"Women Are Furious About This Research." Why New Dads Suffer In Silence - Darby Saxbe

Dr Darby Saxbe is a clinical psychologist, professor at USC, and author. Do dads get postpartum depression? Mothers face enormous physical and emotional changes after childbirth, but fathers can struggle too, often in silence. So what happens to men when they become dads, why does it affect some so deeply, and how can they adapt to a new life that nature has thrust upon them? Expect to learn what actually happens to dads after moms give birth, the physiological changes that happen to dads after birth, which behaviors create the effect known as “dad brain”, the biggest upsides and downsides of fatherhood for men, why postpartum depression in fathers goes unrecognized, the worst advice dads get, and much more… - Modern Wisdom Merch available this Friday at https://www.mwmerch.com/ Get 160+ lab tests for just $365 and save an extra $25 at https://functionhealth.com/modernwisdom Get a Free Sample Pack of LMNT’s most popular flavours with your first purchase at https://drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom Sign up for a one-dollar-per-month trial period from Shopify at https://shopify.com/modernwisdom Get 35% off your first subscription on the best supplements from Momentous at ⁠https://livemomentous.com/modernwisdom⁠ Get ChatGPT to explore ideas, solve problems, and learn faster at ⁠⁠https://chatgpt.com - 0:19 What is Dad Brain? 2:18 How Fatherhood Has Changed Over Time 8:18 What Happens to Men During Pregnancy? 12:57 Should Fathers Be in the Delivery Room? 13:47 Are Sympathetic Pregnancies Real? 15:17 What Couples Should Focus on During Pregnancy 17:56 The Real Cause of Dad Brain 24:18 The Top Behaviours That Trigger Dad Brain 31:31 Biology or Choice: What Makes a “Hands-On” Dad? 33:48 The Truth Behind the Deadbeat Dad Narrative 36:44 Can Fathers Bond at Any Age? 38:50 How Fatherhood Changes Male Hormones 46:44 Why Becoming a Father Is the Ultimate Masculine Role 50:25 Does Dad Brain Get Worse With More Kids? 53:19 How Daughters Change Fathers 1:00:48 Does Housework Ruin Cortisol Recovery? 1:03:43 Do Dads Experience Postpartum Depression? 1:15:29 Why Postpartum Depression Happens in Women 1:18:55 How to Support a Partner Through Postpartum Depression 1:31:09 The Worst Advice New Dads Hear - 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/ Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic here - https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom - 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?

  I'm sorry it's taken so long, but merch is nearly here this Friday, the 31st of July at 12:00 midday Central Time or 6:00 PM UK Time. The brand new Modern Wisdom merch goes live. Head to MWMerch.com now to sign up. You'll get first access and once this is sold out, it's gone, never to be printed again. You've only got six days to be able to buy, so head to MWMerch.com now. Most people are familiar with mum brain, but you found that dads' brains go through a bunch of changes too.

• 0:25Speaker 01

  Exactly. Yeah, so I've been looking at new fathers in my lab over the last decade plus. We've scanned men when they're midway through their partner's pregnancy and then again after they have their first child. And we find that the brain, and I should caveat, this is not a bad thing, loses grey matter volume across that transition to fatherhood. So the patterns look similar to those that have been observed in moms and they seem to be of smaller magnitude, they're more variable and they're more tied to dad's parenting experience.

• 0:59Chris Williamson?

  How does it differ from mum brain? What are the biggest differences?

• 1:03Speaker 01

  So new moms lose about 2.5% of their grey matter volume across the transition into first time motherhood. And they lose volume in parts of the brain that are really linked to hormones. So that includes not just the cortex, which if you think about sort of the outer layer of brain tissue that does a lot of our higher order thinking and reasoning. It also includes what's called the subcortex, which contains our amygdala, our ventral striatum, which processes reward and a number of other structures that are linked with drive and gut feelings. Dads change mostly just in the cortex, which is that sort of executive functioning, thinking and reasoning part of the brain. Moms show profound changes across the whole brain.

• 1:48Speaker 01

  And dads' changes are, like I said, smaller in magnitude. So dads is about 1% of their grey matter volume. And my lab found that this was totally tied to dads' parenting time and investment. So dads who felt more bonded with their babies before birth, they were more motivated to take time off after birth, they spent more day to day time with kids in the first few months and they reported feeling more bonded and having more pleasure in interacting with their kids. Those dads showed the biggest brain change.

• 2:19Chris Williamson?

  How would you categorize the change in fatherhood over the last few generations?

• 2:23Speaker 01

  There's been a dramatic change. So by some estimates, dads' daily time in parenting has tripled or even quadrupled compared to the father knows best dads of the 50s and 60s. So there's been a huge uptick. And what's interesting is that there was an inflection point around the pandemic where men who might have been commuting to an office and maybe missing a lot of the day to day stuff with their kids, suddenly had the experience of being hands on parents in a different way. And a lot of people wondered whether that uptick would persist and it has. So millennial dads are spending more time with kids than any other generation of US dads.

• 3:07Speaker 01

  And there's evidence that Gen Z dads are spending even more time than millennial dads. So there's been a pretty dramatic shift.

• 3:15Chris Williamson?

  How does modern fathering differ from hunter gatherer societies?

• 3:19Speaker 01

  So it's interesting. So in my book, I talk about the model of hunter gatherer fatherhood, the Acha, which is a society in the Congo where men spend a lot of time within hands' reach of infants and they're very involved in infant care. And what's unique about the Acha, and this quality is shared by a number of other hunter gatherer societies, is that they have a very egalitarian, flat social structure and there's a lot of cooperative resource gathering. So we know hunter gatherer societies are the context in which we spent 95% of our human history. So they tell us something about the environments within which we adapted, within which we evolved. And we know that women contributed a ton of calories.

• 4:03Speaker 01

  So when people say it's unnatural for women to work, in fact, women have been economically productive for most of our human history. But in the Acha, the main form of resource gathering is joint cooperative net hunting. So couples work together to gain resources for the society. And as a result, really differentiated specialized parenting roles don't make very much sense, right? They would not be economically adaptive. But you see other models, even within Africa, I talk about another society, the Kipsigis, which is a day's drive away, where there are strict prohibitions against men picking babies up in the first year after birth.

• 4:45Chris Williamson?

  No way.

• 4:45Speaker 01

  So you'd never see a man carrying a baby outside his own home. They're not supposed to share a sleeping surface with babies because it's considered that the manliness of the father will disrupt the infant's rearing and that the infant will compromise the father's masculinity. So, and this is something I talk about a lot in my book, there's so much societal and cultural variability around fatherhood.

• 5:15Chris Williamson?

  What is the resource gathering process of the second tribe?

• 5:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, so it's very different. It's much more risky, it's more hazardous, it's slash and burn forestry. And so it makes sense, just as in the Acha, it makes sense not to specialize too strictly. It makes sense in the Kipsigis that dads are going to do most of the economic work and moms are going to do most of the caretaking. And to be clear, dads are very involved with older kids. They'll teach them how to hunt, they'll teach them how to provision, but they are not picking babies up.

• 5:53Chris Williamson?

  Do you see parallels between modern society with more egalitarian access to work, more female breadwinners and the Acha?

• 6:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think there's some key distinctions, but there's more of a through line, I think, between that model of social organization and contemporary societies, right? Because we have women in the workforce and our jobs no longer require upper body strength or high risk tolerance for the most part, right? So women have the opportunity to earn income. And, you know, like I said, most of human history, we were either hunter gatherers or small family farmers. So women were contributing to economic productivity even within those models. But agricultural society has different conditions and generally demands more specialization. There's more stability that allows you to accumulate and store wealth.

• 6:48Speaker 01

  You need armies to guard your wealth and you end up with a less flexible and less egalitarian social structure. So gender roles get a little more entrenched. I think what's interesting about contemporary society is that we are in flux between these different models of what we expect from men and women. And men and women are changing at different rates.

• 7:12Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, well, it makes sense that we'd need to be adaptable. So I'm interested in the fact that you choose to do the first scan of the father's brain halfway through pregnancy. Is there any reason to not, is there any concern that by doing it halfway through pregnancy that some changes may have happened already? Would a baseline be better? I guess you're trying to get pregnant, you've then decided to basically bet your study on a bunch of people who aren't yet parents, but we promise we're really trying hard.

• 7:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think if we'd had more time and more funding, we probably would have done a preconception scan. And so there's a really good study that came out when I was halfway through data collection for my dad's study. It focuses on mothers and they were recruited from a fertility clinic. So they were trying to get pregnant, about half of the mothers did and about half of the mothers, or rather about half of the women remained non-mothers. And they found that the brain changed even during pregnancy. So we didn't have the opportunity to do that because I was recruiting couples who were already willing to come into the lab, pregnant, and I wanted mothers and fathers to participate together. But I think we might have seen some different patterns if we'd started the study earlier.

• 8:19Chris Williamson?

  What happens with fathers-to-be when their partners are pregnant?

• 8:22Speaker 01

  A lot. So we see hormone changes, we see new emotional worries and concerns, we see couple relationship changes, we sleep, even sleep disruption that starts early before the baby's born. And we don't know exactly the time course of brain remodeling because like I said, my scan study started in mid-pregnancy. We don't have other sources of information for the most part. And so we're making our best guess. My hunch is that what is reorganizing the brain more than anything else is parenting experience and the way in which that challenges the brain and the social demands that it places on the brain. So my guess is that when we're looking at fathers, we're going to see most of the change

• 9:05Speaker 01

  happening after birth, but we don't know that for sure. We need to replicate these studies and extend them.

• 9:11Chris Williamson?

  Right. Am I right in saying that there's research that shows how the relationship manages conflict impacts how painful the childbirth is?

• 9:19Speaker 01

  Yes, my lab did that study. Yeah, so we brought, is that stressing you out?

• 9:24Chris Williamson?

  It's just, it's kind of tenuous, right? Like you've just explained that relationships stress happens, sleep disruption happens and that feels like quite a high. Bah, that's a, that's a, a, a big impact of pre-child's, uh, like, regulation.

• 9:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think the bottom line is that kids are resilient. Humans are resilient. We have survived in all kinds of different conditions and that's kind of our superpower as humans is our adaptability. But it's a relatively new phenomenon for men to be present at their baby's birth. Right? So birth is a very social process and that's unique for humans. So, most animals can deliver an infant solo, no problem. Birth is fairly straightforward. We have these complicated, annoying human pelvises that reshaped when we started walking upright. And we also have these babies with these gigantic social brains. And so birth can be very cumbersome for women and they often require assistance to steer a baby out of the birth canal.

