The absolute necessity of fathers: Warren Farrell/JB Peterson

Warren Farrell is the author of books published in 17 languages. They include two award-winning international bestsellers: "Why Men Are the Way They Are," plus "The Myth of Male Power." Warren has been chosen by the Financial Times as one of the world's top 100 thought leaders. He is currently the chair of the commission to create a White House council on boys and men. He's the only man in the U.S. to have been elected three times to the board of the National Organization for Women.

Now in New York City, Dr. Farrell has appeared repeatedly on "Oprah," "Today," and "Good Morning America," and has been the subject of features on "2020," in Forbes, The Wall Street Journal, People, Parade, and The New York Times. His co-author of his newest book is Dr. John Gray, the author of "Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus." Once again, this is the book we're going to talk not only about today, the new one, "The Boy Crisis," but also about Dr. Farrell's career, his goals, and his aims, and all of that.

And so I'd like to introduce everyone to Dr. Warren Farrell and ask him to tell us what he's up to and why.

Well, I guess what I'm up to is sort of the evolution of maybe all that time since 1969, and when the women's movement surfaced, I was very interested in it and felt that women really needed to be able to be equally respected and enter the workplace and have options open. I was upset that women were not playing sports to the degree that I felt that was creating the benefits to them of sports. And so I started articulating this and started talking to my doctoral dissertation advisors about doing this, and their first reaction was, "Warren, the women's movement is just a fad."

And I said, "I don't think so. I think this is the beginning of the change of gender roles from both men and for women." And so I talked with them about that, eventually convinced them that I could change my dissertation, and that led me to be seen by NOW as someone who was a man who was receptive at a time when the feminist movement was getting a lot of accusations of being man-haters.

And so I think I served the purpose of, "Here's a who, here's a man, a real-life flesh man who advocates, but we're advocating here. Get up and say what we're saying; it's going to be harder to call you a manager." And so I started doing that and then ended up speaking all around the world on women's issues and the value of women being secure enough and competent enough to be able to share the breadwinning burdens that men handle. That was my focus for until the mid-70s.

In the mid-70s, I began to see that the feminist movement had made a great deal of progress, and everyone was sort of getting on board who was at least in the sort of middle class above and educated. But it was also a huge number of divorces occurring, and so I began to say it's important for the children to have both parents after divorce. Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem, and a woman named Karen DeCrow agreed with me, but now the board I was on—the board of NOW at that time—had gotten elected as a result of my advocacy to the board of NOW.

My fellow female co-workers on the board of NOW said, "We're at a dilemma here," and the dilemma is that the women are writing us saying they're going to withdraw from NOW if they don't have the option to determine what happens with the children after divorce. And we don't want to lose NOW membership because it's not only important for family purposes, but for all the other agendas we have. So I said, "Well, the important thing is not women's rights or men's rights; the important thing is knowing what's best for the children."

And they said, "Yes, Warren, great theory, but we really need to focus on empowering women on a broad spectrum." And so they ended up all voting in terms of giving women the option to be fully involved with the children or not, depending on under the guise that women know the children the best and therefore they know what's best for the children. And so NOW and I began to have a significant amount of tension over that point, and Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem didn't weigh in; they weren't on the board of NOW.

And then all the other boards of NOW around the country began to go the same way that the New York City NOW went, and so that led to my disengagement. I also started forming hundreds of men's groups, one of which I think you know was joined by John Lennon, and that had a big impact on both the people in the groups and I began to see what men's pain was.

And so I began to articulate men's pain as well as women's pain in my presentations. When I was only articulating women's pain and women's challenges, I would almost always get standing ovations and maybe an average of three invitations for a new speaking engagement, and that was helping me live financially very well. But then, when I started to integrate the perspectives and feelings of men from the men's groups, there was a lot of—I didn't see those standing ovations.

Why not? Why not? What fights for new speaking engagements went from three to two to one and then eventually to zero? Well, it seems self-evident in some sense that if you're articulating truthfully and carefully what would be good for either sex, in some sense, you have to be articulating what would be good for both. I mean, unless you view the battleground—unless you view reality as a battleground between the sexes and as a zero-sum game, we can't have an intelligent conversation about what's good for women or what's good for men. We have to have a conversation about what's good for men and men, and women and women, and men and women.

So why do you think—what was your sense of why it was when you started to raise these other issues that you were immediately unpopular? Two questions: why do you think that made you unpopular? And why is it that you so early cottoned on to the fact that there was something going on that wasn't exactly kosher in relationship to NOW's push for a particular kind of family structure and a particular view of women's rights?

Yes, I think what happened for me was I just—when I started focusing on what was best for children, and then I began to—we only had minimal amount of research up for that at that point in time—this is your early 70s—but we had enough for me to make a case to the board. And when I saw the resistance, the degree to which there were two things happening: one is we don't want to lose our power base; we don't ever want to have a woman say whatever option she wants should be closed to her.

And so I began to see that the women's movement was caring more about women than they were caring about the children. That was the first disillusionment that I had. Okay, so your first ethical point in some sense is that when you're speaking about families and you have to balance the rights and responsibilities of men, women, and children, that it makes sense to you to put children's well-being first and foremost, and then to place men and women as individuals, say, or perhaps even as a couple, below that.

Yes, exactly. What I was saying was that freedom of choice is wonderful, but when you make the freedom of choice to have a child, you then start prioritizing the needs of the child you made. But you knew that those needs were going to be the child's needs first when you made that free choice. So it wasn't like you were coerced into or pressured into making that choice; you made the free choice to have a child that incorporates the need to put the child's perspectives before yours.

That's part of your free choice, right? So it's basically the freedom, there is the freedom to take on a certain kind of relatively permanent responsibility, and then to abide by that come hell or high water, essentially into the future, that the children should not respect the parents' needs. Because part of what I talked about in "The Boy Crisis" is that, "Ain't nobody happy." You know, that everybody has to be happy in a family.

And that part of choosing a child to be responsible is to choosing the child not just to have its needs met but to also care about whether what their moms' or dad's needs are being met as well. And that has to be very primary and primal and introduced early. But the—and then secondly, I also felt—and Betty Friedan felt this way also—that the women's movement would never go as far as it could go unless men were equally involved and proud of being involved in the fathering role.

Because a woman who has to take on the entire response, a woman who wants to break glass ceilings and go as far as she can but also wants children can't do that all if the man is working full-time and she's working full-time. Either the children get neglected or, you know, or something has to go. And so women will often say to me, "You know, I want to be a habitable woman," and I say, "You can be a habitable woman; find a man who wants to be home full-time with the children, and let's reshape society."

So we're saying that men are not only worrier warriors that we praise and call heroes when they go to war and they die for us, but they're also warriors if they choose. If you choose a man who wants to be fully involved with the child, let's honor him and respect him because we know that the social bribes that we gave men to die allowed men to be willing to sacrifice their lives in exchange for being called hero.

Well, if we reframe being a father as being a different type of hero, men will follow. Because men basically go wherever the praise goes.

