Modern Wisdom - #680 - Dr Anna Machin - Do You Actually Need A Father To Raise A Child?

Episode Date: September 14, 2023

Dr Anna Machin is an evolutionary anthropologist at Oxford University, a researcher into the role of fatherhood across time and an author. The modern world has made dads surplus to requirements in many ways. The deadbeat dad is such a meme in sitcoms and cartoons now that it's no surprise men don't feel they have a role in child rearing. But just how important are fathers to the development of boys and girls? And what don't we know about their impact? Expect to learn how fathers saved the human race when babies heads got too big, whether it's normal for dads to not feel love for their baby when it's born, the most important ways dads can bond with their kids, whether dads are more important to girls' or boys' development, what pushback Anna got for writing a pro-father book and much more... Sponsors: Get 10% discount on Marek Health’s comprehensive blood panels at https://marekhealth.com/modernwisdom (use code: MODERNWISDOM) Get 20% discount & free shipping on your Lawnmower 4.0 at https://manscaped.com/modernwisdom (use code MODERNWISDOM) Get 15% discount on Craftd London’s jewellery at https://craftd.com/modernwisdom (use code MW15) Extra Stuff: Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello friends, welcome back to the show. My guest today is Dr. Anna Machen, she's an evolutionary anthropologist at Oxford University, a researcher into the role of fatherhood across time and an author. The modern world has made Dad surplus to requirements. In many ways, the deadbeat Dad is such a meme in sitcoms and cartoons now that it's no surprise, men don't feel that they have a role in child rearing. But just how important are fathers to the development of boys and girls, and what don't we know about their impact? Expect to learn how fathers save the human race when babies' heads got too big, whether it's normal for dads to not feel love for their baby when it's born, the most important ways dads can bond with their kids, whether dads are more important to girls or boys'

development, what pushback and a got for writing a pro-father book? And much more. This feels like a very important conversation, and I learned an awful lot about the unseen impact of fathers and fatherlessness on the outcomes that kids get on their emotional intelligence on their level of mental health, everything. And also the challenges that are faced by dads.

I really, really hope that this gives comfort or advice or solace to many people that need it. And Anna's book is fantastic and you should definitely go and check that out as well if you resonate with this episode. This Monday, the world's strongest bodybuilder, Stan Effardin, creator of the vertical diet and absolutely fantastic human with tons and tons of insights about training and dieting, is on Modern Wisdom. Another Modern Wisdom cinema episode filmed out in LA when I was with Jim Shark and this one is really, really great. So get ready for that.

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by going to bit.ly slash cdwisdom using the code mw15, a checkout. That's bit.ly slash letter c letter d wisdom and mw15, a checkout. That's b-i-t dot l-y slash lettacy, lettady wisdom, and MW15, a checkout. But now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome, Dr. Animation. Why do we need to change the narrative around fathers? We need to change the narrative about fathers partly because the one we have at the moment is a complete fiction which is kind of made up for many myths and stories we've been told in our culture over the years about the role of fathers about their importance to their children about how they become fathers, how they learn the knowledge to become fathers. And actually, all of this is based upon absolutely

zero academic research. Absolutely no observational research at all. It's just stories that we've told each other anecdotes. And because of that the myths we've built up around fathers are just that they're myths they're not actually true and they are very damaging to fathers, they're damaging to men. And they're also damaging to their families. So the work that I do and those are my colleagues around the world, we do it because we actually want the facts to be out there. We want the stories we tell about fathers to actually be accurate. Which myths do you wish that you could put into the ground

and fully bury about dads? The first one I would bury is that fathers, men are not instinctive parents. So we have this story, and I hear it a lot still from the dads that I study, went before they have children, which is that, like mum is an instinctive parent, she's somehow like magically able to do this, whereas dads have to learn.

And because of that, they tend to see what mum does as a goal standard of parenting, and whatever they do, as a secondary bit of a failure. And actually it's not true, we'll probably go into that a little bit later, but we've discovered that men are as biologically primed to parent as women are, which as an evolutionary anthropologist makes perfect sense to me. But that's probably one of the biggest ones because it really undermines a man's confidence that he feels that actually if he just goes with what his gutters telling him, he will be okay. He really, a lot of them lack a lot of confidence and they do very much belittle themselves in

relation, for example, to what Mum is doing. Yeah, it's, there is a demonization of fatherhood and I want to get into this later as well, but I wonder how much of it is a cope in response to single-parent households and just trying to not make children who grow up in single-parent households feel like they're falling behind, because if we minimize the impact that fathers have on children's rearing, then the people who do grow up with just mum don't feel like they're missing out on as much. And this is a trend that we see, the tyranny of the minority is somehow,

sometimes how it's categorized, but yeah, it's so, so fascinating. One of the other things, William Costello, who's one of David Buses' students out here, told me a story that you taught him about how fathers saved the human race for extinction because babies' heads got too big. What's that?

Okay, so what happened? So our brains are six times bigger than they should be for an animal of our size, of our body weight. And we're also bipedals. So we have this massive problem with our anatomy, about 1.8 million years ago to start with, where our hips are narrowed,

because our we've gone bipedals, so the birth canal got narrower, but we had this big increase in size of our brains, for example, compared to chimps. And we got to this point about 1.8 million years ago, where their head would no longer fit through the pelvis at full term. So we started having to birth our babies very preterm, basically.

We should be pregnant for much, much longer than we are. And that meant you had this helpless baby and mom wasn't able to do that entirely on her own, particularly if she had like totalism everybody else around her. Initially women helped each other with kin and that was fine for about just over a million years. And then about half a million years ago, our brains took a massively began and suddenly just relying on your sisters, your grandmother, your mom, whoever it might be, wasn't enough. And actually, our species was threatened with extinction because these babies were not surviving.

