Child Attachment Expert: Hidden Dangers Of Daycare, It Might Be Causing Future Issues For Your Kid! Birth Rates Are Plummeting & Its Terrifying! Dr Erica Komisar

Erica Komisar is a clinical social worker, psychoanalyst, and parent guidance expert with over 30 years of private practice experience. She is the author of books such as, ‘Chicken Little the Sky Isn't Falling: Raising Resilient Adolescents in the New Age of Anxiety’. In this conversation, Erica and Steven discuss topics such as, how the mental health crisis is impacting children, how attachment disorders are created in childhood, the dangers of the falling birth rate, and how daycare may cause future issues for your kid. 00:00 Intro 02:21 Erica's Mission 08:12 Who Are Erica's Patients? 09:35 How Have Social Changes Influenced Parenting? 13:00 Is the Role of a Mother More Important Than That of a Father? 16:30 Why Are Fathers Important From a Biological Level? 23:20 Erica's Unpopular Ideas About Parenting 25:17 Family Diaspora: Raising Children Without Extended Family 27:31 Can Raising Children Away From Extended Family Be Justified? 28:30 Voluntary Childlessness 29:25 Attachment Disorders 33:40 How Do Attachment Disorders Manifest in Adulthood? 34:54 Choosing a Partner Based on Attachment Styles 36:20 Predicting Relationship Success Based on Attachment Styles 37:53 Does Having More Children Correlate With Neglect? 39:19 Decline in Birth Rates 41:23 What Is Unique About Relationships With Your Own Children? 43:12 What Contributes to Growing Infertility Among People? 46:45 How Did Erica Manage to Balance Work and Motherhood? 48:48 Should Fathers Be the Stay-at-Home Parent? 51:18 Harlow's Study on Rhesus Monkeys 53:38 The Challenge of Motherhood in Poor Socioeconomic Conditions 57:36 Does More Paid Leave Equal Better Childcare? 59:10 Connection Between Upbringing and Success in Adult Life 01:01:40 ADHD: Why Has It Risen So Much in the Past Decade? 01:07:40 We're Medicating ADHD Wrong 01:09:26 The Top Stressors We're Exposing Our Children To 01:11:29 Is ADHD Hereditary? 01:16:50 What's Wrong With Medicating Children? 01:21:15 The Link Between Stress and ADHD 01:22:23 What to Do if a Kid Screams in a Supermarket 01:25:54 The Different Types of Trauma 01:32:43 Same-Sex Couples Taking Roles 01:38:50 What Should Career-Driven Mothers Do? 01:42:08 Not Everyone Can Do This Stuff 01:45:25 Children Don't Need Other Kids Until the Age of 3 01:47:00 Ads 01:48:59 What's So Important at 3 Years Old? 01:55:32 Can I Repair My Trauma and Brain Past My 30s? 01:58:44 Our Pain and Trauma Are Rooted in Childhood 02:02:33 Is "Daddy Issues" a Thing? 02:06:33 Are We Taking Men's Purpose Away? 02:10:42 Men's Testosterone Drops When They Become Fathers 02:13:03 What Happens When Men Become the Primary Caregiver? 02:16:22 Should We Split Schools Into Genders? 02:19:11 Testosterone Decrease 02:21:12 Raising Healthy Kids in a World of Technology 02:24:45 The Importance of Being Present With Your Child 02:25:48 What Should Employers Do? 02:27:22 Do You Realise How Controversial the Things You Say Are? 02:28:02 The Reason All of This Is So Personal to You 02:30:58 What Does Your Obituary Say? Follow Erica: Instagram - https://g2ul0.app.link/pwv9PCz0lRb Twitter - https://g2ul0.app.link/2EKsgfB0lRb Website - https://g2ul0.app.link/OPtiA4a8lRb You can purchase Erica’s books: ‘Chicken Little the Sky Isn't Falling: Raising Resilient Adolescents in the New Age of Anxiety’, here: https://amzn.to/41CKbWd 'Being There: Why Prioritizing Motherhood in the First Three Years Matters' - https://www.amazon.com/Being-There-Prioritizing-Motherhood-Matters/dp/0143109294 The The Diary Of A CEO Conversation Cards here: https://g2ul0.app.link/f31dsUttKKb Follow me: https://g2ul0.app.link/gnGqL4IsKKb Independent research: https://stevenbartlett.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/DOAC-Erica-Komisar-Independent-research-further-reading.pdf Sponsors: ZOE - http://joinzoe.com with code BARTLETT10 for 10% off WHOOP - https://JOIN. WHOOP. COM/CEO Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  One in five children will not leave childhood without developing a serious mental illness. Anxiety, depression, ADHD, behavioral problems. And what pisses me off is that we're not really educating or telling parents the truth. It's too high.

• 0:14Steven Bartlett?

  Why is it that what you say is so troubling for some people?

• 0:17Speaker 00

  Sometimes facts are an inconvenient truth, but everything I'm going to say is supported by research.

• 0:23Speaker 02

  Erica Komisar is a parenting expert and psychoanalyst.

• 0:26Speaker 00

  Who uses over 30 years of research

• 0:28Speaker 02

  to challenge the societal norms on parenting and early child development.

• 0:32Speaker 00

  There's some myths that really have to be debunked about how to raise a healthy child. And the first is daycare is good for children for socialization. No, it's so bad for their brain. And it's been known to increase aggression, behavioral problems, attachment disorders because of babies need their mothers for the first three years for emotional security.

• 0:50Steven Bartlett?

  Can a father do that?

• 0:51Speaker 00

  So fathers are important in a different way. And I'll go through all of that. But they're both critical because if you're raised without one, you are missing a piece. And then there's quality versus quantity time. Myth, you need to be there a quality of time as well as a quantity of time. You can't have a fabulous career and then come home and be present for your child on your time. It needs to be on their time. And there's more.

• 1:14Steven Bartlett?

  And we're going to go through all of them. But are there any areas of privilege that you need to acknowledge? Maybe someone who doesn't have a partner there or someone who is in an extremely difficult economic situation.

• 1:23Speaker 00

  I do, but there are ways to creatively deal with it. And I'll go through each of them. So there's.

• 1:30Steven Bartlett?

  I want to keep the diary of a CEO free and not behind any kind of paywall or subscription model forever. And the way that we do that is that you guys choose to follow and subscribe to this show. So if you're listening to the show right now, you might have been sent the episode. You might have listened to a couple before. Can you do me a favor? And if you do me this favor, I promise that I'm going to fight every turn over the next 10 years to keep this show completely free without paywalls and without any kind of cost to the user. Can you hit the follow button? The follow button will be on whatever app you're listening to now. It might be Spotify or Apple or something like that. But hitting that follow button, which is usually in the corner of the app or a little tick, is the reason this show will stay free forever. Forever. Thank you so much. If you do that for me, thank you so much. I really appreciate it. Back to the episode.

• 2:19Steven Bartlett?

  Erica, you're clearly on a mission.

• 2:23Steven Bartlett?

  And I get that energy from you that there's really an idea that you believe that much of the world doesn't believe or is struggling to accept in some way. But it's an important idea. What is the mission that you're on?

• 2:39Speaker 00

  I like to think of it as three Ps. Presence, prioritization, and prevention. And I'll go through each of them.

• 2:48Speaker 00

  My mission is to educate parents and policymakers and clinicians and educators about the fact that for children to be mentally healthy in the future, you have to be physically and emotionally present for them throughout childhood, but particularly in the two critical periods of brain development, which are zero to three and nine to 25, which is adolescence. So in those two critical periods of brain development, particularly zero to three, much of a child's development depends on their environment, and you are their environment. So I run around the world talking about the importance of physical and emotional presence. Attachment security.

• 3:32Speaker 00

  Attachment security is the foundation for future mental health. Prioritization. We prioritize everything today other than our children. We prioritize our work, our careers, our material success, our personal desires and pleasures. But what we're not prioritizing is children. And, you know, that's a problem because if we don't prioritize them, they break down. They may break down at three. They may break down at eight, or they may not break down till they're in adolescence. But eventually, they break down. And prevention, there's so much that we can do. We have a mental health crisis now in the world. It varies to a certain degree in America.

• 4:17Speaker 00

  One in five children will not leave childhood without breaking down at some point, without developing a serious mental illness. Anxiety, depression, ADHD, behavioral problems, suicidal thoughts. So we have a problem. In the UK, it's one in six. In America, it's one in five. Around the world, it's about one in five. That is a shocking figure. And so, and the truth is, we can do a great deal to prevent that. The idea that we are trying to put out fires without talking about what is the origin of these issues. The way that the mental health care system works now, it's like what I call cutting the grass.

• 5:00Speaker 00

  Children are medicated, which is basically just pain management. They're given CBT therapy, which again is just pain management. But why aren't we asking the important questions, which is, where does emotional regulation originate? Where does it come from? When does it start? How do we foster development in children from a very young age to promote resilience to stress and adversity in the future? And so those are my three missions.

• 5:30Steven Bartlett?

  And for someone who doesn't know your work and isn't aware of you, they might be thinking, how would you know, Erica? How would you know the answer?

• 5:41Speaker 00

  So I'm a psychoanalyst. I'm also a social worker. I started out as a social worker and then became a psychoanalyst. I'm also an author of books on parent guidance and parent education. And I've been in practice seeing patients. So the majority of my work is still seeing patients. I have a full-time job of seeing patients. And as someone who is also a parent, I have three children of my own. And so as a parent, as a clinician, as an author who has for the past 20 years been researching, and what I did is I collected research in epigenetics and attachment theory and neuroscience and wrote my first book, Being There.

• 6:26Speaker 00

  Because what happened is I was seeing this uptick in mental illness in children, and this is really how I got into it. About thirty years ago, I started practicing about thirty six years ago. But I was probably five years into my practice and I was seeing that the families that were coming to see me had younger and younger children that were being diagnosed with very serious mental illnesses and being medicated at a very young age, basically silencing their pain. And what I was observing in my practice is that those children who were doing the least well were the ones whose mothers were the least present in their lives.

• 7:09Speaker 00

  So their primary attachment figures were the least present in their lives. And so then I started looking at the research. I looked at all the neuroscience research since the nineties and all of the new, new research that had come out. I looked at the old attachment theories which had been around since the sixties and I looked at the epigenetic research, which was rather new too. And I saw this trend. I, I saw that we were abandoning our children for our own desires, for our careers, for material success. And there was a great deal of misunderstanding about the irreducible emotional needs of children.

• 7:49Steven Bartlett?

  We're going to go through all of that today. I'm very excited to learn more about all of this. I'm not a parent myself. From all the investigative research we've done, you have three very well-adjusted children. So congratulations for that and I hope to have successful children myself one day. But I'm also just really interested in understanding myself through the work that you've done and the work that you continue to do because we're all at one point children and much of the fingerprints of that early experience still exists in us today. So I'm keen to understand how things that might have happened to me or anyone listening today when we were younger may have shaped us in pro-social, antisocial ways or productive or unproductive ways. You mentioned that you still see clients and patients today.

• 8:32Steven Bartlett?

  What kind of patients do you see? What are they struggling with and who are they? Are you seeing the parents, the kids, both?

• 8:40Speaker 00

  Well, I have a very large parent guidance practice because of the books that I write and the articles I write. I also write for the Wall Street Journal and other newspapers. [10.19 So I, you know, people find me through my writing and then they reach out for help. And, and so I have, the parent guidance basically means people come to see me, either both parents or one parent, because they have questions about their child's development or something's going wrong. Their child's starting to, to develop symptoms and they don't want to medicate them and they want to understand what's really at the root cause of, of, of the issue. And so that's a, a good portion of my practice, but I also see

• 9:21Speaker 00

  individual patients for depression and anxiety and I see couples and, you know, the joke about psychoanalysts is we're all specialists in depression and anxiety. But, um, yeah, so I see individuals and couples, but a lot of parent guidance work.

• 9:36Steven Bartlett?

  And they come to you typically because they're, they're noticing something is not right with their child?

• 9:41Speaker 00

  Sometimes they'll come preventatively because they want to raise a healthy child and there's so much white noise in society. There's so much of misinformation. Our instincts are to lean into our children. Our evolutionary drive is to create a feeling of safety and security for our children and to be as present as possible and to soothe them when they're in distress and to be there to teach them our values. And, but society took a turn. It took a turn in the, I suppose you could say going back to the industrial revolution. If I really want to go back, I'll say the industrial revolution was a time when women

• 10:24Speaker 00

  were forced into the workplace, into factories and cities, you know, they were separated from children for the first time. But really the turn that society took that, that I think has a lot to do with what's happening today is the Me movement of the sixties and also the feminist movement. Both of those movements, which had a tremendously positive impact on society in one way, also had a tremendously negative impact on society. When women decided that it was cool to go to work and to work full-time out of the home, you know, everybody cheered and said, great, you know, women have the same rights as men and now everybody can be in the workforce and be independent and make money and do their own thing. Me, me, me, me, me.

• 11:09Speaker 00

  The problem is that children were dropped. They were abandoned. And their needs, which are not needs that are going to shift because society shifts, because they have irreducible neurological, emotional needs. So we know that babies are born neurologically and emotionally fragile. And so what that means is they're not born resilient. And today, what's being projected onto babies is they can handle a lot. They can handle stress, they can handle separation. They can handle you going back to work after six weeks or three months and leaving them

• 11:49Speaker 00

  in daycare with strangers or, you know, and from an evolutionary perspective. Babies have always needed the physical, skin-to-skin contact with their mothers for the first year. Most parts of the world, babies are worn on their mothers' bodies. Because mothers perform a number of really important functions for babies that are biological functions, based on our evolutionary need to provide our babies with what we call attachment security. So, you know, society took a turn and it's caused a lot of damage. I mean, this mental health crisis in children, I saw coming 30 years ago.

• 12:31Speaker 00

  And it was already, you know, so, you know, I have friends and colleagues like Jonathan Hyde, who says, "Oh, well, it didn't start till social media." And that's false. Because I was seeing this uptick, and if you really look, there was an uptick in mental illness in children going back decades. And it had everything to do with the shift in society towards self-centeredness, towards narcissism, towards individualism, towards me, me, me. And so, you know, and I always say that you don't have to have children, period, to have a satisfying life. But if you're going to have children, you need to be equipped to care for them.

• 13:13Speaker 00

  Because having children alone, without really understanding what it means to care for them and being prepared to take on that responsibility, is causing our children to break down.

• 13:24Steven Bartlett?

  Why do you mention mothers and not fathers in that? Because you seem to have an emphasis on the role that a mother plays, and it seems to be more important in your view than the role that a father plays, or maybe even that a nanny or some other caregiver could play. And I noticed that on your first book, which was written in 2017, Being There, on the cover it says, "Why prioritizing motherhood", in bigger letters, "in the first three years matters", scientifically, evolutionarily, with studies and research, how can you make the case to me to make me believe that the role of the mother in particular is essential versus a father or other caregiver?

• 14:01Speaker 00

  So in fact, in the book, it talks about the difference between mothers and fathers, because that's an important question. And the reason I wrote about mothers is not because fathers are unimportant, but fathers are important in a different way. So there's a whole debate in society about this kind of idea of gender neutrality, that mothers and fathers are interchangeable. But actually, from an evolutionary perspective, as mammals, they're not interchangeable. They serve different functions. And those roles and those behaviours are connected to nurturing hormones. So mothers are really important for what we call sensitive empathic nurturing when children are infants and toddlers. That means that when children are in distress,

• 14:46Speaker 00

  mothers soothe babies and therefore regulate their emotions from moment to moment. Every time a mother soothes a baby with skin-to-skin contact and eye contact and the soothing tone of her voice, she's leaning into that baby's pain and she is regulating that baby's emotions. And the way I like to think about it is that, you know, when babies are born, they're born emotionally disjointed. Think about sailing in the Atlantic. This is how babies' emotions go. They'll go from zero to 60 in three seconds with their emotions. And where we want to get babies is to sailing in the Caribbean,

• 15:28Speaker 00

  not flatlining, but we want them to be able to regulate their emotions, but they're not born that way. And so mothers...

