#680 - Dr Anna Machin - Do You Actually Need A Father To Raise A Child?

26:29So I always get my dad's like, oh my god, I now can't watch charity appeals on the tele, you know, without crying. And it's partly because you have your test history. So it's emotional, but it's emotional in a sad direction. It's not like they get more aggressive emotional. No, no, they tend not to actually, that's probably because there's a drop in testosterone. So we don't see in some male other animals who don't tend to do the caring side, but tend to do, for example, defense of the nest. We will see more aggressive behavior. That tends to be caused by the increase in a hallmark called vasopressin, which actually isn't terribly important in humans.

27:05Men have kind of replaced that with oxytocin. So we don't tend to see increases in aggression, but we do tend to see increases in stress response when we see increases in, yeah, vigilance, basically just sheer vigilance for what's going on. Yeah, that's very interesting. Okay, so let's roll the clock forward. This imaginary father and his imaginary sleep deprivation has got to maybe three to six months in, and the baby's a little bit less of a puddle on the floor. I've heard this story of, you know, it's very important for the child to lie on the father's chest, skin to skin contact. How much of this is broscience and how much of this is legit?

27:41Absolutely, legit. If there's one thing I will tell a father after birth is put that baby on your chest. Still here, even though we've spent years trying to educate the medical establishment, we still find that fathers aren't offered it as routine, which is ludicrous. And we still have to say to them, you have to be assertive enough to ask for it and say, please give me the baby I want to put baby on my chest. The reason for that is that human babies are sensory beings like a lot of little baby mammals. They do everything. Their senses are very heightened. One of the senses that's not heightened is vision, but they are amazing at smelling.

28:19They're amazing at feeling and touch. So if you put them on your chest as a father, what happens is they first will they smell you and they start to smell who you are because they can't really see you. Secondly, a wonderful thing called bar behavioural sink really happens. So when you put a baby on your chest, their physiology starts to go into time with your physiology. So they'll come to the same temperature as you. That heart rate will come to the same heart rate as you. Their blood pressure will come to the same blood pressure as you. Okay. Also, touch is the key release of bondage hormones.

28:51Oxytocin dopamine beta endorphin. If you want to release those, the best thing you can do is use touch. So skin to skin contact after birth, skin to skin contact at any point during the baby's life is really, really critical for fathers. So it's something that's routinely given to women, but not to men and actually in a way arguably it's more critical for men because moms got that little bit of head start with her bonding home as having gone through childbirth. But it's really critical as the first interaction between a father and child, I think. Robyn taught me about the release of bonding hormones when finger over skin movement is kept at two centimetres per second or less.

29:33Yeah, there's a particular rhythm and it's why we find some touch or some striking irritating and some striking really lovely. And I suppose you know you might have a partner who strikes and sometimes you're like No, that's really. And it's usually because it's at the wrong frequency. You have these special hairs and special nerve cells in our skin and it's just a very particular strength rate. Apparently that was, if you run that back and you look at the primatology side of it, it's a pace at which it would be quick enough to be able to find and groom for. But if it was any quicker than that, you're not going through and actually being able to pick out whatever the things are.

30:13Yeah, okay, so we've spoken about kind of some of the challenges that both dads and mums face. What is the difference in the roles that mums and dads are supposed to play? Like why are they here when it comes to the raising of children? Okay, so we have to this, this is where it can all get horrible political and I can be miscreated horribly and picked up by both sides of the argument. From an evolutionary point of view, as I mentioned earlier, evolution hates redundancy, so it will not cause two roles, like parenting roles, to be exactly identical, if that's not required. So what's happened in human evolution is that there are some things that both parents do.

30:52So both parents are care, both parents are highly empathetic. If you look at the brain activity and the brains of mothers and fathers when they're interacting with their children, we see equal, we see synchrony in empathetic areas of the brain, we see synchrony in the care -taking areas of the brain. but beyond that there are some really distinct differences and they seem to relate partly to the evolutionary age of the two roles and partly to the fact that mum's role is quite biologically constrained. Partly by childbirth, partly by breastfeeding, particularly in the early stages where dad's role is much more flexible.

