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Unknown A
One in five children will not leave childhood without developing a serious mental illness. Anxiety, depression, adhd, behavioral problems. And what pisses me off is that we're not really educating or telling parents the truth as to why.
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Unknown B
Why is it that what you say is so troubling for some people?
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Unknown A
Sometimes facts are an inclusion in truth. But everything I'm going to say is supported by research.
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Unknown B
Erika Massar is a parenting expert and.
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Unknown A
Psychoanalyst who uses over 30 years of.
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Unknown B
Research to challenge the societal norms on parenting and early child development.
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Unknown A
There's some myths that really have to be debunked about how to raise a healthy child. And the first is daycare is good for children, for socialization. No, it is so bad for their brain. And it's known to increase aggression, behavioral problems, attachment disorders, because babies need their mothers for the first three years for emotional security.
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Unknown B
Your father did not.
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Unknown A
So fathers are important in a different way. And I'll go through all of that, but they're both. Because if you're raised without one, you are missing a piece. And then there's quality versus quantity time myth. You need to be there. A quality of time as well as a quantity of time. You can't have a fabulous career and then come home and be present for your child on your time. It needs to be on their time.
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Unknown B
And there's more, and we're going to go through all of them. But are there any areas of privilege that you need to acknowledge? Maybe someone who doesn't have a partner there or someone who is in an extremely difficult economic situation?
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Unknown A
I do, but there are ways to creatively deal with it, and I'll go through each of them. So there's.
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Unknown B
This has always blown my mind a little bit. 53% of you that listen to the show regularly haven't yet subscribed to the show. So could I ask you for a favor before we start? If you like the show and you like what we do here and you want to support us, the free, simple way that you can do just that is by hitting the subscribe button. And my commitment to you is if you do that, then I'll do everything in my power, me and my team, to make sure that this show is better for you every single week. We'll listen to your feedback, we'll find the guests that you want me to speak to, and we'll continue to do what we do. Thank you so much, Erika. You're clearly on a mission, and I get that energy from you that there's really an idea that you believe that Much of the world doesn't believe or is struggling to accept in some way, but it's an important idea.
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Unknown B
What is the mission that you're on?
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Unknown A
I like to think of it as three presence, prioritization, and prevention. And I'll go through each of them. My mission is to educate parents and policymakers and clinicians and educators about the. The fact that for children to be mentally healthy in the future, you have to be physically and emotionally present for them throughout childhood, but particularly in the two critical periods of brain development, which are 0 to 3 and 9 to 25, which is adolescence. So in those two critical periods of brain development, particularly 0 to 3, much of a child's development depends on their environment, and you are their environment. So I run around the world talking about the importance of physical and emotional presence. Attachment, security. Attachment security is the foundation for future mental health prioritization. We prioritize everything today other than our children. We prioritize our work, our careers, our material success, our personal desires and pleasures.
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Unknown A
But what we're not prioritizing is children. Um, and you know, that's a problem because if we don't prioritize them, they break down. They may break down at 3, they may break down at 8, or they may not break down till they're in adolescence, but eventually they break down. And prevention. There's so much that we can do. We have a mental health crisis now in the world. It varies to a certain degree. In America, one in five children will not leave childhood without breaking down at some point, without developing a serious mental illness. Anxiety, depression, adhd, behavioral problems, suicidal thoughts. So we have a problem. In the UK it's 1 in 6. In America, it's 1 in 5. Around the world, it's about 1 in 5. That is a shocking figure. And so, and the truth is, we can do a great deal to prevent that.
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Unknown A
The idea that we are trying to put out fires without talking about what is the origin of these issues. The way that the mental health care system works now, it's like what I call cutting the grass. Children are medicated, which is basically just pain management. They're given CBT therapy, which, again, is just pain management. But why aren't we asking the important questions, which is, where does emotional regulation originate? Where does it come from? When does it start? How do we foster development in children from a very young age to promote resilience to stress and adversity in the future? And so those are my three missions.
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Unknown B
And for someone who doesn't know your work and isn't aware of you, they might be thinking, how would you know, Erica? How would you know the answer?
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Unknown A
So I'm a psychoanalyst. I'm also a social worker. I started as a social worker and then became a psychoanalyst. I'm also an author of books on parent guidance and parents education. And I've been in practice seeing patients. So the majority of my work is still seeing patients. I have a full time job of seeing patients. And as someone who is also a parent, I have three children of my own. And so as a parent, as a clinician, as an author who has for the past 20 years been researching. And what I did is I collected research in epigenetics and attachment theory and neuroscience and wrote my first with being there. Because what happened is I was seeing this uptick in mental illness in children and this is really how I got into it about 30 years ago. I started practicing about 36 years ago, but I was probably five years into my practice and I was seeing that the families that were coming to see me had younger and younger children that were being diagnosed with very serious mental illnesses and being medicated at a very young age, basically silencing their pain.
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Unknown A
And what I was observing in my practice is that those children who were doing the least well were the ones whose mothers were the least present in their lives. So their primary attachment figures were the least present in their lives. And so then I started looking at the research. I looked at all the neuroscience research since the 90s and all of the new, new research that had come out. I looked at the old detachment theories which have been around since the 60s. And I looked at the epigenetic research, which was rather new too. And I saw this trend. I saw that we were abandoning our children for our own desires, for our careers, for material success. And there was a great deal of misunderstanding about the irreducible emotional needs of children.
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Unknown B
We're going to go through all of that today. I'm very excited to learn more about all of this. I'm not a parent myself. From all the investigative research we've done, you have three very well adjusted children. So congratulations for that. And I hope to have successful children myself one day. But I'm also just really interested in understanding myself through the work that you've done and the work that you continue to do, because we're all at one point children. And much of the fingerprints that I experienced that exists in us today. So I'm keen to understand how things that might have happened to me or anyone listening today when we were younger, may have Shaped us in pro social, antisocial ways or productive or unproductive ways. You mentioned that you still see clients and patients today. What kind of patients do you see? What are they struggling with and who are they?
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Unknown B
Are you seeing the parents, the kids? Both.
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Unknown A
Well, I have a very large parent guidance practice because of the books that I write and the articles I write. I also write for the Wall Street Journal and other newspapers. So people find me through my writing and then they reach out for help. And so the parent guidance basically means people come to see me, either both parents or one parent, because they have questions about their child's development or something's going wr their child's starting to develop symptoms and they don't want to medicate them, and they want to understand what's really at the root cause of the issue. And so that's a good portion of my practice. But I also see individual patients for depression and anxiety, and I see couples. And you know, the joke about psychoanalysts is we're all specialists in depression and anxiety. But yeah, so I see individuals and couples. But a lot of parentists work, and.
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Unknown B
They come to you typically because they're noticing something is not right with their child.
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Unknown A
Sometimes they'll come preventatively because they want to raise a healthy child. And there's so much white noise in society. There's so much of misinformation. Our instincts are to lean into our children. Our evolutionary drive is to create a feeling of safety and security for our children and to be as present as possible and to soothe them when they're in distress and to be there to teach them our values and. But society took a turn. It took a turn in the. I suppose you could say, going back to the Industrial Revolution. If I really want to go back, I'll say the Industrial revolution was a time when women were forced into the workplace, into factories and cities. You know, they were separated from children for the first time. But really, the term that society took, that I think has a lot to do with what's happening today is the me movement of the 60s and also the feminist movement, Both of those movements, which had a tremendously positive impact on society in one way, also had a tremendously negative impact on society.
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Unknown A
When women decided that it was cool to go to work and to work full time out of the home, you know, everybody cheered and said, great. You know, women have the same rights as men. And now everybody can be in the workforce and be independent and make money and do their own thing. Me, me, me, me, me. The problem is that children were dropped, they were abandoned, and their needs, which are not needs that are going to shift because society shifts because they have irreducible neurological emotional needs. So we know that babies are born neurologically and emotionally fragile. And so what that means is they're not born resilient. And today what's being projected onto babies is they can handle a lot. They can handle stress, they can handle separation, they can handle you going back to work after six weeks or three months and leaving them in daycare with strangers or, you know, and from an evolutionary perspective, babies have always needed the physical skin to skin contact with their mothers.
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Unknown A
For the first year, most parts of the world, babies are worn on their mother's bodies because mothers perform a number of really important functions for babies that are biological functions based on our evolutionary need to provide our babies with what we call attachment security. So, you know, society took a turn and it's, it's, it's caused a lot of damage. I mean, this mental health crisis in children I saw coming 30 years ago and it was already, you know, so, you know, I have friends and colleagues like Jonathan Haidt who says, oh, well, it didn't start till social media. And that's false because I was seeing this uptick. And if you really look, there was an uptick in mental illness in children going back decades. And it had everything to do with the shift in society towards self centeredness, towards narcissism, towards individualism, towards me, me, me.
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Unknown A
And so, you know, and I always say that you don't have to have children, period to have a satisfying life. But if you're going to have children, you need to be equipped to care for them. Because having children alone, without really understanding what it means to care for them and being prepared to take on that responsibility is causing our children to break down.
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Unknown B
Why do you mention mothers and not fathers in that? Because you seem to have an emphasis on the role that a mother plays and it seems to be more important in your view than the role that a father plays or maybe even a nanny or some other caregiver play. I noticed that on your first book, which written in 2017, being there on the COVID it says why prioritizing motherhood in bigger letters in the first three years matters scientifically, evolutionarily, with studies and research, how can you make the case to me to make me believe that the role of the mother in particular is essential versus a father or other caregiver?
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Unknown A
So in fact, in the book it talks about the difference between mothers and fathers, because that's an Important question. And the reason I wrote about mothers is not because fathers are unimportant, but fathers are important in a different way. So there's a whole debate in society about this kind of idea of gender neutrality, that mothers and fathers are interchangeable. But actually from an evolutionary perspective, as mammals, they're not interchangeable. They serve different functions. And those roles and those behaviors are connected to nurturing hormones. So mothers are really important for what we call sensitive empathic nurturing when children are infants and toddlers. That means that when children are in distress, mothers soothe babies and therefore regulate their emotions from moment to moment. Every time a mother soothes a baby with skin to skin contact and eye contact and the soothing tone of her voice, she's leaning into that baby's pain and she is regulating that baby's emotions.
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Unknown A
And the way I like to think about it is that, you know, when babies are born, they're born emotionally disjointed. Think about sailing in the Atlantic. This is how babies emotions go. They'll go from 0 to 60 in 3 seconds with their emotions. And where we want to get babies is to sailing in the Caribbean, not flatlining. But we want them to be able to regulate their emotions, but they're not born that way. And so mothers, because they soothe the baby from moment to moment, when they're physically and emotionally present enough in the first three years, they help a baby to learn how to regulate their emotions. So by three years of age, 85% of the right brain is developed. And by three years of age, babies can then start to internalize the ability to regulate their own emotions. Now if mothers aren't present as the primary attachment figures to do that mirroring of emotion, to do that soothing of their emotions, then babies don't learn how to regulate their emotions.
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Unknown A
The other thing that's important that mothers do is they buffer babies from stress by wearing them on their body for the first year and then by being as present as possible for three years, they actually protect babies brains from cortisol, the stress hormone. So there is a hormone called oxytocin, it's the love hormone and it is protective against cortisol. The more a mother nurtures with sensitive empathic nurturing, meaning when the baby cries, the mother goes, oh sweetheart, you know, let me see the boo boo, let me kiss the boo boo. That actually raises the oxytocin in the baby's brain, which then protects the baby from cortisol.
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Unknown B
Can father do that?
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Unknown A
So now fathers, why are fathers important? So fathers also produce oxytocin but it has a different effect on their brain. So for mothers, oxytocin makes mothers sensitive, empathic nurturers, very vigilant to the baby's distress. When fathers produce oxytocin, it comes from a different part of their brain, and it makes them more what we call playful, tactile stimulators of babies. What does that sound like to you?
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Unknown B
Playful, tactful stimulators of babies.
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Unknown A
Throwing the baby up in the, Tickling the baby and running after the baby and roughhousing. And so that's important for a variety of reasons. First, it encourages things like exploration and risk taking. It encourages separation. And fathers do this really important thing, which is they help the baby to learn to regulate certain emotions. So mothers help to regulate sadness, fear, distress. Fathers help to regulate excite and aggression. So when fathers aren't in the house, when they're single mothers raising children without a father, often little boys develop behavioral problems, is what we're seeing, that they can't regulate their aggression because fathers help little boys in particular, but little girls too, to regulate aggression. So when fathers aren't around, you'll often see little boys who are more impulsive, who are more aggressive. So the answer is fathers and mothers are both critical to the development of children, which is a very controversial thing to say today because if you're raised without one, you are missing a piece.
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Unknown A
But they're not the same. And they're not the same because our hormones dictate they're not the same. So fathers produce a hormone in great quantities called vasopressin. Vasopressin is the protective aggressive hormone. And what does it do? It helps fathers to protect their family. There was a study that was done where mothers and fathers lay in bed and the baby cries. It was out of the uk, the study. The baby cries and the father sleep through the baby's distress cries, but the mothers wake up right away. Okay, but with the rustling of leaves outside the window, the mothers sleep through it, and the fathers wake up right away because the fathers are attuned to predatorial threat. So our nurturing hormones make us different. I mean, the fact that we can say that there are many things that are similar between women and men. Of course we're both intelligent, we can both be ambitious.
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Unknown A
But I think the idea that we want to kind of make everything the same when it's just not factual, it is the inconvenient truth that mothers and fathers nurturing hormones dictate that if they are healthy and they've been raised in a healthy environment, they are different. Now, does that mean that a father can't raise a child and be a sensitive, empathic nurturer? It doesn't mean he can't take on that role. But if as a society, we can't acknowledge the differences, then a father can't learn to be a sensitive, empathic nurturer, Meaning these are instinctual behaviors. And so that infant, if that father is going to stay home with that baby, acknowledging the differences allows that father then to become a sensitive, empathic nurturer.
