Why Fathers Matter - Dr Anna Machin

Anna Machin is an evolutionary anthropologist at Oxford University, a researcher into the role of fatherhood across time and an author. The modern world has made dads surplus to requirements in many ways. The deadbeat dad is such a meme in sitcoms and cartoons now that it's no surprise men don't feel they have a role in child rearing. But just how important are fathers to the development of boys and girls? And what don't we know about their impact? Expect to learn how fathers saved the human race when babies heads got too big, whether it's normal for dads to not feel love for their baby when it's born, the most important ways dads can bond with their kids, whether dads are more important to girls' or boys' development, what pushback Anna got for writing a pro-father book and much more... Sponsors: Get 10% discount on Marek Health’s comprehensive blood panels at https://marekhealth.com/modernwisdom (use code: MODERNWISDOM) Get 20% discount & free shipping on your Lawnmower 4.0 at https://manscaped.com/modernwisdom (use code MODERNWISDOM) Get 15% discount on Craftd London’s jewellery at https://craftd.com/modernwisdom (use code MW15) Extra Stuff: Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom #family #fatherhood #mensrights - 00:00 We Need to Change the Narrative Around Fathers 06:02 How Evolution Shows the Value of Fatherhood 12:26 Is Modern Culture Making Fathers Redundant? 23:28 Changes in the Brain in a Committed Relationship 27:19 Why Babies Should Lie on the Father’s Chest 30:17 Differences in Roles of Mothers & Father’s in Child-Nurturing 41:23 Why Adolescents Need Their Fathers 50:04 Why Does Our Current Society Demonise Fathers? 58:13 What Anna Wished More People Knew 1:01:39 Where to Find Dr Machin - Get access to every episode 10 hours before YouTube by subscribing for free on Spotify - https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn or Apple Podcasts - https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Get my free Reading List of 100 life-changing books here - https://chriswillx.com/books/ - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/

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

• 0:00Chris Williamson?

  Why do we need to change the narrative around fathers?

• 0:05Speaker 01

  We need to change the narrative about fathers, partly because the one we have at the moment is a complete fiction, which is kind of made up from many myths and stories we've been told in our culture over the years about the role of fathers, about their importance to their children, about how they become fathers, how they learn the knowledge to become fathers. And actually, all of this is based upon absolutely zero academic research, absolutely no observational research at all. It's just stories that we've told each other, anecdotes. And because of that, the myths we've built up around fathers are just that, they're myths, they're not actually true, and they are very damaging to fathers, they're damaging to men, and they're also damaging to their families.

• 0:49Speaker 01

  So the work that I do, and those of my colleagues around the world, we do it because we actually want the facts to be out there. We want the stories we tell about fathers to actually be accurate.

• 1:00Chris Williamson?

  Which myths do you wish that you could put into the ground and fully bury about dads?

• 1:06Speaker 01

  The first one I would bury is that fathers, men are not instinctive parents. So we have this story, and I hear it a lot still from the dads that I study, well before they have children, which is that like mum is an instinctive parent, she's somehow like magically able to do this, whereas dads have to learn. And because of that, they tend to see what mum does as a gold standard of parenting, and whatever they do as a secondary bit of a failure. And actually, it's not true, and we'll probably go into that a little bit later, but we've discovered that men are as biologically primed to parent as women are, which as an evolutionary anthropologist makes perfect sense to me. But that's probably one of the biggest ones, because it really undermines

• 1:46Speaker 01

  a man's confidence, that he feels that actually if he just goes with what his gut is telling him, he will be okay. He really, a lot of them lack a lot of confidence, and they do very much belittle themselves in relation, for example, to what mum is doing.

• 2:03Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it's. There is a demonisation of fatherhood, and I want to get into this later as well, but I wonder how much of it is a cope in response to single parent households and us trying to not make children who grow up in single parent households feel like they're falling behind, because if we minimise the impact that fathers have on children's rearing, then the people who do grow up with just mum don't feel like they're missing out on as much. And this is a trend that we see, you know, the tyranny of the minority is somehow, sometimes how it's categorised. But yeah, it's so, so fascinating. One of the other things, William Costello, who's one of David Boss's students out here, told me a story

• 2:44Chris Williamson?

  that you taught him about how fathers saved the human race for extinction because babies' heads got too big.

• 2:52Speaker 01

  Yeah. Okay, so what happened? So our brains are six times bigger than they should be for an animal of our, of our size, of our body weight. And we're also bipedal. So we have this massive problem with our anatomy about 1.8 million years ago to start with, where our hips had narrowed because we'd gone bipedal. So the birth canal got narrower. But we had this big increase in the size of our brains, for example, compared to chimps. And we got to this point about 1.8 million years ago where the head would no longer fit through the pelvis at full term. So we started having to birth our babies very preterm, basically. We should be pregnant for much, much longer than we are. And that

• 3:34Speaker 01

  meant you had this helpless baby and mum wasn't able to do that entirely on her own. Particularly if she had like toddlers and everybody else around her. Initially, women helped each other with kin. And that was fine for about just over a million years. And then about half a million years ago, our brains took a massive leap again. And suddenly, just relying on your sisters, your grandmother, your mum, whoever it might be, wasn't enough. And actually, the race, our species was threatened with extinction because these babies were not surviving. And so what happened, whoops, what happened next was that the, that the next genetically related person had to step in, and that was dad. Now, this was a big thing for mammals, for a mammal, because only 5% of mammals actually have

• 4:18Speaker 01

  investing fathers. So we're really rare. And we're actually the only ape that does it. So this was a big, big evolutionary step for a mammal to take, for dad to stick around. But if dad hadn't stuck around, the species, I would... Argue would have died out because there were all these babies and none of them were surviving and none of those genes were carrying on down the generation. So we would have hit a really difficult demographic problem.

• 4:45Chris Williamson?

  Lots of interesting things there. First off, if it wasn't for the width of women's hips, how long do you think they would gestate for?

• 4:53Speaker 01

  We don't really know, but it's probably getting to maybe pushing towards elephantine levels. So nearly probably, yeah, if not slightly longer because you've got a big brain to grow in there and that takes a lot of energy and it takes a lot of time.

• 5:12Chris Williamson?

  So there is a, it's, it's, it's not quite an arms race, but it is a, an evolutionary trade off between how much mum needs to walk and how long the child needs to gestate for.

• 5:24Speaker 01

  Yes, yes. And the way we dealt with that and the way we dealt with this demographic nightmare is we birthed our babies earlier and earlier and earlier. And that's why when you look at a chimp baby, it's like bounding around the trees after a week. And you're going to human baby and oh my God, you've got years before it's going to be doing that.

• 5:40Chris Williamson?

  It's just a puddle for the next two years.

• 5:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. If any, you know, if anyone's looked after a newborn baby, you know how unbelievably helpless they are. And that was the trade off. But that meant that in the classic, classic statement, it then started to take a village to raise a child because you suddenly have this kid who was helpless, but was growing this enormous brain that was going to need loads and loads of support.

• 6:02Chris Williamson?