• 15:36Speaker 00

  Because they soothe the baby from moment to moment, when they're physically and emotionally present enough in the first three years, they help a baby to learn how to regulate their emotions. So by three years of age, eighty-five percent of the right brain is developed. And by three years of age, babies can then start to internalize the ability to regulate their own emotions. Now, if mothers aren't present as the primary attachment figures, to do that mirroring of emotion, to do that soothing of their emotions, then babies don't learn how to regulate their emotions. The other thing that's important that mothers do is they buffer babies from stress by wearing them on their body for the first year. And then by being as present as possible for three years,

• 16:21Speaker 00

  they actually protect babies' brains from cortisol, the stress hormone. So there is a hormone called oxytocin. It's the love hormone, and it is protective against cortisol. The more a mother nurtures with sensitive empathic nurturing, meaning when the baby cries, the mother goes, "Oh, sweetheart, you know, let me see the boo-boo, let me kiss the boo-boo." That actually raises the oxytocin in the baby's brain, which then protects the baby from cortisol.

• 16:53Steven Bartlett?

  Can a father do that?

• 16:54Speaker 00

  So, now, fathers. Why are fathers important? So fathers also produce oxytocin, but it has a different effect on their brain. So for mothers, oxytocin makes mothers sensitive empathic nurturers, very vigilant to the baby's distress. When fathers produce oxytocin, it comes from a different part of their brain, and it makes them more what we call playful tactile stimulators of babies. What does that sound like to you?

• 17:22Steven Bartlett?

  Playful tactile stimulators of babies?

• 17:25Speaker 00

  Throwing the baby up in the air, tickling the baby, and running after the baby, and roughhousing. And so that's important for a variety of reasons. First, it encourages things like exploration and risk-taking. It encourages separation. And fathers do this really important thing, which is they help the baby to learn to regulate certain emotions. So mothers help to regulate sadness, fear, distress. Fathers help to regulate excitement and aggression. So when fathers aren't in the house, when there are single mothers raising children without a father, Often little boys develop behavioral problems is what we're seeing, that they can't regulate their aggression.

• 18:09Speaker 00

  Because fathers help little boys, in particular, but little girls too, to regulate aggression. So when fathers aren't around, you'll often see little boys who are more impulsive, who are more aggressive. So the answer is, fathers and mothers are both critical to the development of children, which is a very controversial thing to say today. Because if you're raised without one, you are missing a piece. But they're not the same. And they're not the same because our hormones dictate they're not the same. So fathers produce a hormone in great quantities called vasopressin. Vasopressin is the protective aggressive hormone. And what does it do? It helps fathers to protect their family.

• 18:53Speaker 00

  There was a study that was done where mothers and fathers lay in bed. And the baby cries. It was out of the UK, this study. The baby cries. And the father sleep through the baby's distress cries, but the mothers wake up right away. Okay. But with the rustling of leaves outside the window, the mothers sleep through it and the fathers wake up right away. Because the fathers are attuned to predatory threat. So our nurturing hormones make us different. I mean, the fact that we can say that there are many things that are similar between women and men, of course, we're both intelligent, we can both be ambitious.

• 19:36Speaker 00

  But I think the idea that we want to kind of make everything the same, when it's just not factual. It is the inconvenient truth that mothers and fathers, nurturing hormones dictate that if they are healthy and they've been raised in a healthy environment, they are different. Now, does that mean that a father can't raise a child and be a sensitive empathic nurturer? It doesn't mean he can't take on that role. But if, as a society, we can't acknowledge the differences, then a father can't learn to be a sensitive empathic nurturer. Meaning, these are instinctual behaviors. And so that infant, if that father is going to stay home with that baby,

• 20:19Speaker 00

  acknowledging the differences allows that father then to become a sensitive empathic nurturer.

• 20:26Steven Bartlett?

  So interesting because these aren't the ideas that are socially accepted, or at least the ideas you see on social media. And funnily enough, as you were speaking, I recorded everything you said and I ran it through AI and AI said the core ideas that you shared are well supported by evolutionary psychology and neuroscience, which is quite surprising because usually AI argues with people.

• 20:48Speaker 00

  I mean, so, so the thing is, none of the books I write are based on opinion. So I'm, I'm very skittish about saying anything that isn't backed up with research. So it's everything that I write about and speak about is, is supported by research.

• 21:06Steven Bartlett?

  Why is it that what you say is so troubling for some people? Have you, you know why, right? Because it, because it makes us confront a set of realities that.

• 21:14Speaker 00

  It's an inconvenient truth, to quote Al Gore. It's an inconvenient truth. Sometimes facts are an inconvenient truth, just like, you know, climate change is an inconvenient truth. This is an inconvenient truth. It inconveniences people. It also makes people feel guilty. So I don't believe that guilt is a bad feeling. I don't believe that guilt is a bad thing. Guilt is a sign that your ego is functioning. It's a sign that the part of you, the part of your ego called the superego can identify something that feels right and wrong. So if you look at a baby who's crying, who's your baby, and you feel nothing, that means that

• 21:56Speaker 00

  there's a part of you that is dead inside. There's a part of you that is unempathic towards your own young. And we would say that that doesn't make that person a bad person. It makes that person someone who probably had some early trauma themselves, right? It means that they probably have some kind of attachment disorder where they can't. Be attuned to their their baby's pain, right? So when you are guilty, it means you have internal conflict. It means two parts of you are struggling with each other. The part of you that wants to do whatever you want to do. I want to go out to work. I want to make money. I want to be free, you know? And the other part of you that says, wait a second, but my baby, my baby needs me.

• 22:41Speaker 00

  Look at my vulnerable baby. Look how sad. Look at the distress that my absence is causing that baby. So if we don't feel guilt, then our species is lost. We're lost. Now, excessive guilt is another thing. If you're a good enough mother or a good enough father and you still feel guilty, then we call it anxiety. But for the most part, what I say makes a lot of women and men feel guilty. And again, I don't see that as a bad thing. And I think when we tell parents to turn away from their guilt instead of turning toward it, when we turn towards our internal conflicts, we tend to make better decisions for ourselves,

• 23:25Speaker 00

  for our children, for our families. But when we turn away from those conflicts, we tend not to make good decisions. And those tend to have long term consequences.

• 23:37Steven Bartlett?

  What exactly are you inconveniencing with your truth? What are the ideas that you're?

• 23:42Speaker 00

  That you have to sacrifice time and money and freedom? That if you want to raise healthy children, it's going to require discomfort and frustration and sacrifice. And what's interesting is that what's also happened is because we're raising our children in such a selfish, self-centered environment, young people are more fragile. They are more emotionally fragile. More of them have attachment disorders. They can't bear frustration. They can't bear pain. They can't bear sleeplessness. You know, the idea that you have to get a baby nurse because you can't get up in the middle of the night with your own baby.

• 24:25Speaker 00

  And that's become the norm in certain socioeconomic circles. I mean, so.

• 24:32Speaker 00

  Women and men always raised children in in history in extended family circles. Right. They weren't isolated. And today, parents are very isolated. So you would have your mother staying with you, or you'd have your sister staying with you, or you'd live in a big house and there'd be people to support you.

• 24:55Speaker 00

  I started a nonprofit recently because I found that so many mothers, it's called attachment circles, so many mothers feel so isolated that dealing with the pain and the discomfort of mothering alone is too much for them. So there is that. So we live in a very strange society where people are separate from one another and their own houses and apartments and they don't depend on one another because dependency is a bad word. And but there is also this issue of how are we producing such fragile fragile youth that even the discomfort and the frustration of raising children is too much for them?

• 25:39Steven Bartlett?

  There's a big economic component to this as well, right? Because if you're raising children in isolation, the probability that you have disposable income, or at least enough money to be able to just stay at home and raise the kids and still maintain any standard of quality standard of life is lower if you're not doing it with a big extended family that can support and and pay for some of those costs.

• 26:05Speaker 00

  Interestingly, yes and no to your question.

• 26:10Speaker 00

  People who have less economic resources are in general less isolated, but they are also isolated today. You have a lot of single mothers raising children, not in an apartment with other family members who've had to move to other cities or countries to make a living, who are really isolated. You know, again, I think it crosses socioeconomic lines.

• 26:41Speaker 00

  But with wealthier people, more affluent people,

• 26:46Speaker 00

  they're opting for isolation, many of them. They're buying big houses, they're living in the suburbs, or they're not wanting to lean on anyone, right? So we have what I call a family diaspora. It's really what it is, which is that people will move away from their families of origin when they have children, which is very bizarre and anti-instinctual. So the world's become a global place and we can move wherever we want. But doesn't it make common sense? Isn't it a reasonable clause that you would want to move closer to your extended family, even if they're a pain in the neck, unless they're abusive? Because it provides you with support.

• 27:31Speaker 00

  It provides you with extended family support. But that's not what's happening. People are choosing to live geographically distant from their families of origin. And so it's making it harder for families. It's making it harder for women. It's making them feel more isolated.

• 27:49Steven Bartlett?

  What if they want to? They've got their own career. They've got their own passions. There are things that they love doing. And that means that they have to be working in a major city or they have to be traveling to pursue those things.

• 28:01Speaker 00

  You just said it. What if they have passions? What if they have a career? The problem is children do best in extended family situations. So you can have a fabulous career and move far away from your family. And when you're young and single, and I even call it single when you're married but don't have children, you're still really single. You know what I say to parents is that your life won't be so fabulous if you have children and you're not present for them physically and emotionally, particularly in the early years. Because what happens is they break down. And the expression goes that a parent is only as happy as their least happy child.

• 28:45Speaker 00

  And so there is no fabulous life if your children are breaking down. And that's what families are learning, is that all of that freedom and all that fabulous me time comes at a cost if you have children.

• 29:01Steven Bartlett?

  So one would say then, well, I just won't have children then.

• 29:04Speaker 00

  And that would be fine. And so there are a lot of people that are saying today, I don't see the value in being responsible for another human being. And what they're missing out on is the deep and rewarding emotional connection to your children. It's a love like no other love. But if you've had, if you've had trauma as a child, if you've had parents who were narcissistic or resented parenting, or, you know, were distracted or mentally ill, you know, you may already have had that trauma that that implies that later it's harder to connect, right?

• 29:49Speaker 00

  So those attachment disorders that I was referring to earlier, there's three kinds of attachment disorders. There's the avoidant attachment disorder. So what does that mean? So a healthy attachment looks like this. When you return home, your child feels so securely attached to you. Meaning you've gone out for an hour or two for dinner with your spouse. You come home and your baby is happy to see you and the reunion, what we call the reunion, is a beautiful reunion. The baby is joyful and happy and, you know, that's healthy attachment. It means that you've made your baby feel so safe and secure because you are there primarily and have prioritized them the majority of the time

• 30:33Speaker 00

  as the primary attachment figure, that when you come home, your baby welcomes it. But what we're seeing is more and more children developing attachment disorders because their parents are pushing the limits of how much they can leave those babies and putting them in things like institutional care and leaving them for long hours at a time and traveling for their fabulous careers and their fabulous lives at ages when babies really can't tolerate that kind of separation. When a parent comes, when the primary attachment figure, usually the mother, comes home and the baby turns away from you and turns toward the babysitter or just turns away. That baby has the beginning of what's called an avoidant attachment disorder.

• 31:18Speaker 00

  Now that's correlated later on with things like depression and difficulty-forming attachments later on.

• 31:28Speaker 00

  The next kind of attachment disorder is called an ambivalent attachment disorder. And the mother then comes home and the baby clings to the mother for dear life. Because the internal voice in that baby is my mommy's gonna leave me again. So I have to hold on to her. Now, that baby is fractious and can't be soothed and will not let go of that mother. You know, holding on for dear life. What I call like the rhesus monkeys did to the wire cages, right? And that's correlated later on with anxiety in youth.

• 32:04Speaker 00

  The disorganized attachment disorder is different than the other two in that the other two have a strategy. So think of an attachment disorder as a strategy. A child who's left for too many hours by their parent or whose parent is physically present but emotionally checked out. That baby has to cope, has to have a strategy. Turning away from the mother is a strategy. And the internal narrative is my mommy isn't present for me, can't, isn't, isn't here for me, won't, won't be there for me. I can't trust my environment. And that baby says, and I'm gonna have to cope on my own. What we call learned helplessness. The ambivalent attachment disorder, you know, that baby is, the strategy is, you know,

• 32:48Speaker 00

  I'm gonna hold on because if I don't hold on, she's gonna leave again. Disorganized attachment disorder is the hardest to treat because the baby has no strategy. So the baby cycles through many strategies. The baby will go from clinging to avoiding to being enraged and even slapping or hitting the mother and then cycling through again. And that baby that develops a disorganized attachment disorder, those are more, those babies, it's correlated later with borderline personality disorder. And we're seeing a huge rise in borderline personality disorders. And those are the kids who are cutting themselves, who are trying to commit suicide.

• 33:31Speaker 00

  We have a, a mental illness crisis, the likes of which we've never seen in history. And it has everything to do with how we're raising our children.

• 33:40Steven Bartlett?

  You seem pissed off under that calm demeanor.

• 33:43Speaker 00

  Pissed off? Yes, I suppose I am. I'm not pissed off at the people. I'm pissed off at a society that is lying. We're not really educating or telling parents the truth.

• 33:57Steven Bartlett?

  So there's four attachment disorders. Avoidant, secure, ambivalent, disorganized.

• 34:03Speaker 00

  Well, one, secure, isn't a disorder. So there's secure and then there's three attachment disorders.

• 34:08Steven Bartlett?

  Avoidant, ambivalent, disorganized.

• 34:10Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 34:11Steven Bartlett?

  How does that manifest when you're an adult? So how would I know? Because I can relate to some of these and I'm wondering how that would then manifest in my relationships in my life as an adult outside of the obvious mental health situations.

• 34:24Speaker 00

  So avoidant, an avoidant attachment disorder would be someone who can't form meaningful and deep connections, can't commit, has difficulty committing, has difficulty trusting in the intimacy and the depth of intimacy in a relationship. An ambivalent attachment disorder would be someone who's highly, highly anxious, someone who clings to you, calls you, maybe a woman you've dated in the past who called you five times a day to check on you and was worried that you'd be the little fish that swam away and suffocate. They suffocate the people they love because they're afraid to let go.

• 35:08Speaker 00

  Disorganized attachment, borderline personality disorders, they tend to be very emotionally volatile. There's a lot of anger there and there's a lot of self-harm, self-harming behavior there.

• 35:22Steven Bartlett?

  Do they end up attracting a certain attachment style? So if I'm an avoidant, do I then end up attracting avoidance? Or do I, is there any research on that, on how we then date? I'm guessing secures go for secures.

• 35:36Speaker 00

  Yeah, secures, well, if you're healthy, you're attracted to reciprocally healthy relationships and you trust your environment. So you trust in loving relationships and avoidance, sometimes you're attracted to avoidant.

• 35:51Speaker 00

  People because there's no conflict there. So in other words, someone who can't commit with someone also who can't commit. That can break down those at some point. So remember that these are pathological defenses. So, you know, we use the word defense because it means to protect one, right? And defenses help us until they no longer help us. And so we say attachment disorders are pathological defenses, meaning they don't usually last a lifetime. They break down at some point. And so you might be with another avoidant attachment disordered person. But at some point, one of you breaks down and then realizes that you need the other.

• 36:33Speaker 00

  And then, you know, then you're within a relationship with someone who can't give back. So, yeah, as we say, like levels of water meet. So people will be attracted to one another often of the same ilk. But it isn't necessarily a healthy relationship.

