The Megyn Kelly Show - The Importance of Dads, Allowing Kids to Take Risks, and the Boy Crisis, with Dr. Warren Farrell

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00:00:30.660 Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show.

00:00:32.540 Your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations.

00:00:41.480 Hey everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly.

00:00:43.220 Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show.

00:00:44.760 Have we got an amazing program lined up for you today.

00:00:48.780 I've been thinking about this for days.

00:00:51.300 I was talking to my family about it this morning.

00:00:53.780 It's something I want my kids to listen to.

00:00:56.380 This is a show that has the ability to impact every single one of us.

00:01:00.000 If you have a family, listen up.

00:01:02.020 If you have sons, especially, pay attention.

00:01:05.180 Or if you would like to create a son someday and find a grown son, somebody else's, to partner

00:01:12.280 with in life so you can create a family of your own.

00:01:14.720 If you have a relationship that's on the rocks, all of it, there's help.

00:01:19.240 Workplace issues.

00:01:20.160 That factors into the discussion we're about to have.

00:01:22.280 The co-parenting drama that a lot of people find themselves in, including one of the biggest

00:01:27.200 celebrities in the world, Britney Spears.

00:01:28.900 There's news about that today.

00:01:30.440 All of this factors in as we speak today to Dr. Warren Farrell.

00:01:35.760 He is the author of The Boy Crisis.

00:01:38.800 Why our boys are struggling and what we can do about it.

00:01:42.220 He is also someone that you have been requesting in large numbers, and he has graciously offered

00:01:48.960 to take some of your questions later in this show.

00:01:53.340 His many, many books have been published in more than 50 countries and in 19 languages.

00:01:58.960 Dr. Warren Farrell, welcome to the program.

00:02:06.560 So great to have you here.

00:02:08.180 I'm looking so forward to talking with you.

00:02:10.200 I've admired you for many years.

00:02:12.120 Oh, thank you very much.

00:02:13.800 It was great to read up on some of your accolades.

00:02:17.080 The Financial Times of London has named you one of the world's top 100 thought leaders.

00:02:21.800 Think about that.

00:02:22.780 Top 100 thought leaders.

00:02:23.940 That's not an easy honor to receive.

00:02:27.420 And I respect that.

00:02:28.960 And I respect the area in which you've been working.

00:02:31.640 I mean, I've said a lot that on issues like the Me Too problems, the, you know, what happens

00:02:38.300 on college campuses with women and men, equal pay arguments and so on.

00:02:42.540 I believe the solution to this problem ultimately lies in parents who have both boys and girls.

00:02:50.140 Right?

00:02:50.600 Because we love them both equally.

00:02:53.300 We don't want our daughters to get sexually harassed or assaulted, but we don't want our boys

00:02:57.380 to get unfairly accused of these things.

00:02:59.420 We want our daughters to get equal pay, but we don't want it to come at the expense of boys who

00:03:04.080 have done nothing wrong or based on a lie about boys out earning girls that doesn't take into account

00:03:10.100 life choices.

00:03:10.800 Right?

00:03:10.920 Like when I talk to my other moms and dads of boy and girl parents, they make the most

00:03:16.520 sense to me on these issues.

00:03:18.040 So how did you get so smart on all of this?

00:03:20.400 Are you a, are you a dad of a boy and a girl?

00:03:23.180 And what brought you to this line of thinking to where you are recognized as one of the top

00:03:28.100 100 thought leaders in the world?

00:03:30.720 Well, as you probably know, my background started with the National Organization for Women in

00:03:34.980 New York City.

00:03:35.640 So I was deeply involved with the women's movement.

00:03:38.260 I spoke all over the world on behalf of women's issues.

00:03:40.620 And then as I was speaking, I remember once in particular at a, in Japan, a teacher came

00:03:48.900 up to me afterwards and said, you know, Dr. Farrell, I want to tell you the boys in our

00:03:53.540 class are actually having more problem than the girls.

00:03:55.720 I know you're speaking on behalf of women and supporting women's issues, but have you

00:03:59.980 ever thought about the issues that boys are going through?

00:04:02.720 And so that put that on my radar, maybe 40 years ago.

00:04:05.820 And then as I started hearing the same type of message in other countries, I began to

00:04:11.080 pay more attention to what was happening with boys.

00:04:14.180 And then I saw that boys in all 63 of the largest developed nations were falling behind

00:04:19.280 girls on every academic subject, but especially in reading and writing that turned out to be

00:04:24.860 the biggest predictors of success or failure.

00:04:28.000 And so I started looking more carefully at that and saw that boys sperm counts were male sperm

00:04:34.600 counts were going down, which obviously means that fertility is being affected and the health

00:04:39.420 of the future generations being affected.

00:04:41.580 I saw that male IQs were going down, that male males were having shorter life expectancies when

00:04:48.920 in the past life expectancies had always gone up from year to year, no less generation to

00:04:55.960 generation.

00:04:57.180 And so something was happening on so many levels.

00:05:00.080 The boys were much more likely to drop out of high school.

00:05:02.320 And boys who drop out of high school are far more likely to be unemployed in their 20s,

00:05:08.540 more than 20% likely to be unemployed in their 20s.

00:05:11.800 And of course, girls are not interested in unemployed boys who are often leaving in their

00:05:16.580 parents' basements or are on unemployment lines.

00:05:21.500 Girls, women don't look for future husbands on unemployment lines or in parents' basements.

00:05:27.100 And so this was affecting, as you so wisely pointed out, you know, when we're all in the

00:05:36.040 same family boat and when only one sex wins, both sexes lose.

00:05:41.000 And I think that's been a big, we've overlooked that in the focus on just women's issues,

00:05:47.400 because every woman's issue is a men's issue and every men's issue is a woman's issue.

00:05:52.380 And it's so exactly right.

00:05:54.500 So even the parents who only have daughters need to pay very close attention to this,

00:05:58.900 because what do you want your daughter to wind up with?

00:06:01.600 A strong, well-adjusted, equal partner man.

00:06:06.300 And how are we going to keep producing those if our messaging to kids is girls rule, boys

00:06:12.520 drool?

00:06:13.180 You know, the future is female.

00:06:15.120 All of that is a bunch of bull.

00:06:17.100 And it's very harmful messaging.

00:06:19.760 I'm sure it's intended to lift up little girls, but this is not 1950.

00:06:24.820 This is 2022.

00:06:26.540 And it's very demoralizing, the messages we've settled on right now to young boys.

00:06:32.400 Yes.

00:06:33.120 You know, from boys see messages and people wearing t-shirts saying boys are stupid, throw

00:06:38.060 rocks at them.

00:06:38.960 Or even something a little gentler, but also very malicious in a way, too, is the future is

00:06:45.380 female, is a wonderful message to women saying, you know, the future, you're very much a part

00:06:50.580 of the future.

00:06:51.600 But if boys are hearing that combined with toxic masculinity and combined with we live in a

00:06:56.840 patriarchy in which men made the rules to benefit men at the expense of women, all those things

00:07:01.800 together, take the junior high school boy who's trying to get up enough sense of himself

00:07:08.540 as being an important person in the future.

00:07:11.920 That's not encouraging for that insecure boy.

00:07:15.380 So how did it start?

00:07:16.660 How do we go from the place where I mentioned the 1950s?

00:07:19.780 You know, that was a place in time where gender roles were pretty well defined.

00:07:25.220 There weren't a lot of women in the workforce in any, you know, really powerful or well earning

00:07:30.200 roles.

00:07:31.620 And then things got turned around in some in some ways for the good and in some ways for

00:07:38.220 the bad.

00:07:38.640 But when did the crisis with our boys begin in earnest?

00:07:42.140 Well, it really began probably in the 60s when when there was more and more of an increase

00:07:50.300 in focus on on women's issues.

00:07:53.040 And we were sort of doing a zero sum game.

00:07:56.160 We're saying that, you know, that boys were part of the problem.

00:07:59.480 Boys were the oppressors.

00:08:00.920 And this came out of, you know, the we in the women's movement.

00:08:05.000 I say we in the women's movement because I was very much a part of the women's movement

00:08:07.920 at that time.

00:08:09.260 And we'd come through, you know, the civil rights movement and in which there was an

00:08:14.120 oppressor and an oppressed group.

00:08:15.680 And many of the early feminists were Marxist in their tendencies and they were in Marxism.

00:08:21.260 It was sort of like there's an oppressor and an oppressed.

00:08:23.620 And that hierarchical assumption that somebody has to be on top and somebody's on the bottom.

00:08:29.240 We took that into women's issues and and and said that, you know, women were the oppressed

00:08:35.060 and men were the oppressors.

00:08:36.400 And that left and then we said masculinity is toxic and that toxicity comes from male

00:08:43.400 privilege.

00:08:44.260 Well, it is true that there's a lot of parts of masculinity that are toxic, just like there

00:08:49.140 are a lot of parts of femininity that are toxic.

00:08:51.860 But the toxicity of masculinity does not come from male privilege.

00:08:56.380 It comes from the the price that men paid by having to cut off from their feelings in order

00:09:02.840 to be disposable in war and be willing to be the ones to go out and be killed.

00:09:08.160 And each generation had its war.

00:09:10.000 And we were we told men you were needed and you needed to be drafted and you need to register

00:09:14.580 for the draft.

00:09:15.320 Even today, you need to register for the draft if you're a male, but not a female.

00:09:19.240 And so males learn that if you're going to if you're going to serve that purpose of being

00:09:23.800 worth worthwhile, you're going to either be willing to risk disposability in war or disposability

00:09:29.720 in the workplace and the most hazardous jobs, for example.

00:09:32.220 And this but in order to be willing to be disposable and think of yourself as a hero by possibly

00:09:39.340 giving up your life, you had to disconnect from your feelings of hurt and of pain, of

00:09:44.460 sensitivity.

00:09:45.760 And that created a set of problems of not being able to say what's going on inside of you.

00:09:51.140 And so there were lots of male toxicities, but they didn't emanate from male privilege.

00:09:56.560 They emanated from the price that men paid in order to feel like they would be able to get

00:10:01.380 loved.

00:10:02.280 They noted men noticed that women fell in love with, you know, not the not not the private and

00:10:09.600 the pacifist, but the the soldier and the person that was was quite the opposite of the

00:10:15.840 private and the pacifist, if you will, the officer and the gentleman.

00:10:19.560 Oh, that's so interesting.

00:10:21.080 One of the things you said reminded me of it's a Dr.

00:10:24.200 Phil line, but I loved it.

00:10:26.720 And it goes as follows.

00:10:28.360 How can you win when the person you love most is losing, you know, fights between women and

00:10:33.320 men, the search for women to get ahead in the workplace and sort of equal out their position

00:10:39.120 in America at writ large?

00:10:40.960 How can we win when the guys we want to love and do love are losing?

00:10:46.000 It's not a zero sum game.

00:10:47.340 It can't it can't be zero sum.

00:10:48.660 As you know, I do couples communication workshops, and one of the things I ask every couple to

00:10:54.320 do and, you know, understand in the couples workshops, some people are there just to enhance

00:10:58.500 their marriage or relationship and others are on the verge of divorce or have already

00:11:02.480 filed for divorce.

00:11:03.360 So it's a large group of different group of people.

00:11:06.880 And one of the questions I ask is to write down something, the answer to a question that

00:11:11.980 your partner will never see.

00:11:13.420 Um, and I make sure that that happens, uh, that they don't see it.

00:11:17.680 And, um, and the question is, if you're, if your partner was to be on the verge of dying

00:11:23.460 and you knew with a hundred percent certainty, your partner was going to die.

00:11:26.800 Um, and yet you could, um, you, you knew that with a hundred percent certainty that you could

00:11:32.920 save your partner's life.

00:11:34.280 However, you'd take a 50% chance of risking or losing your own life in the process.

00:11:40.080 Would you do it or not?

00:11:41.700 Yes, no, uncertain.

00:11:45.560 90 some odd percent of the men, usually about 95% of the men, even though some of them are

00:11:51.260 thinking about a divorce, um, say that they would risk their lives at the 50% level to

00:11:58.460 save their partner's lives.

00:12:00.120 About 85% of the women say the same thing about the men and among gay couples is pretty

00:12:06.120 much the same, um, ratio.

00:12:07.760 And yet, so I, so my first step in, in mindsets that I asked people to do in order to, before

00:12:16.200 they listen to their partner's criticism is to say, if I'm willing to die to give my partner

00:12:23.460 life, maybe I could listen to give my partner life.

00:12:28.500 And that's one of six meditations I asked people to go for, to go, um, to do before they hear

00:12:38.260 their partner's criticism of them, realizing that when you provide a safe environment for

00:12:44.280 your partner's concern or criticism, you're giving them life.

00:12:47.740 And you're also guarantee doing what I call a love guarantee.

