Navigating Parenthood: What Every Dad Needs to Know

Hey everyone, welcome to Being Well, I'm Forrest Hanson. If you're new to the show, thanks for listening today, and if you've listened before, welcome back. I'm around the age when a bunch of my friends are either having kids or are talking about having kids. I am also probably planning on having a child at some point. And we've never really done an episode where I talked to my dad about being a dad. And I'm fortunate enough that I get to do

this podcast with him. So today, I'm joined by clinical psychologist Rick Hanson. How are you doing, Dad? Rick Hanson, I'm good and I'm looking forward to this topic because both of us have some skin in the game with it, don't we? Rick Hanson, Ph.D., Forrest Hanson, Yeah. For sure. And before we get into it, lay a little bit of context here. This episode is going to focus on dads in particular for obvious

reasons after all, Rick is a dad. And most of the content out there that relates to parenting is understandably aimed at moms, which isn't an accident. Moms tend to be more involved in child rearing and are more likely to make parenting related purchases. But that being said, obviously, every relationship is different. Parenting dynamics are going to really vary. And there are many relationships out there that include children that don't follow these

kinds of traditional gender roles or dynamics. My hope here is that there's something of this episode for almost everybody. And I don't think it's just for perspective or current parents. My hope is that they also help people think about their own relationships with their parents, maybe in a way that they find helpful or healing. And I know particularly

I think for a lot of guys, Dad, they get into personal growth content as they age. And part because they're thinking about having a kid and they want to give that kid maybe a better experience that they had. On the other side of it, we often hear growing up, wait until you're a parent, then you will understand. Then you will understand why I was the way I was, why I did the things that I did. And so I want to ask you just to open the

episode, Dad, how is that for you? And did becoming a dad actually change how you felt about your relationship with your parents or maybe some of the choices that they made when you were growing up? Yes. In other words, I think both are true. Yeah. Certainly, we're aspects for me that were reparative. In other words, I wanted to do a better job, putting it a certain way that my own dad did. And my own mother did. Parenting roles

can be a little different based on gender. And let's remember as well, of course, there are many same gender couples to the extent that gender categories really fit for people. So and so much of what parenting is about is not specific to any gender. Back when I wrote my very first book, Mother Nurture, 25 years ago, by taking good care of mothers over the long haul, I pulled together a lot of material at that time. So my stats might be slightly

dated, but they're pretty close to true. And when I was pulling together the research for that book, I found that roughly 11 million women in America were raising their child alone. And meanwhile, a million men were also raising one or more children. So it's helpful to appreciate that probably 80, 90, 98% of the research and the really good practical wisdom about being a good father would apply to being a good mother as well. That's so much

of what good parent good fathering is about is the same as good mothering as well. So I wanted to be a good parent period. I had very well intended, very loving, very decent parents who for different reasons, a lot having to do with their own childhoods, the culture they came out of the era in which I was raised were not strong on empathy. And where I would say high on authority and control, a lot of which was anxious and unnecessary. So there

were certain aspects of that that I wanted to do differently. So there's a reparative aspect. And then there's simply the desire to be as good at it as you can be. I'd love for your child. I also wanted to stand against cultural roles. You know, I grew up in the 50s and 60s. I did not want to be Fred Flintstone. I wanted to be really engaged, really moral in my involvement. Research shows that the typical mother and a heterosexual

couple is working 20 hours a week more than her partner is all told time on task. And I did not want to be that guy. Right. I wanted to know how to change the diaper and get good at it. So, you know, there were reparative aspects. And then there's this general aspiration, you know, to be good at it. And to really honor what for most parents is the most important, the most meaningful and also the most stressful, worrisome, disruptive

and depleting thing that they'll ever do. So maybe with that a little bit in mind, if you could go back in time and talk to yourself six months before I was born, six months before I your first child popped out into the world, what advice would you give yourself? Maybe that's a good place to start. What a sweet thing. Oh, so much about it. We'll make room for the whirlwind. And if you're having a second child, life truly is over as

you know it. One child, you can kind of sort of manage to, it's, it's full catastrophe living a little bit. I'm tongue in cheek is, you know, stealing John Cavitt's ends book title. So, first of all, realize that this is a really huge deal. And sometimes people have this fantasy that they're just going to, you know, have this kid and pop them out and it'll be cool. And then everything will be back pretty much to normal, except

they'll have a little buddy. No, it's a major, major, major change. So be prepared for the relentless. I would say that second, really, really, really super duper. I'll let yourself fall in love with your child. Give your heart. Let your heart be taken. Be prepared for that. Third, take really, really good care of your partner, especially can. If it's a mother of the child, she's been through a hormonal roller coaster. She's

still in the middle of it six months pregnant. There's tons of research about how hormonal systems and women just go through tremendous changes literally as the body builds. It's most complex organ ever because it's the organ that contains all the organs. And then expels it through a narrow passageway or through surgery in a process that until fairly

recently was often fatal. It's a big deal. And then afterward, estrogen and progesterone reset and crash, breastfeeding comes along any nutrients in the woman's body that are needed by the child will be given to the child. And so if they're in short supply and her, you'll get depleted. Research shows also that most mothers are enter their first pregnancy already somewhat depleted of a number of important minerals and vitamins and

nutrients in their body. It's a real thing. And it just keeps going. Doesn't end. So take a care of your partner, which means forth to take a care of your partner, you've got to take care of yourself too. You have to be prepared to particularly with some time passing, you know, be straightforward about your own longings, your own needs. Maybe the relationships not really ready for sex, but still you can retain a kind of an intimate

friendship with your partner after, you know, baby makes three. And it's important to be able to speak up about that. I'd say the last thing that would have helped me, but it was difficult to accomplish would be to look for community with other new fathers. They just tend to do that fairly well. Dad's not so much. They don't tend to hang out

with each other, you know, it's their babies in a backpack. So if you have opportunities, I don't know how to do it, but going for hikes, you know, on Saturday morning with a bunch of guys with their kid in the backpack, that's pretty cool. Or other kinds of things, you know, so that you get that sense of fellowship in community. Okay, that would be a start for me. That's a great list off the top here, dad. And obviously any, any advice that I give

here is theoretical nature for me. I'm not a, I'm not a parent. I've just thought about how it might be for me. I've heard stories from other people and I'm very interested in your take on anything that I would add on to what you're already saying here. Something that can be helpful for people to know is that there, there has been increasing focus on postpartum depression in women, your book again, Mother Nurture, you talked about something

