The Four Dos and Don'ts of Divorce | Warren Farrell | EP 187

Why in the world should we assume that the topic of your book—the title of your book—refers to something that is real? And if it's real, why aren't we attending to it, and why is it important?

Yeah, well, first of all, it's real. Because in all 56 of the largest developed nations, boys are falling behind girls in almost every single academic subject, including reading and writing, which are the two biggest predictors of success or failure, as you can probably imagine. And boys who do badly in those subjects are much more likely to drop out of high school. Boys, in general, are much more likely to drop out of high school, especially in the United States. Boys who drop out of high school are more than 20 percent likely to be unemployed in their 20s. This is a statistic before Covid when the unemployment rate in the United States was 3.4 versus more than 20 percent for boys.

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Thank you. Hello, everyone! I'm pleased to be talking today with Dr. Warren Farrell, who I spoke with three years ago, almost to the day, about his previous book, Why Men Earn More. We're going to talk today about The Boy Crisis, which was published just after our last interview, so that's in 2018. Dr. Warren Farrell was chosen by the Financial Times as one of the world's top 100 thought leaders. His books have been published in more than 50 countries and in 19 different languages. They include the New York Times bestseller Why Men Are The Way They Are, which must be a very thick book. Plus, the international bestseller The Myth of Male Power. His most recent is The Boy Crisis, we mentioned, Why Men Earn More as well, which is a very good book. His most recent is The Boy Crisis, as I said, 2018, co-authored with John Gray. The Boy Crisis was chosen as a finalist for the Forward Indies Award, which is the Independent Publishers Award. Dr. Farrell has been a pioneer in both the women's movement, elected three times to the board of the National Organization of Women in New York City, and the men's movement, called by GQ Magazine the Martin Luther King of the men's movement. He conducts couples' communications workshops nationwide. He has appeared on over a thousand TV shows— that's way too many TV shows—and has been interviewed by Oprah, Barbara Walters, Peter Jennings, Katie Couric, Larry King, Tucker Carlson, Regis Philbin, and Charlie Rose. He has frequently written for and been featured in the New York Times and other major publications worldwide. He has two daughters, lives with his wife in Mill Valley, California, and resides virtually at www.warnfarrell.com. As I said, we spoke three years ago. It was May 6, 2018, just before Dr. Farrell's book, The Boy Crisis, was published. We'll concentrate today on this book and associated topics.

Hello, Warren! So good to see you.

It is so good to see you! More than normal, Jordan, for all the... You know, we've had more than the Boy Crisis. We've had the Jordan Peterson Crisis, obviously. A very dull topic that I don't know. It’s just amazing to me that during this process of you going through what you went through—not only with yourself but with Michaela, with Tammy—that you're not only alive, but that you also produced an extraordinary book as well in that period of time. It's just beyond me.

No, thank you!

Yeah, well, it helped keep me afloat. So I've been reviewing The Boy Crisis in quite a bit of detail over the last few days. It's something I haven't thought about for a while; certainly, I thought about it since our last conversation. The world has twisted and turned in all sorts of strange ways since then, and I suppose this issue has been pushed—the particular issue, the Boy Crisis, let's say—has been pushed to the back burner in a major way by all sorts of, well, cultural movements and by Covid. And it's not precisely on the radar.

You mentioned to me just when we were discussing this issue, for example, at the beginning of our conversation today before we started taping, that President Biden established a White House Gender Policy Council, which is supposed to focus on gender issues. But in your opinion, it pretty much only focuses on women and girls and is also supposed to focus on race, but pretty much ignores black boys, which is perhaps the intersectional place—to use a detestable phrase—where the crisis is the most noticeable.

So why in the world should we assume that the topic of your book—the title of your book—refers to something that is real? And if it's real, why aren't we attending to it, and why is it important? You know, as well, first of all, it's real because in all 56 of the largest developed nations, boys are falling behind girls in almost every single academic subject, including reading and writing, which are the two biggest predictors of success or failure, as you can probably imagine. And boys who do badly in those subjects are much more likely to drop out of high school. Boys, in general, are much more likely to drop out of high school, especially in the United States. Boys who drop out of high school are more than 20 percent likely to be unemployed in their 20s. This is a statistic before Covid when the unemployment rate in the United States was 3.4 versus more than 20 for boys.

And so that's just the academic part of it. On the mental health part of it, when boys and girls are at nine, they commit suicide about equally and very minimally. Between the edges ages of 10 and 14, boys commit suicide twice as often as girls. Between the ages of 15 and 19, they commit suicide four times as often as girls. Between the ages of 20 and 25, they commit suicide about five times as often as girls. Most people don't even know this, pay attention to this. But this is only the tip of the iceberg of the mental health issue. Boys are far more likely to die from drug overdoses, opioid overdoses. They're far more likely to be depressed if you measure depression in a way that includes male symptoms of depression—much more likely to enter into places that take care of people who have mental problems and so on.

And then I started asking myself, you know, what causes all this? And when I first submitted The Boy Crisis to the publisher, in sort of a formal proposal, I outlined ten causes. Those causes included the environment, schools, and so on; but I kept coming back to realizing that the hub cause of the boy crisis was dead deprivation—that the boy crisis resides where dads do not reside. And so that got me really thinking about that.

