TRIGGERnometry - The 4 Big Lies We Tell to Parents

00:00:00.000 What matters more to our society right now, which means our values are very screwed up,

00:00:06.920 is the GDP and our economy, rather than what's actually good for the mental health of our children.

00:00:13.020 We're seeing almost immediately that babies' stress levels are so high,

00:00:16.700 they're developing anxiety, depression, ADHD, and more aggression.

00:00:21.580 I blame the fragility of our young people and the fact that they're breaking down

00:00:25.920 on the fact that the adults in the room were not doing their job.

00:00:29.620 You are responsible for your children's mental illness.

00:00:33.500 So we talked about the lies we tell women and mothers.

00:00:36.540 What are the lies we tell men and fathers?

00:00:40.540 Erica, great to have you on Trigonometry.

00:00:42.720 Thank you for having me.

00:00:43.760 And the reason is great to have you on.

00:00:45.080 You are super controversial.

00:00:47.260 You wrote this book in which you suggest that the mothers are really good for their kids.

00:00:51.480 Is that right?

00:00:52.380 Yes.

00:00:52.860 It shouldn't be controversial, but yes.

00:00:56.780 I'm joking around, obviously.

00:00:58.120 But what you wrote the book about, essentially, the central theme is,

00:01:01.340 particularly in the first three years, babies and toddlers really need their mom around.

00:01:06.400 And that seems like actually is quite a difficult thing to say in the modern world.

00:01:11.380 But you can't even use the term mother in some places.

00:01:13.840 In Northern Europe now, in some countries, you're not even allowed to use the term mother.

00:01:17.460 At the UN, they won't let you use the term mother.

00:01:20.320 So yeah, it is problematic.

00:01:22.900 Yeah.

00:01:23.040 And why can't you use the term mother?

00:01:25.020 Because they feel everything has to be gender neutral and that mothers are exactly the same

00:01:29.620 as fathers.

00:01:30.280 And the truth is that there are a lot of ways in which men and women are the same, but there's

00:01:34.840 a lot of ways in which we're different.

00:01:36.260 And one of the ways in which we're different is how we nurture children.

00:01:41.740 Imagine that.

00:01:42.620 Well, the reason I think, again, we're joking around, but actually, I think the reason it

00:01:47.460 is a difficult thing to talk about is not actually that a bunch of snowflakes are offended.

00:01:52.980 But I think the nature of our modern world has changed so much that a lot of women really

00:01:58.640 feel a tremendous amount of pressure to get back to work.

00:02:02.220 And that pressure is often economic.

00:02:03.920 It's some of it is cultural, some of it's societal.

00:02:06.940 And it's just a difficult message for some people to hear because maybe they don't have

00:02:11.220 that choice nowadays.

00:02:12.620 Is that fair?

00:02:13.480 Yeah, there's a huge rise in postpartum depression.

00:02:17.660 Really?

00:02:18.760 It's very, very high now.

00:02:21.360 In some places, as high as 30 percent.

00:02:25.840 And one of the reasons that I see for that in my practice is that women, from the moment

00:02:31.500 they get pregnant, are conflicted.

00:02:33.500 They feel a terrific amount of conflict.

00:02:35.720 And when they have a baby, even if they have time off, they are always preoccupied with

00:02:42.120 when they're going to go back.

00:02:43.780 So it's very hard for women to relax and feel that their role is valuable and their time

00:02:49.560 is valuable and well spent because they feel a lot of internal turmoil and conflict.

00:02:53.820 And we've done that to women and to men.

00:02:56.960 We've created this conflict where we can't just say, sort of like just being able to say

00:03:03.220 mothers are important.

00:03:04.640 We can't just say being with your children in those early years is just really critically

00:03:09.220 important and relax into it and enjoy it.

00:03:12.580 And you have a long life and you can do everything in your life.

00:03:16.120 You can be successful with your career, but just not all at the same time.

00:03:20.900 And you say all this stuff about how it's better for mothers.

00:03:25.000 What's wrong with sending your six-month-old to a nursery, to daycare?

00:03:29.700 So daycare, for a variety of reasons, is very bad for children.

00:03:34.440 The right brain, the social-emotional part of the brain, is 85 percent developed by the

00:03:39.580 age of three.

00:03:41.020 And mothers perform a number of things, a number of roles in those first three years

00:03:46.080 that helps that right brain to grow.

00:03:47.940 One of the things they do is buffer children from stress.

00:03:51.140 That's one of their major roles.

00:03:52.860 In most parts of the world, babies are worn on their mother's bodies to keep the cortisol

00:03:56.800 levels down, to raise the oxytocin levels, which is the love hormone, and to keep the stress

00:04:02.240 levels, the cortisol hormone, down.

00:04:05.380 And what we're doing is we're separating mothers and babies at such an early age that it's

00:04:10.020 stimulating the stress-regulating part of the brain, the amygdala, which is meant to remain

00:04:15.120 offline for the first year.

00:04:17.620 Baby's stress levels are supposed to be very, very low while their brains are developing

00:04:23.000 in the first year.

00:04:23.960 When we separate a mother from a baby, that baby no longer feels safe because they need

00:04:28.940 something called attachment security.

00:04:31.160 And it creates a great amount of stress.

00:04:33.120 The salivary cortisol levels go up very high.

00:04:36.120 Those babies have a higher incidence of things like aggression, behavioral problems, and anxiety

00:04:42.880 later in their school, and even immediately.

00:04:46.540 I mean, we're seeing almost immediately that babies' stress levels are so high, they're developing

00:04:51.160 anxiety, depression, ADHD, and more aggression.

00:04:55.540 And so, you know, basically separating mothers and babies or separating babies from their primary

00:05:03.180 attachment figures in those early years causes too much stress for that baby's brain.

00:05:08.340 So do you think, Erica, a lot of the issues that we're seeing with our youngsters now, the

00:05:12.920 Gen Z generation, can be tracked right the way back to the way that we raise them as infants?

00:05:18.440 Oh, absolutely.

00:05:19.100 Um, not just Gen Z, but, you know, even before that, you know, so this started, you would say

00:05:26.180 the movement to separate mothers and babies, I mean, I suppose you could say historically

00:05:30.780 it started with the industrial revolution when mothers went to factories, but really when

00:05:34.820 it picked up speed is the 60s when we started talking about feminism and the me generation

00:05:40.100 and individuality and how important it was to pursue your own personal ambitions and personal

00:05:46.560 desires and pleasure, and it was all about pleasure.

00:05:50.480 And so what we did is we diminished the role of caregiving in society because it was hard,

00:05:58.440 because it was a responsible role, because it requires sacrifice.

00:06:02.400 And so when that happened and women were pushed to go out into the work world when they had very

00:06:09.200 young children, I mean, Gloria Steinem said to women, if you don't work out in the work world,

00:06:13.820 you are not part of our movement. And these were to women who already had young children.

00:06:18.940 Um, and she said things like your kids will be just fine. And our kids are not just fine,

00:06:23.120 particularly in the early years when mothers disappear. Um, so babies are born incredibly

00:06:29.080 neurologically and emotionally fragile, right? We know that, that the first three years,

00:06:33.980 babies are not like other creatures ready to go. They're very fragile. And the thing that

00:06:39.620 helps them to develop in a healthy way is that buffering from stress, but also mothers do this

00:06:45.180 other important thing, which is they regulate baby's emotions from moment to moment. Every time

00:06:49.700 a mother soothes a baby that's in distress, she's actually regulating their emotions. So babies aren't

00:06:54.880 born with the ability to regulate their emotions. So Gen Z, the millennials, these were generations that

00:07:00.880 were anxiety and depression, which are disorders of emotional regulation. People cannot regulate their

00:07:07.240 emotions. Um, I always say that, you know, when you're a baby, you're born with the ability to

00:07:11.920 go from zero to 60 in three seconds with your emotions. You can go from being happy, happy,

00:07:15.920 happy to being, you know, sort of like sailing a sailboat in the Atlantic in a storm. That's how

00:07:22.380 babies are born. And it's only because mothers are physically and emotionally present to, to soothe the

00:07:28.460 baby when they're in distress, to help the baby to regulate emotions, that it's more like sailing in the

00:07:32.820 Caribbean. You know, it's interesting what you say about removing mothers from babies. And there's

00:07:38.680 going to be a lot of moms watching this. And there's a lot of young women who are going, well,

00:07:43.660 what can I do? Because this is a society that we live in. The economic realities, whatever you want

00:07:50.700 to call, whatever you want to call it, hypercapitalism, blah, blah, blah. It has effectively

00:07:55.500 meant that the vast majority of people can't rely on a one parent income. So what I would say is

00:08:03.720 strategize for those couples that don't have children, strategize. Think of raising a child

00:08:08.360 as a team sport. So, um, do without when you can do without in the early years, if you have to do

00:08:14.540 without, um, if you can, right. And if you can't, then there's a hierarchy to childcare that is better

00:08:21.340 for children than daycare. Um, the best is your primary attachment figure. The next best is

00:08:26.540 something called kinship bond. So it would be your dad or your aunt or your grandmother or your next

00:08:32.440 door neighbor. Who's aunt Julie, who's like family to you. And this has a more similar investment in

00:08:38.080 your life and will be around forever. Um, that would be the next best kind of care. Then would be

00:08:44.080 a babysitter or nanny, which most people can't afford one babysitter or nanny, which is what's best.