  And MPI, male parental investment, just to really, really drive this home, how rare this is. Ninety five percent of all mammal species have zero male parental investment and none of the other ape family do. Like we are, we are the outlier.

• 6:21Speaker 01

  Yeah. And the reason for that, and that's why we then go on to this argument of how important fathers are. Because if fathers hadn't been important, and if they weren't still important, they just wouldn't have evolved. They just would not have evolved because evolution, it hates what we call redundancy. So what it doesn't do is it doesn't invent or cause to evolve two roles which are identical or near each other unless they're really needed. So it wouldn't have caused a human father to evolve unless he was absolutely critical for the survival of the species. It just doesn't work like that.

• 6:55Speaker 01

  So it, you know.

• 6:57Chris Williamson?

  Go back 750,000 years ago. What would the typical father have done?

• 7:04Speaker 01

  The typical father 750,000 years ago would have probably acted very much like a chimp father. Um, I would probably have probably sides, several children with several different females because reproductive success, in terms of evolution, the only thing that's important is reproductive success. How many kids are you having? Are they surviving? Are they themselves reproducing? Okay, so before we had investing fathers, before dad had to do that, he would have been spreading his seed. Because that would have increased the likelihood of reproductive success. But we got to this tipping point where he was doing that and oh my God, none of them were surviving.

• 7:38Speaker 01

  Okay, so actually your reproductive success is pretty much zero. And so evolution will have selected for those men who stuck around and actually started investing. But the, but the problem is you get to the point where a man, you could say, well, he could just carry on, you know, siring several children with several different women. But the problem you have is that first of all, he wants paternity certainty. So if he's doing that, that means all the other, that means the women who he is mating with are also mating with other men. And then you've got this conundrum of, oh my God, I, I'm now possibly investing in someone else's child and I don't really want to do that. So the way I deal with this is I do a thing called mate guarding, which a lot of uh, primates who do couple up do.

• 8:19Speaker 01

  And I'm going to stick by the female side. But if you stick by the female side, you're not mating with anyone else. And you slowly move into this thing where we have for a greater or lesser period of time, what we call parental monogamy. And that the father sticks with the woman, only mates with that woman and helps to raise the children because that's the only way his genes are going to survive.

• 8:36Chris Williamson?

  So I got sent something by Machin Murphy earlier on. Right. This is really, this is really interesting. So this is a pushback against Alpha Tate, Alpha male sort of hyper Andrew Tate approach as being what's classed as reproductive success. And a tweet from him says, I've always been skeptical of sexual partner count as a measure of male reproductive success. In our species, concealed ovulation and contraception make it rather unlikely that a man will produce children through anything other than long-term committed relationships. And it got me thinking about how this is reflected ancestrally as well, that, you know, spreading your seed around, even the most alpha of alpha males, it doesn't track

• 9:20Chris Williamson?

  using wolves or chimp tribes or silverback gorillas as the model for us because the children come out in a very different sort of way. And as you identified, and anyone that's read The Ape Who Understood the Universe knows, humans are grandchildren optimizing machines. That's the thing that needs to happen. Once you get to the stage of grandchildren, sweet, like I, hands are off the wheel, so to speak. But yeah, I think it's a really nice reframe. And it also maybe explains, I don't know how long 500,000 years is evolutionarily, pretty long time, but I think a lot of men feel in them a little conflict that, you know, they want dad, but they want Chad in their own lives.

• 10:04Chris Williamson?

  They want to kind of, and there is a battle that I see amongst my friends. I'm 35 and I'm seeing these former degenerates start to calm down a little bit and, but they still have this sort of vestige of what they used to be, but they have this desire for what they want to become. And I almost see perhaps the 750,000 year ago version of them battling with the 250,000 year old version of them. And I do think, you know, it's, who's going to give men sympathy for, oh, poor, poor party boys, like starting to settle down, like the adult infant, the juvenile that really needs to grow up. I'm like, yo, I'm, I'm on boards. Like I've, I've been around enough of these, these are my friends.

• 10:45Chris Williamson?

  But I do think that it's interesting to see the knobs and the dials start to get tweaked a little bit. You know, we talk a lot about the, the change for women they've hit and uncharitably hit the wall or largely just, I realize that this is now the time for me to settle down. But no one really ever talks about the equivalent with men. And I do think that I see it in my friends. I need to grow up. I need to stop being such an adult infant.

• 11:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely. And in fact, I do have a colleague in Finland who does study male baby lust. And it's something that, again, we don't, we don't talk about. We talk about ticking clocks for women and the fact that they get this sudden insatiable desire to have children. But men have it too. And it's partly because of as you go, as you age, your testosterone naturally declines anyway. Um, and so what testosterone is really, really good at in high volumes is helping you find a mate. It's really good at focusing your attention on that scene. It's really good at giving you all those features which women find attractive. It makes you very driven about finding a mate. But as you age, actually, it declines.

• 11:52Speaker 01

  And it's a natural decline and you start to focus more upon having a family. The other great thing about it, which is the fascinating thing about testosterone is when you do become a father for the first time, it drops significantly, like really significantly, up to a third. And it will never return to the pre-birth level as long as you remain in contact with your child. So testosterone is a very powerful hormone. But I think it's until very recently, we didn't realise how important it was in shaping fatherhood, shaping human fatherhood.

• 12:23Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, so there's an interesting parallel, I think, going on here that

• 12:28Chris Williamson?

  what was needed ancestrally was resources and protection, primarily, I'm going to guess, from a father. Right? Like if you're spending 20 hours a day with an infant in your arms, it's hard to go picking berries or taking down a wildebeest. Similarly, you are physically more frail and the child is unbelievably frail. Therefore, you need someone to play the bodyguard hypothesis. I think your ex-boss told me on this podcast, Robin Dunbar. So I think that there is an equivalent change that's happened culturally.

• 13:01Chris Williamson?

  Socioeconomically in the modern world, which almost reverses this. So women finally have access financially and educationally to not be dependent on their partners. And emotionally, there is a push to almost reprogram some of the maternal instincts and some of the pair bonding instincts that women have. You know, there was a famous article in the New York Times last year by Chelsea Conneboy that said maternal instinct is a myth that men created to keep women down. And I think what this has created is that an assumption, women don't need men financially, women don't need men emotionally. So women don't need men parentally either. That's the stage that we are, at least in some corners of uneducated

• 13:46Chris Williamson?

  popular culture, getting to.

• 13:48Speaker 01

  Yeah. And that certainly is that men are dispensable. I would never forget reading something about the Y chromosome and the Y chromosome has, does have very little of any use on it in terms of genes. And so this argument, the one day it will die out and actually we won't need any men. And what that really misses is actually fathers aren't really there for mothers. Fathers are there for their children. So whether or not as a woman, you feel that you need that, that, that partner in your life, and I will get into the single parent thing in a minute. What is very clear from the data that we've collected and colleagues around the world in the last 15 years is that your children do need you. So actually, it's not about as a woman, I've got my own money, I can

• 14:30Speaker 01

  protect myself, you know, da, da, da, da, da. It's actually, but your kid needs the input from that father. Because actually, what fathers bring to their children is very different from what mothers do. And when I started 15 years ago, the mantra was fathers had no role in child development, because mothers were the environment of raising that child mostly. She was the major input into that child's life, and therefore you didn't need dad around, really. And we have found, again, not surprising from an evolutionary point of view, that fathers actually have a very separate, unique and important input into their children's development. And if you don't have that, then first of all, it has to be found from somewhere else. So actually, the argument from feminists or women or whatever it should be, shouldn't be, I don't need this man. The question should be, yes, but does your child need this man? Because actually, that's what he's there for.