31:32So what we have found is that if we look at peak activations in the brain when we're looking at interactions with mom, dad and baby. The big activations in the maternal brain are in the core of the brain. So the limbic hair of the brain, the unconscious brain, very, very, very ancient is all this time and that's where nurturing is and attachment is and risk detection is. So there's really fundamental caring things. So you know, you look at the tiniest little bowl or mouse and it's got the same thing happening in its brain. Dad's obviously that bit lights up but the peak in activation is actually in the neocortex, the newest bit of the brain, which is understandable, because it's an evolutionarily quite young fatherhood.

32:12And there we see a lot of activation in the social cognition areas of the brain. So that's at the front of the brain, and that's to do with being able to sort of maneuver your way through the complexities of social life. And there is lots of different things involved in that, so it might be social communication. It might be things like empathy, it might be things like what we call sharing, caring and helping. But it can also be things like resilience, mental resilience. And so, Dad's role, I've kind of reduced it in a simple catchphrase, but Dad's role is to scaffold the child's entry into the world beyond the family.

32:54So, what Dad is there to do is once all All that very initial nurturing has happened and the baby starting to grow and maybe Mum has another baby is to take that child and this is what would have happened 500 ,000 years ago. Take that toddler and start to prepare them to go beyond the family. So the first thing they might do is go to preschool. And we know from research that the attachment to father builds with their child, the sensitivity of their parenting to that child is the biggest predictor in how well that child transitions into preschool. So how good are How good are they at sharing caring and helping?

33:30How good is their social communication? How good is their emotional inhibition and regulation? Those are all driven mostly by the relationship that child has with their father. Because it seems to me that dad is the key to this. And what's really interesting is, as an anthropologist, I study fathering around the world. So obviously, how a culture views father does very, and we have certain views in the West, and those aren't necessarily the views shared around the world. But what we do see is regardless of whatever culture you're in, every dad is doing that social scaffolding. When you reduce everything away, that's what he's doing.

34:05So it might be, you know, a study group in Kenya called the Kipsigis, who are tea planters, quite a patriarchal community, very male driven. But dad will take, well, first of all, as soon as the child is able, he will take the child into fields to teach them how to use the crop. But the most important thing he does is he takes them to the market and he teaches them how to build the social network That's going to enable that kid to negotiate and sell the tea So he will do that even in the West we do that, you know dad might be might you know get their really good Work experience gig because he's built a really good network on the golf course or at the country club or wherever it might be and so dads are very involved in making sure their kid has the network, has the social skill, has the resilience to actually survive in our world.

34:53And part of that resilience is things like taking appropriate risk, helping, you know, helping them deal with challenge, helping them deal with failure. And we see that from very early age, that's what Ruff and Tumble play does partly. And so dad is there to make sure this kid has the skills to survive outside the family. And that seems to be the key role of fathers. What is the role of challenge that seems to be one of the key differences that you've found between mum and dad? Yeah, the role for challenge is because we live in a really difficult world. And you as a child and as an adolescent have to learn to deal with that challenge, navigate that challenge, get over it, deal with failure, dust yourself down, get yourself back up, maybe find a different way around it or whatever it might be.

35:37And you need to be given those challenges in a way as a child, which is challenging, but not too much. And that's difficult. Some parents shirk away from that completely and it's the whole cotton wool ball thing. I love this might go a little bit too far, but it's really important your child confronts challenge. And it seems to be that dad is the key one in doing that. And it starts because of Ruffentumble play. So, Reffentomal Play starts at around six to nine months. It's when you see fathers and most fathers do this and most people recognize it. You know, it's when you, you know, it's quite robust.

36:16It's quite physical. There'll be wrestling. There'll be tickling. There'll be running around. There'll be jumping off stuff. There'll be throwing each other around the room. And it's really critical to child development. When dad say to me, what's the one thing I can do with my child to build our bonds to help my child. I'll say play with them. It is the most critical thing and this whole fun parent thing kind of annoys me a little bit because actually when dads do it, they're not, I mean, it's fun, but they're not doing it because they're the fun parent. They're doing it because it actually, developmentally, is critical to the child because the child starts to learn about reciprocity and social relationships.

