Office Hours with Arthur Brooks - The Three Secrets to Raising Great Kids

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Starting point is 00:00:12 Wayfair, every style, every home. I want to talk today about one of the greatest sources of both happiness and unhappiness for many, perhaps most people. And that's being a parent. What are the kinds of things that you think that you need to do so you can have good and happy kids? Should you be lax? Should you be strict or easy?

Starting point is 00:00:30 Should you yell at them a lot? Should you have a lot of rules or not so many? Should they be free range? What are the different styles of parenting? How should you behave? Does it matter at all? What I do? And that's really the nature versus nurture debate. How much of a child's development is due to their genes

Starting point is 00:00:47 rather than their upbringing? It turns out that there are certain things about parenting that not everybody takes into consideration that are really important that most people don't know about. And if you do these parenting things, it'll matter a lot. Hi, friends. Welcome to Office Hours. I'm Arthur Brooks. This is a show about love and happiness. More specifically, about the science of love and happiness,

Starting point is 00:01:18 how you can use the best that has been thought and said in neuroscience, behavioral science, philosophy, wisdom, traditions, put it all together to create a strategy to live a better life and to help other people live a better life as well. This is my personal mission, and I'm so happy and so gratified that you've chosen to spend a little time on this journey with me. I want you to use this in your life, but also to pass it on to other people. That's why I'm doing this show and why I'm so grateful to you for spending this time with me. I hope that you're enjoying the show so far.

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Starting point is 00:02:52 And as always, please, go to the website for all kinds of cool resources, things that you can read things that you can listen to, ways that you can get actually engaged in our movement. Right now, you're like Neo in the Matrix. You can keep scrolling, experiencing a simulation of life, or you can wake up to how your attention is being harvested for profit. It's happening to people all over the world right now. You don't want to be productized like this anymore, but it's hard. Tech addiction is so potent because it's been designed to tap into your dopamine system, Just like heroin, porn, gambling. You've got the cravings. You're addicted.

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Starting point is 00:03:51 Noble Mobile is the phone plan that finally aligns incentives with what's good for you. Use less data, earn money back. And when you do, you'll be living once again in real life. And you're going to like how it feels. I want to talk today about one of the greatest sources of both happiness and unhappiness for many, perhaps most people. And that's being a parent, being a mother or father. Most people will talk about the joys that that brings,

Starting point is 00:04:15 the frustrations that that brings, the fear that that brings is being apparent. And I want to talk about that because I have two questions that I want to ask empirically and that I want to help you. you craft a life strategy around if you have kids are going to have kids, contemplating having kids at some point in the future. Number one, how to be a great and happier parent. And number two, how to raise great kids and indeed happier kids. What are the data say? It's not all chance, as it turns out. Now, of course, this is a huge topic. We could dedicate many episodes to it. We could dedicate a whole podcast to this and in fact, people have. If you like this episode, please tell me and I will do

Starting point is 00:04:55 more on this subject. Parenting is something that I feel very deeply about. It's a very personal issue. As a parent and grandparent, it's something I've done a lot of research on. And in conjunction with romantic partnerships, marriage, these are some of the most important things that we can do. This is really how we live forever in our way. So please let me know if you want to hear more about this. This is just the opening act, if it will be according to you. Now, what do parents care about? What do parents most care about? And this is a question that empirical researchers have asked over the years. If you have children or plan to have them, what do you want? What do you care about the most? What are you most worried about? That was actually asked in a survey last year by the Pew Research Center,

Starting point is 00:05:34 which is one of the most robust and best research organizations for survey-based research. It ranked in order what people most want for their kids and what people are most worried about for their kids. Number one in what they want, the desire of most parents. This is 94% of parents say that they want their kids to be honest and ethical. Interesting, right? Not having a good old time, not being all cheerful. Number one, 94% say this is outranked everything else is I want honest and ethical kids. Number two is one of the most worried about. I should say, what's the number one thing on the worry list? This is 76% of parents in the number one slot is that they're worried that their kids might struggle with depression or anxiety. Now, that probably