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Unknown B
So interesting, because these aren't the ideas that are socially accepted, or at least the ideas used on social media. And funnily enough, as you were speaking, I recorded everything you said and I ran it through AI And AI said the core ideas that you shared are well supported by evolutionary psychology and neuroscience, which is quite surprising because usually AI argues with people.
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Unknown A
I mean, so the thing is, none of the books I write are based on opinion. So I'm very skittish about saying anything that isn't backed up with research. So everything that I write about and speak about is supported by research.
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Unknown B
Why is it that what you say is so troubling for some people? You know why? Right? Because it makes us confront a set.
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Unknown A
Of realities, that it's an inconvenient truth. To quote Al Gore, it's an inconvenient truth. Sometimes facts are an inconvenient truth. Just like, you know, climate change is an inconvenient truth. This is an inconvenient truth. It inconveniences people. It also makes people feel guilty. So I don't believe that guilt is a bad feeling. I don't believe that guilt is a bad thing. Guilt is a sign that your ego is functioning. It's a sign that the part of you, the part of your ego called the superego, can identify something that feels right and wrong. So if you look at a baby who's crying, who's your baby, and you feel nothing, that means that there's a part of you that is dead inside. There's a part of you that is unempathic towards your own young. And we would say that that doesn't make that person a bad person.
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Unknown A
It makes that person someone who probably had some early trauma themselves. Right? It means that they probably have some kind of attachment disorder where they can't be attuned to their. Their baby's pain. Right? So when you are guilty, it means you have internal conflict. It means two parts of you are struggling with each other. The part of you that wants to do whatever you want to do. I want to go out to work, I want to make money, I want to be free, you know, and the other part of you that says, wait a second, but my baby, my baby needs me. Look at my vulnerable baby. Look how sad. Look at the distress that my absence is causing that baby. So if we don't feel guilt, then our species is lost. We're lost. Now excessive guilt is another thing. If you're a good enough mother or good enough father and you still feel guilty, then we call it anxiety.
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Unknown A
But for the most part, what I say makes a lot of women and men feel guilty. And again, I don't see that as a bad thing. And I think when we tell parents to turn away from their guilt, instead of turning toward it, when we turn towards our internal conflicts, we tend to make better decisions for ourselves, for our children, for our families. But when we turn away from those conflicts, we tend not to make good decisions. And those tend to have long term consequences.
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Unknown B
What exactly are you inconveniencing with your truth? What are the ideas that you're.
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Unknown A
That you have to sacrifice time and money and freedom, that if you want to raise healthy children, it's going to require discomfort and frustration and sacrifice. And what's interesting is that what's also happened is because we're raising our children in such a selfish, self centered environment, young people are more fragile, they are more emotionally fragile. More of them have attachment disorders. They can't bear frustration, they can't bear pain, they can't bear sleeplessness. You know, the idea that you have to get a baby nurse because you can't get up in the middle of the night with your own baby. And that's become the norm in certain socioeconomic circles. I mean, so women and men always raised children in history, in extended family circles, right? They weren't isolated. And today parents are very isolated. So you would have your mother staying with you, or you'd have your sister staying with you, or you'd live in a big house and there'd be people to support you.
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Unknown A
I started a nonprofit recently because I found that so many mothers, it's called Attachment Circle. So many mothers feel so isolated that dealing with the pain and the discomfort of mothering alone is too much for them. So there is that. So we live in a very strange society where people are separate from one another in their own houses and apartments, and they don't depend on one another because dependency is a bad word. But there is also this issue of how are we producing such fragile youth that Even the discomfort and the frustration of raising children is too much for them.
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Unknown B
There's a big economic component to this as well.
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Unknown A
Right?
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Unknown B
Because if you're raising children in isolation, the probability that you have disposable income or at least enough money to be able to just stay at home and raise the kids and still maintain any standard of quality, standard of life is lower if you're not doing it with a big extended family that can support and pay for some of those costs.
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Unknown A
Interestingly, yes and no to your question. People who have less economic resources are in general less isolated, but they are also isolated. Today you have a lot of single mothers raising children, not in an apartment with other family members, who've had to move to other cities or countries to make a living, who are really isolated. You know, again, I think it crosses socioeconomic lines, but with wealthier people, more affluent people, they're opting for isolation. Many of them, they're buying big houses, they're living in the suburbs or, or they're not wanting to lean on anyone. Right? So we have what I call a family diaspora. It's really what it is, which is that people will move away from their families of origin when they have children, which is very bizarre and anti instinctual. So the world's become a global place and we can move wherever we want.
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Unknown A
But doesn't it make common sense, isn't it a reasonable clause that you would want to move closer to your extended family, even if they're a pain in the neck? Unless they're abusive, because it provides you with support, it provides you with extended family support. But that's not what's happening. People are choosing to live geographically distant from their families of origin. And so it's making it harder for families, it's making it harder for women, it's making them feel more isolated.
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Unknown B
They've got their own career, they've got their own passions. There are things that they love doing and that means that they have to be, be working in a major city or they have to be traveling to pursue those things.
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Unknown A
You just said it. What if they have passions? What if they have a career? The problem is children do best in extended family situations. So you know, you can have a fabulous career and move far away from your family. And when you're young and single, and I even call it single, when you're married but don't have children, you're still really single. You know, what I say to parents is that your life won't be so fabulous if you have children and you're not present for them physically and emotionally, particularly in the early years, because what happens is they break down. And the expression goes that a parent is only as happy as their least happy child. And so there is no fabulous life if your children are breaking down. And that's what families are learning, is that, you know, all of that freedom and all that fabulous me time comes at a cost if you have children.
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Unknown B
So one would say, then, well, I.
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Unknown A
Just won't have children then, and that would be fine. And so there are a lot of people that are saying today, I don't see the value in being responsible for another human being. And what they're missing out on is the deep and rewarding emotional connection to your children. It's a love like no other love. But if you've had. If you've had trauma as a child, if you've had parents who were narcissistic or resented parenting or, you know, were distracted or mentally ill, you know, you may already have had that trauma. That. That implies that later it's harder to connect, right? So those attachment disorders that I was referring to earlier, there's three kinds of attachment disorders. There's the avoidant attachment disorder. So what does that mean? So a healthy attachment looks like this. When you return home, your child feels so securely attached to you, meaning you've gone out for an hour or two for dinner with your spouse, you come home, and your baby is happy to see you.
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Unknown A
And the reunion, what we call the reunion, is a beautiful reunion. The baby is joyful and happy, and, you know, that's healthy attachment. It means that you've made your baby feel so safe and secure because you are there primarily and have prioritized them the majority of the time as the primary attachment figure, that when you come, baby welcomes it. But what we're seeing is more and more children developing attachment disorders because their parents are pushing the limits of how much they can leave those babies and putting them in things like institutional care and leaving them for long hours at a time and traveling for their fabulous careers and their fabulous lives. At ages when babies really can't tolerate that kind of separation, when a parent comes, when the primary attachment figure, usually the mother, comes home and the baby turns away from you and turns toward the babysitter or just turns away.
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Unknown A
That baby has the beginning of what's called an avoidant attachment disorder. Now, that's correlated later on with things like depression and difficulty forming attachments later on. The next kind of attachment disorder is called an ambivalent attachment disorder. And the mother then comes home and the baby clings to the mother for dear life because the internal voice in that baby is, my mommy's going to leave me again. So I have to hold on to her. Now, that baby is fractious and can't be soothed and will not let go of that mother. You know, holding on for dear life. What I call like the rhesus monkeys did to the wire cages, Right? And that's correlated later on with anxiety in youth. The disorganized attachment disorder is different than the other two in that the other two have a strategy. So think of an attachment disorder as a strategy.
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Unknown A
A child who's left for too many hours by their parent or whose parent is physically present but emotionally checked out. That baby has to cope, has to have a strategy. Turning away from the mother is a strategy. And the internal narrative is, my mommy isn't present for me, isn't here for me, won't be there for me. I can't trust my environment. And that baby says, and I'm going to have to cope on my own. What we call learned helplessness, the ambivalent attachment disorder that baby is. The strategy is, I'm going to hold on, because if I don't hold on, she's going to leave again. Disorganized attachment disorder is the hardest to treat because the baby has no strategy. So the baby cycles through many strategies. The baby will go from clinging to, to avoiding, to being enraged and even slapping or hitting the mother and then cycling through again.
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Unknown A
And that baby that develops a disorganized attachment disorder, those are more those babies. It's correlated later with borderline personality disorder. And we're seeing a huge rise in borderline personality disorders. And those are the kids who are cutting themselves, who are trying to commit suicide. We have a mental illness crisis the likes of which we've never seen in history. And it has everything to do with how we're raising our children.
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Unknown B
You seem pissed off under that condominium.
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Unknown A
Pissed off? Yes, I suppose I am. I'm not pissed off at the people. I'm pissed off at a society that is lying. We're not really educating or telling parents the truth.
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Unknown B
So there's four attachment disorders. Avoidant, secure, ambivalent, disorganized.
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Unknown A
Well, one. Secure isn't a disorder. So there's secure, and then there's three attachment disorders.
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Unknown B
Avoidant, ambivalent, disorganized.
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Unknown A
Yes.
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Unknown B
How does that manifest when you're an adult? So how would I know? Because I can relate to some of these, and I'm wondering how that would Then manifest in my relationship to my life as an adult outside of the obvious mental health situations.
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Unknown A
So avoidant. An avoidant attachment disorder would be someone who can't form meaningful and deep connections, can't commit, has difficulty committing, has difficulty trusting in the intimacy and the, the depth of intimacy in a relationship. An ambivalent attachment disorder would, would be someone who's highly, highly anxious, someone who clings to you, calls you, maybe a woman you've dated in the past who called you five times a day to check on you and was worried that you'd be a little fish that swam away and suffocate. They suffocate the people they love because they're afraid to let go. Disorganized attachment, borderline personality disorders. They tend to be very emotionally volatile. There's a lot of anger there and, and there's a lot of self harm, self harming behavior there.
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Unknown B
Do they end up attracting a certain attachment style? So if I'm an avoidant, do I then end up attracting avoidance or do I. Is there any research on that on how we then date? I'm guessing secures. Go for secures.
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Unknown A
Yeah, secures. Well, if you're healthy, you're attracted to reciprocally healthy relationships and you trust your environment, so you trust in loving relationships. And avoidance sometimes are attracted to avoidant people because there's no conflict there. So in other words, someone who can't commit with someone also who can't commit, that can break down those at some point. So remember that these are pathological defenses. So you know, we use the word defense because it means to protect one. Right. And defenses help us until they no longer help us. And so we say attachment disorders are pathological defenses, meaning they don't usually last a lifetime. They break down at some point. Point. And so you might be with another avoidant attachment disordered person, but at some point one of you breaks down and then realizes that you need the other. And then you know, then you're with, in a relationship with someone who can't give back.
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Unknown A
So yeah, as we say, like levels of water meet. So people will be attracted to one another, often of the same ilk, but it isn't necessarily a healthy relationship.
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Unknown B
And of all these four attachment styles, who do you think which attachment style, in your opinion and from your observations of the people that you've seen, is most likely to have a successful and then also unsuccessful relationship?
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Unknown A
Oh well, secure attachment will have a successful, I mean secure people with secure attachment will be drawn to healthy, reciprocal, loving, deep connections because they've had a deep and loving connection with their mother. So remember I said that you. It's only after three years of age that you internalize the feeling of security and where you internalize the feeling that the world is a safe place and you can trust the people in it and you can trust to love another person. And so, you know, we, we throw that word trust around, but we don't realize that it comes from the very beginnings of our development. When we don't trust others, it's generally because we couldn't trust those that we were to depend upon when we were at our most vulnerable stage.
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Unknown B
And what about the alternative? So if which of these attachment styles is least likely to have successful relationships?
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Unknown A
That's disorganized. Yeah, they have a very hard time forming relationships, holding onto relationships. Yeah, I would say they're the most complicated to treat and they're also the most complicated in terms of being able to have successful relationships in the future.
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Unknown B
I was wondering, as you're speaking, whether if I have more kids, so if I have 10 young kids, is there a higher probability of neglect in those kids? Because if I'm a mother, I just don't have time for all of these kids at the same time. They can't all be on my chest at the same time.
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Unknown A
Yeah, it's a good question. Well, there's something in the developing world called maternal depletion syndrome, which is that mothers can actually die in the developing world of having too many children in too short a period of time. They get depleted physically, but they also get depleted emotionally. I'm going to say it right now so everybody can hear it. Who's watching this? Having children is stressful. It is frustrating. It does require that you are sleepless for the first five years. It requires that you can tolerate a lot of discomfort and frustration. So if there was a job description first, it would say the most joyful, enriching thing you can do in your entire life. But what comes with that to foster healthy development is frustration, lack of sleep, stress, discomfort. And so that should be part of the job description.
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Unknown B
Yeah, it seems to be such an important principle for life generally that everything has a trade off. And I think it was Einstein that said, for every force has an equal and opposite counterforce or something to that effect. And a lot of people are choosing not to make the decision to have kids. I was looking at some stats around this. The European Union witnessed only 3.8 million births in 2022, nearly half the number recorded six decades ago, marking one of the lowest birth rates in history. France, for example, known for its robust family policies, has seen a decrease from 830,000 children born in 2010 to just 670,000 2023, the lowest since World War II. And this is a huge global trend across especially have a lot of money.
