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May 6, 2018 - Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
01:34:47
The absolute necessity of fathers: Warren Farrell/JB Peterson
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Warren Farrell is the author of books published in 17 languages.
They include two award-winning international bestsellers, Why Men Are the Way They Are, plus The Myth of Male Power.
Warren is being chosen by the Financial Times as one of the world's top 100 thought leaders.
He is currently the chair of the commission to create a White House Council on Boys and Men.
He's the only man in the U.S. to have been elected three times to the board of the National Organization for Women, now, in New York City.
Dr.
Farrell has appeared repeatedly on Oprah, Today, and Good Morning America, and has been the subject of features on 2020 in Forbes, The Wall Street Journal, People, Parade, and The New York Times.
His co-author of his newest book is Dr.
John Gray, the author of Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus.
Once again, this is the book.
We're going to talk not only about the book today, the new one, The Boy Crisis, but also about Dr.
Farrell's career and his goals and his aims and all of that.
And so, I'd like to introduce everyone to Dr.
Warren Farrell and ask him to tell us what he's up to and why.
Well, I guess what I'm up to is sort of the evolution of maybe all that time since 1969 and when the women's movement surfaced I was very interested in it and felt that women really needed to be able to be equally respected and enter the workplace and have options open and I was upset that women were not playing sports to the degree that I felt that was Creating the benefits to them of sports and so I started articulating this and started talking to my doctoral dissertation advisors about
doing this and their first reaction was Warren the women's movement is just a fad and I said I don't think so I think this is the beginning of the change of gender roles from both men and from women and so I Talked with them about that eventually convinced them that I could change my dissertation and And that led me to being seen by now as someone who was a man who was receptive at a time that the feminist movement was getting a lot of accusations of being man-haters.
And so I think I served the purpose of here's a man, a real-life flesh man who advocates what we're advocating here.
Get up and say what we're saying.
It's going to be harder to call you a man-hater.
And so I started doing that and then ended up speaking all around the world on Women's issues and the value of women being secure enough and competent enough to be able to share the breadwinning burdens that men handle.
And that was my focus for until the mid-70s.
In the mid-70s, I began to see that the feminist movement had made a great deal of progress and everyone was sort of getting on board who was, at least in the sort of Middle class, above, and educated.
And so that was...
But there was also a huge number of divorces occurring.
And so I began to say, it's important for the children to have both parents after divorce.
And Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem and a woman named Karen DeCrowe agreed with me.
But...
Now, I was on the Board of Now at that time.
I had gotten elected as a result of my advocacy to the Board of Now.
And my fellow and female co-workers on the Board of Now said, we're in a dilemma here.
And the dilemma is that the women are writing us saying they're going to withdraw from Now.
If they don't have the option to determine what happens with the children after divorce.
And we don't want to lose now membership because it's not only important for family purposes, but for all the other agendas we have.
And so I said, well, the important thing is not women's rights or men's rights.
The important thing is knowing what's best for the children.
And they said, yes, Warren, great theory, but we really need to focus on empowering women on a broad spectrum.
And so they ended up all voting in terms of giving women the option to be fully involved with the children or not, depending under the guise that women know the children the best and therefore they know what's best for the children.
And so NOW and I began to have a significant amount of tension over that point.
And Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem didn't weigh in.
They weren't on the board of NOW and then all the other boards of NOWs around the country began to go the same way that the New York City NOW went.
And so that led to my Disengagement and also I started forming hundreds of men's groups, one of which I think you know was joined by John Lennon and that had a big impact on both the people in the groups and I began to see what men's pain was.
And so I began to articulate men's pain as well as women's pain in my presentations.
And when I was only articulating women's pain and women's challenges, I would almost always get standing ovations and maybe an average of three invitations for a new speaking engagement.
And that was helping me live financially very well.
But then when I started to integrate the perspectives and feelings of men from the men's groups, there was a lot of...
I didn't see those standing ovations.
Why not?
Why not?
...invitations for new speaking engagements went from three to two to one and then eventually to zero.
Well, it seems self-evident in some sense that if you're articulating truthfully and carefully what would be good for either sex, in some sense you have to be articulating what would be good for both.
I mean, unless you view the battle...
Unless you view reality as a battleground between the sexes and as a zero-sum game, we can't have an intelligent conversation about what's good for women or what's good for men.
We have to have a conversation about what's good for men and men and women and women and men and women.
And so, why do you think, what was your sense of why it was when you started to raise these other issues that you were immediately unpopular?
Two questions.
Why do you think that made you unpopular?
And why is it that you so early cottoned on to the fact that there was something going on that wasn't exactly kosher in relationship to Now's push for a particular kind of family structure and a particular view of women's rights.
Yes, I think what happened for me was I just when I started focusing on what was best for children and then I began to we only had minimal amount of research up for that at that point in time this is you know early 70s and but we had enough for me to make a case to the board and when I saw the resistance the degree to which There was two things happening.
One is we don't want to lose our power base.
We don't ever want to have a woman say whatever option she wants should be closed to her.
And so I began to see that the women's movement was caring more about women than they were caring about the children.
That was the first disillusionment that I had.
Okay, so your first ethical point, in some sense, is that when you're speaking about families and you have to balance the rights and responsibilities of men, women, and children, that it makes sense to you to put children's well-being first and foremost, and then to place men and women as individuals, say, or perhaps even as a couple, below that.
Yes, exactly.
What I was saying was that freedom of choice is wonderful.
But when you make the freedom of choice to have a child, you then start prioritizing the needs of the child.
And you knew that those needs were going to be the child's needs first when you made that free choice.
So it wasn't like you were coerced into the into or pressured into making that choice You made the free choice to have a child that Incorporates the need to put the child's perspectives before yours.
That's part of your free choice Right, so it's basically the freedom there is the freedom to take on a certain kind of relatively permanent Responsibility and then to abide by that come hell or high water essentially into the future and That the children should not respect the parents' needs, because part of what I talked about in the boy crisis is that ain't nobody happy, you know, that everybody has to be happy in a family.
And that part of choosing a child to be responsible is choosing the child not just to have its needs met, but to also care about whether mom's or dad's needs are being met as well.
And that has to be very primal and Introduced early.
And then secondly, I also felt, and Betty Friedan felt this way also, that the women's movement would never go as far as it could go unless men were equally involved and We're proud of being involved in the fathering role because a woman who wants to break glass ceilings and go as far as she can, but also wants children, can't do that all.
If the man is working full-time and she's working full-time, either the children get neglected or something has to go.
And so women will often say to me, you know, I want to be a have-it-all woman.
And I say, you can be a have-it-all woman.
Find a man who wants to be home full-time with the children.
And let's reshape society so we're saying that men are not only warriors, That we praise and call heroes when they go to war and they die for us, but they're also warriors if you choose a man who wants to be fully involved with the child, let's honor him and respect him because we know that the social bribes that we gave men to die Allowed men to be willing to sacrifice their lives in exchange for being called hero.
Well, if we reframe being a father as being a different type of hero, men will follow because men basically go wherever the praise goes.
Okay, okay.
So in the 70s, so you started to put forward the case for children and to some degree as well simultaneously the case for fathers and you received a fair bit of resistance as a consequence of that and it sounds like The way you're setting up the argument is that the conflict, what was the conflict though?
Was it that the women who were being appealed to by now wanted untrammeled freedom of choice for them under all circumstances?
The reason I'm asking is because if you have children, obviously half the children you have are female, and you'd assume that if it was a matter of women's Opening up what would be best for women in any kind of medium to long-term manner that the concerns about daughters would be perhaps even if it isn't concerns about sons It would be concerns about daughters that would emerge as paramount even over the concerns of the mother So so what is it that was I still don't exactly get why it was
that you weren't being successful because it doesn't make sense Because there was two things happening simultaneously.
One was such a strong emphasis on freedom.
And the freedom manifested in two areas.
One is in the area of divorce.
In divorce, the women were often saying, I don't like my husband.
I want to start a new life.
I want to be able to move out of state if I wish to, to get a job that I want.
Or my new husband or boyfriend wants to move out of state.
And so I want to be able to take my children or child with me.
And I know what's best for my child, which would be like the medical community saying, we don't want women to be participating in the medical community because we know what's best for the patient, and not that women might have a separate contribution to make.