And so what happened, whoops, what happened next was that the next genetically related person had to step in, and that was dad. Now this was a big thing for mammals, for a mammal, because only 5% of mammals actually have investing for this, so we're really rare, and we're actually the only ape that does it. So this was a big, big evolutionary step for a mammal to take, for dad to stick around. But if dad hadn't stuck around, the species I would argue would have died out, because there were all these babies and none of them were surviving and none of those genes were carrying on jam the generation. So we would have hit a really difficult demographic problem. Lots of interesting things there. First off, if it wasn't for the width of women's hips, how long do you think they would just date for?

We don't really know, but it's probably getting to maybe pushing towards elephantine levels. So it'll need for 18 months. Yeah, if not slightly longer, because you've got a big brain to grow in there. And that takes a lot of energy and it takes a lot of time. So there is a... It's not quite an arms race, but it is an evolutionary trade off between how much mum needs to walk and how long the child needs to just

state for. Yes. Yes. And the way we dealt with that and the way we dealt with this demographic nightmare is we birthed our babies earlier and earlier and earlier. And that's why when you look at a chimp baby, it's like bounding around the trees after week. And you're gonna human baby and oh my god, you've got years before it's gonna be doing that. Just to puddle for the next two years. Yeah, exactly. If any of you know, if anyone's looked after a newborn baby, you know how unbelievably helpless they are. And that was the trade-off. But that meant that in the classic statement, it then started to take a village to raise a child,

because you suddenly had this kid who was helpless, but was growing this enormous brain that was going to need loads and loads of support. And MPI, male parental investment, just to really, really drive this home, how rare this is. 95% of all mammal species have zero male parental investment and none of the other ape family do. Like we are really outlier. And the reason for that and that's why we then go on to this argument of how important fathers are because if fathers hadn't been important and if they weren't still important, they just wouldn't have evolved. They just wouldn't have evolved because evolution hates what we call redundancy. So what it doesn't do is it doesn't invent

or cause to evolve two roles, which are identical or near each other unless they're really needed. So it wouldn't have caused a human father to evolve unless he was absolutely critical for this rival of the species. It just doesn't work like that. So, you know.

Go back 750,000 years ago. What would the typical father have done? The typical father, 750,000 years ago, would have probably acted very much like a chimp father and would probably have probably side several children with several different females because reproductive success in terms of evolution the only thing that's important is reproductive success. How many kids are you having? Are they surviving? Are they themselves

reproducing? Okay, so before we had investing fathers, before dad had to do that he would have been spreading his seat because that would have increased the likelihood of reproductive success. But we got to this tipping point where he was doing that and oh my God, none of them were surviving. Okay, so actually your reproductive success is pretty much zero. And so evolution will have selected for those men who stuck around and actually started investing,

but the problem is you get to the point where a man you could say, well, he could just carry on, you know, sarring several children with several different women. But the problem you have is that first of all, he wants paternity certity. So if he's doing that, that means all the other, that means the women who he is mating with are also mating with other men. And then you've got this conundrum of, oh my God,

I am now possibly investing in someone else's child and I don't really wanna do that. So the way I deal with this isundrum of, oh my God, I'm now possibly investing in someone else's child, and I don't really want to do that. So the way I deal with this is I do a thing called make guarding, which a lot of primates who do couple up do, and I'm going to stick by the female side, but if you stick by the female side, you're not meeting with anyone else, and you slowly move into this thing

where we have for a greater or lesser period of time, what we call parental monogamy, and that the father sticks with the woman, only mates with that woman, only makes for that woman and helps to raise the children because that's the only way his genes are going to survive. So I got sent something by Mackin Murphy early on. This is really interesting. So this is a pushback against alpha male sort of hyperandruitate approach as being what's classed as reproductive success. And a tweet from him says, I've always been skeptical of sexual partner counters and measure of male reproductive success.

In our species, concealed ovulation and contraception make it rather unlikely that a man will produce children through anything other than long term committed relationships. And it got me thinking about how this is reflected ancestrally as well, that spreading your seed around, even the most alpha of alpha males, it doesn't track using wolves or chimp tribes or silverback gorillas as the model for us because the children come out in a very different sort of way. And as you identified, and anyone that's read the APO understood the universe knows,

humans are grandchildren optimizing machines. That's the thing that needs to happen. Once you get to the stage of grandchildren, sweet, like I hands are off the wheel, so to speak. But yeah, I think it's a really nice reframe. And it also maybe explains, I don't know how long 500,000 years is evolutionarily pretty long time, but I think a lot of men feel in them a little conflict that, you know, they want dad, but they want Chad in their own life. They want to kind of, and there is a battle that I see amongst my friends, I'm 35, and I'm seeing these formative generates

start to calm down a little bit. But they still have this sort of vestige of what they used to be, but they have this desire for what they want to become. And I almost see, perhaps, the 750,000 year ago version of them battling with the 250,000 year old version of them. And I do think, you know, think, who's going to give men sympathy for poor party boys, starting to settle down? The adult infant, the juvenile, that really needs to grow up. I'm on board. I've been around enough of these, these are my friends. But it's interesting to see the knobs and the dials start to get tweaked a little bit.

We talk a lot about the change for women they've hit and uncharitably hit the wall, or largely just, I realize that this is now the time for me to settle down. No one really ever talks about the equivalent with men. And I do think that I see it in my friends. I need to grow up. I need to stop being such an adult infant.

Yeah, absolutely. And in fact, I do have a colleague in Finland who does study male baby lust. And it's something that again, we don't talk about. We talk about ticking clocks for women and the fact that they get this sudden insatiable desire to have children. But men have it too. And it's partly because as you go, as you age, your testosterone naturally declines anyway. And so, what testosterone is really, really good at in high volumes is helping you find

a mate. It's really good at focusing your attention on that scene. It's really good at giving you all those features which women find attractive. It makes you very driven about finding a mate. But as you age, actually, it declines. And it's a natural decline. And you start to focus more upon having a family. The other great thing about it, which is the fascinating thing about testosterone, is when you do become a father for the first time, it drops significantly, like really significantly up to a third. And it will never

return to the pre-birth level, as long as you remain in contact with your child. So testosterone is a very powerful hormone, but I think it's until very recent, we didn't realize how important it was in shaping fatherhood, shaping human fatherhood. Yeah, so there's an interesting parallel, I think going on here that what was needed and sastrally was resources and protection,

primarily I'm going to guest from a father. Like if you're spending 20 hours a day with an infant in your arms, it's hard to go picking berries or taking down a will to beast. Similarly, you are physically more frail and the child is unbelievably frail, therefore you need someone to play the bodyguard hypothesis. I think your ex-boss told me on this podcast, Robin Dunbar. So I think that there is an equivalent change that's happened culturally, socioeconomically in the modern world, which almost reverses this.