• 10:30Speaker 01

  So you see in most human births, there, there are helpers. And in fact, one theory about why we evolved to live in societies is so that you would have people to assist in childbirth. That's one reason that we humans aren't just kind of, you know, solo, uh, you know, roamers, right? Like, we need to be embedded in society so that our babies will survive. But the people helping with childbirth are almost always women through most of human history. It's a midwife, it's a grandmother, it's sisters and community members. So it was really only in the 19th century that childbirth became really medicalized.

• 11:11Speaker 01

  And you have doctors in hospitals who are presiding over childbirth. Even then dads were kept out of the delivery room. So it was in the 60s and 70s really that dads started to advocate to be present during their baby's birth. Before that, moms were under heavy anesthesia and the standard father role was basically hang out, pass out cigars. And, you know, get congratulated by your buddies, right? So we've seen this big shift and there hasn't been a lot of research on how the couple affects the childbirth experience. And also what is the emotional impact for both mom and dad when dad is present at birth?

• 11:50Speaker 01

  We now expect dads to do a lot of the support that might have been provided by intergenerational kin in previous eras. And dads aren't necessarily trained for that or primed for that. And so there can be emotional fallout from witnessing a traumatic and stressful birth. And like you mentioned, the study from my lab, we found that when couples fought in more negative ways during pregnancy, the birth was more medically complex and riskier and both members of the couple appraised it as being more stressful.

• 12:24Chris Williamson?

  That's likely just the impact of emotional stress on a mother's body. Therefore, the downstream impact of that physiologically during childbirth is going to be negative.

• 12:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. So we know stress, tension, fear, pain, right? So when you're delivering an infant, your body has to release and relax. You have to allow the infant to move down through the birth canal. If you're clenched up, stressed and tense, it makes it harder and it's going to feel more painful. And it's going to lead to more difficult birth outcomes.

• 12:57Chris Williamson?

  What's been the impact of having men in the delivery room? Do you think it's been a good idea?

• 13:01Speaker 01

  I think it's been really good for some couples and I think it's been challenging for others. And it's become controversial, right? So every sports season, there's a player that can't participate because he has to be present at his baby's birth. And I think it's really valuable for moms who benefit from having a partner there to provide support. Again, because we don't have these close intergenerational ties that maybe were normative a couple of generations ago. So I think having social support, continuous social support is one of the best ways to have a positive birth experience. However, I think when dads are unprepared, when they're terrified,

• 13:40Speaker 01

  and when they haven't figured out how to communicate effectively with moms, they can have a deleterious impact on the birth process.

• 13:47Chris Williamson?

  What's Kuwait syndrome?

• 13:50Speaker 01

  So that's male pregnancy and it's a phenomenon by which males start to... Well, it's a controversial thing. I talk about it a little bit in the book. I think it's more anecdotal than evidence-based. So the data on it, there have been a couple of studies that have, that have been done, but I don't fully trust the results. We actually looked at it in my sample of dads. We didn't find any associations between hormones and dad's self-reported pregnancy symptoms. But it's basically like a sympathetic pregnancy. And you see it in different cross-cultural models. So men feeling like they're experiencing nausea, pregnancy patterns of weight gain, uh, sympathetic labor pains.

• 14:31Speaker 01

  And the study that was done in a UK hospital found that expectant dads reported a bunch of pregnancy-like symptoms during their partner's pregnancy.

• 14:40Chris Williamson?

  Just empathizing. Lady, you say that you need us to open up more. Just empathi... I'm empathizing so much that I'm having period pains.

• 14:46Speaker 01

  Well, and a lot of these pains are stress-related, right? So if you think about things like gastrointestinal distress and, you know, difficulty sleeping, those are things that come when you're really stressed and anxious.

• 14:57Chris Williamson?

  Basically pregnant.

• 14:58Speaker 01

  So, yeah, exactly.

• 15:00Chris Williamson?

  Basically pregnant.

• 15:01Speaker 01

  Needless to say, a lot of expectant moms are annoyed by this research because, you know, only one of you is actually puking because of the baby. The other person might just be freaking out. But I think it's interesting that we are so contagious and we soak up the emotional experiences of people around us.

• 15:17Chris Williamson?

  What do you think couples should pay attention to as they're going through pregnancy then?

• 15:21Speaker 01

  So I think they need to learn how to communicate effectively and listen to each other. I think a lot of the time, women hear each other's birth stories. Just like you're at a picnic and everybody's telling you the gnarly story of, you know, their third baby's birth that got really complicated. Men don't necessarily get the opportunity to hear about different kinds of birth experiences or watch media that portrays birth in realistic ways because our pop culture conceptions are sort of bananas. So I think birth education that involves fathers can be really valuable to normalize what to expect. What is the progress of labor going to be like? And how can you effectively provide support and be a calming influence?

• 16:03Chris Williamson?

  I've heard you say if you think that having a baby is going to fix your relationship, don't do it.

• 16:08Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 16:08Chris Williamson?

  Why?

• 16:09Speaker 01

  Yeah. So the studies show a reliable drop in relationship satisfaction around the birth of a baby. And it's unsurprising if you think about the challenges of adjusting to life with a new baby. I used to joke that my husband and I went from good time pals to were suddenly operating a small business with a very disappointed customer, right? You have someone, you have someone crying around the clock who is not pleased with anything you're doing to comfort them. Your sleep is disrupted and you're suddenly worrying about money and your living arrangements and all of these new concerns that maybe you didn't have.

• 16:50Chris Williamson?

  Permanent one-star reviews.

• 16:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

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• 17:37Chris Williamson?

  That's $1 a day to stop guessing with your health and start knowing. And right now, you can get $25 off, bringing it down to 340 bucks. So get the exact same blood panels that I do and save $25 by going to the link in the description below or heading to functionhealth.com-modernwisdom using the code MODERNWISDOM at checkout. Okay, so why is it that becoming a father isn't enough? It's becoming a caregiver that creates that brain?

• 18:06Speaker 01

  So why is it that you need to actually spend time parenting?

• 18:11Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 18:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, because it takes practice and repetition to build the brain, just like anything you learn. Whether you're learning an instrument or a new language or, you know, you're a London taxi driver navigating the city. So I think with moms, you have this kind of high floor of investment, primed and ready to go. And partially that's because it takes so much energy to incubate a pregnancy. It's thousands of calories. So moms have already devoted a lot of energetic resources to babies before they even arrive. So in, if you think about, you, you sort of have a caregiving dial that can be turned up or down. Moms are turned all the way up by the time the baby arrives.

• 18:53Speaker 01

  So the example I gave you of a village where dads don't pick up their babies in the first year, it'd be very hard to find a village like that made up of moms who had similar prohibitions, right? Moms in many ways are biologically primed to care. With dads, it's like the dial is set more in the middle. And it can be turned up or down depending on culture and local contextual demands. So I think what's really cool about dads is that they come equipped with the biology that makes them ready to adapt to become sensitive caregivers. But whether or not they turn the dial is up to them. It's up to is mom incapacitated?

• 19:34Speaker 01

  Is am I in a culture where dads are really hands on? So in the book, I talk about this concept of facultative adaptation, which is to say an adaptation that comes online when needed that can be very useful. So you think about primates who run on four legs. But if they need to grab something, they can stand up and walk on two legs. So you can grab more stuff if you have that ability. If you can turn up the dial for fatherhood, you can enrich kids' lives and you can benefit them and provide them with better outcomes and better odds of survival.

• 20:11Chris Williamson?

  Presumably, paternity uncertainty has got a role to play here as well.

• 20:15Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 20:15Chris Williamson?

  You don't want to be locked in hormonally, neurologically, to raising a child that you're not sure is yours.

• 20:22Speaker 01

  Exactly. And one of the really unique things about humans is we conceal our ovulation. So human males don't know for sure whether or not they've caused a pregnancy. So it actually incentivizes human males to invest in courtship. Because you can't just helicopter in, have sex once, and know that you've made a baby. You have to show up repeatedly if you want to be sure you have very good odds of success. And so you're going to show up with gifts and you're going to get to know that person. And, and so it's adaptive to pair bond, which is why humans have really high rates of pair bonding compared to other species. So we do see that dads' predilection to caregive,

• 21:04Speaker 01

  again, can turn that dial up or down depending on the stability of their relationship with the baby's mother.

• 21:13Chris Williamson?

  Oh, so a, a less stable relationship with the mother would result in a different parenting style from the dad?

• 21:20Speaker 01

  It could. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, it would motivate different reproductive strategy.

• 21:25Chris Williamson?

  Are you familiar with the Westermark effect?

• 21:27Speaker 01

  Hmm, I don't think so.

• 21:28Chris Williamson?

  It's how incest avoidance happens inside humans. So it, what's fascinating about this is, because you don't have, there's no guarantees, I suppose. Even, even like harem-style guerrillas and stuff don't know that the big silverback is the one that's had the kid and not some young upstart that's managed to sneak in or whatever.

• 21:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:49Chris Williamson?

  But for the most part, that would be a little bit different. What's fascinating is when you've got like ecologically informed, uh, neurological and behavior change, hormonal behavior change. It happens, there's this window between the age of like one and 10. And if you see primarily your mother, but also your father giving care to another infant.

• 22:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 22:13Chris Williamson?

  You are, uh, grow up with a sexual aversion to them. And what was interesting, I, I think it's a, um, maybe a, an Indian, an Indian culture that they, or perhaps a, an Asian culture, like Far East Asian culture, where they used to find future wives for their baby sons as infants, and they'd raise them together.

• 22:40Speaker 01

  Oh, interesting.

• 22:40Chris Williamson?

  So you would have, you know, a three-year-old and a three-year-old living together. What they didn't realize is they were basically locking in this biological imprinting of, that's my sister.

• 22:49Speaker 01

  Right.

• 22:49Chris Williamson?

  So highly maladaptive.

• 22:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 22:52Chris Williamson?

  Um, but you can see where the similarity lies here that

• 22:54Speaker 01

  Totally.

• 22:55Chris Williamson?

  The father's level of brain adaptation is based on the behavior of how much time he spends raising the child, doing nurturing, doing caregiving. And that means that you can go both ways. In the same way as you could have a twin that was born but raised separately, you would have no, like imbued sexual aversion to them.

• 23:17Speaker 01

  Right.

• 23:17Chris Williamson?

  There will be no incest disgust.

• 23:19Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 23:19Chris Williamson?

  Because the behavior that brings that in. So really, mothers are the only ones that have that like locked-in contract, biological contract with the baby. And everybody else, from brothers, sisters, to aunts, to uncles, they're all kind of just learning as they go.