On the other hand, there was women who wanted to have the freedom to be able to have children without being married, and so 53% of women under 30 today who have children in the United States have children without being married.
And the belief was, again, that women knew what was best for the children, so they could take this on if they wanted to, and if they couldn't find a man that they really wanted, that they could raise the child by themselves or the children by themselves.
Okay, so part of it was actually driven by questioning the necessity of the nuclear family as the smallest viable unit.
A, that's correct, and B, the feminist community started, when I would go to feminist rallies and so on, there would be many books about Lenin and the The nuclear family being the patriarchal men that were oppressing women.
I think the feminist movement grew out of two huge iterations.
One was the civil rights movement, where there was an oppressor and an oppressed.
Then there was the The movement of not just civil rights, but after the civil rights movement came the Marxism and the belief that there were oppressors and oppressed among Marxists.
And a lot of the feminist movement, the early feminist movement was very, we had groups like Red Stockings and many other groups like that that were socialist worker party type feminists that very much believed in Marxism and they had the dichotomy of oppressor versus oppressed.
So when it came to men, men because we earned more, because our biological, not our biological, but our socialized and biological responsibility was to earn the money and do that type of nature of providing, The feminist movement looked at the fact that we earned more money once we had children, and so therefore we must be the oppressor, like the bourgeoisie of Marxism, and women must be the oppressed.
So we have two things happening simultaneously, this belief that the oppressors are wanting to be equally involved with the children, and then secondly, men having no idea why they had value Third, the very few men that did study the value of being a father and how important it was to children didn't speak up about it, and women can't hear what men don't say.
So we had this world then where women were sharing the burden of breadwinning.
But no one was even interested in asking the question about whether men could share the burden from women of providing equally for the family.
And women weren't even interested in that because they were so focused on their freedom and saw men as the oppressor.
And so there was no space to articulate the value of fathers and men in the family.
Okay, so well, you know, your terminology is interesting too, because you're attributing the desire of the women who were pushing against what you were saying, say, you're attributing that to a desire to freedom, but it seems to me that you could easily use irresponsibility as a terminology there,
you know, because freedom without concern for the medium to long-term consequences of your actions, especially when you're bringing in When you're dealing with minors, when you're dealing with children, that's not freedom, that's irresponsibility.
That is absolutely a responsibility, and that is where we as a society have failed to come in and say, you know, first of all, whenever either sex wins, that is, a woman wins custody, for example, whenever either sex wins, both sexes lose.
And it's worse than that.
Whenever either sex wins, both sexes lose, and in the case of family, the children lose enormously.
And we also need to sort of understand exactly what is it that leads to children doing so much better when they have fathers involved.
I started researching that and I ended up, as you know, with the boy crisis, ended up with more than 70 different ways that when children have their father involved in about an equal way, that they do so much better.
Well, it would be a lovely thing if you could detail out some of that now and then we'll go back to the...
The political, ideological story here.
But see, one of the things that's happened in Ontario recently is that our government has introduced Legislation that is predicated on the idea that all families are equal.
And the idea behind that, you could argue, is laudable.
I wouldn't argue that, but you could argue it.
That, you know, people have a variety of ways of solving the problem of having children, and that there's a variety of viable solutions to that problem, and that no one family organizational type should be Privileged above the others.
I mean, I suppose with the exception of multi-partner marriages, which we still don't approve of, let's say.
The problem with that, as far as I can tell, is that it does appear from the research that the nuclear family is the smallest viable unit.
Which is not to say that there aren't single mothers or single fathers who do an admirable job under trying conditions.
But part of the problem, this is a deep problem, is that Whenever you posit something as a value, so you might say, well, we want intact families, mother and father, that's the value we're heading for because that seems to be best for the children, then you produce a rank order of accordance with that, and the people who aren't in accordance with that value, you can easily make a case that they're being discriminated against.
And we're in a situation in our society now where even if the discrimination occurs, let's say, because of the pursuit of an admirable value, it's regarded as prejudicial.
And I think that's fed by that underlying hypothesis that was anti-nuclear family that...
Any sort of hierarchical structure is part of the tyrannical patriarchy.
It's something like that that's running underneath it.
So anyways, let's review, if you would, it'd be very helpful, I think, for everyone, some of the many ways that it's necessary for children to have fathers, why that's better, and perhaps also for society as well, not just for children.
Absolutely.
Children that have a lot about an equal or more than equal father involvement have a number of things in common as a rule.
And obviously there's reversals of this and not everyone fits this pattern.
But the first is they're far more likely to have postponed gratification.
And I'll elaborate on that a little bit more.
Postponed gratification is probably the single most Important quality to becoming successful and becoming successful especially being employed in a job that has some meaning for you is one of the most important ingredients in happiness and a sense of purpose and a sense of motivation and a sense of willingness to get up in the morning and so in a little while I'll be happy to just trace back how that postponed gratification happens more when you have a father.
Yeah because I'm really interested in hearing about that Secondly, children that have an equal amount of father involvement are far less likely to be depressed.
They're far more likely to be assertive and not aggressive, which is something you usually think of men as being aggressive, but actually the children of both girls and boys whose fathers are involved are far more likely to understand the distinction between being assertive and being aggressive and choose assertiveness.
Boys, another surprising one for me, in doing the research, was finding that boys and girls who are raised with about an equal amount of father involvement are far more likely to be empathetic.
Because I always thought of empathy coming predominantly from moms, and I'll be happy to explain in a bit why it does come more from moms, but why the outcome for the child is not more empathy.
The outcome for the child is less empathy, so a little bit more on that later.
Yeah, sure.
Far more likely both boys and girls should drop out of school if there isn't father involvement.
Far more likely when a relationship breaks up, a child that has not had significant father involvement is much more likely to be depressed and be withdrawn and feel alienated.
Far more likely to be addicted to video games.
Far more likely to be addicted to video porn.
Far less more likely to have few social skills.
Few emotional skills.
To do worse in every academic area, but especially in reading and writing, which are the two biggest predictors of success.
Far more likely to have a lower sperm count.
And here's an amazing thing I just discovered toward the end of The research for the boy crisis I saw in Pediatrics Magazine that children who by the age of nine don't have a significant amount of father involvement, both girls and boys were likely to have shorter telomeres.
And as most of us know, the telomeres are pivotal in predicting life expectancy.
So boys and girls, the average shorter telomere For a nine-year-old boy or girl without father involvement was 14% shorter.
But the boys' telomeres were then again 40% shorter than the girls.
So here this was predicting about a 14% shorter life expectancy for the average child without father involvement by the age of nine already.
And yet the boys were suffering more.
So two things faceted me there is, you know, if all the things like, you know, dropping out of school and things like that, I ask myself, well, maybe this is because boys with father involvement just have better, you know, better neighborhoods.
The fathers earn more, the families earn more.
Maybe it's a matter of poverty versus not poverty.
So I started looking at boys and girls growing up in good, quote, good neighborhoods with quote, good schools, and comparing them with boys and girls growing up in poor neighborhoods, in poor schools, and found that boys and girls growing up in Good neighborhoods with poor schools that did not have significant father involvement did about the same as boys and girls growing up in poor neighborhoods with poor schools that did have father involvement.
That father involvement was really as good a predictor of success as the quality of the school system, the quality of the neighborhood, and the socioeconomic class.
And this is what's led to the psychologists gathering together behind people like Warshaw, 100 psychologists and researchers saying, you know, this is not a correlation, the involvement of father.
This is not a matter of socioeconomic issues.
This is a matter of actual father's involvement, especially the biological father's involvement, Actually makes a significant difference.
We have been wrong about the assumption that this was probably just a correlation.
And so the more I looked, the more I found just every nightmare of a parent to be so increased when there was not a significant amount of father involvement.
And I was dating before I married Liz, the woman you just met just before we got on.
Before we got married 14 years ago, I was dating a number of women.
Almost every woman was a single mother.
And every single woman was working her rear off, trying to balance her life.
Every woman used the word overwhelmed by the way she felt.
Almost every woman said, well, I'd like my dad and the dad involved, but...
But I started listening to the butts of the women and then listening to men who had wanted to be more involved with their children and listening to what the differences were between what made the men feel not wanted, what made the men feel excluded, and why the women felt that they needed to not have the man involved.
And I saw this entire set of misunderstandings here.