00:12:51.760 You're guaranteeing that your partner will feel safe when she or he says, whatever they

00:12:57.240 want to say in whatever way they want to say it, exaggerating, not telling the same story

00:13:03.020 that you would tell.

00:13:03.860 And when they feel completely heard, they feel safe by you, therefore they feel more

00:13:10.100 loved by you and therefore they feel more love for you.

00:13:13.740 And it's exactly what you were saying a minute ago, these, that, you know, when we love somebody

00:13:17.960 so much, what is there about us that can't hear their complaint and what there is about

00:13:23.120 us that can't hear their complaints or their criticism is that historically and biologically,

00:13:27.540 when there was a complaint or a criticism about us, it was a potential enemy.

00:13:33.180 And so biologically, we were prepared to become defensive when we heard an enemy criticize us,

00:13:39.900 um, because defenses were our way of surviving.

00:13:43.600 However, they're the, while they're helpful for survival in the past, they're not helpful

00:13:49.160 for love in the future.

00:13:51.100 How big, and I want to get into more of the couple stuff later, for sure.

00:13:55.400 They're kind of all fascinating, but how big a role has men's presence outside the home

00:14:02.600 as the, typically the historical, uh, primary wage earner played in this, I don't even know

00:14:08.940 what toxic masculinity is exactly.

00:14:11.480 You know, I, I can think of one example of it in my life.

00:14:15.300 I mean, I'm, there have been more, but I'll give you one example that I know was a toxic

00:14:18.700 masculine moment.

00:14:20.140 Beyond that, I don't really understand it.

00:14:21.700 Um, I was a young lawyer.

00:14:24.800 I was in my twenties.

00:14:25.940 I bumped into a guy from college.

00:14:28.080 I went to Syracuse university and he was like, Oh, you're a lawyer.

00:14:31.720 I'm like, yeah, I'm a lawyer.

00:14:32.680 He's like, Oh, good for you.

00:14:33.580 He's like, I never, I never expected you to wind up, you know, doing something like that.

00:14:37.200 I'm like, Oh, well, thanks.

00:14:38.080 Yeah, it's working out fine.

00:14:39.120 He's like, what firm are you with?

00:14:40.140 And I happen to be with one of the best firms in the country.

00:14:42.480 So there's no way around acknowledging, you know, it was a great firm.

00:14:46.200 And he's like, Oh, good for you.

00:14:47.740 It's nice.

00:14:48.360 Go make me a sandwich.

00:14:49.780 And he walked away.

00:14:50.980 So he's a jerk, right?

00:14:52.160 The guy's, the guy's a jerk.

00:14:53.320 And I would definitely say that's toxically masculine, I guess, under sort of the loose

00:14:58.060 term that the way it's used today, where you're just sort of like a douchey guy putting

00:15:02.640 down a woman, um, in a way that seems based on gender or sex roles and so on.

00:15:07.680 Anyway, I don't really understand the term, but I do wonder to your point about years

00:15:12.860 of going to war and years of being the one to have to sacrifice and risk physically sort

00:15:17.020 of the other piece of that is years of having to be the one out of the house and not really

00:15:21.240 around the children as much and not, you know, and having the responsibility of being the

00:15:25.820 nurturer at home.

00:15:28.920 Yeah, I think a lot, a lot of, I think a lot of men do do things that, you know, even they

00:15:34.240 would look back on and say, we're, we're not appropriated or not, you know, not, not,

00:15:38.880 not conducive.

00:15:39.680 And one of the things that I used to do is a couple, I used to do, um, role reversal dates

00:15:45.320 and men's beauty contests.

00:15:46.460 And so I would say every woman is in a beauty contest every day of her life.

00:15:50.480 And so, um, I'll, if men here in the audience would like to understand what women go through

00:15:55.540 as being part of that beauty contest in everyday life, I'll ask every single man in the audience

00:16:00.480 to come up on the stage and in the aisles and to be part of that beauty contest of everyday

00:16:05.420 life, uh, that women go through.

00:16:07.780 And so I would then have all the women be the judges.

00:16:10.960 And so the, uh, women would ask, um, so, so the guys at the end of the process, um, there

00:16:17.600 would be six finalists and then finally a winner.

00:16:20.780 And the, the guy who was the winner would almost always say some version of this is interesting.

00:16:26.540 I'm so proud of being a winner.

00:16:28.620 And for the last, you know, hour, I competed fiercely to, to get this accolade of being

00:16:35.540 a winner.

00:16:36.220 And yet the questions that have been asked of me are making me feel like they're, they're

00:16:41.560 not tapping into my values, my intelligence, my thoughtfulness, my caring.

00:16:46.820 They're just, you know, they're just, I'm being looked at as a body.

00:16:50.140 And, um, and I, that feels really, um, bad to me, even though I've competed to be part

00:16:55.580 of that.

00:16:56.480 Um, and so when the women heard that, they'd go, yes, thank you.

00:17:00.980 Um, and I'd say, but remember, this is a role reversal experience.

00:17:04.480 So I'm going to ask now the women, uh, to experience what men go through.

00:17:08.760 And so, first of all, I'd ask the women to sit in seats in rows according to how much

00:17:14.180 money they predicted that they would be making in the future.

00:17:17.360 Then I'd ask the guys to focus on, um, the women who earned the most money so that their

00:17:23.100 children would have the most options in the best schools, the best neighborhoods and so

00:17:26.920 on.

00:17:27.340 And to not just put their eyes on the women in the back rows who are on average, more

00:17:31.700 attractive, interestingly.

00:17:33.520 And so the, the, the guys, um, tried to, you know, I really had to work hard to get

00:17:38.480 the guys to do that.

00:17:39.720 And finally, um, I'd ask the women to sort of focus on the body that you'd most be

00:17:45.020 interested in to really tune into the guys' bodies.

00:17:47.660 But of course, because the men had been through that men's beauty contest, uh, they all had

00:17:51.480 an hour of training to tune into the guys' bodies.

00:17:54.600 And so then the women came up and they tried to compete for the man that was, was most attractive,

00:18:00.460 uh, to them.

00:18:02.300 And oftentimes the most attractive men, the finalists in the beauty contest had seven,

00:18:06.720 eight, nine women, uh, that were competing to be their date for the evening.

00:18:11.800 And so, um, at the end of that process, I'd ask the women to talk about their experiences

00:18:16.940 and they'd say, this is amazing.

00:18:19.440 Whenever I've used the word in the past, use the word jerk, I would use it for a man.

00:18:25.860 But today I came up and I was wanting to ask Bill or whatever out.

00:18:31.100 And there were seven other women competing with me.

00:18:33.960 So I started saying, you know, Bill, you're going to really love going out in my portion.

00:18:38.000 I'm going to take you to this restaurant, which I've never been to, but I heard it was the

00:18:41.340 best restaurant in town.

00:18:43.040 I can't afford it, but I was exaggerating what I had.

00:18:46.180 I don't have a Porsche.

00:18:47.320 I was exaggerating where I would take them to, which I couldn't afford.

00:18:50.820 And then when, when I had it narrowed down to two or three women and I still wasn't winning,

00:18:56.040 I took the guy by the arm and pulled him away, uh, with me.

00:19:00.620 Uh, so I, uh, and, and did something that if a guy did that to me, I would consider that

00:19:06.200 sexual harassment or some version of that.

00:19:08.060 Um, but I did it to him.

00:19:09.880 I was like such a jerk.

00:19:12.260 Um, and now I'm getting to, I'm getting the, the cue that, you know, that, that being that

00:19:17.920 toxic male, being that jerk was oftentimes, uh, what I did to compensate for my insecurity,

00:19:24.320 to be able to not get rejected.

00:19:26.740 And the guys would go, Oh, thank you.

00:19:29.860 That is what so frequently being a jerk is about, um, doing something that is, I'm trying

00:19:36.580 to do to minimize rejection.

00:19:38.780 But in the process of doing it, I oftentimes increase my possibility of being rejected.

00:19:44.320 Yes.

00:19:44.920 Yes.

00:19:45.420 Oh gosh.

00:19:45.820 It reminds me of another, another incident back in my young, same timeframe.

00:19:49.720 Um, when, you know, I was at the dating version of myself and, uh, I was new in Washington,

00:19:53.500 DC and I went out to a bar and there was a guy who worked on Capitol Hill who thought

00:19:57.780 I knew who he was because he was some, you know, fourth aid to some 400th congressman.

00:20:02.500 I'm like, I never even heard of your congressman, nevermind you.

00:20:05.080 And, um, this guy starts going on thinking it's going to make him sound studly about how

00:20:10.940 he's going to marry his first wife and he's going to have all of his children with his

00:20:14.600 first wife.

00:20:15.200 Who's got to be hot cause he's got to have good looking children.

00:20:17.780 And then once she gets fat and old, he's going to dump her and he's going to make sure

00:20:22.080 he has a trophy wife for the second way.

00:20:23.960 Cause he never wants to be with somebody fat and wrinkly and older.

00:20:26.640 And I was getting so pissed off listening to this guy.

00:20:28.980 I remember saying to him, I'm like, well, you better hope that your wallet fattens at

00:20:32.880 the same rate that your hairline recedes.

00:20:35.000 Otherwise you're not going to command that.

00:20:37.820 That's great.

00:20:38.760 And the great least that's fascinating and sad, deeply sad.

00:20:43.560 Um, and I don't know how any man would ever think that that would work.

00:20:48.100 Oh, sure.

00:20:48.960 Let me be number one.

00:20:50.020 I look forward to that.

00:20:51.740 Yeah, yeah, exactly.

00:20:52.680 Yeah.

00:20:52.900 We'd like to go out with me and be, be the, the, the, the woman I have children with and

00:20:57.900 dump.

00:20:58.640 Um, and you know, the ironic thing is that once men fall in love with women, um, it is

00:21:07.060 there, the depression, the sadness that they go through, the withdrawal, the, um, office,

00:21:15.360 often suicidal tendencies that they, they feel ideations that they have are enormous.

00:21:20.700 Um, when women and men break up, um, it is more likely the woman, the man who will be,

00:21:25.820 um, deeply depressed as a result of that, because very, very frequently, the man has

00:21:32.000 all, it doesn't feel comfortable talking about feelings to anybody, but his wife and

00:21:37.400 his fears to anybody, but his wife.

00:21:38.860 And so everything that he, that he, uh, when he talks to other men about a problem that

00:21:44.340 he might have with his wife, men will usually give him about two or three minutes worth of

00:21:48.300 time and then switch the topic to, you know, what do you think of the game last night or

00:21:51.980 what, some, something like that and not pay really attention to him.

00:21:56.060 Uh, whereas when women talk to women about the problems they're having with guys, the

00:22:00.540 women are much more likely to say, oh yeah, I observed that with your husband or your

00:22:03.840 boyfriend.

00:22:04.440 And yeah, I had the same problem with my boyfriend.

00:22:06.680 And by the time the woman is done, she's feeling supported and heard and understood by

00:22:11.620 her women friends.

00:22:12.920 Guys don't do that for men friends.

00:22:14.560 And so all of men's eggs of intimacy are in the basket of their wives or women friends.

00:22:19.960 And when they break up, uh, they often go through very deep depression, um, much more

00:22:24.860 frequently than, than the female does.

00:22:27.360 So guys have been put in this very tough position where we want them to risk their

00:22:30.860 lives to protect us.

00:22:32.200 I mean, they were the hunter gatherers.

00:22:33.780 They were out there supposed to be dealing with the, you know, woolly mammoth, whatever

00:22:38.080 at the time.

00:22:39.820 And then we make them, you have to go out into the workplace and deal with that rat race

00:22:44.140 and earn the paycheck.

00:22:45.880 And then we kind of turned everything on its head and said, now this version of you is

00:22:50.820 unacceptable.

00:22:51.300 Now, all the things that have happened to you from thousands of years of evolution are

00:22:56.180 as of today, unacceptable.

00:22:58.120 They all must be unlearned.

00:23:00.180 And at the same time, they're looking at women saying, STEM educate, go to the sciences,

00:23:07.600 go to the math, go out there and be the primary wage earner.

00:23:10.460 And a lot of women were like, oh, okay, I'll do it.

00:23:12.000 I'll do it.

00:23:12.440 And then only learned later.

00:23:14.320 Well, uh, I'm not sure how much I love.

00:23:16.980 A lot of them learned.

00:23:17.900 And I'm not sure how much I love this role either, right?

00:23:21.580 Both of us have been placed in, in these new, uh, configurations that may or may not

00:23:26.100 align with what we truly want.

00:23:28.440 Yes.

00:23:28.680 And that's the real key for some women and some men, they really do align.

00:23:33.540 I was always, I always had an interest in being the provider protector, but I also had

00:23:38.660 a very strong nurturer connector part of me.

00:23:41.300 And I was always torn between those two, you know, parts of myself and that's me.

00:23:46.680 Um, but other men were, you know, very comfortable.

00:23:48.780 They, they, they really wanted to go to, you know, to be a soldier.