Okay, so in the 70s, you started to put forward the case for children and to some degree as well simultaneously the case for fathers, and you received a fair bit of resistance as a consequence of that. And it sounds like the way you're setting up the argument is that the conflict—what was the conflict though? Was it that the women who were being appealed to by NOW wanted untrammeled freedom of choice for them?

The reason I'm asking is because if you have children, obviously half the children you have are female, and you'd assume that if it was a matter of women's opening up, what would be best for women in any kind of medium to long-term manner, that the concerns about daughters would be perhaps—even if it isn't concerns about sons—it would be concerns about daughters that would emerge as paramount even over the concerns of the mother.

So what is it that was—I still don't exactly get why it was that you weren't being successful because it doesn't make sense.

Because the priority there was two things happening simultaneously. One was such a strong emphasis on freedom and the freedom manifested in two areas. One is in the area of divorce. In divorce, the women were often saying, "I don't like my husband; I want to start a new life; I want to be able to move out of state if I wish to to get a job that I want," or "my new husband or boyfriend has a—wants to move out of state, and so I want to be able to take my children or child with me," because—and "I know what's best for my child," which would be like, you know, the medical community saying, "We don't want women to be participating in the medical community because we know what's best for the patient," and not that women might have a separate contribution to make.

On the other hand, there was women who wanted to have the freedom to be able to have children without being married. And so 53% of women under 30 today who have children in the United States have children without being married. And the belief was, again, that women knew what was best for the children so that they could take this on if they wanted to, and if they couldn't find a man that they really wanted that they could raise the child by themselves or the children by themselves.

Okay, so part of it was actually driven by questioning the necessity of the nuclear family as the smallest viable unit, and part of that—hey, that's correct.

But—and the feminist community started—when I would go to feminist rallies and so on, there would be many books about, you know, Lenin and the nuclear family being the patriarchal that were oppressing women. And so I think the feminist movement grew out of two huge iterations. One was the civil rights movement where there was an oppressor and an oppressed. Then there was the movement of—not just civil rights, but after the fem—after the civil rights movement came the Marxism, and the belief that there were oppressors and oppressed among Marxists.

A lot of the feminist movement, the early feminist movement was very—we had groups like Red Stockings and many other groups like that that were socialist worker party type feminists that very much believed in Marxism. And they had the dichotomy of oppressor versus oppressed.

So when it came to men, men—because we earned more because our biological—not our biological, but our socialized and biological responsibility was to earn the money and do that type of nature of providing, the feminist movement looked at the fact that we earned more money once we had children. And so therefore we must be the oppressor, like those—like the bourgeoisie of Marxism, and women must be the oppressed.

So you have two things happening simultaneously: this belief that the oppressors are wanting to be equally involved with the children. And then secondly, men having no idea why they had value. Third, men—the very few men that did study the value of being a father and how important it was to children didn't speak up about it, and women can't hear what men don't say.

So we had this world then where women were sharing the burden of breadwinning, but no one was even interested in asking the question about whether men could share the burden from women of earning, of providing equally for the family. And women weren't even interested in that because they were so focused on their freedom and saw men as the oppressor. And so there was no space to articulate the value of fathers and men in the family.

Okay, so you know, your terminology is interesting too because you're attributing the desire of the women who were pushing against what you were saying to a desire for freedom, but it seems to me that you could easily use irresponsibility as a terminology there. You know because free—well, freedom without concern for the medium to long-term consequences of your actions, especially when you're bringing in—when you're dealing with minors, when you're dealing with children—that's not freedom; that's irresponsibility.

That is absolutely irresponsibility, and that is where we, as a society, have failed to come in and say—first of all, whenever either sex wins—that is, a woman wins custody, for example—whenever either sex wins, both sexes lose. And it's worse than that; whenever either sex wins, both sexes lose, and in the case of family, the children lose enormously.

And we also need to sort of understand exactly what is it that leads to children doing so much better when they have fathers involved. I started researching that and they ended up, as you know, with "The Boy Crisis." I ended up with more than 70 different ways that when children have their father involved in it about an equal way, they do so much better than—

Well, it would be a lovely thing if you could detail out some of that now, and then we'll go back to the political ideological story here. But see, one of the things that's happened in Ontario recently is that we've—our government has introduced legislation that is predicated on the idea that all families are equal.

And the idea behind that, you could argue, is laudable. I wouldn't argue that, but you could argue it that, you know, people have a variety of ways of solving the problem of having children, and that there's a variety of viable solutions to that problem and that no one family organizational type should be privileged above the others.

I mean, I suppose with the exception of multi-partner marriages, which we still don't approve of, let's say. The problem with that, as far as I can tell, is that it does appear from the research that the nuclear family is the smallest viable unit.

Which is not to say that there aren't single mothers or single fathers who do an admirable job under trying conditions, but part of the problem—this is a deep problem—is that whenever you posit something as a value, so you might say, well, we want intact families: mother and father, that's—that's the value we're heading for because that seems to be best for the children.

Then you produce a rank order of accordance with that, and the people who aren't in accordance with that value—you can easily make a case that they're being discriminated against. And we're in a situation in our society now where even if the discrimination occurs, let's say because of the pursuit of an admirable value, it's regarded as prejudicial.

And I think that's fed by that underlying hypothesis that was anti-nuclear family, that any sort of hierarchical structure is part of the tyrannical patriarchy. It's something like that that's running underneath it.

So anyways, let's review, if you would, it'd be very helpful for everyone, some of the many ways that it's necessary for children to have fathers. Why that's better and perhaps also first for society as well, not just for children.

Absolutely. Children that have a lot—about an equal or more than equal father involvement have a number of things in common, as a rule. And obviously, there's reversals of this, and not everyone fits this pattern.

But the first is they're far more likely to have postponed gratification. And I'll elaborate on that a little bit more—postponed gratification is probably the single most important quality to becoming successful. And becoming successful, especially being employed in a job that has some meaning for you, is one of the most important ingredients in happiness, and a sense of purpose, and a sense of motivation, and a sense of willingness to get up in the morning.

And so, in a little while, I'll be happy to just trace back how that postponed gratification happens more when you have a father.

Yeah, because I'm really interested in hearing about that.

Second layer: children that have an equal amount of father involvement are far less likely to be depressed. They're far less more likely to be assertive and not aggressive, which is something you usually think of men as being, you know, aggressive.

But actually, the children of both girls and boys whose fathers are involved are far more likely to understand the distinction between being assertive and being aggressive and choose assertiveness. Boys—another surprising one for me in doing the research was finding that boys and girls who are raised with about an equal amount of father involvement are far more likely to be empathetic.

Because I always thought of empathy coming predominantly from moms, and I'll be happy to explain in a bit why it does come more from moms, but why the outcome for the child is not more empathy—the outcome for the child is less empathy.

So, a little bit more on that later. Yeah, sure.

Far more likely both boys and girls should drop out of school if there isn't father involvement. Far more likely when a relationship breaks up, a child that has not had significant father involvement is much more likely to be depressed and withdrawn and feel alienated.

Far more likely to be addicted to video games. Far more likely to be addicted to video porn. Far less more likely to have few social skills, few emotional skills, to do worse in every academic area, but especially in reading and writing, which are the two biggest predictors of success.