called depleted mother syndrome. This was, I think actually before we even had the technical term postpartum depression, but, oh no, postpartum depression is a very specific diagnosable issue. Okay. And you were just trying to do like the types of broadening the scope, gotcha. Yeah, five to 10%, it's a clinical issue, complications around it. I can speak to it, but it's not really relevant for this topic, but it's a thing. I had this notion that I started to

see, so forgive the sidebar. It'll be relevant. Yeah, no, go ahead. Yeah, that I just watched your mom very, very robust, physiologically and psychologically, strong relationship with me. And then, wow, roughly year two and then edging into your three of your life and around this time, your sisters started to come along. And you can also imagine women

having babies at later and later ages. You see the gradual accumulation of these things, often leading to what I think is actually a clinically meaningful depletion of physiological resources in the body, literally, from all the pouring out, which is accompanied by a sense of mental depletion as well. You're just kind of running on empty. And on any given day, you can soldier on and you can do a good job, but your sense of well being is really

affected. Sometimes long term, women get stuck in some of the health issues that are fostered by this kind of depletion, which I think is sustained. And it also affects the relationship. If she's just feeling like she's running on empty and he comes home from work and is really excited about a great conversation and maybe some romance later that night, she's just fried and then that tends to cascade into issues in the relationship, which can

then backfire into issues of teamwork and blah, blah, blah, blah. So that's what that notion was all about. And the larger point here is to realize that it's pretty, I won't say easy. It's fairly straightforward to get to the first year. It's a big deal. Sleepless nights, relentless mess. But the point is it just keeps on going. And it's really usually around the kids second, third, fourth or fifth year that the wheels really start coming

off for one or both of the parents. You know, bothers who are willing to kind of hang in there for a while, but after two, three years of this, they're like, hey, what about me? And women who've got partners who are not pulling their weighted home who are nitpicking and sniping and other parenting, even though they're the one who's doing most of it kind of had it up to here. And there's some kind of large fraction of married couples who have

children who separate by the baby's second birthday. So that child will have no memory of their parents being together. So it's, you know, so it's important to think about the longer haul. Yeah, that's a great point. And I just take my numbers right here. I think that there was the technical recognition of postpartum depression. In other words, major depressive disorder with postpartum onset is how it's framed in the DSM in 1994.

And then your book Mother Nurture came along in 2002, obviously, after that. But the, it's funny how long it took for like the technical recognition of that as an issue when obviously people have been watching moms being moms for thousands and thousands of years. My point in all of this relevant to kind of what we're focusing on here is that obviously that's a huge deal. And there's increasing recognition of it. The recognition of that

in men is much less common broadly in terms of understanding that as an issue. But the research suggests that about 10% of fathers develop essentially postpartum depression. For them, it's probably more tied to all the things that you're describing their dad, the relentlessness, the self identity changes associated with becoming a dad, the feeling of this old version of your life dying away to some extent, the sense of loss associated

with that. These are all real experiences, right? And those experiences don't make you a bad dad. And I think that it's really important to just name that sort of clearly because they are so common. You can have a real question inside of yourself of what does this mean for me as a self concept standpoint that doesn't mean that you don't love your child enough?

I want to, that's beautiful for us. I want to kind of add a couple of points to it. First is there's this really haunting term called the Mask of Motherhood, the poet and feminist scholar, Adrian Rich coined it. And one of the points she makes is that behind this mask of that's presented to the world of how a mother should be, how she thinks her mother

was, you know, this mask that kind of hides the ways that it's wearing on her. You know, behind that mask for mothers certainly can be a lot of wearing this, a lot of just kind of having to really work hard to get out of it every day. Also, there's a mask of fatherhood with typical gender socialization around stoicism, being tough, being a tough guy, never complaining, never whining and so on, not really showing weakness, not being vulnerable,

not being soft, not being overwhelmed by something. It can be particularly hard to reveal what's going on behind that mask. So maybe some of what we can be doing here is laying on groundwork for guys who are entering parenthood to just kind of check themselves and realize, hey, I've got to be able to talk about stuff down the road. And if you're already a dad,

you know, maybe there's a word to the wise here. Okay. Second key point, to your list already of things that can wear dads down that are stressors, one of them that I would like to add is the ways in which for all kinds of actually biologically rooted and in some senses, good reasons, you can feel pretty abandoned by your partner. There's a kind of egocentrism, I think of it that comes in, this understandable, the mama bear and the baby

bear. That whole world is like one big circle. And then everything out around it is sort of a means to an end of maintaining the mama bear, baby bear system. That is the unit. Yeah. Yeah. And the dad can suddenly feel ejected into some kind of orbit out there roughly around Neptune or Pluto. And you know, can put up with it for a while, but it can get pretty darn wounding. And it's not even so much that you're going

to put it. It's not even so much that your own desires, you know, to be listened to or share your war stories from work or, you know, even have sex every so often. It's not that per se is that you don't matter enough for her to make an effort while you watch or making all kinds of efforts for your child, which you understand, but also making lots of efforts for other people like mom friends who are calling up to arrange some kind of

play date the next weekend. And you know, I can really land on you. I'm speaking obviously from some experience here, but I'm not alone. I'm not alone. And being honest about again, the kind of tender hurt in that, which is not gender typical socialization for men

to talk about. I wonder about kind of two pieces with that dad, because I would love to talk about that because I do think it's something that is a little under explored when people talk about parenting, just the, the, the diet that tends to get created between a mom and a young child, particularly like toddler baby age, to your point earlier on dad, that can

be disrupted. If you take a more active role as a parent as a father, if you're able to, if your work schedule allows you to, if you maybe live in a part of the world that has paid time off her fathers, maybe that's a possibility for you to be engaged in that way where that diet is just naturally disrupted because you're taking on more of the, the parenting role, then that's something that can maybe actually help out that problem

a little bit in kind of a way. But for many dads who were in the United States and a lot of Western countries, they're continuing to kind of be the primary breadwinner while the mom is dealing with the baby. That's a typical structure that families often have.

Inside that experience, that was there anything that you did with, with mom or just like communicating it to make that process easier for you or to make your needs more, more present inside of the relationship to express yourself in that way? I was aided by my own background in which, for example, I was doing my PhD dissertation on 15 month olds when you were 15 months old. So I had access to a lot of high quality

research and, and council. And you were a psychoeducated at the time and so yeah, yeah, facility with this language and all of that stuff.

Yeah, I was fortunate. I want to frame that as I was fortunate. And I also, by the way, for the record, want to be super clear, when I talk about the losses that can be present psychologically for, for fathers in the relationship with the mother of their children, let's say, I don't mean that in any wish I perform to diminish the impact of parenthood on mothers.

I hope it's really clear at this point. I'm a really strong advocate for mothers. And if you just step back and you think, okay, what's the one thing we could do for a generation that would truly create a kind of utopia on this planet? What's the one intervention that would have the greatest impact of all? It would be to make the care of mothers, the number one public priority. It would change everything in one generation. It would

be profound. It would end war. It would end poverty. It would reset the relationship the power structure between the between the genders and in many, many countries. It would be huge. So I'm a super advocate for that. Okay. That definitely for the record. I came into it second in a system that was really sparse. The so-called village it takes to raise a child in many, many countries in the world, particularly in America, many

areas, there's more like a ghost town. So it was really on Janime. I remember for us that when we brought you home from the hospital, you were a scheduled C-section as you know. And we got in the car and I thought, wow, they're just sort of letting us take this kid out of here. It is pretty wild if you think about it. But wow, they gave us the most important thing of all. A precious, vulnerable kid. Just boom, you get to go do it. No license,

no real training, no mandatory training. Wow. Okay. So cut into the chase here. What did I do? First, I did not feel left out for a really long time because I had the background fortunately in what I'd read in the research and I was kind of prepared for a lot of things. And I also knew that it was really up to Janime to hang together because we were not supported as generations have been in the past. And including all the way in the past and our

hunter-gather ancestors, I knew that was really on us. So I knew that I really had to come through. And it's also my nature. I'm determined. I have values and I want to fulfill my values. And I don't want to suck. I want to get an A. And so I wanted to get an A as a dad and

the partner of someone who's a mother. So that was all very much there for me. I found ways, Jan and I negotiated when you were just a smidge older so that I would get a kind of restorative roughly six hours a week to disappear early in the morning on a Saturday and go hiking and wilderness and then come home. And we swapped it. She would get her restorative six hours a week, which often involved me taking care of you while we all went to the mall

together, which was fine with me. And I think fine for you, everyone adored you because you're were and are adorable. There you are. So I was okay with that. I do sometimes tell people that I peaked when I was like three and a half years old. I was a very cute kid. You know, that's right. Now you're still peaking brother. You're really honest with that. I appreciate it. It's true. Actually, you know, and then being candid, the wheels

did start to come off in our relationship, which we've written about. So I can be public about it around the time your sister was born. The years were ticking by, you know, maybe four or a year's you're approaching for like I'm saying, things had up over time. And at a certain point, Janet, I had a reset and to her enormous credit, she responded to the reset. So maybe that's a way of talking about this a little too. Well, so when you

say we had a reset, what does that mean? I'm not trying to like, so to be clear, for you for listeners. Please, please, try to lead my heavy line to your relationship with with mom here. But you are you're using words that I know. Yeah. What does that mean? Because because there's a there's a realness here that I think sometimes gets lost inside of these conversations. Yeah. And so I'm deliberately leaning into that a little bit. And I'm

very curious. What do you mean by that? I can speak to my relationship with Elizabeth. We've totally had moments inside of our relationship where we were able to take a step back, go, oh, like we've fallen into a pattern here that is not that is not good for us. It is no longer productive for our relationship. It isn't meeting our needs. And we need to find a little space and figure out how do we deal with this problem in a collaborative and

productive way where the framework is collaboration. The framework is we both agree that this isn't quite working. And we need to find a new way of doing it. Is that basically what you guys did? Yeah. And I think by the way that you don't necessarily have to get to the details of it here, dad, if you don't want to, but go ahead. Yeah. I think that any most most parenting couples who've stayed together, let's say, will recognize in the tone of my

voice when I go, oh, reset. You know, they will have their own story related to that. But they will know that you will know what I'm talking about. So let me give you two examples. Okay. Yeah. First reset was on my side. And I recall that you were still really young, you know, four months old, six months old, and our dear friend Bob, my first rock climbing partner. So there I am. And Bob's coming to town and we used to, we would go sailing,

which was cool. And you know, you were sitting in mom's lap four or five, six months old, totally dependent on her. And I said, oh, by the way, just making plans, you know, Bob's coming to town and he and I will kind of go sailing. I will be back in time for dinner. Okay. And she just stared at me like, what? What? You're just going to leave me alone for the most of the day. So you can go off sailing with your buddy. What? And I looked

at her and until you had come along, we would do stuff like that. It was no big deal. We could operate independently. That's another thing. It was really important for guys to understand. Child comes along. You cannot agree to disagree. You have to collaborate. You have to work together and you have to take into account your partner. And that's what happened for me. I looked at her and I realized that life as I knew it, I that I,

as I had previously known it was over total reset. And that I had to take her into account in a whole new kind of way. So that would be an example of a reset. I think this really important. And I think there really are these turning points in people's lives. Sometimes it's in the framework of hitting bottom related to some chemical dependency. They're very several kinds of resets where you just go, got it. I need to go down a different road.

Now you may slip from time to time on that other road and find yourself back on the original road. But as soon as you realize it, maybe because somebody has pointed it out to you and if you grumble a bit, you realize it, then you get back on the right road because you truly have made a reset. So that's really true. Second really important point, it's context for the other reset is that like many, many, many, many, many, many, many mothers, your

mom is getting really depleted. There is nothing as primal and physically demanding as bearing and breastfeeding a child. Really real. Okay. So yep, she and I had a reset. Basically, I kind of moved out of the category of fuming and sniping a little and being kind of grumpy around the edges. So I had a pretty solemn interaction with her where I was really kind of grave and serious, which is sometimes what you get to. Just like she was grave and serious

toward me with that reset, you know, when you were really little. I was grave and serious and to her vast credit, even though she was fried, even though she was swimming upstream every day, you know, she really took a big breath and realized that she had to take me into account too in new kinds of ways. Typically, the greatest threat to the survival of a couple

is the arrival of a child. Bingo. That's factually true. And let's also put it in context that with or without children, the actual effective divorce rate, certainly in America, is around two out of three couples. If you take the 50, 50 legally married divorce rate and then you throw in people who are functionally married, let's say they own property and had children and they parted ways or people who are legally married and parted ways, but retain

that legal relationship. Well, it's close to two thirds. So, you know, if you want to beat those odds, you really have to put energy into the system because rust never sleeps. If those resets are not made, if they're necessary, that couple will probably not survive. Now, it may take finally getting the kids off to college, but the lethal blow may have happened all the way back by the time the child was before the child entered first grade.

So these are two really important resets, realizing as both in biology and socially constructed roles, the more independent partner really needs to take into account their vulnerable partner who's really attached to that young child. And also the other kind of a reset, if you don't really take your partner, let's say the father into account, including his very understandable needs to be cherished, to feel cherished, to feel that he matters to, you

know, do that at your own peril. And I'll say a third, a third peril, if I could here, that we definitely were able to manage, but couples that don't manage it get into deep trouble. You got to keep talking with each other. You need to have conversation, real conversation, real conversation often goes out the window when kids come along. Gender

roles tend to become even more polarized than ever. People now start living in separate worlds with separate people and that, you know, kind of conversation, fun, joking, tenderness, warmth, humor, interest, feeling of the other person is interested in you, tends to go out

the window when kids come along. And that motive relating, it's not dramatic. It's day to day, but if you're not putting those 10, 20, 30 minutes a day, which is often what about what it is, a real conversation into your relationship, then too, you know, that fabric that joins you together tends to become increasingly tattered until it can finally become torn.

And I think this speaks to just a really common sense piece of advice here, which is the best thing that you can do for your relationship after you have a kid is have a good relationship before you have a kid. So this is a, what is that ounce of prevention is worth a pound of care situation here? Because whatever you think is going to happen after popping out of child, the reality is that it's probably not going to improve your relationship. And

that's a myth that a lot of people have about it. You know, let's have a kid. Let's think about whether or not we should get a divorce after we have a kid and we'll see if that helps. It's not going to help. As you know, as I do, we talk to a lot of couples, that idea. Yeah. But related to that, it is truly something where now's the time to have some of these conversations, including like very granular conversations, uncomfortably

granular, probably from time to time. You know, I've been with my partner Elizabeth for a long time. We have every intention of spoiler alert, getting married, having a kid, all of this stuff. And we've wandered into the point in our relationship over the last couple of years where we've started having some of these like, what do we want that to look like

at a really practical way? Conversations about everything from what's this potential kids name to how much time do we want to carve out for ourselves to what do we want co-parenting to look like like all of that to your best to really lay a foundation. So you're working

from something in terms of your your agreements, your understandings, all of that. Also understanding that a lot of this is going to fly out the window, probably the moment that a kid actually comes along, but at least you've done your homework here. This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. Kids are always learning and growing, but as adults, particularly with so many demands on our time and effort, it's easy to lose that curiosity.

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listening every week has honestly changed my life. If you're ready to join Sarah and millions of others transforming their health, search Zoe Science and Nutrition wherever you listen to podcasts. Beautifully beautifully said. And to add to it, be prepared to have a lot of fun. In other words, love that. There's just so much about being a parent, mother or father. That's just extraordinary. It's fantastic. Mom and I had fun every day basically

with you. It was a delight. And including in ways that led us into appreciating each other, feeling really just compassionate for what your mom went through to bear in birth and the nurse and rear. Two beautiful kids. Wow. I think I got some of that good vibes coming my way too. And just doing stuff together. You're hanging out with your adorable little

kid. And even so much of the tasks of everyday life and parenting were just wonderful. There's this lovely distinction we talk about between how different kinds of happiness, but we could talk about hedonic well-being and new dimonical being. And there are a lot of aspects of parenting that are not full of hedonic well-being. You're tired. It's late. You're fried. And yet as you walk your child up and down the hallway, it's the most fulfilling

thing you've ever done in your entire life. So be prepared for that aspect as well. And I would add that kind of consistent with research on emotionally positive experiences. Really look for those good times. If you're going to put your kid in the car seat, enjoy it. I took a lot of pleasure in getting good at things. You know, mastery motivation. I like learning things and coming competent at them. So I took pleasure. I took pleasure in

interactive competence. Being able to be really tuned into you and really tuned in your sister as a kind of competence that I wanted to develop. You may be feel good. And also much more importantly, it was the best possible way to be a good parent myself, which I cared a lot about. So have fun with it. Try to draw your partner into the fun of it. Try to have fun together. And when you do have those positive times, really, really take them

in. Put them in the bank because there were going to be a lot of withdrawals. So maybe the most common email or comment that we get about being a parent or from parents, whether it's parents with young kids or prospective parents is some version of I really want to have a good relationship with my kids. And I'm really concerned that I'm not going to have one. Like I'm very concerned that my kids won't like me that I will be a bad parent

and bad dad. I won't be able to forge a strong relationship with them. This is often common from people who don't themselves have a strong relationship with their parents. There wasn't a lot of good modeling of what like a healthy parental relationship looks like. And so I thought it might make sense here to do kind of the opposite of what we normally do. Normally what we do on the podcast is we start really general with like a lot of

theory and then we drill down to practice here. We've kind of gone the other way. We've started with your experience and we're sort of expanding out to some good general points about like what does good parenting look like? What is a healthy relationship between a parent and a kid look like for a lot of people who just haven't experienced that in their life? Something you mentioned at the very, very beginning of the podcast dad was about

these two different dimensions. You were talking about demandingness or the amount of demands that you have on your kid and then responsiveness trying to be really more emotionally responsive to them. Would you mind explaining those things like what those words mean and how that shakes out in terms of parenting styles? Yeah, those two dimensions are really fundamental and you're reminding me of Diana Bomren's work who was involved in my own dissertation

into a minor extent way back in the day and it's just a legendary figure. She was one of the first researchers to identify these dimensions which could be summarized in somewhat different way or simpler way of maybe has love and power. So she talked about parenting styles that were highly nurturing, highly affectionate, very warm in various aspects of lovingness like delighting in your child, pricing, your capacity to be emotionally attuned. Great.

And then there's the dimension of power. Do you exercise authority or not? And then she had these four quadrants, these two by two matrix here. You know, high love, high power, she called authoritative, high love, low power, she called permissive, high power, low love, she called authoritarian and low love, low power, she called neglect. I would add a more complication here and then this is a framework for what I tried to do for us.

And you know, if I were to go back in time, I would prod myself not so much to change what I was doing in certain regards, but how I was doing it. So I'm happy to be candid with you here. The way I would describe it is that through these three dimensions, I'll call it authority, aspiration and nurturance. The statistically best odds pattern is high

nurturance, high aspiration, moderate to low authority. And an important point here has to do with context because if, as I said, the village that it takes to raise a child is for you a ghost town, including those aspects in generations past of shared values and shared normative expectations for child behavior and models around you of other children, meeting norms and standards, just simply that's how we do it here. You know, there's a kind

of homogeneity of expectations. But later on in life, if you're in environments where there's not much consistency around you, and in fact, a lot of the culture around you is really toward the permissive, even very laissez-faire, even neglectful aspect of parenting, then it puts more and more of a burden on you if you are aiming for high aspirations. And if you have some, you know, I would say reasonable, certainly normal range expectations for child

character and behavior. First and foremost, high nurturance. High nurturance covers a lot of sins and can repair and compensate for a lot of issues. So now's the time to really focus on being expressive, warm, pricing, cherishing, empathically attuned. These are skills and also commitments that we can make now. And this is your best resource, your

heart, second dimension, aspiration. Both your mom and I have inherited really fairly significant issues that landed on our work life or career because our parents, just because of their own background, we're not able to share certain aspirations with us. They weren't even possible. They weren't really named. We had no idea that these things were possible. So the territory of aspiration and which involves character too, what kind of person are you

becoming? There's a lot of research that shows that that's really important. Now here's a key point. All children need tons and tons of love, tons of nurturance. But some children, flourish, even without any aspirational support from their parents. And some children really move into character virtues and appropriate forms of behavior without the exercise of parental power. A lot of variation in the temperament of the child that you end up with. And that

has to be really taken into account. I hope I'm not boring people by really walking through some of these really important distinctions. So then, you know, then you're in the question of what do I do about authority? Because typically very few children have bad memories of childhood relating to being really nurtured. But bad memories from childhood related to conflicts with parents over aspiration or authority, those tend to be remembered. It's the negativity

bias. We tend to remember those episodes and they tend to color our overall impression of our own childhood. And that's something actually I've been really looking hard at lately in my own views of my parents. When I really, really think back and I start to realize all the things they must have been doing that I habituated to. I didn't notice because

they were just routine. But for me to be able to be supported by them in a variety of ways for them to deal with their own struggles and issues with each other and still hang in there and be good parents, well, there must have been a ton of stuff going on that I don't remember. But I can survive. You know, I can conclude. And I need to bring it into account.

I need to take that into account for a full and rounded view of my own parents, both for them, even though they're not here anymore, but also for them, which lives deeply inside me to this day, it could be healing and helpful for me today to realize that, you know, net, net, my parents actually were better parents than I gave them credit for. Certainly when I was growing up and definitely also, you know, as I was an adult. And the last thing

I'll just say and then I want to really open it up to you. The child has a lot of agency. Kids do stuff deliberately as six year olds or 12 year olds or certainly 15 year olds that can really impact the family system. Kids treat their siblings deliberately in various ways that then parents have to get involved with. Kids make choices to some extent about how they approach school to what extent they get involved in risky behavior. Parents get

drawn into these issues. Kids make choices as I did and their own treatment of their own parents. And that can have big consequences as well, including for the parents marriage. So it's important to appreciate that your children, if you're becoming a father or a mother, your children will have agency as well. But they don't have the same moral culpability.

And if we don't respect the fact that there are agents, including the ways in which they're making bad choices or harmful choices that impact you, then we deny the agency that they really have. Sure. Or they have temperamental variation in terms of their desire for the kinds of aspirations that you might have for them. Yep. That's right. And this I think gets to like to you just pretty common sense points, but ones that it's really important

to say during a podcast like this one. Just the general idea of like you'll forget what was said, but you won't forget how it was said. Yeah. That's right. I have no bad memories that I can remember that are connected to a lack of appropriate parental control. Now, some of that is selection bias because you guys were involved parents who cared about what was going on in my life. You cared about me. If you were going to err on a side,

you were going to err on the side of getting in there and doing something. And I think that's probably the right side to err on broadly speaking. That's I suspect how I will err as a parent, but I do think that it's telling that pretty much every bad memory relates to that. The second point is to parent the child that you have. Kids are unique. There's

a lot of variation kid to kid. And I think that what happens for a lot of parents, certainly it's already happening to me to some extent as a perspective parent is that you start to kind of have a vision of what your kid will be like or questions about what will my kid be like. And there's a lot of socialization. That's part of that as well. There's a lot of gender socialization. That can be a part of that. A lot of a lot of men, a lot

of dads want to go out there and throw the ball around with their kid. You know, that's kind of this aspirational thing that they have. Maybe you don't want to have a kid who wants to throw the ball around. Maybe that kid's got no interest in catching a ball. And kids are extremely perceptive. And one of the things that they can really pick up is a sense of disappointment, parental disappointment. So it's normal to have expectations of how

this kid is going to be. But end of the day, like your child's an end, not a means to your ends, like they're a thing on their own. And I think that it's really important here to be open to the range of outcomes, open to differences, open to this kid being a very unique individual and mostly rolling with that. Not 100%. But most normal range stuff, just got to go with that. And you got to also release your attachment to the view

that you have of all of those views and beliefs about what your kid might be. Does that kind of check out for you, Dad? On the substance of what you say, I agree. And that's how I tried to be a parent. And I didn't always do succeed. But that's really how I tried to be in research on younger children. And average, let's say preschool or toddler has roughly 20 control episodes with a caregiver an hour. Control episode being that the parent is either

thwarting or denying the child's wants. And by, you know, general observation, roughly half of them are unnecessary in a typical family. Now, it leaves roughly 10 an hour, every six minutes, that it's parent of a two year old or a five year old has to regulate them in some way. So there you are. You're in the middle of it. You're moving through a store. Your child is squirming in the shopping cart, grabbing things. You got to regulate them.

Yeah, for sure. You know, your five year old wants to whack the two year old. You got to regulate them. My own theory of parenting going forward. Now I would, you know, advise on how I tried to act myself as a parent was big pasture real fences. So in the sense of response to preferences, absolutely half those control episodes were stupid. You know, what I mean? And my whole dissertation was about offering alternatives rather than thwarting

the child's desire, offer an alternative that's possible. That's a more skillful or appropriate way to fulfill the desire. So when I talk about really the territory, especially of authority, I'm really not talking about preferences. You know, I agree with you entirely, minimize control episodes for all kinds of reasons. And if you still, you're a docibly, find yourself needing to exercise regulation. That's a control episode. The ones of the child are being

thwarted in some more men. Hopefully for good purpose. Then the how of that is what's really, really important. You can't, you can't escape the what of it, which a lot depends

on like you were saying, the nature of the child and the larger context. The more that your child is just kind of easy going and naturally cooperative wanting to to please parents and kind of even killed in their temperament and all the rest of that and the more that you're involved in a culture in which you're raising a child alongside other people in which there's some kind of, you know, consensus around general norms for child behavior and everybody

including in the school system is sort of representing that standard. You know, then it's a lot easier to really, really, really keep your control episodes to a minimum. It can be harder if there are other issues, but it whatever that is, if you're going to have control episodes, yep, you're right. They're very memorable, aren't they? And I'm wondering, have you actually heard of this thing called gentle parenting that?

I've heard of various versions of it because this has been a big topic these days and like parenting circles. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Attachment centered parenting. I'm all for the continuum concept, all for positive discipline versions of that. I'm all for most of those books and approaches though. They don't really tell you what to do when the rubber hits the road. Yeah. That's sort of what my experience was when I started looking into it. Yeah.

What do you do then? And that's a whole conversation. For example, what if the child is bound to determine to do things that are threats to their safety? They won't hold your hand as a young kid in a busy city sidewalk. They could run into traffic. They like doing really exciting things that are dangerous. You know, maybe they are starting to get into drugs, you know, in junior high school. Your duty to their safety trumps their autonomy and trumps

whether they're happy with your exercise of power over them in the moment. So I've thought a lot about my what right to exercise power over this kid, you know, and I came into that as a kid who did not like my parents exercise of power. 95%, not 50%, 95% of my parents control episodes were just unnecessary. And so I came into it pretty alert around that. The good advice that I find in it as a nonparent would like rings true to me is that as a parent

emotionally regulating yourself is really important. Huge. It's also hard because to your theme throughout this conversation, dad, this is a long haul. You're not just doing this for a month or for a year. You're in it for 18 years at the very least, most are in it

for a lot longer than that. And you're going to get worn down and it's going to get easier and easier and easier to just like scream at your kid or tell him to shut up or yank come into your your body really abruptly and kind of abrasively or you know, go to corporal punishment or whatever it is. Like these are often things that people resort to and parents resort to when they don't feel like they have any other tools when they've run out of tools.

They either haven't educated themselves about the alternative tools or they've just gotten to the end of their rope and they're like, well, if nothing else works, I guess this is what I have to do now in order to whatever. And I think that it's that fill in the blank that whatever that is actually really worth taking a look at. Like do you feel like you need to control your kid because your kid is actually unsafe or do you feel like you

need to control your kid because you want to control your kid? These are two very different things and it's really important to look at the difference between them, I think. Are you regulating them for them? Are you regulating them for you? And we can be honest about this. And sometimes I do think it's okay to regulate them for you, you know, like you're having an interaction with another adult, your kid is not doing anything unsafe, but they're

being really freaking annoying. Like there's a place for being like, hey kiddo, can you just like give me a moment here or whatever the two notches turned up version of that is? Okay. So okay, emotional regulation really, really, really important. I think that there's a lot in gentle parenting that's basically just about regulating yourself emotionally. All that

piece of it I love. The piece of it that I've got a lot of questions about is the semen and attempt to treat kids as if they are tiny adults and as if they have the ability to logic and reason themselves through interactions in the same way that adults do because there's a lot in gentle parenting that's about like explaining to your kid why you're doing things.

And I do think that that's great. I love the idea of giving your your child reasons for things because even with you guys, I had moments as a kid where I just did not understand what was going on. And I think you guys did by and large a really great job of telling me what was going on. And even so, I was confused a lot of the time because life is confusing. It's a big spooky world out there. So I love that piece of it. But a kid's brain does not understand like sharing

as a concept until they're about five years old. They literally do not have that gear inside of their head yet. Like same things with self regulating motions. So the idea that you're going to kind of like why a three year old into like why they should stop hitting you. I don't know if you're really going to do that. I don't know what you think about that dad. Also a lot of these approaches are incredibly verbal. They're really about talking and talking and talking and

kids are often like really bottom up creatures. I would say that in terms of the audience here, you know, people preparing to guys, let's say in particular, preparing to become a parent, there's some things that are really important to try to keep in mind. One is put tons and tons of positive moments in the bank with your kid. Just be really committed to that. Steadfast and make yourself emotionally and temporally. I don't mean temporarily. I mean temporally in terms

of time available to that child. Second, look for all kinds of things outside of what you're doing that will really nurture that child and take really good care of that child and help that child to be easier to raise and less in less need of regulation. So paying attention to the child's health and what the child eats of that child research shows is going to have basically two sugar donuts and a Coca-Cola for breakfast. Well, that child is going to have behavior issues at school

that you're going to hear about. It really supports your partner. I try to involve other people in the system, which has occurred in our hunter-gather background, who can be both nurturing and give you respite and also can be role models and establish normative standards for the child so you don't have to do all the work. And then I would say third, clarify in your own mind what your view is, your principled view about parental authority. For example, you might take the stance that net, net,

net. You really do not want to exercise parental power for whatever reason. Maybe you're really concerned about losing your relationship with the child. Maybe you think that it's just bad

parents shouldn't do that. Okay. Clarify your take on that. If on the other hand, you consider that at a fundamental level, parents need to be able to exercise power for the sake of their child's safety and also aspiration and also to manage a home, a family that's not run by the kit, which can create a lot of issues, including for the parents relationship, which that child needs

to be preserved, ideally. Decide what your view is about that. And the fundamental question or norm about whether your children need to fundamentally respect adult authority, appropriate legitimate adult authority exercised in appropriate legitimate ways. And I think a lot of people get into trouble because they're not clear in their view and they sort of oscillate between

permissiveness and coming down like a ton of bricks. And it's a lot better to know what your stance is and then ask yourself, how am I going to work with my partner because if you have a partner who really is not committed to parental authority as a value, doesn't see its point or just doesn't want to get into any kind of a conflict with the child. That could be a parent, kind of a

permissive parent that's really easy going. But if you're the other parent who sees the need for reasonable parental authority to support the aspiration of the children to maintain a reasonable family and to exercise authority and regulation when need be, and your partner is really different about that, that's something to really think through and talk about. I'm really glad that you're mentioning this at the end here, dad, because one of the things that we know is among the most

damaging experiences for a child is parental inconsistency is what it's called. This is particularly the experience that these kinds of rules fluctuate wildly based off of circumstance, what's going on inside of the parents, which parent they're talking to, all of that, particularly the feeling that like support comes and goes or love comes and goes. It just seems clear that one of the things to really work out with your partner, including in some of those conversations that maybe you have

before a kid pops out, is like, how do you want to be about that kind of thing? What are your agreements with each other about if one parent says A, and the kid comes to the other parent, and is asked a question and you say B, how do you reconcile that? Which what are we going to

with? Who's player? We're backing here. I think that those are all pieces that can kind of fly under the radar a little bit, just because so many of the other experiences are so enormous, associated with parenthood, that a lot of these basic functional questions can go unanswered until a kid comes along and then you're just dealing with a live fire, which is never really the best case scenario. Yeah, and I think it's also important to realize that in many places today,

there really isn't a clear norm for kids, who are just being kids. We're just being normal, rowdy, unruly, compestuous, happy-go-lucky, pleasure-seeking, six-year-olds, or 16-year-olds, right? If there isn't that norm of fundamental respect for adult authority that's appropriate,

you have to relitigate it every time. Sometimes you'll see what happens is that because it wasn't established early on in the early years for the child who are really established with consistency between the parents, then wow, I've seen a lot of wheels coming off when kids enter at a lessons because they're hadn't been in establishing and a consistency, as you say, of reasonable expectations, of basic cooperation with parental authority and general appropriate adult authority.

This was a really interesting one. I've really enjoyed being able to talk about this in more of a kind of relaxed way. Often when we go into these conversations, we've got a lot of research, a lot of talking points, things like this. This was more just about direct experience, which is great. Yeah. One other suggestion for parents to be, do what our ancestors did if you possibly can,

spend a lot of time around young children. Not just when everything's all nice and nice, but hour after hour after hour, be alone with a young child, 15 months old, two and a half, five and a half for an entire day, and then add that up, 365 of them in a row. There's a lot of research that shows that actually being home alone with a young child is more stressful, physically stressful in terms of cortisol releases and so forth, than probably 90% of all

jobs. That's the day in and day out of it. That will really help you. When you kind of imagine how you want to be as a parent, if you're not yet a parent, you're going to have a lot of years to get used to and skillful with what's it like to raise a three-year-old. But if you really start to imagine some of these idyllic scenarios, that's great. Then ask yourself, okay, typical scenarios. What do you plan on doing? If your kid just literally will not stop throwing food, what are you

going to do? For example, and then you could play out other versions of that. You've tried general parenting. You've tried positive discipline. You've tried it all. Okay, what are you going to do? Because you will get real. You will get very real. It's also helpful to think about it in advance and to appreciate the intensity and the ways you can get cranked up yourself. There's a haunting

phrase also besides the mask of motherhood called Ghosts in the Nursery. I think it's from a paper by Somal Fryberg back in the day who talks about the ways that we get reactivated ourselves. Those are the ghosts in the nursery. We get reactivated ourselves from how we were parented or things that we wanted when we were little too. Definitely. You start to feel like you're channeling the parent that was the last person in the world you wanted to act like. What do you do

then? Being aware of that as well in terms of your own self-awareness and introspection and having a partner or perhaps a therapist who can help you look at that stuff before you go into parenthood. That's good too. I really loved talking with Rick today about being a dad. As you can imagine, being a father and

son pair ourselves, there's a lot of subtext inside of a conversation like this. It's kind of difficult to not reflect on our own relationship as we're having a conversation about this kind of relationship. And at the very end of things, after we turned off the recording, we kept talking about this. And we had just a really interesting conversation about that. And I want to share a little bit from that with you toward the end of this recap. But to start the recap off, we begin the conversation

by talking about the preparation that you do for becoming a parent. I asked Rick if you went back in time and could talk to yourself six months before I came along, what advice would you give yourself? And I thought that he had just a phenomenal five-point plan here of things to think about. First, give your heart. Do everything that you can when this kid comes along to be taken by them, to feel love toward them, to let yourself be as invested as humanly possible in them. All of that.

That is a very natural process, obviously, but particularly for guys when you're talking about typical male socialization, there can be a kind of resistance to total loving by and toward another being. And another point that he raised related to that for people who are raised with more of a stiff upper lip background, claim your own needs here. Understand that you've got your own vulnerability stuff is going to happen during the very long haul of this relationship that you have

with your partner with your kid inside of your other friendships. All of that, that's going to wear you down. That's going to rub you the wrong way that's going to piss you off. We're all vulnerable people and we can be honest about that. And when we're honest about that, it supports us and taking care of our own needs. And when we take care of our own needs, we can better support our partner. Second, he said, prepare for the whirlwind. Your life's going to change a lot. One kid

totally transforms your life. Two kids, I forget with the exact line that he had about it was, but it was something like the chaos is complete or something along the lines of that. A lot's going to change. Lots can happen. Do everything that you can before the kid comes along to prepare for it. Third, take care of your partner. This is somebody who either went through a major surgery or a extremely traumatic physical experience for their body. They are flushed with hormones. They

have just been through a lot recently. You're both about to be incredibly sleep-deprived. The whole thing is basically a recipe for disaster, which relates to something that I mentioned early on, which is do everything that you can before a kid comes along to make sure that your relationship is as good as it could possibly be. A kid is probably not going to solve your problems, and it's almost certainly going to exacerbate them. Fourth, look for community. There are a lot of

community activities that moms do together. There are some that dads do together, but they're tend to be fewer of them, and there's sort of a less clear pathway into them often for dads. This means that if you're going to get into those spaces, you probably have to go a little bit more out of your way to do so. The fifth point, Rick Mayet, I've already named, which is take care of yourself, look after your own needs, to add on to that. Men get postpartum depression too.

Roughly 10% of new dads develop postpartum depression. It is very common for new dads to be extremely hard on themselves when this happens. Being frank about it, it's not uncommon for there to be a sense of buyers remorse associated with having a kid because your life changes. So dramatically, it's important to acknowledge this just as like a human experience. It doesn't mean you're a bad person. It doesn't mean you're a bad dad. You're doing the best that you can't.

Related to that, your self-concept is going to totally transform based off of this, and that could be a pretty fraught process for people. One of the things also that Rick mentioned early on was how having a kid often creates a natural dyad between mom and child that the dad can kind of feel like he's a little bit on the outs of. This is particularly going to be the case if the dad is in more of that traditional breadwinner role as opposed to being involved more in the direct raising of his

kid. The more involved that dad becomes in raising his kid, the less he's going to feel that way. So hey, this is a natural nudge to of course be as involved as you can in the life of your child and do everything that you can to support your partner inside of that process. And it also raises this as an important issue to talk about inside of your relationship. If you feel it, start to come up. The key point here comes down to communication. Are you able

to talk with your partner about these kinds of issues? Are you able to set expectations, maintain healthy boundaries, all of that good stuff that we talk about on the podcast all the time? But this is often complicated by classic male gender socialization. We are often taught to not expressable inrability, to express those needs to other people, to go to our partner who we see

doing an incredible amount of work, being completely flooded as is. And to them from that position, make like a vulnerable request of them when they already seem overwhelmed like man, that's a really hard thing to do. And you also need to be pretty judicious about how you do it.

And this took us to a story that Rick had about a couple of resets and his relationship with my mom, Jan, when they were able to take a step back from what was going on, evaluate the relationship that they had started to create inside of that parental space and make some deliberate choices

about how they wanted it to be in the future. And they were able to really look at it in a way that allowed them to both be supportive of each other, see the different needs that they both had, see the ways in which those needs were not getting met, and then make a choice about how they

actually wanted things to be in the future. This then took us to the part of the conversation that it was focused on building a strong relationship with your kids and the kinds of parenting styles that tend to lead to good outcomes, not just for children generally, but for the relationship that parents have with their children. This took us to some work from psychologist Diana Blomrand, which was done in the 1960s, that tracked these two different metrics. The first was responsiveness,

and the second was demandingness. You can probably understand both of these intuitively. Responsiveness basically just speaks to how responsive the parent is to the needs of their child, and how they respond when their child has needs. In other words, are they more punishing, are they more supportive, are they more emotionally tuned? What's going on there? And then demanding this refers to expectations. Do the parents and force rules have boundaries set expectations,

all of that stuff. And the basic conclusion here is that authoritative parenting, in other words, parenting that is high in both responsiveness and demandingness. There's a lot of love, and there's also clear boundaries, tends to lead to the best outcomes for kids.

Around this point in the conversation, I mentioned something about parenting the child that you have, not the child that you wish you had, not the child that you kind of imagined before you had a kid, not the kid that you saw in the catalog, the actual one that popped out into the world and into your life. Kids are incredibly perceptive, and they are particularly perceptive of disappointment. It's normal to have expectations of what your child is going to be like, and then they appear,

and most of those bets are off. So it's really important here to be open to differences, to variety, and a lot of this just gets down to preferences. Every kid is going to be different. Some kids are going to want to play with trucks, some are going to want to play with dolls, some are going to be extroverts, some are going to be introverts, and we can't really change temperament, even if we wanted to. We just have to kind of roll with the punches.

And this is what took Rick and me to a really interesting conversation that we had after we turned the camera off. Because a big question in the space right now is how much parental authority is the right amount of parental authority. We can all, I think, basically accept that it's appropriate for a parent to tell their kid to not hit another kid. That's a place where we can display some

parental authority. But a second ago, I just said, it's maybe not as appropriate and you should just kind of roll with it if your kid prefers to play with a truck rather than playing with a doll or vice versa. One of those is a value. Don't hit other kids. The other is a preference, trucks versus dolls. But clearly the line between those two things, a value and a preference is a pretty thin one. And this is then complicated by all of the material that parents bring to raising

their kid. Speaking personally, the mistakes that I make with my kid are probably going to be along the lines of being a little too free range with them about some academic pursuit things, really encouraging them in the direction of forming strong relationships with other kids, really trying to be sociable, really trying to be engaged, really investing in those relationships. I'm going to nudge them in that direction. Maybe even a little too far. Why am I going to do that?

Because I had my own experiences growing up and most of my painful experiences were related to feeling like I wasn't connected enough to other kids, feeling essentially like a bit of a social outcast. And I don't want my kid to have that same pain. Someone had nudge them in a direction that I think could maybe do something about it. But what if I have a little introvert, right?

Is that a value or preference? And as we were talking about after the episode, Rick mentioned that he kind of wished that somebody in his orbit, a parent, a mentor, somebody like that, had had more aspiration for him, particularly academically. He went to college at the age of 16. He was incredibly successful. There were a million doors open for him. And he kind of just didn't really walk through any of them because he didn't really recognize it as a possibility that you could

apply to a master's program at some Ivy League University or something like that. You know, that just wasn't what people in his orbit did so he didn't really consider it. So when it came time to raise me, wow, there was a real focus on academic achievement. On the one hand, that's a value. On the other hand, it's just kind of projection, right? Like it's just interpreting from your own experience and placing it onto your kid. And what if your kid cares about that less

than you do? And I think the point here is to be really attentive to the ways in which our own experiences can be projected onto our kids. And what I'm taking away from all of this as somebody who hopes to be a parent in the future is to be really attentive to my own vulnerabilities, my own preferences, and the ways in which I can easily project that onto a kid who may or may not care about the same things that I do. And while we were having this conversation, Rick and I

identified four things. These are not novel ideas, but we talked about them and we've just really felt that they were true. That bottom line are going to really improve your likelihood of having a good relationship with your kid. So here are those four things. First, tons of love. Everything you can do to love this kid as much as you possibly can. Second, big pasture. A lot of space to explore, a lot of possibilities, a lot of room for other ideas, a lot of room for various preferences.

But third, real fences. Real boundaries set clearly. The boundaries are the boundaries. I understand that you want to keep on the line on the floor there a little timmy, but hey, it's time to go home. And then fourth, really importantly, a willingness to admit fault. We all mess up. And I can think of so many positive experiences that I had as a younger person that were tied to feeling like my parents did something that was kind of unfair, like they made a mistake, like they didn't show up

when they were supposed to. And then they just admitted it. They admitted fault. They were willing to say, you know what? I goofed that forest and I'm going to do better next time. That was an incredible thing to hear as a kid. And I think that admitting fault when you're in a position of authority is a really complicated thing. You can really feel like it makes your position more vulnerable. You can feel very threatened by it. That's that's all understandable.

But strong people admit fault. Strong people change their opinion when they're presented with new information. Strong people look out for the needs of those who are more vulnerable than they are. And you know, a three year old is pretty vulnerable being. So yeah, those were just the four things that we found that we think if they're present, you can get away with a lot of other stuff

happen. You can handle a lot of messes. You can have a lot of difficult interactions. But if you got a lot of love, big past year, real fences and a willingness to admit fault, man, you've really kind of set yourself up for success there. So I hope you enjoyed today's conversation. I got a lot out of it personally. It was very valuable for me. I'm going to really be thinking about it for a little while. If you've been enjoying the podcast for a while and you haven't yet subscribed,

please do that. It really helps us out. If you'd like to leave a rating and a positive review, you can do that on Spotify or on iTunes. If you listen over there, if you'd prefer to be watching the podcast and you're currently listening to it, hey, we got a YouTube channel. You can just find it by searching my name for us, Tansen, on YouTube. And if you'd like to support

the show in other ways, you can find us on Patreon. It's patreon.com slash being well podcast and for just a few dollars a month, you can sign up, support the show, get transcripts, get ad free versions of the episodes, a lot of great stuff over there. Until next time, thanks for listening, and I'll talk to you soon.