00:23:52.920 But the question that I will ask of a, of a boy, a young man who wants to be a soldier

00:23:57.900 or go into the military is, are you doing it because uncle Joe's picture was on the,

00:24:02.960 on the mantle and he served as a Marine in world war II.

00:24:06.380 He was always spoken of as a, as a hero.

00:24:09.240 That is, are you following a social bribe to be approved of and recognized and acknowledge,

00:24:16.080 or are you doing it because it's something deep inside of you that you feel will, that

00:24:20.900 you, you feel will be energized by the discipline and energized by serving.

00:24:25.480 So look deeply inside of yourself and find out, uh, we don't, what you, uh, what, who you

00:24:31.640 really are.

00:24:32.300 And that's the function of two good parents, um, who are, who are, who are doing two things

00:24:37.660 usually with children, uh, when women alone are parents, they're usually very good at

00:24:42.560 identifying the child, the children's, um, gifts.

00:24:46.340 Uh, you're a wonderful singer.

00:24:47.860 You really play that guitar.

00:24:49.320 Well, you're a good basketball player.

00:24:51.300 And, um, and, and then encouraging the boy or the girl to sort of pursue those gifts.

00:24:56.000 And oftentimes the girl or boy, uh, does do that.

00:24:58.960 Um, dads tend to play a role of saying, um, yes, if you want to do that, that's great.

00:25:05.600 Um, but that's going to mean if you want to be a, the, you know, one of the gymnasts and

00:25:09.300 the Olympics, uh, that's going to take you making sacrifices.

00:25:12.640 You're not going to be able to go to as many parties.

00:25:14.480 You're not going to be able to play as many video games.

00:25:16.280 You're not going to be able to, um, to, you know, to just goof off and hang out, um,

00:25:20.240 with, with people, um, and talk with them on the phone for hours.

00:25:23.780 You're going to have to make sacrifices.

00:25:25.340 And if I'm going to make the sacrifice to take you to, to give you a tutor, uh, to take

00:25:30.060 you to, um, to your, to your practices, um, I want some sacrifice from you.

00:25:35.160 I don't want you to try to have it both ways.

00:25:37.120 And dads are more likely to say, if you don't do that, I'll stop giving you the things you

00:25:43.560 need to, to have your dream.

00:25:45.260 When the children have that boundary enforcement, they're oftentimes, they oftentimes learn that

00:25:51.900 if they do want to pursue a dream, like being an Olympic gymnast, it's going to take sacrifices.

00:25:57.400 And if I don't make those sacrifices, I'm not going to get my parental support, but if

00:26:01.820 I do, I will, or if I decide we do, I don't want to pursue that dream.

00:26:05.520 I want to have a more balanced life than being an Olympic gymnast or whatever.

00:26:09.100 Um, then, uh, then my parents will support that, but they're not going to support me to

00:26:15.040 do something that I say I want to do, but I only halfheartedly do because that will not

00:26:20.780 get me there.

00:26:21.920 And so it's that combination of nurturing, protecting that moms so frequently do traditionally.

00:26:28.080 And sometimes these are reversed, of course.

00:26:30.500 And conversely, that dads often say, uh, they're much more likely to do the boundary enforcement

00:26:36.220 and be tough on the kids and say, you know, if you want this, I'll participate, I'll give

00:26:41.940 to you, but only if you do your part in the game.

00:26:45.580 Sometimes that feels to a mom, like the dad is being too tough that, you know, the child starts

00:26:49.900 crying because they can't go to their best friend's birthday party.

00:26:53.400 Um, and the dad understands that that's a real sacrifice that that kid makes.

00:26:58.020 Um, but says that that's the way you get that goal.

00:27:01.840 But if you want the goal of a balanced life and good emotional skills and having, um, you

00:27:06.360 know, having people to having all the learning experiences that come with playing with other

00:27:10.380 people, uh, then that's okay too, but it's a different experience in life.

00:27:15.220 You're not going to the Olympics as a teenager then the, the, the point of the story is supportive

00:27:21.980 of the notion that we need dads.

00:27:24.300 We need dad, we need moms and dads in the family and more and more in American society.

00:27:30.160 We're, we don't have the dads.

00:27:31.720 We, we have an absentee dad problem that is pretty massive and it's cross-cultural.

00:27:39.280 It's cross-racial.

00:27:41.480 I mean, obviously there's been some attention paid to what's happening in the, in the black,

00:27:45.780 uh, communities given what we see in terms of crime rates and inner cities and absentee

00:27:50.260 fathers, but it's not just a black family problem.

00:27:53.720 And you, I know you've pointed out that, um, is it the second highest, like the second

00:27:59.300 highest version of an American family has a single mom living with her child or children.

00:28:04.220 That's, that's the second most common family you'll see in America.

00:28:09.180 Yes.

00:28:09.500 It's, uh, 40% of children live, um, with only, um, their mom, only one parent and almost always

00:28:17.420 the mom.

00:28:18.020 And you, you, so you, you mentioned a couple of things about history here, which is very

00:28:22.520 important.

00:28:23.440 Uh, Moynihan was the first person to see this Senator, um, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who was

00:28:28.160 a U S Senator, Department of Labor, uh, secretary under Johnson and Nixon.

00:28:32.180 And, um, so one of the most respected people in the country, and he did something that is

00:28:37.680 commonly called the Moynihan report.

00:28:39.580 And this is 1965, mind you.

00:28:42.180 So in 1965, he, uh, was assigned to find out why there's so much crime in inner cities.

00:28:48.660 And there was a lot of fear.

00:28:50.000 Oh my goodness, this is going to be a racist report.

00:28:52.060 That's going to show that, you know, the blacks commit most of the crimes and, um, everyone

00:28:56.200 was sort of like putting their heads behind their, um, yeah, their, their hands and, uh,

00:29:00.480 wondering what was going to come out.

00:29:02.180 And what he found out was that it something very different, which is the children committing

00:29:08.180 crimes in the inner cities were children who had minimal or no father involvement, but I

00:29:13.600 came to call dad deprived children.

00:29:15.940 Now they were mostly in black families.

00:29:18.900 25% of black families at that point in 1965 were being raised with, uh, only a mom and almost

00:29:26.560 no dad.

00:29:27.160 At that point in time, it was less than 1%, three, three tenths of 1% of, um, um, um, Caucasian

00:29:35.300 families were being, were, um, raised in that situation today.

00:29:39.040 It is 32% of Caucasian families have children raised by only one parent, almost always the

00:29:46.620 mom.

00:29:46.920 And 72 or 3% of the black families have children being raised by only the mom.

00:29:55.340 And so today, Caucasian children are in the same situation, even worse than black families

00:30:04.000 were in 1965.

00:30:05.420 And we see that when a child is raised without a dad for each 1% increase in children being

00:30:13.280 raised without a dad, there's a 3% increase in crime, um, uh, happening in that, in that

00:30:19.520 area where that is, um, uh, prone.

00:30:21.480 And so I really began, and Jerome Powell pointed this out, uh, um, and, uh, the, you know, the

00:30:26.900 Fed chair, uh, said that, you know, looking around the world, he saw that, you know, where

00:30:31.260 there were problems, but particularly in the United States, uh, they were problems of children

00:30:36.420 that did not have their fathers and their problems of boys.

00:30:40.260 And we were not doing, and boys were, were not being, um, educated, um, to, um, have technology

00:30:49.240 to have both parents.

00:30:50.440 And so this was part of what I was discovering as I did the research for the boy crisis.

00:30:55.500 When I submitted the boy crisis to my publisher, I initially outlined 10 different causes of

00:31:03.100 the boy crisis.

00:31:04.080 And then I started studying each of those 10 causes.

00:31:07.080 And I wrote my publisher and said, I'm sorry, but I'm finding that largely the boy crisis resides

00:31:12.000 where dads do not reside.

00:31:13.900 And he said, well, then elaborate on that.

00:31:15.920 And so I began to look at that in greater depth and found out that the children who had

00:31:22.260 minimal or no father involvement, or what I call it came to call dad deprived, those children

00:31:27.540 did worse in 70 plus different metrics from, but the boys did much more intensely worse than

00:31:35.520 the girls.

00:31:36.080 So the boys and girls, for example, were more likely to commit suicide when they didn't have

00:31:40.520 dads, but boys at the age of nine, um, they commit suicide about equally to girls.

00:31:45.900 And very minimally, but between the ages of 10 and 14 boys suicide rate became twice that

00:31:53.200 of girls between the ages of 15 and 19, four times that of girls between the ages of 20

00:31:59.120 and 25, uh, five times that of girls.

00:32:02.180 And the single biggest predictor of suicide in either boys or girls was lack of presence

00:32:08.760 of dads.

00:32:09.400 And so that got me into looking at, well, you know, I, I knew my dad was important, but

00:32:15.880 I didn't have any clue that he was that important.

00:32:19.880 And I started to, you know, to examine exactly, um, you know, what there was about fathering

00:32:25.840 that was so different from what mother, mother style parenting was and why children who did

00:32:32.100 the best have what I call checks and balance parenting where the father respects the mother

00:32:37.980 style, the mother respects the father style, and they communicate about how to make win-win

00:32:42.580 situations out of putting both of their styles together.

00:32:45.880 Hmm.

00:32:46.680 All right.

00:32:47.060 So now this has you worried because you lost your spouse and your, your children don't have

00:32:53.400 a living father or because you got a divorce and he turned out to be a deadbeat and left

00:32:58.560 or because you're in a lesbian couple, right?

00:33:01.820 And you, you have children, all those things, uh, Dr. Farrell has taken a look at and has

00:33:06.580 thoughts on, and I'll pick it up right there after a very quick break.

00:33:15.420 So now that we've scared the, you know what, out of, uh, parents who are in fatherless homes,

00:33:21.880 right?

00:33:22.180 Either they've gotten a divorce or the dad's taken off, or maybe you're a mom who's made

00:33:28.380 the dad not have contact, you know, bitter, the guy, you didn't like him, you kept him

00:33:33.500 out.

00:33:33.960 You got a good child arrangement, you know, child custody arrangement, uh, thinking that

00:33:38.040 was best.

00:33:38.500 Or even just like two of my closest friends are in a lesbian couple.

00:33:42.000 They say they're bi, but they're in a lesbian marriage anyway, for the record, they, there's

00:33:47.260 no dad around and they just had a boy.

00:33:49.640 They have three girls.

00:33:50.320 They just had a boy, but they have a good plan for male role models in their children's

00:33:55.780 lives, including their boy.

00:33:57.180 But what is the answer to, to those situations?

00:34:01.160 A lot of, a lot of levels.

00:34:02.740 First, the first level, um, many dads do become deadbeat to withdraw, um, after they, when they

00:34:10.500 feel like they're only wanted for their wallet and they're only wanted for their money.

00:34:14.140 And so, um, if, if you're a mom and you really want to have the dad back in your life, but

00:34:19.760 he seems to not take much interest or he's getting involved with another woman and their

00:34:23.800 children, um, and he feels more needed by that other family than he does by, by, uh,

00:34:28.480 you and your children.

00:34:29.860 One of the first way, the first thing you can do is to, um, study the differences between

00:34:36.040 dad style parenting and mom style parenting and, and point and tell him that you value his

00:34:43.280 roughhousing, but now you understand why roughhousing leads to empathy, the exact opposite of what

00:34:51.220 you think roughhousing leads to.

00:34:53.160 And I'll, I'll explain why, if we talk about that in a little while, why teasing has certain

00:34:58.220 benefits, why taking certain risks up to a certain point, um, teach increases children's

00:35:04.180 IQ, increases, increases children's ability to, to assess risks.

00:35:09.120 In other words, excuse me, find out what dads tend to do that leads children to do so much

00:35:19.800 better with dads.

00:35:21.760 Let your, the man that has dropped out of your children's life, uh, let him know that you

00:35:27.760 now understand why he is needed and you want to support that as long as he's also listening

00:35:34.960 to you and your, your input.

00:35:38.340 Um, and so that's the number one way to get the most important person in your children's

00:35:43.680 life, aside from you back into your children's life, which is, um, the biological dad, the

00:35:49.700 stepfather, um, is very, can be a very important substitute role model, but it's almost never as

00:35:56.040 important as the biological dad and the biological mom, because the, eventually the children look

00:36:01.280 in the mirror and they see, uh, whatever they hear about the biological father or mother,

00:36:06.500 they worry or think that that might be them in the future.

00:36:10.140 They see the parents, both parents, body language, eyes, you know, eye color, um, hair, whatever.

00:36:16.880 And they know that whatever you say about the other parent is also that's being said about

00:36:23.140 them.

00:36:23.540 Um, and so, and both parents are, both children are looking always for the, the input of both

00:36:30.580 parents because it's also part of who they are.

