Dr. Warren Farrell is the author of books published in 17 languages. They include two award-winning international bestsellers: Why Men Are the Way They Are, and The Myth of Male Power. Warren has been chosen by the Financial Times as one of the world s top 100 thought leaders. He is currently the chair of the commission to create a White House Council on Boys and Men. He s the only man in the U.S. to have been elected three times to the National Organization for Women in New York City. Dr. Farrell has appeared repeatedly on Oprah, Today, and Good Morning America, and has been the subject of features in Forbes, the Wall Street Journal, People, Parade, and the New York Times. His co-author of his newest book, The Boy Crisis, is Dr. John Gray, author of Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus. We re going to talk not only about his new book, but about his career and why he s dedicated his life to fighting for women s equality and the rights of women in the workplace. And why he thinks women should share the breadwinning burden that men traditionally assume. You can support these podcasts by donating to Dr. Peterson s PODCAST by clicking the link to which can be found in the description of his book, "The Boy Crisis." You can also become a supporter of the podcast by clicking this link. You re gonna get a discount on the book, too! Thank you so much for listening, Dr. Jordan B. Peterson, and I m so grateful for all the support you all have shown me over the past few years. I m looking forward to hearing back from you all. I can t wait to hear back from all of the support I've done it. I hope you all can do it, I really appreciate it. Thank you all of you, I can't wait to do it. -JORDY P. Farrell, I m going to do that, I do it in the next week, I will do it more than that, - Thank you, thank you, Thank you really, I say it, thank me, I am not doing it, really I really do - JORDY PRODUCING YOU, I DO NOT DO IT, I LOVE YOU, THANK ME, MAKING ME THAN I DO THAN THAT, THANK YOU, PRODUATION, AND I AM THOUGHT AND I DO THAT, I AM PRAISE YOU, MALLY CHEER AND I M NOT QOTDS AND I LOVE THEM, AND GOT THEM, VOTED TO ME, AND THEY DO THAT AND I ME THEAED ME, ME DO THEM, ME LOVE ME, THIEVEMENTS, AND THIEED THEM, GOT ME OUTS OUTS AND VOTING IN ME AND THOTED THEM AND S NOT S NOT ME AND A CHEOTES AND A QOTED IN ME, S AND A THOT OUTS ARE QOTION AND APPEARION AND G AND A PEDCAST AND A FOTOGROGRAPHY AND A SALLY AND A BUTTER AND A VOTER AND A PLOT AND A BEDCAST, AND ALL OF THOT HE QOTING THEM AND A NECK AND A SO MUCH MORE ...
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00:00:51.040Welcome to the Jordan B. Peterson podcast.
00:00:59.780You can support these podcasts by donating to Dr. Peterson's Patreon, the link to which can be found in the description.
00:01:06.840Dr. Peterson's self-development programs, self-authoring, can be found at selfauthoring.com.
00:01:12.020Dr. Warren Farrell is the author of books published in 17 languages.
00:01:32.580They include two award-winning international bestsellers,
00:01:36.100Why Men Are the Way They Are, plus The Myth of Male Power.
00:01:40.480Warren has been chosen by the Financial Times as one of the world's top 100 thought leaders.
00:01:47.980He is currently the chair of the commission to create a White House council on boys and men.
00:01:53.180He's the only man in the U.S. to have been elected three times to the board of the National Organization for Women, now, in New York City.
00:02:01.200Dr. Farrell has appeared repeatedly on Oprah, Today, and Good Morning America,
00:02:06.380and has been the subject of features on 2020 in Forbes, the Wall Street Journal, People, Parade, and the New York Times.
00:02:14.540His co-author of his newest book is Dr. John Gray, the author of Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus.
00:03:15.120I think this is the beginning of the change of gender roles from both men and from women.
00:03:20.300And so I talked with them about that, eventually convinced them that I could change my dissertation.
00:03:25.880And that led me to being seen by now as someone who was a man who was receptive at a time that the feminist movement was getting a lot of accusations of being man haters.
00:03:36.900And so I think I served the purpose of here's a man, a real-life flesh man who advocates what we're advocating here.
00:03:47.140It's going to be harder to call you a man hater.
00:03:48.820And so I started doing that and then ended up speaking all around the world on women's issues and the value of women being secure enough and competent enough to be able to share the breadwinning burdens that men handle.
00:04:03.340And that was my focus until the mid-70s.
00:04:08.300And in the mid-70s, I began to see that the feminist movement had made a great deal of progress and everyone was sort of getting on board who was at least in the sort of middle class above and educated.
00:04:22.780And so that was, but it was also a huge number of divorces occurring.
00:04:29.260And so I began to say, it's important for the children to have both parents after divorce.
00:04:34.820And Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem and a woman named Karen DeCrow agreed with me.
00:04:39.840But now the board of, I was on the board of now at that time.
00:04:43.480I had gotten elected as a result of my advocacy to the board of now.
00:04:48.080And my fellow and, you know, female co-workers on the board of now said, we're in a dilemma here.
00:04:56.600And the dilemma is that the women are writing us saying they're going to withdraw from now if they don't have the option to determine what happens with the children after divorce.
00:05:06.780And we don't want to lose now membership because it's not only important for family purposes, but for all the other agendas we have.
00:05:14.540And so I said, well, the important thing is not women's rights or men's rights.
00:05:20.140The important thing is knowing what's best for the children.
00:05:22.700And they said, yes, Warren, great theory, but we really need to focus on empowering women on a broad spectrum.
00:05:29.500And so they ended up all voting in terms of giving women the option to be fully involved with the children or not,
00:05:37.040depending on under the guise that women know the best, know the children the best, and therefore they know what's best for the children.
00:05:43.220And so now and I began to have a significant amount of tension over that point.
00:05:48.520And Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem didn't weigh in.
00:06:03.260And also I started forming hundreds of men's groups, one of which I think you know was joined by John Lennon.
00:06:10.200And that had a big impact on both the people in the groups.
00:06:15.240And I began to see what men's pain was.
00:06:18.220And so I began to articulate men's pain as well as women's pain in my presentations.
00:06:24.940And when I was only articulating women's pain and women's challenges, I would almost always get standing ovations and maybe an average of three invitations for a new speaking engagement.
00:06:38.020And that was helping me live financially very well.
00:06:40.380But then when I started to integrate the perspectives and feelings of men from the men's groups, there was a lot of, I didn't see those standing ovations.
00:06:51.720The various invitations for new speaking engagements went from three to two to one and then eventually to zero.
00:06:57.420Well, it seems self-evident in some sense that if you're articulating truthfully and carefully what would be good for either sex, in some sense you have to be articulating what would be good for both.
00:07:10.760And unless you view reality as a battleground between the sexes and as a zero-sum game, we can't have an intelligent conversation about what's good for women or what's good for men.
00:07:23.940We have to have a conversation about what's good for men and men and women and women and women and men and women.
00:07:30.760And so, why do you think, what was your sense of why it was when you started to raise these other issues that you were immediately unpopular?
00:07:42.380Why do you think that made you unpopular?
00:07:44.220And why is it that you so early cottoned on to the fact that there was something going on that wasn't exactly kosher in relationship to now's push for a particular kind of family structure and a particular view of women's rights?
00:08:01.400Yes, I think what happened for me was, I just, when I started focusing on what was best for children, and then I began to, we only had minimal amount of research for that at that point in time.
00:08:18.100And, but we had enough for me to make a case to the board.
00:08:20.960And when I saw the resistance, the degree to which there was two things happening.
00:08:27.260One is, we don't want to lose our power base.
00:08:30.620We don't ever want to have a woman say whatever option she wants should be closed to her.
00:08:36.900And so, I began to see that the women's movement was caring more about women than they were caring about the children.
00:08:43.400That was the first disillusionment that I had.
00:08:45.800Okay, so your first, your first ethical point, in some sense, is that when you're speaking about families, and you have to balance the rights and responsibilities of men, women, and children, that it makes sense to you to put children's well-being first and foremost, and then to place men and women as individuals, say, or perhaps even as a couple below that.
00:09:42.080So, it's basically the freedom there is the freedom to take on a certain kind of relatively permanent responsibility, and then to abide by that, come hell or high water, essentially, into the future.
00:09:52.980That the children should not respect the parents' needs, because part of what I talk about in the boy crisis is that ain't nobody happy, you know, that everybody has to be happy in a family.
00:10:03.880And that part of choosing a child to be responsible is choosing the child not just to have its needs met, but to also care about whether mom's or dad's needs are being met as well.
00:10:16.400And that has to be very primal and introduced early.
00:10:22.160But that the, and then secondly, I also felt, and Betty Friedan felt this way also, that the women's movement would never go as far as it could go unless men were equally involved and proud of being involved in the fathering role.
