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one in five children will not leave childhood without developing a serious mental illness anxiety depression ADHD
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behavioral problems and what pisses me off it's that we're not really educating or telling parents the truth as to why
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why is it that what you say is so troubling for some people sometimes facts are An Inconvenient Truth but
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everything I'm going to say is supported by research Erica Kamar is a parenting expert and psychoanalyst who uses over
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30 years of research to challenge the societal norms on parenting and Early Child Development there's some myths
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that really have to be debunked about how to raise a healthy child and the first is dayc care is good for children
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for socialization no it is so bad for their brain and it's been known to increase aggression behavioral problems
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attachment disorders because babies need their mothers SP the first three years for emotional security can a father do
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that so fathers are important in a different way and I'll go through all of that but they're both critical because
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if you're raised without one you are missing a piece and then there's quality versus quantity time myth you need to be
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there a quality of time as well as a quantity of time you can't have a fabulous career and then come home and
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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
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of them but are there any areas of privilege that you need to acknowledge maybe someone who doesn't have a partner
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there or someone who is in an extremely difficult economic situation they do but there are ways to creatively deal with
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it and I'll go through each of them so there's this has always blown my mind a little
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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
00:01:38
before we start if you like the show and you like what we do here and you want to support us the free simple way that you can do just that is by hitting the
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Subscribe button and my commitment to you is if you do that then I'll do everything in my power me and my team to
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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
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you want me to speak to and we'll continue to do what we do thank you so much
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Erica you're clearly on a mission and I get that energy from you
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that there's really an idea that you believe that much of the world doesn't believe or is struggling to accept in
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some way but it's an important idea what is the mission that you're
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on I like to think of it as three PS presence prioritization and prevention
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and I'll go through each of them um my mission is to educate parents and
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uh policy makers and clinicians and Educators about the the fact that for
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children to be mentally healthy in the future you have to be physically and
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emotionally present for them throughout childhood but particularly in the two critical periods of brain development
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which are 0 to3 and 9 to 25 which is adolescence so in those two critical
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periods of brain development uh particularly 0 to3 um
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much of a child's development depends on their environment and you are their environment so I run around the world
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talking about the importance of physical and emotional presence attachment security attachment security is the
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foundation for future mental health prioritization we prioritize everything
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today other than our children we prioritize our work our careers uh our
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material success our personal desires and Pleasures but what we're not prioritizing is children um and you know
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that's a problem because if we don't prioritize them they break down they may break down at three they may break down
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at 8 or they may not break down till they're in adolescence but eventually they break down and prevention there's
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so much that we can do we have a mental health crisis now in the world it varies
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to a certain degree in America one in five children will not leave childhood without breaking down at some point
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without developing a serious mental illness anxiety depression ADHD
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behavioral problems um Suicidal Thoughts so uh we have a problem in the UK it's 1
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in six in America it's one in five it's around the world it's about one in five
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that is a shocking figure and so and and the truth is we can do a great deal to
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prevent that the idea that we are trying to put out fires without talking about
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what is the origin of these issues the way that the mental health care system works now it's like what I call cutting
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the grass uh children are medicated which is basically just pain management
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um they're given CBT therapy which again is just pain management but why aren't
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we asking the important questions which is where does emotional regulation
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originate where does it come from from when does it start how do we Foster
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development in children from a very young age to promote resilience to stress and adversity in the future and
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so those are my three missions and for someone who doesn't know your work and doesn't isn't aware
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of you they might be thinking how would you know Erica how would you know the answer
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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
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an author of books on parent guidance and parents education um and I've been in practice
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seeing patience so the majority of my work is still seeing patience I have a fulltime job of seeing patience and uh
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as someone who is also a parent I have three children of my own um and so as a
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parent as a clinician uh as an author who has for the past 20 years been
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researching and what I did is I collected research in epigenetics and attachment Theory and
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Neuroscience and uh wrote my first book being there because what what happened
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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
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I started practicing about 36 years ago but I was probably 5 years into my
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practice and I was seeing that the families that were coming to see me had younger and younger children that were
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being diagnosed with very serious mental illnesses and being medicated at a very
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young age basically silencing their pain and what I was observing in my practice
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is that those children who were doing the least well were the ones whose
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mothers were the least present in their lives so their primary attachment Figures were the least present in their
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lives and so then I started looking at the research I looked at all the Neuroscience research since the 90s and
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all of the new new research that had come out um I looked at the old attachment theories which have been
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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
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were abandoning our children for our own desires for our careers for material
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success um and there was a great deal of misunderstanding about the irreducible emotional needs of children we're going
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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
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investigative research we've done you have three very well adjusted children um so congratulations for that and I
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hope to have successful children myself one day but I'm also just really interested in understanding myself
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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
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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
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listening today when we were younger may have shaped Us in pro-social antisocial
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ways or productive or unproductive ways you mentioned that you still see clients
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and patients today what kind of patients do you see
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what are they struggling with and who are they are you seeing the parents the kids both well I have a very large parent
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guidance practice because of the books that I write um and the articles I write I also write for the Wall Street Journal
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and other newspapers so I you know people find me through my writing um and
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then they reach out for help um and and so I have the parent guidance basically means people come to see me either both
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parents or one parent because they have questions about their child's development or something's going wrong
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their child's starting to to develop symptoms um and they don't want to medicate them and they want to
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understand what's really at the root cause of of of of the issue and so
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that's a a good portion of my practice but I also see individual patients for depression and anxiety and I see couples
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and you know the joke about psychoanalysts is we're all specialists in depression and
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anxiety but um yeah so I see individuals and couples but a lot of parent guidance
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work and they come to you typically because there's they're noticing something is not right with their child
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sometimes they'll come preventatively because they want to raise a healthy child and there's so much white noise in
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society there's so much of misinformation our instincts are to lean
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into our children our evolutionary Drive is to create a feeling of Safety and
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Security for our children and to be as present as possible and to sooe them when they're in distress and to be there
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to teach them our values and but Society um took a turn it took a turn in the you
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could say going back to the Industrial Revolution if I really want to go back I'll say the Industrial Revolution was a
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time when women were forced into the workplace into factories and cities you
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know they were separated from children for the first time but really the turn that Society took that that I think has
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a lot to do with what's happening today is the me movement of the 60s and also the feminist movement both of those
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movements which had a tremendously positive impact on society in one way
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also had had a tremendously negative impact on society um when women decided
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that it was cool to go to work and to work full-time out of the home you know
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everybody cheered and said great you know women have the same rights as men and now everybody can be in the
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workforce and be independent and make money and do their own thing me me me me me the problem is that children were
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dropped they were abandoned and their needs which are not needs that are going
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to shift because Society shifts because they have irreducible uh neurological emotional
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needs so we know that babies are born neurologically and emotionally
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fragile and so what that means is they're not born resilient and today
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what's being projected onto babies is they can handle a lot they can handle
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stress they can handle separation um they can handle you going back to work after six weeks or three
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months and leaving them in daycare with strangers or you know and from an evolutionary
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perspective babies have always needed the physical skin-to-skin contact with
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their mothers for the first year and most parts of the world babies are worn on their mother's bodies because mothers
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perform a number of really important functions for babies that are biological functions based on our evolutionary need
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to provide our babies with what we call attachment security um so you know
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Society took a turn and it's it's um it's caused a lot of damage I mean this
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Mental Health crisis in children I saw coming 30 years ago and it was already
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you know so um you know I have uh friends and colleagues like Jonathan Hy who says oh well it didn't start till
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social media and that's false because I was seeing this uptick and if you really look there was an uptick in mental
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illness and children um going back decades and it had everything to do with
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the shift in society towards self-centeredness towards narcissism
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towards individualism towards M me me and so you know and I we say that you don't have to
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have children period to have a satisfying life but if you're going to
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have children you need to be equipped to care for them because having children
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alone without really understanding what it means to care for them and being prepared to take on that
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responsibility is causing our children to break down why do you mention mothers and not fathers in that because you you
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seem to have an emphasis on the role that a mother plays and it seems to be more important in your view than the
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role that a father plays or maybe even that a nanny or some other caregiver could play and I noticed that on your
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first book which was written in 2017 being there on the cover it says why prioritizing motherhood in big
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letters in the first three years matters scientifically evolutionarily with
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studies and research how can you make the case to me to make me believe that the role of the mother in particular is