So for example, boys who are raised by moms and dads together and go from an intact family to a school that has very few male teachers—there's not a huge impact, a little bit of an impact that's negative, but not much. But if they go from a female-only home environment, have only a female role model, then they go to a school with almost no male teacher role models—they are much more subjected to and much more vulnerable to being seduced by gangs as a pseudo-family or trying not having the postponed gratification that dads tend to bring to the family. And so therefore, without that postponed gratification, they're more vulnerable to a drug dealer saying you can make money really easily by dealing drugs—you don't have to worry about getting the best grades in school. You'll prove everybody that, you know, you'll drive around in a nice car. You'll be able to get the girls you can't get because you're, you know, you're sort of a loser at school, etc.

So I started looking at all these things. I saw that the sperm count of boys had dropped 50 percent and the IQs of boys had dropped 15. And just I started, you know, looking and wondering about, you know, two things. One is how amazing—how much evidence there was for the boy crisis, and the second was exactly the question you asked. Since it's so evident and we're so focused on girls and women's issues, why are we not even seeing the boys' and men's issues that are coming up and how damaging it is to women to not have father involvement? For example, women that I had dated between my marriages were constantly talking about being overwhelmed. And so women are losers by fathers not being involved. Fathers feel a lack of purpose, and they deal with the whole thing that you talk about in your first rule of, you know, not having some type of change of culture where there's a vitality to give them—to give them purpose. And so we're in a very challenging situation.

I did come to understand what the cause of it is, but it really is depressing to see how ubiquitous that cause is. So why do you think if the crisis is of the magnitude that you suggest—

You cite some statistics in the early part of your book: more men in the UK have died by suicide in the past year than all British soldiers in all wars since 1945. Suicide now takes more lives than war, murder, and natural disasters around the world combined. That might not include Covid, I presume. That statistic is stealing more than 36 million years of healthy life, and the rate of suicide is growing much faster for men than for women. You mentioned that boys' IQ has dropped about 15 points since the 1980s and made a case in your book that that's related to fatherlessness.

We'll get back into that. Boys scored lower than girls in the 63 largest developed nations in which the PISA— a set of international standard tests—was given. Boys are 50 percent more likely than girls to fail to meet basic proficiency in any of the three core subjects of reading, math, and science by eighth grade. In the U.S., 40 percent of girls are at least proficient in writing compared to one in five boys. One in five boys who perform as well as girls are graded less favorably. You know we did some research years ago showing that agreeable children get better grades than their IQ would predict, and girls are more agreeable than boys. And so what that means is if you're less agreeable and more likely to be troubled, then because that is associated with being less agreeable, then you're graded more harshly than your pure cognitive ability would predict. And that probably accounts for the gender difference, or at least for part of it—not that it particularly matters.

But boys have gone from 61 percent of university degrees to 39 percent. Girls—the reverse. The percent of boys who say they don't like school has gone up 70 percent since 1980. I imagine it was already pretty high in 1980. Boys are expelled from school three times as often as girls; that's the same statistic basically, as boys are more likely to be arrested for conduct disorder, juvenile delinquency. Men are much more likely to be imprisoned. It's the same pattern there. One in three children in the UK and the U.S. grow up without a father. And you know our culture pushes the idea constantly that all families are of equal virtue, let's say.

And I suppose that's justified in that it's self-evident that of all the things that people strive to do well in their lives, they strive to raise their children, I would say, more diligently than they might meet any other requirement or responsibility. And so it seems cruel to judge the quality of the family, given the commitment that it takes, for example, to be a single parent. But I'm releasing a podcast this week with Richard Tremblay, who’s perhaps the world's foremost authority on the development of aggression in children development and regulation, and his data certainly indicates that having a single mother, especially a single mother with issues, is a predictor of the maintenance of aggressive behavior throughout the lifespan—a major predictor.

Now, he associates that more with trouble on the maternal side—young mothers, young uneducated mothers, young uneducated mothers with psychiatric and other health difficulties who lack social support, hasn't concentrated so much on the fatherlessness end of it. But the upshot is—or the takeaway is—the same: these are families that are not producing children who have the same probability of thriving, let's say. You said also Japan has increased its vocational education programs so that 23 percent of its high school graduates study at vocational schools, and they have a 99.6 percent employment rate. That's something we can talk about as well.

So your book is peppered with, well, painful statistics, I would say. Why do you think we don't attend to this, Warren?

I think historically and biologically, men were programmed—and really through animals, including insects, right on through to human beings—we were programmed to be able to be willing to die in order to get women's love. And so in every generation had its war. And in each generation's war, we said some version of Uncle Sam needs you, and we pointed to the uncle who in the Marine uniform on the mantle, and we were so proud of him. He died in World War I or II, and the boy sees that. The boy can get love and approval and respect, even though he's being criticized by this person or that person or in school or at home.

He can be a soldier, and so we give—we inspire boys to be disposable. And when somebody is likely to be lost, you don't develop as much emotional attachment to that person. And if your way of surviving is for males to be willing to lose their life so we're not under Nazi rule, etc., you begin to develop a connection between caring about men largely to the degree that they are willing to protect women and die for women. And so you don't care about the people who are dying so much if you have an incentive in there to—if you have an incentive to have them be willing to die in order to protect you, and so, so it's a Disposable Male hypothesis. That would be the hypothesis on the evolutionary psychology front.

I mean, one of the things I've noticed is that my critics, let's say, like to parody my audience as, well, angry, white, and young and male, let's say. But the thing that's interesting about that is that perhaps you could give me the benefit of the doubt and say that if that is my audience—and my audience is certainly much broader than that and that wasn't who I was targeting, let's say—but even if it was, well, is there something wrong with talking to those people who are alienated and angry and perhaps for some genuine reason? The answer seems to be, the default answer seems to be, they're so contemptible that anyone who even tries to help them is to be regarded with extreme suspicion.