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

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

last 15 years is that your children do need you. So actually it's not about as a woman, I've got my own money, I can protect myself, you know, da, da, da, da, da, it's not about as a woman, I've got my own money, I can protect myself, you know, da, da, da, da, da, da, it's actually but your kid needs the input from that father because actually what fathers bring to their children is very different from what mothers do. And when I started 15 years ago, the mantra was, fathers had no role in child development because mothers were the environment of raising that child mostly. She was the major input into that child's life and therefore you didn't need that around really and we have found Again, not surprising from an evolutionary point of view that fathers actually have a very separate

unique and important input into their children's development and if you don't have that Then first of all it has to be found from somewhere else So actually the argument from feminists or women or whatever it should be shouldn't be I don't need this man The question should be yes, but just your child need this man. Exactly. That's what he's there for. So maybe you don't want to partner in your life. Okay, fine, co-parent. You know, okay, you can live separately. This is fine. You don't have to be romantically involved. You don't have to have any financial aid. You don't need to ask him for any protection. But what about the kid? Just, but what about the kid? Just fundamentally, what about the kid?

And I think that's the argument. Yeah, a lot of men and dads are feeling quite surplus for requirements now, I think. You know, we had this as you identified bit of uncertainty around fathers, I think. I had this really very formative conversation in a group couple of months ago, just before we I found out that I was going to have a chat with you. And it was so timely because I'm thinking about this and the role of dads and so on and so forth.

And it was a mastermind filled with a couple of billionaires and a bunch of millionaires. So these people, monetarily in terms of resources, are very, very successful. And they said, like, let's just do a round table. We've all eaten dinner. Does anybody have any challenges that they're facing personally or professionally throw them out into the group? And I think there was one round, one sweep that went round. And on the second one, this guy said, my wife is six months pregnant, seven months

pregnant. All that she's talking about is the baby and I don't feel anything and I feel ashamed. At the fact that I'm not, like when's this cascade of hormones going to come? Is it gonna come when the baby arrives? What if it doesn't? What if I'm not meant to be a dad?

You know, I want kids and I can't wait to have kids, but I don't feel anything and I'm scared of telling her. Maybe she's gonna think I'm less of a man. I'm not going to be a good father. Maybe she's gonna think I'm less of a man. I'm not going to be a good father. Maybe she's gonna wanna leave me. There was just like pouring out of this guy, self-doubt and concern and shame and guilt and terror. And I really touched me.

This guy opened up and sat right across. The guy equally successful with three kids. And he said, same for me, same for me. Just hold on, it will come. It's going to take longer. But the point being, you know, when we're talking about men and dads feeling surplus to requirements, there is a, it's a very vicious sort of double-ended sword that's happening here where culture is maybe feeding an increasing narrative that women can survive without dads and dads at surplus requirement and we don't want to make the

single-parent household people feel uncomfortable. And what that does is it slots almost perfectly into these fears that fathers innately have. So you have this almost sort of extrinsic and intrinsic narrative being woven together that certainly to the guy that was sat next to me, it played right into the fears that he already had. And it didn't make him feel like he was any more secure. Yeah, absolutely. And that's why in a way, I do the work I do, and I publish the work I do in a helpful format. So that's why I wrote my book,

and that's why we have to get this information out there about dads, because what he was feeling is completely and utterly normal. I can think of only maybe three or four men that I've studied who haven't had that concern and I've studied many, many men in this process. And the other guy at the table was right, it will come. But we don't tell men that, you know, we hear this thing of, oh, the baby will come out

and you'll feel amazing and you'll feel adated and it'll be amazing and you'll need to love them. Probably not. And actually, quite a lot of women don't feel like either, let you into a little secret. But it's because we can explain that. We can explain that. Mum, when she's pregnant, is there's raging hormones everywhere. When she gives birth, she's got a massive flood of hormones which help her give birth, actually, but as a side effect are amazing bonding hormones. So we've got obstetase,

and we've got dopamine, we've got beta endorphin in there. Accelerating the bond, she's going to build with that baby. And that's done partly because babies are tough and you don't want us to leave it on the hillside. So, okay, let's give us some really good chemicals, side effects, and she will. Dads can only build their bond because they don't go through that physiological process. They don't breastfeed, for example. They have to build their bond through interaction. Okay, so for example, the drop in testosterone doesn't occur and tell the baby is born.

So that's first of all a big tough thing. So you're not getting this drop in testosterone which makes you more motivated to care for the baby and also releases more of an effect from your bonding hormones. High testosterone blocks the effects of bonding hormones. Okay. So if you drop the, you get much more of an effect of oxytocin and dopamine and things like that. So he's not getting that head start during pregnancy He has to wait for the baby to be born then you get this baby who's born if your partner is breastfeeding Then basically in those first few weeks there's very little way in Because she's breastfeeding the babies are there a sleep or it's crying or whatever it might be and it's very latched on to mom

And that's a really tough period. I've had dads who very much that has driven them to postnatal depression. Okay. So it's very serious. Farthest can get postnatal depression as well. Oh my god, yet the rate is about 10% and it's genuinely postnatal depression. And again, that's something we need to talk about and highlight for men. So what I always say to men is I explained them physiologically what's happening. I say to them, you build your bond during interaction and those first weeks babies not doing anything, so that's really hard. If you can, find a way in.

