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July 7, 2015 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
57:37
3017 What Science Is Telling Us About Fathers | Paul Raeburn and Stefan Molyneux
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Hi everybody, Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio.
I have Paul Rayburn on the line.
He is a journalist and blogger, the author of four, count them four books, including, well, Two Fathers Matter, What Science is Telling Us About, The Parent We've Overlooked, The New Science of Fatherhood, and some books.
You can go to paulrayburn.com.
For more, he also works on the author of the About Fathers blog at Psychology Today and a regular contributor to many magazines and websites.
So I guess now to freedomainradio.com.
Thank you so much for joining us, Paul.
I'm happy to be here, Seth.
So before we dive into the subject matter, which I'm, of course, rapidly interested in, as I assume you are as well, I wonder if you could talk a little bit about how you ended up noticing this giant glaring absence of paternity in social and particularly in psychological and research discourse.
So how did you end up noticing that?
It's hard to notice the things that are missing.
And how did you get around to that?
Well, I went looking and the reason I went looking is because...
I have three grown kids and I have two boys in elementary school.
And so when the first of the young boys was born, and I was starting around a second time on this family parenting business, I questioned a little bit what I'd done the first go around, and I thought, you know, it's time maybe to, because I'm a science reporter, to look into the science about fathers and fatherhood.
One of the things I've tried to do throughout my career is to look in areas where we have a lot, our heads are full of a lot of things that we think are true, but we don't really know what's true.
And fatherhood fell into exactly that category for me.
So I said, okay, I think I know What was good and bad about my upbringing?
I think I know what I've tried to do with my children, but what does the science really show us?
So I went looking, and frankly, I didn't think I'd find enough to fill up a book.
I thought I was going to do a magazine article, and I started digging around, and it turned out there's an enormous body of research on what fathers contribute to their kids and how important they are, and it's mostly published in journals that You know, non-specialists wouldn't read, even science writers don't look at normally.
And so there it sat, and there were, you know, oh, I don't know how many people I'd say are deeply into this field, 50, 100, maybe 200 small band of scientists around the world, many of them in the U.S. and the U.K., who talk to each other and have made these great advances, but don't much talk to anybody else.
So this was, you know, this was raw meat for me.
When I saw that there was all this research there that hadn't been reported, I jumped right in.
So that's basically how I got onto this.
Okay, so why, I mean, I have my own theories, but, you know, you are the expert, so, but why do you think it remains so locked up in this ivory tower?
You know, this happens sometimes.
We, you know, we sort of, we pay scientists to do research.
We don't pay them to go on TV or to spend a lot of time with people like me and other reporters.
And so a lot of them just don't do much of that.
There are other categories.
There are some scientists who are eager for every conceivable opportunity to talk to the press, and sometimes those are people who are not only doing science but trying to market a product of some sort that comes out of their science.
There are a lot of scientists who just feel like if they do their research, They've done what they promised to do, and that's fair enough, and they don't reach out to the press very often.
Some of them are skittish about the press and have had bad experiences and try to avoid the press.
So I just tried to kind of break down that wall.
But this happens in lots of areas, but fatherhood, it turns out, was one.
Yeah, because to me the point of this research would be to positively affect people's parenting styles.
I mean, it's sort of like, I've got a cure for cancer.
I'm going into hiding.
And it's like, I can understand some of Higgs boson research and so on.
I can understand that people are like, oh, it's too exhausting to explain it to lay people, so I'm just going to play with my bits and burps.
But this seems so, I mean, it is so directly applicable to, I think, what is the most important task we take on, which is the raising of kids.
So to do all this research and then bury it in a drawer, I don't know, it just seems a bit counterintuitive.
Yeah, I mean, you know, I can't really say more than I've said.
I don't really understand, you know, it's each individual scientist that's made some kind of decision about this.
And some of them took a little prodding when I tried to talk to them and asked them to talk about their research.
You know, it's funny, when you report on cancer, mentioning cancer, you report on cancer, and cancer researchers have had lots of experience talking to the press.
They know what's going on, they know how to do it, and they understand the importance of it.
A lot of researchers in social science haven't had that experience.
And, you know, there's also a political element here, too, let's face it.
I mean, you know, fathers are often overlooked, partly because, you know, a lot of us are concerned about past discrimination and, you know, women We have traditionally had a much harder time in the job market than men, and women often in some circumstances make less for the same work than men do.
And there's a whole series of things that have energized activists about social change and trying to make sure women and men get a fair shake.
And so if you start talking about the importance of fathers, you can be buttonholed into a certain kind of political spot that may or may not Wait, you mean Republican?
Is that right?
I'm not a Republican.
Well, more so, I mean, reactionary, you know, against the sort of social changes and more women in the workforce and all those things.
So some people might want to lay low because of that.
And my experience has been, I can talk about the importance of fathers.
I don't think that conflicts at all with efforts to You know, none of the research shows that mothers are not important.
It's just that I think the state of affairs has been that, you know, everybody knows that mothers are important and people are a little fuzzier about fathers.
And what this research adds up to ultimately is that both parents are important and each parent contributes unique things to the kids.
Which might, you know, sometimes feels controversial, but actually the idea that two parents of different sexes operate a little differently shouldn't really be all that surprising.
Well, I mean, if I remember rightly, that's how we get kids in the first place, so it shouldn't come to people.
There is some biology there that's not necessarily fit for the airwaves, but yes, you're absolutely right.
Oh, it's fit for our airwaves.
We don't have any...
