Why Children of Divorce Grow Into Broken Adults - Erica Komisar - #1081

28:22And it's terrible. And so if I were going to say, are there periods that are more stable in terms of development and brain growth, you would say probably from about six to about 11, if there's an ideal period to divorce, it might be that. Never a good time to divorce, but if you're going to do it. Never a good time to divorce, but if you have to do it, that's probably a good window. You could also do it after 14. It's a little more stable after 14. So adolescence is broken up into three periods, early adolescence, mid-adolescence, and late adolescence. So you kind of want to get to late adolescence if you want to divorce.

29:05And then I'm going to say there's another period that's sensitive. I mean, it's a little like a landmine, right? Because what I'm saying is try not to do it zero to three. I feel like I'm playing divorce battleships with you. But you know what? Developmentally, children are more sensitive. See, no one ever talks about this. So this is maybe controversial to say that there are better times to divorce than other times. People think these are all the myths, right? They think, oh, it's better to do it while the baby is little because they'll never know any better. Okay, then you're tearing apart attachment security.

29:38Oh, another myth. Oh, it's better to wait till they go to college. And just when they go to college, we'll divorce. When they go to college, we'll tell them and we'll separate. Right. When kids go to college, it's a transition that is so incredibly fragile and they need to feel that they're tethered to something very secure to go out into the world and individuate. So there's two things. There's separation, which is physical separation. And then there's individuation, which is developing your identity as a separate person. And it is such a fragile period. So I say, if you're going to do it after they go to college, then wait till they finish college and they're launched.

30:21Wait a few years. So if you've waited this long, don't do it when they're 18. Wait till they're like 23. And they have friends and they have a job and they're more secure. But this idea that, you know, as soon as they go to college, they're like done, they're cooked. And it's, you know, like they're not cooked at 18. They're not cooked till they're 27. And so, yeah, there are better times than I mean, there's no good time to divorce, but there are better times for children than other times. What is the impact on the future adult when divorce happens 11 to 14? We've spoken about the importance of the primary attachment figure, the fact that this is getting ripped away, regulation of emotions.

31:07That has to be a different mechanism. It's the same stimulus, parents splitting up, but it's got to be a different mechanism that's happening now. So what is the impact and what that person will be like in future? Well, they're already more unstable in that period. So what you're trying to do is you're trying to help stabilize them in that period and provide them with a sense of security. So, you know, people hear attachment security and they think it's only zero to three. In fact, attachment security is throughout childhood at different points. And so another point of attachment security is when your child is separating, because you want to be as secure as possible.

31:43You want to give them a stable base, a platform from which to experiment and explore being independent. But it's hard to do that if what you're coming back to are moving tectonic plates. And so really, there are points at which children need a lot of stability to grow. So if you destabilize them at a time when they're already unstable, it's going to be very hard for them to find their footing. It may delay their development. It may keep them in a somewhat regressed state. So some kids whose parents divorce at very critical periods of brain development, they kind of stay in a more regressed state.

32:25They don't keep developing. It's sort of like they get stuck in a certain period. Why? Because to continue to move in development, you need a certain amount of stability. And so they stay in a state of wherever they were traumatized, they get stuck there. So to say that divorce is a trauma, it is a trauma. And what my book is trying to do is to help you to reduce that trauma, to mitigate that trauma, and make it as gentle and as sensitive and as the least traumatic situation you can make it for that child. Who is affected more by divorce, boys or girls? It's a good question. Funny enough, at different stages of development, it might be different, but boys are more neurologically sensitive than girls.

33:16Um, we know this from all the research that even from in utero, boys are more sensitive to cortisol, to the stress hormone. And, um, we see it in little boys who go into fight and flight so easily in school with behavioral problems and attentional issues. There's probably more little boys with behavioral problems and attentional issues than little girls. Um, but girls are also susceptible to stress, particularly in adolescence. I mean, one of the things that we know is that girls' brains are very hypervigilant to criticism of any kind. It's why social media is so bad for girls. Especially during that 11 to 14 range.

33:58Yeah, self-consciousness and criticism that they exaggerate in their minds. And so, you know, at different stages of development, it's different. But what we do know is that little boys are more prone to things like autism to behavioral issues to attentional issues. And all of those are, you know, autism is a developmental condition that goes back to being in utero. But there is some research to try to connect cortisol to autism. and the idea is not that it causes autism, but it may be one of the things that can trigger the gene and turn it on. So we know that boys are very, very neurologically sensitive.

34:47So I would say probably boys even more than girls, but at certain periods of development, particularly adolescence, girls can be very susceptible as well. What about separation during pregnancy? What's the impact of that? You don't want the mother to be under stress. So what we know from the research is that cortisol is transmitted to the baby. And again, as I said, there's some research that's going on trying to connect what cortisol does to the baby's developing brain. so if a mother is stressed out in her pregnancy either because of a divorce or because of a work situation or because a parent's dying or um there's a lot of research now going on about how that affects the baby in utero so that i'll i'll leave it at that to say it's not good for the mother but we know it's definitely not good for the baby well presumably the same thing is true of women who need to keep on cranking their careers right up until the moment that they give birth.

35:51No one around the office really thinks all that much. Well, I'd better not push to hit the sales target this quarter because Suzanne is pregnant. So we have a business and you're supposed to be here. And also there's a sense I think that a lot of women have of a, they don't want to be seen as fragile. They don't need to be seen as a diva. They don't want to have the accusation of, oh, here we go. The estrogen is on the line and no one's, no work's going to get done. They're just going to be crying in the bathroom all day. So I think pushing through the normal discomforts of everyday work, which when you actually think about it, when you think about what even a relatively unstressful job, somebody that's a gardener, right?

36:33Which I think of as probably being a little bit more sedate than someone that's a salesperson. Even that there's traffic on the way to work and you're trying to get in and out and there's some conflict and the boss has changed and the new guy that's just come in, he's a bit of a dick. And all of these little insults that happen, that's not to say that there wouldn't have been this ancestrally, but given that we're trying to design an environment that's really great for mom and baby and then dad as a part of that. Yeah, the fact that what's the mandatory mat leave in America? I was going to say, do you want to know what my wishlist is or do you want to know the reality?

37:11because there is no maternity leave. We have something called the Family Leave Act, which means that you can't be fired for three months, but you don't get any pay. So there is no federal paid leave in our country, none. State by state, like New York State, I believe now gives three months of paid leave at minimum wage, maybe, but it's not very much, but that's state by state. But there is no federal paid leave. And then it's contingent upon your employer's good graces if they decide to give you six weeks or three months. But there's - Totally discretionary. There's totally discretionary. So I call this - That is fucking barbaric.

37:54This country is mad. It is. I call it the most uncivilized country. And the country that pays lip service, so this is my frustration, the country that pays lip service to mental health talks a lot about mental health and children and we care and we love families and it's all a bunch of bullshit because if you really cared about mental health and you really cared about children and you really cared about families you would have 12 to 18 months of paid leave i just came back from australia where i have probably had more influence in australia and the uk in terms of policy than in America. And I'm American.

38:34I live here. But nobody wants to listen to me here. You know, the Democrats see my messaging as anti-feminist and the Republicans see my message as too expensive. And so I am just stuck in no man's land. I am in no man's land. I'm with you. I'm with you, Erica. Don't worry. No, I'm in the trenches with you. Don't worry about it. Until the day I die, I will be fighting in this fight, I'm afraid. So I'm, you know, 61. If I live another 25 years, I'm pretty sure I'm going to be fighting until the day I die. But, you know, until we recognize that mental health starts from birth, even from in utero.

39:16It starts from conception. It starts from conception. The last trimester with cortisol, Women are most susceptible. Babies are most susceptible to cortisol in the last trimester. So if we were to give women 18 months of paid leave, which will never happen, but I wish it would, then we would start. And some countries are starting to do this now that are more civilized than us and really do care about children's mental health. You start to give the mother a paid leave before the baby's born so she can relax, get her cortisol levels down, and then prepare for this baby psychologically and emotionally.

39:57What's happening is women wait till a minute before the baby's born, and they're totally wound up and feeling guilty about leaving their work and overwhelmed. And then they have a baby, and they're exhausted, and they crash from postpartum depression. They also crash from postpartum depression because from the moment their baby is born, they're worried about when they're going to go back to work. And they're on a timer. They're on a ticker, like a basketball game. What do they call it? A shot clock. They're on a shot clock. A work clock to go back. So they're counting the minutes. And so what happens is that stress, cortisol, affects breast milk development.

40:38So we have this phenomenon of all these mothers breaking down from postpartum depression, but also saying, I'm not producing enough breast milk. This is a phenomenon that we never experienced before, because cortisol affects prolactin and estrogen and breast milk development. A quick aside, most people think that they're dehydrated because they don't drink enough water. Turns out water alone isn't just the problem, it's also what's missing from it, which is why for the last five years, I've started every single morning with a cold glass of Element in water. Element is an electrolyte drink with a science-backed ratio of sodium, potassium, and magnesium.

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42:19It's better to have two parents. It's better to have a mother and father because they serve different functions. But as they say in the UK, better to have an heir and a spare, right? So the idea that you have two parents means that if you lose one, you have another. But the concept is when you have a nuclear family, when you have two parents, you're under the illusion that it's a safe nest, that it is a safe, stable environment in which to grow up. And that stability provides you with the emotional security you need to develop in a healthy way. When that sense, that illusion, you know, there is an illusion because there's no permanence in life, right?

43:01I mean, your parents could die, they could get sick, they could, you know, get hit by a bus, you know, I mean, there's no permanence, but we're born with a sort of a need for that illusion of permanence. And in fact, people with very healthy defenses, Me included with everything that's going on in the world, as you know, which could be crazy making. My defenses help me not to obsess over it or focus on it because I can stay optimistic. My resilience allows me to cope with the adversity of the world. It's like having shock absorbers, right? And so it's that sense of stability and permanence. When you divorce, that permanence is, the children are disillusioned in a way before they're ready.

43:51I always say every child is born with the need for a sense of omnipotence in their parents. They need to believe their parents are perfect. They can do anything. They'll protect them. Yeah. And so I always tell this story. My husband, when he was a little boy, his father always drove. It was more traditional. His mother never drove when the father was in the car. And he would sit in the back and he said, I always felt like my father knew every road on every map in the whole world. That's what childhood is. It's a sense of feeling protected and as if your parents are bigger and bigger than life characters.

