Child Attachment Expert: We're Stressing Newborns & It's Causing ADHD! Hidden Dangers Of Daycare!

0:00 one in five children will not leave childhood without developing a serious mental illness anxiety depression ADHD behavioral problems and what pisses me off it's that we're not really educating or telling parents the truth as to why why is it that what you say is so troubling for some people sometimes facts are An Inconvenient Truth but everything I'm going to say is supported by research Erica Kamar is a parenting expert and psychoanalyst who uses over 30 years of research to challenge the societal norms on parenting and Early Child Development there's some myths that really have to be debunked about how to raise a healthy child and the first is dayc care is good for children for socialization no it is so bad for their brain and it's been known to

0:45 increase aggression behavioral problems attachment disorders because babies need their mothers SP the first three years for emotional security can a father do that so fathers are important in a different way and I'll go through all of that but they're both critical because if you're raised without one you are missing a piece and then there's quality versus quantity time myth you need to be there a quality of time as well as a quantity of time you can't have a fabulous career and then come home and be present for your child on your time it needs to be on their time and there's more and we're going to go through all of them but are there any areas of privilege that you need to acknowledge maybe someone who doesn't have a partner there or someone who is in an extremely difficult economic situation they do but there are ways to creatively deal with it and I'll go through each of them so there's

1:32 this has always blown my mind a little bit 53% of you that listen to the show regularly haven't yet subscribed to the show so could I ask you for a favor before we start if you like the show and you like what we do here and you want to support us the free simple way that you can do just that is by hitting the Subscribe button and my commitment to you is if you do that then I'll do everything in my power me and my team to make sure that this show is better for you every single week we'll listen to your feedback we'll find the guest that you want me to speak to and we'll continue to do what we do thank you so much Erica you're clearly on a mission and I get that energy from you that there's really an idea that you believe that much of the world doesn't believe or is struggling to accept in

2:19 some way but it's an important idea what is the mission that you're on I like to think of it as three PS presence prioritization and prevention and I'll go through each of them um my mission is to educate parents and uh policy makers and clinicians and Educators about the the fact that for children to be mentally healthy in the future you have to be physically and emotionally present for them throughout childhood but particularly in the two critical periods of brain development which are 0 to3 and 9 to 25 which is adolescence so in those two critical periods of brain

3:04 development uh particularly 0 to3 um much of a child's development depends on their environment and you are their environment so I run around the world talking about the importance of physical and emotional presence attachment security attachment security is the foundation for future mental health prioritization we prioritize everything today other than our children we prioritize our work our careers uh our material success our personal desires and Pleasures but what we're not prioritizing is children um and you know that's a problem because if we don't prioritize them they break down they may break down at three they may break down at 8 or they may not break down till

3:50 they're in adolescence but eventually they break down and prevention there's so much that we can do we have a mental health crisis now in the world it varies to a certain degree in America one in five children will not leave childhood without breaking down at some point without developing a serious mental illness anxiety depression ADHD behavioral problems um Suicidal Thoughts so uh we have a problem in the UK it's 1 in six in America it's one in five it's around the world it's about one in five that is a shocking figure and so and and the truth is we can do a great deal to prevent that the idea that we are trying

4:35 to put out fires without talking about what is the origin of these issues the way that the mental health care system works now it's like what I call cutting the grass uh children are medicated which is basically just pain management um they're given CBT therapy which again is just pain management but why aren't we asking the important questions which is where does emotional regulation originate where does it come from from when does it start how do we Foster development in children from a very young age to promote resilience to stress and adversity in the future and so those are my three missions and for someone who doesn't know your work and doesn't isn't aware of

5:21 you they might be thinking how would you know Erica how would you know the answer so I'm a psychoanalyst um I'm also a social worker I started out as a social worker and then became a psychoanalyst I'm also an author of books on parent guidance and parents education um and I've been in practice seeing patience so the majority of my work is still seeing patience I have a fulltime job of seeing patience and uh as someone who is also a parent I have three children of my own um and so as a parent as a clinician uh as an author who has for the past 20 years been researching and what I did is I collected research in epigenetics and attachment Theory and

6:09 Neuroscience and uh wrote my first book being there because what what happened is I was seeing this uptick and mental illness in children and this is really how I got into it um about 30 years ago I started practicing about 36 years ago but I was probably 5 years into my practice and I was seeing that the families that were coming to see me had younger and younger children that were being diagnosed with very serious mental illnesses and being medicated at a very young age basically silencing their pain and what I was observing in my practice is that those children who were doing the least well were the ones whose mothers were the least present in their

6:54 lives so their primary attachment Figures were the least present in their lives and so then I started looking at the research I looked at all the Neuroscience research since the 90s and all of the new new research that had come out um I looked at the old attachment theories which have been around since the 60s and I looked at the epigenetic research which was rather new too and I saw this trend I I saw that we were abandoning our children for our own desires for our careers for material success um and there was a great deal of misunderstanding about the irreducible emotional needs of children we're going to go through all of that today I'm very excited to learn more about all of this I'm not a parent myself um from all the

7:41 investigative research we've done you have three very well adjusted children um so congratulations for that and I hope to have successful children myself one day but I'm also just really interested in understanding myself through the work that you've done and the work that you continue to do because we're all at one point children and much of the Fingerprints of that early experience still exists in us today so I'm ke to understand how things that might have happened to me or anyone listening today when we were younger may have shaped Us in pro-social antisocial ways or productive or unproductive ways you mentioned that you still see clients and patients today what kind of patients do you see what are they struggling with and who are they are you seeing the parents the kids both well I have a very large parent

