Jordan Peterson and Warren Farrell on The Boy Crisis and Gender Politics

[Music] dr warren farrell is the author of books published in 17 languages they include two award-winning international bestsellers why men are the way they are plus the myth of male power warren is being chosen by the financial times as one of the world's top 100 thought leaders he is currently the chair of the commission to create a white house council on boys and men he's the only man in the u.s to have been elected three times to the board of the national organization for women now in new york city dr farrell has appeared repeatedly on oprah today and good morning america and has been the subject of features on 2020 in forbes the wall street journal people parade and the new york times his co-author of his newest book is dr john gray the author of men are from mars women are from venus once again this is the book we're going to talk not only about the book today the new one the boy crisis but also about dr farrell's career and his goals and his aims and all of that and so i'd like to introduce everyone to dr warren farrell and ask him to tell us what he's up to and why well i guess what i'm up to is sort of the evolution of maybe all that time since 1969 and uh when the women's movement surfaced i was very interested in it and felt that women really needed to be able to be equally respected and enter the workplace and have options open and i was upset that women were not playing sports to the degree that i felt that was creating the benefits to them of sports and so i started articulating this and started talking to my doctoral dissertation advisors about doing this and their first reaction was warren the woman's movement is just a fad and i said i don't think so i think this is the beginning of the change of of gender roles from both men and firm women and so i talked with them about that eventually convinced them that i could change my dissertation and that led me to being seen by now as someone who was a man who was receptive at a time that the feminist movement was getting a lot of um accusations of being man-haters and so i think i served the purpose of here's a who here's a man a real-life flesh man who advocates but we're advocating here um get up and say what we're saying it's going to be harder to call you a man-hater and so um the i i started doing that and then ended up speaking all around the world on women's issues and the value of women being secure enough and competent enough to be able to share the breadwinning burdens that men handle and that was my focus for until the mid 70s and in the mid 70s i began to see that the feminist movement had made a great deal of progress and was everyone was sort of getting on board who was in at least in the sort of middle class above and educated and so um that was but there was also a huge number of divorces occurring and so i began to say it's important for the children to have both parents after divorce and betty friedan and gloria steinem and a woman named karen de crow agreed with me but now the board of i was on the board of now at that time had gotten elected as a result of my um advocacy to the board of now and my fellow um and you know female co-workers on the board of now said we we're at a dilemma here and the dilemma is that the women are writing us saying they're going to withdraw from now if they don't have the option to determine what happens with the children after divorce um and uh we don't want to lose now membership because it's not only important for family purposes but for all the other agendas we have and so i said well the important thing is not women's rights or men's rights the important thing is knowing what's best for the children and they said yes warren great theory but we really need to focus on empowering women and on a broad spectrum and so they ended up all voting in terms of giving women the option to be fully involved with the children or not depending on what under the guise that women know the best know the children the best and therefore they know what's best for the children and so now and i began to have a significant amount of tension over that point and betty friedan and gloria steinem didn't weigh in they weren't on the board of now and then all the other boards of nails around the country began to go the same way that the new york city now went and so that led to my um disengagement and also i started forming hundreds of men's groups one of which i think you know was joined by john lennon and that was that had a big impact on both the people in the groups and i began to see what men's pain was and so i began to articulate men's pain in as well as women's pain in my um in my presentations and when i was only articulating women's pain and women's challenges i would always almost always get standing ovations and maybe an average of three invitations for a new speaking engagement and that was helping me live financially very well um but then when i started to integrate the perspectives and feelings of men from the men's groups there was a lot of i didn't see those standing ovations why not why not what fights for new speaking engagements went from three to two to one and then eventually to zero well it seems it seems self-evident in some sense that if you're articulating truthfully and carefully what would be good for either sex in some sense you have to be articulating what would be good for both i mean unless you view the the battleground unless you view reality as a battleground between the sexes and as and as a zero-sum game we can't have an intelligent conversation about what's good for women or what's good for men we have to have a conversation about what's good for men and men and women and women and men and women and so why do you think what was your sense of why it was when you started to raise these other issues that you were that you were immediate immediately unpopular two questions why do you think that made you unpopular and why is it that you so early cottoned on to the fact that there was something going on that wasn't exactly kosher in relationship to now's push for for for a particular kind of family structure and a particular view of women's rights yes yeah i i think what happened for me was um i i just when i started focusing on what was best for children and then i began to we only had minimal amount of research up for that at that point in time this is you know early 70s and but we had enough for me to make a case to the board and when i saw the resistance the degree to which um there's there was two things happening one is we we don't want to lose our power base we don't ever want to have a woman say whatever option she wants should be closed to her and so i began to see that the women's movement was caring more about women than they were caring about the children that was the first disillusionment that i had okay so your first your first ethical point in some sense is that when you're speaking about families and you have to balance the rights and responsibilities of men women and children that it makes sense to you to put children's well-being first and foremost and then to to place men and women as individuals say or maybe perhaps even as a couple below that yes exactly what i was saying was that freedom of choice is wonderful but when you make the freedom of choice to have a child you then start prioritizing the needs of the child you made but you knew that those needs were going to be the child's needs first when you made that free choice so it wasn't like you were coerced into the into or pressured into making that choice you made the free choice to have a child that incorporates the need to put the child's perspectives before yours that's part of your free choice right so it's basically the freedom there is the freedom to take on a certain kind of relatively permanent responsibility and then to abide by that come hell or high water essentially into the future that the children should not respect the parents needs because part of what i talk about in the boy crisis is that uh ain't nobody happy you know um that everybody has to be happy in a family and that and that part of choosing a child to be responsible is to choosing the child not just to have its needs met but to also care about what whether what what their moms or dads needs are being met as well and that has to be very primary and primal and introduced early um but that the uh and then secondly um i i also felt and and betty for dan felt this way also that the women's movement would never go as far as it could go unless the unless men were equally involved and proud of being involved in the fathering role because a woman who has to take on the entire response a woman who wants to break glass ceilings and go as far as she can but also once children can't do that all if the man is working full-time and she's working full-time either the children get neglected or um you know or something something has to go and so women will often say to me you know i want to be a habital woman and i say you can be a habital woman revere find a man who wants to be home full time with the children and let's reshape society so we're saying that that men are not only worrier warriors that we that we praise and call heroes when they go to war and they die for us but they're also warriors if they choose if you if you choose a man who wants to be fully involved with the child let's honor him and respect him because we know that the the social bribes that we gave men to die allowed men to be willing to sacrifice their lives in exchange for being called hero uh well if we if we reframe being a father as being a different type of hero men will follow because men basically go wherever the praise goes okay okay so in the 70s so you started to put forward the case for children and to some degree as well simultaneously the case for fathers and you received a fair bit of resistance as a consequence of that and it sounds like the way you're setting up the argument is that the conflict what was the conflict though was it that the the women who were being appealed to by now wanted untrammeled freedom of choice for them under all circumstances the reason i'm asking is because if you have children obviously half the children you have are female and you'd assume that if it was a matter of of women's opening up what would be best for women in any kind of medium to long-term manner that the concerns about daughters would be perhaps even if it isn't concerns about sons it would be concerns about daughters that would emerge as paramount even over the concerns of the mother so so what is it that was i still don't exactly get why it was that you weren't being successful because it doesn't make sense because the pr the priority there was two things happening simultaneously one was such a strong emphasis on freedom and the freedom manifested in two areas one is in the area of divorce in divorce the women were often saying i i don't like my husband i want to start a new life i want to be able to move out of state if i wish to to get a job that i want or my new husband my new husband or boyfriend has a has a wants to move out of state and so i want to be able to take my children or child with me um because and uh and and i know what's best for my child which would be like the you know medical community saying we don't want women to be participating in the medical community because we know what's best for for the patient and not not