Transcript of Darby Saxbe (on Dad Brain) New

Welcome, welcome, welcome to Armchair Expert Experts on Expert. I'm Dax Randall Shepherd. I'm joined by Monica Lily Padman. This was a big exception. As you know, UCLA and USC are rivals.

Okay?

They're the enemy if you went to UCLA. But I got over that so that we could host our guest, who is a professor at the University of Southern California, clinical psychologist, and tenured full professor at the University of Southern California, Darby Saxby. Also my favorite name of a guest I think we've had. Great name. Darby Saxby. What a fun, fun name. She has a new book out called Dad Brain: The New Science of Fatherhood and How It Shapes Men's Lives.

This is really important stuff.

Yeah. As she will tell us in this, although historically only men have been researched for medicine, which is an atrocity, mostly only women have been researched for parenthood. Correct. So that's the counterbalancing disparity. And so she has studied men, thank God, and she's studied dads, and now we've learned a lot about it, and it's very exciting.

Really fascinating chemically, like what goes on.

And, um, dad bod— we get a scientific explanation of dad bod.

We sure do.

Finally. Please enjoy Darby Saxby. Boom.

Nice to meet you.

Monica, very nice to meet you. Hey. Thank you for coming.

Oh, my pleasure.

Hi.

Look how many items you have.

I really brought a lot of stuff.

Hi, Jack. Nice to meet you. Yeah.

Yeah, you know, you never know how much downtime you'll have, so I figured I could do some grading.

You're thinking ahead.

I could do some texting.

Sure, sure, sure. Where in Ohio? Because, you know, I'm right up the street from you. I think you'll be the guest we had this—

You're from Michigan.

Yes. And were you in the shadow of Cedar Point?

Oh, of course. Yeah.

Yeah. Well, how close to Sandusky were you?

So I'm from Oberlin. So it's like a small college town. It's between Toledo and Cleveland.

Right. As is Sandusky.

As is Sandusky.

Yeah.

Yeah. And yeah, you know your Cedar Point well.

Oh, come on. Yeah. It's my religion.

Oh yeah.

Did you have a season's pass because you were so close?

You know, my parents were nerds.

Yeah.

So we actually didn't go there that often, even though it's really close. But my mom now has a house on Lake Erie.

Oh, wonderful.

And so we go every summer for like a month. And it's like one of the only things to do with the kids is take them to Cedar Point.

How old are your kids?

They're 14 and 17.

Oh, deal. They run wild there.

Yeah. Oh, they love it.

Cheese on a stick, the cable ride. I'm so happy for them. I'm ashamed that I haven't brought my kids to Cedar Point yet. Oh yeah. I honestly, it crosses my mind. I'm like, I'm not doing a good job as a parent.

Yeah, you're failing. Yeah.

Last year we went to Dollywood for the first time.

We're going in June.

You are?

Yes. So my book tour is a road trip to Dollywood. Oh, so it's a book tour, college tour, road trip to Dollywood. It's like a triple purpose book tour.

This is fun.

So we're going to drive from New York down to Tennessee.

Okay.

And stop along the way in D.C. I'll do some book stuff there. My daughter's going to look at some colleges.

Ooh, tour Mount Vernon.

Exactly.

Yeah. Yeah.

We're gonna go to Charlottesville, look at UVA.

Nice.

Which is where my husband went. Great school. Totally great school. And then we culminate at Dollywood.

This is the huge upside of being a professor is you have a summer, man. Lucky kids. Okay, so mom and dad, both doctors. One's a surgeon, one's a—

Internist.

Okay. So as a kid, they were married to what age for you?

I was 9 when they got divorced.

Okay. How many siblings?

So I have an older half sister and then 2 brothers who are my full brothers. So my dad has 4 children altogether. My mom has 3. Okay.

So when they met, he had already been married and had a child. Exactly. Okay. Now, this is very scandalous by all accounts. Yes. Your mother had a patient. Yes. Okay. Please tell us.

Yes. So she treated a patient who was dying of cancer, and cancer treatment often takes a long time. And she fell in love with the patient's husband.

Oh, wow. During that process. Wow.

David. And I think that was with the sort of awareness and consent. I don't know the full story because I was a kid when all of this happened. This is why. But so they fall in love, and my mom ultimately marries David.

Left your father for David. By the way, I have to imagine that's not an insanely uncommon thing in that situation, because you are seeing a man at potentially his best or worst. Yes. Caring for a dying spouse, you're going like, wow, this person's very loving, they're committed. You're Showing a very nice side to yourself.

Yeah. And I think he truly did love his wife who died. Yeah. You know, it was tragic. Yeah. So it wasn't like he was looking to move on and she just happened to be there. It was a process.

Yeah.

Yeah.

How old was everyone in this situation? So you were 9.

I was 9. My brother Beau was 6 and my brother Tom was 3.

And how old was your mom?

Oh gosh. She had me when she was 31. So she was 40. Oh, okay. Yeah. Now I'm 49. So that seems, young to me.

Oh, right.

Yeah, yeah. Right. But at the time, she was super old.

Yeah. Yeah. Did they tell you right away what happened?

We knew that my mom was moving out, and it was sort of a process. Like, she moved to an apartment down the street, and then later that year moved across town. Oberlin is a small, small town, so across town is like 2 miles. I could ride my bike between our houses. Oh, that's good. Yeah. And so then we did this joint custody thing. So every other week I would switch between my mom's house and my dad's house. But at first my dad just got sole custody because my mom was the one who left. And the courts in Ohio were like, whore.

Yeah, I'm going to give the kids— divorced woman. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Also, we're of a similar age. And so I'm a child of divorce, certainly in my neighborhood. I want to say it was like 1 in every 15 houses, not half. It was still like I wasn't allowed to hang out with certain kids because they didn't like that I had a single mom.

Yeah, like I felt like the first kid I knew whose parents were divorced. Yeah. Even though, yeah, statistically it wasn't that uncommon.

How much does your dad fall into the surgeon stereotype? Because your dad's a surgeon and there's a stereotype and we've interviewed a bunch of them and it's pretty fucking consistent. I'm going to have to acknowledge.

So you're going to say the stereotype is what, like power hungry?

I don't even know. Power hungry, but a little bit arrogant.

Yep.

A little. I don't want to say narcissist. That's the wrong word. But there's this true confidence and a bit of they feel like they've mastered something that is almost almost godlike. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I think some myopic thinking a little bit.

It's crazy. So, I helped my dad do surgery. We did these sort of charity trips to the Dominican Republic when I was a teenager, and I was allowed to scrub in and kind of assist.

Oh my God.

I know, which is probably really unprofessional, actually. I think there was one time I almost passed out, but it was the first time I ever saw my dad in that role. And I was like, "It's like a superpower." It is.

Oh, it is.

Like, you are literally cutting into a human body. Body, saving them, and then you're moving things around. It's like a crazy—

put them back together and they work.

Yeah, and they work. So I was kind of blown away.

It's worthy of some confidence. Yeah.

And I always thought my dad was like a pretty humble, low-key guy, but in the OR, you have to be like the king.

Yeah.

So that's the other factor that I don't even blame them so much, is the role is such that you are at the top of the decision-making. This is the same as a director. Like, if you've been directing movies for 25 years, guess what? You start kind of thinking everyone should value your opinion a little more than they should. It's just kind of inevitable. Yeah.

As a professor running a lab, I work with my grad students and I'm like, they have to listen to me. Yeah, it's a powerful narcotic. Yeah.

And then you go home and you're like, oh, right, no one here gives a shit.

Oh no, my kids could not be less impressed.

Yeah. Yeah. So suffice to say, Dad had virtually zero experience dadding even though he was your father until this divorce. And he had quite a rocky road, but he did figure it out.

So just tell us what the experience was like once Mom was out of the picture. Yeah. And I will say that my dad, having read the book, thinks that he was very involved when we were little. So in his defense—

Sure.

And when I tried to qualify it, the book didn't make it so. But he was, I think, an '80s dad. He was pretty hands-off. He was not super involved in our daily routines, our bedtimes.

He didn't know what time you went to school, probably. He didn't know what time your school ended.

He was doing his own thing.

Yeah, yeah.

He was going to the Masonic Lodge. So my mom left. All of a sudden, he is the sole parent. And he had to figure a lot of stuff out. Like, he made dinner for us, he cleaned the kitchen.

You guys need lunch for school.

He woke us up, he packed our lunches. He actually made really good lunches. He was good at it. I think the meticulousness that you need to have where you're scrubbing in as a surgeon made him, like, a very natural cleaner of the kitchen.

Sure, sure, sure.

Oh, yeah. I think he kind of leaned into it. He was tracking our routines. He was driving us to school. He became the parent.

But Andy also had moments where he, like, threw TV sets out in the snow and stuff, right?

He had a temper.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's overwhelming. Yes. Especially if you haven't been doing it.

Exactly. And I think he was like, "What is happening here?" His life is really falling apart.

Yeah.

And he was depressed. And yeah, like, my brothers one morning wouldn't wake up to go to church, and he took the TV set out of the wall and was like—

Oh, yeah, she is.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Into a snowbank. Yeah.

It might shock people to know how often those types of solutions cross your mind.

Yeah.

Like when you're a dad, you're just kind of like, okay, so the problem is these iPads. Easy fix. I'll throw these fuckers in the trash. We have these impulses. I can eliminate the problem entirely. It's not the move, but I have to fight through a lot of these urges.

Yes, I've made the threat to throw my kids' phones out the window. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Many, many times.

Yeah, yeah. You then go on to get a PhD in psychology.

Yes, in clinical psych.

What's so funny is in your book you say that all research is me-search. I had never heard that term and we heard it yesterday.

Yeah.

Oh. Or Monday.

Yeah.

That's funny. Weird.

It is. And you guys all know that as standard, but I'm like, how could we have interviewed this many social scientists and not learned that?

Two in one week.

Every time you interview one, you should be like, what's wrong with you?

Well, I do that anyway. And someone finally said, when I asked that question, like, you don't study something on accident. We're all trying to answer some weird question that irked us since childhood. Right. And that person said, yeah, well, all research is me-search. And then you said it. So you were drawn into studying parenting. Does it start specifically with fathering or is just general parenting?

So originally transitioned into parenthood, and I was curious about couples and how they navigated relationships and roles. And I worked on this big study at UCLA, which was called the Center for the Everyday Lives of Families, where we basically camped out in families' homes.

Oh boy. Like anthropologists.

Yeah. And there were a bunch of anthropologists on the study team. And so it was this cool collaborative study, and we tracked them around their houses. We borrowed this technique that you use for primate research called scan sampling, where we were recording their movements. Mm. Like, every 10 minutes, where is everybody? What are they doing?

Wow.

And so we had this really cool corpus of data, and I worked with the cortisol data, which is stress hormone data, to see how are their physiological stress levels tracking with their relationship quality and how they feel about their homes. And so that kind of got me interested in family stress. And then I wanted to kind of go to the source, which is, you know, when does a couple become like a triad? When do they start a family, basically? And so when I had the chance to start my own lab at USC, I knew I wanted to do a transition to parenthood study. And I got interested in fathers actually in part out of convenience, which was that I knew I wanted to do a brain scanning component. And as a postdoc who was starting to plan this study, I was not allowed to go into the scanner because I was pregnant.