00:10:40.740Because a woman who has to take on the entire responsibility, a woman who wants to break glass ceilings and go as far as she can, but also wants children, can't do that all.
00:10:50.200If the man is working full-time and she's working full-time, either the children get neglected or, you know, or something has to go.
00:10:58.320And so, women will often say to me, you know, I want to be a have-it-all woman.
00:11:01.820And I say, you can be a have-it-all woman.
00:11:04.180Revere, find a man who wants to be home full-time with the children.
00:11:07.960And let's reshape society so we're saying that men are not only warriors that we praise and call heroes when they go to war and they die for us,
00:11:19.880but they're also warriors if they choose, if you choose a man who wants to be fully involved with the child, let's honor him and respect him.
00:11:28.080Because we know that the social bribes that we gave men to die allowed men to be willing to sacrifice their lives in exchange for being called hero.
00:11:37.780Well, if we reframe being a father as being a different type of hero, men will follow because men basically go wherever the praise goes.
00:11:47.460Okay. Okay. So, in the 70s, so you started to put forward the case for children and, to some degree as well, simultaneously, the case for fathers.
00:11:56.520And you received a fair bit of resistance as a consequence of that.
00:11:59.980And it sounds like the way you're setting up the argument is that the conflict, what was the conflict, though?
00:12:07.120Was it that the women who were being appealed to by now wanted untrammeled freedom of choice for them under all circumstances?
00:12:15.760The reason I'm asking is because if you have children, obviously, half the children you have are female.
00:12:22.540And you'd assume that if it was a matter of women's opening up what would be best for women in any kind of medium to long-term manner,
00:12:31.380that the concerns about daughters would be, perhaps, even if it isn't concerns about sons,
00:12:37.060it would be concerns about daughters that would emerge as paramount, even over the concerns of the mother.
00:12:41.780So, what is it that was, I still don't exactly get why it was that you weren't being successful because it doesn't make sense.
00:12:50.340Because there was two things happening simultaneously.
00:12:55.420One was such a strong emphasis on freedom.
00:12:58.840And the freedom manifested in two areas.
00:14:16.560And B, the feminist community started, when I would go to feminist rallies and so on,
00:14:23.120there would be many books about, you know, Lenin and the nuclear family being the patriarchal men that were oppressing women.
00:14:33.380And so, I think the feminist movement grew out of two huge iterations.
00:14:39.800One was the civil rights movement where there was an oppressor and an oppressed.
00:14:43.620Then there was the movement of not just civil rights, but after the civil rights movement came the Marxism and the belief that there were oppressors and oppressed among Marxists.
00:15:01.820And a lot of the feminist movement, the early feminist movement was very...
00:15:05.800We had groups like Red Stockings and many other groups like that that were socialist worker party type feminists that very much believed in Marxism.
00:15:13.240And they had the dichotomy of oppressor versus oppressed.
00:15:16.780So, when it came to men, men, because we earned more...
00:15:20.960Because our biological, not our biological, but our socialized and biological responsibility was to earn the money and do that type of nature of providing,
00:15:29.960the feminist movement looked at the fact that we earned more money once we had children.
00:15:35.200And so, therefore, we must be the oppressor like those, like the bourgeoisie of Marxism, and women must be the oppressed.
00:15:42.760So, you have two things happening simultaneously.
00:15:45.040This belief that the oppressors are wanting to be equally involved with the children.
00:15:51.040And then secondly, men having no idea why they had value.
00:15:58.640The very few men that did study the value of being a father and how important it was to children didn't speak up about it.
00:16:06.720And women can't hear what men don't say.
00:16:08.420So, we had this world then where women were sharing the burden of breadwinning, but no one was even interested in asking the question about whether men could share the burden from women of earning, of providing equally for the family.
00:16:26.700And women weren't even interested in that because they were so focused on their freedom and saw men as the oppressor.
00:16:33.700And so, there was no space to articulate the value of fathers and men in the family.
00:16:39.720Okay. So, well, you know, your terminology is interesting, too, because you're attributing the desire of the women who were pushing against what you were saying, say.
00:16:49.640You're attributing that to a desire to freedom, but it seems to me that you could easily use irresponsibility as a terminology there.
00:16:58.640You know, because freedom without concern for the medium to long-term consequences of your actions, especially when you're bringing in...
00:17:08.660When you're dealing with minors, when you're dealing with children, that's not freedom. That's irresponsibility.
00:17:15.400That is absolutely irresponsibility. And that is where we as a society have failed to come in and say, you know, first of all, whenever either sex wins, that is, a woman wins custody, for example.
00:17:29.560Whenever either sex wins, both sexes lose. And it's worse than that. Whenever either sex wins, both sexes lose. And in the case of family, the children lose enormously.
00:17:40.680And we also need to sort of understand exactly what is it that leads to children doing so much better when they have fathers involved.
00:17:51.960I started researching that and I ended up, as you know, with the boy crisis, ended up with more than 70 different ways that when children have their father involved in about an equal way, that they do so much better.
00:18:06.280Well, it would be a lovely thing if you could detail out some of that now, and then we'll go back to the political ideological story here.
00:18:13.980But, see, one of the things that's happened in Ontario recently is that our government has introduced legislation that is predicated on the idea that all families are equal.
00:18:28.340And the idea behind that, you could argue is laudable. I wouldn't argue that, but you could argue it, that, you know, people have a variety of ways of solving the problem of having children,
00:18:42.540and that there's a variety of viable solutions to that problem, and that no one family organizational type should be privileged above the others.
00:18:53.000I mean, I suppose, with the exception of multi-partner marriages, which we still don't approve of, let's say.
00:19:00.620The problem with that, as far as I can tell, is that it does appear from the research that the nuclear family is the smallest viable unit.
00:19:09.620Which is not to say that there aren't single mothers or single fathers who do an admirable job under trying conditions.
00:19:16.060But part of the problem, this is a deep problem, is that whenever you posit something as a value,
00:19:24.120so you might say, well, we want intact families, mother and father, that's the value we're heading for, because that seems to be best for the children.
00:19:32.240Then you produce a rank order of accordance with that, and the people who aren't in accordance with that value,
00:19:37.800you can easily make a case that they're being discriminated against.
00:19:40.520And we're in a situation in our society now where, even if the discrimination occurs, let's say, because of the pursuit of an admirable value,
00:20:19.580Children that have a lot about an equal or more than equal father involvement have a number of things in common as a rule.
00:20:26.520And obviously, there's reversals of this, and not everyone fits this pattern.
00:20:31.360But the first is they're far more likely to have postponed gratification.
00:20:37.420And I'll elaborate on that a little bit more.
00:20:39.640Postponed gratification is probably the single most important quality to becoming successful.
00:20:46.400And becoming successful, especially being employed in a job that has some meaning for you,
00:20:51.720is one of the most important ingredients in happiness and a sense of purpose
00:20:57.020and a sense of motivation and a sense of willingness to get up in the morning.
00:21:01.140And so in a little while, I'll be happy to just trace back how that postponed gratification happens more when you have a father.
00:21:08.240Yeah, because I'm really interested in hearing about that.
00:21:11.760Secondly, children that have an equal amount of father involvement are far less likely to be depressed.
00:21:17.580They're far less more likely to be assertive and not aggressive, which is something you usually think of men as being, you know, aggressive.
00:21:25.580But actually, the children of both girls and boys whose fathers are involved are far more likely to understand the distinction between being assertive and being aggressive and choose assertiveness.
00:21:36.620Boys, another surprising one for me in doing the research was finding that boys and girls who are raised with about an equal amount of father involvement
00:21:46.320are far more likely to be empathetic, because I always thought of empathy coming predominantly from moms.
00:21:52.620And I'll be happy to explain in a bit why it does come more from moms, but why the outcome for the child is not more empathy.
00:22:01.000The outcome for the child is less empathy.
00:22:06.780Far more likely both boys and girls should drop out of school if there isn't father involvement.
00:22:12.000Far more likely when a relationship breaks up, a child that has not had significant father involvement is much more likely to be depressed and be withdrawn and feel alienated.
00:22:25.160Far more likely to be addicted to video games.
00:22:28.260Far more likely to be addicted to video porn.
00:22:31.260Far more likely to have few social skills, few emotional skills.
00:22:36.060To do worse in every academic area, but especially in reading and writing, which are the two biggest predictors of success.
00:22:44.800Far more likely to have a lower sperm count.
00:22:48.040And here's an amazing thing I just discovered toward the end of the research for the boy crisis.
00:22:53.060I saw in Pediatrics magazine that children who, by the age of nine, don't have a significant amount of father involvement.
00:23:03.500Both girls and boys were likely to have shorter telomeres.