• 15:17Speaker 01

  So maybe you don't want to partner in your life. Okay, fine, co-parent. You know, okay, you can live separately. This is fine. You don't have to be romantically involved. You don't have to have any financial aid. You don't need to ask him for any protection. But what about the kid?

• 15:32Speaker 01

  Just fundamentally, what about the kid?

• 15:35Speaker 01

  And I think that's the argument.

• 15:38Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, a lot of men and dads are feeling quite surplus to requirements now. I think, you know, we had this, as you identified, a bit of uncertainty around fathers. I think I had this really very formative conversation in a group. Couple of months ago, just before we I found out that I was going to have a chat with you. And it was so timely because I'm thinking about this and the role of dads and so on and so forth. And it was a mastermind filled with a couple of billionaires and a bunch of millionaires. So these people monetarily in terms of resources are very, very successful.

• 16:15Chris Williamson?

  And they said, look, let's just do a round table. We've all eaten dinner. Does anybody have any challenges that they're facing personally or professionally? Throw them out into the group. And I think there was one round, one sweep that went round. And on the second one, this guy said, my wife is six months pregnant, seven months pregnant. All that she's talking about is the baby and I don't feel anything and I feel ashamed at the fact that I'm not like, when's this cascade of hormones going to come? Is it going to come when the baby arrives? What if it doesn't? What if I'm not meant to be a dad? You know, I want kids and I can't wait to have kids, but I don't feel anything. And I'm scared. I'm scared of telling her. Maybe she's going to think I'm less of a man. I'm not going to be a good father. Maybe she's going to want to leave me.

• 16:55Chris Williamson?

  There was just like pouring out of this guy self doubt and and and concern and shame and guilt and terror. And I really, it really touched me. You know, this guy opened up and sat right across with the guy equally successful with three kids. And he said, same for me, same for me, just hold on, it will come, it's going to take longer. But the point being, you know, when we're talking about men and dads feeling surplus to requirements, there is a It's a very vicious sort of double ended sword that's happening here where culture is maybe feeding an increasing narrative that women can survive without dads and dads are

• 17:40Chris Williamson?

  a surplus requirement and we don't want to make the single parent household people feel uncomfortable. And what that does is it slots almost perfectly into these fears that fathers innately have. So you have this almost sort of extrinsic and intrinsic narrative being woven together that certainly to the guy that was sat next to me, it played right into the fears that he already had. And it didn't make him feel like he was any more secure.

• 18:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely. And that's why, in a way, I do the work I do and I publish the work I do in a helpful format. So that's why I wrote my book and that's why we have to get this information out there about dads, because what he was feeling is completely and utterly normal. I can think of only maybe three or four men that I've studied who haven't had that concern. And I've studied many, many men in this process. And and the other guy at the table was right, it will come, but we don't tell men that, you know, we hear this thing of, oh, the baby will come out and you'll feel amazing and you'll feel adated and it'll be amazing and you'll immediately love them. Probably not. And actually, quite a lot of women don't feel that either. I'll let you into a little

• 18:50Speaker 01

  secret, but but it's because and we can explain that, we can explain that mum, when she's pregnant is there's raging hormones everywhere. When she gives birth, she's got a massive flood of hormones which help her give birth, actually, but as a side effect are amazing bonding hormones. So we've got oxytocin, we've got dopamine, we've got beta endorphin in there, accelerating the bond she's going to build with that baby. And that's done partly because babies are tough and you don't want her to leave it on the hillside. So, okay, let's give her some really good, you know, chemicals, side effects, and she will, dads can only build their bond because they don't go through that physiological process. They don't breastfeed, for example. They have to build their bond through interaction. Okay. So for example, the drop in testosterone doesn't occur until the baby is born.

• 19:34Speaker 01

  So that's first of all, a big tough thing. So you're not getting this drop in testosterone, which makes you more motivated to care for the baby, and also releases more of an effect from your bonding hormones. High testosterone blocks the effects of bonding hormones. Okay, so if you drop the, you get much more of an effect of oxytocin and dopamine and things like that. So he's not getting that head start during pregnancy. He has to wait for the baby to be born. Then you get this baby who's born. If your partner is breastfeeding, then basically in those first few weeks, there's very little way in because she's breastfeeding, the baby's either asleep, or it's crying, or whatever it might be, and it's very latched on to mum. And that's a really tough period. I've had dads who very much, that has driven them to postnatal depression. Okay.

• 20:15Chris Williamson?

  Fathers can get postnatal depression as well.

• 20:18Speaker 01

  Oh, my god, yeah. The rate is about 10%. And it's genuinely postnatal depression. And again, that's something we need to talk about and highlight for men. So what I always say to men is, I explain to them physiologically what's happening. I say to them, you build your bond during interaction. In those first weeks, baby's not doing anything. So that's really hard. If you can, find a way in. So maybe your thing is baby massage before bed. Maybe your thing is giving it a bath. Maybe your thing is reading a story, even if it doesn't understand you, it still works. Find your thing, and it's your thing, nobody else's thing. Okay, and try and do it every day. But until your baby starts to interact with you, until they start smiling and babbling and laughing and looking pleased to see you, and then at six months, they start playing with you, and then you can do rough and tumble

• 21:02Speaker 01

  play and all these wonderful things. Until that time, it's going to be tough, but it will come. But we don't tell dads that. So they sit there thinking, either baby doesn't like me, or, oh, my god, I'm not feeling anything for this baby, or, and or, you know, mum's really good at this. Why am I so awful at this? How come she's got a bond? How come she knows what's going on? And I don't know what's going on. So they build this massive, massive pressure. And actually, we just need to tell them. We just need to say this is normal. And the fact that you were talking at a man's group, that's brilliant. You know, we have in the past set up antenatal groups just for men.

• 21:39Speaker 01

  And they are amazingly powerful.

• 21:40Chris Williamson?

  Antenatal groups.

• 21:41Speaker 01

  Yes, so so prenatal groups before the baby is born. So in the UK, you know, you go to those and you go with your partner and mum's there and very little is focused on dad. And dads tend to not voice their fears in those environments because they are there there as like the supporter and the rock and they're not gonna say anything.

• 21:57Chris Williamson?

  Well, look at how much mum's going through. She is the one that's.