36:50Play has to be fun for both people. Otherwise, it's, you know, it descends. So it's that give and take of play. It's understanding, you know, am I actually pushing the other person too much that they're not enjoying this anymore? So empathy isn't wrong. It's about physical challenge. Oh my god, this is quite difficult, but I know this amount of it is about risk. How can I assess risk? Actually, flinging myself off the top of this climbing frame might be too much. So, and it actually starts to build the child's ability to see all those things. And that just goes on throughout life. So we know looking at adolescence, that the biggest factor in a child's mental health when we look at the parental input is actually the relationship they have with their dad.

37:25Dad is like the superhero of mental resilience in adolescents. For boys and girls. For boys and actually for girls that's even more powerful. And we think that it's only really been studied in the West, though there's been a few studies in China. We think that's because in a patriarchal world, if you have a dad who spends time with you, who inputs into your life, who values your opinions, first of all it's amazing for yourself to be. And it's saying, you know, you are valuable, what you say is valuable and I'm going to support you in saying it. And in a patriarchal world, that's quite a powerful message to give a girl.

38:00But it's okay for you to voice who you are. And I am here and I'm going to support you in that. So actually, it can be a bigger impact on girls than on voice. So that's us getting up into adolescence. Just to round out that sort of conversation about play, what does play do for the father or for the bond with the father, beyond the child in isolation, I know risk, I know reciprocity, I know empathy. Yeah. Okay. So it's one of the key ways that fathers build their bonders through play because as I've said, you have to interact with your child and one of the key ways you can do it is through a full -time play because because it's fast and it's breathless and it's exercise and it's touch and sometimes a little bit of pain.

38:42It releases a lot of oxytocin and particularly beta and all from which is your body's pain killer and it's released during exercise. and those are really powerful bonding chemicals. And because it's so fast and so in a way time efficient, it does it in this souped -up way. So you could give your baby a massage, and that would be lovely, and they'd get some beta endorphin, and they'd get some oxytocin. But if you rough and tumble play with them, it's much, much more an impact, at much high levels of those chemicals. So it's actually a really good way of building a tight bond pretty quickly with a child.

39:11What's really, really interesting is rough and tumble play is mainly a Western phenomenon. We do see it in other cultures, but it's rarer, and that is because most fathers in Western cultures don't have much time with their children. They are time poor because of the culture we have and they're the primary breadwinner. And therefore, this is developed to enable them to very quickly bond with their children's time efficiency. High ROI strategy for bonding. Yeah. Whereas, if we go and look at the Aka, okay, who are in the Congo, they are the most hands -on fathers in the world, they spend at least about 55 to 60 percent of their day in actual physical contact with their children.

39:51They don't really do it, but they are with their children all day, they're carrying them, they're singing to them, they're telling them stories, they're going on the on the net hunt with them. They don't need to do it in the same way. And so they don't. I know that it's going to be hard to make the comparison because the difference in culture and and so on. Is there something different about the upbringing, the risk tolerance, the empathy, either in childhood adolescence or adulthood of the children who are given this more protracted lower intensity bond with dad from the Acker as opposed to the high peak, high ROI thing?

40:30I'm wondering if there's something that the Ruffentumble play gives or doesn't give that a flatter, longer equivalent of play per day does? No, we don't really see any difference actually in terms of bonding, in terms of attachment, in terms of adjustment of children. The only difference actually between something like the Aka and maybe some Western fathers is the degree to which they will allow their children to confront risk. So little Aka baby, little Aka toddlers are walking around with knives. You know, it's a hunter -gatherer of society. They don't quite have the same, I don't know, lack of tolerance for severe risk and actually children learning skills early on.