00:23:07.340And as most of us know, the telomeres are pivotal in predicting life expectancy.
00:23:13.560So, boys and girls, the average shorter telomere for a nine-year-old boy or girl without father involvement was 14% shorter.
00:23:27.780But the boys' telomeres were then again 40% shorter than the girls.
00:23:33.520So, here this was predicting about a 14% shorter life expectancy for the average child without father involvement by the age of nine already.
00:23:46.080So, two things faceted me there is, you know, if all the things like, you know, dropping out of school and things like that.
00:23:53.820I asked myself, well, maybe this is because boys with father involvement just have better, you know, better neighborhoods.
00:24:01.020But the fathers earn more, the families earn more.
00:24:04.840Maybe it's a matter of poverty versus not poverty.
00:24:07.320So, I started looking at boys and girls growing up in good, quote, good neighborhoods with, quote, good schools.
00:24:14.500And comparing them with boys and girls growing up in poor neighborhoods and poor schools.
00:24:18.900And found that boys and girls growing up in good neighborhoods with poor schools that did not have significant father involvement did about the same as boys and girls growing up in poor neighborhoods with poor schools that did have father involvement.
00:24:34.720That father involvement was really as good a predictor of success as the quality of the school system, the quality of the neighborhood, and the socioeconomic class.
00:24:45.080And this is what's led to, you know, to the psychologists gathering together behind people like Warshaw, 100 psychologists and researchers saying, you know, this is not a correlation, the involvement of father.
00:24:59.880This is not a matter of socioeconomic issues.
00:25:03.040This is a matter of actual father's involvement, especially the biological father's involvement, actually makes a significant difference.
00:25:12.840We have been wrong about the assumption that this was probably just a correlation.
00:25:17.460And so, the more I looked, the more I found just every nightmare of a parent to be so increased when there was not a significant amount of father involvement.
00:25:29.140And I was seeing, you know, I was dating between, before I married Liz, the woman you just met just before we got on, before we got married 14 years ago.
00:25:39.260So, I was dating a number of women, almost every woman had, was a single mother.
00:25:44.340And these, every single woman was working her rear off, trying to balance her life.
00:25:51.140Every woman used the word overwhelmed by the way she felt.
00:25:55.460Every, almost every woman said, well, I'd like my dad and the dad involved, but.
00:25:59.560But when the, but I started listening to the butts of the women, and then listening to men who had wanted to be more involved with their children, and listening to what the differences were between what let the men, what made the men feel not wanted, what made the men feel excluded, and why the women felt that they needed to not have the man involved.
00:26:21.320And I saw this entire set of misunderstandings here, and if I hope the boy crisis does anything, it's to sort of explain, you know, here are the 10 major things that dads do that, that sort of annoy women, or make women feel that they're not protecting their children adequately.
00:26:40.640Which, when they understand the purpose of these things, and when dads get their homework done enough to articulate to the moms the purpose of these things, that we'll realize that these are necessary ingredients in a child's life.
00:26:55.500Okay, so that's a good, that's a good place to go next.
00:26:57.780So you laid out a whole slew of reasons, a slew of consequences of fatherlessness.
00:27:03.720And we'll return back to the causal relationship between what men do, and these beneficial outcomes, but if you could go on now to tell us what it is that men are doing at a micro level, then we could return to the causal link between that and the positive outcomes.
00:27:19.220And you said those also cause some contention in the household.
00:27:22.580Yes, you know, I'll give one example, for example, will be, a father is roughhousing with the kids.
00:27:30.380And the mom's looking over and saying, looking at scans and thinking, okay, when should I interfere, when should I not interfere?
00:27:37.140And the mom's saying to herself, hmm, Jimmy, you know, please keep the kids away from the credenza there.
00:27:45.300Keep the kids away from the couch, because they could hit their head there.
00:27:48.180Why don't you wait, hubby, to tomorrow, when you can take this outside?
00:27:55.300And then the mother is sort of hesitating to not be overly controlling.
00:28:00.340And yet at the same time, she's feeling she has to monitor the husband as well as monitor the husband with the kids.
00:28:07.080And she's feeling in the back of her mind like, sooner or later, there's going to be an accident here.
00:28:13.240And I'm going to be upset with myself for not being stricter.
00:28:16.560But on the other hand, the kids seem to be having fun, so I should let things go.
00:28:20.640Well, you know, there's a psychobiologist named Yach Panksepp, who is one of the world's great biological psychologists.
00:28:27.520And he studied rough-and-tumble play in animals.
00:28:32.140So rats, for example, a huge part of the socialization process that's key to the development of the prefrontal cortex in juvenile male rats in particular,
00:28:42.820emerges and matures as a consequence of rough-and-tumble play.
00:28:45.880And one of the amazing things that Panksepp discovered, and this truly is an amazing thing,
00:28:50.740is that if you pair two rats together and then let them play repeated bouts,
00:28:59.280the big rat will dominate the little rat to begin with in the first bout.
00:29:04.040But if the big rat doesn't let the little rat win about 30% of the time in repeated play bouts, then the little rat won't play anymore.
00:29:12.200So you get an emergent morality, an emergent play-centered morality, even among rats as a consequence of rough-and-tumble play.
00:29:19.500And that rough-and-tumble, I did a fair bit of research on rough-and-tumble play about, oh, it's probably 20 years ago now, 15 years ago anyways.
00:29:26.520And it's really quite clear that rough-and-tumble play helps children parameterize their bodies so that they know how they extend and also what limits there is in the use of physical interactions with another person.
00:29:39.860What's fun? What's provocative? What's pushing it too far? What's painful?
00:29:46.100And of course, kids love rough-and-tumble play as well.
00:29:49.220They're just absolutely starving for it.
00:29:51.220And we've squeezed it out of the kindergartens, the nursery schools, the elementary schools, the junior high schools, all of that, and forbidden.
00:29:59.220And what Panksep also found was that if you deprived juvenile rats of the opportunity to engage in active rough-and-tumble play,
00:30:07.320that they showed symptoms that were broadly analogous to those of attention deficit disorder in human boys,
00:30:14.620and that you could also treat that with Ritalin the same way in rats as you could with boys.
00:30:19.340So there's that rough-and-tumble play issue.
00:30:21.980You know, and you might think too, the question is, one question is, why might a mother be distrustful of the rough-and-tumble play episode?
00:30:32.320And some of that might be sensitivity with regards to the kids.
00:30:36.160But a huge part of that also is trust on her trust with regards to the father.
00:30:41.880You know, because it's rambunctious and noisy.
00:30:43.740And if she trusts, let's say, that active masculinity that plays rough, then she'll stay away and let the fun happen.
00:30:53.040But if there's distrust running through the family, then she'll stand between the kids and the father,
00:30:59.020and then he won't get to involve himself in that way.
00:31:09.720Let me take the evolution of how rough-and-tumble play goes and all the dimensions of where, the slippery slope that it leads to.
00:31:17.700So the father, what the mom, what neither the mom nor the dad know is that this rough-and-tumble play leads to the types of things that you just mentioned,
00:31:27.940which are also evident in elephants and so on.
00:31:30.800But it also leads to the distinction between a child being able to distinguish between being assertive versus aggressive.
00:31:36.960So the kid starts, for example, maybe kicking the dad in the wrong place or poking the dad in the eyes or pulling the dad's hair.
00:31:45.000And the dad says, sweetie, you can fake eye contact to the left and then move to the right to win in this wrestling match.
00:32:04.780So imagine that a rough-and-tumble bout is like a dance.
00:32:10.200Okay, and the point of the dance is so that both people are having a good time while it's happening.
00:32:15.320Because otherwise it's not play, right?
00:32:17.580And as soon as either party is no longer having a good time, you've actually snapped out of the psychobiological function of the play circuit.
00:32:24.640So basically what you're telling the child by putting those rules on is we can interact physically within a very limited set of parameters.
00:32:33.440And what you have to learn to do is to be a sophisticated player within that set of parameters.
00:32:39.440And you want to learn how to push the boundaries, right?
00:32:41.840Because the most fun rough-and-tumble play is right on the edge between assertiveness and aggression.
00:32:47.020So, and you can see kids, like I used to work in daycare centers when I was a kid, when I was 18, 19.
00:32:53.540And the kids would line up to rough-and-tumble play with me because that was still allowable then.
00:34:06.100And the framework here is that when you set up a system where you said that, you know, men are part of the patriarchy,
00:34:12.680their desire is to dominate women and make rules to benefit men at the expense of women,
00:34:20.360you have a framework, an emotional setting, which is not conducive to men saying, here's my value.
00:34:28.940Or women saying, let me see what the checks and balances of parenting is that leads to the best of you coming out and the best of me coming out.
00:34:37.280All of that has sort of, we've skipped over an inherent sense of father knows best to father knows less.