Ah.

Ah.

So I was working on a neuroimaging study, and they were keeping me out of the neuroimaging suite. And you can scan pregnant women, but it's just like a couple layers of extra care. And so I was like, how am I gonna study women's brains? Well, why don't I scan the dads? And then as soon as I thought of that, I got really interested 'cause I kind of dug into the research on fatherhood and there's so much.

It's scant.

And I got fascinated with that. Yeah. Yeah.

So historically medical research has been extremely asymmetric and we've studied men. You know, at a really high rate to the detriment of a lot of women's health. But this is completely reversed, right? I think in the book it says 1 in 10 journals on this topic are about fathers. The rest are about mothers.

Exactly. So our parenting research, research on the parent-child bond, research on the transition to parenthood, it's completely mother-centric.

Right.

So we just don't really understand men's experiences of parenting as well. And I think there are emerging research programs that are attempting to answer these questions. And that was one reason I was excited to write the book.

Okay, so let's start with just mammals. How frequent do mammals father their offspring? And maybe we should pick some terms, right? Because you can father offspring, but we're going to talk about the process of raising or being involved. So what should we call that?

Fatherhood?

Yeah. So in the book, I kept calling it hands-on fatherhood. And then I was like, I'm talking about mammals. So should it be like paws-on fatherhood?

Yeah.

You know, like tendrils on fatherhood depending on— so I guess active fatherhood is a good term, right? So you can sire offspring, but to be involved in their actual rearing, turns out humans are pretty unusual because we do have human fathers who are actually involved in day-to-day care. And so actually, if you look across all the species, fish, males are primary parents, birds, biparental, males do a ton of parenting. Frogs, lots of male parenting. But in mammals, it's fairly unusual to have biparental.

Is that 'cause of mammary glands? Is that because we have a unique style of feeding our young?

Exactly. Which is where the term mammal comes from, right? It— so it comes from milk. So literally, it's baked into the term that this is a mother-centric animal.

Yeah.

Right.

And I mean, you do have some examples of primates and rodents where males are participating in rearing, but what makes humans unusual is the sort of flexibility flexibility and the fact that we raise children kind of collectively. And so that's called cooperative breeding or alloparenting, and that's sort of our signature style of how we raise kids.

Yeah, we only kind of see this in primates. You see this in primates to varying degrees, right?

Yeah.

Really social group animals where you're gonna have aunties helping and you're gonna have wet nursing and you're gonna have a lot of different things.

Exactly. Like, a lot of shared care. So you kind of need a complex this social brain that can track who's safe. And the reason I think that style originates is just because our babies require so much care. Like, our human babies are so half-baked when they emerge, and so you really need this tag team. And then fathers become really important.

Okay, so now let's talk about hunting and gathering groups or societies or whatever you want to call it. First, we must point out the vast majority of time we've been here— we've been here for 300,000 years as a species, give or take. And agriculture comes around 16,000 years ago. So we're talking about 95% of the time we have been here, we lived a certain way, which I think we regularly underestimate. Monica and I get in some debates sometimes, and I'm like, you have to accept that we were designed and wired to function in a certain dynamic that we no longer do. And there's a ton of challenges that come with having left that design, right? Rather left that context with the same design.

Yeah.

So let's talk about what parenting looks like for hunting and gathering groups.

Hunter-gatherers live in these small sort of mobile bands of 20 to 30 people. There isn't a lot of private enclosed space. We don't have our big houses and our backyards. So everybody is helping everybody, and parenting looks pretty collective. And that can include fathers. So there's all this cultural variability in how much men are doing. But in hunter-gatherer societies, you sort of have these egalitarian social structures because you sort of don't want to compete for resources because everything is shared. And you have some flexibility around gender roles because women actually are bringing in as many calories as men.

Oh, way, way more. They're responsible for like 90% of the calories.

They are really important resource gatherers, which is why it's funny when people are like, "Women shouldn't work, they should just mother." They've working since the beginning of time.

No, what's very weird is that they didn't work for a few hundred years. That's what's really weird.

Like, we had this strange blip where women sort of stayed home and were specialized to the domestic realm.

But again, they lost their whole support system. So kind of they had to.

Yeah. So going back, though, to— I talked to an anthropologist who studied this hunter-gatherer tribe called the Akha, and the men are super hands-on with the babies. They're holding babies. I think they're within arm's reach of their babies about 47% of the time.

They let a baby suckle from their nipple that's not even giving milk?

Exactly. Like, you'll see a group of men hanging out and they're drinking wine and they're all holding babies. Cute. You know? I know, it's adorable.

But there's huge variation within hunting and gathering groups. So then the other one is— what is it? The Kingsbiggie?

Yes. Pronounce it for me. Yes, the Kipsigis. And if you think about how much fathering are men doing, It's like, well, how does the culture make its living? In the Kipsigis, which is a different tribe where there's this totally different style of fathering, there are all these prohibitions against men picking up babies and interacting with babies too much in the first year after birth.

It's emasculating.

It's unmanly. Exactly.

But how did that even evolve?

So there, the resource gathering is more risky, it's more hazardous. And so you end up just getting more specialization.

Oh.

You're not bringing a 2-year-old along on this hunt.

Exactly. So you might be involved as a father with older kids, right? You're gonna take older kids along to show them how to hunt, but you are not carrying babies around the way the Akka are.

Well, think of the Inuit. Only the males are hunting whale and other fish, and they're out in these canoes. You're not bringing one or two or three— you know, you're not bringing out a young boy until they're pretty self-sufficient. So in that case, it would make total sense that that's how they would function.

Exactly.

I think there's a lot of dynamics that are worth thinking about from that hunting-gathering, and we kind of already talked about it. But I often say, in my own experience parenting, I feel so blessed that I studied anthro because many new parents talk about the moment they drive home from the hospital with the baby in the backseat and they're like, oh, Jesus, we don't know what we're doing. But I've watched hundreds of hours of video of children in hunting and gathering societies. They rear themselves. A 9-year-old is in charge of 12 kids. Everyone's climbing a tree. Many are falling out. People are breaking bones. They're so fucking resilient, it's crazy if you get to see how we actually live for so long. So I kind of didn't have that panic just because I got to observe how we're really designed to do it. We're pretty resilient.

Yeah, kids are designed to, I think, be somewhat free-range. Having a parent who's on top of a kid at all times is actually not always the best.

Minimally, it's not how we live for most of the time.

Exactly. You got mixed-age playgroups is like the classic kind of configuration for kids are learning. They're learning from their peers.

Even if we had stayed egalitarian in sharing the parenting duties, it still would have become much, much different because, to your earlier point, we lived in longhouses. There was always someone around to help. Everything was communal. And then we ultimately evolved into, like, single-house dwelling with just two people. And even if both people had split it, which they didn't, it would have been infinitely more stressful. This is a uniquely stressful way to rear kids, the way we do it.

Yeah. This is not how we evolved as humans. We need community support. And yet we live in suburbs, we're car-dependent, we don't have our extended family nearby, we don't have those multi-generational networks.

If you knocked on your neighbor's door in any apartment in LA and said, "I need you to watch my baby for 3 hours while I go to the store," they would panic, right?

Or you'd be like, something's wrong with them.

Yeah. Who would trust me with their baby?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.

It's a very bizarre way we're living in, in some regards.

It's like money driven, really.

Yeah.

I mean, that's part of why we live away from our parents and stuff. It's like, we're gonna go chase success. And even your house is an example of success.

Yeah, totally. It's this kind of late capitalist way to live.

Yes.

So you had a Fulbright Fellowship and you went to Spain in 2019 and you got to kind of observe how they do parenting there. So what did you gather from them? Cuz obviously there's huge cultural differences in how we're all doing it around the globe. So tell us a bit about different places and how they're doing it.

Yeah, it was super fun. So my kids were pretty young when we did that. They were 8 and 10. It was right before the pandemic, so it was good timing. And we did like the playground tour of Barcelona, just like every playground. And there were a lot of young parents out and about. And I think it's because like most countries except for the US, there is really generous maternity and paternity leave. So you're home, you have flexibility in those early years. And so the whole society just feels a little more oriented to what young kids need. Public places like our apartment was on a square where, you know, you have the café where people are smoking and eating tapas, and you have the old guys on the bench gossiping. And then there was always a play structure. All the squares have a little play structure. So there are just a lot of public spaces for kids, and so it feels more integrated. And what were you observing about fathering there? I would see men outside our apartment window pushing strollers around and hanging out with each other. And there was more of a sense, I think, of connectedness and a kind of society of fathers that you just don't see as much in the States when you're kind of more isolated in your home.

What happens in Sweden? What's going on in Germany?

So my husband's sister lives in Sweden and raised her kids there. And you've got really generous year-plus-long maternity leaves, and you also have really affordable early childcare that's high quality. So the stress level there for parents, I think, looks really different. And for fathers in particular, because you have these kind of paternity leave incentive programs that are designed to normalize and destigmatize dads taking leave. So basically, the couple gets a certain amount of leave, some of it is earmarked for dad. If he doesn't take it, it goes away, they lose that benefit. So a lot of men take it because that's It's a free benefit.

It's like vacation days. Yeah, you got to use them.

Totally. So you have— it's called the Latte Papas, which is like this society of guys who are like holding the little to-go cup.

Yeah, yeah.

And just walking around the cities with Björns on and stuff. Exactly. So again, it's just like a very normalized thing that men are going to be very hands-on because it's baked into their policy.

It is so weird because I feel like even here, even when there are paternity leaves, a lot of men don't take the full thing.

Well, again, it's emasculating. It's like your buddies at work are gonna be like, "You're fucking going up for—" You know, like, there's a stigma about it.

And there are studies on this, that men are really reluctant, and they think they're gonna get punished at work. And I think we still have this ideal worker idea that you sacrifice everything for your job. And if you take time off after a baby's born, you're a slacker.

Or minimally, you're removing yourself from advancement. Yeah. You're not out competing a coworker. Someone else will get the account. There's a lot of different pressures. Yeah. Okay. So when you started studying this in your lab, we had some stereotypes, right? We had this notion that mothers are natural parents and mothers and nurturers. And then we know all these physiological changes that happen to them, both when pregnant. We know about their hormones changing. We all accept this and know this. And then just the general assumption is like, like, probably nothing happens to Dad. Even I think when we first had kids, I was susceptible to that, where I was like, I think this crying is at a different volume to me than it is to her. I think she has better chemistry than I have currently for this. So let's talk about first what you started finding when you would look at what happens to Dad between conception and birth, because there's all these documented changes for Mom.

What happens to Dad in that period? With Mom, you can literally visibly see her body changing, right, if it's a biological pregnancy. And with dad, there's a lot going on under the hood. So there's research that suggests that testosterone levels drop, oxytocin levels change, a hormone called prolactin changes as well.