44:32When they divorce, you see the imperfections of your parents and you start to see them as human before you're ready, but also the impermanence of relationships and the lack of trust, right? So then you no longer necessarily trust in the permanence of those connections, of those romantic connections. So, you know, many kids from divorce have trouble trusting in the permanence of marriage and connections later on. not all so the reason i wrote this book is how do you how do you help them the way you talk to them the way you treat each other the way you care about each other as a divorced couple the way you work together and collaborate and cooperate and communicate that's going to determine you know that you can put them first and sacrifice your desires and needs for fairness and put them first.

45:28All of that is going to dictate whether that child in the future can see relationships as trustworthy. Isn't it crazy the idea of fairness, that that needs to be put to one side, that there is something unfair to the parents that is adaptive for the kid, that's good for them, that's good for their upbringing. I think a lot of children blame themselves for their parents' divorces. Why do you think that's such a common pattern? It's magical thinking. So children who are very young there's a great commercial on television a little boy is in a Darth Vader outfit and he's got a wand or whatever it's called a lightsaber fucking wand a lightsaber Darth Vader going Expelliarmus a lightsaber and he flashes it towards his car the family car and the father is behind with the the remote control and the father presses it and the little boy goes oh my god i turned it off in my lightsaber that's magical thinking magical thinking is something children have when they're very little and they outgrow which is the belief that they are the center of the universe it's a good thing um we're born if our parents focus on us as as if we are the center of the universe then we believe that we are the center of the universe and that gives us a sense of steadiness and stability and security from which to develop we outgrow magical thinking where we feel we're in control of everything but it helps us to feel secure when we're little so if something bad happens to our parents when we're angry at them like if your father or mother get into a car accident and die, let's say, when you are really angry at them because they didn't give you that toy or, you know, when you have terrible fantasies and thoughts as a child that you wish they would die or, you know, which aren't so terrible, they're just fantasies.

47:32And that parent actually does die. That child then feels responsible for that death. That's magical thinking. So basically they believe they control what's around them. So it's very common for children to believe that they are responsible for the breakup of their parents. And so that's one of the things in the book that I talk about. How do you talk to children so you disavow them of those illusions, that they are not responsible, that you will always love them? Because again, that destruction of that sense of permanence in a relationship and that breaking of trust, children can easily understand parents' breakup as something parents could do.

48:14If parents can leave one another, then can't they leave them as well? And so there's a lot of things that parents need to consider when they talk to their children. And there is a way to talk to children about a divorce. Is there a sense as well, like how a lot of attachment wounds from early childhood get replayed in adult relationships that if I can redeem myself in this situation, I will fix the wound that existed before that sort of classic loop. Is there something similar to that going on with the magical thinking from the kids that if I caused it, I can fix it? This line that I wrote in an essay a couple of weeks ago, which was, if as a child, you're taught that you need to work hard to be loved, if you don't feel loved, you just need to work harder.

49:01And it kind of feels a little bit similar to that. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, again, I think it's very important, I'll say this, that if you're going through a divorce that you get support, you know, and I'm not going to be one of those therapists who says like everybody needs therapy. Not everybody needs therapy, but a lot of people do, particularly if they're going through life transitions or traumas And so if you think about divorce is a trauma for everyone, for parents, for children. And so parents need support. One of the main reasons they need support is so they don't leak all over their children because it's very common for parents to overshare their pain with their children, to leak all over their children.

49:47Treating the kid, the kid of the separation, as the therapist for the separation. Yes. And also just as a container, dumping into them about, you know, either oversharing about their loneliness or their pain or their sex lives. So basically, parents need therapy so they can raise children without burdening those children. Children need therapy because they can't always go to their parents and tell them what they're feeling and thinking because they might feel uncomfortable. And so they need a safe space that isn't either parent to bring their feelings. That doesn't mean that parents aren't also safe spaces, but children need to have therapy to make sure that you're addressing these conflicts and these traumas early on.

50:42And so as you say, they don't carry them into adolescence and young adulthood and adulthood. What are the typical stages that children go through emotionally during a divorce? It's the same stage as any mourning process. Think of it as grief. They go through the same Kubler-Ross. I always say grief is grief. Mourning is mourning. It's a death. And so when someone dies, you go through the disbelief and you go through the sadness and you go through the anger and you go through the acceptance. And the problem is if your child gets stuck or if you as a parent, as an adult, while you're going through a divorce, get stuck.

51:23I've had patients who've gotten stuck for a decade in grief, meaning they get stuck in anger or they get stuck in sadness and despair where they can't, you're meant to move through grief. So I'm Jewish. So we say, you know, mourning is a year. You know, from the moment someone dies, we don't unveil the stone. We don't take a cloth off the stone. We don't put the stone up, actually, for a year. So it's a year, but we have a year to go through the process, right? But then we're meant to unveil the stone and move on with life. What's happening is that people are holding on. They're getting stuck, almost like a scratch in an old LP record.

52:04They're getting stuck at certain stages of the grief and mourning process. And they'll either get stuck in the depression or the disbelief or the anger, but many don't get to the acceptance stage. And children also aren't getting to the acceptance stage. They're getting sort of stuck in one stage of grief or another. How should parents tell their kids if they're divorcing? Together. Emotionally balanced. So if you are hysterical or your partner is, that's not the time to do it, to do it in a way that is emotionally regulated, to do it in a way where you agree on what you're going to tell the children.

52:47um don't do it before a major exam be sensitive you know this is like the fact that you have to tell people please be sensitive don't do it at a time when your children are very stressed at school or stressed socially or about to play a big game or a big concert or you know don't do it at a major holiday don't do it at christmas time i'm not christian but don't do it at hanukkah don't Because that holiday will forever be associated with that divorce, right? They'll never be able to love Christmas again. Don't do it on their birthday because they'll never like their birthday. How much of a dick do you have to be as a parent?

53:26You'd be surprised. Happy birthday also. Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, so I suppose you could do it on vacation when you have a whole week to spend together and process and go for walks and talk about things. I suppose that's not going to tether it to some geographical location. The kid might have to go back to the living room. That's the seat where I sat. That's right. So somebody said to me, well, if you're going to, this is an analogy, mind you, if you're going to neuter your dog, make sure that you take them to a vet that you never, ever want them to go to again. Bingo. Take them to a crap holiday destination that they're never going to want to go back to.

54:06It was bad enough already. And spend a week there and process it with them. Um, yeah. So, so basically the idea is just be wise and sensitive about it. I mean, think about the fact that how you tell them will always be referred back to in their mind, how and where. What sort of explanations are psychologically helpful and which should never be said? you never want to say um i never loved your mother or i never loved your father because or i wish that i had never married that person or been with that person because what's implied there i'll let you answer that one uh the family unit that you thought was secure was never secure and your ability to understand what is and is not attachment was wrong all along.

55:03And you should never have been born. And that. Yeah. Downstream from I didn't love them is and we shouldn't have had you. Right, right. I wish I'd never met your father. I wish I'd never married your mother. It was a mistake. This is more than just the we're getting divorced conversation. This is now two years later, the very difficult night where all of the co-parenting schedules have fallen apart. And I wish I'd never met them. I wish I'd never. Children want to know that they were born out of love. It's hard. I've had families where it's been like a one night stand. And they say, how do I talk about it then?

55:45And I say, well, you say you were young and it was the illusion of love. You thought you loved the person. That's okay. But to say that all children want to be conceived out of love. They want to be wanted. You know, there's this whole issue of, we say, adopting children is a mitzvah. It is a great blessing. But it's really hard to, and you need to know when you adopt children that it's hard because that child, no matter how wonderful you are, you're always going to have to address and help that child. Again, it's a mitzvah because you're helping that child to overcome a conflict and a trauma, which is that their biological parents didn't want them.

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57:41Do you know that, Jared? No, I didn't know. James is adopted. James says that he is the closest advocate for the abortion community that exists because if you were adopted at some point, there was a conversation and he literally says, no one speaks for the aborted community. I will. That's his one source of privilege that he's got. Um, but yeah. And you know, the mad thing, the maddest thing is James has just got the most secure, high self-esteem, confident attachment thing. Both of his parents absolutely love him. And, uh, he's still got fantastic relationship with both of them. And, um, but you have to deal with it.

58:20And so, yes. So adopting children is a mitzvah, but you have to know how to help them with that. Sorry, what's a mitzvah? Oh, it's a blessing. We say it's a blessing. It's the greatest blessing. But it is something you have to deal with. You have to know that that's a part of the underlying unconscious feeling is, did my parents want me? And it's the same with children that go through a divorce. Am I the cause of this divorce? Did my parents conceive me out of love? Did they ever love one another? And so, you know, I would say that most parents conceive children when they loved one another. I would say most, you know, or at least there was the perception of love, right?

59:03The illusion of love. And so you want to give children that. You want to give them that perception, that illusion, that reality that, you know, that we loved each other very much and you were conceived in love and brought into this world in love. But we adults sometimes fall out of love, but they never, ever, ever fall out of love with their children. That's a good point. What role does honesty play versus protecting children from adult realities? Mm-hmm. So I always say that honesty, children have bullshit meters, so they know when you're lying to them. So you don't want to lie out and out, blatantly lie to them, but you have to be sensitive in your truths, right?

59:48You have to be discriminating in your truths and how you describe those truths. So you can tell children the truth. I think that a lot of parents lie to their children or make promises to their children because they feel guilty. That's dangerous. So meaning, if you're divorcing and your child asks you, you know, will we still have holidays together? What will we do about Christmas? saying to them, oh, no, we're still a family. We'll always, you know, I always think this is funny. There's a division in the community that deals with divorcing families and this idea of that we're still a family. It's a complicated thing to say we're still a family.

1:00:40Yes, in some form, we're still a family, but usually divorced families don't spend holidays together. Maybe they do in the beginning, but eventually they don't. And so to promise your child that nothing is going to change in their life, in their living situation, in their school, you do want to keep as much the same as possible. You want to disrupt as little as possible in a child's life, particularly in the first year. But to make promises that you can't keep to them is perceived by children as lies and a further breach in trust. I wonder, let's say that I gave you the task of trying to design the worst possible divorce for a child to go through.

