Raise Healthy & Resilient Children with Erica Komisar | Mind Pump 2512
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Title: Raise Healthy & Resilient Children with Erica Komisar | Mind Pump 2512
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Transcript:
(00:01) there are a lot of fathers who discourage their wives from taking time off they say you promised me the mortgage the car payment I married a professional woman I don't want to stay at home wife you know you got to go back to work right away and they don't realize that they're not just doing harm to their relationship with their wife but they're also doing harm to their child and ain't nobody got time for that oh I'm depressed cuz my parents were depressed and it's genetic no you're not depressed because your parents were
(00:27) depressed you're depressed cuz your parents were depressed because of something called the inheritance of acquired characteristics the absence of mothers in children's lives under the age of three was impacting their mental health going forward you should not sleep train a child under the age of one when they cry they need you when they cry they're scared they're in distress if you don't respond to their distress all you're teaching them is that the world is an unsafe place and you are an untrustworthy attachment figure and they
(00:55) go into life believing that and they carry that into their relationships in the future and they literally feel lonely and alone Erica welcome to the show thank you for having me thank you so we saw you at ARK uh in London and we were just right afterwards we're like we need to get her on the show we're all parents and I think I want to start with the the book that you wrote U what inspired you to write the book um being there and and what was that about well I'm a therapist I'm a psychoanalyst and a social worker
(01:26) so for many years I was seeing this uptick of mental illness in children children were being diagnosed and medicated younger and younger I was seeing two and three-year-olds being labeled with things like ADHD and serious behavioral problems and and and and medicated for it and so I was concerned and what I was seeing in my practice is that the absence of primary caretakers or primary attachment figures usually mothers in those children's lives was impacting them so I started looking at all research the Neuroscience
(02:02) the epigenetics the attachment research and basically you know saw in the research that what I was seeing in my practice was true that the absence of mothers in children's lives under the age of three was impacting their mental health going forward and so it took me many years to write the book as I have three children of my own and um as I say in the book your physical and emotional presence is critical to your children so I did a lot lot of research over about a decade and then wrote the book and um yeah it's it's had it's had an impact
(02:37) when did you first start noticing this this uptick so yeah I'm old I mean I've been in practice for 35 years so um even when I was working in clinics when I was a young social worker um I was seeing it and so 35 years ago I started to see it and um and you know and and I wait waited to write this book because of my own children so what I say in the book is you know as a woman or if you're a father who's the primary attachment figure but most primary attachment figures are still mothers but as a as a mother you can do everything in life you
(03:16) just can't do it all at the same time I'm a very good example of that and a lot of the women that I interview in the book are good examples of that so people like NE Loy who is um a congresswoman from Westchester she didn't really start her career in Earnest till she was in her 40s she had four children um and she waited till her children were almost teenagers before she really became one of the longest sitting congresswomen on the hill um you know I was a therapist sure I saw you know when I had young children I saw an hour and a half of
(03:47) patience a day but I wasn't really you know in the scene and it wasn't until really my children were older that I had the space and I felt I wouldn't be um neglecting them to to really start my career so I'm I'm a pretty good example of that so this is referring to like a working parent caregiver who you know mother has their child takes their initial you know however many you know two months leave or whatever goes back to work child goes to daycare and what you're showing and or what the data is showing is within the first three years
(04:19) like that regardless how good you are how good the daycare there's problems there yeah so the first three years is what we call the first critical period of brain development there's two critical periods of brain development one is 0 to three and one is adolescence or 9 to 25 um and so I've written two books uh that are out now about each of these critical periods of brain development but the first one's the most important and you know 85% of the right brain or the social emotional brain of a child is developed by the age of three
(04:49) wow and the environment has everything to do with whether that part of the brain develops in a healthy manner so you know it's it's An Inconvenient Truth to say that that is a really important and critical period for that child to feel safe and secure and to have a primary attachment figure as physically and emotionally present as possible so this means being there literally being there yeah yeah what do you say to the debate around uh quantity versus quality or quality versus quantity I know there's a lot of
(05:21) arguments made that well I don't have a lot of time but the 15 or 30 minutes that I spend my with my kid I'm very very present is there anything there what would you say to no there's nothing there there um so quality time is a ruse because um it assumes that children are like objects possessions that will just sit there waiting for you till you come home and that their needs are dependent on your desires and it's that is that isn't just a lie um children need both quantity and quality time so what I say to parents is you know you can be be
(06:00) there physically and be emotionally checked out so there's a lot of mothers and fathers who are there physically but they are depressed or distracted or resentful or mentally ill or um so you know you can be there physically and be checked out emotionally but you can't be there emotionally if you're not there physically so the the truth is that children need to feel secure and safe they need a primary attachment figure to be as present as possible so from moment moment throughout the first three years when they're in distress because that's
(06:34) when it matters the most when they're in distress they have that primary attachment figure soothing them when they're in distress so in other parts of the world they have something called aloe parenting which has been misused in our culture to say oh well putting your child in daycare or having other people raise your child is Alo parenting like they do in Africa or in India and it's not because Alo parenting basically means there are multiple attachment figures grandparents uncles cousins siblings whatever um who when the baby
(07:04) is in a good State a happy State a playful state that baby can go to those people and it feels very comfortable with them but when the baby's in distress those family members have no problem and no vanity and no possessiveness and so they give the baby right back to the primary attachment figure because there's an understanding that that baby is in need of that mother in our culture you have this strange phenomenon of grandparents and grandmothers and aunts saying I can even babysitters going I can I can do it I
(07:35) can suo the baby in distress I'm like no no no that's not Alo parenting um Alo parenting is when the baby's in a good State the baby can go to grandparents and and feel very comfortable with numerous attachment figures but when the baby's in distress that's when the mother plays a biological role she regulates that baby's emotion so basically what we want is think about you're you're not born with the ability to regulate your emotions you're actually born very emotionally disregulated which is why babies can go
(08:05) from a very happy State 1 second to a very screaming miserable State the next um we they learn how to regulate their emotions from us as parents if we can regulate our emotions but most importantly that we help them when they're in distress we soothe them and it brings them back from so think of it like sailing at the Atlantic you know with big waves 15 foot swells versus sailing in the Caribbean you want your emotions to be sailing in the Caribbean not sailing in the Atlantic and so um that's a mother one of a mother's
(08:39) important functions in those first three years is to help babies to learn to regulate their emotions it's only after that three-year period that babies internalize the ability to regulate their emotions on their own so what are we seeing today we're seeing a rash of adults and adolescents and children who cannot regulate their emotions and no one wants to ask where does emotional regulation come from they just want to silence children's and adults pain and not really ask the important questions because we don't like asking
(09:13) those kinds of questions in our culture because then it means having to change something right so if we just silence people's pain or or you know if you think of it medication is um is pain management but it doesn't really get underneath the real problem which is that we have so many children in adolescence and adults who cannot regulate their emotions that's what depression that's what adoles that that's what our depression anxiety that's what ADHD is it's all about emotional regulation or lack thereof seed is the world's best probiotic if
(09:45) you want a probiotic go with seed click right here so do you see a lot of the dysfunction in society right now like could you almost Trace that back to that very pivotable moment where you know it's it's that primary attachment that they didn't have and and they didn't weren't able to really build and develop that emotional regulation well what we're seeing is a large number of attachment disorders in uh children and Adolescence and adults what do attachment disorders do they correlate to mental illness later on so when a child
(10:21) doesn't get their emotional needs met they develop what we call pathological defenses they basically have to develop coping mechanisms to cope with the either the absence of that that one person in the world who makes them feel safe and secure um and so some of those coping mechanisms uh will look like avoidant defenses so we call that an avoidant attachment disorder where maybe a mother or father whoever is the primary attachment figure comes home and the baby turns away or the baby turns towards the caregiver who's caring for
(11:00) them and not towards the mother or father U many parents who come to me say that is the moment that they know that they've been gone too long because their baby will not look at them their baby looks at the babysitter not at them right um another attachment disorder is called an ambivalent attachment disorder where the mother comes home and the baby clings to the mother for dear life anxiously because the baby feels the mother could go away at any moment so now that's a baby who is waiting for the penny to drop you know and then you have
(11:32) probably the most challenging of all attachment disorders which is um a disorganized Detachment Disorder so think of the other two as strategies right there's strategies to cope with the absence of of your of of your primary attachment figure right um and so without a strategy children cycle through strategies so first they'll turn away then they'll cling then they'll slap the mother out of rage and then they'll cycle again and those children end up with often end up with personality disorders and what I was
(12:03) seeing as well is that in adolescence there's a huge rise in borderline personality disorders in adolescence um and those are kids who probably had uh some kind of attachment it's probably a disorganized attachment disorder and don't have a strategy so those are the kids who are cutting themselves those the kids who are um jumping in front of trains and out of Windows and killing themselves and most of those kids have borderline personality disorders so there's a lot of self Haring uh self-mutilating behavior in kids today much more than
(12:39) when I was a young therapist what about parents who are like well you know I I took my kid to daycare they cried a couple times and then they they're fine they seem fine they don't cry anymore that's called learned helplessness so that's a defense Yeah so basically Independence is something that is developed organically so there's a very famous psychoanalyst named Margaret mer who talked about after the first year where the attachment is really secured right where you feel secure your mother or your father around primarily they're
(13:13) providing you with a feeling of safety and then after that first year for the next two years you do something called emotional refueling which is you go back and forth between getting a hug and feeling secure and then going out and exploring physically exploring like toddling that's why they they call it toddler you toddle away and you take risks right but you only take the risks if you can look back and see your mother or father is there to come back and and and touch touch base with um and so that goes on for another two years so you
(13:45) could say that attachment isn't something that happens in a few weeks or a few months which is the misunderstanding about it bonding happens in that period but then attachment takes probably a full year and then another two years of rein forcing and reinforcing and reinforcing so what would exercise so this is a fitness podcast what would it be if someone said well I worked out for you know a few months and I'm one and done I'm done you know great and you said no no no no no this is like maintenance this is like you right so it needs to be
(14:17) repeated and repeated and repeated right and so you know the problem in society is that um I think there's a lot of misinformation so I think people when they hear attachment they go oh my child's attached after a few weeks in the hospital or a few months right same thing with daycare the misinformation there a few things that are myths one is that children need daycare for socialization they do not children under the age of three do something called parallel play they do not play with other children they play by themselves
(14:49) and they play with the one person in the world who they trust which is their primary attachment figure okay and maybe an alternative attachment figure like a grandmother or a babysitter right and particular particularly if the mother or the father are in um you know uh in in a in a distance where they could get to them if they're in distress right so this myth that children need daycare is a justification for two parent Working Families okay um the other myth is that oh if my children cry and then they stop
(15:22) they're great they're okay yeah they're fine in fact what you've done is you've taught them if I were to do a baby voice I had a I have a colleague who is very famous who who does research on Mothers and infants and she does a great baby voice I don't do such a great baby voice but the baby would say okay mommy is not coming she's not coming and I'm all alone in the world and I'm just going to have to manage and so they suck it up and they hold all of those feelings inside so that and then they learn something called learned helplessness
(15:53) it's the same with the cry it out method to put children to sleep I was just going to ask about that yeah it's very first of all it's neurologically damaging to children under the age of one you should not sleep train a child under the age of one period I'm going to repeat that you should not sleep train a child under the age of one when they cry they need you when they cry they're scared they're in distress if you don't respond to their distress all you're teaching them is that the world is an unsafe place and you are an
(16:23) untrustworthy attachment figure for them and they go into life believing that and they carry that that into their relationships in the future and they literally feel lonely and alone so it's a great way to give a child a foundation of mental illness wow okay so don't sleep don't sleep train your child under the age of one after that you can teach a child to sleep depending on the child very sensitive children particularly little boys because little boys are more neurologically fragile than little girls do not do well sleeping on their own
(16:56) when they're really little I mean children want to be approximate to their parents now you can get them to sleep in another room um but particularly if you've given them a good solid foundation it's a lot easier um so things like sleep training or dropping kids off a daycare um adults want to believe it's okay because it suits them but it's not okay because when you teach a child learned helplessness again all you're teaching them is that you can't be trusted now Erica can you can you overcompensate the other direction in
(17:26) that situation so let's say uh you know sleep training um and you like okay I'm not going to do the cry method at all but then every time they do I'm going to come get them and bring them to me and sleep with me is that okay is or is it or can that be too much in other parts of the world that's what they do we've talked about that that's how they used to raise them in tribes right the baby would be attach the mother 247 that's it I mean we're not meant to so I've treated a lot of children in my career um and you know when you have a child
(17:54) come to you and say um you know I I I don't understand stand mommy and daddy sleep together and I'm really little and I'm sleeping all alone in my room and I'm really scared and I say you're absolutely right it doesn't make sense to a child and it doesn't make sense period so now am I advocating like a Sears method that parents should sleep with their children not necessarily I mean we live in a modern culture where people you know don't necessarily buy into that I get it so then I'm going to recommend that you sleep with your child
(18:26) for the first few months because that provides them when a child comes out of the womb they have been in that womb for 9 months they feel completely attached to that to that attachment figure and we are nothing more than mamals so that means everything instinctual smell sound um the the eyes of your mother that's all something you bond with and attached to and makes you feel secure so you know have your baby in your bed for the first few months um contrary to again another myth you know sleep keeping with your
(18:59) child in the beginning is dangerous all right if you're a drug addict or you're an alcoholic or you're taking so the reason that it came out with the American I think it was the American Psychological it was the American Pediatric Association came out and said don't sleep with your child well I'll tell you why because half of America is on ambian or melatonin if you're on a sleep medication yeah you it's probably true if you're taking pills to sleep first of all you should be seeing a therapist because the first thing we ask