What does prolactin do?

You can tell from the name, it promotes lactation. Okay. Hmm. So it's very good for breastfeeding, which obviously is not that helpful for dads. And in men, surprisingly, prolactin levels before birth seem to predict at least this is what we found in our lab, predicted dads' kind of bonding and motivation to parent in the early postpartum period. Mm. So we found that guys with higher prolactin levels prenatally had more enjoyment of the infant postpartum, were spending more time with the infant postpartum. And it's interesting because in fish, and I mentioned that fish are primary caregiver fathers, if you dump prolactin into the water, fish will start acting really paternal. So it's actually a hormone that kind of turns on fatherhood in fish, and it turns out it might work in a similar way in humans. Wow!

Well, the testosterone thing is fascinating. I'd like to hear what the current theory is on why that drops. To me, it seems quite obvious. It's like, you're gonna need maximum patience and minimized aggression.

Yeah. All right? Yeah, exactly.

They don't want you to squeeze and pop the baby.

Yeah, like, we just don't need— A ton of testosterone.

You don't need that grip strength.

Exactly. When you're scared and there's a baby crying, you don't know how to solve it. Do we think that's why it lowers? Yeah.

We need high testosterone if we're competing for mates. It will help us to be competitive, to focus on our status, to be aggressive. And it's not that useful when we have a new baby. It's not as adaptive to sustain high testosterone levels. And testosterone comes at an immune cost for the body. —so having jacked-up testosterone is not that helpful to us when we're in a context that doesn't require that competition. Well, it doesn't reward it. Exactly. And so even in birds, you see higher testosterone at the start of breeding season when birds are, like, trying to find a chick. Mm-hmm. Yeah. I mean— Yeah. A female. That's where we got it. Testosterone levels will drop once a male has sort of completed mating and needs to take care of hatchlings. So it's like this normative change change that's occurring over the transition to fatherhood. And then there's probably a rebound, right? And then dad maybe knocks up a new bird. But it looks like you see kind of similar patterns in humans, rats, and primates as well. So testosterone levels sort of fluctuate with your reproductive demands and also with your reproductive strategy. So if you want to maximize your number of offspring, you probably want high T.

But if you want to actually do a good job of parenting, you You want lower T.

And also, you're not as prone to create more progeny that you would have to then care for but be divided because you've just had this one. It's almost like going out asterisk a little bit for a primate. Right.

There's, like, this life history theory that sort of determines when does it make sense for our hormones to change to support our different roles.

Yeah. Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert. If you dare. We are supported by Allstate. Checking Allstate first could save you hundreds on car insurance. Not checking your gas gage before hitting the road? You genuinely thought you could make it? You were wrong. That's a very long stretch of highway where you learned exactly how far fumes can take you, and it's not far enough. Yeah, checking first is an excellent plan. So check Allstate first for an auto quote. It could save you hundreds. And for fast, reliable help when you need Need it? Add an Allstate Roadside Plan today. You're in good hands with Allstate. Potential savings vary. Insurance and Roadside Assistance plans are subject to terms, conditions, and availability. Insurance provided by Allstate North American Insurance Company, Northbrook, Illinois. Roadside Assistance plans provided by Allstate Motor Club, Incorporated, an Allstate affiliate. Okay, now until this book, I would have thought I was— well, not terribly unique because I did get some anecdotal information, but we were one time at an ultrasound appointment at the OB, and they're measuring Kristen's weight, and I decide to hop on that scale. And I just simply hadn't been on a scale in, I think, 4 or 5 months.

And I just looked at it, I go, holy shit, I've gained like 20 pounds and I didn't even notice. That's never happened in my life where I just gained 20 pounds without noticing. And I've talked to other dads who have done that as well. Have you observed that?

What's happening there? Totally. So dad bod is a thing. It's like this humorous troll Yeah, exactly. But it's a real thing. Men actually do often gain weight across the transition to fatherhood, and it kind of connects back to what we were just talking about, like that normative change in testosterone is one of the drivers of sort of adiposity or weight changes.

Yeah, reduction of muscle mass, which is burning less calories. So there's that element working. I was more thinking of it in a nurture context, which is like, she's eating like crazy, so I'm just joining her. Like, is that what's going on?

You see it in —mates too. So they increase in body size across a mate's pregnancy. It might be because a larger body is more imposing. They can more easily pick up offspring. And it's also like you want some reserve in case there's scarcity.

Right. You might have to be giving your resources to another. Exactly. That's really evolutionarily poignant, right? Is I need a little buffer because I'm about to share now.

Yeah. Which is true, I think, for why women gain weight, right? Because we gain more weight than our babies are gonna weigh. Like, I was super bummed when I realized that.

Oh yeah, like 4 racks. Yeah. Yeah, 5 of those.

I was like, "This baby is not 35 pounds." Yeah, yeah, yeah. Where does the extra weight go? But it's like you actually need some reserve because who knows? There could be a famine.

Well, and you're going to be burning 2,000 extra calories a day to produce milk if you breastfeed. Right. Exactly. Or whatever the number is. It's something very high.

Yeah, it's a high-calorie demand, so it's like your body actually has to be sort of beefed up. So it might be that there's a similar— process happening for dads. Yeah, yeah.

What other things are happening in that window before baby arrives? So there's the body, there's the hormonal drop. What's going on psychologically and behaviorally? So the hormones are changing.

So psychologically, we can see mood disorder risk. Postpartum depression is something we think of as like a mom-only phenomenon. It can totally emerge in dads. There's evidence that new dads have about twice the prevalence of depression as just men in the general population.

Oh, wow. While mom's pregnant?

It can be before birth. It can be after birth. Yeah. So it's like, we call it postpartum depression, but it's really perinatal. It's like across that transition. And if you think about it, it's like a lot of the same risk factors that moms experience, like sleep deprivation, increased stress, identity conflict, role confusion, relationship stress, and hormone changes. It's like that perfect storm. So that's affecting men too.

Oh my God. The moms are gonna hate this. They love that they can claim the hormone changes.

I talked to a perinatal psychologist and we actually talked about this exact thing. She said she's gotten a lot of pushback. Yeah. 'Cause she's tried to get postpartum depression in men more recognized. And some of the advocacy groups are like, can't moms just have this one thing? Right. And she's like, yes, but also if men are struggling, that's not great for mom either.

Exactly.

No, it's helping moms to understand dads. Yeah, sure.

Yeah.

Okay, again, this is very anecdotal, but this is what I've observed. I've seen a lot of people trying to get sober who tell themselves, "I'm gonna get sober when I have a child." And then you watch them, and I've watched addiction ramp up, not decrease, in a very unmanageable way as that date approaches. It's over then, so cram it in now. And I'll even admit this, that during the first pregnancy, there is a new finality on the table that is very unique. I can't undad. It's permanent. Yeah. And I think that creates some angst and some fear, and you feel like, oh shit, truly now I'm an adult. I see a lot of antsy behavior in expecting fathers.

Yeah, it's like getting a face tattoo.

Yeah. But even that you could get rid of. You could. It's maybe the only permanent thing.

Yeah, you're going to be a dad for the rest of your life, no matter what. Now, you might not be a husband for the rest of your life, you might may not have a show up or not.

Maybe you don't raise them or whatever, but you've—

but that kid will exist. Exactly. Yeah, I think it's terrifying to a lot of men.

Yeah, it's quite a ride. And women. Yeah, yeah, yeah, everyone. Scary. Okay, how do dads experience childbirth?

It's interesting because if you think about it, men have not been present at childbirth for most of our human history. Childbirth has been this participatory experience where human women need a lot of help, but it hasn't typically been that the helpers have been men. And so we are kind of doing this experiment in just this last, like, 150 years, right, where you have males as part of the birthing experience, either as doctors or as fathers. And stereotypically, men were kept out of— oh, they would tell you, don't go in there.

Yeah, like, it's better for your marriage if you don't see that. Totally. Yeah, in the '50s.

Yeah, '50s, you see the dad is handing out cigars bars, right? In the waiting room. He meets the baby once it's been washed. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Her makeup's on. Exactly.

Yeah, she's brushed her hair. Seeing birth, I think, really rocks a lot of dads' worlds, right? It's like both in, I think, really good ways and also in ways that can be hard because it's this powerful experience. There's nothing like it. It can be scary for mom. It can be scary for dad. Things can go Things can also go beautifully well. So there's just a lot of variability. It's a very heightened experience.

And increasingly people have emergency C-sections, which is the way it happens, certainly in LA. It's like almost everyone you meet with children our age, they have the same story. It's like, I was in labor for 14 hours, the heart rate crashed, emergency. So that was my experience, right? I'm not only seeing that, I'm also seeing my wife get operated on. I saw my wife opened up and her organs being moved. And it's like, whoa, whoa, whoa. Yeah. This is terrifying. I'd say the beauty of it— and I just want to flag, I'm just going to tell my real experience. I'm really paranoid it's going to sound like virtue signaling, like I'm an ideal. I don't want that to be. I'm just going to tell you the truth. Yeah. The amount of respect and admiration you have for your wife when you see what they go through, in my opinion, is not to be missed. You go, whoa, whoa, whoa. Well, first of all, you might have the moment I had, which is like, you're so afraid you're gonna lose her. So that's its own experience. And then to see what they go through, you're gonna minimally be grateful to that person for the rest of your life because they went through that for this thing you love.

It's very powerful.

Yeah, it is very powerful. My first birth was pretty straightforward, but the second one, I lost a lot of blood. It got complicated. Yeah. And my husband was terrified. And I still hold that against our son, you know, every so often. You should. Clean your room.

If he was a nobody, Nobel Peace Prize, you can go like, "Okay, you're now even." That's right. You're just now even. That's right.

You're out of the hole.

Yes, you've made up the debt. Okay, so once the baby's there, dad's brain changes.

We in our lab scanned men whose partner was midway through pregnancy. We then scanned the men again about 6 months after birth. And we found that men's brains were losing gray matter volume, which is probably reflecting a process of streamlining and pruning and becoming more efficient. Yeah, it sounds bad.

It's kind of counterintuitive because mom's brain shrinks too. That's a little more well documented. And you think, oh, my brain shrinks. But it's like, no, but it weirdly is working more efficiently now.

Exactly. And the brain shrinks at other windows in the lifespan too. So in early childhood, we're in this kind of stage of lots of exploration and tons of inputs. And then as the child kind of gets ready for school age, the brain is actually losing gray matter volume and it's becoming more streamlined and kind of canalized along certain pathways. Pathways. Right. So it reflects a process of learning. It's like you're consolidating. Mm-hmm.

It's almost like if you think about refining a product, an engineer, one of their main tasks is like, which of these components is redundant? I can get rid of— your whole goal is to keep getting it smaller and smaller and smaller. And I guess that's what's happening in your brain.

Yeah, exactly. You want, like, an efficient brain. And the parts of the brain that seem to shrink are the social cognition regions. Which are linked with empathy, responsive caregiving. So that sort of supports the theory that it's not like a deficit model, something isn't getting taken away, but it's rather this adaptive plasticity.

