Why do we need to change the narrative around fathers? We need to change the narrative about fathers partly because the one we have at the moment is a complete fiction which is kind of made up from many myths and stories we've been told in our culture over the years about the role of fathers, about their importance to their children, about how they become fathers, how they learn the knowledge to become fathers. And actually all of this is based upon absolutely zero academic research. I've seen no observational research at all.
It's just stories that we've told each other anecdotes. And because of that, the myths we built up around fathers are just about their myths. They're not actually true and they are very damaging to fathers, they're damaging to men, and they're also damaging to their families. So the work that I do and those, my colleagues around the world, we do it because we actually want the facts to be out there.
We want the stories we tell about fathers to actually be accurate. Which myths do you wish that you could put into the ground and fully bury about dads? The first one I would bury is that fathers, men, are not instinctive parents. So we have this story, and I hear it a lot still from the dads that I study before they have children, which is that mum is an instinctive parent.
She's somehow like magically able to do this, whereas dads have to learn. And because of that, they tend to see what mum does as a gold standard of parenting and whatever they do as a secondary bit of failure. And actually it's not true. And we'll probably go into that a little bit later.
But we've observed that men are as biologically primed to parent as women are, which as an evolution anthropologist, makes perfect sense to me. But that's probably one of the biggest ones because it really undermines a man's confidence that he feels that actually if he just goes with what his gut is telling him, he will be okay. He really. A lot of them lack a lot of confidence and they do very much belittle themselves in relation, for example, to what mum is doing.
Yeah, it's. There is a demonization of fatherhood and I want to get into this later as well, but I wonder how much of it is a cope in response to single parent households and us trying to not make children who grew up in single parent households feel like they're falling behind. Because if we minimize the impact that fathers have on children's rearing, then the people who do grow up with just mum don't feel like they're missing out on as much. And this is a trend that we see.
You know, the tyranny of the minority is sometimes categorized. But yeah, it's so, so fascinating. One of the other things, William Costello, who's one of my daily buses students out here, told me a story that you taught him about how fathers saved the human race for extinction because babies heads got too big. Yeah.
Okay, so what happened? So our brains are six times bigger than they should be for an animal of our size, of our body weight. And we're also bipedal. So we had this massive problem with our anatomy about 1.8 million years ago, to start with, where our hips had narrows because we'd gone bipedal, the birth canal got narrower.
But we had this big increase in size of our brains, for example, compared to chimps. And we got to this point about 1.8 million years ago where the head would no longer fit through the pelvis at full term. So we started having to birth our babies very preterm. Basically, we should be praying for much longer than we are.
And then you had this helpless baby and mum was able to do that entirely on her own, particularly if she had like toddlers and everybody else around her. Initially, women helped each other with kin and that was fine for about just over a million years. And about half a million years ago, our brains were massively again and suddenly just relying on your sisters, your grandmother, your mom, who everybody wasn't enough, and actually the race, our species was threatened with extinction because these babies were not surviving. And so what happened next was that the next genetically related person had to step in, and that was bad.
Now, this was a big thing for mammals, for a mammal, because only 5% of mammals actually have an investigative father. So we're really rare and we're actually the only ape that does it. So this was a big, big evolutionary step for a mammal to take for dad to stick around. But if dad hadn't stuck around, the species, I would argue, would have died out because there were all these babies and none of them were surviving and none of those genes were preying on child generation.
So we would have hit a really difficult demographic problem. Lots of interesting things there. First off, if it wasn't for the width of women's hips, how long do you think they would gestate for? We don't really know, but it's probably getting to maybe pushing towards elephantine levels.
So nearly 18 months. Yeah. If not slightly longer, because you've got a big brain to grow in there and that Takes a lot of energy and it takes a lot of time. It's not quite an arms race, but it is an evolutionary trade off between how much mum needs to walk and how long the child needs to gestate for.
Yes, yes. And the way we dealt that, the way we dealt with this demographic nightmare, is we birthed our babies earlier and earlier and earlier. And that's why we look at a chimp baby. It's like babbling around the trees after a week and you've got a human baby and, oh, my God, you've got years before it's going to be doing that.
Just a puddle for the next two years. Yeah, exactly. If any infernal touch on your baby, you know how unbelievably helpless they are. And that was the trade off.
But that meant that in the classic statement, it then started to take a village to raise a child because she suddenly had this kid who was helpless but was growing this enormous brain that was going to need loads and loads of support and MPI male parental investment just to really, really drive this home. How Rare this is. 95% of all mammal species have zero male parental investment and none of the other ape family do. We are.
And the reason for that, and that's why we then go on to this argument about how important fathers are. Because if fathers hadn't been important, if they weren't still important, they just wouldn't have evolved. They just would not have evolved. Because evolution, it hates what we call redundancy.
So what it doesn't do is it doesn't invent or cause to evolve two roles which are identical or near each other, unnecessarily needed. So it wouldn't, of course, a human father to revolve. Well, that seems absolutely critical for this rival disease. It just doesn't work like that.
So, you know, go back 750,000 years ago. What would the typical father have done? The typical father 750,000 years ago would have probably acted very much like a chimp father and would probably have probably sided several children with several different females with reproductive success. In terms of evolution, anything according to reproductive success, how many kids are you having?
Are they surviving? Are they themselves reproducing? Okay, so before we had investing. False.
Before dad had to do that, he would have been spreading his seed because that would have increased the likelihood of reproductive success. We got to this tipping point where he was doing that and, oh, my God, none of them were surviving. Okay, so actually, your reproductive success is pretty much zero. And so even if you're Selected for those men who stuck around and actually started investing.
But the problem is you get to point where a man who said, well, he could just carry on, you know, sirring several children with several different women. But the problem you have is that first of all he wants maternity certainty. So if he's doing that, that means all the other families of women who he is mating with also mating with other men. And then you've got this conundrum of, oh my God, I am now possibly investing in someone else's child and I let everyone do that.
So how I deal with this, I do a thing called mate guarding, which a lot of primates who do couple up do. And I'm going to stick by the female side. But if you stick by the female side and you slowly move into this thing where we have for a greater, lesser period of time what we call parental monogamy and that the father sticks with the woman, only mates with that woman and helps to raise the children because that's the only way his genes can survive. So I got sent something by Macken Murphy earlier on.
This is really interesting. So this is a pushback against alpha male sort of hyperandrou take approach as being what's classed as reproductive success. And a tweet from him says, I've always been skeptical of sexual partner count as a measure of male reproductive success in US species. Concealed ovulation and contraception make it rather unlike that a man will produce children through anything other than long term committed relationships.
It got me thinking about how this is reflected ancestrally as well that, you know, spreading your seed around even the most alpha of alpha males. It doesn't track using wolves or chimp tribes or silverback gorillas as the model for us because the children come out in a very different sort of way. And as you identified, and anyone that's read the ecomonetus of the universe knows humans are grandchildren optimizing machines. That's the thing that needs to happen once you get SDH grandchildren.
Sweet like hands are off the wheel, so to speak. But yeah, I think it's a really nice reframe and it also maybe explains I don't know how long 500,000 years is evolutionarily pretty long time. But I think a lot of men feel in them a little conflict that, you know, they want dad, but they want Chad in their own life. They want to kind of.
And there is a battle that I see amongst my friends. I'm 35 and I'm seeing these former degenerates start to calm down A little bit and, but they still have this sort of vestige of what they used to be, but they have this desire for what they want to become. And I almost see perhaps the 750,000 year old AGO version of them battling with the 250, 000 year old version of them. And I do think, you know, it's, who's going to give men sympathy for oh, poor party boys, like starting to settle down like the adult infant, the juvenile that really needs to grow up.
I'm on board. Like I've been around enough of these, these are my friends. But I do think that it's interesting to see the knobs and the dials start to get tweaked a little bit. You know, we talk a lot about the change for women.
They've hit uncharitably hit the wall or largely just I realize this is now the time for me to settle down. No one really ever talks about the equivalent with men. And I do think that I see it in my friends, like I need to grow up, I need to stop being such an adult infant. Yeah, absolutely.
And in fact I do have a colleague in, in Finland who does study male baby lust. And it's something that again we don't, we don't talk about, we talk about ticking clocks for women and the fact that they get this sudden insatiable desire to have children. But men have it too. And, and it's partly because of as you go, as you age, your testosterone naturally declines anyway.
And so what testosterone is really, really good at in high volumes is helping you find a mate. It's really good at focusing your attention on that scene. It's really good at giving you all those features which women find attractive. It makes you very driven by finding a mate.
But as you age actually declines and it's a natural decline and you start to focus more upon having a family. The other great thing about it, which is the fascinating thing about test Australia, is when you do become a father for the first time, it drops significantly, like really significantly up to a third. And it will never return to their pre birth level as long as you remain in contact with your child. So testosterone is a very powerful hormone.
But, but I think it's. Until very recently we didn't realize how important it was in shaping fatherhood. Shaping human fatherhood. Yeah.
So there's an interesting parallel I think going on here that what was needed ancestrally was resources and protection primarily, I'm going to guess from a father, right. Like if you're spending 20 hours a day with an infant in your arms, it's time to go king berries or taking down a wilder beast. Similarly, you are physically more frail and the child is unbelievably frail. Therefore you need someone to play the bodyguard hypothesis.
I think your ex boss told me on this podcast, Robert. So I think that there is an equivalent change that's happened culturally, socioeconomically, in the modern world which almost reverses this. So women finally have access financially and educationally to not be dependent on their partners. And emotionally, there is a push to almost reprogram some of the maternal instincts and some of the pair bonding instincts that women have.
You know, there was a famous article in the New York Times last year about Charles hasn't avoided that. Maternal instinct is a myth that men created to keep women down. And I think what this has created is that an assumption. Women don't need men financially, women don't need men emotionally, so women don't need men parentally either.
That's the stage that we are, at least in some corners of uneducated popular culture getting to. Yeah, and that's earlier. That men are just as. I never forget reading something about the Y chromosome zone.
And the Y chromosome does have very little of any use on it in terms of genes. What that really misses is actually fathers aren't really there for mothers. Fathers are there for their children. So whether or not it's a woman, you feel that you need that partner in your life.
And I'll get into the single parent thing in a minute. What is very clear from the data we've collected and colleagues around the world in the last 15 years is that your children do need you. So actually it's not about as a woman, I've got my own money, I can protect myself, you know, da da da. It's actually about your kid needs input from that father.
Because actually what fathers bring to education is very different from what mothers do. And When I started 15 years ago, the mantra was fathers had no role in child development because mothers were the environment of raising that child mostly. She was a major input in that child's life. And therefore you didn't need data around really.
And we found, again, not surprising from evolution point for you, the fathers actually have a very separate, unique and important input, intellectual development. And if you don't have that, then first of all it has to be found from somewhere else. So actually the argument from feminists or women or wherever it should be, shouldn't be, I don't need this man. The question should be, yes, but does your child need this man because actually that's what he's there for.
So maybe you don't want a partner in your life. Okay, fine, co parent, you know, okay, you can live separately, this is fine. You don't have to be very amounted to be involved. You don't have to have any financial aid, you don't need to ask for any protection.
But what about the kid? Just fundamentally what about the kid? And I think that's the argument. Yeah, a lot of men and dads are feeling quite surplus requirements now I think you know we had this as you identified bit of uncertainty around fathers.
I think I had this really very formative conversation in a group a couple of months ago just before we. I found out that I was gonna have a chat with you and it was so timely. I'm thinking about this and the role of dads and so on and so forth. And it was a mastermind filled with a couple of billionaires and a bunch of millionaires.
So these people monetarily in terms of resources are very successful. And they said look let's just do a round table, we all eat dinner. Does anybody having any challenges that they're facing personally or professionally for the minded group? And I think there was one round one sweet people went around on the second one.
This guy said my wife is six months pregnant, seven months pregnant. All that she's talking about is the baby and I don't feel anything. And I feel ashamed at the fact that I'm not like when's this cascaded hormones going to come is going to come in the baby Ayden boy, if it doesn't, what if I'm not meant to be a dad? You know, I want kids and I can't wait to have kids but I don't feel anything.
And I'm scared of telling her maybe she's gonna think I'm less of a man, I'm not gonna be a good father, maybe she'll wanna leave me. There was just like pouring out with this guy self doubt and concern and shame and guilt and terror. And it really touched me, you know, this guy opened up and sat right across another guy equally successful with three kids. And he said same for me, same for me, just hold on, it will come, it's gonna take longer.
But the point being when we're talking about men, dad's feelings, surplus requirements. There is a, it's a very vicious sort of double ended sword that's happening here where culture is merely feeding an increasing narrative that women can survive without dads and dads acceptless requirement. We don't wanna make a single parent household people feel uncomfortable. And what that does is it slots almost perfectly into these fears that fathers innately have.
So you have this almost sort of extrinsic and intrinsic narrative being woven together. That certainly to the guy who sat next to me, it played right into the fears that he already had and it didn't make him feel like he was any more secure. Yeah, absolutely. And that's why, in a way, I do the work I do and I publish the work I do in a helpful format.
So that's why I wrote my book and that's why we have to get this information out there about dads, because what he was feeling is completely and utterly normal. I can think of only maybe three or four men that I've studied who haven't had that concern. And I've studied many, many men in this process. And.
And the other guy detained was right, it will come. But we don't tell men that. You know, we hear this thing. Oh, they come out, you feel amazing, you feel elated and you'll be amazing and you'll immediately love them.
Probably not. Actually quite a lot of women don't feel like either let them secret. But. But it's because.
We can explain that. We can explain that Mum, when she's pregnant is. There's raging hormones everywhere. When she gives birth, she's got a massive flood of hormones which help her give birth, actually.
But as a side effect are amazing body hormones. We've got oxytocin, we've got dopamine, we've got giant dorphin in there accelerating the bond she's gonna build with that baby. And that's done partly because babies are tough and you don't want to leave on the hillside. So, okay, let's give her some really good, you know, chemical side effects and she will.
Dads can only build their bond because they don't go through their physiological process. They don't breastfeed, for example. They have to build their bond through interaction. Okay, so for example, the drop in testosterone doesn't occur until the baby is born.
So that's first of all a big tough thing. So you're not getting this dropping testosterone, which makes you more motivated to care for the baby and also releases more of the effects for your bonding hormones. High testosterone blocks the effects of bonding hormones. Okay.
So if you drop it, you get much more effective to oxytocit and dopamine and things like that. So he's not getting a head start during pregnancy. He has to wait for baby born and get his baby's born. If your partner is breastfeeding, then basically in those first few weeks there's very little weigh in because she's breastfeeding.
Babies either asleep or it's crying or whatever it might be. And it's very latched on to mum. And that's a really tough period. I've had dads who very much that has driven them to postnatal depression.
Okay, so get postnatal depression as well. Oh my God. Yeah. The rate is not 10% and it's genuinely post expression again.
That's something we need to talk about and highlight from there. So what I always say to men is I explain to them physiologically what's happening. I say to them that you build up on your attraction and there's no thanks. That's really hard if you can find a way in.
So maybe your thing is baby massage before bed. Maybe your thing is giving it bath. Maybe your thing is reading a story if it doesn't understand you. So it works.
Find your thing, that's your thing, nobody else's thing. Okay. And try to do every day but until your baby starts to interact with you, until you start smiling and babbling and laughing and completes you and then in six months they start playing with you and then you can do rough and tumble play all these wonderful things. Until that time it's going to be tough, but it will come.
But we don't tell that as that Saturdays they sit there thinking either baby doesn't like me or oh my God, I'm not feeling anything for this baby. Or, and, or, you know, mum's really good at this. Why am I so awful at this? How come she got born?
How come she knows what's going on? I don't know what's going. So they build this massive, massive pressure and actually we just need to tell them, we just need to say this is normal. And the fact that you were talking about a man's group, that's brilliant.
You know, we have in the past set up antenatal groups just for men and they are amazingly powerful. Antenatal groups. Yes. So prenatal groups before baby is born.
So in the uk, you know, YAGA ladies and you have your partner and mum's there very little focused on dad. And dads tend to not voice their fears. And those environments we say there is like supporter in the rock and then they're full enough. Mom's going through.
She's the one that's all about supporting women. What can you do to support them. But actually if you do a man's group and particularly if you bring in men, like what happened on your evening thing where there's a dad there who goes, it's okay, they open up amazingly and they will tell you all their fears and all their. And then having some experience dads there is really powerful because they will tell.
And I go, that happened to me. But I can assure you it's all fine. And they can ask all the silly questions that they think is silly and they're not going to ask in front of a load of women and also most anti natal teachers of women. And it's just a really powerful thing to do.
But we have to prepare these fathers. You're like saying to them you do want to prepare for them. You read all these books and they say how support mother has to do this. And that's really important, I get that.
But there's very little out there that actually says what about dad? Because he is actually going through a profound emotional, biological, physiological change as well. It's just not quite as obvious because it's a big bump, you know. But actually his brain is changing just as much as we know that now from scans.
You know, we can see the change in man's brain when he comes apart. But we just need to share the knowledge, I think. And that's why it's very important we do a lot of talks do on podcasts to write the life of dad because I wanted, and that's written for fathers because I wanted them to have a book that wasn't about supporting mum, that wasn't about what's happening to mum, it was about what's happening to them because I think that's really important. You've mentioned about this adjustment in androgens.
So testosterone drops. It actually drops a level, I think we get into a committed relationship and then drops again. Yeah, yeah, dramatic. What, what's going on with Grey Matter?
What's happening to our brain? So what we see in the brain is we see two key changes in the brain which we see an are genital in women. And we see first of all we see changes in the very cord brain, in the limpid area of the brain, the amygdala and the hypothalamus, which are related to risk detection, which is understandable. So as a parent you need to be very good risk detection.
You need to look out for those risks you obey. Second, really big ones are in the outer areas of the brain. So we see the areas related to empathy, increasing size which again is obvious. You need to be very good at reading your child's emotional needs, what their emotional status, what are they going to need?
And particularly when you've got somebody screaming at you, you need to be very good at that. The other thing is all those really good parenting skills like attention and planning and problem solving and organizing. So those areas of the brain associated with that, some of them related to executive function, they also increase in size. So you see all these areas becoming primed so that you are as good at this as you possibly can be.
And we see that happening in men and in women. I wonder if the hardcore productivity pills corner of viviennesnet gets a hold of this conversation and finds out that their executive function can be increased by having kids. The amount of having children. Having children is a productivity hack.
I'm going to be a parallel process. My Google calendar is going to be completely put together. Yeah, true. Yeah.
The scene offset may deregate that. Talk to me about this risk detection stuff and fear stuff because there's these videos on the Internet. It's dads. It's like dad's doing unbelievable things.
The child's dicking about on the corner of a couch and falls off and this father gets like some Odell Beckham Jr. Random reverse crow grip thing or like they plucks and plucks them before a random tractor accident occurs or whatever. So does this increase in that. Does this mean that parents specifically judge awesome mothers?
Is there baseline anxiety? Is that raised? Does this bleed crossing to the rest of their life too? Do they have a sense of fear, anxiety, stress, whatever occurring as well?
We do tend to. It's part. It's quite a complex multifactorial thing. You do see an increased increase in cork assault in young parents.
Obviously it is a very stressful thing to do not only with a lack of sleep but also with the sheer amount of learning you need to do and the fact that yes, you have to have this high choice protection. We do find that men and it's probably due to drop and testosterone definitely become more emotional in situations with shed female relations. So I always use my dad's like oh my God, I can't watch charity appeals on the tell. You know about crime and it's probably because it's emotional, but it's emotional in a sad direction.
It's not like they get more aggressive emotional. No, no, they tend not to actually. That's probably because of drop off of testosterone. So we don't see in some male other animals who don't Tend to do the caring side, but tend to do, for example, defense of the nest.
We will see more aggressive behavior. That tends to be caused by the increase in the hormonal vasopressin, which actually isn't terribly important in humans. Men can't replace that with oxytocin, so we don't tend to see increases in depression, but we do tend to see increases in stress response and we see increases in vigilance, basically, just sheer vigilance. Yeah, that's very interesting.
Okay, so let's roll the clock forward. This imaginary father and his imaginary sleep deprivation has got to maybe three to six months in and the baby's a little bit less puddle on the floor. I've heard this story of, you know, it's very important for the child to lie on the father's chest. Skin to skin contact.
How much of this is bro science and how much of this is legit? Absolutely legit. If there's one thing I will tell a father after birth is put that baby on your chest. Still here.
Even though we spent years trying to educate the medical establishment, we still find that fathers aren't offered it as a routine, which is ludicrous. And we still have to say to them, you have to be assertive enough to ask her and say, please give the baby once the baby on my chest. The reason for that is human babies are sensory beings. Like a lot of little baby mammals.
They do everything. Their senses are very heightened. One of the senses that's not heightened is vision. But they are amazing at smelling.
They're amazing at feeling and touch. If you put them on your chest as a father, what happens is they first of all smell you. They start to smell who you are because they can't really see you. Secondly, a wonderful thing called bio behavioral synchrony happens.
So when you put a baby on your chest, their physiology starts goes time with your physiology. They'll come to the same temperature as you, Their heart rate will come to the same heart rate as you. Their blood pressure will come to the same blood pressure as you. Okay.
Also, touch is the key releaser of bonding hormones. Oxytocin, dopamine, B12. If you want to release, the best thing you can do is use touch. So skin tone contact after birth, Skin tone contact at any point during a baby's life is really, really critical for mothers.
So something that's routinely given to women but not to men. And actually, in a way, arguably, it's more critical for men because mums got a little bit of head start with her Bonnie Hormones having gone through childhood, but it's really critical as the first interaction between a father and child. Robin taught me about the release of bonding hormones when finger over skin movement is kept at 2cm per second or less. Yeah, there's a particular.
Yeah, that's true. There's a particular rhythm. It's why we find some touch or some stroking irritating and some stroking really lovely. And I suppose you have a partner who strokes and stuff.
You're like. And it's usually because it's at the wrong frequency. You have these special, special hairs and special nerve cells in our skin. And it's just a very particular stroke.
Apparently that was. If you run that back and you look at the primatology side of it, it's a pace at which it would be quick enough to be able to find and groom fur. But if it's any quicker than that, you're not going through and actually being able to pick out one of the things. Okay, so we've spoken about some of the challenges that both dads and mums face.
What is the difference in the roles that mums and dads are supposed to play? Like, why are they here when it comes to the raising of children? So we have this. This is where it can get horrible to wisdom.
And I can give this quote to horribly and picked up by both sides of the argument for an evolution for you as Azamut. Evolution hates redundancy. So it will not cause two roles, like parenting roles, to be exactly identical if that's not required. So what's happened in the human evolution is that there are some things that both parents do.
So both parents are care. Both parents are highly empathetic. If you look at the brain activity in the brains of mothers and folds when they're attracting their children, we see equal C, synchrony and empathetic areas of the brain. We see synchrony in, you know, the caretaking areas of the brain.
But beyond that, there are some really distinct differences. And they seem to relate partly to the evolutionary age of the two roles and partly to the fact that mum's role is quite biologically constrained partly by childbirth, partly by breastfeeding, particularly in the early stages, where dad's role is much more flexible. So what we have found is that if we look at peak activations in the brain, when we're looking at interactions with mum, dad and baby, the peak activations in the terminal brain are in the core of the brain. So the limiting area of the brain and the unconscious brain, very, very, very ancient.
There's always time and that's where nurturing is and attachment is and risk detection is. So it's really fundamental, caring things. So, you know, you look at the tiniest little voralous and it's got the same thing happening in its brain. Dads, obviously that bit lights up, but the peak inactivation is actually in the neocortex, the newest bit of brain, which is understandable because it's an evolutionary, quite young fatherhood.
And there we see a lot of activation in the social cognition areas of the brain. So that's the front of the brain, and that's to do with being able to sort of manoeuvre your way to the complexities of social life. And there's lots of different things involved in that. So it might be social communication, it might be things like empathy, it might be things like we call sharing, caring and helping, but it can also be things like resilience, mental resilience.
And so dad's role, I kind of reduced it. A simple catchphrase, but that's always a scaffold, the child's entry into well beyond the family. So what Danny's left to do is, once all that very initial nurturing has happened and the baby starts to grow and maybe mum has another baby, is to take that child and this is what happened 500,000 years ago, take that toddler and start to prepare them to go beyond the family. So the first thing they might do is preschool.
And we know from research that the attachment a father builds with their child, the sensitivity of their parenting to that child, is the biggest predictor in how well that child transitions into preschool. So how good are they? How good are they at sharing, caring and helping? How good is their social communication?
How good is their emotional inhibition and regulation? Those are all driven mostly by the relationship that child has with their father. Because it seems to me that dad is the key to this. And what's really interesting is as an unfortunately following around the world.
So obviously how our culture views fathers does vary. And we have certain views in the west, and those aren't necessarily the views shared around the world. But what we do see is, regardless of whatever culture you're in, every dad is doing that social scaffolding. When you reduce everything away, that's what he's doing.
So it might be, you know, studied a group in Kennedy called Kipsigis, who are tea planters, quite a patriarchal community, very male driven. But dad will take. Well, first of all, as soon as the child is able, he will take the child into fields to teach them how to use the crop. The most important thing he does is he takes them to the market and he teaches them how to build a social network that's going to enable that kid to negotiate and sell the tea.
So he will do that. Even though we do that. Dad might be. Might get the really good work experience gig because he's built a really good network on the golf course or at the country club or wherever it might be.
And so dads are very involved in making sure their kid has the network, has the social skill, has the resilience to actually survive in our world. And part of that resilience is things like taking appropriate risk, helping, you know, helping them deal with challenge, helping them deal with failure. And we see that from very early age. That's what football play does partly.
And so dad is there to make sure this kid has the skills to survive outside the family. And that seems to be the key role of fathers. What is the role of challenge? That seems to be one of the key differences that you found between mum and dad.
Yeah, the role of challenge is because, you know, we live in a really difficult world and you as a child and as an adolescent have to learn to deal with that challenge, navigate that challenge, get over it, deal with failure, dust yourself down, get yourself back up, maybe find a different way around it or whatever it might be. And you need to be given those challenges in a way as a child, which is challenging, but not too much. And that's difficult. Some parents shirk away from that completely and it's the whole cotton ball ball thing, I just might go a little bit too far.
But it's really important your child confronts challenge. And it seems to me that Dan is the key one in doing that. And it starts because of rough and tumble play. So rough and tumble play starts at around six to nine months.
It's when you see fathers, and most fathers do this and most people recognise, you know, when you, you know, it's quite robustious, it's quite physical. They'll be wrestling, they'll be tickling, we'll be running around, they'll be jumping off stuff, they'll be throwing each other around the room. And it's really critical to child's moment. When dad say to you, what's the one thing I can do with my child to build our bonds, to help my child, I'll say play with them.
It's the most thing. And this whole fun parent thing kind of annoys me a little bit because actually when dads do it, they're not admitting it's fun, but they're not doing it because they're fun parent. They're doing it because actually developmentally is critical to the child, because the child starts to learn about reciprocity in social relationships. Play has to be fun for both people, otherwise it's, you know, it descends.
So it's that give and take of play. It's understanding, you know, I'm actually pushing the other person too much that they're enjoying with singing. So empathy, isn't it? It's about physical challenge.
Oh my God. Disqualified. I feel violence. It's about risk.
How can I assess risk? Actually flinging myself off the top of this climbing frame might be too much. So. And it actually starts to build the child's ability to see all those things.
And that just goes on throughout life. So we know, looking at adolescence, that the biggest factor in a child's mental health, when you look at the parental input, is actually the relationship they have with their dad. Dad is like the superhero of mental resilience for boys and girls. Actually for girls it's even more powerful.
And we think that it's only really been studied in the West. There's been a few studies in China. We think that's because in a patriarchal world, if you have a dad who spends time with you, who inputs into your life, who values your opinions, first of all, it's amazing for your self esteem and it's saying you are valuable. What you say is valuable and I'm going to support you in saying it.
And in a patriarchal world, that's quite a powerful message to give about. But it's okay for you to voice who you are and I'm here and I'm going to support you in that. So actually it could be a bigger impact on girls than on boys. So that's us going up into adolescents just to round out that sort of conversation about play.
What does play do for the father of the bond with the father beyond the child in isolation? I know sex. I rested. Empathy.
Yeah. Okay. So it's one of the key ways that fathers build their bond is through play. Because as I said, you have to interact with your child.
And one of the key ways you can do it is through your physical play because it's fast and it's breathless and it's exercise and it's touched and sometimes a little bit of pain, it releases all the lots of potatoes to edroentrophil from which is body painkiller and is released during exercise. And those are really powerful bonding chemicals. And because it's so fast and so in a way time efficient. It does it in this souped up way.
So you could give your baby a massage and that'd be lovely. And then it gets me trying to get oxytocin. But if you often double play with it, it's much, much more of an impact. It's much higher levels of those chemicals.
So it's actually a really good way of building a tight bond pretty quickly, a child. What's really, really interesting is rough and tumble play is mainly a western phenomenon. We do see it in other cultures, but it's rarer. And that is because most farms in western cultures don't have much time with their children.
They are time poor because of the culture we have and they're the primary breadwinner. And therefore this has developed to enable them to very quickly bond their children and time for children, high ROI strategy for bonding. Whereas if we go and look at a scale, look at the aka, okay, who are in the Congo, they are the most hands on fathers in the world. They spend at least about 55, 60% of their day in actual physical contact with their children.
They don't really do it, but they are with their children all day. They're carrying them, they're singing to them, they're telling them stories, they're going on their net taunt with them. They don't need to do it in the same way. I know that it's gonna be hard to make a comparison because of the difference in culture and so on.
Is there something different about the upbringing, the risk tolerance, the empathy either in childhood, adolescence or adulthood of the children who are given this more protracted, lower intensity bond with that from the AKA as opposed to the high peak, high ROI thing. I'm wondering if there's something that the rough and tumble play gives or doesn't give that a flatter longer equivalent of play per day does. No, we don't really see any difference actually in terms of bonding, in terms of attachment, in terms of adjustment of children. The only difference actually between Gabyaka and maybe some Western fathers is the degree to which they will allow their children to confront risk.
So little like a baby, little like a toddlers walking around with knives. You know, it's a hunter, gatherer of society. They don't quite have the same, I don't know, lack of tolerance for severe risk in actual children learning skills earlier. So actually that's really the thing difference you see with them is that they're there lighting fires and carrying knives and doing all these Things at a very young age, which probably most of us have a poor cat, so they seem to be fine.
Roll the clock forward then. Let's get into adolescence and the particularly useful role of dads when we get there. Yeah, so adolescence is a key time and it's a time when we see a lot of rewiring of the adolescent brains, when you go through puberties, a lot of dewiring, rewiring. And it's a difficult time for children, mental health wise, because we're starting to see a change in the focus of attachment from parents to peers.
And that means that actually your ability to navigate the social world at that point is really, really critical. And we see a lot of the mental health issues that young people have manifest themselves within the social sphere. So things like social anxiety, for example, things like body issues, they tend to be within the social sphere caused partly by the society in which the child lives. And because of that, it seems to be that because dad is the one that has the skills to scaffold the child and also the person who has been like the key resilience builder in the child that continues into adolescence.
But what's really interesting is dad doesn't really have to do anything amazing. So you don't have to spend hours with your adolescent or you don't have to, you know, spend lots and lots of money. Actually, what seems to work with adolescents is just feeling that you, you as a father value their company and you as a father, as a busy person, have taken the time to spend time with them, maybe do a hobby they like. It ought to be something as mundane as washing the car, walking with dog, making Sunday lunch.
Just something where the dad has said, I'm going to spend this time with you. And what's really interesting is how children view whether or not their parents value them. Difference between mums and dads. So children think their mum values them if their mum remembers their favorite breakfast cereal or, you know, makes sure their sports kit is packed or all that kind of thing.
They value their dads because they think their dad values them because he spends time with them. And that might be because, you know, dad's time is seen as a very Constantine of thing. So it's about doing those things with the child. It's about having a secure attachment to the child.
A secure attachment starts as soon as birth begins. But if you can maintain that secure attachment all the way through adolescence, it's really, really powerful. And we know that what you do with your kid as an adolescent, as a father, carries them well into young adulthood. So there have been studies showing that dads who have good secure attachments, who spend time with their children.
First of all, those kids have much higher self esteem. They're much less likely to have things like depression and anxiety. They're much less likely to report loneliness. But as a young adult, for a starter mental health, also dealing with things like stressful things in their daily life, they are much more capable of dealing with those things.
So what am I thinking? Yeah, I've got it in my head about trying to fold into the discussion of teen girl depression. 60% of 12 to 16 year old US females say that they have regular or persistent feelings of hopelessness, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. I'm trying to work out or deduct the base rate from that of fatherless homes.
I'm trying to work out, you know, whether Jonathan Haidt is correct at folding this at the feet of smartphones and hijack of female comparison during the time that they switch from parent to peer association and how much of it is a little bit more fundamental than that. And it's absentee fathers. That could be absentee fathers due to it being single parent households. That could be due to the increase in living costs and the fact that dad needs to work more, which means that they're not as involved.
That could be if Jonathan is adamant that it needs something to do with technology, it could be due to the distraction or the increase in distractibility of dad from screens, which means that he's not spending as much time with kids. But. But yeah. Looking at the pathologies and challenges that young men and young women are facing as they get into adolescence and then young adulthood.
Can you draw lines between fatherless homes or a lack of male parental input into raising kids up? Do you know what you mentioned? So many different factors there and they will all be important because it's a multi factorial problem. I want to make two points.
The first is that we need to be very careful about what we talk about father. Okay. In the west we associated with father with biological fathers who talk about father's absence because biological father is not in the home or in the life of the child. If you look at other cultures in the world, that obsession with biological father is a little bit strange.
Certain. Some societies of biological father doesn't refactor at all. Particularly matriarchal societies. In many societies have what's known as a social father and that can be a grandfather, an uncle, an elder brother.
So South Africa, for example, it's quite normal within Black communities for the grandfather to raise the children because the father has to go away to work and that's perfectly normal. And the grandfather has a special name for father. In some societies kids have whole teams of fathers who will do something different and that might be largely father load of social fathers, who knows? So I think we need to be very careful about talking about absentee fathers because actually if you look at many children who are in single parent households with a mother, if you ask them who have a significant menial life, they will come up with some and we assume there is no father figure in their life.
But that father figure doesn't have to be the dad. It could be the grandparent, it could be a teacher, it could be a coach, it could be a brother, it could be your mom's best friend. It doesn't have to be the biological father. It has to be someone who is willing to and might not even consciously know what they are doing, but they are feeding into that childhood.
So first of all, I'm playing backward. We are very biased in the west towards biological fathers and we need to be. Secondly, it's very multifactorial. Certainly I think part of the reason I support fathers in relation to more equality in the home and things like potentially and things like that is because they are important to children and they are important to child development.
And we find that children who have more from their father do tend to be more resilient and they do tend to have more success, particularly girls. So, you know, that is a factor, having that father figure in your life. And that's why we do try and fight here in the UK for more rights and fathers. But then again, I agree social media is an issue and I talk about that in a very different area of my life.
Talking about the mismatch between the speed of evolution of the human brain and the speed of our ability to innovate. So we have a very, very intra brain that can't cope with the way we innovated. The iPhone for example. We are not made to operate within that environment and it's a major, it handicaps our brain's ability.
We don't get all Wesley positive bonding hormones, we don't. We are seeing something that quite often is lying to us and we're not telling you that it's possible that's what's lying to us if it's not right in front of us. So theory of mind. We are not a great theory of mind at a distance.
So social media certainly has a role, I think, but it's not the only role and it really does depend upon the child. So there's a real interplay between a child's personality and social media. So you will get a child, you could get one child who's on social media eight hours a day and will be completely affected by it and then you'll get another child who's more vulnerable. It's really, really complicated.
But I think the reason why I try and empty the fatherhood a bit of it is because kids have evolved to have these two roles in their lives. And the SARS shows us that the dads are primed to do this role. The SARS shows that the fathers are important and developmentally to their children. We know that where fathers have secure attachments to their children that children have better outcomes and we know that's good for society.
So the reason why I fight for fatherhood and more equality in the home is because of that. Because it is good for children, it's good for fathers, it's good for families and it's good for society. Good for women. If you can get fathers, if you can get equal paternity leave for fathers with maternity, women can go back to work sooner.
They have less of a career penalty. They're then sharing what we call career penalty with the fathers. The gender pay gap reduces, you know, so it's kind of for those of us who campaign, do research is kind of a no brainer. But convincing governments is another issue.
Yeah. Why is it the case? Given that mothers want the best outcomes for their children, mothers also want the best outcomes, presumably for themselves. These are facilitated through making men more integrated, through making them more necessary into the raising of children.
Is it just short sightedness and a lack of insight into your work that's causing a kind of anti dad surplus of requirements male narrative at the moment? Culture. Do you think there are several things our media culture hasn't changed enough so we sell. It's getting better.
We have less representations of completely useless dad. All the surplus dad in adverts on Italian sitcoms, but it's still bad. It's a very ingrained belief. Homer Simpson, Peter Griffin.
Oh, you know, if you've ever watched Peppa Pig. I know. I love Peppa Pig. Daddy Pig is just the worst representation of all the things you've ever seen.
He's completely useless. And that's funny. So there's that. There is.
And I am feminist to my very core. Unfortunately there is an element of feminism that doesn't want men to be involved and they want the primacy of the woman to be kept as a parent and they feel that men are moving into what is a female space. Now if you look at the evolutionary story and you put it starts that's obviously completely ludicrous but it's a belief and I have had quite, I've had backlashes from fairly women because of the work I do, because I should be studying mothers as a woman. So there is that backlash.
Governments just don't want to invest in it. You know, we've had the system we've had for such a long time. It doesn't matter. I can hit them overhead with my research, my book till I'm blue in the face and we have all been doing it recently in the uk we've had a massive consultation on paternity leave.
We all tripped up to parliament, we all presented everything which is being, it's highly, highly convinced. We can show you the child outcomes, we can show you how it's all about money. We can show you how much the government will ultimately save. But first of all they're not going to save that money for like three decades.
So this current government, I'm not interested because I will be well retired by them and they just come out the end and change practically nothing. There's a real reluctance to do it, you know, even though we've got perfect examples from northern Europe where it works very, very well. Yeah, it's, it's a shame, it's a shame. I've been having a lot of conversations, a lot of conversations about dating for a long time and now how you thought about the role of men and masculinity means to be men and so on and so forth and yeah, it's unfortunate that any gains for men are seen as a loss for women.
You know, there's a zero sumness to a lot of conversations and yeah, what else? What do people say? You're this self confessed feminist with a bona fides out front writing a book about men and dads and saying that we need to give them more budget and more attention and more care and more sympathy and more resources. What's the pushback being like?
The pushback is. The pushback is I quite often get the response, quite an angry response. So every now and then I get called to radio phone ins and quite often I will get somebody on the phone saying to me, these men, you know, haven't given birth, they haven't gained through the pain in it. Particularly if you talk about person's brush.
They should all just pull themselves together. That's classic that There are limited resources in the latest resources against women. And I can kind of see that. I'm going here with the nhs.
But what really gets me is the lack of empathy because empathy doesn't cost anything. It's limitless. But we have to pay the very strong, giving empathy as well. So if we give any empathy to men, then women get less.
No, actually that's not what happens. We're just emphasizing the both of them. Why is it that it's seen as a loss that you're supporting a man? You can actually support both.
It's amazing that you can. So you very much get that attitude that you give to one, you're taking away from the other. And I find that. I find it astonishing.
I find, you know, when people say, particularly people pull themselves, you know, would you ever say that all over who's struggling? So why do you think it's okay to search a man? You know? But it's very ingrained.
I think it's. I think they feel threatened. I think they feel threatened by what it means about their identity. It doesn't mean anything about their identity, but I think they think it does.
It means we're taking some sort of primacy away from them. I think maybe. I had a conversation, quite a few conversations, but Dr. John Barry from the center for Male Psychology, been thinking about some things.
I'm going to read you a little Excerpt from the 1. I knew this recently. A common question is why don't men just do better? Surely they can try harder in school, employment and health.
Chop chop, men hurry up and stop being so useless. Well, no other group is told that when they suffer with poor performance or accolades in the real world that they should just pull themselves up by their bootstraps. We don't tell any other group to talk about their problems. Instead.
Instead we spend billions in taxpayer money and private charity to set up committees, departments, campaigns and funds to solve the problem. In simple terms, if a woman has a problem, we ask what can we do to fix society? If a man has a problem, we ask what can men do to fix themselves? And I think it is sort of imbalanced, specifically in certain areas.
It isn't everywhere. And there are still areas in which the imbalance runs in the other direction. But especially around parenting. You know, there is this empathy gap for sure.
Dr. Jari called it gamma bias. I think it's his technical term for it. And yeah, it sucks.
You can have a guy going through postnatal depression, being eating through the pain of childbirth. I was going to be A good dad. And now you tell me that I'm not. And he's also, you know, I can remember one of the guys who I work with who was possibly one of the worst case of patients.
Depression, isolation and he was his wife. The birth was traumatic. He was left standing in a room on his own for six hours with the newborn baby. He'd been shut in the room, the wife had been taken off somewhere, nobody saw him anything, they didn't get mentioned feedback.
Baby was screaming, he didn't know what he was doing. So first of all he thinks his wife's dying. No, she doesn't know she's dying. And he's left for this baby.
Then they get discharged from hospital and because he only gets two weeks paternity leave, she's in hospital for 10 days. So he's actually home with the baby and the wife who's son very ill for three days. Then they ask her back to work, leave her on their own. So he's like, oh my God, feeling horribly guilty, terribly stressed, how's she gonna be on her own?
Gets home at night, tries to do everything, stays up all night with the baby, then goes back to work then because you know, now I have to earn more money. So the child then takes promotion to a new job. So pressure of trying to impress the new job, learn the new job seller, does sick baby, six months behind with baby and surprise, surprise, he gets basically under pressure. Of course he does.
He's got all these different conflicting, you know, men are told now you have to be the hands on father, you have to be the perfect father, you have to be really good at this and you've got to see plenty fathers with whose system, it's all amazing and that you're still told no, you don't have to be the breadwinner and you have to be the rock. And you're not allowed to have any emotions about this and you're not allowed to have any fears because this is about mum. And so that is a massive pressure cooker of stress. And if you, and you know, then we haven't talked about maybe, you know, you might have had history of depression before or you might have had history or let's say your partner's depressed, if your partner is depressed, you're much more like yourself, you're posting depression.
So it's just this massive horrible mixture that is going to blow. What would you do if you were able to prescribe some cultural, structural, personal, psychological interventions or suggestions for people either as a group or individually? What do you wish that more people or governments were doing. I wish fundamentally that everybody knew this about men.
I wish they knew the science. I wish they knew the story of fatherhood. I wish they understood how important fathers were. I wish they understood what happened to a man.
I wish they understood how many different things there are to balance and how difficult it is to be told you have to be this, but you also have to be this. And you just have to slot into it. Okay, just. So just do it.
I wish that they knew that story and I wish there were more groups. I wish when parents did antenatal training that there was more time spent just with men, helping them and seeing them actually that they need as much support as mum does, but just in a different way. Okay? They just need a different sort of support.
They need a different. Because they are fundamentally going through as much as I said before, as much emotional physiological changes. It's just hidden, that's all. It's just not as obvious.
And so I just wish we could share all this information. I wish that, you know, when people learned about what happens to mum, they learn about what happens to dad and it's just seen as an equal journey. And what's really sad actually, for all her couples, it is an equal journey. And actually mum's find this really hard when they go into hospital and dad's shoved in a corner or dad's not asked what he wants to do or not asked to hold baby or any of these things.
Or when the health is comes around after birthday. No, no, no, she's had a hospital going, how are you? Mum will never ever at any point say, how are you dad? How are you doing?
Is there anything that you're concerned about? Would you like to talk about it? You know, because he's just there in the corner, you know, making the tea. So I just wish people understood that fathers are true co parents and the true co parents are very important reason.
And if they weren't important, they wouldn't be here. We just wouldn't have happened. We'd be like, you know, our chimp cousins. What's going on next?
Talk to me about what's fascinating you now. What's really fascinating in the field of fatherhood actually is, and it's partly slightly personal is fathers of kids with special needs, because mums themselves with kids with special needs certainly struggle for support and recognition. But for fathers there's again even less recognition and also this role of trying to build resilience and try to scaffold your child's entry into well beyond the family. That is a whole bigger job when you have a child with special needs.
I have a daughter who's recently diagnosed with autism. And a big thing for us is, okay, how do we prepare her to survive in the world, a world which isn't really adapted to her needs, and particularly my husband, particularly going forward into relationships and things like that. That's something that's a real focus on how can we give her the ability to detect risk? How can we give her the ability to deal with challenges, deal with the social complexities, which is.
Autistic person is really hard. So that's a real key thing for me now. It's a very unresearched area, and so I'd really like to start looking at fathers who are in that position. I think had the perfect mother for it, though.
Had the perfect mother to be able to go out and do the firsthand research and be able to come up with the strategies. Dr. Animation, ladies and gentlemen. And I absolutely love your work.
I think this is very, very, very important, and it's fascinating, and any friend of Robin's is a friend of mine as well. Where should people go if they want to keep up to date with your stuff on the Internet? You can follow me on Twitter, Animation on Twitter. And you can follow what you go to my website, which is animation.com, and it's all on there.
I appreciate you. Thank you. Thank you.