that women might have a separate um contribution to make on the other hand there was the that there was women who wanted to have the freedom to be able to have children without being married um and so 53 of women under 30 today who have children in the united states have children without being married and the belief was again that women knew what was best for the children so we could they could take this on if they wanted to and they couldn't find a man that they really wanted that they could raise the child by themselves or the children but themselves okay so so part of it was actually driven by questioning the necessity of the nuclear family as the smallest viable unit and part of that hey that's correct and b uh the feminist community started um when when i would go to feminist rallies and so on uh there would be many books about you know lenin and the the nuclear family being the the patriarchal that were oppressing women and so there so i think the feminist the feminist movement grew out of two huge iterations one was the civil rights movement where there was an oppressor and an oppressed then there was the um the the the movement of um not just civil rights but after the femi after the civil rights movement came the the marxism and the belief that there were oppressors and oppressed in among marxists and a lot of the feminist movement the early feminist movement was very we had groups like red stockings and many other groups like that that were socialist worker party type feminists that very much believed in marxism and they had the dichotomy of oppressor versus oppressed so when it came to men men because we earned more we because our biological not our biological our socialized and biological responsibility was to earn the money and do that type of nature of providing the feminist movement looked at the fact that we earned more money once we had children and so therefore we must be the oppressor like those like the bourgeoisie of marxism and women must be the oppressed so you have two things happening simultaneously this belief that the oppressors are wanting to be equally involved with the children and then secondly men having no idea why they had value third men who the very few men that did study the value of being a father and how important it was to children um didn't speak up about it and women can't hear what men don't say so we had this world then where women were sharing the burden of about breadwinning but no one was even interested in asking the question about whether men could share the burden from women of of of earning of providing equally for the family and and women weren't even interested in that because they were so focused on their freedom and saw men as the oppressor and so there was no space to articulate the value of fathers and men in the family okay so well you know your terminology is interesting too because you're attributing the the desire of the women who were pushing against what you were saying say um you're attributing that to a desire to freedom but it seems to me that you could easily use irresponsibility as a terminology there you know because free free while freedom without concern for the medium to long-term consequences of your actions especially when you're bringing in when you're dealing with minors when you're dealing with children that's not freedom that's irresponsibility that is absolutely irresponsibility and that is where we as a society have failed to come in and say um you know first of all whenever either sex wins that is a woman wins custody for example whenever either sex wins both sexes lose and it's worse than that whether whenever either sex wins both sexes lose and in the case of a family the children lose enormously and and we also need to sort of understand exactly what is it that that that leads to children doing so much better when they have fathers involved i was i started researching that and i ended up as you know with the boy crisis ended up with more than 70 different ways that when children have their father involved in an about an equal way that they do so much better they do well it would be a lovely thing if you could detail out some of that now and then we'll go back to the the political ideological story here but but see one of the things that's happened in ontario recently is that we've our our government has introduced legislation that is predicated on on the idea that all families are equal and the the idea behind that you could argue is laudable i i wouldn't argue that but you could argue it that you know people have a variety of ways of solving the problem of having children and that there's a variety of viable solutions to that problem and that no one family organizational type should be privileged above the others i mean i suppose with the exception of multi-partner marriages which we we still don't approve of let's say the problem with that as far as i can tell is that it does appear from the research that the nuclear family is this my smallest viable unit which is not to say that there aren't single mothers or single fathers who do an admirable job under trying conditions but part of the problem this is a deep problem is that whenever you whenever you posit something as a value so you might say well we want intact families mother and father that's that that's the value we're heading for because that seems to be best for the children then you produce a rank order of accordance with that and the people who aren't in accordance with that value you can easily make a case that they're being discriminated against and we're in a situation in our society now where even if the discrimination occurs let's say because of the pursuit of an admirable value it's regarded as prejudicial and i think that's fed by that underlying hypothesis that was anti-nuclear family that any sort of hierarchical structure is part of the tyrannical patriarchy it's something like that that's running underneath it so anyways let's review if you would it'd be very helpful i think for everyone some of the many ways that it's necessary for children to have fathers why that's better and and perhaps also first for society as well not just for children absolutely children that have a lot about equal or uh more than equal father involvement have a number of things in common as a rule and obviously there's reversals of this and and not every everyone fits this this pattern but the first is they're far more likely to have postponed gratification and i'll elaborate on that a little bit more postponed gratification is probably the single most important quality to becoming successful and becoming successful especially being employed in a job that has some meaning for you is one of the most important ingredients in happiness and a sense of purpose and a sense of motivation and a sense of willingness to get up in the morning and so um in a little while i'll be happy to just trace back how that postponed gratification happens more when you have a father yeah because i'm really interested in hearing about that second second layer this far children that have an equal amount of father involvement are far less likely to be depressed they're far less more likely to be assertive and not aggressive which is something you usually think of men as being you know aggressive but actually the children of both girls and boys whose fathers are involved are far more likely to understand the distinction between being assertive and being aggressive and choose assertiveness boys another surprising one for me in doing the research was finding that boys and girls who are raised with about an equal amount of father involvement are far more likely to be empathetic because i always thought of empathy coming predominantly from moms and i'll be happy to explain in a bit why it does come more from moms but why the outcome for the child is not more empathy the outcome for the child is less empathy so a little bit more on that later yeah sure far more likely both boys and girls should drop out of school if there isn't far uh father involvement uh far more likely when um when a relationship breaks up um a child that has not had significant father involvement is much more likely to be depressed and be withdrawn and be feel alienated um far more likely to be addicted to video games far more likely to be addicted to video porn far less more likely to have few social skills few emotional skills to do worse in every academic area but especially in reading and writing which are the two biggest predictors of success uh far more likely to have a lower sperm count have um and here's an amazing thing i just discovered toward the end of the research for the boy crisis i saw in pediatrics magazine and that children who by the age of nine don't have a significant amount of father involvement both girls and boys were likely to have shorter telomeres and as most of us know the telomeres are pivotal in predicting life expectancy so boys and girls the average shorter telomere for a nine-year-old boy or girl without father involvement was 14 uh i'm sorry it was uh yes uh 14 shorter but the boys telomeres were then again 40 shorter than the girls so here this was predicting about a 14 shorter life expectancy for the average child without father involvement by the age of nine already and yet the boys were suffering more so two things fascinated me there is you know if all the things like you know dropping out of school and things like that i asked myself well maybe this is because boys with father involvement um just have better um you know better neighborhoods um the fathers earn more the families earn more maybe it's a matter of poverty versus not poverty so i started looking at boys and girls growing up in good quote good neighborhoods with quote good schools and comparing them with boys and girls growing up in poor neighborhoods in poor schools and found that the that boys and girls growing up in good neighborhoods with poor schools that did not have significant father involvement did about the same as boys and girls growing up in poor neighborhoods with poor schools that did have father involvement that father involvement was really as as good a predictor of success um as the quality of the school system the quality of the neighborhood and the socio-economic class and this is what's led to um you know to the psychologist um gathering together behind people like warsha 100 psychologists and researchers saying you know this is not a correlation the involvement of father this is not a matter of socioeconomic issues this is a matter of actual fathers fathers father's involvement especially the biological father's involvement actually makes a significant difference we have been wrong about the assumption that this was probably just a correlation and so the more i looked the more i found just every nightmare of a parent to be so increased when there was not a significant amount of father involvement and i was seeing i was dating between before i married liz the woman you just met just before we got on before we got married 14 years ago i was dating a number of women almost every woman had was a single mother and these every single woman was working her rear off trying to balance her life every woman used the word overwhelmed by the way she felt every almost every woman said well i'd like my dad and the dad involved but um but when the but i started listening to the butts of the women and then listening to men who had wanted to be more involved with