• 36:50Steven Bartlett?

  And of all these four attachment styles, who do you think, which attachment style, in your opinion and from your observations and the people that you've seen, is most likely to have a successful and then also unsuccessful relationship?

• 37:04Speaker 00

  Oh, well, secure attachment will have a successful. I mean, people with secure attachment will be drawn to healthy, reciprocal, loving, deep connections because they've had a deep and loving connection with their mother. So remember I said that it's only after three years of age that you internalize a feeling of security. And where you internalize the feeling that the world is a safe place and you can trust the people in it. And you can trust to love another person. And so, you know, we throw that word trust around. We don't realize that it comes from the very beginnings of our development.

• 37:46Speaker 00

  When we don't trust others, it's generally because we couldn't trust those that we were to depend upon when we were at our most vulnerable stage.

• 37:57Steven Bartlett?

  And what about the alternative? So if, which of these attachment styles is least likely to have? Successful relationships.

• 38:04Speaker 00

  That's disorganized, yeah. They have a very hard time forming relationships, holding on to relationships. Yeah, I would say it's, it's, they're the most complicated to treat. And they're also the most complicated in terms of, you know, being able to have successful relationships in the future.

• 38:24Steven Bartlett?

  I was wondering, as you were speaking, whether if I have more kids, so if I have ten young kids.

• 38:29Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 38:30Steven Bartlett?

  Is there a higher probability that of neglecting those kids? Because I, if I'm a mother, I just don't have time for all of these kids at the same time. They can't all be on my chest at the same time.

• 38:39Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's, it's a good question. Well, there's something in the developing world called maternal depletion syndrome, which is that mothers can actually die in the developing world of having too many children in too short a period of time. They get depleted physically, but they also get depleted emotionally. I'm going to say it right now, so everybody can hear it who's watching this. Having children is stressful. It is frustrating. It does require that you are sleepless for the first five years. It requires that you can tolerate a lot of discomfort and frustration. So if there was a job description, first it would say the most joyful, enriching thing you can do in your entire life.

• 39:23Speaker 00

  But what comes with that to foster healthy development is frustration, lack of sleep, stress, discomfort. And so that should be part of the job description.

• 39:36Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, it seems to be such an important principle for life generally, that everything has a trade off. And I think, was it Einstein that said for every force has like an equal and opposite counterforce or something to that effect? And a lot of people are choosing not to make the decision to have kids. I was looking at some stats around this. The European Union witnessed only 3.8 million births in 2022. Nearly half the number recorded six decades ago, marking one of the lowest birth rates in history. France, for example, known for its robust family policies, has seen a decrease from eight hundred and thirty thousand children born in two thousand and ten to just six hundred and seventy thousand in two thousand and twenty-three, the lowest since World War Two.

• 40:21Steven Bartlett?

  And this is a huge global trend across especially countries that have a lot of money.

• 40:27Speaker 00

  It is. So I speak at a big conference called the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship, and they talk about a lot of these alarming dropping birth rates. The truth is, though, that as countries become more developed, birth rates do decline to a certain degree. That has to do with economics, some of it. But there is a trend that's happening that's worse than this, which is people, it's not that they're having less children, which actually, you know, everybody has their own limits in terms of their capacity to give and to love. And so for some people, maybe one child is enough. For other people, five children isn't enough, meaning they have so much inside of them to give, right?

• 41:12Speaker 00

  But the alarming thing for me isn't the dropping birth rates due to economics. You know, so maybe people aren't having ten children like they used to. They're having three children or two children, right? The alarming thing for me is that people are not having children. That's more alarming to me because that's more a sign not of a country developing, but of a country and a society, of a modern society, which does not see the value in in raising children and having deep and loving relationships be a priority in your life.

• 41:54Steven Bartlett?

  Those people would say I have deep and loving relationships with my partner, with my dog, with my uncle, auntie, friends, et cetera.

• 42:01Speaker 00

  It's different. And why is it different? It's a good question. It's different because in the end, your relationship with your partner or with your auntie or with your dog isn't the same level of dependency. The ability to care for another human being, to allow another human being to be dependent on you, to devote to that human being, is a growing transforming experience for human beings. One would say that Not sure I completely buy this fully because, but Jordan Peterson, I think, has said, I think it was Jordan who said that you can't fully become an adult if you don't have a child.

• 42:44Speaker 00

  Now, I'm not sure I would go that far because there are some people who can't have children. But I do think that there is something in terms of developmentally on an adult development level that transforms you, that is meant to transform you in being generative and having children. Again, it's not for everyone. And I do say this, that I'm not part of the pro-natality movement where I say, everybody should have children. I don't think everybody should have children. But I do think that if you're going to have children, then you need to look deeply at your own upbringing and your own losses and your own early traumas before you bring them

• 43:29Speaker 00

  into this world. So you can repair whatever it is you need to repair and not create what we call generational expression of things like attachment disorders and mental illness.

• 43:41Steven Bartlett?

  Because a lot of people are struggling now to have kids, even those that want to.

• 43:45Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 43:46Steven Bartlett?

  I was looking at some stats and there's a global prevalence of infertility. Approximately 18% of adults worldwide, about one in six, has experienced infertility at some point in their lives.

• 43:56Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 43:56Steven Bartlett?

  Between 2015 and 2019, about roughly 15% of US women aged 15 to 49 experienced impaired fertility. And in the UK, research indicates that one in eight women, listening to this now, and one in 10 men aged 16 to 74 have experienced infertility, which is defined as unsuccessfully attempting pregnancy for a year or longer.

• 44:18Steven Bartlett?

  And I've spoken to a lot of people, actually, that have tried to have kids.

• 44:21Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 44:22Steven Bartlett?

  For years, two years.

• 44:23Speaker 00

  It's very sad. It's very sad. When people want children and they can't have children, it is incredibly sad.

• 44:28Steven Bartlett?

  When you think about what's contributing to that, what, how do you diagnose that infertility challenge?

• 44:33Speaker 00

  There are a lot of theories. Some are environmental. Some are the fact that we're delaying having children. We're lying to women and to men. We're telling them, freeze your eggs. In fact, this is a little disturbing. I'll tell you about this. That law firms now are paying for the freezing of their young female associates' eggs.

• 44:56Speaker 00

  I find that disturbing. Saying, "Freeze your eggs, work really hard for us, yeah, you can have children later." And the truth is, a lot of them can't. Because when you freeze eggs, it's not a guarantee of fertility. It's not a guarantee that those eggs will turn into embryos. It's not a guarantee that those embryos will turn into babies. So there's the age piece. There is also, and there's the environmental piece, there is also the stress piece, which we are not talking about. There's a component to getting pregnant that is about stress. We have more stress on both men and women. You know, it used to be that men died sooner because they had more stress.

• 45:41Speaker 00

  But now I think it's evened out the odds. I think women may die sooner because they have the stress of working and raising children, for the most part. But the point is that the stress that young adults face because they're trying to, you know, we should talk about some of the other myths. What's another myth? We'll weave it through this talk. Another myth is you can do everything all at the same time and do it well. Myth, that's a big myth. You can't. You can't have a fabulous career, working full-time and traveling and being fabulous, and raise healthy children. The good news is, life is long.

• 46:25Speaker 00

  You may live till 120 like Moses. And I think of your generation, you're younger than me, but I think you probably will live well over 100. And so what that means is you have many, many, many, many, many, many years to have a fabulous career when your children don't need you so much. But you have a very small window to create that emotional security for your children that will be the core of them. You know, we talk a lot about your physical core and core training. This is your emotional core. This is the emotional core of human beings. Attachment, security, and a feeling of safety that you can rely on the people who

• 47:10Speaker 00

  you need most in the world to be there when you need them. That is your emotional core.

• 47:16Steven Bartlett?

  How did you manage? You're a mother of three. You've raised three very wonderful, well-adjusted children.

• 47:22Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 47:22Steven Bartlett?

  But you're also successful.

• 47:24Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 47:24Steven Bartlett?

  You have books. You're traveling around the world, you said.

• 47:27Speaker 00

  So I'm a good example. I had a career when I was in my twenties. And I got married when I was... I met my husband when I was 27. And I got married when I was just shy of 30, or I was 30. And then we had children in our 30s. So before we had children, I was working... I was seeing something like 40 hours of patients a week. And I was working into the wee hours of the night. I would work till 11 o'clock at night, coming home exhausted. Then we had children, but it was an agreement that we had, that when we had babies, I would take a good, long period off

• 48:10Speaker 00

  and then really go back very, very, very minimally. And I had the kind of career by choice that I could have control over. And it could be flexible and I could control it. And so I took six months off with each child. And then after six months, only went back to work an hour and a half a day, five days a week. So just... We had an agreement, my husband and I, which is it would be just enough to pay a mother's helper, a nanny. And so... And we did without, in those years. We did without vacations. We did without, you know, second homes. We did without fancy clothes. We did without. The other things that many of our peers were getting,

• 48:55Speaker 00

  and traveling and doing, we said, what's important to us is that we pare down, not expand now. This is... We're expanding as parents, so we want to pare down materially. Life is long and you can have a successful career. Some of the women that I interviewed for my book are women who didn't even start their careers until they were in their 40s, after they had children that were older.

• 49:20Steven Bartlett?

  Could it have worked if your husband stayed home instead of you? In your view? Because I'm trying to understand if you're saying that dads don't need to be as there, present, as much as the mother?

• 49:31Speaker 00

  They have to be there in a different way. In the early days, men don't breastfeed. So that's the first thing. Unless you can show me a man who has grown breasts and can actually breastfeed. Maybe it's coming, I don't know. But for now, women's bodies connect them to their babies. They connect them through birth. They connect them through breastfeeding. There is a physical component and a hormonal component to infancy and motherhood. And there really is a difference in the way that mothers respond to babies and fathers respond to babies. Now, when do fathers become really important? It's not that the father isn't important to give the mother a break or to bond with

• 50:16Speaker 00

  the baby or to bathe the baby. But what that baby needs is that attachment security to that primary attachment figure. So the mother, usually the mother. Sometimes it's the father, but usually the mother. Fathers with their playful tactile stimulation, they become really important when children become mobile. When children start to crawl and toddle, when they're around 18 months to two years old, fathers become incredibly exciting and they're really important. So when fathers aren't around in those days, when children are starting to explore the world, those children have a harder time separating from mothers.

• 50:58Speaker 00

  So it's really important to have what we said, the yin and the yang. What we are doing now is we are not prioritizing attachment security, which is the foundation for then healthy separation. And when healthy separation starts, fathers are critical. When you have another child, a second child, fathers are critical because fathers seduce the older child. They say, come on, let's go out and play. Let's go kick the soccer ball. Let's go to the swing set. And they give a space to the mother with the next baby. They help the older children to grow up.

• 51:35Steven Bartlett?

  Earlier on, you mentioned a study that I read about when I was studying psychology once upon a time, which is the rhesus monkey study with the wire mother. For anybody that's never heard about that study, I think it's quite important to understand the profound impact that touch and.

• 51:50Speaker 00

  Well, that was an attachment study.

• 51:52Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, what was it, what's, what's touch called from, in a, in a science world?

• 51:55Speaker 00

  Skin to skin.

• 51:56Steven Bartlett?

  Skin to skin. Can you give me an overview of that study and what it showed for people that aren't aware of it?

• 52:02Speaker 00

  Well, they took these baby rhesus monkeys and they, they let some be with the mothers and the mothers nurtured those babies. And those babies became healthily attached and secure. And those were the healthy, emotionally healthy babies. Then they gave another subset of monkeys, a wire mother covered with a piece of cloth or fur or something. And those babies became very neurotic, but at least they were clinging. They became like the ambivalent attachment babies because there was no response from the mother, but at least they were holding on to this mother. And then they gave, and these babies became very neurotic. And then they gave the subset of babies nothing.

• 52:49Speaker 00

  And those babies literally lost their minds. And, I mean, there are other studies which are more recent than that. That's quite an old study. There, there is a researcher named Michael Meany. He did a study on licking and grooming animals who lick and groom their young, meaning are nurturing, skin to skin, lick and groom. In human terms, that would be holding, touching, loving, skin to skin. Those, if, if a mother licked and groomed her young, that baby would become more resilient to stress in the future. The babies who were not licked and groomed by their mothers become, became less resilient to stress in the future.

• 53:30Speaker 00

  In addition, the babies who were more resilient to stress because their mothers had licked and groomed them, passed down generationally the ability to lick and groom the next generation. What happened to the babies who weren't licked and groomed? Guess what happened?

• 53:46Steven Bartlett?

  They didn't pass it down.

• 53:47Speaker 00

  Right. And that's what's happening to humans today. If we don't lick and groom our babies, I mean, you know, take it for whatever. If we don't lick and groom our babies, we don't pass on resilience to stress and adversity, but we also don't pass on the desire to lick and groom, to have babies.

• 54:09Steven Bartlett?

  Your story, going back to your story, which we're talking about, are there any areas of privilege that you need to acknowledge that someone else listening to this now goes, yeah, but that's all right for you because, you know, maybe someone who didn't have a partner there or someone who is in a difficult economic situation, extremely difficult economic situation, living in the projects in Harlem or something. I really want to, I'm saying this because.

• 54:38Speaker 00

  Well, it's not the mothers in the projects in Harlem because I'll tell you the mothers in the projects in Harlem stay home with their babies. That's what's interesting. Very poor people in America. So let me just say, I love America. America sucks. And I'll tell you why America sucks from my perspective. And I say this internationally, I go around the world saying, America sucks. And I'm going to tell you why. We are the only country in the world, other than Papua New Guinea, who does not have a paid parental maternity leave. We do not have paid maternity leave. Nobody cares about children. They care about the GDP and the bottom line. And the people who are out there talking about this stuff

• 55:19Speaker 00

  are economists saying, women have to work, work, work for the economy. Nobody cares about children. Because if we cared about children, our tax money would be in paid leave, not for three months, not for six months, for at least a year. In Hungary, they have three years. Slovenia, Slovakia, Estonia has three years. Hungary, I think, has two years of paid leave. Sweden, I have some issues with Sweden, but Sweden has 14 months. Sweden, after 14 months, makes women go back to work full, full, full time and put them in institutional care. And all those babies are breaking down. So 14 months isn't even enough. So, but if we could even get to a civilized place of one year of paid leave

• 56:04Speaker 00

  in this country. And then the next two years, some way that parents could be complimented, so they could work part-time, supplemented, so they could work part-time.

• 56:17Speaker 00

  You know, I'm a reasonable, realistic person. I know this country is never going to go for three years of paid leave, even though I would love them to. I also know that this country isn't going to go for an entitlement called paid leave, because that's the kind of country we are. We talk a big game, but we don't want to put our money where our mouth is. There is the possibility, now that the Republicans are in, of a creative solution, which is potentially using things like social security in advance, borrowing from your social security. So I'm a mom, and I say, ah, to stay home, I can borrow from my social security for a year,

• 56:59Speaker 00

  and then work a year or two longer in my life. Wouldn't you say that most women who wanted to stay home with their babies would say, I'll work longer so I can stay home with my baby? There are ways to creatively deal with it. From my perspective, this is what's going on. People on the left will not compromise. They'll only do an entitlement called paid leave, but they only are asking for it for three to six months. After that, they want women back in the workforce and institutional daycare. So I'm not on the left.

• 57:32Speaker 00

  People on the right talk a lot about family. They're the party of the family now. But they do not want tax dollars to go into paid leave. They don't like the entitlements that already exist, and they don't want to add anymore. And so the only way they're going to give it to women and men is if they put skin in the game. This is the country we live in. Again, I'm a realist. I think in any way that we can give families the choice to care for their own children, particularly in the early years, we will create a population of healthier children.

• 58:07Steven Bartlett?