And if I hope the boy crisis does anything, it's to sort of explain, you know, here are the 10 major things that dads do that sort of annoy women or make women feel that they're not protecting their children adequately, which when they understand the purpose of these things and when dads get their homework done enough to articulate to the moms the purpose of these things, that we'll realize that these are necessary ingredients in a child's life.
Okay, so that's a good place to go next.
So you laid out a whole slew of reasons, a slew of consequences of fatherlessness.
And we'll return back to the causal relationship between what men do and these beneficial outcomes.
But if you could go on now to tell us what it is that men are doing at a micro level, then we could return to the causal link between that and the positive outcomes.
And you said those also cause some contention in the household.
Yes, you know, I'll give one example, for example, will be a father is roughhousing with the kids.
And the mom's looking over and saying, looking askance and thinking, okay, when should I interfere?
When should I not interfere?
And the mom's saying to herself, Jimmy, you know, please keep the kids away from the credenza there.
Keep the kids away from the couch because they could hit their head there.
Why don't you wait, Javi, to...
Tomorrow, when you can take this outside, I feel much safer with the kids.
And then the mother is sort of hesitating to not be overly controlling, and yet at the same time, she's feeling she has to monitor the husband as well as monitor the husband with the kids.
And she's feeling in the back of her mind like, sooner or later, there's going to be an accident here, and I'm going to be upset with myself for not being stricter.
But on the other hand, the kids seem to be having fun, so I should let things go.
Well, you know, there's a psychobiologist named Jak Panksepp, who is one of the world's great biological psychologists, and he studied rough-and-tumble play in animals.
So rats, for example, a huge part of the socialization process that's key to the development of the prefrontal cortex in juvenile male rats in particular emerges and matures as a consequence of rough and tumble play.
And one of the amazing things that Panksepp discovered, and this truly is an amazing thing, is that if you pair two rats together and then let them play repeated bouts, the big rat will dominate the little rat to begin with.
In the first bout.
But if the big rat doesn't let the little rat win about 30% of the time in repeated play bouts, then the little rat won't play anymore.
So you get an emergent morality, an emergent play-centered morality, even among rats as a consequence of rough and tumble play.
And that rough and tumble, I did a fair bit of research on rough and tumble play about, oh, it's probably 20 years ago now, 15 years ago anyways, and it's really quite clear that rough and tumble play helps children parameterize their bodies so that they know how they extend and also what limits there is in the use of physical interactions with another person, what's fun, what's provocative, what's pushing it too far.
What's painful?
And of course, kids love rough and tumble play as well.
They're just absolutely starving for it, and we've squeezed it out of the kindergartens, the nursery schools, the elementary schools, the junior high schools, all of that, and forbidden.
And what Pangsep also found was that if you deprived juvenile rats of the opportunity to engage in active rough and tumble play, That they showed symptoms that were broadly analogous to those of attention deficit disorder in human boys.
And that you could also treat that with Ritalin the same way in rats as you could with boys.
So there's that rough and tumble play issue.
You know, and you might think too...
The question is, one question is, why might a mother be distrustful of the rough-and-tumble play episode?
And some of that might be sensitivity with regards to the kids, but a huge part of that also is trust, on her trust with regards to the father.
You know, because it's rambunctious and noisy, and if she trusts, let's say, that act of masculinity...
That plays rough.
Then she'll stay away and let the fun happen.
But if there's distrust running through the family, then she'll stand between the kids and the father, and then he won't get to involve himself in that way.
And then he'll turn off.
And I've seen that happen in many, many families.
Okay, so there's rough and tumble play.
That's a big one.
What else do you see?
Let me take the evolution of how rough and tumble play goes and all the dimensions of the slippery slope that it leads to.
What neither the mom nor the dad know is that this rough and tumble play leads to the types of things that you just mentioned, which are also evident in elephants and so on.
It also leads to the distinction between a child being able to distinguish between being assertive versus aggressive.
So the kid starts, for example, maybe kicking the dad in the wrong place or poking the dad in the eyes or pulling the dad's hair, and the dad says, sweetie, you can fake eye contact to the left and then move to the right to win in this wrestling match, or you can do this, this, and this, but you can't do these things.
And if you do do these things, we'll stop the roughhousing.
Yeah, so there's a really important issue there.
So two things there.
So imagine that a rough and tumble bout is like a dance.
Okay, and the point of the dance is so that both people are having a good time while it's happening.
Because otherwise it's not play, right?
And as soon as either party is no longer having a good time, you've actually snapped out of the psychobiological function of the play circuit.
So basically what you're telling the child by putting those rules on is, we can interact physically within a very limited set of parameters.
And what you have to learn to do is to be a sophisticated player within that set of parameters.
And you want to learn how to push the boundaries, right?
Because the most fun rough-and-tumble play is right on the edge between assertiveness and aggression.
And you can see kids, like I used to work in daycare centers when I was a kid, when I was 18, 19.
The kids would line up to rough and tumble play with me, because that was still allowable then, and they were so desperate for it, it was just ridiculous.
And I could really tell the difference between the kids who had engaged in that sort of play and the ones that hadn't.
And the ones that hadn't were painfully awkward.
And they would hurt themselves and you when you wrestled with them.
They'd put their thumb in your eye and they would cry often too when they got surprised but not hurt.
You know, because they couldn't tell the difference between just being startled and being hurt.
And so they were fragile and that also made them not fun to play with.
And the thing that's so interesting about that too is that Piaget talked about this when he talked about the development of children is that You know, the more sophisticated pretend play and then sophisticated cognitive play that emerges, say, between five and seven and then with the cognitive play older than that is that unless you have that underlying psychomotor embodied dance down,
you don't get to really proceed in a sophisticated way to those higher levels of play because other people don't want to play with you.
So the rough-and-tumble play, the importance of that can hardly be overstated.
And the framework here is that when you've set up a system where you've said that men are part of the patriarchy, their desire is to dominate women and make rules to benefit men at the expense of women, you have a framework, an emotional setting, Which is not conducive to men saying, here's my value.
Or women saying, let me see what the checks and balances of parenting is that leads to the best of you coming out and the best of me coming out.
All of that has sort of, we've skipped over an inherent sense of father knows best to father knows less.
And so the The process that I'll be sharing in a moment of what rough housing leads to and the slippery slope that happens when it doesn't happen is what has not even been nurtured as a possibility to be articulated in this culture at this time.
I also think too, you know, that if you have a partner who hasn't been played with Then that partner can't tell the difference between boisterous rambunctiousness and aggression.
And if there's a hypothesis about domination and the patriarchy running its course underneath that, then there's going to be conceptual confusion about the physical interactions that have the appearance of submission and dominance because that's part of the...
Roughhousing play routine, that is going to be viewed through a lens of tyrannical interaction, rather than just good fun.
And I mean, you can tell the difference, because if the kids are rough and tumble playing, they're unbelievably enthusiastic about it, and engaged, and laughing, and giggling, and like, they'll play right to the point of exhaustion, because they need it.
They need it so much.
But that's a hard thing to observe from the outside if you're not accustomed to that.
And if you don't have that framework of men having and dads having a value to begin with, absolutely not.
So here's maybe what might be helpful for a mom to understand.
That the rough and tumble play we now know helps children distinguish between being assertive and aggressive, but a number of other things also happen during that play, which is a bond that is created between the father and the child.
And in doing expert witness work to help children have both parents have to divorce, I've observed more than 50 families, and usually the father interacting with the children.
And in almost every case, I believe, that I have seen, this bond is used by the father to say things like, okay, no more roughhousing now.
Tell you what, You get your homework done, you get your chores done, you get all ready for bed, brush teeth, teeth brush well, and the bedtime is 9 o'clock.
Whenever you get all that done, we'll have between the time you get it done and the time of 9 o'clock in order for you to have some more fun, either with roof housing or reading your favorite story or whatever you prefer.
It's your choice.
Well, you know, with Panksepp's work too, he found that the little rats, the rats will work to enter a play arena.
Because play, you think play is a...
So Panksep established very, very clearly that there is a primary play circuit in mammals.
It's a separate psychobiological circuit.
It's not exploration.
It's a whole different motivational drive.
But activity in that circuit is intrinsically pleasurable.
And part of that appears to be because it's so key to proper socialization.
That it's regarded by children and by social mammals as intrinsically valuable.