(19:27) as therapists is if you're not sleeping then you're probably suffering from either depression or anxiety so it's one of the first signs of mental illness is not sleeping so you know instead of asking the questions of what's causing me to not sleep people just go to the doctor and say give me some ambian give me some melatonin so I'm guessing the American Pediatric Association said well we're not going to conquer this alcoholism and drug addiction and and melatonin an ambient use so we're just going to tell everybody not to sleep with their
(19:58) children so I'm telling you right now sleep with your children if you're not a drug addict an alcoholic or you're not taking sleep medication because it's better for your children it's better for you you'll sleep better in the first few months and your child will sleep better you said little boys are more neurologically sensitive than little girls what do you mean by that so more little boys are more little sorry more little boys are born in the world and more little uh girls survive and that's because little boys don't make it and
(20:26) that's because they are more neurologically fragile um and physically fragile um there's also a lot of research on the fact that more little boys get autism so autism is something that we now know generally if it's uh you know of a biological nature develops in utero and has something to do with cortisol so little boys are much more sensitive to cortisol both in utero and when they come out so um you know and and and that's important because little boys who are very sensitive and who are labeled as having behavioral problems
(21:00) and ADHD instead of understanding that they are more sensitive they're more sensitive to stress so and what a stress look like to a baby it's it's precocious or premature separation from a mother it's the cry it out method it's if there is some kind of trauma in the family or you know a divorce going on or moving or um a father loses his job or an alcoholic parent or mentally ill parent um that little boys are more neurologically sensitive to stress and there is a gene now that they' found for sensitivity to stress which can occur in boys and girls
(21:42) um because there is no genetic marker for depression and anxiety and people don't know that either the myth is oh I'm depressed because my parents were depressed and it's genetic no you're not depressed because your parents were depressed genetically you're depressed because your parents were depressed because of something called the inheritance of acquired characteristics if you're raised with a depressed parent you're more likely to be depressed if you're raised with a narcissistic parent you're more likely to develop
(22:07) narcissistic traits if you're raised with a borderline parent you're more likely to be borderline that's something called the inheritance of acquired characteristics that's environmental the genetic markers are for things like schizophrenia and there's some genetic markers for bipolar but what they have found and I couldn't have written being there without this piece of research there's a few pieces of research that I couldn't have written the book without and one piece of research that came out right before my book came out was they
(22:35) found the gene for sensitivity to stress that many many children have so what does it mean it means that those children if provided with sensitive empathic nurturing attachment security and the physical and emotional presence of that sensitive empathic parent in the first year it can neutralize the expression of that Gene because we have genes right we have genes for cancer we have genes for Ms we have genes for all kinds of things they don't necessarily get expressed that's what epigenetics talks about like
(23:06) to get expressed something has to trigger it right so for those children if they're provided with security and physical and emotional presence and and empathy those children can be as normal feeling as any other child who's born without that sensitivity but if that child who is born with that sensitive Gene basically it's a short on the serotonin receptor if that child is met with daycare or insensitivity or sleep training um then there are correlations to things like depression anxiety ADHD right so ADHD is not a
(23:44) disorder ADHD is a stress response and the fact that we have I don't know 40% of children in America being labeled with ADHD says that we have stressed out our children but again nobody's asking why are all these children getting a disorder that's not a disorder cuz because we're not looking at the underlying causes wow does the way we've organized our education system contribute to the I mean we're talking about the first three years right daycare but what about as they grow up and go to school and that whole
(24:13) environment is that have we messed up there too well think of it as a very stressful so why are you guys necessary because you're telling people that exercise is important it relieve stress it helps with mental health but the truth is that we live in a very stressful Society much more stressful than ever before and so one of the things that stresses out Children is the separation of very young infant from mothers at such a young age so that's the first thing that stresses out Children the next big thing that
(24:42) stresses out Children is how we educate children in our country we educate them by forcing cognitive development on them before they're actually ready um because you know the um the analogy I use is that um social emotional development is like your socks and cognitive development is like your shoes you always want to put your socks on before your shoes although we're in California maybe you don't wear socks I don't know but you know the idea is um yeah you social emotional development has to pred cognitive development now if you force
(25:16) children to learn things like numbers and letters and what do they say Reading Writing and arithmetic when they're two years and three years old you can force that cram that into their brain but the reper cussions of that are that to learn we must be able to cope with a good deal of frustration right and to cope with the frustration of learning we have to have had the social emotional development that helps give us the emotional regulation to cope with the frustration of cognitive learning so you don't want to force children you want it to be
(25:50) play-based education that's social emotionally oriented until they're then capable so in my day you didn't have to learn your letters and your numbers till you were at least in first grade that means you were 6 years old before you were even introduced to letters and numbers before then it was free play kindergarten was Garden of children it was basically free play Nursery School was organized chaos it was free play it was to get children into the framework of being in a group situation but without structured group activities
(26:32) and so it's been perverted the whole educational system is based on cognitive development crammed into children as early as possible and it's stressing out particularly little boys so little boys are the ones who are really suffering because they're going off the rails right they're so they're going into fight ORF flight mode so you all know what fight or flight mode is it's right it's the evolutionary response to stress that human beings either you know if the sablet tooth tiger is chasing you you're gonna fight the tiger or you're going to
(27:04) run right flee so think of the behavioral problems we're seeing particularly in little boys as the fight part of fight or flight and think of the ADHD or the distractability is the flight part again no one's asking why are our kids all in fight or flight and what changes do we need to make or how far have we gone in society away from a healthy structure yeah it's interesting that you're you're saying this about boys too because I can see how this get compounded by the the idea that well boys need to toughen up
(27:39) oh my kids's crying or my kid's whatever he's going to toughen up a little bit whereas with your girl or your daughter you may be a little more sensitive to those types of things is that am I putting together something that's true well I mean that idea that any child who is under the age of five should toughen up well okay so mothers and fathers are different and this is a controversial thing to say in a society that tries to say that we're all the same so and the truth is that the differences are really important they
(28:11) have been important in an evolutionary way for thousands of years were mammals and for thousands of years males and Fe females and species take care of different parts of the of the nurturing behaviors right so our hormones connect to our nurturing behaviors so you know that you know mothers uh when they nurture they produce a lot of something called um oxytocin which is the love hormone which makes mothers sensitive empathic in their in their nurturing Behavior so if a baby falls down the mother goes over and says oh sweetheart
(28:44) how are you let me you know and the father instead of having so much oxytocin has a lot of what we call vasopressin and it's called the protective aggressive hormone the father goes over and says come on get up you're fine you're good wipe yourself off let's go let's go play now why because in the old days if the father was responsible for protecting his young he would be looking out for other male lions behind and say come on get up get up you got to keep going keep moving um and so there are reasons for it so there was research
(29:16) done in um in the UK where mother and father lay side by side in bed and when the baby cried in the middle of the night was in distress the mother woke up was Vigilant the mother woke up immediately the father slept through it but when there was a rustling of leaves outside the window the father woke up and the mother slept through it yeah I've experienced that it's very strange yeah well it's not strange it's it's it's actually instinctual and it's based on your nurturing hormones so fathers have a way of count being the
(29:46) Counterpoint to Mother's sensitive empathic nurturing which is they say come on let's explore let's play a little rough house let's they help with separation so this whole idea of be tough came from the idea it originated in the idea that fathers were encouraging a little bit of risk-taking right um and there's nothing wrong with that it's actually not a bad thing that's different than toughness you know it it's um you know I think that that the idea that fathers help with and encourage exploration physical exploration and risk taking and and
(30:24) physical play I think is a very important thing I think when little boys are raised without fathers hey sorry to interrupt look I have a free guide that teaches you how to lose fat in three steps just three steps that will burn the most amount of body fat and help keep it off this guide is totally free we're giving it to everybody right now if you want it click on the link at the top of the description below all right back to the show there's a lot of research now to say that those little boys have more behavioral problems
(30:53) because they don't have their father helping to regulate things like aggression through physical play so what fathers do when they do Rough House play is they're helping to regulate aggression they're showing their sons how do you in a contained and and you know moderated way Express physical aggression through play without going over the top right they also show through their own way that they how fathers regulate their own aggression and anger they model it right so when fathers are not around little boys will
(31:26) have more behavioral problems will have have a harder time separating from their mothers so society's kind of out of whack right now yeah a little yeah I've heard you talk about uh you know in the first like um three years the mother's impact on the child is so uh important at what point does the father come in what's the most pivotable uh age where where the father has that like moment of development where he can make an impact so the father's always important the father goes from being a buddy kind of a buddy to their child
(32:02) whether it's a little girl or a little boy they're the play they're the you know so we say mothers are the love objects of attachment and fathers are the love objects of Separation so almost from the beginning and they're both necessary and one can't replace the other because you need both right so from the beginning mothers are the nurtur so when babies are infants you'd say they need mostly sensitive empathic nurture but that doesn't mean that fathers can't hold and love and bathe and be sensitive empathic too I mean the
(32:33) good thing about modern society is that fathers now know they can also be sensitive and empathic but there's a funny piece of research which is there was research to show that they were trying to show that fathers and mothers could be the same so they gave fathers intranasal oxytocin so fathers produce oxytocin too but it again makes them more playful tactile stimulators of babies but they gave fathers intranasal oxytocin to up the anti kind of thing and fathers ended up not being more like mothers but being more manically like
(33:05) fathers like throw the baby up higher in the air tickle them more aggressively like run faster and so you know that um so to say that fathers are always important they are always important to support mothers first and foremost there's a lot of misunderstanding again a myth that you know couples today don't believe that mothering is important this is the myth that anybody can do it so I'm telling you right now not anybody can do it so there are a lot of fathers who discourage their wives from taking time off they say you promised me the
(33:42) mortgage the car payment I married a professional woman I don't want to stay at home wife you know you got to go back to work right away and they don't realize that they're not just doing harm to their relationship with their wife but they're also doing harm to their child yeah you know and nobody got time for that so when when you I imagine you have to have a lot of parents that are in the situation though where they are uh two two incomes both have to go to work yet they have a kid what are some of the things and and they don't have a
(34:14) choice right they've got themselves in this mortgage they're overleveraged maybe whatever the reason be and they had a kid now they're here what are some of the things that you give them as far as advice since they're in that position obviously ideally would be the mother staying home with them for the 3 years but they're not in that situation so what do you tell them so if you knew you had a crisis let's look at it from a different angle if you had a crisis let's say you lost your job or something or somebody was Ill in your family you
(34:39) would make adjustments yeah you'd sell your car You' get a cheaper apartment you wouldn't take vacations for a couple of years um you wouldn't buy you get hand-me-down clothes for your kids you wouldn't buy your kids new sneakers ever you take your cousin sneakers for your kids and you'd accommodate no one seems to be able to accommodate anymore so we're not talking about really poor people because that we're you know if we're talking about really poor people who are living on minimum wage salaries just to be able to pay their $1,500 a
(35:13) month in rent and be able to provide food for their kids um I am always advocating in fact I was supposed to be in Washington last week speaking to the entire Republican Senate uh and I'm hoping to get there in the next few weeks um about the importance of some kind of creative paid leave cuz we are the most uncivilized country in the world I go all over the world to speak and we are the and I'm ashamed I love America but I'm ashamed of this aspect of America that we're the only country I think other than Papa new
(35:47) guini that does not have a national paid leave so how can we say we're a country of families if we don't even have paid leave right for very poor women who have no choices now if we're talking about middle class families what would you do I mean you you already framed it uh the right way I think which is if you if you treated it like it was a crisis I just I think that's the problem lies right there is that we've been conditioned to believe that this is Norm this is fine this is healthy uh well we've been conditioned to believe that lifestyle
(36:21) matters more than relationships and that's there in lies the problem yeah so this so in other words what you're saying is this is such a big problem or potential issue that you need to adjust your lifestyle to make this happen because it's so impactful and you're going to go speak to uh politicians because of the downstream or societal effects this has on us as a whole it's that big of a deal is what you're saying I mean if our children are breaking down so one in five children will not leave childhood without a serious mental
(36:55) illness Houston we have a problem and so we can turn away but it's not getting better it's getting worse and those children then grow up into adults and then we have much less functional adults in the world so yeah it's not something we can turn away from any longer no are uh what about your I'm sure you have critics who are saying well this is sexist this is oppressive you're just trying to get women to stay at home you're trying to what do you say to them to these people oh gosh I've been called misogynistic like I I mean
(37:28) I'm a woman so how could I be misogynistic um it's internalized misogyny it is there you go um I've been called all kinds of names um you know the thing is this is not about it's not about you it's not about you as a grownup you these children did not ask to be brought into the world this is about your children and if you're going to put your children first then you do what your children need and children have irreducible needs and they've had those irreducible needs for thousands of years so because you want to switch up society and have
(38:08) everybody work and focus on economic um success and Career Success and material success over relational success that's not that's not your children's problem that's your problem so what I say to them is this is not sexist this is an evolutionary need of your child and so you know you're either going to uh listen to that need or you're going to ignore it and if you ignore it there's going to be consequences well since we're going down that path do we see a difference between fathers being stay atome and mothers being so you have a couple Mom
(38:47) and Dad mom has a baby she works dad stays at home is that a disadvantage is that suboptimal does the data show that there's it's better when mom stays at home so there are some dads who are more sensitive empathic nurture this than mothers I mean that that's the truth there are a lot of mothers today who you know the title of being there was originally called The Lost Instinct I liked that title I like that I like being there too but I like the Lost Instinct because and that's the title I had in my head for a decade because