  How do we know that more paid leave equals better children, less strain on the healthcare system in terms of mental health, mortality, whatever it might be? How do you make a statistical or a science or research-backed case that if we had three years of paid leave in the United States, or in the UK, or Australia, Canada, wherever, that it would be a net positive for society outside of it just being an opinion?

• 58:31Speaker 00

  Well, the research shows, the longitudinal attachment research shows that children who are insecurely attached at 12 months of age, 20 years later are insecurely, 80% of them are insecurely attached and suffer from mental disorders. That's what the longitudinal attachment research says. So we now have decades of, basically, children were followed from when they were infants. And the ones who were securely attached 20 years later are still securely attached and doing great. And the ones who were insecurely attached, most still insecurely attached. And it's tied and correlated to all of these mental illness conditions, right?

• 59:12Speaker 00

  So there's a lot of research to show what attachment security does for children in the long run. So, you know, you're asking a question about, I mean, I suppose you could take your paid leave and go play soccer in the park and go play tennis and, I don't know, like play cards with your friends. I mean, you know, how can I say how people are going to use their paid leave? But if your paid leave is being used to be home with your child, then it's going to benefit your child.

• 59:40Steven Bartlett?

  So many of the guests that I speak to on this podcast, especially those that become incredibly successful, athletes, entrepreneurs, whoever, they often have some form of neglect in their past. Richard Williams, Serena and Venus Williams' father, he was very intense with them from a very young age. And he's raised two of the greatest tennis players in history. Joe Jackson was strict and often controversial with Michael, who went on to become the king of pop. Earl Woods, who was Tiger Woods' father, was very intense in his coaching and mentoring style, which led him to become great. And obviously Beyonce's the other example I gave, who Matthew managed, Matthew, which is Matthew and Tina, who

• 1:00:21Steven Bartlett?

  were parents to Beyonce, managed Destiny's Child and Beyonce's solo career, meticulously shaping them into a global superstar. So parents think, you know, I want to raise kids that are superstars. I want my kids to be great.

• 1:00:34Speaker 00

  Okay, so I'm going to say right now, I don't recommend that as a professional.

• 1:00:38Steven Bartlett?

  Okay.

• 1:00:39Speaker 00

  I'm just saying. So I can't comment on a lot of those people because I could get in a lot of trouble for commenting on a lot of those people. But I will say that amongst those people, they're

• 1:00:51Speaker 00

  Is controversy, meaning at least one of those parents, and I don't know the history of the others, was abusive. And so you could say that narcissism is abusive to children. When we project our needs and desires and likes and who we are onto our children, we're not letting them authentically be themselves. The greatest gift you can give your child is to see your child as an authentic individual who is an individual and themselves, and not to see them as a mini me. When you start architecting their life, there's a good chance you're going to lose that child emotionally at some point.

• 1:01:36Speaker 00

  They're either going to hate you. They may be successful in their careers, they may have terrible personal lives, they may be narcissistic parents themselves. So I don't recommend that school of thought. What I do recommend is if your child shows promise in something that they also seem to love and have a drive to be good at, then you can support that drive. Just make sure to keep yourself in check along the way to make sure that they are driving it, not you.

• 1:02:11Steven Bartlett?

  ADHD.

• 1:02:12Speaker 00

  Yeah, okay.

• 1:02:13Steven Bartlett?

  A B. I don't feel like I don't even have to ask a question here, but just to set the stage, the reason why I'm so compelled by this is just this, I have to say it, the shocking rise in diagnosis and prescriptions over the last 10 years. Between 2018, ADHD diagnoses in the UK rose approximately 20-fold.

• 1:02:36Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:02:37Steven Bartlett?

  Among boys aged 10 to 16, diagnosis increased from 1% roughly to about 3.5% in 2018. And in men aged 18 to 29, there was a nearly 50-fold increase in ADHD prescriptions during the same period. And the same applies to the United States, where an estimated 15.5 million adults in the US have been diagnosed with ADHD. Approximately 1 in 9 US children have been diagnosed with ADHD at some point, with 10.5% having a current diagnosis.

• 1:03:08Steven Bartlett?

  I don't know where ADHD was, but the conversation around it, the prescriptions, the diagnosis seemed to have really surged into culture in a really, really big way. What's going on?

• 1:03:17Speaker 00

  So ADHD was one of the factors that drove me to write being there. Because I was seeing this huge uptick in ADHD diagnosis and children being medicated so, so early. Do you know what the fight or flight reaction is?

• 1:03:31Steven Bartlett?

  That's when the sympathetic nervous system starts to kick into action and...

• 1:03:39Speaker 00

  Yes, so well, it's basically our evolutionary response to a predatory threat. So if a sable-toothed tiger was chasing you, you either stood and fought, fight, or you ran for your life, flight. So when our children are under stress, they go into fight or flight. So one of the first signs that a child is under stress that they cannot manage is when they become aggressive in school. They hit, they bite, they throw chairs, they have trouble, you know, socially in daycare

• 1:04:24Speaker 00

  or preschool or even in school. Or they become distracted, which is the flight part of fight or flight. So what's happening is their nervous systems, the stress-regulating part of their brain is getting turned on. So we say that the stress-regulating part of their brain has to do with a little almond-shaped part of the brain called the amygdala. It's a very primitive part of the brain, very old part of the brain. And it regulates stress throughout our lives. It helps us to manage it. What we know is that part of the brain is supposed to remain offline. For the first year to three years, which is why mothers wear babies on their bodies. It's why babies stay close to their mothers in the first three years.

• 1:05:09Speaker 00

  To keep the amygdala quiet and only incrementally, incrementally expose children to stress and frustration that they can manage. So imagine taking small bites of it so you can digest it, right? And your mother's there to help you digest the stress. What we're doing now by separating mothers and babies, by putting babies into daycare with strangers, is by sleep training babies, all these weird things that we're doing to babies, is we're turning the amygdala on. We're making it active precociously, too early. What happens when the amygdala is activated too early is it becomes very active and very large

• 1:05:54Speaker 00

  very quickly. The problem is then it shrivels up and burns out also because it cannot manage that kind of stress so early. When it ceases to be functional, it ceases to be functional for a lifetime. And so it's very important to protect, you know, what's the expression? The family jewels. It's very, these are the family jewels in the brain of a baby. This is the jewel, the amygdala. You want to keep the stress to an absolute minimum in the first year, which is why sleep training is dangerous. It's why letting babies cry it out. It's why putting babies into daycare.

• 1:06:34Speaker 00

  It's why leaving babies for hours on end when they're so, so very fragile is so bad for their brains because it gets the cortisol flowing, which is the stress hormone, but it makes this part of the brain very active, so it grows, grows, grows, and then

• 1:06:51Speaker 00

  And ceases to be functional in the future, like a PTSD response. So what we know is that these children are in hyper vigilant states of stress.

• 1:07:02Steven Bartlett?

  ADHD children.

• 1:07:03Speaker 00

  ADHD children, hyper vigilant states of stress. If you stay in a hyper vigilant state of stress long enough, you go into a hypo vigilant state of stress, which then causes depression. So what we have now are not disorders. So there was a whole movement to take the D off of ADHD because it's not a disorder. It is a stress response. And instead of asking the right questions, which are, okay, what's causing the stress? How do we make sure that our children are not exposed to this kind of stress? Because they're going into fight or flight.

• 1:07:44Speaker 00

  So the nervous system, as you said, the brain has an on switch and an off switch. The on switch to stress is the amygdala, the hippocampus is the off switch. And you'd say the stress response is in a negative feedback loop. It's actually important. Like in other words, if a sable toothed tiger is chasing you, very important that you can activate, right? And run or fight. So the stress response is supposed to be short term. It's supposed to be not, it's supposed to be acute rather than chronic. So we can kind of manifest it. We can activate it. But then it's supposed to be turned off by the turn off switch, the hippocampus. What we're seeing in children's brains is that the amygdala is growing

• 1:08:29Speaker 00

  very precociously large and the hippocampus, which is the off switch, is very small. So we have this problem, as we say Houston, we have a problem. We have an on switch going full speed, gas, no brakes and no off switch. And that's causing ADHD behavioral problems that are.

• 1:08:50Speaker 00

  Hugely rising in children in school, a lot of aggression and violence. And so that's what's happening. This is a stress response. And again, instead of asking the right questions like, where is this coming from? What's causing the stress? Instead, we silence the children's pain. We tell, we tell parents, we'll medicate it and we'll just relieve the symptoms. For me, that's malpractice. The way we treat ADHD is malpractice. A child develops, goes into fight or flight when they are under stress. It could be psychosocial stressors at home, in the family. It could be at school. It could be with their friends. It could be a learning disability. There are so many things that can cause kids stress.

• 1:09:35Speaker 00

  So instead of medicating them, why don't we figure out what's happening to that child deeply? That's causing them to go into fight or flight.

• 1:09:44Steven Bartlett?

  Isn't that point of view? I've got two questions here. The first is, how do you know that it's stress? And the second is, if it is stress, then that, the problem, or at least the inconvenient truth that that then creates is that the parent is responsible.

• 1:09:59Speaker 00

  Yes, that's the, there's the inconvenient truth.

• 1:10:01Steven Bartlett?

  For their child's ADHD.

• 1:10:02Speaker 00

  Yes, yes, that's the inconvenient truth. It's not so simple. Sometimes it's the families. Usually it's the family, particularly with small children. But when children get to school, it could be social. As I said, you know, you can't control whether your children are exposed to social issues or bullying, or there's many things that can cause stress in children. But when they're very little, you are their environment. So the inconvenient truth is that when your child gets an ADHD diagnosis, the first thing you should do is go to a therapist who will do parent guidance with you. Don't rush that child to a psychiatrist to medicate them.

• 1:10:42Speaker 00

  You go with your partner or spouse and talk to a parent guidance expert about what could be causing this child to feel such stress. And look at the psychosocial stressors. Look at the influences and the dynamics in this child's life that would be causing them to go into a state of stress like this.

• 1:11:02Steven Bartlett?

  Give me some examples of the type of stresses, the everyday stresses that we're now exposing children to that are leading to ADHD in your opinion.

• 1:11:09Speaker 00

  Well, again, let's start at home. At home, the stresses might be that they were.

• 1:11:16Speaker 00

  Hand it over to a daycare center at an early age, which turned that amygdala response on, which turned the stress-regulating part of their brain on too early. Now you have that hyper vigilant reaction and they can't turn it off, right? It could be a divorce situation, 50% of couples divorce, which means that divorce is an adversity. You know, I have a book coming out in a year about how to divorce and mitigate the impact of the divorce on the child, but no matter what, a divorce is an adversity on a child and a stress. When parents fight dramatically in the home, if there's tremendous sibling rivalry issues in the home, if there's the birth of another child, it's stressful, right?

• 1:12:00Speaker 00

  If you have a sibling, believe it or not, that's a very stressful thing. If parents are sensitive about that, then it can be mitigated, but if parents are insensitive about the birth of a second child and the feelings that your first child may have, that can cause stress. Moving can cause stress. Illness or mental illness in a parent can cause stress. Alcoholism, any kind of addiction can cause stress. A grandparent or uncle or aunt, or even a parent getting sick and dying can cause... I mean, there are so many things that can cause stress, but the point is that stress can be regulated, but it can only be regulated if parents are introspective and self-aware and willing to look at their part in it.

• 1:12:43Speaker 00

  If parents hand a child over to a psychiatrist and say, "Fix my child," of course psychiatrists will cooperate with you and silence your child's pain, but is that really what you want to be doing? Because in the end, you're just putting your finger in a dike, you're putting your finger in a dam, and eventually that dam is going to burst.

• 1:13:05Steven Bartlett?

  What'd you say to some of the evidence around there being a link to a hereditary component? In twin studies, they found that ADHD is about 74 to 80% inheritable, making one of the most genetically influenced psychiatric conditions.

• 1:13:19Speaker 00

  Let me tell you a different study that will help you to understand that study. Which is that we know that there is no genetic precursor to mental illness. There is no genetic precursor to ADHD. There is no genetic precursor to depression and no genetic precursor to anxiety.

• 1:13:37Steven Bartlett?

  What do you mean by precursor?

• 1:13:38Speaker 00

  Meaning, there's no genetic connection. You don't get it in your genes. If your father or your mother were depressed, you get it by something called the inheritance of acquired characteristics. If you're raised by a depressed parent, you're more likely to become depressed. It's the nature nurture argument, okay? But what they did find.

• 1:13:58Speaker 00

  Now schizophrenia has a genetic connection, bipolar disorder, those have genetic, but the rest do not. Anxiety, depression, ADHD, no genetics. What they did find is a genetic tie to something called the sensitivity gene. It's a short allele on the serotonin receptor. And serotonin, as we know, is used to regulate happy emotions, to regulate emotions, right? So when you have a short allele, it means that you have a harder time picking up the serotonin, but it also means that you are more sensitive to stress. Now, those children who are born with this gene, this short allele on the serotonin

• 1:14:42Speaker 00

  receptor gene, they are more prone to mental illness later on because of that sensitivity to stress. What the study shows is if those children who are born with that gene for sensitivity are provided with emotionally and physically present attachment security in the first year, it neutralizes the expression of that gene. So epigenetics means that we're born with genes, like you might have a gene for rheumatoid arthritis, or you might have a gene for cancer, but it never gets expressed. Well, we all have genes for something, but they don't necessarily get expressed. That's what epigenetics is.

• 1:15:23Speaker 00

  It means the environment has to turn on the gene to make it, let's rock and roll, right? What it showed in this study is that the children who were born with this genetic precursor, this sensitivity to stress, if they had sensitive, empathic, nurturing, and present parents in the first year, it neutralized the expression of that gene. So those children could be as healthy as children born without that gene.

• 1:15:51Speaker 00

  If, however, children born with that sensitivity gene were neglected, you know, abandoned, not provided with sensitive empathic present nurturing, it exacerbated that gene. So we know that that sensitivity gene is tied and correlated to mental illness later on, unless the sensitive empathic nurturing mitigates that gene.

• 1:16:15Steven Bartlett?

  And what do you say to people that point to MRI scans?

• 1:16:19Speaker 00

  FMRI's and yeah, there's, there's all kinds of neurological tests now where we can see the brain in action. So it's not a static thing. We can actually see the blood flow to the brain. We can see the electrical activity in the brain. It's amazing, actually.

• 1:16:36Steven Bartlett?

  But some people say that this proves that it's the way your brain is. And lots of my friends that have ADHD, when they talk about their ADHD or the way that they are, they say, my brain works like this.

• 1:16:46Speaker 00

  No, it's not correct. Their brain is sensitive to stress. Someone with ADHD is more sensitive to stress. So you could ask them questions like this. You could say, were you more, are you a more sensitive person? Are you more sensitive to noise, to smells, to touch when you were a child? Did you not like itchy things? Did you cry more? Were you more sensitive when your parents would go out for the night? Were you more sensitive when your mom would go to work? Or were you more sensitive when you were left at nursery school? And they're probably going to say yes.

• 1:17:19Steven Bartlett?

  But if they say no, and they still have an ADHD diagnosis?

• 1:17:22Speaker 00

  I would guarantee, almost guarantee, they wouldn't say no, because people with ADHD are people who are sensitive. Sensitivity is an amazing strength. If it's met with sensitivity. If you have a sensitive child. So what does a sensitive child look like? If you have multiple children. Then you know, because the first thing I'll do when I give a public talk is I'll say, okay, any, everybody here, who has a sensitive child? And I describe, okay, sensitive child is a child who cries more, is harder to soothe, is more clingy, doesn't like you leaving them, is harder, has a harder time separating, has a harder time going to sleep and being left to sleep on their own, is sensitive

• 1:18:07Speaker 00

  to things like noise and smells and touch and.

• 1:18:11Steven Bartlett?