00:08:49.460 It's called single surrogate caregiving. Um, if you can't afford that, then share the care with

00:08:55.060 another family, get your best friend and say, let's share the cost of a nanny or a babysitter.

00:09:00.480 And that's already going to be better for children than if they go into daycare. Um,

00:09:06.120 minimize your time at work whenever possible, maximize your time with your children, because

00:09:10.920 there is no such thing as quality time. That is a ruse. That is a myth. Uh, it was invented

00:09:16.600 in a time of pushing women economically to go back into the workforce. So basically what matters

00:09:22.780 more to our society right now, which means our values are very screwed up is the GDP and our

00:09:28.540 economy rather than what's actually good for the mental health of our children. Because it seems to

00:09:34.120 me, and I think you'd agree with this, that women have been sold a lie, Erica. Absolutely.

00:09:38.760 They've been told that they can have it or you can have the great job. You can have,

00:09:42.120 you can be a COO, a COO, you can raise four kids. You can do, but that's patently a nonsense,

00:09:48.960 isn't it? More than that. Yes. That that's all nonsense because you can have it all in life. I

00:09:54.860 mean, I'm a good example. My career didn't really begin in earnest till I was in my fifties when I

00:09:59.960 wrote a book until then, my practice was so very, very, very small because I would not leave my

00:10:05.200 children for more than an hour and a half a day. Um, and so we got by, but we gave up a lot. We didn't

00:10:11.360 take vacations. We didn't have cars, fancy cars. We didn't, you know, we didn't buy things. We just

00:10:17.400 said, we're not going to buy things. We're a team. You're going to work. I said to my husband,

00:10:21.260 and I'm going to work a very little, just enough to add to the income, but we're going to, we're

00:10:26.240 going to hold back on income until our children were older. So it takes strategy. And, and I do think

00:10:33.620 it's possible, but I think you have to get your mindset right around it first. I think even for,

00:10:38.980 for people who are socioeconomically less privileged, I think there are ways of maximizing

00:10:46.180 your time with your children. One of those ways in my book, Being There, I interviewed people from

00:10:51.940 all socioeconomic backgrounds and the ones who did the best with their children were the ones who,

00:10:58.580 when they weren't working, devoted their time to their children. So if you have to work to put a roof

00:11:04.660 over your children's head or food on the table, then the answer is when you come home at night,

00:11:09.300 you belong to your children. Your weekends belong to your children. Um, and that's hard for parents

00:11:14.980 to hear because we're so much into take care of yourself. And it's so, but the truth is that if

00:11:19.780 your children haven't seen you all day, then you need to compensate by being there as much as possible.

00:11:25.280 And it's a really important point because as somebody who used to teach for longer than I care to

00:11:31.080 remember, um, one of the things I noticed was that if a parent wasn't there, if a caregiver wasn't

00:11:36.600 there, what immediately the kid would gravitate to is a screen. Yes. And that brings a whole host of

00:11:43.060 other problems on top of what we're already talking about. Because another function of parents is they

00:11:47.700 help to stimulate children, right? They stimulate their brains. Uh, they stimulate them in so many ways.

00:11:53.260 And so if you're not there to stimulate your child, interact with them, basically just basic

00:11:58.000 interaction, talking to them, reading to them, um, then they're going to have to interact with

00:12:03.460 their media, with their technology. So, um, yeah, I mean, it's, it, and again, I, I do encourage

00:12:10.260 it. It's, it's easy for us to say that, you know, you can't afford it. What I say to parents is before

00:12:17.260 you say that, before it jumps out of your mouth that you can't afford it, sit down with your partner.

00:12:22.280 If you have one, sit down with your parents. If you're a single parent, sit down with your,

00:12:26.580 your extended family and figure out a way to work less. If you have to work to work less,

00:12:34.020 um, you know, the goal in life is work less, make more. So maybe you have a goal of having the kind

00:12:40.140 of job where you work by the hour and make more per hour, but work less hours. So you have more

00:12:45.700 time with your children, maximize the time with your children. That's what I would say.

00:12:50.260 And you mentioned, uh, a few things that are interesting to tie together. I mean,

00:12:54.800 first of all, you mentioned feminism and that's an interesting avenue for us to explore. Um,

00:12:59.580 because feminism, as I understand it, was a movement for the liberation of women. At least

00:13:03.300 that's how it's been presented. Um, but the problem is with what you're saying is you, you are putting

00:13:10.620 a framework of parenthood that is not liberating. It's constraining, right? You're saying you must

00:13:17.140 sacrifice of yourself for this thing that you chose to bring into the world. That's the opposite

00:13:22.000 of liberation in the way that we now understand it. So unpack that for us. Can you be a feminist

00:13:26.880 and also believe what you believe? I'm a feminist, but feminism really was,

00:13:31.240 was meant to give women choice. The word is choice. You have a choice to have a child or not to have a

00:13:37.980 child. Now you can have a very linear, uh, almost masculine feeling career because masculine careers

00:13:44.220 were linear. They could be linear, right? And so you can do that and not have children and you can

00:13:49.900 still have a very fulfilling life. And I don't encourage people to have children if they don't

00:13:54.740 want to care for children. So many years before me, Penelope Leach said, if you don't want to care

00:13:59.600 for your children, don't have them. Right. And that still stands today. Um, you don't have to have

00:14:05.600 children to have, um, a good life. You can have a wonderful generative life with being generative in

00:14:11.480 other ways. But if you're going to bring a soul into this world, you are responsible for that

00:14:16.900 person. You are responsible that you get them from point A to point B and, and help them to be as

00:14:23.200 healthy as possible. And that is your responsibility. Um, and so we haven't really talked about

00:14:28.420 responsibility to parents because we're so fixed on talking about personal freedom, but the reality

00:14:34.380 is you are not going to raise healthy children if you don't grasp and take joy in the responsibility.

00:14:40.600 So I can only use my father as an example. My father took such great joy in being a father,

00:14:48.160 you know, caring for us, providing for us, providing for my mother. So she could look after us.

00:14:53.600 It gave him such pleasure to care for us. It wasn't a burden. He didn't opine about how hard it was and

00:15:01.080 he didn't feel competitive with my mother to stay home. And, you know, he just felt such joy and

00:15:07.080 pleasure in caring for his family. And my mother felt great joy and pleasure in caring for us.

00:15:12.900 And so what's happened to the world that both men and women feel so angry and resentful and burdened,

00:15:21.200 um, and uncomfortable with the role of being parents.

00:15:26.220 What has happened to the world?

00:15:28.560 Well, I mean, I think we haven't been honest. I think there's a lot we haven't been honest.

00:15:32.720 We haven't been honest about the fact that having a child and raising a child is much harder than we

00:15:41.000 tell them and we should tell them. So for instance, you should tell parents you will not sleep for five

00:15:45.800 years, period. And that way they won't sleep train their children and destroy their children's brain

00:15:51.900 cells. I mean, I can tell you right now, it is devastating when parents come into me and say,

00:15:57.120 I sleep train my child and my child has never been the same emotionally, neurologically.

00:16:02.720 You are basically...