Far more likely to have a lower sperm count. Here's an amazing thing I just discovered toward the end of the research for "The Boy Crisis": I saw in Pediatrics magazine that children who by the age of nine don't have a significant amount of father involvement, both girls and boys, are likely to have shorter telomeres.

And as most of us know, the telomeres are pivotal in predicting life expectancy. So boys and girls—the average shorter telomere for a nine-year-old boy or girl without father involvement was 14—I'm sorry. It was—yes, it was 14 shorter. But the boys' telomeres were then again 40 shorter than the girls'.

So here this was predicting about a 14 shorter life expectancy for the average child without father involvement by the age of nine already. And yet the boys were suffering more.

So two things fascinated me there: if all the things like, you know, dropping out of school and things like that, I ask myself, "Well, maybe this is because boys with father involvement just have better neighborhoods, the fathers earn more, the families earn more. Maybe it's a matter of poverty versus not poverty."

So I started looking at boys and girls growing up in good—quote good—neighborhoods with quote good schools and comparing them with boys and girls growing up in poor neighborhoods in poor schools, and found that boys and girls growing up in good neighborhoods with poor schools that did not have significant father involvement did about the same as boys and girls growing up in poor neighborhoods with poor schools that did have father involvement.

That father involvement was really as good a predictor of success as the quality of the school system, the quality of the neighborhood, and the socioeconomic class. And this is what's led to, you know, the psychologists gathering together behind people like Warsha, 100 psychologists and researchers saying, "You know, this is not a correlation.

The involvement of father—this is not a matter of socioeconomic issues; this is a matter of actual fathers' involvement, especially the biological fathers' involvement, actually makes a significant difference." We have been wrong about the assumption that this was probably just a correlation.

And so the more I looked, the more I found just every nightmare of a parent to be so increased when there was not a significant amount of father involvement, and I was seeing—I was dating before I married Liz, the woman you just met just before we got on before we got married 14 years ago.

I was dating several women; almost every woman had was a single mother. And every single woman was working her rear off trying to balance her life. Every woman used the word overwhelmed, by the way she felt.

Every almost every woman said, "Well, I’d like my dad and the dad involved," but—but I started listening to the "buts" of the women and then listening to men who had wanted to be more involved with their children, and listening to what the differences were between what left the men—what made the men feel not wanted, what made the men feel excluded, and why the women felt that they needed to not have the man involved.

And I saw this entire set of misunderstandings here, and if I hope "The Boy Crisis" does anything, is to sort of explain, you know, here are the 10 major things that dads do that sort of annoy women or make women feel that they're not protecting their children adequately.

Which when they understand the purpose of these things and when dads get their homework done enough to articulate to the moms the purpose of these things, that will realize that these are necessary ingredients in a child's life.

Okay, so that's a good place to go next. So you laid out a whole slew of reasons, a slew of consequences of fatherlessness, and we'll return back to the causal relationship between what men do and these beneficial outcomes. But if you could go on now to tell us what it is that men are doing at a micro level, then we could return to the causal link between that and the positive outcomes. And you said those also caused some contention in the household.

Yes, yeah. I'll give one example. For example, will be a father is roughhousing with the kids, and the mom's looking over and saying—looking at scans and thinking, "Okay, when should I interfere? When should I not interfere?"

And the mom's saying to herself, "Jimmy, you know, please keep the kids away from the credenza there; keep the kids away from the couch because you—they could hit their head there. Why don't you wait happy to tomorrow when you can take this outside? I feel much safer with the kids."

And then the mother is sort of hesitating to not be overly controlling and yet at the same time she's feeling she has to monitor the husband as well as monitor the husband with the kids. And she's feeling in the back of her mind, "Sooner or later there's going to be a—there's going to be an accident here and I'm going to be upset with myself for not being stricter."

But on the other hand, the kids seem to be having fun, so I should let things go. Well, you know, there's a psychobiologist named Yak Panskepp who is one of the world's great biological psychologists, and he studied rough and tumble play in animals.

So rats, for example, a huge part of the socialization process that's key to the development of the prefrontal cortex in juvenile male rats in particular emerges and matures as a consequence of rough and tumble play.

And one of the amazing things that Panskepp discovered—and this truly is an amazing thing—is that if you pair two rats together and then let them play repeated bouts, the big rat will dominate the little rat to begin with in the first bout. But if the big rat doesn't let the little rat win about 30% of the time in repeated play bouts, then the little rat won't play anymore.

So you get an emergent morality in emergent play-centered morality even among rats as a consequence of rough and tumble play. And that rough and tumble—I did a fair bit of research on rough and tumble play about—oh, it's probably 20 years ago now, 15 years ago anyways—and it's really quite clear that rough and tumble play helps children parameterize their bodies, so that they know how they extend and also what limits there are in the use of physical interactions with another person: what's fun, what's provocative, what's pushing it too far, what's painful.

And of course, kids love rough and tumble play as well; they're just absolutely starving for it, and we've squeezed it out of the kindergartens, the nursery schools, the elementary schools, the junior high schools—all of that.

And for—and what Panskepp also found was that if you deprived juvenile rats of the opportunity to engage in active rough and tumble play, that they showed symptoms that were broadly analogous to those of attention deficit disorder in human boys.

And that you could also treat that with Ritalin the same way in rats as you could with boys. So there's that rough and tumble play issue. You know, and you might think too—the question is: one question is why might a mother be distrustful of the rough and tumble play episode?

Some of that might be sensitivity with regard to the kids, but a huge part of that also is trust on her—trust with regards to the father. You know, because it's rambunctious and noisy, and if she trusts, let's say, that act of masculinity that plays rough, then she'll stay away and let the fun happen.

But if there's distrust running through the family, then she'll stand between the kids and the father, and then he won't get to involve himself in that way, and then he'll turn off. And I've seen that happen in many, many families.

Okay, so there's rough and tumble play; that's a big one. What else did you see?

Let me take the evolution of how rough and tumble play goes and all the dimensions of where it go with the slippery slope that it leads to. So the father—what the mom—what neither the mom nor the dad know is that this rough and tumble play leads to the types of things that you just mentioned, which are also evident in elephants and so on.

But it also leads to the distinction between a child being able to distinguish between being assertive versus aggressive. So the kid starts, for example, maybe kicking the dad in the wrong place or poking the dad in the eyes or pulling the dad's hair. And the dad says, "Sweetie, you can fake eye contact to the left and then move to the right to win in this wrestling match, or you can—you know, you can do this, this and this, but you can't do these things."

Yes. And if you do those things, we'll stop the roughhousing.

Yeah. So there's a really important issue there: so two things there. So imagine that a rough and tumble bout is like a dance. Okay?

And the point of the dance is so that both people are having a good time while it's happening because otherwise it's not play, right? And as soon as either party is no longer having a good time, you've actually snapped out of the psychobiological function of the play circuit.

So basically, what you're telling the child by putting those rules on is we can interact physically within a very limited set of parameters. And what you have to learn to do is to be a sophisticated player within that set of parameters.