And it seems to me that that's in some manner a reflection of the phenomenon that you're discussing, which is a very, what would you say, it's very deeply rooted and fundamental, at least from one perspective. So, you know, I was thinking today, maybe our culture is set up so that the most esteemed people are highly successful men, but the least esteemed people are unsuccessful men. And so maybe that's the strange paradox. Is that men, so in some sense, have it the best if they're occupying the pinnacle of achievement, but they have it the worst if they're at the bottom of the heap.

And that seems right if you look at women's dating preferences, for example, compared to men. Women are disproportionately attracted to successful men and disproportionately likely even to rank men of average attainment as below average—whether it's attractiveness or any of the other criteria by which such things might be judged. So you know, the question is, if it is so deeply rooted—well, one question is, if it's so deeply rooted, what makes you think there's anything that we can do about it? I mean, you haven't had any luck, for example, convincing the White House over years to pay some attention to boys essentially, even though they're the problem, let's say. You might think that even from the perspective of prevention there would be some attention paid in that direction. But this bias is so pervasive that it seems to even interfere with that.

Absolutely.

So a few things, lots of really good things you brought up. So let me deal with the first thing on the anger issue. One of—I don't know if we discussed this before, Jordan, but I've been teaching couples communication workshops for 30 years—and just produced a Zoom course on that a few days ago. And one of the things that is fundamental to that course is that men and women—and this is gay couples as well and trans couples, and even parents and children—all complain about their partners or their parents or their child's anger. And almost one of the things that I work with them on is to understand that anger is vulnerability's mask. And the moment you see your partner as angry, look for the vulnerability that created that anger.

The fact that they felt rejected, the possibility that they felt rejected, the possibility that they felt misunderstood—the possibility that they said what they feel their bother that bothers them over and over again, but it's been ignored. And every time that they say that, say what bothers them, there's a response to it. The disconnect that cuts them off and interrupts them before they finish their full feeling. They're not drawn out, and the response that they get is an argument. And so they tend to not bring up issues that really concern them because it's only going to be met by an argument that will escalate the problem. And so they end up walking on eggshells.

Now, who does that? Men? Women? Both sexes do that. And it doesn't make any difference whether it's straight or gay couples; they both do. This is a complaint that I hear from literally everybody. And so when your audience is criticized as being angry, I would just ask, you know, if you look at that anger and as the vulnerability, how is that audience not being heard? And the way you are serving that audience is to hear so—to the degree that that audience is part—part of your audience is serving that audience by healing them, by having them have a place where they feel heard as opposed to dismissed. When someone feels dismissed, they become depressed; they turn inward.

An example of that is when men and fathers and mothers go through the family court system, fathers are much less likely to feel heard in the family courts and to feel treated as equals. That's another reason why I wanted to talk to you before and today. In my clinical practice, I had men who are fine, upstanding men who were absolutely ground into nothing by the family court system. I mean, I pulled out all the tricks I had out of my hat. One client in particular—a medical professional whose life was completely destroyed by the family law system—it was like watching a train wreck in slow motion, to use a terrible cliché.

We tried every trick in the book to keep him afloat. What he wanted was 50/50 access to his three kids, and he was a really good father. I went out with him a number of times with his kids and watched how he interacted with them and how he taught them and how he cared for them and went to his house and looked at how he set up their bedroom. This guy did everything right; he was extremely high in conscientiousness, so unsurprising. But you know, he had his driver's license taken away, he had his passport taken away, he had his livelihood demolished by ill-founded rumors by a spouse that was hell-bent on his destruction.

I mean, we even went so far as to have him pick up his kids when they made the switch in front of a really, really busy supermarket. She would pull up behind him right in front of the doors of the supermarket. The kids would come out; she would stay in the car. The kids would come out and go into his truck and pull away, so that everything that transpired between the two of them was in full public view all the time. And despite that, she managed to get into his car a number of times.

But anyways, he was just demolished. And I've seen this. And you know, I get criticized—maybe we can go into this a little bit. I get criticized for a couple of things by men regularly. One is I get criticized because I stand up for traditional marriage, and there's always a proportion of men who write—and they're usually men who've been demolished by the family court system—who say, “Look, you should stop telling young men to adopt a permanent relationship, get married, because the family court system is so prejudiced against man that to sign a marriage contract if you sign it with the wrong person is tantamount to—well, let's not call it a death warrant, but it's a very bad idea.”

And my response to that is, well, you're basically married if you lived together for six months anyway, and so I don't see how the marriage actually adds to that in terms of risk. But it's not like I don't understand that there's a point there. And it's so interesting because I do believe that the family court system—I've looked at it. I've been involved in it several times; it wasn't to my benefit, I would say.

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The men who are objecting have a point. And then I'm also suggesting to young men another point of criticism that, you know, they adopt traditional responsibilities to the degree that that's possible, and that that's where they'll find meaning. But, you know, some of your work makes me second-guess that, at least to some degree, wondering if I just don't see an alternative. I suppose that's really the issue—is that, well, what do we have? We have our jobs, we have our careers, we have our loved ones, we have our families. That's life, and if you don't have that, well, then you're adrift. That's the purpose void that you talk about in this book.

But if the traditional pathways to meaning, let's say, are no longer reliable, what's a guy to do?

Let's say we really—

So to affirm what you're saying and put a piece of data to that, when people are going through the family court system, mothers and fathers are going through the family court system, the father is eight times as likely as the mother to commit suicide from the frustration of not feeling able to connect to his children. What very few mothers and fathers understand is that dads have adopted, in their traditional role, sort of a father's Catch-22. They learn to earn money, they learn to love their family by being away from the love of their family.