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essential versus a father or other caregiver so in fact in the book it
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talks about the difference between mothers and fathers because that's an important question um and the reason I
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wrote about mothers is not because fathers are unimportant but fathers are important in a different way so there's
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a whole debate in society about this kind of idea of gender neutrality that
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mothers and fathers are interchangeable but actually from an evolutionary perspective as mammals they're not
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interchangeable they serve different functions and those roles and those behaviors are connected to nurturing
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hormones so mothers um are really important for what we call sensitive
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empathic nurturing when children are infants and toddlers that means that
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when children are in distress mothers soothe babies and therefore regulate
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their emotions from moment to moment every time a mother soothes a baby uh
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with skin-to-skin contact and eye contact and the soothing tone of her voice she's leaning into that baby's
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pain and she is regulating that baby's emotions and the way I like to think about it is that you know when babies
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are born they're born emotionally disjointed think about say
00:14:59
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
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and where we want to get babies is to sailing in the Caribbean not flatlining
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but we want them to be able to regulate their emotions but they're not born that way and so
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mothers because they sooth the baby from moment to moment when they're physically and emotionally present enough in the
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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
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is developed and by 3 years of age babies can then start to internalize the
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ability to regulate their own emotions now if mothers aren't present as the primary attachment figures to do that
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mirroring of emotion to do that soothing of of their emotions then babies don't
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learn how to regulate their emotions the other thing that's important that mothers do is they buffer babies from
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stress by wearing ing them on their body for the first year and then by being as present as possible for three years they
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actually protect baby's brains from cortisol the stress hormone so there is
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a a hormone called oxytocin it's the love hormone and it is protective
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against cortisol the more a mother nurtures with sensitive empathic nurturing meaning when the baby cries
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the mother goes oh sweetheart you know let me see the boo boo let me kiss the boo boo that that actually raises the
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oxytocin in the baby's brain which then protects the baby from cortisol can a
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father do that so now fathers why are fathers important so fathers also
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produce oxytocin but it has a different effect on their brain so for mothers oxytocin makes mothers sensitive
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empathic nurturers very Vigilant to the baby's distress when fathers produce oxytocin it comes from a different part
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of their brain and makes them more what we call playful tactile stimulators of
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babies what does that sound like to you playful tactful stimulators of babies
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throwing the baby up in the air and tickling the baby and running after the baby and rough housing and so that's
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important for a variety of reasons um first it encourages things like
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exploration and risk-taking it encourages separation and fathers do this really
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important thing which is they help the baby to learn to regulate certain emotions so mothers help to regulate
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sadness fear distress fathers help to regulate excitement and aggression so
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when fathers aren't in the house when there are single mothers raising children without a father often little
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boys develop behavioral problems is what we're seeing that they can't regulate their aggression because fathers help
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little boys in particular but little girls too to regulate aggression so when fathers are aren't around you'll often
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see little boys who are more impulsive who are more aggressive um so the answer
00:18:06
is fathers and mothers are both critical to the development of children which is a very controversial thing to say today
00:18:14
because if you're raised without one you are missing a piece but they're not the
00:18:19
same and they're not the same because our hormones dictate they're not the same so fathers produce a hormone in
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great quantities called vasopress vasopressin is the protective aggressive hormone and what does it do it helps
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fathers to protect their family there was a study that was done where mothers and fathers lay in
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bed and the baby cries was out of the UK this study the baby cries and the father
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sleep through the baby's distress cries but the mothers wake up right away okay
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but with the rustling of leaves outside the window the mother sleep through it and the fathers wake up right away
00:19:01
because the fathers are attuned to predatorial threat so our nurturing
00:19:06
hormones make us different I mean the fact that we can say that there are many
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things that are similar between women and men of course we're both intelligent we can both be
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ambitious um but I think the idea that we want to kind of make everything the
00:19:26
same when it's just not factual it is the the Inconvenient Truth that mothers and fathers nurturing hormones dictate
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that if they are healthy and they've been raised in a healthy environment they are different now does that mean
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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
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but if as a society we can't acknowledge the differences then a father can't learn to be a sensitive empathic
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nurturer meaning these are instinctual behaviors and so that infant if that
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father is going to stay home with that baby acknowledging the differences allows that father then to become a
00:20:07
sensitive empathic nurturer so interesting because these aren't the ideas that are socially
00:20:14
accepted or at least the ideas you see on social media and funly enough as you were speaking I recorded everything you
00:20:19
said and I ran it through Ai and AI said the core ideas that you shared um are well supported by evolutionary
00:20:25
Psychology and Neuroscience which is quite surprising because usually AI argues with people I mean so so the
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thing is none of the books I write are based on opinion so I'm I'm very skittish about saying anything that
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isn't backed up with research um so it's everything that I write about and speak
00:20:45
about is is supported by research why is it that what you say is so troubling for
00:20:51
some people have you you know why right because it because it makes us confront a set of realities that it's an
00:20:58
inconvenience Tru toore it's An Inconvenient Truth um sometimes facts
00:21:04
are An Inconvenient Truth just like you know Climate Change Is An Inconvenient Truth um this is An Inconvenient Truth
00:21:11
it inconveniences people it also makes people feel guilty so I don't believe
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that guilt is a bad feeling I don't believe that guilt is a Bad Thing guilt
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is a sign that your ego is functioning it's a sign that the part of you the
00:21:28
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
00:21:36
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
00:21:42
part of you that is unempathic towards your own young and we would say that
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that doesn't make that person a bad person it makes that person someone who probably had some early trauma
00:21:54
themselves right it means that they probably have some kind of attachment disorder where they can't be attuned to
00:22:02
their their baby's pain right so when you are guilty it means you have
00:22:07
internal conflict it means two parts of you are struggling with each other the part of you that wants to do whatever
00:22:13
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
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says wait a second but my baby my baby needs me look at my vulnerable baby look
00:22:26
how sad look at the distress that my absence is causing that baby so if we
00:22:31
don't feel guilt then our species is lost we're lost now excessive guilt is
00:22:39
another thing if you're a good enough mother or a good enough father and you still feel guilty then we call it
00:22:45
anxiety but for the most part what I say makes a lot of women and men feel guilty
00:22:53
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
00:23:00
instead of turning toward it when we turn towards our internal conflicts we
00:23:05
tend to make better decisions for ourselves for our children for our families um but when we turn away from
00:23:13
those conflicts we tend not to make good decisions and those tend to have long-term
00:23:19
consequences what exactly are you inconveniencing with your truth what are the ideas that you're
00:23:26
that you have to sacrifice time and money and
00:23:31
freedom that if you want to raise healthy children it's going to require discomfort and frustration and
00:23:39
sacrifice and what's interesting is that what's also happened is because we're raising our children in such a selfish
00:23:46
self-centered environment um young people are more fragile they are more emotionally
00:23:53
fragile more of them have attachment disorders they can't bear frustration
00:23:58
they can't bear pain they can't bear sleeplessness you know the idea that you have to get a baby nurse because you
00:24:05
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
00:24:12
mean so women and men always raise children
00:24:19
in in history in extended family circles right um they weren't isolated and today
00:24:27
parents are very isolated so you would have your mother staying with you or you'd have your sister
00:24:33
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
00:24:42
because I found that so many mothers it's called attachment Circle so many mothers feel so
00:24:49
isolated that dealing with the pain and the discomfort of mothering alone is too
00:24:54
much for them so there is that so we live in a very strange Society where
00:25:00
people are separate from one another in their own houses and apartments and they
00:25:05
don't depend on one another because dependency is a bad word and but there there is also this issue of how are we
00:25:13
producing such frag fragile youth that even the discomfort and the frustration
00:25:19
of raising children is too much for them there's a big economic component to this
00:25:24
as well right because if you're raising children in isolation the probability that you have disposable income or at
00:25:32
least enough money to be able to just stay at home and raise the kids and still maintain any standard of quality
00:25:38
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
00:25:45
those costs interestingly yes and no to your
00:25:50
question um people who have less economic resources are in general eneral
00:25:59
less isolated but they are also isolated today you have a lot of single mothers
00:26:05
raising children not in an apartment with other family members who've had to
00:26:10
move to other cities or countries to make a living um who are really
00:26:17
isolated you know again it I I think it crosses socioeconomic lines um but with
00:26:25
wealthier people more affluent people um they're opting for isolation many of
00:26:32
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
00:26:40
have what I call a family diaspora it's really what it is um which is that
00:26:47
people will move away from their families of origin when they have children which is very bizarre and anti-
00:26:54
instinctual so the world's become a global place and we can move wherever ever we want but doesn't it make Common
00:27:00
Sense isn't it a reasonable appause that you would want to move closer to your extended family even if they a pain in
00:27:08
the neck unless they're abusive um because it provides you with support it
00:27:14
provides you with extended family support but that's not what's happening people are choosing to live
00:27:21
geographically distant from their families of origin and so it's making it harder for families it's making it
00:27:28
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
00:27:34
got their own passions there are things that they love doing and that means that they have to be working in a major city
00:27:40
or they have to be traveling to pursue those things you just said it what if
00:27:47
they have passions what if they have a career the problem is children do best
00:27:53
in extended family situations so you know you can have a fabulous career and move far away from your family and when
00:28:00
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
00:28:07
um you know what I say to parents is that your life won't be so fabulous if
00:28:12
you have children and you're not present for them physically and emotionally
00:28:18
particularly in the early years because what happens is they break down and the expression goes that a parent is only as
00:28:25
happy as their least happy child and so there is no fabulous life if your
00:28:31
children are breaking down and that's what families are learning is that you know all of that
00:28:37
freedom and all that fabulous me time comes at a cost if you have children so
00:28:45
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
00:28:51
that are saying today I don't see the value in being responsible for another
00:28:56
human being and what they're missing out on is the deep and rewarding emotional
00:29:02
connection to your children It's A Love Like No Other Love But if you've
00:29:09
had if you've had trauma as a child if you've had parents who were narcissistic
00:29:15
or resented parenting or uh you know were distracted or mentally ill you know
00:29:24
you may already have had that trauma that that implies that later it's harder
00:29:31
to connect right so those attachment disorders that I was referring to earlier there's three kinds of
00:29:37
attachment disorders there's the avoidant attachment Disorder so what does that mean so a healthy attachment
00:29:43
looks like this um when you return home your child
00:29:48
feels so securely attached to you meaning you've gone out for an hour or two for dinner with your spouse you come
00:29:56
home and your baby is happy to see you and the reunion what we call the reunion
00:30:02
is a beautiful reunion the baby is joyful and happy and you know that's
00:30:07
healthy attachment it means that you've made your baby feel so safe and secure because you are there primarily and have
00:30:13
prioritize them the majority of the time as the primary attachment figure that when you come home your baby welcomes it
00:30:21
but what we're seeing is more and more children developing attachment disorders because their parents are push ping the
00:30:28
limits of how much they can leave those babies and putting them in things like institutional care and leaving them for
00:30:35
long hours at a time and traveling for their fabulous careers than their fabulous lives at ages when babies
00:30:42
really can't tolerate that kind of Separation when a parent comes when the primary attachment figure usually the
00:30:49
mother comes home and the baby turns away from you and turns toward the
00:30:54
babysitter or to just turns away that baby has the beginning of what's called
00:30:59
an avoidant attachment disorder now that's correlated later on with things
00:31:05
like depression and difficulty forming attachments later
00:31:11
on the next kind of uh attachment disorder is called an ambivalent attachment disorder and the mother then
00:31:17
comes home and the baby clings to the mother for dear life because the
00:31:23
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
00:31:29
fractious and can't be soothed and will not let go of that mother you know
00:31:34
holding on for dear life what I call like the rees's monkeys did to the wire cages right and that's correlated later
00:31:42
on with anxiety in youth the disorganized attachment
00:31:48
disorder is different than the other two in that the other two have a strategy so think of an attachment disorder as a
00:31:55
