The 4 Big Lies We Tell to Parents
Episode Stats
Length
1 hour and 11 minutes
Words per minute
173.74165
Harmful content
Misogyny
24
sentences flagged
Toxicity
11
sentences flagged
Hate speech
29
sentences flagged
Summary
In this episode, Dr. Erica Kogan talks with Dr. Kelly about her new book, "Motherhood and the Early Years: Why Babies Need Their Mom" and why it's so important for them to have a mom in their lives.
Transcript
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What matters more to our society right now, which means our values are very screwed up,
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is the GDP and our economy, rather than what's actually good for the mental health of our children.
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We're seeing almost immediately that babies' stress levels are so high,
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they're developing anxiety, depression, ADHD, and more aggression.
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I blame the fragility of our young people and the fact that they're breaking down
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on the fact that the adults in the room were not doing their job.
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You are responsible for your children's mental illness.
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So we talked about the lies we tell women and mothers.
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You wrote this book in which you suggest that the mothers are really good for their kids.
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But what you wrote the book about, essentially, the central theme is,
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particularly in the first three years, babies and toddlers really need their mom around.
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And that seems like actually is quite a difficult thing to say in the modern world.
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But you can't even use the term mother in some places.
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In Northern Europe now, in some countries, you're not even allowed to use the term mother.
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At the UN, they won't let you use the term mother.
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Because they feel everything has to be gender neutral and that mothers are exactly the same
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And the truth is that there are a lot of ways in which men and women are the same, but there's
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And one of the ways in which we're different is how we nurture children.
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Well, the reason I think, again, we're joking around, but actually, I think the reason it
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is a difficult thing to talk about is not actually that a bunch of snowflakes are offended.
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But I think the nature of our modern world has changed so much that a lot of women really
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feel a tremendous amount of pressure to get back to work.
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It's some of it is cultural, some of it's societal.
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And it's just a difficult message for some people to hear because maybe they don't have
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Yeah, there's a huge rise in postpartum depression.
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And one of the reasons that I see for that in my practice is that women, from the moment
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And when they have a baby, even if they have time off, they are always preoccupied with
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So it's very hard for women to relax and feel that their role is valuable and their time
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is valuable and well spent because they feel a lot of internal turmoil and conflict.
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We've created this conflict where we can't just say, sort of like just being able to say
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We can't just say being with your children in those early years is just really critically
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And you have a long life and you can do everything in your life.
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You can be successful with your career, but just not all at the same time.
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And you say all this stuff about how it's better for mothers.
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What's wrong with sending your six-month-old to a nursery, to daycare?
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So daycare, for a variety of reasons, is very bad for children.
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The right brain, the social-emotional part of the brain, is 85 percent developed by the
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And mothers perform a number of things, a number of roles in those first three years
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One of the things they do is buffer children from stress.
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In most parts of the world, babies are worn on their mother's bodies to keep the cortisol
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levels down, to raise the oxytocin levels, which is the love hormone, and to keep the stress
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And what we're doing is we're separating mothers and babies at such an early age that it's
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stimulating the stress-regulating part of the brain, the amygdala, which is meant to remain
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Baby's stress levels are supposed to be very, very low while their brains are developing
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When we separate a mother from a baby, that baby no longer feels safe because they need
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Those babies have a higher incidence of things like aggression, behavioral problems, and anxiety
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I mean, we're seeing almost immediately that babies' stress levels are so high, they're developing
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anxiety, depression, ADHD, and more aggression.
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And so, you know, basically separating mothers and babies or separating babies from their primary
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attachment figures in those early years causes too much stress for that baby's brain.
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So do you think, Erica, a lot of the issues that we're seeing with our youngsters now, the
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Gen Z generation, can be tracked right the way back to the way that we raise them as infants?
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Um, not just Gen Z, but, you know, even before that, you know, so this started, you would say
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the movement to separate mothers and babies, I mean, I suppose you could say historically
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it started with the industrial revolution when mothers went to factories, but really when
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it picked up speed is the 60s when we started talking about feminism and the me generation
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and individuality and how important it was to pursue your own personal ambitions and personal
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desires and pleasure, and it was all about pleasure.
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And so what we did is we diminished the role of caregiving in society because it was hard,
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because it was a responsible role, because it requires sacrifice.
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And so when that happened and women were pushed to go out into the work world when they had very
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young children, I mean, Gloria Steinem said to women, if you don't work out in the work world,
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you are not part of our movement. And these were to women who already had young children.