(39:19) women how many you know when I was a kid there was a lollipop commercial how many licks does it take to get to the center of the tit how many generations does it take to kill women's instinctual connection to their children oh wow and three generations in there are many women who would rather be at work than with their own children now mind you it is not uncommon if you're not a lover of babies like in my field I'm a lover of babies but that's what I do for a living it's what I sleep and eat and breathe professionally and personally
(39:52) okay but not everybody's like that you know you could be in any number of professions where other people's babies don't turn you on um and that's okay but it is instinctually incorrect for your own baby not to turn you on so when mothers say I would rather be away from my baby than with my baby so there's something called maternal preoccupation which is the instinctual need to be with your infant so what happens is your hormones take over and you can't think of anything else you don't want to do anything else you don't
(40:26) want to be any so when you hear women say ah I can't you know I hate this I hate breastfeeding I hate pregnancy you know what you're seeing is the destruction of women's instincts and so as a society we go that's great that's fine that's normal um and what I'll say is everybody has boring moments in their job probably you guys do too right um that's okay but you know that's different than being pervasively bored or resentful or um uncomfortable being around your own child so then we know something's happen to that some trauma some attachment
(41:08) disorder some you know I always say when a when a woman has a baby and a man when he's a father it opens up a door to the Past a door that's been closed and it's a door that uh where you're the child and you're experiencing being parented by your parent and so when you have a child as a woman a door opens to the past of of the experience of being a child and if that experience was joyful if you had a mother and a father who love being parents and just that you were the most important thing in the world and the
(41:48) most interesting part of their lives and they love being with you and they love playing with you and they loved engaging you then when you have a baby it's the happiest moment of your life but when you have a baby and you've had a parent who's been resentful or mentally ill or physically absent or the door that gets opened up is sadness anger grief um and you want to shut that door really fast and so that means you want to get away from that baby as quickly as possible because what that baby triggers is a lot
(42:19) of anger and grief and depression and loneliness right so if that's not treated before you have a baby you end up with postpartum depression there's another myth so many myths that postpartum depression is normal and everybody gets it and it's only hormonal hormones are just the Catalyst they're the key that opens the door but they're not the reason that you got postpartum depressed postpartum depression so in my field we say anytime you feel something very intensely and the intens of the feeling doesn't match the current situation then
(43:00) you know there's history in it wow so if you have a reaction that's over the top whether it's anger or depression or you know there's history in it again we're not asking the right questions what do you say so you're so you you've worked with lots of people what do you say to the mom who feels what you're feel what you're talking about where she she feels depressed or detached or wants to get away and then the shame name sets in why do I feel this way I shouldn't feel this which I feel like could only make things worse
(43:33) how do you how do they work through that well if you if you told them that they're they're probably feeling maybe for the first time in their lives the abuse and neglect of their own mothers and that it's not their fault and that they need treatment that they need to address their own sadness and anger and and feelings about their mother that they may never have knowledged feeling then it relieves that woman from feeling like a bad person because shame is is basically when you feel like a bad person right that your
(44:10) character is involved in something that's happening right something you can or can't do that then your character is implicated and so yeah I mean to say to women that having a child is a psychotic experience and what do I I mean by that you've grown this little person like a little alien you can watch them you know your stomach moves and everybody goes oh look isn't that but it's it's kind of a a a crazy experience right you think about it it's incredible but it's also kind of crazy and then this baby comes
(44:44) out in what seems like this almost violent bloody experience of coming out of a woman's body now if you've had that healthy attachment and that loving relationship it mitigates whatever trauma there is in having a baby right and it turns that trauma uh into what post-traumatic growth yes it turns it into almost a joyful Mountain that you've climbed and come out in the other side with this beautiful baby right but again if you had a lot of trauma and loss and depression and loneliness as a child that psychotic experience can
(45:23) actually trigger a psychotic experience now right wow do we see um attachment issues with uh like when sergus like I we donate sperm and egg to another person they have our baby as soon as the baby's born though they're with us is there anything there because they were grown you're bringing up a good question so also the January special is here we have four workout program bundles the new to weightlifting bundle the body transformation bundle the new year extreme intensity bundle and the body transformation bundle 2.0 every single
(46:00) one of those workout program bundles is $300 off retail it's massive sale if you're interested go to maps january. comom all right back to the show can that surrogate meaning can the woman who's getting the baby from the surrogate be attached or can the surrogate be attached that's those are two really two important questions are you asking a woman to carry a baby who then you're taking that baby away from who's developing an attach to that baby and the answer is of course there's something that we should be looking at
(46:31) there but if they're going into it voluntarily and you know uh I'm not going to say anything about that but I'm going to say that we we are very detached from the idea that the surrogate could have feelings too we treat the surrogate like an object like an incubator they're not incubators they're women and they're growing a baby in their body and you have to think about them okay how about the woman who is receiving the baby so the research shows that when you adopt a baby you can develop an attachment response you can
(47:06) produce oxytocin from adopting a baby it can be very strong if you've had a healthy uh attachment to your own mother and somebody hands you a baby and says this is your baby now you can and you know that you're responsible for that baby that baby is your baby no one else's baby cuz remember I said not being interested in other people's children is perfectly normal um but yeah you can develop attachment to a baby that is your baby by by adoption what about the baby does the baby have any negative effect from being yeah okay so well let's talk about
(47:48) the obvious again the Inconvenient Truth that breastfeeding is best why because breastfeeding isn't just about the immunological prop properties of the milk right we know it's not just about the the nutrition it's the experience of breastfeeding is an attachment experience you're basically feeding a baby with your own body you're having skin-to-skin contact um if you hold the baby this I can get into left-sided and right-sided cradling if you hold the baby on the left because right sided cradling you know even though you have to alternate
(48:23) breasts most healthy mothers cradle on the left side not the right side interesting um because what we're looking for is right brain to right brain connection so so most mothers will have bigger breasts on the left side the right side yeah wow um that's one of the things that we use to diagnose if a mother breastfeeds or cradles when she's not breastfeeding more on the right side then we look at that as an indicator of maybe some attachment issue anyway but breastfeeding on your left side or is very perfectly so if there's a God made
(48:57) it perfectly attuned to right brain to right brain connection you have the baby skin to skin you're making eye contact with the baby it's very hard to do anything else while you're breastfeeding although I've watched mothers on their phones please don't look at your phone or scroll on the Internet or watch television while you're breastfeeding pay attention to your baby because it's what the the the thing about breastfeeding that's important is it's the attachment it's the skin to skin super connected it's super connected so
(49:28) um that you're not going to get with when somebody hands you a baby so you don't get you get a bottle experience now that is not the end of the world you can take your shirt off so I say to mothers and fathers if you want to get attached to a baby you have to have skin to skin now you can you can't you can't not be skin to skin with breastfeeding but with a bottle you can be not skin to skin right I've seen mothers in restaurants uh feed babies by putting the bottle in their mouths with the babies facing out and my husband has to
(50:03) restrain me from going up to them gently and saying you know I'm an expert in this and if you turn the baby he like holds me back from you know like he's like stop it you don't know them like but I have to tell them um don't feed your baby with the bottle facing out if you're a father and you're feeding the baby at night cradle the baby on the left side look at the baby take your top off it's a little hairy so what um the baby doesn't care you might care cuz the baby's going to grab that hair and man is it going to hurt so you might want to
(50:38) shave your chest if you're going to play the role of mother um but skin to skin is very important so there are ways of creating the attachment so one thing I tell mothers where the baby did not come out of their body is that you crawl into bed with that baby naked that even though you can't feed the baby with your breast let the baby touch your breast and fondle your breast and feed the baby with the bottle skin to skin um you know they even have these Contraptions that you can for women who have had breast reductions where they
(51:14) have these little tubes very intensive time intensive little tubes that attach to the milk and a mother who's adopted a baby or a mother who has had a surrogate can use these tiny little to attach to their nipple and they can breastfeed how about that wow that's that's absolutely remarkable what about the birth process um like you know C-section or you know I I you know we I have two little ones and both birth experiences were so different one of them was the you know the cascading interventions of you know PTO
(51:49) and then you know then you had the epidural then C-section and then the second one we had with a in a birth center and it was so different it was so different I have to imagine they both have different effects on attachment they do well it depends yes the answer is yes um but that doesn't mean some of those adversities can't be overcome okay one thing I'll say is if your wife is having a c-section you have to be you know whether your wife is having a c-section or not it's your role to be the advocate for your wife and that
(52:22) means that you tell the nurse don't take that baby away from more than in a minute you follow that baby to the nursery and you make sure that baby gets whatever they're going to do they try to do it in the room with your wife and not take the baby away if it's a vaginal birth and then you make the baby come back and lie in the room with your wife um and you have to Advocate because hospitals will take that baby away and the baby will disappear for hours they don't care it's not their baby um so you know I remember saying to my husband we
(52:52) have three kids you follow that baby to the nursery whatever they're doing you bring that baby back immediately to me and he did he was my Advocate cuz I couldn't get out of bed right now if it's a C-section you make sure that that mother bonds with the baby before they take because what they'll do is they'll take the baby away and they'll say oh you need to rest dear oh we'll bring the B no no no no no that baby needs to see that mother and that baby needs to lie on that mother and there there needs to be a bonding moment immediately right
(53:25) and you know again the in sensitivity you you have to be the advocate for sensitivity so that's your role particularly if there's a C-section so that mother needs to bomb with that baby and then that baby needs to come back into that room with the mother even if the mother's had a csection even if it means you lie there with that baby in your arms as a father next to that mother while she's sleeping and overcoming the the you know the the C-section but as much contact with that mother as possible because the truth is
(53:56) is that in the early hours of after having a baby um a lot is happening neurobiologically in a mother and a lot of it has to do with contact with the baby the more contact with the baby the better even when like when you hear pries lots of people come to me and say how had to preey and what do I do I say you have as much contact with that baby as you can you make them let you hold that baby you put your hands in that baby has to smell you I don't care unless it's a real dire emergency and it's a 2B baby you you need to have
(54:28) contact with that baby what else can what else can dads do in those first few years to support mom what is important for us as fathers to really help um this process support your wife if she says to you I think I want to stay home with the baby don't say well why don't you go to work for a few months and see how you feel don't do that I'll tell you the don't dos um you know when she says uh you know I I'm I'm exhausted I'm absolutely depleted can you help me in the middle of the night don't say well I need to sleep because I'm going to work
(55:06) tomorrow so I'm going to go in the other room um if you uh you know the idea is that for the most part being a mother of a newborn is like being in the trenches it's absolutely exhausting now we're built for it we're built like steel tanks or or at least we used to be it's really interesting mothers are much more fragile now and it's because they're more emotionally fragile oh right so if you're emotionally fragile it makes you more physically fragile they say I can't stay up I can't I can't now you know I was up every night and my body was made
(55:46) to do this we were made to do this something has happened in society that has killed biological instincts so mothers will now say I can't I need a baby nurse I can't do it but here's the thing being a partner with them means supporting them in any way you can if they need you to hold the baby while they shower or if they need you to give up your golf match to be with the baby so they can nap for three hours on a Saturday or you know um I always say golf isn't a great thing to do when you have babies anyway cuz you're basically
(56:22) abandoning your family but okay um nothing about that you know gym in your house and get a peleton and you know do your thing but don't go play golf um but you know the idea is support your wife in any way she needs you but exhaustion it's it's how can I support you with your exhaustion what can I do for you so you can sleep so self-care is critical for mothers to be able to last the long term so whatever you can do to help her so she can care for herself so she can get sleep so she can eat well um yeah that's what you can do as a father Erica
(56:59) talk about um communication to the baby around the baby uh at what at what point is that critical like what is that like talk to me about what that looks like as parents speaking to their babies and speaking around their baby so talking to a baby is really important now there's a lot another myth I'm giving you a lot of my that you should talk to Children particularly young children like their adults no there's research to show that motheres and father e we call it motheres but it's that you know when when you see a
(57:33) baby what what do you see you go high pitch with your voice do even fathers do oh honey how are you honey and it's a lilting kind of beautiful up and down and it stimulates the right brain of the baby it's been known to grow the social emotional part of the baby so there was some uh research done about how Chinese is the most up and down melodic tonal language that stimulates baby's right brains and so yeah motheres is actually critical to the development of a baby's brain so even as a father if you you know the idea that fathers talk to
(58:14) babies and like you know son you're you know no like you know talk to a baby like they're a baby until they get older you know as my kids laugh because I have a friend who's a a nursery school teacher and she still talks to my 25-year-old as if he's like a nursery school that's not so good but um young children benefit from being talked to because when you talk to them they learn to speak more quickly unless you speak multiple languages and that's important if you speak multiple languages in the home then children are going to develop
(58:45) language skills later that's important to remember that doesn't mean there's something wrong with them um but speak to them read to them um it's it's really important they learn Language by you talking to them yeah yeah and then what about the communication and the dialogue and the way we communicate as a as a couple in front of the child too so the greatest gift you can give your children is to love each other now I'm saying this as I'm about to release a book in a year on divorce so you'd say how is this woman who's writing books about
(59:17) attachment now writing a book about divorce because as a therapist I know that divorces are going to happen and so inevitably right how do you do it without doing so much harm to your children that's that's what I was trying to get out but the idea is that the greatest gift you can give to your children is to love your wife or love your husband and show it lots of affection lots of words of affection with each other um the more love that they you surround them with the greater the gift to your child let's say somebody's listening
(59:52) right now and their child is three or four or five and they're like oh man I'm seeing signs of some of these attachment issues um is there anything they can do now to help mitigate some of those or help backtrack a little bit so the brain is plastic and what that means is the right brain is is um can grow and Shrink depending on the environment the first three years sets the stage right but it doesn't mean that what happens after isn't important because it is and there's a lot of repair that can be done after 3 years of age but you know if you