• 23:38Speaker 01

  Right. So there's that natural variability that you see in the other parents, the people who are playing a role in parenting. And we know that as humans, we evolved to be alloparents. So we're what's called cooperative breeders, which is to say we participate in collective care of offspring, which is very adaptive because human babies are so uniquely difficult to raise. We require so much intensive care. And it's too much for any one person to provide all of the round-the-clock care. So we help each other out with parenting and caregiving. But the extent to which dads play a role is something that varies based on societal context.

• 24:18Chris Williamson?

  What are the behaviors that most create dad brain? If I was to design a menu or a daily routine to maximize that 1% change, what would I be doing?

• 24:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, you'd be picking your baby up, you'd be caring for them, you'd probably be sharing a sleeping surface with them, you'd be diapering them, you'd be feeding them, you'd be bathing them. So you'd be doing the kind of intensive care that helps you really get to know a baby and attunes you more to their physiology and to their mind. Because where we see a lot of the change happening in men's brains is in what we call the mentalizing network. And that's a part of the brain that activates when we think about other people's minds and their intentions. It's what reads other people's emotions. And you could think about it as the seat of our empathy.

• 25:10Speaker 01

  And so that is a dynamic part of the brain in new dads and also in new moms, in part because when you are having to care for an infant who cannot communicate effectively, right? Because they can't talk, they just cry. You have to be able to read their emotions and you have to be able to problem solve to figure out what they need. So you're getting a lot of exercise to that empathetic part of the brain.

• 25:33Chris Williamson?

  The executive function has been tuned down. So maybe your ability to come up with novel solutions might be less?

• 25:38Speaker 01

  Well, no, because I actually think you have to problem solve quite a bit. So your executive functioning is also gonna tune.

• 25:43Chris Williamson?

  Did you not say that some of the, oh, is it just moms that have got the executive function tuned down?

• 25:47Speaker 01

  No, moms, both dads and moms. So it's tuning up. Well, it depends on whether you think of losing gray matter volume as a tune up or a tune down.

• 25:57Chris Williamson?

  Right, right.

• 25:57Speaker 01

  And the jury's a little out on that. We see volume reduction, which we think is about pruning and becoming more efficient.

• 26:06Chris Williamson?

  What's lost?

• 26:08Speaker 01

  Well, our short-term memory for objects that aren't our baby. So there's some evidence that working memory gets compromised. But we often use this deficit framing when we talk about mommy brain. Like, oh, I, you know, I forgot where I parked the car. It actually looks like certain kinds of memory are enhanced. And it's salience-driven. So it's memory for your baby's smells, objects that are pertinent to your baby. You know, rodents have to figure out where they've stashed their babies, like in a nest full of bedding. So one reason the hippocampus, which is the part of the brain that we think of as implicated in memory, is also really sensitive to smell, is you kind of have to smell your way to find the baby, to retrieve your pup.

• 26:52Speaker 01

  So the hippocampus is really plastic in new moms and new dads. So it's like our memory is actually getting a different kind of workout. But we're maybe losing our sharpness in some domains and improving our functioning in others.

• 27:07Chris Williamson?

  Better able to detect, what does this small thing want? What does it mean? Where did I leave things that are associated with it? Bottles and diapers and it itself and stuff like that.

• 27:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:20Chris Williamson?

  But maybe less so, where did I leave the car? Where did I leave the keys? What does the rest of my day look like outside of the baby orchestrating the operations of the rest of my life?

• 27:31Speaker 01

  Exactly. And it's also about value, right? It's what domains are we motivated to optimize? So a lot of people find, both moms and dads, that after they have kids, they care a little bit less about achieving at work, right? Which is not to say that moms and dads are bad workers. If anything, I actually think they make great contributions to organizations because of all the skills they develop.

• 27:55Chris Williamson?

  Maybe a different domain to a non-parent.

• 27:57Speaker 01

  Right, but priorities shift.

• 27:59Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 27:59Speaker 01

  And, and at least in the short term. Although, the good news is that it appears that having become a parent is neuroprotective in late life. So there's some work coming out of the UK Biobank, which is this big repository of scan studies from middle-aged and older adults that finds that when you've had more children, you actually have better cognitive functioning and brains that look younger. So if you use a, a machine learning algorithm to try to figure out how old is the brain compared to its chronological age, people who've had more kids, up to a certain point, it tops off at around three kids, actually have brains that the machine learning algorithm codes as younger.

• 28:41Chris Williamson?

  What's your proposed mechanism for that?

• 28:42Speaker 01

  So I think it's about social integration. So the fact that it shows up in dads as well as moms tells me it's not just pregnancy hormones. It's not just birth experience, it's not just breastfeeding. I think it's about, and we know this in both men and women, that being more socially connected to other people is really important for health.

• 29:00Chris Williamson?

  Even if that person is a mini version of you?

• 29:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, even more so maybe, because then you're especially attuned to them.

• 29:06Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 29:07Speaker 01

  Right? It's good for longevity.

• 29:08Chris Williamson?

  So it could, so the, the thing that's coming to mind here is, I wonder whether you could replicate those neuroprotective results by just having a really, really, really deep friendship with one person. And I wonder whether you could create the same brain changes in reduction of salience networks outside of this one thing and increase of awareness, attention, et cetera, with business or a dog? Like, if you just dedicate, because if these networks are as flexible as you say they are, if they're as malleable as you say they are, then it shouldn't just be a baby that's able to trigger this.

• 29:42Speaker 01

  Anything really vulnerable that you care for, develop empathy for, probably.

• 29:47Chris Williamson?

  You might not develop that much empathy for your business.

• 29:50Speaker 01

  Maybe not, or for your friend. I mean, I guess you can be very empathic for a friend.

• 29:53Chris Williamson?

  But if it was a, a, a animal that you're caring for?

• 29:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely. And I think a lot of young people do adopt pets, either in lieu of or in preparation for having babies. And, and you are practicing a lot of those same kinds of skills.

• 30:07Chris Williamson?

  Hmm. Is it just, it's literally just the fact that salience outside, that all of the mum brain stuff, all of the dad brain stuff, the things that they are, are reporting, being confused by, maybe being a little bit irritated by, those are primarily? Stuff, anything that's not baby related is just a little bit less aware to me.

• 30:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, although you might find, and, and this is true, I talked to somebody that took a parenting class and found that it ultimately made him a much better manager at work. So I think there's sort of like this short term, maybe downgrading of everything except the baby. And then there's a long-term building of new skills and stronger social networks, ideally, right? When things go right, that's not true for everybody. But I think these are transferable skills. So if you think about becoming an empathetic parent as analogous to being a good friend or a good caretaker in other domains, you know.

• 31:02Chris Williamson?

  Transferable skills?

• 31:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, like men who are coaches, who are teachers, who are guidance counselors, who are religious leaders. You know, I talked to somebody for the book who said, we often think about caregiving in very feminized ways, but the fireman who pulls a family out of a burning building is a caregiver, right? The policeman who keeps the family safe is a caregiver, right? We can broaden our understanding of care to include sort of traditional masculinity and celebrate how important that is for society.

• 31:31Chris Williamson?

  So if a dad's brain literally doesn't change unless he's hands-on with caregiving, is it right to say, like, I love my kids, but I'm not a hands-on guy is more a biological confession than a personality trait?

• 31:46Speaker 01

  I think it depends. I think it depends on what the context is and what is adaptive for a particular family. Cause I think there are cultures in which having dads who aren't hands-on makes sense for that, the local demands, because you have other caregivers or because dads are needed to do some kind of very specialized labor. I think in contemporary societies where we expect a fairly high level of involvement from most fathers, I would frame it as a missed opportunity.

• 32:19Chris Williamson?

  Have you seen Bob Odenkirk talking about what it means to be a dad?

• 32:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 32:23Chris Williamson?

  It's so good.

• 32:24Speaker 01

  I love Bob Odenkirk.

• 32:25Chris Williamson?

  He's the man. Play that clip for me, Jared. I think it's, I think it's so cool. Who are you jealous of?

• 32:29Speaker 02

  Anybody who's still got little kids at home growing up.

• 32:32Chris Williamson?

  Oh.

• 32:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, there's no question, I knew what I was doing when I had kids growing up.

• 32:39Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 32:39Speaker 02

  I was being a dad. I mean, that was my job. And I didn't have to ask myself, what am I doing here? What am I doing? How can I be a part of this world? How can I be meaningful today? I didn't have to ask that question because of, and answer is, pick up everything between here and the door.

• 32:55Chris Williamson?

  That's right.

• 32:55Speaker 02

  And make sure they get to school and have a laugh with them.

• 32:59Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 32:59Speaker 02

  You know? It was, life was, I understood my purpose.

• 33:04Chris Williamson?

  Best answer. Who are you jealous of?

• 33:07Speaker 01

  I love that. Yeah. And I think we do find that sense of meaning and purpose, which is so important for our wellbeing, our sense of connectedness, our sense of coherence, like he just talked about, like feeling like you have a reason to do what you do every day and that life is happening according to plan. That is so important for psychological health.

• 33:32Chris Williamson?

  I'm so excited to become a father. I can't wait for it.

• 33:34Speaker 01

  So are you working on it?

• 33:36Chris Williamson?

  Uh, yeah, well reliably, you can't do it on your own.

• 33:39Speaker 01

  I've heard that.

• 33:40Chris Williamson?

  Which is, which is, I have tried. But, uh, yeah, that's, you need somebody else to be ready at the same time.

• 33:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's the tricky part.

• 33:48Chris Williamson?

  What do you make of the deadbeat dad narrative?

• 33:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I think it is true in some cases and it's unfair to dads in many other cases. So in 1960, you had 88% of kids living with a father at home. That dipped down in 2005 to 67% of kids and it's actually rebounded. So today, about 76% of kids in the US are living with a father at home. So there's been.

• 34:14Chris Williamson?

  A father or the father?

• 34:15Speaker 01

  They're usually the father, but not always. So sometimes there's complex fatherhood where dads are living with kids that weren't originally theirs, but at least having a stepfather figure in the home. So there's been this kind of U-shaped change in father presence. But I think we often think about fatherhood as this binary, absent dad versus present dad. And there are a lot of shades of gradation in between. So many non-residential fathers are really involved in caregiving. I talk about this in the book, but after my parents got divorced, we did joint custody. So my brothers and I were alone with our dad every other week and he went from fairly hands-off caregiver to suddenly the primary parent in charge of everything we needed.