They often do things like—they may drive cabs, they may quit their passion of being an elementary school teacher, becoming a superintendent or a principal of schools, and they hate administration. But they end up earning more money because they want their children to do better than they had a chance to do in their life. They want the children to go to a good school, which means a good school district, which means a more expensive home, which means that if they were a musician, or an actor, or a writer, or that elementary school teacher, they have to give up that for the most part because they'll earn more doing something that they like less.

And so we've—

This is something which is part of the pay gap that's never really emphasized, is that one of the ways you earn more—and you outline that in, I think, a great book, Why Men Earn More—I think that is a great book. You know, you point out that you earn more for doing jobs that are less intrinsically desirable in some sense. I mean, that's part of the equation at least—the jobs are more dangerous, they take you away from home more often, etc., and those are disproportionately male jobs.

I mean the guy that I saw who got demolished so badly, you know, his wife claimed to be the primary caregiver, and the courts are tilted so that they favor the mother, especially in the first three years of a child's life. And I've had some sympathy for that perspective for a variety of reasons, although I think I've rethought my stats and believe that 50/50 custody default is the appropriate default, just like 50/50 default with regards to money or during the life of the marriage, is the default.

But my client worked a lot to provide for his family, and so his wife stayed at home and was with the kids all the time. As a consequence, when they went to court, she had the upper hand in the custody negotiation because the judge believed perhaps that it was in the best interest of the children that they continue with their primary caregiver. That's a very hard argument to push aside, given the strength of the mother-child bond, especially in the first—in especially in the first year.

I mean, maybe the first year is exceptional; perhaps it's not. Perhaps we have to move to 50/50 regardless. But what do you think about that?

One of the things that I talk about in The Boy Crisis is the four must-dos after divorce. And this is like I'm now putting huge amounts of research together into sort of four simple things. But one, the number one and most important is that the children have an equal amount—by the way, this is if you want the children to do almost as well as they would in an intact family, not as well, but almost as well.

Okay, so this is a child's center—see, that’s something we should establish here too as a principle in my sense is always marriage is for children, not for adults. Exactly. They're the primary target of rank-ordered importance—children first, and then the adults. Marriage is for children, not for adults. That’s a very immature way of looking at the world. If you think your marriage is for you, you have a free choice when you have children to have the children and not have the children. That's like having a free choice to take the job or not take the job. But once you take the job, you take the responsibilities with it.

And so in court, what I talk about—I do a lot of expert witness work on this issue. In court, what I explain is that we now, for the first time in the last five or six years, we now have really incontrovertible evidence that four things are really needed if we want the children to do the best after divorce.

Number one is an equal amount of time with mother and father. The closer you get to 50/50, even when the child is like one year old or just born, that is— that leads to the greatest possibility of a positive outcome on so many measures that we’d have to spend almost a half hour talking about those.

Well, I’d like to talk about that to some degree because it’s somewhat counterintuitive. So, I think it's important to delve into that.

Absolutely, and I'll be happy to do that. Okay.

And then number two is that the father and mother live within about 20 minutes’ drive time from each other. Because when they don't, oftentimes they become very resentful of the other parent because they have to go to the other parent's home and miss their soccer practice, so therefore they don't get the skills and the teamwork and the continuity to be good on the soccer team or miss their best friend's birthday party or whatever.

And so there's a tension when the father and mother live, after divorce, more than about 20 minutes of drive time from each other. Number three is that the children cannot experience any bad-mouthing or negative body language from mom toward dad, dad toward mom. Because when the child looks in the mirror, and let's say the child's a boy, and hears that your father is irresponsible and your father is a liar and your father is this and that, that boy is looking in the mirror and saying, well, maybe I'm a narcissist like my dad.

Well, boys are young boys play dad, and so whatever they think of his dad is going to enter their space of fantasy. I mean what they play out in their fantasy play is their destiny. Yes, and so that image of future masculinity—I always think of Captain Hook when I think of that because Peter Pan stays Peter Pan because he doesn’t want to be Captain Hook.

It's a brilliant story because it's got it exactly right. If you conceptualize the great father as a power-hungry tyrant—which is increasingly the way we conceptualize our entire society and we call it patriarchal, then why would you want to grow up to be that? Why would you want to be that adult?

And so if the mother is modeling her opinion that that's what constitutes dad, that she's also modeling her opinion that that's what constitutes future mature son, since he's going to be dad. Yes, exactly. And then that boy hearing that both—let's say if he hears that from the mother, by the way, this is true father to mother also. I mean, bad-mouthing in the part of the father of the mother is really damaging to the child because not only does that child have half the genes of the other parent, but also the child can't bring it up to either parent because if it brings it up to the parent that made that complaint, it loses that the favoritism of that parent. If it brings it up to the other parent—that your dad said this or mom said this about you—that destabilizes the child's future even more so the child has a terrible secret all the time—betrayal. The child's in a state of betrayal all the time, no matter what.

Exactly. And I've seen children used as weapons continually in exactly that manner. It's appalling. It's appalling beyond comprehension.

And then the fourth thing that's very important is that the children—the parents, rather, are in couples communication counseling or relationship counseling—not just when there is an emergency. When there's an emergency, there's everything has to be made as a quick decision, and there's a tendency to see the other parent's worst intent, whereas long-term counseling allows the father and the mother to see, to have time to hear the mother or father's best intent about what they're doing and why they're doing it.

So at the bare minimum, that means that the couple gets together in an administrative sense to sort out the necessary details in the presence of a relatively, what would you say, interest-free, commitment-free, bias-free third party.

