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Aug. 11, 2022 - The Megyn Kelly Show
01:35:14
20220811_the-importance-of-dads-allowing-kids-to-take-risks
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Toxic Masculinity and Femininity 00:15:09
Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show, your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations.
Hey, everyone, I'm Megan Kelly.
Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show.
Have we got an amazing program lined up for you today?
I've been thinking about this for days.
I was talking to my family about it this morning.
It's something I want my kids to listen to.
This is a show that has the ability to impact every single one of us.
If you have a family, listen up.
If you have sons, especially, pay attention.
Or if you would like to create a son someday and find a grown son, somebody else's, to partner with in life so you can create a family of your own.
If you have a relationship that's on the rocks, all of it, there's help.
Workplace issues, that factors into the discussion we're about to have.
The co-parenting drama that a lot of people find themselves in, including one of the biggest celebrities in the world, Britney Spears.
There's news about that today.
All of this factors in as we speak today to Dr. Warren Farrell.
He is the author of The Boy Crisis, Why Our Boys Are Struggling and What We Can Do About It.
He is also someone that you have been requesting in large numbers.
And he has graciously offered to take some of your questions later in this show.
His many, many books have been published in more than 50 countries and in 19 languages.
Dr. Warren Farrell, welcome to the program.
So great to have you here.
I'm looking so forward to talking with you.
I've admired you for many years.
Oh, thank you very much.
It was great to read up on some of your accolades.
The Financial Times of London has named you one of the world's top 100 thought leaders.
Think about that.
Top 100 thought leaders.
That's not an easy honor to receive.
And I respect that.
And I respect the area in which you've been working.
I mean, I've said a lot that on issues like the Me Too problems, the, you know, what happens on college campuses with women and men, equal pay arguments and so on, I believe the solution to this problem ultimately lies in parents who have both boys and girls, right?
Because we love them both equally.
We don't want our daughters to get sexually harassed or assaulted, but we don't want our boys to get unfairly accused of these things.
We want our daughters to get equal pay, but we don't want it to come at the expense of boys who have done nothing wrong or based on a lie about boys out earning girls that doesn't take into account life choices, right?
Like when I talk to my other moms and dads of boy and girl parents, they make the most sense to me on these issues.
So how did you get so smart on all of this?
Are you a dad of a boy and a girl?
And what brought you to this line of thinking to where you are recognized as one of the top 100 thought leaders in the world?
Well, as you probably know, my background started with the National Organization for Women in New York City.
So I was deeply involved with the women's movement.
I spoke all over the world on behalf of women's issues.
And then as I was speaking, I remember once in particular in Japan, a teacher came up to me afterwards and said, you know, Dr. Farrell, I want to tell you, the boys in our class are actually having more problem than the girls.
I know you're speaking on behalf of women and supporting women's issues, but have you ever thought about the issues that boys are going through?
And so that put that on my radar maybe 40 years ago.
And then as I started hearing the same type of message in other countries, I began to pay more attention to what was happening with boys.
And then I saw that boys in all 63 of the largest developed nations were falling behind girls on every academic subject, but especially in reading and writing that turned out to be the biggest predictors of success or failure.
And so I started looking more carefully at that and saw that boys' sperm counts were male sperm counts were going down, which obviously means that fertility is being affected and the health of the future generations being affected.
I saw that male IQs were going down, that males were having shorter life expectancies when in the past, life's expectancies had always gone up from year to year, no less generation to generation.
And so something was happening on so many levels.
Boys were much more likely to drop out of high school.
And boys who drop out of high school are far more likely to be unemployed in their 20s, more than 20% likely to be unemployed in their 20s.
And of course, girls are not interested in unemployed, you know, boys who are often living in their parents' basements or are on unemployment lines.
Girls, women don't look for future husbands on unemployment lines or in parents' basements.
And so this is affecting, as you so wisely pointed out, you know, when this is that we're all in the same family boat.
And when only one sex wins, both sexes lose.
And I think that's been a big, we've overlooked that in the focus on just women's issues, because every woman's issue is a men's issue and every men's issue is a woman's issue.
It's so exactly right.
So even the parents who only have daughters need to pay very close attention to this because what do you want your daughter to wind up with?
A strong, well-adjusted, equal partner man.
And how are we going to keep producing those if our messaging to kids is girls rule, boys drool?
You know, the future is female.
All that is a bunch of bull.
And it's very harmful messaging.
I'm sure it's intended to lift up little girls, but this is not 1950.
This is 2022.
And it's very demoralizing, the messages we've settled on right now to young boys.
Yes, you know, from boys see messages and people wearing t-shirts saying boys are stupid, throw rocks at them.
Or even something a little gentler, but also very malicious in a way too, is the future is female is wonderful message to women saying, you know, the future, you are very much a part of the future.
But if boys are hearing that combined with toxic masculinity and combined with we live in a patriarchy in which men made the rules to benefit men at the expense of women, all those things together take the junior high school boy who's trying to get up enough sense of himself as having being an important person in the future.
That's not encouraging for that insecure boy.
So how did it start?
How do we go from the place where I mentioned the 1950s?
That was a place in time where gender roles were pretty well defined.
There weren't a lot of women in the workforce in any really powerful or well-earning roles.
And then things got turned around in some ways for the good and in some ways for the bad.
But when did the crisis with our boys begin in earnest?
Well, it really began probably in the 60s when there was more and more of an increase in focus on women's issues.
And we were sort of doing a zero-sum game.
We were saying that boys were part of the problem.
Boys were the oppressors.
And this came out of the women's movement.
I say we in the women's movement because I was very much a part of the women's movement at that time.
And we'd come through the civil rights movement and in which there was an oppressor and an oppressed group.
And many of the early feminists were Marxist in their tendencies.
And they were in Marxism, it was sort of like there's an oppressor and an oppressed.
And that hierarchical assumption that somebody has to be on top and somebody's on the bottom.
We took that into women's issues and said that women were the oppressed and men were the oppressors.
And that left, and then we said masculinity is toxic and that toxicity comes from male privilege.
Well, it is true that there's a lot of parts of masculinity that are toxic, just like there are a lot of parts of femininity that are toxic.
But the toxicity of masculinity does not come from male privilege.
It comes from the price that men paid by having to cut off from their feelings in order to be disposable in war and be willing to be the ones to go out and be killed.
And each generation had its war.
And we told men you were needed and you needed to be drafted and you need to register for the draft.
Even today, you need to register for the draft if you're a male, but not a female.
And so males learned that if you're going to serve that purpose of being worthwhile, you're going to either be willing to risk disposability in war or disposability in the workplace in the most hazardous jobs, for example.
And this, but in order to be just willing to be disposable and think of yourself as a hero by possibly giving up your life, you had to disconnect from your feelings of hurt and of pain, of sensitivity.
And that created a set of problems of not being able to say what's going on inside of you.
And so there were lots of male toxicities, but they didn't emanate from male privilege.
They emanated from the price that men paid in order to feel like they would be able to get loved.
They noted men noticed that women fell in love with, you know, not the private and the pacifist, but the soldier and the person that was quite the opposite of the private and the pacifist, if you will, the officer and the gentleman.
Oh, that's so interesting.
One of the things you said reminded me of, it's a Dr. Phil line, but I loved it.
And it goes as follows.
How can you win when the person you love most is losing?
You know, fights between women and men, the search for women to get ahead in the workplace and sort of equal out their position in America at writ large.
How can we win when the guys we want to love and do love are losing?
It's not a zero-sum game.
It can't be zero-sum.
As you know, I do couples communication workshops.
And one of the things I ask every couple to do, and understand in the couples workshops, some people are there just to enhance their marriage or relationship, and others are on the verge of divorce or have already filed for divorce.
So it's a large group of people, different group of people.
And one of the questions I ask is to write down something, the answer to a question that your partner will never see.
And I make sure that that happens, that they don't see it.
And the question is, if your partner was to be on the verge of dying and you knew with 100% certainty your partner was going to die, and yet you could, you knew that with 100% certainty that you could save your partner's life.
However, you'd take a 50% chance of risking or losing your own life in the process.
Would you do it or not?
Yes, no, uncertain.
90-some odd percent of the men, usually about 95% of the men, even though some of them are thinking about a divorce, say that they would risk their lives at the 50% level to save their partner's lives.
About 85% of the women say the same thing about the men.
And among gay couples, it's pretty much the same ratio.
And yet, So my first step in mindsets that I ask people to do in order to before they listen to their partner's criticism is to say, if I'm willing to die to give my partner life, maybe I could listen to give my partner life.