1:01:28As to say, what is the worst way that two people could get divorced? How would they talk about it? What would they do? How would they tell them? How would that roll over time? Oh, dear. What would that look like? How much time do we have? Because I treat some of those cases. It's very sad for me to treat them. Well, you've got inspiration then. This should be easy. The worst cases are the cases where one parent, I suppose, betrays another parent, and then it's something that the parent who's betrayed can't get over. And so there is depression, hostility, belligerence between the two parents. I guess the main things that I've seen are when parents treat children as possessions, like a Porsche or a car or, you know, like splitting the 50-50 piece when they treat children as possessions.

1:02:31That is a terrible thing. I think when parents lie to children in one way or another, when parents overshare with children, when parents alienate children from one parent or another, when parents are terrible at communicating and cooperating with each other, we call it co-parenting for a reason. when they are more focused on themselves and their own pain and will do what's right for them, but not what's good for their children. Yeah, those are some of the... And they did it at Christmas. Yeah, those are some of the top hits. Okay, and what's the inverse? If you were to tactically say these are the biggest movers for going through a difficult time well, what does that look like?

1:03:28cooperation, communication, respect, you finding somewhere deep inside of you the respect and admiration and love that you once shared with the person that you had children with. You might not be in love with them anymore. You might even be angry at them and disappointed in them, but that you can dig deep and find some degree of respect and admiration and love for them that you shared with them so you can do the right thing for your children. So you can see your children for where they are developmentally and in age and know that in the scheme of life, you know, for women who have careers and want children, I always say, you know, you can do everything in life.

1:04:13You just can't do it all at the same time. And I'm going to say it's the same with divorce. You know, throughout a child's life, you are going to get a lot of love and attention and connection to that child. She may not get it all at the same time as the other parent. So the competition between parents sometimes sort of overwhelms what a child may need or maybe usurps what a child may need. So, you know, the idea of working collaboratively, having good open communication, having some respect and admiration for the partner that you have the child with, and then living close together. You know, the other thing is that the best co-parenting situations are ones where parents live close to each other, close enough that they, children can go easily back and forth.

1:05:05You don't have to put them on a flight. The other thing I will say is there is a trend in America to do this 2-3-2, you know, custody arrangement, which is like treating children like they're a sack of potatoes. Children hate it. What's 232? Two days with one parent, three days with another parent, two days with two, three, two, three, two, three. It's like a dance, two-step dance. It drives children crazy. And when they grow up, teenagers and young adults will say, the worst thing for me was that I was thrown back and forth like a sack of potatoes. Why is it so bad? Why is 232 so bad for children?

1:05:48because they need stability particularly during the week when they're in school they need to feel that they have a primary residence where they can lay their head down on the same pillow and they have some stability this idea of so you know for anybody who's ever had two homes either intentionally involuntarily or involuntarily you know what it's like to have to move from home to home to home to home. It's crazy making. And for a child who's already feeling destabilized, I always say in the first year, the best is to do something called nesting where they don't have to move at all. I always recommend that for a year, no more than a year.

1:06:28Put them in one location and have the other parent come to visit regularly. They stay in their home. They stay in their home and the parents come and go. so the parents have a separate apartment and so um so and that's fine for a year but after that that you find an arrangement where the children can have a primary residence and this is also very controversial because you know everybody wants to see this thing as a fairness thing and everybody has to have their you know like i'll take the legs you take the arms but what children actually need is stability they need to feel they have a secure and primary home and then Go ahead.

1:07:03And then, so the old arrangements, interestingly, the old arrangements, which now are considered passe, where a child lived with a mother during the week and then spent weekends with the father or maybe was with the father Friday through Sunday morning. That works far better because the child isn't in school. The child can be home, come home every day, do their homework in the same place and have a sense of stability and then go to the father on weekends. or if the father's the primary attachment figure, the child lives with the father during the week and then goes to the mother on the weekends.

1:07:38But the idea of having a primary stable residence is far better for children. And that doesn't mean that the parent who's not living with the child during the week can't see the child. You know, you can come and you can have dinners and you can have mock sleepovers and you can pick the child up from school and take them to soccer practice. But it's the idea of where you sleep. You travel a lot. I know, right? You travel a lot and I travel a lot for what we do. You know what it feels like, too. It's like being almost like in a band, you know, where you're like have one gig and it's very destabilizing to not sleep in the same place and have a home.

1:08:16And I think that's what it feels like to children. And they resent that more than anything. I would tell parents who are listening, children resent that more than anything. Consciously resent it. Consciously resent it. and tell parents they resent it. What is the longest amount of time that kids should go without seeing the other parent? I think parents should see children every day if they can. So if I live down the street from you, I don't recommend that people live in the same building, but sometimes it works for a variety of reasons. I think it can be problematic. But if you live down the street or a block away where you can still stay in the routine of walking your child to school or picking them up from school or going to soccer practice with them.

1:09:01That's a very good thing for children where a lot of the routines that they may have had with the parent aren't disrupted. So that can be a very good thing where parents are geographically close and they continue to do the same things they always did on a daily basis. You know, if Tuesday night was pizza night at the house, then your dad takes you out for pizza on Tuesday nights but then brings you home to sleep in your bed that you're used to. The things that you do now when your children are young and you're going through a divorce are going to be appreciated in the long run. They may not say to you, the kids, thank you, mommy.

1:09:43Thank you, daddy. But in the long run, your children will see. They will know whether you have been willing to sacrifice your own personal desires and needs for them. And in the long run, it will pay off in terms of the relationship with them. But yes, parents should have regular access to their children. And if they're geographically connected, then I don't actually like the 2-3-2 because what it assumes is that on those two days or three days, the child can't see the other parent. Yeah, it's an all or nothing black to white to black to white. And then I have situations where parents move out of state where they're literally, I can't tell you how many people call me to do expert witness for their cases.

1:10:28And these cases are so incredibly sad to me. And I cannot take all the cases that I'm asked to be expert witness on, but cases where parents have moved out of state and they literally want to take a breastfeeding baby away from a mother for a week at a time to be in another state, to be handed over to a caregiver or put in daycare or to a grandmother because that way they possess that child. I'm like, first of all, parents shouldn't be allowed to move out of state. I mean, and if they move out of state, then the other parent has to go with them. This idea that you can take babies away from parents, it shouldn't be allowed.

1:11:10Or that if you move out of state that you give up your custody rights. That's it. or you come and visit on weekends or vacations, but that somehow you're not pulling the baby apart for your own personal satisfaction and fairness. It certainly seems like the onus is on the parents that moves away, even if they weren't the one that was the departure from the relationship. It should be that way. The onus should be on them to have to make the accommodation. You know, the other thing is this is a very common situation now, which is very frustrating to me. if one parent is a stay-at-home parent, and let's say it's the mother, but it could also be the father.

1:11:51If one parent was the primary attachment figure and the stay-at-home parent, and the other parent was working full-time, and that situation is going to continue, then, or even if the mother or the primary attachment figure works part-time and the father works full-time, let's just say that for now. But the father wants the child half the time. But the child could be with the mother if the father's traveling or is working 10-hour days. There are parents who would rather take the child away from the spouse who could watch that child and be with that child and care for that child and put that child in daycare or give that child over to a babysitter rather than allowing a mother or the primary parent to care for them.

1:12:47This is happening all the time and it's selfishness. It is pure, unadulterated selfishness. And it is very hard for me to see parents being selfish in the face of a divorce. It's the one thing I can't abide by. Before we continue, if you care about what you're putting in your body. Protein powder is probably the supplement that you think least about. You buy a big tub that says grass fed on the label and you figure that's good enough. But here's the thing. Most brands never test their product after they leave the factory. And that is why I'm such a massive fan of Momentus. They test every single batch for contaminants, heavy metals, and banned substances.

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1:13:52Buy it completely risk free. They ship internationally. And right now you can get up to 35 % off your first subscription and that 30 day money back guarantee by going to the link in the description below or heading to livemomentous.com slash modernwisdom using the code modernwisdom at checkout. That's L-I-V-E-M-O-M-E-N-T-O-U-S dot com slash modernwisdom and modernwisdom at checkout. Look, I understand. I'm trying to sort of put myself in the mind as somebody that's never been married and doesn't have a kid. I'm trying to put myself in the mind of someone who's on the tail end of it, who's trying to do a post-mortem of the imaginary marriage and child.

1:14:29it must be so difficult to try and navigate this rupture of an attachment the person that you thought you're going to spend the rest of your life with has left you and now there's this weird push and pull dynamic and what are we going to do about money and i need my emotions are bleeding out of me i mean think about how much people struggle just with normal breakups already and then divorce is even worse and what's going to happen with the car and what's going to happen with the bank account and what's going to happen with the house and what's going to happen with the kid. And all of this excess emotion is just pouring out of you.

1:15:06And the baby or adolescent is just the sponge that's absorbing a lot of this. It's really tough. And I get it. I had a, I'm using my evolutionary psychologist hat here. Given the fact that it's important for there to be the spare when it comes to parenting. Obviously, if you were to go through a divorce pre-verbal, there's going to be stress. But if the wife was to hot swap to a new male partner sufficiently quickly, presumably that would actually mitigate some of these challenges because baby's ability to detect that is dad is actually pretty limited in any case at the start. So not advocating it, not saying that this is a strategy, but I think it's an interesting thought experiment that what you need is a male figure.

1:16:08For instance, could a mother use her father, get her father to come and live in the house with her and have a brother or an uncle or something like that, or best friend's husband or whatever. Can you mitigate some of that? Yes. And that's very important to understand with older children. Let's say you have a primary school age child, an eight-year-old child, or even a six-year-old child who is very attached to the non-primary attachment figure parent. Having a grandmother in the house or an aunt that lives with you or even a babysitter, it's perfectly fine and reasonable to say there's a female figure in the house.

1:16:52We're talking about when children are developing a deep sense of attachment security. Remember that attachment security is the foundation for mental health. So this is a period that should not be touchable. It should not be a movable feast at all. It should be respected on such a high level that judges and mediators and divorce attorneys and forensic psychologists and co-parenting specialists, they should all be on the same page. Unfortunately, they're not. Most are not well versed on attachment security or the importance of it. And again, prioritize the fairness, the legal fairness of splitting the baby in half and parents' rights.