8:28 guidance practice because of the books that I write um and the articles I write I also write for the Wall Street Journal and other newspapers so I you know people find me through my writing um and then they reach out for help um and and so I have the parent guidance basically means people come to see me either both parents or one parent because they have questions about their child's development or something's going wrong their child's starting to to develop symptoms um and they don't want to medicate them and they want to understand what's really at the root cause of of of of the issue and so that's a a good portion of my practice but I also see individual patients for depression and anxiety and I see couples and you know the joke about psychoanalysts is we're all specialists

9:14 in depression and anxiety but um yeah so I see individuals and couples but a lot of parent guidance work and they come to you typically because there's they're noticing something is not right with their child sometimes they'll come preventatively because they want to raise a healthy child and there's so much white noise in society there's so much of misinformation our instincts are to lean into our children our evolutionary Drive is to create a feeling of Safety and Security for our children and to be as present as possible and to sooe them when they're in distress and to be there to teach them our values and but Society

9:59 um took a turn it took a turn in the you could say going back to the Industrial Revolution if I really want to go back I'll say the Industrial Revolution was a time when women were forced into the workplace into factories and cities you know they were separated from children for the first time but really the turn that Society took that that I think has a lot to do with what's happening today is the me movement of the 60s and also the feminist movement both of those movements which had a tremendously positive impact on society in one way also had had a tremendously negative impact on society um when women decided that it was cool to go to work and to work full-time out of the home you know everybody cheered and said great you

10:45 know women have the same rights as men and now everybody can be in the workforce and be independent and make money and do their own thing me me me me me the problem is that children were dropped they were abandoned and their needs which are not needs that are going to shift because Society shifts because they have irreducible uh neurological emotional needs so we know that babies are born neurologically and emotionally fragile and so what that means is they're not born resilient and today what's being projected onto babies is they can handle a lot they can handle stress they can handle separation um they can handle you going

11:31 back to work after six weeks or three months and leaving them in daycare with strangers or you know and from an evolutionary perspective babies have always needed the physical skin-to-skin contact with their mothers for the first year and most parts of the world babies are worn on their mother's bodies because mothers perform a number of really important functions for babies that are biological functions based on our evolutionary need to provide our babies with what we call attachment security um so you know Society took a turn and it's it's um it's caused a lot of damage I mean this Mental Health crisis in children I saw coming 30 years ago and it was already

12:18 you know so um you know I have uh friends and colleagues like Jonathan Hy who says oh well it didn't start till social media and that's false because I was seeing this uptick and if you really look there was an uptick in mental illness and children um going back decades and it had everything to do with the shift in society towards self-centeredness towards narcissism towards individualism towards M me me and so you know and I we say that you don't have to have children period to have a satisfying life but if you're going to have children you need to be equipped to care for them because having children alone without really understanding what it means to care for them and being prepared to take on that

13:05 responsibility is causing our children to break down why do you mention mothers and not fathers in that because you you seem to have an emphasis on the role that a mother plays and it seems to be more important in your view than the role that a father plays or maybe even that a nanny or some other caregiver could play and I noticed that on your first book which was written in 2017 being there on the cover it says why prioritizing motherhood in big letters in the first three years matters scientifically evolutionarily with studies and research how can you make the case to me to make me believe that the role of the mother in particular is essential versus a father or other caregiver so in fact in the book it talks about the difference between mothers and fathers because that's an

13:53 important question um and the reason I wrote about mothers is not because fathers are unimportant but fathers are important in a different way so there's a whole debate in society about this kind of idea of gender neutrality that mothers and fathers are interchangeable but actually from an evolutionary perspective as mammals they're not interchangeable they serve different functions and those roles and those behaviors are connected to nurturing hormones so mothers um are really important for what we call sensitive empathic nurturing when children are infants and toddlers that means that when children are in distress mothers soothe babies and therefore regulate their emotions from moment to moment

14:39 every time a mother soothes a baby uh with skin-to-skin contact and eye contact and the soothing tone of her voice she's leaning into that baby's pain and she is regulating that baby's emotions and the way I like to think about it is that you know when babies are born they're born emotionally disjointed think about say sailing in the Atlantic this is how baby's emotions go they'll go from 0 to 60 in 3 seconds with their emotions um and where we want to get babies is to sailing in the Caribbean not flatlining but we want them to be able to regulate their emotions but they're not born that way and so mothers because they sooth the baby from moment to moment when they're physically

15:25 and emotionally present enough in the first three years they help a baby to learn how to regulate their emotions so by 3 years of age 85% of the right brain is developed and by 3 years of age babies can then start to internalize the ability to regulate their own emotions now if mothers aren't present as the primary attachment figures to do that mirroring of emotion to do that soothing of of their emotions then babies don't learn how to regulate their emotions the other thing that's important that mothers do is they buffer babies from stress by wearing ing them on their body for the first year and then by being as present as possible for three years they actually protect baby's brains from

16:10 cortisol the stress hormone so there is a a hormone called oxytocin it's the love hormone and it is protective against cortisol the more a mother nurtures with sensitive empathic nurturing meaning when the baby cries the mother goes oh sweetheart you know let me see the boo boo let me kiss the boo boo that that actually raises the oxytocin in the baby's brain which then protects the baby from cortisol can a father do that so now fathers why are fathers important so fathers also produce oxytocin but it has a different effect on their brain so for mothers oxytocin makes mothers sensitive empathic nurturers very Vigilant to the baby's distress when fathers produce