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Um, and she said things like your kids will be just fine. And our kids are not just fine,
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particularly in the early years when mothers disappear. Um, so babies are born incredibly
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neurologically and emotionally fragile, right? We know that, that the first three years,
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babies are not like other creatures ready to go. They're very fragile. And the thing that
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helps them to develop in a healthy way is that buffering from stress, but also mothers do this
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other important thing, which is they regulate baby's emotions from moment to moment. Every time
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a mother soothes a baby that's in distress, she's actually regulating their emotions. So babies aren't
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born with the ability to regulate their emotions. So Gen Z, the millennials, these were generations that
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were anxiety and depression, which are disorders of emotional regulation. People cannot regulate their
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emotions. Um, I always say that, you know, when you're a baby, you're born with the ability to
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go from zero to 60 in three seconds with your emotions. You can go from being happy, happy,
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happy to being, you know, sort of like sailing a sailboat in the Atlantic in a storm. That's how
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babies are born. And it's only because mothers are physically and emotionally present to, to soothe the
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baby when they're in distress, to help the baby to regulate emotions, that it's more like sailing in the
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Caribbean. You know, it's interesting what you say about removing mothers from babies. And there's
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going to be a lot of moms watching this. And there's a lot of young women who are going, well,
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what can I do? Because this is a society that we live in. The economic realities, whatever you want
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to call, whatever you want to call it, hypercapitalism, blah, blah, blah. It has effectively
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meant that the vast majority of people can't rely on a one parent income. So what I would say is
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strategize for those couples that don't have children, strategize. Think of raising a child
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as a team sport. So, um, do without when you can do without in the early years, if you have to do
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without, um, if you can, right. And if you can't, then there's a hierarchy to childcare that is better
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for children than daycare. Um, the best is your primary attachment figure. The next best is
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something called kinship bond. So it would be your dad or your aunt or your grandmother or your next
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door neighbor. Who's aunt Julie, who's like family to you. And this has a more similar investment in
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your life and will be around forever. Um, that would be the next best kind of care. Then would be
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a babysitter or nanny, which most people can't afford one babysitter or nanny, which is what's best.
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It's called single surrogate caregiving. Um, if you can't afford that, then share the care with
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another family, get your best friend and say, let's share the cost of a nanny or a babysitter.
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And that's already going to be better for children than if they go into daycare. Um,
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minimize your time at work whenever possible, maximize your time with your children, because
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there is no such thing as quality time. That is a ruse. That is a myth. Uh, it was invented
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in a time of pushing women economically to go back into the workforce. So basically what matters
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more to our society right now, which means our values are very screwed up is the GDP and our
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economy rather than what's actually good for the mental health of our children. Because it seems to
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me, and I think you'd agree with this, that women have been sold a lie, Erica. Absolutely.
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They've been told that they can have it or you can have the great job. You can have,
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you can be a COO, a COO, you can raise four kids. You can do, but that's patently a nonsense,
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isn't it? More than that. Yes. That that's all nonsense because you can have it all in life. I
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mean, I'm a good example. My career didn't really begin in earnest till I was in my fifties when I
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wrote a book until then, my practice was so very, very, very small because I would not leave my
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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
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take vacations. We didn't have cars, fancy cars. We didn't, you know, we didn't buy things. We just
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said, we're not going to buy things. We're a team. You're going to work. I said to my husband,
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and I'm going to work a very little, just enough to add to the income, but we're going to, we're
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going to hold back on income until our children were older. So it takes strategy. And, and I do think
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it's possible, but I think you have to get your mindset right around it first. I think even for,
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for people who are socioeconomically less privileged, I think there are ways of maximizing
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your time with your children. One of those ways in my book, Being There, I interviewed people from
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all socioeconomic backgrounds and the ones who did the best with their children were the ones who,
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when they weren't working, devoted their time to their children. So if you have to work to put a roof
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over your children's head or food on the table, then the answer is when you come home at night,
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you belong to your children. Your weekends belong to your children. Um, and that's hard for parents
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to hear because we're so much into take care of yourself. And it's so, but the truth is that if
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your children haven't seen you all day, then you need to compensate by being there as much as possible.
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And it's a really important point because as somebody who used to teach for longer than I care to
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remember, um, one of the things I noticed was that if a parent wasn't there, if a caregiver wasn't
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there, what immediately the kid would gravitate to is a screen. Yes. And that brings a whole host of
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other problems on top of what we're already talking about. Because another function of parents is they
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help to stimulate children, right? They stimulate their brains. Uh, they stimulate them in so many ways.
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And so if you're not there to stimulate your child, interact with them, basically just basic
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interaction, talking to them, reading to them, um, then they're going to have to interact with
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their media, with their technology. So, um, yeah, I mean, it's, it, and again, I, I do encourage
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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
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you say that, before it jumps out of your mouth that you can't afford it, sit down with your partner.