their children and listening to what the differences were between what left the mid what made the men feel not wanted what made the men feel excluded and why the women felt that they needed to not have the man involved and i saw this entire set of misunderstandings here and if i hope the boy crisis does anything is to sort of explain you know here are the ten major things that dads do that that sort of annoy women or make women feel that they're not protecting their children adequately which when they understand the purpose of these things and when dads get their homework done enough to articulate to the moms the purpose of these things that will realize that the these are necessary ingredients in a child's life okay so that's a good that's a good place to go next so you laid out a whole slew of reasons a slew of consequences of fatherlessness and we'll return back to the causal relationship between what men do and these beneficial outcomes but if you could go on now to tell us what it is that men are doing at a micro level then we could return to the causal link between that and the positive outcomes and you said those also caused some contention in the household yes yeah i'll give one example for example will be um a father is roughhousing with the kids and the mom's looking over and saying looking at scans and thinking okay when should i interfere when should i not interfere and the mom's saying to herself um jimmy uh you know um please keep the kids away from the the credenza there keep the kids away from the the couch because you they could hit their head there why don't you wait happy to tomorrow when you can take this outside i feel much safer with the kids and then the mother is sort of hesitating to not be overly controlling and yet at the same time she's feeling she has to monitor the husband as well as monitor the husband with the kids and she's feeling in the back of her mind like i sooner or later there's going to be a there's going to be an accident here and i'm going to be upset with myself for not being stricter but on the other hand the kids seem to be having fun so i should let things go well you know there's a there's a psychobiologist named jack pancep who is one of the world's great biological psychologists and he studied rough and tumble play in in animals so rats for example a huge part of the the socialization process that's key to the development of the prefrontal cortex in juvenile male routes in particular emerges and matures as a consequence of rough and tumble play and one of the amazing things that panks have discovered and this truly is an amazing thing is that um if you if you pair two rats together and then let them play repeated bouts the big rat will dominate the little rat to begin with in the first bout but if the big rat doesn't let the little rat win about 30 percent of the time in repeated play bouts then the little rat won't play anymore so you get an emergent morality in emergent play-centered morality even among rats as a consequence of rough and tumble play and that rough and tumble i did a fair bit of research on rough and tumble play about oh it's probably 20 years ago now 15 years ago anyways and it's really quite clear that rough and tumble play helps children parameterize their bodies so that they know how they extend and and and also what limits there is in the use of physical interactions with another person what's fun what's provocative what's pushing it too far what's painful and of course kids love rough and tumble play as well they're just absolutely starving for it and we've squeezed it out of the kindergartens the nursery schools the elementary schools the junior high schools all of that and for and forbid and what pang sepp also found was that if you deprived juvenile rats of the opportunity to engage in active rough and tumble play that they showed symptoms that were broadly analogous to those of attention deficit disorder in human boys and that you could also treat that with ritalin the same way in rats as you could with boys so there's that rough and tumble play issue you know and you might think too the question is one question is why might a mother be distrustful of the rough and tumble play episode and some of that might be sensitivity with regards to the kids but a huge part of that also is trust on her trust with regards to the father you know because it's rambunctious and noisy and if she trusts let's say that that act of masculinity that plays rough then she'll stay away and let the fun happen but if there's distrust running through the family then then she'll stand between the kids and the father and then he won't get to involve himself in that way and then he'll turn off and i've seen that happen many many families okay so there's rough and tumble play that's a big one what else did what else do you see let me take the the evolution of how rough and tumble play goes and all the the the dimensions of where it go with the slippery slope that it leads to so the the the father the what the mom what neither the mom nor the dad know is that this rough and tumble play leads to the types of things that you just mentioned which are also evident in you know and elephants and so on yeah but it also leads to the distinction between a child being able to distinguish between being assertive versus aggressive so the so the kid starts for example maybe um kicking the dad in the the wrong place or poking the dad in the eyes or pulling the dad's hair and the dad says um sweetie you can fake you can fake eye contact to the left and then move to the right to win in this wrestling match or you can um you know you can do this this and this but you can't do these things yes and if you do do these things we'll stop the rough housing yeah so there so there's a really important issue there so two things there so imagine that imagine that a rough and tumble bout is like a dance okay and and the point of the dance is so that both people are having a good time while it's happening because otherwise it's not play right and as soon as either party is no longer having a good time you've actually snapped out of the psychobiological function of the play circuit so basically what you're telling the child by putting those rules on is we can interact physically within a very limited set of parameters and you what you have to learn to do is to be a sophisticated player within that set of parameters and you want to learn how to push the boundaries right because the most fun rough and tumble play is right on the edge between assertiveness and aggression so and you can see kids like i used to work in daycare centers when i was a kid when i was 18 19 and the kids would line up to rough and tumble play with me because that was still allowable then and they were so desperate for it it was just ridiculous and i could really tell the difference between the kids who had engaged in that sort of play and the ones that hadn't and the ones that hadn't were painfully awkward and they would hurt themselves and you when you wrestled with them they'd put their thumb in your eye or and they would cry often too when they got surprised but not hurt you know because they couldn't tell the difference between just being startled and being hurt and so they were fragile and that also made them not fun to play with and the thing that's so interesting about that too is that piaget talked about this when he talked about the development of children is that you know the more sophisticated pretend play and then sophisticated cognitive play that emerges say between five and seven and then with the cognitive play older than that is that unless you have that underlying psychomotor embodied dance down you don't get to really proceed in a sophisticated way to those higher levels of play because other people don't want to play with you so the rough and tumble play the importance of that can hardly be overstated so absolutely and the framework here is that when you set up a system where you've said that you know men are part of the patriarchy their their their their desire is to dominate women and make rules to benefit men at the expense of them benefit men at the expense of women you have a framework an emotional setting which does not is not conducive to men saying here's my value or women saying let me see what the checks and balances of parenting is that leads to the best of you coming out and the best of me coming out all of that has sort of we've skipped over an inherent sense of father knows best who father knows less um and and and we've and and so the the the process that i'll be sharing in a moment of what rough housing leads to and and the slippery slope that happens when it doesn't happen um is is what has not even been um nurtured as a possibility to be articulated in this culture at this time i also think too you know that if you have a a partner who hasn't been played with then that partner can't tell the difference between boisterous rambunctiousness and aggression and if there's a hypothesis about domination and the patriarchy running its course underneath that then there's going to be conceptual confusion about the physical interactions that have the appearance of submission and dominance because that's part of the roughhousing play routine it's gonna that that is going to be viewed through a lens of tyrannical interaction rather than just good fun and i mean you can tell the difference because if the kids are rough and tumble playing they're unbelievably enthusiastic about it and engaged and laughing and giggling and like they'll play right to the point of exhaustion because they need it they need it so much but that's a hard thing to observe from the outside if you're not accustomed to that and if you don't have that framework of of um of men having and dads having a value to begin with absolutely not so here's here's maybe what what might ring be helpful for a mom to understand at the rough and tumble play we now know helps children distinguish between being assertive and aggressive but a number of other things all also happen during that play which is that is a bond that is created between the father and the child and in almost every i've in doing expert witness work to help children have both parents have to divorce i've observed more than 50 families and um and usually the father interacting with with the children and in almost every case every case section actually i believe that i have seen this is this bond is used by the father to say things like okay um we're no more rough housing now tell you what um you get your homework done you get your chores done you get all ready for bed brush teeth teeth brush well and um the bedtime is nine o'clock whenever you get all that done we'll have between the time you get it done and the time of nine o'clock in order for you to have some more fun either with roughhousing or reading my favorites your favorite story or whatever whatever you prefer it's your choice well you know with with pancep's work too he found that the little rats the rats will work to enter a play arena because because play you think play is a so panks have established very very clearly that there is a primary play circuit in mammals it's a separate psychobiological circuit it's not exploration it's a whole different motivational drive but that the ac but activity in that circuit is intrinsically pleasurable and part of that appears to be because it's so key to proper socialization that it it's regarded by by