16:57 oxytocin it comes from a different part of their brain and makes them more what we call playful tactile stimulators of babies what does that sound like to you playful tactful stimulators of babies throwing the baby up in the air and tickling the baby and running after the baby and rough housing and so that's important for a variety of reasons um first it encourages things like exploration and risk-taking it encourages separation and fathers do this really important thing which is they help the baby to learn to regulate certain emotions so mothers help to regulate sadness fear distress fathers help to regulate excitement and aggression so

17:42 when fathers aren't in the house when there are single mothers raising children without a father often little boys develop behavioral problems is what we're seeing that they can't regulate their aggression because fathers help little boys in particular but little girls too to regulate aggression so when fathers are aren't around you'll often see little boys who are more impulsive who are more aggressive um so the answer is fathers and mothers are both critical to the development of children which is a very controversial thing to say today because if you're raised without one you are missing a piece but they're not the same and they're not the same because our hormones dictate they're not the same so fathers produce a hormone in

18:29 great quantities called vasopress vasopressin is the protective aggressive hormone and what does it do it helps fathers to protect their family there was a study that was done where mothers and fathers lay in bed and the baby cries was out of the UK this study the baby cries and the father sleep through the baby's distress cries but the mothers wake up right away okay but with the rustling of leaves outside the window the mother sleep through it and the fathers wake up right away because the fathers are attuned to predatorial threat so our nurturing hormones make us different I mean the fact that we can say that there are many

19:14 things that are similar between women and men of course we're both intelligent we can both be ambitious um but I think the idea that we want to kind of make everything the same when it's just not factual it is the the Inconvenient Truth that mothers and fathers nurturing hormones dictate that if they are healthy and they've been raised in a healthy environment they are different now does that mean that a father can't raise a child and be a sensitive empathic nurture it it doesn't mean he can't take on that role but if as a society we can't acknowledge the differences then a father can't learn to be a sensitive empathic nurturer meaning these are instinctual

20:00 behaviors and so that infant if that father is going to stay home with that baby acknowledging the differences allows that father then to become a sensitive empathic nurturer so interesting because these aren't the ideas that are socially accepted or at least the ideas you see on social media and funly enough as you were speaking I recorded everything you said and I ran it through Ai and AI said the core ideas that you shared um are well supported by evolutionary Psychology and Neuroscience which is quite surprising because usually AI argues with people I mean so so the thing is none of the books I write are based on opinion so I'm I'm very skittish about saying anything that isn't backed up with research um so it's

20:45 everything that I write about and speak about is is supported by research why is it that what you say is so troubling for some people have you you know why right because it because it makes us confront a set of realities that it's an inconvenience Tru toore it's An Inconvenient Truth um sometimes facts are An Inconvenient Truth just like you know Climate Change Is An Inconvenient Truth um this is An Inconvenient Truth it inconveniences people it also makes people feel guilty so I don't believe that guilt is a bad feeling I don't believe that guilt is a Bad Thing guilt is a sign that your ego is functioning it's a sign that the part of you the part of your ego called the super ego

21:32 can identify something that feels right and wrong so if you look at a baby who's crying who's your baby and you feel nothing that means that there's a part of you that is dead inside there's a part of you that is unempathic towards your own young and we would say that that doesn't make that person a bad person it makes that person someone who probably had some early trauma themselves right it means that they probably have some kind of attachment disorder where they can't be attuned to their their baby's pain right so when you are guilty it means you have internal conflict it means two parts of you are struggling with each other the part of you that wants to do whatever you want to do I want to go out to work

22:18 I want to make money I want to be free you know and the other part of you that says wait a second but my baby my baby needs me look at my vulnerable baby look how sad look at the distress that my absence is causing that baby so if we don't feel guilt then our species is lost we're lost now excessive guilt is another thing if you're a good enough mother or a good enough father and you still feel guilty then we call it anxiety but for the most part what I say makes a lot of women and men feel guilty and again I don't see that as a bad thing and I think when we tell parents to turn turn away from their guilt

23:03 instead of turning toward it when we turn towards our internal conflicts we tend to make better decisions for ourselves for our children for our families um but when we turn away from those conflicts we tend not to make good decisions and those tend to have long-term consequences what exactly are you inconveniencing with your truth what are the ideas that you're that you have to sacrifice time and money and freedom that if you want to raise healthy children it's going to require discomfort and frustration and sacrifice and what's interesting is that what's also happened is because we're raising our children in such a selfish self-centered

23:51 environment um young people are more fragile they are more emotionally fragile more of them have attachment disorders they can't bear frustration they can't bear pain they can't bear sleeplessness you know the idea that you have to get a baby nurse because you can't get up in the middle of the night with your own baby and that's become the norm in certain socioeconomic circles I mean so women and men always raise children in in history in extended family circles right um they weren't isolated and today parents are very isolated so you would have your mother staying with you or you'd have your sister staying with you or you'd live in a big

24:36 house and there'd be people to support you um I started a nonprofit uh recently because I found that so many mothers it's called attachment Circle so many mothers feel so isolated that dealing with the pain and the discomfort of mothering alone is too much for them so there is that so we live in a very strange Society where people are separate from one another in their own houses and apartments and they don't depend on one another because dependency is a bad word and but there there is also this issue of how are we producing such frag fragile youth that even the discomfort and the frustration