41:11So actually that's really the only difference you see with them is that they're there, you know, lighting fires and carrying knives and doing all these things at a very young age which probably most of us was kind of bulk out but they seem to be fine. Roll the clock forward then. Let's get into adolescence and the particularly useful role of dads when we get there. Yeah. So adolescence is a key time and it's a time when we see a lot of rewiring of the adolescent brain. So when you go through puberty, there's a lot of dewiring, rewiring and it's a difficult time for children. It's a particularly different time, mental health wise because we're starting to see a change in the focus of attachment from parents to peers and that means that actually your ability to navigate the social world at that point is really, really critical.

41:58And we see a lot of the mental health issues that young people have manifest themselves within the social sphere. So things like social anxiety, for example, things like body issues. They tend to be within the social sphere caused partly by the society in which the child lives. And because of that, it seems to be that because dad is the one that has these skills to scaffold the child and also the person who has been like the key resilience builder in the child. That continues into adolescence. But what's really interesting is dad doesn't really have to do anything amazing. So you don't have to spend hours with your adolescent or you don't have to spend lots and lots of money.

42:38Actually, what seems to work with adolescence is just feeling that you as a father value their company and you as a father as a busy person have taken the time to spend time with them maybe doing a hobby they like. Or it can be something as mundane as washing the car, walking the dog, making Sunday lunch, just something where the dad has said, I'm going to spend this time with you. And what's really interesting is, is how children view whether or not their parents value them, difference between moms and dads. So do you want to think their mom values them? If their mom remembers their favorite breakfast cereal or makes sure their sports kit is packed or all that kind of thing.

43:16They value their dads because they feel they're their dad values them because he spends time with them. And that might be because dad's time is seen as this very concertina thing. So it's about doing those things with the child. It's about having a secure attachment to the child. And secure attachment starts as soon as birth begins. But if you can maintain that secure attachment all the way through to adolescence, it's really, really powerful. And we know that what you do with your kid as an adolescent as a father carries them well into young adulthood. So they've been studies showing that dads who have good secure attachments, who spend time with their children.

43:54For us all those kids have much higher self -esteem, they're much less likely to have things like depression or anxiety, they're much less likely to report loneliness. But as a young adult, for us start the mental health is better, but also for example, just dealing with things like stressful things in their daily life, they are much more capable of dealing with those things. So what I'm thinking? Yeah. I've got it in my head about trying to fold into the discussion of teen girl depression, 60 % of 12 to 16 year old US females say that they have regular or persistent feelings of hopelessness, etc, etc, etc.

44:39I'm trying to work out or deduct the base rate from that of fatherless homes. I'm trying to work out, you know, whether Jonathan Height is correct at folding this at the feet of smartphones and a hijack of female comparison during the time that they switch from parent to peer association and how much of it is a little bit more fundamental than that and its absentee fathers. That could be absentee fathers due to it being single parent households, that could be due to the increase in living costs and the fact that dad needs to work more, which means that they're not as involved. That could be if Jonathan is adamant that it needs to be to do with technology, it could be to do with the distraction or the increase in distractibility of dad from screens, which means that he's not spending as much time with kids.

45:31But yeah, looking at the pathologies and challenges is that young men and young women are facing as they get into adolescence and then young adulthood. Can you draw lines between fatherless homes or a lack of male parental input into raising kids up? Do you know what? You've mentioned so many different factors there and they will all be important because it's a multifactorial problem. I wanna make two points. The first is that we need to be very careful about what we mean when we talk about a father. Okay. In the West, we associate the word father with biological father and so we talk about father absence because the biological father is not in the home or not in the life of the child.

46:09If you look at other cultures in the world, that obsession with biological fatherhood is a little bit strange. So in some societies the biological father doesn't really factor at all, particularly in matriarchal societies. In many societies they have what's known as a social father and that can be a grandfather and uncle, an elder brother, lots of people. So in South Africa for example, it's quite normal within black communities for the grandfather to raise the children because the father has to go away to work. And that's perfectly normal. And the grandfather has a special name for father. In some societies, kids have whole teams of fathers who will do something different.