I think in general, would it be fair to say that probably for the last 50 years or so, we've had a giant, though not consciously directed, but a sort of giant social experiment which has been, let's see how we do with fewer fathers in the world.
Let's see how we do with fewer fathers raising children.
Let's see how it works out.
And I think the idea that We may have looked at some benefits and skipped over some costs, I think is quite troubling to people.
So you're talking about the absence of fathers in many homes, that kind of thing?
Yeah, I mean you point out in your book that at no time since we started recording statistics, or at least in the US, at no time has there been fewer fathers in families as now.
Right.
Right, that's right.
So a couple of things.
Those fathers are missing in the home.
They're not missing altogether.
They're out there somewhere.
And so there are opportunities, if they're disconnected, to try to reconnect them.
But yeah, it's true that many, many fathers, the statistics on divorce are just depressing.
People understand that divorce is a complicated situation that we would like to avoid as much as possible, but at the same time, many people, including me, do go through a divorce.
Many, many fathers after divorce have minimal contact.
They might see their kids one or two times over the course of a year.
I'm not talking about Fathers who are unemployed or move away or something.
But I'm talking about, you know, fathers who are middle class, fathers with the means to see their kids, you know, the financial means to take them out for pizza and owning a car to go see them.
And everything should be easy.
But even in those circumstances, it's not.
And that's a complicated question.
You know, why that's the case is complicated, and I didn't get into that so much.
But it does underscore the problem we have.
If we find a lot of research, as we do, that shows that fathers are important, then the absence of those fathers in so many homes is an even bigger problem than we thought.
And it's not really recognized by a court system that quite often can be disproportionately brutal towards father access.
Let me rephrase that.
You say it's not...
It's not adequately recognized by the courts.
It's not recognized by the courts at all, ever.
Well, that would fall under not adequately.
The courts are way behind the times.
Zero is less than five.
Let's talk about that just briefly, because before we talk about what the problem is, I think it's important to talk about why the problem has arisen.
And I think court systems and a variety of weird Tax and subsidy and financial arrangements have produced this kind of single mother paradise, so to speak.
And the court system, I think, in particular, it seems to be quite brutal in terms of access, allegations of abuse during divorces, and the hostility engendered by this adversarial family court system, I think, creates a lot of friction between fathers, in particular, and kids.
I mean, I would love to find, if anybody listening has the money...
to buy however many thousand, 10,000 copies of my book and send them to every judge in the US and Canada and somehow make them read it just to understand how important fathers are.
That would be hugely important.
Courts, judges, by and large, people who've talked to judges and interviewed them, and if you look at the rulings they make, they come from some kind of background that has persuaded them that women are far more important for kids than men.
And they make judgments accordingly and really wildly underestimate the importance of having men continue to be in touch with their You know, after a divorce.
And it's really awful.
And I don't know how we're going to change that.
When these judges retire, one can hope that younger judges coming in will have a different view of things, but that's a process that will take decades.
So, you know, that's a real problem.
I would assume it would provoke significant backlash from some of the more extremist feminist organizations who seem to trump sort of short-term women's interest against long-term social good.
Not all, but certainly some of the more extreme ones.
Well, you know, I think, yeah, I mean, change is always hard for everybody involved.
And so if we change this, it's going to be hard.
And, you know, to be fair, there are a lot of difficult financial issues involved in divorce.
And You know, traditionally women have frequently come out on the short end on that, but we're not talking about, you know, making women's situation worse or better, or we're trying to make, you know, the situation, I mean, we all say that we're trying to make, that we're thinking about the kids.
We're trying to make things better for the kids.
Judges say that more than anybody, but they don't act in that way because they just, you know, they're not bad people.
They just don't understand What fathers contribute to kids, and yet they're in a position where they make judgments that depends on that.
Okay, so if it's alright, let's dive.
I think it's a great, great point.
Let's dive into the material itself.
And I just want to put a plug in and say that, I mean, obviously you're a very accomplished science writer, Paul, but the way that you step people through challenging information is very, Lovely.
I mean, I can say lovely because I have a British accent.
Most colonists can't.
But no, I mean, we're going to put links to the book.
We're going to try and promote the book because it's really essential information.
And I've done a lot of research into this area, and yours is the best explication of these issues that I found.
So I really want to compliment you on that.
It's really delightful to read and moving.
So thank you for that skill.
Yeah, that's very nice of you to say so.
And It takes some work to do that, and I'm glad that I succeeded.
Oh, yeah.
It was a great quote from Churchill who said, I'm sorry I wrote you such a long letter.
I didn't have time to make it shorter.
Simplicity and clarity is like boiling away stuff to make treacle.
It takes a lot of heat and energy, and then you finally end up with something useful.
Yeah, that's exactly right.
Even before birth, because fatherhood Occurs in some ways before conception.
It occurs in your body weight, as you argue, you know, like the overweight mice produce overweight daughters, even if the daughters are fed normal caloric intakes.
It's your health, it's your smoking, it's your age at conception.
So fatherhood and the quality of children that you can create starts long before you do the Shakespearean beast with two backs and actually get someone conceived.
I wonder if you could talk a little bit about How early fatherhood starts in terms of quality?
Well, I think, you know, there's actually some interesting research on Sperm development and sperm competition and a lot of things that happen to prepare people for pregnancy.
Mostly where I started my story was during pregnancy.
So, you know, as you say, there is an initiating event that causes a pregnancy.
And from there, we really think fathers are on the sidelines.
I mean, what can fathers do during pregnancy?
They have not yet They've met this creature, they've maybe seen a fuzzy ultrasound picture, and really had no contact in any way.