25:22 of raising children is too much for them there's a big economic component to this as well right because if you're raising children in isolation the probability that you have disposable income or at least enough money to be able to just stay at home and raise the kids and still maintain any standard of quality standard of life is lower if you're not doing it with a big extended family that can support and and pay for some of those costs interestingly yes and no to your question um people who have less economic resources are in general eneral less isolated but they are also isolated today you have a lot of single mothers

26:08 raising children not in an apartment with other family members who've had to move to other cities or countries to make a living um who are really isolated you know again it I I think it crosses socioeconomic lines um but with wealthier people more affluent people um they're opting for isolation many of them they're buying big houses they're living in the suburbs or or they're not wanting to lean on anyone right so we have what I call a family diaspora it's really what it is um which is that people will move away from their families of origin when they have

26:54 children which is very bizarre and anti- instinctual so the world's become a global place and we can move wherever ever we want but doesn't it make Common Sense isn't it a reasonable appause that you would want to move closer to your extended family even if they a pain in the neck unless they're abusive um because it provides you with support it provides you with extended family support but that's not what's happening people are choosing to live geographically distant from their families of origin and so it's making it harder for families it's making it harder for women it's making them feel more isolated but what if they they want to they've got their own career they've got their own passions there are things that they love doing and that means that

27:40 they have to be working in a major city or they have to be traveling to pursue those things you just said it what if they have passions what if they have a career the problem is children do best in extended family situations so you know you can have a fabulous career and move far away from your family and when you're young and single and I even call it single when you're married but don't have children you're still really single um you know what I say to parents is that your life won't be so fabulous if you have children and you're not present for them physically and emotionally particularly in the early years because what happens is they break down and the expression goes that a parent is only as

28:29 happy as their least happy child and so there is no fabulous life if your children are breaking down and that's what families are learning is that you know all of that freedom and all that fabulous me time comes at a cost if you have children so one would say then well I just won't have children then and that would be fine and so there are a lot of people that are saying today I don't see the value in being responsible for another human being and what they're missing out on is the deep and rewarding emotional connection to your children It's A Love Like No Other Love But if you've had if you've had trauma as a child if

29:15 you've had parents who were narcissistic or resented parenting or uh you know were distracted or mentally ill you know you may already have had that trauma that that implies that later it's harder to connect right so those attachment disorders that I was referring to earlier there's three kinds of attachment disorders there's the avoidant attachment Disorder so what does that mean so a healthy attachment looks like this um when you return home your child feels so securely attached to you meaning you've gone out for an hour or two for dinner with your spouse you come

30:00 home and your baby is happy to see you and the reunion what we call the reunion is a beautiful reunion the baby is joyful and happy and you know that's healthy attachment it means that you've made your baby feel so safe and secure because you are there primarily and have prioritize them the majority of the time as the primary attachment figure that when you come home your baby welcomes it but what we're seeing is more and more children developing attachment disorders because their parents are push ping the limits of how much they can leave those babies and putting them in things like institutional care and leaving them for long hours at a time and traveling for their fabulous careers than their fabulous lives at ages when babies really can't tolerate that kind of

30:47 Separation when a parent comes when the primary attachment figure usually the mother comes home and the baby turns away from you and turns toward the babysitter or to just turns away that baby has the beginning of what's called an avoidant attachment disorder now that's correlated later on with things like depression and difficulty forming attachments later on the next kind of uh attachment disorder is called an ambivalent attachment disorder and the mother then comes home and the baby clings to the mother for dear life because the internal voice in that baby is my Mommy's going to leave me again so I have to hold on to her now that baby is

31:32 fractious and can't be soothed and will not let go of that mother you know holding on for dear life what I call like the rees's monkeys did to the wire cages right and that's correlated later on with anxiety in youth the disorganized attachment disorder is different than the other two in that the other two have a strategy so think of an attachment disorder as a strategy a child who's left for two many hours by their parent or whose parent is physically present but emotionally checked out that baby has to cope has to have a strategy turning away from the mother is a strategy and the internal narrative is my mommy isn't present for me can't isn't isn't here for me won't won't be there for me I can't trust my

32:19 environment and that baby says and I'm going to have to uh cope on my own what we call learned helplessness um the ambivalent attachment disorder you know that baby is the strategy is you know I'm going to hold on because if I don't hold on she's going to leave again disorganized Detachment disorder is the hardest to treat um because the baby has no strategy so the baby Cycles through many strategies the baby will go from clinging to avoiding to being enraged and even slapping or hitting the mother and then cycling through again um and that baby that develops a disorganized attachment disorder those are more those babies it's correlated later with

33:04 borderline personality disorder and we're seeing a huge rise in borderline personality disorders and those are the kids who are cutting themselves who are trying to commit suicide um we have a a mental illness crisis the likes of which we've never seen in history and it has everything to do with how we're raising our children you seem pissed off under that calm demeanor pissed off yes I suppose I am I'm not pissed off at the people I'm pissed off at a society that is lying we're not really educating or telling parents the truth so there's four attachment disorders avoidant secure ambivalent disorganized well one secure isn't a disorder so there's secure and

33:51 then there's three attachment disorders avoid in bivalent disorganized yes how does that manifest when you're an adult so how would I know because you know I can relate to some of these and I'm wondering how that would then manifest in my relationships with my life as an adult outside of the obvious mental health you know situations so avoiding an avoiding attachment disorder would be someone who um can't form meaningful and deep connections can't commit has difficulty committing has difficulty trusting in the intimacy and the the depth of intimacy in a relationship and ambivalent an attachment disorder would would be someone who's highly highly anxious um someone who clings to you uh