Exactly. It's really a management ploy rather, in some sense, than a counseling ploy per se—or at least you could parse it out in those two ways.

Obviously, once you have children with someone, you're married to them permanently in some real sense, and so that has to be taken care of. And a lot of taking care of a marriage... I do make this point to some degree in Beyond Order when I talk about making space for romance. A fair bit of marriage is administrative detail and getting that down, getting that right. I mean, all that allows you to see some goodwill on the part of your partner as well.

Yes, absolutely. And you brought up a moment ago to go to the different developmental advantages that happen when father and mother are both involved. And those developmental advantages include the father involvement. So after marriage or after divorce, father involvement—lack of father involvement is the single biggest predictor of suicide. It is one of the biggest predictors of a child not graduating from high school, dropping out of school. It's a very big predictor of a child being aggressive but not assertive.

And last time when we did our last interview together, we talked about the whole roughhousing dimension of things, and I'm not going to go through that again because of the fact that people can go to that other interview and see that. But there are about nine differences between dad-style parenting and mom-style parenting, and a lot of those differences—moms are so good at, say, spotting a son's and daughter's gifts, like saying, “Sweetie, you sing so nicely,” or “You're going to be a great actress or a musician,” or whatever—you should try and do that. And dads are likely to affirm that but not so vociferously at first, but are more likely to say some version of a, “Well, you know, if you want to be a gymn... If you want to be in the Olympics, you've got to practice all the time,” and, “Yes, we'll give you some tutoring or we'll go out of our way to take you to gymnastics practice, but if you're not really focused on... If you're focused, son, responding to tweets and going to parties and doing other things, you're never going to become an Olympic gymnast, so you have to make a trade-off.”

And the dad is much more likely to enforce the boundaries around that trade-off and require the child to focus and discipline on a focus and have postponed gratification around what they say they want to do and give up support for the child that the child doesn't follow through with, that it only has a dream that they're not willing to have the discipline.

Okay, so there's a real hypothesis there which I think is worth delving into because one question obviously is, well, why is it not good to be without a father? Is it not the case that someone else, maybe two females, for example, could play the paternal role? And obviously that's true to some degree if we could specify what the paternal role is. But you make a very specific case, which is quite an interesting one, which is that it's fathers primarily who are responsible for the instantiation of delay of gratification.

Now, we should point out that among psychologists who are leery of IQ as the best predictor of success in the long run, the vast majority of those psychologists—whose opinion I do not agree with, by the way—is that the thing that predicts better than IQ is the capacity to delay gratification. And that seems to be associated with trait conscientiousness. And trait conscientiousness, which is dutifulness, industriousness, and orderliness, the ability to make and maintain verbal contracts, conscientiousness is the best predictor of long-term success outside of general cognitive ability. I would also say that in cultures where families are more likely to be intact, and so we could say Southeast Asian cultures, for example, and point out that children from Southeast Asian cultures do disproportionately better in North America than children of North American parents, the reason for that seems twofold. One is more correlational, perhaps, in that those families are much more likely to be intact and so to have fathers, but the second is that the advantage that is accrued to those children seems to be in the domain of conscientious striving—it's work ethic, it's the ability to delay gratification.

And so if it is the case that father involvement is a key predictor of the capacity to delay gratification, then that's an absolutely crucial issue, and we need to know, well, is that true? And we also need to know if it's true, why it's true. And perhaps it has something to do with the relative disagreeability of fathers. So women are more prone to negative emotion than men, and they're more empathic and compassionate and polite than men. Men are more disagreeable and use disagreeableness as the best predictor, by the way, of criminal behavior from the personality perspective, even though it's not a very good predictor.

But if you're really, really disagreeable, that's one of the things that can end—that can land you in jail because you don't take other people into account; you can be callous and cruel and unkind. But just because something has its pathologies in the extreme doesn't mean it’s not necessary in moderation. And disagreeable people are better at saying no and at setting boundaries and at being cruel to be kind, let's say.

Well sure, you’re good at that. You want to do that, but here's what it's going to take, and I'm going to draw boundaries, and I'm going to draw lines.

And you think that's fathers, and what evidence do you have for that?

Oh my goodness. Oh, just for example, one of the things I'll talk about is the difference between boundary-setting and boundary-enforcement. And you know, dads and moms will both set boundaries very similarly; they'll both say you can't have your ice cream until you finish your peas. And children will test boundaries pretty much exactly the same way, though.

Exactly, right. Absolutely, and they balance on that edge and push because they want to find out exactly where that border is. My son, who’s relatively disagreeable, pushed boundaries at every opportunity when he was between two and four. It was really something to behold—he was a force of nature in going right up to the line and pushing on it just to see what was going to happen, you know?

And then, but the difference between moms and dads is not these boundary-setting or the children's challenge, but rather the boundary enforcement. The child will be able to say to mom some version of like, “Uh, you know, I had a tough time in school today. I really don't want to go to bed because I was teased by one of this boy, and he's the best, the most popular boy, or the most popular girl in the school.” Usually, it would be the boy that would tease him.

And, you know, and so mom is saying to herself, you know, “Well, what am I going to do here? Am I going to get into a big argument over a few peas when he's depressed? That would be insensitive and stupid, so I tell you what, sweetie, you know, you can have this many more peas and then you can have your ice cream.” And then the boy will see, “Ah, negotiating is a possibility here.”

So from a position of weakness, yes, exactly. I will have half that many peas than mommy put aside, and then mom is going again, you know, “All right, at least he tried; I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt. Okay, you can have the ice cream now.”