And that's one of six meditations I ask people to go for, go to do before they hear their partner's criticism of them, realizing that when you provide a safe environment for your partner's concern or criticism, you're giving them life and you're also guaranteed doing what I call a love guarantee.
You're guaranteeing that your partner will feel safe when she or he says whatever they want to say in whatever way they want to say it, exaggerating, not telling the same story that you would tell.
And when they feel completely heard, they feel safe by you.
Therefore, they feel more loved by you and therefore they feel more love for you.
And it's exactly what you were saying a minute ago, that when we love somebody so much, what is there about us that can't hear their complaint?
And what there is about us that can't hear their complaints or their criticism is that historically and biologically, when there was a complaint or a criticism about us, it was a potential enemy.
And so biologically, we were prepared to become defensive when we heard an enemy criticize us because defenses were our way of surviving.
However, they're the, while they're helpful for survival in the past, they're not helpful for love in the future.
How big, and I want to get into more of the couple stuff later for sure.
It's kind of all fascinating.
But how big a role has men's presence outside the home as the typically the historical primary wage earner played in this?
I don't even know what toxic masculinity is exactly.
You know, I can think of one example of it in my life.
I mean, there have been more, but I'll give you one example that I know was a toxic masculine moment.
Beyond that, I don't really understand it.
I was a young lawyer.
I was in my 20s.
I bumped into a guy from college.
I went to Syracuse University.
And he was like, oh, you're a lawyer?
I'm like, yeah, I'm a lawyer.
He's like, oh, good for you.
He's like, I never expected you to wind up doing something like that.
I'm like, oh, well, thanks.
Yeah, it's working out fine.
He's like, what firm are you with?
And I happen to be with one of the best firms in the country.
So there's no way around acknowledging, you know, it was a great firm.
And he's like, oh, good for you.
It's nice.
Go make me a sandwich.
And he walked away.
So he's a jerk, right?
The guy's a jerk.
And I would definitely say that's toxically masculine, I guess, under sort of the loose term that the way it's used today, where you're just sort of like a douchey guy putting down a woman in a way that seems based on gender or sex roles and so on.
Anyway, I don't really understand the term, but I do wonder to your point about years of going to war and years of being the one to have to sacrifice and risk physically.
Sort of then the other piece of that is years of having to be the one out of the house and not really around the children as much and not, you know, having the responsibility of being the nurturer at home.
Yeah, I think a lot a lot of, I think a lot of men do do things that, you know, even they would look back on and say were not appropriate or not, you know, not conducive.
Role Reversal Experience 00:07:32
And one of the things that I used to do is a couple, I used to do role reversal dates and men's beauty contests.
And so I would say every woman is in a beauty contest every day of her life.
And so if men here in the audience would like to understand what women go through as being part of that beauty contest in everyday life, I'll ask every single man in the audience to come up on the stage and in the aisles and to be part of that beauty contest of everyday life that women go through.
And so I would then have all the women be the judges.
And so the women would ask, so the guys at the end of the process, there would be six finalists and then finally a winner.
And the guy who was the winner would almost always say some version of, this is interesting.
I'm so proud of being a winner.
And for the last hour, I competed fiercely to get this accolade of being a winner.
And yet the questions that have been asked of me are making me feel like they're not tapping into my values, my intelligence, my thoughtfulness, my caring.
They're just, you know, they're just, I'm being looked at as a body.
And that feels really bad to me, even though I've competed to be part of that.
And so when the women heard that, they'd go, yes, thank you.
And I'd say, well, remember, this is a role reversal experience.
I'm going to ask now the women to experience what men go through.
And so first of all, I'd ask the women to sit in seats and rows according to how much money they predicted that they would be making in the future.
Then I'd ask the guys to focus on the women who earned the most money so that their children would have the most options in the best schools, the best neighborhoods, and so on, and to not just put their eyes on the women in the back rows who were on average more attractive, interestingly.
And so the guys tried to, you know, I really had to work hard to get the guys to do that.
And finally, I'd ask the women to sort of focus on the body that you'd most be interested in to really tune into the guys' bodies.
But of course, because the men had been through that men's beauty contest, they all had an hour of training to tune into the guys' bodies.
And so then the women came up and they tried to compete for the man that was most attractive to them.
And oftentimes the most attractive men, the finalists in the beauty contest, had seven, eight, nine women that were competing to be their date for the evening.
And so at the end of that process, I'd ask the women to talk about their experiences and they'd say, this is amazing.
Whenever I've used the word in the past, used the word jerk, I would use it for a man.
But today, I came up and I was wanting to ask Bill or whatever out.
And there were seven other women competing with me.
So I started saying, you know, Bill, you're going to really love going out in my Porsche.
And I'm going to take you to this restaurant, which I've never been to, but I heard it was the best restaurant in town.
I can't afford it.
But I was exaggerating what I had.
I don't have a Porsche.
I was exaggerating where I would take him to, which I couldn't afford.
And then when I had it narrowed down to two or three women and I still wasn't winning, I took the guy by the arm and pulled him away with me and did something that if a guy did that to me, I would consider that sexual harassment or some version of that.
But I did it to him.
I was like such a jerk.
And now I'm getting to, I'm getting the cue that being that toxic male, being that jerk was oftentimes what I did to compensate for my insecurity, to be able to not get rejected.
And the guys would go, oh, thank you.
That is what so frequently being a jerk is about.
Doing something that is trying to do to minimize rejection.
But in the process of doing it, I oftentimes increase my possibility of being rejected.
Yes, yes.
Oh, gosh, it reminds me of another, another incident back in my young timeframe when I was at the dating version of myself and I was new in Washington, D.C.
And I went out to a bar and there was a guy who worked on Capitol Hill who thought I knew who he was because he was some fourth aide to some 400th congressman.
I'm like, I never even heard of your Congressman, never mind you.
And this guy starts going on thinking it's going to make him sound studly about how he's going to marry his first wife and he's going to have all of his children with his first wife, who's got to be hot because he's got to have good looking children.
And then once she gets fat and old, he's going to dump her and he's going to make sure he has a trophy wife for the second wife because he never wants to be with somebody fat and wrinkly and older.
And I was getting so pissed off listening to this guy.
I remember saying to him, I'm like, well, you better hope that your wallet fattens at the same rate that your hairline recedes.
Otherwise, you're not going to command that.
That's greatly fascinating and sad, deeply sad.
And I don't know how any man would ever think that that would work.
Oh, sure, let me be number one.
I look forward to that.
Yeah, exactly.
Would you like to go out with me and be the woman I have children with and dump?
And the ironic thing is that once men fall in love with women, it is there, the depression, the sadness that they go through, the withdrawal, the often suicidal tendencies that they feel, ideations that they have are enormous.
When women and men break up, it is more likely the man who will be deeply depressed as a result of that, because very frequently the man has all, it doesn't feel comfortable talking about feelings to anybody but his wife and his fears to anybody but his wife.
And so everything that he, when he talks to other men about a problem that he might have with his wife, men will usually give him about two or three minutes worth of time and then switch the topic to, you know, what do you think of the game last night or what some something like that and not pay really attention to him.
Whereas when women talk to women about problems they're having with guys, the women are much more likely to say, oh, yeah, I observed that with your husband or your boyfriend.
And yeah, I had the same problem with my boyfriend.
And by the time the woman is done, she's feeling supported and heard and understood by her women friends.
Guys don't do that for men friends.
And so all of men's eggs of intimacy are in the basket of their wives or women friends.
And when they break up, they often go through very deep depression much more frequently than the female does.
So guys have been put in this very tough position where we want them to risk their lives to protect us.
I mean, they were the hunter-gatherers.
They were out there supposed to be dealing with the, you know, bully mammoth, whatever, at the time.
And then we make them, you have to go out into the workplace and deal with that rat race and earn the paycheck.
And then we kind of turned everything on its head and said, now this version of you is unacceptable.
Now all the things that have happened to you from thousands of years of evolution are as of today unacceptable.
They almost be unlearned.
And at the same time, they're looking at women saying, STEM educate.
Go to the sciences, go to the math, go out there and be the primary wage earner.
And a lot of women were like, oh, okay, I'll do it.
Pursuing Dreams Through Sacrifice 00:03:50
I'll do it.
And then only learned later, well, I'm not sure how much I love.
A lot of them learned.
I'm not sure how much I love this role either, right?
Both of us have been placed in these new configurations that may or may not align with what we truly want.
Yes.
And that's the real key.
For some women and some men, they really do align.