34:38 calls you maybe uh a woman you've dated in the past who called you five times a day to check on you was worried that you'd be the little fish that swam away um and suffocate they suffocate the people they love because they're afraid to let go um disorganized attachment borderline personality disorders they tend to be very emotionally volatile um there's a lot of anger there and um and there's a lot of self harm self Haring Behavior there do they end up attracting a certain attachment style so if I'm an avoidant do I then end up attracting avoidance or do I is there any research on that on how we then date I'm guessing secures go for secures yeah secures well if you're healthy you're

35:24 attracted to reciprocally healthy relationships and you trust your environment so you trust in loving relationship ships and um avoidance sometimes are attracted to avoidant people because there's no conflict there so in other words someone who can't commit with someone also who can't commit um that can break down those at some point so remember that these are pathological defenses so you know we use the word defense because it means to protect one right and and defenses help us until they no longer help us and so we say attachment to disorders are pathological defenses meaning they don't usually last a lifetime they break down at some point and so you might be with another

36:10 avoiding attachment disordered person but at some point one of you breaks down and then realizes that you need the other and then you know then you're with in a relationship with someone who can't give back so yeah as we say like levels of water meat so people will be attracted to another often of the same ilk but but it isn't necessarily a healthy relationship and of all these four attachment Styles who do you think which attachment style from in your opinion and from your observations and the people that you've seen is most likely to have a successful and then also unsuccessful relationship oh well secure attachment will have a successful I mean secure people with secure attachment uh

36:57 will be drawn to healthy reciprocal loving um deep connections because they've had a deep and loving connection with their mother so remember I said that you it's only after 3 years of age that you internalize a feeling of security and where you internalize a feeling that the world is a safe place and you can trust the people in it and you can trust to love another person and so you know we we throw that word trust around we don't realize that it comes from the very beginnings of our de development when we don't trust others it's generally because we couldn't trust those that we were to depend upon when we were at our most vulnerable stage and

37:43 what about the the alternative so if which of these attachment Styles is least likely to have successful relationships that's disorganized yeah they have a very hard time forming relationships holding on to relationships um yeah I would say it's it's they're the most complicated to treat and they're also the most complicated in terms of you know being able to have successful relationships in the future I was wondering as you were speaking whether if I have more kids so if I have 10 young kids yeah is there a higher probability that of neglect in those kids because I just if if I'm a mother I just don't have time for all of these kids at the same time they can't all be on my chest at the same time yeah it's it's a good question well there's something in the developing world called

38:28 maternal dep syndrome which is that mothers can actually die in the developing world of having too many children in Too Short a period of time uh they get depleted physically but they also get depleted emotionally I'm going to say it right now so everybody can hear it who's watching this having children is stressful it is frustrating it does require that you are Sleepless for the first five years it requires that you can tolerate a lot of discomfort and frustration so if there was a job description first it would say the most joyful uh enriching thing you can do in your entire life but what comes with that to Foster healthy development is

39:14 frustration lack of sleep stress uh discomfort and so that should be part of the job description yeah it seems to be such an important principle for Life generally that everything has an A tradeoff and I think was it Einstein that said for every Force has like an equal and opposite counter force or something to to that effect and a lot of people are choosing not to make the decision to have kids I was looking at some stats around this the European Union witnessed only 3.8 million births in 2022 nearly half the number recorded six decades ago marking one of the lowest birth rates in history France for example known for its robust family policies has seen a decrease from 830,000 children

40:00 born in 2010 to just 670,000 2023 the lowest since World War II and this is a huge Global Trend across especially countries that have a lot of money it is so I speak at a big conference called The Alliance for responsible citizenship and they talk about a lot of these alarming dropping birth rates the truth is though that uh as countries become more developed birth rates do decline to a certain degree ree that has to do with economics some of it but there's a trend that's happening that's worse than this which is people it's not that they're having less children which actually you know everybody has their own limits in terms

40:45 of their capacity to give and to love and so for some people maybe one child is enough for other people five children isn't enough meaning they have so much inside of them to give right um but the alarming thing for me isn't the dropping birth rates due to economics you know so maybe people aren't having 10 children like they used to they're having three children or two children right the alarming thing for me is that people are not having children that's more alarming to me because that's more a sign not of a country developing but of a country and a society of a modern society which does

41:31 not see the value in in raising children and having deep and loving relationships be a priority in your life those people would say I have deep and loving relationships with my partner with my dog with my Uncle Auntie friends Etc it's different and why is it different it's a good question it's different because um in the end your relationship with your partner or with your auntie or with your dog isn't the same level of dependency the ability to care for another human being uh to allow another human being to be dependent on you to devote to that human being is a growing transforming experience for human beings one would say

42:18 that not sure I completely buy this fully because but Jordan Peterson I think has said I think it was Jordan who said that you can't fully become an adult if you don't have a child now I'm not sure I would go that far because there's some people who can't have children but I do think that there is something in terms of developmentally on an adult development level that transforms you that is meant to to transform you in being generative and having children again it's not for everyone and I do say this that um I'm not part of the pr nality movement where I say everybody should have children I don't think everybody should have children but I do think that if you're going to have

43:06 children then you need to look deeply at your own upbringing and your own losses and your own early traumas before you bring them into this world so you can repair whatever it is you need to repair and not uh create what we call generational expression of things like attachment disorders and mental illness and cuz a lot of people are struggling now have kids even those that want to yeah um looking at some stats and there's a global prevalence of infertility approximately 18% of adults worldwide about one in six experience infertility at some point in their lives yeah between 2015 and 2019 about roughly 15% of us women aged 15 to 49 experienced impaired fertility and in the UK Research indicates that one in eight women listening to this now and

43:54 one in 10 men aged 16 to 74 have experienced infertility which is defined as unsuccessfully attempting pregnancy for a year or longer and I've spoken to a lot of people actually that have tried to have kids yeah for years very sad it's very sad when people want children and they can't have children it is incredibly sad when you think about what's contributing to that what how do you diagnose that infertility challenge there are a lot of theories some are environmental some are the fact that we're delaying having children we're lying to women and to men we're telling them freeze your eggs in fact this is a little disturbing I'll tell you about this that law firms now are um paying for the freezing of their young female Associates

44:43 eggs I find that disturbing um saying freeze your eggs work really hard for us yeah you can have children later and the truth is a lot of them can't because when you freeze eggs it's not a guarantee of fertility it's not a guarantee that those eggs will turn into embryos it's not a guarantee that those embryos will turn into babies so there's the age piece um there is also and there's the environmental piece there is also the stress piece which we are not talking about um there's a component to getting pregnant that is about stress we have more stress on both men and women you know it used to be that men died sooner because they had more stress but now I think it's evened out the odds I

45:28 think women make die sooner because they have the stress of working and raising children for the most part um but the point is that that uh the stress that young adults face because they're trying to you know we should talk about some of the other myths what's another myth we'll weave it through this talk another myth is you can do everything all at the same time and do it well myth that's a big myth you can't you can't have a fabulous career working full-time and traveling and being fabulous and raise healthy children the good news is life is long you may live till 120 like Moses

46:13 and I think of your generation you're younger than me but um I think you probably will live well over a hundred um and so what that means is you have many many many many many many years to have a fabulous career when your children don't need you so much but you have a very small window to create that emotional security for your children that will be the core of them you know we talk a lot about your physical core and core training this is your emotional core this is the emotional core of human beings attachment security and a feeling of safety that you can rely on the people who you need most in the world to be there when you need them that is your

46:58 emotional core how did you manage your mother of three you've raised three very wonderful well adjusted children but you're also successful yeah you have books you you're you're traveling around the world you said so I'm a good example um I had a career when I was in my 20s um and I got married when I was I met my husband when I was 27 and I got married when I was just shy of 30 or I was 30 um and then we had children in our 30s uh so before we had children I was working I was seeing something like 40 hours of patience a week and I was working into the we hours of the night I

47:44 would work till 11:00 at night coming home exhausted then we had children but it was an agreement that we had that when we had babies I would take a good long period off and then really go back very very very minimally and I had the kind of career by choice that I could have control over and be it could be flexible and I could control it and so I took six months off with each child and then after six months only went back to work an hour and a half a day five days a week so just we had an agreement my husband and I which is it would be just enough to pay a mother's helper a nanny and so and we did without in those years

48:30 we did without vacations we did without you know second homes we did without fancy clothes we did without the other things that many of our peers were getting and traveling and doing we said what's important to us is that we pair down not expand now this is we're expanding as parents so we want to pair down materially life is long and you can have a successful career some of the women that I interview for my book are women who didn't even start their careers until they were in their 40s after they had children that were older could it have worked if your husband stayed home instead of you in your view because I'm trying to understand if you're saying that dads don't need to be as their present as much as the mother

49:17 they have to be there in a different way in the early days men don't breastfeed so that's the first thing unless you can show me a man who has grown breasts and can actually breastfeed maybe it's coming I don't know but for now um women's bodies connect them to their babies they connect them through birth they connect them through breastfeeding there is a physical component and a hormonal component to infancy and motherhood and there really is a difference in the way that mothers respond to babies and fathers respond to babies now when the fathers become really important it's not that the father isn't important to give the mother a break or to bond with the baby

50:03 or to bathe the baby but what that baby needs is that attachment security to that primary attachment figure so the mother usually the mother sometimes it's the father but usually the mother fathers with their playful tactile stimulation they become really important when children become mobile when children start to crawl and toddle when they're around 18 months to 2 years old fathers become incredibly exciting and they're really important so when fathers aren't around in those days um when children are starting to explore the world those children have a harder time separating from mothers so it's really important to have what we said the yin and the Yang what we are doing now is we

50:51 are um not prioritizing attachment security which is the foundation for then healthy separation and when healthy separation starts fathers are critical when you have another child a second child fathers are critical because fathers seduce the older child they say come on let's go out and play Let's go kick the soccer ball let's go to the swing set and they give a space to the mother with the next baby they help the older children to grow up earlier on you mentioned a study that I read about when I was studying psychology Once Upon a Time which is the Reus the reesus monkey study with the wire mother for anybody that's never heard about that study I think it's quite important to understand the profound impact that touch and um well that was an attachment study yeah

51:37 what was it what's what's touch called from in a in the Science World skin to skin skin to skin can you give me an overview of that study and what it showed for people that aren't aware of it well they took these baby reesus monkeys and they they let some be with the mothers and the mothers nurtured those babies and those babies became healthily attached and secure and those were the healthy emotionally Healthy Babies then they gave um another subset of monkeys um a wire mother covered with a piece of cloth or fur or something and those babies became very neurotic but at least they were clinging they became like the ambivalent attachment babies because there was no response from the

52:23 mother but at least they were holding on to this mother and then they gave and these Bab babies became very neurotic and then they gave the subset of babies nothing and those babies literally lost their minds and um I mean there are other studies which are more recent than that that's quite an old study there there is a researcher named Michael meanie he did a study on licking and grooming animals who lick and groom their young meaning are nurturing skinto skin lick and groom uh in human terms that would be holding touching loving skin skin those uh if if a mother licked and groomed her young that baby would become more resilient to stress in the future the

53:09 babies who were not licked and groomed by their mothers become became less resilient to stress in the future in addition the babies who were more resilient to stress because their mothers had licked and groomed them passed down generationally the ability to lick and groom the Next Generation what happened to the baby who weren't licked and groomed guess what happened they didn't pass it down right and that's what's happening to humans today if we don't lick and groom our babies I mean you know take it for whatever um if we don't lick and groom our babies it we don't pass on resilience to stress and adversity but we also don't pass on the desire to lick and groom you're to have babies your

53:54 story going back to your story which we were talking about are there any areas of privilege that you need to acknowledge that someone else listening to this now goes yeah but that's all right for you because you know maybe someone who didn't have a partner there or someone who is in a difficult economic situ extremely difficult economic situation living in the projects in Harlem or something I really want to I'm saying this because well it's not the mothers and the projects in Harlem because I'll tell you the mothers in the projects in Harlem stay home with their babies that's what's interesting very poor people in America so let me just say I love America America sucks and I'll tell you why America sucks from my perspective

54:40 and I say this internationally I go around the world saying America sucks and I'm going to tell you why um we are the only country in the world other than Papa new guini who does not have a paid parental maternity leave we do not have paid maternity leave nobody cares about children they care about the GDP and the bottom line and the people who are out there talking about this stuff are economists saying women have to work work work for the economy nobody cares about children because if we cared about children our tax money would be in paid leave not for three months not for six months for at least a year and hungry they have three years Slovenia

55:25 Slovakia um Estonia has three years Hungary I think has 2 years of paid leave Sweden I have some issues with Sweden but Sweden has 14 months Sweden after 14 months makes women go back to work full full full-time and put them in institutional care and all those babies are breaking down so 14 months isn't even enough so but if we could even get to a civilized place of one year of paid leave in this country and then the next two years some way that parents could be complemented so they could part-time supplemented so they could work part-time um you know I'm a I'm a reasonable realistic person I know this country is never going to go for three years of pay leave even though I would love them to I also know that

56:11 this country isn't going to go for an entitlement called pay leave because that's the kind of country we are we talk a big game but we don't want to put our money where mou this there is the possibility now that the Republicans are in of a creative solution which is potentially using things like Social Security in advance borrowing from your social security so I'm a mom and I say ah to stay home I can borrow from my social security for a year and then work a year or two longer in my life wouldn't you say that most women who wanted to stay home with their babies would say I'll work longer so I can stay home with my baby there are

56:57 ways to creatively deal with it um from my perspective this is what's going on people on the left will not compromise they'll only do an entitlement called paid leave but they only are asking for it for 3 to 6 months after that they want women back in the workforce and institutional dayare so I'm not on the left um people on the right talk a lot about family they're the party of the family now but they do not want tax dollars to go into PID leave they they don't like the entitlements that already exist and they don't want to add anymore and so the only way they're going to give it to women and men is if they put skin in the game M this is the country we live in again I'm a realist I think in any way that we can give families the

57:44 choice to care for their own children particularly in the early years we will create a population of healthier children how do we know that more paid leave equals better children less strain on the Healthcare System in terms of mental health mortality whatever it might be how do you make a statistical or a science or research backed case that if we had three years of paid leave in the United States or in the UK or Australia Canada wherever that the it would be a net positive for society outside of it just being an opinion well the research shows the longitudinal attachment research shows that children who are insecurely attached at 12 months of age 20 years later are insecurely 80% of them are are insecurely attached and suffer from

58:30 mental disorders that's what the longitudinal attachment research says so we now have Decades of basically children were followed from when they were infants and the ones who were securely attached 20 years later are still securely attached and doing great and the ones who were insecurely attached most still insecurely attached and it's tied and correlated to all of these mental illness conditions right so there's a lot of research to show what attachment security does for children in the long run so you know you're asking a question about I mean I suppose you could take your paid leave and go play soccer in the park and go play tennis and I don't know like play cards with your F I mean

59:17 you know how can I say how people are going to use their paid leave but if your paid leave is being used to be home with your child then it's going to benefit your child so many of the the guests that I speak to on this pod C especially those that become incredibly successful um athletes entrepreneurs whoever they often have some form of neglect in their past Richard Williams Serena and Venus Williams father he um he was very intense with them from a very young age and he's raised two of the greatest tennis players in history Joe Jackson was strict and often controversial with Michael who went on to become the King of Pop El Woods who was Tiger Wood's father was very um intense in his Co coaching and mentoring style which led him to become great and obviously Beyonce is the other example I

1:00:02 gave who Matthew managed Matthew which is Matthew and Tina who were parents to Beyonce managed Destiny's Child and Beyonce's solo career meticulously shaping them into a global Superstar so parents think you know I want to raise kids that are superstars I want I want my kids to be great okay so I'm gonna say right now I don't recommend that as a professional okay I'm just saying so I can't comment on a lot of those people because I could get in a lot of trouble for commenting on a lot of those people but I will say that amongst those people there is controversy meaning at least one of those parents and I don't know the history of the others was abusive and so you could say that narcissism is abusive to children

1:00:51 when we project our needs and desires and likes and who we are onto our children we're not letting them authentically be themselves the greatest gift you can give your child is to see your child as an authentic individual who is an individual and themselves and not to see them as a mini me um when you start architecting their life there's a good chance you're going to lose that child emotionally at some point they're either going to hate you they're they may be successful in their careers they may have terrible personal lives they may be narcissistic parents themselves so I don't recommend that school of

1:01:36 thought what I do recommend is if your child shows promise in something that they also seem to love and have a drive to be good at then you can support that drive just make sure to keep yourself in check along the way to make sure that they are driving it not you health is a huge Focus for me in 2025 and I'm not just talking about eating right and exercising I'm talking about my recovery too I'm halfway through 60 workouts in 60 days and to help my body recover I've been using a health Gadget that I've shared with you before they're a sponsor of this podcast and their product has such a huge impact on my recovery I'm referring to my Bon charge infrared SAA blanket these are similar to the infrared saers that you see in gyms and

1:02:23 Spas but the big difference is that it's portable I started the year off at my home in South afca so I brought the blanket with me and I used it most nights before bed when I was training hard and it helped me relax it helped my muscles feel less sore and I wake up feeling more recovered it works by heating up your body directly rather than just the air around you to improve circulation and reduce stiffness I've also noticed that it's had a big impact on my skin as well and thankfully Bon Chargers offered me 25% off for my listeners so if you use code diarhea checkout you'll also get free shipping and a yearlong warranty head to bond charge.com diary ADHD yeah okay a I don't feel like I don't even have to ask a question here but just to set the stage the reason why

1:03:10 I'm so compelled by this is just this I have to say it the shocking rise in diagnosis and prescriptions over the last 10 years between 20 20 208 ADHD diagnosis is in the UK Rose approximately 20 fold yes among boys aged 10 to 16 diagnosis increased from 1% roughly to um about 3.5% in 2018 and in men aged 18 to 29 there was a nearly 50-fold increase in ADHD prescriptions during the same period and the same applies to the United States where an estimated 15.5 million adults in the US have been diagnosed with ADHD approximately one in nine us children have been diagnosed with ADHD at some point with 10.5% having a current

1:03:58 diagnosis it I don't know what ADHD was but the conversation around it the prescriptions the diagnosis seemed to have really surged into culture in a really really big way what's going on so ADHD was one of the factors that drove me to right right being there um because I was seeing this huge uptick and ADHD diagnosis and children being medicated so so early do you know what the fight ORF flight reaction is that's when the sympathetic nervous system starts to kick into action and yes so well it's basically our evolutionary response to uh predatorial threat so if a sablet tooth tiger was chasing you you either stood and fought fight or

1:04:45 you ran for Your Life Flight so when our children are under stress they go into fight or flight so one of the first signs that a child is under stress that they cannot manage is when they become aggressive in school they hit they bite they throw chairs um they have trouble you know socially in daycare or preschool or even in school or they become distracted which is the flight part of fight ORF flight so what's happening is their nervous systems the stress regulating part of their brain is getting turned on so we

1:05:31 say that the stress regulating part of their brain has to do with a little almond shaped part of the brain called the amydala it's a very primitive part of the brain very old part of the brain and it regulates stress throughout our lives it helps us to manage it what we know is that part of the brain is supposed to remain offline for the first year to three years which is why mothers wear babies on their bodies it's why babies stay close close to their mothers in the first 3 years to keep the amydala quiet and only incrementally incrementally expose children to stress and frustration that they can manage so imagine taking small bites of it so you can digest it right and your mother's

1:06:17 there to help you digest the stress what we're doing now by separating mothers and babies by putting babies into daycare with strangers um is by sleep training babies all these weird things that we're doing to babies is we're turning the amydala on we're making it active precociously too early what happens when the amydala is activated too early is it becomes very active and very large very quickly the problem is then it shrivels up and burns out also because it cannot manage that kind of stress so early when it ceases to be functional it ceases to be functional for a

1:07:02 lifetime and so it's very important to protect you know what's the expression the Family Jewels it's very these are the family jewels in the brain of a baby this is the jewel the amydala you want to keep the stress to an absolute minimum in the first year which is why sleep training is dangerous it's why letting babies cry it out it's why putting babies into daycare it's why leaving babies for hours on end when they're so so very fragile um is so bad for their brains because it gets the cortisol flowing which is the stress hormone but it makes this part of the brain very active so it grows grows grows and then and ceases to be functional in the future like a PTSD response so what we

1:07:49 know is that these children are in hyper Vigilant states of stress ADHD children ADHD children hypervigilant states of stress if you stay in a hypervigilant state of stress long enough you go into a hypo Vigilant state of stress which then causes depression so what we have now are not disorders so there was a whole movement to take the d off of ADH D because it's not a disorder it is a stress response and instead of asking the right questions which are okay what's causing the stress how do we make sure that our children are not exposed to this kind of stress because they're going into fight or

1:08:34 flight so the nervous system as you said the brain has an on switch and an off switch the on switch to stress is the amydala the hippocampus is the off switch and you'd say the stress response is in a negative feedback loop it's it's it's actually important like in other words if a sabl tooth tiger is chasing you very important that you can activate right and run or fight so the stress response is supposed to be shortterm it's supposed to be not it's supposed to be acute rather than chronic so we can kind of manifest it we can uh activate it but then it's supposed to be turned off by the turnoff switch the hippocampus what we're seeing in children's brains is that the amydala is

1:09:20 growing very precociously large and the hippocampus which is the off switch is very small so we have problem as we say Houston we have a problem we have an on

…