strategy a child who's left for two many hours by their parent or whose parent is physically present but emotionally
00:32:02
checked out that baby has to cope has to have a strategy turning away from the
00:32:08
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
00:32:15
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
00:32:22
we call learned helplessness um the ambivalent attachment disorder you know that baby
00:32:29
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
00:32:37
Detachment disorder is the hardest to treat um because the baby has no strategy so the baby Cycles through many
00:32:44
strategies the baby will go from clinging to avoiding to being enraged
00:32:51
and even slapping or hitting the mother and then cycling through again um and that baby that develops a disorganized
00:32:58
attachment disorder those are more those babies it's correlated later with borderline personality disorder and
00:33:04
we're seeing a huge rise in borderline personality disorders and those are the
00:33:09
kids who are cutting themselves who are trying to commit suicide um we have a a mental illness
00:33:16
crisis the likes of which we've never seen in history and it has everything to do with how we're raising our children
00:33:23
you seem pissed off under that calm demeanor pissed off yes I suppose I am
00:33:29
I'm not pissed off at the people I'm pissed off at a society that is lying
00:33:35
we're not really educating or telling parents the truth so there's four
00:33:41
attachment disorders avoidant secure ambivalent disorganized well one secure
00:33:47
isn't a disorder so there's secure and then there's three attachment disorders avoid in bivalent disorganized yes how
00:33:54
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
00:34:00
wondering how that would then manifest in my relationships with my life as an adult outside of the obvious mental
00:34:05
health you know situations so avoiding an avoiding attachment disorder would be
00:34:10
someone who um can't form meaningful and deep connections can't commit has
00:34:18
difficulty committing has difficulty trusting in the intimacy and the the
00:34:24
depth of intimacy in a relationship and ambivalent an attachment disorder would
00:34:29
would be someone who's highly highly anxious um someone who clings to you uh
00:34:36
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
00:34:43
you'd be the little fish that swam away um and suffocate they suffocate the people they love because they're afraid
00:34:49
to let go um disorganized attachment borderline personality disorders they
00:34:55
tend to be very emotionally volatile um there's a lot of anger there and um
00:35:01
and there's a lot of self harm self Haring Behavior there do they end up
00:35:08
attracting a certain attachment style so if I'm an avoidant do I then end up attracting avoidance or do I is there
00:35:15
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
00:35:21
attracted to reciprocally healthy relationships and you trust your environment so you trust in loving
00:35:27
relationship ships and um avoidance sometimes are attracted to
00:35:33
avoidant people because there's no conflict there so in other words someone who can't commit with someone also who
00:35:40
can't commit um that can break down those at some point so remember that
00:35:45
these are pathological defenses so you know we use the word defense because it means to protect one right and and
00:35:53
defenses help us until they no longer help us and so we say attachment to disorders are pathological defenses
00:35:59
meaning they don't usually last a lifetime they break down at some point
00:36:05
and so you might be with another avoiding attachment disordered person
00:36:10
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
00:36:19
in a relationship with someone who can't give back so yeah as we say like levels
00:36:24
of water meat so people will be attracted to another often of the same
00:36:29
ilk but but it isn't necessarily a healthy relationship and of all these four
00:36:35
attachment Styles who do you think which attachment style from in your opinion and from your observations and the
00:36:40
people that you've seen is most likely to have a successful and then also unsuccessful relationship oh well secure
00:36:48
attachment will have a successful I mean secure people with secure attachment uh
00:36:53
will be drawn to healthy reciprocal loving um deep connections because they've had
00:37:01
a deep and loving connection with their mother so remember I said that you it's only after 3 years of age that you
00:37:07
internalize a feeling of security and where you internalize a feeling that the world is a safe place
00:37:15
and you can trust the people in it and you can trust to love another person and
00:37:21
so you know we we throw that word trust around we don't realize that it comes from the very beginnings of our de
00:37:28
development when we don't trust others it's generally because we couldn't trust
00:37:34
those that we were to depend upon when we were at our most vulnerable stage and
00:37:40
what about the the alternative so if which of these attachment Styles is least likely to have successful
00:37:47
relationships that's disorganized yeah they have a very hard time forming relationships holding on to
00:37:53
relationships um yeah I would say it's it's they're the most complicated to treat and they're also
00:38:01
the most complicated in terms of you know being able to have successful relationships in the future I was
00:38:08
wondering as you were speaking whether if I have more kids so if I have 10 young kids yeah is there a higher
00:38:14
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
00:38:20
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
00:38:26
maternal dep syndrome which is that mothers can actually die in the developing world of having too many
00:38:31
children in Too Short a period of time uh they get depleted physically but they also get depleted emotionally I'm going
00:38:38
to say it right now so everybody can hear it who's watching this having children is stressful it is
00:38:46
frustrating it does require that you are Sleepless for the first five years it
00:38:51
requires that you can tolerate a lot of discomfort and frustration so if there was a job
00:38:57
description first it would say the most joyful uh
00:39:03
enriching thing you can do in your entire life but what comes with that to
00:39:09
Foster healthy development is frustration lack of sleep stress uh discomfort and so that should
00:39:17
be part of the job description yeah it seems to be such an important principle for Life generally
00:39:23
that everything has an A tradeoff and I think was it Einstein that said for every Force has like an equal and
00:39:29
opposite counter force or something to to that effect and a lot of people are
00:39:35
choosing not to make the decision to have kids I was looking at some stats around this the European Union witnessed
00:39:40
only 3.8 million births in 2022 nearly half the number recorded six decades ago
00:39:47
marking one of the lowest birth rates in history France for example known for its robust family policies has seen a
00:39:54
decrease from 830,000 children born in 2010 to just
00:40:00
670,000 2023 the lowest since World War II and this is a huge Global Trend across
00:40:08
especially countries that have a lot of money it is so I speak at a big conference called The Alliance for
00:40:14
responsible citizenship and they talk about a lot of these alarming dropping
00:40:19
birth rates the truth is though that uh as countries become more developed birth
00:40:25
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
00:40:31
that's worse than this which is people it's not that they're having less children which actually you know
00:40:38
everybody has their own limits in terms of their capacity to give and to love
00:40:45
and so for some people maybe one child is enough for other people five children isn't enough meaning they have so much
00:40:52
inside of them to give right um but the alarming thing for me isn't the dropping
00:40:58
birth rates due to economics you know so maybe people aren't having 10 children
00:41:04
like they used to they're having three children or two children right the alarming thing for me is that people are
00:41:11
not having children that's more alarming to me because that's more a sign not of a
00:41:17
country developing but of a country and a society of a modern society which does
00:41:25
not see the value in in raising children
00:41:31
and having deep and loving relationships be a priority in your life those people
00:41:37
would say I have deep and loving relationships with my partner with my dog with my Uncle Auntie friends Etc
00:41:44
it's different and why is it different it's a good question it's different because um in the end your relationship
00:41:51
with your partner or with your auntie or with your dog isn't the same level of
00:41:57
dependency the ability to care for another human being uh to allow another human being to
00:42:05
be dependent on you to devote to that human being is a growing transforming
00:42:11
experience for human beings one would say that not sure I completely buy this
00:42:18
fully because but Jordan Peterson I think has said I think it was Jordan who said that you can't fully become an
00:42:25
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
00:42:31
children but I do think that there is something in terms of developmentally on
00:42:36
an adult development level that transforms you that is meant to to
00:42:43
transform you in being generative and having children again it's not for everyone and I do say this that um I'm
00:42:51
not part of the pr nality movement where I say everybody should have children I don't think everybody should have
00:42:57
children but I do think that if you're going to have children then you need to look deeply at
00:43:06
your own upbringing and your own losses and your own early traumas before you
00:43:11
bring them into this world so you can repair whatever it is you need to repair
00:43:17
and not uh create what we call generational expression of things like attachment disorders and mental illness
00:43:24
and cuz a lot of people are struggling now have kids even those that want to yeah um looking at some stats and
00:43:30
there's a global prevalence of infertility approximately 18% of adults worldwide about one in six experience
00:43:37
infertility at some point in their lives yeah between 2015 and 2019 about roughly
00:43:43
15% of us women aged 15 to 49 experienced impaired fertility and in the UK Research indicates that one in
00:43:49
eight women listening to this now and one in 10 men aged 16 to 74 have experienced infertility which is defined
00:43:55
as unsuccessfully attempting pregnancy for a year or longer and I've spoken to a lot of
00:44:02
people actually that have tried to have kids yeah for years very sad it's very
00:44:07
sad when people want children and they can't have children it is incredibly sad when you think about what's contributing
00:44:13
to that what how do you diagnose that infertility challenge there are a lot of theories some are environmental some are
00:44:20
the fact that we're delaying having children we're lying to women and to men
00:44:25
we're telling them freeze your eggs in fact this is a little disturbing I'll tell you about this that law firms now
00:44:32
are um paying for the freezing of their young female Associates
00:44:38
eggs I find that disturbing um saying freeze your eggs work really hard for us
00:44:46
yeah you can have children later and the truth is a lot of them can't because
00:44:52
when you freeze eggs it's not a guarantee of fertility it's not a guarantee that those eggs will turn into
00:44:58
embryos it's not a guarantee that those embryos will turn into babies so there's the age piece um there is also and
00:45:06
there's the environmental piece there is also the stress piece which we are not talking about um there's a component to
00:45:14
getting pregnant that is about stress we have more stress on both men and women
00:45:21
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
00:45:26
think women make die sooner because they have the stress of working and raising children for the most part um but the
00:45:33
point is that that uh the stress that young adults face because they're trying
00:45:40
to you know we should talk about some of the other myths what's another myth we'll weave it through this talk another
00:45:46
myth is you can do everything all at the same time and do it well myth that's a
00:45:54
big myth you can't you can't have a fabulous career working full-time and
00:46:02
traveling and being fabulous and raise healthy children the good news is life
00:46:07
is long you may live till 120 like Moses and I think of your generation you're
00:46:13
younger than me but um I think you probably will live well over a hundred
00:46:19
um and so what that means is you have many many many many many many years to
00:46:24
have a fabulous career when your children don't need you so much but you have a very small
00:46:30
window to create that emotional security for your children that will be the core
00:46:37
of them you know we talk a lot about your physical core and core training this is your emotional core this is the
00:46:43
emotional core of human beings attachment security and a feeling of
00:46:49
safety that you can rely on the people who you need most in the world to be
00:46:55
there when you need them that is your emotional core how did you manage your mother of
00:47:01
three you've raised three very wonderful well adjusted children but you're also successful yeah you have books you
00:47:08
you're you're traveling around the world you said so I'm a good example um I had
00:47:13
a career when I was in my 20s um and I got married when I
00:47:21
was I met my husband when I was 27 and I got married when I was just shy of 30 or
00:47:27
I was 30 um and then we had children in our
00:47:32
30s uh so before we had children I was working I was seeing something like 40
00:47:37
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
00:47:44
home exhausted then we had children but it was an agreement that we had that when
00:47:49
we had babies I would take a good long period off and then really go back very
00:47:56
very very minimally and I had the kind of career by choice that I could have
00:48:01
control over and be it could be flexible and I could control it and so I took six
00:48:07
months off with each child and then after six months only went back to work
00:48:13
an hour and a half a day five days a week so just we had an agreement my
00:48:19
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
00:48:27
we did without vacations we did without you know second homes we did without
00:48:32
fancy clothes we did without the other things that many of our peers were
00:48:37
getting and traveling and doing we said what's important to us is that we pair
00:48:42
down not expand now this is we're expanding as parents so we want to pair down materially life is long and you can
00:48:51
have a successful career some of the women that I interview for my book are women who didn't even start their
00:48:58
careers until they were in their 40s after they had children that were older
00:49:03
could it have worked if your husband stayed home instead of you in your view because I'm trying to understand if
00:49:08
you're saying that dads don't need to be as their present as much as the mother
00:49:14
they have to be there in a different way in the early days men don't breastfeed
00:49:20
so that's the first thing unless you can show me a man who has grown breasts and can actually breastfeed maybe it's
00:49:26
coming I don't know but for now um women's bodies connect them to their
00:49:32
babies they connect them through birth they connect them through breastfeeding there is a physical component and a
00:49:39
hormonal component to infancy and motherhood and there really is a difference in the way that mothers
00:49:46
respond to babies and fathers respond to babies now when the fathers become
00:49:52
really important it's not that the father isn't important to give the mother a break or to bond with the baby
00:49:59
or to bathe the baby but what that baby needs is that attachment security to
00:50:05
that primary attachment figure so the mother usually the mother sometimes it's the father but usually the mother
00:50:12
fathers with their playful tactile stimulation they become really important
00:50:18
when children become mobile when children start to crawl and toddle when
00:50:24
they're around 18 months to 2 years old fathers become incredibly exciting and
00:50:31
they're really important so when fathers aren't around in those days um when children are starting to explore the
00:50:37
world those children have a harder time separating from mothers so it's really
00:50:42
important to have what we said the yin and the Yang what we are doing now is we
00:50:47
are um not prioritizing attachment security which is the foundation for
00:50:53
then healthy separation and when healthy separation starts fathers are critical
00:51:00
when you have another child a second child fathers are critical because fathers seduce the older child they say
00:51:07
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
00:51:13
mother with the next baby they help the older children to grow up earlier on you
00:51:18
mentioned a study that I read about when I was studying psychology Once Upon a Time which is the Reus the reesus monkey
00:51:25
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
00:51:33
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
00:51:39
skin skin to skin can you give me an overview of that study and what it showed for people that aren't aware of
00:51:45
it well they took these baby reesus monkeys and they they let some be with
00:51:50
the mothers and the mothers nurtured those babies and those babies became healthily attached and secure and those
00:51:58
were the healthy emotionally Healthy Babies then they gave um another subset
00:52:04
of monkeys um a wire mother covered with a piece of cloth or fur or something and
00:52:13
those babies became very neurotic but at least they were clinging they became like the ambivalent attachment babies
00:52:20
because there was no response from the mother but at least they were holding on to this mother and then they gave and
00:52:26
these Bab babies became very neurotic and then they gave the subset of babies
00:52:31
nothing and those babies literally lost their minds and um I mean there are other
00:52:38
studies which are more recent than that that's quite an old study there there is a researcher named Michael meanie he did
00:52:45
a study on licking and grooming animals who lick and groom their young meaning are nurturing skinto skin lick and groom