children and by social mammals as intrinsically valuable and so it makes perfect sense that that can be used as a source of primary reward and i think your comments about the the man and the kids binding themselves together through play is also really important because one of the things that i do with young men who you know i think young men tend to be somewhat alienated from infants who are under about nine months old because they're not really equipped to know what the hell to do with them i mean they can learn and they can be good at it but it's not their domain of natural expertise but once a kid hits about nine months and starts to be able to imitate and to pound and to and to play and to respond to gentle teasing like that's a perfect time for the father to swoop in which is very helpful for a mother by the way who wants to have another child and to start really cementing a relationship that's based on that interesting combination of of high energy fun plus the disciplined interactions that are necessary as a precursor to that and if you interfere with that then you stop the father from being able to form that pro from liking his kids really you know because that's how the liking comes about is is through play and so it's it's crucial it's of crucial significance absolutely and thank you the the the the additional framework that you're placing on this is really deepening my own understanding of it as well a book called affective neuroscience written by yak pancep it's on my reading list on my website i would highly recommend that because he lays out the findings from the animal literature on the primary place it's really he should have won a nobel prize for it i mean discovering an entirely new motivational system in the brain is a major major contribution and to also the other thing that he did that was so cool and sort of reminded me of jean piaget's work a little bit is he made a very strong case that out of play emerges an ethic and you know that that's why i was so interested when you mentioned that interactions with father actually increase empathy because you know if someone has empathy for you that means that i mean that can lead to a certain kind of narcissism right because you're always the center of attention you're not empathic unless you learn to that you're not any more important than the next person particularly the person that you happen to be playing with so okay so let's continue with with what fathers are doing yeah so in that rough housing what happens is that the bond that is created by the dad allows the dad to say you've got you know here's we'll continue the rough housing if you get you know between 8 30 and 9 if you if you have everything done um but so that the child learns to postpone gratification from doing the what it loves to do right then and there that is be roughhoused with and deal with what it has to deal with before it gets more of what it uh what it needs and so but the bond so that's interesting so you you actually think and i wonder if there's been any any see we don't know much about the origin of the trade conscientiousness which is at least in part the ability to delay gratification and it is after intelligence it's the best predictor of long-term life success especially in managerial and administrative jobs in algorithmic jobs it's not associated with creativity but but that's that's a side issue so your hypothesis is that the primary way men are socializing that is by using work to play as a as a as a bridge yes that that play creates a bond so a lot of the problem is when when moms often talk to say you know you have to do this you have to do that you have to do this you have to do that the mother is often experienced by the child that's sort of the disciplinarian who's always making him or her do things and there's the seeds of rebellion start to occur i'm sort of like how much am i going to be myself how much am i going to do what mom does do i want to be a mama's boy or it doesn't even happen consciously but you know you just sort of feel like you're being pushed down by all the rules but with dad you the bond that is or moms who roughhouse with the children a bond is created and from that and and you want to return to that that connection so you it's like a child going on a roller coaster you where you know there's an enormous amount of safety but you also excitement but also an enormous amount of safety and so you trust the dad to combine that both and you want to return to that so you're willing to focus on getting done what you need to do your homework your chores your brush your teeth or whatever in order to get what you want to do which is the you know of post bone gratification but now let's take the slippery slope when this doesn't happen so okay so let me let me just add one more thing to that well the thing that's so cool about that is that you've also provided a really intelligent piece of parenting advice for for fathers it's like because you're so let's say b.f skinner who was the famous animal behaviorist demonstrated quite clearly that you could train animals with reward more effectively than with threat or punishment now threat or punishment is necessary obviously we wouldn't have biological systems subservient those emotions if they weren't necessary but but reward is harder to use because you have to be much more attentive and and intervene when something good happens and so you really have to be watching but your hypothesis here is look fathers spend a bunch of time playing with your kids and having as much fun as you can with them because by formulating that bond you can use that as a as the source of reward that will be appreciated by the child with regards to disciplinary strategies so it's it's a it's a two-fold victory one is it's fun and you get to like your kids and have a good time with them but the second is you have a very positive means of disciplining them in the best sense encouraging them and disciplining them so that's that's a really useful thing to know practically you're so deepening the trust of the kids like like you're you're playing and you're right on the edge that you were talking about but there's dad to make sure that the fun doesn't get too hard for you for him uh for your sister and so on and so that that's all happening at the same time now when the right and that's embodied you can see that two ways that's embodied trust so if you toss a little kid up in the air and catch them i mean it's very exciting to them both being tossed up because of the threat but then the relief that occurs because of the safety that's put in there so it's it's not abstract it's really demonstrated and then our dad tossing that child up and and then in fact missing the child quote unquote and the child lands on the bed and he's like like oh you know i was missed so you were gonna catch me but you know also recognized yes well that shows that that shows that things can happen that aren't entirely what you predict but within the confines of a trusting relationship that's still okay and then you could also imagine if the if the dad is wrestling with more than one kid at the same time then he's also acting as just referee right so and then the kids learn how to be judicious in the distribution of attention they learn how to play fair they learn how everybody how everybody can have a turn and everybody wins at the same time and so and that bonding is what is part of what creates just everything you just said is part of what leads the child to have empathy training and the empathy training came from no you were too rough on your sister there if you try it again you can't be that rough oh you still continue to be that rough okay let's no more play that's right play stops when everyone isn't having fun what when when my kids were little we had this couch that was a sectional in six pieces and so we could put the couches facing each other and then we put up the the uh the backs all the way around it so it was like a little wrestling ring and so then i would take the kids in there and just wrestle them half to death you know but one of the things i used to do was if one of the kids was rough with the other and made them cry then i noticed that the kid who made the other kid cry wouldn't look at the crying kid they'd look away and avoid and so i always used to say no no no you look you look and you see what happened because that that triggers that embodied empathy and then you can easily have a conversation and say look you know is that how you want the game to go or do you want everybody to have fun and the thing is once the kid actually looks then they've got it right because they can't escape from that empathic identification and so yeah when the child doesn't have that you know we said we have all this data now these 70 different areas where children do so much worse when they don't have a father involvement so let's look at the next stage of that now when when that father does not do this rough housing and as just one example of many and um and does not is not enforcing boundaries um the child then doesn't learn to have that postponed gratification so we have hard data on this that children children raised predominantly by dads are only 15 likely to have adhd children raised predominantly by moms are 30 likely to have adhd so if we looked at what we just talked about the children that are raised by the dads are learning that they have to postpone that gratification in order to get the reward that they want now you take that capacity to postpone credit vacation to school the child without postponed gratification assigned a homework assignment doesn't really feel is oftentimes distracted by a text that's come in distracted by um the opportunity to play video games distracted by wanting to exchange notes with other kids is distracted distracted sure just well yeah well the distraction the thing about the dis there's no need to explain adhd what there is a need to do is to explain why every kid doesn't have it and the answer is the answer that you just laid out is that some kids learn how to control their destruct like distractibility doesn't require an explanation because people are distracted by what's immediately rewarding and that doesn't require it's like addiction actually addiction doesn't require explanation either what requires explanation is the development of the resources that allow you to withstand addictive pressures in the face of the fact that they're always they're everywhere and they're powerful so it's it's it's development of control that's that's really the curious issue and i've never heard this i've never heard anyone make this connection between the use of play as a reward and that delay of gratification that's a very very interesting idea that's very interesting and and then let me take it another step further if i may so when this delayed gratification is happening and it does not happen and then the boy isn't able to finish homework he starts beginning um to feel ashamed of himself or if he's maybe athletic and his parents believe that it's really going to be helpful to the child to have beautiful dreams sweetie you want to be an nba player and you're tall and you you know you continue practicing you could be an nba player and you can have your dreams but the post he doesn't have that postponed gratification so cannot do the boring repetition that comes with all success including being an olympic star or an nba player or anything else or playing