Whereas dad is much more likely to go, “I'm sorry, we have a deal here, sweetie. I know you had a bad day in school, but you—you need to finish the peas. The deal is before you get your ice cream.”

“Oh, daddy, you're so mean. Mommy doesn't do that to me!”

“And she but me—and yeah! And dad goes, ‘Well, you know, you can continue to complain, but this is my rules now.’ And if you continue to complain, there’ll be no more ice cream. There’ll be no ice cream even it's a possibility tomorrow night.”

Now we're forcing the child to be—to pay attention to doing what she or he needs to do—to finish the peas before she or he gets the ice cream, what they want to have.

Okay, so let me take what you said apart a little bit from a personality perspective. Okay? So I'm going to hit it from three perspectives. So the first is I've always been entranced by the Disney movie Pinocchio, and Pinocchio is about the development of an autonomous individual, right? Someone who's free from having his strings pulled by others and who isn't a wooden head but someone who's alive and can think for himself.

And as Pinocchio develops, he faces a number of temptations, and one is to become an actor, which means to become a deceiver or a player of parts rather than the real thing. But another is to become a neurotic wreck who wants vacations. So he's tempted by Pleasure Island. And the way the fox and the cat tempt him is by convincing him that he's ill, convincing him to capitalize on that, and convincing him that the respite for his illness is a vacation from his— a permanent vacation from his responsibility.

So his—the temptations are deceitful actor and neurotic victim. So it's a very perspicacious film; it's a remarkable film.

But in any case, now, let's take that apart a little bit. So I'll first make an observation for my own marriage: my wife is no pushover and she's relatively low in agreeableness by female standards. But what I've observed in our relationship was that it was hard for her to discipline the children.

And I think the reason for that was partly temperament because I think the feminine temperament tilts towards compassion and nurturance, whereas the masculine temperament tilts more toward self-love.

Yeah, fine. That's good, thank you for filling in there.

Yeah, yeah. It's conditional. It’s if there’s a conditional element to it, right? The judgmental element—which is what you'll love, by the way. But conditional approval is part of total love, right? Good, good clarification.

Absolutely right, because the container is love, yes. But that can mean delay of gratification, right? And there's a cruelty in delay of gratification even when you impose it on yourself. It’s a cruelty in the local sense because it causes distress.

I mean, right now my son and daughter are teaching their son, who's only slightly over one, “No.” And I told them how to do it.

So, for example, he sits at our table out in the backyard, and he reaches behind, and he's tearing the plants out of the green wall that's behind him. And so that's a no. And I said, “I encourage them. I said, look, take his hand, hold it firmly so that he can't move it, say ‘No,’ hold him until he stops struggling to undertake his goal-directed activity. He'll probably cry. As soon as he stops resisting, let go and give him a pat, say you do that 20 times, then when you say ‘No,’ he'll cry and stop, and then 20 times after that, he'll just stop. He won't cry.”

And so you've taught him “No”—which is an amazing thing because then you can let him go free because whenever you say “No,” he'll just stop. And so you can facilitate his freedom instead of having to be a helicopter tyrant parent—who I've seen many of—who is one step behind their ambulatory two-and-a-half-year-old, you know, interfering with absolutely everything he does because he can't grasp a basic principle of socialization.

In any case, “No” has some pain associated with it because otherwise it wouldn't produce tears. And “No” is a very, very hard thing to learn.

And it needs to be embodied, right? So you can see it play itself out.

So then you can play with it. Yes, absolutely!

Let me address the females in the audience here listening to this if they are single moms and what can you do? So the number one thing that you can do is take a look at the differences between dad-style parenting and mom-style parenting because oftentimes the things that dads do look like they're not caring about the children. The things like teasing, the things like roughhousing, the things that letting the children take risks—like climbing the trees like we talked about—they all seem like this tough love decision is often seen.

You see the toughness without the love very frequently. And so take a very careful look at that. Make sure that if you still have the dad at all around or available, that you get into family dinner night discussions where everybody learns how to listen to everybody else's perspective in the family.

Learn how to do a negotiating of that checks and balance parenting. But if it's absolutely impossible to get the biological father involved—and I'm afraid that the biological father—children do better with the biological father than they do with a stepfather. Mostly, step-parents elevate risk for abuse by 100-fold, if I remember correctly. It’s a statistically very pronounced phenomenon.

Stepfathers almost always are never allowed to be more than advisors. If you do have a stepfather, work on that issue that I talk about in The Boy Crisis book on how to engage the stepfather as a real equal—assuming that he’s a responsible and loving man. But if all those things fail, make sure you get your child and at the age-appropriate time into Cub Scouts.

Cub Scouts involve children involved in Cub Scouts for two or more years have a very significant increase in character development over children that are involved in Cub Scouts minimally and/or not at all. Boy Scouts are a wonderful construct of deconstruction of masculinity.

They've really figured out how to bring out the best in boys. Faith-based communities: children who are in faith-based communities—make sure your faith-based leader gets your son involved with other boys his age. And make sure he—he encourages your son to be, and all the boys in the group to talk about their feelings and their fears so that they can see they're not alone in those feelings and fears.

Make sure your children are involved in what I call the liberal arts of sports. But by the liberal arts of sports, I mean team sports. Also, pick up team sports, which, and also sports where you have to develop your own skills. You're part of a team, like in gymnastics or in tennis, but you're not interacting with the team all the time. Each of those things will develop and your son different types of skill sets.