And it turns out that far from being on the sidelines, fathers are, there's a very important connection.
So we know that mothers go through all kinds of hormonal changes during pregnancy.
That's old news and experienced by every woman who becomes pregnant.
And so the interesting piece was what happens to fathers.
And it turns out that fathers go through hormonal changes during pregnancy.
And this is quite new research, and it's even been amplified by more work since I wrote the book.
And is this experience a sharp drop in testosterone?
And some other things.
They also curiously experience a rise in prolactin, which is a hormone associated with nursing in mothers.
Why that should go up in fathers remains a mystery so far.
But this drop in testosterone seems like something maybe we can explain.
So before men get married or choose a partner, as biological creatures, they're involved in a competitive, mate-seeking Enterprise, okay, just as primates are and lots of other animals.
The men compete, the males compete for the females.
And so testosterone, which is associated with competitiveness, is a good thing to have.
You want to be able to have some, you know, figuratively speaking, some tough elbows in this fierce mate competition.
But once you've picked a partner, and once the two of you have chosen to become pregnant, then the competitiveness is not so important.
And the thinking is that the drop in testosterone makes men somewhat less competitive and more nurturing, so that it actually prepares them for parenthood.
And I just want to point out, it's quite significant.
I mean, you've quoted 33%, I've heard 40% over time.
33% drop in testosterone when you have your first contact with your baby.
It's not like an electrical spark robs you of testosterone, but it diminishes quickly.
Even testicular size shrinks with contact with your offspring.
It really is quite a wild phenomenon that I actually only found out long after I was a stay-at-home dad, which explained a few things in my life.
Man boobs!
But it really is quite striking.
Yeah, it's interesting.
It continues as your kids grow when they're young.
And there's another interesting piece, too.
There's another hormonal thing that happens after the kids are born.
If you choose to play with your children and spend some time with them, probably a lot of listeners have heard about oxytocin, which is, I hate to even repeat this, but it's often referred to in the press as the love hormone or something like that, which is kind of cheesy.
But in fact, oxytocin in men and women is associated with emotional connections.
So it turns out that when fathers play with their kids, spend time with them, they experience a rise in oxytocin.
So that they're getting that kind of emotional connection with their kids, and that can be measured by this rise in oxytocin.
Same thing with mothers in this case, too.
But again, it's not such a surprise that mothers would feel this.
For many of us, it is a surprise that fathers would have this same biological response.
But is it?
I mean, this is the thing.
It's only a surprise because we've ignored evolution for so long.
I mean, this is what drives me nuts about the people who say that fathers aren't particularly important or particularly necessary.
It's like, well, you do know that we've evolved for hundreds of thousands, if not millions of years in our current incarnation, and...
You know, nature, you know, to anthropomorphize it, nature tweaks species quite a bit for optimal development and the idea that a species such as ours, which has like, I think outside of elephants, like the longest gestational to maturity time frame, would not require a father.
Of course.
Of course fathers are necessary and of course fathers would go through all of the changes that would make them optimal fathers because those fathers who didn't I couldn't have
said it better myself.
That's exactly right.
I mean, the way I think of it is that Nature ruthlessly prunes away anything that's not necessary.
So we don't have tails anymore because somewhere our ancestors no longer needed them and we got rid of them.
And if fathers weren't necessary and important in contributing to offspring, exactly as you say, then we would have gotten rid of them a long time ago too.
Like most animal species, in fact, Fathers have little or nothing to do with rearing the offspring.
So even mammals, who are our closest relatives, in 95% of mammal species, the fathers have no contribution to make except their one initiating burst.
Otherwise, nothing.
They're gone.
And there are only a few primates, monkeys, that show some paternal involvement, and humans.
Humans show huge paternal involvement.
So, you're right.
I mean, the long view, the evolutionary view, you know, makes a lot of these things clearer, there's no question.
And for those, I just put a pump in for those who are listening to this, I'm just working on a series on R versus K selection, which is, R is low parental investment and high promiscuity and so on, and rabbits and so on, and K is humans and elephants and wolves and so on.
And yeah, I mean, the Because we see so many animal species like frogs and turtles and insects where there's no parental involvement, it's hard to understand just how much the exception is that we have as humans because we have this ridiculously quarter century to grow brain.
And massive helplessness, right?
The first six months after birth is sometimes called the fourth trimester because we're so ridiculously underdeveloped that we really should have stayed in the womb.
It's just that we can't without the brains growing too big to get through the birth canal.
So yeah, human beings are one of the species that develop, I think, the slowest in terms of learning to walk and stuff like that.
Uh, and we, you know, the, the idea that some breastfeeding mom is going to go out hunting a woolly mammoth is just ridiculous.
And so the, the, the necessity of fathers biologically, like those who say you don't need dads, I mean, they're as foundational, uh, a set of fundamentalists as those who believe that the earth was created in six days.
I mean, it's, it's nonsense.
Well, I, I, I, you know, in general, I think you're right.
You're, you're, you're clearly, you've read a lot about this and, and you're into this.
You're much more informed than a lot of hosts I've talked to over the, the recent months.
But, um, The evolutionary perspective is important.
However, I always like to say, we have a lot of single mothers for a variety of reasons that are complicated and not something that I have done research on, but we know that we have a lot of them.
Single mothers should not...
Give up hope.
Clearly, single mothers can raise very successful children.
I can think of two successful children, which are Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, who you might like or dislike, but it's fair to say they achieved reasonable success in their careers after being raised by single mothers.
So it is possible.
I've had a lot of single mothers say, well, what should I know about this?
What should I do?