And so it makes perfect sense that that can be used as a source of primary reward.
And I think your comments about the The man and the kids binding themselves together through play is also really important because one of the things that I do with young men who, you know, I think young men tend to be somewhat alienated from infants who are under about nine months old because they're not really equipped to know what the hell to do with them.
I mean, they can learn and they can be good at it, but...
It's not their domain of natural expertise.
But once a kid hits about nine months and starts to be able to imitate and to pound and to play and to respond to gentle teasing, like that's a perfect time for the father to swoop in, which is very helpful for a mother, by the way, who wants to have another child, and to start really cementing a relationship that's based on that interesting combination of high-energy fun plus...
The disciplined interactions that are necessary as a precursor to that.
And if you interfere with that, then you stop the father from being able to form that, from liking his kids, really.
You know, because that's how the liking comes about, is through play.
And so it's crucial, it's of crucial significance.
Absolutely.
And thank you.
The additional framework that you're placing on this is really deepening my own understanding of it as well.
Yeah, well, there's a book called Affective Neuroscience written by Yak Panksepp.
It's on my reading list on my website.
And I would highly recommend that because he lays out the Findings from the animal literature on the primary play circuit.
It's really, he should have won a Nobel Prize for it.
I mean discovering an entirely new motivational system in the brain is a major, major contribution.
And to also, the other thing that he did that was so cool, and sort of reminded me of Jean Piaget's work a little bit, is he made a very strong case that out of play emerges an ethic.
And, you know, that's why I was so interested when you mentioned that interactions with father actually increase empathy.
Because, you know, if someone has empathy for you, that means that, I mean, that can lead to a certain kind of narcissism, right?
Because you're always the center of attention.
You're not empathic unless you learn that you're not any more important than the next person, particularly the person that you happen to be playing with.
So, okay, so let's continue with what fathers are doing.
Yeah.
So in that roughhousing, what happens is that the bond that is created by the dad allows the dad to say, we'll continue the roughhousing between 8.30 and 9, if you have everything done.
So the child learns to postpone gratification from...
Doing what it loves to do right then and there, that is, be roughhoused with and deal with what it has to deal with before it gets more of what it needs.
And so, but the bond...
So that's interesting.
So you actually think, and I wonder if there's been any...
See, we don't know much about the origin of the trait conscientiousness.
Which is, at least in part, the ability to delay gratification.
And it is, after intelligence, it's the best predictor of long-term life success, especially in managerial and administrative jobs, in algorithmic jobs.
It's not associated with creativity, but that's a side issue.
So, your hypothesis is that the primary way men are socializing that is by using work to play as a bridge.
Yes, that play creates a bond.
So a lot of the problem is when moms often say, you know, you have to do this, you have to do that, you have to do this, you have to do that.
The mother is often experienced by the child as sort of the disciplinarian who's always making him or her do things.
And there's a seeds of rebellion start to occur of sort of like, how much am I going to be myself?
How much am I going to do what mom does?
Do I want to be a mama's boy?
Or it doesn't even happen consciously.
You just sort of feel like you're being pushed down by all the rules.
But with dad, the bond that is, or moms who roughhouse with the children, a bond is created and you want to return to that connection.
So it's like a child going on a roller coaster where you know there's an enormous amount of safety, excitement, but also an enormous amount of safety.
And so you trust the dad to combine that both, and you want to return to that.
So you're willing to focus on getting done what you need to do, your homework, your chores, your brush, your teeth, or whatever, in order to get what you want to do, which is the form of postponed gratification.
But now let's take the slippery slope when this doesn't happen.
Okay, so let me just add one more thing to that.
Well, the thing that's so cool about that is that you've also provided a really intelligent piece of parenting advice for fathers.
So let's say B.F. Skinner, who was the famous animal behaviorist, demonstrated quite clearly that you could train animals with reward more effectively than with threat or punishment.
Now, threat or punishment is necessary Obviously, we wouldn't have biological systems subserving those emotions if they weren't necessary.
But reward is harder to use because you have to be much more attentive and intervene when something good happens, and so you really have to be watching.
But your hypothesis here is, look, fathers, Spend a bunch of time playing with your kids and having as much fun as you can with them because by formulating that bond, you can use that as the source of reward that will be appreciated by the child with regards to disciplinary strategies.
So it's a two-fold victory.
One is it's fun and you get to like your kids and have a good time with them.
But the second is you have a very positive means of disciplining them in the best sense, encouraging them and disciplining them.
Yes.
So that's a really useful thing to know practically.
So deepening the trust of the kids, like you're playing and you're right on the edge that you were talking about, but there's dad to make sure that the fun doesn't get too hard for you, for him, for your sister, and so on.
And so that's all happening at the same time.
Now, when the Right, and that's embodied, you can see that two ways, that's embodied trust.
So if you toss a little kid up in the air and catch them, I mean, it's very exciting to them, both being tossed up because of the threat, but then the relief that occurs because of the safety that's put in there.
So it's not abstract, it's really demonstrated.
Absolutely.
Our dad tossing that child up and then, in fact, missing the child, quote-unquote, and the child lands on the bed.
And it gets warm.
It's like, oh, I was missed, so you were going to catch me, but also recognizing.
Yes, well, that shows that things can happen that aren't entirely what you predict, but within the confines of a trusting relationship, that's still okay.
And then you could also imagine if the dad is wrestling with more than one kid at the same time, then he's also acting as just referee.
And then the kids learn how to be judicious in the distribution of attention.
They learn how to play fair.
They learn how everybody can have a turn and everybody wins at the same time.
And that bonding is part of what creates...
Just everything you just said is part of what leads the child to have empathy training.
And the empathy training came from, no, you were too rough on your sister there.
If you try it again, you can't be that rough.
Oh, you still continue to be that rough?
Okay, let's...
No more play.
That's right.
Play stops when everyone isn't having fun.
When my kids were little, we had this couch that was a sectional in six pieces.
And so we could put the couches facing each other, and then we put up the backs all the way around it, so it was like a little wrestling ring.
And so then I would take the kids in there and just wrestle them half to death, you know.
But one of the things I used to do was, if one of the kids was rough with the other and made them cry, Then I noticed that the kid who made the other kid cry wouldn't look at the crying kid.
They'd look away and avoid.
And so I always used to say, no, no, no, you look.
You look and you see what happened, because that triggers that embodied empathy.
And then you can easily have a conversation and say, look, you know, is that how you want the game to go?
Or do you want everybody to have fun?
And the thing is, once the kid actually looks, then they've got it, right?
Because they can't escape from that empathic identification.
And so...
When the child doesn't have that, we have all this data now, these 70 different areas where children do so much worse when they don't have a father involvement.
So let's look at the next stage of that.
When that father does not do this roughhousing, as just one example of many, And is not enforcing boundaries.
The child then doesn't learn to have that postponed gratification.
So we have hard data on this.
The children raised predominantly by dads are only 15% likely to have ADHD. Children raised predominantly by moms are 30% likely to have ADHD. So if we looked at what we just talked about, the children that are raised by the dads are learning that they have to postpone that gratification.
In order to get the reward that they want.
Now you take that capacity to postpone gratification to school.
The child without postpone gratification, assigned a homework assignment, doesn't really feel, is oftentimes distracted by a text that's come in, distracted by the opportunity to play video games, distracted by wanting to exchange notes with other kids, is distracted, distracted, distracted.
Sure.
Well, yeah.
Well, the distraction, the thing about the, there's no need to explain ADHD. What there is a need to do is to explain why every kid doesn't have it.
And the answer is, the answer that you just laid out, is that some kids learn how to control their...
Like, distractibility doesn't require an explanation.
Because people are distracted by what's immediately rewarding.
And that doesn't require...
It's like addiction.
Actually, addiction doesn't require explanation either.
What requires explanation is the development of the resources that allow you to withstand addictive pressures in the face of the fact that they're everywhere and they're powerful.
So it's development of control that's really the curious issue.
I've never heard anyone make this connection between the use of play As a reward and that delay of gratification.
That's a very, very interesting idea.
That's very interesting.
And then let me take it another step further, if I may.
So when this delayed gratification is happening, or does not happen, and then the boy isn't able to finish homework, he starts beginning to feel ashamed of himself.
Or if he's maybe athletic and his parents believe that it's really going to be helpful to the child to have beautiful dreams.