00:52:52
uh in human terms that would be holding touching loving skin skin those uh if if
00:52:58
a mother licked and groomed her young that baby would become more
00:53:04
resilient to stress in the future the babies who were not licked and groomed by their mothers become became less
00:53:11
resilient to stress in the future in addition the babies who were more resilient to stress because their
00:53:18
mothers had licked and groomed them passed down generationally the ability to lick and groom the Next
00:53:24
Generation what happened to the baby who weren't licked and groomed guess what happened they didn't pass it down right
00:53:31
and that's what's happening to humans today if we don't lick and groom our
00:53:37
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
00:53:45
resilience to stress and adversity but we also don't pass on the desire to lick and groom you're to have babies your
00:53:52
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
00:53:59
to this now goes yeah but that's all right for you because you know maybe someone who didn't have a partner there
00:54:06
or someone who is in a difficult economic situ extremely
00:54:13
difficult economic situation living in the projects in Harlem or something I
00:54:19
really want to I'm saying this because well it's not the mothers and the projects in Harlem because I'll tell you
00:54:24
the mothers in the projects in Harlem stay home with their babies that's what's interesting very poor people in
00:54:31
America so let me just say I love America America sucks and I'll tell you
00:54:36
why America sucks from my perspective and I say this internationally I go around the world saying America sucks
00:54:42
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
00:54:50
parental maternity leave we do not have paid maternity leave nobody cares about children they
00:54:57
care about the GDP and the bottom line and the people who are out there talking about this stuff are economists saying
00:55:04
women have to work work work for the economy nobody cares about children because if we cared about children our
00:55:11
tax money would be in paid leave not for three months not for six months for at
00:55:19
least a year and hungry they have three years Slovenia Slovakia um Estonia has three years
00:55:25
Hungary I think has 2 years of paid leave Sweden I have some issues with Sweden but Sweden has 14 months Sweden
00:55:33
after 14 months makes women go back to work full full full-time and put them in institutional care and all those babies
00:55:38
are breaking down so 14 months isn't even enough so but if we could even get
00:55:44
to a civilized place of one year of paid leave in this country and then the next two years some
00:55:52
way that parents could be complemented so they could part-time supplemented so
00:55:58
they could work part-time um you know I'm a I'm a reasonable realistic person
00:56:03
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
00:56:09
this country isn't going to go for an entitlement called pay leave because that's the kind of country we are we
00:56:14
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
00:56:21
in of a creative solution which is potentially using things like Social
00:56:29
Security in advance borrowing from your social security so I'm a
00:56:34
mom and I say ah to stay home I can borrow from my social security for a
00:56:41
year and then work a year or two longer in my life wouldn't you say that most
00:56:48
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
00:56:54
ways to creatively deal with it um from my perspective this is what's going on
00:56:59
people on the left will not compromise they'll only do an entitlement called
00:57:05
paid leave but they only are asking for it for 3 to 6 months after that they want women back in the workforce and
00:57:11
institutional dayare so I'm not on the left um people on the right talk a lot
00:57:16
about family they're the party of the family now but they do not want tax dollars to go into PID leave they they
00:57:22
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
00:57:28
give it to women and men is if they put skin in the game M this is the country
00:57:34
we live in again I'm a realist I think in any way that we can give families the
00:57:41
choice to care for their own children particularly in the early years we will create a population of healthier
00:57:49
children how do we know that more paid leave equals better children less strain
00:57:55
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
00:58:02
that if we had three years of paid leave in the United States or in the UK or Australia Canada wherever that the it
00:58:10
would be a net positive for society outside of it just being an opinion well the research shows the
00:58:16
longitudinal attachment research shows that children who are insecurely attached at 12 months of age 20 years
00:58:23
later are insecurely 80% of them are are insecurely attached and suffer from
00:58:29
mental disorders that's what the longitudinal attachment research says so we now have
00:58:36
Decades of basically children were followed from when they were infants and
00:58:42
the ones who were securely attached 20 years later are still securely attached and doing great and the ones who were
00:58:47
insecurely attached most still insecurely attached and it's tied and correlated to all of these mental
00:58:53
illness conditions right so there's a lot of research to show what attachment security does for children in the long
00:59:00
run so you know you're asking a question about I mean I suppose you could take
00:59:07
your paid leave and go play soccer in the park and go play tennis and I don't
00:59:13
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
00:59:19
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
00:59:24
guests that I speak to on this pod C especially those that become incredibly successful um athletes entrepreneurs
00:59:32
whoever they often have some form of neglect in their past Richard Williams
00:59:37
Serena and Venus Williams father he um he was very intense with them from a
00:59:42
very young age and he's raised two of the greatest tennis players in history Joe Jackson was strict and often
00:59:47
controversial with Michael who went on to become the King of Pop El Woods who was Tiger Wood's father was very um
00:59:55
intense in his Co coaching and mentoring style which led him to become great and obviously Beyonce is the other example I
01:00:00
gave who Matthew managed Matthew which is Matthew and Tina who were parents to Beyonce managed Destiny's Child and
01:00:07
Beyonce's solo career meticulously shaping them into a global Superstar so parents think you know I want to raise
01:00:14
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
01:00:21
a professional okay I'm just saying so I can't comment on a lot of those people
01:00:26
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
01:00:33
there is controversy meaning at least one of those parents
01:00:39
and I don't know the history of the others was abusive and so you could say that narcissism is abusive to children
01:00:47
when we project our needs and desires and likes and who we are onto our
01:00:54
children we're not letting them authentically be themselves the greatest gift you can give your child is to see
01:01:01
your child as an authentic individual who is an individual and themselves and
01:01:09
not to see them as a mini me um when you start architecting their life there's a
01:01:16
good chance you're going to lose that child emotionally at some point they're either going to hate you they're they
01:01:22
may be successful in their careers they may have terrible personal lives they
01:01:27
may be narcissistic parents themselves so I don't recommend that school of
01:01:34
thought what I do recommend is if your child shows promise in something that
01:01:39
they also seem to love and have a drive to be good at then you can support that
01:01:46
drive just make sure to keep yourself in check along the way to make sure that
01:01:51
they are driving it not you health is a huge Focus for me in 2025 and I'm not
01:01:58
just talking about eating right and exercising I'm talking about my recovery too I'm halfway through 60 workouts in
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and a yearlong warranty head to bond charge.com diary ADHD yeah okay a I don't feel like
01:03:04
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
01:03:10
have to say it the shocking rise in diagnosis and prescriptions over the
01:03:15
last 10 years between 20 20 208 ADHD
01:03:21
diagnosis is in the UK Rose approximately 20 fold yes among boys
01:03:26
aged 10 to 16 diagnosis increased from 1% roughly to um about 3.5% in 2018 and
01:03:33
in men aged 18 to 29 there was a nearly 50-fold increase in ADHD prescriptions
01:03:39
during the same period and the same applies to the United States where an estimated 15.5 million adults in the US
01:03:44
have been diagnosed with ADHD approximately one in nine us children
01:03:50
have been diagnosed with ADHD at some point with 10.5% having a current diagnosis it I don't know what ADHD was
01:03:58
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
01:04:06
ADHD was one of the factors that drove me to right right being there um because I was seeing this huge uptick and ADHD
01:04:13
diagnosis and children being medicated so so early do you know what the fight ORF flight reaction is that's when the
01:04:22
sympathetic nervous system starts to kick into action and
01:04:27
yes so well it's basically our evolutionary response to uh predatorial threat so if a sablet tooth tiger was
01:04:35
chasing you you either stood and fought fight or
01:04:42
you ran for Your Life Flight so when our children are under
01:04:49
stress they go into fight or flight so one of the first signs that a
01:04:56
child is under stress that they cannot manage is when they become aggressive in
01:05:02
school they hit they bite they throw chairs um they have trouble you know
01:05:09
socially in daycare or preschool or even in
01:05:15
school or they become distracted which is the flight part of fight ORF flight
01:05:22
so what's happening is their nervous systems the stress regulating part of their brain is getting turned on so we
01:05:29
say that the stress regulating part of their brain has to do with a little almond shaped part of the brain called
01:05:35
the amydala it's a very primitive part of the brain very old part of the brain and it regulates stress throughout our
01:05:41
lives it helps us to manage it what we know is that part of the brain is supposed to remain offline for the first
01:05:49
year to three years which is why mothers wear babies on their bodies it's why
01:05:54
babies stay close close to their mothers in the first 3 years to keep the amydala
01:06:00
quiet and only incrementally incrementally expose children to stress
01:06:05
and frustration that they can manage so imagine taking small bites of it so you
01:06:11
can digest it right and your mother's there to help you digest the stress what
01:06:17
we're doing now by separating mothers and babies by putting babies into daycare with
01:06:23
strangers um is by sleep training babies all these weird things that we're doing
01:06:28
to babies is we're turning the amydala on we're making it active precociously
01:06:35
too early what happens when the amydala is activated too early is it becomes
01:06:41
very active and very large very quickly the problem is then it shrivels
01:06:47
up and burns out also because it cannot manage that kind of stress so early when
01:06:54
it ceases to be functional it ceases to be functional for a lifetime and so it's very important to
01:07:02
protect you know what's the expression the Family Jewels it's very these are the family jewels in the brain of a baby
01:07:09
this is the jewel the amydala you want to keep the stress to an absolute
01:07:14
minimum in the first year which is why sleep training is dangerous it's why letting babies cry it out it's why
01:07:21
putting babies into daycare it's why leaving babies for hours on end when they're so so very
01:07:27
fragile um is so bad for their brains because it gets the cortisol flowing
01:07:32
which is the stress hormone but it makes this part of the brain very active so it grows grows grows and
01:07:38
then and ceases to be functional in the future like a PTSD response so what we
01:07:45
know is that these children are in hyper Vigilant states of stress ADHD children
01:07:52
ADHD children hypervigilant states of stress if you stay in a hypervigilant state of
01:07:59
stress long enough you go into a hypo Vigilant state of stress which then
01:08:05
causes depression so what we have now are not
01:08:10
disorders so there was a whole movement to take the d off of ADH D because it's
01:08:17
not a disorder it is a stress response and instead of asking the right
01:08:22
questions which are okay what's causing the stress how do we make sure that our children
01:08:28
are not exposed to this kind of stress because they're going into fight or flight so the nervous system as you said
01:08:34
the brain has an on switch and an off switch the on switch to stress is the
01:08:40
amydala the hippocampus is the off switch and you'd say the stress response
01:08:45
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
01:08:51
you very important that you can activate right and run or fight so the stress
01:08:57
response is supposed to be shortterm it's supposed to be not it's supposed to be acute rather than chronic
01:09:03
so we can kind of manifest it we can uh activate it but then it's supposed to be
01:09:10
turned off by the turnoff switch the hippocampus what we're seeing in children's brains is that the amydala is
01:09:17
growing very precociously large and the hippocampus which is the off switch is
01:09:23
very small so we have problem as we say Houston we have a problem we have an on
01:09:28
switch going full speed gas no brakes and no off switch and that's causing
01:09:35
ADHD behavioral problems that are hugely rising in children in school
01:09:42
a lot of aggression and violence and so that's what's happening this is a stress response and again instead of asking the
01:09:49
right questions like where is this coming from what's causing the stress instead we silence the children
01:09:55
children's pain we tell we tell parents we'll medicate it and we'll just relieve the
01:10:00
symptoms for me that's malpractice the way we treat ADHD is malpractice a child
01:10:07
develops goes into fight ORF flight when they are under stress it could be psychosocial stressors at home in the
01:10:15
family it could be at school it could be with their friends it could be a learning disability there's so many
01:10:21
things that can cause kids stress so instead of medicating them why why don't we figure out what's happening to that
01:10:28
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
01:10:35
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
01:10:41
Inconvenient Truth that that then creates is that the parent is
01:10:46
responsible yes that's the there's the Inconvenient Truth for that child's ADHD yes yes that's the Inconvenient Truth
01:10:54
it's not so simple sometimes it's the family usually it's the family
01:11:00
particularly with small children but when children get to school it could be social as I said you know you can't
01:11:06
control whether your children are exposed to social issues or bullying or
01:11:11
there's many things that can cause stress in children but when they're very little you are their environment so the
01:11:17
Inconvenient Truth is that when your child gets an ADHD diagnosis the first thing you should do is go to a therapist
01:11:24
who will do parent Guidance with you don't rush that child to a psychiatrist
01:11:29
to medicate them you go with your partner or spouse and talk to a parent guidance expert about what could be
01:11:37
causing this child to feel such stress and look at the psychosocial stressors
01:11:43
look at the influences and the Dynamics in this child's life that would be causing them to go into a state of
01:11:49
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
01:11:57
your opinion well again let's start at home at home the stresses might be that
01:12:03
they were handed over to a daycare center at an early age um which turned that
01:12:10
amygdala response on which turned the stress regulating part of their brain on too early now you have that
01:12:16
hypervigilant reaction and they can't turn it off right um it could be a
01:12:21
divorce situation 50% of couples divorce which means that div divorce is an
01:12:27
adversity you know I have a book coming out in a year about how to divorce and mitigate the impact of the divorce on
01:12:32
the child but no matter what a divorce is an adversity on a child and a stress um when parents fight uh dramatically in
01:12:40
the home if there's uh tremendous sibling rivalry issues in the home if there's the birth of another child
01:12:47
that's stressful right if you have a sibling believe it or not that's a very stressful thing if parents are sensitive
01:12:54
about that then it can be mitigated but if parents are insensitive about the birth of a second child and the feelings
01:13:00
that your first child may have that can cause stress moving can cause stress illness or mental illness in a parent
01:13:07
can cause stress alcoholism any kind of addiction can cause stress a grandparent
01:13:12
or uncle or Aunt or even a parent getting sick and dying can cause I mean there are so many things that can cause
01:13:19
stress but the point is that stress can be regulated but it can only only be
01:13:25
regulated if parents are introspective and self-aware and willing to look at
01:13:30
their part in it if parents hand a child over to a psychiatrist and say fix my
01:13:36
child of course psychiatrists will cooperate with you and silence your
01:13:42
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
01:13:49
dyke you're putting your finger in a dam and eventually that dam is going to burst what' you say to some of the
01:13:55
evidence around there being a link to a hereditary component in twin studies
01:14:00
they found that ADHD is about 74 to 80% heritable making one of the most genetically influenced psychiatric
01:14:06
conditions let me tell you a different study that will help you to understand that study which is that we know that there
01:14:14
is no genetic precursor to mental illness there is no genetic precursor to
01:14:19
ADHD there is no genetic precursor to depression and no genetic precursor to
01:14:25
anxiety what you mean by precurser meaning there's no genetic connection you don't get it in your genes if your
01:14:31
father or your mother were depressed you get it by something called the inheritance of acquired characteristics if you're raised by a