The research does suggest that, you know, if mothers are raising kids by themselves, they should get males involved with the family.
If they have a brother, you know, who can do some things with the kids, a neighbor, close friends, whatever, granddads, and get them involved because they can't do everything a father would do, but they can do some of it, and that's important for kids.
I mean, I had this wild experience that may have sort of triggered my interest in these things in that I grew up, my parents divorced when I was a baby, and I grew up like in what seemed to me a near universal matriarchy.
You know, like I had lots of aunts, and they were divorced, because this was the 70s, where divorce was like this plague running through society.
Or, you know, they had workaholic children.
I went to nursery school and then I went to kindergarten and it's just, you know, it's just like a sea of estrogen out there that the kids get put into.
And then when I was six, I was sent to boarding school, which is like this Dickensian slash Orwellian cold eyed male dominated environment where, you know, you were lucky to sight a female at the zoo.
And I think going from those two environments to me was was quite wild because they were markedly, markedly different in terms of attitudes towards competition, physical intimacy, emotional availability and and aggression.
I mean, it really was night and day.
Now, I'm not saying that's necessarily ideal, but I think I had a real pendulum swing relatively rapidly from a very matriarchal to a very patriarchal environment.
Yeah, I think it's one of those experiences where it seems like in life we keep having experiences where we're reminded that boys and girls are different.
We learn that somewhere in our toddler years and that we keep relearning it in different experiences, different circumstances as we But you had a real extreme dose of, you know, different circumstances there.
But, you know, the kind of thing that suggests, I mean, I don't know how you think about that experience, but, you know, you would be a good case study for, you know, being exposed to both maternal and paternal type instincts.
And with any luck, that worked out all right for you.
I don't know.
What do you think?
Well, I think that it gave me a skepticism towards some of the...
You know, there's all these science fiction movies, but in the future everyone's androgynous, you know, all the same haircuts, and everyone has the same silver pantsuits or whatever, right?
And it gave me a sort of skepticism towards this idea that we could get to this radical egalitarianism of gender.
And by egalitarianism, I don't mean equality before the law, equality of rights and opportunities.
Those, of course, should be universal, but that everything was going to be the same.
And I certainly had some skepticism towards that.
I had Janet Heimlich on the show a few years ago who talked about limitations of the studies that purport to show differences between male and female brains.
On the other hand, I've had other researchers I've talked to who've said, oh yeah, basically you give a little girl toy trucks and next thing you know she's breastfeeding the toy trucks and wrapping them up in blankets and doing all that kind of stuff.
And you give little boys dolls and suddenly they're basically anatomically dissecting them to see what's inside.
things like that.
So, you know, I think there is obviously some socialization, but the socialization to some degree, I think, is just an acceptance of reality.
And it's a bell curve for everyone.
But bell curves don't have to shift a lot to end up with some general differences between the populations.
Right, right.
No, I agree.
It is, you know, and it's important to remember that it's a bell curve.
Again, you've got a sophisticated understanding of this, but some people who come to it without thinking about it too much would just expect everything is black and white.
And of course, it's not.
You One of the things that research has shown that I wrote about in the book is the importance of play, and in particular the kind of play that fathers engage in.
And that is what, you know, the scientific term for it is rough and tumble play.
Wait, there's got to be a Latin phrase for that somewhere.
Yeah, exactly.
That doesn't sound right.
That's too colloquial.
It's too easy, yeah.
No one's going to pay for that.
Exactly.
But, you know, fathers are much more likely than mothers to get down on the floor, roll around with the kids, wrestle, tickle, or, you know, jump out from behind the couch and scare the kids and do all these kinds of things, you know.
And every time I talk about this, my wife, Elizabeth, chimes in and she goes, well, I do that too, you know.
And she does.
Of course she does.
But it's, you know, it's the bell curve, you know.
It's More likely that fathers will do that more of the time than mothers will.
And that has real virtue.
Play, one of the things I learned, one of the most profound things really is that play is not just play.
In fact, play is an important thing for kids' social development.
So when fathers engage in that kind of rough-and-tumble play, it's what you would describe as a sort of unpredictable thing.
Surroundings for the child, where the father's coming and going, and he's loud, and he's quiet, and he's sneaking around, and whatever he might be doing.
And it turns out that correlates with the kids who experience that as children are much more socially adept as teens and adults.
Because they're used to that.
They're used to that kind of surprising thing, which is, you know, in families, things are generally sort of predictable, and hopefully they're warm and comforting and nurturing.
Out in the real world, it's very different.
Things are surprising and unexpected and complicated.
And that kind of complicated play prepares kids to do better in complicated social circumstances.
So it turns out to be really important for their development.
So that's one thing single mothers should think about is, you know, get down on the floor and wrestle around with the kids, even if it's not your natural instinct.
Well, I think it also helps with the management of aggression is one of the great challenges of society because we don't want this sort of passive rabbit based docility society because there's no particular challenges, growth or advancements in that society.
At the same time, we don't want this hyper-aggressive, chest-thumping, bullying society because that's kind of on the fascistic side and we don't want that either.
And I noticed when I was...
I used to play this game with my daughter called The Smorg Game.
And that was after the dragon in The Hobbit, which we were reading at the time.
And so I pretend to lie asleep on the bed, and I've got plastic gems all around my belly.
And she's got to get them...
from me without waking me up, right?
And then, of course, I do wake up.
I let out a mighty roar, and I chase after her, and so on.
Now, when she was two and three, she would run away and hide.
And that, of course, would have very evolutionarily adaptive behavior, right?
I mean, if there's a predator, go hide in a tree trunk or something.