Starting point is 00:06:21 wouldn't have been the case 50 years ago because depression has about tripled among adolescents and anxiety has about doubled when we talk clinically, when this is diagnosed actually as psychiatric conditions, mood disorders. So they wouldn't have talked about it in this way, but they would have talked about being worried about their kids and not being happy, which kind of amounts to the same thing. So all together with these data tell us. And once again, I'll put this survey in the show notes so you can go look at it yourself. Is it what most people want overwhelmingly is their kids to be good people and happy people or relatively happy people. That's what most parents want. But in that order, by the way, good people who are also happy.

Starting point is 00:06:58 And those two things are obviously really related. So this is what we're really worried about as parents is what we can do to give our kids the highest odds of being good people and happy people. And I know exactly how this feels in those two categories. You know, I have three kids. Those of you who follow my work might know that I have three. They're all adults. 28, 26, and 23 at this point. And, you know, 10 years ago, they were all teenagers, which was a super fun walk in the park, as you can imagine, having three teenagers at home.

Starting point is 00:07:28 And they were all challenging in their own way. They were all difficult in their own way. And they, oh, they worried Esther and me in their own way. One of my kids, when he was in middle school, he was particularly difficult at one period. They all go through their periods of particular difficulty. And I remember haranguing him constantly about his homework. and his grades, which would become a real problem,

Starting point is 00:07:49 not because he didn't understand, but because he sort of lacked motivation, wasn't living up to his potential. You know, classic. You'd get calls from the school that, you know, he was getting bad grades or, or he might fail a class, or, you know, he didn't show up for his exams or, finally, Esther's like, at least we know he's not cheating,

Starting point is 00:08:05 you know, she's an optimist. But one night after an especially bad day, I was taking stock of the situation, and I came to this realization. I didn't actually care about his grades. I was haranguing him about something I didn't care about. I was using his performance in school as a proxy for what I really cared about, was him becoming a responsible, ethical, faithful, well-adjusted man.

Starting point is 00:08:27 In other words, I wanted him to be good and happy, exactly the qualities that the Pew Research team found in their survey-based data. And that led me as a behavioral scientist to start studying how to do that. So not just hoping and not just using intuition, and not using sort of pop psychology and not just Googling it, I started to do some real, no-filling research. One of the great things about being a behavioral scientist is because it's not research, it's me search,

Starting point is 00:08:54 and it's my family search, as it were. And so I started doing real work on this. And I want to tell you a little bit about what I've found over the years that subsequently I've been able to verify with respect to what I see in the data and what I see in the studies and also what have experienced as I've worked with families in my everyday work.

Starting point is 00:09:13 What are the kinds of things that you think that you need to do so you can have good and happy kids? Should you be lax? Should you be strict or easy? Should you yell at them a lot? Should you have a lot of rules or not so many? Should they be free range? What are the different styles of parenting? How should you behave?

Starting point is 00:09:33 How should you treat them? That's what I looked into. But here's where my research really started. How much does it matter? You know, because this is kind of the baseline of what you would do as a behavioral scientist. You want to know as like, does it matter at all what I do? And that's really the nature versus nurture debate. How much of a child's development and an adolescent's development is due to their genes rather than their upbringing?

Starting point is 00:09:56 Okay. Now, when I was a kid, the psychology literature suggested that nurture was a lot more important than nature. And this has kind of gone back and forth over the years. But there was this blank slate kind of theory that we were tabula rasa or nearly so. and that parenting is what really mattered to mold who they will become as adults. Lots and lots and lots of books came out about that. There's a lot of parenting and child rearing books. I mean, the famous Benjamin Spock book about how to raise babies and children

Starting point is 00:10:26 was really a lot about how to treat them in a particular way so that they will grow up, depending entirely on how you treat them and what you say to them and how you act to become happy and good, good and happy like we talked about before. And I was sort of interested in this to begin with because I didn't know. I didn't know what the current state of the literature was. And by the way, the nature and nurture thing is really interesting because our kids vary with respect to how much nature and nurture are going to work. Let me explain.

