicated at a very

young age basically silencing their pain and what I was observing in my practice

is that those children who were doing the least well were the ones whose

mothers were the least present in their lives so their primary attachment Figures were the least present in their

lives and so then I started looking at the research I looked at all the Neuroscience research since the 90s and

all of the new new research that had come out um I looked at the old attachment theories which have been

around since the 60s and I looked at the epigenetic research which was rather new too and I saw this trend I I saw that we

were abandoning our children for our own desires for our careers for material

success um and there was a great deal of misunderstanding about the irreducible emotional needs of children we're going

to go through all of that today I'm very excited to learn more about all of this I'm not a parent myself um from all the

investigative research we've done you have three very well adjusted children um so congratulations for that and I

hope to have successful children myself one day but I'm also just really interested in understanding myself

through the work that you've done and the work that you continue to do because we're all at one point children and much

of the Fingerprints of that early experience still exists in us today so I'm ke to understand how things that might have happened to me or anyone

listening today when we were younger may have shaped Us in pro-social antisocial

ways or productive or unproductive ways you mentioned that you still see clients

and patients today what kind of patients do you see

what are they struggling with and who are they are you seeing the parents the kids both well I have a very large parent

guidance practice because of the books that I write um and the articles I write I also write for the Wall Street Journal

and other newspapers so I you know people find me through my writing um and

then they reach out for help um and and so I have the parent guidance basically means people come to see me either both

parents or one parent because they have questions about their child's development or something's going wrong

their child's starting to to develop symptoms um and they don't want to medicate them and they want to

understand what's really at the root cause of of of of the issue and so

that's a a good portion of my practice but I also see individual patients for depression and anxiety and I see couples

and you know the joke about psychoanalysts is we're all specialists in depression and

anxiety but um yeah so I see individuals and couples but a lot of parent guidance

work and they come to you typically because there's they're noticing something is not right with their child

sometimes they'll come preventatively because they want to raise a healthy child and there's so much white noise in

society there's so much of misinformation our instincts are to lean

into our children our evolutionary Drive is to create a feeling of Safety and

Security for our children and to be as present as possible and to sooe them when they're in distress and to be there

to teach them our values and but Society um took a turn it took a turn in the you

could say going back to the Industrial Revolution if I really want to go back I'll say the Industrial Revolution was a

time when women were forced into the workplace into factories and cities you

know they were separated from children for the first time but really the turn that Society took that that I think has

a lot to do with what's happening today is the me movement of the 60s and also the feminist movement both of those

movements which had a tremendously positive impact on society in one way

also had had a tremendously negative impact on society um when women decided

that it was cool to go to work and to work full-time out of the home you know

everybody cheered and said great you know women have the same rights as men and now everybody can be in the

workforce and be independent and make money and do their own thing me me me me me the problem is that children were

dropped they were abandoned and their needs which are not needs that are going

to shift because Society shifts because they have irreducible uh neurological emotional

needs so we know that babies are born neurologically and emotionally

fragile and so what that means is they're not born resilient and today

what's being projected onto babies is they can handle a lot they can handle

stress they can handle separation um they can handle you going back to work after six weeks or three

months and leaving them in daycare with strangers or you know and from an evolutionary

perspective babies have always needed the physical skin-to-skin contact with

their mothers for the first year and most parts of the world babies are worn on their mother's bodies because mothers

perform a number of really important functions for babies that are biological functions based on our evolutionary need

to provide our babies with what we call attachment security um so you know

Society took a turn and it's it's um it's caused a lot of damage I mean this

Mental Health crisis in children I saw coming 30 years ago and it was already

you know so um you know I have uh friends and colleagues like Jonathan Hy who says oh well it didn't start till

social media and that's false because I was seeing this uptick and if you really look there was an uptick in mental

illness and children um going back decades and it had everything to do with

the shift in society towards self-centeredness towards narcissism

towards individualism towards M me me and so you know and I we say that you don't have to

have children period to have a satisfying life but if you're going to

have children you need to be equipped to care for them because having children

alone without really understanding what it means to care for them and being prepared to take on that

responsibility is causing our children to break down why do you mention mothers and not fathers in that because you you

seem to have an emphasis on the role that a mother plays and it seems to be more important in your view than the

role that a father plays or maybe even that a nanny or some other caregiver could play and I noticed that on your

first book which was written in 2017 being there on the cover it says why prioritizing motherhood in big

letters in the first three years matters scientifically evolutionarily with

studies and research how can you make the case to me to make me believe that the role of the mother in particular is

essential versus a father or other caregiver so in fact in the book it

talks about the difference between mothers and fathers because that's an important question um and the reason I

wrote about mothers is not because fathers are unimportant but fathers are important in a different way so there's

a whole debate in society about this kind of idea of gender neutrality that

mothers and fathers are interchangeable but actually from an evolutionary perspective as mammals they're not

interchangeable they serve different functions and those roles and those behaviors are connected to nurturing

hormones so mothers um are really important for what we call sensitive

empathic nurturing when children are infants and toddlers that means that

when children are in distress mothers soothe babies and therefore regulate

their emotions from moment to moment every time a mother soothes a baby uh

with skin-to-skin contact and eye contact and the soothing tone of her voice she's leaning into that baby's

pain and she is regulating that baby's emotions and the way I like to think about it is that you know when babies

are born they're born emotionally disjointed think about say

sailing in the Atlantic this is how baby's emotions go they'll go from 0 to 60 in 3 seconds with their emotions um

and where we want to get babies is to sailing in the Caribbean not flatlining

but we want them to be able to regulate their emotions but they're not born that way and so

mothers because they sooth the baby from moment to moment when they're physically and emotionally present enough in the

first three years they help a baby to learn how to regulate their emotions so by 3 years of age 85% of the right brain

is developed and by 3 years of age babies can then start to internalize the

ability to regulate their own emotions now if mothers aren't present as the primary attachment figures to do that

mirroring of emotion to do that soothing of of their emotions then babies don't

learn how to regulate their emotions the other thing that's important that mothers do is they buffer babies from

stress by wearing ing them on their body for the first year and then by being as present as possible for three years they

actually protect baby's brains from cortisol the stress hormone so there is

a a hormone called oxytocin it's the love hormone and it is protective

against cortisol the more a mother nurtures with sensitive empathic nurturing meaning when the baby cries

the mother goes oh sweetheart you know let me see the boo boo let me kiss the boo boo that that actually raises the

oxytocin in the baby's brain which then protects the baby from cortisol can a

father do that so now fathers why are fathers important so fathers also

produce oxytocin but it has a different effect on their brain so for mothers oxytocin makes mothers sensitive

empathic nurturers very Vigilant to the baby's distress when fathers produce oxytocin it comes from a different part

of their brain and makes them more what we call playful tactile stimulators of

babies what does that sound like to you playful tactful stimulators of babies

throwing the baby up in the air and tickling the baby and running after the baby and rough housing and so that's

important for a variety of reasons um first it encourages things like

exploration and risk-taking it encourages separation and fathers do this really

important thing which is they help the baby to learn to regulate certain emotions so mothers help to regulate

sadness fear distress fathers help to regulate excitement and aggression so

when fathers aren't in the house when there are single mothers raising children without a father often little

boys develop behavioral problems is what we're seeing that they can't regulate their aggression because fathers help

little boys in particular but little girls too to regulate aggression so when fathers are aren't around you'll often

see little boys who are more impulsive who are more aggressive um so the answer

is fathers and mothers are both critical to the development of children which is a very controversial thing to say today

because if you're raised without one you are missing a piece but they're not the

same and they're not the same because our hormones dictate they're not the same so fathers produce a hormone in

great quantities called vasopress vasopressin is the protective aggressive hormone and what does it do it helps

fathers to protect their family there was a study that was done where mothers and fathers lay in

bed and the baby cries was out of the UK this study the baby cries and the father

sleep through the baby's distress cries but the mothers wake up right away okay

but with the rustling of leaves outside the window the mother sleep through it and the fathers wake up right away

because the fathers are attuned to predatorial threat so our nurturing

hormones make us different I mean the fact that we can say that there are many

things that are similar between women and men of course we're both intelligent we can both be

ambitious um but I think the idea that we want to kind of make everything the

same when it's just not factual it is the the Inconvenient Truth that mothers and fathers nurturing hormones dictate

that if they are healthy and they've been raised in a healthy environment they are different now does that mean

that a father can't raise a child and be a sensitive empathic nurture it it doesn't mean he can't take on that role

but if as a society we can't acknowledge the differences then a father can't learn to be a sensitive empathic

nurturer meaning these are instinctual behaviors and so that infant if that

father is going to stay home with that baby acknowledging the differences allows that father then to become a

sensitive empathic nurturer so interesting because these aren't the ideas that are socially

accepted or at least the ideas you see on social media and funly enough as you were speaking I recorded everything you

said and I ran it through Ai and AI said the core ideas that you shared um are well supported by evolutionary