00:36:33.960 And so, um, it's, so that's, that's the number one way, but if there's, if the, you know, the

00:36:39.380 dad has died or he's in prison for too long to, to, to come out, um, to be with the children

00:36:44.860 or for some other reason truly is a deadbeat, um, and won't come back under even those circumstances,

00:36:50.580 then, um, there's a lot of things you can do.

00:36:53.500 One is if you're at all faith-based oriented, get your child involved in a faith-based community

00:36:59.160 in which the minister, priest, uh, rabbi or umam is, um, forms groups of boys, your son's

00:37:07.140 age, and make sure that they're in confidential groups where they talk about their feelings or

00:37:12.860 their fears.

00:37:13.380 So that almost all boys growing up as girl and girls as well, uh, feel like they have

00:37:19.940 special insecurities, but boys in particular have almost no permission to talk about those

00:37:25.480 insecurities.

00:37:26.120 And when every boy in a confidential group of your son's age is talking about his insecurities,

00:37:31.560 it makes each boy in the group realize that they're, those, that those insecurities are

00:37:36.440 not just them.

00:37:38.020 They're everyone's insecurities.

00:37:39.580 And that makes them feel a lot more internally secure.

00:37:43.560 That's one example.

00:37:45.020 Another is get your children involved in the liberal arts of sports.

00:37:48.620 When I say the liberal arts of sports, what I mean is get them involved in team sports where

00:37:53.040 they learn how to, to get good advice from a coach and how to work together with other

00:37:57.760 people to win, get them involved in one of the most neglected forms of sports, um, in

00:38:03.260 recent history, which is pickup team sports.

00:38:05.740 Pick up team sports is wonderful preparation to be an entrepreneur because you're creating

00:38:10.480 something from nothing.

00:38:12.080 You're creating your own, um, say on a basketball court, you're saying, do I play half court

00:38:16.400 or full court?

00:38:17.360 Um, do I pass to this person or do I pass or not pass to that person?

00:38:21.240 Because it's every time that person asked me to pass to him, he just wants to hog the

00:38:25.480 ball for himself.

00:38:26.240 So you're learning all those skills as to how to put a team together, how to work, how

00:38:30.520 to select and unselect from, from various people that you work with.

00:38:34.920 And then also individual sports like tennis or gymnastics where there's a team, but the

00:38:41.460 primary focus is on your developing your own discipline and your own skill sets.

00:38:45.600 And if you're a mom and you, uh, go out to the games, especially the organized sports

00:38:51.880 games, um, and make contact with the, the coach, um, particularly if it's a male coach

00:38:57.460 and explain to the male coach that the boy doesn't have the biological father around.

00:39:02.240 And if he, if he, the coach can take your son aside occasionally and point out valid things

00:39:08.160 that your son is doing well to make your, help your son feel special.

00:39:11.840 And also things that your son is not doing as well as he could be doing to make your

00:39:16.260 son, um, have an inspiration to do those things better.

00:39:19.620 Uh, that's a helpful role model to bring into your, into your son's life.

00:39:24.300 Um, you know, third Cub Scouts and Boy Scouts, Cubs, almost every parent I know cares that their

00:39:30.340 children have idea, uh, have character, good character more than almost anything else.

00:39:36.040 And Cub Scouts, if your child attends Cub Scouts, your son attends Cub Scouts for two years

00:39:40.980 are more consistently, uh, studies show that those children develop much more positive

00:39:46.460 personality characteristics that, that, of integrity, of loyalty, of, um, of, um, of

00:39:53.760 honesty, uh, than they do without the Cub Scouts.

00:39:58.100 Boy Scouts have, are one of the most amazing, um, constructs of masculinity, but, you know, boys

00:40:04.280 do very much better when they have incentives and when they get little badges to say, I did

00:40:11.060 it.

00:40:11.480 And, um, and then, but the, the badges, the, the merit badges and Boy Scouts, not only are

00:40:18.220 merit badges for that particular activity, but they usually put your son in contact with

00:40:23.720 a male mentor who is good at that activity.

00:40:25.960 And so you're, you're, you're giving your son male mentor after male mentor and a concrete,

00:40:31.580 um, goal of being able to, um, say, I, I did this activity well.

00:40:37.240 And, um, and then, and then possible bigger goals like becoming an Eagle Scout or a Star Scout,

00:40:42.660 um, to, um, to, to say that I have, you know, put together not just one specialty, but multiple

00:40:49.260 specialties.

00:40:49.980 And in the process, your son is, is able to, to discover, you know, what am I good at?

00:40:56.500 What do I like?

00:40:57.820 And, um, and what, what's the combination of what I like and good at?

00:41:01.860 I was blessed to be good at math, but I didn't like math.

00:41:05.420 And so I got into something that wasn't math oriented.

00:41:09.100 Well, this is so fascinating.

00:41:10.380 And it's so heartening to know there are avenues where you can create a male role model types in

00:41:17.440 your son's life, even if you're in the unfortunate position of not having, uh, you know, biological

00:41:21.600 dad in the house, or you've just chosen not to, um, one thing you said, reminded me of a story

00:41:26.460 that's in the news this week.

00:41:27.480 And we have the video, the importance of sports, then the lessons that are learned out on the

00:41:31.620 sports field.

00:41:32.200 This made national news.

00:41:33.380 It was a little league game happened on Tuesday between a team from Paraland, Texas

00:41:38.200 and a team from Tulsa, Oklahoma.

00:41:40.560 Now here's what you're going to see in one second.

00:41:42.360 The Texas East pitcher is named Caden Shelton and Caden had a pitch get away from him and

00:41:48.720 it struck Tulsa's Isaiah Jarvis in the head.

00:41:53.000 Isaiah falls to the ground, fortunately hit his helmet.

00:41:56.640 So he was okay.

00:41:58.780 And then the pitcher, the pitcher, Caden got very upset that he had hurt, you know, inadvertently

00:42:05.180 this other kid, this batter, and he started crying in the mound.

00:42:08.020 And here you see the kid from Tulsa who got hit, walk over to the pitcher's mound.

00:42:14.640 He's, he hugs the pitcher.

00:42:17.440 Oh my God.

00:42:18.420 It's like, I want to cry.

00:42:19.660 He's hugging him, making the pitcher feel better.

00:42:22.720 And he says, Hey, you're doing just great.

00:42:26.440 You're doing great.

00:42:28.160 And the coach comes out, the other boys come out, I'm like getting misty.

00:42:32.920 I just looking at this example, um, of how amazing it was.

00:42:37.640 And the Texas East, the pitcher's team wound up winning the game nine to four.

00:42:41.560 They've qualified for the little league world series.

00:42:45.440 Um, and the boy who threw the pitch later gave an interview saying he could hardly breathe

00:42:49.800 out there.

00:42:50.160 He was so upset about hurting the batter.

00:42:52.800 And, uh, when the little kid told him, look, you got this, you got this, just take deep

00:42:56.700 breaths.

00:42:56.980 He was saying to him and just think happy thoughts.

00:42:59.520 I think my God, what every parent would want, right.

00:43:04.480 For, to, for their kids to experience on the, on the ball field.

00:43:08.080 And if I were the parent of the little boy who did the hugging, the one Isaiah Jarvis,

00:43:15.000 I'd be like, I'm not doing a college application essay.

00:43:18.480 I'm just going to submit this videotape.

00:43:20.500 So, you know, what kind of a person I am.

00:43:23.180 I so agree with you.

00:43:24.800 I am, I am misty eyed watching that also.

00:43:27.900 That was just absolutely the type of, um, you know, the type of character development

00:43:34.200 we all want for our children.

00:43:35.820 And one of the nice things about sports is that especially, um, pick up team sports and

00:43:40.880 where you're changing, you know, the sports every day.

00:43:43.200 I can remember when I was playing baseball and, you know, somebody would slide into first

00:43:47.680 base and somebody would say, you know, the second baseman would say, you're out.

00:43:50.560 And then, and the person sliding in said, I'm safe.

00:43:52.780 You dummy, blah, blah, blah.

00:43:54.160 They're back and forth at each other.

00:43:56.180 On the next day, we'd be on the same team together and, um, you know, and calling somebody

00:44:00.680 else, um, you know, the dummy.

00:44:02.100 And so, you know, we, we began to learn, um, unconsciously that where you stand depends

00:44:08.480 on where you sit.

00:44:09.280 And that, you know, that, that, you know, mocking each other or, you know, calling each other

00:44:13.800 names, uh, that those were things that weren't, um, fundamentally, um, name calling that really

00:44:19.980 we meant.

00:44:20.560 They were just the, the, the, the, um, uh, the, the moment of excitement and, um, and anger.

00:44:27.320 And then we, we knew though, uh, that the, the people that we were yelling at, uh, the

00:44:32.480 next day, we might be on their same team and just yelling differently about the same type

00:44:36.920 of, um, outer safeness.

00:44:39.480 My gosh, there's so much to learn from the sports teams.

00:44:42.840 And, uh, and like you say, just the pickup game, you know, my kids are down there right now playing

00:44:46.620 four square.

00:44:47.820 I got, this isn't something we arranged.

00:44:49.660 They just went to play four square.

00:44:50.500 There's so many, and then they come home, they realize, and I saw my little guy, when he turned

00:44:54.500 nine, they were playing a game of four square.

00:44:55.940 And I saw all these other kids make sure, I guess they're, you're like king.

00:45:00.100 You can be, I don't know that how it works, but you can be ace, you can be queen, you can be

00:45:03.620 joker or whatever.

00:45:04.500 And if you're King, it's good.

00:45:06.020 And these kids, while they're a lot of them were older last round, they, they made sure

00:45:11.620 my little guy who was the birthday boy was King on the very last, you know, bouncing of

00:45:16.080 the ball.

00:45:16.520 Like, that's great.

00:45:17.620 Nobody told him to do it.

00:45:18.660 They're just being good kids, learning kindness, fears, competitiveness.

00:45:21.880 They were going to kill each other five minutes earlier, but it ended on a positive note that

00:45:26.240 made the birthday boy feel good.

00:45:27.780 And those are the kinds of moments where you believe in humanity.

00:45:30.840 Um, and it makes you want to foster more of it.

00:45:32.820 Absolutely.

00:45:34.080 Is this Thatcher who was playing four square?

00:45:36.120 Yeah.

00:45:36.700 That's my little Thatcher, my babe, who I'm trying to infantilize and not turn into a

00:45:42.080 man.

00:45:42.680 I want him to stay home with mommy forever.

00:45:46.500 You know, it's hard.

00:45:47.340 The more, the more we love somebody, uh, the more we want to enable them or we, the more

00:45:52.320 we want to do for them, but the doing for them is so often enabling them.

00:45:55.620 Um, and, uh, we often say moms have unconditional love and we don't sometimes understand that

00:46:01.160 both moms and dads have unconditional love, but dads are far more likely to have conditional

00:46:07.020 approval as part of the package of unconditional love.

00:46:10.740 And so it's so important for us to understand that, that concept.

00:46:15.780 Well, and I know you say you need the data around.

00:46:17.880 I mean, of course these are all, you know, stereotypes and it could be different.

00:46:20.140 Maybe, maybe moms are more like this in some families, but I remember when my, when our

00:46:24.820 eldest was learning how to ride a bike and I thought he was too young to switch from his

00:46:28.260 little balance bike where you just push your feet to a bike with pedals.

00:46:32.180 And Doug was like, Meg, it's time.

00:46:34.680 He can do it.

00:46:35.300 And I was like, well, I don't, I don't know.

00:46:37.400 He's like, just go have lunch with Janice, have a glass of wine and you come back later.

00:46:42.620 I'm like, well, put on his little knee pads.

00:46:44.320 And his, I really was totally paranoid.

00:46:46.080 He's not like me, but I did.

00:46:47.660 And he kicked me out and I came back from lunch with my friend Janice and I came back

00:46:53.840 to this child riding a bike, no knee pads, none of the protective stuff except for the

00:46:57.820 helmet, riding, yelling, I'm doing it.

00:47:02.440 I'm doing it.

00:47:04.620 The dad, his willingness to take risks, his, you know, just the attitude you're talking

00:47:10.480 about is what led to that moment.

00:47:12.960 Absolutely.

00:47:13.380 And to a couple of things of your parent listening to this is that sometimes those risks will

00:47:19.200 end up in exactly what the mom predicted, a scraped knee, you know, some of the child

00:47:25.020 falling and doing, you know, and falling on his or her head or something along those

00:47:29.760 lines.

00:47:30.620 And if you'd like to, when we come back after break, I'd love to talk about some of the ways

00:47:36.260 that manifests, like how dad's doing roughhousing so often scares moms, how the, how the, what

00:47:42.760 moms predict that will come out of the roughhousing, that one of the children getting hurt is oftentimes

00:47:48.140 more likely to be correct than not correct.

00:47:50.860 Yet what the children get from the roughhousing when it's done in the way that the best dads

00:47:57.060 do it, that lead to the children who do the roughhousing actually being more empathetic

00:48:02.860 than they would without the roughhousing.