46:44And that might be the biological father and the social fathers. Who knows. So I think we need to be very careful about talking about absentee fathers because actually if you look at many children who are in single parent households with a mother, if you ask them who are the significant men in your life, they will come up with some. And we assume there is no father figure in their life, but that father figure doesn't have to be the dad, it could be the grandparent, it could be a teacher, it could be a coach, it could be a brother, it could be your mom's best friend. It doesn't have to be the biological father, it has to be someone who is willing to, and might even not even consciously know what they are doing, but they are feeding into that child's development.

47:24So first of all, I would make that point that we are very biased in the West towards biological fathers and we needn't be. Secondly, it's very multifactorial. Certainly, I think part of the reason I support fathers in relation to more equality in the home with things like paternity leave and things like that is because they are important to children and they are important to child development. And we find that children who have more input from their father do tend to be more resilient and they do tend to be more successful outcomes, particularly girls. So, you know, that is the factor having that father figure in your life.

47:59And that's why we do try and fight here in the UK for more rights for fathers. But then again, I agree social media is an issue. And I talk about that in a very different area of my life, talking about the mismatch between the speed of evolution of the human brain and the speed of our ability to innovate. So we have a very, very ancient brain that can't cope with the way we've innovated the iPhone, for example. We are not made to operate within that environment and it's a major, it hand -to -caps our brain's ability. We don't get all those lovely positive bonding hormones. We don't, we are seeing something that quite often is lying to us and we're not terribly good at spotting what's lying to us if it's not right in front of us.

48:41So theory of mind, we are not very good at theory of mind at a distance. So social media certainly has a role, I think, but it's not the only role and it really does depend upon the child. So there's a real interplay between a child's personality and social media. So you will get a child, you could get one child who was on social media eight hours a day and would be completely unaffected by it and then you'll get another child who is more vulnerable. It's really, really complicated. But I think the reason why I try and pick the fatherhood bit of it is because kids have evolved to have these two roles in their lives.

49:19And the science shows us that the dads are primed to do this well. The science shows that the fathers are important developmentally to their children. We know that where fathers have secure attachments to their children, the children have better outcomes. And we know that that's good for society. So the reason why I fight for fatherhood and more equality in the home is because of that and because it is good for children. It's good for fathers, it's good for families and it's good for society. It's good for women. If you can get fathers, if you can get equal paternity leave for fathers with materially, women can go back to work sooner.

49:49They have less of a career penalty, they're then sharing what we call the career penalty with the fathers. The gender pay gap reduces. So it's kind of for those of us who campaign and do the research of fathers, it's kind of a bit of a no brainer, but convincing governments is another issue. Yeah, why is it the case given that the mothers want the best outcomes for their children? mother's also want the best outcomes presumably for themselves. These are facilitated through making men more integrated through making them more necessary into the raising of children. Is it just short -sightedness and a lack of insight into your work that's causing a kind of anti -dad surplus of requirements, male narrative at the moment culturally do Do you think?

50:39There are several things. Our media culture hasn't changed enough. So we still, it's getting better. We have less representations of the completely useless dad or the surplus dad in Advert, Sontelli and sitcoms, but it's still there. It's a very ingrained belief. Paul Massimson, Peter Griffin. Oh, you know, and if you've ever watched Pepper Pig, I mean, I love Pepper Pig. Daddy Pig is just the worst representation of fatherhood you've ever seen. He's completely useless. And that's funny. So there's that, there's, there is, and I am feminist to my very core. Unfortunately, there is an element of feminism that doesn't want men to be involved.

51:21And they want the primacy of the woman to be kept as a parent. And they feel that men are moving into what is a female space. Now, if you look at the evolutionary story and you look at the science, that's obviously completely ludicrous, but it's a belief. And I have had quite, I've had back lashes from fellow women because of the work I do, because I should be studying mothers as a woman. So there is that backlash. Governments just don't want to invest in it, you know, it's, we've had the system we've had for such a long time. It doesn't matter, I can hit them over the head with my research and my book till I'm blue in the face.

51:59And we have all been doing recently in the UK we've had a massive consultation on paternity leave. We all grouped up to Parliament, we all presented everything which has been, you know, it's highly, highly convincing. We can show you the child outcomes, we can show you how much because ultimately it's all about money. We can show you how much the government will ultimately save. But first of all, they're not going to save that money for like three decades. So this current government, I'm not interested because I will be well -retired by then. And they've just come out the end and changed practically nothing.