Psychology and Neuroscience which is quite surprising because usually AI argues with people I mean so so the

thing is none of the books I write are based on opinion so I'm I'm very skittish about saying anything that

isn't backed up with research um so it's everything that I write about and speak

about is is supported by research why is it that what you say is so troubling for

some people have you you know why right because it because it makes us confront a set of realities that it's an

inconvenience Tru toore it's An Inconvenient Truth um sometimes facts

are An Inconvenient Truth just like you know Climate Change Is An Inconvenient Truth um this is An Inconvenient Truth

it inconveniences people it also makes people feel guilty so I don't believe

that guilt is a bad feeling I don't believe that guilt is a Bad Thing guilt

is a sign that your ego is functioning it's a sign that the part of you the

part of your ego called the super ego can identify something that feels right and wrong so if you look at a baby who's

crying who's your baby and you feel nothing that means that there's a part of you that is dead inside there's a

part of you that is unempathic towards your own young and we would say that

that doesn't make that person a bad person it makes that person someone who probably had some early trauma

themselves right it means that they probably have some kind of attachment disorder where they can't be attuned to

their their baby's pain right so when you are guilty it means you have

internal conflict it means two parts of you are struggling with each other the part of you that wants to do whatever

you want to do I want to go out to work I want to make money I want to be free you know and the other part of you that

says wait a second but my baby my baby needs me look at my vulnerable baby look

how sad look at the distress that my absence is causing that baby so if we

don't feel guilt then our species is lost we're lost now excessive guilt is

another thing if you're a good enough mother or a good enough father and you still feel guilty then we call it

anxiety but for the most part what I say makes a lot of women and men feel guilty

and again I don't see that as a bad thing and I think when we tell parents to turn turn away from their guilt

instead of turning toward it when we turn towards our internal conflicts we

tend to make better decisions for ourselves for our children for our families um but when we turn away from

those conflicts we tend not to make good decisions and those tend to have long-term

consequences what exactly are you inconveniencing with your truth what are the ideas that you're

that you have to sacrifice time and money and

freedom that if you want to raise healthy children it's going to require discomfort and frustration and

sacrifice and what's interesting is that what's also happened is because we're raising our children in such a selfish

self-centered environment um young people are more fragile they are more emotionally

fragile more of them have attachment disorders they can't bear frustration

they can't bear pain they can't bear sleeplessness you know the idea that you have to get a baby nurse because you

can't get up in the middle of the night with your own baby and that's become the norm in certain socioeconomic circles I

mean so women and men always raise children

in in history in extended family circles right um they weren't isolated and today

parents are very isolated so you would have your mother staying with you or you'd have your sister

staying with you or you'd live in a big house and there'd be people to support you um I started a nonprofit uh recently

because I found that so many mothers it's called attachment Circle so many mothers feel so

isolated that dealing with the pain and the discomfort of mothering alone is too

much for them so there is that so we live in a very strange Society where

people are separate from one another in their own houses and apartments and they

don't depend on one another because dependency is a bad word and but there there is also this issue of how are we

producing such frag fragile youth that even the discomfort and the frustration

of raising children is too much for them there's a big economic component to this

as well right because if you're raising children in isolation the probability that you have disposable income or at

least enough money to be able to just stay at home and raise the kids and still maintain any standard of quality

standard of life is lower if you're not doing it with a big extended family that can support and and pay for some of

those costs interestingly yes and no to your

question um people who have less economic resources are in general eneral

less isolated but they are also isolated today you have a lot of single mothers

raising children not in an apartment with other family members who've had to

move to other cities or countries to make a living um who are really

isolated you know again it I I think it crosses socioeconomic lines um but with

wealthier people more affluent people um they're opting for isolation many of

them they're buying big houses they're living in the suburbs or or they're not wanting to lean on anyone right so we

have what I call a family diaspora it's really what it is um which is that

people will move away from their families of origin when they have children which is very bizarre and anti-

instinctual so the world's become a global place and we can move wherever ever we want but doesn't it make Common

Sense isn't it a reasonable appause that you would want to move closer to your extended family even if they a pain in

the neck unless they're abusive um because it provides you with support it

provides you with extended family support but that's not what's happening people are choosing to live

geographically distant from their families of origin and so it's making it harder for families it's making it

harder for women it's making them feel more isolated but what if they they want to they've got their own career they've

got their own passions there are things that they love doing and that means that they have to be working in a major city

or they have to be traveling to pursue those things you just said it what if

they have passions what if they have a career the problem is children do best

in extended family situations so you know you can have a fabulous career and move far away from your family and when

you're young and single and I even call it single when you're married but don't have children you're still really single

um you know what I say to parents is that your life won't be so fabulous if

you have children and you're not present for them physically and emotionally

particularly in the early years because what happens is they break down and the expression goes that a parent is only as

happy as their least happy child and so there is no fabulous life if your

children are breaking down and that's what families are learning is that you know all of that

freedom and all that fabulous me time comes at a cost if you have children so

one would say then well I just won't have children then and that would be fine and so there are a lot of people

that are saying today I don't see the value in being responsible for another

human being and what they're missing out on is the deep and rewarding emotional

connection to your children It's A Love Like No Other Love But if you've

had if you've had trauma as a child if you've had parents who were narcissistic

or resented parenting or uh you know were distracted or mentally ill you know

you may already have had that trauma that that implies that later it's harder

to connect right so those attachment disorders that I was referring to earlier there's three kinds of

attachment disorders there's the avoidant attachment Disorder so what does that mean so a healthy attachment

looks like this um when you return home your child

feels so securely attached to you meaning you've gone out for an hour or two for dinner with your spouse you come

home and your baby is happy to see you and the reunion what we call the reunion

is a beautiful reunion the baby is joyful and happy and you know that's

healthy attachment it means that you've made your baby feel so safe and secure because you are there primarily and have

prioritize them the majority of the time as the primary attachment figure that when you come home your baby welcomes it

but what we're seeing is more and more children developing attachment disorders because their parents are push ping the

limits of how much they can leave those babies and putting them in things like institutional care and leaving them for

long hours at a time and traveling for their fabulous careers than their fabulous lives at ages when babies

really can't tolerate that kind of Separation when a parent comes when the primary attachment figure usually the

mother comes home and the baby turns away from you and turns toward the

babysitter or to just turns away that baby has the beginning of what's called

an avoidant attachment disorder now that's correlated later on with things

like depression and difficulty forming attachments later

on the next kind of uh attachment disorder is called an ambivalent attachment disorder and the mother then

comes home and the baby clings to the mother for dear life because the

internal voice in that baby is my Mommy's going to leave me again so I have to hold on to her now that baby is

fractious and can't be soothed and will not let go of that mother you know

holding on for dear life what I call like the rees's monkeys did to the wire cages right and that's correlated later

on with anxiety in youth the disorganized attachment

disorder is different than the other two in that the other two have a strategy so think of an attachment disorder as a

strategy a child who's left for two many hours by their parent or whose parent is physically present but emotionally

checked out that baby has to cope has to have a strategy turning away from the

mother is a strategy and the internal narrative is my mommy isn't present for me can't isn't isn't here for me won't

won't be there for me I can't trust my environment and that baby says and I'm going to have to uh cope on my own what

we call learned helplessness um the ambivalent attachment disorder you know that baby

is the strategy is you know I'm going to hold on because if I don't hold on she's going to leave again disorganized

Detachment disorder is the hardest to treat um because the baby has no strategy so the baby Cycles through many

strategies the baby will go from clinging to avoiding to being enraged

and even slapping or hitting the mother and then cycling through again um and that baby that develops a disorganized

attachment disorder those are more those babies it's correlated later with borderline personality disorder and

we're seeing a huge rise in borderline personality disorders and those are the

kids who are cutting themselves who are trying to commit suicide um we have a a mental illness

crisis the likes of which we've never seen in history and it has everything to do with how we're raising our children

you seem pissed off under that calm demeanor pissed off yes I suppose I am

I'm not pissed off at the people I'm pissed off at a society that is lying

we're not really educating or telling parents the truth so there's four

attachment disorders avoidant secure ambivalent disorganized well one secure

isn't a disorder so there's secure and then there's three attachment disorders avoid in bivalent disorganized yes how

does that manifest when you're an adult so how would I know because you know I can relate to some of these and I'm

wondering how that would then manifest in my relationships with my life as an adult outside of the obvious mental

health you know situations so avoiding an avoiding attachment disorder would be

someone who um can't form meaningful and deep connections can't commit has

difficulty committing has difficulty trusting in the intimacy and the the

depth of intimacy in a relationship and ambivalent an attachment disorder would

would be someone who's highly highly anxious um someone who clings to you uh

calls you maybe uh a woman you've dated in the past who called you five times a day to check on you was worried that

you'd be the little fish that swam away um and suffocate they suffocate the people they love because they're afraid

to let go um disorganized attachment borderline personality disorders they

tend to be very emotionally volatile um there's a lot of anger there and um

and there's a lot of self harm self Haring Behavior there do they end up

attracting a certain attachment style so if I'm an avoidant do I then end up attracting avoidance or do I is there

any research on that on how we then date I'm guessing secures go for secures yeah secures well if you're healthy you're

attracted to reciprocally healthy relationships and you trust your environment so you trust in loving

relationship ships and um avoidance sometimes are attracted to

avoidant people because there's no conflict there so in other words someone who can't commit with someone also who

can't commit um that can break down those at some point so remember that

these are pathological defenses so you know we use the word defense because it means to protect one right and and

defenses help us until they no longer help us and so we say attachment to disorders are pathological defenses

meaning they don't usually last a lifetime they break down at some point

and so you might be with another avoiding attachment disordered person

but at some point one of you breaks down and then realizes that you need the other and then you know then you're with

in a relationship with someone who can't give back so yeah as we say like levels

of water meat so people will be attracted to another often of the same

ilk but but it isn't necessarily a healthy relationship and of all these four

attachment Styles who do you think which attachment style from in your opinion and from your observations and the

people that you've seen is most likely to have a successful and then also unsuccessful relationship oh well secure

attachment will have a successful I mean secure people with secure attachment uh

will be drawn to healthy reciprocal loving um deep connections because they've had

a deep and loving connection with their mother so remember I said that you it's only after 3 years of age that you

internalize a feeling of security and where you internalize a feeling that the world is a safe place

and you can trust the people in it and you can trust to love another person and

so you know we we throw that word trust around we don't realize that it comes from the very beginnings of our de

development when we don't trust others it's generally because we couldn't trust

those that we were to depend upon when we were at our most vulnerable stage and

what about the the alternative so if which of these attachment Styles is least likely to have successful

relationships that's disorganized yeah they have a very hard time forming relationships holding on to

relationships um yeah I would say it's it's they're the most complicated to treat and they're also

the most complicated in terms of you know being able to have successful relationships in the future I was

wondering as you were speaking whether if I have more kids so if I have 10 young kids yeah is there a higher

probability that of neglect in those kids because I just if if I'm a mother I just don't have time for all of these

kids at the same time they can't all be on my chest at the same time yeah it's it's a good question well there's something in the developing world called

maternal dep syndrome which is that mothers can actually die in the developing world of having too many

children in Too Short a period of time uh they get depleted physically but they also get depleted emotionally I'm going

to say it right now so everybody can hear it who's watching this having children is stressful it is

frustrating it does require that you are Sleepless for the first five years it

requires that you can tolerate a lot of discomfort and frustration so if there was a job

description first it would say the most joyful uh

enriching thing you can do in your entire life but what comes with that to

Foster healthy development is frustration lack of sleep stress uh discomfort and so that should

be part of the job description yeah it seems to be such an important principle for Life generally