The most important one that oftentimes moms don't realize the value of is the value of pickup team sports. Let your son or daughter be at the school without your supervision. Let them pick up a game where they have to decide without somebody supervising them how big the court should be at the basketball court—it should be half size, full size, what are the fouling rules, who do you check? It's perfect developmental skills for being an entrepreneur and being able to make decisions without supervision.

Obviously, team sports are pretty obvious what their benefits are. And be developing skills with that that aren't dependent on this team—are part of the liberal arts of sports.

So spend time in The Boy Crisis book with looking at what you can do as a single...

Yeah, well one of the things I liked about your books and why Men Earn More as well is that they're full of information, but they're also practical and they have practical advice. They say, here are things you can actually do, which is something people apparently appreciate about my books.

So it's nice to have it detailed down to the level of action.

I want to close because I know we've exhausted you. What—why did you receive such—I would like to know why you think you didn't get more traction with the Trump people, but then I would like you to tell me what's up with the Democrats. Why didn't you get rejected so out of hand when you put forward these perfectly reasonable propositions which in principle should be in accordance with what they're claiming to support?

Yes, even the Trump people—this is what I'm going to say now is ten times, tenfold this issue with the Biden people, but even the Trump people were fearful that the single mother would feel criticized, and they were afraid of losing the support from her.

And so that was what I heard behind the scenes was the gap between it being very much recommended by the people that I spoke with versus actually having a presentation delivered by Trump. The other thing was that they were fearful that it would call attention to Trump's failed marriages and his womanizing, and they didn't want to open that door.

So those were the two.

Okay. From the Biden side, it was like—it was, well, the best example of this is what I went to Iowa and I interviewed nine of the presidential candidates that were Democrats, and most of them were very excited, especially Andrew Yang, and Senator Hickenlooper—John Hickenlooper were very excited about what I was saying. Andrew Yang already had a mastery of what was—the problems were with boys; he was on the tip of maybe being able to talk about the issue.

While when I finished talking with both Andrew Yang and Hickenlooper, especially with Andrew Yang, the female campaign manager came up to me and said, “I’m sorry Warren, we just could not have him talk about these issues. This will alienate our feminist base. This will alienate women who are single moms. It will not—and we want also many of the women who are divorced; we want them not to feel that they won't have the choice of going off and starting a new life and bringing their children to a new location with a new man.”

And so we were afraid of losing that bait—their vote. Yes!

Well, into hell with the old man.

Yes, and so it was really—and that they were honest with me. That's the good news. The bad news is they were, you know, that this was the case. And so with when the Biden Administration created the White House Gender Policy Council, which was a day or two before he was actually inaugurated, the—and it was focused on women and girls and, you know, and both black women and girls and white women and girls.

I protested, and talked with Jen Klein, who's the co-chair, about this many times, and her only answer over and over again is, “Warren, President Biden cares about men and boys. Warren, President Biden cares about the fathers.”

My response is, my constant hammering of her about, “Well then it should be written into the White House Gender Policy Council to create these father warrior programs, to create these programs of dozens of which I suggested, that could increase and improve the lives of boys and men.”

And I was met with no answer, like just—

So what’s the problem? What's the problem as far as you're concerned?

We might as well have it written out—what the hell's going on? In Jen Klein's case and in the feminist—the liberal political leadership and the Democrats, it is just a fundamentally and totally honest belief that women have it worse than men, that boys and men—

And the constant image that comes up for the political liberals is, “Warren, it’s the gender gap as the means of classifying the world.”

You know, they keep it worked up as a means of classifying the world. That is the problem.

It isn't who has problems and how do we help them; it's the classification first and then the problem second. It’s that we live in a patriarchal world dominated by men who made the rules to benefit men at the expense of women.

The proof of that, one is that look at who's at the top of the political ladder. Look at who's at the top of the corporate ladder. Look at who's at the top of even the religious life, right?

So it's right back to where we started, which is identify that tiny minority of men who are hyper-successful, generalize that to the masculine universe at large, and to hell with those that are in the middle or the bottom, which is so.

What is that hypergamy in female politics? Is it the same thing?

It's, it is not the realization that the men at the top are often at the top; they're earning that more money not because they feel more fulfilled, or this is their choice. They felt obligated to earn money that somebody else spent while they died sooner.

Right? So it's not even true for the people who have the privilege much less true for men anywhere else on the hierarchy.

Correct. And when I say to them things like, “You know it isn't male privilege; do you consider it male privilege for every generation during their war to train the boys and the men to be the ones that died in war so that you could be protected and saved?”

And it's just like closed mouth.

What about the legislation that's become a real issue in Korea?

Yeah, South Korea.

Actually, I didn’t know that.

Oh yes! Yes, there are no shortage of men who are not thrilled about the fact that they are conscripted for two years and the women aren't.

Now, you know, my sense is, well, the women pay their dues in childbirth and pregnancy, you know. But nonetheless, it’s—it’s an issue, and it’s producing no shortage of resentment and friction among young Koreans.

And here in the United States, you know, it’s still the law, which is probably the most unconstitutional law that most violates the 14th amendment's equal protection and laws. It is still the law of the United States that your son, who's 18, must register for the draft.

If he doesn't, he’s—could be fined a quarter million dollars. He could be put in prison for a year or two. He can—he'll in 42 states, he can lose his driver's license if he doesn't register for the draft. And there's a whole series of other—he could never go to a school that gets Federal money, which is virtually every school, including private schools. This is all the punishment that men have—male. Your son has if he’s 18 and doesn't register for the draft.

The punishment for females is zero because they don't have to register for the draft; they have the option.

So what do you think of that, Warren?