1:17:36It's all about parents. So with a very young baby, the baby's needs must always be prioritized over your own needs. And that's a harsh toke for a lot of parents to hear, but that's the truth. Because they're psychologically suffering. I'm already in pain. That's right. And you're telling me that I need to apply more pain to it. That's right. When you stub your toe, whoever is in the room is going to get screamed at. If I stub my toe and my husband's in the room, I'll be like, It was his fault. I'm going to put that bed in the room. everybody does that right we all do that because it's human nature when we're in pain that we want to make other people feel our pain we lash out we lash out at the people that are around us because we want support i mean think about what pain is the the physical verbal presentation of somebody being in pain right the yelp what is that it's a big alarm it's a big alarm that's going out to everybody around.

1:18:32I require help. And then you curl up into a ball, your shoulders sort of curl over in this kind of way. You make yourself look small and fragile and frail like somebody that could do with some fucking help. It's an infantile yelp. It's when adults act like infants. And when we're in pain, we all regress to an infantile state. Some of us do it more consistently than others. Yes. But the idea is that around children, you better pull yourself together very quickly and realize that you are not an infant. You're the adult in the room and that child is the infant and that child needs you to be the adult in the room.

1:19:06Okay. Talk to me about what parents can do to improve their emotional regulation during these situations. Cause it feels like you need to do it. And I agree that you've had the kid, you were in love, this is now an 18-year contract to get, or maybe a 23-year contract, to get this thing out into the real world, to create a big enough runway. But it's not just, okay, I'll just decide to do it. The sensation, this overwhelm of emotions and activation and my wounds, I'm just like my mother and he's just like my father and rah, rah, rah. How can parents who are going through a divorce learn to regulate themselves better so that they can be better co-parents.

1:19:54Right. It's a trauma laboratory is what I call it. So the idea is that you need a support system. And again, I'm not someone who advocates for therapy with everyone, but I am going to say when you're going through a divorce, you need to get some help. You need to get some therapy because you need some place to go with those feelings where you can deposit them and leave them there once a week, twice a week, where you can go to that person, deposit those feelings, process them, process the conflict, mourn with somebody who's got your back and who understands. You know, sometimes you can also go to your family and your close friends.

1:20:33They have to be supportive. Not all family and friends are supportive. We would hope that they would all be, but not all family and friends are supportive. So, and you know, family and friends come with a particular perspective and often an agenda, which is why therapy is so different than going to family and friends. So people will often say, well, why do I need to go to therapy if I have family and friends? Well, family and friends have a particular perspective and they often want to share it with you. Therapists are not meant to share their own personal perspective with you. And if they do, you shouldn't be with that therapist.

1:21:04A therapist is there to help you to process that grief, to help you to process that loss and to get through it and be a safe container for those feelings. So you need family and friends support as long as they're supportive, and then you also need therapy. You need some place to take those feelings so you don't offload on your children and you don't start making terrible decisions that will have long-term consequences on your children's mental health. Because, again, your children's mental health isn't an easy fix later on. Okay, going back to your original area of work from a few years ago, the attachment security that kids need in those first three years, what does that look like?

1:21:48We've said what it doesn't look like, absentee of the mother, etc., etc. What's the gold standard for attachment security for a child who's naught to three years old? So, again, in a way, I think what's happened to the world is that we used to be able to look at infants and see how fragile they are. I think the world has become desensitized, deconditioned, if you will, to the fragility of infants and toddlers, just how fragile they are. They're not at all resilient. They're not at all self-possessed. they cannot deal with great amounts of stress. So I feel like the world's become sort of desensitized to so many things.

1:22:34But yeah, so attachment security is both an emotional and a physical state of being. It is when babies are born, they literally need skin-to-skin contact to regulate their emotions. You're not only regulating emotions, you're also regulating biological processes. You're regulating their breath and their heartbeat, but mostly their cortisol. You're keeping it very, very, very low. There was a researcher that I interviewed for my book. She's European. And she said, you know, babies in the Western world cry more than any other babies in the world. She said, because in other parts of the world, they don't need to cry because their distress levels are kept so low because they're worn on their mother's fronts and then their mother's backs.

1:23:18They're not separated from their mothers. But in the Western world, we have this very perverse idea that babies are supposed to be independent, that they're born independent, that they're born self-sufficient, like self-cleaning ovens or something. Where do you think that's come from? It comes from a narcissistic, a growth of narcissism, sort of like bacteria, a growth of narcissism in society that has put the individual first before relationships, before connection to others. that could be a whole other podcast interview with you to talk about that but there is a growth in individualism self-centeredness even self-sufficiency so is this as much that newborn baby is now an independent agent or is it i am an independent agent and that thing is imposing on me.

1:24:17Both. Right. It's both. Okay. Where did it start? Some say the industrial revolution, which separated families and made mothers go out to work instead of being with babies. Some say it was the first wave of feminism, but actually the first wave of feminism was very pro-maternal. It was maternal feminism. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, it was. Sheryl Sandberg, is it her fault? No, not Sheryl Sandberg. It was the Gloria Steinems and the people that came later. It was the second wave of feminism that really promoted the idea that mothering was not valuable work. But actually, the first wave of feminism was very pro-maternity.

1:24:54And the me movement, the me movement in the 60s was very pro-individualism. Not me too. No. What's the me movement? The me movement was the beginning. It was a movement towards individualism. It's actually called the me movement. So all of these social movements, which were moving away from the family construct towards sort of the communal construct towards, you know, David Brooks writes about this, other people write about it, but towards a more individualistic, narcissistic, self-oriented approach to living, which also has meant the dissolution of the family. I mean, And, you know, divorce is, we don't talk about divorce.

1:25:38One of the reasons I wrote this book is because I was so frustrated. I only write books when I'm really frustrated about something in society and there isn't anything that I can refer patients to to really help them understand. I think we don't talk about divorce. 50 % of couples divorce. And if you want to know on some basic level what's causing, you know, what's contributing to the mental health crisis, one in two couples divorce, leaving their children without a nuclear family or two parents or, you know, sort of this rift in the family. It's a trauma. And I don't think we want to talk about it because I think it's so sensitive because then people will feel guilty and everybody's so sensitive about everybody feeling badly.

1:26:19Apart from the kids. Apart from the kids. That's it. All the adults in the room are so fragile that we can't talk about having to stay home if you have a child for a little while, having to give up some career ambitions in those early years that your children need you. You know, we can't talk about, you know, divorcing in the first three years probably isn't a good idea. We can't talk about these things because it's going to make somebody feel badly. I'm like, you know what? And I've said this over and over again, a little bit of guilt is a healthy thing because it means your ego is functioning.

1:26:53It's going to guide you in the direction that's good for your behavior. Your superego, which dictates what's right and wrong, is part of your ego. And so when you feel badly, it's generally a signal feeling that tells you you have a conflict. Oh, I have a conflict internally. Something doesn't feel right. Maybe I should look at it. But instead, we tell people, ah, don't feel badly. Everything will be... So we're basically telling people to ignore instincts. You said something about evolutionary instincts. First of all, we're mammals. We have evolutionary instincts. We have nurturing hormones that affect our behavior.

1:27:29And we have guilt. Guilt is like pain. What would we do without pain? You know, there are people that are born without pain receptors. and if they touch a stove, they can like have third degree burns and not know it. What would we do without guilt? We need a little bit of guilt. Excessive amounts of guilt could be pathological, but a little bit of guilt. We don't want anybody to feel badly. Sometimes we have to feel badly if we're going to look at what we're doing to ourselves or to others. I had this realization when I was looking at a study that came out that was reanalyzing some big game hunting data.

1:28:04And you might have seen it. It was women did just as much big game hunting as men and sometimes even more. And I thought, well, this is surprising. Big game hunting is pretty big and women don't tend to be quite as big as men on average. And maybe they've got a surprising figure to me, too. Turns out that it was wrong. That's why it's surprising. They reanalyzed the data, but they'd done loads of fuckery with p-values and categorization and a lot of other stuff. So the revelation became unrevelated, I guess, again later on. And I was trying to think about why the female, I think, feminist leaning researchers had decided that they wanted to do that.

1:28:43What would be the reason for doing it? And, you know, the soft bigotry of low expectations. Yeah. Yeah. I think there's a soft bigotry of male expectations. I think that implicitly, it's the me movement. That's what made me think about it. Implicitly, anything that a man does is seen as the preferred kind of behavior, even by women who are trying to do the we are for women thing. And it's such a slippery, kind of stupid way to slip misogyny into your own worldview as someone that's trying to combat misogyny. Because if you're to say, well, big game hunting, that's important. Women should have done it.

1:29:19Maybe they did even more. It's like, but implicitly you're derogating how important the gathering is if you're saying that the hunting is more important and the rearing and the nurturing and all of the other things. So the same to say that motherhood is just, it's not that important, you know, working. It is interesting to me that a lot of the people that hold these sorts of opinions were able to hold two that seem to contradict each other. First, corporations are soulless, blood-sucking monstrosities and capitalism is a scourge on the earth that's trying to keep everybody down. And also your career is the single most important thing that you should do and nobody should ever stop you from doing it, least of all a child.

1:29:55And also maternity leave is a complete fucking crime against humanity and inhuman and we should have more of it. Okay, well, square this triangle for me, please, because it just seems like people want, I think that you're right, sovereignty, independence, but it's a kind of petulant independence. It's like a stamping of the feet and throwing of the hands on the floor. It's infantile, yeah. It's juvenile. Like, I want my thing. I want my thing the way I want it right now and nobody else can tell me how. But you don't even know what's good. This isn't an informed opinion. You don't know what's right for you.

1:30:29You don't know what you're going to regret or not regret in future because you haven't thought about this. You're at the mercy of memes that have been created by people who have got even less education than you do that you're now being marionetted by. You're being parroted by these ideas that you don't have any idea where they've come from. And I'm sure that I have tons of them as well, but these are big life decisions. And I just, that soft bigotry thing was so surprising to me as a group of people trying to be pro women, trying to be holistically integrated, transcending and including all of the things that they want women to have been in the past and become in the future, you are by design making anything that women have a predisposition toward less.