I was always, I always had an interest in being the provider protector, but I also had a very strong nurturer, connector part of me.
And I was always torn between those two parts of myself.
And that's me.
But other men were very comfortable.
They really wanted to go to be a soldier.
But the question that I will ask of a boy, a young man who wants to be a soldier or go into the military is, are you doing it because Uncle Joe's picture was on the mantle and he served as a Marine in World War II?
He was always spoken of as a hero.
That is, are you following a social bribe to be approved of and recognized and acknowledged?
Or are you doing it because it's something deep inside of you that you feel will be energized by the discipline and energized by serving?
So look deeply inside of yourself and find out who you really are.
And that's the function of two good parents who are doing two things usually with children.
When women alone are parents, they're usually very good at identifying the children's gifts.
You're a wonderful singer.
You really play that guitar well.
You're a good basketball player.
And then encouraging the boy or the girl to sort of pursue those gifts.
And oftentimes the girl or boy does do that.
Dads tend to play a role of saying, yes, if you want to do that, that's great.
But that's going to mean if you want to be one of the gymnasts in the Olympics, that's going to take you making sacrifices.
You're not going to be able to go to as many parties.
You're not going to be able to play as many video games.
You're not going to be able to just goof off and hang out with people and talk with them on the phone for hours.
You're going to have to make sacrifices.
And if I'm going to make the sacrifice to take you to, to give you a tutor, to take you to your practices, I want some sacrifice from you.
I don't want you to try to have it both ways.
And dads are more likely to say, if you don't do that, I'll stop giving you the things you need to to have your dream.
When the children have that boundary enforcement, they oftentimes learn that if they do want to pursue a dream like being an Olympic gymnast, it's going to take sacrifices.
And if I don't make those sacrifices, I'm not going to get my parental support.
But if I do, I will.
Or if I decide I don't want to pursue that dream, I want to have a more balanced life than being an Olympic gymnast or whatever, then my parents will support that, but they're not going to support me to do something that I say I want to do, but I only half-heartedly do because that will not get me there.
And so it's that combination of nurturing, protecting that moms so frequently do traditionally.
And sometimes these are reversed, of course.
And conversely, that dads often say they're much more likely to do the boundary enforcement and be tough on the kids and say, you know, if you want this, I'll participate, I'll give to you, but only if you do your part in the game.
Sometimes that feels to a mom like the dad is being too tough.
The child starts crying because they can't go to their best friend's birthday party.
And the dad understands that that's a real sacrifice that that kid makes, but says that that's the way you get that goal.
The Dad Deprivation Crisis 00:04:34
But if you want the goal of a balanced life and good emotional skills and having, you know, having people to having all the learning experiences that come with playing with other people, then that's okay too.
But it's a different experience in life.
Yeah, you're not going to the Olympics as a teenager then.
The point of the story is supportive of the notion that we need dads.
We need moms and dads in the family.
And more and more in American society, we don't have the dads.
We have an absentee dad problem that is pretty massive.
And it's cross-cultural.
It's cross-racial.
I mean, obviously there's been some attention paid to what's happening in the in the black communities, given what we see in terms of crime rates in inner cities and absentee fathers, but it's not just a black family problem.
And you, I know you've pointed out that is it the second highest, like the second highest version of an American family has a single mom living with her child or children.
That's the second most common family you'll see in America.
Yes, it's 40% of children live with only their mom, only one parent and almost always the mom.
And so you mentioned a couple of things about history here, which is very important.
Moynihan was the first person to see this, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who was a U.S. Senator, Department of Labor, Secretary under Johnson and Nixon.
And so one of the most respected people in the country.
And he did something that is commonly called the Moynihan Report.
And this is 1965, mind you.
So in 1965, he was assigned to find out why there's so much crime in inner cities.
And there was a lot of fear.
Oh, my goodness, this is going to be a racist report that's going to show that the Blacks commit most of the crimes.
And everyone was sort of like putting their heads behind their hands and wondering what was going to come out.
And what he found out was that something very different, which is the children committing crimes in the inner cities were children who had minimal or no father involvement, but I came to call dad deprived children.
Now, they were mostly in Black families.
25% of Black families at that point in 1965 were being raised with only a mom and almost no dad.
At that point in time, it was less than 1%, three-tenths of 1% of Caucasian families were raised in that situation.
Today, it is 32% of Caucasian families have children raised by only one parent, almost always the mom.
And 72% or 3% of the Black families have children being raised by only the mom.
And so today, Caucasian children are in the same situation, even worse, than Black families were in 1965.
And we see that when a child is raised without a dad, for each 1% increase in children being raised without a dad, there's a 3% increase in crime happening in that area where that is prone.
And so I really began, and Jerome Powell pointed this out in the Fed chair, said that looking around the world, he saw that where there were problems, but particularly in the United States, they were problems of children that did not have their fathers and problems of boys.
And we were not doing, and boys were not being educated to have technology, to have both parents.
And so this was part of what I was discovering as I did the research for the boy crisis.
When I submitted the boy crisis to my publisher, I initially outlined 10 different causes of the boy crisis.
And then I started studying each of those 10 causes.
And I wrote my publisher and said, I'm sorry, but I'm finding that largely the boy crisis resides where dads do not reside.
And he said, well, then elaborate on that.
And so I began to look at that in greater depth and found out that children who had minimal or no father involvement or what I came to call dad deprived, those children did worse in 70 plus different metrics from, but the boys did much more intensely worse than the girls.
Finding Male Mentors for Boys 00:09:20
So the boys and girls, for example, were more likely to commit suicide when they didn't have dads.
But boys at the age of nine, they commit suicide about equally to girls and very minimally.
But between the ages of 10 and 14, boys' suicide rate became twice that of girls.
Between the ages of 15 and 19, four times that of girls.
Between the ages of 20 and 25, five times that of girls.
And the single biggest predictor of suicide in either boys or girls was lack of presence of dads.
And so that got me into looking at, well, you know, I knew my dad was important, but I didn't have any clue that he was that important.
And I started, you know, to examine exactly, you know, what there was about fathering that was so different from what mother style parenting was and why children who did the best have what I call checks and balance parenting, where the father respects the mother style, the mother respects the father's style, and they communicate about how to make win-win situations out of putting both of their styles together.
All right.
So now this has you worried because you lost your spouse and your children don't have a living father or because you got a divorce and he turned out to be a deadbeat and left or because you're in a lesbian couple and you have children.
All those things Dr. Farrell has taken a look at and has thoughts on.
And I'll pick it up right there after a very quick break.
So now that we scared the, you know what, out of parents who are in fatherless homes, right?
Either they've gotten a divorce or the dad's taken off or maybe you're a mom who's made the dad not have contact, you know, bitter, the guy, you didn't like him, you kept him out, you got a good child arrangement, you know, child custody arrangement, thinking that was best.
Or even just like two of my closest friends are in a lesbian couple.
They say they're bi, but they're in a lesbian marriage anyway, for the record.
There's no dad around and they just had a boy.
They have three girls.
They just had a boy, but they have a good plan for male role models in their children's lives, including their boy.
But what is the answer to those situations?
A lot of levels.
First, the first level, many dads do become deadbeats or withdraw after they, when they feel like they're only wanted for their wallet and they're only wanted for their money.
And so if you're a mom and you really want to have the dad back in your life, but he seems to not take much interest or he's getting involved with another woman and their children, and he feels more needed by that other family than he does by you and your children.
One of the first way, the first thing you can do is to study the differences between dad style parenting and mom style parenting and point and tell him that you value his rough housing, but now you understand why rough housing leads to empathy, the exact opposite of what you think rough housing leads to.
And I'll explain why if we talk about that in a little while, why teasing has certain benefits, why taking certain risks up to a certain point increases children's IQ, increases children's ability to assess risks.
In other words, find out what dads tend to do that leads children to do so much better with dads.
Let the man that has dropped out of your children's life, let him know that you now understand why he is needed and you want to support that as long as he's also listening to you and your input.
And so that's the number one way to get the most important person in your children's life aside from you back into your children's life, which is the biological dad.
The stepfather can be a very important substitute role model, but it's almost never as important as the biological dad and the biological mom, because eventually the children look in the mirror and they see whatever they hear about the biological father or mother, they worry or think that that might be them in the future.
They see the parents, both parents' body language, eyes, eye color, hair, whatever, and they know that whatever you say about the other parent is also that's being said about them.
And so, and both parents are, both children are looking always for the input of both parents because it's also part of who they are.
And so it's so that's that's the number one way.