That would make sense.
And then, like when she was about three and a half or maybe three and three quarters, oh, Paul, it was wild, wow.
Without warning, I didn't even...
She turned around and just attacked me.
I mean, like, enough running!
I'm turning!
You know, she'd hidden, like, a little stick she used as a saw.
She just whacked me on the knees.
And I thought, like, wow, what a fantastic transition, because at that point she was able to...
And so learning sort of how to run and hide, learning how to hunt, the aggression, as you pointed out, prior to birth that is needed to gather the resources to attract a female mate is very important.
At the same time, you don't want to use that same level of aggression Right.
With your children because that will traumatize them and make them socially awkward and volatile.
Right.
So I think that the rough and tumble stuff, particularly male to male, teaches how to use your physical aggression but being conscious of the other person and not hurting them.
And I think that's where a lot of that play comes in.
Yeah.
Yeah, I agree.
That's a great observation on your part, though.
That's really...
Interesting.
You must have been taken aback a bit when suddenly she turned around and came back.
That's great!
I'm like, oh, I guess we hit a milestone there, didn't we?
No longer afraid of dragons.
November 22nd.
Now, with regards to aggression and language development, Which remain, to some degree, at least when boys are young, two of the big challenges the boys are still facing in terms of either being under aggressive.
I'm a big fan of the Aristotelian mean, you know, like too much caution is cowardice, too little caution is foolhardiness, too little anger is passivity, too much anger is, I think, just called being a jerk.
I don't know what the phrase is.
Yeah.
In Greek, but I'm a big fan of the Aristotelian mean, and I think that with assertiveness, it needs to go that way as well.
And you have talked about how disengaged fathers, the kids have, particularly the boys, problems with assertiveness, either too much or too little.
And also with language development, I find it fascinating the degree to which fathers are the keystone to the arch of language development in many ways.
Yeah, language development was another big surprise to me, a big surprise to science people who looked at this, too.
There was a group at the University of North Carolina that, you know, thought, like most of us probably think, that mothers were probably more important in kids' language development, you know, at least in part because mothers still spend more time with the kids in most families, even with mothers working in two-income families.
Mothers, you know, still spend more time with kids according to various surveys of time use.
So the thinking was, it seemed obvious, as with so many things in science, it seemed obvious before any experiments were done that mothers would have the biggest influence on kids' language development.
So they did the experiments and looked at kids in various circumstances, and what they found was that fathers have By far, the substantial, most important influence on kids' language development.
And they did not find that mothers have less influence on kids' language development.
They found that mothers had no influence on kids' language development.
So this was, you know, incredibly surprising and unexpected.
And so then I think about that a little bit and figure out what was going on.
And, you know, the science is that fathers have the biggest influence.
The speculation, which is not science, but the sort of intelligent speculation to explain it, is...
That mothers become more attuned to kids' vocabularies, and they know what words the kids know.
They're more likely to know what words they don't know.
Fathers who spend a little bit less time don't have quite that sync with their kids, and so they're likely to use a broader vocabulary, more difficult words, and so forth.
And the net effect of that It's thought is to stretch kids and bring them along faster.
Now, it's nice that kids have quicker language development.
It's fun.
I think that's one of the great joys of parenthood, is watching kids pick up language and new words and new subtleties.
Pardon me.
But that has further implications.
And the implications are, if kids get more thoroughly developed their language ability, they have an easier transition to school.
Which is the first real big bump in kids' development.
They do better in elementary school and that continues throughout high school.
So this has huge implications for kids.
And the secret is fathers have to spend time with their kids, talk to their kids, engage with them.
And that emotional connection combined with the father's use of language turns out to be really important for kids.
Yeah, and there's a great picture.
We'll see if we can link it somewhere.
There's a great picture I saw once on the internet, which was...
It was three pictures of a child being thrown in the air by his father.
It was a little boy.
A child being thrown in the air by the father.
And the first picture, the kid was like two or three feet above the dad.
And the first is, that's what's happening.
The second is the kid like...
7 or 8 or 10 feet above the father, and that is what the kid feels.
And in the third one, the kid is like 30 feet up in the air, and that's what the mother sees.
And that had a huge amount of truth, I think, because as far as caution goes, one of the things that struck me that as we've become a less father-centric society, we've become increasingly, I would argue, kind of hysterical about social discourse.
You know, like people trigger warnings, people needing safe rooms for ideas that are contrary to their own.
I think some of the robustness of discourse has been, it's kind of a cliche to say, but it's been a little bit swallowed up in reactionary political correctness, both from the left and the right, where everyone just gets offended and gets upset and storms out and so on.
And I wonder the degree to which not having fathers around Who train the amygdala to manage risk by exposing it progressively to risks.
I think that's...
It's like the stare test.
You know, every kid wants to jump from one higher stare.
And my wife and I have different definitions of what is a safe stare to jump from.
And my sort of feeling has, you know, growing up as a kid who did a lot of sports and all that.
Yeah, sometimes you're going to get injured and that's how you learn your limits.
Whereas, of course, an injury to a child's body like wounds the mom's heart in the way that...
It doesn't.
You know, when I was a kid, you'd get injured.
You'd have all these whiskey-breathed male sports coaches who basically would just rasp at you with their cigarette breath and say, walk it off.
Walk it off.
You'll be fine.
Walk it off.
Whereas the moms are like, oh, my angel, let me get you bandages.
You're never playing this nasty game again.
I mean, that's a cliche.
But I think that how well we can manage and accept risk, I think, has a lot to do with fatherhood.