00:34:44.280And so the process that I'll be sharing in a moment of what rough housing leads to and the slippery slope that happens when it doesn't happen
00:34:56.400is what has not even been nurtured as a possibility to be articulated in this culture at this time.
00:35:03.500I also think too, you know, that if you have a partner who hasn't been played with,
00:35:10.240then that partner can't tell the difference between boisterous rambunctiousness and aggression.
00:35:16.520And if there's a hypothesis about domination and the patriarchy running its course underneath that,
00:35:22.940then there's going to be conceptual confusion about the physical interactions that have the appearance of submission and dominance,
00:35:29.640because that's part of the rough housing play routine, that is going to be viewed through a lens of tyrannical interaction rather than just good fun.
00:35:40.260And I mean, you can tell the difference because if the kids are rough and tumble playing,
00:35:44.400they're unbelievably enthusiastic about it and engaged and laughing and giggling and like,
00:35:49.880they'll play right to the point of exhaustion because they need it, they need it so much.
00:35:54.040But that's a hard thing to observe from the outside if you're not accustomed to that.
00:35:58.260And if you don't have that framework of men having and dads having a value to begin with, absolutely not.
00:36:05.580So here's maybe what might be helpful for a mom to understand.
00:36:11.200That the rough and tumble play, we now know, helps children distinguish between being assertive and aggressive.
00:36:18.380But a number of other things also happen during that play,
00:36:21.940which is a bond that is created between the father and the child.
00:36:26.000And in almost every, in doing expert witness work to help children have both parents have to divorce,
00:36:32.460I've observed more than 50 families and usually the father interacting with the children.
00:36:38.120And in almost every case, every case, actually, I believe, that I have seen,
00:36:42.660there's this bond is used by the father to say things like,
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00:39:54.960You know, with Panksepp's work too, he found that the little rats, the rats will work to enter a play arena.
00:40:05.760Because play, you think play is a, so Panksepp established very, very clearly that there is a primary play circuit in mammals.
00:40:14.440It's a separate psychobiological circuit.
00:40:16.380It's not exploration, it's a whole different motivational drive, but that the, but activity in that circuit is intrinsically pleasurable.
00:40:24.300And part of that appears to be because it's so key to proper socialization that it's regarded by children and by social mammals as intrinsically valuable.
00:40:35.380And so it makes perfect sense that that can be used as a source of primary reward.
00:40:39.740And I think your comments about the, the man and the kids binding themselves together through play is also really important.
00:40:47.640Because one of the things that I do with young men who, you know, I think young men tend to be somewhat alienated from infants who are under about nine months old.
00:40:55.860Because they're not really equipped to know what the hell to do with them.
00:40:59.720I mean, they can learn and they can be good at it, but it's not their domain of natural expertise.
00:41:05.380But once a kid hits about nine months and starts to be able to imitate and to pound and to, and to play and to respond to gentle teasing,
00:41:13.980like that's a perfect time for the father to swoop in, which is very helpful for a mother, by the way, who wants to have another child.
00:41:19.880And to start really cementing a relationship that's based on that interesting combination of, of high energy fun, plus the disciplined interactions that are necessary as a precursor to that.
00:41:34.260And if you interfere with that, then you stop the father from being able to form that product from liking his kids, really, you know, because that's how the liking comes about is, is through play.
00:41:49.240The, the, the, the additional framework that you're placing on this is really deepening my own understanding of it as well.
00:41:55.240Yeah, well, there's a book called Affective Neuroscience written by Yak Panksepp.
00:41:59.240It's on my reading list on my website.
00:42:01.240And I would highly recommend that because he, he lays out the findings from the animal literature on the primary play circuit.
00:42:08.240It's really, he should have won a Nobel Prize for it.
00:42:10.240I mean, discovering an entirely new motivational system in the brain is a major, major contribution.
00:42:17.240And to also, the other thing that he did that was so cool and sort of reminded me of Jean Piaget's work a little bit is, he made a very strong case that out of play emerges an ethic.
00:42:29.240And, you know, that, that's why I was so interested when you mentioned that interactions with father actually increase empathy.
00:42:36.240Because, you know, if someone has empathy for you, that means that, I mean, that can lead to a certain kind of narcissism, right?
00:42:44.240Because you're always the center of attention.
00:42:46.240You're not empathic unless you learn to, that you're not any more important than the next person, particularly the person that you happen to be playing with.
00:42:53.240So, okay, so let's continue with, with what fathers are doing.
00:43:00.240So in that rough housing, what happens is that the bond that is created by the dad allows the dad to say, you've got, you know, here's, we'll continue the rough housing.
00:43:10.240If you get, you know, between 830 and nine, if you, if you have everything done.
00:43:14.240But so the, the, the child learns to postpone gratification from doing the, what it loves to do right then and there, that is be rough housed with and deal with what it has to deal with before it gets more of what it, what it needs.
00:43:33.240So you, you actually think, and I wonder if there's been any, any, see, we don't know much about the origin of the trait conscientiousness, which is at least in part the ability to delay gratification.
00:43:44.240And it is after intelligence, it's the best predictor of long-term life success, especially in managerial and administrative jobs and algorithmic jobs.
00:43:52.240It's not associated with creativity, but, but that's, that's a side issue.
00:43:55.240So your hypothesis is that the primary way men are socializing that is by using work to play as a, as a, as a bridge.
00:44:06.240Yes, that, that, that play creates a bond.
00:44:08.240So a lot of the problem is when, when moms often talk to say, you know, you have to do this, you have to do that, you have to do this, you have to do that.
00:44:15.240The mother is often experienced by the child as sort of the disciplinarian who's always making him or her do things.
00:44:22.240And there's a seeds of rebellion start to occur of sort of like, how much am I going to be myself?
00:44:27.240How much am I going to do what mom does?
00:44:30.240Or it doesn't even happen consciously, but no, you just sort of feel like you're being pushed down by all the rules.
00:44:36.240But with dad, you, the bond that is, or moms who rough house with the children, a bond is created.
00:44:42.240And from that, and, and you want to return to that, that connection.
00:44:45.240So you, it's like a child going on a roller coaster where, you know, there's an enormous amount of safety, but you also, excitement, but also an enormous amount of safety.
00:44:55.240And so you trust the dad to combine that both and you want to return to that.
00:44:59.240So you're willing to focus on getting done what you need to do, your homework, your chores, your brush teeth or whatever, in order to get what you want to do, which is the, you know, of postponed gratification.
00:45:11.240But now let's take the slippery slope when this doesn't happen.
00:45:15.240So let me, let me just add one more thing to that.
00:45:17.240Well, the thing that's so cool about that is that you've also provided a really intelligent piece of parenting advice for, for fathers.
00:45:24.240It's like, because you're, so let's say BF Skinner, who was the famous animal behaviorist, demonstrated quite clearly that you could train animals with reward more effectively than with threat or punishment.
00:45:36.240Now, threat or punishment is necessary.
00:45:39.240Obviously, we wouldn't have biological systems subserving those emotions if they weren't necessary.
00:45:44.240But, but reward is harder to use because you have to be much more attentive and, and intervene when something good happens.
00:45:51.240And so you really have to be watching. But your hypothesis here is, look, fathers, spend a bunch of time playing with your kids and having as much fun as you can with them.
00:46:01.240Because by formulating that bond, you can use that as a, as the source of reward that will be appreciated by the child with regards to disciplinary strategies.
00:46:10.240So it's, it's, it's a, it's a, it's a twofold victory. One is it's fun and you get to like your kids and have a good time with them.
00:46:17.240But the second is you have a very positive means of disciplining them in the best sense, encouraging them and disciplining them.
00:46:24.240disciplining them. So that's, that's a really useful thing to know practically.
00:46:28.240So deepening the trust of the kids, like, like you're, you're playing and you're right on the edge that you were talking about.
00:46:34.240But there's dad to make sure that the fun doesn't get too hard for you, for him, for your sister and so on.
00:46:41.240And so that's all happening at the same time. Now, when the right and that's embodied, you can see that two ways that's embodied trust.
00:46:48.240So if you toss a little kid up in the air and catch them, I mean, it's very exciting to them, both being tossed up because of the threat, but then the relief that occurs because of the safety that's put in there.
00:46:58.240So it's, it's not abstract. It's really demonstrated.
00:47:01.240And then our dad tossing that child up and, and then in fact, missing the child, quote unquote, and the child lands on the bed.
00:47:09.240And it's like, oh, you know, I was missed. So you were going to catch me, but you know, also recognize.
00:47:15.240Yes. Well, that shows that that shows that things can happen that aren't entirely what you predict, but within the confines of a trusting relationship, that's still okay.