• 35:01Speaker 01

  And I watched how transformative that was for him. So there are different ways again to turn that dial of fatherhood. And I think when dads fully check out, like I said, it's a missed opportunity, both for themselves and for their kid. But there are a lot of ways to turn the dial back up. I talked to a dad for the book who spent the first three years of his son's life in jail and was able to get out, reunite with his son, take parenting classes. He now works at an organization called Homeboy Industries, which does intervention for gang-involved people in LA. And he directs a project fatherhood program.

• 35:41Speaker 01

  And he said, having that bond with his son was the single saving grace that actually helped him to reroute his life.

• 35:49Chris Williamson?

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• 36:33Chris Williamson?

  first purchase by going to the link in the description below or heading to drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom. That's drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom. Are you aware if there's a window similar to the Western effect of time after which an older male isn't able to attach to a younger child in the same way? Like this has pretty sort of positive connotations for stepdads. Because it suggests that you can bond pretty much just as, apart from the cognitive realization, like this isn't mine. If you spend enough time with baby on chest, you're probably going to get locked in.

• 37:15Chris Williamson?

  But especially with stepdads and maybe fathers that are absent or are working or whatever, they might not be as available during those years. And I have to assume like, if I hang around with a 21-year-old dude lots and empathize and care for him, I'm probably not going to see him as my son, just like out of the gates. So it suggests to me that there's a kind of tail off in some way, but I mean, this is total bro science here. So this, this makes me feel.

• 37:42Speaker 01

  That's the bro science.

• 37:43Chris Williamson?

  It's the bro science hat. But you understand what I mean? Have you got any insight around whether that's true or not?

• 37:47Speaker 01

  It's a really interesting question, sort of at what point do you maybe miss that opportunity to bond? And I think what's key is that you have a front row seat to a child's development during some critical period. However, I think we often over emphasize early infancy. And there's this idea that if we miss the first hour after birth or the first three days after birth or the first month, that we've somehow missed our chance to bond. And that's not really true, right? We know that adoptive parents and stepparents can have profound connections with their kids. I grew up with a stepdad who I met when I was nine and he ended up being a really formative influence in my life.

• 38:30Speaker 01

  And, and so I think it depends on when the dad comes into the picture and what kind of work and practice he's willing to put in to make that connection. But I would say as long as there's any stretch of a child's youth that a dad is witnessing and participating in, he can play a role as a parent.

• 38:50Chris Williamson?

  What about impacts on hormones in men?

• 38:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, so we see changes in testosterone around the birth of a new baby. We don't know as much about how hormones change in adoptive or stepparents because there just isn't a lot of research about this. Most of the work is on early parenthood and most of it is focusing on biological parents.

• 39:12Chris Williamson?

  So testosterone gets tuned down.

• 39:15Chris Williamson?

  Does that increase with caregiving?

• 39:17Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 39:18Chris Williamson?

  In fact, does that happen without caregiving?

• 39:21Speaker 01

  No.

• 39:22Chris Williamson?

  Right.

• 39:22Speaker 01

  So it's linked, as are the brain changes, to dad's participation in care.

• 39:28Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 39:29Speaker 01

  So we see this not just in humans, we see this in animal models as well. You are probably familiar with the challenge hypothesis, the idea that we want high levels of testosterone under certain circumstances. It's adaptive for testosterone to drop in other circumstances. So birds are the classic example. Testosterone levels rise at the start of breeding season. When birds are competing for mates, they're looking to spread their seed. They want as many opportunities as possible, so they need status to try to find a partner. And then after mating has been accomplished, it's immunologically costly to maintain perpetually high levels of T. Testosterone naturally decreases and the reproductive strategy is shifting towards

• 40:14Speaker 01

  more nurturing. So instead of maximizing our numbers of babies that we can produce, we want to maximize the odds that any given baby is going to survive. And our hormones kind of follow suit. And you see it in primates, you see it in rodents as well as in humans, you see these natural shifts.

• 40:35Chris Williamson?

  What, what are the behavior changes that happen in men based on their hormones?

• 40:42Speaker 01

  So typically, when testosterone decreases, it's serving a function whereby dads are getting more invested in the partner relationship. They are more interested, more motivated to maintain a stable pair bond, and they're less aggressive. So a lot of the work in rodents has looked at sort of territorial aggression. And, you know, when you see a new pup in the nest, do you want to kill them? Or do you want to care for them? And testosterone levels can sort of modulate where you end up along that continuum. So we want, in general, if anyone is spending a lot of time with infants, to be less motivated to kill and more motivated to care.

• 41:27Chris Williamson?

  Risk-taking behavior as well.

• 41:29Speaker 01

  Goes down. And you see that, you know, you, you see actually, in some ways, health improvements, we can talk about dad bod at some point, I'm sure, but you see some health improvements in terms of less risky driving, less likely to get into fights, lower levels of substance use, being more conscientious about doctor checkups. So all of those behaviors that keep us alive and ready to provide for our offspring.

• 41:55Chris Williamson?

  Blame it on the testosterone.

• 41:56Speaker 01

  Shift. Sure.

• 41:57Chris Williamson?

  Blame it on the testosterone. You know, one, one of my favorite studies around risk-taking behavior and male and female relationships, looking at studies of men crossing the road and the distance from them to the nearest car in the presence of women or without the presence of women.

• 42:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 42:14Chris Williamson?

  Dude, if there's a woman there, it's like three times closer.

• 42:17Speaker 01

  Oh, my God.

• 42:17Chris Williamson?

  Dude, look at how hard I am, harder than this car. But.

• 42:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, that doesn't end well a lot of the times.

• 42:23Chris Williamson?

  Typically, in a fight between you and a car, you usually lose.

• 42:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 42:26Chris Williamson?

  However, the thing that's interesting there, like, we know that testosterone can change. If we had a ton of weapons on this table, like axes and spears and guns and stuff.

• 42:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 42:38Chris Williamson?

  And me and the guys walked around and like picked them up and played with them, our testosterone would go up.

• 42:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I would be terrified.

• 42:44Chris Williamson?

  It's very, yeah, that, that happens after. That's the way that we close the show out is by wielding weapons inside of this room.

• 42:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, remind me to get out of here first.

• 42:52Chris Williamson?

  We're live action role-playing. It's the Middle Ages. So that sense, the fact that we can be so reactive as men, that we talk about how hormonal women are.

• 43:02Speaker 01

  Right.

• 43:03Chris Williamson?

  And yes, but reliably, men, much more unreliable.

• 43:06Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 43:06Chris Williamson?

  Similarly, a lot of hormonal changes, but they don't happen on the same sort of lunar schedule. But what that must mean, I, I don't know whether this will be the primary driver, because a lot of it's like, there's a girl there, and I'm just going to show how, how hard I am and how masculine and the risk-taking.

• 43:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 43:24Chris Williamson?

  But also, there'll probably be a bit of an increase in testosterone, and that might push it a little bit more.

• 43:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 43:28Chris Williamson?

  And the same thing will be presumably happening here as well, that there's a relational component. There's the sort of top-down, baby, must be here for baby, must not drive recklessly, a text whilst drive, etc. But also, there is this sort of bottom-up environment that's being created, which encourages us to behave in that way, too.

• 43:46Speaker 01

  Exactly. Biology and culture work together, as they do in so many ways in parenthood. And, and yeah, I think it's really interesting, the extent to which our culture is kind of in flux between different models of fatherhood.

• 44:01Chris Williamson?

  Mm-hmm.

• 44:01Speaker 01

  And so, you know, are we low T dads or high T dads? But there's plenty of work suggesting that, you know, in athletic competition, in other opportunities for men to raise their status, you see changes in testosterone. So testosterone, you know, I think we can talk about testosterone supplementation and what that means for men who want to be dads. I think, to me, what is adaptive about testosterone, as with any other hormone, is that it's responsive to context. And we want to be flexible, because we want to have a biology that sets us up to achieve our goals.

• 44:41Chris Williamson?

  You're saying that if you were to be taking testosterone enhancement whilst becoming a father, you think that you're able to outwit biology's well-proven environment that it's trying to create inside of you, and you're just plowing through it by injecting yourself with T?

• 45:00Speaker 01

  I think that's the fear. That's the risk. And, and anecdotally, I hear from moms who say, yeah, my husband's been taking T and he has no patience with the baby. Who knows? We need better, more rigorous studies to see if that's actually true.

• 45:15Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, but he's jacked.

• 45:16Speaker 01

  But exactly. So there's a trade-off.

• 45:18Chris Williamson?

  The baby's growing up with a jacked dad. Come on.

• 45:21Speaker 01

  And in some contexts, that could be really good. Like, if you have to fight your way out of a cage to get a leg of lamb for your kid, then you probably want high testosterone in early parenthood. But that might not serve the style of fatherhood that is more desired by a lot of couples today.

• 45:39Chris Williamson?

  Presumably as well, if that environment was the one that you were in, your body would detect it and go, hey, there's some more testosterone for you, as opposed to you going, no, shut up. A thousand nanograms per deciliter is absolutely fine.

• 45:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, in risky environments.

• 45:53Chris Williamson?

  You know better than your body does.

• 45:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, when you're in a risky or competitive environment, men want higher testosterone that's going to serve their goals. It's not always going to serve their goals when they're in a parenting environment. And so, you know, I think the thing about supplementation is we sort of have this idea that manliness is about maintaining perpetually high T.

• 46:15Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 46:15Speaker 01

  I think actually, positive masculinity is more about adaptability, being flexible, and showing up in the way that you need to for changing situations.

• 46:24Chris Williamson?

  Well, what a horrendous own goal it would be if you decided to keep your testosterone high in an attempt to show your masculinity, and then the process ended your lineage.

• 46:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 46:37Chris Williamson?

  Like, well done, dude.

• 46:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 46:38Chris Williamson?

  Like, you blew through all of the warning signs that you should have been tuned down from.

• 46:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 46:44Chris Williamson?

  So yeah, I guess testosterone drops when men become engaged fathers, right? So some men will hear that and think, okay, so fatherhood makes you less of a man.

• 46:52Speaker 01

  Right.

• 46:53Chris Williamson?

  Do you think that the fear of losing masculinity by caregiving is actually driving avoidant fatherhood in some ways, maybe?

• 47:01Speaker 01

  This was something I worried about when writing this book and trying to summarize the science around fatherhood, is that the subtitle I joked for a while would be, "Fatherhood gives you a smaller brain, makes you sleepier, sadder, fatter, and have lower testosterone, but it's really good."

• 47:17Chris Williamson?

  Jared.

• 47:17Speaker 01

  It'll give you, so that I don't think that would, that wouldn't sell very many books.