  If you grew up in an environment that was stressful, and again, we've, you've identified that stress can come in many forms, it could be arguing parents, it could be a neighbor or whatever, some environmental factor that caused that stress, you were sensitive, you developed ADHD, you become an adult, you get diagnosed at 30 years old as having ADHD.

• 1:18:28Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:18:29Steven Bartlett?

  You're offered medication, you take the medication, the medication makes you much more functional in your career, in your relationships, in your life.

• 1:18:37Speaker 00

  It's a stimulant, and so what stimulants do is they cause, they can cause great anxiety, they can cause panic attacks in adolescence, they can cause growth issues, so I have patients who come to me, young men who didn't grow because they were put on stimulants when they were young, so in, in, in terms of the consequences of using stimulants, the jury is still out, but we know that they cause growth issues, they cause panic attacks, they cause anxiety disorders, they cause depression, so.

• 1:19:10Steven Bartlett?

  They're quite life-saving, they're quite life-saving for some people in terms of having a.

• 1:19:13Speaker 00

  They can be, they can be, so what I would say is, if you have tried everything to uncover what the stress is that's causing you to react this way, and you still are feeling that way, then sometimes medication can be a lifesaver, the problem is that we turn to medication in, in adolescents and children and young adults, we, we turn to it as a performance drug. Because there's so much stress in modern life and there's such a need for people to perform and be successful in their careers and in school and get good grades. There's so much pressure on kids. So, you know, I'm sixty and we didn't have this kind

• 1:19:54Speaker 00

  of pressure growing up. And so the generations that follow have so much pressure. That pressure makes children literally go off the rails. We could talk about the academic pressure, the competitiveness, the perfectionism. So ADHD is a bucket. It's a bucket which you throw people in who have anxiety that has never been treated. And so, and there's different ways of thinking about treatment too. So we are a society that likes superficial quick fixes. We like drugs, we like CBT therapy. The truth is that this is not a

• 1:20:36Speaker 00

  quick fix. Figuring out relationally, dynamically, what happened to you as a child, what your losses were, what your traumas were, what caused you to feel so anxious, what's caused you to go into fight or flight, is hard work. It requires frustration, it requires commitment, it requires going to someone who can think very deeply with you. You know, I want to define what anxiety is, because I think it's really important. Because we rarely define

• 1:21:11Speaker 00

  depression and anxiety. Depression is preoccupation with past losses. Anxiety is preoccupation with future losses that may never occur. What do they have in common?

• 1:21:28Steven Bartlett?

  It's all about losses?

• 1:21:30Speaker 00

  All about loss. And you could say the generations now are very preoccupied with loss.

• 1:21:40Steven Bartlett?

  Loss of status, achievement, but because we're also very preoccupied with gain.

• 1:21:49Speaker 00

  Well, we're preoccupied with what I say, the, you know, I don't want to judge, but I want to say the unimportant things in life. What are the important things in life? Relationships, love, connection, health, right? You would say objectively, family. These are the important things in life. But we've become very preoccupied with material success, money, career achievements, fame. I think there was a study that interviewed teenagers. And it was really discouraging because they said that the thing they wanted more in life than anything was to be famous.

• 1:22:33Speaker 00

  And so we're preoccupied with the wrong things.

• 1:22:36Steven Bartlett?

  On this point of stress and the link with ADHD, looking at some research from the Injury.com Research Education Group. It says that children with an ACE score, which is the trauma-based score, where I think it goes up to 10 different sort of questions, with an ACE score of four or more, so four experiences of trauma or more, have nearly four times, which is 400% more chance of having parent-reported ADHD compared to children with no ACEs.

• 1:23:05Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:23:05Steven Bartlett?

  And some of the factors that have a big impact is socio-economic hardship increases your probability of having ADHD by 40%, parental divorce by 35%, familial mental illness, or a parent having a mental illness increases it up to almost 60%, 55%, I believe, and neighborhood violence, almost 50%, familial incarceration. So if a parent goes to prison, then that increases your probability of ADHD by about 40% as well. And that's published by the, I think it's the New England.

• 1:23:36Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:23:36Steven Bartlett?

  What is it? Oh, the National Library of Medicine, National Center of Biological Information.

• 1:23:40Speaker 00

  Yeah, so remember what I said, that you can't control everything that happens to your child. Divorces do happen and adversities happen to children, health, health issues happen to children. What you can control is you can control the first three years and be as present as possible for your child.

• 1:23:59Steven Bartlett?

  So if my kids start screaming in a supermarket.

• 1:24:03Steven Bartlett?

  One of the prevailing pieces of advice says, just walk off or start screaming yourself as the parent to show them. Am I supposed to just ignore my child when it's screaming and throwing a tantrum? Am I meant to drop what I'm doing and go and cater to them? What am I meant to do in these situations?

• 1:24:17Speaker 00

  You can have me on speed dial, Stephen.

• 1:24:19Steven Bartlett?

  You be careful, because if you make a promise like that-

• 1:24:21Speaker 00

  Yes, I promise, I promise. I'll be on speed dial.

• 1:24:24Steven Bartlett?

  You only want to drop your career and focus on raising my children.

• 1:24:27Speaker 00

  No, but you can call me. You can have me on speed dial.

• 1:24:30Steven Bartlett?

  I've got this on video. That's legally binding.

• 1:24:31Speaker 00

  No, you can have me on speed dial.

• 1:24:33Steven Bartlett?

  How much?

• 1:24:34Speaker 00

  Yeah, you can, as much as you want. So, the deal is, you don't yell at your children. An emotionally regulated parent, a healthy parent produces a healthy child. So, what is a healthy parent? A healthy parent is a parent who feels good about themselves, who has authentically good self-esteem, not grandiosity, but really feels good about themselves, knows their strengths and limitations, and overall as a whole person feels good about themselves. They have the capacity to regulate their emotions, to keep their emotions from going too high and too low. Remember sailing in the Caribbean, meaning they can stay calm in a storm? Is sensitive and empathic as a nurturer. These are signs of health in a parent.

• 1:25:19Steven Bartlett?

  So if my kid says, "I want that pack of sweets," and I go, "You can't have that pack of sweets."

• 1:25:25Speaker 00

  Well, first you have to, so before you discipline, you always want to be empathic first. So I always say that if you are going to discipline a child, first you have to recognize how they feel. I mean, recognizing how children feel is important anyway, meaning when you recognize a child's feelings, if they're sad, you mirror their sadness. If they're angry, you say, "I can see you're angry." If they're happy, you look happy with them. That kind of reflection- Is the way that your child knows that you acknowledge them, that they're a person to you, that they're a separate person to you. It's how they feel valuable. So when you acknowledge their feelings, that's the first critical,

• 1:26:09Speaker 00

  you'd say parenting 101, acknowledge your child's feelings.

• 1:26:13Steven Bartlett?

  So I would tend to my child and say, you want sweets, are you hungry?

• 1:26:16Speaker 00

  Yeah, you can say, I can see that you really want that packet of sweets. I can see how hard it is because you really want it. But you know, you can't have it before dinner. You know, that's the rule.

• 1:26:25Steven Bartlett?

  And then they stop screaming and crying.

• 1:26:27Speaker 00

  And then they start screaming and you say, a broken record is a communication style where you say, oh, I can see it's really hard for you, but you still can't have the sweets. And you stay with them and you keep empathizing and then setting structure, empathizing, structure, empathizing, structure. The mistake that parents make is that they go right into the no word. They don't use empathy, they don't bring empathy in. And the truth is that even as an adult, if somebody just says no, without first recognizing how you feel, you feel very unsatisfied. Right? For a child, it's critical. It's critical that even when you have to say no,

• 1:27:09Speaker 00

  and particularly if you have to say no, that you first recognize how they feel.

• 1:27:13Steven Bartlett?

  I mean, that's what all the relationship experts on the show tell me. They say, if you want to be successful in a romantic relationship, then you first must make your partner feel heard and understood.

• 1:27:21Speaker 00

  That's right.

• 1:27:22Steven Bartlett?

  Even if you disagree in an argument, first acknowledge what they said, maybe repeat it back to them. And then they'll feel heard and understood and it kind of stops the broken record. Do you think that I'm a traumatized child?

• 1:27:33Speaker 00

  I don't know, I haven't heard about your traumatized background. If so, if you have a trauma, I would say we're all. So let me say this, there's this word trauma is used a lot. Can I just talk about it for a moment? There's something called big T trauma, right? Big T traumas like I was in a car accident and I lost my legs or, um, you know, I lost my parents, you know, my mother died of brain cancer or my, my father was an alcoholic and beat me. Or, you know, there's, there are things that are more concrete that you can like hold on to, things that happened to people. Yeah, I was raped or, you know, those are big T trauma.

• 1:28:14Speaker 00

  But believe it or not, probably fewer people suffer from big T trauma and more people suffer from little T trauma. And little T trauma is more nuanced. It's, um, it, it requires looking with a, with a finer tooth comb at, at the issues. It's more relational. It's more, I was subtly neglected by my mother. My mother wasn't a good listener. My mother loved me, but my father loved me, but he never understood me. Uh, my parents were narcissistic and very self-centered. Um, they were never around, you know? And so people will come into my office and sit down, individuals for therapy.

• 1:28:59Speaker 00

  And they'll say, you know, I don't know what's wrong with me. I had two parents who stayed together, had all the material wealth that I could need. I never wanted for stuff. Uh, you know, my parents stayed together and I don't know what's wrong with me. And so I say, okay, so you're telling me nothing big and traumatic happened to you in your life. Now let's talk about the nuance. And we're not very nuanced anymore. So we don't want to look at what causes most forms of mental illness, depression, anxiety, uh, even ADHD, are the relational nuances of a family.

• 1:29:38Steven Bartlett?

  And what do you mean by the relational nuances? It could be the

• 1:29:42Speaker 00

  Neglect.

• 1:29:42Steven Bartlett?

  Neglect.

• 1:29:43Speaker 00

  Being ignored, having a mentally ill parent that no one knows about. Maybe a depressed mother who sleeps in, in the morning and doesn't get up and feed you. You know, you get up and feed yourself. Or, uh, maybe you're a latchkey kid who comes home and, and you're isolated and alone. Things that people can't see, um, but you see. And so that's why people, I would say, most people go into therapy not for big T traumas, believe it or not, even though the ACEs study says, you know, alcoholism, drug addiction. Of course, those are big T traumas. Most people come into therapy for little T trauma.

• 1:30:24Speaker 00

  And the reason why it's quite difficult for those people is there's not a lot of reinforcement from society that those are also traumas, but in fact, they are traumas. Attachment trauma, you know, if you were put in daycare. And so I have patients who come to me and say, I can remember being put in daycare. And, you know, you're not supposed to remember things until the age of four or five, but some patients can remember flashes of memory under five. And they'll say, I was put into daycare. I just, all I can remember is screaming my lungs out for my mommy.

• 1:31:00Steven Bartlett?

  You're not a fan of daycare, are you?

• 1:31:01Speaker 00

  No.

• 1:31:03Steven Bartlett?

  What's wrong with daycare?

• 1:31:05Speaker 00

  Daycare raises salivary cortisol levels in children, the studies show, meaning those babies are put into stressful states at a very young age when their brains are developing. Daycare has been known to increase aggression and anxiety and behavioral problems in the school years. And those children are more likely to develop attachment disorders. Remember, those first three years when children are so very fragile and vulnerable, taking them away from your body as a primary attachment figure and handing them over to strangers and leaving them there for hours on end

• 1:31:47Speaker 00

  will cause your child to have to develop pathological defenses. And that's what those children are forced to do. So it is the least good option of childcare. So let's talk about what are the better options of childcare if you have to use childcare. You know how we say breast is best? And it is for a variety of reasons. But the best is your primary attachment figure for the first three years as much as possible.

• 1:32:13Steven Bartlett?

  Primary attachment figure, you mean the mother?

• 1:32:16Speaker 00

  Well, no, it can be the father.

• 1:32:18Steven Bartlett?

  Okay.

• 1:32:19Speaker 00

  It's the go-to person who's a sensitive, empathic nurturer. So when that baby's in distress, that baby gets their emotional needs met.

• 1:32:28Steven Bartlett?

  It can be the father?

• 1:32:30Speaker 00

  It can be the father, but first the father has to learn how to be a sensitive. It doesn't come naturally to most men with rare exception. I have known some patients where the husband, the father, was more sensitive than the mother. It's possible. But in general, instinctually, fathers are not sensitive, empathic nurturers because it's against their evolutionary instinct. Their evolutionary instinct, if you were an animal on the plains of Africa, you're an impala, you're a daddy impala, your baby is born and it comes out running because they are, they're like born and you're all running together.

• 1:33:12Speaker 00

  You get behind that baby and you're like, get going, buddy. You better get going or you're going to be lunch for that lion. That's a father's instinct is to protect, it's protective aggression, right? That's different than the baby impala falls down and the mother comes over and licks the baby and says, are you okay, honey? Can I give you a hug? If impala could talk. So it's a different instinct. So fathers can be taught to be primary attachment figures, but this is why I say it's so very important that we recognize the difference between men and women. If we just think they're exactly the same and we put a, throw a father into the mix with an infant and the mother's going out and the father's staying home.

• 1:33:53Speaker 00

  If we don't talk about this stuff and, and talk about it openly and say, when the baby cries, you have to mirror the baby's emotions, you have to do skin to skin, you have to soothe the baby, not encourage resilience, not, not distract the baby, not use discrepant emotions with the baby. If the baby's crying, don't go, oh, you're okay, you'll be fine. No, no. So it's really important if the father's going to stay home that he learns how to be a mother. You know, sometimes gay couples will come to me and I'll say, you know, two gay men will come, I'll say, which one of you is going to be the mother? Now, that may seem politically incorrect, but someone's got to play that role. You cannot have two fathers for a child. A child needs a mother and a father.

• 1:34:37Speaker 00

  If you're going to have two men, then one of them has to play that sensitive empathic role. The other has to play the playful tactile stimulation role. Same with two women who are raising children. It's better to have a father and a mother than two mothers. So which of you is going to be the dad? Which of you is going to roughhouse and play basketball and roll the rounds on the ground and tickle the baby and encourage exploration and risk-taking and...

• 1:35:00Steven Bartlett?

  Can't you both do half each?

• 1:35:01Speaker 00

  No, no, no. And I'll tell you why. It's very confusing to children. They, when parents say, "I'm both mother and father to my child," I say, "No, no. It's very confusing to children." They need to have a mother figure and a father figure. And I say that, knowing today's politics and knowing today's social situation. You can have a mother figure who's not a mother. Maybe it's a nanny, maybe it's a grandmother. You need a mother figure. And you need that mother figure to be around a lot. If that mother figure is the one who provides the sensitive empathic nurturing. So, some of this can be taught, but it can't be taught unless you first acknowledge that there are differences.

• 1:35:46Speaker 00

  If we cannot, as a society, acknowledge the inconvenient truth that men and women are different in terms of their nurturing behaviours, then we can't teach anybody anything.

• 1:35:56Steven Bartlett?

  I'm looking at some stats here in front of me on a graph, which I was just reading as you're explaining that, because it seems to be quite relevant. And it shows that in 1960, one in 10 mothers were the sole primary breadwinner.

• 1:36:10Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:36:10Steven Bartlett?

  Now, it's almost at half, it's on its way to half.

• 1:36:12Speaker 00

  I know.

• 1:36:13Steven Bartlett?

  Almost half the mothers are the sole or primary breadwinner in 2016. So, I mean, these mothers can't just quit their jobs.

• 1:36:25Speaker 00

  So it's a good question. I get a lot of people coming to me and saying, and this is very common. I want to quit my job. I want to downscale. I want to work part-time. But my husband won't support it. Because I made a promise that I would be the primary breadwinner. And now I want to switch and he won't switch. Or he doesn't support me giving up my high-paying job. But I feel this transformation of being with my baby and I don't want to leave my baby. The problem with young people is they promise each other, they make promises to each other that they probably should not make.