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Unknown A
It is. So I speak at a big conference called the alliance for Responsible Citizenship, and they talk about a lot of these alarming dropping birth rates. The truth is, though, that as countries become more developed, birth rates do decline to a certain degree. That has to do with economics, some of it. But there's a trend that's happening that's worse than this, which is people. It's not that they're having less children, which actually, you know, everybody has their own limits in terms of their capacity to give and to love. And so for some people, maybe one child is enough. For other people, five children isn't enough, meaning they have so much inside of them to give. Right. But the alarming thing for me isn't the dropping birth rates due to economics, you know, so maybe people aren't having. Having 10 children like they used to, they're having three children or two children.
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Unknown A
Right. The alarming thing for me is that people are not having children. That's more alarming to me because that's more a sign not of a country developing, but of a country and a society, of a modern society which does not see the value in. In raising children and having deep and loving relationships be a priority in your life.
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Unknown B
Those people would say, I have deep and loving relationships with my partner, with my dog, with my uncle, auntie, friends, etc.
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Unknown A
It's different. And why is it different? It's a good question. It's different because in the end, your relationship with your partner or with your auntie or with your dog isn't the same level of dependency. The ability to care for another human being, to allow another human being to be dependent on you, to devote to that human being, is a growing, transforming experience for human beings. One would say that. Not sure I completely buy this fully because. But Jordan Peterson, I think, has said. I think it was Jordan who said that you can't fully become an adult if you don't have a child. Now, I'm not sure I would go that far because there's some people who can't have children. But I do think that there is something in terms of developmentally, on an adult development level that transforms you, that is meant to. To. To transform you in being generative and having children.
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Unknown A
Again, it's not for everyone and I Do say this, that I'm not part of the pronatality movement where I say everybody should have children. I don't think everybody should have children. But I do think that if you're going to have children, then you need to look deeply at your own upbringing and your own losses and your own early traumas before you bring them into this world so you can repair whatever it is you need to repair and not create what we call generational expression of things like attachment disorders and mental illness.
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Unknown B
Because a lot of people are struggling now with have kids, even those that want to. Looking at some stats and there's a global prevalence of infertility. Approximately 18% of adults worldwide, about 1 in 6 experience infertility at some point in their lives. Between 2015 and 2019, about roughly 15% of US women aged 15 to 49 experience impaired fertility. In the UK, research indicates that 1 in 8 women listening to this now and 1 in 10 men aged 16, 74 have experienced infertility, which is defined as unsuccessfully attempting pregnancy for a year or longer. And I've spoken to a lot of people actually that have tried to have kids for years.
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Unknown A
It's very sad. It's very sad when people want children and they can't have children. It is incredibly sad when you think.
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Unknown B
About what's contributing to that. How do you diagnose that infertility challenge?
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Unknown A
There are a lot of theories. Some are environmental, some are the fact that we're delaying having children, we're lying to women, women and to men. We're telling them, freeze your eggs. In fact, this is a little disturbing, I'll tell you about this, that law firms now are paying for the freezing of their young female associates eggs. I find that disturbing. Saying, freeze your eggs work really hard for us. Yeah, you can have children later. And the truth is a lot of them can't. Because when you freeze eggs, it's not a guarantee of fertility. It's not a guarantee that those eggs will turn into embryos. It's not a guarantee that those embryos will turn into babies. So there's the age piece. There is also. And there's the environmental piece. There is also the stress piece, which we are not talking about. There's a component to getting pregnant that is about stress.
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Unknown A
We have more stress on both men and women. You know, it used to be that men died sooner because they had more stress, but now I think it's evened out the odds. I think women may die sooner because they have the stress of working and raising children for the most Part. But the point is that the stress that young adults face because they're trying to, you know, we should talk about some of the other myths. What's another myth? We'll weave it through the star. Another myth is you can do everything all at the same time and do it well. Myth, that's a big myth. You can't, you can't have a fabulous career working full time and traveling and being fabulous and raise healthy children. The good news is life is long. You may live till 120 like Moses. And I think of your generation, you're younger than me, but I think you probably will live well over 100.
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Unknown A
And so what that means is you have many, many, many, many, many, many years to have a fabulous career when your children don't need you so much, but you have a very small window to create that emotional security for your children that will be the core of them. We talk a lot about your physical core and core training. This is your emotional core. This is the emotional core of human beings. Attachment, security and a feeling of safety that you can rely on the people who you need most in the world to be there when you need them. That is your emotional core.
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Unknown B
How did you manage? You're a mother of three. You've raised three very wonderful, well adjusted children, but you're also successful, you have books, you're traveling around the world, you said.
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Unknown A
So I'm a good example. I had a career when I was in my 20s and I got married when I was, I met my husband when I was 27 and I got married when I was just shy of 30 or I was 30. And then we had children in our 30s. So before we had children, I was working. I was seeing something like 40 hours of patients a week. And I was working into the wee hours of the night. I would work till 11 o'clock at night, coming home exhausted. Then we had children. But it was an agreement that we had that when we had babies, I would take a good long period off, off, and then really go back very, very, very minimally. And I had the kind of career by choice that I could have control over and it could be flexible and I could control it.
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Unknown A
And so I took six months off with each child and then after six months only went back to work an hour and a half a day, five days a week. So just we had an agreement, my husband and I, which is, it would be just enough to pay a mother's helper, a nanny. And so, and we did without, in those years, we did without vacations. We did without, you know, second homes. We did without fancy clothes. We did without the other things that many of our peers were getting and traveling and doing. We said, what's important to us is that we pare down, not expand. Now this is. We're expanding as parents, so we want to pare down materially. Life is long and you can have a successful career. Some of the women that I interview for my book are women who didn't even start their careers until they were in their 40s, after they had children that were older.
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Unknown B
Could it have worked if your husband stayed home instead of you, in your view? Because I'm trying to understand if you're saying that dads don't need to be there present as much as the mother.
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Unknown A
They have to be there in a different way. In the early days, men don't breastfeed. So that's the first thing. Unless you can show me a man who has grown breasts and can actually breastfeed. Maybe it's coming, I don't know. But for now, women's bodies connect them to their babies. They connect them through birth. They connect them through breastfeeding. There is a physical component and a hormonal component to infancy and motherhood. And there really is a difference in the way that mothers respond to babies and fathers respond to babies. Now, when do fathers become really important? It's not that the father isn't important to give the mother a break or to bond with the baby or to bathe the baby, but what that baby needs is that attachment security to that primary attachment figure. So the mother, usually the mother, sometimes it's the father, but usually the mother.
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Unknown A
Fathers, with their playful tactile stimulation, they become really important when children become mobile, when children start to crawl and toddle when they're around 18 months to 2 years old, fathers become incredibly exciting, and they're really important. So when fathers aren't around in those days, when children are starting to explore the world, those children have a harder time separating from others. So it's really important to have what we said, the yin and the yang. What we are doing now is we are not prioritizing attachment security, which is the foundation for then healthy separation. And when healthy separation starts, fathers are critical. When you have another child, a second child, fathers are critical because fathers seduce the older child. They say, come on, let's go out and play. Let's go kick the soccer ball. Let's go to the sphinx. And they give a space to the mother with the next baby.
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Unknown A
They help the older children to grow up earlier On.
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Unknown B
You mentioned a study that I read about when I was studying psychology once upon a time, which is the rhesus monkey study with the YA mother. For anybody that's never heard about that study, I think it's quite important to understand providing back that touch and.
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Unknown A
Well, that was an attachment study.
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Unknown B
Yeah. What's touch called in the science world?
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Unknown A
Skin to skin.
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Unknown B
Skin to skin. Can you give me an overview of that study and what it showed for people that aren't aware of it?
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Unknown A
Well, they took these baby rhesus monkeys and they let some be with mothers, and the mothers nurtured those babies, and those babies became healthily attached, attached and secure. And those were the healthy, emotionally healthy babies. Then they gave another subset of monkeys a wire mother covered with a piece of cloth or fur or something. And those babies became very neurotic, but at least they were clinging. They became like the ambivalent attachment babies because there was no response from the mother, but at least they were holding on to this mother. And then they gave, and these babies became very neurotic, and then they gave the subset of babies nothing. And those babies literally lost their minds. And I mean, there are other studies which are more recent than that. That's quite an old study there. There is a researcher named Michael Meaney. He did a study on licking and grooming.
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Unknown A
Animals who lick and groom their young, meaning are nurturing, skin to skin lick. In human terms, that would be holding, touching, loving, skin to skin. Those. If a mother licked and groomed her young, that baby would become more resilient to stress in the future. The babies who were not licked and groomed by their mothers became less resilient to stress in the future. In addition, the babies who were more resilient to stress because their mothers had licked and groomed them passed down generationally the ability to lick and groom the next generation. What happened to the babies who weren't licked and groomed? Guess what happened?
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Unknown B
They didn't pass it down.
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Unknown A
Right. And that's what's happening to humans today. If we don't lick and groom our babies, I mean, you know, take it for whatever. If we don't lick and groom our babies, we don't pass on this resilience to stress and adversity. But we also don't pass on the desire to lick and groom to have babies.
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Unknown B
Your story, going back to your story which we were talking about, are there any areas of privilege that you need to acknowledge that someone else listening to this now goes, yeah, but that's all right for you because you know, maybe someone who didn't have a partner there or someone who is in a difficult economic situation. Extremely difficult economic situation, living in the projects in Harlem or something. I really want to. I'm saying this because.
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Unknown A
Well, it's not the mothers in the projects in Harlem, because I'll tell you, the mothers in the projects in Harlem stay home with their babies. That's what's interesting. Very poor people in America. America. So let me just say I love America. America sucks. And I'll tell you why America sucks from my perspective. And I say this internationally. I go around the world saying, America sucks. And I'm going to tell you why. We are the only country in the world other than Papua New guinea who does not have a paid parental maternity leave. We do not have paid maternity leave. Nobody cares about children. They care about the GDP and the bottom line. And the people who are out there talking about this stuff are economists saying women have to work, work, work for the economy. Nobody cares about children because if we cared about children, our tax money would be in paid leave.
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Unknown A
Not for three months, not for six months. Months for at least a year. In Hungary, they have three years. Slovenia, Slovakia, Estonia has three years. Hungary, I think has two years of paid leave. Sweden, I have some issues with Sweden, But Sweden has 14 months. Sweden, after 14 months, makes women go back to work full, full time and put them in institutional care. And all those babies are breaking down. So 14 months isn't even enough. So. But if we could even get to a civilized place of one year of paid leave in this country and then the next two years some way that parents could be complimented so they could work part time, supplemented so they could work part time. You know, I'm a reasonable, realistic person. I know this country is never going to go for three years of paid leave, even though I would love them to.
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Unknown A
I also know that this country isn't going to go for an entitlement called paid leave because that' the kind of country we are. We talk a big game, but we don't want to put our money where our mouth is. There is the possibility now that the Republicans are in of a creative solution which is potentially using things like Social Security in advance, borrowing from your Social Security. So I'm a mom and I say, ah, to stay home. I can borrow from my Social Security for a year and then work a year or two longer in my life. Wouldn't you say that most women who wanted to stay home with their babies would say, I'll work longer so I can stay home. With my baby, there are ways to creatively deal with it. From my perspective, this is what's going on. People on the left will not compromise.
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Unknown A
They'll only do an entitlement called paid leave, but they only are asking for it for three to six months. After that, they want women back in the workforce and institutional daycare. So I'm not on the left. People on the right talk a lot about family. They're the party of the family now, but they do not want tax dollars to go into paid leave. They don't like the entitlements that already exist and they don't want to add anymore. And so the only way they're going to give it to women and men is if they put skin in the game. This is the country we live in. Again, I'm a realist. I think in any way that we can give families the choice to care for their own children, particularly in the early years, we will create a population of healthier children.
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Unknown B
How do we know that more paid leave equals better children, less strain on the healthcare system in terms of mental health, mortality, whatever it might be. How do you make a statistical or a science or research backed case that if we had three years of paid leave in the United States or in the uk, Australia, Canada, wherever, that it would be a net positive for society outside of it just being an opinion?
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Unknown A
Well, the research shows, the longitudinal attachment research shows that children who are insecurely attached at 12 months of age, 20 years later are insecure. 80% of them are insecurely attached and suffer from mental disorders. That's what the longitudinal attachment research says. So we now have decades, decades of basically children were followed from when they were infants. And the ones who were securely attached 20 years later are still securely attached and doing great. And the ones who are insecurely attached, most still insecurely attached. And it's tied and correlated to all of these mental illness conditions. Right. So there's a lot of research to show what attachment security does for children in the long run. So, you know, you're asking a question about, I mean, I suppose you could take your paid leave and go play soccer in the park and go play tennis and I don't know, like play cards with your friend.
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Unknown A
I mean, you know, how can I say how people are going to use their paid leave? But if your paid leave is being used to be home with your child, then it's going to benefit your child.
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Unknown B
So many of the guests I speak on this podcast, especially those that become incredibly successful athletes, entrepreneurs, whoever, they often have some form of neglect in their past. Richard Williams, Serena and Venus Williams father, he was very intense with them from a very young age. And he's raised two of the greatest tennis players in history. Joe Jackson was strict and often controversial with Michael, who went on to become the king of Pop. Elwoods, who was Tylewood's father, was very intense in his coaching and mentoring style, which led him to become great. And obviously Beyonce is the other example I gave who Matthew Antina, who were parents to Beyonce, managed Destiny's Child and Beyonce's solo career meticulously shaped him into global superstars. So parents, parents think, you know, I want to raise kids that are superstars. I want my kids to be great.
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Unknown A
So I'm gonna say right now, I don't recommend that as a professional.
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Unknown B
Okay?