(1:00:26) you I'll use an analogy if you tear your ACL are you going to wait 3 years to deal with it the sooner you get or you spray in your ankle the sooner you get to your physical therapist the sooner you get to your surgeon the the more easily it will repair it will heal it's the same thing if you hear this today and your child is five go get help now because the sooner you get to that injury the greater the chance you can repair it and I mean not to say that there are Miracles but the truth is I wrote the book the first book I did
(1:01:02) because in my practice which is a parent guidance practice people come to me from all over the world remotely or in person to talk about their children and the experience of being a parent and so little changes that you make in your parenting can make all the difference in your child's behavior and much of the time you see those changes almost immediately MH so it's never too late are there ways to repair some of these ruptures in age appropriate ways like for a 5-year-old a six-year-old a 10-year-old what does it
(1:01:37) look like if you have a kid who seems avoidant um do you then just tend every need to show them that I'm here or is that too much depending on the age like what does that kind of look like well you end up having to do a lot of backtracking so you end up having to really make up a lot of the things that they didn't get in their infantile experience so you do end up having to change the way you parent so the reason I do parent guidance even before I ever send a child to Child therapy is because sometimes when parents get help and they
(1:02:08) change the way they parent children don't even need to be in therapy interesting so it's certainly the first place you want to go and even if children do need therapy their parents need to be in therapy too because unless you change the environment that a child goes back to you're basically putting that child back in the same environment right so changing the way you parent can change that child's Behavior at at any stage you know I I always joke that sometimes with teenagers parents will come in and say you know I so the the second book that I
(1:02:44) wrote is called Chicken Little the sky isn't falling raising resilient Adolescence in the New Age of Anxiety that is a mouthful and the original title that I wanted to give that that book was second chances because the second critical period of brain development gives you another opportunity to be there for them not exactly in the same way as you would have been 0 to3 but it's another opportunity because 0 to3 is a period of what we call neurogenesis so it's a period of cell growth think of a garden and the garden grows and grows and grows
(1:03:17) and by three if you do it right it's an overgrown garden and then in adolescence the garden needs to be pruned back it needs to be trimmed back because if you don't prune back the cells the the cells you don't need then the garden doesn't function you know so it's another period where the environment matters a great deal and you're you are a lot of the environment you're not all of the environment when zero to three you're all of the environment 9 to 25 you're a lot of the environment so they have other things in their environment they
(1:03:48) have peers they have school they have activities right but you're still a lot of the environment so in adolescence you have a second chance how important are the friends that our kids choose are they do they play a massive role I've heard some parents say and I have a 5-year-old so we're not here yet but Katrina and I have talked before like you know would we move to another state just to get him out of a a bad school or bad friendships and like would that be something we would consider doing because you can see how
(1:04:18) sometimes there's these kids that can impact a a really good kid in such a negative way because of the influence that he has or if we are so solid as parents do we protect him from something like that what are your thoughts around that so that's a difficult question I think there are really good reasons to change a child's environment if you can to help them to give them an opportunity to reinvent themselves at certain points if they're being teased in middle school if they're getting into drugs and alcohol and changing their environment
(1:04:48) can be very effective in helping them to reinvent themselves in a new environment but if that's all you do then that's problematic so you'd have to do that also while you're getting that child some help right you don't just want to treat the environment as if it's the geographical environment as if it's everything but there there really good arguments to be made about if you can afford it if you can if your child is not doing well socially because interestingly the most important thing in school contrary to what we talk about
(1:05:21) another myth is not academic growth and development but is social growth and development if you have a child who's doing fabulously academically but is socially suffering those are the kids that I worry about the most now the kids who are socially doing well and academically suffering I worry about them too they have low self-esteem and whatever you know it's you have to tend to both but a child who's not doing well socially there there are very good arguments to be made about if you can find a better match for them so think of life is match
(1:05:56) right your partner or your wife whoever you chose is a match um the school that your child goes to if you have the privilege not all not everybody does have the privilege you're in a school district you don't have the money you're stuck you know um I think a lot of people are turning to homeschooling when their kids are struggling now because that's an you know that was never an option before and it's an option now but there is a good argument to be made about changing an environment not in every situation there are some
(1:06:25) situations in which you want to help your child to become more resilient you certainly want to turn over every stone before you do that yeah right you don't want to impulsively jump to that you want to get them help you want to get you know get them some therapy you want to talk to the school and the school counselor you want to talk to the other parents of the kids you try everything that you need to try sort of like again I'm going to use an analogy with your body you know if you you know some people would say you don't get an ACL
(1:06:54) tear repair you just work on the muscles around it and see if you know so you try to do everything without doing surgery got it but the surgery sometimes is necessary do we what's the impact of technology that we're seeing are we seeing anything now like um people on social media parents are present physically but not really present because they're on their phones or maybe kids who are put in front of iPads I mean when we were kids we could watch TV but they were like five channels and it wasn't you know so enticing and today
(1:07:24) it's like they could be so distract fact that both parents and children are we seeing that having the a similar impact to what you're saying in terms of you know having issues with attachment you know this is also an interesting question in our gener My Generation so I'm 60 so when I was growing up um we watched a lot of TV okay now it wasn't good for us for sure and I don't recommend that people just plop their children in front of TV unless it's Mr Rogers and then I highly recommend but then I I recommend you you
(1:07:57) download every segment of Mr every rerun of Mr Rogers and watch it with your children you can I stop every I we do that with my kids and I tell you what if your kids are used to what they show kids now Mr Rogers will seem so slow so boring so and that's the point that was the whole point the point that was the point he made there were whole episodes where youd have you watch a you know a whole minute go by you're just sitting there watching it are made he would take you to factor I mean isn't there a podcast how how how how we make it or
(1:08:27) something he would show you how things are made he would talk to children as with great respect and he would anyway I could go on and on about Mr Rogers but um so there is some television that is perfectly fine the thing that really ruin children is is is our smartphones and the internet and um social media so in Australia I don't know if you heard but they just passed a law that no children under the age of 16 are allowed on social media great they won't do it here it's so upsetting why not do it here why did Australia have to do it
(1:08:58) before us you know um but the idea is that um television can be addictive because it's dissociative Behavior so if you go and sit and watch Netflix for an hour at night with your spouse you know after a long day that's not you know that's a little dissociation where you're you know tubing out to whatever but um you know watching 6 hours of TV or 4 hours on your social media on your smartphone that's dissociative behavior of a different kind and so we know that a little bit of dissociation everybody does babies do it
(1:09:35) so when they're over stimulated what do babies do when they're over stimulated they look away or they go to sleep right that's a little bit of dissociative Behavior but it's protective it's defensive but we've made dissociation and art in our culture we basically said yeah you dissociate for 4 6 hours at a time you go you know and then it becomes addictive mhm so cuz you don't learn any other way to regulate this is how you you learn to regulate is by disassociating well you don't learn to regulate you avoid regulation it's not
(1:10:09) actually and that's also a myth that it regulates it doesn't regulate it it it puts regul you're in limbo pause right there so I I want to I want to stop right there when you're kid is freaking out whatever and you're like no no if I put them in front of the iPad like they stop crying they're they're calm that's dissociation that's not regula no that's dissociation um so you know the hard work of teaching children to regulate means you have to put everything you're doing down and be with your child and be where they are if they're sad you have
(1:10:42) to be able to reflect their sadness if they're angry you have to be with them you got to get their back and parents just don't seem to have the the inner resources and a lot of it has to do with upbringing so we say that this has now become generational expression of parents really struggling to regulate their own emotions and therefore not being able to regulate their children's so what is regulation regulation is is emotional reflection that's what it is that's what regulation is if you are sad I sit with you and I hold your hand and
(1:11:18) I say I'm so sorry I see you're sad or if you're angry I say I can see you're so angry because Jimmy took your toy or you know if you're uh you know angry like or sad or confused or you just be with the child that's what regulation is it's about reflection and parents who weren't reflected don't have the capacity to be with their children in their discomfort in their distress in their sadness in their anger even in their even in their excitement wow so you see your kid having a tantrum you're like I can't deal with it go in your
(1:11:55) room yes that's right I can't deal with it I can't deal with it so a tantrum is is what we call an emotional blown fuse it means that um you the oldtime speakers if you listen to them too loudly they would blow you know like the old time speakers I don't think they do that anymore but whatever the woofer the Tweet or something would blow they would have like an emergency break on them um that's what's happened to your child it's like the speaker blew right they lost control they're not in control in that moment it's not a discipline issue
(1:12:27) it's actually that your child lost control like a seizure think of it like a neurological seizure like if somebody was having an epileptic seizure you wouldn't just leave them on would you leave them on the floor seing so it's so interesting that parents cuz we're taught like it is it is socially taught to us like oh your kids's having a tantrum and you're with them no no no you got to tell them to stop they can't act that way you know put them in the room because they because they misunderstand it to be to be a
(1:12:56) discipline issue it's not a discipline issue it's an emotional issue right and so if you look at it from a different angle and say my child is suffering it's distress at the greatest level are you going to leave your child in distress no you're going to stay with them be calm tell them you're there sit quietly tell them they're safe tell them that you're not going anywhere you can see they're so upset and you're not going to leave leave them you're right there that's what you do when someone is having a seizure right so again so many myths in
(1:13:35) our culture that are myths that I think over the last 30 years really have become myths a lot of it is just well I grew up that way I turned out fine again no you didn't no no that's the problem if you're not capable of regulating your child's emotions because your emotions weren't regulated then it it's not fine for you either how how often are there tantrums and and you know when they act out like that or have blow a fuse uh is a reflection of something that we're doing as parents is it is it is it always connected is it sometimes connected is
(1:14:14) it more often than not are they supposed to throw them or not it's so it's stress so now there's a lot of things that cause stress that are just developmental so at two when kids start really throwing Tantrums what's happening is they're internalizing structure so until two babies can do whatever they want you have to poop you poop in your in your diaper you want to eat you cry somebody feeds you like there's basically you're not told no until you're about two right for the most part you're just kind of floating you know uh it's awesome and
(1:14:47) then a two suddenly parents start using the word no no no no no don't do that no don't do that and so now you're internalizing structure and so it's so hard for children to go from a place of you know I'm the center of the universe and everything I need is taken care of to uh now I can't do something I want to do so there's a structure issue which is that internalizing structure is painful it's like fitting an elephant through a hole that a mouse would go through I mean that's how painful it is to them and so when you have a tantrum you're
(1:15:22) actually seeing the pain that your child is in and and really the problem is that most parents can't remember what it's like to be children parents who are the best parents are parents who can remember who can break through their Amnesia and can remember what it's like to be children themselves but the parents who are so disconnected from their memories of childhood or their emotional experiences of childhood those are the parents that struggle the most because if you to empathize you need to have a reference point so if you can
(1:15:56) remember what it was like to be left at daycare and feel the pain and the abandonment and the terror you would never leave your child at daycare if you can remember what it was like to have a tantrum and to feel so overwhelmed with your emotions and and with anger and sadness and excitement and all mixed together you would never yell at your child when they're having a tantrum it's Amnesia it's when parents don't remember what it's like to be a child that they react in the way that they do negatively all right just to wrap up in
(1:16:34) an ideal situation you you a couple has a child how long three years mom stays home is with the child and is there for those first three years and then afterwards you could look at possible daycare School type of type of situation anything over three is in daycare it's nursery school but I caution people that you want to make sure that your Nursery School is not more than a few hours a day at three years of age they're just cutting their teeth on the idea of separation so you know this idea that you put them for six hours in Nursery
(1:17:05) School is ridiculous it's as bad as daycare for them again you're taking a child who's been home primarily with their primary attachment figure and you're putting them in six hours no so the idea is a gradual buildup so maybe at three you find a nursery school that's the way Nursery schools used to be a few hours a day M right where they get to practice and where it's a gentle separation where it takes a couple weeks and they let you be in the classroom until you can move out of the classroom you know gentle separation process few
(1:17:33) hours a day that's all at 3 at 4: maybe you move up to 5 hours because It prepares them for kindergarten right but that would be the ideal if you're asking me what the ideal is now the mothers have to stay home full-time mind you this is where people misunderstood my book the book said being there why prioritizing motherhood in the first three years matters for some women they can stay at home for other women they want to work a little part-time so there are ways of managing working but still prioritizing your children so you know
(1:18:05) the problem is we prioritize our work and not our families that's the problem today so it doesn't mean you can't work and not all women either can financially stay home full-time or you know can emotionally but the idea that the more more is more is what I say the more you are physically and emotionally present for your children in the first three years the greater the chance your children will be mentally healthy in the future you know what interesting uh I I have to say this before we end here is that a lot of what you're saying I can
(1:18:35) hear some people go oh that's going to make a soft Society it's going to make a bunch of whatever but it's like actually doing the opposite of what you're saying is what's causing that's right a lot of what we think is so resilience is built so say to get to resilience you have to provide a Foundation think of the softness and the sensitivity and the empathy as the I don't know if California has basements but in on the East Coast you have to put in the basement and the cement foundation of the house if you just build a house on
(1:19:10) top of the ground with the first sign of a hurricane or a storm that house is going to blow down think of The Three Little Pigs you know um the foundation for resilience is is sensitivity on sensitivity you can build a house that withstands adversity that can deal with stress but if you take that Foundation away and you just expect too much of a child you force them to be tough too early yeah you may get what you want but that house will break down as soon as the opportunity wow presents itself wow thank you so much this has
(1:19:47) been fascinating yeah very very uh great interview and episode I really appreciate you coming on here thank you for having me thank you thank you all right I know you like that episode if you did check this one out 30% body fat for men this is way too high this is actually a bit high for women as well so in today's episode we're talk about how you can go from 30 to 10 what is 10% body fat this is when you have a visible six-pack can you go from 30 to 10% yes it's possible but not if you guess along the way so we're going to talk about how
(1:20:17) you can do that in today's episode now there's a huge range right of like body types some people can run uh a little bit heavier uh and or a little bit higher by