that everything has an A tradeoff and I think was it Einstein that said for every Force has like an equal and

opposite counter force or something to to that effect and a lot of people are

choosing not to make the decision to have kids I was looking at some stats around this the European Union witnessed

only 3.8 million births in 2022 nearly half the number recorded six decades ago

marking one of the lowest birth rates in history France for example known for its robust family policies has seen a

decrease from 830,000 children born in 2010 to just

670,000 2023 the lowest since World War II and this is a huge Global Trend across

especially countries that have a lot of money it is so I speak at a big conference called The Alliance for

responsible citizenship and they talk about a lot of these alarming dropping

birth rates the truth is though that uh as countries become more developed birth

rates do decline to a certain degree ree that has to do with economics some of it but there's a trend that's happening

that's worse than this which is people it's not that they're having less children which actually you know

everybody has their own limits in terms of their capacity to give and to love

and so for some people maybe one child is enough for other people five children isn't enough meaning they have so much

inside of them to give right um but the alarming thing for me isn't the dropping

birth rates due to economics you know so maybe people aren't having 10 children

like they used to they're having three children or two children right the alarming thing for me is that people are

not having children that's more alarming to me because that's more a sign not of a

country developing but of a country and a society of a modern society which does

not see the value in in raising children

and having deep and loving relationships be a priority in your life those people

would say I have deep and loving relationships with my partner with my dog with my Uncle Auntie friends Etc

it's different and why is it different it's a good question it's different because um in the end your relationship

with your partner or with your auntie or with your dog isn't the same level of

dependency the ability to care for another human being uh to allow another human being to

be dependent on you to devote to that human being is a growing transforming

experience for human beings one would say that not sure I completely buy this

fully because but Jordan Peterson I think has said I think it was Jordan who said that you can't fully become an

adult if you don't have a child now I'm not sure I would go that far because there's some people who can't have

children but I do think that there is something in terms of developmentally on

an adult development level that transforms you that is meant to to

transform you in being generative and having children again it's not for everyone and I do say this that um I'm

not part of the pr nality movement where I say everybody should have children I don't think everybody should have

children but I do think that if you're going to have children then you need to look deeply at

your own upbringing and your own losses and your own early traumas before you

bring them into this world so you can repair whatever it is you need to repair

and not uh create what we call generational expression of things like attachment disorders and mental illness

and cuz a lot of people are struggling now have kids even those that want to yeah um looking at some stats and

there's a global prevalence of infertility approximately 18% of adults worldwide about one in six experience

infertility at some point in their lives yeah between 2015 and 2019 about roughly

15% of us women aged 15 to 49 experienced impaired fertility and in the UK Research indicates that one in

eight women listening to this now and one in 10 men aged 16 to 74 have experienced infertility which is defined

as unsuccessfully attempting pregnancy for a year or longer and I've spoken to a lot of

people actually that have tried to have kids yeah for years very sad it's very

sad when people want children and they can't have children it is incredibly sad when you think about what's contributing

to that what how do you diagnose that infertility challenge there are a lot of theories some are environmental some are

the fact that we're delaying having children we're lying to women and to men

we're telling them freeze your eggs in fact this is a little disturbing I'll tell you about this that law firms now

are um paying for the freezing of their young female Associates

eggs I find that disturbing um saying freeze your eggs work really hard for us

yeah you can have children later and the truth is a lot of them can't because

when you freeze eggs it's not a guarantee of fertility it's not a guarantee that those eggs will turn into

embryos it's not a guarantee that those embryos will turn into babies so there's the age piece um there is also and

there's the environmental piece there is also the stress piece which we are not talking about um there's a component to

getting pregnant that is about stress we have more stress on both men and women

you know it used to be that men died sooner because they had more stress but now I think it's evened out the odds I

think women make die sooner because they have the stress of working and raising children for the most part um but the

point is that that uh the stress that young adults face because they're trying

to you know we should talk about some of the other myths what's another myth we'll weave it through this talk another

myth is you can do everything all at the same time and do it well myth that's a

big myth you can't you can't have a fabulous career working full-time and

traveling and being fabulous and raise healthy children the good news is life

is long you may live till 120 like Moses and I think of your generation you're

younger than me but um I think you probably will live well over a hundred

um and so what that means is you have many many many many many many years to

have a fabulous career when your children don't need you so much but you have a very small

window to create that emotional security for your children that will be the core

of them you know we talk a lot about your physical core and core training this is your emotional core this is the

emotional core of human beings attachment security and a feeling of

safety that you can rely on the people who you need most in the world to be

there when you need them that is your emotional core how did you manage your mother of

three you've raised three very wonderful well adjusted children but you're also successful yeah you have books you

you're you're traveling around the world you said so I'm a good example um I had

a career when I was in my 20s um and I got married when I

was I met my husband when I was 27 and I got married when I was just shy of 30 or

I was 30 um and then we had children in our

30s uh so before we had children I was working I was seeing something like 40

hours of patience a week and I was working into the we hours of the night I would work till 11:00 at night coming

home exhausted then we had children but it was an agreement that we had that when

we had babies I would take a good long period off and then really go back very

very very minimally and I had the kind of career by choice that I could have

control over and be it could be flexible and I could control it and so I took six

months off with each child and then after six months only went back to work

an hour and a half a day five days a week so just we had an agreement my

husband and I which is it would be just enough to pay a mother's helper a nanny and so and we did without in those years

we did without vacations we did without you know second homes we did without

fancy clothes we did without the other things that many of our peers were

getting and traveling and doing we said what's important to us is that we pair

down not expand now this is we're expanding as parents so we want to pair down materially life is long and you can

have a successful career some of the women that I interview for my book are women who didn't even start their

careers until they were in their 40s after they had children that were older

could it have worked if your husband stayed home instead of you in your view because I'm trying to understand if

you're saying that dads don't need to be as their present as much as the mother

they have to be there in a different way in the early days men don't breastfeed

so that's the first thing unless you can show me a man who has grown breasts and can actually breastfeed maybe it's

coming I don't know but for now um women's bodies connect them to their

babies they connect them through birth they connect them through breastfeeding there is a physical component and a

hormonal component to infancy and motherhood and there really is a difference in the way that mothers

respond to babies and fathers respond to babies now when the fathers become

really important it's not that the father isn't important to give the mother a break or to bond with the baby

or to bathe the baby but what that baby needs is that attachment security to

that primary attachment figure so the mother usually the mother sometimes it's the father but usually the mother

fathers with their playful tactile stimulation they become really important

when children become mobile when children start to crawl and toddle when

they're around 18 months to 2 years old fathers become incredibly exciting and

they're really important so when fathers aren't around in those days um when children are starting to explore the

world those children have a harder time separating from mothers so it's really

important to have what we said the yin and the Yang what we are doing now is we

are um not prioritizing attachment security which is the foundation for

then healthy separation and when healthy separation starts fathers are critical

when you have another child a second child fathers are critical because fathers seduce the older child they say

come on let's go out and play Let's go kick the soccer ball let's go to the swing set and they give a space to the

mother with the next baby they help the older children to grow up earlier on you

mentioned a study that I read about when I was studying psychology Once Upon a Time which is the Reus the reesus monkey

study with the wire mother for anybody that's never heard about that study I think it's quite important to understand the profound impact that touch and um

well that was an attachment study yeah what was it what's what's touch called from in a in the Science World skin to

skin skin to skin can you give me an overview of that study and what it showed for people that aren't aware of

it well they took these baby reesus monkeys and they they let some be with

the mothers and the mothers nurtured those babies and those babies became healthily attached and secure and those

were the healthy emotionally Healthy Babies then they gave um another subset

of monkeys um a wire mother covered with a piece of cloth or fur or something and

those babies became very neurotic but at least they were clinging they became like the ambivalent attachment babies

because there was no response from the mother but at least they were holding on to this mother and then they gave and

these Bab babies became very neurotic and then they gave the subset of babies

nothing and those babies literally lost their minds and um I mean there are other

studies which are more recent than that that's quite an old study there there is a researcher named Michael meanie he did

a study on licking and grooming animals who lick and groom their young meaning are nurturing skinto skin lick and groom

uh in human terms that would be holding touching loving skin skin those uh if if

a mother licked and groomed her young that baby would become more

resilient to stress in the future the babies who were not licked and groomed by their mothers become became less

resilient to stress in the future in addition the babies who were more resilient to stress because their

mothers had licked and groomed them passed down generationally the ability to lick and groom the Next

Generation what happened to the baby who weren't licked and groomed guess what happened they didn't pass it down right

and that's what's happening to humans today if we don't lick and groom our

babies I mean you know take it for whatever um if we don't lick and groom our babies it we don't pass on

resilience to stress and adversity but we also don't pass on the desire to lick and groom you're to have babies your

story going back to your story which we were talking about are there any areas of privilege that you need to acknowledge that someone else listening

to this now goes yeah but that's all right for you because you know maybe someone who didn't have a partner there

or someone who is in a difficult economic situ extremely

difficult economic situation living in the projects in Harlem or something I

really want to I'm saying this because well it's not the mothers and the projects in Harlem because I'll tell you

the mothers in the projects in Harlem stay home with their babies that's what's interesting very poor people in

America so let me just say I love America America sucks and I'll tell you

why America sucks from my perspective and I say this internationally I go around the world saying America sucks

and I'm going to tell you why um we are the only country in the world other than Papa new guini who does not have a paid

parental maternity leave we do not have paid maternity leave nobody cares about children they

care about the GDP and the bottom line and the people who are out there talking about this stuff are economists saying

women have to work work work for the economy nobody cares about children because if we cared about children our

tax money would be in paid leave not for three months not for six months for at

least a year and hungry they have three years Slovenia Slovakia um Estonia has three years