• 21:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, exactly. And they're all it's all about supporting mum. What can you do to support mum? Um, but actually, if you do a man's group, and particularly if you bring in men like happened on your evening where there's a dad there who goes, it's okay. They open up amazingly and they will tell you all their fears and all this. And then having some experienced dads there is really powerful because they will turn around and go, that happened to me, but I can assure you it's all fine. And they can ask all the silly questions that they think is silly and they're not going to ask in front of a load of women and also most antenatal teachers are women. And it's just a really powerful thing to do, but we have to prepare these fathers. You're like saying to them, you do all this preparation for mum and you read all these books and they say how to support mum and how to do this. And that's really important. I get that.

• 22:44Speaker 01

  But there's very little out there that actually says, and what about dad? Because he is actually going through a profound emotional, biological, physiological change as well. It's just not quite as obvious because there's not a big bump, you know? But actually, his brain is changing just as much as hers. We know that now from scans. You know, we can see the change in a man's brain when he becomes a father. But we just need to share the knowledge, I think. And that's why it's very important to me to do a lot of talks, to do a lot of podcasts, to write The Life of Dad. Because I want and that's written for fathers, because I wanted them to have a book that wasn't about supporting mum, that wasn't about what's happening to mum, that was about what's happening to them. Because I think that's really important.

• 23:29Chris Williamson?

  You've mentioned about this adjustment in androgens. So testosterone drops. It it actually drops a little, I think, when you get into a committed relationship and then it drops.

• 23:36Speaker 01

  It does a little and then it's true. Yeah, exactly. And then it's dramatic. Yeah, yeah, dramatic drop.

• 23:42Chris Williamson?

  What's going on with? Gray matter, what's happening to our brains?

• 23:46Speaker 01

  Okay, so what we see in the brains is we see two key changes in the brain, which we see, and they're identical in women, and we see, first of all, we see changes in the very core of the brain, particularly in the limbic area of the brain, the amygdala and the hypothalamus, which are related to risk detection, which is understandable. So as a parent, you need to be very good at risk detection, you need to look out for those, for those risks to your baby. Second, really big ones are in the outer areas of the brain. So we see the areas related to empathy, increase in size, which again is obvious. You need to be very good at reading your child's emotional needs, what their emotional state is, what they're going to need. And particularly when all you've got is somebody screaming at you, you need to be very good at that. The other thing is all those really good parenting skills, like attention and planning and problem solving and organising. So those areas of

• 24:31Speaker 01

  the brain associated with that, some of them are related to executive function, they also increase in size. So you see all these areas becoming primed so that you are as good at this as you possibly can be. And we see that happening in men and in women.

• 24:49Chris Williamson?

  I wonder if the hardcore productivity-pilled corner of the internet gets a hold of this conversation and finds out that their executive function can be increased by having kids. They might see having children.

• 25:00Speaker 01

  That'd be everyone's having children, yeah.

• 25:02Chris Williamson?

  Having children is a productivity hack. No, they'll say, look, think about how I'm going to be able to parallel process, my, my Google Calendar is going to be completely put together.

• 25:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, you'll just be knackered, but anyway.

• 25:12Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, true. Yeah, the, the sleep offset may, may derogate that. Talk to me about this risk detection stuff and fear stuff, because there's these videos on the internet, it's dads, it's like dads doing unbelievable things, the child's dicking about on the corner of the couch and falls off, and this father gets like some Odell Beckham Jr. reverse crow grip thing, or like they plucks them, plucks them before a random tractor accident occurs or whatever, you know, like, so there's, there's this increase in that, but does this mean that parents, specifically dads but also mothers, is there baseline anxiety? Is that raised? Does this bleed across into the rest of their life too? Do they have

• 25:57Chris Williamson?

  a sense of fear, anxiety, stress, whatever, occurring as well?

• 26:02Speaker 01

  We do tend to, it's part, it's quite a complex, multifactorial thing. You do see an increase, increase in cortisol in young parents, obviously. It is a very stressful thing to do, not only with the lack of sleep, but also with the sheer amount of learning you need to do. And the fact that, yes, you have to, you have to have this heightened risk detection. We do find that men, and it's probably to do with the drop in testosterone, definitely become more emotional in situations which they feel relate to them. So I always get my dad saying, oh, my God, I now can't watch charity appeals on the telly, you know, without crying. And it's partly because you've had a drop in testosterone.

• 26:36Chris Williamson?

  It's emotional in a sad direction. It's not like they get more aggressive emotional.

• 26:41Speaker 01

  No, no, they tend not to actually. And that's probably because there's a drop in testosterone. So we don't see in some male other animals who don't tend to do the caring side, but tend to do, for example, defence of the nest. We will see more aggressive behaviour. That tends to be caused by the increase in a hormone called vasopressin, which actually isn't terribly important in humans. Men, men have kind of replaced that with oxytocin. So we don't tend to see increases in aggression, but we do tend to see increases in stress response. And we see increases in, yeah, vigilance, basically, just sheer vigilance for what's going on.

• 27:17Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, that's very interesting. Okay, so let's roll the clock forward. This imaginary father and his imaginary sleep deprivation has got to maybe three to six months in, and the baby's a little bit less of a puddle on the floor. I've heard this story of, you know, it's very important for the child to lie on the father's chest, skin to skin contact. How much of this is bro science? And how much of this is legit?

• 27:41Speaker 01

  Absolutely legit. If there's one thing I will tell a father after birth is put that baby on your chest. Still here, even though we've spent years trying to educate the medical establishment, we still find that fathers aren't offered it as routine, which is ludicrous. And we still have to say to them, you have to be assertive enough to ask for it and say, please give me the baby. I want to put the baby on my chest. The reason for that is human babies are sensory beings, like a lot of little baby mammals. They do everything. Their senses are very heightened. One of the senses that's not heightened is vision. But they are amazing at smelling. They're amazing at feeling and touch. So if you put them on your chest as a father, what happens is they, first of

• 28:25Speaker 01

  all, they smell you. They start to smell who you are because they can't really see you. Secondly, a wonderful thing called bio behavioural synchrony happens. So when you put a baby on your chest, They, their physiology starts to go into time with your physiology. So they'll come to the same temperature as you. Their heart rate will come to the same heart rate as you. Their blood, their blood pressure will come to the same blood pressure as you. Okay. Also, touch is the key releaser of bonding hormones. It, you know, oxytocin, dopamine, beta, endorphin. If you want to release those, the best thing you can do is use touch. Um, so skin to skin contact after birth, skin to skin contact at any point during the baby's life is really, really critical for fathers. So it's something that's routinely given to women, but not to men. And actually, in

• 29:08Speaker 01

  a way, arguably, it's more critical for men because mum's got that little bit of head start with her bonding hormones, having gone through childbirth. Um, but it's really critical as the first interaction between a father and child, I think.

• 29:20Chris Williamson?

  Robin taught me about the release of bonding hormones when finger over skin movement is kept at two centimeters per second or less.

• 29:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's a particular, yeah, no, that's true. There's a particular rhythm and it's why we find some touch or some stroking irritating and some stroking really lovely. And I suppose, you know, you might, if we, you know, you, you have a partner who strokes you, sometimes you're like, no, that's really, and it's usually because it's at the wrong frequency. We have these special, special hairs and special nerve cells in our skin and it's just a very particular stroke rate.