• 47:22Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 47:22Speaker 01

  And we've talked about some of the benefits of fatherhood, like an increased sense of meaning and purpose, and neuroprotection in late life. I would argue that being a good dad is one of the most manly things you can do. You're literally rearing the next generation. You're guiding them, you're protecting them, you're inspiring them, you're teaching them. So when you think about what is masculinity for, I would argue that in some ways, it's for your ability to be a good dad. So I think we confuse, like, just having a certain hormone level equals masculinity. And I would counter-argue, it's more about what is your social role? And how are you showing up to do the things that are needed of you?

• 48:02Chris Williamson?

  And what is your definition of success?

• 48:04Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 48:04Chris Williamson?

  Especially, this is a more, I'm going to put, it's a more controversial area to talk about. But if you were to say, for women, what is your definition of success? I think mum-brain is seen as quite a big loss by a lot of women. While I'm executively less competent, my ability to remember, maybe I was an assistant or a teacher or someone who worked in marketing or whatever, and I can't hold on to the ideas in the way that I used to, you say, well, that looks like a massive loss in all of the ways that society says that a woman should be successful.

• 48:41Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 48:42Chris Williamson?

  Apart from the one that's most important, which is being a good mum.

• 48:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 48:45Chris Williamson?

  And it's all about definition of success. And if you're in a meritocratic capitalist world that says your ability to produce economically and to rise up through the ladder of status and prestige and socioeconomic hierarchy, that's your primary goal. That's exactly what you bring to the world. Yeah, that looks like a loss. Apart from the fact that your kid is happier and you're more in tune with them and more in love with them. And so again, it's the same thing as the, as the dad masculinity conversation. I just think it's a, it's a bit more of a minefield.

• 49:14Speaker 01

  No, I think you're right. I think we, we undervalue care, and we don't prioritize it as a public social good, which it certainly is. And I think as a result, we have this whole discourse around bouncing back after baby. You know, how quickly can you get your pre-baby body back? How quickly can you get your pre-baby brain back? And in fact, it's supposed to be transformative. You have a whole new role to play. And I think we want to celebrate that.

• 49:45Chris Williamson?

  Weird kind of denial of the.

• 49:49Chris Williamson?

  Preciousness of parenthood.

• 49:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:52Chris Williamson?

  It's a real middle finger to that, to go, I had this inconvenience for a while. I was kind of afflicted with motherhood or fatherhood. And my goal is to get back to what I was before, as opposed to become something new.

• 50:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. And I will say, as a parent of teens, I don't want to go back to my pre-baby self because I was clueless. I think you learn a lot and figure a lot of things out.

• 50:17Chris Williamson?

  I can use that as my excuse.

• 50:19Speaker 01

  As a parent.

• 50:20Chris Williamson?

  As a, as a non, as a non-parent, my cluelessness is exclusively because of my lack of child.

• 50:24Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 50:25Chris Williamson?

  Does the dad brain and the mum brain, does that happen again and again? Does it re-kickstart? Do you regrow? How does, how do multiple children play into this?

• 50:35Speaker 01

  So there's some really interesting new research about this. And I should preface by saying the research literature is really scant. Part of why I wrote the book is because I want more studies to get funded and more studies to get done in both dads and moms. So there's one study that I know of that looks at what happens to the brain when you have a second kid. It was done in moms. It was done in the Netherlands. And what happens is the brain shrinks again, but it actually shrinks in some different ways and in some different places. So there's some rebound. So we actually think maternal brain change, and I'm guessing paternal brain change too, when we have more longitudinal data points, is actually U-shaped. So you lose volume and then you regain some volume.

• 51:16Chris Williamson?

  It'll be adaptive.

• 51:16Speaker 01

  Which is adaptive, exactly. Because you don't necessarily want to end up with a much smaller brain after having had many more kids. So you get some rebound, but then.

• 51:24Chris Williamson?

  Ten kids and you can't function, the kids are looking after you.

• 51:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, you're walking around like the guy in Beetlejuice with the tiny shrunken head, right? Yeah, you don't want that to happen, but you end up actually, where you lose gray matter volume with a second pregnancy is actually in areas that are tied more to deploying, let's see, what's a good way to say this, like managing multiple inputs. So those are areas that if you just streamline and tune them, they're actually salient for taking care of multiple kids. So it's kind of like task switching.

• 52:00Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 52:00Speaker 01

  And being oriented cognitively to variable demands. Those are the places where you see that sharpening of functioning in second time moms.

• 52:10Chris Williamson?

  You know, I'd love to see, I'd love to see a comparison between that and mothers who have twins or triplets.

• 52:15Speaker 01

  Yeah. I don't know.

• 52:17Chris Williamson?

  Wouldn't that be so cool?

• 52:18Speaker 01

  Yes. And the studies unfortunately exclude twin and triplet moms because they're going to add too much complexity.

• 52:24Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 52:25Speaker 01

  But this is really.

• 52:26Chris Williamson?

  If you did a study specifically on them.

• 52:28Speaker 01

  It's a really interesting paradigm, right? Because you kind of get double the dose of parenting experience and you get more parenting hormones too.

• 52:34Chris Williamson?

  Do you have, yeah, more time on skin? I mean, both dad and mum will be really at the upper limit of that one to 2.5% range.

• 52:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 52:43Chris Williamson?

  But also, I wonder if you basically speedrun level one and go straight to level two as mum, where you've got the, the multitasking, like baby juggling skill.

• 52:52Speaker 01

  Yeah. You might advance to that second time brain a little faster.

• 52:56Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, so interesting.

• 52:57Speaker 01

  And my guess is also with twins and triplets, dad gets more involved. So again, you're talking about tuning the dial up that turns fatherhood behavior on. When you have multiples, you need dad more because you need more help to parents.

• 53:11Chris Williamson?

  You basically had a baby with leverage.

• 53:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 53:13Chris Williamson?

  Right? You invested, you invested at like two or three X, the starting capital in the beginning.

• 53:18Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 53:19Chris Williamson?

  I read about the daughter effect. Is that real?

• 53:22Speaker 01

  Which, say, say what you mean by it.

• 53:24Chris Williamson?

  When fathers have daughters, their behavior changes in unique ways that wouldn't have done with a son.

• 53:31Speaker 01

  Yeah. So I'm glad you asked that because my lab literally just wrote a paper over the weekend. We do these paper in a day retreats where we all get together and we write chunks of a paper together. And we looked at how men's behavior and well-being and hormones change when they have either a son or a daughter. So we found that when men have daughters, and this is from our longitudinal sample, they show more of a drop in testosterone across the transition to that parenthood. And they also spend less time caring for their babies. And they report more parenting stress and worse bonding. So it's kind of bad news for girls, actually.

• 54:12Speaker 01

  And we need to figure out what modulates that and, you know, how to offset it. But it suggests that when men are expecting girls, they might be in need of some additional coaching and preparation to figure out how they can show up as effective parents.

• 54:29Chris Williamson?

  Does the sex of the baby change how the brain adapts in the other direction then?

• 54:33Speaker 01

  So we don't know because there haven't been enough studies of this. I've looked at this a little bit in our data and.

• 54:40Chris Williamson?

  Should be pretty easy to do, right? Was it boy, was it girl, compare groups?

• 54:42Speaker 01

  But you're cutting your sample in half. So if you already have an underpowered sample, then you know, you're losing your ability to pick up on it.

• 54:49Chris Williamson?

  Put the hat on and just throw some hypotheses up.

• 54:51Speaker 01

  Let's just take our best guess.

• 54:53Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 54:53Speaker 01

  Yeah. I, I know of a little bit of work suggesting that it shifts certain brain responses. Like I think there was a study, actually it was done at Emory in Atlanta that found that the, the brain was more primed to happy facial expressions from girls and distressed expressions from boys. And so there were some different patterns of brain responses. But the literature is tiny. We don't know a lot about those kind of sex specific effects in the brain.

• 55:23Chris Williamson?

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• 56:06Chris Williamson?

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• 56:46Chris Williamson?

  So more protection from the outside world might require more testosterone, but less risk-taking and less aggression toward the inside world requires less testosterone. So there's a strange balance that's going. Do you understand?

• 56:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. I think that's an interesting hunch. I mean, I think our time course was just from mid-pregnancy to the first six months. So we didn't really have enough, you know, the babies aren't even really.

• 57:08Chris Williamson?

  You need more money. Someone needs to give you a ton of money.

• 57:10Speaker 01

  Thank you. From your lips to God's ears, right? Give us more grants. We'll study this. We're actually doing a seven year follow-up right now. So we'll see what happens when the kids are hitting first and second grade. We're collecting that data as we speak. But our hunch is exactly what you said first, which is that we think that dads might behaviorally be interacting with new babies differently, depending on whether they're a boy or a girl. And there's evidence that even before babies are born, if you ask parents, what are the traits of your new child? They are shaped by knowing the sex of the baby. So new parents tend to describe a baby girl as being more delicate, more vulnerable. They might, yeah, sweet, soft.

• 57:52Speaker 01

  They might describe a baby boy as rambunctious or mischievous or tough and strong. And so it may be that dads are getting more active and are playing with girls in a way that's more about cuddling and nurturing and are playing with boys in a way that's more about playing and activating. And we know that in fact dads do have these kind of signature styles of playing with kids. They do tend to engage in more of what's called proprioceptive touch, which is like picking babies up, moving them around in space, like really active exploratory kind of boundary pushing play. And it may just be that dads are doing more of that when they've got a baby boy. And that is why their testosterone isn't falling in exactly the same way.

• 58:34Chris Williamson?

  Also that the behavior of the boys and the girls will be, the boy is more likely to want to play with trucks, linear objects, et cetera. And the girl is more likely to want to do the caregiving stuff.

• 58:48Speaker 01

  Although again, these are six month old babies, so they can't even pick up a truck, let alone.

• 58:52Chris Williamson?

  I was thinking, I was thinking more about when you get to sort of two, three, four. I had Joyce Benenson on the show, it's just the best. And she was saying, she looked at the playground of kindergarteners, like three, four years old, and you know, there's not been a massive amount of time to socialize you into your gender role already. And all of the girls were playing a game where they had to keep something alive. And all of the boys were playing a game where they had to fight something in a war.

• 59:25Speaker 01

  Fighting something in a war is also keeping something alive.

• 59:28Chris Williamson?

  That's true. That is true.

• 59:30Speaker 01

  But I would say, like, I would actually push back on that a little bit and say there is a role for socialization even in very young kids. So in the book, I talked about an experiment that was done by the BBC where they brought a bunch of toddlers into a playroom and they got these adult volunteers and they switched the toddlers' names and outfits. So they had a little girl, they put her in boy clothes and gave her a boy's name. They were trying to trick these playmate, these adult playmate volunteers. So it took a little boy, put him in a dress, gave him a girl's name. And they found that the volunteers played totally differently with the, I think these were two-year-olds, depending on the name and the outfit. And they sort of appraised the play differently.