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If you have one, sit down with your parents. If you're a single parent, sit down with your,
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your extended family and figure out a way to work less. If you have to work to work less,
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um, you know, the goal in life is work less, make more. So maybe you have a goal of having the kind
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of job where you work by the hour and make more per hour, but work less hours. So you have more
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time with your children, maximize the time with your children. That's what I would say.
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And you mentioned, uh, a few things that are interesting to tie together. I mean,
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first of all, you mentioned feminism and that's an interesting avenue for us to explore. Um,
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because feminism, as I understand it, was a movement for the liberation of women. At least
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that's how it's been presented. Um, but the problem is with what you're saying is you, you are putting
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a framework of parenthood that is not liberating. It's constraining, right? You're saying you must
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sacrifice of yourself for this thing that you chose to bring into the world. That's the opposite
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of liberation in the way that we now understand it. So unpack that for us. Can you be a feminist
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and also believe what you believe? I'm a feminist, but feminism really was,
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was meant to give women choice. The word is choice. You have a choice to have a child or not to have a
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child. Now you can have a very linear, uh, almost masculine feeling career because masculine careers
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were linear. They could be linear, right? And so you can do that and not have children and you can
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still have a very fulfilling life. And I don't encourage people to have children if they don't
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want to care for children. So many years before me, Penelope Leach said, if you don't want to care
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for your children, don't have them. Right. And that still stands today. Um, you don't have to have
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children to have, um, a good life. You can have a wonderful generative life with being generative in
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other ways. But if you're going to bring a soul into this world, you are responsible for that
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person. You are responsible that you get them from point A to point B and, and help them to be as
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healthy as possible. And that is your responsibility. Um, and so we haven't really talked about
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responsibility to parents because we're so fixed on talking about personal freedom, but the reality
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is you are not going to raise healthy children if you don't grasp and take joy in the responsibility.
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So I can only use my father as an example. My father took such great joy in being a father,
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you know, caring for us, providing for us, providing for my mother. So she could look after us.
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It gave him such pleasure to care for us. It wasn't a burden. He didn't opine about how hard it was and
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he didn't feel competitive with my mother to stay home. And, you know, he just felt such joy and
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pleasure in caring for his family. And my mother felt great joy and pleasure in caring for us.
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And so what's happened to the world that both men and women feel so angry and resentful and burdened,
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um, and uncomfortable with the role of being parents.
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Well, I mean, I think we haven't been honest. I think there's a lot we haven't been honest.
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We haven't been honest about the fact that having a child and raising a child is much harder than we
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tell them and we should tell them. So for instance, you should tell parents you will not sleep for five
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years, period. And that way they won't sleep train their children and destroy their children's brain
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cells. I mean, I can tell you right now, it is devastating when parents come into me and say,
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I sleep train my child and my child has never been the same emotionally, neurologically.
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Tell our audience, Erica, because this is something I have some horrifying stories,
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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
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Well, all I can say is if you saw an adult hysterically crying and desperately afraid,
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you would never just let them go. You would never shut the door in their face, right? But we tell
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parents to do that with their babies. We tell them to put their babies in a room, to let them cry until
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the point of vomiting and hysteria, and raise their cortisol levels past the point of them being able
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to ever process any of that stress. And we tell them not only that it's okay, but it's ideal,
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right? Because what we're valuing is parents' comfort over children's comfort. In the first year in
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particular, children's comfort has to come first, not parents' comfort. And so this is the myth that we
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teach parents that you can have children and nothing will change. You can have children and
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your comfort will never be disrupted. It's not painful. Everything will stay the same. And this
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is a lie. When you have a baby, well, you have a baby. I don't know if you have a baby. Okay,
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but you have a baby. Look at my face. This is what you look like. Two and a half years of no sleep.
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Look at me. And five is the number. So, you know, when you have a baby.
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I thought this was going to be a depressing episode anyway, but now it's got personal. But
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thank you, Erica. When you have a baby, everything changes. Everything changes. And so we do not tell
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people that. We need to tell young people, but it changes for the good if you're healthy. So what I
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say to mothers is giving birth is a psychotic event, right? You have this little person moving,
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a little alien coming out of your body in the most dramatic, bloody scene. If you've watched the
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birth of your child, yet it's beautiful, right? How do we say? But it's absolutely beautiful,
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but it's very dramatic. So. Not literally. It's literally not beautiful at all. Okay.
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Metaphorically. When that, you could say that a door opens when a woman gives birth. Yes.