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Unknown A
I'm just saying. So I can't comment on a lot of those people because I could get a lot of trouble for commenting on a lot of those people. But I will say that amongst those people, there is controversy, meaning at least one of those parents, and I don't know the history of the others, was abusive. And so you could say that narcissism is abusive to children. When we project our needs and desires and likes and who we are onto our children, we're not letting them authentically be themselves. The greatest gift you can give your children child is to see your child as an authentic individual who is an individual and themselves, and not to see them as a mini me. When you start architecting their life, there's a good chance you're going to lose that child emotionally at some point. They're either going to hate you, they may be successful in their careers, they may have terrible personal lives, they may be narcissistic parents themselves.
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Unknown A
So I don't recommend that school of thought. What I do recommend is if your child shows promise in something that they also seem to love and have a drive to be good at, then you can support that drive. Just make sure to keep yourself in check along the way to make sure that they are driving it, not you.
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Unknown B
Health is a huge focus for me in 2025, and I'm not just talking about eating right and exercising. I'm talking about my recovery, too. I'm halfway through 60 workouts in 60 days. And to help my body recover, I've been using a health gadget that I've shared with you before. They're a sponsor of this podcast and their product has such a huge impact on my recovery. I'm referring to my Bon Charge infrared sauna blanket These are similar to the infrared saunas that you see in gyms and spas, but the big difference is that it's portable. I start the year off at my home in South Africa, so I brought the blanket with me and I used it most nights before bed when I was training hard and it helped me relax, it helped my muscles feel less sore and I wake up feeling more recovery. It works by heating up your body directly rather than just the air around you to improve circulation and reduce stiffness.
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Unknown B
I've also noticed that it's had a big impact on my skin as well. And thankfully Boncharge has offered me 25% off for my listeners. So if you use code diary at checkout, you'll also get free shipping and a year long warranty. Head to boncharge.com diary ADHD.
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Unknown A
Yeah.
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Unknown B
Okay, I feel like I didn't have to ask a question here, but just to set the stage, the reason why I'm so compelled by this is just this, I have to say it. The shocking rise in diagnosis and prescriptions over the last 10 years. Between 20, 2018, ADHD diagnosis in the UK rose approximately 20 fold.
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Unknown A
Yes.
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Unknown B
Among boys aged 10 to 16, diagnosis increased from 1% roughly to about 3.5% in 2018. And in men aged 18 to 29, there was a nearly 50 fold increase in ADHD prescriptions during the same period. And the same applies to the United States where an estimated 15.5 million adults in the US have been diagnosed with ADHD. Approximately one in nine US children have been diagnosed with ADHD at some point, with 10.5% having a current diagnosis. I don't know what ADHD was, but the conversation around it, the prescriptions, the diagnosis seemed to have really surged into culture in a really, really big way. What's going on?
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Unknown A
So ADHD was one of the factors that drove me to right being there because I was seeing this huge uptick in ADHD diagnosis and children being medicated so, so early. Do you know what the fight or.
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Unknown B
Flight reaction, that's when the sympathetic nervous system starts to kick into action and.
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Unknown A
Yes. So. Well, it's basically our evolutionary response to predatorial threat. So if a sable toothed tiger was chasing you, you either stood and fought fight or you ran for your life. Flight. So when our children are under stress, they go into fight or flight. So one of the first signs that a child is under stress that they cannot manage is when they become aggressive in school. They hit, they bite, they throw chase, they have trouble, you know, socially in daycare or Preschool or even in school, or they become distracted, which is the flight part of fight or flight. So what's happening is their nervous systems, the stress regulating part of their brain, is getting turned on. So we say that the stress regulating part of their brain has to do with a little almond shaped part of the brain called the amygdala. It's a very primitive part of the brain, very old part of the brain, and it regulates stress throughout our lives.
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Unknown A
It helps us to manage it. What we know is that part of the brain is supposed to remain offline for the first year to three years, which is why mothers wear babies on their body, bodies. It's why babies stay close to their mothers in the first three years to keep the amygdala quiet and only incrementally, incrementally expose children to stress and frustration that they can manage. So imagine taking small bites of it so you can digest it, right? And your mother's there to help you digest the stress. What we're doing now by separating mothers and babies, by putting babies into daycare with strangers, is by sleep training babies. All these weird things that we're doing to babies is we're turning the amygdala on, we're making it active precociously too early. What happens when the amygdala is activated too early is it becomes very active and very large very quickly.
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Unknown A
The problem is then it shrivels up and burns out also because it cannot manage that kind of stress so early. When it ceases to be functional, it ceases to be functional for a lifetime. And so it's very important to protect, you know, what's the expression, the family jewels. It's very. These are the family jewels in the brain of a baby. This is the jewel, the amygdala. You want to keep the stress to an absolute minimum in the first year, which is why sleep training is dangerous. It's why letting babies cry it out. It's why putting babies into daycare, it's why leaving babies for hours on end when they're so, so very fragile is so bad for their brains because it gets the cortisol flowing, which is the stress hormone. But it makes this part of the brain very active. So it grows, grows, grows, and then.
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Unknown A
And ceases to be functional in the future, like a PTSD response. So what we know is that these children are in hypervigilant states of stress. ADHD children, hypervigilant states of stress. If you stay in a hypervigilant state of stress long enough, you go into a Hypovigilant state of stress, which then causes depression. So what we have now are not disorders. So there was a whole movement to take the D off of ADHD because it's not a disorder, it is a stress response. And instead of asking the right questions, which are, okay, what's causing the stress? How do we make sure that our children are not exposed to this kind of stress because they're going into fight or flight. So the nervous system, as you said, the brain has an on switch and an off switch. The on switch to stress is the amygdala. The hippocampus is the off switch.
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Unknown A
And you'd say the stress response is in a negative feedback loop. It's actually important. Like in other words, if a sable toothed tiger is chasing you, very important that you can activate right run or fight. So the stress response is supposed to be short term, it's supposed to be not. It's supposed to be acute rather than chronic. So we can kind of manifest it, we can activate it, but then it's supposed to be turned off by the turn off switch. The hippocampus, what we're seeing in children's brain is that the amygdala is growing very precociously large and the hippocampus, which is the off switch, is very small. So we have this problem, as we say, Houston, we have a problem. We have an on switch going full speed, gas, no brakes, and no off switch. And that's causing ADHD behavioral problems that are hugely rising in children in school, a lot of aggression and violence.
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Unknown A
And so that's what's happening. This is a stress response. And again, instead of asking the right questions, like where is this coming from? What's causing the stress? Instead, we silence the children's pain, we tell parents we'll medicate it and we'll just relieve the symptoms. For me, that's malpractice. The way we treat ADHD is malpractice. A child develops, goes into fight or flight when they are under stress. It could be psychosocial stressors at home, in the family, it could be at school, it could be with their friends, it could be a learning disability. There's so many things that can cause kids stress. So instead of medicating them, why don't we figure out what's happening to that child deeply that's causing them to go into fight or flight?
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Unknown B
Isn't that point of view? I've got two questions here. The first is how do you know that it's stress? And the second Is if it is stress, then the problem, or at least the inconvenient truth that then creates is that dependent parent is responsible.
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Unknown A
Yes, that's the. There's the inconvenient truth for their child's adhd. Yes, yes, that's the inconvenient truth. It's not so simple. Sometimes it's the families. Usually it's the family, particularly with small children. But when children get to school, it could be social. As I said, you know, you can't control whether your children are exposed to social issues or bullying or. There's many things that can cause stress in children, but when they're very little, you are their environment. So the inconvenient truth is that when your child gets an ADHD diagnosis, the first thing you should do is go to a therapist who will do parent guidance with you. Don't rush that child to a psychiatrist to medicate them. You go with your partner or spouse and talk to a parent guidance expert about what could be causing this child to feel such stress. And look at the psychosocial stressors.
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Unknown A
Look at the influences and the dynamics in this child's life that would be causing them to go into a state of stress like this.
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Unknown B
Give me some examples of the type of stresses, the everyday stresses that we're now exposing children to that are leading to adhd, in your opinion?
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Unknown A
Well, again, let's start at home. At home, the stresses might be that they were handed over to a daycare center at an early age, which turned that amygdala response on, which turned the stress regulating part of the brain on too early. Now you have that hypervigilant reaction and they can't turn it off. Right. It could be a divorce situation. 50% of couples divorce, which means that divorce is an adversity. I have a book coming out in a year about how to divorce and mental mitigate the impact of the divorce on the child. But no matter what, a divorce is an adversity on a child and a stress. When parents fight dramatically in the home, if there's tremendous sibling rivalry issues in the home, if there's the birth of another child, it's stressful, right? If you have a sibling, believe it or not, that's a very stressful thing.
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Unknown A
If parents are sensitive about that, then it can be mitigated. But if parents are insensitive about the birth of a second child and the feelings that your first child may have, that can cause stress. Moving can cause stress. Illness or mental illness in a parent can cause stress. Alcoholism, any kind of addiction can Cause stress. A grandparent or uncle or aunts or even a parent getting sick and dying can cause. I mean, there are so many things that can cause stress. But the point is that stress can be regulated, but it can only be regulated if parents are introspective and self aware and willing to look at their part in it. If parents hand the child over to a psychiatrist and say, fix my child, of course psychiatrists will cooperate with you and silence your child's pain. But is that really what you want to be doing?
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Unknown A
Because in the end, you're just putting your finger in a dike. You're putting your finger in a dam, and eventually that dam is going to burst.
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Unknown B
What do you say to some of the evidence around there being a link to a hereditary component? In twin studies, they found that ADHD is about 74 to 80% heritable, making it one of the most genetically influenced psychiatrics.
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Unknown A
Let me tell you a different study that will help you to understand that study, which is that we know that there is no genetic precursor to mental illness, there is no genetic precursor to adhd, there is no genetic precursor to depression, and no genetic precursor to anxiety.
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Unknown B
What do you mean by precursor?
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Unknown A
Meaning there's no genetic connection. You don't get it in your genes if your father or your mother were depressed. You get it by something called the inheritance of acquired characteristics. If you're raised by a depressed parent, you're more likely to become depressed. It's the nature nurture argument. Okay, but what they did find. Now, schizophrenia has a genetic connection. Bipolar disorder, those have genetic, but the rest do not. Anxiety, depression, adhd, no genetics. What they did find is a genetic tie to something called the sensitivity gene. It's a short allele on the serotonin receptor. And serotonin, as we know, is used to regulate happy emotions. To regulate emotions, Right. So when you have a short allele, it means that you have a harder time picking up the serotonin, but it also means that you are more sensitive to stress. Now, those children who are born with this gene, this short allele on the serotonin receptor gene, they are more prone to mental illness later on because of that sensitivity to stress.
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Unknown A
What the study shows is if those children who are born with that gene for sensitivity are provided with emotionally and physically present attachment security in the first year, it neutralizes the expression of that gene. So epigenetics means that we're born with genes like you might have a gene for rheumatoid arthritis, or you might have a gene for cancer, but it never gets expressed. Well, we all have genes for something, but they don't necessarily get expressed. That's what epigenetics is. It means the environment has to turn on the gene to make it. Let's rock and roll. Right. What it showed in the study is that the children who were born with this genetic precursor, the sensitivity to strengthen if they had sensitive empathic nurturing and present parents in the first year, it neutralized the expression of that gene. So those children could be as healthy as children born without that gene.
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Unknown A
If, however, children born with that sensitivity gene were neglected, you know, abandoned, not provided with sensitive empathic present nurturing, it exacerbated that gene. So we know that that sensitivity gene is tied and correlated to mental illness later on unless the sensitive empathic nurturing mitigates that gene.
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Unknown B
And what do you say to people.
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Unknown A
Point to MRI scans, FMRIs and. Yeah, there's all kinds of neurological tests now where we can see the brain. Brain in action. So it's not a static thing. We can actually see the blood flow to the brain. We can see the electrical activity in the brain. It's amazing. Actually.
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Unknown B
Some people say that this proves that it's the way your brain is. And lots of my friends that have adhd, when they talk about their ADHD or the way that they are, they say, my brain works like this.
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Unknown A
No, it's not correct. Their brain is sensitive to stress. Someone with ADHD is more sensitive to stress. So you could ask them questions like this. You could say, are you a more sensitive person? Are you more sensitive to noise, to smells, to touch? When you were a child, did you not like itchy things? Did you cry more? Were you more sensitive when your parents would go out for the night? Were you more sensitive when your mom would go to work? Or were you more sensitive when you were left at nursery school? And they're probably going to say yes.
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Unknown B
But if they say no and they still have an ADHD diagnosis, I would.
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Unknown A
Guarantee, almost guarantee they wouldn't say no, because people with ADHD are people who are sensitive. Sensitivity is an amazing strength if it's met with sensitivity. If you have a sensitive child. So what does a sensitive child look like if you have multiple children? Then, you know, because the first thing I'll do when I give a public talk is I'll say, okay, any. Everybody here who has a sensitive child and I describe, okay, sensitive child is a child who cries more, is harder to soothe, is more clingy, doesn't like you. Leaving them is harder, has a harder time Separating has a harder time. Going to sleep and being left to sleep on their own is sensitive to things like noise and smells and touch.
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Unknown B
If you grew up in an environment that was stressful, and again, you've identified that stress can come in many forms. It could be arguing parents, it could be a neighbour or whatever, some environmental factor that caused that stress. You were sensitive, you developed ADHD, you become an adult, you get diagnosed at 30 years old as having ADHD. You're offered medication, you take the medication, the medication makes you much more functional in your career, in your relationships and your life.
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Unknown A
It's a stimulant. And so what stimulants do is they can cause great anxiety, they can cause panic attacks in adolescents, they can cause growth issues. So, so I have patients who come to meet young men who didn't grow because they were put on stimulants when they were young. So in terms of the consequences of using stimulants, the jury is still out, but we know that they cause growth issues, they cause panic attacks, they cause anxiety disorders, they cause depression, they're quite.