And you want to learn how to push the boundaries, right? Because the most fun rough and tumble play is right on the edge between assertiveness and aggression. And you can see kids—like I used to work in daycare centers when I was a kid—when I was 18, 19—and the kids would line up to rough and tumble play with me because that was still allowable then.

And they were so desperate for it; it was just ridiculous, and I could really tell the difference between the kids who had engaged in that sort of play and the ones that hadn't.

And the ones that hadn't were painfully awkward, and they would hurt themselves. And when you wrestled with them, they'd put their thumb in your eye or—and they would cry often too when they got surprised but not hurt, you know, because they couldn't tell the difference between just being startled and being hurt.

And so they were fragile, and that also made them not fun to play with. And the thing that's so interesting about that too is that Piaget talked about this when he talked about the development of children, is that, you know, the more sophisticated pretend play, and then sophisticated cognitive play that emerges, say, between five and seven, and then with the cognitive play older than that, is that unless you have that underlying psychomotor embodied dance down, you don't get to really proceed in a sophisticated way to those higher levels of play because other people don't want to play with you.

So the rough and tumble play—the importance of that can hardly be overstated.

So absolutely, and the framework here is that when you set up a system where you've said that, you know, men are part of the patriarchy, their desire is to dominate women and make rules to benefit men at the expense of them at the benefit of men at the expense of women, you have a framework, an emotional setting, which does not is not conducive to men saying, "Here's my value," or women saying, "Let me see what the checks and balances of parenting is that leads to the best of you coming out and the best of me coming out."

All of that has sort of—we've skipped over an inherent sense of "father knows best," "father knows less." And so the process that I'll be sharing in a moment of what roughhousing leads to and the slippery slope that happens when it doesn't happen is what has not even been nurtured as a possibility to be articulated in this culture at this time.

I also think too, you know, that if you have a partner who hasn't been played with, then that partner can't tell the difference between boisterous rambunctiousness and aggression.

And if there's a hypothesis about domination and the patriarchy running its course underneath that, then there's going to be conceptual confusion about the physical interactions that have the appearance of submission and dominance because that's part of the roughhousing play routine.

It's going to—that is going to be viewed through a lens of tyrannical interaction rather than just good fun. And I mean, you can tell the difference because if the kids are rough and tumble playing, they're unbelievably enthusiastic about it and engaged and laughing and giggling.

And like they'll play right to the point of exhaustion because they need it; they need it so much. But that's a hard thing to observe from the outside if you're not accustomed to that and if you don't have that framework of men having—and dads having a value to begin with.

Absolutely not.

So here's maybe what might ring be helpful for a mom to understand: at the rough and tumble play, we now know helps children distinguish between being assertive and aggressive, but a number of other things all also happen during that play, which is a bond that is created between the father and the child.

And in almost every—I've—doing expert witness work to help children have both parents have to divorce, I've observed more than 50 families, and usually, the father interacting with the children, and in almost every case, every case actually—I believe that I have seen this—is this bond is used by the father to say things like, "Okay, we're no more roughhousing now. Tell you what, you get your homework done; you get your chores done; you get all ready for bed; brush your teeth well.

And the bedtime is nine o'clock. Whenever you get all that done, we'll have between the time you get it done and the time of nine o'clock in order for you to have some more fun—either with roughhousing or reading your favorite story or whatever you prefer."

You know, with Panskepp's work too, he found that the little rats—the rats will work to enter a play arena because—because play—you think play is so—Panskepp established very, very clearly that there is a primary play circuit in mammals; it’s a separate psychobiological circuit. It's not exploration; it's a whole different motivational drive.

But that activity in that circuit is intrinsically pleasurable. And part of that appears to be because it's so key to proper socialization that it's regarded by children and by social mammals as intrinsically valuable.

And so it makes perfect sense that that can be used as a source of primary reward, and I think your comments about the man and the kids binding themselves together through play is also really important because one of the things that I do with young men who—you know, I think young men tend to be somewhat alienated from infants who are under about nine months old because they're not really equipped to know what the hell to do with them.

I mean, they can learn and they can be good at it, but it's not their domain of natural expertise. But once a kid hits about nine months and starts to be able to imitate and to pound and to—and to play and to respond to gentle teasing, like, that's a perfect time for the father to swoop in, which is very helpful for a mother, by the way, who wants to have another child, and to start really cementing a relationship that's based on that interesting combination of high-energy fun plus the disciplined interactions that are necessary as a precursor to that.

And if you interfere with that, then you stop the father from being able to form that pro—from liking his kids really, you know, because that's how the liking comes about is through play.

And so it's crucial of crucial significance—thank you. The additional framework that you're placing on this is really deepening my own understanding of it as well. A book called "Affective Neuroscience," written by Yak Panskepp, it's on my reading list on my website, and I would highly recommend that because he lays out the findings from the animal literature on the primary play.

It's really—he should have won a Nobel Prize for it! I mean, discovering an entirely new motivational system in the brain is a major, major contribution.

And also, the other thing that he did that was so cool and sort of reminded me of Jean Piaget's work a little bit is he made a very strong case that out of play emerges an ethic.

And you know, that's why I was so interested when you mentioned that interactions with fathers actually increase empathy because, you know, if someone has empathy for you, that means that— I mean, that can lead to a certain kind of narcissism, right? Because you're always the center of attention.

You're not empathic unless you learn that you're not any more important than the next person, and particularly the person that you happen to be playing with.

So, okay, so let's continue with what fathers are doing.

Yeah, so in that roughhousing, what happens is that the bond that is created by the dad allows the dad to say, "You've got, you know, here's— we’ll continue the roughhousing if you get, you know, between 8:30 and 9, if you if you have everything done."

But the bond—so that's interesting.

So you actually think—and I wonder if there's been any—see, we don't know much about the origin of the trait conscientiousness, which is at least in part the ability to delay gratification, and it is, after intelligence, it's the best predictor of long-term life success, especially in managerial and administrative jobs, in algorithmic jobs.

It's not associated with creativity, but that's a side issue.

So your hypothesis is that the primary way men are socializing that is by using work to play as a bridge?

Yes. That play creates a bond. So a lot of the problem is when moms often talk to say, you know, "You have to do this; you have to do that; you have to do this; you have to do that."

The mother is often experienced by the child as sort of the disciplinarian who's always making him or her do things, and there's the seeds of rebellion start to occur. I'm sort of like, "How much am I going to be myself? How much am I going to do what mom does? Do I want to be a mama's boy?" It doesn't even happen consciously, but you just sort of feel like you're being pushed down by all the rules.

But with Dad, the bond that is created and from that—and you want to return to that that connection.

So, it's like a child going on a roller coaster; you know, there’s an enormous amount of safety but you also—excitement, but also an enormous amount of safety.

And so you trust the dad to combine that both, and you want to return to that. So you're willing to focus on getting done what you need to do, your homework, your chores, your brushing your teeth, or whatever in order to get what you want to do, which is the, you know, postponed gratification.

But now let’s take the slippery slope when this doesn’t happen.

So, okay, so let me just add one more thing to that.