You presumably have sample groups where it's like there's varying levels of participation. Are you seeing more shrinkage and increased participation?

What's happening there? Yeah, exactly. So as men are spending more time with babies, we see more gray matter volume decrease. Mm-hmm. So it was the men in our study who said they wanted to take more time off after birth, they were spending more day-to-day time with infants, they told us they enjoyed interacting more with infants, they had stronger bonding with the babies even before birth, and then they had stronger bonding after birth. Those were the dads that seemed to show the greatest changes, like the greatest reductions in gray matter volume. So those dads looked the most like previous studies that have focused on moms transitioning to parenthood. As men engage in parenthood, they're kind of building this parenting brain.

I just love how flexible the human is. I know. Yeah. It's really wild. And if he doesn't do that, his brain will be perfectly set up to do whatever occupation he's doing.

We often think of the brain as, like, this fixed organ, but it is reshaped by our social experience. And parenthood is one example of a window of plasticity where we want a brain that can mold itself to serve the functions of a parent.

Yeah, this incredibly new and novel experience we're all having. Yeah.

It kind of goes against this idea that women are natural nurturers. That's why I think you say we debate, but I'm saying this: I think anyone can be a nurturer. Oh, yeah, yeah.

Not just a woman. And that's exactly one of the reasons I wanted to write this book, right? Yeah. Because we sort of assume assume, like, women are built to kind of parent instinctively. And it's really the opposite. It's as we engage in parenting, we learn, and then we sort of build a neurobiology that supports that.

Yeah.

Yeah. Humans are built to nurture.

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Like, we all have this sort of parenting brain that's ready to go when we are ready to deploy it.

What happens to dad's hormones once baby has arrived? It's a continuation of that lower testosterone and stuff. Yes. And you have a beef with oxytocin.

Yeah. I, I have a beef.

Will you lay out your beef with oxytocin?

I love it and I hate it. Okay. Tell us. And it's because the research literature's a mess on oxytocin because it's super hard to sample it well. So you've probably heard it's the cuddle hormone, it's the love hormone.

Women get a dump of it after an orgasm. Yeah, exactly.

If you hug for 20 seconds, you get a release.

A little blast. Yeah. Massage. And all of that has a grain of truth, but it's It's hard to sample it because by the time it gets to your bloodstream, it's already moved on. Like, it's an organ that's active in the brain. So if you really want to sample it accurately, you need to take cerebral spinal fluid, which, you know, not a great thing.

No one's signing up for.

No one wants to come into the lab and do a spinal tap. It's hard to sample it accurately, and then the way that you assay it in the lab— this gets kind of in the weeds, but there are different ways to look at it, and those ways don't always well with each other.

I think another fair way to also look at it is we really have only diagnosed, I don't know, 6 neurotransmitters. Like, we only have a chemistry set of 5, 6 hormones, and we have behavior that's in the tens of billions of permutations. So at best, you're looking at some ratio of many different hormones acting in concert to produce an outcome, right? Yeah. We're so attracted to a singular cause. —will go, boom, that's it, dopamine, it's causing all this. Well, it's like in conjunction with a lot of things, right?

Exactly. We are filled with all these different inputs, and we sort of glorify oxytocin. Or I often hear, as a cortisol research— people say, my cortisol is too high, I have to treat my cortisol. It's like, no, you want high cortisol in certain contexts. And I think this is true with testosterone too. You want to be flexible. You wanna have a biology that can adapt to your context. And so there's no such thing as overly high this or overly low that. It's like, how flexible are you?

Yeah, I think what they mean is that this system has been hijacked, which does happen all the time, and your cortisol levels are responding as if you're being chased by a lion, but you have a deadline due. You know, there's some hijacking of the system.

Yeah, because we live in these complex worlds that don't reflect what we need to survive. When I teach this to my undergrads, I always say, "If I'm having a fight-or-flight response because I'm stuck in traffic, what am I gonna do, like, run across the freeway?" Not adaptive. So it's like having all the blood go to my large muscles. Yes, you can sprint. It's not helping me.

You hit your brake pedal extra hard.

Yeah, yeah, it makes me— Yell at the other drivers, but that's not super adaptive either.

Right. But it's like the cortisol's not the problem. It's the situation that hijacked the cortisol response. Right. It's our interpretation. With that said, what's happening to dad's cortisol once the baby's arrived?

So the cortisol literature also a bit of a mixed bag. Some studies find higher cortisol in new dads. Some studies find lower cortisol. It's very situational. But we do know, and I found this in my lab, that hormones like cortisol, prolactin, and testosterone track within couples. So it may be that dads are kind of in training with a pregnant partner or with a new mom to sort of help jumpstart their own process of whether it's neurobiological remodeling or behavioral repertoire. It's like there's something about proximity to the—

There's a mirroring, right? Yeah. Dad's and mom's hormones are fluctuating, if not at the same levels, in the same pattern-ish. Exactly. So there's like a—

a synchrony within cohabiting couples.

Which is dangerous and beneficial.

Right. And actually, I've found that when cortisol patterns get too strongly linked, that's a risk factor that makes couples report more dissatisfaction.

Yes, yes, yes. Someone should be resetting their cortisol at all times, probably. Yeah, you need to be balancing. I feel very blessed in that we read this. So we got this book, Brain Rules for Babies, in anticipation of our first child arriving. And in maybe the introduction, it says quite starkly— I'll forget the number, but it was either 60% or 70%. A child will make 60% or 70% of relationships worse. That is the data, right? Yeah. And I was like, just helpful to know going into this. This isn't going to make us happier with one another, per se. Odds are it's going to make us less satisfied with our relationship. So, like, you got to be extra aware of that high probability. So let's talk about what you call the parenting crisis.

I often say to people, like, if you think that having a baby will save your relationship— Oof. Bad idea. Yeah. Right? It's— If anything, it's gonna make it harder. It's gonna shine a magnifying glass. Exactly. This was true for my husband and I. Like, you go from being fun-time friends who can go catch a movie or go out to eat to, like, you're running a small business, and your product is the care and feeding of your baby.

Is the most important product of all time. Right? Right?

But you have to strategize and trade off. And in the middle of the night, maybe neither of you feels like getting up. There is so much more of a breeding ground for conflict when you're both tired, you're both kind of figuring out these new identities, you don't really have the same opportunities for fun. So it is a real challenge for a lot of couples.

Yeah, I would even add to it's like the general pattern, there's lots of exceptions, but And also, you've probably chosen to have a child at the moment where you felt most stable and kind of financially sorted and all these other things you were waiting to gel before you commit to that. So it's like you're probably going from the high watermark of the relationship. For Kristen and I, it was like, oh, we were starting to travel a lot, financially we were good. So it's going to be a huge swing. Yeah.

And you're like, how can I screw this up?

Yeah, let's see if you can fuck this whole thing up.

This is like just when my husband and I got to a place where our kids were old children could take care of themselves, we started getting pets. Uh-oh. You're like, you just can't. Oh my gosh. Why do we have more things to take care of?

Have there been any studies? This would be so interesting. Studies of couples where the father is not the biological dad. Yeah. Do they still experience all these hormonal changes and things like that?

Totally. Yeah. So I talk about, there's one study where they looked at adoptive parents and it was gay male couples who had adopted a baby. And then they compared them to heterosexual couples.

Mm-hmm. With adopted children?

I think they were all biological parents. Okay, great. Yeah, you had this adoptive sample. And they had in the heterosexual couples, like, a primary caregiver and a secondary caregiver. I think they basically treated mom as primary, dad as secondary. And then in the gay male couples, they said, "Who's the primary caregiver? Who's the secondary caregiver?" And what was cool was that the primary caregiver gay male dads looked just like mom. Moms, if you looked at their brain responses to baby, and the secondary caregiver dads looked like heterosexual dads. Whoa! So it kind of shows you how, again, adaptable the brain can be, right? That men can build these primary caregiver brains.

Yeah. Okay, so part of this crisis, and you said, is like you have this whole new list of chores. So when you're observing outcomes, is this crisis less or more when things are split more equitably?

Yeah. So it seems like couples fare better when they have a more egalitarian balance. But what's interesting is that parents are pretty bad predictors of what that's gonna look like. We did a study where we brought couples into the lab. These were the couples in our longitudinal sample. And we said, "What's your plan for splitting up baby care?" We gave them a worksheet. We asked them to sort of estimate on a scale for each of 10 different baby care tasks, tasks. And then we brought them back 6 months after birth and said, well, who's doing what? And in every case, they had overestimated how much dad was gonna do before birth.

And my guess too, did they even agree about how much mom and dad were doing when asked 6 months later?

Dad thought that he was gonna do more, and then after birth, he thought that he was doing more. That's right. Yeah. So dads were sort of estimating a higher contribution at both time points, but the couple was also were just overestimating how much of an even split they were going to achieve.

Yeah, so this is tricky, and I think it's like, it's so generational, right? So when I compare my parenting to my father's, I mean, A, he split when I was 3, but even when he was there for my brother up till 8, I'm doing 1,000x of what he did. It's really hard to quantify what's running. There are these markers that seemed obvious. Like, my goals were like, I want to do half the feedings. So at night we both have to wake up 4 times. I want to do 2 of those. Diapers— I was hell-bent on every other one. I'm gonna do it. There's some aspect the kids do go to mom. There is something primitive going on that needs to be acknowledged. Even though I'm very progressive and I want all this to happen, there's some realities to once you have a kid. It's like, we were both present nonstop, but in the car, Lincoln would be like, Mama. Yes, honey. Mama. Yeah, hon. Mama. She just loves saying mama over and over again. There is a pull on mom, even if all the chores are split evenly. Right. There's an emotional drain that is really hard to right-size.

Yes. And I think it's hard to optimize a balance ahead of time. We were not surprised, actually, that moms ended up doing more after birth because there are a lot of reasons for that. If she's breastfeeding, the baby gets more comfortable with her early on. Moms also have this head start of pregnancy to kind of develop that bond. And moms may even just have more time off from work. And so moms themselves may want to be the primary parent. It doesn't necessarily mean that there's something wrong. But we did find that the more dads were doing, the happier they actually were with parenting. So dads who were participating participating more had lower parenting stress, and moms had better relationship satisfaction.

Yeah, this is where I'll say that this will go against any fear I have of virtue signaling. I reverse engineered selfishly why I wanted to do, in my mind, half. I didn't do half. I'm sure I didn't do half, and I'm sure I overestimated what I did, and I'm sure she has a better account of what I did. But my reasoning was, I'm very opinionated. I care a lot about what decisions we make about the school and the sleep schedule and all the stuff. I can't sit idly by and just have my partner make all those decisions. It felt very important, and I knew I needed to earn my seat at the table. I'm like, there's no way I can blow in at night and kiss them good night and then tell them what approach I think we need to use, because she'll go, bullshit, you don't even know them, you don't know what they're like when they meltdown over this. And so I just self- officially very much wanted to make decisions together. And I just knew you don't get that right if you're sitting it out. So that would be my call to dads.

It's like, if you want a say in this, you gotta fucking earn the say.