00:47:24.240And then you could also imagine if the, if the dad is wrestling with more than one kid at the same time, then he's also acting as just referee.
00:47:33.240Right. So, and then the kids learn how to be judicious in the distribution of attention.
00:47:38.240They learn how to play fair. They learn how everybody, how everybody can have a turn and everybody wins at the same time.
00:47:45.240And so, and that bonding is what is part of what creates just everything you just said is part of what leads the child to have empathy training.
00:47:56.240And the empathy training came from, no, you were too rough on your sister there.
00:48:00.240If you try it again, you can't be that rough.
00:48:03.240Oh, you still continue to be that rough.
00:48:06.240Okay. Let's no more play. That's right.
00:48:09.240Play stops when everyone isn't having fun.
00:48:11.240When, when, when my kids were little, we had this couch that was a sectional in six pieces.
00:48:17.240And so we could put the couches facing each other and then we put up the, the, the backs all the way around it.
00:48:24.240So it was like a little wrestling ring.
00:48:26.240And so then I would take the kids in there and just wrestle them half to death, you know.
00:48:29.240But, but one of the things I used to do was if one of the kids was rough with the other and made them cry,
00:48:37.240then I noticed that the kid who made the other kid cry wouldn't look at the crying kid.
00:49:10.240When the child doesn't have that, you know, so we have all this data.
00:49:13.240Now these 70 different areas where children do so much worse when they don't have a father involvement.
00:49:20.240So let's look at the next stage of that.
00:49:22.240Now when, when that father does not do this rough housing and as just one example of many,
00:49:28.240and does not, is not enforcing boundaries, the child then doesn't learn to have that postponed gratification.
00:49:36.240So we have hard data on this, that children, children raised predominantly by dads are only 15% likely to have ADHD.
00:49:44.240Children raised predominantly by moms are 30% likely to have ADHD.
00:49:48.240So if we looked at what we just talked about, the children that are raised by the dads are learning that they have to postpone that gratification in order to get the reward that they want.
00:49:58.240Now you take that capacity to postpone gratification to school.
00:50:02.240The child without postponed gratification assigned a homework assignment doesn't really feel, is oftentimes distracted by a text that's come in,
00:50:11.240distracted by the opportunity to play video games, distracted by wanting to exchange notes with other kids.
00:50:19.240Sure, just, well yeah, well the distraction, the thing about the, there's no need to explain ADHD.
00:50:25.240What there is a need to do is to explain why every kid doesn't have it.
00:50:29.240And the answer is, the answer that you just laid out, is that some kids learn how to control their, like distractibility doesn't require an explanation.
00:50:37.240Because people are distracted by what's immediately rewarding.
00:50:41.240And that doesn't require, it's like addiction.
00:50:45.240What requires explanation is the development of the resources that allow you to withstand addictive pressures in the face of the fact that they're always, they're everywhere and they're powerful.
00:50:55.240So it's, it's, it's, it's development of control that's, that's really the curious issue.
00:51:01.240And I've never heard this, I've never heard anyone make this connection between the use of play as a reward and that delay of gratification.
00:51:13.240And, and then let me take it another step further, if I may.
00:51:16.240So when this delayed gratification is happening and, or does not happen, and then the boy isn't able to finish homework, he starts beginning to feel ashamed of himself.
00:51:27.240Or if he's maybe athletic and his parents believe that it's really going to be helpful to the child to have beautiful dreams.
00:51:34.240Sweetie, you want to be an NBA player and you're tall and you, you know, you continue practicing, you can be an NBA player and you can have your dreams.
00:51:42.240But the post, he doesn't have that postponed gratification.
00:51:45.240So cannot do the boring repetition that comes with all success, including being an Olympic star or an NBA player or anything else.
00:51:53.240Or playing the piano or learning to read or.
00:51:59.240And so you, so anything that is his dream, the bigger the dream, the bigger the disappointment.
00:52:06.240And it's not just disappointment that he fears will happen to his parents, but also the, the sense that he says he's going to do one thing in school.
00:52:15.240His, his teachers, his peers are not respecting him as much.
00:52:51.240Okay. And, and we'll assume that it's a difficult goal.
00:52:54.240And so then there's an ethic that emerges out of that, which is that if that goal is valuable and it's difficult, then there's sacrifices that have to be made.
00:53:03.240Delays of gratification that have to be implemented in order for you to be worthy to attain that goal.
00:53:09.240Okay. That's all part of the game. If you think about it as a game.
00:53:13.240Well, then, then if you observe yourself unable to play the rules of the game, play by the rules, then how can you not have any, how can you not suffer shame and self-contempt?
00:53:23.240Because you've already adopted an ethical framework, which is, this is worth attaining.
00:53:29.240And if you observe in yourself, then the inability to attain it because you're constantly being distracted, then you're, you're going to have contempt for yourself.
00:53:39.240And then the way out of that, this is something I learned from Nietzsche.
00:53:43.240Here's the terrible thing about that, because that's a great pathway to nihilism, because let's say you posit four goals in succession that you find valuable, and then you observe yourself unable to discipline yourself to attain the goals.
00:53:57.240Well, the most, after four successive failures, it's like Homer Simpson said to Bart, he said to Bart, you tried and you failed, and then you tried and you failed again.
00:54:09.240What did you learn? And, and Homer says to Bart, the conclusion is, never try.
00:54:16.240Right. And so if you fail a few times at attaining something of importance, because you see that you have no discipline, then the logical response to that is to cease positing goals.
00:54:29.240Absolutely. And that's a, that's exactly what happens. And, but we have, through technology, sort of a perfect escape.
00:54:37.240And that escape is into video games where you can identify with a hero and you can lose the game as often as you wish to with nobody noticing.
00:54:46.240And then as you begin to get better with certain, you know, with certain manipulations, you can play that game with certain types of people and increase your, your skill set at the game.
00:54:57.240But you're never able to translate that into everyday life where, you know, and so you start becoming addicted to that game, which is, you know, which are designed to increase your dopamine without having to actually achieve anything.
00:55:14.240Well, the thing about the games that's, that's different, like the video games, what's different. So a game for a little kid has to be immediately rewarding.
00:55:23.240That's why rough and tumble play works, for example, has to be immediately rewarding. And then the game shades into real life.
00:55:30.240But as the game shades into real life, what happens is the rewards are deferred. And you get more and more disciplined at not being immediately rewarded, like when you're learning to read or play the piano for the long term goal.
00:55:42.240The thing about video games is that they do require the development of skill, but the immediate reward is built in along with the delayed reward.
00:55:52.240Because otherwise the game wouldn't be fun for someone who's learning. And so the problem is, is that a lot of real life games aren't necessarily fun while you're learning them.
00:56:01.240Because you have to attain a certain level of mastery and that requires discipline. That's also what's wrong with the idea that children can just learn in keeping with what they're spontaneously interested in.
00:56:12.240It's like there's some truth in that because why not follow a child's interests. But the problem is, is that many highly skilled endeavors, virtually any endeavor that it's going to be of economic or productive utility requires a apprenticeship where there's a lot of grinding, there's a lot of just disciplinary or disciplined repetition.
00:56:34.240And so, and so, okay, well, all right. So, and then one more dimension of that is that, that as the boy gets to boy girl age, if he's had or if he begins to sense that he's heterosexual, he notices that the girls are far more interested in going out with the quarterbacks or the student body presidents or the performer type boys that are sort of honored in the school system and in life in general.
00:56:57.240And so he begins to start withdrawing and fearing that he can't attract those girls, especially the ones he's most biologically addicted to, beautiful ones, the cheerleader types. He starts withdrawing into porn and a little bit of porn is not a huge issue, but the porn basically is based on the dopamine increasing with each new stimulus that you have.
00:57:23.920And so as he gets addicted to, and so as he gets addicted to, and so as he gets addicted to that dopamine, he begins to get addicted to only being able to be stimulated when the risk taking is higher and higher.
00:57:33.920So finally he succeeds in one girl, woman being able to come over to his house and be sexual with her, but he's so unable to be turned on just by the near maybe light touch of a hand or turned on by just being fascinated by what she's saying and the interaction or some combination of the drama of being with her combined with her.
00:57:52.920Combined with a little bit of touch. He's so used to a huge amount of stimulus that occurs. And when he gets to be trusting of her a little bit, he says, you know, can you be this way? Can you do this? Can you act this way?
00:58:04.920And she feels like just some piece of object that is being traded in for the porn eventually gets disgusted with him, withdraws. And he begins to say, you know, all right, this convinces me. I am as worthless as I thought I was.
00:58:16.920And the only thing that will give me satisfaction is back to the porn. And what became a little bit of an addiction becomes more of an addiction, even as he's also becoming simultaneously frequently addicted to the video games at the same time.