Well, the thing that's so cool about that is that you've also provided a really intelligent piece of parenting advice for fathers. It's like—because you're—hi, so let's say B.F. Skinner, who is the famous animal behaviorist, demonstrated quite clearly that you could train animals with reward more effectively than with threat or punishment.

Now, threat or punishment is necessary; obviously we wouldn't have biological systems subservient to those emotions if they weren't necessary. But reward is harder to use because you have to be much more attentive and intervene when something good happens.

And so you really have to be watching, but your hypothesis here is, "Look, fathers, spend a bunch of time playing with your kids and having as much fun as you can with them because by formulating that bond, you can use that as the source of reward that will be appreciated by the child with regards to disciplinary strategies."

So it's a twofold victory. One is it's fun, and you get to like your kids and have a good time with them. But the second is you have a very positive means of disciplining them in the best sense—encouraging them and disciplining them. So that's a really useful thing to know practically.

So deepening the trust of the kids like that, like you're playing and you're right on the edge that you were talking about, but there's Dad to make sure that the fun doesn't get too hard for your sister and so on. And so that's all happening at the same time.

Now, when that—right, and that's embodied. You can see that two ways. That's embodied trust.

So if you toss a little kid up in the air and catch them, I mean, it's very exciting to them, both being tossed up because of the threat, but then the relief that occurs because of the safety that's put in there.

So it's not abstract; it's really demonstrated. A dad tossing that child up and then, in fact, missing the child, quote unquote, and the child lands on the bed, and he's like enormous, like, "Oh!" You know, "I was missed!"

So you were going to catch me, but you know also recognized. Yes, well, that shows that things can happen that aren't entirely what you predict, but within the confines of a trusting relationship, that's still okay.

And then you could also imagine if the dad is wrestling with more than one kid at the same time, then he's also acting as just referee, right?

So—and then the kids learn how to be judicious in the distribution of attention; they learn how to play fair; they learn how everybody can have a turn and everybody wins at the same time.

And that bonding is part of what creates just everything you just said is part of what leads the child to have empathy training.

And the empathy training came from, "No, you were too rough on your sister there. If you try it again, you can't be that rough."

Oh, you still continue to be that rough? "Okay, let's no more play."

That's right.

Play stops when everyone isn't having fun.

What—when my kids were little, we had this couch that was a sectional in six pieces, and so we could put the couches facing each other, and then we put up the backs all the way around it, so it was like a little wrestling ring.

And so then I would take the kids in there and just wrestle them half to death, you know.

But one of the things I used to do was, if one of the kids was rough with the other and made them cry, then I noticed that the kid who made the other kid cry wouldn't look at the crying kid; they'd look away and avoid.

And so I always used to say, "No, no, no, you look! You look and you see what happened." Because that triggers that embodied empathy.

And then you can easily have a conversation and say, "Look, you know, is that how you want the game to go?" Or do you want everybody to have fun?

And the thing is, once the kid actually looks, then they've got it, right? Because they can't escape from that empathic identification.

And so, yeah, when the child doesn't have that, you know, we said we have all this data now—these 70 different areas where children do so much worse when they don't have a father—that involvement.

So let's look at the next stage of that now. When that father does not do this roughhousing and is just one example of many, and does not—is not enforcing boundaries, the child then doesn't learn to have that postponed gratification.

So we have hard data on this: that children raised predominantly by dads are only 15% likely to have ADHD; children raised predominantly by moms are 30% likely to have ADHD.

So if we looked at what we just talked about, the children that are raised by the dads are learning that they have to postpone that gratification in order to get the reward that they want.

Now you take that capacity to postpone gratification to school. The child without postponed gratification assigned a homework assignment doesn't really feel is oftentimes distracted by a text that's come in, distracted by the opportunity to play video games, distracted by wanting to exchange notes with other kids—distracted, distracted.

Sure, just—well, yeah, well the distraction thing about the dis—there's no need to explain ADHD. What there is a need to do is to explain why every kid doesn't have it.

And the answer is the answer that you just laid out is that some kids learn how to control their distractibility. It doesn't require an explanation, because people are distracted by what's immediately rewarding, and that doesn't require—it's like addiction.

Actually, addiction doesn't require explanation either. What requires explanation is the development of the resources that allow you to withstand addictive pressures in the face of the fact that they're everywhere, and they're powerful.

So it's the development of control that's really the curious issue. And I’ve never heard this—I’ve never heard anyone make this connection between the use of play as a reward and that delay of gratification.

That's a very, very interesting idea. That's very interesting.

And then let me take it another step further, if I may. So when this delayed gratification is happening and or does not happen, and then the boy isn't able to finish homework, he starts beginning to feel ashamed of himself.

Or if he's maybe athletic and his parents believe that it's really going to be helpful to the child to have beautiful dreams—sweetie, you want to be an NBA player? And you're tall, and you know, you continue practicing, you could be an NBA player and you can have your dreams.

But the post—he doesn't have that postponed gratification so cannot do the boring repetition that comes with all success, including being an Olympic star or an NBA player or anything else, or playing the piano or learning to read or a great example—certainly the violin.

And so you—so anything that is his dream, the bigger the dream, the bigger the disappointment.

And it's not just disappointment that he fears will happen to his parents, but also the sense that he says he's going to do one thing in school.

His teachers, his peers are not respecting him as much. The cheerleaders aren't going first and ten in a concussion again to him; they're doing it to somebody else at first and then do it again.

And so the boy is beginning to feel shame.

Yeah, well, you think shame—look, here's the precondition for shame. So let's say that you are attracted by a goal, naturally. And, you know, maybe that's scaffolded by your parents; maybe it's scaffolded by your peers, but it's something that you're naturally turning your attention towards; it grips you in some sense.

Okay? And we'll assume that it's a difficult goal. And so then there's an ethic that emerges out of that, which is that if that goal is valuable and it's difficult, then there's sacrifices that have to be made, delays of gratification that have to be implemented in order for you to be worthy to attain that goal.

Okay, that's all part of the game. If you think about it as a game, well, then if you observe yourself unable to play the rules of the game play by the rules, then how can you not have any—how can you not suffer shame and self-contempt?

Because you've already adopted an ethical framework, which is this is worth attaining. And if you observe in yourself then the inability to attain it because you're constantly being distracted, then you're going to have contempt for yourself, and then the way out of that—this is something I learned from Nietzsche—here's the terrible thing about that, because that's a great pathway to nihilism.

Because let's say you posit four goals in succession that you find valuable, and then you observe yourself unable to discipline yourself to attain the goals.

Well, the most—after four successive failures, it's like Homer Simpson said to Bart. He said to Bart, "You tried and you failed, and then you tried and you failed again. What did you learn?" And Homer says to Bart, "The conclusion is never try."

Right?

And so if you fail a few times at attaining something of importance because you see that you have no discipline, then the logical response to that is to cease positing goals.

Absolutely.

And that's exactly what happens. But we have, through technology, sort of a perfect escape. And that escape is into video games where you can identify with a hero, and you can lose the game as often as you wish to with nobody noticing.

And then as you begin to get better with certain—you know, with certain manipulations, you can play that game with certain types of people and increase your skill set at the game.