00:48:04.940 So, you know, very few dads understand this and, you know, they don't go ahead and say,

00:48:08.700 I want to do roughhousing with the kids to make them more empathetic.

00:48:11.480 It's about the most counterintuitive thing you could imagine.

00:48:14.580 But I do want to talk about that.

00:48:16.060 And I want to talk about the teasing too, because I'm Linda Kelly's daughter and there's a lot

00:48:19.680 to answer for Dr. Warren Farrell, standby, quick break.

00:48:23.280 So much more, including couples, including school shootings, and more of a deep dive on

00:48:29.820 our young men.

00:48:34.700 Dr. Farrell, the, the, the notion of roughhousing and teasing, right?

00:48:38.920 I know it's got to have some limits about it.

00:48:40.500 We're not talking about beating the hell out of somebody and we're not talking about crushing

00:48:44.160 their spirit to the point where they're in tears because you've insulted them so badly.

00:48:47.260 But there's a whole realm before you get into those danger zones.

00:48:53.440 Yes.

00:48:54.200 A very good example of that is like, let's say you have two sons and a daughter and, you

00:49:01.340 know, you're, and the, and the, and the dad starts to say, oh, okay.

00:49:04.980 The three of you get on the couch and the three of you jump off the couch onto my back

00:49:08.820 and I'll see whether I can pin the three of you down before the three of you pin me down.

00:49:12.480 And the kids are all excited about, you know, doing that.

00:49:15.660 And mom is going, looking oftentimes and going, oh my God, I feel like I have just one more

00:49:19.760 child to monitor here.

00:49:21.800 You know, she's sort of saying, you know, I, you know, I don't want to be controlling

00:49:25.560 and the kids seem like they're having fun.

00:49:27.460 But on the other hand, I just feel like, you know, sooner or later, somebody is going

00:49:30.640 to get hurt.

00:49:31.060 Um, and she's only about 99% likely to be right.

00:49:35.180 Um, and the, and so eventually, you know, they're roughhousing, the kids are loving it.

00:49:41.840 And eventually somebody starts to cry.

00:49:44.320 Um, and the mom goes, oh my God, now she feels guilty that she didn't interfere, uh,

00:49:48.720 because she, you know, didn't don't, doesn't want the children to cry or get hurt.

00:49:52.480 And so she, but she thinks, all right, dad will be mature enough to recognize that this

00:49:56.560 ends up in kids getting hurt and he'll stop the roughhousing.

00:49:59.440 But he doesn't stop the roughhousing.

00:50:01.560 He goes some version of, um, you know, Jimmy, you can't stick your, um, you know, your elbow

00:50:06.420 in your, your sister's, um, eye like that.

00:50:08.920 That's not a way to win roughhousing.

00:50:10.460 And you can't push so hard.

00:50:12.500 That's too aggressive that you, it's fine to be assertive.

00:50:15.500 You can put your eye, you know, fake, fake your, your, your brother or sister out.

00:50:20.540 Uh, you just can't push them that hard.

00:50:22.700 Uh, okay.

00:50:23.300 Okay, dad, we got it.

00:50:24.140 We got it.

00:50:24.820 Um, and then they go back and they go back to roughhousing and mom is saying to herself,

00:50:29.100 wait a minute, he didn't learn his lesson.

00:50:31.320 Now they're back to doing the same thing that led to the children getting hurt before.

00:50:35.300 And then sooner or later, again, the children, um, get, uh, somebody does something too aggressive.

00:50:41.280 And dad is more likely to say something like, okay, um, you did what you said you wouldn't

00:50:46.000 do.

00:50:46.320 And now the roughhousing stops and there's no more roughhousing until maybe two days from

00:50:51.340 now.

00:50:52.260 And so mom feeling, mom's feeling a little bit mixed about this, you know, wait a minute,

00:50:56.740 like that you stopped the roughhousing, but what are you telling the kids you're going

00:51:00.280 to do it again in a couple of days.

00:51:02.420 And it's the couple of days later that the payoff comes.

00:51:06.640 Um, now the kids know that if they're too aggressive or they stick their elbow in their

00:51:11.140 sister or brother's eye, uh, that the roughhousing is going to stop like it did last time.

00:51:18.300 Now they're beginning to learn postponed gratification.

00:51:22.040 Immediate gratification is pushing their brother or sister out of the circle or putting the elbow

00:51:26.700 in the eye, um, postponed gratification is saying to themselves, I want the roughhousing

00:51:32.360 even more than I want this immediate gratification of pushing my sister or brother around.

00:51:37.340 And I know I'm going to lose, um, the roughhousing, what I really want.

00:51:41.880 If I, if I do the pushing around and I'm too aggressive, that's when the, and the, the

00:51:47.760 postponed gratification is the single biggest predictor of success or failure.

00:51:53.320 Um, and so in life, like as a human.

00:51:55.880 In, in life as a human, academic success or failure, academic success or failure is most

00:52:02.760 predicted by reading and writing skills, but life success or failure is most predicted by

00:52:09.560 the ability to have postponed gratification.

00:52:12.140 Obviously it's not the only predictor, lots of other things as well, but postponed gratification

00:52:16.880 is the single biggest one.

00:52:18.580 And the other, the other thing that's so helpful in life is empathy.

00:52:22.860 And so here's the connection between empathy and, and roughhousing that the, the children

00:52:29.080 who realize that they have no choice, but to think of their sisters or brothers feelings

00:52:34.700 by being pushed too hard or having an elbow in the eye, they're learning to think of their

00:52:39.780 sister and brother in order to get what they want.

00:52:43.960 Children don't develop empathy by choice.

00:52:47.300 They develop it by knowing that they get something that they want as a result of being empathetic.

00:52:54.360 Interestingly, parents who are extremely empathetic, but for whom empathy is only a one-way street,

00:53:00.260 that is the parents are constantly empathetic to the children.

00:53:03.260 That does not lead to empathetic children.

00:53:06.360 Children only, children who are only empathized with, but are not required like at family dinner

00:53:12.300 nights to also hear the parents and the parents' perspective.

00:53:17.100 They don't learn, they don't learn to be empathetic themselves.

00:53:21.280 They only learn to receive empathy and receiving empathy as a one-way street becomes narcissism.

00:53:28.500 And that explains a lot.

00:53:30.120 Yeah, it does.

00:53:31.660 You know, our society today's day, I mean, we talk a lot about helicopter parents who are

00:53:34.880 there like, I mean, that's exactly the wrong thing to do on every front, according to what

00:53:38.980 I'm hearing, you know, you're taking away so many opportunities from your child and you're

00:53:43.940 not, you may be, you may be keeping him or her safe for the time being, but not for the

00:53:48.300 long-term and you're not developing any character.

00:53:51.500 Yes, absolutely.

00:53:52.520 And, and, and, and here, you know, obviously safety and watching out for a child's safety

00:53:57.160 is important also.

00:53:58.620 And, and so before we were talking, I was mentioning that checks and balance parenting is, is the

00:54:04.320 parenting that, that really is most helpful for children.

00:54:07.340 So for example, uh, uh, the, the child may go to the mom and say, can I climb the tree

00:54:12.020 in the backyard?

00:54:13.060 And the mom may say, well, sweetie, you're, you're too young for that now, maybe in a few

00:54:17.100 years.

00:54:17.800 And then goes to the child, goes to the dad and the dad says, okay, but be careful.

00:54:21.880 And then the mother sees the child out there climbing the tree and goes, what are you doing?

00:54:25.480 I told you you couldn't climb the tree.

00:54:26.740 Well, dad said, Ted, dad said I could climb the tree.

00:54:29.460 And so checks and balance parenting would be mom and dad getting together and saying, okay,

00:54:34.440 you know, um, I don't want the child to climb the tree because the child can get hurt, fall

00:54:38.580 out, get a concussion, might be the end of his or her life.

00:54:41.500 And dad says, well, the child needs to learn how to take risks.

00:54:44.460 And, um, and, and, and that actually, if he, if he's, you know, one of the things I discuss

00:54:49.440 in the boy crisis is that risk taking children, uh, like the ones that climb the tree have better,

00:54:55.180 um, uh, skills that lead to an actual increase in their IQ because their synapses are, uh, firing

00:55:02.480 and developing in ways that, that, that were outside of their normal comfort zone and their

00:55:06.700 normal pattern.

00:55:07.680 So anyway, the children, so dad can maybe explain that intellectually, but also can explain that

00:55:13.960 the two of them can end up working on a compromise.

00:55:16.240 Like, okay, the child can climb the tree, but not beyond a certain level.

00:55:20.260 And to, to make sure that the father is underneath the tree so that in case the child does fall,

00:55:25.340 uh, that she or he, um, gets protected by the child's, uh, the father cushioning the child.

00:55:29.880 And the mom might negotiate with the dad to take the cell phone away from the dad.

00:55:33.620 So the dad is focusing on the child and not the cell phone.

00:55:37.240 And, um, and so what the two have done together is to give the child maximum protection, but

00:55:43.020 at the same time, uh, give the child, uh, the ability to develop the, um, that constant assessment

00:55:49.140 of what's safe and what's not safe with the underlying security blanket, like a rollercoaster,

00:55:54.300 you know, you get the excitement out of the rollercoaster you get, um, but you, you know,

00:55:58.460 that's the, the, the, the rollercoaster is going to keep you safe at the same time, um,

00:56:02.820 as it's going to allow you to have a certain amount of excitement and risk-taking.

00:56:07.340 I mean, all these are so, they're fascinating to me.

00:56:11.020 And it does seem to me, I mean, you tell me, but like for my friends in the same sex marriage,

00:56:15.460 this seems like, I mean, I, I don't want to characterize anybody, but one of them is from

00:56:20.920 Vermont and she's much more earthy.

00:56:23.040 And she's, you know, she's more like, we're not doing that, you know, like this, that makes

00:56:28.440 no sense.

00:56:29.320 And, and the other gal is more like fun loving and a spender and like, more like it's fine.

00:56:36.860 I don't know.

00:56:37.280 Like, so I feel like, is it about gender roles exactly?

00:56:41.200 Or is it about personality types that tend to be associated with one gender or the other?

00:56:47.000 That's a really good way of putting it.

00:56:48.540 It is, um, almost all the, um, couples in my couples workshops that have been gay, uh,

00:56:54.160 or, um, have been, uh, have said that they do a couple of exceptions to this, um, but that

00:56:59.940 they do have like a male and female role within the framework of the gay couple, whether it's

00:57:04.080 the male, male, or the female.

00:57:06.020 And, um, and so you, you often, so, you know, where those roles develop from and why we're,

00:57:11.720 you know, most, most of the time couples are attracted to the members of either the other

00:57:16.100 sex or the same sex that are fairly different from them.

00:57:19.460 Um, but then they end up blaming the other sex for the differences that they were attracted

00:57:23.300 to.

00:57:24.040 And so, you know, one of the little wisdoms in my couples workshop is before you blame

00:57:28.400 your partner, look in the mirror, uh, see what you needed that led you to be attracted

00:57:32.480 to the person you were attracted to, whether you're gay or straight, this seems to be a

00:57:36.680 pattern.

00:57:37.060 And the, you know, in gay couples, uh, one does tend to play more of a male role.

00:57:41.320 One does tend to play more of a female role and very occasionally I find them, you know,

00:57:45.800 not being able to differentiate.

00:57:47.460 Uh, so anyway, and then, okay.

00:57:50.540 So yeah, go ahead.

00:57:52.200 Sorry.

00:57:53.060 So there's two other things I want to get to before we take the callers and I want to make

00:57:55.840 sure I get them in.

00:57:56.340 Cause I do want to spend some time on couples.

00:57:57.700 I think your insights are so helpful, but I, but I, we have to talk about school shootings

00:58:01.980 because I know you've written a lot about that and we've covered so much about this and,

00:58:07.580 you know, you, you make some very obvious, um, observations, but they need to be underscored

00:58:13.800 and then you go much deeper.

00:58:15.500 School shootings are committed by boys, by young men.

00:58:19.560 It's not girls who are doing this.

00:58:21.780 And there's a reason for that, you know, and you point out people take, those are the violent

00:58:25.400 videos and, you know, definitely guns have something to do with it.

00:58:29.280 Um, but, and even absentee fathers, boys and girls grow up in that same home, a brother

00:58:34.980 and a sister, they grew up in that same home without the dad, with the violent video games,

00:58:39.820 with guns, potentially maybe not with a very good, good, healthy family dynamic, but still

00:58:45.160 it's boys who are doing the mass shootings, the school shootings.

00:58:47.880 So let's get into it.

00:58:49.180 Why?

00:58:50.080 Why is that?

00:58:51.240 Yes.

00:58:51.480 Um, the boys are usually, um, a boys be, they're usually more, much more likely than other people

00:58:59.200 to be dad deprived.