1:31:17And anything that meant true freedom is having sex like your brother and working like your father. So there's a defense called identification with the aggressor. It's a psychoanalytic term, but it basically describes what it is. that when you feel abused or oppressed, rather than taking a position opposite the oppressor, you want to become the oppressor because then you have the power. Redemption. You have the power. You have the control. You'd rather be the victimizer than the victim. And what happened with the second wave of feminism is a lot of those feminists had come from very traumatic histories where they were very adversarial with men and treated men more as adversaries, had been abused, or there was a lot in that group of women.

1:32:15And although they did a good thing for society by freeing women from the oppression of men, in a way what they did is they wanted to become men instead of saying, we want to be respected and valued for being women and maybe even be paid for being women. So one of the things is that men had power and control because they had money and money became power and control. It wasn't just political power, it was financial power. And so, right, so women rather than saying, you know what, women's work is valuable work. Caregiving, caring for children, nursing elderly, nursing, teaching, all these professions which were quote-unquote women's work are incredibly valuable.

1:33:04One might say in the age of AI, they may be the only ones left because they're so right-brained and irreplaceable. They'll try to replace them with AI, but they're not going to be able to, at least not well. And so these kinds of important loving caregiving relationship work, it was diminished and demeaned in favor of men's work. Now, that is identification with the aggressor. That is becoming your oppressor and the aggressor instead of saying, wait a second, we are valuable and what we do is valuable and we want to be recognized for what we do and we want to be paid for what we do. So I just came back from Australia where they're proposing not only 18 months of paid leave, but family stipends instead of daycare.

1:33:55I fight against daycare. I go around the world and speak out against universal institutional warehouses of children and what I call day orphanages, which is what daycare is and how terrible it is for children's nervous system and how it's contributing to the mental health crisis. But they're also proposing now against the labor government, the conservative government is proposing income splitting, which means that, you know, if your husband is the main money earner, you know, because one thing for women is they weren't getting social security. If you were, if you're caregiving and taking care of children, you're also not getting a pension, right?

1:34:34For the most part, your husband is getting the pension and you're not getting the pension. You're not being paid. He's being paid. So the idea of income splitting where a wife is considered half of what the husband earns is on the wife. So she's also getting a pension. But the concept is that rather than women say, pay us for our work, give us some power and some legitimacy and some admiration for our work. they said no I'm going to be I want to compete with men and be better than men and that's what happened to the feminist movement and that's when children got left behind talk to me about daycare what's the problem with daycare well daycare as I said it's basically separating babies from their primary attachment figures putting them in institutional settings with ratios of no less than five to one, usually eight to one caregiver to child ratio.

1:35:29And you're basically sending that child's cortisol levels. The research shows that salivary cortisol levels go through the roof. So babies go into high stress states. Now they're separated from their mother's bodies and they're separated from the person in the world who's meant to make them feel safe. They're in a loud, overstimulating setting with babies crying and caregivers, transient caregivers, alternating and some being absent and it's a new caregiver because they're always out sick. And it's the worst, the worst possible caregiving situation for a child. There are so many better. If you have to work, the best is a mother or father, whoever is the primary attachment figure.

1:36:12The next best is kinship bonds, which are family or extended family members who have a more similar investment to children emotionally. The next best would be a single surrogate caregiver or a nanny or a babysitter who's going to be an alternative attachment figure to that baby, which will provide them with some sense of security and care for them in your home. And if you can't afford that, then share a caregiver. That's a big thing in California where they will split the cost of one caregiver. So that caregiver is now taking care of two or three children. You have now reduced the ratio and that child is being cared for in your home.

1:36:45And you have agency over that. It's basically private daycare where you don't have to travel. And it's in your home. And so you have agency over who that person is, how they care for your child. You can put cameras in your house if you want. You can see what they do. You can observe them. You know who's taking care of your children. And your child isn't going into this high stress state of screaming, crying. If you go into a daycare center, you would cry. I always say to parents, you drop them off and you have this schizoid response where you shut down what you're feeling and go to work. But if you knew what happened in those daycare centers, if you heard those babies cry.

1:37:23What does happen? What happens in daycares? Crying babies. Because the bottom line is, if I handed you eight babies and you're one person, could you soothe all those babies in distress at the same time? I'm not convinced I could soothe one of them. Okay. Now I'm giving you eight. And so what's happening is those one person cannot, you know, parents who are, have attachment disorders of their own think, oh, it's better for somebody else to care for my child because I'm not a good, I can't handle it. without thinking, who's this person that I've just handed my baby to and how are they going to care for five to eight children and soothe them when they're in distress?

1:38:07And so parents just, it's like they shut down a part of their, it's like they shut down their empathy. It's like they have a schizoid response with empathy where they cannot see their baby's vulnerability or their baby's suffering. What are your favorite studies that show how we shouldn't ignore early attachment in childhood? John Bowlby is the father of attachment. You need go no farther than John Bowlby, but you could look at all of the, what they call the stranger situation studies, which they've been doing since the 1960s. They have repeated this experiment over and over. In fact, there's a researcher named Beatrice Beebe in New York.

1:38:50She's very famous. And I was in some of her videos because when I was a young social work student, I did some volunteering in a stranger situation study. Again, this situation is repeated over and over and over again. It's the most well-known attachment security study. And it sort of goes something like this. The mother and baby are playing in a room. A stranger walks in. So the mother walks out of the room, the mother walks back in and there's a reunion. It's sort of they look at the baby's reactions. They look at the interaction between the mother and the baby, the interaction between the stranger and the baby.

1:39:30They look at the reunion between the mother and the baby. So this is something that's done over and over. We have so much longitudinal research on attachment security going back to the 60s. So much research to show that attachment security, if you're not securely attached at 12 months, then 72 % of those babies 20 years later will not be securely attached. And that insecure attachment is tied to depression, anxiety, borderline personality disorder. So we have the research. The research has been there for many years. We just now we have now we have the neuroscience research and the epigenetics research to support the attachment research.

1:40:13Square this circle with the heritability of attachment style for me. The heritability of attachment style. No. So it's generational expression. So I sort of balk at the idea of inheritance. It's inheritance of acquired characteristics. So you don't inherit it genetically. You inherit sensitivity genetically, but you inherit through acquired characteristics, meaning your environment. A mother who is insecurely, anxiously attached will more likely produce an anxiously attached baby. A mother who is avoidantly attached will more likely produce an avoidantly attached baby. A mother who has a disorganized attachment and is a borderline personality disorder kind of patient will more likely produce a child who has a disorganized attachment and probably a borderline personality disorder.

1:41:06So we call it generational expression of mental illness. So inheritance of acquired characteristics.

1:41:17I guess it's interesting to think about predisposition versus predetermination with stuff like this. The raw materials are there. I've always thought this about, I'm a big Plowman fan. I think he's one of the best researchers of all time. He's one of the fifth most cited psychologist in the 20th century. The guy that, kind of the grandfather of behavioral genetics, I think he rules. And when I think about the first few years of a child's life, it's such a weird confluence of what were the raw materials that you were made of? Yeah. How are they expressed in the people who gave you them? They are expressed in behavior.

1:42:04Yeah. And that behavior happens to be the environment. It would be like a cow that cuts its own leg off to then cook it in a stew. You know, like the very thing that it's made of is the thing that's creating it. And that's a fucking horrific analogy. But it seems so unfair. This is what I sort of came back to when I started to think deeply about behavioral genetics and attachment style. that you have presumably an anxiously attached mother has the raw materials to be anxiously attached and then is presenting in an anxiously attached way, which means that the child that has the raw materials to be anxiously attached gets that reinforced.

1:42:47And all of this happens pre-verbal. All of this happens before you can even remember. I can't remember anything basically before age nine or 10. Really spotty memories. So, you know the song from Hamilton, you want to be in the room where it happens? The room where it happens is zero to three. That's what it means to be in the room where it happens. And no one wants to talk about the room where it happens because they can't remember it consciously because it's pre-conscious memory, but it's what shapes your personality. so nature versus nurture is always an interesting question because we do we are born with a constitution meaning constitution is the amount of aggression we're born with babies are all born aggressive you guys the most aggressive people on the planet three-year-olds so well no actually babies are born dysregulated and babies are all born aggressive so you know people get it wrong People think that babies are born regulated and we dysregulate them by neglecting them or abusing them.

1:43:48No, actually, babies are born dysregulated with highs and lows. I mean, if you ever just observe a baby, infants that are newborn infants, they will go from being happy one second and zero to 60 in three seconds. Boy, they'll be screaming. Just the most bipolar little blobs. Polar little blobs. Okay, but they're not blobs. They're incredibly sort of present, but they have no emotional regulation. And it is by that skin-to-skin contact, that calm, soothing tone of voice of the primary attachment figure. Every time the baby's in distress, the mother soothes the baby. The way I would describe it is babies are born like sailing a sailboat in the Pacific in a storm.

1:44:38This is how babies are born. By having a mother physically and emotionally present in those first three years who is calm and present and loving and soothing, you get the baby. You don't want to get the baby flatlining. That's not what we call homeostasis. We call homeostasis more like sailing in the Caribbean on a sunny day. there's waves but you know you can manage them and then you know they're kind of manageable and pleasant and that's where you want to get the baby but you cannot do that if you throw your baby into a daycare setting if you disappear 10 hours a day and go to work and the one person that's meant to help them to learn these things they're not learning so we have children who are going into primary school years and then adolescence completely dysregulated, which is why they're all breaking down in this mental health crisis.

1:45:33It's not a mystery, but you have to go back to the room where it happens. But aggression, aggression is one of the things that you're born with constitutionally. You know, in the old days, you used to go into a hospital into a maternity ward. Thank goodness John Bowlby got rid of the maternity wards. You know, John Bowlby went into the hospitals in the UK. And he said, no, no, no. Those babies, they need to lie in with their mothers. They need to be, they've come out of their mothers. What was a maternity ward? It was a room where they took the babies from the mothers so the mothers could rest and they took them.