Yeah, I mean, Flying the Baby, as you know, the cover of my book shows a father throwing a baby about six or seven feet over his head, which was artfully done.
I think no children, as far as I know, no children were harmed in the production of that cover.
But there's no question that fathers like to do that kind of thing.
It's part of the rough and tumble play thing.
And again, it's one of those things that will condition kids to the idea that, you know, something that That's frightening is actually safe and fine if done in the right circumstances.
When my kids were young, just riding on my shoulders was a big...
I mean, they would have sort of perpetual grins as long as they were up there before I felt my trunk collapsing under the weight of the kids.
You know, kids love that kind of thing.
They love those sort of managed risks.
The parents are doing the managing.
The kids aren't necessarily aware of the managing, and it's good to do that.
That's one of the things.
You know, people often ask me, what did I learn myself in terms of my own fathering from doing this book?
And I learned a number of things.
I think anybody who reads it, Do Fathers Matter?, will find things that Apply to him or to her, you know, that makes sense.
But in one of the things in my case, I'm sorry to say I'm a very cautious, over-cautious, hyper-cautious father.
I don't know why.
It may have something to do with my upbringing.
My parents were quite cautious.
And so I'm far from one of those walk-it-off types.
I'm afraid I'm...
The type to run in with the bandages right away and things.
But I'm much more aware of that and I understand that better than I did before I went through this research.
And that's a useful thing to know.
So I actually try to curb that to give the kids a little more rope and a little more opportunity to take chances so they do develop that comfort with risk, which is a useful thing to have as an adult.
Yeah, I mean, my daughter, I guess like most kids, loves to run down hills, you know, because it's like gravity.
Gravity gives you that hyperdrive, right?
You can run fast.
Yeah, you can run super fast.
And like all kids, it's like it also takes you right to the edge of manageable risk.
Because when you're running down a hill, especially if it's a steep and long hill, you're right at the edge of what you can do.
Like you're right at the edge of falling or staying up.
And, you know, of course my wife is like turning all kinds of shades of different colors.
But for me, I'm like, okay, but let's say we tell her not to run down hills.
So what happens is she does less running, which means she gets less cardiovascular exercise, which means she's going to grow up less healthy.
Right?
There's no way to eliminate real kids.
Let's keep our kids indoors.
That way they'll be safe from the 1 in 10 billion stranger danger abductions.
It's like, okay, but they're getting obese and now they're not getting exercise.
So now their health is at risk in much more predictable ways.
Or people are like, well, I don't want my kids playing out on the street because the cars, so I'm going to drive them to all these activities.
And it's like, You know that they're eight times more likely to be injured inside of a car than by a car from the outside.
And people, it's just hard to figure out these risks.
We've sort of focused on that, which is most immediately or viscerally dangerous, without seeing, as economists constantly remind us to do, the unseen costs of the decisions that we're making.
And I think that's where a lot of children are facing challenges.
And without the male-female balance, I really think it's hard to get that good mean out of that.
Yeah, I agree.
The mix is the magic here, you know, of the two kinds of approaches, absolutely.
Now, IQ as well.
IQ is something that I find relentlessly and endlessly fascinating.
I've had, like, James Flynn and Kevin Beaver and all that on the show to talk about IQ. And for me, you know, I think IQ is one of these resources that we just need a whole lot more of in the world.
And I was fascinated.
I've done shows with Alison Gopnik about spanking and the detrimental effect that spanking has on IQ. But you found...
That dads as well helped to boost IQ. Yeah, that's right.
So involved fathers, you know, the involvement of fathers in their kids, you know, at various ages as the kids are growing up is correlated with higher IQ, which again...
It was a surprising thing.
Until somebody looked, we just didn't know these things.
It's fascinating to find out.
I may be a little less enthusiastic than you are about IQ. IQ measures something that's probably useful, but You know, we've been through the era of, I bet you've had somebody on to talk about emotional intelligence and, you know, other kinds of intelligence, you know, multiple intelligences that people talk about.
Howard Gardner at Harvard, I think, is one of the fathers of this sort of thing, so to speak.
And so there are many kinds of intelligence.
IQ is important.
It may not be as directly linked with success of various kinds as we once thought.
But again, it's one of those things in the context of our discussion here.
It shows another very important connection between fathers and kids that we didn't know was there.
Now that we know that it's there, we can use that as a tool.
Many of these things are tools to help us understand how we behave as fathers and to do a better job with our kids.
That's really...
It's a book about fathers, but Do Fathers Matter is really about kids.
The whole motivation for the thing is, how can we be better fathers to help our kids get a better start and do better later in life?
I don't exactly define what I mean by better.
I think we all have different ideas about that, but without getting too scientific about it, I think we understand a lot of what that means.
We want kids to be happy.
We want them to be healthy.
We want them to be Successful in one or more ways.
And, you know, a lot of what I've written about in Do Fathers Matter is aimed at helping us do that.
Right.
Do you think it would be too far to say that...
We can say male absence rather than father absence because, of course, there are indications as far as I understand it.
Obviously, correct me if I'm going a straight Paul, but there are indications that...
As you said earlier, we can substitute fathers with other male figures.
But male absence for children, it seems to me almost along the same continuum as environmental toxins, to have an absence of masculinity in the raising of children.
You know, produces significant, raises the chances of mental dysfunctions, social dysfunctions, aggression dysfunctions, early onset sexuality.
As you say, the girls who are primed with positive memories of their father respond to less casual sex prompts, fewer casual sex prompts, or think of more long-term Monogamous or semi-monogamous sexual relationships.