01:14:38
depressed parent you're more likely to become depressed it's the nature nurture argument okay but what they did
01:14:45
find now schizophrenia has a genetic connection bipolar disorder those have
01:14:50
genetic but the rest do not anxiety depression ADHD no genetic gentics what
01:14:56
they did find is a genetic tie to something called the sensitivity
01:15:02
Gene it's a short Al on the serotonin receptor and serotonin as we know is
01:15:09
used to regulate happy emotions to regulate emotions right so when you have
01:15:15
a short Al it means that you have a harder time picking up the serotonin but
01:15:20
it also means that you are more sensitive to stress
01:15:26
now those children who are born with this Gene this short Al on the serotonin
01:15:31
receptor gene they are more prone to mental illness later on because of that
01:15:37
sensitivity to stress what the study shows is if those
01:15:43
children who are born with that Gene for sensitivity are provided with
01:15:49
emotionally and physically present attachment Security in the first year
01:15:55
it neutralizes the expression of that Gene so epigenetics means that we're born with genes like you might have a
01:16:02
gene for rheumatoid arthritis or you might have a gene for cancer but it never gets expressed well we all have
01:16:07
genes for something but they don't necessarily get expressed that's what epigenetics is it means the environment
01:16:12
has to turn on the gene to make it let's rock and roll right um what it showed in
01:16:19
this study is that the children who were born with this genetic precursor this
01:16:24
sensitivity ity to stress if they had sensitive empathic nurturing and present parents in the first year it neutralized
01:16:32
the expression of that Gene so those children could be as healthy as children
01:16:38
born without that Gene if however children born with that sensitivity Gene
01:16:44
were neglected you know abandoned not provided with sensitive empathic present
01:16:49
nurturing it exacerbated that Gene so we know that that sensitivity Gene tied and
01:16:55
correlated to mental illness later on unless the sensitive empathic nurturing
01:17:01
mitigates that Gene and what you say to people that point to MRI
01:17:06
scans fmis and yeah there's there's all kinds of um neurological tests now where
01:17:13
we can see the brain in action so it's not a static thing we can actually see
01:17:18
the blood flow to the brain we can see the electrical activity in the brain it's it's amazing actually but some
01:17:25
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
01:17:32
are they say my brain works like this no it's not correct their brain is
01:17:38
sensitive to stress someone with ADHD is more sensitive to stress so you could
01:17:44
ask them questions like this you could say were you more are you a more sensitive person are you more sensitive
01:17:51
to noise to Smells to touch when you were a child did you not like itchy things did you cry more were you more
01:17:58
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
01:18:04
Nursery School um and they're probably going to say yes but if they say no and
01:18:09
they still have an ADHD diagnosis I would guarantee almost guarantee they wouldn't say no because people with ADHD
01:18:16
are people who are sensitive sensitivity is an amazing
01:18:21
strength if it's met with sensitivity if you have a sensitive child so what
01:18:27
does a sensitive child look like if you have multiple children then you know
01:18:32
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
01:18:40
child who cries more is harder to soothe um is more clingy doesn't like you
01:18:47
leaving them is harder has a harder time separating has a harder time going to sleep and being left to sleep on their
01:18:54
own um is sensitive to things like noise and smells and touch and if you grew up
01:19:01
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
01:19:07
neighbor or whatever some environmental factor that caused that stress you are sensitive you developed ADHD you become
01:19:13
an adult you get diagnosed at 30 years old as having ADHD yeah you're offered
01:19:18
medication you take the medication the medication makes you much more functional in your career in your
01:19:23
relationships in your life it's a stimulant and so what stimulants do is they cause they can cause great
01:19:30
anxiety they can cause panic attacks in adolescence uh they can cause growth
01:19:35
issues so uh I have patients who come to me young men who didn't grow because
01:19:42
they were put on stimulants when they were young so um in in in terms of the
01:19:48
consequences of using stimulants the jury is still out but we know that they cause growth issues they cause panic
01:19:54
attacks they cause anxiety disorders they cause depression they're quite life saving
01:19:59
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
01:20:06
you have tried everything to uncover what the stress is that's causing you to
01:20:12
react this way and you still are feeling that way then sometimes medication can
01:20:17
be a lifesaver the problem is that we turn to medication uh in in adolescen and
01:20:23
children and young adult we we turn to it as a performance drug um because there's so much stress
01:20:30
in Modern Life and there's such a need for people to perform and be successful in their careers and in school and get
01:20:37
good grades there's so much pressure on kids so you know I'm 60 and we didn't
01:20:42
have this kind of pressure growing up and so so the generations that follow
01:20:48
have so much pressure that pressure makes children literally go off the
01:20:54
rails we could talk about the academic pressure the competitiveness the
01:21:00
perfectionism um it so ADHD is a bucket it's a bucket which you
01:21:07
throw people in who have anxiety that has never been treated and so and
01:21:13
there's different ways of thinking about treatment too so we are a society that likes superficial quick fixes we like
01:21:19
drugs we like CBT therapy the truth is that this is not not a quick
01:21:25
fix figuring out relationally dynamically what happened to you as a
01:21:31
child what your losses were what your traumas were what caused you to feel so
01:21:38
anxious what's caused you to go into fight ORF flight is hard work it
01:21:43
requires frustration it requires commitment it requires going to someone who can think very deeply with you you
01:21:51
know I I want to Define what anx is because I think it's really
01:21:57
important because we rarely Define depression and anxiety um depression is
01:22:04
preoccupation with past losses anxiety is
01:22:10
preoccupation with future losses that may never occur what do they have in
01:22:16
common it's all about losses all about loss and you could say the generations
01:22:23
now are very preoccupied with loss loss of status
01:22:32
achievement but because we're also very preoccupied with gain well we're preoccupied with I what
01:22:40
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
01:22:46
things in life relationships love connection Health right you would say
01:22:54
objectively family these are the important things in life but we've become very preoccupied with material
01:23:03
success money uh career achievements Fame I
01:23:09
think there was a study that interviewed teenagers um and it was really
01:23:15
discouraging because they said that the thing they wanted more in life than anything was to be famous and so we're
01:23:22
preoccupied with the wrong things on this point of stress in the link with ADHD um looking at some research from
01:23:30
the injury.com research education group um it says that children with an ace
01:23:36
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
01:23:42
more so four experiences of trauma or more have nearly four times which is 400% more chance of having parent
01:23:50
reported ADHD compared to children with no Aces yeah and some of the factors that have big impact is soo
01:23:56
socioeconomic hardship increases your probability of having ADHD by 40% parental Divorce by 35% familial mental
01:24:04
illness or a parent having a mental illness increases it up to almost 60% 55% I believe and neighborhood violence
01:24:11
almost 50% familial incarceration so if a parent goes to prison then that
01:24:16
increases your probability of ADHD by about 40% as well and that's published by the I think it's the New England
01:24:25
yeah what is oh the National Library of Medicine National Center of biological information yeah so remember what I said
01:24:30
that you can't control everything that happens to your child divorces do happen and adversities happen to Children
01:24:36
Health health issues happen to Children what you can control is you can control
01:24:43
the first three years and be as present as possible for your child so if my kid
01:24:48
start screaming in a supermarket m one of the prevailing pieces of advice says
01:24:53
just walk off or start screaming yourself as the parent to show them do am I supposed to just ignore my child
01:25:00
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
01:25:06
speed dial Stephen you be careful because if you make a promise like that I promise I promise I'll be on speed you
01:25:13
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
01:25:18
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
01:25:25
is you don't yell at your children an emotionally regulated parent a healthy
01:25:30
parent produces a healthy child so what is a healthy parent a healthy parent is a parent who feels good about themsel
01:25:36
who has authentically good self-esteem not grandiosity but really feels good
01:25:41
about themselves knows their strengths and limitations and overall as a whole person feels good about themselves um
01:25:49
they have the capacity to regulate their emotions to keep their emotions from going too high and too low remember
01:25:55
sailing in the Caribbean meaning they can stay calm in a storm um is sensitive
01:26:01
and empathic as a nurturer these are signs of Health in a in a parent so if
01:26:07
my kid says I want that pack of sweets and I go you you you can't have the pack
01:26:13
of sweets well first you have to so before you discipline you always want to be empathic first so I always say that
01:26:19
that if you are going to discipline a child first you have to recognize how
01:26:25
they feel I mean recognize recognizing how children feel is important anyway
01:26:30
meaning when you recognize a child's feelings if they're sad you mirror their sadness if they're angry you say I can
01:26:37
see you're angry if they're happy you look happy with them that kind of reflection is the way that your child
01:26:44
knows that you acknowledge them that they're a person to you that they're a
01:26:50
separate person to you it's how they feel valuable so when you acknowledge their feelings that's the first critical
01:26:58
you'd say parenting 101 acknowledge your child's feelings so I would turn to my child and say you want sweets are you
01:27:04
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
01:27:10
really want it but you know you can't have it before dinner you know that's the rule and then they stop screaming
01:27:15
and cry and then they start screaming and you say broken record is a communication style where you say oh I
01:27:21
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
01:27:29
and then setting structure empathizing structure empathizing structure the mistake that parents make is that they
01:27:36
go right into the no word they don't use empathy they don't bring empathy in and
01:27:41
the truth is that even as an adult if somebody just says no without first
01:27:47
recognizing how you feel you feel very unsatisfied right for a child it's
01:27:54
critical it's critical that even when you have to say no and particularly if you have to say no that you first
01:28:00
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
01:28:07
then you first must make your partner feel heard and understood that's right even if you disagree in an argument
01:28:12
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
01:28:19
that I'm a traumatized child I don't know I haven't heard about your traumatized background if so if you have
01:28:25
a trauma I would say we're all so let me say this there's this word trauma is
01:28:30
used a lot can I just talk about it for a moment there's something called Big tea
01:28:35
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
01:28:44
know my mother died of brain cancer or my my father was an alcoholic and beat
01:28:49
me or you know there's there are things that are more concrete that you can like
01:28:55
hold on to things that happened to people yeah I was raped or you know
01:29:00
those are big tea trauma but believe it or not probably
01:29:06
fewer people suffer from Big tea trauma and more people suffer from little tea
01:29:11
trauma and little tea trauma is more nuanced it's um it it requires looking
01:29:20
with a with a finer tooth comb at at the issues it's more relational it's more I
01:29:27
was subtly neglected by my mother my mother wasn't a good listener my mother
01:29:32
loved me but my father loved me but he never understood me uh my parents were
01:29:38
narcissistic and very self-centered um they were never around
01:29:43
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
01:29:50
know what's wrong with me I had two parents who stayed together I had all
01:29:55
the material wealth that I could need I never wanted for Stuff uh you know my
01:30:01
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
01:30:07
traumatic happened to you in your life now let's talk about the nuance and we're not very nuanced
01:30:14
anymore so we don't want to look at what causes most forms of mental illness
01:30:19
depression anxiety uh even ADHD are the relational
01:30:24
nuances of a family and what do you mean by the relational nuances it could be the neglect neglect being ignored having
01:30:33
a mentally ill parent that no one knows about maybe a depressed mother who sleeps in in the morning and doesn't get
01:30:39
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
01:30:46
you're isolated and alone or things that people can't see um but you see and so that's why
01:30:54
people I would say most people go into therapy not for big tea traumas believe
01:31:00
it or not even though the aces study says you know alcoholism drug addiction of course those are big tea traumas most
01:31:07
people come into therapy for little te trauma and and the reason why it's it's
01:31:16
quite difficult for those people is there's not a lot of reinforcement from society that those are also traumas but
01:31:23
in fact they are traumas attachment trauma you know if you were put in daycare and you so I have patients who
01:31:30
come to me and say I can remember being put in daycare and you know you're not supposed to remember things until the
01:31:37
age of four or five but some patients can remember flashes of memory under five and they'll say I was put into
01:31:43
daycare I just all I can remember is screaming my lungs out for my momy
01:31:48
you're not a fan of daycare are you no what's wrong with daycare
01:31:54
daycare raises salivary cortisol levels in children the studies show be meaning
01:32:00
those babies are put into stressful States uh at a very young age when their brains are
01:32:06
developing daycare has been known to increase aggression and anxiety and
01:32:11
behavioral problems in school in the school years and those children are more likely to develop attachment disorders
01:32:19
remember those first three years when children are so very fragile and vulnerable taking them away from your
01:32:27
body as a primary attachment figure and handing them over to strangers and leaving them there for
01:32:33
hours on end will cause your child to have to develop pathological defenses and that's
01:32:40
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
01:32:46
better options of child care if you have to use child care you know how we say breast is best
01:32:53
and it is for a variety of reasons but the best is your primary attachment
01:32:59
figure for the first three years as much as possible primary attachment attachment figure you mean the mother
01:33:05
father well no it can be the father okay it's the go-to person who's a sensitive
01:33:11
empathic nurturer so when that baby's in distress that baby gets their emotional needs met it can be the father it can be
01:33:19
the father but first the father has to learn how to be a sensitive it doesn't come naturally to most men with rare
01:33:25
exception I have known some patients where the husband the father was more
01:33:31
sensitive than the mother it's possible but in general instinctually fathers are
01:33:38
not sensitive and paic nurtures because it's against their evolutionary Instinct their evolutionary
01:33:44
Instinct if you were an animal on the plains of Africa you're uh you're you're a an
01:33:51
Impala you're a daddy Impala your baby is born and it comes out
01:33:56
running cuz they are they're like born and you're all running together you get behind that baby and
01:34:02
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
01:34:10
is to protect it's protective aggression right that's different than the baby
01:34:15
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
01:34:21
you know if and paa could talk um so it's a different Instinct so fathers can
01:34:26
be taught to be primary attachment figures but this is why I say it's so very important that we recognize the
01:34:32
difference between men and women if we just think they're exactly the same and we put a throw a father into the mix
01:34:38
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
01:34:45
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
01:34:53
have to s soothe the baby not encourage resilience not not distract the baby not
01:34:59
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
01:35:06
important if the father's going to stay home that he learns how to be a mother you know sometimes gay couples will come
01:35:12
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
01:35:19
seem Politically Incorrect but someone's got to play that role you cannot have two fathers for a child a child needs a
01:35:25
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
01:35:31
stimulation role same with two women who are raising children it's better to have a father and a mother than two mothers
01:35:38
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
01:35:44
the ground and tickle the baby and encourage exploration and risk taking and can't you both do half each like so
01:35:51
couldn't no no and I'll tell you why it's very confusing to children they
01:35:56