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Unknown B
Life saving for some people in terms of having a.
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Unknown A
They can be, they can be. So what I would say is if you have tried everything to uncover what the stress is that's causing you to react this way and you still are feeling that way, then sometimes medication can be a lifesaver. The problem is that we turn to medication in adolescents and children and young adults. We turn to it as a performance strug because there's so much stress in modern life and there's such a need for people to perform and be successful in their careers and in school and get good grades. There's so much pressure on kids. So, you know, I'm 60 and we didn't have this kind of pressure growing up. And so the generations that follow have so much pressure. That pressure makes children literally go off the rails. We could talk about the academic pressure, the competitiveness, the perfectionism. So ADHD is a bucket.
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Unknown A
It's a bucket which you throw people in who have anxiety that has never been treated. And so. And there's different ways of thinking about treatment too. So we are a society that likes superficial quick fixes. We like drugs, we like CBT therapy. The truth is that this is not a quick fix. Figuring out relationally, dynamically, what happened to you as a child, what your losses were, what your traumas were, what caused you to feel so anxious, what's caused you to go into fight or flight is hard work. It requires frustration, it requires commitment, it requires going to someone who can think very deeply with you. You know, I want to define what anxiety is because I think it's really important because we rarely define depression and anxiety. Depression is preoccupation with past losses. Anxiety is preoccupation with future losses that may never occur. What do they have in common?
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Unknown B
It's all about losses, all about loss.
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Unknown A
And you could say the generations now are very preoccupied with loss, loss of status, achievement.
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Unknown B
But because we're also very preoccupied with gain.
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Unknown A
Well, we're preoccupied with what I say. The. You know, I don't want to judge, but I want to say the unimportant things in life. What are the important things in life? Relationships, love, love, connection, health. Right. You would say objectively, family. These are the important things in life. But we've become very preoccupied with material success, money, career achievements, fame. I think there was a study that interviewed teenagers, and it was really discouraging because they said that the thing they wanted more in life than anything was to be famous. And so we're preoccupied with the wrong.
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Unknown B
Things on this point of stress. Link with ADHD. I'm looking at some research from the injury.com research education group. It says that children with an ACE score, which is the trauma score, where I think it goes up to 10 different questions with an ACE score of four or more. So four experiences of trauma or more have nearly four times, which is 400% more chance of having parent reported ADHD compared to children with no aces. And some of the factors that have a big impact is socioeconomic hardship increases the probability of having ADHD by 40%. Parental divorce by 35%. Familial mental illness. A parent having mental illness increases up to almost 60%, 55%, I believe, and neighborhood violence, almost 50%. Familial incarceration. So if a parent goes to prison, then that increases your probability of ADHD by about 40% as well. And that's published by the. I think it's the New England.
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Unknown A
Yeah.
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Unknown B
What is it called? The National Library of Medicine, national center for Biological Information.
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Unknown A
Yeah. So remember what I said, that you can't control everything that happens to your child. Divorces do happen and adversities happen to children. Health, health issues happen to children. What you can control is you can control the first three years and be as present as possible for your child.
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Unknown B
So if my kids start screaming in a supermarket, one of the prevailing pieces of advice says just walk off or start screaming yourself as the parent to show them. Am I supposed to just ignore my child when it's screaming during a tantrum. Am I meant to drop what I'm doing and go and cater to them? What am I meant to do is.
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Unknown A
You'Ll have me on speed dial.
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Unknown B
Stephen, you be careful because if you.
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Unknown A
Make a promise like that, I promise. I promise I'll be on speed. Cool.
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Unknown B
You really want to drop your career.
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Unknown A
And focus on raising my children?
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Unknown B
No.
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Unknown A
But you can call me. No, you can have me on speed, you can, as much as you want. So the deal is you don't yell at your children. An emotionally regulated parent, a healthy parent produces a healthy child. So what is a healthy parent? A healthy parent is a parent who feels good about themselves, who has authentically good self esteem. Not grandiosity, but really feels good about themselves, knows their strengths and limitations and overall, as a whole person feels good about themselves. They have the capacity to regulate their emotions to keep their emotions from going too high and too low. Remember sailing in the Caribbean, meaning they can stay calm in a storm, is sensitive and empathic as a nurturer. These are signs of health in a parent.
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Unknown B
So if my kid says, I want that pack of sweets, and I go, you can't have that pack of sweets.
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Unknown A
Well, first you have to. So before you discipline, you always want to be empathic first. So I always say that if you are going to discipline a child, first you have to recognize how they feel. I mean, recognizing how children feel is important anyway. Meaning when you recognize a child's feelings, if they're sad, you mirror their sadness. If they're angry, you say, I can see you're angry. If they're happy, you look happy with them. That kind of reflection is the way that your child knows that you acknowledge them, that they're a person to you, that they're a separate person to you. It's how they feel valuable. So when you acknowledge their feelings, that's the first criteria critical. You'd say, Parenting 101. Acknowledge your child's feelings.
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Unknown B
So I would turn to my child and say, you want sweets? Are you hungry?
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Unknown A
Yeah. You can say, I can see that you really want that packet of sweets. I can see how hard it is because you really want it. But you know you can't have it before dinner. You know, that's the rule. And then they stop screaming, and then they start screaming. And you say, broken record is a communication style where you say, oh, I can see it's really hard for you, but you still can't have the sweets. And you stay with them and you keep empathizing and then Setting structure. Empathizing structure. Empathizing structure. The mistake that parents make is that they go right into the no word. They don't use empathy, they don't bring empathy in. And the truth is that even as an adult, if somebody just says no without first recognizing how you feel, you feel very unsatisfied. Right. For a child, it's critical. It's critical that even when you have to say no, and particularly if you have to say no, that you first recognize how they feel.
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Unknown B
I mean, that's what all the relationship experts on the show tell me. They say if you want to be successful in a romantic relationship, then you first must make your partner feel heard and understood.
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Unknown A
That's right.
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Unknown B
Even if you disagree in arguments, first acknowledge what they said, maybe repeat it back to them and then they'll feel heard and understand. It kind of stops the broken record. Do you think that I'm a traumatized child?
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Unknown A
I don't know. I haven't heard about your traumatized background. If so, if you have a trauma, I would say we're all. So let me say, say this. There's this word, trauma is used a lot. Can I just talk about it for a moment? There's something called big T trauma, right? Big T traumas. Like I was in a car accident, I lost my legs, or you know, I lost my parents, you know, my mother died of brain cancer, or my father was an alcoholic and beat me. Or you know, there's, there are things that are more concrete that you can like hold on to things that happen to people. Yeah, I was raped. Or, you know, those are big T trauma. But believe it or not, probably fewer people suffer from big T trauma and more people suffer from little T trauma. And little T trauma is more nuanced.
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Unknown A
It requires looking with a finer tooth comb at the issues. It's more relational. It's more, I was subtly neglected by my mother. My mother wasn't a good listener. My mother loved me, but my father loved me, but he never understood me. My parents were narcissistic and very self centered. They were never around. And so people will come into my office and sit down individuals for therapy and they'll say, I don't know what's wrong with me. I had two parents who stayed together, had all the material wealth that I could need. I never wanted for stuff. You know, my parents stayed together and I don't know what's wrong with me. And so I say, okay, so you're telling me nothing big and traumatic happened to you in your life now let's talk about the nuance. And we're not very nuanced anymore. So we don't want to look at what causes most forms of mental illness.
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Unknown A
Depression, anxiety, even ADHD are the relational nuances of a family.
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Unknown B
And what do you mean by the relational nuances?
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Unknown A
It could be the neglect. Neglect, being ignored, having a mentally ill parent that no one knows about. Maybe a depressed mother who sleeps in in the morning and doesn't get up and feed you. You know, you get up and feed yourself. Or maybe you're a latchkey kid who comes home and you're isolated and alone. Things that people can't see, but you see. And so that's why people. I would say most people go into therapy not for big T traumas. Believe it or not, Even though the ACEs study says, you know, alcoholism, drug addiction, of course those are big T traumas. Most people come into therapy for little T trauma. And the reason why it's quite difficult for those people is there's not a lot of reinforcement from society that those are also traumas. But in fact, they are traumas. Attachment trauma. You know, if you were put in daycare.
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Unknown A
And so I have patients who come to me and say, I can remember being put in daycare. And, you know, you're not supposed to remember things until the age of four or five. But some patients can remember flashes of memory under five and they'll say, I was put into daycare. I just. All I can remember is screaming my lungs out for my mommy.
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Unknown B
You're not a fan of daycare, are you?
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Unknown A
No.
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Unknown B
What's wrong with daycare?
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Unknown A
Daycare raises salivary cortisol levels in children, the studies show, meaning those babies are put into stressful states at a very young age when their brains are developing. Daycare has been known to increase aggression and anxiety and behavioral problems in school in the school years. And those children are more likely to develop attachment disorders. Remember those first three years when children are so very fragile and vulnerable, taking them away from your body as a primary attachment figure and handing them over to strangers and leaving them there for hours on end will cause your child to have to develop pathological defenses. And that's what those children are forced to do. So it is the least good option of child care. So let's talk about what are the better options of child care if you have to use child care. You know, we say rest is best, and it is for a variety of reasons.
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Unknown A
But the best is your primary attachment figure for the first three years as much as possible.
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Unknown B
Primary attachment, attachment figure you mean the mother?
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Unknown A
Well, no, it can be the father. It's the go to person person who's a sensitive empathic nurturer. So when that baby's in distress, that baby gets their emotional needs met.
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Unknown B
It can be the father.
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Unknown A
It can be the father. But first the father has to learn how to be a sensitive. It doesn't come naturally to most men. With rare exception, I have known some patients where the husband, the father, was more sensitive than the mother. It's possible, but in general, instinctually, fathers are not sensitive empathic nurtures because it's against their evolutionary instinct. Their evolutionary instinct. If you are an animal on the plains of Africa, you're, you're, you're an impala, you're a daddy impala. Your baby is born and it comes out running because they are, they're like born and you're all running together. You get behind that baby and you're like, get going, buddy. You better get going or you're going to be lunch for that lion. That's a father's instinct, is to protect. It's protective aggression, right? That's different than the baby. And Paula falls down and the mother comes over and licks the baby and says, are you okay, honey?
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Unknown A
Can I give you a hug? If impala could talk. So it's a different instinct. So fathers can be taught to be primary attachment figures. But this is why I say it's so very important that we recognize the difference between men and women. If we just think they're exactly the same. And we put it, throw a father into the mix with an infant and the mother's going out and the father's staying home. If we don't talk about this stuff and talk about it openly and say when the baby cries, you have to mirror the baby's emotions. You have to do skin to skin. You have to soothe the baby, not encourage resilience, not, not distract the baby, not use discrepant emotions with the baby. If the baby's crying, don't go, oh, you're okay, you'll be fine. No, no. So it's really important if the father's going to stay home that he learns how to be a mother.
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Unknown A
You know, sometimes gay couples will come to me and I'll say, you know, two gay men will come. I'll say, which one of you is going to be the mother? Now that may seem politically incorrect, but someone's got to play that role. You cannot have two fathers for a child. A child needs a mother and a father. If you're Going to have two men, then one of them has to play that sense of empathic role. The other has to play the playful tactile stimulation role. Same with two women who are raising children. It's better to have a father and a mother than two mothers. So which of you is going to be the dad? Which of you is in a rough house and play basketball and roll around on the ground and tickle the baby and encourage exploration and risk taking?
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Unknown B
And can't you both do half each?
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Unknown A
No, no. And I'll tell you why. It's very confusing to children when parents say, I'm both mother and father to my child, I say, no, no. It's very confusing to children. They need to have a mother figure and a father figure. And I say that knowing today's politics and knowing today's social situation, you can have a mother figure who's not a mother. Maybe it's a nanny, maybe it's a grandmother. You need a mother figure and you need that mother figure to be around a lot if that mother figure is the one who provides the sensitive, empathic nurturing. So some of this can be taught, but it can't be taught unless you first acknowledge that there are differences. If we cannot as a society acknowledge the inconvenient truth that men and women are different in terms of their nurturing behaviors, then we can't teach anybody anything.
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Unknown B
I'm looking at some stats here in front of me on a graph which I was just reading as you're explaining that, because it seems to be quite relevant. And it shows that in 1960, one in 10 mothers were the sole primary breadwinner. Now it's almost at half. It's on its way to half. I know almost half the mothers are the sole or primary breadwinner in 2016. So I mean, these mothers can't just quit their jobs.
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Unknown A
So it's a good question. I get a lot of people coming to me and saying, and this is very common, I want to quit my job, I want to downscale, I want to work part time, but my husband won't support it because I made a promise that I would be the primary breadwinner. And now I want to switch. And he won't switch or he doesn't support me giving up my high paying job. But I feel this transformation of being with my baby and I don't want to leave my baby. The problem with young people is they promise each other. They make promises to each other that they probably should not make. Do not promise your spouse that nothing will Change. When you have a baby, say to your spouse, let's prepare for everything to change. Let's believe that anything is possible. And let's prepare. Let's strategize.
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Unknown A
Let's say, what if I want to stay home with the baby? What if I. I may not feel like that now, but what if I see this baby and I fall in love with this baby and I want to stay home and I'm the mother and I want to breastfeed and I don't want to go back to work for a while? And so then you say, what would that scenario look like? What could we do? What can we downscale in terms of our material life and our lifestyle that makes it possible for me to stay home? And I don't think we do that. Instead, women say nothing's going to change, and men say nothing's going to change. And then they have babies and they're not prepared for the changes that occur. Changes occur in men, too. It's not just women. I mean, fathers also can have this transformation, right, where they also want to work less.