00:59:00.440 So, uh, of the seven mass shootings in which 10 or that were school shootings, uh, that

00:59:06.820 when, which 10 or more people were killed since in the 21st century, um, we, we know the

00:59:13.440 family backgrounds of six of those boys and the family backgrounds of six, the six boys

00:59:18.140 that we know are pretty similar.

00:59:19.780 They're, they're all dad deprived boys, very minimal or no father involvement.

00:59:24.280 And most of the boys also had antagonistic argument, very argumentative relationships

00:59:30.320 with their mothers, um, and, and usually had no father and no good male role model in their

00:59:36.440 life, um, that was active and present in their life, um, with consistency, but mostly it's

00:59:42.160 dad deprivation and boys.

00:59:43.420 Um, so, you know, what can, so what is this about?

00:59:48.080 And the boy with, um, with no, um, and I got a, an example of this, uh, was a boy from not

00:59:55.520 too far from Uvalde, Texas who had called me before the Uvalde, Texas incident and said,

01:00:00.760 I really want to thank you, um, Dr. Farrell for, you know, the boy crisis book.

01:00:04.600 I was, um, with a fascist group called 8chan and, um, I didn't have a, um, a father.

01:00:11.500 I was raised by a mom who didn't like men.

01:00:14.080 Um, and then I, I got into lots of conflicts with her and then was passed on to my grandmother,

01:00:19.260 um, on my mother's side and then aunts.

01:00:22.480 Um, and we got all into big fights and, um, I had, I felt I had no purpose in life.

01:00:28.660 I was addicted to video games.

01:00:30.000 I saw myself as a character in a video game, not as a real human being.

01:00:33.380 Um, I, um, without the purpose and structure, I got attracted to a fascist, um, 8chan group.

01:00:39.720 Um, and I started to think that, you know, having the fascist solution would be a really,

01:00:44.520 um, good solution.

01:00:45.880 And I could teach the world a lot of things, but underneath it all, I was super angry.

01:00:50.740 And he said, what I got out of the boy crisis was not your data, but rather that, that my,

01:00:57.120 my attitudes, my internal thinking was seen exactly.

01:01:02.320 I felt like somebody finally understood me.

01:01:05.260 And when I finished that, I ended up not having the anger that I felt before.

01:01:11.480 I still had anger.

01:01:12.880 I still hated my mom, but it was not enough anger to, uh, execute on a 52 page manifesto

01:01:20.560 that I had written.

01:01:21.540 That was what all the exact plans I was going to do to create this mass shooting.

01:01:26.080 So thanks for saving my life and thanks for saving the life of many other people.

01:01:31.140 And, um, to this, um, and so my next job with that young, young, young man was to communicate

01:01:37.080 with him on zoom and to try to get him to, um, to see that his mother loved him, probably

01:01:41.660 not hated him.

01:01:43.200 And, um, fortunately that has worked.

01:01:45.180 And he's now sees his mother as having let him do the video games, because that was the

01:01:49.460 one thing that his mother felt that he was, uh, that satisfied him and made him happy.

01:01:53.560 And she wanted to make him happy.

01:01:54.820 Um, and so, but the, it's just an example of the, what happens in so many young men's lives

01:02:03.400 who don't feel they have the structure, the purpose, and the role model.

01:02:08.620 When, uh, when a girl is raised by a single mom, uh, she usually, she at least has a female

01:02:14.480 role model that she can sort of model herself afterwards.

01:02:17.380 And girls have much more permission in society to be able to express their feelings and fears.

01:02:22.140 And moms can often identify with those feelings and fears.

01:02:25.000 So at least while the girl is, um, significantly, um, oftentimes hurt by not having a significant

01:02:31.660 father involvement, um, nevertheless, um, the amount of, of damage is much more frequently,

01:02:38.680 um, um, befalls the boy without a, without a same sex role model.

01:02:43.900 Hmm.

01:02:44.700 My gosh, that is just terrifying.

01:02:46.700 I mean, what you just described describes the Uvalde shooter and describes the new town

01:02:52.580 shooter.

01:02:52.980 I mean, you can just think of the ones off the top of your head where in both of those

01:02:56.620 cases, the mothers allowed the boys to spend countless hours, um, behind.

01:03:01.660 To close doors in the basement, watching violent videos.

01:03:04.940 The mother in the Uvalde case was absentee and reportedly had many other issues, including,

01:03:10.260 you know, many interactions with the police and so on.

01:03:12.960 And the dad wasn't there either.

01:03:14.940 In either case, there was a divorce in the Sandy Hook.

01:03:17.160 I don't, but I think he lived in a different place.

01:03:19.360 And, uh, the kid was living with a grandfather.

01:03:23.080 Adam Lanza, of course, had that very similar background of, of lack of father involvement as

01:03:27.200 well.

01:03:27.860 And so, and so the, so the importance of us bringing our dads.

01:03:33.220 Now this, I want to be really clear.

01:03:35.580 This is, this does not mean that if you have a child growing up without a dad, he's going

01:03:39.800 to become a mass shooter or he's going to commit suicide.

01:03:42.620 Um, you know, many, many children raised by single mothers who are probably the hardest,

01:03:46.020 among the hardest working people in the country, um, do just fine.

01:03:49.360 Um, but among the ones that are having problems, these, uh, what we call failure to launch,

01:03:54.700 the ones that we know are bright, but are not living up to their, their, the intelligence

01:03:59.860 we sense in them.

01:04:01.240 Um, those are the ones that so frequently do not have that, that, um, that, you know, that

01:04:06.840 you take that risk, that teasing, um, that, that helps children be able to be criticized

01:04:13.840 without, and recognizing that they can laugh at themselves and have the humiliation, the

01:04:18.620 self, um, uh, the, uh, the, uh, the ability to, to laugh at themselves in that, that capacity.

01:04:25.240 There's so many things that both parents bring to parenting that children, um, really seem

01:04:30.620 to need both girls and boys and girls have a similar set of problems, but there are also

01:04:35.280 some different ones.

01:04:36.300 So for example, children, uh, who are girls who are not raised with minimal or no father

01:04:41.220 involvement are far more likely to become pregnant out of wedlock as teenagers.

01:04:46.220 And one of the reasons is that they don't know how to rough house with their dad.

01:04:49.760 They don't know how to talk with their dad.

01:04:51.160 They don't have lots of social skills of, of knowing how to deal with the male and male

01:04:56.420 energy and male humor and male teasing, uh, that, uh, that girls who grow up with those

01:05:02.100 types of, of social skills learn.

01:05:04.620 And therefore they, uh, when they're with a boy, one of two things tends to happen.

01:05:09.240 And they tend to feel like the only way I can please this boy and not lose him to another

01:05:13.520 girl is by being sexual with him.

01:05:16.740 Um, and so she becomes sexual with him before she's comfortable being sexual with him, uh,

01:05:22.140 because she feels that's the way she can keep him.

01:05:24.460 Or conversely, she's so fearful about relationships to begin with.

01:05:28.360 She's afraid of becoming intimate with boys at all.

01:05:30.740 And so one of those two extremes, um, is more likely to happen with girls, um, being raised,

01:05:36.400 um, with a minimal or no father involvement.

01:05:39.240 Hmm.

01:05:39.900 So what you're telling me is that because I lost my dad to a heart attack when I was

01:05:42.960 15 and he was 45 when Linda, my mom thereafter continued to mock my feet, which are very unattractive

01:05:49.160 and to tell me that I was going to be with her for a long time because I too was rather

01:05:53.740 unattractive.

01:05:54.420 She was shoring me up.

01:05:55.860 She was shoring me up for life.

01:05:57.120 That's amazing.

01:06:00.840 It's like Eleanor Roosevelt's, um, stepmother, you know, uh, FDR's father.

01:06:04.620 And it was, um, you know, it was, it was constantly commenting that, you know, FDR should find somebody

01:06:10.100 other than Eleanor because she wasn't good looking enough for the, you know, for the society and

01:06:14.520 Eleanor's own father, uh, own mother, uh, was critical of her looks.

01:06:18.660 And it's such a sad thing when we put so much emphasis, especially on female looks.

01:06:24.320 Yeah.

01:06:24.960 Well, I mean, let me tell you, she wasn't wrong.

01:06:27.520 If you could see pictures of me as a little girl, there was no promise there.

01:06:30.260 I mean, they were just setting me up for the future, but you know, a little hair dye and

01:06:34.580 I got my teeth fixed and you know, you lost some weight.

01:06:37.180 Then your bone structure comes out.

01:06:38.400 There's hope for everyone.

01:06:39.940 Um, let's talk about couples and attraction.

01:06:43.780 Cause this is one of the things I find very interesting.

01:06:45.740 You have a thing in one of your books.

01:06:47.100 I'm trying to remember which one it was, but it's about how a man needs one thing in order

01:06:53.220 to want to sleep with a woman to find her attractive.

01:06:56.480 He needs her to be sexually attractive to him.

01:06:58.360 And a woman needs a list that is as long as Santa scroll in general before she, and like

01:07:05.320 what's on her list and why are we so different when it comes to what makes us actually want

01:07:10.380 to couple with the other sex?

01:07:13.020 Yeah.

01:07:13.460 For, I guess, reasons of evolution, you know, men, um, the male need was a sexually attractive

01:07:20.180 and younger female, uh, which was, um, and the sexually attractive historically meant,

01:07:25.180 um, that they were genetically more healthy.

01:07:27.580 They had, you know, cheekbones that were, you know, similar in high and, and other characteristics

01:07:32.100 that, that were signatures of greater health and youth, of course, because they had, you

01:07:37.800 know, the, they were at the right age to be able to, to, to bear children.

01:07:41.520 And so we've been genetically programmed to fall in, you know, to have sex, to desire to

01:07:45.780 have sex with a woman who is just plain beautiful and young.

01:07:48.320 Um, um, and the, and women, um, historically, um, desired to have sex with men who were, well,

01:07:55.700 they were able to provide income or some economic securities or some ability to protect and provide.

01:08:01.500 Um, but the men who are, you know, the, the qualities it takes to be successful at work

01:08:06.520 are often an enormous tension with the qualities it takes to be successful in love, uh, to be

01:08:12.320 successful in work, uh, you learn to listen as somebody else is talking and provide solutions

01:08:18.620 inside of your mind as somebody else is talking.

01:08:21.280 If you're a lawyer, you've, you, you learn to find the criticism, the fault in what somebody

01:08:25.740 else is saying, and you're rehearsing your response to that fault, uh, while the other

01:08:30.240 person is talking, well, that may be great in a law court, but if you come home and you

01:08:34.140 do that with your husband or your wife or your children, uh, your children don't feel

01:08:37.740 heard that your husband or wife doesn't feel heard.

01:08:39.940 So the qualities it took to become successful at work, um, become, um, oftentimes unsuccessful

01:08:45.260 in love.

01:08:46.120 And the challenge with all that is that, that, that therefore the lists that women have to

01:08:51.640 gather in order to be not just protected, but to be with a man.

01:08:55.740 Who's emotionally intelligent, despite being successful, I say, despite being successful

01:09:01.020 because those two are often in tension, um, means that she has to check, not just for the

01:09:06.160 success, but is there respect for her beyond the, um, as part of the emotional intelligence

01:09:12.660 is respect for her manifested by listening, not solving problems.

01:09:16.820 Almost every CEO I've ever dealt with has been so good at solving their wife's problems.

01:09:23.540 Um, and it's almost always the husband CEO and the wife, but when it's reversed, the same

01:09:28.940 type of thing with the female CEO is often that she's very good at solving her husband's

01:09:33.620 problems.

01:09:33.960 But, uh, the woman whose problems are solved in a few seconds, while she hasn't been able

01:09:39.440 to solve those problems, um, in all her lifetime up to that point, uh, does not feel more respected

01:09:45.080 by those problems being solved and just not feel heard.

01:09:48.100 And so there's so much.

01:09:49.960 And she doesn't feel they're solved.

01:09:51.660 And she doesn't feel they're solved.

01:09:53.320 And the best way I can communicate with that male CEO is to say, listening is the solution.

01:10:01.660 Like, you don't have to solve the problem.

01:10:06.100 You have solved the problem by listening.

01:10:09.600 And when she asks you for your input, yes, eventually give your input.

01:10:14.560 But before you give your input, say, you know, if, if you were the person that you're dealing

01:10:20.920 with, what would you say?

01:10:23.220 Role, role play the person she's having the conflict with, have her role play it.

01:10:27.620 When most, for most people, the answer is within them.

01:10:32.420 And when you draw them out to discover the answer that's within them, they feel so much

01:10:38.160 more empowered and so much more loved by you and so much more listened to by you.

01:10:43.960 And that's the solution or a little tip of the iceberg of the solution.

01:10:49.380 Is that also true with children, right?

01:10:51.500 It's like the role is not the same.

01:10:53.180 If you're the parent listening to your child, especially the younger children, you know, they're

01:10:57.060 not, they're not 25, you know, they're minors.