• 29:56Chris Williamson?

  Apparently that was, if you run that back and you look at the primatology side of it, it's a pace at which it would be quick enough to be able to find and groom fur. But if it was any quicker than that, you're not going through and actually being able to pick out whatever the, the things are. Okay. So we've spoken about kind of some of the challenges that both dads and mums face. What is the difference in the roles that mums and dads are supposed to play? Like, why, why are they here when it comes to the raising of children?

• 30:28Speaker 01

  Okay. So we have this, this is where it can all get horribly political and I can be misquoted horribly and picked up by both sides of the argument. From an evolutionary point of view, as I mentioned earlier, evolution hates redundancy. So it will not cause two roles, like parenting roles, to be exactly identical if that's not required. So what's happened in human evolution is that there are some things that both parents do. So both parents are care, both parents are highly empathetic. If you look at the brain activity in the brains of mothers and fathers when they're interacting with their children, we see equal, we see synchrony in empathetic areas of the brain. We see synchrony in the caretaking areas of the brain.

• 31:08Speaker 01

  But beyond that, there are some really distinct differences. And they seem to relate partly to the evolutionary age of the two roles. And partly to the fact that mum's role is quite biologically constrained.

• 31:26Speaker 01

  Partly by childbirth, partly by breastfeeding, particularly in the early stages where dad's role is much more flexible. So what we have found is that if we look at peak activations in the brain when we're looking at interactions with mum, dad and baby. The peak activations in the paternal brain are in the core of the brain. So the limbic area of the brain, the unconscious brain, very, very, very ancient, as old as time. And that's where nurturing is and attachment is and risk detection is. So there's really fundamental caring things. So you know, you look at the tiniest little vol or mouse and it's got the same thing happening in its brain. Dad's, obviously that bit lights up, but the peak in activation is actually in the neocortex, the newest bit of the brain, which is understandable because it's evolutionarily quite young fatherhood.

• 32:11Speaker 01

  And there we see a lot of activation in the social cognition areas of the brain. So that's at the front of the brain. And that's to do with being able to sort of manoeuvre your way through the complexities of social life. And there was lots of different things involved in that. So it might be social communication. It might be things like empathy. It might be things like what we call sharing, caring and helping. But it can also be things like resilience, mental resilience. And so dad's role, I've kind of reduced it in a simple catchphrase, but dad's role is to scaffold the child's entry into the world beyond the family.

• 32:55Speaker 01

  What dad is there to do is, once all that very initial nurturing has happened and the baby's starting to to grow and maybe mum has another baby, is to take that child, and this is what would have happened 500,000 years ago, take that toddler and start to prepare them to go beyond the family. So the first thing they might do is go to preschool. And we know from research that the attachment to father builds with their child, the sensitivity of their parenting to that child is the biggest predictor in how well that child transitions into preschool. So how good are they? How how good are they at sharing, caring and helping? How good is their social communication? How good is their emotional inhibition and regulation? Those are

• 33:36Speaker 01

  all driven mostly by the relationship that child has with their father. Because it seems to me that dad is the key to this. And what's really interesting is, as an anthropologist, I study fathering around the world. So obviously, how a culture views fathers does vary. And we have certain views in the West, and those aren't necessarily the views shared around the world. But what we do see is, regardless of whatever culture you're in, every dad is doing that social scaffolding. When you reduce everything away, that's what he's doing. So it might be, you know, studied a group in Kenya called the Kip Sigis, who are tea planters, quite a patriarchal community, very male driven. But dad will take, well, first of all, as soon as the child is able, he will take the child into fields to teach them how

• 34:19Speaker 01

  to use the crop. But the most important thing he does is he takes them to the market. And he teaches them how to build the social network that's going to enable that kid to negotiate and sell the tea. So he will do that. Even in the West, we do that, you know, dad might be, might, you know, get the really good work experience gig, because he's built a really good network on the golf course, or at the country club, or wherever it might be. And so dads are very involved in making sure their kid has the network, has the social skill, has the resilience to actually survive in our world. And part of that resilience is things like taking appropriate risk, helping, you know, helping them deal with challenge, helping them deal with failure. And we see that from very early age. That's what rough and tumble play does partly.

• 35:04Speaker 01

  And so dad is there to make sure this kid has the skills to survive outside the family. And that seems to be the key role of fathers.

• 35:13Chris Williamson?

  What is the role of challenge? That seems to be one of the key differences that you've found between mum and dad.

• 35:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, the role for challenge is because, you know, we live in a really difficult world. And you as a, as a child and as an adolescent have to learn to deal with that challenge, navigate that challenge, get over it, deal with failures, dust yourself down, get yourself back up, maybe find a different way around it or whatever it might be. And so, and you need to, you need to be given those challenges in a way as a child, which is challenging, but not too much. And that, and that's difficult. Um, you know, some, some parents shirk away from that completely and it's the whole cotton wool wool thing. Others might go a little bit too far. Um, but it's really important your child confronts challenge and it seems to be that dad is the key one in doing that.

• 36:02Speaker 01

  And it starts because of rough and tumble play. So rough and tumble play starts at around six to nine months. It's when you see fathers and most fathers do this and most people recognise it, you know, it's when you, you know, um, it's quite robustious, it's quite physical, there'll be wrestling, there'll be tickling, there'll be running around, there'll be jumping off stuff, there'll be throwing each other around the room. And it's really critical to child development. Uh, when dad say to me, what's the one thing I can do with my child to build our bonds, to help my child, I'll say play with them.

• 36:34Speaker 01

  It is the most critical thing. And this whole fun parent thing kind of annoys me a little bit because actually when dads do it, they're not, I mean, it is fun, but they're not doing it because they're the fun parent. They're doing it because it actually developmentally is critical to the child. Because the child starts to learn about reciprocity and social relationships. Play has to be fun for both people. Otherwise it's, you know, it descends. So it's that give and take of play. It's understanding, you know, am I actually pushing the other person too much that they're not enjoying this anymore? So empathy is involved. It's about physical challenge. Oh my God, this is quite difficult, but I'm going to surmount it. It's about risk. How can I assess risk? Actually flinging myself off the top of this climbing frame, it might be too much. So, and it actually starts to build the child's ability to see all those things. And that just goes on throughout life. So we know, looking at adolescence,

• 37:19Speaker 01

  that the biggest factor in a child's mental health, when we look at the parental input, is actually the relationship they have with their dad. Dad is like the superhero of mental resilience in adolescence.

• 37:29Chris Williamson?

  For boys and girls?

• 37:30Speaker 01

  For boys, and actually for girls, it's even more powerful. And we think, though it's only really been studied in the West, though there's been a few studies in China. We think that's because in a patriarchal world, if you have a dad who spends time with you, who inputs into your life, who values your opinions, first of all, it's amazing for your self-esteem. And it's saying, you know, you are valuable, what you say is valuable, and I'm going to support you in saying it. And in a patriarchal world, that's quite a powerful message to give a girl. That it's okay for you to voice who you are. And I am here and I'm going to support you in that. So actually, it can be a bigger impact on girls than on boys.