So maybe your thing is baby massage before bed, maybe your thing is giving it a bath, maybe your thing is reading a story even if it doesn't understand you, it still works. Find your thing and it's your thing. Nobody else's thing, okay? And try and do it every day. But until your baby starts to interact with you and tell you, they start smiling and babbling and laughing and looking please see you and then it's six months they start playing with you and then you can do rough and tumble playing and all these wonderful things. And tell that time, it's going to be tough, but it will come. But we don't tell that so they sit there thinking,

either baby doesn't like me or oh my god I'm not feeling anything for this baby or and or you know mom's really good at this Why am I so awful at this? How come she's got a bond? How come she knows what's going on? I don't know what's going on. So they build this massive, massive pressure and actually we just need to tell them we just need to say this is normal and the fact that you were talking at a man's group, that's brilliant. You know, we have in the past set up, and tinatal groups

just for men. And they are amazingly powerful. And tinatal groups. Yes. So, so prenatal groups before the baby is born. So in the UK, you know, you go to those and you go with your partner and mum's there and very little is focused on dad. And dads tend to not voice to their fears and those environments because they are there as like the supporter and the rock and then it's going to send things. But if you get them, she's the one that's going through. Yeah, exactly. And they're all about supporting mum.

What can you do to support mum? But actually, if you do a man's group and particularly if you bring in men like what happened on your evening where there's a dad there who goes it's okay. They open up amazingly and they will tell you all their fears and all this and then having some experienced dads there is really powerful because they will turn around and go that happened to me but I can assure you it's all fine. And they can ask all the silly questions that they think a silly and they're not going to ask in front of a load of women and also most anti-natal teachers are women and it's just

a really powerful thing to do. But we have to prepare these fathers. You're like saying to them, you do all this preparation for a moment, you read all these books and they say how to support mom and how to do this and that's really important. I get that. But there's very little out there that actually says, and what about that? Because he is actually going through a profound emotional, biological, physiological change as well. It's just not quite as obvious, because there's not a big bump, you know? But actually, his brain is changing just as much as hers. We know that now from scans. You know, we can see the change in a man's brain when he becomes a father. But we just need to share the knowledge, I think. And that's why

it's very important to me to do a lot of talks, to do a lot of podcasts, to share the knowledge, I think. And that's why it's very important to me to do a lot of talks, to do a lot of podcasts, to write the life of dad, because I want, and that's written for fathers, because I wanted them to have a book that wasn't about supporting mom, that wasn't about what's happening to mom, there was about what's happening to them,

because I think that's really important. You've mentioned about this adjustment in Androgens, so Testosterone drops. It actually drops a little, I think, when really important. You've mentioned about this adjustment in Androgens, so testosterone drops. It actually drops a little, I think, when you get into a committed relationship and then it drops a little. It does a little, and then it's true, yeah, exactly. And then it's dramatic again. What's going on with grey matter? What's happening to our brains?

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

let's say I do that, some of them related to executive function, they also increase in size. So you see all these areas becoming primed so that you are as good at this as you possibly can be and we see that happening in men and in women. I wonder if the hardcore productivity pill is corner of the internet, gets a hold of this conversation and finds out that their executive function can be increased by having kids. They might be having children.

That would be everyone's having children, yeah. Having children is a productivity hack. No, they'll say, look, they'll think about how much I'm gonna be able to parallel process my Google calendar is going to be completely put together. You're just being an naked, but anyway. Yeah, the true. Yeah, the sweep offset may, may derogate that.

Talk to me about this risk detection and stuff and fear stuff because there's these videos on the internet. It's, it's like dad's doing unbelievable things. The child's dicking about on the corner of the couch and falls off and this father gets some Odell Beckham, Jr. reverse crow grip thing or like they pluck them before a random tractor accident occurs or whatever, you know, like,

so there's this increase in that, but does this mean that parents, specifically, dads, but also mothers, is there baseline anxiety? Is that raised? Does this bleed across into the rest of their life, too? Do they have a sense of fear, anxiety, stress, whatever occurring as well? We do tend to, it's part, it's quite a complex, multifactorial thing. You do see an increase in cortisol and young parents, obviously. It is a very stressful thing to do, not only with a lack of sleep, but also with the sheer

amount of learning you need to do. And, in fact, yes, you have to have this heightened risk detection. We do find that men, and it's probably to do with the job and test-octrine, definitely become more emotional in situations which they feel relate to them. So, I always get my dad's like, oh my god, I now can't watch charity appeals on the telly, you know, without crying. And it's partly because you have a job. So it's emotional, but it's it's emotional in a sad direction. It's not like they get more aggressive emotional. No, they tend not to actually. That's probably because there's a drop in test testosterone. So we don't see in some male other animals who don't tend to do the caring side, but tend to do, for example,

defense of the nest. We will see more aggressive behaviour. That tends to be caused by the increase in a hallmark called vasopressin, which actually isn't terribly important in humans. Men have kind of replaced that with oxytocin. So we don't tend to see increases in aggression, but we do tend to see increases in stress response when we see increases in, yeah, vigilance, basically just sheer vigilance for what's going on.

Yeah, that's very interesting. Okay, so let's roll the clock forward. This imaginary father and his imaginary sleep deprivation has got to maybe three to six months in, and the baby's a little bit less of a puddle on the floor. I've heard this story of, you know, it's very important for the child to lie on the father's chest, skin to skin contact. How much of this is bro science and how much of this is legit? Absolutely, legit. If there's one thing I will tell a father after birth is put that baby on your chest. Still here, even though we've spent years trying to educate the medical establishment, we still

find that fathers aren't offered it as routine, which is ludicrous. And we still have to say to them, you have to be assertive enough to ask for it and say, please give me the baby, I want to put the baby on my chest. The reason for that is, human babies are sensory beings, like a lot of little baby mammals. They do everything. Their senses are very heightened. One of the senses that's not heightened is vision, but they are amazing at smelling. They're amazing at feeling and touch.