00:16:04.080 Tell our audience, Erica, because this is something I have some horrifying stories,

00:16:08.100 just anecdotally of people, the things people say, and they don't even understand what they're

00:16:12.040 saying. A friend of mine said to me, oh, we're just sleep training our baby. And he gave himself

00:16:17.040 a nosebleed and, you know, and, but explain to people, what is sleep training? Why is it bad for

00:16:22.640 kids? And all of that.

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00:17:52.120 Well, all I can say is if you saw an adult hysterically crying and desperately afraid,

00:17:58.540 you would never just let them go. You would never shut the door in their face, right? But we tell

00:18:03.160 parents to do that with their babies. We tell them to put their babies in a room, to let them cry until

00:18:09.440 the point of vomiting and hysteria, and raise their cortisol levels past the point of them being able

00:18:15.760 to ever process any of that stress. And we tell them not only that it's okay, but it's ideal,

00:18:22.280 right? Because what we're valuing is parents' comfort over children's comfort. In the first year in

00:18:28.560 particular, children's comfort has to come first, not parents' comfort. And so this is the myth that we

00:18:37.080 teach parents that you can have children and nothing will change. You can have children and

00:18:42.820 your comfort will never be disrupted. It's not painful. Everything will stay the same. And this

00:18:49.940 is a lie. When you have a baby, well, you have a baby. I don't know if you have a baby. Okay,

00:18:55.460 but you have a baby. Look at my face. This is what you look like. Two and a half years of no sleep.

00:18:59.960 Look at me. And five is the number. So, you know, when you have a baby.

00:19:03.760 I thought this was going to be a depressing episode anyway, but now it's got personal. But

00:19:07.240 thank you, Erica. When you have a baby, everything changes. Everything changes. And so we do not tell

00:19:14.440 people that. We need to tell young people, but it changes for the good if you're healthy. So what I

00:19:21.060 say to mothers is giving birth is a psychotic event, right? You have this little person moving,

00:19:27.940 a little alien coming out of your body in the most dramatic, bloody scene. If you've watched the

00:19:34.180 birth of your child, yet it's beautiful, right? How do we say? But it's absolutely beautiful,

00:19:39.140 but it's very dramatic. So. Not literally. It's literally not beautiful at all. Okay.

00:19:45.160 Metaphorically. When that, you could say that a door opens when a woman gives birth. Yes.

00:19:50.220 That door is either opened to a past of a joyful, loving relationship with her mother and father,

00:19:59.560 particularly her mother, or a painful one. So that door can be, it's like Alice in Wonderland. That door

00:20:08.420 can be either a door to a loving, attentive, connected past, in which case the moment of looking at your

00:20:17.280 baby is the most joyful experience because you're connecting with your loving mother in that moment.

00:20:24.220 If, however, you were, your mother was depressed, narcissistic, absent, resentful, angry, abusive,

00:20:32.460 the door that opens that may have been closed for many years because we say repression is a great

00:20:38.080 defense of it lasts a lifetime. You basically forget you get amnesia. When that door opens,

00:20:43.640 all of the amnesia is let loose, right? All of the memories are let loose of a painful childhood.

00:20:50.380 And that's when postpartum depression sets in. You could say that the hormones connected with

00:20:55.640 having a baby, um, will either, uh, motivate those happy feelings or motivate those very,

00:21:05.380 very severely depressed feelings. Um, and it depends on your childhood.

00:21:10.080 Well, Erica, so just to be clear, uh, what you're saying is women are more likely to have postpartum

00:21:16.180 depression if their childhood was suboptimal. Absolutely. If the, if the relationship with

00:21:21.500 their mother was either full of conflict or if they had a depressed mother or a narcissistic mother,

00:21:27.860 if they were neglected or abused in any way, uh, emotionally and or physically, um, the door that

00:21:34.860 opens is that door. That's interesting. It's maps onto something very, very, I'm not an expert,

00:21:41.000 obviously, but I've been saying whenever people ask me, I'm like, whatever skill you lack or whatever

00:21:45.480 shit you haven't worked out before you have a baby. Like if you don't know how to drive, if you don't

00:21:49.340 have to do this, if you don't have to do your taxes, like learn that before you have kids,

00:21:52.920 because the amount of time you have, it's going to go through the floor and stuff will come up.

00:21:56.860 That's unprocessed, right? Yep. Yep. I mean, I can tell you some other lies that we tell parents.

00:22:01.100 Oh God. Okay. Okay. Well the quality versus quantity time, there's no such thing as quality

00:22:05.920 time. If you want to raise healthy children, you need quantity time. Okay. But there's a myth that

00:22:10.320 we're telling women, which is that they can have children later if they freeze their eggs. It's a

00:22:15.960 crazy myth. Um, and some of them can, and some of them can't. So, um, my son's girlfriend, um, is,

00:22:23.820 is working in a law firm and, um, the law firm has said basically they will pay for the freezing of

00:22:30.280 eggs to women. And it's a manipulative way of getting them to work many, many more years

00:22:35.220 intensely. And they said, don't worry, you can have a baby when you're in your forties.

00:22:39.760 And what's happening is women are getting to their forties and the eggs that they froze don't

00:22:44.400 necessarily turn into embryos and the embryos don't necessarily turn into babies. And then they're

00:22:49.980 bereft because they were lied to. So we, we are telling a lot of lies, um, to accommodate to a

00:22:57.120 narrative that is quite an unhealthy narrative. It's that to me seems like the worst type of lie

00:23:05.920 because that is, it it's, it's one thing to lie. And it's another thing to intentionally gaslight

00:23:13.260 an entire gender, many of whom desperately want children and you were selling them down the river

00:23:20.640 so that you can make more money out. Well, that's, that's, that was my thought. I,

00:23:24.680 I almost fell on the floor when I heard that. So that, that was my thought too.

00:23:29.000 But that's tragic. It is tragic. It is tragic. There are a lot of lies that we're telling that

00:23:33.980 are tragic. I mean, you know, even just the lie I mentioned of nothing changes, no, everything

00:23:38.540 changes. And, and in a good way, um, you know, having a baby, as you know, is the most joyful

00:23:45.560 experience, but it's also painful because, you know, in Judaism, we say there is no joy without pain.

00:23:51.720 There is no light without dark. Um, the, the, the pain helps us to appreciate the beauty of things

00:23:58.060 and the joy of things. So, you know, this idea that if I'm a little uncomfortable, then it's all

00:24:03.600 about me is part of, and again, I'm not blaming the younger generations. Let me say that what I am

00:24:10.800 blaming is societal political movements that created a narrative that, um, caregiving is not

00:24:20.280 valuable and that everything else that involved career, um, making money and materialism, uh, high

00:24:29.120 achievement and fame, that success was defined in such a way that it, it became perverse. And that's,

00:24:36.180 I blame the fragility of our young people and the fact that they're breaking down

00:24:40.820 on the fact that the adults in the room were not doing their job.

00:24:46.060 That's something that I wanted to talk about because when I was a teacher, I worked in very

00:24:50.580 socio economically deprived areas, incredibly deprived, uh, in East London, a couple of miles

00:24:57.320 away from here, which is some of the way that kids were raised is heartbreaking. And one of the

00:25:02.800 things I noticed was the profound effect, not having a father in the home and the damage it did

00:25:11.560 to children, boys and girls, but in very different ways. So can we talk about that a

00:25:16.120 little bit? Because I feel this is really important. So my original intention was to write a book about

00:25:21.000 motherhood and fatherhood. But when I really wrote my book about motherhood, I looked out there and

00:25:25.740 there were so many people that were writing books about fatherhood that were wonderful. So I felt I,

00:25:29.660 you know, in that space, it had been covered, but I can tell you what is so important. People like

00:25:35.240 Alan Shore and Richard Reeves and, um, Will and Warren Farrell have written books about, about, um,

00:25:41.520 fatherhood and how important it is. But basically the reason fatherhood is so, so very important is

00:25:47.440 that fathers do something very different than mothers. So mothers provide sensitive, empathic

00:25:53.100 nurturing, nurturing, soothing babies in distress, helping to regulate sadness, fear. Um, and, and so

00:25:59.640 we, we know that, right? Fathers regulate excitement, aggression, and if you don't, and impulsivity, if you