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(00:01) there are a lot of fathers who discourage their wives from taking time off they say you promised me the mortgage the car payment I married a professional woman I don't want to stay at home wife you know you got to go back to work right away and they don't realize that they're not just doing harm to their relationship with their wife but they're also doing harm to their child and ain't nobody got time for that oh I'm depressed cuz my parents were depressed and it's genetic no you're not depressed because your parents were
(00:27) depressed you're depressed cuz your parents were depressed because of something called the inheritance of acquired characteristics the absence of mothers in children's lives under the age of three was impacting their mental health going forward you should not sleep train a child under the age of one when they cry they need you when they cry they're scared they're in distress if you don't respond to their distress all you're teaching them is that the world is an unsafe place and you are an untrustworthy attachment figure and they
(00:55) go into life believing that and they carry that into their relationships in the future and they literally feel lonely and alone Erica welcome to the show thank you for having me thank you so we saw you at ARK uh in London and we were just right afterwards we're like we need to get her on the show we're all parents and I think I want to start with the the book that you wrote U what inspired you to write the book um being there and and what was that about well I'm a therapist I'm a psychoanalyst and a social worker
(01:26) so for many years I was seeing this uptick of mental illness in children children were being diagnosed and medicated younger and younger I was seeing two and three-year-olds being labeled with things like ADHD and serious behavioral problems and and and and medicated for it and so I was concerned and what I was seeing in my practice is that the absence of primary caretakers or primary attachment figures usually mothers in those children's lives was impacting them so I started looking at all research the Neuroscience
(02:02) the epigenetics the attachment research and basically you know saw in the research that what I was seeing in my practice was true that the absence of mothers in children's lives under the age of three was impacting their mental health going forward and so it took me many years to write the book as I have three children of my own and um as I say in the book your physical and emotional presence is critical to your children so I did a lot lot of research over about a decade and then wrote the book and um yeah it's it's had it's had an impact
(02:37) when did you first start noticing this this uptick so yeah I'm old I mean I've been in practice for 35 years so um even when I was working in clinics when I was a young social worker um I was seeing it and so 35 years ago I started to see it and um and you know and and I wait waited to write this book because of my own children so what I say in the book is you know as a woman or if you're a father who's the primary attachment figure but most primary attachment figures are still mothers but as a as a mother you can do everything in life you
(03:16) just can't do it all at the same time I'm a very good example of that and a lot of the women that I interview in the book are good examples of that so people like NE Loy who is um a congresswoman from Westchester she didn't really start her career in Earnest till she was in her 40s she had four children um and she waited till her children were almost teenagers before she really became one of the longest sitting congresswomen on the hill um you know I was a therapist sure I saw you know when I had young children I saw an hour and a half of
(03:47) patience a day but I wasn't really you know in the scene and it wasn't until really my children were older that I had the space and I felt I wouldn't be um neglecting them to to really start my career so I'm I'm a pretty good example of that so this is referring to like a working parent caregiver who you know mother has their child takes their initial you know however many you know two months leave or whatever goes back to work child goes to daycare and what you're showing and or what the data is showing is within the first three years
(04:19) like that regardless how good you are how good the daycare there's problems there yeah so the first three years is what we call the first critical period of brain development there's two critical periods of brain development one is 0 to three and one is adolescence or 9 to 25 um and so I've written two books uh that are out now about each of these critical periods of brain development but the first one's the most important and you know 85% of the right brain or the social emotional brain of a child is developed by the age of three
(04:49) wow and the environment has everything to do with whether that part of the brain develops in a healthy manner so you know it's it's An Inconvenient Truth to say that that is a really important and critical period for that child to feel safe and secure and to have a primary attachment figure as physically and emotionally present as possible so this means being there literally being there yeah yeah what do you say to the debate around uh quantity versus quality or quality versus quantity I know there's a lot of
(05:21) arguments made that well I don't have a lot of time but the 15 or 30 minutes that I spend my with my kid I'm very very present is there anything there what would you say to no there's nothing there there um so quality time is a ruse because um it assumes that children are like objects possessions that will just sit there waiting for you till you come home and that their needs are dependent on your desires and it's that is that isn't just a lie um children need both quantity and quality time so what I say to parents is you know you can be be
(06:00) there physically and be emotionally checked out so there's a lot of mothers and fathers who are there physically but they are depressed or distracted or resentful or mentally ill or um so you know you can be there physically and be checked out emotionally but you can't be there emotionally if you're not there physically so the the truth is that children need to feel secure and safe they need a primary attachment figure to be as present as possible so from moment moment throughout the first three years when they're in distress because that's
(06:34) when it matters the most when they're in distress they have that primary attachment figure soothing them when they're in distress so in other parts of the world they have something called aloe parenting which has been misused in our culture to say oh well putting your child in daycare or having other people raise your child is Alo parenting like they do in Africa or in India and it's not because Alo parenting basically means there are multiple attachment figures grandparents uncles cousins siblings whatever um who when the baby
(07:04) is in a good State a happy State a playful state that baby can go to those people and it feels very comfortable with them but when the baby's in distress those family members have no problem and no vanity and no possessiveness and so they give the baby right back to the primary attachment figure because there's an understanding that that baby is in need of that mother in our culture you have this strange phenomenon of grandparents and grandmothers and aunts saying I can even babysitters going I can I can do it I
(07:35) can suo the baby in distress I'm like no no no that's not Alo parenting um Alo parenting is when the baby's in a good State the baby can go to grandparents and and feel very comfortable with numerous attachment figures but when the baby's in distress that's when the mother plays a biological role she regulates that baby's emotion so basically what we want is think about you're you're not born with the ability to regulate your emotions you're actually born very emotionally disregulated which is why babies can go
(08:05) from a very happy State 1 second to a very screaming miserable State the next um we they learn how to regulate their emotions from us as parents if we can regulate our emotions but most importantly that we help them when they're in distress we soothe them and it brings them back from so think of it like sailing at the Atlantic you know with big waves 15 foot swells versus sailing in the Caribbean you want your emotions to be sailing in the Caribbean not sailing in the Atlantic and so um that's a mother one of a mother's
(08:39) important functions in those first three years is to help babies to learn to regulate their emotions it's only after that three-year period that babies internalize the ability to regulate their emotions on their own so what are we seeing today we're seeing a rash of adults and adolescents and children who cannot regulate their emotions and no one wants to ask where does emotional regulation come from they just want to silence children's and adults pain and not really ask the important questions because we don't like asking
(09:13) those kinds of questions in our culture because then it means having to change something right so if we just silence people's pain or or you know if you think of it medication is um is pain management but it doesn't really get underneath the real problem which is that we have so many children in adolescence and adults who cannot regulate their emotions that's what depression that's what adoles that that's what our depression anxiety that's what ADHD is it's all about emotional regulation or lack thereof seed is the world's best probiotic if
(09:45) you want a probiotic go with seed click right here so do you see a lot of the dysfunction in society right now like could you almost Trace that back to that very pivotable moment where you know it's it's that primary attachment that they didn't have and and they didn't weren't able to really build and develop that emotional regulation well what we're seeing is a large number of attachment disorders in uh children and Adolescence and adults what do attachment disorders do they correlate to mental illness later on so when a child
(10:21) doesn't get their emotional needs met they develop what we call pathological defenses they basically have to develop coping mechanisms to cope with the either the absence of that that one person in the world who makes them feel safe and secure um and so some of those coping mechanisms uh will look like avoidant defenses so we call that an avoidant attachment disorder where maybe a mother or father whoever is the primary attachment figure comes home and the baby turns away or the baby turns towards the caregiver who's caring for
(11:00) them and not towards the mother or father U many parents who come to me say that is the moment that they know that they've been gone too long because their baby will not look at them their baby looks at the babysitter not at them right um another attachment disorder is called an ambivalent attachment disorder where the mother comes home and the baby clings to the mother for dear life anxiously because the baby feels the mother could go away at any moment so now that's a baby who is waiting for the penny to drop you know and then you have
(11:32) probably the most challenging of all attachment disorders which is um a disorganized Detachment Disorder so think of the other two as strategies right there's strategies to cope with the absence of of your of of your primary attachment figure right um and so without a strategy children cycle through strategies so first they'll turn away then they'll cling then they'll slap the mother out of rage and then they'll cycle again and those children end up with often end up with personality disorders and what I was
(12:03) seeing as well is that in adolescence there's a huge rise in borderline personality disorders in adolescence um and those are kids who probably had uh some kind of attachment it's probably a disorganized attachment disorder and don't have a strategy so those are the kids who are cutting themselves those the kids who are um jumping in front of trains and out of Windows and killing themselves and most of those kids have borderline personality disorders so there's a lot of self Haring uh self-mutilating behavior in kids today much more than
(12:39) when I was a young therapist what about parents who are like well you know I I took my kid to daycare they cried a couple times and then they they're fine they seem fine they don't cry anymore that's called learned helplessness so that's a defense Yeah so basically Independence is something that is developed organically so there's a very famous psychoanalyst named Margaret mer who talked about after the first year where the attachment is really secured right where you feel secure your mother or your father around primarily they're
(13:13) providing you with a feeling of safety and then after that first year for the next two years you do something called emotional refueling which is you go back and forth between getting a hug and feeling secure and then going out and exploring physically exploring like toddling that's why they they call it toddler you toddle away and you take risks right but you only take the risks if you can look back and see your mother or father is there to come back and and and touch touch base with um and so that goes on for another two years so you
(13:45) could say that attachment isn't something that happens in a few weeks or a few months which is the misunderstanding about it bonding happens in that period but then attachment takes probably a full year and then another two years of rein forcing and reinforcing and reinforcing so what would exercise so this is a fitness podcast what would it be if someone said well I worked out for you know a few months and I'm one and done I'm done you know great and you said no no no no no this is like maintenance this is like you right so it needs to be
(14:17) repeated and repeated and repeated right and so you know the problem in society is that um I think there's a lot of misinformation so I think people when they hear attachment they go oh my child's attached after a few weeks in the hospital or a few months right same thing with daycare the misinformation there a few things that are myths one is that children need daycare for socialization they do not children under the age of three do something called parallel play they do not play with other children they play by themselves
(14:49) and they play with the one person in the world who they trust which is their primary attachment figure okay and maybe an alternative attachment figure like a grandmother or a babysitter right and particular particularly if the mother or the father are in um you know uh in in a in a distance where they could get to them if they're in distress right so this myth that children need daycare is a justification for two parent Working Families okay um the other myth is that oh if my children cry and then they stop
(15:22) they're great they're okay yeah they're fine in fact what you've done is you've taught them if I were to do a baby voice I had a I have a colleague who is very famous who who does research on Mothers and infants and she does a great baby voice I don't do such a great baby voice but the baby would say okay mommy is not coming she's not coming and I'm all alone in the world and I'm just going to have to manage and so they suck it up and they hold all of those feelings inside so that and then they learn something called learned helplessness
(15:53) it's the same with the cry it out method to put children to sleep I was just going to ask about that yeah it's very first of all it's neurologically damaging to children under the age of one you should not sleep train a child under the age of one period I'm going to repeat that you should not sleep train a child under the age of one when they cry they need you when they cry they're scared they're in distress if you don't respond to their distress all you're teaching them is that the world is an unsafe place and you are an
(16:23) untrustworthy attachment figure for them and they go into life believing that and they carry that that into their relationships in the future and they literally feel lonely and alone so it's a great way to give a child a foundation of mental illness wow okay so don't sleep don't sleep train your child under the age of one after that you can teach a child to sleep depending on the child very sensitive children particularly little boys because little boys are more neurologically fragile than little girls do not do well sleeping on their own
(16:56) when they're really little I mean children want to be approximate to their parents now you can get them to sleep in another room um but particularly if you've given them a good solid foundation it's a lot easier um so things like sleep training or dropping kids off a daycare um adults want to believe it's okay because it suits them but it's not okay because when you teach a child learned helplessness again all you're teaching them is that you can't be trusted now Erica can you can you overcompensate the other direction in
(17:26) that situation so let's say uh you know sleep training um and you like okay I'm not going to do the cry method at all but then every time they do I'm going to come get them and bring them to me and sleep with me is that okay is or is it or can that be too much in other parts of the world that's what they do we've talked about that that's how they used to raise them in tribes right the baby would be attach the mother 247 that's it I mean we're not meant to so I've treated a lot of children in my career um and you know when you have a child
(17:54) come to you and say um you know I I I don't understand stand mommy and daddy sleep together and I'm really little and I'm sleeping all alone in my room and I'm really scared and I say you're absolutely right it doesn't make sense to a child and it doesn't make sense period so now am I advocating like a Sears method that parents should sleep with their children not necessarily I mean we live in a modern culture where people you know don't necessarily buy into that I get it so then I'm going to recommend that you sleep with your child
(18:26) for the first few months because that provides them when a child comes out of the womb they have been in that womb for 9 months they feel completely attached to that to that attachment figure and we are nothing more than mamals so that means everything instinctual smell sound um the the eyes of your mother that's all something you bond with and attached to and makes you feel secure so you know have your baby in your bed for the first few months um contrary to again another myth you know sleep keeping with your
(18:59) child in the beginning is dangerous all right if you're a drug addict or you're an alcoholic or you're taking so the reason that it came out with the American I think it was the American Psychological it was the American Pediatric Association came out and said don't sleep with your child well I'll tell you why because half of America is on ambian or melatonin if you're on a sleep medication yeah you it's probably true if you're taking pills to sleep first of all you should be seeing a therapist because the first thing we ask