1:46:07So now nurses who they didn't recognize this were, you know, were just mammals, didn't recognize the smell or the voice, couldn't find their mother's eyes because they saw their mother's eyes when they were born because they would show you the baby. Here's your baby. Now, bye. And they would take the baby away. Put it in this maternity room with other screaming, crying babies. And the mother is sleeping and they're telling the mother, this is normal. I mean, like cuckoo, right? So he said, wait a second. You know, he studied cultures all over the world. He wrote a big book like this called Detachment, which I recommend everyone who has a baby to read.

1:46:44And another book like this is big like this called separation, where he studied cultures all over the world. Universal, right? The idea that attachment security is critical to a baby's emotional regulation and conditioning. Okay. So he got them to get pretty much get rid of, they still have them for like ill babies, but even the ill babies are supposed to lie in with the mothers, right? But if you went into one of those maternity wards before he did that what you'd find is that constitutionally you had 20 babies in there constitutionally babies are not the same some babies would stare at the light and try to reach their hand and try to sort of just they were quieter and then there were other babies that were just like, well, pick me the fuck up, you know?

1:47:40That's me. I'm not baby. And so babies were born with different varied amounts of aggression. Okay. I'm allowed to curse on, right? It's a podcast. Correct. So they're born with varying amounts of aggression. And so that is constitution. They're also born with varying amounts of energy. That is constitution. You know, I have three kids. Two of them have my husband's calm energy. My middle son has my energy. He's just got my energy. Aggression, energy, there are certain things that we call just internal to us, constitutional to us. But pretty much everything else is not constitutional. It's environmental.

1:48:26When you say constitutional, what do you mean? Meaning, there's a genetic marker for it or it's passed down. So, in other words, a very high-energy mother or father might produce a very high-energy baby. A very quiet, kind of calm, more passive-feeling parent can produce a less aggressive child. Stuff like extroversion, openness to experience, agreeableness, all of these things. That is constitution. You will see that in children very young. You'll see a child who, and that's when parents go, oh, I was just like her. She's like me. Right? And so there is constitution. It's a small part of our personality because it's not the constitution, it's what we do with it.

1:49:13It is important to embrace your child's constitution as individual to them. If your child is more reticent, if your child is more extroverted, those are things that you aren't going to change about your child, but you want to appreciate and accept about your child. Levels of aggression. Some kids are more, you know, little boys are more needing to get their aggression out and play physically or do sports or, you know, some are more, they want to sit in a corner and read and do art. And there's something constitutional that isn't environmental, but the rest is environmental. Okay. So what happens if a primary attachment figure isn't sufficiently available during those first few years?

1:50:02So children develop coping mechanisms, but they aren't necessarily healthy coping mechanisms. So they're adaptations they have to make, and they're usually pathological, meaning they form what we call attachment disorders, which are defenses that help them to cope with the loss. strategies, if you will, to cope with the loss. And the kids who develop a strategy tend to survive more than the kids without a strategy. So they tend to do a little bit better. That doesn't mean there aren't long-term consequences. So a strategy is an avoidant attachment disorder is a strategy. My mommy's left me. My daddy's left me in this place with strangers and no one's coming and I'm crying and no one's going to pick me up.

1:50:53And I'm just going have to manage on my own. And so it's something called learned helplessness, where they turn away from care. And that's most closely correlated with depression and difficulty trusting in relationships later on. An anxious attachment disorder, another strategy. It's a consistent strategy. If your mommy leaves and when she comes back, you cling to her like a baby monkey, and you will not let her go and you cry desperately and you just cling to her. And the dialogue in the baby's head is something like, you know, my mommy left me. She's going to leave me again. And it's the anticipation of loss.

1:51:38So we say anxiety is the anticipation of loss in the future. It's PTSD. So an anxious baby is clinging because they know their mommy's going to leave again. And that's very much correlated with anxiety in the future. Then there are babies that don't have, can't find a strategy. And so they end up cycling through all of the coping mechanisms. They might turn away from the mother on the reunion and then cling to the mother and then slap the mother because they're enraged and then turn away from the mother, cling to the mother, and then slap the mother. And we call this disorganized detachment disorder because it doesn't have a strategy.

1:52:19They can't, it's almost like gears trying to find where they click in, but never quite finding where they click in. And that's associated with that kind of emotional volatility is associated with borderline personality disorder later on. So we see the results of the mental health issues related to these attachment disorders, but we don't want to talk about it because we don't want to talk about the room where it happens. why why don't we want to talk about the room because then we would have to question this system that we've created which sends people which first of all values work and making money more than anything else careerism and materialism and going out into the world values that more than anything and pushes women to go back into the workforce right away and also tells women that if they stay home, they're nothing.

1:53:13They're no one. They're invisible. They're meaningless. They're powerless. They're useless. They're without any value. And this is a message that's got to change if we want our children to be healthy. What are the uncomfortable realities for modern women about raising healthy children? That they have to sacrifice something. And men, too. It's both. It's sacrifice. It's the inability to deal with discomfort and sacrifice and doing without for, not forever, but in the years that your children need you the most. And you know what? I'm going to be honest. Throughout your children's childhood, sacrifice is the word.

1:53:52If you can't make sacrifices, don't have children. Penelope Leach, a famous child developmentalist said well before me, if you don't want to care for your children, don't have them. Just don't do it. But people think that they're caring for their children. I do care for my child. I'd look after them at home, I'd go to work, I'd take them to daycare. No, caring for children is actually being there from moment to moment to help to regulate their emotions and being present physically and emotionally. Throughout childhood, I'm going to say zero to three is a critical period of brain development, but throughout childhood, if you don't have a primary person for them to be primarily present, when they come home from school, when they're doing their homework at night, when they are in their transitions of waking up, going to school, coming home from school, getting ready for bed, going to sleep, and then doing it all over again the next day.

1:54:46If they don't have someone to help them. So parents are the emotional digestive system for children throughout childhood. They metabolize. Yeah. Yeah. And when it happened that we decided that children somehow were born with the ability to metabolize their feelings and their experiences and the world around them, that's when it changed for children because they can't. they need us they need they need to depend on us in those years and when we decided that we were all going to just do what was good for us and what felt good for us that's when it changed for children how available is available what does that look like so at some point children go to school and maria montessori called school work she said they go to work school is children's work It's also play.

1:55:49Yes, child labor. It's play. It should be play. It shouldn't be work, but you could say it's their work. Learning, playing to learn. We want to make it play-based when they're little, but it's their work. So when they go to work, you go to work. now one of you has to work and make enough money to you know have a roof over your head whoever is that primary caregiver to that child the idea is to work when they work you know i always say to young mothers when they have a baby sleep when your baby sleeps it's so tempting when you have a baby to like go do the dishes or you know write emails or whatever you know get on the peloton or I'm like, no, no, no, no.

1:56:30Sleep when the baby sleeps. If you need time to yourself, then take a little time during the day while the baby's awake and have a mother's helper. Have your mother come. You need to do it with people around. You can't do it in isolation. This weird idea that we isolated ourselves with babies and spent eight hours alone. I mean, never was that way. We lived in houses with extended family. Yes, yeah. There's a wonderful man named Mark Friedman, who if you ever want to have somebody on your podcast who says something really interesting, like me, he's been sort of, he's sort of, how should I say, he's treated badly.

1:57:08Pilloried. Yes. Controversial. He's among friends. He says we've lost extended family generational living and it's disastrous to us as human beings. And it seems like a basic thing, but he actually talks about the origin of it. And he talks about the origin of like nursing homes and assisted living and how that was founded by real estate developers. I was about to say one of my friends, Adam Lane Smith, attachments dude. I know Adam. Wonderful guy. And he's got this, he was the first person that introduced me to this idea. I can't remember the tweet, but it's something like, never forget that moving away from home and not living in pan-generational housing for your entire life is a psyop made up by mortgage companies to keep you poor and alone.

1:57:54And it was real estate developers, actually. They said, we are going to create these adolescent living for older people and tell them that your family doesn't matter, but only you matter. Here it is. There it is. Adolescent living for older people is such a hilarious way. It's halls of residence for elderly people. You can have a second adolescence, you know, this kind of weird. Anyway, the idea is that, you know, it's very important that women and men raise their children with other people around, that they're not isolated. You know, I found this stat, you know, fuck, who was the evolutionary pediatrician that we had on the show?

1:58:34Not Paul Eastwick. Who was the other guy? Have a look. The evolutionary psychology of child rearing. It'll be in the Spotify thing. just mid-70s researcher, evolutionary psychology informed. He taught me that one in six adults in America have flattening of the occipital lobe. Yeah. So the back of their head is basically a straight line. You're actually not meant to, you're actually meant to be on your mother's body for the first year. Bingo. Because this is how, this is how much. I know. Kids are being left on the ground. or you're just on the floor. You're on the floor so much that the floor made an imprint on your head.

1:59:14Yes, that's right. That's right. Your head is the floor now. The neglect is a permanent imprint on your head. It's reshaped the back of your head. It's reshaped the back. Your skull is literally changed. And so there are little kids' families that I treat where they've had to wear helmets and yeah. So you say take your ambitions and leave them at the door when you have children. Yes, for a while. Yeah. What are the toughest realizations that women have to accept given that a lot of pride and worth by society is laid at the feet of what's your job projections and what are you going to do with your career and when are you going to go back?

1:59:48Again, that's a societal shift that has to change. It has to happen because if we only value work outside the home as valuable work, then women will continue to feel internal conflict over something they feel pulled towards. So in a way, I think what I've done with my books and with my platform is give women permission and tell them that your work is valuable. What you do when you care for your children is probably the most valuable thing you'll ever do in your life. That doesn't diminish your career. And in fact, whatever career you had, whatever skills you built, But you don't lose them. You don't get amnesia and forget them all.

2:00:34You don't become, and this is, you know, you'd say we have terrorized women into believing that they lose everything if they take time off, that they lose all their skills and all their position in their careers. And it's just a bunch of baloney because you never lose your skills. And if you had an identity in a work or a profession, you don't lose that. You always have that. In some way, it's a part of you and it will always be a part of you. And you'll come back and use it in whatever way you use it. I used to fly to visit my sister in London. She lived in London her whole adult life. And every time she'd pick me up at the airport, she would drive me a different way back.