So if you put them on your chest as a father, what happens is they, first of all, they smell you. They start to smell who you are because they can't really see you. Secondly, a wonderful thing called bar behavioural synchrony happens. So when you put a baby on your chest, their physiology starts to go into time with your physiology. So they'll come to the same temperature as you. That heart rate will come to the same heart rate as you. Their blood pressure will come to the same blood pressure as you. Also, touch is the key release of bondage hormones. Oxytocin dopamine beta and Dorphin,

if you want to release those, the best thing you can do is use touch. So skin to skin contact after birth, skin to skin contact at any point during the baby's life is really, really critical for fathers. So it's something that's routinely given to women, but not to men, and actually, in a way, arguably it's more critical for men,

because moms got that little bit of head start with her bonding home, it's having gone through Charlotte. But it's really critical, as the first interaction between a father and child, I think. Robin taught me about the release of bonding hormones when finger-over-skin movement is kept at at 2cm per second or less. Yeah, there's a particular rhythm and it's why we find some touch or some striking irritating and some striking really lovely. And I suppose you know, you might have a partner who strikes and sometimes you're like, no, that's really.

And it's usually because it's at the wrong frequency. You have these special hairs and special nerve cells in our skin and it's just a very particular strength rate. That works. Apparently that was, if you run that back and you look at the primatology side of it, it's a pace at which it would be quick enough

to be able to find and groom for. But if it was any quicker than that, you're not going through and actually being able to pick out whatever the things are. Okay, so we've spoken about some of the challenges that both dads and mums face. What is the difference in the roles that mums and dads are supposed to play? Why are they here when it comes to the raising of children? Okay, so we have to, this is where it can all get horribly political and I can be miscreated horribly and picked up by both sides of the argument. For an evolutionary point of view, as I mentioned earlier, evolution

hates redundancy so it will not cause two roles like parenting roles to be exactly identical if they're not if that's not required. So what's happened in human evolution is that there are some things that both parents do. So both parents are care, both parents are highly empathetic. If you look at the brain activity and the brains of mothers and fathers when they're interacting with their children, we see equal, we see synchrony in empathetic areas of the brain, we see synchrony in the care-taking areas of the brain. But beyond that, there are some really distinct differences, and they seem to relate partly

to the evolutionary age of the two roles, and partly to the fact that mum's role is quite biologically constrained. Partly by childbirth, partly by breastfeeding, particularly in the early stages where dad's role is much more flexible. So what we have found is that if we look at peak activations in the brain when we're looking at interactions with mum, dad and baby, the peak activations in the maternal brain are in the core of the brain. So the limbicare of the brain, the unconscious brain, very, very, very ancient is all this time. And that's where nurturing is and attachment is and risk detection is. So there's really fundamental caring things. So you know, you look at the tiniest little bowl or mouse and it's got the same

thing happening in its brain. Dad's obviously that bit lights up but the peak in activation is actually in the neocortex, the, oh, the newest bit of the brain which is understandable because it's an evolutionarily quite young fatherhood. And there we see a lot of activation in the social cognition areas of the brain. So that's at the front of the brain and that's to do with being able to sort of maneuver your way through the complexities of social life. And there is lots of different things involved in that so it might be social communication. It might be things like empathy. It might be things like what we call sharing, caring, and helping. But it can also be things like resilience, mental resilience. And so dad's role, I've kind of reduced it in a simple catchphrase, but that's where all this has scaffold the child's entry into the world beyond the family. So what dad is there to do is once all that very initial nurturing has happened and the

baby starting to grow and maybe mum has another baby is to take that child and this is what would have happened 500,000 years ago. Take that toddler and start to prepare them to go beyond the family. So the first thing they might do is go to preschool. We know from research that the attachment to farther builds with their child, the sensitivity of their parenting to that child is the biggest predictor in how well that child transitions into preschool. So how good are they?

How good are they at sharing caring and helping? How good is their social communication? How good is their emotional sharing caring and helping? How good is their social communication? How good is their emotional inhibition and regulation? Those are all driven mostly by the relationship that child has with their father. Because it seems to me that dad is the key to this. And what's really interesting is, as an anthropologist, I study fathering around the world.

So obviously, how a culture views father does vary. And we have certain views in the West, and those aren't necessarily the views shared around the world. But what we do see is regardless of whatever culture you're in, every dad is doing that social scaffolding. When you reduce everything away, that's what he's doing. So it might be, you know, studied a group in Kenya called the Kip Sigis, who are tea planters,

quite a patriarchal community, very male driven. But dad will take, well first of all, as soon as the child is able, he will take the child into fields to teach them how to use the crop. But the most important thing he does is he takes them to the market and he teaches them how to build the social network that's going to enable that kid to negotiate and sell the tea. So he will do that. Even in the West we do that. Dad might be, might get their really good work experience gig because he's built a really good network on the golf course or at the country club or wherever it might be. And so dads are very involved in making sure their kid has the network, has the social skill, has the resilience to actually survive in our

world. And part of that resilience is things like taking appropriate risk, helping, you know, helping them deal with challenge, helping them deal with failure. And we see that from very early age, that's what Ruff and Tumble play does partly. And so dad is there to make sure this kid has the skills to survive outside the family. And that seems to be the key role of fathers. What is the role of challenge? That seems to be one of the key differences that you've found between mum and dad.

Yeah, the role for challenge is because, you know, we live in a really difficult world. And you as a child and as an adolescent have to learn to deal with that challenge, navigate that challenge, get over it, deal with failure, dust yourself down, get yourself back up, maybe find a different way around it or whatever it might be. And you need to be given those challenges in a way as a child, which is challenging, but not too much.

And that's difficult. Some parents shirk away from that completely and it's the whole cotton wool ball thing. I love this might go a little bit too far, but it's really important your child confronts challenge and it seems to be that dad is the key one in doing that and it starts because of Ruff and Tumble play. So Ruff and Tumble play starts it around six to nine months.