(19:27) as therapists is if you're not sleeping then you're probably suffering from either depression or anxiety so it's one of the first signs of mental illness is not sleeping so you know instead of asking the questions of what's causing me to not sleep people just go to the doctor and say give me some ambian give me some melatonin so I'm guessing the American Pediatric Association said well we're not going to conquer this alcoholism and drug addiction and and melatonin an ambient use so we're just going to tell everybody not to sleep with their
(19:58) children so I'm telling you right now sleep with your children if you're not a drug addict an alcoholic or you're not taking sleep medication because it's better for your children it's better for you you'll sleep better in the first few months and your child will sleep better you said little boys are more neurologically sensitive than little girls what do you mean by that so more little boys are more little sorry more little boys are born in the world and more little uh girls survive and that's because little boys don't make it and
(20:26) that's because they are more neurologically fragile um and physically fragile um there's also a lot of research on the fact that more little boys get autism so autism is something that we now know generally if it's uh you know of a biological nature develops in utero and has something to do with cortisol so little boys are much more sensitive to cortisol both in utero and when they come out so um you know and and and that's important because little boys who are very sensitive and who are labeled as having behavioral problems
(21:00) and ADHD instead of understanding that they are more sensitive they're more sensitive to stress so and what a stress look like to a baby it's it's precocious or premature separation from a mother it's the cry it out method it's if there is some kind of trauma in the family or you know a divorce going on or moving or um a father loses his job or an alcoholic parent or mentally ill parent um that little boys are more neurologically sensitive to stress and there is a gene now that they' found for sensitivity to stress which can occur in boys and girls
(21:42) um because there is no genetic marker for depression and anxiety and people don't know that either the myth is oh I'm depressed because my parents were depressed and it's genetic no you're not depressed because your parents were depressed genetically you're depressed because your parents were depressed because of something called the inheritance of acquired characteristics if you're raised with a depressed parent you're more likely to be depressed if you're raised with a narcissistic parent you're more likely to develop
(22:07) narcissistic traits if you're raised with a borderline parent you're more likely to be borderline that's something called the inheritance of acquired characteristics that's environmental the genetic markers are for things like schizophrenia and there's some genetic markers for bipolar but what they have found and I couldn't have written being there without this piece of research there's a few pieces of research that I couldn't have written the book without and one piece of research that came out right before my book came out was they
(22:35) found the gene for sensitivity to stress that many many children have so what does it mean it means that those children if provided with sensitive empathic nurturing attachment security and the physical and emotional presence of that sensitive empathic parent in the first year it can neutralize the expression of that Gene because we have genes right we have genes for cancer we have genes for Ms we have genes for all kinds of things they don't necessarily get expressed that's what epigenetics talks about like
(23:06) to get expressed something has to trigger it right so for those children if they're provided with security and physical and emotional presence and and empathy those children can be as normal feeling as any other child who's born without that sensitivity but if that child who is born with that sensitive Gene basically it's a short on the serotonin receptor if that child is met with daycare or insensitivity or sleep training um then there are correlations to things like depression anxiety ADHD right so ADHD is not a
(23:44) disorder ADHD is a stress response and the fact that we have I don't know 40% of children in America being labeled with ADHD says that we have stressed out our children but again nobody's asking why are all these children getting a disorder that's not a disorder cuz because we're not looking at the underlying causes wow does the way we've organized our education system contribute to the I mean we're talking about the first three years right daycare but what about as they grow up and go to school and that whole
(24:13) environment is that have we messed up there too well think of it as a very stressful so why are you guys necessary because you're telling people that exercise is important it relieve stress it helps with mental health but the truth is that we live in a very stressful Society much more stressful than ever before and so one of the things that stresses out Children is the separation of very young infant from mothers at such a young age so that's the first thing that stresses out Children the next big thing that
(24:42) stresses out Children is how we educate children in our country we educate them by forcing cognitive development on them before they're actually ready um because you know the um the analogy I use is that um social emotional development is like your socks and cognitive development is like your shoes you always want to put your socks on before your shoes although we're in California maybe you don't wear socks I don't know but you know the idea is um yeah you social emotional development has to pred cognitive development now if you force
(25:16) children to learn things like numbers and letters and what do they say Reading Writing and arithmetic when they're two years and three years old you can force that cram that into their brain but the reper cussions of that are that to learn we must be able to cope with a good deal of frustration right and to cope with the frustration of learning we have to have had the social emotional development that helps give us the emotional regulation to cope with the frustration of cognitive learning so you don't want to force children you want it to be
(25:50) play-based education that's social emotionally oriented until they're then capable so in my day you didn't have to learn your letters and your numbers till you were at least in first grade that means you were 6 years old before you were even introduced to letters and numbers before then it was free play kindergarten was Garden of children it was basically free play Nursery School was organized chaos it was free play it was to get children into the framework of being in a group situation but without structured group activities
(26:32) and so it's been perverted the whole educational system is based on cognitive development crammed into children as early as possible and it's stressing out particularly little boys so little boys are the ones who are really suffering because they're going off the rails right they're so they're going into fight ORF flight mode so you all know what fight or flight mode is it's right it's the evolutionary response to stress that human beings either you know if the sablet tooth tiger is chasing you you're gonna fight the tiger or you're going to
(27:04) run right flee so think of the behavioral problems we're seeing particularly in little boys as the fight part of fight or flight and think of the ADHD or the distractability is the flight part again no one's asking why are our kids all in fight or flight and what changes do we need to make or how far have we gone in society away from a healthy structure yeah it's interesting that you're you're saying this about boys too because I can see how this get compounded by the the idea that well boys need to toughen up
(27:39) oh my kids's crying or my kid's whatever he's going to toughen up a little bit whereas with your girl or your daughter you may be a little more sensitive to those types of things is that am I putting together something that's true well I mean that idea that any child who is under the age of five should toughen up well okay so mothers and fathers are different and this is a controversial thing to say in a society that tries to say that we're all the same so and the truth is that the differences are really important they
(28:11) have been important in an evolutionary way for thousands of years were mammals and for thousands of years males and Fe females and species take care of different parts of the of the nurturing behaviors right so our hormones connect to our nurturing behaviors so you know that you know mothers uh when they nurture they produce a lot of something called um oxytocin which is the love hormone which makes mothers sensitive empathic in their in their nurturing Behavior so if a baby falls down the mother goes over and says oh sweetheart
(28:44) how are you let me you know and the father instead of having so much oxytocin has a lot of what we call vasopressin and it's called the protective aggressive hormone the father goes over and says come on get up you're fine you're good wipe yourself off let's go let's go play now why because in the old days if the father was responsible for protecting his young he would be looking out for other male lions behind and say come on get up get up you got to keep going keep moving um and so there are reasons for it so there was research
(29:16) done in um in the UK where mother and father lay side by side in bed and when the baby cried in the middle of the night was in distress the mother woke up was Vigilant the mother woke up immediately the father slept through it but when there was a rustling of leaves outside the window the father woke up and the mother slept through it yeah I've experienced that it's very strange yeah well it's not strange it's it's it's actually instinctual and it's based on your nurturing hormones so fathers have a way of count being the
(29:46) Counterpoint to Mother's sensitive empathic nurturing which is they say come on let's explore let's play a little rough house let's they help with separation so this whole idea of be tough came from the idea it originated in the idea that fathers were encouraging a little bit of risk-taking right um and there's nothing wrong with that it's actually not a bad thing that's different than toughness you know it it's um you know I think that that the idea that fathers help with and encourage exploration physical exploration and risk taking and and
(30:24) physical play I think is a very important thing I think when little boys are raised without fathers hey sorry to interrupt look I have a free guide that teaches you how to lose fat in three steps just three steps that will burn the most amount of body fat and help keep it off this guide is totally free we're giving it to everybody right now if you want it click on the link at the top of the description below all right back to the show there's a lot of research now to say that those little boys have more behavioral problems
(30:53) because they don't have their father helping to regulate things like aggression through physical play so what fathers do when they do Rough House play is they're helping to regulate aggression they're showing their sons how do you in a contained and and you know moderated way Express physical aggression through play without going over the top right they also show through their own way that they how fathers regulate their own aggression and anger they model it right so when fathers are not around little boys will
(31:26) have more behavioral problems will have have a harder time separating from their mothers so society's kind of out of whack right now yeah a little yeah I've heard you talk about uh you know in the first like um three years the mother's impact on the child is so uh important at what point does the father come in what's the most pivotable uh age where where the father has that like moment of development where he can make an impact so the father's always important the father goes from being a buddy kind of a buddy to their child
(32:02) whether it's a little girl or a little boy they're the play they're the you know so we say mothers are the love objects of attachment and fathers are the love objects of Separation so almost from the beginning and they're both necessary and one can't replace the other because you need both right so from the beginning mothers are the nurtur so when babies are infants you'd say they need mostly sensitive empathic nurture but that doesn't mean that fathers can't hold and love and bathe and be sensitive empathic too I mean the
(32:33) good thing about modern society is that fathers now know they can also be sensitive and empathic but there's a funny piece of research which is there was research to show that they were trying to show that fathers and mothers could be the same so they gave fathers intranasal oxytocin so fathers produce oxytocin too but it again makes them more playful tactile stimulators of babies but they gave fathers intranasal oxytocin to up the anti kind of thing and fathers ended up not being more like mothers but being more manically like
(33:05) fathers like throw the baby up higher in the air tickle them more aggressively like run faster and so you know that um so to say that fathers are always important they are always important to support mothers first and foremost there's a lot of misunderstanding again a myth that you know couples today don't believe that mothering is important this is the myth that anybody can do it so I'm telling you right now not anybody can do it so there are a lot of fathers who discourage their wives from taking time off they say you promised me the
(33:42) mortgage the car payment I married a professional woman I don't want to stay at home wife you know you got to go back to work right away and they don't realize that they're not just doing harm to their relationship with their wife but they're also doing harm to their child yeah you know and nobody got time for that so when when you I imagine you have to have a lot of parents that are in the situation though where they are uh two two incomes both have to go to work yet they have a kid what are some of the things and and they don't have a
(34:14) choice right they've got themselves in this mortgage they're overleveraged maybe whatever the reason be and they had a kid now they're here what are some of the things that you give them as far as advice since they're in that position obviously ideally would be the mother staying home with them for the 3 years but they're not in that situation so what do you tell them so if you knew you had a crisis let's look at it from a different angle if you had a crisis let's say you lost your job or something or somebody was Ill in your family you
(34:39) would make adjustments yeah you'd sell your car You' get a cheaper apartment you wouldn't take vacations for a couple of years um you wouldn't buy you get hand-me-down clothes for your kids you wouldn't buy your kids new sneakers ever you take your cousin sneakers for your kids and you'd accommodate no one seems to be able to accommodate anymore so we're not talking about really poor people because that we're you know if we're talking about really poor people who are living on minimum wage salaries just to be able to pay their $1,500 a
(35:13) month in rent and be able to provide food for their kids um I am always advocating in fact I was supposed to be in Washington last week speaking to the entire Republican Senate uh and I'm hoping to get there in the next few weeks um about the importance of some kind of creative paid leave cuz we are the most uncivilized country in the world I go all over the world to speak and we are the and I'm ashamed I love America but I'm ashamed of this aspect of America that we're the only country I think other than Papa new
(35:47) guini that does not have a national paid leave so how can we say we're a country of families if we don't even have paid leave right for very poor women who have no choices now if we're talking about middle class families what would you do I mean you you already framed it uh the right way I think which is if you if you treated it like it was a crisis I just I think that's the problem lies right there is that we've been conditioned to believe that this is Norm this is fine this is healthy uh well we've been conditioned to believe that lifestyle
(36:21) matters more than relationships and that's there in lies the problem yeah so this so in other words what you're saying is this is such a big problem or potential issue that you need to adjust your lifestyle to make this happen because it's so impactful and you're going to go speak to uh politicians because of the downstream or societal effects this has on us as a whole it's that big of a deal is what you're saying I mean if our children are breaking down so one in five children will not leave childhood without a serious mental
(36:55) illness Houston we have a problem and so we can turn away but it's not getting better it's getting worse and those children then grow up into adults and then we have much less functional adults in the world so yeah it's not something we can turn away from any longer no are uh what about your I'm sure you have critics who are saying well this is sexist this is oppressive you're just trying to get women to stay at home you're trying to what do you say to them to these people oh gosh I've been called misogynistic like I I mean
(37:28) I'm a woman so how could I be misogynistic um it's internalized misogyny it is there you go um I've been called all kinds of names um you know the thing is this is not about it's not about you it's not about you as a grownup you these children did not ask to be brought into the world this is about your children and if you're going to put your children first then you do what your children need and children have irreducible needs and they've had those irreducible needs for thousands of years so because you want to switch up society and have
(38:08) everybody work and focus on economic um success and Career Success and material success over relational success that's not that's not your children's problem that's your problem so what I say to them is this is not sexist this is an evolutionary need of your child and so you know you're either going to uh listen to that need or you're going to ignore it and if you ignore it there's going to be consequences well since we're going down that path do we see a difference between fathers being stay atome and mothers being so you have a couple Mom
(38:47) and Dad mom has a baby she works dad stays at home is that a disadvantage is that suboptimal does the data show that there's it's better when mom stays at home so there are some dads who are more sensitive empathic nurture this than mothers I mean that that's the truth there are a lot of mothers today who you know the title of being there was originally called The Lost Instinct I liked that title I like that I like being there too but I like the Lost Instinct because and that's the title I had in my head for a decade because