Like the old-fashioned patriarchal part of me thinks— I think two ways at the same time, you know. Unfortunately about that, I think, you know, I do believe to some degree that that's the balancing of the scales. You know, that, as you pointed out in your own book, you know, men die in war and women die in childbirth.

Now, they don't die in childbirth so much anymore, but they did, and in great numbers, and it was terrible pain and all of the privation that went along with that obligatory responsibility—a tremendous amount of that has been ameliorated, not all of it, but a tremendous amount, thank God, for technological progress. And so—but having said that, well, it doesn't sit well.

The idea of women drafted for frontline combat doesn't sit well for me.

Yes! And I think there's an answer to that, which is we don't have to draft people for frontline combat. There are men that are not suited to that; there are women that are not suited to that.

But I think it's—a good solution would be either you don't have registration for the draft, which creates a different set of problems, not having a ready group ready. But say you have people register at the age of 18 for some type of service of, say, six months or more. And then you mark off the type of service that your personality, that your contribution can make.

It could be a healthcare frontline worker; you can be a volunteer in this way or that way. So if there's mandatory service, it's mandatory for all, but the service itself can differ, and everyone could have some choice in that.

And who knows? Maybe there'd be enough people picked for frontline combat to fill the necessary places. It's possible. I mean, there are people who are constitutionally inclined towards that, and if there isn't enough people for that, then you do a supply-and-demand type of phenomenon. You raise the income for the people who do volunteer, right?

Right, right, right!

Which would be—that would be the equitable way of dealing with it is, is increase the hazard pay, yes, exactly, right!

And you’d watch the demand increase!

Exactly, because there'd be people who are right on the line—right on the edge, exactly!

Right, right, right, right, right!

Any final things to say?

Yeah, I guess maybe the most important thing I'd like us to all get is that there are so many things like hashtag Me Too that are so valuable for us to hear the pain and the experience that women go through. But hashtag Me Too as a monologue is a disaster because it needs to be a dialogue.

Yeah! Just like it needs to be a dialogue between men and women in a family! Exactly!

We need to hear that men have pain—men have all these, you know, the 50-plus developmental challenges that I talk about, that men feel lonely, isolated, and that men—why men suffer more. Because when—and because one thing we need to do, it’s just for compassion.

Secondly, there's so many misunderstandings and anger that is happening by—we say on the one hand, men are—we have toxic masculinity. They don't express their feelings; they don't say who they are. And then we make men pay an enormous price when they do express their feelings.

And so, so many young men feel caught between a rock and a hard place.

Yes, well, I would say that's happened in my case, you know, because I have this unfortunate proclivity to burst into tears at the slightest provocation, which has haunted me my entire life but is still quite pronounced.

And it isn't exactly obvious to me that, you know, my radical left-wing critics are above using that as a weapon.

It's quite interesting to note, you know, and maybe they're justified in doing so. I'm not saying that that's—but that's, it runs contrary to their hypothetical theory.

Yes! Yes, exactly!

And you know, and I've said man after man, by the way. I have that exact same character, so if my wife were here listening now, she'd be really chuckling because, I mean, anything that is, you know, what I had to hold myself back when I was talking about the memory of the men in the prison population coming up to me afterwards and themselves crying.

Right, right, yeah. I think you just about got me there too!

Interesting! The hashtag Me Too dialogue is so important not just for empathy, but also because to eradicate the toxic part of masculinity that keeps feelings all to oneself.

Because when you do that, you end up having a volcano built inside of you, and it comes out as anger; it comes out as distance; it comes out as drinking; it comes out in destructive behavior, and it also comes out in things like school shootings, mass shootings, committing crimes.

And both to protect ourselves from the mass shootings, from the ISIS recruits, almost all of whom are dead-deprived males and females.

And also, Adams can you do data? Is there data on that one with regards to recruitment for—

Yes, there is. In fact, it was done by three sociologists who looked at the studied ISIS recruits in Lebanon. And after doing that, they anecdotally told each other afterwards, you know a lot of these guys have—don’t have their dads.

And they were trying to get involved with ISIS to have some sense of purpose beyond themselves. And well, it was never part of our questionnaire. They went back and then did a systematic study of the men asking—including that question that had not been asked at the beginning and found that to be the single most common denominator of the ISIS recruits.

By the way, there’s 89 male ISIS recruits and 11 female ISIS recruits—yeah!

And the females had dad deprivation as an issue as well as the males as the single biggest characteristic.

Patriarchal ideology has a substitute for paternal relationships?

Yes! Yes, absolutely.

And just a need to have some sense of purpose and feeling of being needed. And that's one of the things that guys are so good at as working with moms. Moms are so good at identifying a child's gifts, nurturing the child's gifts, and dads are so good at the tough love oftentimes that are necessary to help the child achieve those gifts.

Yeah, well I thought, you know, it seems to me that the central characteristic of the benevolent paternal spirit, parodied as the patriarchy, is encouragement.

Oh! Encourage! Well, I would, I say, I think I take a little bit of a different issue there. I think moms and dads both encourage a lot.

But moms oftentimes repeat the encouragement, and when the child fails are still encouraging, whereas the dads say if you want to get to that outcome, you need to not do that texting; you need not to do all the things that that outcome requires, and they tend to sort of enforce those boundaries and hold the child accountable to a greater degree.

Does that make sense?

Sure, sure!

Thank you very much for talking with me today. It's just much, much appreciated.

You don't exhaust me; you energize me!

I just—oh, well, okay! Glad to hear that!

And I hope that everyone finds this conversation useful.

Thank you!

Thanks again!

Thank you!

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Thank you.