Hungary I think has 2 years of paid leave Sweden I have some issues with Sweden but Sweden has 14 months Sweden

after 14 months makes women go back to work full full full-time and put them in institutional care and all those babies

are breaking down so 14 months isn't even enough so but if we could even get

to a civilized place of one year of paid leave in this country and then the next two years some

way that parents could be complemented so they could part-time supplemented so

they could work part-time um you know I'm a I'm a reasonable realistic person

I know this country is never going to go for three years of pay leave even though I would love them to I also know that

this country isn't going to go for an entitlement called pay leave because that's the kind of country we are we

talk a big game but we don't want to put our money where mou this there is the possibility now that the Republicans are

in of a creative solution which is potentially using things like Social

Security in advance borrowing from your social security so I'm a

mom and I say ah to stay home I can borrow from my social security for a

year and then work a year or two longer in my life wouldn't you say that most

women who wanted to stay home with their babies would say I'll work longer so I can stay home with my baby there are

ways to creatively deal with it um from my perspective this is what's going on

people on the left will not compromise they'll only do an entitlement called

paid leave but they only are asking for it for 3 to 6 months after that they want women back in the workforce and

institutional dayare so I'm not on the left um people on the right talk a lot

about family they're the party of the family now but they do not want tax dollars to go into PID leave they they

don't like the entitlements that already exist and they don't want to add anymore and so the only way they're going to

give it to women and men is if they put skin in the game M this is the country

we live in again I'm a realist I think in any way that we can give families the

choice to care for their own children particularly in the early years we will create a population of healthier

children how do we know that more paid leave equals better children less strain

on the Healthcare System in terms of mental health mortality whatever it might be how do you make a statistical or a science or research backed case

that if we had three years of paid leave in the United States or in the UK or Australia Canada wherever that the it

would be a net positive for society outside of it just being an opinion well the research shows the

longitudinal attachment research shows that children who are insecurely attached at 12 months of age 20 years

later are insecurely 80% of them are are insecurely attached and suffer from

mental disorders that's what the longitudinal attachment research says so we now have

Decades of basically children were followed from when they were infants and

the ones who were securely attached 20 years later are still securely attached and doing great and the ones who were

insecurely attached most still insecurely attached and it's tied and correlated to all of these mental

illness conditions right so there's a lot of research to show what attachment security does for children in the long

run so you know you're asking a question about I mean I suppose you could take

your paid leave and go play soccer in the park and go play tennis and I don't

know like play cards with your F I mean you know how can I say how people are going to use their paid leave but if

your paid leave is being used to be home with your child then it's going to benefit your child so many of the the

guests that I speak to on this pod C especially those that become incredibly successful um athletes entrepreneurs

whoever they often have some form of neglect in their past Richard Williams

Serena and Venus Williams father he um he was very intense with them from a

very young age and he's raised two of the greatest tennis players in history Joe Jackson was strict and often

controversial with Michael who went on to become the King of Pop El Woods who was Tiger Wood's father was very um

intense in his Co coaching and mentoring style which led him to become great and obviously Beyonce is the other example I

gave who Matthew managed Matthew which is Matthew and Tina who were parents to Beyonce managed Destiny's Child and

Beyonce's solo career meticulously shaping them into a global Superstar so parents think you know I want to raise

kids that are superstars I want I want my kids to be great okay so I'm gonna say right now I don't recommend that as

a professional okay I'm just saying so I can't comment on a lot of those people

because I could get in a lot of trouble for commenting on a lot of those people but I will say that amongst those people

there is controversy meaning at least one of those parents

and I don't know the history of the others was abusive and so you could say that narcissism is abusive to children

when we project our needs and desires and likes and who we are onto our

children we're not letting them authentically be themselves the greatest gift you can give your child is to see

your child as an authentic individual who is an individual and themselves and

not to see them as a mini me um when you start architecting their life there's a

good chance you're going to lose that child emotionally at some point they're either going to hate you they're they

may be successful in their careers they may have terrible personal lives they

may be narcissistic parents themselves so I don't recommend that school of

thought what I do recommend is if your child shows promise in something that

they also seem to love and have a drive to be good at then you can support that

drive just make sure to keep yourself in check along the way to make sure that

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and a yearlong warranty head to bond charge.com diary ADHD yeah okay a I don't feel like

I don't even have to ask a question here but just to set the stage the reason why I'm so compelled by this is just this I

have to say it the shocking rise in diagnosis and prescriptions over the

last 10 years between 20 20 208 ADHD

diagnosis is in the UK Rose approximately 20 fold yes among boys

aged 10 to 16 diagnosis increased from 1% roughly to um about 3.5% in 2018 and

in men aged 18 to 29 there was a nearly 50-fold increase in ADHD prescriptions

during the same period and the same applies to the United States where an estimated 15.5 million adults in the US

have been diagnosed with ADHD approximately one in nine us children

have been diagnosed with ADHD at some point with 10.5% having a current diagnosis it I don't know what ADHD was

but the conversation around it the prescriptions the diagnosis seemed to have really surged into culture in a really really big way what's going on so

ADHD was one of the factors that drove me to right right being there um because I was seeing this huge uptick and ADHD

diagnosis and children being medicated so so early do you know what the fight ORF flight reaction is that's when the

sympathetic nervous system starts to kick into action and

yes so well it's basically our evolutionary response to uh predatorial threat so if a sablet tooth tiger was

chasing you you either stood and fought fight or

you ran for Your Life Flight so when our children are under

stress they go into fight or flight so one of the first signs that a

child is under stress that they cannot manage is when they become aggressive in

school they hit they bite they throw chairs um they have trouble you know

socially in daycare or preschool or even in

school or they become distracted which is the flight part of fight ORF flight

so what's happening is their nervous systems the stress regulating part of their brain is getting turned on so we

say that the stress regulating part of their brain has to do with a little almond shaped part of the brain called

the amydala it's a very primitive part of the brain very old part of the brain and it regulates stress throughout our

lives it helps us to manage it what we know is that part of the brain is supposed to remain offline for the first

year to three years which is why mothers wear babies on their bodies it's why

babies stay close close to their mothers in the first 3 years to keep the amydala

quiet and only incrementally incrementally expose children to stress

and frustration that they can manage so imagine taking small bites of it so you

can digest it right and your mother's there to help you digest the stress what

we're doing now by separating mothers and babies by putting babies into daycare with

strangers um is by sleep training babies all these weird things that we're doing

to babies is we're turning the amydala on we're making it active precociously

too early what happens when the amydala is activated too early is it becomes

very active and very large very quickly the problem is then it shrivels

up and burns out also because it cannot manage that kind of stress so early when

it ceases to be functional it ceases to be functional for a lifetime and so it's very important to

protect you know what's the expression the Family Jewels it's very these are the family jewels in the brain of a baby

this is the jewel the amydala you want to keep the stress to an absolute

minimum in the first year which is why sleep training is dangerous it's why letting babies cry it out it's why

putting babies into daycare it's why leaving babies for hours on end when they're so so very

fragile um is so bad for their brains because it gets the cortisol flowing

which is the stress hormone but it makes this part of the brain very active so it grows grows grows and

then and ceases to be functional in the future like a PTSD response so what we

know is that these children are in hyper Vigilant states of stress ADHD children

ADHD children hypervigilant states of stress if you stay in a hypervigilant state of

stress long enough you go into a hypo Vigilant state of stress which then

causes depression so what we have now are not

disorders so there was a whole movement to take the d off of ADH D because it's

not a disorder it is a stress response and instead of asking the right

questions which are okay what's causing the stress how do we make sure that our children

are not exposed to this kind of stress because they're going into fight or flight so the nervous system as you said

the brain has an on switch and an off switch the on switch to stress is the

amydala the hippocampus is the off switch and you'd say the stress response

is in a negative feedback loop it's it's it's actually important like in other words if a sabl tooth tiger is chasing

you very important that you can activate right and run or fight so the stress

response is supposed to be shortterm it's supposed to be not it's supposed to be acute rather than chronic

so we can kind of manifest it we can uh activate it but then it's supposed to be

turned off by the turnoff switch the hippocampus what we're seeing in children's brains is that the amydala is

growing very precociously large and the hippocampus which is the off switch is

very small so we have problem as we say Houston we have a problem we have an on

switch going full speed gas no brakes and no off switch and that's causing

ADHD behavioral problems that are hugely rising in children in school

a lot of aggression and violence and so that's what's happening this is a stress response and again instead of asking the

right questions like where is this coming from what's causing the stress instead we silence the children

children's pain we tell we tell parents we'll medicate it and we'll just relieve the

symptoms for me that's malpractice the way we treat ADHD is malpractice a child

develops goes into fight ORF flight when they are under stress it could be psychosocial stressors at home in the

family it could be at school it could be with their friends it could be a learning disability there's so many

things that can cause kids stress so instead of medicating them why why don't we figure out what's happening to that

child deeply that's causing them to go into fight or flight isn't that point of view I've got two questions here the

first is how do you know that it's stress and the second is if it is stress then that the problem or at least the

Inconvenient Truth that that then creates is that the parent is

responsible yes that's the there's the Inconvenient Truth for that child's ADHD yes yes that's the Inconvenient Truth

it's not so simple sometimes it's the family usually it's the family

particularly with small children but when children get to school it could be social as I said you know you can't

control whether your children are exposed to social issues or bullying or

there's many things that can cause stress in children but when they're very little you are their environment so the