• 1:00:13Speaker 01

  So, you know, they taped these sessions and with the boy who's dressed as a little girl, oh, you know, she loves the pink dolly. And with the girl who's dressed as a little boy, you know, he wants to push the truck. So I do think we have this way of sort of sorting

• 1:00:29Chris Williamson?

  Self fulfilling prophecy.

• 1:00:30Speaker 01

  Boys and girls. And so it's, you know, like with everything, it's a mix of biology and culture. There's some biological propensity there, but we amplify it through our culture and through the way we socialize. And I think that leads to more divergent outcomes.

• 1:00:42Chris Williamson?

  That's like the Dartmouth Skaar study, but done on kids.

• 1:00:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, totally.

• 1:00:47Chris Williamson?

  Kind of hilarious.

• 1:00:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:00:49Chris Williamson?

  What was the housework and cortisol research?

• 1:00:51Speaker 01

  So this was work I did in my graduate training. This was part of my dissertation. So we looked at dual income couples who were followed around their homes for a week. This was like a week in the life study of these middle-class couples in LA. And we recorded how much time they were spending in common household activities. So we looked at housework time, leisure time, childcare time, other kinds of activities. I found that housework is bad for your health, which I think anyone could have told you. So the more time you spend doing housework on, you know, as part of a typical week, the less cortisol recovery you have at the end of the day.

• 1:01:34Speaker 01

  So we looked at the magnitude of cortisol change from the afternoon into the evening. And you want this drop in cortisol levels at the end of the day. So cortisol has a diurnal rhythm, has kind of a circadian pattern. You want to start high and you want to end low. And when people were doing more housework in the evenings, they had less of that nadir that they were hitting at bedtime. And we also found that when you entered moms and dads' time use together in the same model, moms benefited in terms of their cortisol when dads were doing more housework. And dads benefited when they had more leisure time and their partners had less leisure time.

• 1:02:15Speaker 01

  So kind of a mixed bag of results where it's sort of, you know, if you're a mom, you want your partner to be helping with housework. And if you're a dad, you want to be sitting back and relaxing while your partner is taking care of business.

• 1:02:28Chris Williamson?

  Hmm. It's a bit zero sum.

• 1:02:30Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. It's sort of depressing.

• 1:02:32Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it is. What's stress contagion?

• 1:02:35Speaker 01

  So stress contagion is when couples influence each other's hormone levels. So I found that you see linked cortisol levels in cohabitating couples. And I've looked at this in moms and dads. I've also looked at this in non-parent male and female couples. So when one person has higher cortisol, their partner has higher than usual cortisol as well. And it seems like when the relationship quality is compromised, when you have more conflict, you have more tightly linked patterns of cortisol. So people are actually increasing each other's stress rather than helping to balance or modulate it.

• 1:03:14Chris Williamson?

  How do you fix that?

• 1:03:15Speaker 01

  You help people communicate better and fight more effectively so that they can calm each other down rather than amp each other up.

• 1:03:23Chris Williamson?

  Right.

• 1:03:23Speaker 01

  I think when you're frustrated and stressed and you have a partner who's exacerbating that, it's very hard to recover. If you have a partner who can help to talk you down and sort of balance out your irritated state with a calm state, then you can better recover in terms of your biology.

• 1:03:43Chris Williamson?

  Hmm. What are the downsides of fatherhood for men?

• 1:03:47Speaker 01

  Well, we talked about already, you know, weight gain. We talked about testosterone changes. There also increased vulnerability to mood disorders. So the prevalence of depression in new dads is about twice that of the general population. There's a lot of controversy about whether we call it postpartum depression in dads. A lot of

• 1:04:09Chris Williamson?

  I've observed this. In your opinion,

• 1:04:10Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:04:11Chris Williamson?

  do dads get postpartum depression?

• 1:04:12Speaker 01

  So in the book, I say, I think perinatal depression is a better word. That just means around the birth of a baby.

• 1:04:19Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 1:04:19Speaker 01

  But to me, it's semantic. It doesn't matter that much whether we call it postpartum or perinatal. I think some people really are attached to the idea of postpartum really means having given birth. That's not really what the term means. It just means occurring after the birth of a baby. And the fact is that a lot of the risk factors for depression are shared by new moms and new dads. You've got stress, you've got disrupted sleep, you've got relationship conflict, you've got new responsibilities, identity crisis, hormone changes, brain changes. So even though you're not the person that's physically delivered an infant, you are still experiencing a lot of the same overlapping risks.

• 1:04:59Chris Williamson?

  What does postpartum mean?

• 1:05:02Speaker 01

  So it just means after the birth of a baby, the time period.

• 1:05:05Chris Williamson?

  After your birth of a baby.

• 1:05:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, it doesn't necessarily mean

• 1:05:07Chris Williamson?

  So it is a gender neutral term.

• 1:05:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's a gender neutral term. It doesn't necessarily mean that you birthed the baby. It just means the time period that falls after the birth of a baby. That said, I don't want to antagonize the moms who keep coming into my Instagram comments to get mad at me for talking about postpartum depression. Cause I understand, you know, I

• 1:05:26Chris Williamson?

  Well, what are they mad about? Are they mad about the fact that this is our term? Like, we want it to be, it needs to be like paternal postpartum depression. Or so it needs some sort of a qualifier on it? It sounds to me like, and I saw a bunch of comments on Instagram talking about the same thing.

• 1:05:46Chris Williamson?

  It's not about this is a term that we care about. It, my best reading of it, right? And this is me trying to steel man it as best I can.

• 1:05:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:05:55Chris Williamson?

  The process of childbirth for a woman is so arduous and traumatic and scary that any man who appears to be flippant or dismissive or to kind of liken the challenge that he goes through to the one that the mum goes through. That is seen as being very callous and, and it doesn't fully appreciate or understand the sacrifice of a, of a mum. I think that's the best reading of it.

• 1:06:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think that's a good reading. I think another piece of that

• 1:06:29Chris Williamson?

  That's me with my peaceful hat on.

• 1:06:31Speaker 01

  Yes. Where's your peaceful hat? You're missing that prop. You need to, you need a new prop.

• 1:06:35Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:35Speaker 01

  I would say that a lot of women legitimately feel like they've had to work very hard to get postpartum depression recognized. There's inadequate funding, there's inadequate attention paid to reproductive health and mood disorders in moms. And so if they're fighting to get access to treatment and to get education about their mental health, they feel like, how can dads just sort of show up and make it all about them? That seems very unfair. And I'm totally sympathetic to that argument. I mean, I talked to a psychotherapist who works with new dads from my book, who's done a lot of advocacy for postpartum mental health in men.

• 1:07:18Speaker 01

  And she says, a lot of the women's health advocates are just like, can't we have this one thing? Can't we have the postpartum period? This is ours.

• 1:07:24Chris Williamson?

  Right. But I mean, that, my peaceful hat's got taken off now. That is fucking stupid. But because what you're saying is, can we not, not support men because we want women to have most of the attention? You go, well, hang in a second. Are you most concerned about owning this area of cognitive real estate? Like it's some sort of cultural appropriation by men? Or do you care about the outcome of the kid and of the mum?

• 1:07:46Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:07:46Chris Williamson?

  Because if you don't treat the mental health of the father, how do you think the mum's going to feel? And how do you think the child's going to grow up? So what you're saying is you would rather be intellectually superior, but in the real world have negative side effects. Like that is the outcome. Whether that's what they know or what they mean, doesn't matter. Like, it's not my job to sugarcoat the fact that you trying to own some area of cognitive real estate is having a negative impact on men. That should be enough, but also on mum, if the men thing wasn't enough. And if that's not enough, on baby too. So like, not recognizing, and if you did this in reverse, right? And this is true for a very, very, very long time. There was, all research was done on men.

• 1:08:31Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:08:31Chris Williamson?

  It was just the male body standard inside of the medical industry.

• 1:08:35Chris Williamson?

  No one said, well, this is cancer. That's men's thing. You go, no, this is not a fucking gendered issue. So, I mean, I've got, I've got a video to show you. I've got a video from the Times that you've probably seen that I think is very interesting. And the video is interesting and the comments are way more interesting.

• 1:08:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:08:53Chris Williamson?

  So it's this one, it's this one on TikTok, Jared.

• 1:08:55Speaker 03

  I had postnatal depression. Yes, dads can get it too. In 2021, when my daughter Aurelia was about a month old, my wife turned to me in bed one morning and she asked, how much do you love her? I froze, I kind of gritted my teeth and said, yeah, I really love her, but inside I knew it wasn't there yet. I struggled to bond with my baby, felt disconnected and had growing shame that I was not being the natural father I thought I would be. About six months into fatherhood, I opened up to my wife. I wanted to be a rock to Chessie, who had had a complicated pregnancy. Eventually I got therapy, but postnatal depression was never erased. It wasn't until Aurelia was a year old that I came across an article about men's PND,

• 1:09:39Speaker 03

  that everything started to make sense. About 10% of new dads will experience depressive symptoms during the perinatal period and first year of a child's life. For me and my wife, it was a eureka moment. Men are not routinely screened for PND. So many cases go undiagnosed. I think the system is not changing quickly enough to offer support and spot the signs of depression in dads. My bond with Aurelia is now incredible. And with new understanding and support, I hope I won't suffer from PND again, but I think new dads should know they might not have that emotional bond straight away.

• 1:10:13Chris Williamson?

  All right. Let me pause it there, Jared.

• 1:10:16Speaker 01

  I love that.

• 1:10:17Chris Williamson?

  Just look at the comments, just press on the comments on the right hand side for me.

• 1:10:20Speaker 01

  I don't think I want to see the comments.

• 1:10:21Chris Williamson?

  Uh, Matt, please, I already had a long day. How do I make this about myself? Thank you for telling us that's Tom Scarborough. Oh, Matt, it's not the same thing. This isn't depression, it's discomfort and uncertainty. Postpartum depression is linked to the dramatic hormonal changes that happen after childbirth, such as sudden drops in estrogen progesterone. Not sure how this affects the father. Time of irritation, 1:41 PM. Playing on my device. Yes, however, calling it postnatal depression isn't the right phrase. Think he ultimately just didn't like all the attention in the relationship shifting to the baby. Please, I'm already annoyed today. How can I make this about me too? I feel left out. Is there poo in my AirPods?

• 1:10:54Speaker 01

  Oh my gosh.

• 1:10:56Chris Williamson?

  Like.