when parents say I'm both mother and father to my child I say no no is very
01:36:02
confusing to children they need to have a mother figure and a father figure and
01:36:07
I say that knowing today's politics and knowing today's social situation you can
01:36:12
have a mother figure who's not a mother maybe it's a nanny maybe it's a
01:36:17
grandmother you need a mother figure and you need that mother figure to be around
01:36:23
a lot if that mother figure is the one who provides the sensitive empathic
01:36:28
nurturing so some of this can be taught but it can't be taught unless you first
01:36:33
acknowledge that there are differences if we cannot as a society acknowledge the Inconvenient Truth that men and
01:36:39
women are different in terms of their nurturing behaviors then we can't teach anybody anything I'm looking at some
01:36:45
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
01:36:53
one in 10 mothers were the sole primary bread winner yeah now it's almost at
01:37:00
half it's on its way to half I know almost half of mothers are the sole or primary bread winner in
01:37:07
2016 so I mean these mothers can't just quit their
01:37:13
jobs so it's it's it's a good question I get
01:37:18
a lot of people coming to me and saying and this is very common
01:37:24
I want to quit my job I want to downscale I want to work
01:37:30
part-time but my husband won't support it because I made a promise that I would
01:37:36
be the primary bread winner and now I want to switch and he won't switch or he
01:37:41
doesn't support me giving up my high-paying job but I feel this transformation of being with my baby and
01:37:48
I don't want to leave my baby the problem with young people is they promise each other they make promises to
01:37:54
each other that they probably should not make do not promise your spouse that nothing will change when you have a baby
01:38:01
say to your spouse let's prepare for everything to change let's believe that anything is
01:38:11
possible and let's prepare let's strategize let's say
01:38:17
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
01:38:23
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
01:38:30
then you say what would that scenario look like what could we do what could we downscale in terms of our material life
01:38:36
and our lifestyle that makes it possible for me to stay
01:38:41
home and I don't think we do that instead women say nothing's going to
01:38:47
change and men say nothing's going to change and then they have babies and they're not prepared for the change
01:38:53
changes that occur changes occur in men too it's not just women I mean fathers
01:38:58
also can have this transformation right um where they also want to work less or
01:39:05
you know sometimes the transformation comes in the form of wanting to work less and being home sometimes it comes
01:39:10
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
01:39:17
stimulate something it stimulates some evolutionary response in men and women
01:39:23
the hardest thing I find is when men and women compete it was much easier in the olden
01:39:30
days now not everything was good in the olden days but you would say the idea that roles were
01:39:36
defined meant that men and women didn't compete over their roles now what I
01:39:43
think is causing a lot of these divorces and what's causing a lot of marital conflict is that men and women compete
01:39:50
over everything they compete over who's going to make more money they compete over who's going to care for the baby um
01:39:58
and so it's like you you're a CE CEO of a company you had your own company so
01:40:04
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
01:40:10
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
01:40:16
of marketing you can have a CFO you can have a COO these are different roles and
01:40:21
they don't compete with one another they work work is a team parenting is a team sport not a competitive Sport and so
01:40:30
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
01:40:35
and we're the same it means that couples are competing with one another and that's causing so much tension because
01:40:42
what's best is when couples compliment each other when their
01:40:48
differences mean that as a team they work well to care for child and I would
01:40:54
say the secret to success in a marriage is save your competition for the tennis court for the basketball court for
01:41:02
running in the park but don't compete over child rearing who's going to take care of the children don't compete over
01:41:09
who makes more money find a way to compliment each other and be a team there's so many mothers listening
01:41:16
now that are very career- driven and you may be causing some existential crisis
01:41:22
you may be affirming a lot of what they believe and think and what they feel intuitively um are you are you saying
01:41:30
then that for those women that are pursuing you know high octane careers in
01:41:35
leadership roles that also want to have children that it's one or the
01:41:40
other no I'm saying that there are certain careers realistically here's the Inconvenient Truth again bunch of
01:41:47
inconvenient truths um there are certain careers that
01:41:53
that are harder to be a good mother period I'm saying that I know
01:41:59
it's a harsh to but there it is there are certain careers that are too demanding to be present for your
01:42:06
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
01:42:12
world and misses your children's birthday and misses your children's soccer games and misses your children's
01:42:17
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
01:42:23
day you think that child is going to have a healthy relationship with that parent another myth here we are I told
01:42:31
you I was going to weave the myths in quality versus quantity time you cannot
01:42:37
be there for your children on your own time you have to be
01:42:43
there on their time meaning quality time is a narcissistic fantasy I can be there
01:42:50
on my time so so my child sits at home and is like a vase on the counter
01:42:57
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
01:43:04
day long and when you come home that's your that's on your time you need to be
01:43:12
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
01:43:19
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
01:43:27
what are the careers that are really good for whoever's going to be the primary attachment figure service Fields
01:43:34
Fields where you have your own business and you can make your own schedule
01:43:40
around your children where your children don't work around you you work around your children Physical Therapy
01:43:48
Psychotherapy speech therapy Consulting Maybe um anything that's entrepreneurial
01:43:55
anything that is a service field CEO podcaster investor entrepreneur no I'm going to disagree with you I'm going to
01:44:01
say you can but you have to be willing to set limits with yourself so you have
01:44:07
to be willing to say do you know Monae the painter yeah he was famous in his
01:44:12
own life now most painters have to be dead to be famous and he painted on a
01:44:20
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
01:44:26
afternoon he'd have dinner with his family you know we We Are The Architects
01:44:31
of our own lives kind of no not kind of I'm representing the opinion of some
01:44:38
people who might be listening I obviously there's so who are the people who can't architect their own lives you
01:44:44
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
01:44:50
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
01:44:58
parent at the time I was I had two ccjs I was broke I shoplifting food to feed
01:45:04
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
01:45:10
assistance and I was working in call centers working night shifts because that was the best job I could get to pay
01:45:15
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
01:45:23
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
01:45:29
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
01:45:35
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
01:45:42
kids yet I'm hoping to okay so um first of all it's a good reason to use birth
01:45:47
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
01:45:54
say that what we should be promoting in this world I'm going to say this it's
01:46:00
controversial is that whoever is the primary attachment figure has a career
01:46:06
that they have control over and flexibility maybe the other person doesn't maybe the other person works for
01:46:11
someone or whatever but in my book I interview a lot of different women from a lot of different socioeconomic
01:46:17
backgrounds and one of the women that I interviewed was a nanny and she said she had three
01:46:24
children and she said that the way that I rais my children because I was a
01:46:30
single mother raising three children I had to work to pay the rent she said but
01:46:36
I made sure that I didn't work past 5:00 I never worked past 5:00 I'd come home
01:46:42
at 5:00 I didn't go out at night people would say let's go I said no my children
01:46:49
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
01:46:56
am with my children and my children knew that I had to work but the way I used my
01:47:01
free time was very carefully um she also said to me and
01:47:08
again a number of there are a number of interviews in there she also said that the people who she left her children
01:47:14
with she never used daycare she had extended family watch her child so her
01:47:21
neighbor who was her dear friend she paid to watch her child and so that
01:47:27
person was auntie and that person was like family and was in that child's life
01:47:33
forever so what I say about child care is there are different levels of
01:47:38
importance so the first the best is your primary attachment figure next best is kinship bonds family or extended family
01:47:46
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
01:47:51
early age so versus going to daycare will they'll be around other kids no no
01:47:56
children don't need other kids until the age of three they do something called parallel play what they need is
01:48:02
oneon-one connection they need attachment security and they need their emotional needs met by one person
01:48:10
oneon-one um after three then the beginning of preschool then they start to actually
01:48:15
interact with one another until then they're not playing together they're just doing parallel play so that's
01:48:21
another myth the myth that Day Care is good for children for socialization no
01:48:26
children don't need socialization before three unless their mother's with them so
01:48:31
what I say is do play dates do play groups but be within eye gaze or ear
01:48:38
earshot of a child meaning there's something called um reprosa which is
01:48:44
emotional refueling so when children start to explore when you've given them emotional security and they feel so
01:48:51
secure that you're going to be there then they start to take chances they start to take risks they start to toddle
01:48:57
off that's where the word Tod toddler came from they toddle away but guess what they do for emotional
01:49:04
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
01:49:13
and then they run off again you are their Touchstone of security and that's
01:49:18
how children become courageous that's how they develop the ability to explore and still feel secure your gut and my
01:49:26
gut is the home of our digestion and it's also a gateway to Better Health but it can be hard to know what's going on
01:49:31
in there Zoe who sponsors this podcast has one of the largest microbiome databases on the planet and one of the
01:49:38
world's most advanced at home gut health tests their blood sugar sensor which I have in this box in front of me goes on
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01:49:48
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01:49:55
blue Zoe cookie which tests your metabolism oh and I can't forget there's also a poo sample which is a critical
01:50:01
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01:50:07
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Steven 10 for 10% off your membership head to zoe.com now as you guys know
01:50:29
whoop is one of my show sponsors it's also a company that I have invested in and it's one that you guys asked me
01:50:34
about a lot the biggest question I get asked is why I use whoop over other wearable technology options and there is
01:50:40
a bunch of reasons but I think it really comes down to the most overlooked yet crucial feature it's non-invasive nature
01:50:47
when everything in life seems to be competing for my attention I turn to whoop because it doesn't have a screen
01:50:52
and will armed the CEO who came on this podcast told me the reason that there's no screen because screens equal
01:50:59
distraction so when I'm in meetings or I'm at the gym my whoop doesn't demand my attention it's there in the
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background constantly pulling data and insights from my body that are ready for when I need them if you've been thinking
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and zero commitment that's join. whoop.com CEO let me know how you get on you keep
01:51:24
mentioning but 3 years old yes why three years old and there's kind of like two
01:51:30
SE segments to this question that I was Keen to understand is there an element of neuroplasticity that makes the age of
01:51:37
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
01:51:44
before 3 years old to a child inadvertently at all reversible okay and is it damage so plasticity
01:51:53
there are certain what we call critical periods of right or social emotional brain development one is 0 to three and
01:51:59
it's the most important because what's happening is something called neurogenesis so it's the growth of cells
01:52:06
and your presence as a parent who provides Safety and Security buffers
01:52:12
your child from stress regulates their emotions is critical to them growing
01:52:19
that right brain because 85% of their right brain is developed by three crazy
01:52:24
right 85% and you being there changes the
01:52:29
architecture of that brain that's how important you are like people come up to me in cocktail parties and they'll say
01:52:35
to me ah I don't have to be there my babies just sleeping and pooping and you
01:52:41
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
01:52:49
have to be here now because now is when the cell GR growth is happening you every time a baby snuggles and takes the
01:52:57
breast and looks at you with their eyes and you sing to them thousands millions
01:53:03
of synapses are firing okay so you have think of a garden by three years of age you're
01:53:10
growing a garden I know because I just started a garden where I have vegetables and flowers and it's abundant it's an
01:53:17
abundant I love my garden this is an abundant Garden of brain isssue okay if
01:53:25
you do it right it grows it overgrows you know the flowers the vegetables it's
01:53:30
growing crazy okay now they go into childhood after 3 years old they go into
01:53:37
childhood and for from 3 years old till about 9 years
01:53:42
old it's still growing but it's not growing at the same pace so say that
01:53:48
it's still like growing a little like like it the garden grows in one big burst and then little bursts so from 3
01:53:55
to 9 it's still growing right but not not to the same degree as the first critical period of brain development now
01:54:02
adolescence comes 9 to 25 and now you have to prune back the
01:54:07
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
01:54:14
grow them to begin with so in these two critical Windows the
01:54:19
environment dictates do the sales grow do they get
01:54:25
pruned and when they're really little you're their environment you're it tag
01:54:30
you're it when they're an adolescence you're a very important part of the environment but not all of their
01:54:36
environment they have friends they have school they have activities right and so
01:54:41
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
01:54:47
them and you want to fortify them right you want to fortify them so when they get adolescence which is really painful
01:54:54
and hard and a struggle that they have the re the inner resources to to cope
01:55:00
with adolescence because it's so hard adolescence right and it offers such adversity social adversity academic
01:55:07
adversity right social media so both of these periods are
01:55:12
important if you miss the first window what 0 to three yes the title of
01:55:19
my second book it's called Chicken Little the sky
01:55:24
isn't falling raising resilient Adolescence in the New Age of Anxiety if that isn't a mouthful do you know what
01:55:30
the title of the book was supposed to be it was supposed to be second
01:55:36
chances oh okay and the title of Being There was supposed to be called The Lost
01:55:42
Instinct so if you messed up your kids you get a second chance second chance
01:55:47
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
01:55:53
have done in the first three years you got to be there you got to be there in a
01:55:58
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
01:56:05
not there when the door swings open everybody knows that teenagers close
01:56:11
their doors if they have doors and that's their way of saying my
01:56:16
defenses are up go away if parents work really hard and
01:56:21
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
01:56:28
closed closed baby closed if you aren't there when the door
01:56:34
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
01:56:42
take a break from they're studying if you are not there then and open for business for communication the door
01:56:48
closes again so it goes back to to this idea that children need you when they need
01:56:57
you not when you're personally available and if you miss that window it's not the
01:57:04
end of the world because you can a word that we use is to repair you can repair
01:57:10
a lot of the damage but to repair the damage you can't go back it's sort of
01:57:16
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
01:57:23
murdered somebody today and the the priest says well you know say 12 hell mares and I don't know I'm not Catholic
01:57:29
but you know but you can't go out and murder again so if you're going to repair it means that whatever happens
01:57:37
between you and your child you're trying to be a better parent you're trying to do things differently right you can't
01:57:44
take advantage of their good graces and keep pushing them away pushing them um
01:57:51
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
01:57:58
years old for example and I had a traumatic upbringing can I repair myself