Inconvenient Truth is that when your child gets an ADHD diagnosis the first thing you should do is go to a therapist

who will do parent Guidance with you don't rush that child to a psychiatrist

to medicate them you go with your partner or spouse and talk to a parent guidance expert about what could be

causing this child to feel such stress and look at the psychosocial stressors

look at the influences and the Dynamics in this child's life that would be causing them to go into a state of

stress like this give me some examples of the type of stresses the everyday stresses that we're now exposing children to that are leading to ADHD in

your opinion well again let's start at home at home the stresses might be that

they were handed over to a daycare center at an early age um which turned that

amygdala response on which turned the stress regulating part of their brain on too early now you have that

hypervigilant reaction and they can't turn it off right um it could be a

divorce situation 50% of couples divorce which means that div divorce is an

adversity you know I have a book coming out in a year about how to divorce and mitigate the impact of the divorce on

the child but no matter what a divorce is an adversity on a child and a stress um when parents fight uh dramatically in

the home if there's uh tremendous sibling rivalry issues in the home if there's the birth of another child

that's stressful right if you have a sibling believe it or not that's a very stressful thing if parents are sensitive

about that then it can be mitigated but if parents are insensitive about the birth of a second child and the feelings

that your first child may have that can cause stress moving can cause stress illness or mental illness in a parent

can cause stress alcoholism any kind of addiction can cause stress a grandparent

or uncle or Aunt or even a parent getting sick and dying can cause I mean there are so many things that can cause

stress but the point is that stress can be regulated but it can only only be

regulated if parents are introspective and self-aware and willing to look at

their part in it if parents hand a child over to a psychiatrist and say fix my

child of course psychiatrists will cooperate with you and silence your

child's pain but is that really what you want to be doing um because in the end you're just putting your finger in a

dyke you're putting your finger in a dam and eventually that dam is going to burst what' you say to some of the

evidence around there being a link to a hereditary component in twin studies

they found that ADHD is about 74 to 80% heritable making one of the most genetically influenced psychiatric

conditions let me tell you a different study that will help you to understand that study which is that we know that there

is no genetic precursor to mental illness there is no genetic precursor to

ADHD there is no genetic precursor to depression and no genetic precursor to

anxiety what you mean by precurser meaning there's no genetic connection you don't get it in your genes if your

father or your mother were depressed you get it by something called the inheritance of acquired characteristics if you're raised by a

depressed parent you're more likely to become depressed it's the nature nurture argument okay but what they did

find now schizophrenia has a genetic connection bipolar disorder those have

genetic but the rest do not anxiety depression ADHD no genetic gentics what

they did find is a genetic tie to something called the sensitivity

Gene it's a short Al on the serotonin receptor and serotonin as we know is

used to regulate happy emotions to regulate emotions right so when you have

a short Al it means that you have a harder time picking up the serotonin but

it also means that you are more sensitive to stress

now those children who are born with this Gene this short Al on the serotonin

receptor gene they are more prone to mental illness later on because of that

sensitivity to stress what the study shows is if those

children who are born with that Gene for sensitivity are provided with

emotionally and physically present attachment Security in the first year

it neutralizes the expression of that Gene so epigenetics means that we're born with genes like you might have a

gene for rheumatoid arthritis or you might have a gene for cancer but it never gets expressed well we all have

genes for something but they don't necessarily get expressed that's what epigenetics is it means the environment

has to turn on the gene to make it let's rock and roll right um what it showed in

this study is that the children who were born with this genetic precursor this

sensitivity ity to stress if they had sensitive empathic nurturing and present parents in the first year it neutralized

the expression of that Gene so those children could be as healthy as children

born without that Gene if however children born with that sensitivity Gene

were neglected you know abandoned not provided with sensitive empathic present

nurturing it exacerbated that Gene so we know that that sensitivity Gene tied and

correlated to mental illness later on unless the sensitive empathic nurturing

mitigates that Gene and what you say to people that point to MRI

scans fmis and yeah there's there's all kinds of um neurological tests now where

we can see the brain in action so it's not a static thing we can actually see

the blood flow to the brain we can see the electrical activity in the brain it's it's amazing actually but some

people say that this proves that it's the way your brain is and lots of my friends that have ADHD when they talk about their ADHD or the way that they

are they say my brain works like this no it's not correct their brain is

sensitive to stress someone with ADHD is more sensitive to stress so you could

ask them questions like this you could say were you more are you a more sensitive person are you more sensitive

to noise to Smells to touch when you were a child did you not like itchy things did you cry more were you more

sensitive when your parents would go out for the night were you more sensitive when your mom would go to work or were you more sensitive when you were left at

Nursery School um and they're probably going to say yes but if they say no and

they still have an ADHD diagnosis I would guarantee almost guarantee they wouldn't say no because people with ADHD

are people who are sensitive sensitivity is an amazing

strength if it's met with sensitivity if you have a sensitive child so what

does a sensitive child look like if you have multiple children then you know

because the first thing I'll do when I give a public talk is I'll say okay any everybody here who has a sensitive child and I describe okay sensitive child is a

child who cries more is harder to soothe um is more clingy doesn't like you

leaving them is harder has a harder time separating has a harder time going to sleep and being left to sleep on their

own um is sensitive to things like noise and smells and touch and if you grew up

in an environment that was stressful and again we've you've identified that stress can come in many forms it could be arguing parents it could be a

neighbor or whatever some environmental factor that caused that stress you are sensitive you developed ADHD you become

an adult you get diagnosed at 30 years old as having ADHD yeah you're offered

medication you take the medication the medication makes you much more functional in your career in your

relationships in your life it's a stimulant and so what stimulants do is they cause they can cause great

anxiety they can cause panic attacks in adolescence uh they can cause growth

issues so uh I have patients who come to me young men who didn't grow because

they were put on stimulants when they were young so um in in in terms of the

consequences of using stimulants the jury is still out but we know that they cause growth issues they cause panic

attacks they cause anxiety disorders they cause depression they're quite life saving

they're quite life-saving for some people in terms of having a they can be they can be so what I would say is if

you have tried everything to uncover what the stress is that's causing you to

react this way and you still are feeling that way then sometimes medication can

be a lifesaver the problem is that we turn to medication uh in in adolescen and

children and young adult we we turn to it as a performance drug um because there's so much stress

in Modern Life and there's such a need for people to perform and be successful in their careers and in school and get

good grades there's so much pressure on kids so you know I'm 60 and we didn't

have this kind of pressure growing up and so so the generations that follow

have so much pressure that pressure makes children literally go off the

rails we could talk about the academic pressure the competitiveness the

perfectionism um it so ADHD is a bucket it's a bucket which you

throw people in who have anxiety that has never been treated and so and

there's different ways of thinking about treatment too so we are a society that likes superficial quick fixes we like

drugs we like CBT therapy the truth is that this is not not a quick

fix figuring out relationally dynamically what happened to you as a

child what your losses were what your traumas were what caused you to feel so

anxious what's caused you to go into fight ORF flight is hard work it

requires frustration it requires commitment it requires going to someone who can think very deeply with you you

know I I want to Define what anx is because I think it's really

important because we rarely Define depression and anxiety um depression is

preoccupation with past losses anxiety is

preoccupation with future losses that may never occur what do they have in

common it's all about losses all about loss and you could say the generations

now are very preoccupied with loss loss of status

achievement but because we're also very preoccupied with gain well we're preoccupied with I what

I say the I you know I don't want to judge but I want to say the unimportant things in life um what are the important

things in life relationships love connection Health right you would say

objectively family these are the important things in life but we've become very preoccupied with material

success money uh career achievements Fame I

think there was a study that interviewed teenagers um and it was really

discouraging because they said that the thing they wanted more in life than anything was to be famous and so we're

preoccupied with the wrong things on this point of stress in the link with ADHD um looking at some research from

the injury.com research education group um it says that children with an ace

score which is the trauma B score where I think it goes up to 10 different sort of questions with an a score of four or

more so four experiences of trauma or more have nearly four times which is 400% more chance of having parent

reported ADHD compared to children with no Aces yeah and some of the factors that have big impact is soo

socioeconomic hardship increases your probability of having ADHD by 40% parental Divorce by 35% familial mental

illness or a parent having a mental illness increases it up to almost 60% 55% I believe and neighborhood violence

almost 50% familial incarceration so if a parent goes to prison then that

increases your probability of ADHD by about 40% as well and that's published by the I think it's the New England

yeah what is oh the National Library of Medicine National Center of biological information yeah so remember what I said

that you can't control everything that happens to your child divorces do happen and adversities happen to Children

Health health issues happen to Children what you can control is you can control

the first three years and be as present as possible for your child so if my kid

start screaming in a supermarket m one of the prevailing pieces of advice says

just walk off or start screaming yourself as the parent to show them do am I supposed to just ignore my child

when it's screaming and throwing a tantrum am I meant to drop what I'm doing and go and Cat to them what am I meant to do in these situ you have me on

speed dial Stephen you be careful because if you make a promise like that I promise I promise I'll be on speed you

want to drop your career and focus on raising my children you you can no but you can call me you got this on video

speed that's legally binding no you can have me on speed doll how much um yeah you can as much as you want so the deal

is you don't yell at your children an emotionally regulated parent a healthy

parent produces a healthy child so what is a healthy parent a healthy parent is a parent who feels good about themsel

who has authentically good self-esteem not grandiosity but really feels good

about themselves knows their strengths and limitations and overall as a whole person feels good about themselves um

they have the capacity to regulate their emotions to keep their emotions from going too high and too low remember

sailing in the Caribbean meaning they can stay calm in a storm um is sensitive

and empathic as a nurturer these are signs of Health in a in a parent so if

my kid says I want that pack of sweets and I go you you you can't have the pack

of sweets well first you have to so before you discipline you always want to be empathic first so I always say that

that if you are going to discipline a child first you have to recognize how

they feel I mean recognize recognizing how children feel is important anyway

meaning when you recognize a child's feelings if they're sad you mirror their sadness if they're angry you say I can

see you're angry if they're happy you look happy with them that kind of reflection is the way that your child

knows that you acknowledge them that they're a person to you that they're a

separate person to you it's how they feel valuable so when you acknowledge their feelings that's the first critical

you'd say parenting 101 acknowledge your child's feelings so I would turn to my child and say you want sweets are you

hungry yeah you can say I can see that you really want that packet of sweets I can see how hard it is because you

really want it but you know you can't have it before dinner you know that's the rule and then they stop screaming

and cry and then they start screaming and you say broken record is a communication style where you say oh I

can see it's really hard for you but just still can't have the sweets and you stay with them and you keep empathizing

and then setting structure empathizing structure empathizing structure the mistake that parents make is that they

go right into the no word they don't use empathy they don't bring empathy in and

the truth is that even as an adult if somebody just says no without first

recognizing how you feel you feel very unsatisfied right for a child it's

critical it's critical that even when you have to say no and particularly if you have to say no that you first

recognize how they feel I mean that's what all the relationship experts on the show tell me they say if you want to be successful in a romantic relationship

then you first must make your partner feel heard and understood that's right even if you disagree in an argument

first acknowledge what they said maybe repeat it back to them and then they'll feel heard and understood and it kind of stops the broken record do you think

that I'm a traumatized child I don't know I haven't heard about your traumatized background if so if you have

a trauma I would say we're all so let me say this there's this word trauma is

used a lot can I just talk about it for a moment there's something called Big tea

trauma right big tea traumas is like I was in a car accident and I lost my legs or um you know I lost my parents you