Yeah. And I think a lot of men increasingly— because you flagged a really important thing when you said you're doing so much more than your dad did or than your grandfather did. Contemporary men are doing way more hands-on childcare. Than men of previous generations in the US. And I think men themselves, if you say, "What are the most meaningful things you do in your life?" Being a parent is up there, and it's a similar number of men will rate that as their highest priority as women. Yeah, yeah. So it's also like, not only do men want to be involved, it's like there's a value. The pride, yeah.

Yeah. I know we live in LA, and we send our kids to a charter school that's pretty progressive, but— But, and I might be mis-evaluating it, but I do drop off every morning, and if it's not 50/50, it's probably 30/70. There's dads everywhere. When I was a kid in elementary school, I never saw a child's dad once in my life, you know, unless mom was in the hospital or something. So relative, I can a little bit understand why guys of this generation are overestimating our output, because it's like, it's so drastically different.

Well, women are also working so much more that you have to decide who's taking the kid to school. It's not a given, but my parents both worked, so it was a split. Whoever could do it often was my dad because she also was gone. So I think as women have become much more in a breadwinner position, it's helped with a lot of this egalitarian nature of parenting. Yeah, exactly. Funniest thing happened when I was home in Georgia. I was with all my friends, they all have kids. Last Last weekend? Yeah. Last weekend. All the kids are running around and these two, their dad and their mom are sitting next to each other. They came up to the table and they said, mom, can dad take us to the grocery store? And I started laughing so hard. And even he said, why aren't you just asking me? He was sitting right next to her. Yeah. It was so funny. That was the instinct was to ask mom's permission.

It just made me really mad. That's hilarious. That's the default. Yeah.

A lot of the time. Well, also it might be game theory, right? So they know Mom says yes more than Dad. If they ask Dad to go to the store, he's gonna say no. But if they ask Mom, they're used to getting a yes. So maybe Mom will be able to get Dad to say yes. There's a lot of— it's smart strategy going on.

Yeah. Maybe if they were separated, but the fact that they were right next to each other, it was such a stark, like, yeah, yeah. Like clearly that's the person to ask. Right.

But in our house we have domains, right? There's stuff that's no problem for me to say no to. There's stuff for her that's no problem to say no. And they just know if they want this thing, they go to me. If they want they go to her. Yeah, they're smart. They're clever little monkeys.

They know who to ask. Yeah, my kids know who to ask for takeout. My husband is much more likely to order.

Are there ideal roles for dad in regards to parenting? I'm thinking about like play and sports. And I know for my girls, like wrestling, they just love to wrestle me. Mom did not want to fucking wrestle. I love to wrestle. Are there roles that we are more geared to take on?

Yeah, the kind of roughhousing parent, the play parent. So dads do a lot of what's called proprioceptive touch, which is like moving babies around in space, right? If we're moving a child around, like picking them up, throwing them up in the air, chasing them, tickling them. And so there's a lot of evidence that dads just gravitate to that style of play, and that that style of play is really rewarding for kids. Kids seek it out, they benefit from it, It builds their confidence. It builds their risk tolerance.

Their balance, their agility. Yeah.

And I think the sports dad is kind of a continuation of that. It's a domain that a lot of dads feel comfortable kind of having mastery of.

Yeah. I think we always get into these murky waters of what we're supposed to be doing versus what kind of yields better outcomes. Are there domains that are best served by mom or dad? I mean, play's one of them, but can you think of others? Yeah. And I think even with play, play.

Like, I'm always careful to not be too gender essentialist, right? Because there are totally moms that love to wrestle and are physical, and they're totally dads that are the more cerebral parent or the more affectionate parent. But I think what works best for kids is when each parent has their own relationship and the kid gets exposed to different styles, right? You can have a really secure attachment to more than one parent, and the research suggests that dads and moms don't actually have dramatically different levels of attachment to their kids. So it's healthy for kids to realize there are safe, secure caregivers that I can depend on. And if this person isn't available, I can go to this person. Sometimes that's a childcare provider. Sometimes that's mom or grandparent or a dad. Different people have their own style. And kids, again, learn to be adaptable. They learn to be flexible.

But there's no dead-end streets. Or are there? And we're just afraid to admit that.

Like, what would a dead-end street be?

I don't know. I just think of this imperative someone said, and it's just proven to be true, which is like, you should not teach your kids to do stuff. If you want to take them skiing, bring in an outsider. They don't do well listening to you for that kind of thing. Or if you want to teach them piano lessons, get someone else that doesn't have all this murky— So I just wonder if we're trying to encourage men or women to do things that, like, it's not really gonna bear the outcome we want. Want.

Yeah, I do think because we don't have the collective network of caregivers that maybe we evolved to have, a lot of pressure is on mom and dad, the nuclear family, and they're trying to play all roles in a kid's life. And I think as to whether parents can be good teachers, I know for my kids, definitely not. Yeah. Yeah. They don't wanna listen to me. My son is in a phase where he wants to make hip-hop beats all day long. My husband is a music producer. Oh, perfect. And you think, maybe. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. It's like, you know, Dad does this for a living, he could advise on your beats. Like, no interest. I think it's good for kids to have their own things.

Again, a brand new concept, with the exception of when someone's partner died. The stepparent is like an entirely new construct. Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert. If you There. You yourself had a kind of a fun arc with Dave that I'd like to hear about. And tell me what the role of a stepparent is, a father. I've had only bad ex— Well, the last one was good, but I've had really bad experiences.

Yeah, I had a sort of bad experience that became good. I did not want my parents to get divorced. I blamed my stepfather. And we had a really combative relationship when I was a teenager. Lots of fighting, tears, yelling. And he was a really good cook, so that was actually one thing that helped me forge a connection with him. But beyond that, if you had asked me when I was, like, a 14-year-old, I would've said, "My stepdad sucks." And it was really only as I got older that that I appreciated. He was a poet, he was a writer, he was a translator, he was an English professor at Oberlin, where I grew up, and was this, like, source of wisdom. He loved to travel.

It sounds like the antithesis of your father, who's a surgeon in many ways. Yeah. True.

Different vibes. And I think I got a lot from both of those relationships. When I became an academic, it was partially because I had seen David I mean, basically, his job just seemed fun. He could come home early after teaching a class and play Nintendo baseball. And he just seemed like he had a really chill job. And my parents were always working, so I was like, "Well, obviously being a professor is great." That was my plan.

Yeah, yeah. I think you were right.

I think I was. Little did I know how hard it would actually be to get there. But now it's great. But he really inspired me. I think I learned a lot from him. It's a tough road. It's totally hard. You both don't want to supplant the parent, but then also you are acting as a parent. So it's just a breeding ground.

You're like a perpetual substitute teacher. Yeah, totally. But the rewards for stepfathers, do we observe those in the same way we see the biological fathers?

Yeah, I think our framing around stepparenthood has been so negative that people see the bad stepfather, the bad stepmother, and even in fairy tales, like the evil stepmother. And if you look at the research, a lot of kids who grow up with stepparents say this relationship is really valuable. And so, to whatever extent a real bond can form, it can serve a lot of the same positive functions that a biological parent bond can form, right? Like, we don't need to be biologically related to a kid in order to take care of a kid. That kind of goes with the whole alloparenting idea. We evolved to sort of know how to take care of each other. And that could be through adoption, through stepparents, or through biological parenthood.

Tell me how fatherhood would best be seen as a public good. How would we all benefit from that?

The more we can kind of empower men to participate fully in care, the more we can value care as something that isn't just the domain of one gender. That requires some investment. I think it requires really smart policy, and it requires kind of cultural change, right, to kind of see men as natural caregivers. I think it's interesting, we're living We're living in this era where it feels like there's a resurgence of neo-traditional gender roles. The tradwife and the sort of breadwinner male. To me, that runs a little counter to our evolutionary history, which is about flexibility and not about getting locked in to, "This is the job of moms and this is the job of dads." So I really think that if we were a society that really valued the welfare of young kids, kids, we would be a society that champions fathers. Not to the exclusion of mothers, but fathers are really important for mothers' well-being too. And we would be a society that really puts its resources into how do we nurture the next generation of humans.

Do we have any proof of concept elsewhere that we can say this is a worthy investment, that it yields some kind kind of a result we all want or benefit from? Yeah, definitely. Because like, you're an employer and you don't have kids, you don't care about kids, and you're only thinking about kids. It's like, I don't want to— you know, I can see that being a tough sell unless we have some data that would say somehow the whole tide lifts. But yeah, what do we have to demonstrate?

The research is finding that when companies have parental leave, paternity leave, it's good for retention, it's good for employee well-being, It's actually unfortunate. Just in the last few weeks, there have been some headlines that some big companies are actually cutting their parental leave programs, sort of a cost-cutting thing. But it's really good for worker loyalty and for worker productivity. And then we have these international models where we have more generous leaves in other countries. And you do see that as dads are getting more access to federally funded paid paternity leave, they're getting more involved. It's better for the couple relationship. It's better for mom's health outcomes. Health outcomes, it's better for the kids' health outcomes, and it's better for the father himself.

Yeah, so let's talk about the fun benefits, the kind of long-term impact that fathering has on men.

In the short term, right, you're losing gray matter volume, your hormones are changing, it's this set of challenges. Yeah. In the long term, the evidence is that becoming a parent is neuroprotective. So work on both fathers and mothers finds that if you look at when you look at how the brain is aging, you have markers of a younger-looking brain when you have children. And so these are big scan studies that look at thousands of people in later life. And they find you can use, like, a computer machine learning algorithm to basically gage the age of a brain. And people's brains look younger relative to chronological age if they are parents. And you see that for fathers as well as for mothers, which tells me it's not just a pregnancy hormone thing. It's about caregiving. It's about social integration. And we also know from longitudinal work that the quality of a man's relationships is what's really important for his health and well-being in late life.

Men tend to be lonely. Yes. Right.

Men are at risk for social isolation, which we know is a factor in all-cause mortality. Worse than smoking. Yep. It is super bad for you. And we know this from the longest-running longitudinal study, which was done at Harvard. They recruited men who were undergrads and a comparison sample of inner-city Boston teens. They followed them through the ends of their lives and are now following their grandkids. So this is like a 100-year study. Wow. And they found that more than your income, your job prestige, it was the quality of your relationships with people close to you that predicted a longer, healthier life. So the more I think we can encourage men to invest in relationships, relationships, the more we can benefit their health. We have this manosphere idea that men need to be making lots of money, dating lots of women, driving lots of Lamborghinis, lots of Lamborghinis. That is not really what's good for men or anyone, or anyone, or for society. Yeah, well, women should try it out before we decide. You know, I guess it's worth a shot. I'm trying it. How many Lamborghinis can you drive? Right, exactly. Exactly.

One study that came out that made headlines last year that thrilled me to no end was this impact on men having daughters specifically. Are you aware of this one? It's cumulative as well. And so on average, it was like 1.7 years longer a man lives per daughter. And there doesn't seem to be an end to that. So if the man has 5 daughters, he's looking at like 8.5 years extra life. Yeah.

Well, I think it's that social connection. Do you have a support system in later life? Do you feel like you're part of a community? And we know that that is so important for human health.

Yeah. This would definitely be kind of more of a psychological analysis of it, but I think men interacting with little girls allows them to embrace a whole side of themselves that has been excluded to them. Yeah. For lack of a better word, the sweetness of the exchange has to be restorative. It's just such a beautiful feeling. I could cry thinking about, like, just what my little girls give me, what they allow me to experience. I don't know where else I go get that. Right.

We don't really let men have a lot of variability in how they express themselves. We have very strong opinions, culturally, culturally about what makes a man masculine. And dressing up like a princess and doing a tea party usually is not part of that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But I think a lot of men enjoy playing with different sides of themselves. Yeah. And that's totally healthy and fun.

I also think when you have a son and you're a man in this country in 2026, you still have this notion like, "I've gotta toughen this kid up," right? Like, "That's my role here is to present him to the world capable of taking on any challengers." That's not the case. That's not the funnest way to parent. Like, making a kid tough, it doesn't feel good. No one enjoys it. Whereas you don't walk in with that ridiculous notion with your daughter. I have to make them both savvy and aware of the world, but I don't think they need to punch other guys out at the bar at any point. You know? Let's hope not. Yeah. Or tell a coworker to fuck off. Like, all these things we think we have to pass on to men that we don't necessarily think we have to pass on to girls.

Right. Like, we're tough on our sons in a way that we're not. I hate that.

Which then leads to the— Cyclical is crazy.

He's got to go to a playground, watch how parents handle boys versus girls. It's like a lot more grabbing them by the arm. We're still pretty rough on boys.

Boys need a lot of love and care and nurturing. Maybe the most.

Yeah, maybe the most. Yeah. Their instinct is to smash everything with a stick. You got to be like extra on them to show them a different way. I just want to finish on this because I read your New York Times article that I really, really liked. It was just kind of a general call to ignore your kids to some degree. So just tell us a little bit about what's happening and what we could adopt maybe from hunting and gathering.

Yeah, totally. And the idea for that op-ed came actually from research for the Dad Brain book. Oh, it did? Which was that I was interviewing this guy, Barry Hewlett, who's the anthropologist that studies the hunter-gatherer fathers. And he was just telling me about childhood in this society. The model of parenting is just different because it's about learning less through doing direct instruction like you're in a classroom and more about modeling, like you're following adults around and you're emulating what they do. And I think we've got it totally backwards in contemporary society, where we parents follow our kids around and create our lives that are molded around their interests. We're taking our kids to tons of activities, we're putting our kids in special classes. Kids actually aren't getting the opportunity to watch adults work. Our jobs are so atomized and hard for kids to grasp because they're happening on screens that kids aren't moving around the adult world very often with this sense of, "Here's what I can imitate and what I can be." So my argument was that parents should just do boring things with kids because actually it's good for kids to learn how to be patient and watch other people.

And maybe that means taking them on social calls or to the gym or to the bank. I remember going to the hardware store with my parents as a kid, being bored out of my mind, you know, talking to a neighbor.

You'd be stuck with your mom talking with a neighbor, 100%.

When is this gonna end? Yes, like having tea with the 90-year-old woman down the street, having to sit there. That's how you learn how to talk to other people, how to take turns in a conversation.

And so if everything is crafted around the kid, how are you not going to produce a narcissist if you are the center of world literally. And then you leave the house and you find out very abruptly, "Oh, no, no, you're not the center of the world. You have to join other people's worlds." Right.

Like, it's actually better for kids to learn how to go along with a group, how to be an observer, how to integrate yourself. And I think we sort of do try to create these kids who just— the whole universe is revolving around them. And it's not normal in the grand scope of human history. No. And despite being a parent who, as I wrote in that op-ed, thinks that parents should let their kids chill out, I somehow have gotten sucked into the team sports baseball club team. Well, if they love it, they love it. That's fun. And it's like my husband's thing. He loves it. He plays baseball.

He's a coach. I got no problem with someone whose kid desires to do something and you support it. I support that. That's not my issue at all. My issue is the kid doesn't like soccer. Half the people there— I see it when our kids were in soccer. Ours hated it, and then half the other kids hated it. I'm like, what are we all doing? Why are we insisting that this is something that has to be done? No one here is enjoying this except for the ones that are into it.

Yeah, I know, but then that becomes a finish what you start. I mean, there's so many layers to all of this. Like, that's right. I do think a lot of kids are like, I want to play soccer, Johnny's playing soccer, we're going to do it together. They start and they're like, I hate But I do see a value in, "Well, you're a part of this team, and you gotta see this through. You don't ever have to do this again, but we're seeing it through." I absolutely— I understand that.

That's how we handled it all. We just didn't come back for the second season.

Yeah, that's fine. But it's like, team sports are real. They teach you things, and they teach you that. You've committed to this.

But we had a great expert on— it might have been a childhood psychologist who was saying, "It's also important to figure out what it is your kid likes about it, 'cause you could not be diagnosing the right thing." Like, a lot of kids that like soccer, they like being outside. They like being with friends. It might not be soccer they like. You got to actually figure out what is the thing that they are craving. It might not be the obvious thing.

Yeah. In another cultural context, that could just be them running wild with a band of kids. That's right.

With some hammers and some nails and saws they shouldn't have. Yeah. Machetes. Yeah. I had access to all that stuff. Well, Darby, this has been delightful. This is a great book. I'm really glad you're studying this. I think to your point, the more we approach appreciate that dads are designed to do this too, I think that'll help further an expectation that they should do it. Yeah, I can't see an outcome that's worse with dads being more and more involved and taking on more things and feeling like, no, they're designed to as well.

I agree. I think dads can feel empowered that they actually do know what they're doing and can learn.

Okay, so the book is called Dad Brain: The New Science of Fatherhood and How It Shapes Men's Lives. Thank you so much for coming in, and I look forward to reading all the work you do in the future.

Thanks, this was super fun.

Hi there, this is Hermion Permian. If you like that, you're gonna love the fact check with Miss Monica.

Cute shirt. Thank you, I'm wearing one of our new merch items. It's very cute. It's so cute. It's like a butter, like a very light yellow, and It has, um, a really cute graphic. It's very '80s. Yeah, it has like the '80s graphic, and it's, it's, it fits really well. I really like the fit on it.

It's got a nice, nice fit.

Kind of cropped, not really, but just— yeah, I think it's a little shrunken. Yeah, yeah, it's very cute. Something crazy happened yesterday night for both of us.

You don't even know yet.

Oh wow, okay. Yeah, this is gonna be a—

no, you go? Um, you know, this— it got more eventful. Wow.

Yeah, there was a huge crash from— I was, I was working, or yeah, I was, I was in my office doing some work, and then there was this huge— I made dinner, so it felt like this was coming from the kitchen.

Um, and it was this enormous crash, and And did you think at any moment there had been a vehicle crash outside your house?

No, no, it was definitely in my house. Okay. Yeah, it just was so loud and thunderous. Yes. And then I went out there and I had— there's a full mirror in my bathroom, like size of the whole wall, size of the entire wall mirror, completely crashed all over the ground.

I didn't say it last night, but there's got to be a couple hundred years of that bad luck. I mean, that's a— that's an enormous mirror. If one little mirror—

would you say that? That's a crazy thing to say to me.

I was looking, I was like, oh, there's so many broken shards.

There's so much broken mirror. Yeah, so that sucked.

Uh, it's because, right, you had a sink, a temporary sink. A temporary sink.

I had a temporary sink in and they had taken it out yesterday to put in the new, the real sink, prepare it for that like today or tomorrow or Monday or whatever. And, um, that sink was—

they underestimated how much that sink was holding up the mirror.

Okay, I have a really interesting pickle. I, I have to go really quickly to sign something. Okay, is that okay? Yeah, I didn't have to sign it actually. What are you doing? Oh, But I caught him. What was it? A DHL package.

But what was in the package?

Boots that I got from an auction. The auction. Oh, okay.

You, you were involved in a boot auction?

Well, I went to Lake's Auction. Oh, right, right, right. And I won these boots. I just got delivered. Oh, and you normally have to sign for DHL.

Yeah, they are strict about that, but you're not—

I started running He was already in his— the van was on. He had to do this. You were waving your arms.

Yeah. You're like, I am here, I can sign. He's like, you didn't need it.

He said, I left it at the door.

Yeah, so it's been delivered. Yeah. I don't want to interact with you, it's already delivered. Yeah. Okay, back to your mirror. Oh yeah. You took it really well.

Yeah. Oh, I, as I said, I'm privileged. Uh-huh. I'm very privileged because I I— well, first I called or I texted my dad Bill and my Uncle Joe, and I said, well, this just happened. Um, think must have been doing more than anticipated. Exactly. And, uh, Bill called, he was just like, oh my God, you know, he was— and he was very sorry. And same with Joe. Um, and I was just nothing.

Yeah, good.

It just really— but again, that is very privileged. I mean, at first I looked at it and I was like, oh, what? How do I do that? How do I clean this up? Exactly.

You know, you're, you're in the sweet spot of they just finished your house, so they're gonna respond. Yeah, they're finishing it. Yeah. Where it gets dicey is like in one year if that mirror falls off, right? Or in 3 years, like at what point do these builders are no longer responsible? Yes. So, you know, in 15 years and that's, that's where my story takes place. Okay.

So yes, I thought, well, fuck, I wish I had a husband here who would deal with this. Uh-huh. Um, but I don't. So I just told Joe, I was like, I'm just leaving it. Yeah. Yeah. I'm just gonna leave it. Yeah. He said, yes, leave it. We'll take care of it tomorrow. Perfect. And so yeah, that's extremely privileged. I knew I really wasn't gonna have to deal with it. I of course am having to deal with it in other ways. Now we need a new mirror. Now we need, you know, that's a whole annoying to do. He just texted me, very Sim. Oh my gosh. Yeah, it was just very startling.

Very loud. Scary.

Very scary. Um, thank God you weren't in there popping a zit. Or, right, or even on the toilet. It— I mean, it was, it was— glass was everywhere. Everywhere. And your child and her friends had come over like 20 minutes before that.

They might have caused it with their energy.

They had crazy energy.

Sleepover, 3 of them, teenagers. They're fucking all got in these crazy outfits. They painted their whole face. And I so relate to this. This was me at this age. They just wanted go out and make a little noise, you know. They want to, they want to stir up the world, some trouble, but really not, not really. They're not ready to. Yeah, they got a response that they should get.

Yeah.

And then they were like, these boys are crazy. I'm like, girls, look at yourself. Exactly. What did you think?

What did you think? You were just going to like—

people were going to just not notice? Exactly. Yeah, they all look like, um, Rainbow Brite or something. They looked nuts.

Um, it was really cute and fun. They came over and I did think, oh my God, what if one of those kids was in the bathroom when that happened? And then I I get sued? What if I sued you?

Yeah, you sue me. But you took yours well. I was really impressed with how chill you were about it.

Yeah, I, um, again, that's privilege.

It is privilege. In my journal this morning, I wrote, I am dying under the weight of my possessions. Oh, because we were in Nashville last weekend, and I really went there because I had a boat lift installed in my dock so that I can get my boat out of the water. It doesn't get all gunked, fucked up. Yeah, they put it in, it's too shallow, boat got stuck on the thing. Okay, going to my bus to get something, the bus inverters have collapsed. This is huge, the inverters have stopped, all the batteries have now— that's a huge project and not cheap. Um, the whole weekend was like, I came to just fix one thing and I left with like 8 things I had to fix. Yeah, so annoying. Yeah, there was— I'm not going to bore you with the list, but while we were We were there, the sprinkler fire suppression system in Kristen's office started leaking. Okay. And it's hardwood, right, in front of that, right? It warped all the wood, ran down the plaster wall, fucked that all up. It's all pushed out. They had to tear out all the wood. You know, it sucks.

It's— yeah, it sucks. And then it gives you this anxiety. It's like, I don't know, the fucking thing leaked that time. What? It's only a year old or 2 years old. What is going to leak again in 2 years where we'll be out, you know, whatever. So I'm already like stressed to the max. Yeah. Go to bed last night. I was up pretty late researching our guest today. 3:00 AM, Kristen— no, maybe Delta got sent upstairs. Dad, come downstairs, there's water leaking out of the ceiling at 3:00 AM. Fuck. Go down into the bedroom they're sleeping in. Sure enough, there's a fucking like 36 6-inch slice in the drywall on the ceiling, and it's just leaking water out. I'm like, where the fuck is that water coming from? I like step outside, I'm looking, oh, my room's above it, but it's— is my bathroom? No, I think my dresser's above that. Pull a panel out of the ceiling, realize, oh, the air conditioning coil system is in there. Oh, it has sprung a leak and it's spraying water, and it's 3 in the morning. And you're like, okay, how do I shut all this down?

Like turning the air off, it's still not shutting off. Then I'm hitting the breaker, now the whole— all the air is off and it's still leaking. And we buckets under the thing and it's 3 and I'm like, I gotta fucking wake up at 6 to drive Delta to school. And I got back in bed, I was like, listen, it's a dream to own a home. It is. And it's also— it's stressful. By the time I laid down at 4:30 in the morning to go back to sleep, I was like, I'm gonna move into a one-bedroom apartment the second these girls are out of school, and I'm gonna have no worries, right? But that's not true. Nope. Because I want all the upside. But sometimes when it rains, it pours. Yeah. Two ceiling leaks. Yeah. In a week with massive damage. That sucks. I wouldn't feel bad for me. I have too much shit. That's what I was kind of saying this morning. I was like, yeah, you have too much shit.

I know. Yeah, it is. You know, I just— I so rarely feel like, oh fuck, I wish— and not even necessarily like, I wish I had a husband. I mean, that was the joke. That's a joke I made on Instagram. But like, I wish somebody else was here right now. I don't feel that all that often, but I did in, in moments like that. You do wish somebody else was around.

Uh-huh. That's what it activates. I mean, a little.

Nothing crazy. I texted Jess, but he's— he would have come over, but he's Texas. Uh-huh. And also, what's he gonna do? I know, but it's not about that.

It's not about that. Yeah, I'm back in my male way of thinking, like, what can I fix?

Not about that. It's just about sharing the experience.

Okay, you ready for this? This was from a commenter, CB91207. MD here. The women— the reason women often have diarrhea when they are starting their periods is due to the release of pro— progesterone? No, prostaglandins. Okay. Which cause smooth muscle contraction in the uterus but also cause smooth muscle in the intestines to contract.

Interesting.

So we got an MD answering your belly issues every time you're on your periods.

Wow. Then how come everyone doesn't have it? Not everyone has.

Maybe they're being secretive about it and They're too shy. Maybe they're embarrassed that they have bottom issues when they have their— Wow. Okay, well, that's good. Thought you'd want that update. It's not you, it's the protag— Yeah.

That's— It's still me though.

I mean, it's still happening to you, but it's nothing you're doing.

It's still happening to me. It's still me who's gross. It's still me who's gonna poop in my car. I can't just be like, be like, well, it's the prolactin.

And that's what I just tell people. Like, if you were in your car doing it and someone saw you like, oh, well, it's a prolactin. Yeah, blame them.

Yeah, you judgmental. I think the first time it happened was also around that. I do think it was sort of connected to my period.

So you just want to— I think you want to be mindful of your calendar. Yeah, for your flies. And not do a lot of big cross-town appointments. Like, just try to— on those 3 Just go like, I never am more than a— the PMS symptoms are for a full week?

Mine are.

Okay. So for that week, we never get more than a mile away from home. No, I can't.

You can't live like that. I can't live like that.

Okay, then put a trash bag in your car. Are you excited for summer? Kids are getting out of school. Not mine, but many kids are out. Well, yeah. Lincoln got out.

Delta's still in. Yeah. I am so excited for summer. Summer. When I was— this morning, your child, as previously mentioned, was wrapping up her sleepover. It was so cute, and they were playing outside. Summertime for them. And Anna was there, and I was like, man, I'm so jealous. I'm so jealous of them right now. But what specific— yeah, it's the, it's the level of carefree free. You are never gonna have it again.

Yeah, yeah, the kids know the ceiling's all fucked up, but they're not worried about that.

It's not on their plane to worry about for 2 months.

Well, you know what they do have to worry about that'd be easy to like under— to misremember how powerful it is? The amount of angst and preoccupation they have about who's going to whose birthday party and what rung of that matter. Like, I got to drive everyone to dinner last— not everyone, I got to drive the 3 teens to dinner, and I was hearing them in the backseat. My favorite thing in the world is to drive them places with their friends because they forget I'm there. And I— what'd you say?

Stomach growled. Oh, it wasn't a fart. Oh yeah, I sent you a picture of the mirror and you said, what happened, did you finally fart? And I did laugh really hard. That was very funny. Okay, anyway, they were in your backseat.

Yeah, And just, you do forget the amount of anxiety that you were carrying about all the social pressure.

Yes, that is true.

That's at a peak. And you and I aren't sit— like, this just happened, right? You were like, oh, you going to the Hansons Memorial Day party? I'm like, oh, I wasn't invited. And you're like, I'm sure you were. And then we both looked and we hadn't been sent the invite. That never happened. Kristen didn't have it and I didn't have it. It was just a mix-up.

But it's not because your name showed up on my— on, on the list you can see who's been invited, and both of you were invited. Was it through Evite?

I don't know. Where did you see my name? Like on the group email or on the Evite?

On the, on the Paperless Po— whatever.

On— yeah, exactly. Yeah. So that never, that never got to me.

So yeah, might be in your spam.

No, no, I looked, I looked everywhere. I, I don't— it did not get to me for whatever reason.

You're going to have to take this up with Amy because she's like, yeah, I sent it to them.

I believe that. Okay. All the— all of it's true. She sent it. It didn't come. So maybe I've blocked paperless post or— yeah. Okay. Whatever the reason is, I didn't have it and I searched everywhere. Right. And, and Kristen didn't have it. Okay. So neither of us had it. And I was like, oh, maybe we weren't invited. And literally we're like, okay, that's fine. Yeah. We'll truck along. If I was 13. Yeah. And we hadn't been invited, it would rattle me. And now I'm like, yeah, if I'm not— someone doesn't want me at a party, fine.

That's still rare. Sure.

I'm only saying I used to be plagued by, where am I? Who invited me? What am I missing out on? So that's an anxiety I had. Yeah. And although we don't have playing on the trampoline, what I have that offset that was like, it doesn't bother me if I'm not invited to the Hanson party. For whatever reason, they thought there's too many people or whatever they thought. I'm fine with it.

But don't you think like, this is interesting, but I guess I feel like maybe I wish you did care. —like, I mean, you were invited, so this is— that's why I can, I can do this thought experiment—is like, if all of a sudden they stopped inviting you to things, if they stopped inviting me to things, I would, I would be like, what ha— what happened? These are my close friends that I used to be invited to all of their things. If they decided to stop, that means something has happened. I've done something, or they something's gone on. Yeah. And I care about these people, so I'd like to figure out what it is. Yeah.

And I'm at a place in life where I don't have the thought of like, what happened? What did I do? My all— my only thought is like, whatever reason they didn't want to invite me is kind of— I don't care. It's none of my business. They decided for whatever reason not to invite me. I know we haven't had a falling out. I know nothing weird's happened. I'm sure I'm going to see next week. I'm not, I'm not doing any of that stuff where I think like something must be wrong. I'm just like, oh, whatever, you have a party, you didn't invite me. I have parties, I invite some people and I don't invite all people. There's no comment on whether I want to be friends with those people or not. It's just like, on that day I had these 4 people over, and I don't know if you saw it on Instagram and you're upset and you're filling in all these blanks that there's issues now, that's all on you.

Well, again, that's where I disagree.

But yeah, yeah, I guess all I'm saying is I now at 51 have the internal security of I'm not really worried about thinking about what I'm not invited to, right? And if someone doesn't want me to be at their party, that's totally fine with me. I don't want to be at someone's party that didn't want me.

But Laura, it's deeper than just being at the party. Party. It's, is this relationship good? And if you value the relationship, I would think you'd want it to be good.

If I text Amy and she didn't get back to me, and then I text her again and she didn't get back to me, now I'd be concerned because we have a personal relationship that we, we respond to each other. If I don't go to one of her parties, that's not how I'm evaluating whether we're connected or not, or we have a good friendship. It's more when I reach out to you, do you respond? Do we reciprocate? Are we good? Whether I'm at your birthday party or your Halloween party, it's— I don't know, that's not what I came for.

All right, right, right.

Um, yeah. So anyways, I'm just saying, I think I, I have other concerns and worries, but I've also been completely liberated from a big bunch of concerns that used to—

yeah, bother me. Well, I just thought like, oh man, they just have nothing. They have nothing to think about for 2 months. Nothing hanging over their head. No homework, no work. Even if you don't have work for 2 months, it's like, when will I ever— when I get back to work, what are we gonna have to do? Will I ever work again? What is— like, it's— there's a lot of thinking about the future, uh, when you're an adult, and that doesn't— I don't think that ends. And then You just, you don't get those, those summers back. You don't get those summers back. So I was jealous, but I'm also so happy for her, and it looked so fun. And sleepovers are so fun, and I miss them.

I do a lot of playing in the sun. Like, I feel like I said this to you out in the yard, I feel like them in the summer, right? Like, I have that sense of I'm waking up and today I'm gonna play with my friends. Uh-huh. And my play's different. I'm like on a boat instead of a trampoline, or I'm on a dirt bike in my yard, or I'm playing pickleball, whatever it is. Mm-hmm. I do have that sense of like, oh, it's, it's playtime.

That's good. Yeah. That's great. Yeah. Wanna do some facts? Yeah, let's do some facts.

Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, if you dare. Darby Saxby. Doesn't it sound like that could be a character in a fun English? Yes, it sounds like it's from—

well, it sounds like it's from Flight of the Conchords because Darby is, is one of the actors on that show.

But I'm more picturing like a little girl in a rain slicker in London. Yeah, that's cute. Darby Saxby. It is. Meet Darby Saxby. She loves her parents but not her Uncle Mike. What did her Uncle Mike do? Uncle Mike is a chimney sweep who gets dusties all over her favorite stuffies. Oh no. Yeah, see, now we got a story.

I love it. I bought in.

I want to know more. Yeah, well, how will she address this situation?

I want to know more about Darby. But you know, she's going to be mean to her Uncle Mike, and her Uncle Mike's just sweeping a chimney.

And then wants to play with her stuffies because he's lonely. Lonely. That's what she's gonna figure out. Compassion.

She's gonna learn compassion from Uncle Mike by the end. Yeah, hopefully it's like 3 or 4 books.

Her stuff, you'll tell her, we don't mind getting dirty if it's to keep someone happy and feeling loved. And she's gonna give her Uncle Mike a big hug at the end. Oh, and he's gonna go, oh, Darby, I wasn't expecting that. You've never given me a hug. And she's gonna hug him, and then he's gonna cry cry with such joy that the tears will wash away all the soot, all the dirt.

Yeah. Oh, I love that ending. It's a tear bath. Listen, um, the one thing though I don't like about that story is that the Stuffies are, are like, they are being codependent. Only if they mind. Yeah, but they're covered.

You're projecting. No, they're covered in dirt, but they're Stuffies, like they care. Like, the dirtier the better.

They know Darby doesn't like it, and they know, like, it itches them. Well, I don't know. Yeah, dirt itches if you're—

yeah, if you're an animal and you have dermis. These is stuffies.

Okay, but they talk, so, yeah, you know, so we're already playing it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think they have feelings, like, um, physical and emotional. Okay. Um, you know, one time I got dirt Unless shit tea.

No, stuck.

Okay, this is so gross. I'm sure I've told you that I got dirt stuck in my neck.

I thought you're talking about your stuffies, but you're— this whole time you've been talking about yourself. You're okay. I gotta rewind. You don't like hugging chimney sweeps. You don't like I got it.

No, I'm saying, I'm saying I feel for these stuffies because I know what it's like to have dirt stuck in your neck.

How did that happen? And it couldn't be cleaned? How long was this dirt in your neck? You had a dirty neck for a while? Yeah. How long? What's going on?

What happened to your neck? Okay. Um, I was like 10 or 11 or—

God, I hope not 12. Probably older, yeah.

And I was at my— we were at a family event at my grandparents' house and my mom was like, looked at me and was like, what's on— something like, what's wrong with you? Something was like wrong with my neck. Yeah. Now I have a huge crease across my neck. I've had it, like high cholesterol, since I was a baby. Okay. I hate it. Okay. But I've always had it. And, um, and it was really dark.

You had been accumulating some dirt and lint and stuff in the fold.

Yes. Yeah, that's natural. She— they all laughed at me, uh-huh, because they realized it was dirt. Like, you know, she was nervous as she came over. Throat or— yeah, exactly. And then she's, she's touching it and dirt's coming out, getting everywhere, probably. Yeah, like all the stuffies, you know? And then they all laughed at me and I didn't clean my neck and I have to clean my neck. Monica, you got to clean your neck. And I was really embarrassed. I probably cried. I'm sure. I'm sure I cried.

Have you seen this video of Malala talking to an Indian mom? I don't think so. It's so great. It's like an Indian therapist. And Malala is like, yes, so I got shot. Okay, I'm hearing you got shot. A lot of people get shot, you know, like not taking it. Yes, everything she says is like, stop being a baby. Yeah. And that might be your fault. Yeah. And, um, it sounds to me like a lot of, uh, poor me, you know, just stop being a victim.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's so funny. You've not seen this clip? No, I haven't. That's really funny. I'm trying to think who sent it to me.

That's very funny. Yeah, you know, my mom will do that. She, for a long time, if like I complained about something that that was like from them. Yeah, you know, she would be like, when are you gonna— like, when are you gonna understand you're your own person? Like, we're not— basically, like, we're not responsible for any of your damage.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Which, like, I respect it.

I guess I get it. Yeah. Um, but she did laugh at me when I had dirt on my neck, and probably because I was taking a bath by myself way too young.

That's what you think? And you didn't know to clean that crease?

No one taught me. Okay, who's supposed to teach me? Well, I bet you're not me. I bet that crease has never been dirty again. That is right. Now it's all dried up because I put extra soap in there.

Do you actually soap that? Yeah, I do. To this day?

Yeah, I wash my neck. Yeah. Oh, okay. I can't risk walking around with dirt neck again.

I don't wash my neck.

Yeah, you don't have a crease. Uh, I got something. It's not the same. Okay, Rob, do you have a crease? I don't think so. Oh, so unfair. Well, this is actually ding ding ding since it's for Darby, and that's parenting. Dads. Yeah, dads. Yeah, my dad, I don't think laughed at me. He didn't even see it. He did not see it. They were like, look, and he's like, I don't see anything.

Exactly.

Yeah, that's where I get my— that's probably where I get my non, um, my non-judgment.

Sherlock would say my powers of observation, so you'd have to say like my deficit of observation.

Yeah, maybe, or something.

But I'd like to— I'd like to twist it and make it positive. Like, that's where I get my just non- judgment. My nonchalance. I wouldn't say I'm laissez-faire or nonchalant, but I don't make judgments about people because I can't see what to judge. So that's a cool thing about me. Um, okay, you said that we've diagnosed like 6 neurotransmitters. Scientists have identified over 200 neurotransmitters, which are the body's chemical messengers. Um, so yeah. Okay. Okay. Brain Rules for Babies. Mm-hmm. You guys read, you said a child will make 60 or 70% of relationships worse. In Brain Rules for Baby, author John Medina notes that more than 80% of marriages experience a significant drop in relationship satisfaction after a child is born. Even better. But 80%. John Gottman, who we love. Uh-huh. He highlights 67 to 70% of couples see the quality of their relationship plummet within the first 3 years of baby's life.

People just need to have that warning. Yeah, it's good. And they should know it'll pass. Yeah, yeah. When you're in it, you don't think it's gonna pass. Yeah, you're like, what have we traded this for that? For sure. Yeah.

Oh, percentage of men who rate having children as a high priority, or like highest priority. So this says about 57% of men ages 18 to 34 want to have children one day, according to a Pew Research Center poll. Surprisingly, this means men are now more likely to prioritize having kids than women, who report a desire for children at 45% in the same age group. Wow, this whole world is flipped.

Flippy flip. Women in college at 65%, the boys want to have kids. Well, it's all connected.

I think all of that is connected because if you're in college as a woman, you have big career aspirations. You're not thinking about having kids, you're thinking doing that. Mhm. Interesting. Now, studies on men having daughters. Yes, research suggests that having daughters increases the life expectancy of fathers, but the opposite is true for mothers.

Does it say that?

Yeah, they live less long with daughters. Come on, listen. It says for fathers, studies including landmark research published in the American Journal of Human Biology show that a father's lifespan increases by an average of 74 weeks for every daughter he he has.

Yeah, so that's about 1 point, whatever I said.

Sons were found to have no significant impact on a father's longevity. Why? Researchers theorize that having daughters may lead men to adopt healthier lifestyle choices, taking fewer risks, and build stronger emotional support networks. Additionally, adult daughters are traditionally more likely to provide care and support as their parents age. That's interesting. You can read more about the reason—

well, they used to. This new crop— I just don't have kids. I doubt they're gonna be around for that shit. For mothers, the physical toil having children impacts mothers differently.

Research shows that mothers experience a reduction in lifespan of about 95 weeks per child, regardless of whether the child is a son or a daughter. The cost is largely attributed to the biological and energetic demands of pregnancy and lactation. Interesting. So my dad got 74 more weeks for me, but he didn't get any for my bro.

And your mom lost 180-some weeks. Yeah. Yeah, thanks. Your mom lost.

That's, that's 4 years. On Elizabeth and Andy's podcast recently, they were talking about this, like when you start counting how many months you have left.

No, it's not a fun— it's not a good idea.

It's not a good idea.

No, no, you don't even need to do it.

Let's not do it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I already did it.

Yeah, I know, I know that.

All right, well, that's it. Darby didn't have many facts, and it was a great episode. I hope men listen and women listen because I I hate to— I— this is gonna sound like woman bashing or mom bashing, and I don't mean to do that. Okay. But I do think moms should realize the impact of kids on fathers. Like, it's not not having an impact on them. Yeah.

Well, there's like, there's upsides and downsides of this stereotype that the, that the dad isn't even relevant. He's not naturally a parent. Yeah, exactly. So it's like they get out of a bunch of shit they shouldn't get out of.

All right, I guess.

Yeah, but then also they get denied all this lovely stuff. And well, and also they're seen as totally expendable, which is not a nice thing to be seen. No, it's not like what you want.

And but it's not even like, you know, I do think moms, for a lot of obvious reasons and understandable reasons, do a lot of like, well, it's a default me, which it often is, but it can be changed as a whole point. Like, I think it's important for everyone to listen to this.

I do think this is changing pretty rapidly.

Yes. Again, because of women in the workforce. Because my dad dropped me off. He would drop me off at school on Monday and pick me up on Friday. Yep. No, he would drop me off at school and we would listen to that Rain song. Um, Peter Gabriel? No, it's like rainbows and sunshine. No, not that one. That's Kermit. This one is like—

No, that's Rainbow Connection. Do you think rainbow? I love Rainbow Connection. Hearts on the other side. It's not Rainbow Connection. Peggy Lee.

How does that go? I don't know.

Sunshine, rainbows. Sunshine, lollipops and rainbows by Leslie Gore. I see that. Sunshine after the rain or something. Yeah, I think it's this. Let's listen.

Wow, you and your dad were having fun. It's not that. Fuck yeah. Can you imagine? You were trying to keep a low profile. If I saw the one Indian family in my school pull up and the door opened, that song was fucking blasting and I was 10, I would just have to fill in so many wrong assumptions. Like, oh, wow, Indians love dance music.

Yeah, well, I forget the song. Sad. That was our song.

I wonder if you called him. He won't know, right?

I bet he'll remember. You think so? Yeah, he listened with his little daughter.

TBD. I think about that daily because I'm nearing the end of drop-off— Delta's drop-off— elementary school drop-off. And we ride the motorcycle every morning, which means I'm guaranteed to have my koala backpack on. Oh, every morning you wear backpack? I wear her as a backpack. She's sitting behind me and she's like holding on to me like she's a koala bear. Yeah. And we talk while we're riding. It's hard to hear. She just gives me squeezes. And so like, I'm excited to not have to, um, be out the door at the same time every day. You're gonna miss it. But I, I, if it's— yeah, as much as I don't like getting up and having to deal with it, I absolutely cherish that every day of my week starts with my koala bear on my back. I know, I love it.

Kids will break your heart.

They'll make your heart and then they'll break it, right?

I love you.