• 1:10:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, I've been, I've been fighting in the comment sections like these for a while now. And, uh, you know, people really come out of the woodwork to be frustrated with this kind of material. And I think there's a gatekeeping around perinatal depression that is unfortunate because mental health is a family system. You need the best possible team around a baby. And the best predictor actually of mom's mental health is the support that she gets from her partner. So if dad is not well, dad is not showing up mom's mental health either. I think the idea that this is a fixed pie or that it's a zero sum game, like there's a finite amount of resources that are going to go to a parent's mental health and they need to be directed solely to mom, I think is really limited.

• 1:11:41Speaker 01

  We need to be thinking about how do moms work together with dads to make sure that the baby is getting well cared for and that everybody's mental health needs are getting met.

• 1:11:52Chris Williamson?

  Having a zero sum view of empathy is like one of the dumbest, especially with something like this. It's just a guy going, I went through this really hard thing. And people going, no, you didn't. No, you didn't. Or I went through something that was way worse than that.

• 1:12:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, why are we gaslighting dads? And why are we pitting dads against moms? And my response to that is if we want to have a society where men are stepping up as parents and they're fully participating in caretaking, they're waking up with the baby, they're doing the hard parts of care, we need to recognize that that's going to have mental health consequences. It's going to be taxing, it's going to be isolating, it's going to be draining. And if we really want men to participate, we have to respect that their mental health matters too. We can't guard it as though it's the sole domain of new moms because we want dads to act more like primary caregivers, but we're not willing to accept that they're going to have vulnerability tied to that.

• 1:12:46Chris Williamson?

  Bingo. Yeah. Uh, you saying the same thing in two different breath, saying different things in the same breath, which is we want dads to be fully involved, but we don't believe that they can have the negative outcomes that other people who've been fully involved for all of history have.

• 1:12:59Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:13:00Chris Williamson?

  What's the rate of postnatal depression in women?

• 1:13:03Speaker 01

  It's a little higher in new moms than it is in new dads. I think it's, it ranges across studies, but like 19 to 21%.

• 1:13:10Chris Williamson?

  It's about double.

• 1:13:10Speaker 01

  About 10%.

• 1:13:11Chris Williamson?

  Which is nearly the same as the change in brain. 1% to 2, 2 and a half.

• 1:13:17Speaker 01

  And I think important context is that women have about twice the rate of anxiety and depression in the general population. So it tracks with that overall base rate.

• 1:13:28Chris Williamson?

  Wow, that's a spicy realization.

• 1:13:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:13:32Chris Williamson?

  It could just be an increase in whatever your predisposition was and that dads are actually getting it at the same rate as moms. And now that we've got more involved caregiving, which is the primary enforcement mechanism for the, the change, I'm going to guess postpartum depression in fathers is mediated by the amount of caregiving that they do.

• 1:13:53Speaker 01

  Right. And that's the other thing.

• 1:13:54Chris Williamson?

  So you're telling me like, that's brutal, that any dad that's listening to this now knows the more that I care for my baby, the higher my likelihood of getting postnatal depression is.

• 1:14:03Speaker 01

  Well, let's keep in mind, it's still a low rate and a lot of people experience baby blues that don't turn into full blown debilitating depression, right? There's a continuum. So you can have depressive symptoms without necessarily becoming somebody who's incapacitated by depression.

• 1:14:24Chris Williamson?

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• 1:15:09Chris Williamson?

  Right now you can get up to 35% off your first subscription and that 30 day money back guarantee by going to the link in the description below or heading to livemomentous.com-modernwisdom and using the code MODERNWISDOM at checkout. That's L I V E M O M E N T O U S dot com slash modern wisdom and modern wisdom at checkout. Why, is there an adaptive explanation for postpartum depression in women?

• 1:15:34Speaker 01

  So I actually think probably not. I think it's more of a sign of an evolutionary cultural mismatch, which is this, going back to this idea that we as humans are cooperative breeders and we evolved to have a lot of support around caregiving. So we evolved to trade off care, to share care with people in the community, with our kin. I think we now place a lot of pressure on individual parents and on the individual nuclear family to serve the roles that dozens of people used to serve. When there was a lot more proximity and people helped each other out a lot more with care. So we isolate new parents. We don't value their work.

• 1:16:19Speaker 01

  We've already talked about, you know, the incentives of a very late capitalist society where we want people to be ambitious drivers and we want them to move on quickly from this interruption of birth. And, and so we're not providing the support, you know, in this country, we don't have universal paid maternity leave or paternity leave. So a lot of women go back to work probably before they feel like they're ready. A lot of men do too. We don't give inadequate, or we don't give adequate time and protection.

• 1:16:49Chris Williamson?

  Right.

• 1:16:50Speaker 01

  And we, you know, we create an uphill battle where parents feel isolated and drained.

• 1:16:57Chris Williamson?

  So is there any evidence of postpartum in hunter gatherer societies?

• 1:17:02Speaker 01

  Not that I know of, but I'm also not sure how well it's been tracked or measured.

• 1:17:07Chris Williamson?

  Yep, okay.

• 1:17:08Speaker 01

  But I think it's.

• 1:17:09Chris Williamson?

  Trying to see if this mismatch hypothesis.

• 1:17:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:17:11Chris Williamson?

  Kind of can just be split tested across like civilizations.

• 1:17:15Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, I, I think it's a really, really interesting question and depression in general, you know, hasn't been observed as much in those populations. So it's a really interesting question, but you know, in hunter gatherer societies, when a woman becomes a mother, she becomes, if anything, more socially integrated into the life of the community. In contemporary society, when a woman becomes a mother, she often becomes more isolated. We have all of these public spaces that, you know, don't bring the baby to a wedding, don't bring the baby to a restaurant, don't bring the baby to a cafe.

• 1:17:52Chris Williamson?

  To work.

• 1:17:52Speaker 01

  People don't want it, yeah, to work, right? Like a hunter gatherer mom can actually still go to work. She can still be wearing the baby, she can function economically.

• 1:18:01Chris Williamson?

  Swaddle up, grab some berries.

• 1:18:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:18:03Chris Williamson?

  Had a good day in the office.

• 1:18:04Speaker 01

  She can occupy a high status social role.

• 1:18:06Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:07Speaker 01

  And, and she can be, you know, fully integrated into the community.

• 1:18:10Chris Williamson?

  That's interesting. So the, the, this, the, what is rewarded socioeconomically at the moment specifically for women, uh, is not.

• 1:18:20Chris Williamson?

  Baby accommodating.

• 1:18:23Speaker 01

  We have this kind of sharp divide between work and home, which I think is a legacy of the Industrial Revolution, right? We, before that, work generally happened at home. Dads were around a lot, moms were around a lot, kids were raised as workers. They were contributing to the family business, the family economy.

• 1:18:39Chris Williamson?

  Jared, if you brought your kid in here and they were able to write good copy, if your eight month old was able to write good YouTube copy, I'd be down. But I would be, I would be absolutely fine. I mean, you're allowed to come as long as you contribute, but.

• 1:18:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:18:53Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, he's trying.

• 1:18:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, good way to hone those skills.

• 1:18:56Chris Williamson?

  What, I'm interested, what do you think's the best advice for dads, like trying to be great father, great husband, still take care of themselves while supporting a mum who's going through postpartum?

• 1:19:08Speaker 01

  Give yourself grace. Don't expect that it will be easy. Forewarned is forearmed. So, you know, know that this is going to rock your world and it's going to be transformative, but it's supposed to be transformative. And I would say steer away from the myth that dads don't have any innate wiring to know how to take care of a baby. I think we have this idea that moms are just born knowing what to do when a baby arrives and men are going to be helpless and useless.

• 1:19:35Chris Williamson?

  Does that help mums postpartum?

• 1:19:36Speaker 01

  I don't think so, because I will say, when I had my kids, I was like, what am I supposed to do with these people? You know, you have to learn and you figure it out. And it's about your motivation and your willingness to practice more than it's about just, you know, having some inborn reflex that's telling you how to care for a child. And dads have that capacity to care and to build those empathetic, responsive caregiving brains.

• 1:20:02Chris Williamson?

  I've got two potential hypotheses in my mind. First one is like postpartum contagion. I have to assume that if the mum is dealing with it, it's more likely that the dad's going to deal with it. But I wonder if level of paternal child caring decreases the likelihood of female postpartum depression.

• 1:20:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:20:29Chris Williamson?

  Do we know, do we know what levels of household setup can increase or decrease the likelihood?

• 1:20:38Speaker 01

  So there is some research on this and it corroborates both of your hunches.

• 1:20:42Chris Williamson?

  Dude, don't test me. Don't test me on this shit.

• 1:20:45Speaker 01

  So you can keep the, the neuroscience hat off. Yeah, you don't need it.

• 1:20:48Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, good.

• 1:20:49Speaker 01

  Um, good instincts, but there's research that depressive symptoms are correlated within moms and dads. So if mom is more depressed, dad's more likely to be depressed. If dad's depressed, mom's more likely to be depressed. And if one partner is well and can support the other partner, that's also a huge resilience factor. That's a buffer. So they track together.

• 1:21:10Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 1:21:10Speaker 01

  And there's also evidence that when dads are more involved, moms benefit. So one really cool study tested a paternity leave reform program in Sweden where they were expanding flexibility of paternity leave for dads. They found that if you look at babies born right before and right after that policy intervention, you actually see lower rates of anti-anxiety medication. Prescriptions were filled less often by the new moms. So if dads have more access to leave, moms actually show this population level, mental health benefit. And my lab has done similar work and we found that if you look at prenatal to postpartum trajectories of depressive symptoms, when dads get access to paid paternity leave, moms

• 1:21:53Speaker 01

  are less likely to get depressed after the birth of a baby.

• 1:21:56Chris Williamson?

  So it seems like for postpartum depression, maybe for dads as well as mums, one of the key drivers is social integration, level of social integration. Does that mean that if you're struggling with postpartum depression, you should try and like turn on the, the socialization taps a little bit? Do mommy, daddy daycare meetup things?

• 1:22:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:22:22Chris Williamson?

  That seems like an intervention that might work.

• 1:22:24Speaker 01

  Exactly. And that goes back to the evolutionary mismatch idea, right? We're supposed to be embedded in social networks that help us care for our kids. We're not supposed to do it alone.

• 1:22:33Chris Williamson?

  Is postpartum basically like, fuck, this is a lot and I'm overwhelmed?

• 1:22:38Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, that's part of it. Yeah. Compounded with sleep loss, identity challenges, relationship strain, money and life worries, and your brain and hormones getting totally, you know, disrupted.

• 1:22:54Chris Williamson?