01:11:00.920 Is it the same role to listen or in that situation, should you be more aggressive about offering

01:11:05.520 proposals?

01:11:07.220 It's, yes.

01:11:08.280 First, listen, see what the children can discover inside of themselves, but then don't hesitate

01:11:13.700 to also share the gap between what the children do come up with and what you feel is helpful

01:11:19.580 for the children to learn.

01:11:21.700 Okay.

01:11:22.260 That's good to know.

01:11:22.960 And you also talk about the importance of that family dinner table, about how that should

01:11:26.700 be treated as sacred at that time.

01:11:29.100 But it's not just getting the fam together.

01:11:32.120 That's, that counts.

01:11:33.240 But it's also about how the conversation goes, what's on the table, what's not, and how you

01:11:38.400 behave in response to what you're hearing and also what you choose to say and share.

01:11:45.020 Can you talk about that for a minute?

01:11:46.400 Family dinner nights are so important.

01:11:48.340 And, but sometimes family dinner nights devolve into family dinner nightmares and soon children

01:11:54.140 don't want to become part of the family dinner night because they don't feel heard.

01:11:57.420 That's usually the key reason.

01:11:59.500 But the other, another reason is that they bring electronics to the table and many parents

01:12:03.680 are not good boundary enforcers and saying, you know, family dinner night, we do it once

01:12:08.860 a week.

01:12:09.480 It is the highest priority.

01:12:11.000 If there's really something, a major emergency that comes up, we reschedule it.

01:12:14.460 We don't cancel it when we, when we do family dinner night, there's no electronics at the

01:12:19.100 table.

01:12:19.560 You have any problem with that and you bring electronics to the table, those electronic

01:12:24.120 devices will be taken from you for the rest of the evening and given to you the following

01:12:28.080 morning.

01:12:29.180 The, you make some small consequence, but that is, that is a meaningful consequence.

01:12:34.020 You, you know, that the, you make it clear that the parents are in charge, not the children

01:12:38.620 being in charge of the parents.

01:12:40.280 Very important distinction for many families these days.

01:12:42.760 Um, and then when you do the family dinner night, you vary topics and you let each, um,

01:12:48.580 person who's, you know, maybe nine, 10 years of age or older in the family to choose a topic

01:12:53.460 of conversation.

01:12:54.440 And then those, the, that topic of conversation gets, um, shared the perspectives on that gets

01:13:00.200 shared by anybody, uh, go, um, each person at the table, you go around the table.

01:13:05.360 And the requirement is that before you go on to the next person, um, the, somebody at that

01:13:10.640 table shares what she or he heard and the, and the family together at that table works

01:13:16.500 to make sure that the person who is speaking feels completely heard, that is not distorted,

01:13:22.860 that nothing is missing.

01:13:24.200 And there's nothing that they feel that they absolutely must add in order to have that,

01:13:27.860 the whole issue understood.

01:13:29.880 When that, when those things are, when the person who's talking said, yeah, nothing was

01:13:34.160 distorted, nothing was missed.

01:13:35.300 And that the essence of what I need to say is understood.

01:13:38.680 Then you move on to the second person.

01:13:40.800 Well, this may take two family dinner nights to, to, to complete this whole round, but in

01:13:46.440 the end, everyone feels understood by their brothers and their sisters, and then by their

01:13:51.260 parents.

01:13:51.720 And, and just as importantly, oftentimes many parents are, who care about family dinner nights

01:13:57.420 and are good couples are, as I was hinting before, they're better at providing empathy and

01:14:03.280 understanding to the children, then the children are providing empathy for the parents' perspective

01:14:08.720 and their brothers and sisters' perspective.

01:14:11.500 But it's also a requirement, if you want your children to be empathetic, that the children

01:14:15.980 be required to also share what their parents said without any distortion and without anything

01:14:23.680 being missed.

01:14:24.280 And what their brothers and sisters said in the same way.

01:14:26.860 And when she, and, and that also there's no fear of bringing up extremely controversial

01:14:34.340 topics.

01:14:35.980 Boys especially love controversial topics, but both boys and girls and parents have in common

01:14:42.760 that they'd all like to be heard.

01:14:45.420 And if you see your children talking for an hour and a half on their phone, phone with a

01:14:49.480 peer.

01:14:49.740 Um, but when you ask them what's going on and they say, oh, nothing much, um, or give

01:14:54.700 you some brief answer, you know, there is, uh, that the reason is that the children aren't

01:14:59.980 feeling as heard by the family members as they are with, um, their peer and that they're feeling

01:15:05.540 that, that interruptions come more than compassion and understanding.

01:15:10.440 So, yeah, they've got to listen to you, uh, speak.

01:15:13.920 That's just as important as you listening to them speaking.

01:15:16.340 Can I just ask you, so when you say any topic and, you know, do you really feel heard if

01:15:21.500 there's a family conflict that makes sense, but are you just saying like, we could say

01:15:25.320 it, we could talk about climate change.

01:15:26.480 We could talk about abortion.

01:15:27.840 We could talk, talk about Trump, like anything.

01:15:31.100 Yes, exactly.

01:15:31.840 And if, if, you know, if two people at the table are Trump supporters and two people at

01:15:34.780 the table feel Trump is the biggest evil or the, you know, that Putin is, uh, you know,

01:15:39.000 doing what is really helpful, going to be helpful for the Ukraine.

01:15:42.280 And, um, you know, and somebody else feels that that's just, you know, one more attack

01:15:46.220 on the Ukraine here.

01:15:47.780 This is good.

01:15:48.540 This is good.

01:15:49.280 Um, this is good fodder for hearing about perspectives that you couldn't even imagine

01:15:55.120 you would want to hear.

01:15:56.440 Um, and, and, and the person who's able to do it, the children that are able to do that

01:16:01.600 have only one problem.

01:16:03.660 They get too many friends.

01:16:05.020 Well, I like what you wrote in one of your books that even if your child doesn't understand

01:16:11.140 it, most children would much rather be a little confused than bored at the dinner table.

01:16:16.340 That's such a good observation.

01:16:17.980 And that's especially true of boys.

01:16:20.920 They want to constantly be challenged.

01:16:23.180 And, and it is true that they won't any more than the girls at the table understand everything,

01:16:27.960 but they'd rather reach for the reach for it and miss some things.

01:16:32.880 And then round two, it's just like we first hear new, when we first hear English or any

01:16:37.900 language, we don't understand 99% of what's being said, but our brains teach us to grasp that

01:16:44.820 this, this means that, and not only does this mean that this word mean that, but this word

01:16:50.680 with this body language, with this tone of voice, um, means something different than that

01:16:55.720 same word, different body language and different tone of voice, which is, which is one of the

01:17:00.620 reasons that, um, that real human contact is so important because the subtleties of body

01:17:08.580 language of, of eyes dilating, of slight withdrawal of, of, of, of tones of voice are not yet captured

01:17:16.740 well enough by AI, um, to be able to, um, teach children emotional intelligence.

01:17:22.540 Oh, that's one of the reasons they need to stay unmasked.

01:17:25.040 Okay.

01:17:25.260 That's my own editorial.

01:17:26.460 Dr.

01:17:27.020 Warren Farrell, staying with us.

01:17:29.560 I definitely want to ask you about conflict resolution in a marriage because the good doctor

01:17:34.060 has a very interesting approach to this on a weekly basis, how many hours should be devoted

01:17:37.980 to conflict free zones and how many should be devoted to actually speaking and saying the

01:17:44.040 things that you haven't been saying.

01:17:49.540 All right.

01:17:50.140 So Dr.

01:17:50.500 Farrell, you, out of your book, the boy crisis came an idea to help couples.

01:17:54.720 And now you host couples communication retreats called role mate to soul mate.

01:18:00.260 Now I understand that one of the most important things is learning how to hear your partner's

01:18:07.680 criticisms without becoming defensive.

01:18:11.320 This is of course, easier said than done, but you have an approach which includes creating

01:18:16.720 a quote conflict free zone and explain how this works on an hourly basis.

01:18:22.760 Cause you've got it down to a series of hours basically.

01:18:25.120 Yes, I have couples create a conflict free zone for 166 hours a week in exchange for a

01:18:33.120 two hour caring and sharing, what I call a caring and sharing time for the other two

01:18:39.760 hours of the week.

01:18:41.060 And so the caring and sharing time is the real backbone.

01:18:44.020 What I found is that when you talk to couples about the value of listening to each other, they

01:18:49.760 all go out of the workshop and feel, oh, now I know more about how important listening

01:18:53.560 is, but that the listening disappear, disappears the moment a criticism appears.

01:19:01.320 So, um, because we are biologically programmed to respond to criticism, uh, with defensively

01:19:08.100 because it was potentially an enemy.

01:19:09.960 So we got up our defenses and we survived by, you know, defeating the enemy or getting up,

01:19:14.960 being defensive when we were criticized.

01:19:16.900 However, as I was mentioning before, that's, you know, great for survival, but it's terrible

01:19:21.060 for love.

01:19:21.560 And so because we are so biologically programmed to become defensive to criticism, um, I had

01:19:28.640 before a couple does any criticism of their partner.

01:19:33.100 What I ask for them to do is to write that criticism down.

01:19:37.240 The criticism that survives as being valuable and important to be shared at the end of the

01:19:41.280 week, um, gets shared just one criticism per week, um, by, um, the, the partner who's upset

01:19:48.060 about that, that issue.

01:19:49.280 And, but before they share that criticism, um, I asked them to go into six mindsets that

01:19:56.680 is to alter their natural biological state of being defensive and to, and substitute that

01:20:02.980 with a temporary state of, of those mindsets saying that something like what I call the love

01:20:10.160 guarantee is one of the mindsets, which is, you know, that if the more I listen, provide

01:20:14.860 a safe environment for my partner's feelings, the more of my partner will feel safe and

01:20:19.440 loved by me.

01:20:20.780 Therefore, the more, um, my partner will feel loved by me, um, as, as, and love, I'm sorry,

01:20:26.960 and love for me as well.

01:20:28.360 And so the, and so after they go through six mindsets like that and say those mindsets out

01:20:34.660 loud, so their partner can see that they're, that they are making themselves safe and receptive.

01:20:40.320 Uh, they then say, uh, that they're ready to hear their partner's, um, criticism, um, and

01:20:46.960 then the partner gets a chance to share his or her criticism in whatever way she or he wants

01:20:52.100 to share.

01:20:52.740 That may be an exaggerated version of the, of the story, a totally different story than

01:20:57.860 the person, um, who is hearing it heard.

01:21:00.740 Um, but normally speaking, our minds are, uh, while they're, our partner is telling a different

01:21:06.160 version of the world that we thought was accurate, we are forming in our own, we're doing self,

01:21:11.440 something that I call self-listening.

01:21:13.460 We're listening to ourselves respond and prepare that response like a lawyer would, uh, to our

01:21:20.140 partners, um, to our partner's story.

01:21:22.800 And as a result is that even though the partner may not be interrupted, best case scenario,

01:21:28.380 nevertheless, they sense that we're, we're somewhere else in preparing our own version

01:21:33.180 and we don't feel heard.

01:21:35.280 And so when somebody gets to the point where they're doing what's quite natural, they're

01:21:40.780 beginning to feel, uh, talk about, talk about their own perspective in their mind's eye.

01:21:45.180 Um, I asked them to say hold and to, to keep that hold, um, sacred.

01:21:52.140 That is, I don't want to be listening to myself while you're talking.

01:21:56.180 I need to be, I need to center myself and go back to really hearing your story from your

01:22:01.680 perspective with no argument inside of my mind, um, uh, to that perspective.

01:22:06.880 Um, and when that type of pure listening is being done and the person who is listening

01:22:12.720 is saying, hold, I want, uh, it's your, your story is sacred.

01:22:18.740 You're the person I love more than anybody in the world.

01:22:20.900 I would die, risk dying for you, um, to give you life.

01:22:24.540 So now I really want to give you life, um, by listening to you and having you feel.

01:22:28.600 It's a mindset.

01:22:29.560 Yeah, it's a mindset.

01:22:30.360 I mean, I, I've talked about this before, but I have to tell you, my, my husband and

01:22:32.740 I were very good at this.

01:22:34.520 And, um, this is a tip I shared, you know, with my audience before, which is generally

01:22:40.620 when, when Doug comes to me with a complaint about something, you know, he feels I've done

01:22:45.500 or something I've said, then when I go to him, the other person on the receiving end of

01:22:50.320 the criticism just naturally switches into a mode of what did I do?

01:22:56.660 Because this is my sweetheart who I love.

01:22:59.780 And it's not like they're peppering me with complaints all the time.

01:23:03.040 This is a reasonable person who loves me.

01:23:06.080 And so I probably did something like what I probably did something to put this person

01:23:11.860 in this mode of being like, I don't like it.

01:23:14.620 And we're really quick to sort of make the case for them.