00:58:28.920And so all of this is that slippery slope from the rough housing that the father is not able to articulate to the mother about the value of that, combined with the trust that you were integrating with that, combined with the lack of the bond, combined with the postponed gratification being taught.
00:58:49.960And then when the postponed gratification is not taught, the slippery slope down the hill to shame, self-disgust, and fear that if he tries anything, he's just going to prove to himself and everybody around him that he's one more failure.
00:59:05.660And the degree to which he articulates the desire to try something is the announcement publicly to a group of people that he's pretty much going to say, today, I'm going to try this and tomorrow it's going to be a failure until he becomes enormously shamed.
00:59:22.060In worst case scenarios, this can lead to such depression that it creates a desire to commit suicide. And in the very worst case scenarios, it's a belief, I believe, we've seen school shooters.
00:59:34.420Yeah, well, that brews resentment. Absolutely, man, that brews resentment and anger like nothing else.
00:59:39.840And who will they get resentment and anger about? Who are the people that have rejected him? It's the classmates, it's the teachers. Nobody appreciates that sweet sensitivity inside of him and sees him.
00:59:53.200Well, I am so angry at that. And one day, I'll just want, I have a desperate need to get their attention and say, I count, I matter, pay attention to me.
01:00:03.760And, you know, in worst case scenarios, only a very small percentage, but in worst case scenarios, you can understand the school shooting emerging from that.
01:00:12.340Yeah, well, for every kid who goes and shoots up a school, there's a thousand who are fantasizing in a direction that's headed that way.
01:00:20.180You know, and some of that's, at the beginning of that, it's something like, well, I'm very angry at people because they don't see the value in me.
01:00:27.440But if they get to the point where they're doing something like fantasizing extreme violence, they're so far past that, even, they think they've developed a real hatred for everything and a wish to see it obliterated.
01:00:39.020And that's, you know, that's, well, obviously, that's the most terrible of the terrible outcomes that might be generated.
01:00:45.240Okay, so you talked about, you talked about rough and tumble play and delay of gratification.
01:00:53.120What, are there other cardinal things that you're seeing fathers do?
01:00:57.540Because that's pretty early on in life, right?
01:00:59.580So you're looking at the interaction with kids there between, say, a year old and five, six years old, seven years old, something like that.
01:01:08.260What do you, what else do you see happening with fathers, both at the early stages and then also later on?
01:01:14.440Yes, another important thing is the concept of hangout time.
01:01:17.960Now, for a mom listening to this who has a daughter, we now know that children who, daughters, who have a significant amount of hangout time with their dads, that creates more psychological centeredness than any other single phenomenon.
01:01:36.900So, for example, let's say you're in a divorce situation and a father has the child for a short period of time, let's say on a Saturday, and he picks his child up from a soccer game and says to, let's say, Josh, Josh, how did the game go?
01:01:55.140And the kid is more, you know, the boy especially is more likely to say, okay, it was okay, well, tell me more, Josh.
01:02:05.220And so, but they, if he, so if at that time, the dad has to drop the boy off to, to, to moms, because it's the end of a visitation time, there's nothing that happens beyond that.
01:02:16.960Right, well, and the boy is going to be, you know, people, kids in particular, I think, although it also happens with couples, is that, you know, one of the things that you do to the person that you're with, to test if they care, is to be somewhat withholding of information that might be relevant, to see to what degree you'll be pursued.
01:02:37.960Because, you know, if you ask me whether I've done something, how it went, one of the things I'm going to want to know is, do you really care?
01:02:47.340And if you're my father, I'm really going to want to know that.
01:02:50.320And so one of the ways I can, I can gauge that is by asking you, but that, that's, that assumes that your answer is going to be reflective of your actual being.
01:03:02.820A better way of doing it is for me to be a little bit withholding, and a little bit resistant, because then I can see, you know, are you going to poke me a bit?
01:03:11.100Because that's a fun thing to do, if you're kind of teasy, you can say, look, kid, you know, poke them in the chest a few times, it's like, loosen up and talk to me, you know, and usually if you do that with a kid, even an adolescent, they'll laugh and, you know, kind of push your hand away and go, oh, dad.
01:03:25.960But they're happy to have that additional prodding, right, to bring them out of their shell.
01:03:32.900And it's a demonstration that the kid actually cares.
01:03:53.900But the reason for the hesitation on saying something that they're ashamed of, like I remember one father was saying that the boy came home and he had been the goalie the week before, but the following week he was not chosen to be goalie and he couldn't understand why.
01:04:11.940And so he hesitates to say something for his dad because he doesn't want the dad to sort of either lecture him or disapprove of him or be disappointed in him or be, you know, sort of like feel like that's not my son.
01:04:25.780You know, I want my son to have scored the goals.
01:04:27.680So with all those fears, the child, especially the boy, when it comes to performance, will keep any failure to perform effectively to himself.
01:04:37.080But now, if the dad drops the child off at mom's, that never gets sorted through.
01:04:42.440If the dad has hangout time with the children, let's say they're doing homework together and dad maybe is watching a TV and the kid is doing homework and then they appear about the same time getting something from the refrigerator and they have a little discussion about what he wants for dinner.
01:04:57.160And the dad asks him to help make dinner with them rather than just sit and take no responsibility, which dads tend to do.
01:05:04.480They ask the children to be helpful with the dinner making and preparing, not just serve them.
01:05:09.380And so in that process of the child chopping up stuff and doing that type of boring thing, the child will tend to say, you know, dad, you know, I was goalie last week, but I wasn't goalie this week.
01:05:21.000And the child might say that to the mom even more quickly, but the child's expectations with the mom is the mom will give the child assurance and say, sweetie, it's no problem.
01:05:37.900Maybe the coach wanted to give the other kids a chance because you're so good, et cetera, et cetera.
01:05:43.260Whereas expect from dad a bit more confrontation, a bit more questioning.
01:05:47.080Well, one of the things I've noticed in talking to my clinical clients about their intimate relationships is I've been trying to gauge rules of thumb for minimal necessary interaction time to maintain a relationship.
01:05:59.220And with couples, I've observed that they need like one or two sessions of intimate time together a week at minimum, something like that, or things start to go south.
01:06:09.720But they also need, as far as I've been able to tell, about 90 minutes of communication time across a single week just to keep each other updated in relationship to their stories.
01:06:24.540One is, do you have some sense of how you would characterize hangout time and how much of it there needs to be in order to not go below, you know, a dangerous minimum?
01:06:36.500And then the other thing I'd like to pick up on is you had talked a little bit about the more confrontational approach that a father might take when discussing a failure or an inadequacy or something like that on the part of a child.
01:06:53.660And so I wanted to relate something that I've learned about talking to majority male audiences in the last year and a half, two years about responsibility and discipline and all of that.
01:07:04.160See, you might think that calling someone on their failure is harsh and judgmental, and it is in a sense, but it's not harsh and judgmental about their potential.
01:07:17.680You know, so if your kid comes to you and says, you know, I screwed up and here's what I did and it didn't go so well, and you say, that's okay, you're a wonderful kid, then the kid's stuck in a bind because they're not feeling so wonderful.
01:07:29.480And they failed. But if you say, well, look, you know, that was stupid, like, what the hell's wrong with you? Here's what you could do. Like, you're better than that, man. Get it together a little bit. Let's come up with some strategies so that you can figure out how that's never going to happen to you again.
01:07:44.100And so instead of putting your faith in who the child is right now, which I would say in some sense is the hallmark of impulsive empathy, you put your faith in who the child could be.
01:07:56.520And that's encouragement. And I would say in circumstances of failure, especially where the child is motivated to try again, encouragement beats, it beats impulsive empathy hands down as a mark of faith in who the child might be.
01:08:13.100Yes. And it takes a while for the child to both reveal its vulnerability and also to have a faith that the parent, that the child tends to open up like a flower.
01:08:28.200To the greater, when she or he realizes that the security that the father is creating by being with them and talking the problem through is there.
01:08:39.440Now, an ideal setting, a father who's wise or a mother who's wise will not give a solution right away.
01:08:46.180Well, we'll ask the kid something like, so, you know, what did you observe?
01:08:50.980What's your best guess as to what happened last week versus this week?
01:08:54.720What do you think was the judge's, was the coach's best intent?
01:08:59.240And let the, and oftentimes inside of the child is a willingness or is a sense of probably what really did happen,
01:09:07.620but a fear of sort of acknowledging it to himself or herself and especially acknowledging it to anyone else
01:09:13.320because the person who they might acknowledge it to will not have respect for them.
01:09:18.040And so being able to sort of give, have the hangout time facilitates enough time to feel both that large basket of,
01:09:27.040those large arms of security and nurturance surrounding him or her.