But if there's, if the dad has died or he's in prison for too long to come out to be with the children or for some other reason truly is a deadbeat and won't come back under even those circumstances, then there's a lot of things you can do.
One is if you're at all faith-based oriented, get your child involved in a faith-based community in which the minister, priest, rabbi, or umam forms groups of boys your son's age and make sure that they're in confidential groups where they talk about their feelings or their fears so that almost all boys growing up as girl and girls as well feel like they have special insecurities,
but boys in particular have almost no permission to talk about those insecurities.
And when every boy in a confidential group of your son's age is talking about his insecurities, it makes each boy in the group realize that those insecurities are not just them.
They're everyone's insecurities.
And that makes them feel a lot more internally secure.
That's one example.
Another is get your children involved in the liberal arts of sports.
When I say the liberal arts of sports, what I mean is get them involved in team sports where they learn how to get good advice from a coach and how to work together with other people to win.
Get them involved in one of the most neglected forms of sports in recent history, which is pickup team sports.
Pickup team sports is wonderful preparation to be an entrepreneur because you're creating something from nothing.
You're creating your own, say on a basketball court, you're saying, do I play half court or full court?
Do I pass to this person or do I pass or not pass to that person?
Because every time that person asks me to pass to him, he just wants to hog the ball for himself.
So you're learning all those skills as to how to put a team together, how to select and unselect from various people that you work with.
And then also individual sports like tennis or gymnastics where there's a team, but the primary focus is on your developing your own discipline and your own skill sets.
And if you're a mom and you go out to the games, especially the organized sports games, and make contact with the coach, particularly if it's a male coach, and explain to the male coach that the boy doesn't have the biological father around.
And if he, the coach, can take your son aside occasionally and point out valid things that your son is doing well to help your son feel special and also things that your son is not doing as well as he could be doing to make your son have an inspiration to do those things better.
That's a helpful role model to bring into your son's life.
You know, third, Cub Scouts and Boy Scouts.
Almost every parent I know cares that their children have idea, have character, good character more than almost anything else.
And Cub Scouts, if your child attends Cub Scouts, your son attends Cub Scouts for two years or more consistently.
Studies show that those children develop much more positive personality characteristics of integrity, of loyalty, of honesty than they do without the Cub Scouts.
Boy Scouts are one of the most amazing constructs of masculinity.
Boys do very much better when they have incentives and when they get little badges to say, I did it.
But the badges, the merit badges and Boy Scouts not only are merit badges for that particular activity, but they usually put your son in contact with a male mentor who is good at that activity.
And so you're giving your son male mentor after male mentor and a concrete goal of being able to say, I did this activity well.
And then possible bigger goals like becoming an Eagle Scout or a Star Scout to say that I have put together not just one specialty, but multiple specialties.
And in the process, your son is able to discover, you know, what am I good at?
Learning Postponed Gratification 00:11:22
What do I like?
And what's the combination of what I like and good at?
I was blessed to be good at math, but I didn't like math.
And so I got into something that wasn't math-oriented.
Wow, this is so fascinating.
And it's so heartening to know there are avenues where you can create a male role model types in your son's life, even if you're in the unfortunate position of not having a biological dad in the house or you've just chosen not to.
One thing you said reminded me of a story that's in the news this week, and we have the video: the importance of sports and lessons that are learned out on the sports field.
This made national news.
It was a little league game.
It happened on Tuesday between a team from Parallel, Texas, and a team from Tulsa, Oklahoma.
Now, here's what you're going to see in one second: the Texas East pitcher is named Caden Shelton.
And Caden had a pitch get away from him and it struck Tulsa's Isaiah Jarvis in the head.
Isaiah falls to the ground, fortunately, hit his helmet.
So he was okay.
And then the pitcher, the pitcher, Caden, got very upset that he had hurt, you know, inadvertently, this other kid, this batter, and he started crying on the mound.
And here you see the kid from Tulsa who got hit walk over to the pitcher's mound.
He's he hugs the pitcher.
Oh my God, it's like I want to cry.
He's hugging him, making the pitcher feel better.
And he says, Hey, you're doing just great.
You're doing great.
And the coach comes out.
The other boys come out.
I'm like getting misty eyed just looking at this example of how amazing it was.
And the Texas East, the pitchers team, wound up winning the game nine to four.
They've qualified for the Little League World Series.
And the boy who threw the pitch leader gave an interview saying he could hardly breathe out there.
He was so upset about hurting the batter.
And when the little kid told him, Look, you got this.
You got this.
Just take deep breaths, he was saying to him, and just think happy thoughts.
I think, my God, what every parent would want, right, for their kids to experience on the ball field.
And if I were the parent of the little boy who did the hugging, the one, Isaiah Jarvis, I'd be like, I'm not doing a college application essay.
I'm just going to submit this videotape so you know what kind of a person I am.
I so agree with you.
I am, I am misty-eyed watching that also.
That was just absolutely the type of the type of character development we all want for our children.
And one of the nice things about sports is that especially pickup team sports and where you're changing the sports every day.
I can remember when I was playing baseball and somebody would slide into first base and somebody would say, the second baseman would say, you're out.
And the person sliding in said, I'm safe, you dummy blah, blah, blah.
And they're back and forth at each other.
Well, the next day, we'd be on the same team together and, you know, and calling somebody else the dummy.
And so, you know, we began to learn unconsciously that where you stand depends on where you sit.
And that, you know, that, you know, mocking each other or calling each other names, that those were things that weren't fundamentally name calling that really we meant.
They were just the moment of excitement and anger.
And then we knew, though, that the people that we were yelling at the next day, we might be on their same team and just yelling differently about the same type of outer safeness.
My gosh, there's so much to learn from the sports teams.
And like you say, just the pickup game.
You know, my kids are down there right now playing Foursquare.
This isn't something we arranged.
They just went to play Foursquare.
There's so many.
And then they come home.
They realize.
And I saw my little guy when he turned nine.
They were playing a game of Foursquare.
And I saw all these other kids make sure.
I guess you're like king.
You can be, I don't know how it works, but you can be ace, you can be queen, you can be joker, whatever.
And if you're king, it's good.
And these kids, while a lot of them were older, the last round, they made sure my little guy who was the birthday boy was king on the very last, you know, bouncing of the ball.
I'm like, that's great.
Nobody told them to do it.
They're just being good kids, learning kindness, fierce competitiveness.
They were going to kill each other five minutes earlier, but it ended on a positive note that made the birthday boy feel good.
Those are the kind of moments where you believe in humanity.
I mean, it makes you want to foster more of it.
Absolutely.
Is this Thatcher who was playing Foursquare?
Yeah, that's my little Thatcher, my babe, who I'm trying to infantilize and not turn into a man.
I want him to stay home with mommy forever.
And it's hard.
The more we love somebody, the more we want to enable them, or the more we want to do for them.
But the doing for them is so often enabling them.
And we often say moms have unconditional love.
And we don't sometimes understand that both moms and dads have unconditional love, but dads are far more likely to have conditional approval as part of the package of unconditional love.
And so it's so important for us to understand that concept.
Well, and I know you say you need the dad around.
I mean, of course, these are all stereotypes and it could be different.
Maybe moms are more like this in some families, but I remember when my, when our eldest was learning how to ride a bike and I thought he was too young to switch from his little balance bike where you just push your feet to a bike with pedals.
And Doug was like, Meg, it's time.
He can do it.
And I was like, well, I don't, I don't know.
He's like, just go have lunch with Janice, have a glass of wine and you come back later.
I'm like, well, put on his little knee pads.
And I really was totally paranoid.
It's not like me, but I did.
And he kicked me out.
And I came back from lunch with my friend Janice.
And I came back to this child riding a bike, no knee pads, none of the protective stuff except for the helmet, riding, yelling, I'm doing it.
I'm doing it.
The dad, his willingness to take risks, his, you know, just the attitude you're talking about is what led to that moment.
Absolutely.
And a couple of things of your parent listening to this is that sometimes those risks will end up in exactly what the mom predicted, a scraped knee, the child falling and doing, you know, and falling on his or her head or something along those lines.
And if you'd like to, when we come back after break, I'd love to talk about some of the ways that manifests, like how dads doing rough housing so often scares moms, how the how the what moms predict that will come out of the rough housing, one of the children getting hurt is oftentimes more likely to be correct than not correct.
Yet, what the children get from the rough housing when it's done in the way that the best dads do it, that lead to the children who do the rough housing actually being more empathetic than they would without the rough housing.
So, you know, very few dads understand this and they don't go ahead and say, I want to do rough housing with the kids to make them more empathetic.