Sweetie, you want to be an NBA player and you're tall and you continue practicing?
You can be an NBA player and you can have your dreams.
But he doesn't have that postponed gratification, so cannot do the boring repetition that comes with all success, including being an Olympic star or an NBA player or anything else.
Or playing the piano or learning to read or...
Great example, certainly the violin.
And so anything that is his dream, the bigger the dream, the bigger the disappointment.
And it's not just disappointment that he fears will happen to his parents, but also the sense that he says he's going to do one thing in school.
His teachers, his peers are not respecting him as much.
The cheerleaders aren't going first in ten.
Get a concussion again to him.
They're doing it to somebody else.
First in ten, do it again.
And so the boy is beginning to feel shame.
Yeah, well, you think shame...
Look, here's the precondition for shame.
So let's say that you are attracted by a goal.
Naturally.
And, you know, maybe that's scaffolded by your parents, maybe it's scaffolded by your peers, but it's something that you're naturally turning your attention towards.
It grips you in some sense.
Okay, and we'll assume that it's a difficult goal.
And so then there's an ethic that emerges out of that, which is that if that goal is valuable and it's difficult, then there's sacrifices that have to be made, delays of gratification that have to be implemented, in order for you to be worthy to attain that goal.
Okay, that's all part of the game, if you think about it as a game.
Well, then if you observe yourself unable to play the rules of the game, play by the rules, then how can you not suffer shame and self-contempt?
Because you've already adopted an ethical framework, which is, this is worth attaining.
And if you observe in yourself then the inability to attain it, because you're constantly being distracted, then you're going to have contempt for yourself.
Absolutely.
And then the way out of that, this is something I learned from Nietzsche.
Here's the terrible thing about that, because that's a great pathway to nihilism.
Because let's say you posit four goals in succession that you find valuable, and then you observe yourself unable to discipline yourself to attain the goals.
Well, after four successive failures, it's like Homer Simpson said to Barth, he said to Barth, You tried and you failed, and then you tried and you failed again.
What did you learn?
And Homer says to Bart, the conclusion is, never try.
Right.
And so if you fail a few times at attaining something of importance because you see that you have no discipline, then a logical response to that is to cease positing goals.
Absolutely.
And that's exactly what happens.
But we have, through technology, sort of a perfect escape.
And that escape is into video games where you can identify with a hero and you can lose the game as often as you wish to with nobody noticing.
And then as you begin to get better with certain manipulations, you can play that game with certain types of people and increase your skill set at the game, but you're never able to translate that into everyday life.
And so you start becoming addicted to that game, which are designed to increase your dopamine without having to actually achieve anything.
Well, the thing about the games that's different, like the video games, what's different...
So, a game for a little kid has to be immediately rewarding.
That's why rough-and-tumble play works, for example, has to be immediately rewarding, and then the game shades into real life.
But as the game shades into real life, what happens is the rewards are deferred, and you get more and more disciplined at not being immediately rewarded, like when you're learning to read or play the piano, for the long-term goal.
The thing about video games is that they do require the development of skill.
But the immediate reward is built in along with the delayed reward because otherwise the game wouldn't be fun for someone who's learning.
And so the problem is that a lot of real life games aren't necessarily fun while you're learning them because you have to attain a certain level of mastery and that requires discipline.
That's also what's wrong with the idea that children can just learn in keeping with what they're spontaneously interested in.
It's like there's some truth in that, because why not follow a child's interests?
But the problem is that many highly skilled endeavors, virtually any endeavor that's going to be of economic or productive utility, requires an apprenticeship where there's a lot of grinding.
There's a lot of just disciplinary or disciplined repetition.
And so, okay, well, all right, so...
And then one more dimension of that is that as the boy gets to boy-girl age, if he begins to sense that he's heterosexual, he notices that the girls are far more interested in going out with the quarterbacks or the student body presidents or the performer type boys that are sort of honored in the school system and in life in general.
And so he begins to start withdrawing and fearing that he can't attract those girls, especially the ones he's most biologically addicted to, beautiful ones, the cheerleader types, he starts withdrawing into porn.
And a little bit of porn is not a huge issue, but the porn basically is Is based on the dopamine increasing with each new stimulus.
And so as he gets addicted to that dopamine, he begins to get addicted to only being able to be stimulated when the risk-taking is higher and higher.
So finally he succeeds and one girl, woman, Being able to come over to his house and be sexual with her, but he's so unable to be turned on just by the near maybe light touch of a hand or turned on by just being fascinated by what she's saying in the interaction or some combination of the drama of being with her combined with a little bit of touch.
He's so used to a huge amount of stimulus that occurs and And when he gets to be trusting of her a little bit, he says, you know, can you be this way?
Can you do this?
Can you act this way?
And she feels like just some piece of object that is being traded in for the porn eventually gets disgusted with him, withdraws, and he begins to say, you know, all right, this convinces me.
I am as worthless as I thought I was.
And the only thing that will give me satisfaction is back to the porn.
And what became a little bit of an addiction becomes more of an addiction, even as he's also becoming simultaneously frequently Addicted to the video games at the same time.
And so all of this is that slippery slope from the rough housing that the father is not able to articulate to the mother about the value of that, combined with the trust that you were integrating with that, combined with the lack of the bond,
combined with the postponed gratification being taught, And then when the postponed gratification is not taught, the slippery slope down the hill to shame, self-disgust, and fear that if he tries anything, he's just going to prove to himself and everybody around him that he's one more failure.
And the degree to which he articulates the desire to try something is the announcement publicly to a group of people that he's pretty much going to say, today I'm going to try this and tomorrow it's going to be a failure until he becomes enormously shamed.
In worst case scenarios, this can lead to such depression that it creates a desire to commit suicide.
And in the very worst case scenarios, it's a belief, I believe, we've seen school shooters.
Yeah, well that brews resentment, absolutely man, that brews resentment and anger like nothing else.
And who will they get resentment and anger about?
Who are the people that have rejected him?
It's the classmates.
It's the teachers.
Nobody appreciates that sweet sensitivity inside of him and sees him.
Well, I am so angry at that.
And one day, I have a desperate need to get their attention and say, I count, I matter, pay attention to me.
And, you know, in worst case scenarios, only a very small percentage.
But in worst case scenarios, you can understand the school shooting emerging from that.
Yeah, well, for every kid who goes and shoots up a school, there's a thousand who are fantasizing in a direction that's headed that way.
You know, and that, and some of that's, at the beginning of that, it's something like, well, I'm very angry at people because they don't see the value in me, but if they get to the point where they're doing something like fantasy extreme violence, they're so far past that even, they think they've developed a real hatred for everything, and a wish to see it obliterated, and that's, you know, that's, well, obviously that's the most terrible of the terrible outcomes that might be generated.
Okay, so you talked about...
You talked about rough and tumble play and delay of gratification.
You tied empathy into that.
Are there other cardinal things that you're seeing fathers do?
Because that's pretty early on in life, right?
So you're looking at the interaction with kids there between, say, a year old and five, six years old, seven years old, something like that.
What else do you see happening with fathers, both at the early stages and then also later on?
Yes, another important thing is the concept of hangout time.
Now for a mom listening to this who has a daughter, we now know that children, daughters, who have a significant amount of hangout time with their dads, that creates more psychological centeredness than any other single phenomenon.
With boys, it's also very important.
So for example, let's say you're in a divorce situation, And a father has the child for a short period of time, let's say on a Saturday, and he picks his child up from a soccer game and says to, let's say, Josh, Josh, how did the game go?
And the kid is more like, you know, the boy especially is more likely to say, okay, it was okay.
Well, tell me more, Josh.
It was just okay, Dad.
And so, if at that time, the dad has to drop the boy off to mom's, because it's the end of visitation time, there's nothing that happens beyond that.
Right, well, and the boy is going to be, you know, people, kids in particular, I think, although it also happens with couples, is that You know, one of the things that you do to the person that you're with to test if they care is to be somewhat withholding of information that might be relevant to see to what degree you'll be pursued.
Because, you know, if you ask me whether I've done something How it went.
One of the things I'm going to want to know is, do you really care?
And if you're my father, I'm really going to want to know that.
And so one of the ways I can gauge that is by asking you, but that's That assumes that your answer is going to be reflective of your actual being, and there's no reason to assume that.