2:01:19It was kind of crazy making. She'd drive me a different way back to her house. And I'd be like, Karen, what's going on? She's like, oh. She said, I love going different ways. You never know what you're going to find. And you might find actually a more interesting way and a shortcut or, you know, might be a better way. And I thought that's sort of an interesting metaphor that when you take time off or slow down when you have a baby, you never know how transformative having a baby will be. So you never know what kind of work you're going to want to do in the future. It may be the same kind of work.

2:01:52It may be something completely different in the future. How fascinating that you've lived two decades, three decades, four decades of your life with this is what I like and this is why I'm here and this is what I'm into. And I know me and I know what's best for me. And then someone comes along and sort of shakes the etch-a-sketch that you'd drawn your life with. That's right. And you go, oh, that was such a existential upheaval. Actually, maybe I, huh, I like people. Yeah. I like people. I didn't think that I liked people. But there's this obsession with objective metrics of success. And we often trade, I kind of got this thing that I can't unsee anymore, that we trade hidden metrics for observable metrics all the time.

2:02:40So a hidden metric might be the quality of your sleep or the peacefulness of your mind as you get to go in the shower or the quality of your relationship with your partner or how deeply you and your baby get to connect. but what are the things that are more measurable that are more objective what's the car that you drive the postcode that you live in the salary that you've got the job title you have uh how important is the company that you're working for how many other people know you followers online social media bank account and it is it that's the bit that i really really struggle to sort of square the circle of, which is nobody loves big corporations and almost everybody fucking works for them.

2:03:22Almost everyone is working for this nameless, faceless organization to whom you are just employee number 1 ,224. And yet that's supposed to be the thing that if it's taken away from a mother or a woman in order to become a mother is the worst possible scenario that she can go through. I feel like I need to do this fucking throat clearing thing because when I don't, the internet comes for me. Absolutely. In the past, women have been financial prisoners of marriages where they haven't been able to leave. That is not something that we want. I think every woman should be able to have a family or not have a family freely and that that should be afforded through their financial freedom.

2:04:05That is important. Also, they want to feel like they're an agent. They want to feel like they've got sovereignty in the world. They want to feel like they can do things. They've accomplished things. but what is good to accomplish the fucking industrial revolution was 150 120 years ago it wasn't that long ago when this thing really got going so to talk about what's important and i mean even think about how curated it was that the school bells used in schools in the uk were the same ones that they used in the factories right that's how conditioned people were yeah that your job is to go and work.

2:04:42In ancient Greek, the ancient Greek word for work was not at leisure. And the modern world has sort of turned this thing inside out. And I don't know, it's a really strange upheaval of what would have been, to me, a much more direct route for women to have value and a sense of purpose and meaning than this weird round the houses inversion thing. And I understand that somebody who fucking presents like me and looks like me talking about this sounds perilously close to someone going, I want to get women out of the boardroom and back into the kitchen and you shouldn't have a fucking degree and rah, rah, rah, rah, rah.

2:05:24I don't think that at all. Well, no. And I'm going to say that the women that I treat who come to me now, it is a particular group of people, come because they are looking for permission to leave that environment and to find many of them want to stay with their children, but many of them are looking for a kind of work that gives them agency, real agency and real control and real flexibility. So the illusion that being in the corporate world gives you agency and control and flexibility, it's like the matrix because it doesn't give you agency and it doesn't give you control and it doesn't give you flexibility you've got stockholm syndrome over your own capital that's right but you've voluntarily decided to put yourself into so the best fields for women and you know and i have said this many times before the best fields for women are not where they have a boss but where they are their own boss or they form cooperatives where they are one of the bosses What's an example of some of those businesses?

2:06:30Service fields. Service fields are wonderful where they can control the service, whether they're massage therapists or psychotherapists or speech therapists or even attorneys that don't work in big corporate firms. Even nurses and doctors who don't want to work in big corporate hospitals. Anyone who provides a service where they're their own boss. But not a teacher, unfortunately. Some teachers, tutors, people who decide to teach on their own terms. You can. You can take those. Any service field is far better for women because they can have some control and agency and have flexibility over their work and control how many hours a week they work and what fees they get.

2:07:17And if their child is sick, the only boss they have to report to is themselves and their clients. Yeah, they can just adapt the workload appropriately. Yeah. But the idea of working in big corporate settings or I had a doctor who came up to me when I wrote Being There. And she was a Harvard-trained pediatrician. Her whole responsibility was on helping children to be healthy. And she said, Harvard gave me three weeks. Three weeks. My body wasn't even healed. And I had to go back to work in the hospital. She said, please do something about this. And so, right. This country is so fucked. Right. So the idea that you somehow have power when you work for a corporation, if you're trying to.

2:08:11I mean, again, I had two parents who were not rich, but my father had his own, he had a furniture business, but he had his own business. And my mother was a bookkeeper that worked in his business. And they always said to me and my sisters, if at all possible, be your own boss. And that's something my husband also learned from his parents. And so, you know. Be your own boss or have your husband be your boss? People say that, you know, is it elitist to say that? No, because if you look at other parts of the world, women form baking cooperatives and artist cooperatives. And, you know, in a way, in many parts of the world, family businesses where you have some say in agency, you know, in India, if you go and you see a fruit stand that's run by a family where the mom goes with the children.

2:09:08And then when she needs to take off, the aunt comes in. But no, the corporate world, it's a ruse. What does the evidence suggest around, let's say it's a family where the man is able to provide enough that the mother doesn't need to work? What are the outcomes of a woman choosing to not go back to work versus going back? Is this just super idiosyncratic? It depends on how you feel work is valuable to you? Yeah, I mean, I think that part of what's happened too is that divorce is so high. And women are so afraid to depend on men. So we've also told women not to depend on men. And we tell men not to depend on women.

2:09:58And then we wonder why nobody that's young wants to get married and have children. We told them, don't depend on anybody. You can't trust men. They're untrustworthy. So you don't want to form a collaborative team with someone who you can't trust. I mean, you have to have secure attachment enough to make good choices of who you trust and then to trust them. Oh, so it becomes a self-perpetuating loop. It does. You have somebody who is unable to be securely attached. Therefore, their ability to discern is poor. Therefore, they choose poorly. That's right. They get a story that reinforces the bad.

2:10:34And round and round we go. it's called neurotic repetition freud called it neurotic repetition what's it referred to as in modern times we repeat patterns of behavior that are unhealthy and so right so if we don't trust if we're a woman who doesn't trust a man to lean on then we're not willing to form a team with that person because there may be times when our husbands lean on us. I mean, you know, I mean, I'm not exactly a perfect example, but my husband worked super hard in his practice and starting his nonprofit when our kids were really young. And I took time off with each kid and then worked very little, very, very, very little, just enough.

2:11:22I had to deal with my husband just enough to pay the mother's helper who helped me during the day with three kids. And now I'm running all over the world writing books, seeing more patients than I ever saw when I was young. And he's spending, still in his practice, but spending more time skiing, hiking, seeing friends, doing the relationship building that he couldn't do when he was young, when I was building relationships with other mothers. And so what I would say is you can do everything in life. You just can't do it all at once. Isn't that fucking cool to think about, okay, we're going to do this for the rest of time.

2:12:02Me and you are going to do this for the rest of time. We're in our 20s or 30s. We're going to do this for the rest of time. We do not need to win the first play. It does not need to be me just dribbling it down the court in order to be able to do that. But you do if you're scared that the person is going to leave you. if you're always waiting for the penny to drop. And we have told women to not trust men. And as a result, maybe men have become less trustworthy. I'm not sure whether it is a vicious cycle, you know. But we have told young people not to trust each other. We've told them it's a tentative connection and it can break at any time.

2:12:42What certainly has happened is that less is being expected of everybody all at the same time. I guess increasingly we're seeing female breadwinners be the primary contributor financially. If a woman is the primary breadwinner, can't the father just be the primary caregiver and the mom go to work? Yes, and it's happening more and more. But if we do that, then we have to look at the problems associated with it. We can't just say, oh, we just switch it. It's like red for blue and blue for red. What are the problems associated with a female primary breadwinner? So one of the issues is that fathers do need to be trained to be sensitive empathic nurturers.

2:13:28Not all. Some get it down pretty quickly. But remember, the playful tactile stimulation is important, but the sensitive empathic nurturing is more important in the early years. So the father who wears the baby skin to skin and feeds the baby as if he's breastfeeding, makes eye contact, left side cradles, looks at the baby when he's feeding the baby with a bottle. Why left? Oh, left side cradling is right brain to right brain connection. One of the ways we diagnose postpartum depression is if I handed you a baby, do we have a doll anywhere? Would you grab the baby on the left side or the right side?

2:14:06Well, now I'm telling you, so it'll influence you. But generally, someone who is securely attached, a mother will grab the baby on the left side, even though you have two breasts that you feed with. Usually a healthy mother, an emotionally healthy mother, has a larger left breast. An emotionally healthy mother has a larger left breast. When she's breastfeeding. Because she feeds primarily on the left side, because that's the side where she feels most connected to the baby's right brain. No fucking way. Yes, fucking way. Hang on, hang on. Is this not... It's not left-handed, right-handed. No, no, no, no, no.

2:14:43What is the thing about eye to eye that... It's crossed. Yes. Left brain, your right brain connects with the baby's right brain. Is there not something, I swear that I had, I swear that I had a conversation with a NLP and conversation expert and she was talking about focusing on the other person's left eye. That looking at that, not looking at that one, looking at that one. Do you know this stuff? Do you know what I'm talking about? It's the same, it's the same research. It's just reflecting this in adulthood. It's how you connect right brain to right brain to another person. But because it's flipped, because we cross over, which is where the split brain patient and the painting of the hands and stuff.

2:15:21You canned a baby. You could try it. You canned a baby to a friend and say, could you hold or, you know, you'll see whether they. So one thing is right brain. If they cradle on the right side, it's more disconnected and it's not as natural. So, again, teaching fathers, oh, cradle on the left side. Look at the baby. Don't look at your phone. If the baby's crying, don't encourage them out of it. Actually reflect their emotions and say, oh, sweetheart, I see you're crying. Do what mothers do. Be a mother, not a father in those early years. You can teach some of this stuff. And then what are some of the other complications?