00:26:08.580 don't have a father present enough, then little boys in particular, but little girls too, don't learn

00:26:14.240 to regulate impulsive feelings. They don't learn to regulate excitement. They don't learn to regulate

00:26:20.240 aggression. And what's been found is when fathers don't live in the home, little boys are far more

00:26:25.040 aggressive, far more impulsive than when there's a father around. Fathers model how you regulate

00:26:31.720 angry feelings, a healthy father, how you regulate aggression. Um, fathers also, uh, you know, they're,

00:26:39.580 they're responsible for separation. So I always say mothers are really good at attachment security,

00:26:43.620 but if a father isn't present to do what we call playful tactile stimulation, which encourages

00:26:50.980 little boys and little girls, but particularly little boys to explore, to explore the world

00:26:56.780 because otherwise they have a very hard time leaving the attachment secure object, right? So the idea is

00:27:03.700 that fathers help to seduce the, their, their children away from the mothers. And so it's a great

00:27:10.260 duo. It's like a great team. It's teamwork. Think that it took thousands of years evolutionarily

00:27:16.740 to create a system where males and females were, were a team, right? They didn't do the same thing

00:27:23.700 because think about it. We don't have companies that are successful with co-CEOs. Do you know one

00:27:28.300 company that has co-CEOs? So what we've created is a competitive, uh, environment for men and women

00:27:36.300 where they're competing against one another rather than complimenting one another.

00:27:41.040 And that is one of the real tragedies of society where men and women now see each other as competition.

00:27:48.600 They do.

00:27:49.060 It's now seen as a battle of the sexes. And because of many different types of political movement and

00:27:55.880 narratives that have been put into place in social media, there now seems to be a fundamental distrust,

00:28:01.580 particularly in Gen Z between males and females. And you think to yourself, watching the discourse

00:28:06.960 that happens online, now I know that online isn't the real world, but it still has a very profound

00:28:11.700 effect. You go, how are we meant to have happy, healthy relationships when the prevailing feeling

00:28:19.880 is one of mutual distrust between the genders? That is a recipe for disaster, isn't it?

00:28:25.380 Well, it is a recipe for disaster and the relationships are showing what a disaster it is.

00:28:30.040 I mean, um, it's interesting because in raising women up, which we needed to do because women were

00:28:39.220 downtrodden at some point in raising women up, we denigrated men. So you could say that it was a

00:28:45.100 very important movement, but we didn't know when to stop. We sort of overshot our mark. Um, and so

00:28:51.240 men are diminished now, boys are diminished now to the extent that I think 60% of undergrad students are

00:28:57.220 women in graduate schools as well. And the statistics say that women will marry at their educational

00:29:04.840 level or above men at their educational level or below. And what's happening is that, uh, men and

00:29:10.760 women are not coming together because women are not choosing, you know, in most mammals and some birds,

00:29:17.180 the women choose. And so women are not choosing the men because they're not as educated. They're not as

00:29:22.720 successful. They're not making as much money. And so then you have this entire population of women

00:29:28.740 who are having children on their own as single mothers, what we call single mothers by choice,

00:29:33.220 because they say they don't want to be with any of the men. So in overshooting our mark, um,

00:29:39.100 even in nursery school in New York, where my kids went to a nursery school, they, when they did

00:29:44.280 the admissions to the schools, they said, well, we have to balance our class. That was their way of

00:29:49.800 saying we were going to take half boys and half girls. That was their way of saying, we're going

00:29:53.540 to, I mean, they balanced it in other ways to alpha kids and beta kids. And, but mostly it was

00:29:58.700 half girls and half boys. And the idea was you kept the balance because you needed to keep the balance.

00:30:04.160 So, you know, again, I think, so things, the scales need to be rebalanced because we are educating

00:30:11.780 little boys like little girls. We're putting them in classrooms, expecting them to sit in circle time

00:30:17.040 quietly for, for, um, you know, 20, 30, 40 minutes. They can't do that. Little boys are not programmed

00:30:23.420 to sit quietly. So we're trying to educate boys like girls. And then boys are getting frustrated.

00:30:29.180 Boys are not successful. They're developing attentional issues because it's a sign of stress

00:30:34.660 and they're labeled. And now they're on a marginalized path. And so they don't do as well in school.

00:30:40.820 Right. So from the very beginning, we are mistreating boys now. The other thing I just quickly want to

00:30:47.400 say is that boys neurologically are more fragile than girls from birth, from in utero. So some of the

00:30:54.420 reason they say there's a higher rate of autism in boys is because the stress in utero affects boys

00:30:59.820 more than girls. But when they come out, you, you know, the statistic is that there are more boys born in

00:31:07.600 the world, but more girls survive because the boys don't survive. So we know that neurologically boys are

00:31:14.280 more fragile. They're more susceptible to stress. They're more sensitive to stress. So we are diminishing

00:31:20.500 our boys who then become men. They are now diminished. They develop more depression, more anxiety. And those

00:31:27.760 that men and women aren't pairing like they used to. And there's something else as well. There's, I don't know

00:31:34.380 if this, I presume it's the same in the States, but there was a piece of educational research in the

00:31:38.620 UK that really struck me, which is we discipline our boys far harsher than we do our girls. A boy,

00:31:46.000 if he does something is far more likely to, to get more harshly punished for the same misdemeanor than a

00:31:53.440 girl is. That's, that's probably true again. And the absence of fathers who help their boys to

00:32:00.540 understand appropriate behavior and ways of channeling and sublimating their aggression,

00:32:05.820 you know, channeling it appropriately means that boys are growing up more aggressive and more out of

00:32:10.800 control with more behavioral problems. Um, and so, yeah, that is, that is a problem in society. We are,

00:32:18.320 we are seeing boys as, um, as we're not really understanding the sensitivity issue in boys.

00:32:25.160 Do you think that's wrong, Erica? And I'm just playing devil's advocate perhaps,

00:32:28.120 but I kind of understand why you might be a little bit stricter with boys because

00:32:32.880 if you were, if effectively, if you were training a gorilla or a chihuahua, like there would be a

00:32:38.660 difference to how you put, how you treated their expressions of aggression because a gorilla can

00:32:43.200 do a lot more damage. Do you see what I'm saying? Yeah. So the best way to do the word discipline

00:32:48.240 actually comes from the word disciple. It means to teach by example. It doesn't mean to punish.

00:32:54.520 There's no punishment in there. And so even the choice of the word punishment, I think is meaningful

00:33:01.260 because in society, we think of regulating aggression as punishment, but in fact, regulating

00:33:05.500 aggression is fathers teaching their sons how to behave. How do you handle anger, daddy? How do you

00:33:12.260 handle your aggressive feelings? What do you do? Well, son, I go out and I kick a ball around and I play

00:33:18.060 basketball and, you know, and I, you know, play the drums and, you know, um, so it, there's the,

00:33:25.520 the absence of fathers is a detriment to boys because boys don't learn how to regulate their

00:33:31.780 aggression in other ways than punishment. Punishment should always be a last resort when you're raising

00:33:37.680 children. You're modeling, you're modeling behavior, you're teaching. That's one of your main roles

00:33:43.980 as a parent is, is a teacher. Um, so imagine if you hired a teacher to teach emotional regulation,

00:33:54.420 to teach resilience, distress, to teach, um, appropriate behavior, to teach values, but they

00:34:01.760 only showed up one and a half hours a day. The Pew research did, um, a piece of research that said

00:34:07.960 that in America, uh, parents are spending about 90 minutes a day with their children. So can you

00:34:15.220 imagine if you hired a teacher to teach your children, but they only showed up 90 minutes a

00:34:18.500 day? How, how well would your children be raised? And Erica, we've obviously talked a lot about

00:34:25.260 mothers and where society encourages them to go wrong and how we might, you know, modify that if in an

00:34:31.320 ideal world. What about fathers? Because, you know, I'm a father. Uh, I also have a career. I'm trying to

00:34:36.620 do things in the world as you are and provide for my family and balance all of those. And, you know,

00:34:42.040 I would say on a working day, I probably spend about an hour, an hour and a half with my son.