• 1:37:08Speaker 00

  Do not promise your spouse that nothing will change when you have a baby. Say to your spouse, let's prepare for everything to change. Let's believe that anything is possible and let's prepare. Let's strategize. Let's say, what if I want to stay home with the baby? What if I, I may not feel like that now, but what if I see this baby and I fall in love with this baby and I want to stay home and I'm the mother and I want to breastfeed and I don't want to go back to work for a while? And so then you say, what would that scenario look like? What could we do? What could we downscale in terms of our material life and our lifestyle?

• 1:37:49Speaker 00

  That makes it possible for me to stay home? And I don't think we do that. Instead, women say, nothing's going to change. And men say, nothing's going to change. And then they have babies. And they're not prepared for the changes that occur. Changes occur in men too. It's not just women. I mean, fathers also can have this transformation, right? Where they also want to work less. Or, you know, sometimes the transformation comes in the form of wanting to work less and being home. Sometimes it comes in the form of wanting to go out and take on the world so they can provide for their family, you know? Yeah. But it does, it does stimulate something. It stimulates some evolutionary response in men and women.

• 1:38:34Speaker 00

  The hardest thing I find is when men and women compete. It was much easier in the olden days. Now, not everything was good in the olden days, but you would say the idea that roles were defined meant that men and women didn't compete over their roles. Now, what I think is causing a lot of these divorces and what's causing a lot of marital conflict is that men and women compete over everything. They compete over who's going to make more money. They compete over who's going to care for the baby. And so it's like you're a CEO of a company. You had your own company. So you can't have co-CEOs. I mean, I don't know if you did, but it doesn't work.

• 1:39:19Speaker 00

  I mean, anybody that I've ever treated that says we're going to do co-CEOs, it always falls apart. You can have a CEO, you can have a president, you can have the head of marketing, you can have a CFO, you can have a CEO. These are different roles. And they don't compete with one another. They work as a team. Parenting is a team sport, not a competitive sport. And so what's happening today, because of all this gender neutrality and we're as, I'm as good as you and you're as good as me and we're the same, it means that couples are competing with one another. And that's causing so much tension because what's best is when couples complement each other, when their differences mean that as a team,

• 1:40:02Speaker 00

  they work well to care for a child. And I would say the secret to success in a marriage is save your competition for the tennis court, for the basketball court, for running in the park. But don't compete over child rearing, who's going to take care of the children. Don't compete over who makes more money. Find a way to complement each other and be a team.

• 1:40:26Steven Bartlett?

  There's so many mothers listening now that are very career-driven. And you may be causing some existential crises. You may be reaffirming a lot of what they believe and think and what they feel intuitively. Are you, are you saying then that for those women that are pursuing, you know, high-octane careers in leadership roles that also want to have children, that it's one or the other?

• 1:40:53Speaker 00

  No, I'm saying that there are certain careers realistically. Here's the inconvenient truth again. Bunch of inconvenient truths.

• 1:41:02Speaker 00

  There are certain careers that are harder to be a good mother. Period. I'm saying that. I know it's a harsh toke, but there it is. There are certain careers that are too demanding to be present for your children, whether you're a mother or a father.

• 1:41:21Speaker 00

  You think if you're a father who's a CEO, who's traveling around the world and misses your children's birthday and misses your children's soccer games and misses your children's piano concerts and isn't there to pick them up at school or have breakfast with them or have dinner at the end of the day, you think that child is going to have a healthy relationship with that parent? Another myth. Here we are. I told you I was going to weave the myths in. Quality versus quantity time. You cannot be there for your children on your own time. You have to be there on their time. Meaning, quality time is a narcissistic fantasy. I can be there on my time.

• 1:42:04Speaker 00

  So, my child sits at home and is like a vase on the counter, waiting for me to come home. And then I come home and there I can be present for my child. Your child has needed you all day long. And when you come home, that's your, that's on your time. You need to be there a quality of time as well as a quantity of time. I always say to people that you can be, you can be physically present, but be emotionally checked out. But you can't be emotionally present if you're not physically there. Enough of the time. And that's just a reality. So what are the careers that are really good for whoever's going to be the primary attachment figure? Service fields.

• 1:42:46Speaker 00

  Fields where you have your own business and you can make your own schedule around your children, where your children don't work around you, you work around your children. Physical therapy, psychotherapy, speech therapy, consulting, maybe. Anything that's entrepreneurial, anything that is a service field.

• 1:43:08Steven Bartlett?

  CEO, podcaster, investor, entrepreneur.

• 1:43:10Speaker 00

  No, I'm going to disagree with you. I'm going to say you can, but you have to be willing to set limits with yourself. So you have to be willing to say. Do you know Monet, the painter?

• 1:43:22Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:23Speaker 00

  He was famous in his own life. Now, most painters have to be dead to be famous. And he painted on a very modest schedule. He'd get up in the morning to catch the light and then he'd be done by like three or four o'clock in the afternoon. He'd have dinner with his family, you know.

• 1:43:41Speaker 00

  We, we are the architects of our own lives.

• 1:43:44Steven Bartlett?

  Kind of.

• 1:43:46Speaker 00

  No, not kind of.

• 1:43:47Steven Bartlett?

  I'm representing the opinion of some people who might be listening. I, obviously, there's.

• 1:43:52Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 1:43:52Steven Bartlett?

  There's a lot of fun in the time.

• 1:43:53Speaker 00

  So who are the people who can architect their own lives? You want to be a, who do you think? I would say hedge fund managers.

• 1:43:59Steven Bartlett?

  Okay, let me tell you then.

• 1:44:00Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:44:00Steven Bartlett?

  So I was eighteen years old, dropped out of university.

• 1:44:02Speaker 00

  Mm hmm.

• 1:44:03Steven Bartlett?

  Um, probably had sex that year. So if I had sex that year and had a baby.

• 1:44:07Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:44:08Steven Bartlett?

  And then I became a single parent. At the time, I was, I had two CCJs. I was broke. I was shoplifting food to feed myself. I printed off the dole forms. I hadn't, I never sent them in, but the forms where you get, you know, like government assistance. And I was working in call centers, working night shifts. Because that was the best job I could get to pay for the, the rent that I had every month. If I'd had a baby at that exact moment in time, I don't think I would be, it wouldn't, it wouldn't resonate with me. What you're saying about being the architect of my own destiny, because there is like immediate emergencies. I can't, I can't feed myself, let alone a kid.

• 1:44:43Speaker 00

  So I'll tell you.

• 1:44:44Steven Bartlett?

  And I also didn't have any family within hours. My mom had basically disowned me because I dropped out of university. I was alone.

• 1:44:51Speaker 00

  Did you have a baby at eighteen?

• 1:44:52Steven Bartlett?

  No.

• 1:44:52Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 1:44:53Steven Bartlett?

  I haven't had kids yet. I'm hoping to.

• 1:44:54Speaker 00

  Okay. So, um, first of all, it's a good reason to use birth control and not have a baby at eighteen. But, okay, let's put that aside for a second. So let's put that aside for a second. Let's say that what we should be promoting in this world, I'm going to say this, it's controversial, is that whoever is the primary attachment figure has a career that they have control over and flexibility. Maybe the other person doesn't. Maybe the other person works for someone or whatever. But in my book, I interview a lot of different women from a lot of different socioeconomic backgrounds. And one of the women that I interviewed was a nanny. And she said, she had three children.

• 1:45:37Speaker 00

  And she said that the way that I raised my children, because I was a single mother raising three children, I had to work to pay the rent. She said, but I made sure that I didn't work past five o'clock. I never worked past five o'clock. I'd come home at five o'clock. I didn't go out at night. People would say, let's go. I said, no, my children, this is my time with my children. So I don't go out at night. I don't go out on weekends. I'm with, when I'm not working, I am with my children. And my children knew that I had to work. But the way I used my free time was very carefully. She also said to me, and again, a number of, there are a number of interviews in there.

• 1:46:22Speaker 00

  She also said that the people who she left her children with, she never used daycare. She had extended family watch her child. So her neighbor, who was her dear friend, she paid to watch her child. And so that person was auntie and that person was like family and was in that child's life forever. So what I say about childcare is there are different levels of importance. So the first, the best is your primary attachment figure. Next best is kinship bonds, family or extended family. Someone who has a similar investment to that child as you do.

• 1:47:01Steven Bartlett?

  Even if the kid's going to be raised alone at that early age. So versus going to daycare, will they'll be around other kids?

• 1:47:07Speaker 00

  No, no, children don't need other kids until the age of three. They do something called parallel play. What they need is one-on-one connection. They need attachment security and they need their emotional needs met by one person, one-on-one.

• 1:47:23Speaker 00

  After three, then the beginning of preschool, then they start to actually interact with one another. Until then, they're not playing together. They're just doing parallel play. So that's another myth. The myth that daycare is good for children for socialization. No. Children don't need socialization before three unless their mother's with them. So what I say is do play dates, do play groups, but be within eye gaze or ear shot of a child. Meaning there's something called reproachma, which is emotional refueling. So when children start to explore, when you've given them emotional security and they feel so secure that you're going to be there, then they start to take chances. They start to take

• 1:48:07Speaker 00

  risks. They start to toddle off. That's where the word toddler came from. They toddle away. But guess what they do for emotional security? They look back and they say, ah, she's there. It's okay. And then they keep playing. Or they run back and get a hug and then they run off again. You are their touchstone of security. And that's how children become courageous. That's how they develop the ability to explore and still feel secure.

• 1:48:36Steven Bartlett?

  Your gut and my gut is the home of our digestion and it's also a gateway to better health. But it can be hard to know what's going on in there. Zoe, who sponsors this podcast, has one of the largest microbiome databases on the planet and one of the world's most advanced at-home gut health tests. Their blood sugar sensor, which I have in this box in front of me, goes on your arm. So you can see how different foods impact your blood sugar. Then there's the at-home blood sample, which is really easy and analyzes your body's blood fat. And of course, the famous blue Zoe cookie, which tests your metabolism. Oh, and I can't forget, there's also a poo sample, which is a critical step in understanding the health of your microbiome. And you post it all to Zoe and you get your results back, which will help you to understand your body's response to different foods. Using

• 1:49:21Steven Bartlett?

  your results, Zoe's app will also create a personalized nutrition plan for you. And this is exactly why I invested in the business. So my question to you is how healthy is your gut? Head to Zoe.com to order your kit and find out. And because you're one of our listeners, use code BARTLET10 for 10% off your membership. Head to Zoe.com now. As you guys know, Whoop is one of my show sponsors. It's also a company that I have invested in, and it's one that you guys ask me about a lot. The biggest question I get asked is why I use Whoop over other wearable technology options? And there is a bunch of reasons, but I think it really comes down to the most overlooked yet crucial feature: its non-invasive nature. When everything in life seems to be competing for my attention, I turn to Whoop because it doesn't have a screen. And Will Ahmed, the CEO,

• 1:50:06Steven Bartlett?

  who came on this podcast, told me the reason that there's no screen: because screens equal distraction. So when I'm in meetings or I'm at the gym, my Whoop doesn't demand my attention. It's there in the background, constantly pulling data and insights from my body that are ready for when I need them. If you've been thinking about joining Whoop, you can head to join.whoop.com/CEO and try Whoop for 30 days, risk-free and zero commitment. That's join.whoop.com/CEO. Let me know how you get on. You keep mentioning, but three years old?

• 1:50:39Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:50:39Steven Bartlett?

  Why three years old? And there's kind of like two segments to this question that I was keen to understand. Is there an element of neuroplasticity that makes the age of three so important? And the other kind of sub-question I was trying to figure out in my head was, is the damage we do before three years old to a child inadvertently at all reversible?

• 1:51:01Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 1:51:01Steven Bartlett?

  And is it damage?

• 1:51:02Speaker 00

  So plasticity, there are certain, what we call, critical periods of right or social emotional brain development. One is zero to three, and it's the most important because what's happening is something called neurogenesis. So it's the growth of cells. And your presence as a parent who provides safety and security, buffers your child from stress, regulates their emotions, is critical to them growing that right brain. Because 85% of the right brain is developed by three. Crazy, right? 85%. And you being there changes the architecture of that brain. That's how important you are. Like, people come up to me in cocktail parties, and they'll say to me,

• 1:51:48Speaker 00

  Ah, I don't have to be there. My baby's just sleeping and pooping and, you know, they don't need me. I'm gonna be around when they're talking and walking. I'm like, no, you got it wrong. I'm like, you have to be here now because now is when the cell growth is happening. Every time a baby snuggles and takes the breast and looks at you with their eyes and you sing to them, thousands, millions of synapses are firing. Okay, so you have, think of a garden. By three years of age, you're growing a garden. I know, because I just started a garden where I have vegetables and flowers and it's abundant. It's an abundant, I love my garden.

• 1:52:32Speaker 00

  This is an abundant garden of brain tissue, okay? If you do it right, it grows, it overgrows. You know, the flowers, the vegetables, it's growing crazy, okay? Now, they go into childhood. After three years old, they go into childhood. And for, from three years old till about nine years old, it's still growing, but it's not growing at the same pace. So say that it's still like growing a little, like, like it, the garden grows in one big burst and then little bursts. So from three to nine, it's still growing, right? But not, not to the same degree as the first critical period of brain development. Now adolescence comes, nine to 25.

• 1:53:17Speaker 00

  And now you have to prune back the garden. Because if you don't prune back the cells you don't need, it's as damaging to the brain as if you didn't grow them to begin with. So, in these two critical windows, the environment dictates, do the cells grow? Do they get pruned? And When they're really little, you're their environment. You're it, Tag, you're it. When they're in adolescence, you're a very important part of the environment, but not all of their environment. They have friends, they have school, they have activities, right? And so it's very important if you can get to the first window to get there, because you don't know what's going to happen to them and you want to fortify them, right?

• 1:54:02Speaker 00

  You want to fortify them so when they get to adolescence, which is really painful and hard and a struggle, that they have the inner resources to cope with adolescence, because it's so hard adolescence, right? And it offers such adversity, social adversity, academic adversity, right? Social media. So both of these periods are important. If you miss the first window...

• 1:54:28Steven Bartlett?

  What, zero to three?

• 1:54:29Speaker 00

  Yes. The title of my second book. It's called Chicken Little: The Sky Isn't Falling, Raising Resilient Adolescents in the New Age of Anxiety. If that isn't a mouthful. Do you know what the title of the book was supposed to be? It was supposed to be Second Chances.

• 1:54:49Steven Bartlett?

  Ah, okay.

• 1:54:51Speaker 00

  And the title of being there was supposed to be called The Lost Instinct.

• 1:54:55Steven Bartlett?

  So if you messed up your kids, you get a second chance to fix it.

• 1:54:58Speaker 00

  You get a second chance. And what do you do? I want people to read the book because it's more nuanced than what I'm saying, a lot of what you should have done in the first three years. You've got to be there. You've got to be there in a different way. You're not going to, I mean, they're not little little, so... But when they come home from school, if you're not there, when the door swings open, everybody knows that teenagers close their doors, if they have doors. And that's their way of saying, "My defenses are up, go away." If parents work really hard and then they come home and they go, "Knock, knock, knock, I'm here to spend time with you. How was your day?" That door's closed.

• 1:55:42Speaker 00

  Closed, baby, closed. If you aren't there when the door opens on its own, on their terms, if you're not there when they're coming out to get a snack or to take a pee or to take a break from their studying, if you are not there then and open for business, for communication, the door closes again.

• 1:56:03Speaker 00

  So it goes back to this idea that children need you when they need you, not when you're personally available. And if you miss that window, it's not the end of the world because you can, a word that we use is to repair. You can repair a lot of the damage, but to repair the damage, you can't go back, it's sort of like going to a confessional if you're Catholic. You know, you go in and you say, you know, oh, Father, I, you know, I murdered somebody today. And the priest says, well, you know, say 12 Hail Marys. And I don't know, I'm not Catholic, but you know, but you can't go out and murder again.