2:16:04That when mothers give up that role, they don't give up the longing for that role. And so it causes competitiveness and envy. If a mother comes home and the baby is reaching for the father, but the mother still feels. Oh, wow. So all of this gender switching. We don't realize that a lot of this stuff is evolutionary. Because how many times has a father come home and seen the baby reaching for the mother? That's right. And thought, why are you not reaching for me? That's right. Except now the mother's really very strong instincts. If you ask most mothers who work full time, who's the primary attachment figure?

2:16:49They'll still say me. Unlike John Bowlby said, the primary attachment figure is the person who is with the baby the majority of the day from moment to moment to soothe them from moment to moment when they're in distress. That's the primary attachment. There are some hard and fast physics of the system that are difficult to work around. I don't know whether you've seen this research. This is really, really new. The bottom two quintiles of male earners and the top quintile of female earners are now mating. Their relationships are female primary breadwinner. So the bottom 40 % of men in that earning bracket and the top 20 % of women are in this dynamic where the woman is earning more.

2:17:36Now, what does this mean for predicting future income? Does this, it could be parity or just a little bit of a difference. But I think this is going to be, this is going to be an increasing challenge. But we also, I mean, we have to have the discussion on an emotional level of whether it's emasculating to men, ultimately, and also the testosterone. discussion. There is an inverse relationship that oxytocin and testosterone have. So the higher the testosterone levels, the lower the oxytocin, the higher the oxytocin, the lower the testosterone. So there's a lot of research going on also because the higher the investment in nurturing, the lower the investment in mating.

2:18:21That's just a mammalian kind of concept. What that means is That father who's been nurturing that baby all day and that mother comes home may not be so interested. Because, you know, men have to perform. Women don't have to perform. They can lie there and pretend. And that's the truth. Men have to perform. And then the question is, how does that impact sexual performance or sexual desire? You know, if you are nurturing, you know, one of the things that always comes up with married couples is she had a baby and she didn't want to have sex with me anymore. I'm like, because she had a baby. And the mating behaviors and the nurturing behaviors are not happening at the same time.

2:19:04When you're nurturing, you don't want to mate again. If you see a female lion who's nurturing her cubs and the male lion comes up and goes, come on, honey, let's do it again. She goes, get away from me. And there's a reason for that because she needs to protect her cubs, but she also can't mate at that moment. So, you know, we are just mammals. That's all. I mean, we have big brains, but we are just mammals and our instincts are related to mammal behavior. So how does it affect marital relationships, sexual relationships? I've had a lot of couples that I've treated where the husband lost interest in the wife.

2:19:44She'd come home and, you know, her testosterone was very high because she'd been out in the work world and she wants to mate, you know, but he's like, you know, I don't want to mate or I don't want to mate with you. I want to find someone who's, who I can feel more, you know, so it's emasculating. And I think we don't want to talk about this. You know who talks about this is Suzanne Banker. Not familiar with her. She writes books about this. That's her specialty is sort of talking about how the gender reversal in relationships has affected marital relationships overall. Jared, spin it up. Suzanne Banker.

2:20:20Suzanne Banker. Thank you. Believe it or not, she's Phyllis Schlafly's niece. Okay. Yeah. This feels like, I don't know, inception or something that all of the circles begin to spiral closer and closer together. I think one of the reasons that this is very difficult to talk about, one of the reasons that people don't want to have this discussion, is there is a lot of, we want to throw shade at the privileged group, the seemingly privileged group, where the man's able to go out and work and they don't want women to be able to go and have their kind of independence. They don't want to give up their place.

2:20:54They're intimidated by educated and socioeconomically successful women. And they should just, they're emasculated, they should just grow up. And they should learn to be able to deal with it. And you go, do the women want that in their partner? How many women come home and want to be ravaged by their partner who's wearing a papoose and has been bottle field feeding all day? This is what's it. What's that Thomas Sowell line? There are no solutions, only trade-offs. Yeah. And look, this is just straight up going to be, unless some socioeconomic reversal happens, whereby women see family building and motherhood as becoming re-pedestralized and the aspirational thing to do.

2:21:43And also we put the safeguards in place to mean that they don't have the concern of being left, being financially independent because they can't be independent. Like a million things needs to happen. I don't think that that's going to occur. So increasingly, this is going to happen. But the denial of the fact that there are some fucking tradeoffs in this. That's really the word, the tradeoffs. And are we really willing to talk about the tradeoffs? Are we willing to, is it so uncomfortable to talk about them that we won't talk about them? Because if you don't, you know, Fred Rogers, Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood, I don't know, you're from the UK, but Mr.

2:22:19Rogers' Neighborhood was a big, he was a minister who had a public television children's show, which was the most psychological show on public television, that basically he was the first person to treat children in a sensitive way and talk to them like sensitive human beings and not treat them like objects. and he said he went in front of PBS when he was trying to save PBS and the funding for it many years ago and he said, you know what I do is I help to educate parents and children that when feelings are mentionable, they're manageable. So for some reason, we've lost sight of that. The things that are mentionable are manageable that we can work through conflicts if we mention them and talk about them by sweeping them under the carpet and not talking about them because it's not politically correct to talk about them, is not going to make them go away.

2:23:13It actually makes them hide in very deep and dark places and cause things like divorce or mental health issues or, you know, no, we have to talk about these things and we have to talk about the trade-offs. You have mentioned, and we've spoken a lot about the physical presence. You keep saying another word as well, which is emotional presence. Yeah. What's that? What is emotional attunement in this context? How important is that? What's the role it plays? Well, you need both. So, you know, this whole idea of quality time is a ruse, and it's just that. It's not a real thing. It was made up to justify parents' absence.

2:23:51Children need, you are their digestive system. You have to be there throughout the day, or somebody has to be there throughout the day that they really trust and feel secure with, who is their primary person, to process, to digest, right? Like a stomach, like a kidney, like to digest. And I think that we have stopped thinking about parents' presence as something that is consistent because it didn't suit the narrative that everybody should go out and work in the corporate world or in the world outside. So quality time is a ruse. Children need both physical presence and emotional. So you can be there physically and be emotionally checked out.

2:24:32It's possible to be there physically and be depressed or distracted or resentful, but it is not. And I say it is not possible to be there emotionally if you are not there physically. This is a bunch of baloney that we are feeding parents. Oh, this magical thinking that quality time makes up for it. That's right. That you can put your child on the shelf like a vase. and it's going to be, or like a picture frame, and it's going to be in the same position when you want to suspend development until you come home again. Can children tell the difference between a mother who is there but doesn't want to be and one who is there but does want to be?

2:25:10Yes. They can also tell the difference between a mother who has to go to work and who doesn't want to go to work. They can feel the pain in that mother, particularly if that mother shares it. And that's, you know, in other words, a housekeeper or a babysitter or someone who works in a factory who's a single mother who's raising three children and has no option. She comes home at six o 'clock and she doesn't leave again because she's not seen her child all day. And she tells her child and she tells her children, I wanted to be with you today and I didn't want to be at work. Where I really wanted to be was right by your side.

2:25:49and her children can feel with great authenticity that she means that. The problem is children know when their mothers and fathers don't want to be with them. This is the thing. Reading all of your work, the thing that has struck me the most is this weird panopticon situation that we've primarily put mothers in, women in, preparing to become mothers. in advance of having kids, I think a lot of women are really nervous. I'm going to have to let go of a lot of things that give me status and acclaim and prestige and independence and a sense of progress. And then once they have their kids, they feel like a second-class citizen because everybody else is doing things.

2:26:34I was having a conversation with a mother of three, who's a good friend, and she was saying, I was so envious of people that had kids during COVID because they didn't feel like they were missing out on anything. Yeah. And yeah, that's right. I was like, hang on a second. What do you mean missing out on anything? They would, that was, that is the thing. The thing is the thing. But there is this FOMO. I feel like I'm falling behind. I have to justify my existence to the universe objectively every single day. And the fact that in advance of having kids, mums can be made to feel uh nervous and then after pregnancy they can feel ashamed and guilty like the single most transcendent beautiful experience that most people go through is tarnished it's tarnished it is by the fact that maybe through necessity yeah i get it like the raw materials of i have to do let's say that you have some degree of i can feather the accelerator of this.

2:27:33I can go to work a bit. I don't need to go all the time. The reason that you're putting your foot back on the gas so quickly is that you feel like you're falling behind. You didn't, all of the things that you worried about, all of the concerns that you had, now you've arrived and you're not even able to enjoy it. You're not even able to enjoy it. And your kid can notice. That's right. It's turned life into a race. And so where are we all racing to? What is the value of life? What is the value of living? What is the meaning of living? And I think we've lost sight of that because if the meaning of living is, and the purpose of life is to be highly successful in our careers and make a lot of money and have a lot of stuff and have a lot of status and celebrity, if that's the meaning and purpose of life for you, then by all means don't have children.

2:28:27But I'm going to say that there's a higher purpose for human beings, which is to love and be loved. And if you're going to teach your children one thing, it's to love and be loved is the meaning and purpose of life. When you lay dying, Aristotle's deathbed question, when you lay dying, it isn't going to be you sitting there going, gosh, I wish I was more famous. Gosh, I wish I had more money or I wish I had another beach house. It's not what you're going to be thinking about. You're going to be either sitting beside the people who you love and who love you and leaving this earth with a legacy of love.

2:29:07And as we say in Judaism, when somebody dies, may their memory be a blessing. You are either going to be a blessing to the people you love or you're not. That is the meaning of life. It is not how much money you make. It is not how successful you are in your career, how much status you have, how much celebrity you have. That is not the meaning of life. And I think we've gotten off track. Erica Commissar, ladies and gentlemen. Erica, you rule. You're so great. And I love your work. And thank you for that. Where should people go to check out everything you've got going on? www.commissar.com. And I have three books here, which I'm going to give all to Chris.

2:29:47I have the first, Being There. About zero to three, I have Chicken Little, The Sky Isn't Falling, Raising Resilient Adolescents. And I have my newest book, which is A Parent's Guide to Divorce. And this is how you raise emotionally resilient children while going through the separation and breakup process. So you can see all those books and buy all those books with the connections from my website, but you can also make appointments to see me. And yeah. You're fantastic. I really hope that you keep going. Thank you. Thank you for having me.

2:30:48And it's completely free. You can get it right now by going to chriswillx.com slash books. That's chriswillx.com slash books.