(39:19) women how many you know when I was a kid there was a lollipop commercial how many licks does it take to get to the center of the tit how many generations does it take to kill women's instinctual connection to their children oh wow and three generations in there are many women who would rather be at work than with their own children now mind you it is not uncommon if you're not a lover of babies like in my field I'm a lover of babies but that's what I do for a living it's what I sleep and eat and breathe professionally and personally
(39:52) okay but not everybody's like that you know you could be in any number of professions where other people's babies don't turn you on um and that's okay but it is instinctually incorrect for your own baby not to turn you on so when mothers say I would rather be away from my baby than with my baby so there's something called maternal preoccupation which is the instinctual need to be with your infant so what happens is your hormones take over and you can't think of anything else you don't want to do anything else you don't
(40:26) want to be any so when you hear women say ah I can't you know I hate this I hate breastfeeding I hate pregnancy you know what you're seeing is the destruction of women's instincts and so as a society we go that's great that's fine that's normal um and what I'll say is everybody has boring moments in their job probably you guys do too right um that's okay but you know that's different than being pervasively bored or resentful or um uncomfortable being around your own child so then we know something's happen to that some trauma some attachment
(41:08) disorder some you know I always say when a when a woman has a baby and a man when he's a father it opens up a door to the Past a door that's been closed and it's a door that uh where you're the child and you're experiencing being parented by your parent and so when you have a child as a woman a door opens to the past of of the experience of being a child and if that experience was joyful if you had a mother and a father who love being parents and just that you were the most important thing in the world and the
(41:48) most interesting part of their lives and they love being with you and they love playing with you and they loved engaging you then when you have a baby it's the happiest moment of your life but when you have a baby and you've had a parent who's been resentful or mentally ill or physically absent or the door that gets opened up is sadness anger grief um and you want to shut that door really fast and so that means you want to get away from that baby as quickly as possible because what that baby triggers is a lot
(42:19) of anger and grief and depression and loneliness right so if that's not treated before you have a baby you end up with postpartum depression there's another myth so many myths that postpartum depression is normal and everybody gets it and it's only hormonal hormones are just the Catalyst they're the key that opens the door but they're not the reason that you got postpartum depressed postpartum depression so in my field we say anytime you feel something very intensely and the intens of the feeling doesn't match the current situation then
(43:00) you know there's history in it wow so if you have a reaction that's over the top whether it's anger or depression or you know there's history in it again we're not asking the right questions what do you say so you're so you you've worked with lots of people what do you say to the mom who feels what you're feel what you're talking about where she she feels depressed or detached or wants to get away and then the shame name sets in why do I feel this way I shouldn't feel this which I feel like could only make things worse
(43:33) how do you how do they work through that well if you if you told them that they're they're probably feeling maybe for the first time in their lives the abuse and neglect of their own mothers and that it's not their fault and that they need treatment that they need to address their own sadness and anger and and feelings about their mother that they may never have knowledged feeling then it relieves that woman from feeling like a bad person because shame is is basically when you feel like a bad person right that your
(44:10) character is involved in something that's happening right something you can or can't do that then your character is implicated and so yeah I mean to say to women that having a child is a psychotic experience and what do I I mean by that you've grown this little person like a little alien you can watch them you know your stomach moves and everybody goes oh look isn't that but it's it's kind of a a a crazy experience right you think about it it's incredible but it's also kind of crazy and then this baby comes
(44:44) out in what seems like this almost violent bloody experience of coming out of a woman's body now if you've had that healthy attachment and that loving relationship it mitigates whatever trauma there is in having a baby right and it turns that trauma uh into what post-traumatic growth yes it turns it into almost a joyful Mountain that you've climbed and come out in the other side with this beautiful baby right but again if you had a lot of trauma and loss and depression and loneliness as a child that psychotic experience can
(45:23) actually trigger a psychotic experience now right wow do we see um attachment issues with uh like when sergus like I we donate sperm and egg to another person they have our baby as soon as the baby's born though they're with us is there anything there because they were grown you're bringing up a good question so also the January special is here we have four workout program bundles the new to weightlifting bundle the body transformation bundle the new year extreme intensity bundle and the body transformation bundle 2.0 every single
(46:00) one of those workout program bundles is $300 off retail it's massive sale if you're interested go to maps january. comom all right back to the show can that surrogate meaning can the woman who's getting the baby from the surrogate be attached or can the surrogate be attached that's those are two really two important questions are you asking a woman to carry a baby who then you're taking that baby away from who's developing an attach to that baby and the answer is of course there's something that we should be looking at
(46:31) there but if they're going into it voluntarily and you know uh I'm not going to say anything about that but I'm going to say that we we are very detached from the idea that the surrogate could have feelings too we treat the surrogate like an object like an incubator they're not incubators they're women and they're growing a baby in their body and you have to think about them okay how about the woman who is receiving the baby so the research shows that when you adopt a baby you can develop an attachment response you can
(47:06) produce oxytocin from adopting a baby it can be very strong if you've had a healthy uh attachment to your own mother and somebody hands you a baby and says this is your baby now you can and you know that you're responsible for that baby that baby is your baby no one else's baby cuz remember I said not being interested in other people's children is perfectly normal um but yeah you can develop attachment to a baby that is your baby by by adoption what about the baby does the baby have any negative effect from being yeah okay so well let's talk about
(47:48) the obvious again the Inconvenient Truth that breastfeeding is best why because breastfeeding isn't just about the immunological prop properties of the milk right we know it's not just about the the nutrition it's the experience of breastfeeding is an attachment experience you're basically feeding a baby with your own body you're having skin-to-skin contact um if you hold the baby this I can get into left-sided and right-sided cradling if you hold the baby on the left because right sided cradling you know even though you have to alternate
(48:23) breasts most healthy mothers cradle on the left side not the right side interesting um because what we're looking for is right brain to right brain connection so so most mothers will have bigger breasts on the left side the right side yeah wow um that's one of the things that we use to diagnose if a mother breastfeeds or cradles when she's not breastfeeding more on the right side then we look at that as an indicator of maybe some attachment issue anyway but breastfeeding on your left side or is very perfectly so if there's a God made
(48:57) it perfectly attuned to right brain to right brain connection you have the baby skin to skin you're making eye contact with the baby it's very hard to do anything else while you're breastfeeding although I've watched mothers on their phones please don't look at your phone or scroll on the Internet or watch television while you're breastfeeding pay attention to your baby because it's what the the the thing about breastfeeding that's important is it's the attachment it's the skin to skin super connected it's super connected so
(49:28) um that you're not going to get with when somebody hands you a baby so you don't get you get a bottle experience now that is not the end of the world you can take your shirt off so I say to mothers and fathers if you want to get attached to a baby you have to have skin to skin now you can you can't you can't not be skin to skin with breastfeeding but with a bottle you can be not skin to skin right I've seen mothers in restaurants uh feed babies by putting the bottle in their mouths with the babies facing out and my husband has to
(50:03) restrain me from going up to them gently and saying you know I'm an expert in this and if you turn the baby he like holds me back from you know like he's like stop it you don't know them like but I have to tell them um don't feed your baby with the bottle facing out if you're a father and you're feeding the baby at night cradle the baby on the left side look at the baby take your top off it's a little hairy so what um the baby doesn't care you might care cuz the baby's going to grab that hair and man is it going to hurt so you might want to
(50:38) shave your chest if you're going to play the role of mother um but skin to skin is very important so there are ways of creating the attachment so one thing I tell mothers where the baby did not come out of their body is that you crawl into bed with that baby naked that even though you can't feed the baby with your breast let the baby touch your breast and fondle your breast and feed the baby with the bottle skin to skin um you know they even have these Contraptions that you can for women who have had breast reductions where they
(51:14) have these little tubes very intensive time intensive little tubes that attach to the milk and a mother who's adopted a baby or a mother who has had a surrogate can use these tiny little to attach to their nipple and they can breastfeed how about that wow that's that's absolutely remarkable what about the birth process um like you know C-section or you know I I you know we I have two little ones and both birth experiences were so different one of them was the you know the cascading interventions of you know PTO
(51:49) and then you know then you had the epidural then C-section and then the second one we had with a in a birth center and it was so different it was so different I have to imagine they both have different effects on attachment they do well it depends yes the answer is yes um but that doesn't mean some of those adversities can't be overcome okay one thing I'll say is if your wife is having a c-section you have to be you know whether your wife is having a c-section or not it's your role to be the advocate for your wife and that
(52:22) means that you tell the nurse don't take that baby away from more than in a minute you follow that baby to the nursery and you make sure that baby gets whatever they're going to do they try to do it in the room with your wife and not take the baby away if it's a vaginal birth and then you make the baby come back and lie in the room with your wife um and you have to Advocate because hospitals will take that baby away and the baby will disappear for hours they don't care it's not their baby um so you know I remember saying to my husband we
(52:52) have three kids you follow that baby to the nursery whatever they're doing you bring that baby back immediately to me and he did he was my Advocate cuz I couldn't get out of bed right now if it's a C-section you make sure that that mother bonds with the baby before they take because what they'll do is they'll take the baby away and they'll say oh you need to rest dear oh we'll bring the B no no no no no that baby needs to see that mother and that baby needs to lie on that mother and there there needs to be a bonding moment immediately right
(53:25) and you know again the in sensitivity you you have to be the advocate for sensitivity so that's your role particularly if there's a C-section so that mother needs to bomb with that baby and then that baby needs to come back into that room with the mother even if the mother's had a csection even if it means you lie there with that baby in your arms as a father next to that mother while she's sleeping and overcoming the the you know the the C-section but as much contact with that mother as possible because the truth is
(53:56) is that in the early hours of after having a baby um a lot is happening neurobiologically in a mother and a lot of it has to do with contact with the baby the more contact with the baby the better even when like when you hear pries lots of people come to me and say how had to preey and what do I do I say you have as much contact with that baby as you can you make them let you hold that baby you put your hands in that baby has to smell you I don't care unless it's a real dire emergency and it's a 2B baby you you need to have
(54:28) contact with that baby what else can what else can dads do in those first few years to support mom what is important for us as fathers to really help um this process support your wife if she says to you I think I want to stay home with the baby don't say well why don't you go to work for a few months and see how you feel don't do that I'll tell you the don't dos um you know when she says uh you know I I'm I'm exhausted I'm absolutely depleted can you help me in the middle of the night don't say well I need to sleep because I'm going to work
(55:06) tomorrow so I'm going to go in the other room um if you uh you know the idea is that for the most part being a mother of a newborn is like being in the trenches it's absolutely exhausting now we're built for it we're built like steel tanks or or at least we used to be it's really interesting mothers are much more fragile now and it's because they're more emotionally fragile oh right so if you're emotionally fragile it makes you more physically fragile they say I can't stay up I can't I can't now you know I was up every night and my body was made
(55:46) to do this we were made to do this something has happened in society that has killed biological instincts so mothers will now say I can't I need a baby nurse I can't do it but here's the thing being a partner with them means supporting them in any way you can if they need you to hold the baby while they shower or if they need you to give up your golf match to be with the baby so they can nap for three hours on a Saturday or you know um I always say golf isn't a great thing to do when you have babies anyway cuz you're basically
(56:22) abandoning your family but okay um nothing about that you know gym in your house and get a peleton and you know do your thing but don't go play golf um but you know the idea is support your wife in any way she needs you but exhaustion it's it's how can I support you with your exhaustion what can I do for you so you can sleep so self-care is critical for mothers to be able to last the long term so whatever you can do to help her so she can care for herself so she can get sleep so she can eat well um yeah that's what you can do as a father Erica
(56:59) talk about um communication to the baby around the baby uh at what at what point is that critical like what is that like talk to me about what that looks like as parents speaking to their babies and speaking around their baby so talking to a baby is really important now there's a lot another myth I'm giving you a lot of my that you should talk to Children particularly young children like their adults no there's research to show that motheres and father e we call it motheres but it's that you know when when you see a
(57:33) baby what what do you see you go high pitch with your voice do even fathers do oh honey how are you honey and it's a lilting kind of beautiful up and down and it stimulates the right brain of the baby it's been known to grow the social emotional part of the baby so there was some uh research done about how Chinese is the most up and down melodic tonal language that stimulates baby's right brains and so yeah motheres is actually critical to the development of a baby's brain so even as a father if you you know the idea that fathers talk to
(58:14) babies and like you know son you're you know no like you know talk to a baby like they're a baby until they get older you know as my kids laugh because I have a friend who's a a nursery school teacher and she still talks to my 25-year-old as if he's like a nursery school that's not so good but um young children benefit from being talked to because when you talk to them they learn to speak more quickly unless you speak multiple languages and that's important if you speak multiple languages in the home then children are going to develop
(58:45) language skills later that's important to remember that doesn't mean there's something wrong with them um but speak to them read to them um it's it's really important they learn Language by you talking to them yeah yeah and then what about the communication and the dialogue and the way we communicate as a as a couple in front of the child too so the greatest gift you can give your children is to love each other now I'm saying this as I'm about to release a book in a year on divorce so you'd say how is this woman who's writing books about
(59:17) attachment now writing a book about divorce because as a therapist I know that divorces are going to happen and so inevitably right how do you do it without doing so much harm to your children that's that's what I was trying to get out but the idea is that the greatest gift you can give to your children is to love your wife or love your husband and show it lots of affection lots of words of affection with each other um the more love that they you surround them with the greater the gift to your child let's say somebody's listening
(59:52) right now and their child is three or four or five and they're like oh man I'm seeing signs of some of these attachment issues um is there anything they can do now to help mitigate some of those or help backtrack a little bit so the brain is plastic and what that means is the right brain is is um can grow and Shrink depending on the environment the first three years sets the stage right but it doesn't mean that what happens after isn't important because it is and there's a lot of repair that can be done after 3 years of age but you know if you
(1:00:26) you I'll use an analogy if you tear your ACL are you going to wait 3 years to deal with it the sooner you get or you spray in your ankle the sooner you get to your physical therapist the sooner you get to your surgeon the the more easily it will repair it will heal it's the same thing if you hear this today and your child is five go get help now because the sooner you get to that injury the greater the chance you can repair it and I mean not to say that there are Miracles but the truth is I wrote the book the first book I did