• 38:11Chris Williamson?

  So that's us getting up into adolescence, just to round out that sort of conversation about play. What does play do for the father or for the bond with the father beyond the child in isolation? I know risk, I know reciprocity, I know empathy.

• 38:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, okay, so it's one of the key ways that fathers build their bond is through play. Because as I've said, you have to interact with your child.

• 38:32Speaker 01

  And one of the key ways you can do it is through rough and tumble play because, because it's fast and it's breathless and it's exercise and it's touch and sometimes a little bit of pain. It releases a lot of oxytocin and particularly beta endorphin, which is your body's painkiller and is released during exercise. And those are really powerful bonding chemicals. And because it's so fast and so in a way time efficient, it does it in this souped up way. So you could give your baby a massage and that would be lovely and they get some beta endorphin and they get some oxytocin. But if you rough and tumble play with them, it's much, much more of an impact, much higher levels of those chemicals. So it's actually a really good way of building a tight bond pretty quickly with a child. What's really, really interesting is rough and tumble play is mainly a Western phenomenon.

• 39:16Speaker 01

  We do see it in other cultures, but it's rarer. And that is because most fathers in Western cultures don't have much time with their children. They are time poor because of the culture we have and they're the primary breadwinner. And therefore, this is developed to enable them to very quickly bond with their children in a time efficient way.

• 39:34Chris Williamson?

  It's a high ROI uh strategy for bonding.

• 39:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. Whereas if we go and look at, let's go look at the Aka, okay, who are in the Congo, they are the most hands-on fathers in the world. They spend at least about fifty-five to sixty percent of their day in actual physical contact with their children. They don't really do it, but they are with their children all day. They're carrying them, they're singing to them, they're telling them stories, they're going on the on the net hunt with them. They don't need to do it in the same way. And so they don't.

• 40:03Chris Williamson?

  I know that it's going to be hard to make the comparison because of the difference in culture and so on. Is there something different about the upbringing, the risk tolerance, the empathy, either in childhood, adolescence or adulthood of the children who are given this more protracted, lower intensity bond with dad uh from the Aka as opposed to the high peak, high ROI thing? I'm wondering if there's something that the rough and tumble play gives or doesn't give that a flatter, longer equivalent of play per day does?

• 40:40Speaker 01

  No, we don't really see any difference actually in terms of bonding, in terms of attachment, in terms of adjustment of children. Um, the only difference actually between something like the Aka and maybe some Western fathers is the degree to which they will allow their children to confront risk. So little Aka baby, little Aka toddlers are walking around with knives. You know, it's it's a hunter gatherer society. They don't quite have the same uh, I don't know, lack of tolerance for for severe risk and actually children learning skills early on. So actually, that's really the only difference you see with them is that they're there, you know, lighting fires and carrying knives and doing all these things at a very young age, which probably most of us was kind of bork at, but they seem to be fine.

• 41:22Chris Williamson?

  Roll the clock forward then, let's get into adolescence and the particularly useful role of dads when we get there.

• 41:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, so adolescence is a key time, and it's a time when we see a lot of rewiring of the adolescent brain. So when you go through puberty, there's a lot of de-wiring, re-wiring, and it's a difficult time for children. It's a particularly difficult time mental health wise, because we're starting to see a change in the focus of attachment from parents to peers. And that means that actually your ability to navigate the social world at that point is really, really critical. And we see a lot of the mental health issues that young people have manifest themselves within the social sphere. So things like social anxiety, for example, things like body issues, they tend to be within the social sphere, caused partly by the society in which the child lives. And because of that, it

• 42:16Speaker 01

  seems to be that because dad is the one that has the skills to scaffold the child, and also the person who has been like the key resilience builder in the child, that continues into adolescence. But what's really interesting is dad doesn't really have to do anything amazing. So you don't have to spend hours with your adolescent, or you don't have to, you know, spend lots and lots of money. Actually, what seems to work with adolescence is just feeling that you as a father value their company. And you as a father, as a busy person, have taken the time to spend time with them, maybe doing a hobby they like, or it can be something as mundane as washing the car, walking the dog, making Sunday lunch, just something where the dad has said, I'm going to spend this time with you. And what's really

• 43:00Speaker 01

  interesting is, is how children view whether or not their parents value them, differs between mums and dads. So children think their mum values them if their mum remembers their favourite breakfast cereal, or, you know, makes sure their sports kit is packed, or all that kind of thing. They value their dad because they value, they feel their dad values them because he spends time with them. And that might be because, you know, dad's time is seen as this very concertina thing. So it's about doing those things with the child. It's about having a secure attachment to the child. And secure attachment starts as soon as birth begins. But if you can maintain that secure attachment all the way through to adolescence, it's really, really powerful.

• 43:42Speaker 01

  And we know that what you do with your kid as an adolescent, as a father, carries them well into young adulthood. So there've been studies showing that dads who have good, secure attachments, who spend time with their children. First of all, those kids have much higher self-esteem. They're much less likely to have things like depression or anxiety. They're much less likely to report loneliness. But as a, as a young adult, for a start, their mental health is better. But also, for example, just dealing with things like stressful things in their daily life. They are much more capable of dealing with those things.

• 44:13Chris Williamson?

  So what I'm thinking.

• 44:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 44:17Chris Williamson?

  I've got it in my head about trying to fold into the discussion of teen girl depression. Sixty percent of twelve to sixteen year old US females say that they have regular or persistent feelings of hopelessness, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

• 44:39Chris Williamson?

  I'm trying to work out or deduct the base rate from that of fatherless homes. I'm trying to work out, you know, whether Jonathan Haidt is correct at folding this at the feet of smartphones and hijack of female comparison during the time that they switch from parent to peer association. And how much of it is a little bit more fundamental than that? And it's absentee fathers. That could be absentee fathers due to it being single parent households. That could be due to the increase in living costs and the fact that dad needs to work more, which means that they're not as involved. That could be if Jonathan is adamant that it needs to be to do with technology.

• 45:23Chris Williamson?

  It could be to do with the distraction or the increase in distractibility of dad from screens, which means that he's not spending as much time with kids. But yeah, looking at the pathologies and challenges that young men and young women are facing as they get into adolescence and then young adulthood. Can you draw lines between fatherless homes or a lack of male parental input into raising kids up?

• 45:50Speaker 01

  Do you know what? You've mentioned so many different factors there and they will all be important. Because it's a multifactorial problem. I want to make two points. The first is that we need to be very careful about what we mean when we talk about a father. Okay, in the West, we associate the word father with biological father, and so we talk about father absence. Because the biological father is not in the home or not in the life of the child. If you look in other cultures in the world. That obsession with biological fatherhood is a little bit strange. So in some societies, the biological father doesn't really factor at all, particularly in matriarchal societies. In many societies, they have what's known as a social father, and that can be a grandfather, an uncle, an elder brother. Lots of people. So in South Africa, for example, it's quite normal within black communities for the grandfather to raise the children because the father has to go away to work.