Starting point is 00:10:54 As I explained in a past episode, two of my kids are biological and one is adopted. And so this is like a social scientist dream, right? I mean, we didn't do it so that I could get data. I promise you, I'm not that weird. But I wanted to know how the similarities and differences and how they responded to different kinds of, of parenting stimuli would differ with respect to nature versus nurture. Now, it's interesting because my three kids, my two older sons are biological, my daughter's adopted, my youngest, she's now 23.

Starting point is 00:11:21 But they all are like me and my wife, but in different ways. So my oldest son is 28. He thinks just like me. We have complete cognitive similarity. He and I make the same jokes. We have the same sense of humor. And many of the same ways of solving problems. So we're cognitively really similar to each other.

Starting point is 00:11:43 My middle son, we have the same appetites, good and bad. We're attracted to the same kind of stuff, right? You mean, the, you know, the exploding fireworks and, you know, that, whatever it is. I mean, we have the same tendency to be attracted and averse to the same kind of stimuli with the same appetites, what it comes down to. And my youngest daughter, who is adopted, here's where he gets really weird. We have exactly the same interests. We're interested in the same stuff. she specialized in college.

Starting point is 00:12:11 She majored, you don't call it specializations, majoring for Pete's sake. I'm a 30-year academic, I should know this. She majored in psychology with an emphasis on neuroscience. Yeah, and why? Because ever since she was a little girl, we'd have these intense conversations about the stuff that I talk about on this show

Starting point is 00:12:26 and the stuff that I write about. She's really, really interested in that. And she's not technically biologically related to me. So I want to know how much of all of these things are nature and how much of all these things are nurtured. Now, again, the old thinking is it's all nurture and no nature. But that turns out to be quite wrong.

Starting point is 00:12:44 And how do we know this? Because modern research has been able to use quasi-experimental methods on twins, identical twins, those who are, especially those who were separated of birth into separate families, and then given personality tests later on in life. That's not a diabolical experiment. It just kind of happened naturally in the way that adoptions were undertaken, especially between the 1930s and the 1960s in the United States. and they're voluntarily reunited.

Starting point is 00:13:10 There's nothing. There's no ethical problems with the surveys with these experiments, as a matter of fact. And you can see some of these meetings for the first time on YouTube. They're beautiful and funny and really lovely. Imagine you're 40 and you find out for the first time you have an identical twin, how weird that would be.

Starting point is 00:13:28 And seeing people understanding this for the first time and the thrill they took in it, it's actually really, really inspirational. The early studies on this, on these twins were coming in the late 1990s. And so that's just when the thinking started to change, which was really my time coming out as a behavioral scientist. I finished my PhD in 1998.

Starting point is 00:13:49 So the first big study that asked nature versus nurture with respect to personality came at 1996 in the journal of personality. So really an apex journal in psychology. And they were looking at these 123 pairs of identical twins, which have identical DNA. and 127 pairs of fraternal twins which share 50% of their genetic material. So they have 50% in common in their genetic profile. And then they looked across the personality profile.

Starting point is 00:14:20 Now, those of you who have been following this work for a while, you know that we study personality with respect to five dimensions. And the five dimensions are remembered in terms of the acronym Ocean, O-C-E-A-N. This is how you remember it when you're first learning it for the first time in school. O is openness to experience or openness to personality. It's a neophilia is another way to say. Is you like new stuff?

Starting point is 00:14:43 C is conscientiousness. You live, you know, true to your word. E is extroversion versus introversion. That was the first of the personality characteristics. Believe it or not, that was sort of popularized by Carl Jung, the Swiss psychiatrist and the early part of the 20th century. So that was the first of these. A is agreeableness.