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That door is either opened to a past of a joyful, loving relationship with her mother and father,
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particularly her mother, or a painful one. So that door can be, it's like Alice in Wonderland. That door
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can be either a door to a loving, attentive, connected past, in which case the moment of looking at your
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baby is the most joyful experience because you're connecting with your loving mother in that moment.
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If, however, you were, your mother was depressed, narcissistic, absent, resentful, angry, abusive,
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the door that opens that may have been closed for many years because we say repression is a great
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defense of it lasts a lifetime. You basically forget you get amnesia. When that door opens,
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all of the amnesia is let loose, right? All of the memories are let loose of a painful childhood.
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And that's when postpartum depression sets in. You could say that the hormones connected with
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having a baby, um, will either, uh, motivate those happy feelings or motivate those very,
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very severely depressed feelings. Um, and it depends on your childhood.
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Well, Erica, so just to be clear, uh, what you're saying is women are more likely to have postpartum
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depression if their childhood was suboptimal. Absolutely. If the, if the relationship with
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their mother was either full of conflict or if they had a depressed mother or a narcissistic mother,
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if they were neglected or abused in any way, uh, emotionally and or physically, um, the door that
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opens is that door. That's interesting. It's maps onto something very, very, I'm not an expert,
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obviously, but I've been saying whenever people ask me, I'm like, whatever skill you lack or whatever
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shit you haven't worked out before you have a baby. Like if you don't know how to drive, if you don't
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have to do this, if you don't have to do your taxes, like learn that before you have kids,
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because the amount of time you have, it's going to go through the floor and stuff will come up.
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That's unprocessed, right? Yep. Yep. I mean, I can tell you some other lies that we tell parents.
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Oh God. Okay. Okay. Well the quality versus quantity time, there's no such thing as quality
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time. If you want to raise healthy children, you need quantity time. Okay. But there's a myth that
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we're telling women, which is that they can have children later if they freeze their eggs. It's a
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crazy myth. Um, and some of them can, and some of them can't. So, um, my son's girlfriend, um, is,
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is working in a law firm and, um, the law firm has said basically they will pay for the freezing of
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eggs to women. And it's a manipulative way of getting them to work many, many more years
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intensely. And they said, don't worry, you can have a baby when you're in your forties.
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And what's happening is women are getting to their forties and the eggs that they froze don't
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necessarily turn into embryos and the embryos don't necessarily turn into babies. And then they're
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bereft because they were lied to. So we, we are telling a lot of lies, um, to accommodate to a
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narrative that is quite an unhealthy narrative. It's that to me seems like the worst type of lie
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because that is, it it's, it's one thing to lie. And it's another thing to intentionally gaslight
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an entire gender, many of whom desperately want children and you were selling them down the river
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so that you can make more money out. Well, that's, that's, that was my thought. I,
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I almost fell on the floor when I heard that. So that, that was my thought too.
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But that's tragic. It is tragic. It is tragic. There are a lot of lies that we're telling that
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are tragic. I mean, you know, even just the lie I mentioned of nothing changes, no, everything
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changes. And, and in a good way, um, you know, having a baby, as you know, is the most joyful
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experience, but it's also painful because, you know, in Judaism, we say there is no joy without pain.
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There is no light without dark. Um, the, the, the pain helps us to appreciate the beauty of things
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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
0.98
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.
00:27:49.060
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
1.00
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,
0.88
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
0.68
00:29:22.720
successful. They're not making as much money. And so then you have this entire population of women
1.00
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
1.00
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
0.94
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,
0.99
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
00:39:16.300
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00:39:20.840
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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
1.00
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
0.81
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
0.97
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.
0.98
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.
0.94
00:45:14.120
It's the story of the three little pigs, right? If you build a house of bricks from the beginning
0.65
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
0.91
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
0.66
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
0.96
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?
0.91
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
0.99
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
00:56:05.340
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
0.66
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,
0.99
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
01:01:30.640
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.
01:01:48.800
But that is the inheritance of acquired characteristics. That is generational 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
01:03:23.200
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.
1.00
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.
01:04:04.760
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,
01:04:23.740
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?
01:04:43.900
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.
01:05:20.720
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,
01:06:13.240
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,
01:06:51.200
And by making it legal, we are really doing a disservice.
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?
01:07:55.260
So that's the part of the brain that regulates things like judgment,
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.
01:08:38.860
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.
01:08:58.680
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.
01:09:18.500
You can see real, but you're not sure what's real.
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,
01:09:44.980
We're telling them it's benign, and we're telling them that nothing bad will happen.
01:09:50.480
And we're doing this all for the pure economics of it, really.
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
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01:10:12.340
Does a religious upbringing slash religious community have any effect on childhood anxiety and depression?
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