  Does that mean? Does that mean that there is a socioeconomic predictor for postpartum depression? Because people who are more wealthy are more likely to have childcare, which means that they have more assistance, less pressure and better sleep.

• 1:23:12Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:23:13Chris Williamson?

  Dude, yes.

• 1:23:14Speaker 01

  So there is a socioeconomic link between postpartum depression risk. And part of it is, you know, there are moms in the US who go back to work less than two weeks after the birth of a baby. So if you're a shift worker, if you're a gig worker, if you're at Walmart, you are probably not getting time to rest, recover and bond. And that's really stressful and really taxing to your ability to adjust to parenthood. So that's part of it. It's also like, what are the community resources that are available to you? Can you afford support and childcare? But some of the best interventions for postpartum depression are around shoring up your social support networks.

• 1:23:54Speaker 01

  So helping get people to be more proactive about asking for help, helping to invest in your relationships. And you can even do preventive intervention before a baby's born to say, and we actually do this, my lab leads psychoeducation workshops with a big hospital system that serves low income new parents. We say, we have them make a social support map. So we say, who are you going to be able to ask for help in different domains after the baby comes? You know, maybe your older brother isn't going to be that helpful when it comes to taking the baby for a nap, but he can help with your lawn care. You know, so how do you plug different people in your life into different roles to make

• 1:24:38Speaker 01

  sure that your social support needs are met? And we try to coach people to be more assertive for, about asking for help, because I think we're conditioned in our society to be very reluctant.

• 1:24:49Chris Williamson?

  Independence, agency, sovereignty.

• 1:24:51Speaker 01

  Individualism.

• 1:24:51Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. I learned from Louise Perry that in like Renaissance England, there was a period called lying in, laying in.

• 1:25:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:25:02Chris Williamson?

  Where for two weeks, the mother didn't move after childbirth, waited on hand and foot.

• 1:25:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:25:09Chris Williamson?

  Anything that was needed. All she did was hold baby and, and like feed baby and everything else, done. Right? The whole family comes in and, and desists and you just, you know, physically traumatic things happen to you. Like, it just seems, it seems very contrary to this like hyper speed productivity engine thing. And it's, it's kind of strange, right? Because my original background was as a productivity dork, which I still have vestiges of. And the way that I started the show was trying to learn life hacks and memorization tools

• 1:25:52Chris Williamson?

  and how to have a great to-do list manager and stuff like that, because that was what I thought was real important to me. And I think I always just assumed that at some point you become an adult and you sort of grow out of that. But that really is one of the drugs of the 21st century, this hyper optimized efficiency culture, get more out. And there's no reason, it was kind of naive of me to think that, oh, well, just when you become a parent, you forget about that or you realize that other things are more important, like my parents did. My parents were never afflicted with productivity culture beforehand.

• 1:26:24Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:26:24Chris Williamson?

  So that's interesting. And then this other story that it really gets me every, and I mentioned to you, I just finished this silent meditation retreat, so my heart is particularly tender. But I, I went to a meetup when I first moved to Austin about four years ago, and it was a bunch of business owners, millionaires and deck of millionaire, like a couple of center millionaires in there. And everyone was a founder. I was by far the poorest person in the room. And they were all talking about what they were doing with their businesses and plans. And I know a guy that can get you in at Target and so on and so forth. And I was like, sat kind of silently, the white belt at the back of the class. And it was a circle thing. And then someone dinged the glass and said, um, well, we'll, we'll have a little brainstorming

• 1:27:09Chris Williamson?

  session. If you've got a problem that you're dealing with at the moment, put your hand in the air. There's a lot of competent people in the room. We'll see if we can help you. And I'm thinking some guy's going to go, I've got a massive problem with the IRS. I'm like trying to get my offshore accounts working, but the Cayman Islands don't like me, some other stuff. This guy just went, his hand straight in the air. He said, my wife's six months pregnant and I don't feel anything. And I'm scared that I'm going to be a bad dad and that I'm not going to love the baby. And she keeps asking me about how I feel and there's nothing there. And I, I feel so guilty and ashamed about the fact that I, I really want this and I love my wife and I want to be a good dad and I'm terrified that I'm going to be, I'm terrified I'm going to be a bad dad. I'm terrified I'm not going to be able to support her. I've got guilt and shame around, I've got this secret, I feel like I'm keeping a secret from her.

• 1:27:56Chris Williamson?

  The room was like.

• 1:27:58Chris Williamson?

  It wasn't what we were expecting. One of the guys over the far side straight away went, dude, don't worry about it. Happened to me. Happens every single, another dad was like, every single time, always happens. Wait six months, it'll all be fixed. Like, wait six months, lie with it on your chest for a while. He gave all of the dad hacks, I guess. I just remember thinking like, fuck, like this guy's in a room surrounded by really impressive business people and he was one, two, and he was competent, all the rest of it. He could have asked anything that he wanted about his business, but the most salient thing in his entire life was the fact that he was watching his wife go through the hormonal changes that make a mother, right? Pregnancy doesn't just make a baby, it also makes a mother.

• 1:28:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:28:38Chris Williamson?

  But pregnancy doesn't make a father in the same way.

• 1:28:41Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:28:41Chris Williamson?

  Right. I, it makes them in some negative ways, right? The lack of sleep and the stress and you know, you've got the Puvade syndrome or whatever it's called.

• 1:28:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:28:50Chris Williamson?

  But it doesn't, it doesn't prepare you in that way. And then when you layer on top, our ability to judge our own competence in these things, we think, well, what are you judging? Well, I'm judging how good of a dad I think I might be. Maybe I wasn't cut out for this. I wasn't a dad before.

• 1:29:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:29:09Chris Williamson?

  And I bet if you were to look at, what could we call this? Like a potential parent guilt? If you were to look at potential parent guilt or potential paternal guilt, maybe better.

• 1:29:23Chris Williamson?

  I bet that it doesn't happen on second kid.

• 1:29:25Speaker 01

  Hmm. Hmm. Yeah, I think this is a common thing that I hear from expectant dads, that they're terrified, that they're not going to know what to do, that they're not going to be good at it. And I think we expect men to be highly competent, you know, women too, but we really socialize men to be good at things. And it's hard to be really good at taking care of a baby in the abstract, because it's all about what does your particular baby need? And how do you get to know your baby? And that's individual and it depends on your time and your motivation and your practice. But I think that idea that men are sort of flailing

• 1:30:06Speaker 01

  around, really uncertain. I talked to a guy whose whole career is talking to startup entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley. And he says, very similar story as yours, he's talked to men who are great at all kinds of, you know, conquering the business world. And yet, when you get them onto the subject of their kids, they're all totally worried that they don't know what they're doing, right? It's a domain where we don't have that same sense of, of skill and power, and it's harder to optimize. And I would say, you know, you, you mentioned this kind of self optimization culture and productivity. And it's interesting, if you watch the kind of

• 1:30:47Speaker 01

  like, get ready with me videos, or here are all the, you know, here's my regimen, here are all the things I do to completely, you know, biohack my way to success. Frequently, they're of someone who's alone. And they take a lot of time and they take a lot of solitary activity. And they're not necessarily about being connected. They're not about giving to other people. They're not about caring for someone who's vulnerable. And I would say, when you think about what makes life worth living, a lot of it is about our relationship health. You know, that's what the best studies of longevity have told us. That's what Work on Men has told us, that, you know, when men are socially isolated in late life, that's a real risk factor for

• 1:31:28Speaker 01

  early mortality. So how can men get more connected? Well, part of it is by devoting yourself to learning how to care for other people. And so, again, going back to this idea of how do we reframe masculinity in more pro-social ways, it's mainly to take care of vulnerable people.

• 1:31:48Chris Williamson?

  Well, I hope that when baby life does begin for me, that everybody is ready for me to shove it down their throat for ages. It's just going to be an endless, and like a sickening barrage of fatherhood content. I can't, it's gonna be, it's gonna be fantastic.

• 1:32:02Speaker 01

  You're gonna be the new Dr. Becky.

• 1:32:04Chris Williamson?

  That's, yeah, yeah, yeah. We'll see about that. What do you think is the worst advice that new dads get?

• 1:32:13Speaker 01

  Well, we already talked about, you know, you can fix your relationship by having a baby. So definitely, that's a very bad advice.

• 1:32:19Chris Williamson?

  The worst advice that potential dads could get. Yeah.

• 1:32:22Speaker 01

  I think other bad advice is just, you know, dads don't know what they're doing, so keep your distance. And I think there are these preconceptions around, should we invest in paternity leave for new dads? Well, dads are useless in the early months. These, they've got nothing to contribute. And I think that is bad advice, because as with moms, dads are capable of learning and their neurobiology is going to come along for the ride as they learn how to take care of kids. I think the other thing is, we sometimes privilege early infancy as the sort of only time for dads to shine. And I talked to Richard Reeves, who's written a lot about healthy masculinity. He said, he thinks that men should be able

• 1:33:06Speaker 01

  to take paternity leave up to their kid's 14th or maybe even 18th birthday.

• 1:33:10Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. Well, there's some roles, especially for dads with girls around puberty.

• 1:33:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:33:17Chris Williamson?

  But are more important.

• 1:33:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:33:18Chris Williamson?

  Than perhaps in early life.

• 1:33:19Speaker 01

  Yeah. And he told me he was a stay at home dad to his sons for a period when they were school age, and that was a great experience. And he loves taking his kids on trips and excursions. And so I think there's a lot of value that dads can add at different stages along the lifespan. And I think when we decide that men don't know what they're doing and we kind of opt them out of a key parenting role, we're losing that opportunity and we're not giving them the windows in which to build their competence.

• 1:33:47Speaker 04

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• 1:33:54Speaker 02

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• 1:33:56Speaker 04

  Woody, Buzz and Jesse are back for a brand new adventure with some seriously cool new tech. What? Holy butterscotch! You said it, Jesse. So save your batteries and watch the global phenomenon at home. And the best part, it's perfect for the whole family. Power up your movie night and watch Disney and Pixar's Toy Story 5, now streaming on Disney Plus, rated PG.

• 1:34:17Chris Williamson?

  Love it. Darby Saxby, ladies and gentlemen, you're great. I love your work. I think it's fantastic. It's brave to do this stuff and to talk about it. And I think the world's a better place for having you in it. So I appreciate you.

• 1:34:27Speaker 01

  Thank you. Real pleasure talking to you.

• 1:34:29Chris Williamson?

  All right. Goodbye, everybody.

• 1:34:31Speaker 02

  Yes, you did it.

• 1:34:32Speaker 01

  Yay. Fun. That was great.