(1:01:02) because in my practice which is a parent guidance practice people come to me from all over the world remotely or in person to talk about their children and the experience of being a parent and so little changes that you make in your parenting can make all the difference in your child's behavior and much of the time you see those changes almost immediately MH so it's never too late are there ways to repair some of these ruptures in age appropriate ways like for a 5-year-old a six-year-old a 10-year-old what does it
(1:01:37) look like if you have a kid who seems avoidant um do you then just tend every need to show them that I'm here or is that too much depending on the age like what does that kind of look like well you end up having to do a lot of backtracking so you end up having to really make up a lot of the things that they didn't get in their infantile experience so you do end up having to change the way you parent so the reason I do parent guidance even before I ever send a child to Child therapy is because sometimes when parents get help and they
(1:02:08) change the way they parent children don't even need to be in therapy interesting so it's certainly the first place you want to go and even if children do need therapy their parents need to be in therapy too because unless you change the environment that a child goes back to you're basically putting that child back in the same environment right so changing the way you parent can change that child's Behavior at at any stage you know I I always joke that sometimes with teenagers parents will come in and say you know I so the the second book that I
(1:02:44) wrote is called Chicken Little the sky isn't falling raising resilient Adolescence in the New Age of Anxiety that is a mouthful and the original title that I wanted to give that that book was second chances because the second critical period of brain development gives you another opportunity to be there for them not exactly in the same way as you would have been 0 to3 but it's another opportunity because 0 to3 is a period of what we call neurogenesis so it's a period of cell growth think of a garden and the garden grows and grows and grows
(1:03:17) and by three if you do it right it's an overgrown garden and then in adolescence the garden needs to be pruned back it needs to be trimmed back because if you don't prune back the cells the the cells you don't need then the garden doesn't function you know so it's another period where the environment matters a great deal and you're you are a lot of the environment you're not all of the environment when zero to three you're all of the environment 9 to 25 you're a lot of the environment so they have other things in their environment they
(1:03:48) have peers they have school they have activities right but you're still a lot of the environment so in adolescence you have a second chance how important are the friends that our kids choose are they do they play a massive role I've heard some parents say and I have a 5-year-old so we're not here yet but Katrina and I have talked before like you know would we move to another state just to get him out of a a bad school or bad friendships and like would that be something we would consider doing because you can see how
(1:04:18) sometimes there's these kids that can impact a a really good kid in such a negative way because of the influence that he has or if we are so solid as parents do we protect him from something like that what are your thoughts around that so that's a difficult question I think there are really good reasons to change a child's environment if you can to help them to give them an opportunity to reinvent themselves at certain points if they're being teased in middle school if they're getting into drugs and alcohol and changing their environment
(1:04:48) can be very effective in helping them to reinvent themselves in a new environment but if that's all you do then that's problematic so you'd have to do that also while you're getting that child some help right you don't just want to treat the environment as if it's the geographical environment as if it's everything but there there really good arguments to be made about if you can afford it if you can if your child is not doing well socially because interestingly the most important thing in school contrary to what we talk about
(1:05:21) another myth is not academic growth and development but is social growth and development if you have a child who's doing fabulously academically but is socially suffering those are the kids that I worry about the most now the kids who are socially doing well and academically suffering I worry about them too they have low self-esteem and whatever you know it's you have to tend to both but a child who's not doing well socially there there are very good arguments to be made about if you can find a better match for them so think of life is match
(1:05:56) right your partner or your wife whoever you chose is a match um the school that your child goes to if you have the privilege not all not everybody does have the privilege you're in a school district you don't have the money you're stuck you know um I think a lot of people are turning to homeschooling when their kids are struggling now because that's an you know that was never an option before and it's an option now but there is a good argument to be made about changing an environment not in every situation there are some
(1:06:25) situations in which you want to help your child to become more resilient you certainly want to turn over every stone before you do that yeah right you don't want to impulsively jump to that you want to get them help you want to get you know get them some therapy you want to talk to the school and the school counselor you want to talk to the other parents of the kids you try everything that you need to try sort of like again I'm going to use an analogy with your body you know if you you know some people would say you don't get an ACL
(1:06:54) tear repair you just work on the muscles around it and see if you know so you try to do everything without doing surgery got it but the surgery sometimes is necessary do we what's the impact of technology that we're seeing are we seeing anything now like um people on social media parents are present physically but not really present because they're on their phones or maybe kids who are put in front of iPads I mean when we were kids we could watch TV but they were like five channels and it wasn't you know so enticing and today
(1:07:24) it's like they could be so distract fact that both parents and children are we seeing that having the a similar impact to what you're saying in terms of you know having issues with attachment you know this is also an interesting question in our gener My Generation so I'm 60 so when I was growing up um we watched a lot of TV okay now it wasn't good for us for sure and I don't recommend that people just plop their children in front of TV unless it's Mr Rogers and then I highly recommend but then I I recommend you you
(1:07:57) download every segment of Mr every rerun of Mr Rogers and watch it with your children you can I stop every I we do that with my kids and I tell you what if your kids are used to what they show kids now Mr Rogers will seem so slow so boring so and that's the point that was the whole point the point that was the point he made there were whole episodes where youd have you watch a you know a whole minute go by you're just sitting there watching it are made he would take you to factor I mean isn't there a podcast how how how how we make it or
(1:08:27) something he would show you how things are made he would talk to children as with great respect and he would anyway I could go on and on about Mr Rogers but um so there is some television that is perfectly fine the thing that really ruin children is is is our smartphones and the internet and um social media so in Australia I don't know if you heard but they just passed a law that no children under the age of 16 are allowed on social media great they won't do it here it's so upsetting why not do it here why did Australia have to do it
(1:08:58) before us you know um but the idea is that um television can be addictive because it's dissociative Behavior so if you go and sit and watch Netflix for an hour at night with your spouse you know after a long day that's not you know that's a little dissociation where you're you know tubing out to whatever but um you know watching 6 hours of TV or 4 hours on your social media on your smartphone that's dissociative behavior of a different kind and so we know that a little bit of dissociation everybody does babies do it
(1:09:35) so when they're over stimulated what do babies do when they're over stimulated they look away or they go to sleep right that's a little bit of dissociative Behavior but it's protective it's defensive but we've made dissociation and art in our culture we basically said yeah you dissociate for 4 6 hours at a time you go you know and then it becomes addictive mhm so cuz you don't learn any other way to regulate this is how you you learn to regulate is by disassociating well you don't learn to regulate you avoid regulation it's not
(1:10:09) actually and that's also a myth that it regulates it doesn't regulate it it it puts regul you're in limbo pause right there so I I want to I want to stop right there when you're kid is freaking out whatever and you're like no no if I put them in front of the iPad like they stop crying they're they're calm that's dissociation that's not regula no that's dissociation um so you know the hard work of teaching children to regulate means you have to put everything you're doing down and be with your child and be where they are if they're sad you have
(1:10:42) to be able to reflect their sadness if they're angry you have to be with them you got to get their back and parents just don't seem to have the the inner resources and a lot of it has to do with upbringing so we say that this has now become generational expression of parents really struggling to regulate their own emotions and therefore not being able to regulate their children's so what is regulation regulation is is emotional reflection that's what it is that's what regulation is if you are sad I sit with you and I hold your hand and
(1:11:18) I say I'm so sorry I see you're sad or if you're angry I say I can see you're so angry because Jimmy took your toy or you know if you're uh you know angry like or sad or confused or you just be with the child that's what regulation is it's about reflection and parents who weren't reflected don't have the capacity to be with their children in their discomfort in their distress in their sadness in their anger even in their even in their excitement wow so you see your kid having a tantrum you're like I can't deal with it go in your
(1:11:55) room yes that's right I can't deal with it I can't deal with it so a tantrum is is what we call an emotional blown fuse it means that um you the oldtime speakers if you listen to them too loudly they would blow you know like the old time speakers I don't think they do that anymore but whatever the woofer the Tweet or something would blow they would have like an emergency break on them um that's what's happened to your child it's like the speaker blew right they lost control they're not in control in that moment it's not a discipline issue
(1:12:27) it's actually that your child lost control like a seizure think of it like a neurological seizure like if somebody was having an epileptic seizure you wouldn't just leave them on would you leave them on the floor seing so it's so interesting that parents cuz we're taught like it is it is socially taught to us like oh your kids's having a tantrum and you're with them no no no you got to tell them to stop they can't act that way you know put them in the room because they because they misunderstand it to be to be a
(1:12:56) discipline issue it's not a discipline issue it's an emotional issue right and so if you look at it from a different angle and say my child is suffering it's distress at the greatest level are you going to leave your child in distress no you're going to stay with them be calm tell them you're there sit quietly tell them they're safe tell them that you're not going anywhere you can see they're so upset and you're not going to leave leave them you're right there that's what you do when someone is having a seizure right so again so many myths in
(1:13:35) our culture that are myths that I think over the last 30 years really have become myths a lot of it is just well I grew up that way I turned out fine again no you didn't no no that's the problem if you're not capable of regulating your child's emotions because your emotions weren't regulated then it it's not fine for you either how how often are there tantrums and and you know when they act out like that or have blow a fuse uh is a reflection of something that we're doing as parents is it is it is it always connected is it sometimes connected is
(1:14:14) it more often than not are they supposed to throw them or not it's so it's stress so now there's a lot of things that cause stress that are just developmental so at two when kids start really throwing Tantrums what's happening is they're internalizing structure so until two babies can do whatever they want you have to poop you poop in your in your diaper you want to eat you cry somebody feeds you like there's basically you're not told no until you're about two right for the most part you're just kind of floating you know uh it's awesome and
(1:14:47) then a two suddenly parents start using the word no no no no no don't do that no don't do that and so now you're internalizing structure and so it's so hard for children to go from a place of you know I'm the center of the universe and everything I need is taken care of to uh now I can't do something I want to do so there's a structure issue which is that internalizing structure is painful it's like fitting an elephant through a hole that a mouse would go through I mean that's how painful it is to them and so when you have a tantrum you're
(1:15:22) actually seeing the pain that your child is in and and really the problem is that most parents can't remember what it's like to be children parents who are the best parents are parents who can remember who can break through their Amnesia and can remember what it's like to be children themselves but the parents who are so disconnected from their memories of childhood or their emotional experiences of childhood those are the parents that struggle the most because if you to empathize you need to have a reference point so if you can
(1:15:56) remember what it was like to be left at daycare and feel the pain and the abandonment and the terror you would never leave your child at daycare if you can remember what it was like to have a tantrum and to feel so overwhelmed with your emotions and and with anger and sadness and excitement and all mixed together you would never yell at your child when they're having a tantrum it's Amnesia it's when parents don't remember what it's like to be a child that they react in the way that they do negatively all right just to wrap up in
(1:16:34) an ideal situation you you a couple has a child how long three years mom stays home is with the child and is there for those first three years and then afterwards you could look at possible daycare School type of type of situation anything over three is in daycare it's nursery school but I caution people that you want to make sure that your Nursery School is not more than a few hours a day at three years of age they're just cutting their teeth on the idea of separation so you know this idea that you put them for six hours in Nursery
(1:17:05) School is ridiculous it's as bad as daycare for them again you're taking a child who's been home primarily with their primary attachment figure and you're putting them in six hours no so the idea is a gradual buildup so maybe at three you find a nursery school that's the way Nursery schools used to be a few hours a day M right where they get to practice and where it's a gentle separation where it takes a couple weeks and they let you be in the classroom until you can move out of the classroom you know gentle separation process few
(1:17:33) hours a day that's all at 3 at 4: maybe you move up to 5 hours because It prepares them for kindergarten right but that would be the ideal if you're asking me what the ideal is now the mothers have to stay home full-time mind you this is where people misunderstood my book the book said being there why prioritizing motherhood in the first three years matters for some women they can stay at home for other women they want to work a little part-time so there are ways of managing working but still prioritizing your children so you know
(1:18:05) the problem is we prioritize our work and not our families that's the problem today so it doesn't mean you can't work and not all women either can financially stay home full-time or you know can emotionally but the idea that the more more is more is what I say the more you are physically and emotionally present for your children in the first three years the greater the chance your children will be mentally healthy in the future you know what interesting uh I I have to say this before we end here is that a lot of what you're saying I can
(1:18:35) hear some people go oh that's going to make a soft Society it's going to make a bunch of whatever but it's like actually doing the opposite of what you're saying is what's causing that's right a lot of what we think is so resilience is built so say to get to resilience you have to provide a Foundation think of the softness and the sensitivity and the empathy as the I don't know if California has basements but in on the East Coast you have to put in the basement and the cement foundation of the house if you just build a house on
(1:19:10) top of the ground with the first sign of a hurricane or a storm that house is going to blow down think of The Three Little Pigs you know um the foundation for resilience is is sensitivity on sensitivity you can build a house that withstands adversity that can deal with stress but if you take that Foundation away and you just expect too much of a child you force them to be tough too early yeah you may get what you want but that house will break down as soon as the opportunity wow presents itself wow thank you so much this has
(1:19:47) been fascinating yeah very very uh great interview and episode I really appreciate you coming on here thank you for having me thank you thank you all right I know you like that episode if you did check this one out 30% body fat for men this is way too high this is actually a bit high for women as well so in today's episode we're talk about how you can go from 30 to 10 what is 10% body fat this is when you have a visible six-pack can you go from 30 to 10% yes it's possible but not if you guess along the way so we're going to talk about how
(1:20:17) you can do that in today's episode now there's a huge range right of like body types some people can run uh a little bit heavier uh and or a little bit higher by
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