But you're never able to translate that into everyday life where, you know, and so you start becoming addicted to that game, which is designed to increase your dopamine without having to actually achieve anything.

Well, the thing about the games that's different, like the video games, what's different?

So a game for a little kid has to be immediately rewarding. That's why rough and tumble play works, for example; it has to be immediately rewarding.

And then the game shades into real life. But as the game shades into real life, what happens is the rewards are deferred, and you get more and more disciplined at not being immediately rewarded.

Like when you're learning to read or play the piano for the long-term goal.

The thing about video games is that they do require the development of skill, but the immediate reward is built in along with the delayed reward because otherwise, the game wouldn't be fun for someone who's learning.

And so the problem is that a lot of real-life games aren't necessarily fun while you're learning them because you have to attain a certain level of mastery, and that requires discipline.

That's also what's wrong with the idea that children can just learn in keeping with what they're spontaneously interested in. It's like there's some truth in that because why not follow a child's interests?

But the problem is that many highly skilled endeavors—virtually any endeavor that is going to be of economic or productive utility—requires an apprenticeship where there's a lot of grinding; there's a lot of just disciplinary, disciplined repetition.

And so, okay, well, all right, so—and then one more dimension of that is that as the boy gets to boy-girl age, if he's had her—if he begins to sense that he's heterosexual, he notices that the girls are far more interested in going out with the quarterbacks or the student body presidents or the performer type boys that are sort of honored in the school system and in life in general.

And so he begins to start withdrawing and fearing that he can't attract those girls, especially the ones he's most biologically addicted to—beautiful ones, the cheerleader types.

He starts withdrawing into porn, and a little bit of porn is not a huge issue, but the porn basically is stimulated—is based on the dopamine increasing with each new stimulus you have.

And so as he gets addicted to that dopamine, he begins to get addicted to only being able to be stimulated when the risk-taking is higher and higher.

So finally he succeeds in one girl, woman, being able to come over to his house and be sexual with her, but he’s so unable to be turned on just by the mere maybe light touch of a hand or turned on by just being fascinated by what she’s saying in the interaction, or some combination of the drama of being with her combined with a little bit of touch.

He’s so used to a huge amount of stimulus that occurs, and when he gets to be trusting him for a little bit, she said he says, "You know, can you be this way? Can you do this? Can you act this way?"

And she feels like just some piece of object that is being traded in for the porn, and eventually gets disgusted with him, withdraws, and he begins to say, "You know, all right, this convinces me I am as worthless as I thought I was."

And the only thing that will give me satisfaction is back to the porn, and what became a little bit of an addiction becomes more of an addiction even as he’s also becoming simultaneously frequently addicted to the video games at the same time.

And so all of this is that slippery slope from the roughhousing that the father is not able to articulate to the mother about the value of that, combined with the trust that you were integrating with that, combined with the lack of post—the bond, combined with the postponed gratification being taught, and then when the postponed gratification is not taught, the slippery slope down the hill to shame, self-disgust, and fear that if he tries anything, he’s just going to prove to himself and everybody around him that he’s one more failure.

And the degree to which he articulates the desire to try something is the announcement publicly to a group of people that he's really pretty much going to say, "Today, I'm going to try this," and tomorrow it's going to be a failure.

Until he becomes enormously shamed. In worst-case scenarios, this can lead to such depression that it creates a desire to commit suicide and in the very worst-case scenarios, it’s a belief, I believe, we’ve seen school shooters.

Yeah, well that brews resentment; absolutely man, that brews resentment and anger like nothing else.

And who will they get resentment and anger about? Who? It’s the classmates; it’s the teachers. Nobody appreciates that sweet sensitivity inside of him and sees him.

Well, I am so angry at that and one day, I have a desperate need to get their attention and say, "I count. I matter. Pay attention to me."

And you know, in worst-case scenarios, only a very small percentage, but in worst-case scenarios, you can understand the school shooting emerging from that.

Yeah, well for every kid who goes and shoots up a school, there's a thousand who are fantasizing in a direction that's headed that way, you know? And some of that's at the beginning of that.

It's something like, "Well, I'm very angry at people because they don't see the value in me," but if they get to the point where they're doing something like fantasy extreme violence, they're so far past that even—they think they've developed a real hatred for everything and a wish to see it obliterated.

And, and that's—that’s, you know, that's—well, obviously, that's the most terrible of the terrible outcomes that might be generated.

Okay, so you talked about rough and tumble play, delay of gratification; you tied empathy into that. What are there other cardinal things that you're seeing fathers do? Because that's pretty early on in life, right?

So you’re looking at the interaction with kids there between say a year old and five, six years old, seven years old, something like that.

What else do you see happening with fathers both at the early stages and then also later on?

Yes, another important thing is the concept of hangout time. Now for a mom listening to this who has a daughter, we now know that children who—daughters who have a significant amount of hangout time with their dads, that creates more psychological centeredness than any other single phenomenon.

With boys, it's also very important. So for example, let’s say you’re in a divorce situation and a father has the child for a short period of time, let’s say on a Saturday, and he picks his child up from a soccer game and says to, let’s say Josh, "Josh, how did the game go?"

And the kid is more like, "You know, the boy especially is more likely to say, "Okay, it was okay." "Well, tell me more, Josh." "It was just okay, Dad."

And so if at that time the dad has to drop the boy off to mom's because it’s the end of a visitation time, there’s nothing that happens beyond that, right?

Well, the boy is gonna be—you know, people- kids in particular, I think, although it also happens with couples, is that, you know, one of the things that you do to the person that you’re with to test if they care is to be somewhat withholding of information that might be relevant to see to what degree you care.

Because you know, if you ask me whether I’ve done something, how it went, one of the things I’m going to want to know is do you really care?

And if you're my father, I'm really going to want to know that. And so one of the ways I can gauge that is by asking you, but that that assumes that your answer is going to be reflective of your actual being, and there’s no reason to assume that.

A better way of doing it is for me to be a little bit withholding and a little bit resistant because then I can see, you know, are you going to poke me a bit? Because that's a fun thing to do; if you’re kind of teasing, you can say, "Look, kid," you know, poke him in the chest a few times, "Loosen up, and talk to me," you know?

And usually, if you do that with a kid— even an adolescent—they’ll laugh and, you know, kind of push your hand away and go, "Dad," but they’re happy to have that additional prodding to bring them out of their shell.

Yeah, and it's a demonstration that the kid actually cares. And you do need time for that.

So absolutely! So that the kid, if he’s done well or she’s done well, is very happy to say, "Ah, I scored three goals today! That's more than has ever been scored in the history of our school! Isn't that incredible?"

No problem, they'll share that right away. But the reason for the hesitation on saying something that they’re ashamed of, like I remember one father saying that the boy came home and he had been the goalie the week before, but the following week he was not chosen to be goalie, and he couldn’t understand why.

And so that he hesitates to say something for his dad because he doesn't want the dad to sort of either lecture him or disapprove of him or be disappointed in him or be, you know, sort of like—feel like, "That's not my son." You know, "I want my son to have scored the goals."

So with all those fears, the child, especially the boy when it comes to performance, will keep any failure to perform effectively to himself.