It's about the most counter thing you can imagine.
No, but I do want to talk about that.
And I want to talk about the teasing too, because I'm Linda Kelly's daughter and there's a lot to answer for.
Dr. Warren Farrell, standby, quick break.
So much more, including couples, including school shootings and more of a deep dive on our young men.
Dr. Farrell, the notion of rough housing and teasing, right?
I know it's got to have some limits about it.
We're not talking about beating the hell out of somebody and we're not talking about crushing their spirit to the point where they're in tears because you've insulted them so badly.
But there's a whole realm before you get into those danger zones.
Yes.
A very good example of that is like, let's say you have two sons and a daughter.
And the dad starts to say, oh, okay, the three of you get on the couch and the three of you jump off the couch onto my back.
And I'll see whether I can pin the three of you down before the three of you pin me down.
And the kids are all excited about doing that.
And mom is going, looking oftentimes and going, oh my God, I feel like I have just one more child to monitor here.
And she's sort of saying, I don't want to be controlling.
And the kids seem like they're having fun.
But on the other hand, I just feel like sooner or later, somebody's going to get hurt.
And she's only about 99% likely to be right.
And so eventually, they're rough housing.
The kids are loving it.
And eventually somebody starts to cry.
And the mom goes, oh my God, now she feels guilty that she didn't interfere because she doesn't want the children to cry or get hurt.
And so she, but she thinks, all right, dad will be mature enough to recognize that this ends up in kids getting hurt and he'll stop the rough housing.
But he doesn't stop the rough housing.
He goes some version of, you know, Jimmy, you can't stick your elbow in your sister's eye like that.
That's not a way to win rough housing.
And you can't push so hard.
That's too aggressive.
It's fine to be assertive.
You can put your eye, you know, fake, fake your brother or sister out.
You just can't push them that hard.
Okay, okay, dad, we got it.
We got it.
And then they go back and they go back to rough housing.
And mom is saying to herself, you know, wait a minute.
He didn't learn his lesson.
Now they're back to doing the same thing that led to the children getting hurt before.
And then sooner or later, again, the children get, somebody does something too aggressive.
And dad is more likely to say something like, okay, you did what you said you wouldn't do.
And now the rough housing stops.
And there's no more rough housing until maybe two days from now.
And so mom's feeling a little bit mixed about this.
You know, wait a minute, like that you stopped the rough housing, but what are you telling the kids you're going to do it again in a couple of days?
And it's the couple of days later that the payoff comes.
Now the kids know that if they're too aggressive or they stick their elbow in their sister or brother's eye, that the rough housing is going to stop like it did last time.
Now they're beginning to learn postponed gratification.
Immediate gratification is pushing their brother or sister out of the circle or putting the elbow in the eye.
Postponed gratification is saying to themselves, I want the rough housing even more than I want this immediate gratification of pushing my sister or brother around.
And I know I'm going to lose the rough housing, what I really want if I do the pushing around and am too aggressive.
That's when the postponed gratification is the single biggest predictor of success or failure.
And so in life, like as a human?
In life as a human, academic success or failure, academic success or failure is most predicted by reading and writing skills.
But life success or failure is most predicted by the ability to have postponed gratification.
Obviously, it's not the only predictor.
Lots of other things as well, but postponed gratification is the single biggest one.
Risk Taking Builds IQ 00:03:35
And the other thing that's so helpful in life is empathy.
And so here's the connection between empathy and rough housing, that the children who realize that they have no choice but to think of their sisters or brothers' feelings by being pushed too hard or having an elbow in the eye, they're learning to think of their sister and brother in order to get what they want.
Children don't develop empathy by choice.
They develop it by knowing that they get something that they want as a result of being empathetic.
Interestingly, parents who are extremely empathetic, but for whom empathy is only a one-way street, that is, the parents are constantly empathetic to the children.
That does not lead to empathetic children.
Children who are only empathized with, but are not required, like at family dinner nights, to also hear the parents and the parents' perspective.
They don't learn to be empathetic themselves.
They only learn to receive empathy and receiving empathy as a one-way street becomes narcissism.
That explains a lot.
It does.
You know, our society today's name, I mean, we talk a lot about helicopter parents where they're like, I mean, that's exactly the wrong thing to do on every front, according to what I'm hearing.
You know, you're taking away so many opportunities from your child and you're not, he may be, you may be keeping him or her safe for the time being, but not for the long term.
And you're not developing any character.
Yes, absolutely.
And here, you know, obviously safety and watching out for a child's safety is important also.
And so before we were talking, I was mentioning that checks and balance parenting is the parenting that really is most helpful for children.
So for example, the child may go to the mom and say, can I climb the tree in the back yard?
And the mom may say, well, sweetie, you're too young for that now, maybe in a few years.
And then the child goes to the dad and the dad says, okay, but be careful.
And then the mother sees the child out there climbing the tree and says, what are you doing?
I told you you couldn't climb the tree.
Well, dad said, I could climb the tree.
And so checks and balance parenting would be mom and dad getting together and saying, okay, you know, I don't want the child to climb the tree because the child can get hurt, fall out, get a concussion, might be the end of his or her life.
And dad says, well, the child needs to learn how to take risks.
And that actually, if he's, you know, one of the things I discuss in the boy crisis is that risk-taking children, like the ones that climb the tree, have better Skills that lead to an actual increase in their IQ because their synapses are firing and developing in ways that were outside of their normal comfort zone and their normal patterns.
So, anyway, the children, so dad can maybe explain that intellectually, but also can explain that the two of them can end up working on a compromise.
Like, okay, the child can climb the tree, but not beyond a certain level.
And to make sure that the father is underneath the tree so that in case the child does fall, that she or he gets protected by the child's father cushioning the child.
And the mom might negotiate with the dad to take the cell phone away from the dad.
So the dad is focusing on the child and not the cell phone.
And so what the two have done together is to give the child maximum protection, but at the same time, give the child the ability to develop that constant assessment of what's safe and what's not safe with the underlying security blanket, like a roller coaster.
Balancing Safety and Freedom 00:09:45
You know, you get the excitement out of the roller coaster, you get, but you, you know, that the roller coaster is going to keep you safe at the same time as it's going to allow you to have a certain amount of excitement and risk-taking.
I mean, all these are so they're fascinating to me.
And it does seem to me, I mean, you tell me, but like from my friends in the same-sex marriage, this seems like, I mean, I don't want to characterize anybody, but one of them is from Vermont and she's much more earthy and she's, you know, she's more like, we're not doing that, you know, like this, that makes no sense.
And the other gal is more like fun-loving and a spender and more like it's fun.
I don't know.
Like, so I feel like, is it about gender roles exactly, or is it about personality types that tend to be associated with one gender or the other?
That's a really good way of putting it.
It is almost all the couples in my couples workshops that have been gay or have been, have said that they do, a couple of exceptions to this, but that they do have like a male and female role within the framework of the gay couple, whether it's the male, male or the female.
And so you, you often, so you know, where those roles develop from and why we're, you know, most of the time, couples are attracted to the members of either the other sex or the same sex that are fairly different from them.
But then they end up blaming the other sex for the differences that they were attracted to.
And so, you know, one of the little wisdoms in my couples workshop is before you blame your partner, look in the mirror, see what you needed that led you to be attracted to the person you were attracted to, whether you're gay or straight.
This seems to be a pattern.
And the, you know, in gay couples, one does tend to play more of a male role, one does tend to play more of a female role.
And very occasionally, I find them, you know, not being able to differentiate.
So anyway, and then okay, so yeah, go ahead.
Sorry.
So there's two other things I want to get to before we take the callers.
And I want to make sure I get them in because I do want to spend some time on couples because I think your insights are so helpful.
But I, but I, we have to talk about school shootings because I know you've written a lot about that.
And we've covered so much about this.
And, you know, you, you make some very obvious observations, but they need to be underscored.
And then you go much deeper.
School shootings are committed by boys, by young men.
It's not girls who are doing this.
And there's a reason for that.
You know, and you point out people tell you, this is the violent videos.
And, you know, definitely guns have something to do with it.
But, and even absentee fathers, boys and girls grow up in that same home.
A brother and a sister, they grew up in that same home without the dad, with the violent video games, with guns potentially, maybe not with a very good, healthy family dynamic, but still it's boys who are doing the mass shootings, the school shootings.
So let's get into it.
Why?
Why is that?
Yes.
The boys are usually A, boys.
be, they're usually much more likely than other people to be dad deprived.