00:34:47.220 And then on the weekend, I tried to be around a lot more. Should, you know, if you, if someone is

00:34:51.800 listening to it in a similar position, they may be really desperately trying to provide the

00:34:56.320 opportunity for their partner to not go to work. They feel like, you know, in order to make that

00:35:00.960 happen, I really, someone's going to have to work here, like outside the home, right?

00:35:04.340 So what's the right way for a dad to be in the modern world? What's the healthy way for a dad

00:35:09.640 to behave? Well, listen, the traditional way was that, um, very young children under the age of

00:35:14.660 three had a primary attachment figure present and fathers spent as much time as they could with

00:35:20.760 children, um, with that playful, physical, playful, tactile stimulation, throwing the baby up in the air,

00:35:26.980 tickling the baby, chasing the baby around. That's a way to help teach children about, um, regulation

00:35:32.320 of, of aggression. Um, and, and what I say is more is more, and, and I'll leave it at that and say

00:35:38.600 more is more, the more you can be there, the better, but there are also the realities of life

00:35:43.100 that you have to earn a living. And if you're a team and you're doing tag team and you're making

00:35:47.100 more money so your wife can stay home, what I would say is if you're a father of a little boy,

00:35:51.700 but even a little girl, but even more of a little boy, um, you need to save time every single day.

00:35:58.660 So fathers get into a mindset and they say, well, um, I'm gone before they wake up in the morning.

00:36:04.140 And well, I have an hour at the end of the day with my son. What I would say is that's probably

00:36:09.140 not enough. Um, and if you're going to work that hard and you come home and you, you only have an

00:36:15.100 hour with your son, you need to leave more time for that play, right? So you can play basketball with

00:36:20.420 the little mini basketball hoop in their room or so you can wrestle and your wife can yell at you

00:36:25.480 because you're overstimulating the baby and that's all part of it. Right. So, um, more is more. And

00:36:30.720 that doesn't mean that you have to be there every single minute of the day with the mother. Otherwise,

00:36:35.060 then you're not a team, then you're competing. Um, but, but more is, but look, I won't be offended

00:36:40.560 if you're like Constantine, you're a shit father. Like you need to be there three hours a day. I'm,

00:36:44.660 I'm interested in what you as an expert in this would say is a healthy, correct amount.

00:36:50.320 So what's really healthy is to be there at transitional times as much as possible.

00:36:54.480 Transitional times. Yes. Waking up in the morning. Um, if you can going to school,

00:37:00.100 but a lot of fathers aren't around for that. Um, and at the end of the day, when they're

00:37:05.140 kind of taking off their, Mr. Rogers was a TV show in America, Fred Rogers, and he had this way of

00:37:11.040 coming into his studio and he would take off his street clothes and he would put on his sweater,

00:37:16.540 his Mr. Rogers sweater in America. This was a educational television for children. He was

00:37:21.360 wonderful. The idea is when you come home and you take off your street clothes and you put on your

00:37:26.620 dad clothes, um, you know, it's, it's being there as much as you possibly can for your son at

00:37:33.520 transitional times, waking up, going to sleep, but before going to sleep, you need to leave at least

00:37:39.140 an hour, if not two hours. So in the 1950s, everybody ranks on the 1950s and I understand why,

00:37:45.720 but leave it to beaver was a TV show in America where the dad came home every day at five 30

00:37:51.300 and was there for the baseball games of the kids and, you know, ate dinner and they watched TV

00:37:57.120 together. They went for a walk around the block together, whatever they did. Right. So that time,

00:38:03.420 which is transitioning from your day to your evening, and then transitioning from your evening

00:38:08.360 to your bath time and your bath time to your bedtime and your bedtime to sleep. Those are transitions.

00:38:13.480 The more transitions you can be there for the better. Well, that's what I do. So we usually

00:38:17.700 have breakfast together before I go. Yeah. And then an evening I come home, we play around,

00:38:22.120 we have dinner and then a bath time and bedtime. That's right. Yeah. And what I would say is don't

00:38:26.820 get so fixed on your children needing a lot of sleep. If you haven't been able to be there during

00:38:31.680 the day, whether you're a woman or a man, um, you need to extend their day. I mean, you know,

00:38:37.440 the expression in my field is it's either front loaded or back loaded. They need what they need

00:38:42.100 and they're going to get what they need. And so parents will say, Oh, my child's so hard to go

00:38:46.100 to sleep after I come home from work. I'm like, because they haven't seen you all day and they're

00:38:51.120 going to get what they need from you at the end of the day, if they didn't get it during the day.

00:38:56.120 So don't be so rigid, uh, as parents, if you work, don't be rigid about their, their,

00:39:01.920 when they go to sleep. Um, meaning, you know, you can't, you can't come home from a long day of work,

00:39:07.200 spend an hour with your child and then put them to sleep. They're going to just say,

00:39:10.240 no, because they need you. So keep them up a little longer and, um, give them more before

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00:41:04.760 Well, I think we tell men and fathers today that their wives, nothing will change, and their

00:41:09.740 professional wives will always be big earners and successful and be partners economically. And

00:41:15.340 you can get the bigger house, and you can get the bigger car, and you can take fancy big, you know,

00:41:19.020 and we're telling parents that there's going to be no change. And we tell men that too.

00:41:23.700 Um, and, and, you know, and we also tell them that mothering is insignificant. It's not valuable

00:41:30.780 work. And some, someone who you pay, uh, very little to and have less respect for will do just

00:41:37.680 fine. What I call the myth of any caregiver will do, which is a real myth. And so we tell that to

00:41:44.180 young men too, who then grow into fathers, and then they're angry at their wives for wanting to stay

00:41:49.800 home. So what I would say is, don't promise each other anything. Know that everything will change.

00:41:57.440 Say, we're not making any promises. We have to see how we feel when this baby is born.

00:42:02.120 And I may want to stay home. And for the father to say, look, let's, let's create a financial

00:42:07.540 plan for us for the next few years, where if you do want to stay home, or if you only want to work

00:42:12.440 part-time, we can manage it. So that's the myth. We tell them nothing will change economically in

00:42:19.780 any other way. And one of the most heartbreaking statistics I've read is that most marriages,

00:42:26.520 and maybe I'm wrong on this, so correct me if I am, most marriages break up. I think it's two

00:42:30.500 years after having a child. How, why is that? Because it's fucking hard, mate.

00:42:35.860 Sorry. Sorry. He's right. I'm with him. I'm with him. So the idea, so the test of one's resilience

00:42:45.380 is if you can manage hard. If you're going to climb Mount Everest, and you go into it with the

00:42:53.000 expectation that you're going to climb a little hill in the Yorkshire countryside, okay, you're going

00:42:59.980 to collapse pretty much. You know, you're not going to have brought the right equipment. You're not going

00:43:05.420 to have prepared and trained for it. But if you tell them, look, the few from up there, it's the

00:43:12.760 best in the world. But to get there, you've got to go through a lot of hardship, but you can do it.

00:43:18.940 We're going to train you. We're going to get you ready. And you know, you're not going to sleep,

00:43:22.860 but it's going to be great because the joyful moments will be more joy and love than you've ever

00:43:26.940 felt in your life. But then there's going to be these terrible moments where you're exhausted.

00:43:30.440 If we tell you and you have realistic expectations, then you can manage it together, right? If we tell

00:43:39.480 men and women lies about raising children, then when they have children, they collapse.

00:43:46.620 And what are these, because we're talking about these lies that we tell,

00:43:51.580 but what are the real brutal truths of raising kids?

00:43:57.560 That it's the most amazing, joyful thing you'll ever do, that the love for your child is the

00:44:05.140 greatest love you will ever feel for anyone. You know, people say, oh, but I have romantic love.

00:44:10.940 Nah, I love my husband with all my might, but it doesn't, it pales in comparison to my love for

00:44:18.060 my children. And he would stay, he would say the same thing. And so it's not the same kind of love,

00:44:24.720 right? So, so I think we're, we're doing young people a great disservice by not being honest about

00:44:31.900 how joyful it can be, but how hard it can be. It is really hard, but you know, hardship was never

00:44:39.760 something that human beings were afraid of in the past. We've become soft in a way we've, we've let,

00:44:47.440 we lack resilience again. And I don't blame young people for this. I blame the generations who didn't

00:44:54.100 provide that emotional foundation. So there's a lot of research, so much research about the fact that

00:44:59.800 if you nurture, if you give to a child in the first three years, if you're physically and emotionally

00:45:05.600 present and you make them feel safe and secure, they can manage stress and adversity going forward.