So there do seem to be a lot of negative results from male absence in the raising of children, to the point where, to me, I almost see that absence as along the lines of an environmental toxin.
Is that too far?
I mean, you've studied, obviously, a lot more than I have.
Well, I've put that kind of question to a number of scientists, and, you know, the general gist of that is right, but they say it differently.
what they say is that rather than saying a father absence uh an absent father is like a toxin they almost universally say an available present engaged father is like a protector is protection so with regard to you know you're referring to something that i wrote about it in families without a father in the house uh teenage girls will into puberty at an earlier age and this is very mysterious and spectacular finding it you
You know, with just a father not being in the house, they go into puberty at an earlier age, they're more likely to engage in risky sexual behavior, more likely to become pregnant as teenagers, all of which are difficult things for young girls and women to cope with.
So but the way they describe that is, you know, the father's presence protects the girl, the daughter against those kinds of things.
So I'm not quite sure exactly what that subtle difference adds up to, but that's the way people talk about it.
And, you know, in a way, it's kind of a nicer way to think of it.
You know what?
And the way I frame the book really is, you know, these are father's contributions to their kids.
So clearly when fathers are absent, some of these contributions are not made.
But I try to take a more, you know, kind of optimistic view and say, here are the things we can do.
And, you know, of course, even when a father is in the house and involved with his kids, understanding the science and what's going on can help him change his behavior in ways that are even better for the kids.
So you're not wrong, but in my case, I try to turn it around and take the positive spin on it.
Right, right.
I mean, I think a case, a strong case could be made that a father absence epigenetically programs the offspring's genetics and hormonal system to prepare for an R-type reproductive strategy, which is why you have early onset sexuality, because father absence is one of the key markers of an R-type reproductive scenario.
but that probably is a bit technical.
Yeah, well, I mean, I think that's, you know, as far as I know, that has not been demonstrated yet, but that's very reasonable speculation, and I've heard others say the same thing, so people will be looking at that, I'm sure.
So, as far as, again, I also want to sort of, you know, when I have people on talking about economic doom scenarios, I like to sort of point out things that people can do.
And we touched on it already.
But if we could close up, Paul, by talking about what we can do.
Because as a society, we are going through this, like, wild...
Unconscious experiment of fatherless children.
And I think as the information becomes more available to people, and we have taken too casually father absence in society, I think.
And I think it's causing a lot of problems.
One of the things I think is so enormously heartbreaking, it's like when the last person who speaks an ancient language dies, especially if the language is oral rather than written, the language dies with them.
And my concern is that it only takes one broken generation for the accumulated wisdom of fatherhood to stop being transmitted.
It's just like millions of years of evolution have given particular hormonal, emotional, and intellectual skills to fathers.
And then it's like, it doesn't vanish completely because the genetics remain the genetics.
But a huge amount of the traditions of fatherhood can just get blown away in a single generation where a lot of people grew up without fathers.
So I think that there's going to be a certain amount of rebuilding.
And I don't think anybody wants to rebuild fathering back to like the 19th century with like whips and stern Victorian stares and children should be seen and not heard.
So I don't mind that we sort of tear something down to build it up again anew.
But what do you think we should try to get out to people what they can do if they are in an environment where father absence is either present or imminent, you know, if people are thinking of separating or divorcing?
Well, I think there's some complicated things that we can try to do and some simple things that we can do.
One clear thing that should be simple, it's turned out not to be simple, but it should be simple, I think we can make it simple, is to give parents, fathers, and mothers as well, more paid leave when they have a child.
So you will immediately hear the voices of business people saying, this will hurt our competitiveness, we can't Afford this you know in in various ways from an economic standpoint Which which might be true and we might be inclined to believe except that among the people who don't buy that theory and who have instituted extensive Leave time paid leave time for parents are every country in Europe Every other industrialized developed country in
the world in fact the countries that do not We require paid leave for parents, including fathers.
Last count, there were four.
Lesotho, Swaziland, Papua New Guinea, and yes, the United States of America.
You in Canada have a lot to teach us about this kind of thing.
It should be easy in the U.S. to make this happen.
But Paul, you know that you can't run an empire and take care of your people simultaneously.
Well, we do have a heavy burden.
There's no question.
Yeah, I mean, if you want 750 military bases, you've got to make sacrifices.
Canada can do it because no empire, but it's just a matter of choices and priorities.
God help us.
There are a few things about the U.S. that are unique and change the...
Change the calculations.
It's true.
But, you know, compared to whatever it costs to run our military bases and so forth, this is a trivial amount of money.
Oh, I think if anybody reasonably had the choice, we would want that rather than an empire.
Anybody would want that.
Except, of course, for the people who profit from the empire.
Right.
So that's one thing that we ought to be able to figure out.
It's been difficult, but if we can get health care for millions more Americans, as we've been able to do over the last few years, we ought to be able to get a little more leave for mothers and fathers.
That would just give fathers more time to spend with their kids and do these things that we've been talking about.
Another thing that's more complicated, and we talked about this a little bit, is reforming divorce and custody decisions.
We really would like to have a situation.
I think we should have a situation in which we can try to separate the complicated and important financial issues that are involved in divorce from the parenting issues.
This is not easy to do because parenting time It represents a share of the income and the resources.
But there are smart people who have looked at this and have come up with proposals and ways to try to improve how that's done.
That's a complicated thing.
I think we could learn to do it.
Even more complicated, as I said before, is the matter of trying to inform judges and reform courts.
Not to engage in any kind of reactionary behavior or not to worry about political correctness one way or the other, but to make fair judgments that understand and incorporate what we know about the importance of fathers into the mix.