It's when you see fathers and most fathers do this and most people recognize it. It's when you, you know, it's quite robust, it's quite physical, there'll be wrestling, there'll be tickling, there'll be running around, there'll be jumping off stuff, there'll be throwing each other around the room. And it's really critical to child development. When dad say to me, what's the one thing I can do with my child to build our bonds, to help my child, I'll say play with them. It is the most critical thing. And this whole fun parent thing, kind of annoys me a little bit,

because actually when dads do it, they're not, I mean, it's fun, but they're not doing it because they're fun parent, they're doing it because it actually, developmentally, is critical to the child, because the child starts to learn about reciprocity and social relationships. Play has to be fun for both people, otherwise it's, you know, it descends. So it's that give and take of play. It's understanding,

you know, am I actually pushing the other person too much that they're not enjoying this anymore? So empathy isn't for. It's about physical challenge. Oh my god, this is quite difficult, but I know this amount of it. It's about risk. How can I assess risk? Actually, flinging myself off of the top of this climbing frame might be too much. much. So Anna actually starts to build the child's ability to see all those things. And that just goes on throughout life. So we know looking at adolescence, that the biggest factor in a child's mental health when we look at the parental input is actually the relationship they have with their dad. Dad is like the superhero of mental resilience in adolescence. For boys and girls. For boys and actually for girls, it's even more

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

what does play do for the father or for the bond with the father beyond the child in isolation? I know risk, I know reciprocity, I know empathy. Yeah. Okay. So it's one of the key ways that fathers build their bond is through play, because as I've said, you have to interact with your child. And one of the key ways you can do bond is through play because as I've said you have to interact with your child and one of the key ways you can do it is through a fron tumble play because because it's fast and it's breathless and it's exercise and it's touch and sometimes it's a little bit of pain. It releases a lot of oxytocin and particularly beta andor from which is your body's pain killer and it's released during exercise and those are really powerful bonding chemicals and because it's so fast and so in a way time efficient it does it in this soup top way. So you could

give your baby a massage and that would be lovely and they get some beach or anything, they get some oxytocin. But if you rough and tumble play with them, it's much, much more an impact, much high levels of those chemicals. So it's actually a really good way of building a tight bond pretty quickly with a child. What's really, really interesting is Ruff and Tumble play is mainly a Western phenomenon. We do see it in other cultures, but it's rarer, and that is because most fathers in Western cultures don't have much time with their children. They are time poor because of

the culture we have, and they're the primary breadwinner. And therefore, this is developed to enable them to very quickly bond with their children and sign efficient money. High ROI strategy for bonding. Yeah, yeah. Whereas if we go and look at, let's go and look at the Acker, okay, who are in the Congo, they are the most hands-on fathers in the world. They spend at least about 55 to 60% of their day in actual physical contact with their children. They don't really do it, but they are with their children all day. They're carrying them, they're singing to them, they're telling them stories, they're going on the net hunt with them.

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

of play per day does. No, we don't really see any difference actually in terms of bonding, in terms of attachment, in terms of adjustment of children. The only difference actually between something like the Aka and maybe some Western fathers is the degree to which they will allow their children to confront risk. So, little Aka baby, little Aka toddlers are walking around with knives. It's a hunter-gatherer society. They don't quite

have the same, I don't know, lack of tolerance for severe risk and actually children learning skills early on. So actually that's really the only difference you see with them is that they're there, you know, lighting fires and carrying knives and doing all these things at a very young age, which probably most of us was kind of bulked out, but they seem to be fine. Roll the clock forward then.

Let's get into adolescence and the particularly useful role of dads when we get there. Yeah. So adolescence is a key time and it's a time when we see a lot of rewiring of the adolescent brain. So when you go through puberty, there's a lot of dewiring, rewiring and it's a difficult time for children. It's a particularly different time, mental health wise because we're starting to see a

change in the focus of attachment from parents to peers. And that means that actually your ability to navigate the social world at that point is really, really critical. And we see a lot of the mental health issues that young people have manifest themselves within the social sphere. So things like social anxiety, for example, things like body issues, they tend to be within the social sphere caused partly by the society in which the child lives. And because of that, it seems to be that because dad is the one that has these skills to scaffold the child, and also the person who has been like the

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

really interesting is, is how children view whether or not their parents value them, difference between moms and dads. So do you want to think their mom values them? If their mom remembers their favorite breath of cereal, or you know, makes sure their sports kit is packed, or all that kind of thing, they value their dads because they feel their dad values them because he spends time with them. And that might be because dad's time is seen as this very concertina thing.

So it's about doing those things with the child. It's about having a secure attachment to the child. And secure attachment starts as soon as birth begins, but if you can maintain that secure attachment all the way through to adolescence, it's really, really powerful. And we know that what you do with your kid as an adolescent as a father carries them well into young adulthood. So they've been studies showing that dads who have good secure attachments who spend time with their children, for us all those kids have much higher self-esteem, they're much less likely to have things like depression or anxiety, they're much less likely

to report loneliness. But as a young adult, for us start the mental health is better, but also, for example, just dealing with things like stressful things in their daily life. They are much more capable of dealing with those things. So why am I thinking? Yeah. I've got it in my head about trying to fold into the discussion of teen girl depression, it's 60% of 12 to 16 year old US females say that they have regular, persistent feelings of hopelessness, etc, etc, etc.

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

which means that he's not spending as much time with kids. But yeah, looking at the pathologies and challenges that young men and young women are facing as they get into adolescence and then young adulthood, can you draw lines between a fatherless homes or a lack of male parental input into raising kids up? Do you know what? You've mentioned so many different factors there and they will all be important because it's a multifactorial problem. I want to make two points. The first is that we need to be very careful about what we mean when we talk about a father.

Okay. In the West, we associate the word father with biological father and so we talk about father absence because the biological father is not in the home or not in the life of the child. If you look at other cultures in the world, that obsession with biological fatherhood is a little bit strange. So in some societies the biological father doesn't really factor at all, particularly in matriarchal societies. In many societies they have what's known as a social father and that can be a grandfather in uncle, an elder brother, lots of people. So in South Africa for example, it's quite normal within black communities for the grandfather to raise the children because the father has to go away to work.