the piano or learning to read or great example certainly the violin um and so you so anything that is his dream the bigger the dream the bigger the disappointment and it's not just disappointment that he fears he'll will happen to his parents uh but also the the sense that he says he's going to do one thing in school his his teachers his peers are not respecting him as much yeah he ca the cheerleaders aren't going first and ten in a concussion again to him they're doing it to somebody else at first then do it again and so the the boy is beginning to feel shame yeah well you think you think shame look here here's the precondition for shame so let's say that you are attracted by a goal naturally and you know maybe that's scaffolded by your parents maybe it's scaffolded by your peers but it's something that you're naturally turning your attention towards it grips you in some sense okay and and we'll assume that it's a difficult goal and so then there's an ethic that emerges out of that which is that if that goal is valuable and it's difficult then there's sacrifices that have to be made delays of gratification that have to be implemented in order for you to be worthy to attain that goal okay that's all part of the game if you think about it as a game well then then if you observe yourself unable to play the rules of the game play by the rules then how can you not have any how can you not suffer shame and self-contempt because you've already adopted an ethical framework which is this is worth attaining and if you observe in yourself then the inability to attain it because you're constantly being distracted then you're you're going to have contempt for yourself and then the way out of that this is something i learned from nietzsche here's the terrible thing about that because that's a great pathway to nihilism because let's say you posit four goals in succession that you find valuable and then you observe yourself unable to discipline yourself to attain the goals well the most after four successive failures it's like homer simpson said to bart he said to bart um you tried and you failed and then you tried and you failed again what did you learn and homer says to bart the conclusion is never try right and so if you fail a few times at attaining something of importance because you see that you have no discipline then the logical response to that is to cease positive goals absolutely and that's a that's exactly what happens and but we have through technology sort of a perfect escape and that escape is into video games where you can identify with a hero and you can lose the game as often as you wish to with nobody noticing um and then as you begin to get better with certain you know with certain manipulations you can play that game with certain types of people and and increase your your uh skill set at the game um but you're never able to translate that into everyday life uh where you know and and so you start becoming addicted to that game which is you know which are designed to increase your dopamine without having to actually achieve anything well the thing about the games that's that's different like the video games what's different so a game for a little kid has to be immediately rewarding that's why rough and tumble play works for example has to be immediately rewarding and then the game shades into real life but as the game shades into real life what happens is the rewards are deferred and you get more and more disciplined at not being immediately rewarded like when you're learning to read or play the piano for the long term goal the thing about video games is that they do require the development of skill but there but the immediate reward is built in along with the delayed reward because otherwise the game wouldn't be fun for someone who's learning and so the problem is is that a lot of real life games aren't necessarily fun while you're learning them because you have to attain a certain level of mastery and that requires discipline that's also what's wrong with the idea that children can just learn in keeping with what they're spontaneously interested in it's like there's some truth in that because why not follow a child's interests but the problem is is that many highly skilled endeavors virtually any endeavor that's going to be of economic or productive utility requires a apprenticeship where there's a lot of grinding there's a lot of just disciplinary disciplined repetition and so okay well all right so and then one more dimension of that is that that as the boy gets to boy girl age if he's had her if he begins to sense that he's heterosexual he notices that the girls are far more interested in going out with the quarterbacks or the student body presidents or the the performer type boys that are sort of honored in the school system and in life in general and so he begins to start withdrawing and fearing that he can't attract those girls especially the ones he's most um biologically addicted to beautiful ones the cheerleaders he starts withdrawing into porn and a little bit of porn is not a huge issue but the the the porn basically is is stimula is is based on uh the dopamine increasing with each new stimulus you have and so as as he gets addicted to that dopamine he begins to get addicted to only being able to be stimulated when the risk-taking is higher and higher so finally so finally he succeeds in one girl woman being able to come over to his house and be sexual with her but he's so unable to be turned on just by the mere maybe light touch of a hand um or turned on by just being fascinated by what she's saying in the interaction or some combination of the drama of being with her combined with a little bit of touch he's so used to a huge amount of stimulus that occurs and he's and when he gets to be trusting him for a little bit she said he says you know can you be this way can you do this can you act this way and she feels like just some piece of object that is being traded in for the poor and eventually gets disgusted with him withdrawals and he begins to say you know all right this convinces me i am as worthless as i thought i was and the only thing that will give me satisfaction is back to the porn and what became a little bit of an addiction becomes more of an addiction even as he's also becoming simultaneously frequently addicted to the video games at the same time and so all of this is that slippery slope from the the roughhousing that the father is not able to articulate to the mother about the value of that um combined with the trust that you were integrating with that combined with the the lack of post the bond combined with the postponed gratification being taught and then when the postgrad postponed gratification is not taught the slippery slope down the hill to shame self-disgust and uh fear that if that if he tries anything he's just gonna prove to himself and everybody around him that he's one more failure and the degree to which he articulates the desire to try something is the announcement publicly to a group of people um that he's really pretty much going to say today i'm going to try this and tomorrow it's going to be a failure until he until he becomes enormously shamed in worst case scenarios this can lead to such depression that it creates a desire to commit suicide and in the very worst case scenarios it's a belief i believe we see in the school shooters yeah well that brews resentment absolutely man that bruised resentment and anger like nothing else and and who would they get resentment and anger about who are the people that have rejected him who it's the it's the classmates it's the teachers nobody appreciates that sweet sensitivity inside of him um and sees him well i am so angry at that and one day i just want uh i have a desperate need to get their attention and say i count i matter pay attention to me and you know in worst case scenarios only a very small percentage but in worst case scenarios you can understand the school shooting emerging from that yeah well for every for every kid who goes and shoots up a school there's a thousand who are fantasizing in a direction that's headed that way you know and that and some of that's at the beginning of that it's something like well i'm very angry at people because they don't see the value in me but if they get to the point where they're doing something like fantasy extreme violence they're so far past that even they think they've developed a real hatred for everything and and a wish to see it obliterated and and that's you know that's well obviously that's the most terrible of the terrible outcomes that might be generated okay so you talked about you talked about rough and tumble plan delay of gratification you tied empathy into that what are there other cardinal things that you're seeing fathers do because that's pretty early on in life right so you're looking at the interaction with kids there between say a year old and five six years old seven years old something like that um what do you what else do you see happening with fathers both at the early stages and then also later on yes another important thing is is the concept of hangout time now for for a mom listening to this who has a daughter uh we now know that children who uh who have a significant amount of hangout time with with with their dads um that creates more psychological centeredness than any other single phenomenon with uh with boys it's also very important so for example um let's say you're in a divorce situation and a father has the child um for a short period of time let's say on a saturday and he picks his child up from a soccer game and says to um let's say josh uh josh how did the game go and the kid is more like you know the boy especially is more likely to say okay it was okay well tell me more josh it was just okay dad and so but they i think so if at that time the dad has to drop the boy off to to to mom's because it's the end of a visitation time there's nothing that happens beyond that right well and the boy is going to be you know people kids in particular i think although it also happens with couples is that you know one of the things that you do to the person that you're with to test if they care is to be somewhat withholding of information that might be relevant to see to what degree you'll be pursued because you know if you ask me whether i've done something how it went one of the things i'm going to want to know is do you really care and if you're my father i'm really going to want to know that and so one of the ways i can i can gauge that is by asking you but that that's that assumes that your answer is going to be reflective of your actual being and there's no reason to assume that a better way of doing it is for me to be a little bit withholding and a little bit resistant because then i can see you know are you going to poke me a bit because that's a fun thing to do if you're kind of teasy you can say look kid you know poke him in the chest a few times it's like loosen up and talk to me you know and usually if you do that with a kid even an adolescent they'll laugh and you know kind of push your hand away and go dad but they're happy to have that additional prodding right to bring them out of their shell and it's a demonstration that the kid actually cares and you do need time for that so absolutely so that the kid if he's done well or she's done well um is very happy to say ah i scored three goals today that's more than has ever been scored in the history of our school isn't that incredible no problem they'll share that right away but the reason for the hesitation on saying something that they're ashamed of like i remember one father was saying that the boy came home and he had been the goalie the week before but the following week he was not um chosen to be goalie and he couldn't understand why and so that he hesitates to say something for his dad because he doesn't want the dad to sort of either lecture him or disapprove of him or be disappointed in him or be um you know sort of like feel like that's not my son you know i want my son to have scored the goals um so with all those fears the child especially the boy when it comes to performance will keep any failure to perform effectively to himself but now if if the dad drops the child off at mom's that never gets sorted through if the dad has hang out time with the children let's say they're doing homework together and dad maybe is watching a tv and the kid is doing homework and then they appear about the same time getting something from the refrigerator and they have a little discussion about what he wants for dinner and they and the dad asks him to help make dinner with him rather than just sit and do take no responsibility which dads tend to do um they ask the children to be helpful with the dinner making and preparing not to serve them and so in that process of the child chopping up stuff and doing that type of boring thing the child will tend to say you know dad you know i was goalie last week but i wasn't going this week what's that about and the dad will and and what the and the child might say that to the mom even more quickly but the child's expectations with the mom is the mom will give the child assurance the ch and say sweetie it's no problem you're you're fine you're wonderful you're a very good goalie maybe this coach wanted to give the other the other kids a chance because you're so good et cetera et cetera whereas they expect from to add a bit more confrontation a little bit more questioning well one of the things i've noticed in talking to my clinical clients about their intimate relationships is i've been trying to gauge rules of thumb for minimal necessary interaction time to maintain a relationship and with couples i've observed that they need like one or two sessions of intimate time together a week at minimum something like that or things start to go south but they also need as far as i've been able to tell about 90 minutes of communication time across a single week just to keep each other updated in relationship to their stories and so two two questions one is do you have some sense of how you would characterize hangout time and how much of it there is how much of it there needs to be in order to not go go below you know a dangerous minimum and then the other thing i'd like to pick up on is you had talked a little bit about um the more confrontational approach that a father might take when discussing a failure or an inadequacy or something like that on the part of a child and so i wanted to relate something that i've learned about talking to majority male audiences in the last year and a half two years about responsibility and discipline and all of that see you might think that calling someone on their failure is harsh and judgmental but and it is in a sense but it's not harsh and judgmental about their potential you know so if your kid comes to you and says you know i screwed up and here's what i did and it didn't go so well and you say that's okay you're a wonderful kid then the kid's stuck in a bind because they're not feeling so wonderful and they failed but if you say well look you know you're that was stupid like what the hell is wrong with you here's what you could do like you're better than that man get it together a little bit let's come up with some strategies so that you can figure out how that's never going to happen to you again and so instead of putting your faith in who the child is right now which i would say in some sense is the heart is the hallmark of impulsive empathy you put your faith in who the child could be and that's encouragement and i would say in in circumstances of failure especially where the child is motivated to try again encouragement beats it beats impulsive empathy hands down as a mark of faith in who the child might be yes and it takes a while for the child to both reveal its vulnerability and also to have a faith that the the parent um that that the the child tends to open up like a flower to the great to the degrader when she or he realizes that the security that the father is creating by being with them and talking the problem through is there now an ideal setting uh a father who's wise or a mother who's wise will not give a solution right away we'll ask the kids something like um so you know what did you observe what's your best guess as to what happened last week versus this week what do you think was the judge's it was the coach's best intent um and let the and oftentimes inside of the child um is a willingness or is a sense of probably what really did happen but a fear of sort of acknowledging it to himself or herself and especially acknowledging it to anyone else because the person who they might acknowledge it to will not have respect for them and so being able to sort of give have the hangout time facilitates enough time to feel both that large basket of those large arms of security um and nurturance surrounding him or her the the fact that the father is not going to give up on time with me will be here for me and i can and then when the father or the mother facilitates the exploration inside of himself about what the problem might be let's let's him help in a you know carl rogers in a rogerian type of sense um to to find out the part of him that already knows the answer then the child is experiencing both respect and a willingness to be confronted by if i don't have the answer inside of me my father will tell me the truth about what i might be uh need to do next and he'll have and that telling me the truth about what he needs to do next is his way of respecting me without even saying he's respecting me because he wouldn't be confronting me with the truth if he didn't respect me yeah and more specifically not not so not even more specifically than me if he didn't respect my intrinsic ability to overcome obstacles and to grow right which is the best the best answer to someone who says i have a problem is well i have faith that you can overcome that right not that you don't have a problem or that you're okay the way you are it's like yeah yeah that's a problem man but you know and then you know there's another thing that you're talking about that's very much in keeping with i would say standard but relatively deep clinical wisdom which is that um people are much more likely to follow a set of injunctions if they generate them themselves and so we've had some really interesting experiences with this program we design designed called the future authoring program and it helps people come up with a life plan so they have to craft a vision for their operations across the six or seven basic dimensions of life like intimate relationships and family and career ambitions and education and resistance to temptation drugs and alcohol care of mental and physical health and so on those fundamental dimensions use of productive use of time outside of work to ask themselves what they would want if they could have what they wanted to need along those domains three to five years down the road to craft a vision based on that um on that array of wants and desires and also to write a counter vision which is where could you be if you allowed yourself to fail catastrophically where what might that look like in three to five years and then to produce a plan and it's had remarkable effects particularly now young men are doing worse than young women in academic environments so the program doesn't seem to have as much effect for young women but that might be because they're already doing better but it has a walloping effect on young men in fact for in vocational junior college settings our latest piece of data which was generated was published last year showed that we could reduce dropout among young men especially aimless ones who hadn't done very well in high school we could drop their dropout rate 50 percent and so and and one of the things i've observed about young men and this might be because they're more disagreeable and confrontational than young women is that unless they have formulated their own plan they're unlikely to do something so when you're talking i think this is true with with young women as well you want to talk to them and say well look what what do you think about what happened and how you're going to get out of it which is an excellent question because it says to the child you can think about what happened and be accurate and you can think of a way out of it and that's encouragement right and that's what you want is to you don't want to protect or shelter your child you want to encourage them and so that collaborative problem solving is a great way to do that absolutely right and and i've seen this over and over again and certainly the data that i gathered for the boy crisis very much shows that as well and he said the hangout time is part of what helps to do that but also the the the checks and balances of parenting is so um pivotal for mothers and fathers to understand and right along the lines of what you're talking about uh is is um so mother and father let's say have the child come home and and from school and say uh and and the child says you know mrs meyers she hates me she hates me i can't i can't be okay in school and maybe the child's in second or third grade and a mother's sort of reaction will tend to be more likely to be something like oh sweetie let me hear more and then when the child complains more about how much mrs myers hates the child the the mom will tend to come up with a solution like let me talk wait till next week on monday i'll talk to i'll make an appointment with the principal and we'll talk about seeing whether you can get into a different class than mrs meyers dad will dads will tend to say to a greater degree um sweetie in life you have to learn to get along with people who can't get along with you uh you know what do you think is is making mrs myers upset about you and the child may or may not be revealing and so the child will say well you know um do you want me to talk to mrs meyers about it no no no no no uh so well if i talk with mrs meyers about it you know what do you think mrs myers would say and then the child under the threat of possibly the dad talking or the mom talking with mrs myers will begin to say what a little bit of what mrs myers feels and then um then negotiate a a an opportunity to talk to mrs meyers and then bring mrs meyers and the child together have a discussion together and so to see whether the child and mrs meyers can work out an understanding where the child begins to understand no it is not that mrs meyer is inherently innate um hates jimmy um it is that there's something else going on here and so the result of working all that through um is a way of facilitating the child to discover um its own solutions to a problem talking it through rather than getting a solution uh rather than being enabled um by the by the system to and by the parent who will eventually disappear from the child's life or worse yet not disappear from the child's life and so and so and so these um these are but oftentimes the mom says you know the child is having a problem here uh why are you being so insensitive are you blaming um you know jimmy for for creating this problem um he's he's telling you that not only does mrs myers hate him but he also she other kids hate mrs meyers as well and so it's not jimmy's fault and are you and so the mom will feel dad as being insensitive when in fact dad is being differently sensitive um and um and sort of long-term postponed gratification sensitive yeah well that's that's the thing and that that's a lot colder a virtue you know because and it also sounds very much like it's grounded in these psychobiological at least partially psychobiological differences between men and women so women are higher in negative emotion and they're more empathic and that's that short-term empathy and so that's perfectly in keeping with the approach that you just described and the advantage see that's a particularly advantageous approach to very very young children especially infants because to be wired properly to take care of infants the infant is always right hey up until about nine months of age or maybe a year of age the right response to your infant if that person is crying is there's something you should do about it as fast as possible we've talked a fair bit about what fathers can do to to help um their children learn to delay gratification and so on we've talked a little bit about what what mothers can understand about how to facilitate that and how to trust it um maybe we could talk a little bit about what families might do in order to improve the improve the performance of their boys and their girls you talked a little bit in your book about family dinner nights and their importance yes um the most important we already know that family dinner nights are important but what make family dinner nights even more valuable is when they don't become family dinner nightmares and knowing how to structure them so they don't become family dinner nightmares when somebody comes up to me after a presentation and says you know i can't get my children to give up electronics at dinner i already know the beginning of the problem that is that the children are in charge of the parents um that you know that and well what can i do to encourage my children to get involved um with you know to to leave the the um the electronics behind and you know number one answer is to require them to it is not an option to sit down at dinner but maybe some nights you'll want it to be some nice knot but if you're having a family dinner night especially structured family dinner night the number one rule is no electronics at dinner yeah if that rule is violated then the electronics are taken away for a reasonable period of time and taken away right away for a reasonable period of time once the rule is understood right and you can imagine that instigating wars in various households yes exactly and so um and then you begin to structure that family dinner night so that everyone has an opportunity to talk and everyone has at the beginning um a structured amount of time that they can check in to just say how their week went or how the week was going since the last time so everyone knows that it's not 40 minutes for so and so and one minute for me the interest in family dinner night be zero for the one that's one minute well that's an extension of the idea of a fair game too and a refereed fair game everyone has had that you're that as a family our job is to make sure everyone's needs are being handled thought of and cared about which is the way empathy is created empathy is not created by a parent who's always empathetic with a child's needs or desires when a parent is always empathetic with the child's needs and desires the child becomes narcissistic not empathetic empathetic and that's one of the things that we have made a mistake with you could say that three or four times in a row i think and that would be really good yes yes right because that's so crucially important because you know if if what you're learning is to put other people's feelings at the same level of importance as your own then obviously that's associated very tightly with delay of gratification with learning how to listen with turn taking with fair play with a with a refereed interaction all of that and so so the other the other thing that that happens too and you see this with couples is that if they have that time together something analogous to family dinner night although i think the family dinner idea is a really good one for reasons i'll mention here in a moment is that what what you're doing imagine your family has a story and the story is where we came from where we are and where we're going together as a unit and then so and then each of the individuals within that story has a story and then what you're doing in those family dinners that interaction time is you're taking the individual threads of the individual story threads and you're weaving them together to make the collective story and that keeps everyone up to date and on the same page and and able to unable to empathize in also a deep manner because if i don't know where you are or what you're up to i can't figure out what you're thinking or feeling and so i have to know what story you're acting out right now and so do you and in order for you to know that for me to know it you have to be able to tell your story and i have to be able to ask you questions about it then i think the other thing that's really important about the shared meal is that you know human beings are really weird creatures because we seriously share food and we're social eaters people don't eat well if they eat on their own and so it's deeply rooted into us that idea of sharing food and so part of the extended process of socialization is to get everybody to sit down around food to be polite and thankful for the fact of the food to enjoy that but then also to to be able to give and take while that's being shared and that's i would say if the most fundamental element of socialization is something like the embodiment of rough and tumble play the next layer on top of that would be the ability to sit down and share food and have a civilized and have civilized discourse absolutely and that civilized discourse really needs to um the respect for story is so cr so pivotal so i teach as you probably know couples communication courses around the country and one of the one of the dimensions of it the single most important um thing that kills marriages or almost all relationships is our biologically oriented inability to handle personal criticism without becoming defensive uh so my first job is to teach couples how to get around that biological propensity to become defensive when they hear criticism one of the many steps in that process which is much too long to go into now but is to give them a picture of of a picture of a person happens to be mario cuomo the former governor of new york uh that was take that was done by four artists of a picture that was taken at the exact same time same place etc and there are four different types of um artists that paint this um uh this picture of him like andy warhol and um digliani and so on and so the and uh work with every couple to understand that when you hear your partner's story you will all even though you're all looking at the same thing there will be a different picture that is being um that is being created by each person at the table and so the job of couples is to understand how much of a sacrifice each person would make so the other person would live and yet how we're often not able to handle personal criticism and to sort of reorient ourselves before we handle personal criticism to move ourselves into a place of really being fascinated by our partner story but at a fail but at a family dinner table um that has to happen with every single member of the family that that when i say why what when person a says something's what what were you talking about in school and somebody says well we're talking about the metoo movement and person a says oh the me too movement is stupid so person b says the metoo movement is the best most progressive thing that's ever happened um and so it is it is very important that the person who says it's the best thing that ever has happened is listened to fully by the person who is uh who believes is stupid and vice versa and that there is no there is that there that there is facilitative questions that the family trains people to ask now this is right so part of it is know the story before you offer criticism and no carl carl rogers had good advice about that eh and and you probably already know this but it's worth reiterating for people who don't so roger's rule was when you're listening to someone then first of all don't assume that either you or they know what they're talking about or what they're going to say because people think by right right people think by talking so you've got to give them a chance to get it all out before you jump on it because they might change their own mind in the mid in mid-stream but so so that's important let them formulate the problem before you jump in with the criticism but then the next thing is and this i really love this i think it's really useful which is that once the person has laid out their story you get to say this is what i heard you say do you agree with my formulation because that stops the list first of all it indicates to the speaker that the listener actually listened or if if if there's an error then the speaker can say no that's not what i meant at all and then there can be some clarification but it also forces the listener to not turn the speaker into a straw man because it isn't only that i have to summarize what you said i have to summarize what you said in a way that you agree with and you know that that's also a useful technique if there happens to be some wide variation in verbal ability among the participants and there might be because of age for example and so you know because it might be that even if you're somewhat incoherent and stuttering and partial in your formulation if i'm an older sibling say i might be able to summarize it back for you in a way that's actually helpful to you from the perspective of a cognitive scaffold and so yeah so so the thing you know we know that human beings organize their personalities at the highest level through narrative and that narrative is not only thought it's spoken and so you speak your personality into being in these sorts of shared environments that you're describing and without that your story is fragmented and incoherent and so are you and so you can see why those shared social look if shared meals weren't so damn important people wouldn't have evolved the capacity to engage in them right i mean they're central to our social life and to have that abandoned in the family is really a catastrophe i think so it really is and i i everything you said absolutely every part of it i so agree with you and you know when you say did i distort something oftentimes someone will say um repeat what they heard heard they say and then the person you asked did i distort anything and the person says yes i think you just sort of this and then the other person will argue and say no i i said that and you know the and the rule of the game is the person who is was speaking whatever makes them feel heard that's when you haven't distorted anything and it's your job it's your job to assist is like the customer is always right right that doesn't mean you have to agree with them it just means you have to have got the damn story straight that's right and that's so that's also important some people really do make the mistake of thinking that if i get right correct what they that they have said that means i agree with them and no it doesn't mean it only means you've heard them and and then you know part of what a family dinner or night is about is having a chance to have somebody if it's a personal criticism or be able to have it respond to that and have the person who um who is listening to who made the criticism to begin with hear that response and ask if there's any distortion on what they've heard to begin with and the the the biggest challenge for people almost everybody i remember i was interviewed was by npr and they said you know how can you you know some of the people who are allied with the men's uh movement they are you know they seem like hateful people and i said well if you're if you're calling yourself progressive as liberals do uh and as we do because i consider myself more on the liberal side of most things um then our first job is to listen when people feel heard they stop hating and you know hating is comes from a build up of not being seen not being heard being distorted being blamed or or caricatured in a negative way um before you're before you're heard it's so that is the job of every um you know of every person that calls themselves progressive is to start hearing rather than arguing first well then at least you can figure out what to argue about yes you know because one of the things that happens with with crystalline communication in the family when the stories are being unfolded is you can identify what the problems are and what they're not like if you you know you might be irritated at having to listen to your spouse lay out in the stumbling in their stumbling manner a particular problem but if you understand at the same time that they might be dispensing of 98 problems and only focusing on two it's worth the wait and so okay one other another question for you um there are people who aren't in the position where they can have male involvement with their children let's say and so what what do you recommend if anything for single mothers who are trying to do the best job they can with their kids but are having a hard time pulling in male attention what do you think they can manage first of all acknowledge yourself for the enormous amount of multi-faceted job you're undertaking second as you look through the differences between what mothers and fathers do ask yourself whether there is any way you have maybe not valued your former husband in a way that can that would that would draw him into the the fold but if the answer to those questions are you know i have valued him and i still can't draw him into the fold he's essentially a deadbeat sorry about that um then here's some options the the number one the the greatest amount of evidence is that involving your children with cub scouts is a very has a very well developed program for developing character motivation integrity loyalty um a sense of making promises that you keep so very good studies have been done of children involved in cub scouts for two years or longer but this means not just getting your child involved in cub scouts here or there but and if your child doesn't like something that's happened making sure your child gets back into the fold and deals with what um that it shouldn't be your child's choice to go to cub scouts or not go to cub scouts as part of your parental responsibility to get him there later to boy scouts or it doesn't have to be cub scouts or boy scouts uh the why some wise have good good programs also uh for for young boys uh mankind project has good um programs for young boys now for the first time they they have a real good uh help assistants to help boys with fathering um the boys clubs have some good programs with young boys um get your if you get your child um vet a male mentor try to get your child to a school that has a significant number of males in at the age that your child is especially if your child is very young it's very important that a child not go from a mom only home to female only schools because the child will start searching for an identity from somebody that's usually destructive like a gang leader that will give will give false um a false identity and so these are just some of many many things if you we often think that a child needs a male mentor yes a child does need a male mentor try to vet the mentors carefully obviously um or get your child to a faith if you're at all involved in faith-based communities and even if you don't believe in god god or not not get your child involved in a faith-based community uh where there's a good male counselor um who has groups for children uh for for young people oftentimes young people that are having troubles um the the the ability to be encouraged to express your feelings to other males and see that your son is not just having the is not isolated in the problems he's facing but but there's many other boys about his age that are having the same problems getting him to be able to express his feelings about that his fears about that to see beyond to have a have little experiences done where he paints a mask of himself and what the mask says and then what what is really being said underneath the mask a good fistful male facilitator can be a wonderful encourager of a boy to express his feelings rather than repress his feelings in a society that is as a and then we what we all have a need to do is to get out there and say something very damaging has happened in our society in the last 50 years we we've had when i started this work with the government with the commission to create a white house council on boys and men i started that after a call from the white house to say asking if i wanted to be an advisor to the white house council on women and girls because of my background with the national organization for women and i said absolutely but there also needs to be a white house council on boys and men well for eight years we worked to make that happen and now we're working with the trump administration to make that happen and no one is getting on board yet but the importance of making that happen is that there has to be an entire change in attitude and atmosphere that we are not just living in a patriarchal a world dominated by a patriarchy that the world was dominated by a need to survive yeah right absolutely mothers and mothers both sacrificed so much of their lives in the hope that their children would have better lives women made sacrifices of careers men dads our dads made sacrifices in their careers there are very few dads of multiple children that that follow the glint in their eye because usually fulfilled occupations that make you fulfilled are not occupations that pay well so most of our fathers gave up fulfillment in order to do the things they needed to do like be a fire fire fighter or coal miner or being willing to be disposable in war in order to be able to make their generation safer and have more options and to have all the sacrifices that our fathers made called male privilege or male dominance or is such an underserving of men so that that entire attitude it's also an underserving of women to state that the entire cultural structure to date has been patriarchal in origin that's right and you know you can argue what the definition of patriarchy is but just understand that your father and grandfather and great grandfather all all did the exact same thing as your great-grandmothers and so on did they they gave their lies in the hope that their your life and their children's lives would be better with greater amounts of opportunities and most of them sacrificed a great deal my father you know managed a company and my mother was very unhappy and he managed his company in europe my mother was very unhappy living in europe rather than the united states which was more comfortable for her so my father eventually gave up his job and sold four brushes from door to door for a year in order to be able to make sure we had enough money at least to go to a state college and my mother had a decent home over her head and so did the children and so yeah well that's all associated with a little bit of gratitude for the past it really is we should be instead of criticizing the world as being patriarchal or as parents as being stupid um we should really be saying mom dad grandpa grandma thank you for making our mastery of survival enough so that we didn't have to focus so much on survival but let us not misuse our opportunities by blaming men for the world that they created that was destructive uh understand that we're living uh 50 longer now than we were 120 years ago and um and that's as a result of all the all the progress that you have made um and so you know this is why we're you know worked so hard to create this white house council on boys and men while we've created a patreon account to be able to sort of make um begin to raise some money um to be able to make this happen but whether it happens by the patreon account or some other way we need to have a total revisiting of the belief of women good men bad women oppressed men oppressors and instead of the monologues of hashtag me too we need to have dialogues instead human resource centers becoming uh h-e-r rather than hr that is all focused on her not not him and her we really need to have dialogues at work about what's working for women what's not working for women what's working for men and what's not working for men and so we really need to have a fundamental revisiting of male female and um and all all of our gender roles of the past that's an excellent that's an that's an excellent place to bring our conversation to a close i would say look i'd really like to talk to you again about probably about pay gap at some point we we really concentrated on on what you've been outlining in this book in your new book in the boy crisis and i would certainly recommend people who are interested in this sort of thing to go out and pick it up it's full of facts and that's kind of nice and it's concentrating on something that's of crucial importance and i think maybe that people are starting to recognize as crucial and as of crucial importance i certainly hope so and so um your work has been very useful to me and um i appreciate it very much the time that you spent today being able to talk to me and i hope we get a chance to talk again i would love to talk about the pay gap it's really impossible to believe that there is not a patriarchal world if you believe that men earn more money than women do for the same work and so one has to really start with that fundamental understanding that's much much more complex than that um and a very very different story than pretty much anybody perceives yes absolutely so we will definitely schedule that in so okay well thank you very much

Channel: drwarrenfarrell

Views: 357,554

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Id: 8AA1lR3CC4s

Length: 95min 4sec (5704 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 09 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/a-man-from-earth]

I don't think either of these men needs an introduction here. They have a fascinating conversation.

[u/Reddit1984Censorship]

Long live Jordan Peterson !!