00:45:14.120 It's the story of the three little pigs, right? If you build a house of bricks from the beginning

00:45:19.900 and you're sensitive and you're present, then that house cannot be blown down. But if you build a house

00:45:26.960 of hay or a house of wood and, uh, you know, put your child in daycare, have somebody else raise them,

00:45:33.400 take vacations and leave your child for a week with granny. I mean, crazy stuff. I hear with little,

00:45:38.500 little babies with what I call empathic impairment. They look at their own babies, these young people,

00:45:44.800 and they cannot see the vulnerability of their own children.

00:45:50.660 And also as well, I remember I was, you see, I was, when I was teaching, I used to see

00:45:57.060 the way that moms would be disconnected from their kids. And then you go, well, no wonder the kid is

00:46:04.620 acting up in school. No wonder the kid lashes out because that fundamental connection between mother

00:46:13.480 and child or father and child, it's just non-existent. So there's something called an attachment disorder,

00:46:20.500 which is generationally passed down, not genetically. What that means is that if you had a mother who

00:46:27.580 struggled with attachment, who struggled with deeply connecting, who struggled with dependency,

00:46:36.260 um, who struggled because her own mother struggled, right? Um, that is passed down to the next generation

00:46:43.500 through pathological defenses. So that baby who is not getting their emotional needs met,

00:46:49.620 sometimes their physical needs met by a mother, um, will have to develop a way to cope. Now,

00:46:55.800 if you're so little, those coping mechanisms are not healthy. They're pathological coping mechanisms

00:47:01.980 that fall apart. One is called an avoidant attachment disorder where it's very hard for that baby to grow

00:47:09.000 up and trust others and trust love. And it's very hard for them to give over to really deeply connecting

00:47:16.800 and loving with others. And it often leads to depression and loneliness. Another attachment disorder

00:47:23.100 is called the ambivalent attachment disorder. That baby clings to their mommy like dear life because

00:47:28.980 they know, and the narrative is, my mommy's going to leave me again, so I just have to hold on to her and never

00:47:33.960 let her go. That is a very anxious baby. That, that then is correlated with anxiety later. And usually,

00:47:40.920 it's an anxious mother produces that anxious baby. And then there's the hardest really that is hard

00:47:47.000 for me to even talk about, which is called the disorganized attachment disorder, which is a baby

00:47:51.280 without a strategy. So think of an avoidant attachment disorder and an ambivalent attachment disorder

00:47:57.220 as strategies, coping mechanisms for that baby to cope with not getting their emotional needs met.

00:48:03.220 Okay. This baby doesn't have a strategy. A disorganized attachment baby will cycle through

00:48:09.180 all the strategies. First, they'll turn away from the mother. Then they'll cling to the mother. Then

00:48:15.100 they'll slap the mother out of rage. And then they'll circle through. That's correlated with borderline

00:48:19.980 personality disorders. And we have a huge uptick in babies without strategies who develop borderline

00:48:26.620 personality disorders. We've never seen so many borderline patients in my field.

00:48:31.520 So, and let's talk about this because this is very, this is very important because a borderline

00:48:36.980 personality disorder, just explain it to the audience because number one, it's very severe. And

00:48:41.240 number two, from what I know of BPD, it's, there is no cure for it.

00:48:46.340 No, there's treatment, but there's no cure. It's very hard to treat. So it is someone who never felt safe.

00:48:55.260 It is a baby who really never was provided with that feeling of safety. So it doesn't really

00:49:00.680 feel safe in the world and alternates between an excessive dependency and excessive rage over

00:49:10.680 dependency, paranoia and persecution, feelings of paranoia and persecution and cycles through these

00:49:18.060 feelings. Basically, they have a hard time having relationships, a very hard time. Now I've treated

00:49:24.100 borderline patients in my practice who do get better. They're never fully better, but they, they,

00:49:30.940 they go on to have relationships and have children, but the treatment is very long and very hard. It's

00:49:36.600 usually psychoanalysis. So, you know, they have DBT therapy, but that just controls symptoms. But if

00:49:43.160 you're really going to try to change the character of a person, it's not easy. So what I say to parents is,

00:49:48.920 you know, you have two windows, you have zero to three and you have nine to 25. You have adolescence.

00:49:54.880 If you miss the first window, my second book was originally supposed to be called Second Chances.

00:50:01.800 They renamed it into Raising Resilient Adolescents in the New Age of Anxiety, whatever. But

00:50:06.100 it was supposed to be called Second Chances because these two windows, meaning from zero to about 25,

00:50:13.120 but once they leave your house, you don't have much hope. So as you're at 18, you have a lot of room

00:50:18.760 to try to repair things. But if you miss that, then a personality gets set, a character gets set.

00:50:26.680 And why is it, Erica, that more women are diagnosed with BPD than men? Is that just the way that

00:50:33.440 more women present with those type of symptoms or is there something else going on?

00:50:38.200 Oh, there's a lot of men with borderline personality disorders. I mean, the kids, you know,

00:50:43.400 boys are more violent with their suicidal attempts and their self-harming behaviors,

00:50:47.400 but they have very high rates of borderline personality now. So, yeah, I mean, I think that

00:50:54.160 was just maybe under-recorded that men have very high rates of self-harming behaviors.

00:50:59.940 And also, does addiction play into this? Because addiction is a dissociative.

00:51:05.400 Yes, it is a dissociative. It's a narcissistic disorder. So you'd say it's all about harm to the

00:51:12.140 self. It's all about the lack of development of the part of you. You know how we talk about core

00:51:18.900 training, physical core training, right? This is emotional core training. Your self is your core.

00:51:26.900 And it develops from the moment you're born. And some psychoanalysts even talk about in utero,

00:51:33.660 but it develops from the moment you're born. And it is about feeling safe and secure and loved and

00:51:40.960 understood. Those would be the four things. Safe, secure, loved, and understood. If you have those

00:51:46.740 four ingredients, then you develop a self. If you don't have those four ingredients, either because

00:51:53.500 you feel safe and secure and loved, but not understood, or you feel loved and understood,

00:51:59.900 but no one was around. So you never really felt safe and secure. Any of those four don't quite

00:52:05.800 develop. You haven't fully developed a self. And that leads to a compensation. You could say it's

00:52:11.840 a disorder of deficiency where you're always trying to fill a void that never got filled. And drugs,

00:52:17.980 alcohol, sex, eating, all those addictions, gambling, pornography, they all try to fill a void

00:52:25.220 in a person where the self is supposed to be. And so there are probably people watching and

00:52:30.920 listening to this that can spot these types of flaws in themselves. What should those people do

00:52:38.440 if they're listening to this? They're going, oh my God. Go get therapy from a psychoanalytic

00:52:45.080 psychotherapist. We either call ourselves psychoanalytic or psychodynamic psychotherapist,

00:52:50.300 not a CBT therapist. CBT therapists are good for what I call symptom relief, cutting the grass.

00:52:57.420 So if you have OCD and you want to learn how to control it, or you just want to learn how to

00:53:02.100 control anxiety rather than understand the deeper underpinnings of it. But you know, you can't really

00:53:09.440 heal by just cutting the grass. You actually got to go to the roots and see what's going on at the

00:53:14.680 roots. So what I do with patients is I really try to understand the origins of things. So that would

00:53:21.400 be the way to define good treatment for someone who's suffering from these disorders versus what

00:53:27.080 I consider more negligent treatment, which is if you're just giving medication as a psychiatrist or

00:53:32.640 you're just cutting the grass and teaching them some behavioral techniques, you're really not helping

00:53:37.720 that person at a very deep level to both uncover and heal from deep, deep trauma and wounds that go

00:53:45.360 back a long time. And because we now seem to have this over-diagnosis, particularly on 14 Gen Z with

00:53:53.420 things like ADHD, is that a result of the parental strategies that you've been talking about earlier?