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Unknown A
Or, you know, sometimes the transformation comes in the form of wanting to work less and being home. Sometimes it comes in the form of wanting to go out and take on the world so they can provide for the family, you know, but it does. It does stimulate something. It stimulates some evolutionary response in men and women. The hardest thing, I find is when men and women compete. It was much easier in the olden days. Now, not everything was good in the olden days, but you would say the idea that roles were defined bind meant that men and women didn't compete over their roles. Now what I think is causing a lot of these divorces and what's causing a lot of marital conflict is that men and women compete over everything. They compete over who's going to make more money. They compete over who's going to care for the baby.
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Unknown A
And so it's like you're a CEO of a company. You had your own company. So you can't have co CEOs. I mean, I don't know if you did, but it doesn't work. I mean, anybody that I've ever treated that says, we're going to do co CEOs, it always falls apart. You can have a CEO, you can have a president, you can have a head of marketing, you can have a cfo, you can have a CEO. These are different roles, and they don't compete with one another. They work as a team. Parenting is a team sport, not a competitive sport. And so what's happening today because of all this gender neutrality. And worst, I'm as good as you and you're as good as me, and we're the same. It means that couples are competing with one another and that's causing so much tension. Because what's best is when couples complement each other, when their differences mean that as a team, they work well to care for a child.
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Unknown A
And I would say the secret to success in a marriage is save your competition for the tennis court, for the basketball court, for running in the park, but don't compete over child rearing. Who's going to take care of the children? Don't compete over who makes money. Money. Find a way to complement each other and be a team.
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Unknown B
There's so many mothers listening now that are very career driven and you may be causing some existential crises. You may be reaffirming a lot of what they believe and think and what they feel intuitively. Are you saying then that for those women that are pursuing high octane careers in leadership roles, that also want to have children, that it's one or the other?
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Unknown A
No, I'm saying that there are certain careers, Realistically. Here's the inconvenient truth again. Bunch of inconvenient truths. There are certain careers that are hard. Harder to be a good mother, Period. I'm saying it. I know it's a harsh joke, but there it is. There are certain careers that are too demanding to be present for your children, whether you're a mother or a father. You think if you're a father who's a CEO, who's traveling around the world and misses your children's birthday and misses your children's soccer games and misses your children's piano concerts and isn't there to pick them up at school or have breakfast with them or have dinner, at the end of the day, you think that child is going to have a healthy relationship with that parent. Another myth. Here we are. I told you I was going to read the myths. Quality versus quantity time.
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Unknown A
You cannot be there for your children on your own time. You have to be there on their time. Meaning quality time is a narcissistic fantasy. I can be there on my time. So my child sits at home and is like a vase on the counter waiting for me to come home. And then I come home and there I can be present for my child. Your child has needed you all day long. And when you come home, that's on your time. You need to be there. A quality of time as well as a quantity of time. I Always say to people that you can be. You can be physically present but be emotionally checked out. But you can't be emotionally present if you're not physically there enough of the time. And that's just a reality. So what are the careers that are really good for whoever's going to be the primary attachment figure?
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Unknown A
Service fields. Fields where you have your own business and you can make your own schedule around your children. Where your children don't work around you, you work around your children. Physical therapy, psychotherapy, speech therapy, consulting maybe. Anything that's entrepreneurial. Anything that is a service field. No, I'm going to disagree with you. I'm going to say you can, but you have to be willing to set limits with yourself. So you have to be willing to say, do you know Monet, the painter? Yeah, he was famous in his own life. Now most painters have to be dead to be famous. And he painted on a very modest schedule. He'd get up in the morning to catch the light and then he'd be done by like 3 or 4 o'clock in the afternoon. He'd have dinner with his family. You know, we are the architects of our own lives. Kind of. No, not kind of.
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Unknown B
I'm representing the opinion of some people who might be listening. Obviously there's a whole lot.
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Unknown A
So who are the people who can't architect their own lives? You want to be a who do you think? I would say hedge fund managers.
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Unknown B
Okay, let me tell you that. So I was 18 years old, university, probably had sex that year. So if I had sex that year and had a baby and then I became a single parent, at the time I was, I had two CCJs, I was broke, I shoplifting food to feed myself. I printed off the dole forms, I never sent them in, but the forms we get, you know, like government assistance. And I was working in call centers, working night shifts because that was the best job I could get to pay for the rent that I had every month. If I'd had a baby at that exact moment in time, I didn't think I would be. It wouldn't resonate with me, what you're saying about being an architect of my destiny, because there is like immediate emergencies. I can't feed myself alone, a kid. So I'll tell you, I was still having family within.
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Unknown B
I was. My mum had basically told me because I dropped university, I was alone.
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Unknown A
Did you have a baby at 18? No.
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Unknown B
Okay. I'm hoping to.
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Unknown A
Okay, so first of all, it's a good reason to use birth control and not have a baby at 18. But okay, let's put that aside for a second. Let's put that aside for a second. Let's say that what we should be promoting in this world, I'm going to say this, it's controversial, is that whoever is the primary attachment figure has a career that they have control over and flexibility. Maybe the other person does it, maybe the other person works for someone or whatever. But in my book, I interview a lot of different women from a lot of different socioeconomic backgrounds. And one of the women that I interviewed was a nanny. And she said she had three children. And she said that the way that I raised my children, because I was a single mother raising three children, I had to work to pay the rent, she said.
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Unknown A
But I made sure that I didn't work past 5:00. I never worked past 5:00. I'd come home at 5:00. I didn't go out at night. People would say, let's go. I said, no, my children, this is my time with my children. So I don't go out at night. I don't go out on weekends when I'm not working. I am with my children. And my children knew that I had to work, but the way I used my free time was very carefully. She also said to me, and again, a number of, there are a number of interviews in there. She also said that the people who she left her children with, she never used daycare. She had extended family watch her child. So her neighbor, who was her dear friend, she paid to watch her child. And so that person was auntie, and that person was like family and was in that child's life forever.
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Unknown A
So what I say about childcare is there are different levels of importance. So the first, the best is your primary attachment, but your next best is kinship bonds, family or extended family, someone who has a similar investment to that child as you do.
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Unknown B
Even if the kids can be raised alone at that early age, vest going to daycare where they'll be around other kids.
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Unknown A
No, no, children don't need other kids until the age of three. They do something called parallel play. What they need is one on one connection. They need attachment, security, and they need their emotional needs met by one person. One on one after three, then the beginning of preschool, then they start to actually interact with one another. Until then, they're not playing together, they're just doing parallel, parallel play. So that's another myth, the myth that daycare is good for children, for socialization. No, children don't need socialization before 3 unless their mother's with them. So what I say is, do play dates, do playgroups, but be within eye gaze or ear, earshot of a child, meaning there's something called rapprochement, which is emotional refueling. So when children start to explore, when you've given them emotional security and they feel so secure that you're going to be there, then they start to take chances, they start to take risks.
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Unknown A
They start to toddle off. That's where the word toddler came from. They toddle away. But guess what they do for emotional security? They look back and they say, oh, she's there, it's okay. And then they keep playing. Or they run back and get a hug and then they run off again. You are their touchstone of security. And that's how children become courageous. That's how they develop the ability to explore and still feel secure.
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Unknown B
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Unknown B
Using your results, Zoe's app will also create a personalized nutrition plan for you. And this is exactly why I invested in the business. So my question to you is, how healthy is your gut? Head to Zoe.com to order your kit and find out. And because you're one of our listeners, use code STEPHEN10 for 10% off your membership. Head to zoe.com now, as you guys know, Whoop is one of my show sponsors. It's also a company that I have invested in and it's one that you guys ask me about a lot. The biggest question I get asked is why I use WHOOP over other wearable technology options. And there is a bunch of reasons, but I think it really comes down to the most overlooked yet crucial features. Feature it's non invasive nature. When everything in life seems to be competing for my attention, I turn to WHOOP because it doesn't have a screen.
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Unknown B
And Will Ahmed, the CEO who came on this podcast, told me the reason that there's no screen because screens equal distraction. So when I'm in meetings or I'm at the gym, my WHOOP doesn't demand my attention. It's there in the background, constantly pulling data, insights from my body that are ready for when I need them. If you've been thinking about joining Whoop, you can head to join.whoop.com CEO and try Whoop for 30 days risk free and zero commitment. That's join.whoop.com CEO. Let me know how you get on. You keep mentioning three years old.
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Unknown A
Yes.
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Unknown B
Why three years old? And there's kind of like two segments to this question question that I was keen to understand. Is there an element of neuroplasticity that makes the age of three so important? And the other kind of sub question I was trying to figure out in my head was, is the damage we do before three years old to a child inadvertently at all reversible? And is it damage?
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Unknown A
So plasticity. There are certain what we call critical periods of right or social emotional brain development. One is zero to three. And it's the most important because what's happening is something called neurogenesis. So it's the growth of cells and your presence as a parent who provides safety and security, buffers your child from stress, regulates their emotions, is critical, critical to them growing that right brain. Because 85% of the right brain is developed by three. Crazy, right? 85%. And you being there changes the architecture of that brain. That's how important you are. Like, people come up to me in cocktail parties and they'll say to me, ah, I don't have to be there. My baby's just sleeping and pooping and you know, they don't need me. I'm going to be around when they're talking and walking. I'm like, no. I'm like, you got it wrong. I'm like, you have to be here now.
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Unknown A
Because now is when the cell growth is happening. Every time a baby snuggles and takes the breast and looks at you with their eyes and you sing to them, Thousands, millions of synapses are firing. Okay, so you have think of a garden by three years of age, you're growing a garden. I know because I just started a garden where I have vegetables and flowers and it's abundant, it's an Abundant. I love my garden. This is an abundant garden of brain tissue, okay? If you do it right, it grows, it overgrows, you know, the flowers, the vegetables. It's growing crazy. Okay? Now they go into childhood. After three years old, they go into childhood, and for. From three years old till about nine years old, it's still growing, but it's not growing at the same pace. So say that it's still, like, growing a little. Like, like, like the garden grows in one big burst and then little bursts.
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Unknown A
So from three to nine, it's still growing. Right? But not. Not to the same degree as the first critical period of brain development. Now, adolescence comes 9 to 25. And now you have to prune back the garden, because if you don't prune back the cells, you don't need. It's as damaging to the brain as if you didn't grow them to begin with. So in these two critical windows, the environment dictates, do the cells grow? Do they get pruned? And when they're really little, you're their environment. You're it, Tag, you're it. When they're in adolescence, you're a very important part of the environment, but not all of their environment. They have friends, they have school, they have activities. Right? And. And so it's very important if you can get to the first window to get there, because you don't know what's going to happen to them.
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Unknown A
And you want to fortify them, right? You want to fortify them. So when they get to adolescence, which is really painful and hard and a struggle, that they have the inner resources to cope with adolescence, because it's so hard, adolescence, Right. And it offers such adversity, social adversity, academic adversity. Right. Social media. So both of these periods are important if you miss the first window.
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Unknown B
1, 0, 2 3.
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Unknown A
Yes. The title of my second book, it's called Chicken Little, the Sky Isn't Falling, Raising Resilient Adolescence in the New Age of Anxiety. If that isn't a mouthful, do you know what the title of the book was supposed to to be? It was supposed to be Second Chances.
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Unknown B
Ah, okay.
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Unknown A
And the title of Being There was supposed to be called the Lost Instinct.
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Unknown B
So if you messed up your kids, you get a second chance.
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Unknown A
You get a second chance. And what do you do? I want people to read the book because it's more nuanced than what I'm saying. A lot of what you should have done in the first three years, you got to be there. You got to be there in a Different way. You're not going to. I mean, they're not little. Little. So. But when they come home from school, if you are not there when the door swings open. Everybody knows that teenagers close their doors if they have doors, and that's their way of saying, my defenses are up, go away. If parents work really hard and then they come home and they go, knock, knock, knock, I'm here to spend time with you. How was your day? That door's closed. Closed, baby, closed. If you aren't there when the door opens on its own, on their terms, if you're not there when they're coming out to get a snack or to take a pee or to take a break from their studying, if you're not there then, and open for business, for communication, the door closes again.
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Unknown A
So it goes back to this idea that children need you when they need you, not when you're personally available. And if you miss that window, it's not the end of the world, because you can. A word that we use is to repair. You can repair a lot of the damage, but to repair the damage, you can't go back. Sort of like going to a confessional. If you're Catholic, you know, you go in and you say, you know, oh, Father, I, you know, I. I murdered somebody today. And the priest says, well, you know, say 12 hail marries. And I don't know, I'm not Catholic, but, you know, but you can't go out and murder again. So if you're going to repair, it means that whatever happens between you and your child, you're trying to be a better parent, you're trying to do things differently, right?
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Unknown A
You can't take advantage of their good graces and keep pushing them away, pushing them. But repair is possible because the brain is plastic and it's always growing and shrinking until it's. It's not.
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Unknown B
What if I'm 30 years old, for example, and I had a traumatic upbringing? Can I repair myself from the childhood trauma that I experienced between the ages of 0 and 10?
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Unknown A
The way that I would put it is it takes a relationship to cause the trauma and it takes another relationship to repair it. So the thing that most people don't understand about therapy and why I really recommend psychodynamic psychotherapy, some people would say psychoanalytic therapy, but a more in depth kind of therapy that lasts longer is because you develop a relationship. It's not that you are healed from some pithy thing that the therapist says. I mean, I wish I was so smart that I could say this. And you Know everybody would say you're a genius and pay me millions of dollars. Doesn' like that. Therapy requires the consistency of a relationship with a therapist because it's through that therapist seeing you through the ups and downs of your life, reflecting your feelings. It's, it's a kind of emotionally reparative experience. But it's not what the therapist says as much as the relationship, the long standing relationship with the therapist.