So of the seven mass shootings in which 10 or that were school shootings, in which 10 or more people were killed since in the 21st century, we know the family backgrounds of six of those boys.
And the family backgrounds of the six boys that we know are pretty similar.
They're all dad deprived boys, very minimal or no father involvement.
And most of the boys also had antagonistic, very argumentative relationships with their mothers and usually had no father and no good male role model in their life that was active and present in their life with consistency.
But mostly it's dad deprivation and boys.
So, you know, what can it, so what is this about?
And the boy with no, and I got an example of this, was a boy from not too far from Uvalde, Texas, who had called me before the Uvalde, Texas incident and said, I really want to thank you, Dr. Farrell, for the boy crisis book.
I was with a fascist group called A-Chan, and I didn't have a father.
I was raised by a mom who didn't like men.
And then I got into lots of conflicts with her and then was passed on to my grandmother on my mother's side and then aunts.
And we got all into big fights.
And I felt I had no purpose in life.
I was addicted to video games.
I saw myself as a character in a video game, not as a real human being.
Without the purpose and structure, I got attracted to a fascist A-chan group.
And I started to think that having the fascist solution would be a really good solution.
And I could teach the world a lot of things.
But underneath it all, I was super angry.
He said, what I got out of the boy crisis was not your data, but rather that my attitudes, my internal thinking was seen exactly.
I felt like somebody finally understood me.
And when I finished that, I ended up not having the anger that I felt before.
I still had anger.
I still hated my mom, but it was not enough anger to execute on a 52-page manifesto that I had written that was what all the exact plans I was going to do to create this mass shooting.
So thanks for saving my life and thanks for saving the life of many other people.
And to this, and so my next job with that young man was to communicate with him on Zoom and to try to get him to see that his mother loved him probably, not hated him.
And fortunately, that has worked.
And he now sees his mother as having let him do the video games because that was the one thing that his mother felt that he was that satisfied him and made him happy and she wanted to make him happy.
And so, but it's just an example of what happens in so many young men's lives who don't feel they have the structure, the purpose, and the role model.
When a girl is raised by a single mom, she usually she at least has a female role model that she can sort of model herself afterwards.
And girls have much more permission in society to be able to express their feelings and fears.
And moms can often identify with those feelings and fears.
So at least while the girl is significantly oftentimes hurt by not having a significant father involvement, nevertheless, the amount of damage is much more frequently befalls the boy without a same-sex role model.
My gosh, that is just terrifying.
I mean, what you just described describes the Uvalde shooter and describes the Newtown shooter.
I mean, you can just think of the ones off the top of your head where in both of those cases, the mothers allowed the boys to spend countless hours behind closed doors in the basement watching violent videos.
The mother in the Uvalde case was absentee and reportedly had many other issues, including, you know, many interactions with the police and so on.
And the dad wasn't there either.
In either case, there was a divorce in the Sandy Hook, but I think he lived in a different place.
And the kid was living with a grandfather.
Adam Lanza, of course, had that very similar background of lack of father involvement as well.
And so the importance of us bringing our dads.
Now, this, I want to be really clear.
This does not mean that if you have a child growing up without a dad, he's going to become a mass shooter or he's going to commit suicide.
Many, many children raised by single mothers who are probably among the hardest working people in the country do just fine.
But among the ones that are having problems, these what we call failures to launch, the ones that we know are bright, but are not living up to the intelligence we sense in them, those are the ones that so frequently do not have that you take that risk, that teasing that helps children be able to be criticized without and recognizing that they can laugh at themselves and have the humiliation, the self,
the ability to laugh at themselves in that capacity.
There's so many things that both parents bring to parenting that children really seem to need, both girls and boys and girls have a similar set of problems, but there are also some different ones.
So for example, children who are girls who are not raised with minimal or no father involvement are far more likely to become pregnant out of wedlock as teenagers.
And one of the reasons is that they don't know how to rough house with their dad.
They don't know how to talk with their dad.
They don't have lots of social skills of knowing how to deal with the male and male energy and male humor and male teasing that girls who grow up with those types of social skills learn.
And therefore, when they're with a boy, one of two things tends to happen.
They tend to feel like the only way I can please this boy and not lose him to another girl is by being sexual with him.
And so she becomes sexual with him before she's comfortable being sexual with him because she feels that's the way she can keep him.
Or conversely, she's so fearful about relationships to begin with, she's afraid of becoming intimate with boys at all.
And so one of those two extremes is more likely to happen with girls being raised with minimal or no father involvement.
Evolutionary Attraction Needs 00:02:22
So what you're telling me is that, because I lost my dad to a heart attack when I was 15, he was 45, when Linda, my mom thereafter, continued to mock my feet, which are very unattractive, and to tell me that I was going to be with her for a long time because I too was rather unattractive.
She was shoring me up.
She was shoring me up for life.
That's amazing.
It's like Eleanor Roosevelt's stepmother, you know, FDR's father, and was, you know, was constantly commenting that, you know, FDR should find somebody other than Eleanor because she wasn't good looking enough for the, you know, for the society.
And Eleanor's own father, own mother, was critical of her looks.
And it's such a sad thing when we put so much emphasis, especially on female looks.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, let me tell you, she wasn't wrong.
If you could see pictures of me as a little girl, there was no promise there.
I mean, they were just setting me up for the future.
But, you know, a little hair dye and I got my teeth fixed and, you know, you lost some weight and your bone structure comes out.
There's hope for everyone.
Let's talk about couples and attraction, because this is one of the things I find very interesting.
You have a thing in one of your books.
I'm trying to remember which one it was, but it's about how a man needs one thing in order to want to sleep with a woman to find her attractive.
He needs her to be sexually attractive to him.
And a woman needs a list that is as long as Santa Scroll in general before she, and like what's on her list and why are we so different when it comes to what makes us actually want to couple with the other sex?
Yeah, for I guess reasons of evolution, you know, men, the male need was a sexually attractive and younger female, which was and the sexually attractive historically meant that they were genetically more healthy.
They had, you know, cheekbones that were, you know, similar and high and other characteristics that were signatures of greater health.
And youth, of course, because they had, you know, the, they were at the right age to be able to bear children.
And so we've been genetically programmed to fall, you know, to have sex, to desire to have sex with a woman who is just plain beautiful and young.
And the and women historically desired to have sex with men who were, well, they were able to provide income or some economic securities or some ability to protect and provide.
Shared Listening Mindset 00:15:12
But the men who are, you know, the qualities it takes to be successful at work are often in enormous tension with the qualities it takes to be successful in love.
To be successful in work, you learn to listen as somebody else is talking and provide solutions inside of your mind as somebody else is talking.
If you're a lawyer, you learn to find the criticism, the fault in what somebody else is saying, and you're rehearsing your response to that fault while the other person is talking.
Well, that may be great in a law court, but if you come home and you do that with your husband or your wife or your children, your children don't feel heard.
Your husband or wife doesn't feel heard.
So the qualities it took to become successful at work become oftentimes unsuccessful in love.
And the challenge with all that is that therefore the lists that women have to gather in order to be not just protected, but to be with a man who's emotionally intelligent despite being successful, I say despite being successful, because those two are often in tension, means that she has to check not just for the success, but is there respect for her beyond the as part of the emotional intelligence?
Is respect for her manifested by listening, not solving problems?
Almost every CEO I've ever dealt with has been so good at solving their wife's problems.
And it's almost always the husband, CEO, and the wife.
But when it's reversed, the same type of thing with the female CEO is often that she's very good at solving her husband's problems.
But the woman whose problems are solved in a few seconds, while she hasn't been able to solve those problems in all of her lifetime up to that point, does not feel more respected by those problems being solved and does not feel heard.
And so there's so much.
And she doesn't feel they're solved.
And she doesn't feel they're solved.
And the best way I can communicate with that male CEO is to say, listening is the solution.
Like, you don't have to solve the problem.
You have solved the problem by listening.
And when she asks you for your input, yes, eventually give your input.
But before you give your input, say, you know, if you were the person that you're dealing with, what would you say?
Role play the person she's having the conflict with.
Have her role play it.
When most, for most people, the answer is within them.
And when you draw them out to discover the answer that's within them, they feel so much more empowered and so much more loved by you and so much more listened to by you.
And that's the solution.
Or a little bit of the tip of the iceberg of the solution.
Is that also true with children, right?
It's like the role is not the same if you're the parent listening to your child, especially the younger children, you know, they're not 25, you know, they're minors.
Is it the same role to listen?
Or in that situation, should you be more aggressive about offering proposals?
It's yes.