52:28There was a real reluctance to do it, you know, even though we've got perfect examples from Northern Europe where it works very, very well.

52:40Yeah, it's a shame. It's a shame. I've been having a lot of conversations. I had a lot of conversations about dating for a long time and now I'm having a lot about the role of men and masculinity and what it means to be a man and so on and so forth. And yeah, it's unfortunate that any gains for men are seen as a loss for women. You know, there's zero summinus to a lot of the conversations. And yeah, what else? What if people said you're this self -confessed feminist with her bona fide's out front, writing a book about men and dads and saying that we need to give them more budget and more attention and more care and more sympathy and more resources.

53:24What's the pushback being like? The pushback is, I quite often get the response, quite an angry response. So every now and then I get called in to do radio phonons and quite often I will get somebody on the phone saying to me, these men, you know, haven't given birth, they haven't gained through the pain of it. They, particularly if you're talking about postnatal depression actually, they should all just pull themselves together. So that's a classic. That there are limited resources and all those resources should go to women. And I can kind of see that argument here with the NHS, but what really gets me is the lack of empathy because empathy doesn't cost anything.

54:01It's limitless. But we have to pay the zero sum game with empathy as well. So if we give any empathy to men, then women get less. No, actually, that's not what happens. We're just empathizing with both of them. Why is it that it's seen as a loss that you're supporting a man. You can actually support both. It's amazing, but you can't. So you very much get that attitude that you give to one, you're taking away from the other. And I find that astonishing. When people say particularly they pull themselves together, I said, I do say to them, would you ever say that to a woman who was struggling? So why do you think it's okay to say it to a man?

54:39Yeah. You know. But it's very ingrained. I think it's, I think that they feel threatened. I think they feel threatened by what it means about their identity. It doesn't mean anything about their identity. But I think they think it does. It means we're taking some sort of primacy away from them, I think, maybe. I had a conversation, I've had a few conversations, but Dr. John Barry from the Centre for Male Psychology, going to be thinking about something. So I'm going to read you a little excerpt from one of my newsletters recently. A common question is, why don't men just do better? Surely they can try harder in school, employment, and health.

55:17Chop chop men hurry up and stop being so useless. Well, no other group is told that when they suffer with poor performance or accolades in the real world, that they should just pull themselves up by their bootstraps. We don't tell any other group to talk about their problems. Instead, we spend billions in taxpayer money and private charity to set up committees, departments, campaigns, and funds to solve the problem. In simple terms, if a woman has a problem, we ask what can we do to fix society? If a man has a problem, we ask what can men do to fix themselves? And I think that this sort of imbalance, specifically in certain areas, this isn't everywhere, and there are still areas in which the imbalance runs in the other direction.

55:53But especially around parenting, there is this empathy gap for sure. Oh yeah, no. Dr. John Marikor's at Gamma Bias, I think it's his technical to do for it. And yeah, it sucks. You could have a guy going through postnatal depression, being told, you didn't go through the pain of childbirth. Yeah. I wasn't sure that I was going to be a good dad. And now you're telling me that I'm not being efficiently supported. And he is also, I can remember one of the guys who I worked with, he was possibly one of the worst cases of postnatal depression I saw. And he was, his wife, the birth was traumatic. He was left standing in a room on his own for six hours with the newborn baby.

56:35He'd been shoved in the room. The wife had been taken off somewhere. Nobody told him anything. They didn't give him anything to feed the baby. The baby was screaming. He didn't know what he was doing. So first of all, he thinks his wife's dying. Nobody tells him what she's dying. And he's left with this baby. Then they get discharged from hospital. And because he only gets two weeks paternity leave, she's in hospital for 10 days. So he's actually home with the baby and the wife who's still very ill. for three days, then he has to go back to work, leave her on in her own. So he's like, oh my God, feeling horribly guilty, terribly stressed, how is she gonna be on her own?