00:54:00.080 Yeah. So you've heard of fight or flight. Yes. Okay. Fight or flight is the evolutionary response

00:54:05.920 to stress, right? The sable-toothed tiger was chasing you. You were running. You were either

00:54:10.020 fleeing or you stood your ground. You were fighting. Okay. It's our nervous system's way of coping with

00:54:15.700 threat. And so what we're seeing in children, and one of the things we're seeing is this huge uptick in

00:54:21.580 children with fight or flight responses. They're either incredibly aggressive, more behavioral problems,

00:54:27.640 particularly in boys in schools. Biting, kicking, hitting, you know. And then we see distractibility.

00:54:35.920 Now, distractibility is not a disorder. Distractibility is a response to stress.

00:54:41.660 It means that that child's nervous system is overloaded. You've overloaded that circuit with

00:54:47.760 stress. So instead of asking, where is the stress coming from? What can we do about the stress? What are

00:54:54.500 the psychosocial stressors that are contributing to this little boy's stress? We're just medicating

00:55:00.040 them, what I call silencing their pain. Diagnose, medicate, throw them in the bucket. And now you've

00:55:06.340 diagnosed someone, and you've categorized them, and you've marginalized them, instead of saying,

00:55:12.220 this child is having a stress response. What's going on? We don't like to think deeply about things

00:55:19.800 today. We like to think very superficially about things, and we like a lot of immediate gratification.

00:55:26.340 Just get rid of my pain. Give me a pill. I don't want to think about things. I don't want to work

00:55:31.140 on things. I don't want to be uncomfortable. Therapy makes me uncomfortable. Unless you're

00:55:35.880 willing to be uncomfortable, you're never going to see the view at the top of Everest.

00:55:40.160 It's also, as well, I think, it's because when you have these things,

00:55:43.700 you will always just about coping. You're always just about coping. So every day is a battle until

00:55:52.100 from the moment you wake up till you get to bed, and you just, well, I held it together for this day

00:55:57.380 and hopefully tomorrow. But one more thing on top of that feels like this could be the thing that could

00:56:02.900 absolutely break you. Yeah.

00:56:05.340 And I think that's a real issue as well, because a lot of people don't realize how they're only just about

00:56:14.340 coping, and they're not truly aware of everything that they're dealing with, which isn't normal

00:56:19.400 and isn't actually comes from the way that you were raised, for instance.

00:56:23.920 Well, I mean, I think we don't talk about prevention also in our health care. We talk about

00:56:31.400 the medical model, which is, it hurts, go get a pill. We don't really talk about, so parent education,

00:56:38.900 what I do, I consider half of what I do, maybe more than half is prevention, right? So talking to

00:56:44.200 parents about what they can do to prevent mental illness in their children. So we...

00:56:48.940 Well, Erica, sorry to interrupt. This is something I wanted to pick up on in the entire conversation

00:56:53.120 you're having with Francis. How, I don't want to overstate the case, but how accurate, because,

00:56:57.980 see, most people's idea about mental health is like, it's a chemical imbalance, it's a thing,

00:57:02.800 it's like, you know, you develop a physical disease, and quite often it's sort of random,

00:57:08.980 it's not caused by a specific thing that you did or ate or whatever, people will think.

00:57:13.500 How accurate is it to say, in your opinion, that a lot of these things are literally caused by your

00:57:19.640 childhood? So, there is no genetic precursor for anxiety and depression, none. There's a genetic

00:57:27.320 precursor for schizophrenia, and some markers for bipolar disorder at a very severe level,

00:57:34.180 but anxiety, depression, ADHD, none. It's generationally passed down. It is something

00:57:41.260 through the inheritance of acquired characteristics. So, it's the nature-nurture debate, right? And even

00:57:49.600 with schizophrenia and bipolar, epigenetics tells us that those genes need to be turned on. There's

00:57:55.560 no genetic precursor for depression, anxiety, and ADHD. What they did find is a genetic marker

00:58:01.620 for a short allele on your serotonin receptor. It's called the sensitivity gene. It means that

00:58:08.640 many children are born more sensitive to stress, and that sensitivity then is correlated with mental

00:58:15.880 illness of different kinds. And more children are born with that sensitivity gene. That's the only

00:58:22.900 genetic marker. So, it means that we need to look at how we're fortifying our children. You know, we don't

00:58:30.640 have a lot of control over a lot of things in our children's lives. I mean, I have grown children, and I

00:58:35.460 can tell you that there is so much that you can't control for your children. And so, what you want to do

00:58:42.240 is control for what you can, right? The serenity prayer. What you can control for is the early years

00:58:49.440 when you have a captive audience, and they need you, and they're dependent on you, and they require

00:58:57.120 a deep sense of safety and security and love and understanding. You can control for that. You build the

00:59:04.300 foundation of the house that builds that house of brick that will be more resilient to adversity in the

00:59:10.940 future. Michael Meaney is a researcher who did research with animals and found that animals who

00:59:16.440 licked and groomed their young, those animals, the babies, were more resilient to stress in the future

00:59:22.240 than the babies whose mothers did not lick and groom them. So, it not only proved that resilience has

00:59:29.620 everything to do with early nurturing, but it also proved that the babies that were licked and groomed

00:59:35.020 passed down generationally to the next generation the ability to lick and groom, but the ones who weren't

00:59:39.860 licked and groomed did not pass down generationally the gene, if there is, there's no gene, the ability

00:59:46.240 to lick and groom. Well, the reason I bring it up is I think it's helpful for parents like me to say,

00:59:53.080 you know, these things that you're sacrificing for, these are the things that you're avoiding. I think

01:00:00.480 if it was stated in that more direct language, frankly, a lot of people would have a stronger sense

01:00:06.040 of like, this is an important thing to do. You know, none of the things that I say are based

01:00:11.160 in opinion. So, I'm a clinician. I see a lot of patients a week still. This is the main part of my

01:00:17.280 life. And I see them all over the world now, you know, and have been for a while, but I see a lot of

01:00:23.660 patients. But I'll say that, you know, we are not being totally honest with patients about, and parents

01:00:34.400 about what causes mental illness. We are telling them lies about, you know, it being genetic, about

01:00:42.100 it not being your fault, about you're not responsible. There's the word responsibility again.

01:00:47.380 I'm going to say something that sounds truly harsh, and I don't mean it to be, but it's the truth.

01:00:51.780 And as my rabbi says, always tell the truth and be authentic, and you can never go wrong. So,

01:00:58.100 I'm going to tell the truth. You are responsible for your children's mental illness. As a parent,

01:01:04.340 you are responsible. Now, that doesn't mean that, and how are you responsible? You're responsible for

01:01:12.580 those early beginnings that help them to be more resilient to adversity and stress in the future,

01:01:19.100 because you cannot predict what will come their way. But what you can do for them is provide them with

01:01:25.340 that early, early, early beginning.

01:01:28.400 Erica?

01:01:29.580 Yes.

01:01:30.320 Go for it.

01:01:30.640 So, we've talked about a number of different things. Is it, what about addiction? Because we had a

01:01:37.220 gentleman by the name of Dr. David Nutt, who's a neuropharmacologist, and he said that the number one

01:01:42.560 prediction for addiction in children is having an alcoholic father.

01:01:47.060 For alcoholism, not addiction, for alcoholism.

01:01:48.800 But that is the inheritance of acquired characteristics. That is generational expression

01:01:54.580 of disease, not genetic expression.

01:01:57.900 And there are several things we've discovered that predispose you to becoming an alcoholic.

01:02:02.840 And the first one is having an alcoholic father. So, there's clearly genetics. But we can go further

01:02:08.340 than that now. And in fact, we know that that vulnerability is in part due to brain chemistry.

01:02:14.500 And it's kind of paradoxical. But people who start off being resistant to alcohol,

01:02:22.300 the people that can stay sober or stay standing after their first binge, when all their friends

01:02:28.180 are on the floor, they're often, they've got alcoholic fathers. And so, they're like pre-tolerant.

01:02:34.520 Now, they're the super, you know, everyone thinks, wow, he's an amazing guy. Look how much you can drink.

01:02:39.420 But the problem is, they end up drinking more and eventually become dependent.

01:02:44.340 So, if you have an alcoholic father, it means that you had a depressed father.

01:02:48.420 Because alcoholism is the symptom. The illness is depression.

01:02:51.720 If you have a depressed parent, you're more likely to be depressed unless you get treatment.