• 46:35Speaker 01

  And that's perfectly normal. And the grandfather has a special name for father. In some societies, kids have whole teams of fathers. Who will do something different. And that might be the biological father and a lot of social fathers. Who knows? So I think we need to be very careful about talking about absentee fathers. Because actually, if you look at many children who are in single parent households with a mother.

• 46:57Speaker 01

  If you ask them, who are the significant men in your life, they will come up with some.

• 47:02Speaker 01

  And we assume there is no father figure in their life, but that father figure doesn't have to be the dad. It could be the grandparent. It could be a teacher. It could be a coach. It could be a brother. It could be your mum's best friend.

• 47:14Speaker 01

  It doesn't have to be the biological father. It has to be someone who is willing to and might even not even consciously know what they are doing. But they are feeding into that child's development. So first of all, I would make that point. That we are very biased in the West towards biological fathers and we needn't be. Secondly, it's very multifactorial. Certainly, I think, I think. Part of the reason I support fathers in relation to more equality in the home with things like paternity leave and things like that. Is because they are important to children. And they are important to child development. And we find that children who have more input from their father do tend to be more resilient. And they do tend to be have more successful outcomes, particularly girls.

• 47:55Speaker 01

  So you know, that is a factor, having that that father figure in your life. And that's why we do try and fight here in the UK for more rights for fathers. Um, but then again, I agree, social media is an issue. And I talk about that in a very different area of my life, talking about the mismatch between uh, the speed of evolution of the human brain and the speed of our ability to innovate. So we have a very, very ancient brain that can't cope with the way we've innovated the iPhone, for example. We are not made to operate within that environment. And it's a major, it handicaps our brain's ability. Uh, we don't get all those lovely positive bonding hormones. We don't. We are seeing something that quite often is lying to us. And we're not terribly good at spotting what's lying to us.

• 48:40Speaker 01

  If it's not right in front of us. So theory of mind, we are not very good at theory of mind at a distance. So social media certainly has a role, I think. But it's not the only role, and it really does depend upon the child. So there's a real interplay between a child's personality. And social media. So you will get a child, you could get one child who was on social media eight hours a day and would be completely unaffected by it. And then you'll get another child who is more vulnerable. It's really, really complicated. But I think the reason why I try and unpick the fatherhood bit of it is because kids have evolved to have these two roles in their lives. And the science shows us that the dads are primed to do this role. The science shows us that the fathers are important developmentally to their children.

• 49:25Speaker 01

  We know that where fathers have secure attachments to their children, the children have better outcomes. And we know that that's good for society. So the reason why I fight for fatherhood and more equality in the home. Uh, is because of that, and because it is good for children. It's good for fathers, it's good for families, and it's good for society. It's good for women. If you can get fathers, if you can get equal paternity leave for fathers with maternity leave, women can go back to work sooner. They have less of a career penalty. They're then sharing what we call the career penalty with the fathers. The gender pay gap reduces, you know, so it's kind of for those of us who campaign and do the research or follow, it's kind of been a no brainer, but convincing governments is another issue.

• 50:03Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, why is it the case, given that the mothers want the best outcomes for their children?

• 50:11Chris Williamson?

  Mothers also want the best outcomes presumably for themselves. These are facilitated through making men more integrated, through making them more necessary into the raising of children.

• 50:28Chris Williamson?

  Is it just short sightedness and a lack of insight into your work that's causing a kind of anti dad surplus of requirements male narrative at the moment culturally, do you think?

• 50:39Speaker 01

  There are several things. Our media culture hasn't changed enough, so we still, it's getting better, we have less representations of the completely useless dad or the surplus dad in adverts on telly and sitcoms, but it's still there. It's a very ingrained belief.

• 50:54Chris Williamson?

  Homer Simpson, Peter Griffin.

• 50:56Speaker 01

  Oh, you know, and if you've ever watched Peppa Pig, I mean, I love Peppa Pig, Daddy Pig is just the worst representation of fatherhood you've ever seen. He's completely useless. And that's funny. So there's that, there's, there is, and I am feminist to my very core. Unfortunately, there is an element of feminism that doesn't want men to be involved.

• 51:21Speaker 01

  And they want the primacy of the woman to be kept as a parent. And they feel that men are moving into what is a female space. Now, if you look at the evolutionary story and you look at the science, that's obviously completely ludicrous, but it's a belief. And I have had quite, I've had backlashers from fellow women because of the work I do, because I should be studying mothers as a woman. So there is that backlash. Governments just don't want to invest in it, you know, it's we've had the system we've had for such a long time. It doesn't matter. I can hit them over the head with my research and my book till I'm blue in the face. And we have all been doing it recently in the UK. We've had a massive consultation on paternity leave. We all trooped

• 52:05Speaker 01

  up to Parliament. We all presented everything which has been, you know, it's highly, highly convincing. We can show you the child outcomes. We can show you how much the because ultimately it's all about money. We can show you how much the government will ultimately save. But first of all, they're not going to save that money for like three decades. So this current government, I'm not interested because I will be well retard by then. And they've just come out the end and changed practically nothing. There was a real reluctance to do it, you know, even though we've got perfect examples from Northern Europe where it works very, very well.

• 52:41Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it's, it's a shame. It's a shame. I've been having a lot of conversations. I had a lot of conversations about dating for a long time. And now I'm having a lot about the role of men and masculinity and what it means to be a man and so on and so forth. And yeah, it's unfortunate that any gains for men are seen as a loss for women. You know, there's a zero sumness to a lot of the conversations. And yeah, what else? What if people said you're this self confessed feminist with her bona fides out front, writing a book about men and dads and saying that we need to give them more budget and more attention and more care and more sympathy and more resources? What's the pushback been like?

• 53:26Speaker 01

  The pushback is, the pushback is, I quite often get the response, quite an angry response. So I, every now and then I get called in to do radio phone ins. And quite often I will get somebody on the phone saying to me, these men, you know, haven't given birth, they haven't gone through the pain of it. Particularly if you're talking about postnatal depression, actually, they should all just pull themselves together. So that's a classic. That there are limited resources and all those resources should go to women. And I can kind of see that argument here with the NHS. But what really gets me is the lack of empathy, because empathy doesn't cost anything. It's limitless, but we have to play the zero sum game with empathy as well. So if we give any empathy to men, then women get less. No, actually, that's not what happens. We're just

• 54:10Speaker 01

  empathising with both of them. Why is it that it's seen as a loss that you're supporting a man? You can actually support both. It's amazing that you can. So you very much get that attitude that you give to one, you're taking away from the other. Um, and I find that I find it astonishing. And I, and you know, when people say particularly they pull themselves together, think to me, I said, you know, I do say to them, would you ever say that to a woman who is struggling?

• 54:38Speaker 01

  So why do you think it's okay to say that to a man? You know, um, but it's, it's, it's very ingrained. I think it's, I think they feel threatened. Um, I think they feel threatened by what it means about their identity. And it doesn't mean anything about their identity. But I think they think it does. It means that we're taking some sort of primacy away from them, I think, maybe.