know my mother died of brain cancer or my my father was an alcoholic and beat

me or you know there's there are things that are more concrete that you can like

hold on to things that happened to people yeah I was raped or you know

those are big tea trauma but believe it or not probably

fewer people suffer from Big tea trauma and more people suffer from little tea

trauma and little tea trauma is more nuanced it's um it it requires looking

with a with a finer tooth comb at at the issues it's more relational it's more I

was subtly neglected by my mother my mother wasn't a good listener my mother

loved me but my father loved me but he never understood me uh my parents were

narcissistic and very self-centered um they were never around

you know and so people will come into my office and sit down individuals for therapy and they'll say you know I don't

know what's wrong with me I had two parents who stayed together I had all

the material wealth that I could need I never wanted for Stuff uh you know my

parents stayed together and I don't know what's wrong with me and so I say okay so you're telling me nothing big and

traumatic happened to you in your life now let's talk about the nuance and we're not very nuanced

anymore so we don't want to look at what causes most forms of mental illness

depression anxiety uh even ADHD are the relational

nuances of a family and what do you mean by the relational nuances it could be the neglect neglect being ignored having

a mentally ill parent that no one knows about maybe a depressed mother who sleeps in in the morning and doesn't get

up and feed you you know you get up and feed yourself or uh maybe you're a latchkey kid who comes home and and

you're isolated and alone or things that people can't see um but you see and so that's why

people I would say most people go into therapy not for big tea traumas believe

it or not even though the aces study says you know alcoholism drug addiction of course those are big tea traumas most

people come into therapy for little te trauma and and the reason why it's it's

quite difficult for those people is there's not a lot of reinforcement from society that those are also traumas but

in fact they are traumas attachment trauma you know if you were put in daycare and you so I have patients who

come to me and say I can remember being put in daycare and you know you're not supposed to remember things until the

age of four or five but some patients can remember flashes of memory under five and they'll say I was put into

daycare I just all I can remember is screaming my lungs out for my momy

you're not a fan of daycare are you no what's wrong with daycare

daycare raises salivary cortisol levels in children the studies show be meaning

those babies are put into stressful States uh at a very young age when their brains are

developing daycare has been known to increase aggression and anxiety and

behavioral problems in school in the school years and those children are more likely to develop attachment disorders

remember those first three years when children are so very fragile and vulnerable taking them away from your

body as a primary attachment figure and handing them over to strangers and leaving them there for

hours on end will cause your child to have to develop pathological defenses and that's

what those children are forced to do so it is the least good option of child care so let's talk about what are the

better options of child care if you have to use child care you know how we say breast is best

and it is for a variety of reasons but the best is your primary attachment

figure for the first three years as much as possible primary attachment attachment figure you mean the mother

father well no it can be the father okay it's the go-to person who's a sensitive

empathic nurturer so when that baby's in distress that baby gets their emotional needs met it can be the father it can be

the father but first the father has to learn how to be a sensitive it doesn't come naturally to most men with rare

exception I have known some patients where the husband the father was more

sensitive than the mother it's possible but in general instinctually fathers are

not sensitive and paic nurtures because it's against their evolutionary Instinct their evolutionary

Instinct if you were an animal on the plains of Africa you're uh you're you're a an

Impala you're a daddy Impala your baby is born and it comes out

running cuz they are they're like born and you're all running together you get behind that baby and

you're like get going buddy you better get going or you're going to be lunch for that lion that's a father's instinct

is to protect it's protective aggression right that's different than the baby

andala falls down and the mother comes over and licks the baby and says are you okay honey can I give you a hug can you

you know if and paa could talk um so it's a different Instinct so fathers can

be taught to be primary attachment figures but this is why I say it's so very important that we recognize the

difference between men and women if we just think they're exactly the same and we put a throw a father into the mix

with an infant and the mother's going out and the father's staying home if we don't talk about this stuff and and talk

about it openly and say when the baby cries you have to mirror the baby's emotions you have to do skin to skin you

have to s soothe the baby not encourage resilience not not distract the baby not

use discrepant emotions with the baby if the baby's crying don't go oh you're okay you'll be fine no no so it's really

important if the father's going to stay home that he learns how to be a mother you know sometimes gay couples will come

to me and I'll say um you know two gay men will come I'll say which one of you is going to be the mother now that may

seem Politically Incorrect but someone's got to play that role you cannot have two fathers for a child a child needs a

mother and a father if you're going to have two men then one of them has to play that sensitive empathic role the other has to play the playful tactial

stimulation role same with two women who are raising children it's better to have a father and a mother than two mothers

so which of you is going to be the dad which of you is going to rough house and play basketball and roll the rounds on

the ground and tickle the baby and encourage exploration and risk taking and can't you both do half each like so

couldn't no no and I'll tell you why it's very confusing to children they

when parents say I'm both mother and father to my child I say no no is very

confusing to children they need to have a mother figure and a father figure and

I say that knowing today's politics and knowing today's social situation you can

have a mother figure who's not a mother maybe it's a nanny maybe it's a

grandmother you need a mother figure and you need that mother figure to be around

a lot if that mother figure is the one who provides the sensitive empathic

nurturing so some of this can be taught but it can't be taught unless you first

acknowledge that there are differences if we cannot as a society acknowledge the Inconvenient Truth that men and

women are different in terms of their nurturing behaviors then we can't teach anybody anything I'm looking at some

stats here in front of me um on a graph which I was just reading is as you're explaining that because it seems to be quite relevant and it shows that in 1960

one in 10 mothers were the sole primary bread winner yeah now it's almost at

half it's on its way to half I know almost half of mothers are the sole or primary bread winner in

2016 so I mean these mothers can't just quit their

jobs so it's it's it's a good question I get

a lot of people coming to me and saying and this is very common

I want to quit my job I want to downscale I want to work

part-time but my husband won't support it because I made a promise that I would

be the primary bread winner and now I want to switch and he won't switch or he

doesn't support me giving up my high-paying job but I feel this transformation of being with my baby and

I don't want to leave my baby the problem with young people is they promise each other they make promises to

each other that they probably should not make do not promise your spouse that nothing will change when you have a baby

say to your spouse let's prepare for everything to change let's believe that anything is

possible and let's prepare let's strategize let's say

what if I want to stay home with the baby what if I I may not feel like that now but what if I see this baby and I

fall in love with this baby and I want to stay home and I'm the mother and I want to breastfeed and I don't want to go back to work for a while and and so

then you say what would that scenario look like what could we do what could we downscale in terms of our material life

and our lifestyle that makes it possible for me to stay

home and I don't think we do that instead women say nothing's going to

change and men say nothing's going to change and then they have babies and they're not prepared for the change

changes that occur changes occur in men too it's not just women I mean fathers

also can have this transformation right um where they also want to work less or

you know sometimes the transformation comes in the form of wanting to work less and being home sometimes it comes

in the form of wanting to go out and Take On The World so they can provide for their you know but it does it does

stimulate something it stimulates some evolutionary response in men and women

the hardest thing I find is when men and women compete it was much easier in the olden

days now not everything was good in the olden days but you would say the idea that roles were

defined meant that men and women didn't compete over their roles now what I

think is causing a lot of these divorces and what's causing a lot of marital conflict is that men and women compete

over everything they compete over who's going to make more money they compete over who's going to care for the baby um

and so it's like you you're a CE CEO of a company you had your own company so

you can't have co-ceos I mean I don't know if you did but it doesn't work I mean anybody that I've ever treated that

says we're going to do co-ceos it always falls apart you can have a CEO you can have a president you can have the head

of marketing you can have a CFO you can have a COO these are different roles and

they don't compete with one another they work work is a team parenting is a team sport not a competitive Sport and so

what's happening today because of all this gender neutrality and we're as I'm as good as you and you're as good as me

and we're the same it means that couples are competing with one another and that's causing so much tension because

what's best is when couples compliment each other when their

differences mean that as a team they work well to care for child and I would

say the secret to success in a marriage is save your competition for the tennis court for the basketball court for

running in the park but don't compete over child rearing who's going to take care of the children don't compete over

who makes more money find a way to compliment each other and be a team there's so many mothers listening

now that are very career- driven and you may be causing some existential crisis

you may be affirming a lot of what they believe and think and what they feel intuitively um are you are you saying

then that for those women that are pursuing you know high octane careers in

leadership roles that also want to have children that it's one or the

other no I'm saying that there are certain careers realistically here's the Inconvenient Truth again bunch of

inconvenient truths um there are certain careers that

that are harder to be a good mother period I'm saying that I know

it's a harsh to but there it is there are certain careers that are too demanding to be present for your

children whether you're a mother or a father you think if you're a father who's a CEO who's traveling around the

world and misses your children's birthday and misses your children's soccer games and misses your children's

piano concerts and isn't there to pick them up at school or have breakfast with them or have dinner at the end of the

day you think that child is going to have a healthy relationship with that parent another myth here we are I told

you I was going to weave the myths in quality versus quantity time you cannot

be there for your children on your own time you have to be

there on their time meaning quality time is a narcissistic fantasy I can be there

on my time so so my child sits at home and is like a vase on the counter

waiting for me to come home and then I come home and there I can be present for my child your child has needed you all

day long and when you come home that's your that's on your time you need to be

there a quality of time as well as a quantity of time I always say to people that you can be you can be physically

present but be emotionally checked out but you can't be emotionally present if you're not phys physically there enough of the time and that's just a reality so

what are the careers that are really good for whoever's going to be the primary attachment figure service Fields

Fields where you have your own business and you can make your own schedule

around your children where your children don't work around you you work around your children Physical Therapy