01:02:56.800 Because you were raised by a parent who couldn't meet your emotional needs,

01:03:01.100 because they couldn't meet their own emotional needs, because someone didn't meet their emotional

01:03:05.640 needs. So, that's, you know, I used a quote last year at my ARC speech by Terry Reel about how every

01:03:12.060 generation has the opportunity to interrupt, be a bridge and interrupt the generational expression

01:03:19.460 of disease in their families.

01:03:21.100 And that's a responsibility of the parent?

01:03:23.200 That is a responsibility of each and every person that parents.

01:03:26.460 That you are self-aware, that you look at yourself, that you look at your parents, that you look

01:03:32.180 at what they did right and what they did wrong, and you learn from it, and you go to therapy

01:03:36.640 if you need help with it, and you become a better parent.

01:03:42.280 It's always good to be better than the last generation in one way or another.

01:03:46.720 We can't always be richer. We can't always have more.

01:03:49.660 But in one way or another, we can improve upon our parents.

01:03:52.700 And healthy parents want their children to improve upon them.

01:03:56.580 Absolutely. Erica, it's been so great to have you on.

01:03:58.880 As you know, my wife is like your number one superfan in the world.

01:04:02.760 And I can see why. It's been so great.

01:04:04.760 I hope your message gets further and further as you carry on doing your important work.

01:04:09.280 We're going to go to our sub-stack to ask you questions from our supporters.

01:04:13.080 Before we do, we always end with the same question, which is,

01:04:15.480 what's the one thing we're not talking about that we should be?

01:04:17.740 Before Erica answers a final question, at the end of the interview,

01:04:21.900 make sure to head over to our sub-stack.

01:04:23.740 The link is in the description where you'll be able to see this.

01:04:27.960 Is there any correlation between leaving parenthood into late 30s and beyond for women,

01:04:32.100 and maybe for men, to the seeming rise in various childhood mental disorders?

01:04:37.380 How much damage did the COVID lockdown inflict on children?

01:04:40.740 And do we still see that after effect today?

01:04:43.900 Do we take emotional abuse seriously enough, or is it just hard to detect?

01:04:48.540 Is it taken less seriously when the mother is a perpetrator and not a male relative?

01:04:53.360 So we didn't talk about older children and adolescents,

01:04:55.820 and I would say the one thing we're not talking about in society that we should be talking about

01:04:59.900 is how marijuana use in adolescents and young adults is devastating.

01:05:06.780 Marijuana has become addictive and toxic because of the levels of THC.

01:05:12.740 98% in gummies, 38% in smoking weed.

01:05:17.880 It's not the marijuana of my generation.

01:05:20.720 It wasn't addictive in my generation, but what we're not telling people about

01:05:25.000 and parents about and kids about is that it's leading,

01:05:28.600 it's the number one leading cause of psychotic breaks in adolescents.

01:05:33.020 If you go into an emergency room, 80% of the mental health visits for adolescents

01:05:39.960 will be because of marijuana-induced depersonalization or psychotic events,

01:05:46.860 and many of those children are then hospitalized for years and don't recover for years.

01:05:52.080 And this is happening every single day, and we don't talk about it.

01:05:56.180 Why? Because it's economically so fruitful now that marijuana is a product that we can sell.

01:06:03.220 But what we're not saying is the high levels of THC are toxic to adolescents and are destroying lives,

01:06:11.240 and marijuana should not be legal.

01:06:13.240 It happened to one of my best friends at university.

01:06:17.380 I saw him change from being a very bright, bubbly, life-of-the-party kind of guy

01:06:23.540 to someone who became angry, introverted, and profoundly unwell.

01:06:27.480 I mean, we're not saying, one, that it's addictive, and we're not saying it's toxic.

01:06:31.600 We've made it into something benign, like going to get a beer in the pub.

01:06:35.840 It is not a beer. It is incredibly addictive, incredibly toxic,

01:06:40.880 and it is literally making kids jump in front of trains.

01:06:44.940 And if we don't educate adolescents and we don't educate parents about this,

01:06:49.020 we are doing a disservice to families.

01:06:51.200 And by making it legal, we are really doing a disservice.

01:06:54.020 So there's the economy over the family.

01:06:57.480 Do you think, is there a point when your brain is fully developed

01:07:00.860 when you're more able to deal with it, in the same way as, you know,

01:07:04.260 if I go and have a couple of glasses of wine, nobody goes,

01:07:07.040 oh, this is constantly destroying his brain, even though technically it sort of is?

01:07:10.120 You can still have a breakdown from the high levels of THC if you're sensitive,

01:07:14.100 but the brain of an adolescent is ten times more responsive

01:07:17.640 to the chemicals in marijuana or the chemicals in any drug.

01:07:21.460 So tenfold reactions because of the dopamine surges.

01:07:27.400 So you would say that an adolescent is more likely to be addicted.

01:07:30.920 There's research to show that if marijuana or alcohol is introduced to an adolescent

01:07:36.800 before the age of 16, they're much more likely to become addicted in the future.

01:07:41.540 But because the brain is so sensitive to these chemicals,

01:07:44.820 they're also more likely to have psychotic breaks.

01:07:47.560 So about 25, is that where the brain is kind of better protected?

01:07:51.500 It settles.

01:07:53.020 The prefrontal cortex is settled.

01:07:55.260 So that's the part of the brain that regulates things like judgment,

01:07:58.140 executive functioning.

01:08:00.040 So you make better choices after 25.

01:08:02.520 So you might be able to take a puff of marijuana when you're 25 and go,

01:08:06.300 a puff is enough for me, I'm not going to have any more.

01:08:08.800 But when you're 18, 14, 20, 22 even, you can't stop.

01:08:14.720 You keep taking another puff and another puff and another puff.

01:08:17.700 So, yeah, we're not telling, again, the lies we tell.

01:08:21.660 And this is something that rings very true for me, particularly.

01:08:27.380 That was the path that I went down for and I lost more years than I care to remember to that.

01:08:33.220 More than you can, probably.

01:08:34.720 Yeah, exactly.

01:08:36.860 I speak as someone in a similar way.

01:08:38.860 Yeah, and I look at, you know, the periods of depression and this friend of mine in particular,

01:08:44.820 who I'm thinking of now, when it comes to schizophrenia particularly,

01:08:52.720 it can very much trigger schizophrenic episode if it's latent within you.

01:08:57.440 Yes, it can.

01:08:58.020 Within you.

01:08:58.680 But even without schizophrenia, it's triggering breaks in kids.

01:09:01.740 So kids who have no gene for schizophrenia, they're not becoming schizophrenic,

01:09:05.000 but they're having what we call depersonalization events, which is slightly a variation on psychosis.

01:09:12.060 If I can describe it to you, you see the world from a distance through a glass plate.

01:09:17.240 You don't know what's real.

01:09:18.500 You can see real, but you're not sure what's real.

01:09:21.460 It's devastating.

01:09:22.580 It causes them to go into hysterical panic states.

01:09:27.860 It's terrible to watch the deterioration of a mind.

01:09:32.120 And again, it's not something that most kids get over so quickly.

01:09:36.600 They go into an emergency room, and many of them end up in hospitals for years,

01:09:40.900 having to withdraw from school.

01:09:42.720 And we're just not being honest.

01:09:44.980 We're telling them it's benign, and we're telling them that nothing bad will happen.

01:09:48.660 It's like having a beer.

01:09:50.480 And we're doing this all for the pure economics of it, really.

01:09:55.680 Erica.

01:09:56.180 Erica, thanks for coming on.

01:09:57.120 Yeah, thank you.

01:09:57.580 All right, head on over to our Substack, where you'll be able to see your questions answered.

01:10:04.360 Does a religious upbringing slash religious community have any effect on childhood anxiety

01:10:09.260 and depression?

01:10:10.400 If so, is it helpful or harmful?

01:10:12.340 Does a religious upbringing slash religious community have any effect on childhood anxiety and depression?

01:10:27.580 Want to fast-forward your career?

01:10:31.580 Discover the Chang School of Continuing Education at Toronto Metropolitan University.

01:10:36.500 Our programs are the perfect way to boost your success.

01:10:39.780 Visit the Chang School online today.

01:10:42.760 Have a great day.

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TRIGGERnometry - June 01, 2025

The 4 Big Lies We Tell to Parents

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