But now if the dad drops the child off at moms, that never gets sorted through. If the dad has hangout time with the children, let’s say they're doing homework together and dad maybe is watching TV and the kid is doing homework, and then they appear about the same time getting something from the refrigerator, and they have a little discussion about what he wants for dinner, and the dad asks him to help make dinner with him rather than just sit and do—take no responsibility, which dads tend to do— they ask the children to be helpful with the dinner making and preparing, not to serve them.

And so in that process of the child chopping up stuff and doing that type of boring thing, the child will tend to say, "You know, Dad, you know I was goalie last week, but I wasn't going this week. What's that about?"

And the dad will—and what the—and the child might say that to the mom even more quickly, but the child's expectations with the mom is the mom will give the child assurance the child will say something like and say, "Sweetie, it's no problem. You’re—you’re fine. You’re wonderful. You’re a very good goalie! Maybe this coach wanted to give the other kids a chance because you’re so good," etc., etc.

Whereas they expect from Dad a bit more confrontation, a bit more questioning.

Well, one of the things I've noticed in talking to my clinical clients about their intimate relationships is I've been trying to gauge rules of thumb for minimal necessary interaction time to maintain a relationship.

And with couples, I've observed that they need like one or two sessions of intimate time together a week at minimum, something like that, or things start to go south.

But they also need, as far as I've been able to tell, about 90 minutes of communication time across a single week just to keep each other updated in relationship to their stories.

And so two questions: One is, do you have some sense of how you would characterize hangout time, and how much of it there needs to be in order to not below go below, you know, a dangerous minimum?

And then the other thing I’d like to pick up on is you had talked a little bit about the more confrontational approach that a father might take when discussing a failure or an inadequacy or something like that on the part of a child.

And so I wanted to relate something that I've learned about talking to majority male audiences in the last year and a half, two years about responsibility and discipline and all of that.

See, you might think that calling someone on their failure is harsh and judgmental, but—and it is in a sense—but it's not harsh and judgmental about their potential.

You know, so if your kid comes to you and says, "You know, I screwed up and here's what I did and it didn't go so well," and you say, "That's okay, you're a wonderful kid," then the kid's stuck in a bind because they're not feeling so wonderful and they failed.

But if you say, "Well, look, you know, you're—that was stupid. Like, what the hell's wrong with you? Here's what you could do. Like, you’re better than that man! Get it together a little bit! Let’s come up with some strategies so that you can figure out how that's never going to happen to you again."

And so instead of putting your faith in who the child is right now—which I would say in some sense is the hallmark of impulsive empathy—you put your faith in who the child could be, and that's encouragement.

And I would say, in circumstances of failure especially, where the child is motivated to try again, encouragement beats impulsive empathy hands down as a mark of faith in who the child might be.

Yes, and it takes a while for the child to both reveal its vulnerability and also to have a faith that the father is respecting his will.

That the child tends to open up like a flower to the greater—to the greater to when she or he realizes that the security that the father is creating by being with them and talking the problem through is there.

Now, an ideal setting a father who is wise or a mother who is wise will not give a solution right away, will ask the kids something like, "So you know what did you observe? What’s your best guess as to what happened last week versus this week? What do you think was the judge's was the coach's best intent?"

And let the—and oftentimes inside of the child is a willingness or is a sense of probably what really did happen, but a fear of sort of acknowledging it to himself or herself, and especially acknowledging it to anyone else, because the person who they might acknowledge it to will not have respect for them.

And so being able to sort of give have the hangout time facilitates enough time to feel both that large basket of those large arms of security and nurture surrounding him or her.

The fact that the father is not going to give up time with me will be here for me and I can—and then when the father or the mother facilitates the exploration inside of himself about what the problem might be, let's let him help in a Carl Rogers—in a Rogerian type of sense—to find out the part of him that already knows the answer.

Then the child is experiencing both respect and a willingness to be confronted by if I don’t have the answer inside of me, my father will tell me the truth about what I might be need to do next, and that telling me the truth about what he needs to do next is his way of respecting me without even saying he’s respecting me because he wouldn’t be confronting me with the truth if he didn’t respect me.

Yeah, and more specifically—not even more specifically than me, if he didn’t respect my intrinsic ability to overcome obstacles and to grow.

Right? Which is the best—the best answer to someone who says I have a problem is, "Well, I have faith that you can overcome that."

Right? Not that you don’t have a problem or that you’re okay the way you are.

It’s like, "Yeah, yeah, that’s a problem, man, but, you know."

And then, you know there's another thing that you're talking about that's very much in keeping with I would say standard but relatively deep clinical wisdom, which is that people are much more likely to follow a set of injunctions if they generate them themselves.

And so we've had some really interesting experiences with this program we design designed called the future authoring program, and it helps people come up with a life plan.

So they have to craft a vision for their operations across the six or seven basic dimensions of life like intimate relationships, family, career ambitions, education, resistance to temptation, drugs and alcohol, care of mental and physical health, and so on, those fundamental dimensions use of productive use of time outside of work to ask themselves what they would want if they could have what they wanted to need along those domains three to five years down the road to craft a vision based on that set of wants and desires and also to write a counter vision, which is where could you be if you allowed yourself to fail catastrophically?

Where—what might that look like in three to five years?

And then to produce a plan. And it's had remarkable effects, particularly now young men are doing worse than young women in academic environments.

So the program doesn't seem to have as much effect for young women, but that might be because they're already doing better.

But it has a walloping effect on young men. In fact, for—in vocational junior college settings, our latest piece of data which was generated and published last year showed that we could reduce dropout among young men, especially aimless ones who hadn't done very well in high school.

We could drop their dropout rate 50%. And so—and one of the things I've observed about young men, and this might be because they're more disagreeable and confrontational than young women, is that unless they have formulated their own plan, they're unlikely to do something.

So when you're talking—I think this is true with young women as well—you want to talk to them and say, "Well, look, what do you think about what happened and how you're going to get out of it?"

Which is an excellent question because it says to the child, "You can think about what happened and be accurate, and you can think of a way out of it." And that's encouragement, right?

And that's what you want is to—you don't want to protect or shelter your child; you want to encourage them.

And so that collaborative problem-solving is a great way to do that.

Absolutely right—and I’ve seen this over and over again.

And certainly, the data that I gathered for "The Boy Crisis" very much shows that as well.

And he said the hangout time is part of what helps to do that, but also the checks and balances of parenting are so pivotal for mothers and fathers to understand.

And right along the lines of what you're talking about is, so mother and father, let's say, have the child come home, and the child says, "You know, Mrs. Myers, she hates me! She hates me! I can’t! I can’t be okay in school!"

And maybe the child's in second or third grade and a mother’s sort of reaction will tend to be more likely to be something, like, "Oh, sweetie, let me hear more."

And then when the child complains more about how much Mrs. Myers hates the child, the mom will tend to come up with a solution, like, "Let me talk. Wait till next week on Monday; I’ll talk to—I’ll make an appointment with the principal, and we’ll talk about seeing whether you can get into a different class than Mrs. Myers."