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Unknown A
So what's healing is the relationship rather than the interpretations.
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Unknown B
It cannot be a romantic relationship that then course corrects you in some regard.
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Unknown A
Okay. So the idea is that to really heal it requires relationships. And those relationships sometimes can be people that you love. The problem with people that you love is that you end up burdening those people. People with you can burden, overburden the people that you love with your conflicts, your internal losses. So you know, if you find yourself using the people that you love like therapists, if you find that you're using the people that you love to, to deal with past losses, I would say it can, it can corrupt the relationship. So you have to be careful. So the reason to go to a therapist would be to preserve the relate. It's not that you don't share with the person that you love, but you don't want to overburden your friends or your lovers with the burdens of your childhood trauma. Right. So I always say that therapy becomes like a safe container.
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Unknown A
You go to therapy, you talk to your therapist, you develop this trusting relationship where everything is left there, so to speak, in that container until you come back. But therapy is not for everyone. It requires laying down your defenses. It requires the ability to be open and talk about your feelings. There are types of therapies that you can go to if you can't talk about your feelings. Things like DBT or cbt. But for the most part, healing therapy requires being open. It requires trusting.
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Unknown B
You must encounter a lot of people that are in denial about their childhood trauma and the role it's played in shaping who they are. Because you'll have people, I'm sure, that are exhibiting adult symptoms, like maybe they can't form relationships very well, maybe they've got other forms of emotional erratic behaviour. And there must be occasions where you have a suspicion that it's linked to some unexperienced and they're in denial. Thinking about people that I know that have presenting symptoms in their life, really sort of like chronic presenting symptoms. But if you were to ask them if their child had played a role, they're almost like defensive of their childhood.
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Unknown A
So defenses are important. Defenses protect us. So. And people also have a misunderstanding of what therapy is about. The kind of therapy. I'm a psychoanalyst, so we don't. People think you go to therapy and they take your defenses away from you. I would never take someone's defenses away unless I could help them to replace them with healthier defenses. So what we do is an exchange. You don't take your foot off a landmine unless you have a really big rock to put in its place, right? So if you're going to let go of one defense, you have to trust the person you're working with that you'll find a better, healthier defense to protect you.
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Unknown B
Give me an example.
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Unknown A
If you used anxiety in childhood. If you use the anxiety to. To get attention, what if you complained as a child and you went around and said, you know, oh, I. You know, I'm worried about this, and I'm. And. And so in a way, it serves a purpose. That anxiety, that, that complaining, that expression of emotion, it gets the attention from your parents. And suddenly, and I do believe that there's a lot of this going on, a lot of kids are breaking down and saying, I'm anxious, I'm depressed. I do think many of them are, but I also think that many of them need their parents to understand them. So that would be what I call. It's a defense, but it's an unhealthy defense because what ends up happening is that the parents stop being able to hear them because they complain and the anxiety starts to grade on the parents and the parents pull away.
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Unknown A
Right? And so what would be a better defense for that child is to learn how to express what they need from their parents instead of just saying, I feel anxious or I feel depressed. But to actually say, you know, mom and dad, you don't really spend any time with me. You don't really. And when you're home, you're distracted, and you're on your computer and your iPads, and, and. And, you know, you don't really seem that interested in me. And so that's a better way of going about getting the attention that they need. So you're never taking something away from someone unless you have something better to give them. And that's a myth of therapy, right? So people feel that they're going to go into therapy and be left defenseless. Now, defensiveness, which you mentioned, is a different thing entirely. When someone is defensive, it means that it's an unhealthy defense.
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Unknown A
It means that you hit something so when you say to your friend, do you have any childhood trauma? And they say, absolutely not, what are you? That defensiveness as opposed to someone who says, you know, I can't think of any. Maybe, maybe, but, you know. So the ability to introspect about the good and the bad and integrate the good and the bad is a healthy sign. If you have a friend who can't talk about the sadness of their childhood, or a friend who can't talk about the happiness, who can't integrate the good and the bad of their childhood, you know, something happened there. And if you have a friend who won't talk at all, then you really know something happened there. You hit a sensitive spot.
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Unknown B
Are daddy issues real? Because the term is thrown around in culture like, oh, she has daddy issues. It's typically, she has daddy issues, isn't it?
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Unknown A
Right. So there's something called Oedipal development, which is sexual development. It's really relational development, but it's sexual development which is that all little boys fall in love romantically with their mothers and want to marry them. So all little boys say, I want to marry you, Mommy, Daddy, get lost. It's sort of like that. And all little girls want to be daddy's little princess and marry Daddy. I want mommy to get lost. And it's this period of about, oh, three to six, three to six years old. And I always prepare parents for this. Fathers need to reinforce themselves and feel secure enough. So when their little boys, who have been their buddies and who have loved them, when their little boys say, bye, bye, Daddy, get lost, they don't react. They don't go into a deep depression. They just, they hold it and they say, oh, I get it, you love Mommy.
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Unknown A
That's okay. Same with little girls. If their mothers overreact, become angry at them, reject them, say, oh, you just love your daddy. And so. But if daddies are not present enough for little girls, it does inform. So our first romantic relationships are with our opposite sex parent. So as a little boy, your first romantic relationships with your mother. As a little girl, your first romantic relationships with your father. If your opposite sex parent is not present at all, there's a loss there. So, you know, sometimes what can happen is if you don't have a present father, or if your father is really just absent, or if he's physically present but emotionally absent, you spend your life looking for that kind of edible connection, that kind of admiration, that kind of love, that kind of, you know, for someone to love you in the way that a father loves a little Girl.
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Unknown B
But with distrust built in.
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Unknown A
Well, not necessarily. I mean, sometimes it's too much trust. I mean, if you are hungry and somebody offers you scraps, you'll take the scraps, right? If you're hungry and somebody says, here's some crumbs of a muffin. So the problem is that.
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Unknown B
But what if they offered me the scraps and sometimes the scraps as I went to reach for them walking out and didn't come back, then I might develop a relationship that it's not safe to trust the scraps because.
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Unknown A
So that's a father who's negligent. But it still leaves that little, it still can leave that little girl with a strong desire to be loved in that way. So it's like a missing, there's a missing piece, right? So you'd say the romantic relationship with the opposite sex parent is a very important part of our sexual development and our relational development. And so it becomes a missing piece for that child who then grows into that adult. If a father was abusive to a little girl, then you know, that little girl may do what we call a neurotic repetition, which is she seeks out abuse of men because that's the only kind of love that she knew or understood. So, you know, you have to remember that, that children perceive of the relationship with your, with their parent as loving, no matter what the parent does to them.
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Unknown A
I used to work when I was a young social worker in foster care and the children who were physically abused by their parents and neglected terribly still wanted to be with their mothers and fathers. They didn't want to be taken away because that's, that was their mother and father and they perceived of that as love. So however we're raised, we perceive of that as love. The problem is, if it's not healthy love, then we can neurotically repeat or repeat that in our adult lives.
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Unknown B
Men, young boys and men. I was looking at some stats earlier on that's said there's been increased sexual inactivity amongst young men, which is an interesting stat. It's risen to almost 31% of men between the ages of 18 and 24 reporting no sexual activity in the past year. So that's almost doubled in about the space of 18 years. Oh, here's an interesting stat. High suicide rates amongst men. Men account for nearly 80% of all suicides in the US, the highest rate observed among 45 to 64 year olds. Globally, suicide is the leading cause of death amongst young men and a survey conducted in the UK found that an increasing amount of men feel hopeless and worthless and that are struggling with finding meaning and purpose in the world. The plight of young men. You talk in your books and your work about how the role of a man has changed and how that this might not be necessarily productive for the health and well being of a man.
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Unknown A
Yeah, we've taken away their purpose. When you take a human being's purpose away, remember the purpose for men was to protect their family, was to, it was to hunt in the old days, feed their families, but it was also to protect their families, it was to provide for their families. And what we've done in reversing everything is although we raised up women, and there are certainly positive things about raising up women, but when we raised up women, we denigrated men. And I have two sons, so they, this is very personal for me. And I also see a lot of young men in my practice, young adult men. And what I'll say is that they feel discouraged, they feel purposeless, they feel diminished. Yeah. And there's been something vengeful, I think about. So the feminist movement was meant to give women choice and to balance off what was imbalanced in society.
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Unknown A
But there's something vengeful about it. I think at moments I feel like there's something vengeful about the modern feminist movement, which is let's get them, let's diminish them, let's take over, let's push them out, let's, you know, let's beat them up, let's get, you know, let's show them who's, I mean, something really vengeful. So, so for me, the feminist movement was meant to create balance. It wasn't meant to, it wasn't meant to set into play this other kind of imbalance. And you know, more than I think 60% of universities are women now, as well as graduate schools. And so that means, and the studies show that men will marry at their educational level or below. Women will only marry at their educational level or above. And by diminishing men so much in terms of our education and professions, we basically taken men's purpose away. They feel purpose.
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Unknown A
And the other thing is, and I'm going to say when men stay home to nurture their children. Now remember, as mammals, we have defined roles that is not instinctual for men to stay home and nurture the young. It's just, it's a reverse of something. And the issue there is that there's an inverse relationship between oxytocin and testosterone. The higher the oxytocin, guess what, the lower the testosterone.
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Unknown B
Yes, so if we're staying home bonding.
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Unknown A
There'S a reason for that. So mammals, when they are nurturing their young, they don't want somebody mating with them. Go away. Right. So the idea is that when a female nurtures, she doesn't want to have sex. She doesn't want to. Right. So the investment in nurturing pushes away the investment in mating.
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Unknown B
And this is why I've read so many stats around men's testosterone dropping when they become fathers. Yeah, I couldn't believe that was true when I read it.
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Unknown A
It's true. There were some studies to talk about how women's testosterone goes up. Women have testosterone when they're out in the work world fighting like men that their testosterone goes up and men's testosterone when they stay home goes down. And what that's doing for sex lives, there's some research about, you know, that is the next world wave, which is what does it do to sex lives? Because men have to perform. They have to get it up to be crude. And so if your testosterone is low, you're not going to get it up. Right. Which is why there's all this Viagra and these patches and supplements and, you know, because it's not, it's not instinctually normal for husbands to stay home and nurture their children. And that's the inconvenient truth, how that affects men's and women's sex life. When women come home from their banking jobs and their law jobs, do their husbands not want to have sex with them?
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Unknown A
And, you know, is that breaking up something? So this is all. I think this is the next wave of we've reversed things societally, socially, fast. And then we hope that our evolutionary bodily responses are just going to catch up in, in nearly a century. And it just doesn't. Evolution doesn't work like that. It takes hundreds, if not thousands of years to change our, our bodily evolutionary responses. Right? Our instinctual responses. So this is, you know, it's, it's problematic. And also when men's testosterone goes down, they get depressed. So they don't perform sexually well. They get depressed, they feel purposeless, they can't do what they're instinctually supposed to do, which is provide, protect, hunt. You know, we talk about dei. I mean, why aren't we talking about, about DEI when it comes to men and women? Why aren't we talking about balancing the scales, giving men purpose again?
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Unknown A
And honestly, we should be talking about what happens to men when they actually do stay home and nurture their young.
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Unknown B
Is this that to support the idea that if you're at home raising your kids as a man, you struggle in the bedroom.
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Unknown A
So there was some research I know that was going on about that, how it affects sex drive. But when your testosterone goes down, it does affect sex drive. We're just not talking about it. So I have anecdotal patients. I have a patient whose wife was a hardcore woman in finance, and he could. Couldn't. He lost interest in her. He had to go out of the marriage and have affairs with women who were more feminine, who were more. So he could feel as if he could play that masculine role. He couldn't do that in his marriage. And so are we going to see kind of a shift in society as a result of this? We're already seeing it. I mean, the other thing that we're doing is to young boys. Let's talk about what we're doing to young boys. This starts very young. We basically educate young boys in a way that really favors girls.
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Unknown A
You know, from a very young age, we talk about being able to sit quietly and regulate your emotions and not be aggressive and not be impulsive. And these little boys are being diagnosed with adhd, many of them just for being little boys. Little boys need to run around. They have a lot of physical energy. They have tons of testosterone. When you're like between three and six, you have a surge of testosterone, and all you want to do is run and jump and play and be outside. And what we're doing, we're putting them in school, making them sit in circle time.
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Unknown B
So.
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Unknown A
So we marginalize them, we label them, we say they have a problem, we say that they have adhd, they have behavioral problems. And in many of them, the stress that I talked about is the stress of making little boys be more like little girls. And that's where it starts. And so then they go into childhood. And again, the educational system favors the way girls learn, not the way boys learn. How do boys learn? Boys have attention spans for very short periods of time, and then they need lots of physical activity. Activity. So ideally, if you go to look at the boys schools, what do they do? They run. The boys like running the dogs in the park. They sit for 45 minutes or half an hour, but then the boys get time off to run around, and then they'll sit another half an hour, and then they'll run around.
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Unknown A
I mean, they have like four Reese's Bearies a day. And so that's really better for boys. And little girls have more of a capacity to sit quietly in circle time and. And sort of, you know, they don't have as much testosterone. They don't have that need to run and jump and play to the same degree that little boys do. They do need to play. We're not letting our kids play boys and girls because we're trying to force left brain development on them too early. But we are forcing little boys into the box and they're not doing well in that box. And then they're labeled, they're labeled as having behavioral problems, adhd. And that label then follows them through childhood, sometimes into middle school, into into high school. Yeah.