Starting point is 00:15:01 You know, that's agreeableness going out of your way not to be disagreeable and to be agreeable with other people. And N is neuroticism, which largely is correlated with sort of melancholy and anxiety, depression and anxiety today. Those particular mood disorders are, and that's a Freudian term is neuroticism. But we keep that in there for the N. So how much of these five personality dimensions are inherited? Oh, openness.

Starting point is 00:15:25 61% inherited. If you have parents who are open to experience, that's going to explain 61% of the variance across the population in openness to experience. among children, right? C, conscientiousness, 44% of your conscientiousness is basically inherited, or the variance is explained by parenting. E, extroversion, 53%. A, agreeableness, 41% and neuroticism, 41% as well. That's a lot. And so it's somewhere between 40, between low 40s and low 60s. So let's just say 50% of your personality is explained by genetics. And the rest is the other 50% is not genetics is what it comes down to.

Starting point is 00:16:14 That's a lot, right? And what that means is that old nurture is not right, at least that we're not blank slates. Okay, you say, all right, great. So it's 50% genetic. That turns out not to be bad news, by the way. Because if you turn out to have a personality you don't like very much, much, don't just say, it's true. My mother did make me unhappy biologically. It just means you need to do more work to work on your personality than somebody who has a personality they like or personality

Starting point is 00:16:45 that's more pleasant, right? There's nothing wrong, but you have to know. If you know your genetic tendency, you can tailor your habits. That's everything that we often do about happiness. If you have a genetic tendency to be gloomy, you need better happiness hygiene. People who are just bubbly and a bullion all the time don't need to do that. But the same thing is true with with the the genetics of your personality. You need to know it, and it's not bad news. I'll talk about this in numerous shows about how you can change that, and I'll talk about that a little bit later here today. Okay, now, the other half, however, you're going to say, okay, fine, I only have half with my, with parenting. It turns out that's not right either, because it's probably

Starting point is 00:17:22 more experience, the individual experience that people have over the course of their lives, which has a lot to do with a lot of things besides parenting. And parenting, per se, in the way that children are parented doesn't make up very much of the other half at all. So this is not from the same set of studies, but here's what really kind of sums it up.

Starting point is 00:17:42 This is an important article that I'll put in the show notes from 2021 from Collabora Psychology, also a really, really good psychology journal that showed that parenting has about as much, on average, explains about as much of the variance in personality as does birth order.

Starting point is 00:18:02 You've seen some of the birth order studies. The first child, the second child, the third child. It's real, but it's actually not that big a deal. It just, it, it, it, it, you kind of see it, but it's really, I mean, I know a lot of people where the first kid is one way, where the first kid is a second way. Everybody knows that the middle child's a problem. Well, not always. Sometimes the middle child is the most responsible of the children. There's, there's, there's stereotypes about this, but they don't really carry very much weight. They just tend to be kind of true, truthy, and the same is true with respect to, parenting. It kind of on average approaches zero percent of explanatory value of the variance in

Starting point is 00:18:39 personality. Okay, so the rest is just the individual experiences that people have, notwithstanding the effect that parents are having over them. And now you're saying, well, man, that's ridiculous. That doesn't make sense at all, or at least it's really unfair that no matter what I do, that it doesn't matter. That's wrong. That's the wrong interpretation. That's the wrong statistical interpretation, but it's also wrong in the following way. These are averages. It turns out that there are certain things about parenting that not everybody takes into consideration that are really important that most people don't know about. And if you do these parenting things, it'll matter a lot. Now, it rounds out across the population to not

Starting point is 00:19:21 mattering very much because most people don't do these things that I'm about to talk about. Okay, so that's what I'm thinking about. Think about it this way. I have a lot of studies that also show, because you know that I'm very interested in the biology of how we build better lives, that dietary supplements, which everybody's talking about, everybody's thinking about, that dietary supplements are very marginal in the way that they affect muscle protein synthesis and hypertrophy, for example. That doesn't mean that no supplements work. It just means that bundles of supplements on average that people are taking, many of which have a very marginal impact on what we do. Some supplements really matter a lot. For example,

Starting point is 00:19:59 people who take relatively high doses of creatine monohydrate but have a really, really good effect, both cognitively and muscle protein synthesis. It's just that on average, not everybody does that. And that's the same thing with respect to parenting. Okay. On average, parenting doesn't have a big effect. But certain things about parenting, if you do them, will. And that's what I really want to focus on, because that's what gets us to the core of what we're trying to get in this episode today. Now, here, let me give you some clues on what the parenting really is. A bunch of pretty interesting patterns emerge from the data with respect to personality, once again. And then we'll go on to happiness and virtue, et cetera.