First, listen, see what the children can discover inside of themselves, but then don't hesitate to also share the gap between what the children do come up with and what you feel is helpful for the children to learn.
Okay, that's good to know.
And you also talk about the importance of that family dinner table, about how that should be treated as sacred that time.
But it's not just getting the fam together.
That counts.
But it's also about how the conversation goes, what's on the table, what's not, and how you behave in response to what you're hearing and also what you choose to say and share.
Can you talk about that for a minute?
Family dinner nights are so important, but sometimes family dinner nights devolve into family dinner nightmares.
And soon children don't want to become part of the family dinner night because they don't feel heard.
That's usually the key reason.
But another reason is that they bring electronics to the table and many parents are not good boundary enforcers in saying, you know, family dinner night, we do it once a week.
It is the highest priority.
If there's really something, a major emergency that comes up, we reschedule it.
We don't cancel it.
When we do family dinner night, there's no electronics at the table.
You have any problem with that and you bring electronics to the table.
Those electronic devices will be taken from you for the rest of the evening and given to you the following morning.
You make some small consequence, but that is a meaningful consequence.
You know that you make it clear that the parents are in charge, not the children being in charge of the parents.
Very important distinction for many families these days.
And then when you do the family dinner night, you vary topics and you let each person who's maybe nine, 10 years of age or older in the family to choose a topic of conversation.
And then that topic of conversation gets shared.
The perspectives on that get shared by anybody, each person at the table.
You go around the table and the requirement is that before you go on to the next person, somebody at that table shares what she or he heard and the family together at that table works to make sure that the person who is speaking feels completely heard, that is not distorted, that nothing is missing, and there's nothing that they feel that they absolutely must add in order to have the whole issue understood.
When the person who's talking said, yeah, nothing was distorted, nothing was missed, and that the essence of what I need to say is understood, then you move on to the second person.
Well, this may take two family dinner nights to complete this whole round, but in the end, everyone feels understood by their brothers and their sisters and then by their parents.
And just as importantly, oftentimes many parents who care about family dinner nights and are good couples are, as I was hinting before, they're better at providing empathy and understanding to the children than the children are at providing empathy for the parents' perspective and their brothers and sisters' perspective.
But it's also a requirement, if you want your children to be empathetic, that the children be required to also share what their parents said without any distortion and without anything being missed, and what their brothers and sisters said in the same way.
And that also there's no fear of bringing up extremely controversial topics.
Boys especially love controversial topics, but both boys and girls and parents have in common that they'd all like to be heard.
And if you see your children talking for an hour and a half on their phone, phone with a peer, but when you ask them what's going on and they say, oh, nothing much, or give you some brief answer, you know there's that the reason is that the children aren't feeling as heard by the family members as they are with their peer, and that they're feeling that interruptions come more than compassion and understanding.
So, yeah, they've got to listen to you speak.
That's just as important as you listening to them speak.
And can I just ask you?
So when you say any topic, and you know, do you really feel heard?
If there's a family conflict, that makes sense.
But are you just saying, like, we could say we could talk about climate change?
We could talk about abortion.
We could talk about Trump, like anything.
Yes, exactly.
And if, you know, if two people at the table are Trump supporters and two people at the table feel Trump is the biggest evil, or that Putin is doing what is really helpful, could be helpful for the Ukraine.
And, you know, and somebody else feels that that's just one more attack on the Ukraine.
Here, this is good.
This is good.
This is good fodder for hearing about perspectives that you couldn't even imagine you would want to hear.
And the person who's able to do it, the children that are able to do that have only one problem.
They get too many friends.
Well, I like what you wrote in one of your books that even if your child doesn't understand it, most children would much rather be a little confused than bored at the dinner table.
That's such a good observation.
And that's especially true of boys.
They want to constantly be challenged.
And it is true that they won't any more than the girls at the table understand everything, but they rather reach for it and miss some things.
And then round two, it's just like we first hear new, when we first hear English or any language, we don't understand 99% of what's being said.
But our brains teach us to grasp that this means that.
And not only does this mean that, this word mean that, but this word with this body language, with this tone of voice, means something different than that same word with different body language and different tone of voice.
Which is so true.
Which is one of the reasons that real human contact is so important because the subtleties of body language, of eyes dilating, of slight withdrawal of tones of voice are not yet captured well enough by AI to be able to teach children emotional intelligence.
Oh, that's one of the reasons they need to stay unmasked.
Okay, that's my own editorial.
Dr. Warren Farrell staying with us.
I definitely want to ask you about conflict resolution in a marriage because the good doctor has a very interesting approach to this on a weekly basis.
How many hours should be devoted to conflict-free zones and how many should be devoted to actually speaking and saying the things that you haven't been saying?
All right, so Dr. Farrell, out of your book, The Boy Crisis, came an idea to help couples.
And now you host couples' communication retreats called Rolemate to Soulmate.
Now, I understand that one of the most important things is learning how to hear your partner's criticisms without becoming defensive.
This is, of course, easier said than done, but you have an approach which includes creating a quote conflict-free zone.
And explain how this works on an hourly basis because you've got it down to a series of hours, basically.
Yes, I have couples create a conflict-free zone for 166 hours a week in exchange for a two-hour caring and sharing, what I call caring and sharing time for the other two hours of the week.
And so the caring and sharing time is the real backbone.
What I found is that when you talk to couples about the value of listening to each other, they all go out of the workshop and feel, oh, now I know more about how important listening is, but that the listening disappears the moment a criticism appears.
So because we are biologically programmed to respond to criticism defensively because it was potentially an enemy, so we got up our defenses and we survived by defeating the enemy or getting up being defensive when we were criticized.
However, as I was mentioning before, that's great for survival, but it's terrible for love.
And so because we are so biologically programmed to become defensive to criticism, I had before a couple does any criticism of their partner, what I ask for them to do is to write that criticism down.
The criticism that survives as being valuable and important to be shared at the end of the week gets shared just one criticism per week by the partner who's upset about that issue.
But before they share that criticism, I ask them to go into six mindsets that is to alter their natural biological state of being defensive and to substitute that with a temporary state of those mindsets saying that something like what I call the love guarantee is one of the mindsets,
which is that if the more I listen, provide a safe environment for my partner's feelings, the more my partner will feel safe and loved by me.
Therefore, the more my partner will feel loved by me and love, I'm sorry, and love for me as well.
And so the and so after they go through six mindsets like that and say those mindsets out loud so their partner can see that they're that they are making themselves safe and receptive, they then say that they're ready to hear their partner's criticism.
And then the partner gets a chance to share his or her criticism in whatever way she or he wants to share.
That may be an exaggerated version of the story, a totally different story than the person who is hearing it heard.
But normally speaking, our minds are while our partner is telling a different version of the world that we thought was accurate, we are forming in our own mind.
We're doing something that I call self-listening.
We're listening to ourselves respond and prepare that response like a lawyer would to our partners to our partner's story.
And as a result is that even though the partner may not be interrupted, best case scenario, nevertheless, they sense that we're somewhere else in preparing our own version and we don't feel heard.
And so when somebody gets to the point where they're doing what's quite natural, they're beginning to feel, talk about their own perspective in their mind's eye, I ask them to say hold and to keep that hold sacred.
That is, I don't want to be listening to myself while you're talking.
I need to center myself and go back to really hearing your story from your perspective with no argument inside of my mind to that perspective.
And when that type of pure listening is being done and the person who is listening is saying, hold, I want it's your story is sacred.
You're the person I love more than anybody in the world.
I would die risk dying for you to give you life.
So now I really want to give you life by listening to you and having you feel.
It's a mindset.
Yeah, it's a mindset.
I mean, I've talked about this before, but I have to tell you my husband and I were very good at this.
And this is a tip I shared with my audience before, which is generally when Doug comes to me with a complaint about something he feels I've done or something I've said.
And when I go to him, the other person on the receiving end of the criticism just naturally switches into a mode of, what did I do?
Because this is my sweetheart who I love.
And it's not like they're peppering me with complaints all the time.
This is a reasonable person who loves me.
And so I probably did something.
Like what?
I probably did something to put this person in this mode of being like, I don't like it.
Dads as Playmates Matter 00:11:06
And we're really quick to sort of make the case for them.
You know, like I felt alone and like you didn't want to be with me when you did the following, you know, for four days in a row and it made me mad at you.
And instead of, you know, one of us, i.e. Doug, switching into mode of like, no, I didn't do it.
It's, it was all in your head.
You know, he would say like, you're right.
I was too absentee.
I was focused on this other thing.
And I'm sorry, I made you feel like I should have stopped to think about your feelings.