01:23:19.000 You know, like I felt alone and like, you didn't want to be with me when you did the

01:23:25.140 following, you know, for four days in a row.

01:23:27.400 And it made me mad at you.

01:23:29.340 And instead of, you know, one of us, I.e.

01:23:31.940 Doug switching into mode of like, no, I didn't do it.

01:23:35.260 It's, it was all in your head.

01:23:36.180 You know, he would say like, you're right.

01:23:38.720 I was too absentee.

01:23:39.840 I was focused on this other thing and I'm sorry, I made you feel I should have stopped

01:23:44.040 to think about your feelings.

01:23:45.380 And then usually I would switch into a mode of, well, I've just been feeling insecure

01:23:49.020 lately.

01:23:49.760 You know, it's not all like if you can be like aggressively taking responsibility, you

01:23:55.740 know, instead of aggressively defensive, because there's always always almost always

01:23:59.720 something you did and he did, you know, it's never usually on the one party.

01:24:03.560 And even if it's just all that you did was you've got a lifelong insecurity on this

01:24:07.260 issue.

01:24:07.480 So you're easily, you know, your buttons are pressed, it can work out so much better

01:24:11.140 if you're just super giving to your partner in this moment.

01:24:13.040 All right, wait, I want to get to my callers enough from lathering from me.

01:24:15.920 So many people are calling in, doc.

01:24:17.240 They want to, they want to talk to you.

01:24:18.860 Let's start it off with Diane in Colorado.

01:24:20.840 Who's got a question for you.

01:24:21.880 Hi, Diane.

01:24:22.340 What's your question for the good doctor?

01:24:25.520 Hi, doctor.

01:24:27.140 It's so insightful listening to you.

01:24:29.280 And I just have a question about my son.

01:24:31.880 He's 17, great kid, responsible.

01:24:35.220 He's in sports.

01:24:36.120 He's a great student.

01:24:36.940 But I don't feel like we have a great relationship.

01:24:39.680 We don't really talk about much.

01:24:41.260 He's not chatty.

01:24:42.960 How do I, how do I develop a deeper relationship with him without him just being annoyed that

01:24:49.340 I pepper him with questions all the time?

01:24:51.760 Do you have a family dinner night that you do at all?

01:24:55.680 We do.

01:24:56.660 We do.

01:24:57.200 But, you know, I find that it's, it's mostly my husband and I talking and they kind of, you know, couple, one word answers.

01:25:07.220 And, and I heard what you said about everybody bringing the topic.

01:25:09.880 And I think that's a great idea.

01:25:13.700 And a lot of this I know is just a normal teenager thing.

01:25:16.520 But how, how can we be better as parents and draw that out of them without just being annoying parents?

01:25:23.620 Yes, it is really helpful to, first of all, you can start with them and their perspectives and sharing, or you can start with yourselves.

01:25:33.580 You, you and your husband, you know, sharing about what you feel and then requiring them to say what they felt they heard from you.

01:25:41.600 And once they feel, once, once the, once it's established that they will be completely heard first and then, and not interrupted and not be, not have a judgment being formed on the parents' part when they're talking.

01:26:01.220 And then they begin to, if they, if over a period of time, they can trust that, that that will happen more and more frequently, or that you see, do you have any other children besides your son?

01:26:13.200 We do.

01:26:13.920 We have another son that's also, he's 15.

01:26:17.620 15.

01:26:18.260 Well, that's a, that's a good age to also, is he more open in general or is less open?

01:26:26.300 Nope.

01:26:26.740 He's a little more open, a little more chatty than, than the older one.

01:26:31.940 But yeah, the other, the older one is just pretty shut off.

01:26:35.680 Doesn't really tell us much.

01:26:36.920 Doesn't really share much.

01:26:38.420 And then I, then I hear exactly what you're saying.

01:26:42.100 Yes.

01:26:42.880 Now, usually the child that doesn't speak up much.

01:26:45.120 And yet, especially if you see him like talking to his friends more freely and more easily feels that the result of him speaking up will be that he will run into some area, which will incur your judgment, your restriction, your wrath.

01:27:02.580 You know, and therefore, why talk to begin with?

01:27:07.580 Um, it's only going to get me into trouble, or it's only going to restrict me in some way or the other, um, and, uh, lead to a restriction.

01:27:14.900 Um, and so the, if the talking is, if, if, if, if, if, if the, if the more talkative child, if you start with that child, and then if you, if that, if you model having that child really feel heard, or your, your husband feeling heard by you when, when he's talking, um, after a while that will probably take.

01:27:35.860 However, let me know if it doesn't, um, my email is warren at warrenferrell.com or just look up warrenferrell and, um, and you'll, you'll see my email on my website.

01:27:46.700 And, um, that's, that's very nice.

01:27:49.800 Diane, you've got a direct line now to warrenferrell.

01:27:52.180 That's pretty good.

01:27:52.940 Thank you for that call and the inquiry and good luck with it.

01:27:55.880 Um, on, on the subject of the dinner table, this is a good one.

01:27:59.600 Brian from California has got a follow-up for you, Dr. Farrell.

01:28:02.700 Brian, what's your question?

01:28:03.540 Thanks for having me on.

01:28:06.720 Uh, so I just, I've tuned in and we've been talking about, you know, having these conversations around the dinner table with your children.

01:28:13.800 And I, I have, uh, teenagers, uh, 17 and, and 15.

01:28:18.220 And, you know, I live in an area that, you know, uh, as far as the country, that's expensive to live.

01:28:23.200 And unfortunately, my wife and I don't have the luxury of being home every night at a specific time to have dinner at the dinner table.

01:28:29.480 So my question is, you know, what, what can be done to make up for the lack of the weekly dinners at the dinner table and, and, you know, conflict resolution, all these things going on in the world.

01:28:41.100 Uh, you know, there's a little bit of guilt that's set in for me as well, not being there for my kids every night for dinner.

01:28:45.820 But, you know, what, what, what can be done as an alternative to make sure that we bring the family dynamics together still?

01:28:51.500 Yes, there, there, there is no substitute of dime for time.

01:28:58.040 That is a father's time is far more valuable than a father's dime.

01:29:02.680 And so if you, um, once a family in the United States gets to be between, uh, 50 and $80,000 worth of income per year, um, the, then the children who do the best, who don't go to psychologists and say, uh, you know, my father didn't, you know, provide enough income for us to live in the top notch area in the country.

01:29:22.220 Uh, you don't hear children reporting that type of message to psychologists.

01:29:26.140 It's usually, uh, my father didn't pay attention to me.

01:29:29.100 My father didn't have enough time for me.

01:29:30.720 My mother didn't have enough time or so on.

01:29:33.280 So it really does require, if you're not doing it, if you don't have time to do a family dinner night, one night a week, then I really would ask you in a really loving way to reconsider where you're living.

01:29:45.480 Um, because, um, you know, working harder to have a better home and even a better school district doesn't have as much impact studies show as having time with the children.

01:29:57.420 And at least that one night a week where you have a family dinner night is really, um, very helpful, but also times playing with your children.

01:30:05.420 And one of the ways that children do so much, uh, one of the reasons children do so well with their dads, when they have a lot of dad involvement is not just because of the existence of dad as a breadwinner, but the existence of the dad as a playmate, as a roughhouser, as a, somebody they go camping with as somebody that lets them go to the lake, um, and maybe get lost, um, because, and then let the child find his or her way back.

01:30:30.500 But knowing that the dad is there, um, to rescue them, if it really needs to be, if it really comes down to that, if night is falling on them and the child is going to be lost, lost, so to speak.

01:30:40.920 Um, so.

01:30:42.040 That's good.

01:30:42.500 Can I just add, Brian, Brian, that my own therapist told me this when I was a very busy working mom that wasn't home for any dinners when I was doing the primetime show.

01:30:49.540 And he said, um, one-on-one time, like once, once a week, make sure you do one thing with one child.

01:30:58.200 Like it could be just, you're going to go out to lunch with that kid, or you're going to take him to the park, or you're going to go see a ball game.

01:31:03.420 Like just some one-on-one time matters.

01:31:06.780 Um, thank you for your call and good luck with your, with your kids, Brian.

01:31:10.180 Appreciate you listening.

01:31:11.220 Let's jump to, uh, Kim in North Carolina.

01:31:13.200 Who's got a good question.

01:31:14.340 Hi, Kim.

01:31:14.740 What's your question for Dr.

01:31:15.600 Farrell?

01:31:16.000 Um, my grandson just started second grade yesterday and is so excited to have his first male teacher.

01:31:24.540 Are there any studies or encouragements for men to get into more of the elementary education?

01:31:32.020 Oh, Kim, you are asking such an important question.

01:31:35.800 Um, it is so important, especially for children.

01:31:39.480 Um, Kim, are you a single mother or are you, um, with, with the biological dad?

01:31:43.700 Uh, uh, she's the grandma.

01:31:47.900 I'm sorry.

01:31:48.360 Oh, you're the grandma.

01:31:49.300 I'm sorry.

01:31:49.820 I'm the grandma.

01:31:50.940 Yes.

01:31:51.540 Uh, so the, uh, children, um, particularly children, if they don't, uh, boys, if they don't have a biological dad at home and they go from, uh, a home without a biological dad to, to a school, um, elementary school with no male role models, uh, that's when children, boys tend to have considerable problems.

01:32:11.040 Um, but so if, if that's the case, uh, one of the things we really need to be doing overall

01:32:17.700 as a culture is really encouraging elementary schools to have, um, male, um, elementary school teachers and not just males like me.

01:32:27.640 I'm a sort of a nurturer connector type of male, but also traditional males.

01:32:32.440 So your son or your grandson in your case, um, has role models of different types of males, not just a type of male.

01:32:40.340 So, uh, we, we really need to be encouraging, um, uh, our, uh, ways of getting our schools encouraged to bring, um, males into the elementary school system.

01:32:52.640 And we have a lot of challenges with that, uh, oftentimes a boy in second grade, if he's crying, let's say, and he sits on his, uh, a male teacher's lap and the male teacher holds him.

01:33:02.380 Uh, it just takes one parent, uh, looking at a picture from a cell phone of the, of the child's, the boy sitting on a, on a male teacher's lap, uh, to suggest that maybe there's some, um, perversion here.

01:33:14.340 And so many, um, when a study was done in Canada of males about whether they wanted to be elementary school teachers, a very high percentage of males said they would love to be elementary school teachers, but more than 75% of them said they were fearful of being accused of some type of, um, perversion if they got too close to the children.

01:33:33.960 Um, and so we really have to deal with that type of, um, fear and over, over concern and lack of, um, lack of understanding how important it is, uh, for children to have, uh, male role models.

01:33:48.980 And so I'm going to jump in just for a second, cause we got one minute to, we got to go and Kim, thank you for the call, but I can see there are a few callers on here.

01:33:57.540 And my love and heart goes out to them about their children who lost their dads, their children who lost their dads and are feeling unmotivated or feeling deeply sad or retreating into video games.

01:34:08.200 I apologize for squeezing this into 60 seconds, but a couple of lines for those parents struggling with that.

01:34:14.280 Yes.

01:34:14.560 Work on getting male coaches, working on work on bringing the best males, you know, over, um, work on, if you get involved with a new man, um, as a stepfather, make sure that the stepfather,

01:34:27.540 stepfather is not limited to just the advisor role, make sure that you allow the stepfather to really be an, have an equal amount of influence on your parenting, get out of your comfort zone, um, and, and, and negotiate to the checks and balance parenting as if the stepfather were the biological father.

01:34:47.740 If the biological father cannot be involved and always make an attempt to get the biological father involved, if that's possible.

01:34:54.120 And I will say this, having lost my own dad, when I was 15, um, there's recovery, it's awful and it's painful, but there's recovery.

01:35:03.180 And there is some, there's some life lessons that come with it that will help make your kids stronger.

01:35:08.400 If they have a loving present mother, they're helping to get them through it.

01:35:12.500 Dr. Warren Farrell, so much love to you.

01:35:14.880 Thank you so much for all of your expertise and all of your books for sharing your personal email.

01:35:20.100 And please come back.

01:35:21.960 Would you?

01:35:22.760 I would be very happy to.

01:35:24.440 It's just a pleasure.

01:35:25.360 I love that you go in depth.

01:35:26.720 I love you that you share your own stories.

01:35:28.800 And I'm in awe of how you go from, um, uh, the interview to a commercial right after that.

01:35:34.520 Exactly.

01:35:34.940 It's an acquired skill.

01:35:36.600 Lots of love, sir.

01:35:37.560 Well, to be continued.

01:35:39.100 Thanks for listening to the Megan Kelly show.

01:35:42.000 No BS, no agenda, and no fear.

The Megyn Kelly Show - August 11, 2022

The Importance of Dads, Allowing Kids to Take Risks, and the Boy Crisis, with Dr. Warren Farrell ｜ Ep. 372

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