Starting point is 00:20:39 Big finding in the literature. Children are more conscientious when their parents were more involved in their lives and worked to provide cultural stimulation, such as them taking them to museums. Okay. That's one piece of evidence there, right? Okay. So that's not just genetics. That has to do with particular parenting actions. That's something that the parents were doing.

Starting point is 00:20:59 This is nothing to do with what the parents were saying and only to do what the parents were doing with their kids that affected their conscientiousness. Second, children are more agreeable, significantly more agreeable when their parents raise them with structure and goals. Once again, that's not just saying, be nice. That's raising them with particular structure and goals. They tend to be more agreeable. That's a pretty big conclusion, by the way. That means that we're going to do these things together. We're going to have particular goals.

Starting point is 00:21:27 There's going to be rewards for the goals. we're going to have a structure in the way that you eat, the way that you sleep, when you get up, when you exercise, when you go to school, showing up on time. That actually leads to people becoming more agreeable. And once again, those are the actions modeled by parents, not just what they're telling their kids. This is also true with happiness, for example. One really interesting study of both fraternal and identical twins found that the genetic component from ratings of happiness, largely, I mean, a lot of it is somewhere between four. 44 and 52% genetic. You know, your happiness is 40, 40, 50% genetic,

Starting point is 00:22:04 a lot like your personality. But there are certain things that parents do, that parents model that have a lot to do with the parenting per se on the later happiness of kids. Most notably, parental warmth and affectionate when parents are really warm and affectionate with each other and really warm and affectionate with their kids, that tends to highly, highly associate

Starting point is 00:22:28 later in life with happiness. And it seems to be really causal. By the way, that's most important from the father. It turns out that the father being warm and affectionate is even more important than the mother being warm and affectionate. And this is one of the reasons that you'll often hear, but I've often said this myself, I've given this advice to dads. The number one thing that you can do on your worst day is for your kids is love their mom overtly and clearly and then go love them. Let's start with their mom.

Starting point is 00:22:59 I mean, you kind of got one job, guys, is what it comes down to. But part of the reason is because that has this big association with the subsequent happiness of children. If you're like me, you've got to be drinking when you're in the gym and you have to be drinking something clean without any calories that would actually give you your electrolytes and all the good stuff. For me, that's element. L-M-N-T. Probably knew that already.

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Starting point is 00:23:45 I use it in the morning, 4.45 in the morning. I don't like to drink anything with caffeine or anything that peps me up because I like to be real clear and I drink my caffeine later. Element is just the ticket that I need. Give it a try yourself. Right now, you can get a free sample packed with any purchase at Drink Element. That's Drink, just like it sounds, LMNT.com slash Arthur. Try it risk-free. If you don't like it, they'll refund your order. No questions ask, but you're going to like it. Okay, now these are clues. Now, once again, the data say that on average across the whole population

Starting point is 00:24:18 of variance in parenting doesn't explain very much at all of variance in personality or happiness. except in these particular kinds of cases. So what do they have in common, these cases? The answer is, it doesn't matter what you say. All that matters is what you do. You want to be a good parent. You want your kids to be good and virtuous and kind and honest and upright and happy or as happy as they can be.

Starting point is 00:24:47 Model what you want to see. That's really what it comes down to. Words are less important than actions. It's almost the case, by the way. When you look at the literature, you can talk to your kids in a foreign language, but what they see is actually what is going to rub off and have a really big effect on them. That's why parents who say, do what I say and not what I do, we're doing it exactly wrong.