• 54:59Chris Williamson?

  I had a conversation, I've had a few conversations, but Dr. John Barry from the Centre for Male Psychology, got me thinking about something. So I'm going to read you a little excerpt from one of my newsletters recently. A common question is, why don't men just do better? Surely they can try harder in school, employment and health. Chop, chop, men, hurry up and stop being so useless. Well, no other group is told that when they suffer with poor performance or accolades in the real world, that they should just pull themselves up by their bootstraps. We don't tell any other group to talk about their problems. Instead, instead, we spend billions in taxpayer money and private charity to set up committees, departments, campaigns and funds to solve the problem. In simple terms, if a woman has a problem, we ask, what can we do to fix society? If a man has

• 55:41Chris Williamson?

  a problem, we ask, what can men do to fix themselves? And I think that this sort of imbalance, specifically in certain areas, this isn't everywhere, and there are still areas in which the imbalance runs in the other direction, but especially around parenting, you know, there is this. Empathy gap, for sure.

• 55:59Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 55:59Chris Williamson?

  Dr. John Barry calls it gamma bias. I think it's his technical term for it. And, um, yeah, it sucks. You could have a guy going through postnatal depression, being told, you didn't go through the pain of childbirth.

• 56:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 56:12Chris Williamson?

  Because, yeah, also, I wasn't sure that I was going to be a good dad. And, and now you're telling me that I'm, I'm not being sufficiently supportive as well.

• 56:18Speaker 01

  And he is also, you know, I can remember one of the, one of the guys who I worked with, who was possibly one of the worst cases of postnatal depression I saw. And he was, he, his wife, the birth was traumatic. He was left standing in a room on his own for six hours with the newborn baby. He'd been shoved in the room, the wife had been taken off somewhere. Nobody told him anything. He didn't, they didn't give him anything to feed the baby. Baby was screaming. He didn't know what he was doing. So first of all, he thinks his wife's dying. Nobody tells him that she's dying. And he's left with this baby. Then they get discharged from hospital. And because he only gets two weeks paternity leave, she's in hospital for 10 days. So he's actually home with the baby and the wife, who's still very ill for three days. Then he has to go back to work, leave her on on her own.

• 57:01Speaker 01

  So he's like, oh my God, feeling horribly guilty, terribly stressed. How's she going to be on her own? Gets home at night, tries to do everything, stays up all night with the baby, then goes back to work. Then because, you know, now I have to earn more money because I've got a child, then takes a promotion to a new job. So you've got the pressure of trying to impress on the new job, learn the new job, still got a sick baby, sick mum at home with baby. And surprise, surprise, he gets postnatal depression. Of course he does. He's got all these different conflicting, you know, with, men are told now, you have to be the hands-on father and you have to be the perfect father. And you have to be really good at this. And you've got all these celebrity fathers with their pupuses and it's all amazing. And, but you're also still told, no, but you still have to be the breadwinner and you have to be the rock.

• 57:45Speaker 01

  And you're not allowed to have any emotions about this and you're not allowed to have any fears because this is about mom. And so that is a massive pressure cooker of stress. And if you, and you know, then we add on top of that, maybe, you know, you might've had a history of depression before, or you might've had a history. Or let's say your partner's depressed. If your partner's depressed, you are much more likely yourself to get postnatal depression. So it's just this massive horrible mixture.

• 58:11Speaker 01

  That is gonna blow.

• 58:13Chris Williamson?

  What would you do if you were able to prescribe some cultural, structural, personal, psychological interventions or suggestions for people, either as a group or individually? What do you wish that more people or governments were doing?

• 58:32Speaker 01

  I wish fundamentally that everybody knew this about men. I wish they knew the science. I wish they knew the story of fatherhood. I wish they understood how important fathers were. I wish they understood what happened to a man. I wish they understood how many different things there are to balance and how difficult it is to be told you have to be this, but you also have to be this. And you just have to slot into it. Okay, just so just do it.

• 58:58Speaker 01

  I wish that they knew that story and I wish there were more groups. I wish when parents did antenatal training, that there was more time spent just with men, helping them and seeing them actually that they need as much support as mum does, but just in a different way. Okay, they just need a different sort of support and they need a different, because they are fundamentally going through as much as I said before, as much of an emotional physiological change as mum is, it's just hidden. That's all. It's just not as obvious. And so I just wish we could share all this information. I wish that, you know, when people learnt about what happens to mum, they learn about what happens to dad. And it's just seen as an equal journey. And what's really sad is actually for a lot of couples, it is an equal journey.

• 59:40Speaker 01

  And actually, mums find this really hard when they go into hospital and dad shoved in a corner. Or dad's not asked what he wants to do or not asked to hold the baby or any of these things. Or when the health visitor comes around after birth, you know, and she'll spend a whole time going, how are you mum? And we'll never, ever at any point say, how are you dad? How are you doing? Is there anything you're all concerned about? Would you like to talk about it? You know, because he's just the guy in the corner, you know, making the tea. Um, so.

• 1:00:07Speaker 01

  I just wish people understood that fathers are true co-parents and they're true co-parents for a very important reason. And if they weren't important, they wouldn't be here. We just wouldn't have them. We'd be like, you know, our chimp cousins. So.

• 1:00:21Chris Williamson?

  What are you working on next? What's, what's, talk to me about what's fascinating you now?

• 1:00:25Speaker 01

  What's really fascinating me in the field of fatherhood actually is, and it's partly slightly personal, is fathers of kids with special needs. Because mums themselves with kids with special needs certainly struggle for support and recognition. But for fathers, there's again even less recognition. And also this role of trying to build resilience and trying to scaffold your child's entry into a world beyond the family, that is a whole bigger job when you have a child with special needs. I have a daughter who's recently been diagnosed with autism. And a big thing for us is, okay, how do we prepare her to survive in the world? A world which isn't really adapted to her needs. And particularly, my,

• 1:01:09Speaker 01

  my husband, particularly going forward into relationships and things like that, that's something that's a real focus for him. How can we give her the ability to detect risk? How can we give her the ability to, to deal with challenge and to deal with the social complexities, which as an autistic person is really hard. So that's a real key thing for me now. It's a very unresearched area. And so I'd really like to, you know, start looking at fathers who are in that position, I think.

• 1:01:33Chris Williamson?

  Had the perfect mother for it, though. Had the perfect mother to be able to go out and do the first-hand research and be able to come up with the strategies. Dr. Animation, ladies and gentlemen, and I absolutely love your work. I think this is very, very, very important. And it's fascinating. And any friend of Robyn's is a friend of mine as well. Where should people go if they want to keep up to date with your stuff on the internet?

• 1:01:53Speaker 01

  You can follow me on Twitter. So I'm Dr. Animation on Twitter. And you can follow, well, you can go to my website, which is animation.com and it's all on there.

• 1:02:03Chris Williamson?

  Oh, yeah. And I appreciate you. Thank you.

• 1:02:05Speaker 01

  Thank you.