A better way of doing it is for me to be a little bit withholding and a little bit resistant, because then I can see, you know, are you going to poke me a bit?
Because that's a fun thing to do if you're kind of teasy.
you can say, look, kid, you know, poke him in the chest a few times.
It's like, loosen up and talk to me, you know, and usually if you do that with a kid, even an adolescent, they'll laugh and, you know, kind of push your hand away and go, oh, dad, but they're happy to have that additional prodding, right, to bring them out of their shell.
And it's a demonstration that the kid actually cares, and you do need time for that.
So, so the kid, if he's done well, or she's done well, is very happy to say, ah, I scored three goals today.
That's more than has ever been scored in the history of our school.
Isn't that incredible?
No problem.
They'll share that right away.
But the reason for the hesitation, On saying something that they're ashamed of.
Like I remember one father was saying that the boy came home and he had been the goalie the week before, but the following week he was not chosen to be goalie and he couldn't understand why.
And so he hesitates to say something for his dad because he doesn't want the dad to sort of either lecture him or disapprove of him or be disappointed in him or be, you know, sort of like feel like that's not my son.
You know, I want my son to have scored the goals.
So with all those fears, the child, especially the boy when it comes to performance, will keep any failure to perform effectively to himself.
But now, if the dad drops the child off at mom's, that never gets sorted through.
If the dad has hangout time with the children, let's say they're doing homework together and dad maybe is watching a TV and the kid is doing homework and then they Appear about the same time getting something from the refrigerator, and they have a little discussion about what he wants for dinner, and the dad asks him to help make dinner with him rather than just sit and take no responsibility, which dads tend to do.
They ask the children to be helpful with the dinner making and preparing, not to serve them.
And so in that process of the child chopping up stuff and doing that type of boring, The child will tend to say, you know, Dad, you know, I was goalie last week, but I wasn't goalie this week.
What's that about?
And the child might say that to the mom even more quickly, but the child's expectations with the mom is the mom will give the child assurance.
And say, sweetie, it's no problem.
You're fine.
You're wonderful.
You're a very good goalie.
Maybe the coach wanted to give the other kids a chance because you're so good, etc., etc.
Whereas expect from dad a bit more confrontation, a bit more questioning.
My clinical clients about their intimate relationships is I've been trying to gauge rules of thumb for minimal necessary interaction time to maintain a relationship.
And with couples, I've observed that they need like one or two Sessions of intimate time together a week at minimum, something like that, or things start to go south.
But they also need, as far as I've been able to tell, about 90 minutes of communication time across a single week just to keep each other updated in relationship to their stories.
And so, two questions.
One is, do you have some sense of how you would characterize hangout time And how much of it there needs to be in order to not go below a dangerous minimum.
And then the other thing I'd like to pick up on is you had talked a little bit about the more confrontational approach that a father might take when discussing a failure or an inadequacy or something like that on the part of a child.
And so I wanted to relate something that I've learned about talking to Majority male audiences in the last year and a half, two years about responsibility and discipline and all of that.
See, you might think that calling someone on their failure is harsh and judgmental.
And it is, in a sense.
But it's not harsh and judgmental about their potential.
You know, so if your kid comes to you and says, you know, I screwed up and here's what I did and it didn't go so well, and you say, that's okay, you're a wonderful kid, then the kid's stuck in a bind because they're not feeling so wonderful and they failed.
But if you say, well, look, you know, you're That was stupid.
Like, what the hell's wrong with you?
Here's what you could do.
Like, you're better than that, man.
Get it together a little bit.
Let's come up with some strategies so that you can figure out how that's never going to happen to you again.
And so, instead of putting your faith in who the child is right now, which I would say in some sense is the hallmark of impulsive empathy, you put your faith in who the child could be.
And that's encouragement, and I would say in circumstances of failure, especially where the child is motivated to try again, encouragement beats, it beats impulsive empathy hands down as a mark of faith in who the child might be.
Yes, and it takes a while for the child to both reveal its vulnerability and also to have a faith that the child tends to open up like a flower when She or he realizes that the security that the father is creating by being with them and talking the problem through is there.
Now, an ideal setting, a father who's wise or a mother who's wise will not give a solution right away.
We'll ask the kids something like, so, you know, what did you observe?
What's your best guess as to what happened last week versus this week?
What do you think was the coach's best intent?
And oftentimes inside of the child is a willingness or is a sense of probably what really did happen, but a fear of sort of acknowledging it to himself or herself and especially acknowledging it to anyone else because the person who they might acknowledge it to will not have respect for them.
And so being able to sort of have the hangout time facilitates enough time to feel both that large Basket of those large arms of security and nurturance surrounding him or her, the fact that the father is not going to give up on time with me,
will be here for me, and then when the father or the mother facilitates the exploration inside of himself about what the problem might be, Let's him help in a Carl Rogers, in a Rogerian type of sense, to find out the part of him that already knows the answer.
Then the child is experiencing both respect and a willingness to be confronted by, if I don't have the answer inside of me, my father will tell me the truth about what I might need to do next.
And that telling me the truth about what he needs to do next is his way of respecting me without even saying he's respecting me because he wouldn't be confronting me with the truth if he didn't respect me.
Yeah, and more specifically, not even more specifically than me, if he didn't respect my intrinsic ability to overcome obstacles and to grow.
Which is the best answer to someone who says, I have a problem is, well, I have faith that you can overcome that.
Not that you don't have a problem or that you're okay the way you are.
It's like, yeah, yeah, that's a problem, man.
And then there's another thing that you're talking about that's very much in keeping with, I would say, standard but relatively deep clinical wisdom, which is that...
People are much more likely to follow a set of injunctions if they generate them themselves.
And so we've had some really interesting experiences with this program we designed called the Future Authoring Program.
And it helps people come up with a life plan.
So they have to craft a vision for their operations across the six or seven basic dimensions of life like intimate relationships and family and career ambitions and education and resistance to temptation, drugs and alcohol, care of mental and physical health and so on.
Those fundamental dimensions.
Productive use of time outside of work.
To ask themselves what they would want if they could have what they wanted to need along those domains three to five years down the road.
To craft a vision based on that array of wants and desires.
And also to write a counter vision, which is where could you be if you allowed yourself to fail catastrophically?
What might that look like in three to five years?
And then to produce a plan.
And it's had remarkable effects.
Now, young men are doing worse than young women in society.
Academic environments.
So the program doesn't seem to have as much effect for young women, but that might be because they're already doing better.
But it has a walloping effect on young men.
In fact, in vocational junior college settings, our latest piece of data, which was generated, was published last year, showed that we could reduce dropout among young men, especially aimless ones who hadn't done very well in high school.
We could drop their dropout rate 50% And one of the things I've observed about young men, and this might be because they're more disagreeable and confrontational than young women, is that unless they have formulated their own plan, They're unlikely to do something.
So when you're talking, I think this is true with young women as well.
You want to talk to them and say, well, look, what do you think about what happened and how you're going to get out of it?
Which is an excellent question, because it says to the child, you can think about what happened and be accurate, and you can think of a way out of it.
And that's encouragement, right?
And that's what you want, is to, you don't want to protect or shelter your child.
You want to encourage them.
And so that collaborative problem solving is a great way to do that.
Absolutely right.
And I've seen this over and over again.
And certainly the data that I gathered for the boy crisis very much shows that as well.
And you said the hangout time is part of what helps to do that.
But also the checks and balances of parenting is so pivotal for mothers and fathers to understand.
And right along the lines of what you're talking about is, so mother and father, let's say, have the child come home from school.
And the child says, you know, Mrs.
Meyers, she hates me.
She hates me.
I can't be okay in school.
And maybe the child's in second or third grade.
And a mother's sort of reaction will tend to be more likely to be something like, oh, sweetie, let me hear more.
And then when the child complains more about how much Mrs.
Meyers hates the child, Mom will tend to come up with a solution like, wait till next week.
On Monday, I'll make an appointment with the principal, and we'll talk about seeing whether you can get into a different class than Mrs.
Myers.
Dads will tend to say, to a greater degree, sweetie, in life you have to learn to get along with people who can't get along with you.
You know, what do you think is making Mrs.
Meyers upset about you?
And the child may or may not be revealing.
And so the child will say, well, you know, do you want me to talk with Mrs.