01:09:32.780The fact that the father is not going to give up on time with me, will be here for me.
01:09:38.640And I can, and then when the father or the mother facilitates the exploration inside of himself about what the problem might be,
01:09:47.320lets him help in a, you know, Carl Rogers, you know, Rogerian type of sense to, to find out the part of him that already knows the answer.
01:09:56.060Then the child is experiencing both respect and a willingness to be confronted by,
01:10:02.740if I don't have the answer inside of me, my father will tell me the truth about what I might be, need to do next.
01:10:09.700And he'll have, and that telling me the truth about what he needs to do next is his way of respecting me
01:10:15.580without even saying he's respecting me because he wouldn't be confronting me with the truth if he didn't respect me.
01:10:21.440Yeah, and more specifically, not, not so, not even more specifically than me,
01:10:26.240if he didn't respect my intrinsic ability to overcome obstacles and to grow, right?
01:10:31.940Which is the best, the best answer to someone who says, I have a problem is, well, I have faith that you can overcome that, right?
01:10:39.380Not that you don't have a problem or that you're okay the way you are.
01:10:42.360It's like, yeah, yeah, that's a problem, man.
01:10:44.040But, you know, and then, you know, there's another thing that you're talking about that's very much in keeping with,
01:10:49.640I would say, standard but relatively deep clinical wisdom, which is that people are much more likely to follow a set of injunctions
01:11:02.080And so we've had some really interesting experiences with this program we designed called the Future Authoring Program,
01:11:08.380and it helps people come up with a life plan, so they have to craft a vision for their operations across the six or seven basic dimensions of life,
01:11:17.500like intimate relationships and family and career ambitions and education and resistance to temptation, drugs and alcohol,
01:11:24.660care of mental and physical health and so on, those fundamental dimensions.
01:11:28.160Use of, productive use of time outside of work to ask themselves what they would want if they could have what they wanted to need
01:11:37.020along those domains three to five years down the road, to craft a vision based on that array of wants and desires,
01:11:45.340and also to write a counter vision, which is where could you be if you allowed yourself to fail catastrophically,
01:11:51.280what might that look like in three to five years, and then to produce a plan.
01:11:55.600And it's had remarkable effects, particularly now, young men are doing worse than young women in academic environments.
01:12:02.380So the program doesn't seem to have as much effect for young women, but that might be because they're already doing better.
01:12:08.580But it has a walloping effect on young men.
01:12:11.580In fact, in vocational junior college settings, our latest piece of data, which was generated, was published last year,
01:12:19.500showed that we could reduce dropout among young men, especially aimless ones who hadn't done very well in high school.
01:12:27.180And so, and one of the things I've observed about young men, and this might be because they're more disagreeable and confrontational than young women,
01:12:35.960is that unless they have formulated their own plan, they're unlikely to do something.
01:12:42.480So when you're talking, I think this is true with young women as well, you want to talk to them and say,
01:12:47.360well, look, what do you think about what happened and how you're going to get out of it?
01:12:51.220Which is an excellent question, because it says to the child, you can think about what happened and be accurate,
01:17:32.680The most important, we already know that family dinner nights are important.
01:17:38.640But what make family dinner nights even more valuable is when they don't become family dinner nightmares and knowing how to structure them so that they don't become family dinner nightmares.
01:17:48.840When somebody comes up to me after a presentation and says, you know, I can't get my children to give up electronics at dinner, I already know the beginning of the problem.
01:17:59.260That is that the children are in charge of the parents.
01:18:02.300That, you know, well, what can I do to encourage my children to get involved with, you know, to leave the electronics behind?
01:18:10.940And, you know, number one answer is to require them to.
01:18:14.440It is not an option to sit down at dinner.
01:18:16.780But maybe some nights you'll want it to be, some nights not.
01:18:19.400But if you're having a family dinner night, especially structured family dinner night, the number one rule is no electronics at dinner.
01:18:27.280If that rule is violated, then the electronics are taken away for a reasonable period of time and taken away right away for a reasonable period of time once the rule is understood.
01:18:36.880Right. And you can imagine that instigating wars in various households.
01:18:41.700Yes, exactly. And so and then you begin to structure that family dinner night so that everyone has an opportunity to talk and everyone has at the beginning a structured amount of time that they can check in to just say how their week went or how the week was going since the last time.
01:18:59.620So everyone knows that it's not 40 minutes for so-and-so and one minute for me, which makes the interest in family dinner night be zero for the one that's one minute.
01:19:10.500Well, that's an extension of the idea of a fair game, too, and a refereed fair game.
01:19:15.640Everyone is happy that you're that as a family, our job is to make sure everyone's needs are being handled, thought of and cared about, which is the way empathy is created.
01:19:27.300Empathy is not created by a parent who's always empathetic with a child's needs or desires.
01:19:32.540When a parent is always empathetic with a child's needs and desires, the child becomes narcissistic, not empathetic.
01:19:38.740And that's one of the things that we have made a mistake with.
01:19:41.180You could say that three or four times in a row, I think, and that would be really good.
01:19:47.040Right, because that's so crucially important because, you know, if what you're learning is to put other people's feelings at the same level of importance as your own,
01:19:58.100then obviously that's associated very tightly with delay of gratification, with learning how to listen, with turn-taking, with fair play, with a refereed interaction, all of that.
01:20:09.160And so, the other thing that happens too, and you see this with couples, is that if they have that time together, something analogous to family dinner night,
01:20:18.220although I think the family dinner idea is a really good one for reasons I'll mention here in a moment,
01:20:22.080is that what you're doing, imagine your family has a story, and the story is where we came from, where we are, and where we're going together as a unit.
01:20:31.320And then each of the individuals within that story has a story, and then what you're doing in those family dinners, that interaction time,
01:20:40.960is you're taking the individual threads, the individual story threads, and you're weaving them together to make the collective story.
01:20:48.800And that keeps everyone up to date, and on the same page, and able to empathize in also a deep manner,
01:20:56.140because if I don't know where you are, or what you're up to, I can't figure out what you're thinking or feeling.
01:21:01.640And so, I have to know what story you're acting out right now, and so do you.
01:21:05.000And in order for you to know that, for me to know it, you have to be able to tell your story,
01:21:09.340and I have to be able to ask you questions about it.
01:21:11.320And then I think the other thing that's really important about the shared meal is that, you know, human beings are really weird creatures,
01:21:17.280because we seriously share food, and we're social eaters.
01:21:21.320People don't eat well if they eat on their own.
01:21:23.460And so, it's deeply rooted into us, that idea of sharing food.
01:21:27.580And so, part of the extended process of socialization is to get everybody to sit down around food,
01:21:34.360to be polite and thankful for the fact of the food, to enjoy that,
01:21:38.500but then also to be able to give and take while that's being shared.
01:21:42.980And that's, I would say, if the most fundamental element of socialization is something like the embodiment of rough-and-tumble play,
01:21:50.020the next layer on top of that would be the ability to sit down and share food and have a civilized, and have civilized discourse.
01:21:57.800Absolutely. And that civilized discourse really needs to, the respect for story is so pivotal.
01:22:04.860So, I teach, as you probably know, couples communication courses around the country.
01:22:10.620And one of the dimensions of it, the single most important thing that kills marriages,
01:22:16.860or almost all relationships, is our biologically oriented inability to handle personal criticism without becoming defensive.
01:22:24.180So, my first job is to teach couples how to get around that biological propensity to become defensive when they hear criticism.
01:22:32.560One of the many steps in that process, which is much too long to go into now,
01:22:36.340but is to give them a picture of a person, happens to be Mario Cuomo, the former governor of New York,
01:22:43.740that was done by four artists of a picture that was taken at the exact same time, same place, etc.
01:22:51.320And there are four different types of artists that paint this picture of him, like Andy Warhol and Modigliani and so on.
01:23:00.220And work with every couple to understand that when you hear your partner's story,
01:23:05.580even though you're all looking at the same thing, there will be a different picture that is being created by each person at the table.
01:23:14.480And so, the job of couples is to understand how much of a sacrifice each person would make so that the other person would live,
01:23:22.580and yet how we're often not able to handle personal criticism,
01:23:25.780and to sort of reorient ourselves before we handle personal criticism,
01:23:29.660to move ourselves into a place of really being fascinated by our partner's story.
01:23:34.500But at a family dinner table, that has to happen with every single member of the family,
01:23:41.680that when I say, when person A says, what were you talking about in school?
01:23:49.220And somebody says, well, we're talking about the Me Too movement.
01:23:52.160And person A says, oh, the Me Too movement is stupid.
01:23:55.680So person B says, the Me Too movement is the best, most progressive thing that's ever happened.