57:07Get home at night, try to do everything, stays up all night with a baby, then goes back to work. Then because, you know, now I have to earn more money because I was job, then takes promotion to a new job. So we've got the pressure of trying to impress on the new job, learn the new job, still got a sick baby, sick mum with baby. And surprise, surprise! He gets postnatal depression. Of course he does. He's got all these different conflicting, you know, with men are told now, you have to be the hands on father and you have to be the perfect father and you have to be really good at this and you've got all these celebrity fathers with their pussas and it's all amazing.

57:41But you're also still told, no, but you still have to be the breadwinner and you have to be the rock and you're not allowed to have any emotions about this and you're not allowed to have any fears because this is about well. And so that is a massive pressure cooker of stress. And if you, and you know, then we add on top of that, maybe, you know, you might have had a history of depression before or you might have had a history of all, let's say your partner's depressed. If your partner's depressed, you are much more like yourself to get postnatal depression. So it's just this massive, horrible mixture that is going to blow.

58:13What would you do if you were able to prescribe some cultural, structural, personal, psychological interventions or suggestions for people either as a group or individually? What do you wish that more people or governments were doing? I wish fundamentally that everybody knew this about men. I wish they knew the science. I wish they knew the story of fatherhood. I wish they understood how important fathers were. I wish they understood what happened to a man. I wish they understood how many different things there are to balance and how difficult it is to be told, you have to be this, but you also have to be this.

58:54And you just have to slot into it, okay? Just so just do it. I wish that they knew that story and I wish there were more groups. I wish when with when parents did anti -natal training that there was more time spent just with men helping them and seeing them actually that they need as much support as the mom does, but just in a different way. Okay, they just need a different sort of support and they need a different because they are fundamentally going through as much as I said before, as much of an emotional physiological change as mom is. It's just hidden. That's all. It's just not as obvious.

59:27And so I just wish we could share all this information. I wish that, you know, when people learn about what happens to the mom, they learn about what happens to dad. And it's just seen as an equal journey. What's really sad is that actually for a lot of couples, it is an equal journey. And actually, moms find this really hard when they go into hospital and dad shoved in a corner. Well, dad's not asked what he wants to do or not asked to hold the baby or any of these things. Or when the health visit comes right after birth, you know, and she'll spend the whole time going, how are you moment? And we'll never, ever at any point say, how are you dad?

59:57How are you doing? Is there anything you're all concerned about? Would you like to talk about it? You know, because he's just the guy in the corner, you know, making the tea. So I just wish people understood that father's a true coparence and the true coparence for a very important reason. And if they weren't important, they wouldn't be here. We just wouldn't have them. We'd be like, you know, our chimp cousins. So, but it's... What are you working on next? What's what's talking to me about what's fascinating you know? What's really fascinating about in the field of fatherhood actually is and is partly slightly personal arm is fathers of kids with special needs because mums themselves with kids with special needs certainly struggle for support and recognition but for fathers there's again even less recognition and also this role of trying to build resilience and trying to scaffold your child's entry into a world beyond the family that is a whole bigger job when you have a child with special needs.

1:00:56I have a daughter who's reasonably diagnosed with autism and a big thing for us is, okay, how do we prepare her to survive in the world? A world which isn't really adapted to her needs and particularly my husband, particularly going forward into relationships and things like that, that's something that's a real focus for him. How can we give her the ability to detect risk? How can we give her the ability to deal with challenge? And to deal with the show through complexities, which is an autistic person, it's really hard. So that's a real key thing for me now. It's a very unresearched area. And so I'd really like to start looking at fathers who are in that position, I think.

1:01:33I had the perfect mother for it, though, the perfect mother to be able to go out and do the first hand research and be able to come up with the strategies. Dr. Animatech in ladies and gentlemen, and I absolutely love your work. I think this is very, very, very important and it's fascinating and any friend of Robbins is a friend of mine as well. Where should people go if they want to keep up to date with your stuff on the internet. You can follow me on Twitter, so I'm Doctor Animation on Twitter, and you can follow, or you can go to my website, which is animation .com and it's all on there. Hell yeah, and I appreciate you.

1:02:04Thank you. Thank you.