01:58:03
from the childhood trauma that I experienced between the ages of zero and 10 the way that I would put it is it
01:58:10
takes a relationship to cause the trauma and it takes another relationship to repair
01:58:17
it so the thing that most people don't understand about therapy
01:58:22
and why I really recommend psychodynamic Psychotherapy some people would say
01:58:29
psychoanalytic therapy but a more indepth kind of therapy that lasts
01:58:35
longer is because you develop a relationship it's not that you are
01:58:40
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
01:58:47
everybody would say you're you're a genius and pay me millions of dollars doesn't work like that therapy requires
01:58:54
the consistency of a relationship with the therapist because it's through that
01:59:00
therapist seeing you through the ups and downs of your life reflecting your
01:59:06
feelings it's it's a kind of emotionally reparative experience but it's not what
01:59:11
the therapist says as much as the relationship the long-standing relationship with the therapist so
01:59:17
what's healing is the relationship rather than the interpretations and can that be a
01:59:23
romantic relationship that then course corrects you in some regard okay so the idea is that um to really heal it
01:59:31
requires relationships and those relationships sometimes can be people that you love the problem with people
01:59:38
that you love is that you end up burdening those people with you can burden overburden
01:59:45
the people that you love with your conflicts your internal losses so you
01:59:50
know if you find yourself using the people that you love like therapists if you find that you're using
01:59:57
the people that you love um to to deal with past losses I would say it can it
02:00:04
can corrupt the relationship so you have to be careful so the reason to go to a therapist would be to preserve the
02:00:11
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
02:00:16
your lovers with the burdens of your childhood trauma right so I always say
02:00:21
that therapy becomes like a safe container you go to therapy you talk to your
02:00:27
therapist you develop this trusting relationship where where everything is
02:00:32
is is left there so to speak in that container until you come back but
02:00:38
therapy is not for everyone it requires laying down your defenses it requires the ability to be open and talk about
02:00:45
your feelings there are types of therapies that you can go to if you can't talk about your feelings things
02:00:51
like DBT or CBT but you know for the most part healing therapy requires being
02:00:57
open it requires trusting you must encounter a lot of people that are in denial about their childhood trauma and
02:01:04
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
02:01:11
relationships very well um maybe they've got other forms of emotional eratic behavior and there must be occasions
02:01:18
where you have a suspicion yeah that it's linked to some Al experience and they're in denial thinking about people
02:01:25
that I know that are have presenting symptoms in their life really sort of
02:01:30
like chronic presenting symptoms but if you were to ask them if their childhood played a role they're almost like
02:01:36
defensive of their childhood so defenses are important defenses protect us so and
02:01:44
people also have a misunderstanding of what therapy is about the kind of therapy I'm a psychoanalyst so we don't
02:01:50
people think you go to therapy and they take your defenses away from you I would never take someone's defenses away
02:01:56
unless I could help them to replace them with healthier defenses so what we do is
02:02:01
in exchange like you don't take your foot off a landmine unless you have a really big rock to put in its place
02:02:08
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
02:02:14
better healthier defense to protect you give me an example if you used
02:02:20
anxiety in child childhood if you use the anxiety
02:02:25
to to get attention what if you complained as a child and you went around and said you
02:02:31
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
02:02:40
that complaining that expression of emotion it gets the attention from your parents and suddenly and I do believe
02:02:46
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
02:02:54
many of them are but I also think that many of them need their parents to
02:02:59
understand them so that would be what I call it's a defense but it's an unhealthy defense
02:03:07
because what ends up happening is that the parents stop being able to hear them
02:03:13
because they complain and the anxiety starts to grade on the parents and the parents pull away right um and so what
02:03:21
would be a better defense for that child is to learn how to express what they
02:03:26
need from their parents instead of just saying I feel anxious or I feel depressed but to actually say you know
02:03:33
Mom and Dad you don't really spend any time with me you don't really and when
02:03:38
you're home you're distracted and you're on your computer and your iPads and and
02:03:43
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
02:03:50
that they need so you're never taking something away from someone unless you have something better to give them and
02:03:56
that's a myth of therapy right so people feel that they're going to go into therapy and be left defenseless now
02:04:03
defensiveness which you mentioned is a different thing entirely when someone is
02:04:09
defensive it means that it's um an unhealthy defense it means that you hit
02:04:16
something so when you say to your friend do you have any childhood trauma and they say absolutely not what are you
02:04:23
that defensiveness as opposed to someone who says you know I I can't think of any
02:04:29
I maybe maybe what you know so the ability to introspect about the good and
02:04:35
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
02:04:41
of their childhood or a friend who can't talk about the happiness who can't integrate
02:04:47
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
02:04:53
then you really know something happened there you hit a sensitive spot are daddy
02:04:59
issues real because the term is thrown around in culture like oh she has daddy issues it's typically she has daddy
02:05:05
issues isn't it right so there's something called edible development which is sexual development it's really
02:05:11
relational development but it's sexual development which is that all little boys fall in love romantically with
02:05:18
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
02:05:24
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
02:05:31
period of about oh 3 to six 3 to six years old and
02:05:38
I always prepare parents for this fathers need to reinforce themselves and
02:05:43
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
02:05:52
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
02:05:58
that's okay same with little girls if their mothers overreact become angry at
02:06:05
them reject them say oh you just love your daddy and so but if daddies are not
02:06:11
present enough for little girls it does inform so our first romantic
02:06:18
relationships are with our opposite sex parent so as a little boy your first romantic relationships with your mother
02:06:25
as a little girl your first romantic relationships with your father if your opposite sex parent is not present at
02:06:31
all there's a loss there so you know sometimes what can
02:06:38
happen is if you don't have a present father or if your father is really just
02:06:43
absent or if he's physically present but emotionally absent you spend your life
02:06:48
looking for that kind of edible connection that kind of admiration that kind of love that kind of um you know
02:06:57
for someone to love you in the way that a father loves a little girl but with distrust built
02:07:02
in well not necessarily I mean sometimes it's too much trust I mean if you are
02:07:09
hungry and somebody offers you scraps you'll take the scraps right if you're
02:07:15
hungry and somebody says here's some crumbs of a muffin so the problem is
02:07:20
that but what if they offered me the scraps and sometimes the scraps as I went to reach for them
02:07:26
walked out and didn't come back then I might develop a relationship that it's not safe to trust the scraps because so
02:07:34
that's a father who's negligent but it still leaves that little it still can leave that little girl with a strong
02:07:41
desire to be loved in that way so it's like a missing there's a missing piece
02:07:48
right so you'd say the Romantic relationship with the opposite sex parent is a very important part of our
02:07:55
sexual development and our relational development and so it becomes a missing piece for that child who then grows into
02:08:02
that adult um if a father was abusive to a little girl then you know
02:08:09
that little girl may do what we call a neurotic repetition which is she seeks out abusive men because that's the only
02:08:15
kind of love that she knew or understood so you know you have to remember that
02:08:21
that children perceive of the relationship with your with their parent as loving no
02:08:26
matter what the parent does to them I used to work when I was a young social worker in foster care and the children
02:08:33
who were physically abused by their parents and neglected terribly still
02:08:39
wanted to be with their mothers and fathers they didn't want to be taken away because that's that was their
02:08:45
mother and father and they perceived of that as love so however we're raised we
02:08:50
perceive of that that is love the problem is if it's not healthy love then we can neurotically repeat or repeat
02:08:56
that in our adult lives men young boys and men I was looking at some stats
02:09:02
earlier on that said there's been increased sexual inactivity amongst young men which is an interesting stat
02:09:09
it's risen to almost 31% of men between the ages of 18 and 24 reporting no sexual activity in the past year so
02:09:16
that's almost doubled in a in about the space of 18 years here's a interesting St
02:09:22
High suicide rates amongst men men account for nearly 80% of all suicides in the US the highest rate observed
02:09:27
among 45 to 6 four yearolds globally suicide is the leading cause of death amongst young men and a survey conducted
02:09:34
in the UK found that an increasing amount of men feel hopeless and
02:09:40
worthless and that are struggling with finding meaning and purpose in the world the plight of young men you talk
02:09:47
in your books and in your work about yeah how the role of a man has changed and how that this might not be
02:09:54
necessarily productive for the health and well-being of a man yeah we've taken away their purpose when you take a human
02:10:00
being's purpose away remember the purpose for men was to protect their family was to it was to
02:10:09
hunt in the old days feed their families but it was also to protect their
02:10:14
families it was to provide for their families and what we've done in
02:10:20
reversing everything thing is although we raised up women and there are certainly positive things about raising
02:10:27
up women but when we raised up women we denigrated men and I have two sons so
02:10:33
this is very personal for me um and I also see a lot of young men in my
02:10:39
practice um young adult men and what I'll say is that they feel discouraged
02:10:45
they feel purposeless they feel diminished um yeah and there has been
02:10:53
something vengeful I think about so the feminist movement was
02:10:59
meant to give women choice and to balance off what was imbalanced in society but there's something vengeful
02:11:06
about it I think at moments I feel like there's something vengeful about the modern feminist movement which is let's
02:11:14
get them let's diminish them let's take over let's push them out let's you know
02:11:19
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
02:11:26
feminist movement was meant to create balance it wasn't meant to it it wasn't
02:11:32
meant to set into play this other kind of imbalance and you know more than I
02:11:38
think 60% of universities are women now as well as graduate schools and so that
02:11:43
means and the study show that men will marry at their educational level or
02:11:49
below women will only marry at their educational level or above and by diminishing men so much in
02:12:00
terms of our education and professions we basically taken men's purpose away
02:12:06
they feel purposeless and the other thing is and I'm going to say when men stay home to nurture their
02:12:13
children now remember as mammals we have defined roles that is not instinctual for men to stay home and nurture their
02:12:20
young it's just it's a reverse of something and the issue there is that
02:12:26
there's an inverse relationship between oxytocin and
02:12:32
testosterone the higher the oxytocin guess what the L the testosterone
02:12:39
yes so if we're staying at home bonding there Reas for that so
02:12:45
mammals when they are nurturing their young they don't want somebody mating
02:12:50
with them go away right so the idea is that when a female nurtures she doesn't
02:12:57
want to have sex she doesn't want to right so the investment in nurturing
02:13:03
pushes away the investment in mating and this is why I've read so many stats around men's testosterone dropping when
02:13:10
they become fathers um some yeah I I
02:13:15
couldn't believe that was true when I read it it's true there was some studies to talk about how women's testosterone
02:13:22
goes up women have testosterone when they're out in the Work World fighting like men that their testosterone goes up
02:13:29
and men's testosterone when they stay home goes down now what that's doing for sex lives um there's some research about
02:13:35
you know it that is the next wave which is what does it do to sex lives because
02:13:42
men have to perform they have to get it up to be crude tell me about it um and
02:13:47
so if your testosterone is low you're not going to get it up right which is why there's all this
02:13:53
Viagra and these patches and supplements and you know because it's not it's not
02:13:59
instinctually normal for husbands to stay home and nurture their children and that's the Inconvenient Truth how that
02:14:07
affects men's and women's sex life when women come home from their banking jobs and their law jobs um did their
02:14:15
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
02:14:22
next wave of we've revers things societally so
02:14:27
fast and then we hope that our evolutionary bodily responses are just
02:14:33
going to catch up in in merely a a century and it just doesn't Evolution
02:14:39
doesn't work like that it takes hundreds if not thousands of years to change our
02:14:44
our bodily evolutionary responses right our instinctual responses so this is you
02:14:50
know it's it's problematic um and also when men's testosterone goes down they
02:14:55
get depressed so they don't perform sexually well they get depressed they
02:15:00
feel purposeless um they can't do what they're instinctually supposed to do
02:15:06
which is provide protect hunt you know we talk about Dei I mean why aren't we
02:15:13
talking about Dei when it when it when it comes to men and women why aren't we
02:15:18
talking about balancing the scales giving purpose again um and and honestly
02:15:24
we should be talking about what happens to men when they actually do stay home and nurture their young is this stats to
02:15:29
support the idea that if you're at home raising your kids as a man you have you struggle in the
02:15:35
bedroom so there was some research I know that was going on about that how it affects sex drive but when your
02:15:41
testosterone goes down it does affect sex drive we're just not talking about it so I have anecdotal patients I have a
02:15:50
patient who who whose wife was a hardcore woman in finance and you know he he couldn't he
02:15:59
lost interest in her he had to go out of the marriage and have affairs with women
02:16:05
who were more feminine who were more so he could feel as if he could play that
02:16:11
masculine role he couldn't do that in his marriage and so are we going to
02:16:17
see kind of a shift in society as a result result of this we're already seeing it I mean the other thing that
02:16:23
we're doing is to young boys let's talk about what we're doing to young boys this starts very young we basically
02:16:31
educate young boys in a way that really favors girls you know from a very young
02:16:38
age we talk about being able to sit quietly and regulate your emotions and not be aggressive and not be impulsive
02:16:45
and these little boys are being diagnosed with ADHD many of them just for being little boys little boys need
02:16:51
to run around they have a lot of physical energy they have tons of testosterone when you're like between
02:16:56
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
02:17:03
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
02:17:10
say they have a problem we say that they have ADHD and they have behavioral problems and in many of them the stress
02:17:17
that I talked about is the stress of making little boys be more like little
02:17:22
girls and that's where it starts and so then they go into childhood and again the educational
02:17:29
system favors the way girls learn not the way boys learn how to boys learn
02:17:34
boys have attention spans for very short periods of time and then they need lots
02:17:41
of physical activity so ideally if you go to and look at the boy schools what do they do they run the boys like
02:17:48
running the dogs in the park they sit for 45 minutes or half an hour
02:17:53
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
02:17:59
mean they have like four ree peries a day and so that's really better for boys
02:18:05
and little girls have more of a capacity to sit quietly in circle time and and
02:18:10
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
02:18:16
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
02:18:22
trying to force left brain development on them too early but we are forcing
02:18:28
little boys into this box and they're not doing well in that box and then
02:18:33
they're labeled they're labeled as having behavioral problems ADHD and that label them follows them through
02:18:41
childhood sometimes into Middle School into into high school yeah what would
02:18:47
you change I make you prime minister of the world president of the world and you can fix this issue oh I would have
02:18:54
little boys educated separately than little girls in the early years in the early years I would have boy schools and
02:19:00
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
02:19:09