Starting point is 00:25:10 It should be do what I do and not what I say, because the saying part, they don't really listen. It goes in one ear and out the other. Modeling is so important in the literature. There's a really important study, actually, from 2001 in the journal's sociological focus. about how to pass on religious behavior. So a lot of people who are religious, a lot of parents who are really religious, they worry a lot in a secularizing world.

Starting point is 00:25:34 What do I do so that my kids go to church, go to synagogue, go to mosque, practice their faith, you know, in all different faiths. So I've been asked this question by Christians and Muslims and Hindus and Buddhists, and they're worried about the quickly secularizing world. And they see so many of their friends' kids fall away from the faith, and they know that their faith is such a gift to them. And they want their kids to practice. What do?

Starting point is 00:25:55 What do I do? what do I do? So this study actually kind of answers that. This study actually shows that when kids see their father in prayer and practicing the faith, that has an enormous predictive value on what they do when they grow up. Now, why is that? Also the mother, but the father much more so, as it turns out, in intact families, obviously, is what I'm talking about. It probably, and this is speculation at this point, it probably is the case that when you're really little, seeing the physically most imposing human being doing something has a big cognitive impact. It is a big cognitive imprinting impact on the child. And I remember this, by the way. I remember this. So as a kid, my mom and my dad, me and my

Starting point is 00:26:41 brother, and my dad was six foot two. I mean, to me, he was like Goliath. He was in North, he was like a giant, right? And super strong. And he was. And he's like a giant. And super strong. I remember asking my brother Jeff, do you think dad's strong enough to lift the house? It was like a corner of the house. My dad was a mathematics professor. He could not. But he was huge, right? And he was strong.

Starting point is 00:27:03 And by the way, he was a proud man. He would not have been on his knee before any other man. No way. Right. But every night before I went to sleep, I saw my father on his knees next to my bed. We would say our prayers. That's what we did. We were a serious, religious Christian family.

Starting point is 00:27:27 And my father prayed on his knees. And what did that mean to me? That my father was in the presence of something more powerful than him. I mean, that's a big deal to a little dude. And it still is. Because when I was a kid, I said, that's what it means to be a big, strong man. Right?

Starting point is 00:27:45 No, no, you can say, how naive, how silly. I get it. And people have said that to me in the past. but that made me who I am now. And I made sure that my kids saw it as well. And that's the example that I'm talking about here. I'm not making the case that this is how you need to live. I am making the case that if you want great kids,

Starting point is 00:28:06 you need to model great behavior. That's the bottom line of what this comes down to. Okay, I can give you the advice. Have good genes. Unhelpful, right? But you can do that other half. And that other half is all the things that you're actually doing. do you want your kids to be honest?

Starting point is 00:28:24 Yeah, I mean, I got 94% of the parents are saying, I want my kids to be honest and ethical. What do you do? Be honest and ethical. Be impeccable to your word. Be admirable. That's what it comes down to. That's the reason.

Starting point is 00:28:37 That's the standard to which you're held publicly and privately. If your dad and a mom is actually being truly admirable in all of these moral ways and having your kids actually see that, having your kids seeing when you could have kept the extra change that they're giving you, when your kids see that you could have cut that ethical corner, when you could have told that lie and gotten away with it and gotten a better price from the card dealer, whatever that happens to be, and your kids are in on it and they saw you not taking the money, not cutting the corner,

Starting point is 00:29:05 not being angry or mean when you were justified in doing so. And that will speak louder than any words you could ever speak in front of your kids. that might just change their lives. As a matter of fact, it's the only thing you can do that probably ever will. So here are three things to keep in mind. Here are three lessons I want you to keep in mind

Starting point is 00:29:26 of the basis of all of this. And once again, we go deeper. We could dig a hole in any other part of this and go to the center of the earth. These things are so deep and there's so rich and there's so much literature. And I'd love to talk about this. So let me know if you want me to do more.