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Unknown B
What would you change? I make you prime minister of the world, President of the world, and you can fix this issue.
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Unknown A
Oh, I would have little boys educated separately than little girls in the early years. In the early years, I would have boys schools and girl schools because little girls learn differently. And also there's been a lot of evidence to show that in the early years when you do single gender education, little girls will try things, will take risks with things that they wouldn't in front of little boys. And little boys will try things that they wouldn't take risks in front of little girls, like little boys are more likely to try art and painting and music. Little girls are more likely to try STEM and math and, you know, all these things that we talk about little girls should do. So the idea is that single gender education in the early years is, is better for little kids because they learn differently.
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Unknown B
What about as it relates to men? What do you change to fix the issues you're talking about with testosterone and those kinds of issues?
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Unknown A
Talk about it. We should be talking about it. We don't talk about this issue. How much, how many times have you heard what I just said? People don't talk about the fact that when you raise, when, if we're going to flip this around and have men be the nurturers, they're going to have pretty low testosterone. You're going to have to supplement their testosterone. And so, you know, and also you take their purpose away evolutionarily and they get depressed. Women have many sources of self esteem. They have work, they have children, they're relational. And for the most part, historically, men found their self esteem from meaningful and purposeful work and also from protecting their families. So what we've done is we've taken their purposeful work outside the home away. We've made their purposeful work staying home with children and you know, we've lowered the testosterone. So if you look at it and say we're trying to switch, it's like a Social experiment.
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Unknown A
We're trying to change something that's taken thousands of years of evolution to create and just, just, you know, less than 100 years. And it's, you know, it's problematic. So what would I do? I would talk about it. I would have couples talk about it. I think they need to talk about the competitiveness. I think they need to talk about the, the envy and the jealousy and, and even the, the disappointment. I mean, a woman who comes home and sees her husband caring for the children, on one hand she might say, oh, my husband's so sweet and lovely and I love that he cares for my children. And on the other hand, she says to her friends, I wish she was bringing in more money and I wish she was taking care, you know, I wish she was taking care of me. So it's problematic.
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Unknown B
There was a longitudinal studies in the Philippines that followed 624 men over almost five years and found that those who became fathers experienced a significant decline in testosterone testosterone levels. Specifically, newly partnered fathers had a medium decrease of almost 30% in morning testosterone and 35% in evening testosterone, which were significantly greater than the declines observed in single non fathers. Moreover, fathers who reported spending three or more hours daily in childcare had lower testosterone levels compared to those less involved in caregiving. And there's also an impact on co sleeping, where research indicates that fathers who co sleep with their children exhibit lower testosterone levels than those who do not. This suggests that close proximity during sleep may further influence hormonal changes associated with parental caregiving. One of the arguments I've heard before as to why men's testosterone dips if they're new fathers is because it's an evolutionary reason to make us not go out and cheat on parenting.
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Unknown B
Daycare, care about kids.
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Unknown A
Well, it's investment in it. So either you're invested in mating or you're invested in caring. Yes, yes and no. Because you still need to have testosterone to have a relationship with your wife, a satisfying relationship. So. And unfortunately, that doesn't stop men from going out and cheating on their wives because a healthy man would say, you know, well, we used to have sex twice a day, every day, and now that we have a baby, we only have sex once or twice a week because the baby's so small. And, and a healthy man would say, that's enough. I can compartmentalize. I can. Right. A less healthy man might say, I'm going to go out and get it someplace else because I can't get it here. So yeah, I mean, there's nuance to all the questions you're asking. But what I would say is that testosterone going down a little bit when you have a baby in the bed is fine, but the kind of testosterone we're talking, talking about going down when you stay home and nurture, we'll see.
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Unknown A
It could be problematic.
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Unknown B
My last question is about devices and technology. There's been a lot of books written recently and a lot of conversation around the impact that screens, social media, mobile phones have on children. What is your thoughts and philosophy towards raising healthy kids in a world of technology?
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Unknown A
Well, I think it's. The American Pediatric association says no technology under the age of two for good reason. No iPhones, no iPads. Right? You want to sit and watch a Mr. Rogers when their baby is two together, a rerun of Mr. Rogers Neighborhood, that's fine. But no technology after that. You want to really regulate that technology. Now why is that important? Because technology raises dopamine levels in your brain, which is why adults get addicted to it too. It's very addictive. And the problem is that with adults when you, when you look at technology, it does raise your dopamine. But there was some research to show that technology raises a dopamine in an adolescent's brain tenfold to that of, of. So in other words, it would be like if you smoked a joint, it would, you know, make you high. If an adolescent smoked the same joint, it would make them 10 times higher.
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Unknown A
It has to do with the, the, the sensitivity of the brain to dopamine and the lack of regulation. So the prefrontal cortex is the part of the brain that regulates emot emotions and it's not fully developed till about 25. So all that dopamine that has to be regulated is more easily regulated in an adult than an adolescent. So it's not good because it leads to addiction. Okay, it's not good because particularly social media, but all kinds of technology, they, they get the amygdala going. Remember that that little almond shaped stress regulating part of the brain, it turns on the stress reaction, which you don't want to do chronically. There's lots of problems with that. And in the case of social media with adolescents, particularly adolescent girls, it takes advantage. I mean you have to say that this was invented to take advantage. It's not a coincidence, it's manipulatively created, debated.
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Unknown A
Because the reason that it's so bad for teenage girls brains is because the self consciousness, the perfectionism is all the brain in a hyper alert state of stress and fear. You're putting those girls and boys into a hyper vigilant state of fear and stress. Right? I have to be perfect. I don't look as good as them. My dress isn't as pretty, so. So you're putting children into a fear state and then they, they can't separate from the device. It's like they get. There was a movie, I think it was called Inception, where you could get stuck in a paradigm, you could get stuck in this fantasy, right? In a virtual reality, in a way. They get trapped in this paradigm of perfectionism, social isolation, self consciousness, which is all the brain in a hypervigilant state of stress. So not good at all. Not good for adults. Much worse for adolescent brains.
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Unknown B
What is the most important thing we should have talked about today that we didn't talk about so far?
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Unknown A
I think we talked about a lot. But I think what I would say is that presence is just so critical to children and there's no replacement. This idea that we have as a society, society, that caregiving of children is something that can be generically assigned to others, that you can delegate, Delegate other things to others, delegate your accounting, delegate your laundry, delegate your cooking. If you're a CEO, delegate everything you can. But spend time with your children, your relationship with them, their mental health depends upon it. And that's not something we say. We say, work, work, work, work, make more money, everybody, work, work, and your children will be just fine. Well, clearly our children are not just fine.
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Unknown B
What do I do as an employer? I employ lots of people and I'm thinking, shit, do I need to give people three years off when they have a kid? Is, is that the.
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Unknown A
Well, in my opinion, give them as much time off as you possibly can. Men and women, men and women. Whoever is the primary attachment figure, I would say whoever's going to really be responsible for caring for that child. But then give them options. Give them choices of how to work in the years that their children are very young. Give them options to work part time or to share a job or to work from home half of the week so they don't have to leave their child and still they can work. Give them choices and options that allow them for some flexibility and control. If you know that an employee has young children, accept the fact that, that they may need to leave early and not stay as late as other people who don't have children. And that's going to make the people who don't have children angry.
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Unknown A
And you know what? Tough, because that's what those children need. Life isn't fair. It's not Always fair. And if you want to have a child, you too could have that. But the idea of exact parity, tough, because that's what society needs. It needs healthy children. If you're going to have a child and you need to leave every day at 4, so you're home for your children. So flexibility, control, options, as much time off in the beginning as possible.
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Unknown B
You realize that some of the things you say are controversial.
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Unknown A
Almost all of them, yeah.
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Unknown B
Why'd you say them anyway?
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Unknown A
Because somebody has to. Because they're the inconvenient truths that are stopping us from having healthy children who grow into unhealthy adults. And so somebody has to say these things. And if you're too worried about people liking you, then you don't sometimes say what needs to be said. Unfortunately, I don't care if people like me, but I do care that people like their children and want to be with their children. So that's why I say these things.
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Unknown B
Why is it so personal to you? I can see it in your face.
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Unknown A
Well, then you'd have to ask me about my own personal story. My personal story, just to wrap it up quickly, is that my own mother was a very loving mother, but could dissociate. And by dissociate, she had a lot of trauma as a child, and I think she managed it by emotionally. She was like a little girl. She's very sweet, but she was like a little girl. And so I couldn't always feel her. I couldn't. She was like sand that slipped through my fingers. So I can remember the pain, but she was. She was there physically, but I could remember the pain of the absence of her mind. And she could feel for me, which is why I have such compassion, but she couldn't think about me. So there's two things parents have to be able to do for children. They have to be able to feel for them.
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Unknown A
They have to feel empathy for their pain, for the distress. They cannot look away from their children's pain and distress. You cannot look away. You do not have the luxury of looking away from your children's distress. But you also have to be able to think about them and be able to think about who they are. My mother could feel for me, but she couldn't think about me because she would dissociate. So my own personal pain is having had a loving mother who had some limitations. And so it made me want to be a better mother, but it also made me want to treat people who want to be better mothers and fathers.
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Unknown B
What were the symptoms that. That had on you as a young woman growing up.
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Unknown A
As an adolescent, I struggled socially and I struggled with my identity and personally and, you know, self esteem, I would say. And it wasn't until I went into things. Therapy. Oh, I tried a lot of things in my 20s. I worked in television production. I worked in. I worked on Capitol Hill. I worked. I worked in many different public relations. And in the end, I found myself sitting in my therapist's office one day and looking around and saying, this is where I want to be. I want to be. I want to do what she does, and I want to help people the way she's helped me. So that relationship with my first therapist and then my second therapist and, you know, as psychoanalysts, we have to be in treatment for many, many, many years because the point is we have to work on ourselves so deep, deeply that we don't do harm to patients inadvertently with our own issues.
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Unknown A
So we have to be very, as we say, very organized as a person. But, yeah, so that's my personal story and why mothering is so important to me, and the vulnerability of babies is so important to me.
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Unknown B
Erica, we have a closing session on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest, not knowing who they are leaving it for. And the question that has been left for you is, what does your obituary say?
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Unknown A
Oh, my gosh. I want to know who left that you're going to tell me after. Oh, boy. What is my obituary say? Kind, generous, compassionate, fervent in her beliefs, stubborn as hell, a good friend, a good mother, a wonderful wife. Yeah.
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Unknown B
I think it will. I certainly think it will. And I think there'd also be an additional couple of sentences there that speak to the value that you've given to the world through the work that you do. Now, people might not agree with everything you say because people have lots of different opinions on these subjects, but I'm of the opinion that people who are willing to deliver their thoughts, their truth, based on the science that they've experienced and that they've read and what they've studied and the experiences they've had, the clients that they've seen, is so unbelievably important, because I think if we look back through history, progress has occurred when people have dissented from the accepted narrative. In fact, I probably wouldn't be able to sit here in America as a black man if it wasn't for people who had the courage of their convictions to dissent from certain narratives.
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Unknown B
And so I've always. I think I've had it hardwired into me. That disagreement is productive, especially when it's well meaning. And that's exactly how I see your work. I think that you're challenging a narrative and bringing evidence and a new opinion to the table. A different perspective that I think is very important for so many. And it's been so interesting for me because I've struggled. I'm approaching that season of life where I become a father and I'm reading all this stuff about leave your kid to cry on the floor in the supermarket or put them in timeout or.
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Unknown A
Oh, I am so giving you my number.
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Unknown B
Yeah, I've been trying to wade through this storm of like bull parenting advice and bullshit and stuff and it's really wonderful to hear your perspective because it is a counter perspective. It's a perspective that nobody really wants to say out loud. And therefore for me, it's useful. Thank you, Erica. Thank you so much for your time generosity today. I really appreciate it and please continue to do what you do. I'm very excited for your upcoming book. I think it's next year, isn't it? It is about divorces. If anyone wants to find more of your work, we've got these two exceptional books here. Being There While Prioritising Motherhood in the First Three Years Matters, which is a wonderful book that was published in 2017, I believe. And this one here, Chicken Little the Skies and Falling Raising Resilient Adolescence in the New Age of Anxiety, which was published in 21, I believe.
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Unknown B
I'll link both of these below. I highly recommend you read these books if you're interested in these subjects like I am. But where else can people find you?
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Unknown A
Www.comisar k o m I s a r dot com and also at Attachment Circles. The website should be up and running soon. If you're looking for community and education, come to Attachment circles.
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Unknown B
Great. I'll link both of those below. Wherever you're listening to this now. Eric, thank you.
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Unknown A
Thank you for having me.
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Unknown B
Some of the most successful, fascinating, insightful people in the world have sat across from me at this table. And at the end of every conversation, I ask them to leave a question behind in Famous Diary of a CEO. And it's a question designed to spark the kind of conversations that matter most, the kind of conversations that can change your life. We then take those questions and we put them on these cards. On every single card, you can see the person who left the question, the question they asked. And on the other side, if you scan that barcode, you can see who answered it. Next something I know a lot of you wanted to know. The only way to find out is by getting yourself some conversation cards, which you can play at home, with friends and family, at work, with colleagues, and also with total strangers on holiday.
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Unknown B
I'll put a link to the conversation cards in the description below. You can get yours@thediary.com this has always blown my mind a little bit. 53% of you that listen to the show regularly haven't yet subscribed to the show. So could I ask you for a favor? If you like the show and you like what we do here, you want to support us, the free, simple way that you can do just that is by hitting the subscribe button. And my commitment to you is if you do that. And I'll do everything in my power, me and my team, to make sure that this show is better for you every single week. We'll listen to your feedback, we'll find the guest that you want me to speak to, and we'll continue to do what we do. Thank you so much.