There was a famous case, I think it was 15 or 20 years ago in Michigan, where there was a proposal to, you know, divide parenting time.
And the judge said, this is in Do Fathers Matter, and the judge said, you know, I... We'll never believe that fathers are important as mothers.
I vomit on the idea that fathers might be as important as mothers.
Well, that sounds objective.
Yeah, doesn't it?
Not driven by any sort of emotional trauma whatsoever.
That was a thoughtful, considered opinion, I think.
Not many others have said it quite that graphically, but I think that kind of feeling is widespread in the divorce courts, and we need to do something about that.
Right.
Yeah, I mean...
They've also been, not to pick on feminist groups, I'm sure that there's lots of groups who have, but there have been feminist groups who also oppose ways to simplify the court system, which does disproportionately benefit women to some degree in divorce at the moment, and there are those challenges.
Plus, of course, you've got to get a bunch of divorce court lawyers to agree to diminishing their income.
Always a bit of a challenge with every group.
I hate to say more so, perhaps, with lawyers, but they certainly are a cunning bunch of money-hungry vixens, so that can be...
That's a rather graphic opinion, too, right?
But I didn't say vomit, so, you know, that's totally different.
Yeah, and so I think that it's always sort of, when I was growing up, and this is the case even now, is that there seems to be these, you know, again, I don't mean to diminish them, because we do want to care about what's harmful to kids, but, you know, there are these razor blades in Halloween candy, which I don't think has ever happened, and yeah, Alar in apples and BPA in bottles and there's these waves of hysteria about things which are detrimental to the development of children.
Vaccines cause autism and things which just there's no proof for.
And so we go through these waves of hysteria and it seems to me like we're missing...
A very important and big picture, which is father absence.
It's not the only thing that we need to do.
But I'd trade in a lot of minor hysterias over overblown or things that aren't really that risky.
I'd trade a lot of those in for a big focus on society needs dads.
And the fact that it's so weird that we've become a society where that even needs to be said, but we have.
And I'm really glad that you're out there saying it and Anything I can do to help further that message, I think, is really important.
I mean, you're obviously a very connected and involved father, and I'm certainly in that way inclined as my way.
And the last thing I wanted to mention, if you get your comment on, is...
There's a sentence that really struck me.
So I'm a big fan of, you know, the Socratic dictum of know thyself, where therapy is really important.
Self-knowledge is really important.
I've gone through therapy myself, and I constantly am recommending it to people who call me and talk to me.
Use a sentence from your book that really stuck out for me.
Hopefully it's not rampant confirmation bias, but here it is anyway.
So it says, It struck me that that came from a personal place from you as well.
I'm sure the data is there to back it up.
I wonder if you could expand on that a little bit.
Yeah, I think it's interesting.
I grew up in a working class neighborhood, working class family, and my father worked multiple jobs.
And so he was often away.
He worked 40 hours during the week and then worked evenings on weekends.
He was a musician, actually, so he was playing on weekends.
And when he was home, he was often exhausted.
On the other hand, I had a great connection with my father.
I mean, among other things, I learned to...
I became a musician myself, and so we For a lot of fathers and kids, it's baseball or something, but for us, it was music.
I felt like I was very connected to my father, even though he worked very hard to provide for us.
It's a little example of the idea that we're not talking about...
It's great for anybody like you who can be a stay-at-home dad.
That's a wonderful thing, and a lot of stay-at-home dads love it.
Um, but you don't have to be a stay at home dad.
You don't have to quit your job to be a good father.
You have to engage with your kids, you know, connect with them emotionally, listen to them.
Uh, you know, a lot of old fashioned advice that, uh, we sometimes forget as we, as we run, run, run through our lives.
Yeah.
I think that's, that's very well said.
Um, As you get older, I think everyone begins to realize, and this is part of the tipping point that Jung talks about, sort of the midpoint of life, as you get older, I think you generally recognize and realize that the lasting value That you are bringing to the world is in your relationships, and particularly in your parenting, which is the gift or curse you give to the next generation that everyone else has to live in the world that your children are going to build and inhabit.
And I think the investment now pays off, not just for you, of course, as a parent, but for society as a whole.
I mean, I'm quite curious, both frightened and excited to see how this experiment is going to play out, but...
Thank you again so much for your time today.
I obviously try and get some of your books moved.
I can't quite cut the check for the 10,000 to go to the judges, but we'll hopefully get the information out.
We'll save our money and see what we can do, right?
Yeah.
Well, thanks so much again, Paul.
And please, everyone, go to paulrayburn.com.
Oh, a new book!
You've got a new book coming.
I have a new book coming out next year called Heavy-duty industrial negotiating tactics to deal with the toughest negotiators we face, that is, our children.
Oh, yeah.
I feel sitting across the table from my daughter sometimes, I feel like I'm trying to negotiate with one of those rapid-fire cattle salesmen up there in the south in a big hat.
You're on a losing end even before anybody says a word.
You know, they're tough.
Yeah.
I have 10,000 different things that I'm focused on, and she's just like, sugar and play.
Yeah, right.
Yeah, yeah.
Okay, well, hopefully we can get you back on when that book is imminent and help people to get hold of that.
And, yeah, thanks again for your time.
I really appreciate it, and we'll talk again.
Can I say it was lovely if I don't have a British accent?
Well, you have to take the feedback from that.
All right, let me just say, it was great to talk to you.
How about that?
I'll take the same route.
That's a good bass Anglo-Saxon monosyllable, so we'll take that.
Thanks again, Paul.
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