• 1:56:44Speaker 00

  So if you're going to repair, it means that whatever happens between you and your child, you're trying to be a better parent. You're trying to do things differently, right? You can't take advantage of their good graces and keep pushing them away, pushing them. But repair is possible because the brain is plastic and it's always growing and shrinking until it's not.

• 1:57:09Steven Bartlett?

  What if I'm 30 years old, for example, and I had a traumatic upbringing? Can I repair myself from the childhood trauma that I experienced between the ages of zero and 10?

• 1:57:21Speaker 00

  The way that I would put it is it takes a relationship to cause the trauma and it takes another relationship to repair it. So the thing that most people don't understand about therapy and why I really recommend psychodynamic psychotherapy, some people would say psychoanalytic therapy, but a more in-depth kind of therapy that lasts longer is because you develop a relationship. It's not that you're healed from some pithy thing that the therapist says. I mean, I wish I was so smart that I could say this and, you know, everybody would say you're a genius and pay me millions of dollars. It doesn't work like that.

• 1:58:05Speaker 00

  Therapy requires the consistency of a relationship with the therapist, because it's through that therapist seeing you through the ups and downs of your life, reflecting your feelings. It's a kind of emotionally reparative experience, but it's not what the therapist says as much as the relationship, the longstanding relationship with the therapist. So what's healing is the relationship rather than the interpretations.

• 1:58:34Steven Bartlett?

  And can that be a romantic relationship that then course corrects you in some regard?

• 1:58:38Speaker 00

  Okay, so the idea is that to really heal, it requires relationships. And those relationships sometimes can be people that you love. The problem with people that you love is that you end up burdening those people with, you can burden, overburden the people that you love with your conflicts, your internal losses. So, you know, if you find yourself using the people that you love like therapists, if you find that you're using the people that you love to, to deal with past losses, I would say it can, it can corrupt the relationship. So you have to be careful. So the reason to go to a therapist would be to preserve the relations.

• 1:59:23Speaker 00

  It's not that you don't share with the person that you love, but you don't want to overburden your friends or your lovers with the burdens of your childhood trauma. Right? So I always say that therapy becomes like a safe container. You go to therapy, you talk to your therapist, you develop this trusting relationship where, where everything is, is, is left there, so to speak, in that container until you come back. But therapy is not for everyone. It requires laying down your defenses. It requires the ability to be open and talk about your feelings. There are types of therapies that you can go to. If you can't talk about your feelings, things like DBT or CBT.

• 2:00:05Speaker 00

  But, you know, for the most part, healing therapy requires being open. It requires trusting.

• 2:00:11Steven Bartlett?

  You must encounter a lot of people that are in denial about their childhood trauma and the role it's played in shaping who they are. Because you'll have people come to you, I'm sure, that are exhibiting adult symptoms like maybe they can't form relationships very well. Maybe they've got other forms of emotional erratic behavior. And there must be occasions where. You have a suspicion.

• 2:00:32Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:00:33Steven Bartlett?

  That it's linked to some early experience and they're in denial. So I'm just thinking about people that I know that are have presenting symptoms in their life, really sort of like chronic presenting symptoms. But if you were to ask them if their childhood played a role, they're almost like defensive of their childhood.

• 2:00:50Speaker 00

  So defenses are important. Defenses protect us. So, and people also have a misunderstanding of what therapy is about, the kind of therapy. I'm a psychoanalyst, so we don't, people think you go to therapy and they take your defenses away from you. I would never take someone's defenses away unless I could help them to replace them with healthier defenses. So what we do is an exchange, like you don't take your foot off a landmine unless you have a really big rock to put in its place, right? So if you're going to let go of one defense, you have to trust the person you're working with, that you'll find a better, healthier defense to protect you.

• 2:01:29Steven Bartlett?

  Give me an example.

• 2:01:30Speaker 00

  If you used anxiety in childhood, if you used the anxiety to, to get attention. What if you complained as a child and you went around and said, you know, oh, I, you know, I'm worried about this and I'm, and, and so in a way it serves a purpose. That anxiety, that, um, that complaining, that expression of emotion, it gets the attention from your parents. And suddenly, and I do believe that there's a lot of this going on. A lot of kids are breaking down and saying, I'm anxious, I'm depressed. I do think many of them are, but I also think that many of them need their parents to understand them.

• 2:02:14Speaker 00

  So that would be what I call, it's a defense, but it's an unhealthy defense. Because what ends up happening is that the parents stop being able to hear them because they complain and the anxiety starts to grate on the parents and the parents pull away, right? And so what would be a better defense for that child is to learn how to express what they need from their parents, instead of just saying, I feel anxious or I feel depressed. But to actually say, you know, mom and dad. You don't really spend any time with me. You don't really, and when you're home, you're distracted and you're on your computer and your iPads. And, and you're not, you don't really seem that interested in me.

• 2:02:58Speaker 00

  And so that's a better way of going about getting the attention that they need. So you're never taking something away from someone unless you have something better to give them. And that's a myth of therapy, right? So people feel that they're going to go into therapy and be left defenseless. Now, defensiveness, which you mentioned, is a different thing entirely. When someone is defensive, it means that it's um, an unhealthy defense. It means that you hit something. So when you say to your friend, do you have any childhood trauma? And they say, absolutely not, what are you, that defensiveness? As opposed to someone who says, you know, I can't think of any, I maybe, maybe, but you know.

• 2:03:43Speaker 00

  So the ability to introspect about the good and the bad and integrate the good and the bad is a, is a healthy sign. If you have a friend who can't talk about the sadness of their childhood, or a friend who can't talk about the happiness, who can't integrate the good and the bad of their childhood, you know something happened there. And if you have a friend who won't talk at all, then you really know something happened there. You hit a sensitive spot.

• 2:04:10Steven Bartlett?

  Are daddy issues real? Because the term is thrown around in culture like, oh, she has daddy issues. It's typically she has daddy issues, isn't it?

• 2:04:18Speaker 00

  Right, so there's something called Oedipal development, which is sexual development. It's really relational development, but it's sexual development, which is that all little boys fall in love romantically with their mothers and want to marry them. So all little boys say, I want to marry you mommy, daddy get lost. It's sort of like that. And all little girls want to be daddy's little princess and marry daddy and want mommy to get lost. And it's this period of about.

• 2:04:46Speaker 00

  Oh, three to six, three to six years old. And I always prepare parents for this. Fathers need to reinforce themselves and feel secure enough. So when their little boys, who have been their buddies and who have loved them, when their little boys say, "Bye bye daddy, get lost." They don't react. They don't go into a deep depression. They just, they hold it and they say, "Oh, I get it. You love mommy, that's okay." Same with little girls. If their mothers overreact, become angry at them, reject them, say, "Oh, you just love your daddy." And so, but if daddies are not present enough for little girls, it does inform.

• 2:05:28Speaker 00

  So our first romantic relationships are with our opposite sex parent. So as a little boy, your first romantic relationships with your mother. As a little girl, your first romantic relationships with your father. If your opposite sex parent is not present at all, there's a loss there. So, you know, sometimes what can happen is if you don't have a present father or if your father is really just absent or if he's physically present but emotionally absent, you spend your life looking for that kind of Oedipal connection, that kind of admiration, that kind of love, that kind of, you know, for someone to love you in the way that a father loves a little girl.

• 2:06:13Steven Bartlett?

  But with distrust built in.

• 2:06:15Speaker 00

  Well, not necessarily. I mean, sometimes it's too much trust. I mean, if you are hungry and somebody offers you scraps, you'll take the scraps, right? If you're hungry and somebody says, "Here's some crumbs of a muffin." So the problem is that...

• 2:06:32Steven Bartlett?

  But what if they offered me the scraps? And sometimes the scraps, as I went to reach for them, walked out and didn't come back? Then I might develop a relationship that it's not safe to trust the scraps because...

• 2:06:45Speaker 00

  So that's a father who's negligent. But it still leaves that little, it still can leave that little girl with a strong desire to be loved in that way. So it's like a missing, there's a missing piece, right? So you'd say the romantic relationship with the opposite sex parent. Is a very important part of our sexual development. And our relational development, and so it becomes a missing piece for that child who then grows into that adult. If a father was abusive to a little girl, then you know, that little girl may do what we call a neurotic repetition,

• 2:07:24Speaker 00

  which is she seeks out abusive men, because that's the only kind of love that she knew or understood. So, you know, you have to remember that that children perceive of the relationship with your with their parent as loving, no matter what the parent does to them. I used to work when I was a young social worker in foster care. And the children who were physically abused by their parents and neglected terribly, still wanted to be with their mothers and fathers. They didn't want to be taken away because that's that was their mother and father, and they perceived of that as love. So however we're raised, we perceive of that as love.

• 2:08:04Speaker 00

  The problem is if it's not healthy love, then we can neurotically repeat or repeat that in our adult lives.

• 2:08:10Steven Bartlett?

  Men, young boys and men. I was looking at some stats earlier on that said there's been increased sexual inactivity amongst young men, which is an interesting stat. It's risen to almost thirty one percent of men between the ages of eighteen and twenty four, reporting no sexual activity in the past year. So that's almost doubled in a in about the space of eighteen years.

• 2:08:31Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:08:32Steven Bartlett?

  Here's an interesting stat. High suicide rates amongst men. Men account for nearly eighty percent of all suicides in the US. The highest rate observed among forty five to sixty four year olds globally. Suicide is the leading cause of death amongst young men. And a survey conducted in the UK found that an increasing amount of men feel hopeless and worthless. And that are struggling with finding meaning and purpose in the world. The plight of young men, you talk in your books and in your work about

• 2:09:01Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:09:02Steven Bartlett?

  how the role of a man has changed and how that this might not be necessarily productive for the health and wellbeing of a man.

• 2:09:09Speaker 00

  Yeah, we've taken away their purpose. When you take a human being's purpose away. I remember the purpose for men was to protect their family, was to, it was to hunt in the old days, feed their families, but it was also to protect their families. It was to provide for their families. And what we've done in reversing everything is although we raised up women, and there are certainly positive things about raising up women, but when we raised up women, we denigrated men. And I have two sons, so this is very personal for me.

• 2:09:49Speaker 00

  And I also see a lot of young men in my practice, young adult men, and what I'll say is that they feel discouraged, they feel purposeless, they feel diminished.

• 2:10:03Speaker 00

  Yeah, and there has been something vengeful, I think, about, so the feminist movement was meant to give women choice and to balance off what was imbalanced in society. But there's something vengeful about it, I think, at moments, I feel like there's something vengeful about the modern feminist movement, which is, let's get them, let's diminish them, let's take over, let's push them out, let's, you know, let's beat them up, let's get, you know, let's show them who's, I mean, something really vengeful. So it, in, so for me, the feminist movement was meant to create balance. It wasn't meant to, it wasn't meant to set

• 2:10:45Speaker 00

  into play this other kind of imbalance. And, you know, more than, I think, sixty percent of universities are women now, as well as graduate schools. And so that means, and the studies show that men will marry at their educational level or below. Women will only marry at their educational level or above. And by diminishing men so much in terms of our education and professions, we've basically taken men's purpose away. They feel purposeless. And the other thing is, and I'm gonna say, When men stay home to nurture their children. Now, remember, as mammals, we have defined roles.

• 2:11:29Speaker 00

  That is not instinctual for men to stay home and nurture their young. It's just, it's a reverse of something. And the issue there is that there is an inverse relationship between oxytocin and testosterone. The higher the oxytocin, guess what?

• 2:11:49Steven Bartlett?

  The lower the testosterone?

• 2:11:50Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 2:11:52Steven Bartlett?

  So if we're staying at home bonding.

• 2:11:54Speaker 00

  There's a reason for that. So mammals, when they are nurturing their young, they don't want somebody mating with them. Go away, right? So the idea is that when a female nurtures, she doesn't want to have sex. She doesn't want to, right? So the investment in nurturing pushes away the investment in mating.

• 2:12:19Steven Bartlett?

  And this is why I've read so many stats around men's testosterone dropping when they become fathers. Some, yeah, I couldn't believe that was true when I read it.

• 2:12:29Speaker 00

  It's true. There was some studies to talk about how women's testosterone goes up. Women have testosterone. When they're out in the work world, fighting like men, that their testosterone goes up and men's testosterone when they stay home goes down. Now, what that's doing for sex lives, there's some research about, you know, that is the next wave, which is what does it do to sex lives? Because men have to perform. They have to get it up, to be crude.

• 2:12:57Steven Bartlett?

  Tell me about it.

• 2:12:59Speaker 00

  And so if your testosterone is low, you're not going to get it up, right? Which is why there's all this Viagra and these patches and supplements and, you know, because it's not, it's not instinctually normal for husbands to stay home and nurture their children. And that's the inconvenient truth. How that affects men's and women's sex life? When women come home from their banking jobs and their law jobs, do their husbands not want to have sex with them? And, you know, is that breaking up something? So this is all, I think this is the next wave of, we've reversed things societally so fast.

• 2:13:40Speaker 00

  And then we hope that our evolutionary bodily responses are just going to catch up in merely a century. And it just doesn't, evolution doesn't work like that. It takes hundreds, if not thousands of years to change our bodily evolutionary responses, right? Our instinctual responses. So this is, you know, it's problematic. And also, when men's testosterone goes down, they get depressed. So they don't perform sexually well, they get depressed, they feel purposeless. They can't do what they're instinctually supposed to do, which is provide, protect, hunt. You know, we talk about D E I.

• 2:14:24Speaker 00

  I mean, why aren't we talking about D E I when it comes to men and women? Why aren't we talking about balancing the scales, giving men purpose again? And honestly, we should be talking about what happens to men when they actually do stay home and nurture their young.

• 2:14:40Steven Bartlett?

  Is this to support the idea that if you're at home raising your kids as a man, you have, you struggle in the bedroom?

• 2:14:48Speaker 00

  So there was some research, I know, that was going on about that, how it affects sex drive. But when your testosterone goes down, it does affect sex drive. We're just not talking about it. So I have anecdotal patients. I have a patient who's, whose wife was a hardcore woman in finance. And, you know, he, he couldn't, he'd lost interest in her. He had to go out of the marriage and have affairs with women who were more feminine, who were more, so he could feel as if he could play that masculine role. He couldn't do that in his marriage. And so are we going to see?

• 2:15:30Speaker 00

  Kind of a shift in society as a result of this, we're already seeing it. I mean, the other thing that we're doing is to young boys. Let's talk about what we're doing to young boys. This starts very young. We basically educate young boys in a way that really favors girls. You know, from a very young age, we talk about being able to sit quietly and regulate your emotions and not be aggressive and not be impulsive. And these little boys are being diagnosed with ADHD, many of them, just for being little boys. Little boys need to run around, they have a lot of physical energy, they have tons of testosterone. When you're like between three and six, you have a surge of testosterone and all you want to do is run and jump and play and be outside.

• 2:16:15Speaker 00

  And what we're doing, we're putting them in school, making them sit in circle time. So, so we marginalize them, we label them, we say they have a problem, we say that they have ADHD, that they have behavioral problems. And in many of them, the stress that I talked about is the stress of making little boys be more like little girls.

• 2:16:35Speaker 00

  And that's where it starts. And so then they go into childhood. And again, the educational system favors the way girls learn, not the way boys learn. How do boys learn? Boys have attention spans for very short periods of time and then they need lots of physical activity. So ideally, if you go to and look at the boys' schools, what do they do? They run the boys like running the dogs in the park. They sit for 45 minutes or half an hour, but then the boys get time off to run around. And then they'll sit another half an hour and then they'll run around. I mean, they have like four recess periods a day. And so that's really better for boys.