education little girls will try things will take risks with things that they
02:19:14
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
02:19:21
try art and painting and music little girls are more likely to try stem and math and you know all these things that
02:19:27
we talk about little girls should do so the the idea is that um single gender
02:19:33
education in the early years is is better for little kids because they learn differently what about as it
02:19:39
relates to men what would you change to fix the issues you were talking about with testosterone and those kinds of
02:19:47
issues talk about it we should be talking about it we don't talk about this issue how much how many times have
02:19:53
you heard what I just said people don't talk about the fact that when you raise
02:19:58
when if we're going to flip this around and have men be the nurturers they're going to have pretty low
02:20:04
testosterone you're going to have to supplement their testosterone and so you know and also
02:20:11
you take their purpose away evolutionarily and they get depressed women have many sources of self-esteem
02:20:20
they have work they have children they're relational and for the most part
02:20:27
historically men found their self-esteem from meaningful and purposeful work and also from protecting their families so
02:20:34
what we've done is we've taken their purposeful work outside the home away we've made their purposeful work staying
02:20:40
home with children and you know we've lowered the testosterone so if you look
02:20:46
at it and say we're trying to switch it's like a social experiment we're trying trying to change something that's
02:20:52
taken thousands of years of evolution to create in just you know less than 100
02:20:59
years and it's you know it's problematic so what would I do I would
02:21:04
talk about it I would have couples talk about it I think they need to talk about the competitiveness I think they need to
02:21:11
talk about the the envy and the jealousy and and even the the disappointment I
02:21:18
mean a woman who comes home and sees her husband caring for the children on the one hand she might say oh my husband's
02:21:24
so sweet and lovely and I love that he cares for my children and on the other hand she says to her friends I wish he
02:21:29
was bringing in more money and I wish he was taking care you know I wish he was taking care of me so it's problematic
02:21:36
there was a longitudinal study done in the Philippines that followed 624 men over almost 5 years and found that those
02:21:42
who became fathers experienced a significant decline in testosterone levels specifically newly partnered
02:21:47
fathers had a medium decrease of almost 30% in morning testosterone and 35% in
02:21:53
evening testosterone which were significantly greater than the declines observed in single nonfathers moreover
02:21:59
fathers who reported spending three or more hours daily in child care had lower
02:22:04
testosterone levels compared to those less involved in caregiving and there's also an impact on co-sleeping where
02:22:10
Research indicates that fathers who co-sleep with their children exhibit lower testosterone levels than those who do not this suggests that close
02:22:17
proximity during sleep May further influence hormonal changes of associated with parental caregiving one of the
02:22:22
arguments I've heard before as to why men's testosterone dips if they're new
02:22:28
fathers is because it's an evolutionary reason to make us not go out and cheat on our partner and take care of our kids
02:22:33
well it's investment in it so either you're invested in mating or you're invested in caring for your children yes
02:22:41
and no because you still need to have testosterone to have a relationship with your wife a satisfying relationship so
02:22:49
and un unfortunately that doesn't stop men from going out and cheating on their wives because a healthy man would say
02:22:56
you know well we used to have sex twice a day every day and now that we have a baby we only have sex once or twice a
02:23:03
week because the baby's so small and and a healthy man would say that's enough I can compartmentalize I can right a less
02:23:11
healthy man might say I'm going to go out and get it someplace else because I can't get it here so yeah I mean there's
02:23:19
Nuance to all the question you're asking but what I would say is that testosterone going down a little bit
02:23:25
when you have a baby in the bed is fine but the kind of testosterone we're talking about going down when you stay
02:23:30
home and nurture um we'll see it could be problematic my
02:23:37
last question is about devices and Technology yeah there's been a lot of books written recently and a lot of conversation around the impact that
02:23:42
screen social media mobile phones have on children what is your thoughts and
02:23:47
philosophy towards raising healthy kids in a world of techn ology well I think it's the American
02:23:53
Pediatric Association says no technology under the age of two for good reason no iPhones no iPads right um you
02:24:04
want to sit and watch a Mr Rogers when your baby is two together a rerun of Mr
02:24:11
Rogers Neighborhood that's fine but no technology after that you want to really
02:24:16
regulate that technology now why is that important because Tech techology raises dopamine levels in your
02:24:24
brain which is why adults get addicted to it too it's very addictive um and the
02:24:29
problem is that with adults when you when you look at technology it does raise your dopamine
02:24:37
but um there there was some research to show that technology raises the dopamine
02:24:42
in an adolescence brain tenfold to that of of so in other words it would be like
02:24:48
if you smoked a joint it would you know make you high if an adolescent smoke the same joint it would
02:24:55
make them 10 times higher it has to do with the um the the sensitivity of the
02:25:01
brain to dopamine and the lack of Regulation so um the prefrontal cortex
02:25:07
is the part of the brain that regulates emotions and it's not fully developed till about 25 so all that dopamine that
02:25:15
has to be regulated is more easily regulated in an adult than an adolescent so it's not not good because it leads to
02:25:21
addiction okay it's not good because uh particularly social media but all kinds
02:25:27
of Technology they they get the amydala going remember that that little almond shaped stress regulating part of the
02:25:33
brain it turns on the stress reaction um which you don't want to do
02:25:39
chronically there's lots of problems with that um and in the case of social media with adolescence particularly
02:25:46
adolescent girls it takes advantage I mean you have to say that this was
02:25:51
invented to take advantage it's not a coincidence uh it's manipulatively
02:25:57
created um because the reason that it's so bad for teenage girls brains is
02:26:04
because the self-consciousness the perfectionism is all the brain in a
02:26:11
hyper Alert state of stress and fear you're putting those girls and boys into
02:26:19
a hyper an state of fear and stress right I have to be perfect I don't look
02:26:25
as good as them uh my my dress isn't as pretty so so you're putting children into a fear State and then they they
02:26:33
can't separate from the device it's like they get there was a movie I think it
02:26:38
was called Inception where you could get stuck in a paradigm you could get stuck
02:26:45
in this fantasy right in in a virtual reality in a way they get get trapped in
02:26:52
this uh Paradigm of perfectionism social isolation
02:26:57
self-consciousness which is all the brain in a hypervigilant state of stress
02:27:03
anx so not good at all not good for adults much worse for adolescent brains
02:27:10
what is the most important thing we should have talked about today that we didn't talk about so far H I think we talked about a lot but
02:27:18
um I think you know what I would say is that
02:27:24
um presence is just so critical to children and there's no replacement this
02:27:30
idea that we have as a society that caregiving of children is
02:27:36
something that can be generically assigned to others that you can delegate
02:27:42
delegate other things to others delegate your accounting delegate your laundry delegate your cooking if you're a CEO
02:27:49
delegate everything you can but spend time with your children your relationship with them
02:27:57
their mental health depends upon it and that's not something we say we say work
02:28:05
work work work make more money everybody work work work work and and your children will be just fine well clearly
02:28:10
our children are not just fine what do I do as an employer I employ lots of people and I'm thinking do I need
02:28:17
to give people three years off when they have a kid is that the well in my opinion give them as much
02:28:24
time off as you possibly can men and women men and women whoever is the primary attachment figure I would say
02:28:31
whoever is going to really be responsible for caring for that child um
02:28:36
but then give them options give them choices of how to work in the years that
02:28:42
their children are very young give them options to work part-time or to share a
02:28:48
job or to work from home half of the week so they don't have to leave their child and still they can work um give
02:28:56
them choices and options that allow them for some flexibility and control um if
02:29:02
you know that a an employee has young children accept the fact that you know
02:29:07
they may need to leave early and not stay as late as as other people who don't have children and that's going to
02:29:13
make the people who don't have children angry and you know what tough because
02:29:18
that's what those children need life isn't fair it's not always fair and if
02:29:23
you want to have a child you too could have that but the idea of exact parody tough
02:29:31
because that's what Society needs it needs healthy children if you're going to have a child and you need to leave
02:29:37
every day at 4 so you're home for your children so flexibility control options
02:29:44
as much time off in the beginning as possible you realize that some of the things you say are controversal
02:29:50
or not almost all of them yeah why' you say them anyway because somebody has
02:29:57
to because they're the inconvenient truths that are stopping us from having healthy children who grow into unhealthy
02:30:06
adults and so somebody has to say these things and if you're too worried about
02:30:12
people liking you then you don't sometimes say what needs to be said and fortunately I don't care if
02:30:19
people like me but I do care that people like their children and want to be with their
02:30:24
children so that's why I say these things why is it so personal to you I can see it in your
02:30:30
face well then you'd have to ask me about my own personal story my personal story just to wrap it up quickly is that
02:30:38
my own mother was a very loving mother but could dissociate and by dissociate
02:30:44
she had a lot of trauma as a child and I think she managed it by emotionally she
02:30:51
was like a little girl she's very sweet but she was like a little girl and so I couldn't always feel her I couldn't she
02:30:59
was like sand that slipped through my finger so I can remember the pain but she was she was there physically but I
02:31:06
could remember the pain of the absence of her mind and uh she could feel for me which
02:31:12
is why I have such compassion but she couldn't think about me so there's two things parents have to
02:31:18
be able to do for children children they have to be able to feel for them they have to feel empathy for their pain for
02:31:25
their distress they cannot look away from their children's pain and distress you cannot look away you do not have the
02:31:31
luxury of looking away from your children's distress but you also have to be able to think about them and be able
02:31:39
to think about who they are my mother could feel for me but she couldn't think
02:31:44
about me cuz she would dissociate so my own personal pain is having had a loving
02:31:49
mother who had some limitations and so it made me want to be
02:31:54
a better mother but it also made me want to treat people who want to be better mothers and fathers what were the
02:32:02
symptoms that that had on you as a young woman growing up as an adolescent I
02:32:08
struggled socially and I struggled uh with my identity and personally and you
02:32:14
know self-esteem I would say and uh it wasn't until I went into therapy um oh I
02:32:20
tried a lot of things in my 20s I worked in television production I worked in uh
02:32:26
uh I worked on Capital Hill I worked I worked in many different public relations and in the end I found myself
02:32:34
sitting in my therapist office one day and looking around and saying this is
02:32:40
where I want to be I want to be I want to do what she does and I want to help
02:32:46
people the way she's helped me so that relationship ship with my first therapist and then my second therapist
02:32:53
and you know as psychoanalysts we have to be in treatment for many many many
02:32:58
years because the point is we have to work on ourselves so deeply that we
02:33:05
don't do harm to patients inadvertently with our own issues so we have to be
02:33:10
very as we say very organized as a person um but yeah so that's my personal
02:33:15
story and why mothering is so important to me and the vulner ility of babies is
02:33:21
so important to me Erica we have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves
02:33:26
a question for the next guest not knowing who they are leaving it for and the question that has been left for you
02:33:33
okay is what does your obituary
02:33:39
say oh my gosh I'm going to know who left that you're going to tell me
02:33:45
after oh boy what does my obituary say
02:33:52
um kind
02:33:57
generous um compassionate fervent in her beliefs
02:34:04
stubborn as hell a good friend a good mother a wonderful
02:34:13
wife yeah I think it will
02:34:20
I certainly think it will and I think there' also be an additional couple of sentences there
02:34:26
that speak to the value that you've given to the world through the work that you do now people might not agree with everything you say because people have
02:34:33
lots of different opinions on these subjects but I'm of the opinion that
02:34:38
people who are willing to deliver their thoughts their truth based on the science that they've experienced and
02:34:44
that they've read and what they've studied and the experiences that they've had the clients that they've seen it's so unbelievably important because I
02:34:51
think if we look back through history progress has occurred when people have dissented from the accepted narrative in
02:34:57
fact I probably wouldn't be able to sit here in America as a black man if it wasn't for people who had the courage of
02:35:03
their convictions to descent from certain narratives and so I've always I think have had it hard worded to me that
02:35:10
disagreement is productive especially when it's well-meaning and that's
02:35:15
exactly how I see your work I think that you're challenging a narrative um bringing evidence and a new opinion
02:35:22
to the table a different perspective that I think is very very important for so many and it's been so interesting for
02:35:27
me because I've struggled you know I'm approaching That season of life where I become a father and I'm reading all this
02:35:33
stuff about leave your kid to cry on the floor in the supermarket or um put them in timeout or um oh I am so giving you
02:35:41
my number yeah I know but I so I've been trying to Wade through this storm of like parenting advice and and
02:35:47
stuff and it's it's really wonderful to hear hear your perspective because it is a counter perspective it's the
02:35:52
perspective that nobody really wants to say out loud um and therefore for me it's useful thank you Erica thank you so
02:35:59
much for your time and generosity today I really really appreciate it and please um continue to do the work you do and I'm very excited for your upcoming book
02:36:05
I think it's next year isn't it it is about divorces um if anyone wants to find more of your work we've got these
02:36:11
two exceptional books here being there why prioritizing motherhood is the F in the first three years matters which is a
02:36:17
wonderful book that was published in 2017 I believe and then this one here Chicken Little the sky isn't falling raising resilient Adolescence in the New
02:36:23
Age of Anxiety which was published in 21 I believe um I'll link both of these below I highly recommend you read these
02:36:30
books if you're interested in these subjects like I am um but where else can people find you
02:36:37
www.car k m i.com and also at attachment circles the
02:36:43
website should be up and running soon uh if you're looking for community and
02:36:48
education um come to attachment circles great I'll link both of those below wherever you're
02:36:53
listening to this now Erica thank you thank you for having me some of the most successful fascinating and insightful
02:36:59
people in the world have sat across from me at this table and at the end of every conversation I asked them to leave a
02:37:04
question behind in the famous Diary of a CEO and it's a question designed to spark the kind of conversations that
02:37:10
matter most the kind of conversations that can change your life we then take those questions and we put them on these
02:37:16
cards on every single card you can see the person who left the question the
02:37:23
question they asked and on the other side if you scan that barcode you can see who answered it next something I
02:37:28
know a lot of you have wanted to know and the only way to find out is by getting yourself some conversation cards
02:37:34
which you can play at home with friends and family at work with colleagues and also with total strangers on holiday
02:37:39
I'll put a link to the conversation cards in the description below and you can get yours at the diary.com this has
02:37:45
always blown my mind a little bit 53% of you that listen to this show regularly haven't yet subscribed to the show so
02:37:52
could I ask you for a favor if you like the show and you like what we do here and you want to support us the free simple way that you can do just that is
02:37:57
by hitting the Subscribe button and my commitment to you is if you do that then I'll do everything in my power me and my
02:38:03
team to make sure that this show is better for you every single week we'll listen to your feedback we'll find the
02:38:08
guest that you want me to speak to and we'll continue to do what we do thank you so much
02:38:14
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02:38:20
oh [Music]