And then usually I would switch into a mode of, well, I've just been feeling insecure lately.
You know, it's not all like, if you can be like aggressively taking responsibility, you know, instead of aggressively defensive, because there's always almost always something you did and he did.
You know, it's never usually on the one party.
And even if it's just all that you did was, you've got a lifelong insecurity on this issue.
So you're easily, you know, your buttons are pressed.
It can work out so much better if you're just super giving to your partner in this moment.
All right, wait, I want to get to my callers.
Enough from blathering from me.
So many people are calling in, Doc.
They want to talk to you.
Let's start it off with Diane in Colorado, who's got a question for you.
Hi, Diane.
What's your question for the good doctor?
Hi, doctor.
It's so insightful listening to you.
And I just have a question about my son.
He's 17, great kid, responsible.
He's in sports.
He's a great student.
But I don't feel like we have a great relationship.
We don't really talk about much.
He's not chatty.
How do I develop a deeper relationship with him without him just being annoyed that I pepper him with questions all the time?
Do you have a family dinner night that you do at all?
We do.
We do.
But, you know, I find that it's mostly my husband and I talking and they kind of, you know, couple one word answers.
And I heard what you said about everybody bringing the topic and I think that's a great idea.
And a lot of this I know is just a normal teenager thing, but how can we be better as parents and draw that out of them without just being annoying parents?
Yes.
It is really helpful to, first of all, you can start with them and their perspectives and sharing, or you can start with yourselves.
You and your husband sharing about what you feel and then requiring them to say what they felt they heard from you.
And once they feel, once it's established that they will be completely heard first and then not interrupted and not be not have a judgment being formed on the parents part when they're talking, then they begin to, if they, if over a period of time they can trust that that will happen more and more frequently.
Or that you see, do you have any other children besides your son?
We do.
We have another son that's also, he's 15.
15.
Well, that's a good age to also, is he more open In general, or is less open?
Nope, he's a little more open, a little more chatty than the older one.
But yeah, the other older one is just pretty shut off, doesn't really tell us much, doesn't really share much.
And but I hear exactly what you're saying.
Yes, yeah, usually the child that doesn't speak up much, and yet, especially if you see him like talking to his friends more freely and more easily, feels that the result of him speaking up will be that he will run into some area which will incur your judgment, your restriction, your wrath, you know, and therefore, why talk to begin with?
It's only going to get me into trouble, or it's only going to restrict me in some way or the other and lead to a restriction.
And so, if the talking is, if the more talkative child, if you start with that child, and then if you model having that child really feel heard or your husband feeling heard by you when he's talking, after a while, that will probably take.
However, let me know if it doesn't.
My email is warren at warrenfarrell.com or just look at Warren Farrell and you'll see my email on my website.
Look at it, that's very nice.
Diane, you got a direct line now to Warren Farrell.
That's pretty good.
Thank you for that call and the inquiry, and good luck with it.
On the subject of the dinner table, this is a good one.
Brian from California's got a follow-up for you, Dr. Farrell.
Brian, what's your question?
Thanks for having me on.
So I've just tuned in and we've been talking about, you know, having these conversations around the dinner table with your children.
And I have teenagers 17 and 15.
And, you know, I live in an area that, you know, another part of the country that's expensive to live.
And unfortunately, my wife and I don't have the luxury of being home every night at a specific time to have dinner at the dinner table.
So my question is, you know, what can be done to make up for the lack of the weekly dinners at the dinner table and conflict resolution, all these things going on in the world?
You know, there's a little bit of guilt that's set in for me as well, not being there for my kids every night for dinner.
But, you know, what can be done as an alternative to make sure that we bring the family dynamics together still?
Yes, there is no substitute of dime for time.
That is, a father's time is far more valuable than a father's dime.
And so if you, once a family in the United States gets to be between $50,000 and $80,000 worth of income per year, then the children who do the best, who don't go to psychologists and say, you know, my father didn't provide enough income for us to live in the top-notch area in the country.
You don't hear children reporting that type of message to psychologists.
It's usually, my father didn't pay attention to me.
My father didn't have enough time for me.
My mother didn't have enough time or so on.
So it really does require, not do it.
If you don't have time to do a family dinner night one night a week, then I really would ask you, in a really loving way, to reconsider where you're living um because um, you know, working harder to have a better home in even a better school district doesn't have as much impact, studies show, as having time with the children, and at least that one night a week where you have a family dinner night is really very helpful.
But also times playing with your children, one of the ways that children do so much, one of the reasons children do so well with their dads when they have a dad, a lot of dad involvement is not just because of the existence of dad as a breadwinner, but the existence of the dad as a playmate, as a roughhauser, as a somebody they go camping with, as somebody that lets them go to the lake and maybe get lost because and and then let the child find his or her way back,
but knowing that the dad is there to rescue them if it really needs to be, if it really comes down to that, if night is falling on them and the child is going to be lost lost, so to speak.
So can I just add, Brian Brian, that my own therapist told me this when I was a very busy working mom that wasn't home for any dinners, when I was doing the primetime show, and he said, um, one-on-one time, like once, once a week, make sure you do one thing with one child, like it could be you just you're gonna go out to lunch with that kid, or you're gonna take him to the park or you're gonna go see a ball game, like just some one-on-one time matters.
Um, thank you for your call and good luck with your, with your kids.
Brian, appreciate you listening.
Let's jump to uh Kim in North Carolina, who's got a good question.
Hi Kim, what's your question for dr Farrell?
My grandson just started second grade yesterday and is so excited to have his first male teacher.
Are there any studies or encouragements for men to get into more of the elementary education?
Oh Kim, you are asking such an important question.
Um, it is so important, especially for children.
Um Kim, are you a single mother?
Are you um with with the biological dad?
Uh, she's the grandma, i'm sorry, the grandma, i'm sorry.
Yes, so the children um, particularly children, if they don't boys, if they don't have a biological dad at home and they go from a home without a biological dad to to a school, elementary school with no male role models.
That's when children, boys tend to have considerable problems.
But so if if that's the case, one of the things we really need to be doing overall as a culture is really encouraging elementary schools to have male elementary school teachers and not just males.
Like me, i'm a sort of nurturer, connector type of male, but also traditional males, so your son, or your grandson in your case, has role models of different types of males, not just a type of male.
So we we really need to be encouraging our Ways of getting our schools encouraged to bring males into the elementary school system.
And we have a lot of challenges with that.
Oftentimes, a boy in second grade, if he's crying, let's say, and he sits on his male teacher's lap and the male teacher holds him, it just takes one parent looking at a picture from a cell phone of the child, the boy sitting on the male teacher's lap to suggest that maybe there's some perversion here.
And so, many, when a study was done in Canada of males about whether they wanted to be elementary school teachers, a very high percentage of males said they would love to be elementary school teachers, but more than 75% of them said they were fearful of being accused of some type of perversion if they got too close to the children.
And so, we really have to deal with that type of fear and overconcern and lack of understanding how important it is for children to have male role models.
So, Dr. Barrel, I'm going to jump in just for a second because we got one minute to we got to go.
And Kim, thank you for the call.
But I can see there are a few callers on here, and my love and heart goes out to them about their children who lost their dads, their children who lost their dads and are feeling unmotivated or feeling deeply sad or retreating into video games.
I apologize for squeezing this into 60 seconds, but a couple of lines for those parents struggling with that.
Yes, work on getting male coaches, work on bringing the best males you know over.
Life Lessons Make Kids Stronger 00:01:23
Work on if you get involved with a new man as a stepfather, make sure that the stepfather is not limited to just the advisor role.
Make sure that you allow the stepfather to really have an equal amount of influence on your parenting.
Get out of your comfort zone and negotiate to that checks and balance parenting as if the stepfather were the biological father, if the biological father cannot be involved.
And always make an attempt to get the biological father involved if that's possible.
And I will say this: having lost my own dad when I was 15, there's recovery.
It's awful and it's painful, but there's recovery.
And there is some, there's some life lessons that come with it that will help make your kids stronger if they have a loving, present mother there helping to get them through it.
Dr. Warren Barrel, so much love to you.
Thank you so much for all of your expertise and all of your books for sharing your personal email.
And please come back, would you?
I would be very happy to.
It's just a pleasure.
I love that you go in depth.
I love that you share your own stories.
And I'm in awe of how you go from the interview to a commercial right after that.
It's an acquired skill.
Lots of love, sir.
Well, to be continued.
Thanks for listening to the Megan Kelly Show.
No BS, no agenda, and no fear.
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