And that's perfectly normal. And the grandfather has a special name for father. In some societies, kids have whole teams of fathers who will do something different. And that might be the biological father and the load of social fathers. Who knows. So I think we need to be very careful about talking about absentee fathers because actually if you look at many children who are in single parent households with a mother, if you ask them who are the significant men in your life, they will come up with some. And we assume there is no father figure in their life, but that father figure doesn't have to be the dad, it could be the grandparent, it could be a teacher, it could be a coach,

it could be a brother, it could be your mom's best friend. It doesn't have to be the biological father, it has to be someone who is willing to, and might even not even consciously know what they are doing, but they are feeding into that child's development. So first of all, I would make that point, that we are very biased in the West towards biological fathers and we needn't be. Secondly, it's very multifactorial. Certainly, I think part of the reason I support fathers in relation to more equality in the home with things like paternity leave and things like that is because they are important to children and they are important to child to fellowmen. We find that children who have more input from their father do tend to be more resilient

and they do tend to be more successful outcomes, particularly girls. So that is the factor having that father figure in your life. And that's why we do try and fight here in the UK for more rights for fathers. But then again, I agree social media is an issue. And I talk about that in a very different area of my life, talking about the mismatch between the speed of evolution of the human brain and the speed of our ability to innovate. So we have a very, very ancient brain that can't cope with the way we've innovated the iPhone, for example.

We are not made to operate within that environment and it's a major, it hand-to-caps our brain's ability. We don't get all those lovely positive bonding hormones. We don't, we are seeing something that quite often is lying to us and we're not terribly good at spotting what's lying to us if it's not right in front of us. So theory of mind, we are not very good at theory of mind at a distance. So social media certainly has a role, I think, but it's not the only role and it really does depend upon the child. So there's a real interplay between a child's personality and social media. So you will get a child,

you could get one child who was on social media eight hours a day and would be completely unaffected by it. And then you'll get another child who is more vulnerable. It's really, really complicated. But I think the reason why I try and I pick the fatherhood a bit of it is because kids have evolved to have these two roles in their lives. And the science shows us that the dads are primed to do this well. The science shows us that the fathers are important developmentally to their children.

We know that where fathers have secure attachments to their children, the children have better outcomes. And we know that that's good for society. So the reason why I fight for fatherhood and more equality in the home is because of that and because it is good for children. It's good for fathers, it's good for families and it's good for society. It's good for women. If you can get fathers, if you can get equal paternity leave for fathers with maternity leave, women can go back to work sooner.

They have less of a career penalty. They're then sharing what we call the career penalty with the fathers. The gender pay gap reduces. So it's kind of for those of us who campaign and do the research of fathers, it's kind of a no brainer, but convincing governments is another issue. Yeah, why is it the case given that the mothers want the best outcomes for their children? Mothers also want the best outcomes presumably for themselves. These are facilitated through making men more integrated, through making them more necessary into the raising of children.

Is it just short-sightedness and a lack of insight into your work that's causing a kind of anti-dad surplus of requirements, male narrative at the moment culturally, do you think? There are several things. Our media culture hasn't changed enough, so we still, it's getting better. We have less representations of the complete useless dad, or the surplus dad in Advert, Sontelli and sitcoms, but it's still there. It's a very ingrained belief. Homer Simpson, Peter Griffin.

Oh, you know, and if you've ever watched Pepper Pig, I mean, I love Pepper Pig. Daddy Pig is just the worst representation of fatherhood you've ever seen. He's completely useless. And that's funny. So there's that. There's, there is, and I am feminist to my very core. Unfortunately, there is an element of feminism that doesn't want men to be involved. And they want the primacy of the woman to be kept as a parent. And they feel that men are moving into what is a female space. Now, if you look at the evolutionary story and you look at the science,

that's obviously completely ludicrous, but it's a belief. And I have had quite, I've had backlash from fellow women because of the work I do because I should be studying mothers as a woman. So there is that backlash. Governments just don't want to invest in it.

We've had the system, we've had for such a long time. It doesn't matter, I can hit them over the head with my research and my book, to I'm blue in the face. And we have all been doing it recently in the UK. We've had a massive consultation on paternity leave. We all troops up to Parliament, we all presented everything, which has been, you know, it's highly, highly convincing. We can show you the child outcomes, we can show you how much, because ultimately it's all about money. We can

show you how much the government will ultimately save. But first of all, they're not going to save that money for like three decades. So this current government, I'm not interested because I will be well-retired by then. And they've just come out the end and changed practically nothing. There is a real reluctance to do it, you know, even though we've got perfect examples from Northern Europe where it works very, very well. Yeah, it's a shame. It's a shame. It's a shame. I've been having a lot of conversations. I had a lot of conversations about dating for a long time and now I'm having a lot about the role of men and masculinity and what it means to be a man and so on and so forth. And yeah, it's unfortunate that any gains for men as seen as a loss for women, you know,

there's zero summinus to a lot of the conversations. And yeah, what else? What if people said, you're this self-confessed feminist with her bonafide's out front, writing a book about men and dads and saying that we need to give them more budget and more attention and more care and more sympathy and more resources? What's the pushback being like? The pushback is, the pushback is I quite often get the response, quite an angry response, so every now and then I get called in to do radio phonons, and quite often I will get somebody on the phone saying to me, these men, you know, haven't given birth, they haven't gone through the pain of

it, particularly if you're talking about postnatal depression actually, they should all just pull themselves together, so that's a classic, that there are limited resources and all those resources you should go to women. And I can kind of see that argument here with the NHS. But what really gets me is the lack of empathy, because empathy doesn't cost anything. It's limitless. But we have to pay the zero sum game with empathy as well.

So if we give any empathy to men, then women get less. No, actually, that's not what happens. We're just empathizing with both of them. Why is it that it's seen as a loss that you're supporting a man? You can actually support both. It's amazing, but you can't. So you very much get that attitude that you give to one, you're taking away from the other. And I find that astonishing. When people say particularly they pulled themselves together, I said, would you ever say that to a woman who was struggling? So why do you think it's okay to say that to a man?