Psychotherapy speech therapy Consulting Maybe um anything that's entrepreneurial

anything that is a service field CEO podcaster investor entrepreneur no I'm going to disagree with you I'm going to

say you can but you have to be willing to set limits with yourself so you have

to be willing to say do you know Monae the painter yeah he was famous in his

own life now most painters have to be dead to be famous and he painted on a

very modest schedule get a in the morning to catch the light and then he'd be done by like 3 or 4:00 in the

afternoon he'd have dinner with his family you know we We Are The Architects

of our own lives kind of no not kind of I'm representing the opinion of some

people who might be listening I obviously there's so who are the people who can't architect their own lives you

want to be a who do you think I would say hedge fun managers okay let me tell you that so I was 18 years old Dr had a

university mhm um probably had sex that year so if I had sex that year and had a baby yeah and then I became a single

parent at the time I was I had two ccjs I was broke I shoplifting food to feed

myself I'd printed off the doll forms I had I never sent them in but the forms where you get you know like government

assistance and I was working in call centers working night shifts because that was the best job I could get to pay

for the the rent that I had every month if I had had a baby at that exact moment in time I don't think I would be the it

wouldn't it wouldn't resonate with me what you're saying about being the architect of my own destiny because there is like immediate emergencies I

can't I can't feed myself let alone a kid so I'll tell you and I also didn't have any family within hours my mom had

basically disowned me because I dropped out a university I was alone did you have a baby at 18 no okay I haven't had

kids yet I'm hoping to okay so um first of all it's a good reason to use birth

control and not have a baby at 18 but okay let's put that aside for a second let's put that aside for a second let's

say that what we should be promoting in this world I'm going to say this it's

controversial is that whoever is the primary attachment figure has a career

that they have control over and flexibility maybe the other person doesn't maybe the other person works for

someone or whatever but in my book I interview a lot of different women from a lot of different socioeconomic

backgrounds and one of the women that I interviewed was a nanny and she said she had three

children and she said that the way that I rais my children because I was a

single mother raising three children I had to work to pay the rent she said but

I made sure that I didn't work past 5:00 I never worked past 5:00 I'd come home

at 5:00 I didn't go out at night people would say let's go I said no my children

this is my time with my children so I don't go out at night I don't go out on weekends I'm with when I'm not working I

am with my children and my children knew that I had to work but the way I used my

free time was very carefully um she also said to me and

again a number of there are a number of interviews in there she also said that the people who she left her children

with she never used daycare she had extended family watch her child so her

neighbor who was her dear friend she paid to watch her child and so that

person was auntie and that person was like family and was in that child's life

forever so what I say about child care is there are different levels of

importance so the first the best is your primary attachment figure next best is kinship bonds family or extended family

someone who has a similar investment to that child as you do even even if the kid's going to be raised alone at that

early age so versus going to daycare will they'll be around other kids no no

children don't need other kids until the age of three they do something called parallel play what they need is

oneon-one connection they need attachment security and they need their emotional needs met by one person

oneon-one um after three then the beginning of preschool then they start to actually

interact with one another until then they're not playing together they're just doing parallel play so that's

another myth the myth that Day Care is good for children for socialization no

children don't need socialization before three unless their mother's with them so

what I say is do play dates do play groups but be within eye gaze or ear

earshot of a child meaning there's something called um reprosa which is

emotional refueling so when children start to explore when you've given them emotional security and they feel so

secure that you're going to be there then they start to take chances they start to take risks they start to toddle

off that's where the word Tod toddler came from they toddle away but guess what they do for emotional

security they look back and they say ah she's there it's okay and then they keep playing or they run back and get a hug

and then they run off again you are their Touchstone of security and that's

how children become courageous that's how they develop the ability to explore and still feel secure your gut and my

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and zero commitment that's join. whoop.com CEO let me know how you get on you keep

mentioning but 3 years old yes why three years old and there's kind of like two

SE segments to this question that I was Keen to understand is there an element of neuroplasticity that makes the age of

three so important and the other kind of sub question I was trying to figure out in my head was is the damage we do

before 3 years old to a child inadvertently at all reversible okay and is it damage so plasticity

there are certain what we call critical periods of right or social emotional brain development one is 0 to three and

it's the most important because what's happening is something called neurogenesis so it's the growth of cells

and your presence as a parent who provides Safety and Security buffers

your child from stress regulates their emotions is critical to them growing

that right brain because 85% of their right brain is developed by three crazy

right 85% and you being there changes the

architecture of that brain that's how important you are like people come up to me in cocktail parties and they'll say

to me ah I don't have to be there my babies just sleeping and pooping and you

know they don't need me I'm going to be around when they're talking and walking I'm like no like you got it wrong I'm like you

have to be here now because now is when the cell GR growth is happening you every time a baby snuggles and takes the

breast and looks at you with their eyes and you sing to them thousands millions

of synapses are firing okay so you have think of a garden by three years of age you're

growing a garden I know because I just started a garden where I have vegetables and flowers and it's abundant it's an

abundant I love my garden this is an abundant Garden of brain isssue okay if

you do it right it grows it overgrows you know the flowers the vegetables it's

growing crazy okay now they go into childhood after 3 years old they go into

childhood and for from 3 years old till about 9 years

old it's still growing but it's not growing at the same pace so say that

it's still like growing a little like like it the garden grows in one big burst and then little bursts so from 3

to 9 it's still growing right but not not to the same degree as the first critical period of brain development now

adolescence comes 9 to 25 and now you have to prune back the

garden because if you don't prune back the cells you don't need it's as damaging to the brain as if you didn't

grow them to begin with so in these two critical Windows the

environment dictates do the sales grow do they get

pruned and when they're really little you're their environment you're it tag

you're it when they're an adolescence you're a very important part of the environment but not all of their

environment they have friends they have school they have activities right and so

it's very important if you can get to the first window to get there because you don't know what's going to happen to

them and you want to fortify them right you want to fortify them so when they get adolescence which is really painful

and hard and a struggle that they have the re the inner resources to to cope

with adolescence because it's so hard adolescence right and it offers such adversity social adversity academic

adversity right social media so both of these periods are

important if you miss the first window what 0 to three yes the title of

my second book it's called Chicken Little the sky

isn't falling raising resilient Adolescence in the New Age of Anxiety if that isn't a mouthful do you know what

the title of the book was supposed to be it was supposed to be second

chances oh okay and the title of Being There was supposed to be called The Lost

Instinct so if you messed up your kids you get a second chance second chance

and what do you do I want people to read the book because it's more nuanced than what I'm saying a lot of what you should

have done in the first three years you got to be there you got to be there in a

different way you're not going to I mean they're not little little so but when they come home from school if you are

not there when the door swings open everybody knows that teenagers close

their doors if they have doors and that's their way of saying my

defenses are up go away if parents work really hard and

then they come home and they go knock knock knock I'm here to spend time with you how how was your day that door is

closed closed baby closed if you aren't there when the door

opens on its own on their terms if you're not there when they're coming out to get a snack or to take a pee or to

take a break from they're studying if you are not there then and open for business for communication the door

closes again so it goes back to to this idea that children need you when they need

you not when you're personally available and if you miss that window it's not the

end of the world because you can a word that we use is to repair you can repair

a lot of the damage but to repair the damage you can't go back it's sort of

like going to a confessional if you're Catholic you know you go in and you say you know oh Father I you know I I

murdered somebody today and the the priest says well you know say 12 hell mares and I don't know I'm not Catholic

but you know but you can't go out and murder again so if you're going to repair it means that whatever happens

between you and your child you're trying to be a better parent you're trying to do things differently right you can't

take advantage of their good graces and keep pushing them away pushing them um

but repair is possible because the brain is plastic and it's always growing and shrinking until it's not what if I'm 30

years old for example and I had a traumatic upbringing can I repair myself

from the childhood trauma that I experienced between the ages of zero and 10 the way that I would put it is it

takes a relationship to cause the trauma and it takes another relationship to repair

it so the thing that most people don't understand about therapy

and why I really recommend psychodynamic Psychotherapy some people would say

psychoanalytic therapy but a more indepth kind of therapy that lasts

longer is because you develop a relationship it's not that you are

healed from some pithy thing that the therapist says I mean I wish I was so smart that I could say this and you know

everybody would say you're you're a genius and pay me millions of dollars doesn't work like that therapy requires

the consistency of a relationship with the therapist because it's through that

therapist seeing you through the ups and downs of your life reflecting your

feelings it's it's a kind of emotionally reparative experience but it's not what

the therapist says as much as the relationship the long-standing relationship with the therapist so

what's healing is the relationship rather than the interpretations and can that be a

romantic relationship that then course corrects you in some regard okay so the idea is that um to really heal it

requires relationships and those relationships sometimes can be people that you love the problem with people

that you love is that you end up burdening those people with you can burden overburden

the people that you love with your conflicts your internal losses so you

know if you find yourself using the people that you love like therapists if you find that you're using

the people that you love um to to deal with past losses I would say it can it

can corrupt the relationship so you have to be careful so the reason to go to a therapist would be to preserve the

relation it's not that you don't share with the person that you love but you don't want to overburden your friends or

your lovers with the burdens of your childhood trauma right so I always say

that therapy becomes like a safe container you go to therapy you talk to your

therapist you develop this trusting relationship where where everything is

is is left there so to speak in that container until you come back but

therapy is not for everyone it requires laying down your defenses it requires the ability to be open and talk about

your feelings there are types of therapies that you can go to if you can't talk about your feelings things

like DBT or CBT but you know for the most part healing therapy requires being

open it requires trusting you must encounter a lot of people that are in denial about their childhood trauma and

the role it's played in shaping who they are because you'll have people come to you I'm sure that are exhibiting adult symptoms like maybe they can't form

relationships very well um maybe they've got other forms of emotional eratic behavior and there must be occasions

where you have a suspicion yeah that it's linked to some Al experience and they're in denial thinking about people

that I know that are have presenting symptoms in their life really sort of

like chronic presenting symptoms but if you were to ask them if their childhood played a role they're almost like

defensive of their childhood so defenses are important defenses protect us so and

people also have a misunderstanding of what therapy is about the kind of therapy I'm a psychoanalyst so we don't

people think you go to therapy and they take your defenses away from you I would never take someone's defenses away

unless I could help them to replace them with healthier defenses so what we do is

in exchange like you don't take your foot off a landmine unless you have a really big rock to put in its place

right so if you're going to let go of one defense you have to trust the person you're working with that you'll find a

better healthier defense to protect you give me an example if you used

anxiety in child childhood if you use the anxiety

to to get attention what if you complained as a child and you went around and said you

know oh I you know I'm worried about this and I'm and and so in a way it serves a purpose that anxiety that um

that complaining that expression of emotion it gets the attention from your parents and suddenly and I do believe

that there's a lot of this going on a lot of kids are breaking down and saying I'm anxious I'm depressed I do think

many of them are but I also think that many of them need their parents to

understand them so that would be what I call it's a defense but it's an unhealthy defense

because what ends up happening is that the parents stop being able to hear them

because they complain and the anxiety starts to grade on the parents and the parents pull away right um and so what

would be a better defense for that child is to learn how to express what they

need from their parents instead of just saying I feel anxious or I feel depressed but to actually say you know