Starting point is 00:29:40 And specifically, what you want to know more about? By the way, the questions that are coming are all about this. and we'll get into some of these things in a minute from you. Three things to keep in mind. Number one, a lot of people today say, I can't have kids because I'm a mess. Yes, you can.

Starting point is 00:29:57 I have the data. Even a hot mess can be a really great parent. Why? Because we can be self-governing individuals. There's a wonderful body of literature and psychology that comes from the British psychologist, Richard Wiseman, on the as-if principle. It actually goes back to the work of William James,

Starting point is 00:30:16 the father of modern psychology who talked about the fact that he purported that he hypothesized that people will become something that they're pretending to be right and that's because you you you it's not manifestation it's just like it's

Starting point is 00:30:31 role playing until it becomes realistic in your own life you live up to the fiction that you're trying to create that that was what he believed and Richard Wiseman has shown in his work that it's absolutely the case called the as a principle act as if you were that particular person.

Starting point is 00:30:47 If you want to be happier, pretend you're happier. I've got all these interesting studies. I probably mentioned them before on the show that if you actually figure out a way to simulate a Duchenne smile, which is physiologically the smile that's uniquely associated with happiness that involves the orbicularis oculi and zygomaticus major muscles and your face, nothing to do with the mouth, all having you with the eyes, that if you can simulate that, that it will fool your brain into thinking you're actually happier

Starting point is 00:31:15 and you will be happier. Now, the way to do that is in the morning to take your pencil, a pencil, and clamp it between your molars. See what happened? It actually exerted the muscles that I'm talking about right there, and you feel happier immediately. If you do that for about a minute, you'll feel happier for about an hour, as a matter of fact. Give it a try. But that's the as if principle. Act as if you were the particular person. You're a hot mess. Well, welcome to the world of hot messes, man, act like a person you want to be around your children. You will become that person and so will they. Well, is it harder for some people than others? Yeah, totally. But here's the point. We are self-governing. You know, we have this big, needy prefrontal cortex, a sixth of your brain

Starting point is 00:32:00 by weight. No, wrong. 30% of your brain by weight. I got that wrong. Got the math wrong. I know you're holding me through that. You're going to write it into the comments. You just had a sixth. That's 30%. And what that allows us to do is to not choose our animal impulses. It allows us to live in our space of our moral aspirations. The executive center of our brain says the limbic system isn't in charge. I am. The conscious me allows me to be the person that I want to be. If I'm a mess and I have a difficult emotional profile,

Starting point is 00:32:30 if I'm suffering from mood disorders, will I find it harder than other people to do the right thing and say the right thing and model the right behavior? Yeah, but all of us can do this. You know, actions are more important than feelings for self-governing individuals. And this is one of the reasons, by the way, that most people are better people once they have kids because they're so much more dedicated to self-governance, to self-management, and it improves their lives because they start to live this as-of-principle.

Starting point is 00:32:56 Even if you're a mess, you can be a great parent, and that's principle one that I want you to remember. Principle number two, when you don't know what to do, you got teenagers or little kids or toddlers that are, you know, waking up at two, o'clock in the morning with croup and you haven't slept in a week, when you don't know what to do, here's your go-to. Be warm and loving. I don't care if you feel it or not, because it's the as-if principle, be warm and loving. Love them more. You know, and I remember that when one of our kids was being particularly difficult and, you know, we just threw up our hands and my wife said, I'm completely resigned. I guess all we can do at this point is love him. Right? In other words, bring it in. This is what great families and really good

Starting point is 00:33:42 couples, by the way, they have in common. It's when they feel avoidance. Like, no, they practice approach. Bring it in. It's one of the things I try to do in my marriage. I don't know is succeed. It's when I'm feeling avoidance. I'm feeling aversion because I'm annoyed. I say, bring it in. Bring it in. Because what are you doing? You're using the opposite signal strategy, using the as a principle. And the ultimate rebellion against the self, and especially in the moments of greatest desperation, is warmth and love. Warmth and love. Warmth and love. when you don't know what to do as a parent, warmth and love. What if they're being a brat?