But it's very ingrained. I think they feel threatened. I think they feel threatened by what it means about their identity. It doesn't mean anything about their identity, but I think they think it does. It means we're taking some sort of primacy away from them, I think, maybe. I had a conversation, I've had a few conversations, but Dr. John Barry from the Center for Male Psychology can be thinking about something. So I'm going to read you a little excerpt from one of my newsletters recently.

A common question is, why don't men just do better? Surely they can try harder in school, employment, and health. Chop chop men hurry up and stop being so useless. Well, no other group is told that when they suffer with poor performance or accolades in the real world, that they should just pull themselves up by their bootstraps. We don't tell any other group to talk about their problems. Instead, instead we spend billions in taxpayer money and private charity to set up committees, departments, campaigns, and funds to solve the problem. In simple terms, if a woman has a problem, we ask what can we do to fix society? If a man has a problem, we ask what can men do to fix themselves?

And I think that this imbalance, specifically in certain areas, this isn't everywhere, and there are still areas in which the imbalance runs in the other direction. But especially around parenting, there is this empathy gap for sure. Oh yeah, no. Yeah. Dr. John Barrie calls it gamma bias.

I think it's his technical to do for it. And yeah, it sucks. You could have a guy going through postnatal depression being told, you didn't go through the pain of childbirth. Yeah, I wasn't sure that I was going to be a good dad. And now you're telling me that I'm not being sufficiently supportive of that. And he is also, you know, I can remember one of the, one of the guys who I worked with, he was possibly one of the worst cases of postnatal depression I saw. And he was, he, his wife, the, the birth was traumatic.

He was left standing in a room on his own for six hours with the newborn baby. He'd been shoved in the room. The wife had been taken off somewhere. Nobody's told him anything. They didn't give him anything to feed the baby. The baby was screaming. He didn't know what he was doing.

So first of all, he thinks his wife's dying. Nobody tells him what she's dying. And he's left with this baby. Then they get discharged from hospital. And because he only gets two weeks paternity leave, she's in hospital for 10 days. So he's actually home with the baby and the wife who's still very ill for three days.

Then he has to go back to work, leave her on in their own. So he's like, oh my God, feeling horribly guilty, terribly stressed, how is she gonna be on her own? Gets home at night, tries to do everything, stays up all night with the baby, then goes back to work. Then because, you know, now I have to earn more money because I was job, then takes promotion to a new job. So you've got the pressure of trying to impress a new job, learn the new job, still got a sick baby, sick mum, with baby. And surprise, surprise! He gets post-natal depression.

Of course he does. He's got all these different conflicting, you know, with men are told now, you have to be the hands on father and you have to be the perfect father and you have to be really good at this and you've got all these celebrity fathers with their pussas and it's all amazing. But you're also still told, no, but you still have to be the bread winner and you have to be the rock

and you're not allowed to have any emotions about this and you're not allowed to have any fears because this is about what? And so that is a massive pressure cooker of stress. And if you, and then we add on top of that, maybe you might have had a history of depression before or you might have had a history, or let's say your partner's depressed.

If your partner's depressed, you're much more like yourself to get postnatal depression. So it's just this massive, horrible mixture that is going to blow. What would you do if you were able to prescribe some cultural, structural, personal, psychological interventions or suggestions for people either as a group or individually? What do you wish that more people or governments were doing? I wish fundamentally that everybody knew this about men.

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

I wish when with when parents did antenatal training that there was more time spent just with men Helping them and seeing them actually that they need as much support as the mom does, but just in a different way. Okay, they just need a different sort of support and they need a different, because they are fundamentally going through as much as I said before, as much of an emotional physiological change as mom is, it's just hidden. That's all, it's just not as obvious. And so I just wish we could share all this information.

I wish that, you know, when people learn about what happens to the mum, they learn about what happens to dad. And it's just seen as an equal journey. What's really sad is that actually for a lot of couples, it is an equal journey. And actually, mum's find this really hard when they go into hospital and dad shoved in a corner. Well, dad's not asked what he wants to do or not asked to hold the baby or any of these things.

Or when the health visit comes right after birth, you know, and she'll spend a whole time going, how are you, Mum, and we'll never, ever at any point say, how are you dad? How are you doing? Is there anything you all considered about? Would you like to talk about it? You know, because he's just the guy in the corner, you know, making the tea. So I just wish people understood that father's a true coparence, and the true co-parents for a very important reason. And if they weren't important, they wouldn't be here. We just wouldn't have them. We'd be like, you know, our chimp cousins. So, but-

What are you working on next? What's- what's- what's talking to me about? What's fascinating you know? What's really fascinating about in the field of fatherhood actually is, and it's partly slightly personal, um, is, uh, father fathers of kids with special needs, because mums themselves with kids with special needs certainly struggle for support and recognition, but for fathers there's again, even less recognition. And also this role of trying to build resilience and try to scaffold your child's entry into a world beyond the family, that is a whole bigger job when you have a child with special needs. I have a daughter who's recently diagnosed with autism and a big thing for us is, okay, how do we prepare

her to survive in the world? A world which isn't really adapted to her needs. And particularly my husband, particularly going forward into relationships and things like that, that's something that's a real focus for him. How can we give her the ability to detect risk? How can we give her the ability to deal with challenge and to deal with the social complexities, which is an autistic person, it's really hard.

So that's a real key thing for me now. It's a very unre-searched area. And so I'd really like to, you know, start looking at fathers who are in that position, I think. I had the perfect mother for it, though, the perfect mother to be able to go out and do the first-hand research and be able to come up with the strategies. Dr. Animation, ladies and gentlemen, and I absolutely love your work. I think this is very, very,

very important and it's fascinating and any friend of Robbins is a friend of mine as well. Where should people go if they want to keep up to date with your stuff on the internet? You can follow me on Twitter so I'm Dr. Animation on Twitter and you can follow, or you can go to my website which is animation.com and it's all on there. Hell yeah, I appreciate you. Thank you. Thank you. Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh,