What matters more to our society right now, which means our values are very screwed up, is the GDP and our economy rather than what's actually good for the mental health of our children. We're seeing almost immediately the baby's stress levels are so high, they're developing anxiety, depression, ADHD, and more aggression.
I blame the fragility of our young people and the fact that they're breaking down on the fact that the adults in the room were not doing their job. You are responsible for your children's mental illness. So we talked about the lies we tell women and mothers. What are the lies we tell men and fathers? Tariffs, meme coins, Girl Scout cookies. What do they all have in common? Come on, it's all about the money.
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Thank you for having me. And the reason is great to have you on. You are super controversial. You wrote this book in which you suggest that mothers are really good for their kids. Is that right? Yes. It shouldn't be controversial, but yes. You know, I'm joking around, obviously, but what you wrote the book about, essentially, the central theme is, particularly in the first three years, babies and toddlers really need their mum around. And that seems like...
actually is quite a difficult thing to say in the modern world. But you can't even use the term mother in some places. In Northern Europe now, in some countries, you're not even allowed to use the term mother. At the UN, they won't let you use the term mother. So, yeah, it is problematic. Yeah, and why can't you use the term mother?
Because they feel everything has to be gender neutral and that mothers are exactly the same as fathers. And the truth is that there are a lot of ways in which men and women are the same, but there's a lot of ways in which we're different. And one of the ways in which we're different is how we nurture children.
Imagine that. Well, the reason I think, again, we're joking around, but actually I think the reason it is a difficult thing to talk about is not actually that a bunch of snowflakes are offended, but I think the nature... of our modern world has changed so much that a lot of women really feel a tremendous amount of pressure to get back to work. And that pressure is often economic. Some of it is cultural. Some of it is societal.
And it's just a difficult message for some people to hear because maybe they don't have that choice nowadays. Is that fair? Yeah, there's a... huge rise in postpartum depression. Really? It's very, very high now. In some places, as high as 30%. And one of the reasons that I see for that in my practice is that women from the moment they get pregnant are conflicted. They feel a terrific amount of conflict and when they have a baby, even if they have time off.
They are always preoccupied with when they're going to go back. So it's very hard for women to relax and feel that their role is valuable and their time is valuable and well spent because they feel a lot of internal turmoil and conflict. And we've done that to women and to men. We've created this conflict where we can't just say sort of like just being able to say mothers are important. We can't just say being with your children in those early years.
is just really critically important and relax into it and enjoy it. And you have a long life and you can do everything in your life. You can be successful with your career, but just not all at the same time. And... You say all this stuff about how it's better for mothers. What's wrong with sending your six-month-old to a nursery to daycare? So daycare, for a variety of reasons, is very bad for children. The right brain...
The social-emotional part of the brain is 85% developed by the age of three. And mothers perform a number of things, a number of roles in those first three years that helps that right brain to grow. One of the things they do is buffer children from stress.
That's one of their major roles. In most parts of the world, babies are worn on their mother's bodies to keep the cortisol levels down, to raise the oxytocin levels, which is the love hormone, and to keep the stress levels, the cortisol hormone down. And what we're doing is we're separating mothers and babies at such an early age that it's stimulating the stress-regulating part of the brain, the amygdala, which is meant to remain.
offline for the first year. Baby's stress levels are supposed to be very, very low while their brains are developing in the first year. When we separate a mother from a baby, that baby no longer feels safe because they need something called a... attachment security, and it creates a great amount of stress. The salivary cortisol levels go up very high. Those babies have a higher incidence of things like aggression, behavioral problems, and anxiety later.
in their school, and even immediately. I mean, we're seeing almost immediately that babies' stress levels are so high, they're developing anxiety, depression, ADHD, and more aggression. And so, you know... So basically separating mothers and babies or separating babies from their primary attachment figures in those early years causes too much stress for that baby's brain.
So do you think, Erica, a lot of the issues that we're seeing with our youngsters now, the Gen Z generation, can be tracked right the way back to the way that we raised them as infants? Oh, absolutely. Not just Gen Z, but... You know, even before that, you know, so this started, you would say the movement to separate mothers and babies. I mean, I suppose you could say historically it started with the industrial revolution when mothers went to factories, but really when it picked up speed is.
the 60s when we started talking about feminism and the me generation and individuality and and how important it was to pursue your own personal ambitions and personal desires and and pleasure and it was all about pleasure And so what we did is we diminished the role of caregiving in society because it was hard.
because it was a responsible role, because it requires sacrifice. And so when that happened and women were pushed to go out into the work world when they had very young children, I mean, Gloria Steinem said to women, if you don't work... out in the work world you are not part of our movement and these were to women who already had young children and she said things like your kids will be just fine and our kids are not just fine particularly in the early years when mothers disappear
so babies are born incredibly neurologically and emotionally fragile right we know that that the first three years babies are not like other creatures ready to go they're very fragile and the thing that helps them to develop in a healthy way is that buffering from stress, but also mothers do this other important thing, which is they regulate baby's emotions from moment to moment. Every time a mother soothes a baby that's in distress, she's actually regulating their emotions.
aren't born with the ability to regulate their emotions. So Gen Z, the millennials, these were generations that were anxiety and depression, which are disorders of. Emotional regulation. People cannot regulate their emotions. I always say that, you know, when you're a baby, you're born with the ability to go from zero to 60 in three seconds with your emotions. You can go from being happy, happy, happy to being, you know, sort of like.
Sailing a sailboat in the Atlantic in a storm. That's how babies are born. And it's only because mothers are physically and emotionally present to soothe the baby when they're in distress, to help the baby to regulate emotions, that it's more like sailing in the Caribbean.
It's interesting what you say about removing mothers from babies. And there's going to be a lot of mums watching this. And there's a lot of young women who are going, well, what can I do? Because this is a society that we live in. The economic realities, whatever you want to call it, hypercapitalism, blah, blah, blah, it has effectively meant that the vast majority of people can't rely on a one-parent income. So...
What I would say is strategize for those couples that don't have children, strategize. Think of raising a child as a team sport. So do without when you can do without in the early years if you have to do without, if you can, right? And if you can't, then there's a hierarchy to childcare that is better for children than daycare.
The best is your primary attachment figure. The next best is something called kinship bond. So it would be your dad or your aunt or your grandmother or your next door neighbor who's Aunt Julie, who's like family to you and has a more similar.
investment in your life and will be around forever that would be the next best kind of care then would be a babysitter or nanny which most people can't afford one babysitter nanny which is what's best it's called single surrogate caregiving if you can't afford that then share the care with another family get your best friend and say let's share the cost of a nanny or a babysitter and that's already going to be better for children than if they go
into daycare minimize your time at work whenever possible maximize your time with your children because there is no such thing as quality time that is a ruse that is a myth it was invented in a time of pushing women economically to go back into the workforce. So basically what matters more to our society right now, which means our values are very screwed up, is the GDP and our economy rather than what's actually good for the mental health of our children.
Because it seems to me, and I think you'd agree with this, that women have been sold a lie, Erica. Absolutely. They've been told that they can have it all. You can have the great job. You can be a COO, a COO. You can raise four kids. patently a nonsense, isn't it? More than that, yes, that's all nonsense because you can have it all in life. I mean, I'm a good example.
My career didn't really begin in earnest till I was in my 50s when I wrote a book. Until then, my practice was so very, very, very small because I would not leave my children for more than an hour and a half a day. And so we got by, but we gave up.
lot we didn't take vacations we didn't have cars fancy cars we didn't you know we didn't buy things we just said we're not going to buy things we're a team you're going to work I said to my husband and I'm going to work a very little just enough to add to the income, but we're going to hold back on income until our children were older. So it takes strategy, and I do think it's possible, but I think you have to get your mindset right around it first. I think even for people who are...
socioeconomically less privileged, I think there are ways of maximizing your time with your children. One of those ways, in my book, Being There, I interviewed
people from all socioeconomic backgrounds. And the ones who did the best with their children were the ones who, when they weren't working, devoted their time to their children. So if you have to work to put a roof over your children's head... or food on the table, then the answer is when you come home at night, you belong to your children.
your weekends belong to your children um and that's hard for parents to hear because we're so much into take care of yourself and it's so but the truth is that if your children haven't seen you all day then you need to compensate by being there as much as possible
And it's a really important point because as somebody who used to teach for longer than I care to remember, one of the things I noticed was that if a parent wasn't there, if a caregiver wasn't there, what immediately the kid would gravitate to. is a screen. And that brings a whole host of other problems on top of what we're already talking about.
Because another function of parents is they help to stimulate children, right? They stimulate their brains. They stimulate them in so many ways. And so if you're not there to stimulate your child, interact with them, basically, just basic interaction, talking to them, reading. to them, then they're going to have to interact with their media, with their technology. So yeah, and again, I do encourage it.
It's easy for us to say that, you know, you can't afford it. What I say to parents is before you say that, before it jumps out of your mouth that you can't afford it, sit down with your partner if you have one. Sit down with your parents. single parents, sit down with your extended family and figure out a way to work less, if you have to work, to work less.
You know, the goal in life is work less, make more. So maybe you have a goal of having the kind of job where you work by the hour and make more per hour, but work less hours so you have more time with your children. Maximize the time with your children.
That's what I would say. And you mentioned a few things that are interesting to tie together. I mean, first of all, you mentioned feminism, and that's an interesting avenue for us to explore. Because feminism, as I understand it, was a movement for the liberation of women. At least that's how... it's been presented. But the problem is with what you're saying is you are putting a framework of parenthood that is not liberating, it's constraining. You're saying you must sacrifice of yourself.
for this thing that you chose to bring into the world. That's the opposite of liberation in the way that we now understand it. So unpack that for us. Can you be a feminist and also believe what you believe? I'm a feminist, but feminism really was meant to give women choice.
The word is choice. You have a choice to have a child or not to have a child. Now, you can have a very linear, almost masculine feeling career because masculine careers were linear. They could be linear. Right. And so you can.
do that and not have children and you can still have a very fulfilling life and i don't encourage people to have children if they don't want to care for children so many years before me penelope leach said if you don't want to care for your children don't have them right and that still stands today you don't have to have children to have a good life you can have a wonderful generative life with being generative in other ways but if you're going to bring a soul into this world you
are responsible for that person. You are responsible that you get them from point A to point B and help them to be as healthy as possible. And that is your responsibility. And so we haven't really talked about responsibility to parents. because we're so fixed on talking about personal freedom. But the reality is you are not going to raise healthy children if you don't...
grasp and take joy in the responsibility. So I can only use my father as an example. My father took such great joy in being a father. You know, caring for us, providing for us, providing for my mother so she could look after us. It gave him such pleasure to care for us. It wasn't a burden. He didn't opine about how hard it was, and he didn't feel compelled.
with my mother to stay home and you know he just felt such joy and pleasure in caring for his family and my mother felt great joy and pleasure in caring for us and so what's happened to the world that both men and women feel so angry and resentful and burdened and uncomfortable with the role of being parents. What has happened to the world? Well I mean I think we haven't been honest. I think there's a lot we haven't been honest about. We haven't been honest about the fact that...
Having a child and raising a child is much harder than we tell them. And we should tell them. So, for instance, you should tell parents you will not sleep for five years. Period. And that way they won't sleep train their children and destroy their children's brain cells. I mean, I can tell you right now, it is devastating when parents come into me and say, I sleep train my child and my child has never been the same.
emotionally, neurologically. You are basically... Tell our audience, Erica, because this is something I have some horrifying stories just anecdotally of the things people say and they don't even understand what they're saying. A friend of mine said to me, oh, we're just sleeping, sleep.
training our baby, and he gave himself a nosebleed. But explain to people, what is sleep training? Why is it bad for kids? And all of that. Here's the truth. If you've been putting off sorting out your health, stop. You're not 22 anymore. Look at you. It's a disgrace. Whether it's hair loss, low energy, or issues in... manual makes it easy to take control of your health without the awkwardness you answer a few questions online a uk-based gp reviews your answers
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Manual.co slash trigger for 55% off. Manual. Men's health the way it should be. Well, all I can say is if you saw an adult... hysterically crying and desperately afraid you would never just let them go you would never shut the door in their face right but we tell parents to do that with their babies we tell them to put their babies in a room to let them cry
until the point of vomiting and hysteria and raise their cortisol levels past the point of them being able to ever process any of that stress. And we tell them not only that it's okay, but it's ideal. Right. Because what we're valuing is parents comfort over children's comfort. In the first year in particular, children's comfort.
has to come first, not parents' comfort. And so this is the myth that we teach parents, that you can have children and nothing will change. You can have children and your comfort will never be disrupted. It's not painful. everything will stay the same. And this is a lie. When you have a baby, well, you have a baby. I don't know if you have a baby. Okay, but you have a baby. Look at my face. This is what you look like. Two and a half years of no sleep. Look at me. And five is the number.
So, you know, when you have a baby... I thought this was going to be a depressing episode anyway, but now it's got personal, but thank you, Erica. When you have a baby, everything changes. Everything changes. And so we do not tell people that. We need to tell young people. But it changes for the good if you're healthy. So what I say to mothers is giving birth is a psychotic.
event right you have this little person moving a little alien coming out of your body in the most dramatic bloody scene if you've watched the birth of your child yet it's beautiful right how do we say but it's absolutely beautiful but it's very
dramatic so not literally it's literally not beautiful at all okay metaphorically when that you could say that a door opens when a woman gives birth yes That door is either opened to a past of a joyful, loving relationship with her mother and father, particularly her mother, or a painful one. So that door can be, it's like Alice in Wonderland, that door can be either a door to a loving, attentive, connected past.
In which case, the moment of looking at your baby is the most joyful experience because you're connecting with your loving mother in that moment. if however you were your mother was depressed narcissistic absent resentful angry abusive The door that opens that may have been closed for many years because we say repression is a great defense if it lasts a lifetime. You basically forget. You get amnesia. When that door opens, all of the amnesia.
is let loose right all of the memories are let loose of a painful childhood and that's when postpartum depression sets in you could say that the hormones connected with having a baby will either motivate those happy feelings or motivate those very, very severely depressed feelings. And it depends on your childhood. Well, Erica, so just to be clear, what you're saying is...
Women are more likely to have postpartum depression if their childhood was suboptimal. Absolutely. If the relationship with their mother was either full of conflict or if they had a depressed mother or a narcissistic mother. were neglected or abused in any way, emotionally and or physically, the door that opens is that door. That's interesting. It maps onto something very, very... i'm not an expert obviously but i've been saying whenever people ask me i'm like
Whatever skill you lack or whatever shit you haven't worked out before you have a baby, like if you don't know how to drive, if you don't know how to do this, if you don't have to do your taxes, like learn that before you have kids. Because the amount of time you have is going to go through the floor and stuff will come up that's unprocessed.
Yeah. I mean, I can tell you some other lies that we tell parents. Okay. Well, the quality versus quantity time. There's no such thing as quality time. If you want to raise healthy children, you need quantity time. Okay. But there's a myth that we're telling women, which is that they can. children later if they freeze their eggs. It's a crazy myth and some of them can. And some of them can't. So my son's girlfriend is working in a law firm and the law firm has.
said basically they will pay for the freezing of eggs to women. And it's a manipulative way of getting them to work many, many more years intensely. And they said, don't worry, you can have a baby when you're in your 40s. And what's happening is women are getting to their 40s. and the eggs that they froze don't necessarily turn into embryos and the embryos don't necessarily turn into babies.
And then they're bereft because they were lied to. So we are telling a lot of lies to accommodate to a narrative that is quite an unhealthy narrative. That to me seems like the worst type of lie because it's one thing to lie and it's another thing to intentionally gaslight an entire gender. many of whom desperately want children, and you were selling them down the river.
So that you can make more money out of it. Well, that was my thought. I almost fell on the floor when I heard that. So that was my thought too. But that's tragic, Erica. It is tragic. It is tragic. There are a lot of lies that we're telling that are tragic. I mean, even just the lie I mentioned of nothing changes, no everything changes. And in a good way, having a baby, as you know, is the most joyful experience.
But it's also painful because, you know, in Judaism we say there is no joy without pain. There is no light without dark. The pain helps us to appreciate the beauty of things and the joy of things. So, you know, this idea that if I'm alive...
little uncomfortable than it's all about me is part of and again I'm not blaming the younger generations let me say that what I am blaming is societal political movements that created a narrative that caregiving is not valuable and that everything else that involved career, making money, materialism, high achievement and fame, that success was defined in such a way that it became perverse. And that's, I blame the fragility.
of our young people and the fact that they're breaking down on the fact that the adults in the room were not doing their job. That's... something that I wanted to talk about, because when I was a teacher, I worked in very socio-economically deprived areas, incredibly deprived, in East London, a couple of miles away from here, which is... some of the way that kids were raised is heartbreaking. And one of the things I noticed was the profound effect not having a father in the home.
and the damage it did to children, boys and girls, but in very different ways. So can we talk about that a little bit? Because I feel this is really important. So my original intention was to write a book about motherhood and fatherhood.
But when I really wrote my book about motherhood, I looked out there and there were so many people that were writing books about fatherhood that were wonderful. So I felt that, you know, in that space, it had been covered, but I can tell you what is so important. People like Alan Shore and Richard Reeve.
and Warren Farrell have written books about fatherhood and how important it is. But basically, the reason fatherhood is so, so very important is that fathers do something very different than mothers. mothers provide sensitive, empathic nurturing, soothing babies in distress, helping to regulate sadness, fear. And so we know that, right? Fathers regulate excitement.
aggression, and impulsivity. If you don't have a father present enough, then little boys in particular, but little girls too, don't learn to regulate impulsive. They don't learn to regulate excitement. They don't learn to regulate aggression. And what's been found is when fathers don't live in the home, little boys are far more aggressive, far more impulsive than when there's a father around. Fathers model.
how you regulate angry feelings. A healthy father. How you regulate aggression. Fathers also you know, they're responsible for separation. So I always say mothers are really good at attachment security. But if a father isn't present to... do what we call playful tactile stimulation, which encourages little boys and little girls, but particularly little boys to explore.
to explore the world, because otherwise they have a very hard time leaving the attachment secure object, right? So the idea is that fathers help to seduce. the their their children away from the mothers and so it's a great duo it's like a great team it's teamwork think that it took thousands of years evolutionarily to create a system where males and females were a team.
right they didn't do the same thing because think about it we don't have companies that are successful with co-ceos do you know one company that has co-ceos So what we've created is a competitive environment for men and women where they're competing against one another rather than complementing one another. And that is one of the real tragedies of society where...
Men and women now see each other as competition. They do. It's now seen as a battle of the sexes. And because of many different types of political movement and narratives that have been put into place in social media. there now seems to be a fundamental distrust, particularly in Gen Z, between males and females. And you think to yourself, watching the discourse that happens online, now I know that online isn't the real world, but it still has a very profound effect.
You go, how are we meant to have happy, healthy relationships when the prevailing feeling is one of mutual distrust? between the genders that is a recipe for disaster isn't it well it is a recipe for disaster and the relationships are showing what a disaster it is i mean um it's interesting because in
Raising women up, which we needed to do because women were downtrodden at some point. In raising women up, we denigrated men. So you could say that it was a very important movement, but we didn't know when to stop. We sort of overshot.
mark. And so men are diminished now, boys are diminished now to the extent that I think 60% of undergrad students are women in graduate schools as well. And the statistics say that women will marry at their educational level or above men at their educational level or below and what's happening is that men and women are not
coming together because women are not choosing, you know, in most mammals and some birds, the women choose. And so women are not choosing the men because they're not as educated. They're not as successful. They're not making as much money. And so then you have this. entire population of women who are having children on their own as single mothers, what we call single mothers by choice, because they say they don't want to be with any of the men. So in overshooting our mark.
Even in nursery school in New York, where my kids went to a nursery school, when they did the admissions to the schools, they said, well, we have to balance our class. That was their way of saying we were going to take half boys and half girls.
That was their way of saying we're going to I mean, they balanced it in other ways to alpha kids and beta kids. And but mostly it was half girls and half boys. And the idea was you kept the balance because you needed to keep the balance. So, you know, again, I think so. The scales need to be rebalanced because we are educating little boys.
like little girls. We're putting them in classrooms, expecting them to sit in circle time quietly for 20, 30, 40 minutes. They can't do that. Little boys are not programmed to sit quietly. So we're trying to educate boys like girls. And boys are getting frustrated. Boys are not successful. They're developing attentional issues because it's a sign of stress. And they're labeled. And now they're on a marginalized path. And so they don't do as well in school.
So from the very beginning, we are mistreating boys now. The other thing I just quickly want to say is that boys neurologically are more fragile than girls from birth. From in utero. So some of the reason they say there's a higher rate of autism in boys is because the stress in utero affects boys more than girls. But when they come out, the statistic is that there are more boys. Boys born in the world, but more girls survive.
Because the boys don't survive. So we know that neurologically, boys are more fragile. They're more susceptible to stress. They're more sensitive to stress. So we are diminishing our boys who then become men. They are now diminished. They develop more depression, more anxiety. And those that men and women aren't pairing like they used to.
There's something else as well. I presume it's the same in the States, but there was a piece of educational research in the UK that really struck me, which is we discipline our boys far harsher than we do our girls.
A boy, if he does something, is far more likely to get more harshly punished for the same misdemeanor than a girl is. That's probably true. Again, in the absence of fathers... who help their boys to understand appropriate behavior and ways of channeling and sublimating their aggression, you know, channeling it appropriately means that boys are growing up more aggressive and more out of control with more behavioral problems.
And so, yeah, that is a problem in society. We are seeing boys as... we're not really understanding the sensitivity issue in boys do you think that's wrong erica and i'm just playing devil's advocate perhaps but i kind of understand why you might be a little bit stricter with boys because if you were
Effectively, if you were training a gorilla or a chihuahua, there would be a difference to how you treated their expressions of aggression because a gorilla can do a lot more damage. Do you see what I'm saying? Yeah. So the best way to... The word discipline... actually comes from the word disciple. It means to teach by example. It doesn't mean to punish.
There's no punishment in there. And so even the choice of the word punishment, I think, is meaningful because in society we think of regulating aggression as punishment. But in fact, regulating aggression is fathers teaching their sons how to behave. How do you handle anger, Daddy? How do you handle your aggressive feelings? What do you do? Well, son, I go out and I kick a ball around and I play basketball and I play the drums.
So the absence of fathers is a detriment to boys because boys don't learn how to regulate their aggression in other ways than punishment. Punishment should... Always be a last resort when you're raising children. You're modeling. You're modeling behavior. You're teaching. That's one of your main roles as a parent is as a teacher. So imagine if you hired a teacher to teach emotional regulation, to teach resilience to stress, to teach appropriate behavior, to teach values.
But they only showed up one and a half hours a day. The Pew Research did a piece of research that said that in America, parents are spending about 90 minutes a day with their children. Can you imagine if you hired a teacher to teach your children, but they only showed up 90 minutes a day? How well would your children be raised? And Erica, we've obviously talked a lot about mothers and where society encourages them to go wrong and how we might...
modify that in an ideal world. What about fathers? Because I'm a father. I also have a career. I'm trying to... do things in the world as you are and provide for my family and balance all of those. And, you know, I would say on a working day, I probably spend about an hour, an hour and a half with my son. And then on the weekend, I try to be around a lot more.
Should, you know, if someone is listening to it in a similar position, they may be really desperately trying to provide the opportunity for their partner to not go to work. They feel like, you know, in order to make that happen, someone's going to have to work here, like outside the home, right?
What's the right way for a dad to be in the modern world? What's the healthy way for a dad to behave? Well, listen, the traditional way was that very young children under the age of three had a primary attachment figure present. And fathers spent as much time as they could with children.
With that playful, physical, playful, tactile stimulation, throwing the baby up in the air, tickling the baby, chasing the baby around. That's a way to help teach children about regulation of aggression. And what I say is more is more.
And I'll leave it at that and say more is more. The more you can be there, the better. But there are also the realities of life that you have to earn a living. And if you're a team and you're doing tag team and you're making more money so your wife can stay home. What I would say is if you're a father of a little.
boy but even a little girl but even more of a little boy um you need to save time every single day so fathers get into a mindset and they say well i'm gone before they wake up in the morning and well i have an hour at the end of the day with my son what i would say is that's probably not enough um and if you're going to work
that hard and you come home and you you only have an hour with your son you need to leave more time for that play right so you can play basketball with the little mini basketball hoop in their room or so you can wrestle and your wife can yell at you because you
overstimulating the baby. And that's all part of it, right? So more is more. And that doesn't mean that you have to be there every single minute of the day with the mother. Otherwise, then you're not a team. Then you're competing. But more is more.
be offended if you're like constantine you're a shit father like you need to be there three hours a day i'm i'm interested in what you as an expert in this would say is a healthy correct amount so what's really healthy is to be there at transitional times as much as possible transitional times yes waking up in the morning If you can, going to school, but a lot of fathers aren't around for that. And at the end of the day, when they're...
kind of taking off there. Mr. Rogers was a TV show in America, Fred Rogers, and he had this way of coming into his studio and he would... take off his street clothes and he would put on his sweater, his Mr. Rogers sweater. In America, this was an educational television for children. He was wonderful.
The idea is when you come home and you take off your street clothes and you put on your dad clothes, you know, it's being there as much as you possibly can for your son at transitional times. Waking up. going to sleep but before going to sleep you need to leave at least an hour if not two hours so in the 1950s everybody ranks on the 1950s and i understand why but leave it to beaver was a tv show in america where the dad came home every day at 5 30.
and was there for the baseball games of the kids and you know ate dinner and they watched tv together they went for a walk around the block together whatever they did right so that time which is transitioning from your day to your evening and then transitioning from your evening to your bath time and your bath time to your bedtime and your bedtime to sleep. Those are transitions. The more transitions you can be there for, the better.
Well, that's what I do. So we usually have breakfast together before I go. And then in the evening, I come home, we play around, we have dinner, and then bath time and bedtime. That's right. And what I would say is don't get so fixed on... your children needing a lot of sleep if you haven't been able to be there during the day whether you're a woman or a man you need to extend their day i mean you know the expression in my field is it's either front loaded or back loaded
they need what they need and they're going to get what they need and so parents will say oh my child's so hard to go to sleep after i come home from work i'm like because They haven't seen you all day, and they're going to get what they need from you at the end of the day if they didn't get it during the day. So don't be so rigid as parents. If you work, don't be rigid about when they go to sleep.
you know you can't you can't come home from a long day of work spend an hour with your child and then put them to sleep they're going to just say no because they need you so keep them up a little longer and um give them more before they go to sleep so we talked about the lies we tell women and mothers? What are the lies we tell men and fathers? Capitalism is evil. You hear that all the time these days, in internet clips, on TV, even in real life.
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Well, I think we tell men and fathers today that their wives, nothing will change and their professional wives will always be big earners and successful and be partners economically. And you can get the bigger house and you can get the bigger car and you can take fancy big, you know. telling parents that there's going to be no change and we tell them that too.
And, you know, and we also tell them that mothering is insignificant. It's not valuable work. And someone who you pay very little to and have less respect for will do just fine. What I call the myth of any caregiver. giver will do, which is a real myth. And so we tell that to young men, too, who then grow into fathers, and then they're angry at their wives for wanting to stay home. So what I would say is don't promise each other. anything.
Know that everything will change. Say, we're not making any promises. We have to see how we feel when this baby is born. And I may want to stay home. And for the father to say, look, let's create a financial plan for us for the next few years. where if you do want to stay home or if you only want to work part-time, we can manage it. So that's the myth. We tell them nothing will change economically in any other way.
One of the most heartbreaking statistics I've read is that most marriages, and maybe I'm wrong on this, so correct me if I am, most marriages break up, I think it's two years after having a child. Why is that? Because it's fucking hard, mate. Sorry. Sorry. I'm with him. I'm with him. So the test of one's resilience...
is if you can manage hard. If you're going to climb Mount Everest and you go into it with the expectation that you're going to climb a little hill in the Yorkshire... countryside okay um you're gonna collapse pretty much you know you're not gonna have brought the right equipment you're not gonna have prepared and trained for it um but if you tell them look
the view from up there it's the best in the world but to get there you've got to go through a lot of hardship but you can do it we're going to train you we're going to get you ready and you know you're not going to sleep but it's going to be great because the joyful moment
will be more joy and love than you've ever felt in your life, but then there's going to be these terrible moments where you're exhausted. If we tell you and you have realistic expectations, then you can manage it together, right? If we tell... Men and women lies about raising children. Then when they have children, they collapse. And what are these? Because we're talking about these lies that we tell. But what are the real brutal truths of raising kids? That it's the most...
amazing, joyful thing you'll ever do, that the love for your child is the greatest love you will ever feel for anyone. People say, oh, but I have romantic love. Nah. I love my husband with all my might, but it pales in comparison to my love for my children. And he would say the same thing. And so... it's not the same kind of love, right? So I think we're doing young people a great disservice by not being honest about how joyful it can be.
but how hard it can be it is really hard but you know hardship was never something that human beings were afraid of in the past we've become soft in a way we've we've let we lack resilience again and i don't blame young people for this i blame the general who didn't provide that emotional foundation. So there's a lot of research, so much research about the fact that if you nurture, if you give to a child in the first three years, if you're physically and emotionally present.
and you make them feel safe and secure, they can manage stress and adversity going forward. It's the story of the three little pigs, right? If you build a house of bricks from the beginning and... you're sensitive and you're present then that house cannot be blown down but if you build a house of hay or a house of wood and You know, put your child in daycare, have somebody else raise them, take vacations and leave your child for a week with granny. I mean, crazy stuff I hear with little babies.
what I call empathic impairment. They look at their own babies, these young people, and they cannot see the vulnerability of their own children. And also as well... I remember when I was teaching, I used to see the way that mums would be disconnected from their kids. And then you go, well, no wonder the kid is acting up in school. No wonder. the kid lashes out because that fundamental connection between mother and child or father and child is just non-existent.
So there's something called an attachment disorder, which is generationally passed down, not genetically. What that means is that if you had a mother who struggled with... who struggled with deeply connecting, who struggled with dependency, who struggled because her own mother struggled. That is passed down to the next generation. through pathological defenses. So that baby who is not getting their emotional needs met, sometimes their physical needs met by a mother.
will have to develop a way to cope. Now, if you're so little, those coping mechanisms are not healthy. They're pathological coping mechanisms that fall apart. One is called an avoidant attachment disorder where... It's very hard for that baby to grow up and trust. others and trust love and it's very hard for them to give over to really deeply connecting and loving with others and it often leads to depression and loneliness another attachment disorder is called the ambivalent attachment disorder
that baby clings to their mommy like dear life because they know and the narrative is my mommy's going to leave me again so I just have to hold on to her and never let her go. That is a very anxious baby. That then is correlated with anxiety later, and usually it's an anxious mother produces that anxious baby. Then there's the hardest, really, that is hard for me to even talk about, which is called the disorganized attachment disorder, which is a baby without a strategy.
So think of an avoidant attachment disorder and an ambivalent attachment disorder as strategies, coping mechanisms for that baby to cope with not getting their emotional needs met. okay this baby doesn't have a strategy a disorganized attachment baby will cycle through
all the strategies. First, they'll turn away from the mother, then they'll cling to the mother, then they'll slap the mother out of rage, and then they'll circle through. That's correlated with borderline personality disorders, and we have a huge uptick. in babies without strategies who develop borderline personality disorders. We've never seen so many borderline patients in my field. So, and let's talk about this because this is very...
This is very important because a borderline personality disorder, just explain it to the audience, because number one, it's very severe. And number two, from what I know of BPD, there is no cure for it. No, there's treatment, but there's no cure. It's very hard to treat. So it is someone who never felt safe. It is a baby who really never... was provided with that feeling of safety. So it doesn't really feel safe in the world and alternates between an excessive dependency.
and excessive rage over dependency, paranoia and persecution, feelings of paranoia and persecution, and cycles through these feelings. Basically, they have a hard time. having relationships a very hard time now i've treated borderline patients in my practice who do get better they're never fully better but they they they go on to have relationships and have children but the treatment is very long
and very hard. It's usually psychoanalysis. So, you know, they have DBT therapy, but that just controls symptoms. But if you're really going to try to change the character of a person, it's not easy. So what I say to parents is, you know, You have two windows. You have zero to three and you have nine to 25. You have adolescence. If you miss the first window, my second book was originally supposed to be called Second Chances. They renamed it into Raising Resilience.
and adolescence in the new age of anxiety, whatever. But it was supposed to be called second chances because these two windows, meaning from zero to about... 25, but once they leave your house, you don't have much hope. So as you're at 18, you have a lot of room to try to repair things. But if you miss that, then a personality gets set, a character gets set.
And why is it, Erica, that more women are diagnosed with BPD than men? Is that just the way that more women present with those type of symptoms or is there something else going on? Oh, there's a lot of men with... borderline personality disorders. I mean, the kids You know, boys are more violent with their suicidal attempts and their self-harming behaviors, but they have very high rates of borderline personality now. So, yeah, I mean, I think that was just maybe under recorded that men.
have very high rates of self-harming behaviors. And also, does addiction play into this? Because addiction is a dissociative. Yes, it is a dissociative. It's a narcissistic disorder. So you'd say... It's all about harm to the self. It's all about the lack of development of the part of you. You know how we talk about core training? Physical core training, right? This is emotional core training. Yourself is your core.
And it develops from the moment you're born, and some psychoanalysts even talk about in utero, but it develops from the moment you're born, and it is about feeling... safe and secure and loved and understood. Those would be the four things, safe, secure, loved, and understood. If you have those four ingredients, then you develop a self. If you don't have those four ingredients, either because you feel safe and secure and loved but not understood.
or you feel loved and understood, but no one was around. So you never really felt safe and secure. Any of those four don't quite develop. You haven't fully developed a self. And that leads to a compensation. could say it's a disorder of deficiency where you're always trying to fill a void that never got filled and drugs alcohol sex
eating, all those addictions, gambling, pornography, they all try to fill a void in a person where the self is supposed to be. And so there are probably people watching and listening to this that can spot these types of... flaws in themselves what should those people do if they're listening to this they're going oh my god go get therapy from
a psychoanalytic psychotherapist. We either call ourselves psychoanalytic or psychodynamic psychotherapist, not a CBT therapist. CBT therapists are good for what I call symptom relief, cutting the grass. So if you have OCD and you want to learn how to control it, or you just want to learn how to control anxiety rather than understand the deeper underpinnings of it.
You know, you can't really heal by just cutting the grass. You actually got to go to the roots and see what's going on at the roots. So what I do with patients is I really try to understand the origins of things. So that would be the way to define.
good treatment for someone who's suffering from these disorders versus what I consider more negligent treatment, which is if you're just... giving medication as a psychiatrist or you're just cutting the grass and teaching them some behavioral techniques, you're really not helping that person at a very deep level to both uncover and heal from deep, deep trauma and wounds.
that go back a long time. And because we now seem to have this over-diagnosis, particularly on Fortune Gen Z with things like ADHD, is that a result of the... parental strategies that you've been talking about earlier so you've heard of fight or flight yes okay fight or flight is the evolutionary response to stress right the sable-toothed tiger was chasing you you were running
You were either fleeing or you stood your ground, you were fighting. It's our nervous system's way of coping with threat. And so what we're seeing in children, and one of the things we're seeing is this huge uptick in children with fight or flight responses. They're either incredibly aggressive, more behavioral problems, particularly in boys in schools, biting, kicking.
hitting you know and then we see distractibility now distractibility is not a disorder distractibility is a response to stress it means that that child's nervous system is overloaded you've overloaded that circuit with stress so instead of asking where is the stress coming from what can we do about the stress what are the psychosocial stressors
that are contributing to this little boy's stress. We're just medicating them, what I call silencing their pain. Diagnose, medicate, throw them in the bucket. And now you've diagnosed someone and you've categorized them and you've marginalized them instead of saying this child is having a stress response. What's going on?
We don't like to think deeply about things today. We like to think very superficially about things and we like a lot of immediate gratification. Just get rid of my pain. Give me a pill. I don't want to think about things. I don't want to work on things. I don't want to be uncomfortable. Therapy makes me uncomfortable. Unless you're willing to be uncomfortable, you're never going to see the view at the top of Everest.
It's also as well, I think, it's because when you have these things, you are always just about coping. You're always just about coping. So every day is a battle until from the moment you wake up till you get to bed. And you just, well, I held it together for this day and hopefully tomorrow. But one more thing on top of that feels like this could be the thing that could absolutely break you. Yeah. And I think that's a real issue as well because...
A lot of people don't realize how they're only just about coping and they're not truly aware of everything that they're dealing with, which isn't normal. It isn't actually. comes from the way that you were raised for instance well i mean i think we we don't talk about prevention also in our health care we talk about the medical model, which is, it hurts, go get a pill. We don't really talk about, so parent education, what I do, I consider half of what I do, maybe more than half is prevention.
Right. So talking to parents about what they can do to prevent mental illness in their children. So sorry to interrupt. This is something I wanted to pick up on in the entire conversation you're having with Francis. How, I don't want to overstate the case, but how accurate, because, see, most people's idea about mental health is like, it's a chemical imbalance, it's a thing, it's like, you know, you develop...
You develop a physical disease and quite often it's sort of random. It's not caused by a specific thing that you did or ate or whatever. People will think. How accurate is it to say in your opinion that... A lot of these things are literally caused by your childhood. So there is no genetic precursor for anxiety and depression. None. There's a genetic precursor for schizophrenia. And some markers for bipolar disorder at a very severe level. But anxiety, depression, ADHD, none.
it's generationally passed down it is something through the inheritance of acquired characteristics so the it's the nature nurture debate right and even with schizophrenia and bipolar Epigenetics tells us that those genes need to be turned on. There's no genetic precursor for depression, anxiety, and ADHD. What they did find is a genetic marker. For a short allele on your serotonin receptor, it's called the sensitivity gene. It means that many children are born more sensitive to stress.
And that sensitivity then is correlated with mental illness of different kinds. More children are born with that sensitivity gene. That's the only genetic marker. So it means that we need to look at... How we're fortifying our children, you know, we don't have a lot of control over a lot of things in our children's lives. I mean, I have grown children, and I can tell you that there is so much that you can't control for your children.
And so what you want to do is control for what you can, right? The serenity prayer. What you can control for is the early years when you have a captive audience and they need you. and they're dependent on you, and they require a deep sense of safety and security and love and understanding. You can control for that. You build the foundation of the house that builds that house of brick.
that will be more resilient to adversity in the future. Michael Meaney is a researcher who did research with animals and found that animals who licked and groomed their young, those animals, the babies, were more resilient to stress in the future.
than the babies whose mothers did not and lick and groom them. So it not only proved that resilience has everything to do with early nurturing, but it also proved that the babies that were licked and groomed passed down generationally to the... next generation the ability to lick and groom, but the ones who weren't licked and groomed did not pass down generationally the gene, if there is, there's no gene, the ability to lick and groom.
Well, the reason I bring it up is I think it's helpful for parents like me to say, you know, these things that you're sacrificing for. these are the things that you're avoiding. I think if it was stated in that more direct language, frankly, a lot of people would have a stronger sense of like, this is an important thing to do. You know, none of the things that I say are based in opinion. So I'm a clinician. I see.
a lot of patients a week still this is the main part of my life um and i see them all over the world now you know and have been for a while but i see a lot of patients um but i i'll say that you know We are not being totally honest with patients about and parents about.
What causes mental illness? We are telling them lies about, you know, it being genetic, about it not being your fault, about you're not responsible. There's the word responsibility again. I'm going to say something that sounds truly harsh, and I don't. mean it to be but it's the truth and as my rabbi says always tell the truth and be authentic and you can never go wrong so i'm going to tell the truth you are responsible for your children's mental illness
As a parent, you are responsible. Now, that doesn't mean that... And how are you responsible? You're responsible for those early beginnings that help them to be more resilient to adversity and stress in the future because you cannot predict what will come their way. But what you can do for them is provide them with that early, early, early beginning. Erica? So we've talked about a number of different things.
What about addiction? Because we had a gentleman by the name of Dr. David Nutt, who's a neuropharmacologist, and he said that the number one prediction for addiction... in children is having an alcoholic father. For alcoholism, not addiction, for alcoholism. That is the inheritance of acquired characteristics. That is generational expression of disease, not genetic expression.