Mom and Dad you don't really spend any time with me you don't really and when

you're home you're distracted and you're on your computer and your iPads and and

you're not you don't really seem that interested in me and so that's a better way of going about getting the attention

that they need so you're never taking something away from someone unless you have something better to give them and

that's a myth of therapy right so people feel that they're going to go into therapy and be left defenseless now

defensiveness which you mentioned is a different thing entirely when someone is

defensive it means that it's um an unhealthy defense it means that you hit

something so when you say to your friend do you have any childhood trauma and they say absolutely not what are you

that defensiveness as opposed to someone who says you know I I can't think of any

I maybe maybe what you know so the ability to introspect about the good and

the bad and integrate the good and the bad is a is a healthy sign if you have a friend who can't talk about the sadness

of their childhood or a friend who can't talk about the happiness who can't integrate

the good and the bad of their childhood you know something happened there and if you have a friend who won't talk at all

then you really know something happened there you hit a sensitive spot are daddy

issues real because the term is thrown around in culture like oh she has daddy issues it's typically she has daddy

issues isn't it right so there's something called edible development which is sexual development it's really

relational development but it's sexual development which is that all little boys fall in love romantically with

their mothers and want to marry them so all little boys say I want to marry you Mommy Daddy get lost it's sort of like

that and all little girls want to be Daddy's Little Princess and marry Daddy and want Mommy to get lost and it's this

period of about oh 3 to six 3 to six years old and

I always prepare parents for this fathers need to reinforce themselves and

feel secure enough so when they're little boys who have been their buddies and who have loved them when their little boys say bye-bye Daddy get lost

they don't react they don't go into a deep depression they just they hold it and they say oh I get it you love Mommy

that's okay same with little girls if their mothers overreact become angry at

them reject them say oh you just love your daddy and so but if daddies are not

present enough for little girls it does inform so our first romantic

relationships are with our opposite sex parent so as a little boy your first romantic relationships with your mother

as a little girl your first romantic relationships with your father if your opposite sex parent is not present at

all there's a loss there so you know sometimes what can

happen is if you don't have a present father or if your father is really just

absent or if he's physically present but emotionally absent you spend your life

looking for that kind of edible connection that kind of admiration that kind of love that kind of um you know

for someone to love you in the way that a father loves a little girl but with distrust built

in well not necessarily I mean sometimes it's too much trust I mean if you are

hungry and somebody offers you scraps you'll take the scraps right if you're

hungry and somebody says here's some crumbs of a muffin so the problem is

that but what if they offered me the scraps and sometimes the scraps as I went to reach for them

walked out and didn't come back then I might develop a relationship that it's not safe to trust the scraps because so

that's a father who's negligent but it still leaves that little it still can leave that little girl with a strong

desire to be loved in that way so it's like a missing there's a missing piece

right so you'd say the Romantic relationship with the opposite sex parent is a very important part of our

sexual development and our relational development and so it becomes a missing piece for that child who then grows into

that adult um if a father was abusive to a little girl then you know

that little girl may do what we call a neurotic repetition which is she seeks out abusive men because that's the only

kind of love that she knew or understood so you know you have to remember that

that children perceive of the relationship with your with their parent as loving no

matter what the parent does to them I used to work when I was a young social worker in foster care and the children

who were physically abused by their parents and neglected terribly still

wanted to be with their mothers and fathers they didn't want to be taken away because that's that was their

mother and father and they perceived of that as love so however we're raised we

perceive of that that is love the problem is if it's not healthy love then we can neurotically repeat or repeat

that in our adult lives men young boys and men I was looking at some stats

earlier on that said there's been increased sexual inactivity amongst young men which is an interesting stat

it's risen to almost 31% of men between the ages of 18 and 24 reporting no sexual activity in the past year so

that's almost doubled in a in about the space of 18 years here's a interesting St

High suicide rates amongst men men account for nearly 80% of all suicides in the US the highest rate observed

among 45 to 6 four yearolds globally suicide is the leading cause of death amongst young men and a survey conducted

in the UK found that an increasing amount of men feel hopeless and

worthless and that are struggling with finding meaning and purpose in the world the plight of young men you talk

in your books and in your work about yeah how the role of a man has changed and how that this might not be

necessarily productive for the health and well-being of a man yeah we've taken away their purpose when you take a human

being's purpose away remember the purpose for men was to protect their family was to it was to

hunt in the old days feed their families but it was also to protect their

families it was to provide for their families and what we've done in

reversing everything thing is although we raised up women and there are certainly positive things about raising

up women but when we raised up women we denigrated men and I have two sons so

this is very personal for me um and I also see a lot of young men in my

practice um young adult men and what I'll say is that they feel discouraged

they feel purposeless they feel diminished um yeah and there has been

something vengeful I think about so the feminist movement was

meant to give women choice and to balance off what was imbalanced in society but there's something vengeful

about it I think at moments I feel like there's something vengeful about the modern feminist movement which is let's

get them let's diminish them let's take over let's push them out let's you know

let's beat them up let's get you know let's show them who's I mean something really vengeful so it in so for me the

feminist movement was meant to create balance it wasn't meant to it it wasn't

meant to set into play this other kind of imbalance and you know more than I

think 60% of universities are women now as well as graduate schools and so that

means and the study show that men will marry at their educational level or

below women will only marry at their educational level or above and by diminishing men so much in

terms of our education and professions we basically taken men's purpose away

they feel purposeless and the other thing is and I'm going to say when men stay home to nurture their

children now remember as mammals we have defined roles that is not instinctual for men to stay home and nurture their

young it's just it's a reverse of something and the issue there is that

there's an inverse relationship between oxytocin and

testosterone the higher the oxytocin guess what the L the testosterone

yes so if we're staying at home bonding there Reas for that so

mammals when they are nurturing their young they don't want somebody mating

with them go away right so the idea is that when a female nurtures she doesn't

want to have sex she doesn't want to right so the investment in nurturing

pushes away the investment in mating and this is why I've read so many stats around men's testosterone dropping when

they become fathers um some yeah I I

couldn't believe that was true when I read it it's true there was some studies to talk about how women's testosterone

goes up women have testosterone when they're out in the Work World fighting like men that their testosterone goes up

and men's testosterone when they stay home goes down now what that's doing for sex lives um there's some research about

you know it that is the next wave which is what does it do to sex lives because

men have to perform they have to get it up to be crude tell me about it um and

so if your testosterone is low you're not going to get it up right which is why there's all this

Viagra and these patches and supplements and you know because it's not it's not

instinctually normal for husbands to stay home and nurture their children and that's the Inconvenient Truth how that

affects men's and women's sex life when women come home from their banking jobs and their law jobs um did their

husbands not want to have sex with them and you know is that breaking up so I mean so this is all I think this is the

next wave of we've revers things societally so

fast and then we hope that our evolutionary bodily responses are just

going to catch up in in merely a a century and it just doesn't Evolution

doesn't work like that it takes hundreds if not thousands of years to change our

our bodily evolutionary responses right our instinctual responses so this is you

know it's it's problematic um and also when men's testosterone goes down they

get depressed so they don't perform sexually well they get depressed they

feel purposeless um they can't do what they're instinctually supposed to do

which is provide protect hunt you know we talk about Dei I mean why aren't we

talking about Dei when it when it when it comes to men and women why aren't we

talking about balancing the scales giving purpose again um and and honestly

we should be talking about what happens to men when they actually do stay home and nurture their young is this stats to

support the idea that if you're at home raising your kids as a man you have you struggle in the

bedroom so there was some research I know that was going on about that how it affects sex drive but when your

testosterone goes down it does affect sex drive we're just not talking about it so I have anecdotal patients I have a

patient who who whose wife was a hardcore woman in finance and you know he he couldn't he

lost interest in her he had to go out of the marriage and have affairs with women

who were more feminine who were more so he could feel as if he could play that

masculine role he couldn't do that in his marriage and so are we going to

see kind of a shift in society as a result result of this we're already seeing it I mean the other thing that

we're doing is to young boys let's talk about what we're doing to young boys this starts very young we basically

educate young boys in a way that really favors girls you know from a very young

age we talk about being able to sit quietly and regulate your emotions and not be aggressive and not be impulsive

and these little boys are being diagnosed with ADHD many of them just for being little boys little boys need

to run around they have a lot of physical energy they have tons of testosterone when you're like between

three and six you have a surge of testosterone and all you want to do is run and jump and play and be outside and

what we're doing we're putting them in school making them sit in circle time so so we marginalize them we label them we

say they have a problem we say that they have ADHD and they have behavioral problems and in many of them the stress

that I talked about is the stress of making little boys be more like little

girls and that's where it starts and so then they go into childhood and again the educational

system favors the way girls learn not the way boys learn how to boys learn

boys have attention spans for very short periods of time and then they need lots

of physical activity so ideally if you go to and look at the boy schools what do they do they run the boys like

running the dogs in the park they sit for 45 minutes or half an hour

but then the boys get time off to run around and then they'll sit another half an hour and then they'll run around I

mean they have like four ree peries a day and so that's really better for boys

and little girls have more of a capacity to sit quietly in circle time and and

sort of you know they're they don't have as much testosterone they don't have that need to run and jump and play to

the same degree that little boys do they do need to play we're not letting our kids play boys and girls because we're

trying to force left brain development on them too early but we are forcing

little boys into this box and they're not doing well in that box and then

they're labeled they're labeled as having behavioral problems ADHD and that label them follows them through

childhood sometimes into Middle School into into high school yeah what would

you change I make you prime minister of the world president of the world and you can fix this issue oh I would have

little boys educated separately than little girls in the early years in the early years I would have boy schools and

girl schools because little little girls learn differently and also there's been a lot of evidence to show that in the early years when you do single gender

education little girls will try things will take risks with things that they

wouldn't in front of little boys and little boys will try things that they wouldn't take risks in front of little girls like little boys are more like to

try art and painting and music little girls are more likely to try stem and math and you know all these things that

we talk about little girls should do so the the idea is that um single gender

education in the early years is is better for little kids because they learn differently what about as it

relates to men what would you change to fix the issues you were talking about with testosterone and those kinds of

issues talk about it we should be talking about it we don't talk about this issue how much how many times have