Meyers about it?
No, no, no, no, no.
So, well, if I talk with Mrs.
Meyers about it, you know, what do you think Mrs.
Meyers would say?
And then the child, under the threat of possibly the dad talking or the mom talking with Mrs.
Meyers, will begin to say a little bit of what Mrs.
Meyers feels and then negotiate An opportunity to talk to Mrs.
Myers and then bring Mrs.
Myers and the child together, have a discussion together, and so to see whether the child and Mrs.
Myers can work out an understanding where the child begins to understand, no, it is not that Mrs.
Myers inherently hates Jimmy.
It is that there's something else going on here.
And so the result of working all that through It is a way of facilitating the child to discover its own solutions to a problem, talking it through, rather than getting a solution, rather than being enabled by the system and by the parent who will eventually disappear from the child's life or, Worse yet, not disappear from the child's life.
And so these are, but oftentimes the mom says, you know, the child is having a problem here.
Why are you being so insensitive?
Are you blaming Jimmy for creating this problem?
He's telling you that not only does Mrs.
Myers hate him, but other kids hate Mrs.
Myers as well.
And so it's not Jimmy's fault.
The mom will feel dad is being insensitive when in fact dad is being differently sensitive.
And sort of long-term postponed gratification sensitive.
Yeah, well that's the thing.
And that's a lot colder of virtue.
You know, because...
And it also sounds very much like it's grounded in these psycho-biological, at least partially psycho-biological differences between men and women.
So women are higher in negative emotion and they're more empathic.
And that's that short-term empathy.
And so that's perfectly in keeping with the approach that you just described.
And the advantage...
See, that's a particularly advantageous approach to very, very young children, especially infants.
Because to be wired properly to take care of infants, the infant is always right.
Hey, up till about nine months of age, or maybe a year of age, the right response to your infant if that person is crying is, there's something you should do about it as fast as possible.
We've talked a fair bit about what fathers can do to help their children learn to delay gratification and so on.
We've talked a little bit about what mothers can understand about how to facilitate that and how to trust it.
Maybe we could talk a little bit about what families might do in order to improve the performance of their boys and their girls.
You talked a little bit in your book about family dinner nights and their importance.
Yes, the most important, we already know that family dinner nights are important, but what make family dinner nights even more valuable is when they don't become family dinner nightmares and knowing how to structure them so that they don't become family dinner nightmares.
When somebody comes up to me after a presentation and says, I can't get my children to give up electronics at dinner.
I already know the beginning of the problem, that is, that the children are in charge of the parents.
What can I do to encourage my children to get involved with, you know, to leave the The electronics behind.
And, you know, number one answer is to require them to.
It is not an option to sit down at dinner, but maybe some nights you'll want it to be, some nights not.
But if you're having a family dinner night, especially structured family dinner night, the number one rule is no electronics at dinner.
If that rule is violated, then the electronics are taken away for a reasonable period of time and taken away right away for a reasonable period of time once the rule is understood.
Right, and you can imagine that instigating wars in various households.
Yes, exactly.
And then you begin to structure that family dinner night so that everyone has an opportunity to talk.
And everyone has at the beginning a structured amount of time that they can check in to just say how their week went or how the week was going since the last time.
So everyone knows that it's not 40 minutes for so-and-so and one minute for me.
The interest in family dinner night be zero for the one that's one minute.
Well, that's an extension of the idea of a fair game, too, and a refereed fair game.
As a family, our job is to make sure everyone's needs are being handled, thought of, and cared about, which is the way empathy is created.
Empathy is not created by a parent who's always empathetic with a child's needs or desires.
When a parent is always empathetic with a child's needs and desires, the child becomes narcissistic, not empathetic.
And that's one of the things that we have made a mistake with.
You could say that three or four times in a row, I think, and that would be really good.
Right, because that's so crucially important because, you know, if what you're learning is to put other people's feelings at the same level of importance as your own, then obviously that's associated very tightly with delay of gratification, with learning how to listen, with turn-taking, with fair play, with a refereed interaction, all of that.
And so, the other thing that happens too, and you see this with couples, is that if they have that time together, something analogous to family dinner night, although I think the family dinner idea is a really good one for reasons I'll mention here in a moment, is that Imagine your family has a story.
And the story is where we came from, where we are, and where we're going together as a unit.
And then each of the individuals within that story has a story.
And then what you're doing in those family dinners, that interaction time, is you're taking the individual threads of...
The individual story threads and you're weaving them together to make the collective story.
And that keeps everyone up to date and on the same page and able to empathize in also a deep manner.
Because if I don't know where you are or what you're up to, I can't figure out what you're thinking or feeling.
And so I have to know what story you're acting out right now and so do you.
And in order for you to know that, for me to know it, you have to be able to tell your story.
And I have to be able to ask you questions about it.
Then I think the other thing that's really important about the shared meal is that, you know, human beings are really weird creatures because we seriously share food and we're social eaters.
People don't eat well if they eat on their own and so it's deeply rooted into us that idea of sharing food and so Part of the extended process of socialization is to get everybody to sit down around food, to be polite and thankful for the fact of the food, to enjoy that, but then also to be able to give and take while that's being shared.
And that's, I would say, if the most fundamental element of socialization is something like the embodiment of rough and tumble play, the next layer on top of that would be the ability to sit down and share food and have a civilized discourse.
Absolutely, and that civilized discourse really needs to, the respect for story is so pivotal.
So I teach, as you probably know, couples communication courses around the country, and one of the dimensions of it, the single most important thing that kills marriages, or almost all relationships, is our biologically oriented Inability to handle personal criticism without becoming defensive.
So my first job is to teach couples how to get around that biological propensity to become defensive when they hear criticism.
One of the many steps in that process, which is much too long to go into now, but is to give them a picture of a person, happens to be Mario Cuomo, the former governor of New York, That was done by four artists of a picture that was taken at the exact same time, same place, etc.
And there are four different types of artists that paint this picture of him, like Andy Warhol and Modigliani and so on.
And work with every couple to understand that when you hear your partner's story, even though you're all looking at the same thing, there will be a different picture that is being created by each person at the table.
And so the job of couples is to understand how much of a sacrifice each person would make so that the other person would live, and yet how we're often not able to handle personal criticism And to sort of reorient ourselves before we handle personal criticism to move ourselves into a place of really being fascinated by our partner's story.
But at a family dinner table, that has to happen with every single member of the family that when I say, when person A says, what were you talking about in school?
And somebody says, well, we're talking about the Me Too movement.
And person A says, oh, the Me Too movement is stupid.
So person B says the Me Too movement is the best, most progressive thing that's ever happened.
And so it is very important that the person who says it's the best thing that ever has happened Right, so part of it is, know the story before you offer criticism.
Carl Rogers had good advice about that, eh?
And you probably already know this, but it's worth reiterating for people who don't.
So Rogers' rule was, when you're listening to someone...
Then, first of all, don't assume that either you or they know what they're talking about or what they're going to say.
Because people think by...
Yes and yes.
Right, right.
People think by talking.
So you've got to give them a chance to get it all out before you jump on it, because they might change their own mind in midstream.
So that's important.
Let them formulate the problem before you jump in with the criticism.
But then the next thing is, and I really love this, I think it's really useful, which is that once the person has laid out their story, you get to say, this is what I heard you say.
Do you agree with my formulation?
Because that stops the listener.
First of all, it indicates to the speaker that the listener actually listened.
Or if there's an error, then the speaker can say, no, that's not what I meant at all.
And then there can be some clarification.
But it also forces the listener to not turn the speaker into a straw man.
Because it isn't only that I have to summarize what you said.
I have to summarize what you said in a way that you agree with.
And, you know, that's also a useful technique if there happens to be some wide variation in verbal ability among the participants.
And there might be because of age, for example.
And so, you know, because it might be that even if you're somewhat incoherent and stuttering and partial in your formulation, if I'm an older sibling, say, I might be able to summarize it back for you in a way that's actually helpful to you from the perspective of a cognitive scaffold.
And so, yeah, so the thing, you know, we know that human beings organize their personalities at the highest level through narrative.
And that narrative is not only thought, it's spoken.
And so, you speak your personality into being in these sorts of shared environments that you're describing, and without that, your story is fragmented and incoherent, and so are you.
And so, you can see why those shared social...
Look, if shared meals weren't so damn important, people wouldn't have evolved the capacity to engage in them, right?
I mean, they're central to our social life, and to have that abandoned in a family is really a catastrophe, I think, so...
It really is.
And everything you said, absolutely every part of it, I so agree with you.
And, you know, when you say, did I distort something, oftentimes someone will say, repeat what they heard they say, and then you ask, did I distort anything?
And the person says, yes, I think you distorted this.
And then the other person will argue and say, no, I said that.
And, you know, the rule of the game is the person who is Right.
That doesn't mean you have to agree with them.
It just means you have to have got the damn story straight.
That's right.
And that's also important.
Some people really do make the mistake of thinking that if I get right, correct, what they have said, that means I agree with them.
No, it doesn't mean.
It only means you've heard them.
And then part of what a family dinner night is about is Having a chance to have somebody, if it's a personal criticism, be able to respond to that and have the person who is listening to, who have made the criticism to begin with, hear that response and ask if there's any distortion on what they've heard to begin with.
The biggest challenge for people, almost everybody, I remember I was interviewed once by NPR, and they said, you know, how can you, you know, some of the people who are allied with the men's movement, they seem like hateful people.
And I said, well, if you're calling yourself progressive, as liberals do, As we do, because I consider myself more on the liberal side of most things, then our first job is to listen.
When people feel heard, they stop hating.
Hating comes from a buildup of not being seen, not being heard.
Being distorted, being blamed or caricatured in a negative way before you're heard.
So that is the job of every person that calls themselves progressive, is to start hearing rather than arguing first.
Well, then at least you can figure out what to argue about.
You know, because one of the things that happens with crystalline communication in a family when the stories are being unfolded is you can identify what the problems are and what they're not.
Like if you, you know, you might be irritated at having to listen to your spouse lay out in their stumbling manner a particular problem, but if you understand at the same time that they might be dispensing of 98 problems and only focusing on two, it's worth the wait.
Okay, another question for you.
There are people who aren't in the position where they can have male involvement with their children, let's say, and so what do you recommend, if anything, for single mothers who are trying to do the best job they can with their kids but are having a hard time pulling in male attention?
What do you think they can manage?
First of all, acknowledge yourself for the enormous amount of multifaceted job you're undertaking.
Second, as you look through the differences between what mothers and fathers do, ask yourself whether there's any way you have maybe not valued your former husband in a way that That would draw him into the fold.
But if the answer to those questions are, no, I have valued him and I still can't draw him into the fold.
He's essentially a deadbeat.
Sorry about that.
Then here's some options.
The number one, the greatest amount of evidence is that involving your children with Cub Scouts has a very well-developed program for developing character, motivation, integrity, loyalty, A sense of making promises that you keep.
So very good studies have been done of children involved in Cub Scouts for two years or longer.
But this means not just getting your child involved in Cub Scouts here or there.
But, and if your child doesn't like something that's happened, making sure your child gets back into the fold and deals with what, that it shouldn't be your child's choice to go to Cub Scouts or not go to Cub Scouts as part of your parental responsibility to get him there later to Boy Scouts, or it doesn't have to be Cub Scouts or Boy Scouts.
Some Y's have good programs also for young boys.
Mankind Project has good programs for young boys now for the first time.
They have real good assistance to help boys with fathering.
The Boys Clubs have some good programs with young boys.
Get your child a male mentor.
Try to get your child to a school that has a significant number of males at the age that your child is, especially if your child is very young.
It's very important that a child not go from a mom only home to female only schools.
Because the child will start searching for an identity from somebody that's usually destructive, like a gang leader, that will give false identity.
And so these are just some of many, many things.
We often think that a child needs a male mentor.
Yes, a child does need a male mentor.
Try to vet the mentors carefully, obviously, or get your child to a faith, if you're at all involved in faith-based communities, And even if you don't believe in God, God or not, get your child involved in a faith-based community where there's a good male counselor who has groups for children, for young people, oftentimes young people that are having troubles.
The ability to be encouraged to express your feelings to other males and see that your son is not just having the, is not isolated in the problems he's facing, but there's many other boys about his age that are having the same problems.
Getting him to be able to express his feelings about that, his fears about that, to have little experiences done where he paints a mask of himself.
And what the mask says and then what is really being said underneath the mask.
A good male facilitator can be a wonderful encourager of a boy to express his feelings rather than repress his feelings in a society that is...
And then what we all have a need to do is to get out there and say something very damaging has happened in our society in the last 50 years.
We've had, when I started this work with the government, with the Commission to Create a White House Council on Boys and Men, I started that after a call from the White House asking if I wanted to be an advisor to the White House Council on Women and Girls because of my background with the National Organization for Women.
And I said, absolutely, but there also needs to be a White House Council on Boys and Men.
Well, for eight years we worked to make that happen, and now we're working with the Trump administration to make that happen, and no one is getting on board yet.
But the importance of making that happen is that there has to be an entire change in attitude and atmosphere that we are not just living in a world dominated by a patriarchy, that the world was dominated by a need to survive.
Yeah, right.
Absolutely.
Mothers and mothers both sacrificed so much of their lives in the hope that their children would have better lives.
Women made sacrifices of careers.
Our dads made sacrifices in their careers.
There are very few dads of multiple children that follow the glint in their eye because usually fulfilled occupations that make you fulfilled Are not occupations that pay well.
So most of our fathers gave up fulfillment in order to do the things they needed to do like be a firefighter or coal miner or being willing to be disposable in war in order to be able to make their generation safer and have more options and to have all the sacrifices that our fathers made called male privilege or male dominance or is such an underserving of men so that that entire attitude has It's also an underserving of women to state that the entire cultural structure
to date has been patriarchal in origin.
That's right.
You can argue what the definition of patriarchy is, but just understand that your father and grandfather and great-grandfather all did the exact same thing as your great-grandmothers and so on did.
Gave their lives in the hope that your life and their children's lives would be better with greater amounts of opportunities and most of them sacrificed a great deal.
My father managed a company and my mother was very unhappy and he managed his company in Europe.
My mother was very unhappy living in Europe rather than the United States which was more comfortable for her.
So my father eventually gave up his job and sold full of brushes from door to door for a year in order to be able to make sure we had enough money at least to go to a state college And my mother had a decent home over her head, and so did the children.
Yeah, well that's all associated with a little bit of gratitude for the past.
It really is.
We should be, instead of criticizing the world as being patriarchal or us parents as being stupid, we should really be saying mom, dad, grandpa, grandma, thank you for making our mastery of survival enough so that we didn't have to focus so much on survival, but let us not misuse our opportunities by blaming men for the world that they created that was destructive.
Understand that we're living 50% longer now than we were 120 years ago.
And that's as a result of all the progress that you have made.
And so, you know, this is why we've worked so hard to create this White House Council on Boys and Men, why we've created a Patreon account to be able to sort of begin to raise some money.
To be able to make this happen, but whether it happens by the Patreon account or some other way, we need to have a total revisiting of the belief of women good, men bad, women oppressed, men oppressors.
And instead of the monologues of hashtag MeToo, we need to have dialogues.
Instead of human resource centers becoming H-E-R rather than H-R that is all focused on her and not Not him and her.
We really need to have dialogues at work about what's working for women, what's not working for women, what's working for men, and what's not working for men.
And so we really need to have a fundamental revisiting of male, female, and all of our gender roles of the past.
That's an excellent place to bring our conversation to a close, I would say.
Look, I'd really like to talk to you again, probably about the pay gap.
At some point.
We really concentrated on what you've been outlining in this book, in your new book, in The Boy Crisis.
And I would certainly recommend people who are interested in this sort of thing to go out and pick it up.
It's full of facts.
And that's kind of nice.
And it's concentrating on something that's of crucial importance.
And I think maybe that people are starting to recognize as of crucial importance.
I certainly hope so.
And so your work has been very useful to me.
I appreciated very much the time that you spent today being able to talk to me, and I hope we get a chance to talk again.
I would love to talk about the pay gap.
It's really impossible to believe that there is not a patriarchal world if you believe that men are in more money than women do for the same work.
And so one has to really start with that fundamental understanding that it's much, much more complex than that, and a very, very different story than pretty much anybody perceives.
Yes, absolutely.
So we will definitely schedule that in.
So, okay.
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