And there are several things we've discovered that predispose you to becoming an alcoholic. And the first one is having an alcoholic father. So there's clearly genetics. But we can go further than that now. And in fact, we know that that vulnerability is in part... due to brain chemistry. And it's kind of paradoxical, but people who start off being resistant to alcohol, the people that can stay sober or stay standing...
after their first binge, when all their friends are on the floor, they're often, they've got alcoholic fathers, and so they're like pre-tolerant. Now, they're the super, you know, everyone thinks, wow, he's an amazing guy, look how much you can drink. But the problem is... they end up drinking more and eventually become dependent.
So if you have an alcoholic father, it means that you had a depressed father because alcoholism is the symptom. The illness is depression. If you have a depressed parent, you're more likely to be depressed unless you get treatment. Because you were raised by a parent who couldn't meet your emotional needs because they couldn't meet their own emotional needs because someone didn't meet their emotional needs. So that's...
You know, I used a quote last year at my ARC speech by Terry Real about how every generation has the opportunity to interrupt, be a bridge and interrupt the generational expression of disease in their families. And that's a responsibility of the parent? That is a responsibility of each and every person that parents.
That you are self-aware, that you look at yourself, that you look at your parents, that you look at what they did right and what they did wrong, and you learn from it, and you go to therapy if you need help with it, and you become a better parent.
It's always good to be better than the last generation in one way or another. We can't always be richer. We can't always have more. But in one way or another, we can improve upon our parents. And healthy parents want their children to improve upon them. Absolutely. Erica, it's been so great to have you on. As you know, my wife is like your number one super fan in the world.
And I can see why it's been so great. I hope your message gets further and further as you carry on doing your important work. We're going to go to our substack to ask you questions from our supporters. Before we do, we always end with the same question, which is what's the one thing we're not talking about that we should be. Before Erica answers a final question, at the end of the interview, make sure to head over to our sub stack. The link is in the description where you'll be able to see this.
Is there any correlation between leaving parenthood into late 30s and beyond for women, and maybe for men, to the seeming rise in various childhood mental disorders? How much damage did the COVID lockdown inflict on children, and do we still see that? after effect today. Do we take emotional abuse seriously enough or is it just hard to detect? Is it taken less seriously when the mother is a perpetrator and not a male relative?
So we didn't talk about older children and adolescents, and I would say the one thing we're not talking about in society that we should be talking about is how marijuana use in adolescents and young adults is devastating. Marijuana has... become addictive.
and toxic because of the levels of THC. 98% in gummies, 38% in smoking weed. It's not the marijuana of my generation. It wasn't addictive in my generation, but what we're not... telling people about and parents about and kids about is that it's leading it's the number one leading cause of psychotic breaks in adolescence if you go into an emergency room 80 percent of the mental health visits for adolescents will be because of marijuana-induced
depersonalization or psychotic events. And many of those children are then hospitalized for years and don't recover for years. And this is happening. every single day and we don't talk about it why because it's economically so fruitful now that marijuana is is a product that we can sell but what we're not saying is um this the high levels of thc are
toxic to adolescents and are destroying lives. And marijuana should not be legal. It happened to one of my best friends at university. I saw him change from being a very bright, bubbly... life of the party kind of guy to someone who became angry, introverted, and profoundly unwell. I mean, we're not saying, one, that it's addictive, and we're not saying it's toxic. We've made it into something benign, like going to get a beer in the pub. It is not a beer.
It is incredibly addictive, incredibly toxic, and it is literally making kids jump in front of trains. And if we don't educate adolescents and we don't educate parents about this, we are doing a disservice to families. And by making it legal... We are really doing a disservice. So there's the economy over the family.
Do you think, is there a point when your brain is fully developed when you're more able to deal with it in the same way as, you know, if I go and have a couple of glasses of wine, nobody goes, oh, this is constantly destroying his brain, even though technically it sort of is. You can still have a breakdown. from the high levels of THC if you're sensitive, but the brain of an adolescent is 10 times more responsive to the chemicals in marijuana or the chemicals in any drug. So tenfold.
reactions because of the dopamine surges. So you would say that an adolescent is more likely to be addicted. There's research to show that if marijuana or alcohol is introduced to an adolescent before. the age of 16, they're much more likely to become addicted in the future. But because the brain is so sensitive to these chemicals, they're also more likely to have psychotic breaks. So about 25, is that where the brain is kind of...
It settles. The prefrontal cortex is settled. So that's the part of the brain that regulates things like judgment, executive functioning. So you make better choices after 25. So you might be able to take a puff of marijuana when you're 25. and go, a puff is enough for me. I'm not going to have anymore. But when you're 18, 14, 20, 22 even, you can't stop. You keep taking another puff and another puff and another puff. So, yeah, we're not telling, again, the lies we tell. And...
This is something that rings very true for me particularly. That was the path that I went down for and I lost more years than I care to remember to that. More than you can, probably. Yeah, exactly. I speak as someone in a similar way. Yeah, and I look at the periods of depression and this friend of mine, in particular, who I'm thinking of now. When it comes to schizophrenia particularly,
It can very much trigger schizophrenic if it's latent within you. But even without schizophrenia, it's triggering breaks in kids. So kids who have no gene for schizophrenia, they're not becoming schizophrenic, but they're having what we call depersonalization. events, which is slightly a variation on psychosis.
If I can describe it to you, you see the world from a distance through a glass plate. You don't know what's real. You can see real, but you're not sure what's real. It's devastating. It causes them to go into hysterical panics. States. It's terrible to watch the deterioration of a mind. And again, it's not something that most kids get over so quickly. They go into an emergency room and many of them end up in hospitals for years.
is having to withdraw from school. And we're just not being honest. We're telling them it's benign, and we're telling them that nothing bad will happen. It's like having a beer. And we're doing this all for the pure economics of it, really. Erica, thanks for coming on. Yeah, thank you. All right, head on over to our Substack where you'll be able to see your questions answered.
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