01:23:59.380And so, it is very important that the person who says it's the best thing that ever has happened
01:24:06.240is listened to fully by the person who believes it's stupid and vice versa,
01:24:12.140and that there is facilitative questions that the family trains people to ask.
01:24:19.040Right, so part of it is, know the story before you offer criticism.
01:24:25.180And now, Carl Rogers had good advice about that, eh?
01:24:29.100And you probably already know this, but it's worth reiterating for people who don't.
01:24:33.960So, Rogers' rule was, when you're listening to someone,
01:24:38.260then, first of all, don't assume that either you or they know what they're talking about or what they're going to say.
01:24:43.820Because people think by, right, right, people think by talking.
01:24:49.120So you've got to give them a chance to get it all out before you jump on it,
01:24:52.300because they might change their own mind in midstream.
01:25:19.060First of all, it indicates to the speaker that the listener actually listened.
01:25:22.880Or if there's an error, then the speaker can say, no, that's not what I meant at all.
01:25:27.540And then there can be some clarification.
01:25:29.420But it also forces the listener to not turn the speaker into a straw man.
01:25:35.240Because it isn't only that I have to summarize what you said.
01:25:38.800I have to summarize what you said in a way that you agree with.
01:25:42.140And, you know, that's also a useful technique if there happens to be some wide variation in verbal ability among the participants.
01:25:49.800And there might be because of age, for example.
01:25:51.820And so, you know, because it might be that even if you're somewhat incoherent and stuttering and partial in your formulation,
01:25:58.960if I'm an older sibling, say, I might be able to summarize it back for you in a way that's actually helpful to you from the perspective of a cognitive scaffold.
01:26:49.160And everything you said, absolutely every part of it, I so agree with you.
01:26:53.520And, you know, when you say, did I distort something?
01:26:55.380Oftentimes, someone will say, repeat what they heard they say.
01:27:00.340And then you ask, did I distort anything?
01:27:03.300And the person says, yes, I think you distorted this.
01:27:05.400And then the other person will argue and say, no, I said that.
01:27:08.000And, you know, the rule of the game is the person who was speaking, whatever makes them feel heard, that's when you haven't distorted anything.
01:27:44.660And then, you know, part of what a family dinner night is about is having a chance to have somebody, if it's a personal criticism, be able to respond to that and have the person who is listening to, who have made the criticism to begin with, hear that response and ask if there's any distortion on what they've heard to begin with.
01:28:02.040And the biggest challenge for people, almost everybody, I remember I was interviewed once by NPR and they said, you know, how can you, you know, some of the people who are allied with the men's movement, they are, you know, they seem like hateful people.
01:28:16.860And I said, well, if you're calling yourself progressive as liberals do, as we do, because I consider myself more on the liberal side of most things, then our first job is to listen.
01:28:30.240When people feel heard, they stop hating.
01:28:32.760And, you know, hating comes from a buildup of not being seen, not being heard, being distorted, being blamed or caricatured in a negative way before you're heard it.
01:28:48.600So that is the job of every, you know, of every person that calls themselves progressive is to start hearing rather than arguing first.
01:28:57.160Well, then at least you can figure out what to argue about, you know, because one of the things that happens with crystalline communication in a family, when the stories are being unfolded, is you can identify what the problems are and what they're not.
01:29:11.300Like if you, you know, you might be irritated at having to listen to your spouse lay out in the stumbling, in their stumbling manner, a particular problem.
01:29:19.320But if you understand at the same time that they might be dispensing of 98 problems and only focusing on two, it's worth the wait.
01:29:28.060And so, okay, one other, another question for you.
01:29:31.940There are people who aren't in the position where they can have male involvement with their children, let's say.
01:29:37.680And so what, what do you recommend, if anything, for single mothers who are trying to do the best job they can with their kids, but are having a hard time pulling in male attention?
01:29:50.680First of all, acknowledge yourself for the enormous amount of multifaceted job you're undertaking.
01:29:57.160Second, as you look through the differences between mothers and fathers do, ask yourself whether there is any way you have maybe not valued your former husband in a way that can, that would, that would draw him into the fold.
01:30:15.940But if the answer to those questions are, you know, I have valued him and I still can't draw him into the fold.
01:30:26.300The number one, the greatest amount of evidence is that involving your children with Cub Scouts is a very, has a very well-developed program for developing character, motivation, integrity, loyalty, a sense of making promises that you keep.
01:30:45.260So very good studies have been done of children involved in Cub Scouts for two years or longer.
01:30:52.520But this means not just getting your child involved in Cub Scouts here or there, but, and if your child doesn't like something that's happened, making sure your child gets back into the fold and deals with what,
01:31:05.720that it shouldn't be that it shouldn't be your child's choice to go to Cub Scouts or not go to Cub Scouts as part of your parental responsibility to get him there later to Boy Scouts, or it doesn't have to be Cub Scouts or Boy Scouts.
01:31:18.240Otherwise, some Whys have good, good programs also for, for young boys.
01:31:22.800Mankind Project has good programs for young boys now for the first time.
01:31:28.040They, they have real good help, assistance to help boys with fathering.
01:31:33.280The Boys Clubs have some good programs with young boys.
01:31:37.740Get your, if you get your child, vet a male mentor, try to get your child to a school that has a significant number of males in, at the age that your child is, especially if your child is very young.
01:31:50.340It's very important that a child not go from a mom-only home to female-only schools because the child will start searching for an identity from somebody that's usually destructive, like a gang leader, that will give, will give false, false identity.
01:32:07.740And so these are just some of many, many things.
01:32:10.760If you, we often think that a child needs a male mentor.
01:32:16.240Try to vet the mentors carefully, obviously, or get your child to a faith, if you're at all involved in faith-based communities.
01:32:24.800And even if you don't believe in God, God or not, not, get your child involved in a faith-based community where there's a good male counselor who has groups for children, for young people, oftentimes young people that are having troubles.
01:32:41.620The ability to be encouraged to express your feelings to other males and see that your son is not just having the, is not isolated in the problems he's facing,
01:32:53.280but there's many other boys about his age that are having the same problems, getting him to be able to express his feelings about that, his fears about that, to see beyond, to have a, have little experiences done where he paints a mask of himself and what the mask says,
01:33:09.540and then what, what is really being said underneath the mask, a good male facilitator can be a wonderful encourager of a boy to express his feelings rather than repress his feelings in a society that is, as a, and then what we all have a need to do is to get out there and say something very damaging has happened in our society in the last 50 years.
01:33:32.460We, we've had, we've had, when I started this work with the government, with the commission to create a White House Council on Boys and Men,
01:33:39.720I started that after a call from the White House to say, asking if I wanted to be an advisor to the White House Council on Women and Girls because of my background with the National Organization for Women,
01:33:49.860and I said, absolutely, but there also needs to be a White House Council on Boys and Men.
01:33:54.420Well, for eight years we worked to make that happen, and now we're working with the Trump administration to make that happen,
01:33:59.540and no one is getting on board yet, but the importance of making that happen is that there has to be an entire change in attitude and atmosphere
01:34:10.740that we are not just living in a patriarchal, a world dominated by a patriarchy, that the world was dominated by a need to survive.
01:34:32.260Dads, our dads made sacrifices in their careers.
01:34:36.160There are very few dads of multiple children that, that followed the glint in their eye because usually fulfilled occupations that make you fulfilled are not occupations that pay well.
01:34:48.000So most of our fathers gave up fulfillment in order to do the things they needed to do, like be a firefighter or coal miner or being willing to be disposable in war
01:34:58.460in order to be able to make their generation safer and have more options and to have all the sacrifices that our fathers made called male privilege or male dominance
01:35:08.620or is such an underserving of men so that that entire attitude is also an underserving of women to state that the entire cultural structure to date has been patriarchal in origin.
01:35:22.100And, you know, you can argue what the definition of patriarchy is, but just understand that your father and grandfather and great grandfather all did the exact same thing as your great grandmothers and so on did.
01:35:36.440And they, they gave their lives in the hope that their, your life and their children's lives would
01:35:42.700be better with greater amounts of opportunities.
01:35:45.140And most of them sacrificed a great deal.
01:35:47.500My father, you know, managed a company and my mother was very unhappy and he managed his
01:35:57.560So my father eventually gave up his job and sold full of brushes from door to door for a year in order to be able to make sure we had enough money,
01:38:24.240And so your work has been very useful to me.
01:38:27.240And I appreciated very much the time that you spent today being able to talk to me.
01:38:32.000And I hope we get a chance to talk again.
01:38:36.060I would love to talk about the pay gap.
01:38:38.060It's really impossible to believe that there is not a patriarchal world if you believe that men are in more money than women do for the same work.
01:38:46.360And so one has to really start with a fundamental understanding that it's much, much more complex than that and a very, very different story than pretty much anybody perceives.