Dad will tend to say to a greater degree, "Sweetie, in life, you have to learn to get along with people who can’t get along with you. You know, what do you think is making Mrs. Myers upset about you?"

And the child may or may not be revealing.

And so the child will say, "Well, you know, do you want me to talk to Mrs. Myers about it?"

"No, no, no, no, no."

So, "Well, if I talk with Mrs. Myers about it, you know, what do you think Mrs. Myers would say?"

And then the child, under the threat of possibly the dad talking or the mom talking with Mrs. Myers, will begin to say what a little bit of what Mrs. Myers feels, and then negotiate an opportunity to talk to Mrs. Myers and then bring Mrs. Myers and the child together to have a discussion together.

And so to see whether the child and Mrs. Myers can work out an understanding where the child begins to understand, "No, it is not that Mrs. Myers inherently hates Jimmy. It is that there’s something else going on here."

And so the result of working all that through is a way of facilitating the child to discover its own solutions to a problem, talking it rather than getting a solution rather than being enabled by the system, and by the parent who will eventually disappear from the child’s life—or worse yet, not disappear from the child’s life.

And so these are—but oftentimes the mom says, "You know, the child is having a problem here. Why are you being so insensitive? Are you blaming, you know, Jimmy for creating this problem? He’s telling you that not only does Mrs. Myers hate him, but he also other kids hate Mrs. Myers as well.

And so it's not Jimmy’s fault. Are you—and so the mom will feel Dad as being insensitive when, in fact, Dad is being differently sensitive, and sort of long-term postponed gratification sensitive.

Yeah, well that's the thing, and that’s a lot colder a virtue, you know? Because—and it also sounds very much like it’s grounded in these psychobiological, at least partially psychobiological differences between men and women.

So women are higher in negative emotion, and they’re more empathic, and that's that short-term empathy.

And so that's perfectly in keeping with the approach that you just described. And the advantage—see, that's a particularly advantageous approach to very, very young children, especially infants, because to be wired properly to take care of infants, the infant is always right.

Hey, up until about nine months of age, or maybe a year of age, the right response to your infant if that person is crying is there's something you should do about it as fast as possible.

Well, we've talked a fair bit about what fathers can do to help their children learn to delay gratification and so on, we've talked a little bit about what mothers can understand about how to facilitate that and how to trust it.

Maybe we could talk a little bit about what families might do in order to improve the performance of their boys and their girls. You talked a little bit in your book about family dinner nights and their importance.

Yes, the most important—we already know that family dinner nights are important, but what makes family dinner nights even more valuable is when they don't become family dinner nightmares and knowing how to structure them so they don't become family dinner nightmares.

When somebody comes up to me after a presentation and says, "You know, I can’t get my children to give up electronics at dinner." I already know the beginning of the problem; that is that the children are in charge of the parents.

That, you know, that—and well what can I do to encourage my children to get involved with, you know, to leave the electronics behind?

And you know, number one answer is to require them to. It is not an option to sit down at dinner.

But maybe some nights, you'll want it to be; some nights—not. But if you're having a family dinner night, especially structured family dinner night, the number one rule is no electronics at dinner.

If that rule isn't violated, then the electronics are taken away for a reasonable period of time and taken away right away for a reasonable period of time once the rule is understood.

Right? And you can imagine that instigating wars in various households.

Yes, exactly. And then you begin to structure that family dinner night so that everyone has an opportunity to talk, and everyone has at the beginning a structured amount of time that they can check in to just say how their week went or how the week was going since the last time.

So everyone knows that it’s not 40 minutes for so and so, and one minute for me.

The interest in family dinner night will be zero for the one that’s one minute.

Well, that’s an extension of the idea of a fair game too and a refereed fair game; everyone has had—that as a family, our job is to make sure everyone's needs are being handled, thought of, and cared about, which is the way empathy is created.

Empathy is not created by a parent who’s always empathetic with a child's needs or desires. When a parent is always empathetic with a child's needs and desires, the child becomes narcissistic, not empathetic.

And that’s one of the things that we have made a mistake with.

You could say that three or four times in a row, I think, and that would be really good.

Yes, yes, right, because that's so crucially important.

Because you know if what you're learning is to put other people's feelings at the same level of importance as your own, then obviously that’s associated very tightly with delay of gratification, with learning how to listen, with turn-taking, with fair play and a refereed interaction—all of that.

And so the other thing that happens too, and you see this with couples, is that if they have that time together—something analogous to family dinner night, although I think the family dinner idea is a really good one for reasons I've mentioned here in a moment—is that what you're doing—imagine your family has a story.

And the story is where we came from, where we are, and where we're going together as a unit. And then so—and then each of the individuals within that story has a story.

And then what you're doing in those family dinners, that interaction time, is you're taking the individual threads of the individual story threads and you're weaving them together to make the collective story.

And that keeps everyone up to date and on the same page and able to and able to empathize in also a deep manner because if I don’t know where you are or what you’re up to, I can’t figure out what you’re thinking or feeling.

And so I have to know what story you’re acting out right now, and so do you. And in order for you to know that for me to know it, you have to be able to tell your story, and I have to be able to ask you questions about it.

Then I think the other thing that's really important about the shared meal is that, you know, human beings are really weird creatures because we seriously share food, and we're social eaters.

People don't eat well if they eat on their own, and so it's deeply rooted into us that idea of sharing food.

And so part of the extended process of socialization is to get everybody to sit down around food, to be polite and thankful for the fact of the food, to enjoy that, but then also to be able to give and take while that's being shared.

And that's, I would say, if the most fundamental element of socialization is something like the embodiment of rough and tumble play, the next layer on top of that would be the ability to sit down and share food and have civilized—have civilized discourse.

Absolutely! And that civilized discourse really needs to—the respect for story is so pivotal.

So what I teach, as you probably know, couples communication courses around the country, and one of the dimensions of it—the single most important thing that kills marriages or almost all relationships is our biologically oriented inability to handle personal criticism without becoming defensive.

So my first job is to teach couples how to get around that biological propensity to become defensive when they hear criticism.

One of the many steps in that process, which is much too long to go into now, but is to give them a picture of—a picture of a person that happens to be Mario Cuomo, the former governor of New York—that was taken by four artists of a picture that was taken at the exact same time, same place, etc., and there are four different types of artists that paint this picture of him, like Andy Warhol and Modigliani and so on.

And so the—and I work with every couple to understand that when you hear your partner's story, you will all—even though you're all looking at the same thing, there will be a different picture that is being created by each person at the table.

And so the job of couples is to understand how much of a sacrifice each person would make so the other person would live.

And yet how we're often not able to handle personal criticism and to sort of reorient ourselves before we handle personal criticism—to move ourselves into a place of really being fascinated by our partner’s story.

But at a family dinner table, that’s has to happen with every single member of the family; that when I say "Why—" when person A says, "But something's what—what were you talking about in school?" and somebody says, "Well, we’re talking about the MeToo movement."

And person A says, "Oh, the MeToo movement is stupid." Some person B says, "The MeToo movement is the best, most progressive thing that's ever happened!"

So it is—it is very important that the person who says it’s the best thing that ever has happened is listened to fully by the person who