• 2:17:17Speaker 00

  And little girls have more of a capacity to sit quietly in circle time and, and sort of, you know, they're, they don't have as much testosterone, they don't have that need to run and jump and play to the same degree that little boys do. They do need to play. We're not letting our kids play, boys and girls, because we're trying to force left brain development on them too early, but... We are forcing little boys into this box and they're not doing well in that box. And then they're labeled, they're labeled as having behavioral problems, ADHD. And that label then follows them through childhood, sometimes into middle school, into, into high school. Yeah.

• 2:17:59Steven Bartlett?

  What would you change? I make you Prime Minister of the world, President of the world, and you can fix this issue.

• 2:18:05Speaker 00

  Oh, I would have little boys educated separately than little girls in the early years. In the early years, I would have boy schools and girl schools because little, little girls learn differently. And also, there's been a lot of evidence to show that in the early years, when you do single gender education, little girls will try things, will take risks with things that they wouldn't in front of little boys. And little boys will try things that they wouldn't take risks in front of little girls. Like, little boys are more likely to try art and painting and music. Little girls are more likely to try STEM and math and, you know, all these things that we talk about little girls should do. So, the, the idea is that, um, single gender education in the early years is, is better

• 2:18:48Speaker 00

  for little kids because they learn differently.

• 2:18:51Steven Bartlett?

  What about as it relates to men? What would you change to fix the issues you were talking about with testosterone and those kinds of issues?

• 2:19:00Speaker 00

  Talk about it. We should be talking about it. We don't talk about this issue. How much, how many times have you heard what I just said? People don't talk about the fact that when you raised, when, if we're going to flip this around and have men be the nurturers, they're going to have pretty low testosterone. You're going to have to supplement their testosterone. And so, you know, and also you take their purpose away evolutionarily and they get depressed. Women have many sources of self-esteem.

• 2:19:32Speaker 00

  They have work, they have children, they're relational. And for the most part, historically, men found their self-esteem from meaningful and purposeful work and also from protecting their families. So what we've done is we've taken their purposeful work outside the home away. We've made their purposeful work staying home with children. And, you know, we've lowered the testosterone. So if you look at it and say, we're trying to switch, it's like a social experiment. We're trying to change something that's taken thousands of years of evolution to create in just, you know, less than a hundred years. And it's, you know, it's problematic. So what would I do? I would talk about it.

• 2:20:17Speaker 00

  I would have couples talk about it. I think they need to talk about the competitiveness. I think they need to talk about the envy and the jealousy and even the disappointment. I mean, a woman who comes home and sees her husband caring for the children, on one hand, she might say, oh, my husband's so sweet and lovely and I love that he cares for my children. And on the other hand, she says to her friends, I wish he was bringing in more money and I wish he was taking care, you know, I wish he was taking care of me. So it's problematic.

• 2:20:48Steven Bartlett?

  There was a longitudinal study done in the Philippines that followed 624 men over almost five years and found that those who became fathers experienced a significant decline in testosterone levels, specifically newly partnered fathers, had a medium decrease of almost 30% in morning testosterone and 35% in evening testosterone, which was significantly greater than the declines observed in single non-fathers. Moreover, fathers who reported spending three or more hours daily in childcare had lower testosterone levels compared to those less involved in caregiving. And there's also an impact on co-sleeping, where research indicates that fathers who co-sleep with their children exhibit lower testosterone levels than those who do not. This suggests that close proximity during sleep may further influence hormonal changes

• 2:21:32Steven Bartlett?

  associated with parental caregiving.

• 2:21:34Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:21:34Steven Bartlett?

  One of the arguments I've heard before as to why men's testosterone dips if they're New fathers is because it's an evolutionary reason to make us not go out and cheat on our partner and take care of our kids.

• 2:21:45Speaker 00

  Well, it's investment in it. So either you're invested in mating or you're invested in caring.

• 2:21:52Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, so it's a good thing.

• 2:21:53Speaker 00

  Yes and no, because you still need to have testosterone to have a relationship with your wife, a satisfying relationship. So, and unfortunately, that doesn't stop men from going out and cheating on their wives, because a healthy man would say, you know, well, we used to have sex twice a day, every day, and now that we have a baby, we only have sex once or twice a week because the baby's so small. And, and a healthy man would say, that's enough. I can compartmentalize. I can, right? A less healthy man might say, I'm gonna go out and get it someplace else, because I can't get it here. So, yeah, I mean, there's nuance to all the questions you're asking. But what I would say is that testosterone

• 2:22:35Speaker 00

  going down a little bit when you have a baby in the bed is fine, but the kind of testosterone we're talking about going down when you stay home and nurture, we'll see, it could be problematic.

• 2:22:49Steven Bartlett?

  My last question's about devices and technology.

• 2:22:51Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:22:51Steven Bartlett?

  There's been a lot of books written recently and a lot of conversation around the impact that screens, social media, mobile phones have on children. What is your thoughts and philosophy towards raising healthy kids in a world of technology?

• 2:23:03Speaker 00

  Well, I think it's the American Pediatric Association says no technology under the age of two, for good reason. No iPhones, no iPads, right? You want to sit and watch a Mr. Rogers when your baby is two together, a rerun of Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood, that's fine, but no technology. After that, you want to really regulate that technology. Now, why is that important? Because technology...

• 2:23:34Speaker 00

  Raises dopamine levels in your brain, which is why adults get addicted to it, too. It's very addictive. And the problem is that with adults, when you, when you look at technology, it does raise your dopamine. But there was some research to show that technology raises the dopamine in an adolescent's brain tenfold to that of, of... So in other words, it would be like, if you smoked a joint, it would, you know, make you high. If an adolescent smoked the same joint, it would make them 10 times higher. It has to do with the, um, the, the sensitivity of the brain to dopamine and the lack of regulation. So, um, the prefrontal cortex

• 2:24:19Speaker 00

  is the part of the brain that regulates emotions. And it's not fully developed till about 25. So all that dopamine that has to be regulated is more easily regulated in an adult than an adolescent. So it's not good because it leads to addiction. Okay. It's not good because particularly social media, but all kinds of technology, they, they get the amygdala going. Remember that, that little almond-shaped stress-regulating part of the brain? It turns on the stress reaction, which you don't want to do chronically. There's lots of problems with that. And in the case of social media with adolescents, particularly adolescent girls, it takes advantage... I mean, you have to say that this was invented

• 2:25:04Speaker 00

  to take advantage. It's not a coincidence. It's manipulatively created. Because the reason that it's so bad for teenage girls' brains is because the self-consciousness, the perfectionism, is all the brain in a hyper-alert state of stress and fear. You're putting those girls and boys into a hyper-vigilant state of fear and stress, right? I have to be perfect. I don't look as good as them. My, my dress isn't as pretty. So, so you're putting children into a fear state and then they, they can't separate from the device. It's like they get...

• 2:25:50Speaker 00

  There was a movie, I think it was called Inception, where you could get stuck in a paradigm. You could get stuck in this fantasy, right? In a virtual reality. In a way, they get trapped in this paradigm of perfectionism, social isolation, self-consciousness, which is all the brain in a hyper vigilant state of stress.

• 2:26:15Steven Bartlett?

  Anxiety.

• 2:26:16Speaker 00

  So, not good at all. Not good for adults, much worse for adolescent brains.

• 2:26:22Steven Bartlett?

  What is the most important thing we should have talked about today that we didn't talk about so far?

• 2:26:27Speaker 00

  I think we talked about a lot. But I think, you know, what I would say is that

• 2:26:37Speaker 00

  presence is just so critical to children. And there's no replacement. This idea that we have as a society that caregiving of children is something that can be generically assigned to others, that you can delegate, delegate other things to others. Delegate your accounting, delegate your laundry, delegate your cooking. If you're a CEO, delegate everything you can. But spend time with your children. Your relationship with them, their mental health depends upon it. And that's not something we say. We say, work, work, work, work, make more money. Everybody work, work, work, work. And your children will be just fine.

• 2:27:22Speaker 00

  Well, clearly, our children are not just fine.

• 2:27:25Steven Bartlett?

  What do I do as an employer? I employ lots of people and I'm thinking, shit. Do I need to give people three years off when they have a kid? Is that the?

• 2:27:33Speaker 00

  Well, in my opinion, give them as much time off as you possibly can.

• 2:27:38Steven Bartlett?

  Men and women?

• 2:27:39Speaker 00

  Men and women, whoever is the primary attachment figure. I would say whoever's going to really be responsible for caring for that child.

• 2:27:48Speaker 00

  But then give them options. Give them choices of how to work in the years that their children are very young. Give them options to work part-time or to share a job or to work from home half of the week so they don't have to leave their child and still they can work. Give them choices and options that allow them for some flexibility and control. If you know that an employee has young children, accept the fact that, you know, they may need to leave early and not stay as late as as other people who don't have children. Now, that's going to make the people who don't have children angry. And you know what? Tough. Because that's what those children need. Life isn't fair.

• 2:28:33Speaker 00

  It's not always fair. And if you want to have a child, you too could have that. But the idea of exact parity, tough. Because that's what society needs. It needs healthy children. If you're going to have a child and you need to leave every day at four, so you're home for your children. So flexibility, control, options, as much time off in the beginning as possible.

• 2:29:00Steven Bartlett?

  You realize that some of the things you say are controversial. Or not.

• 2:29:03Speaker 00

  Almost all of them. Yeah.

• 2:29:06Steven Bartlett?

  Why do you say them anyway?

• 2:29:07Speaker 00

  Because somebody has to. Because they're the inconvenient truths that are stopping us from having healthy children who grow into unhealthy adults. And so somebody has to say these things. And if you're too worried about people liking you, then you don't sometimes say what needs to be said. And fortunately, I don't care if people like me. But I do care that people like their children and want to be with their children. So that's why I say these things.

• 2:29:39Steven Bartlett?

  Why is it so personal to you? I can see it in your face.

• 2:29:43Speaker 00

  Well, then you'd have to ask me about my own personal story. My personal story, just to wrap it up quickly, is that my own mother was a very loving mother, but could dissociate. And by dissociate, she had a lot of trauma as a child, and I think she managed it by emotionally... She was like a little girl. She's very sweet, but she was like a little girl. And so I couldn't always feel her. I couldn't... She was like sand that slipped through my fingers. So I can remember the pain. But she was there physically, but I could remember the pain of the absence of her mind. And she could feel for me, which is why I have such compassion.

• 2:30:27Speaker 00

  But she couldn't think about me. So there's two things parents have to be able to do for children. They have to be able to feel for them. They have to feel empathy for their pain, for their distress. They cannot look away from their children's pain and distress. You cannot look away. You do not have the luxury of looking away from your children's distress. But you also have to be able to think about them and be able to think about who they are. My mother could feel for me, but she couldn't think about me because she would dissociate. So my own personal pain is having had a loving mother who had some limitations. And so it made me want to be a better mother,

• 2:31:07Speaker 00

  but it also made me want to treat people who want to be better mothers and fathers.

• 2:31:14Steven Bartlett?

  What were the symptoms that that had on you as a young woman, growing up, as an adolescent?

• 2:31:20Speaker 00

  I struggled socially and I struggled with my identity and personally and, you know, self-esteem, I would say. And it wasn't until I went into therapy... Oh, I tried a lot of things in my twenties. I worked in television production. I worked in...

• 2:31:39Speaker 00

  I worked on Capitol Hill. I worked in many different public relations. And in the end, I found myself sitting in my therapist's office one day. And looking around and saying, this is where I want to be. I want to be, I want to do what she does. And I want to help people the way she's helped me. So that relationship with my first therapist and then my second therapist. And you know, as psychoanalysts, we have to be in treatment for many, many, many years. Because the point is, we have to work on ourselves so deeply that we don't do harm to patients inadvertently with our own issues.

• 2:32:21Speaker 00

  So we have to be very, as we say, very organized as a person. But yeah, so that's my personal story and why mothering is so important to me. And the vulnerability of babies is so important to me.

• 2:32:36Steven Bartlett?

  Erica, we have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest, not knowing who they are leaving it for. And the question that has been left for you.

• 2:32:45Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 2:32:46Steven Bartlett?

  Is, what does your obituary say?

• 2:32:52Speaker 00

  Oh, my gosh, I'm going to know who left that. You're going to tell me after. Oh, boy, what does my obituary say?

• 2:33:05Speaker 00

  Kind, generous, compassionate,

• 2:33:14Speaker 00

  fervent in her beliefs, stubborn as hell, a good friend, a good mother, a wonderful wife.

• 2:33:26Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:33:30Steven Bartlett?

  I think it will. I certainly think it will.

• 2:33:35Steven Bartlett?

  And I think there'd also be an additional couple of sentences there that speak to the value that you've given to the world through the work that you do. Now, people might not agree with everything you say because people have lots of different opinions on these subjects, but. I'm of the opinion that people who are willing to deliver their thoughts, their truth, based on the science that they've experienced and that they've read and what they've studied and the experiences that they've had, the clients that they've seen, is so unbelievably important. Because I think if we look back through history, progress has occurred when people have dissented from the accepted narrative. In fact, I probably wouldn't be able to sit here in America as a black man if it wasn't for people who had the courage of their convictions to dissent from certain narratives. And so I've always,

• 2:34:19Steven Bartlett?

  I think, I've had it hardwired into me that disagreement is productive, especially when it's well-meaning. And that's exactly how I see your work. I think that you're challenging a narrative, bringing evidence and a new opinion to the table, a different perspective that I think is very, very important for so many. And it's been so interesting for me because I've struggled, you know, I'm approaching that season of life where I become a father, and I'm reading all this stuff about leave your kid to cry on the floor in the supermarket, or put them in timeout, or.

• 2:34:52Speaker 00

  Oh, I am so giving you my number.

• 2:34:54Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, I know. So I've been trying to wade through this storm of like parenting advice and bullshit and stuff. And it's, it's really wonderful to hear your perspective because it is a counter perspective. It's the perspective that nobody really wants to say out loud. And therefore, for me, it's useful. Thank you, Erica. Thank you so much for your time and generosity today. I really, really appreciate it. And please continue to do the work you do. And I'm very excited for your upcoming book. I think it's next year, isn't it?

• 2:35:18Speaker 00

  It is.

• 2:35:19Steven Bartlett?

  About divorces. If anyone wants to find more of your work, we've got these two exceptional books here. Being There: Why Prioritizing Motherhood is in the First Three Years Matters, which is a wonderful book that was published in 2017, I believe. And then this one here, Chicken Little: The Sky Isn't Falling: Raising Resilient Adolescents in the New Age of Anxiety, which was published in 21, I believe. I'll link both of these below. I highly recommend you read these books if you're interested in these subjects like I am. But where else can people find you?

• 2:35:47Speaker 00

  www.komisar.com And also at Attachment Circles, the website should be up and running soon. If you're looking for community and education, come to Attachment Circles.

• 2:36:04Steven Bartlett?

  Great. I'll link both of those below wherever you're listening to this now. Erica, thank you.

• 2:36:08Speaker 00

  Thank you for having me.

• 2:36:09Steven Bartlett?

  Some of the most successful, fascinating and insightful people in the world have sat across from me at this table. And at the end of every conversation, I ask them to leave a question behind in the famous diary of a CEO. And it's a question designed to spark the kind of conversations that matter most, the kind of conversations that can change your life. We then take those questions and we put them on these cards. On every single card, you can see the person who left the question, the question they asked, and on the other side, if you scan that barcode, you can see who answered it next. Something I know a lot of you have wanted to know. And the only way to find out is by getting yourself some Conversation Cards, which you can play at home with friends and family, at work with colleagues, and also with total strangers on holiday. I'll put a link to the Conversation Cards in the description below.

• 2:36:54Steven Bartlett?

  You can get yours at thediary.com.