Starting point is 00:34:17 Especially then, they need your love the most when they deserve your love the least, is what it comes down to. That is the modeling behavior that will truly change their lives. I remember that. My parents loved me when I didn't deserve it. And that's what helped me to love my kids when they deserved it the least. I'm trying to do that with my grandkids, although I have to tell you about my grandkids, they're never bad.

Starting point is 00:34:40 They're always good. I don't know what it is about grandkids, but they're just great all the time. Okay. Number three, be an actor. And this is related to the first two, of course. But imagine that you are playing in a play, the adult version of your kid. Okay? And so you're your kid.

Starting point is 00:34:59 And again, there's a lot of literature on this, but I don't have to give you the literature on this. It makes perfect sense, given all we've talked about before. Pretend if you're, you know, 40 years old and you've got a kid at home was 10. pretend that you are the 40-year-old version of your son or daughter behaving in a particular way that you'd find good and happy because those are the two standards good and happy right what are they doing what are they saying how are they behaving how are they reacting how are they treating other people how are they treating themselves what are their habits think about that okay i'm i'm so you know right

Starting point is 00:35:35 now i'm 62 years old and and and my son wakene is is 28 years old i'm 62-year-old i'm 62-year old Joaquin right now he's sort of past the age where i'm really really worried about this so very much but guess what you know he lives right next to me and he's paying attention to me now too because he wants to know what it's like to be kind of old and he's going to model a lot of his behavior conscious or not on that so i'm 62 year old wakene what do i want to see him doing to be both good and happy and and when we do that kids actually see that and that creates this imprinting behavior and that that theater production itself will almost never steer you wrong you're not going to say you know my 60 year old son what i want to see him doing let's like i want to see him i want to see him being mean to his wife

Starting point is 00:36:21 yeah i want to see him actually behaving workaholicly and not paying attention to his kids and grandkids yeah that's a really good idea that's what i want you know i want to see my 62 year old son being a drunk that's what i want no no it's not what i want and And it's even more important when I was earlier in life, when I was 40 years old. What I want the 40 and the 30-year-old version of my kids to look like? Okay, one last note before we go to questions. As a parent, you're going to make a ton of mistakes. And here's the thing.

Starting point is 00:36:52 It doesn't matter. It mostly doesn't matter. Most mistakes that you make, they seem really heavy and they seem really grave. They're not, as a matter of fact. I can think back on my selfishness and my blunders as a dad. And all the things that I did wrong, all the boring sports games that I missed because I was, you know, so important at work. Birthdays and things that I, you know, it's just, I got it. You know, I'm a troubled soul and I've made a lot of wrong decisions in my life.

Starting point is 00:37:22 And on some sleepless nights, those instances roll around to my head and fill me with regret. They really do. Those aren't the big sources of regret. I have other regrets that are much bigger than that. Maybe somebody on the show will talk about them. But then I look at my. my sons and my daughter and how did it all work out you mean i i started the show talking about my son when he was struggling in school actually the problem was he wasn't struggling in school

Starting point is 00:37:49 we were struggling with the fact that he wasn't struggling and didn't seem to care and all that and and and how did all my hectoring about grades and and values work out it didn't matter in the end the fact that i made those mistakes and the fact that i i ultimately went to doing this stuff that i really cared about, which was trying to be an upright man so that he would be upright as well. And it worked out. Was he a big scholar in college? No, he skipped college. He skipped college, as a matter of fact. With my full blessing and the blessing of his mother, he worked on a farm for a year. And then he joined the Marine Corps, where he spent four years as a mortarman and then as a scout sniper, which is an elite part of the Marine Corps and a very scary job.

Starting point is 00:38:28 Just the training is dangerous, as a matter of fact. But he came out of 23, married with his son. and now he's 26 and has two sons and he's happily married and he loves me and he loves his wife and he loves his kids he loves his mom and i love him and we talk every single day and despite the fact that i'm a complete screw up he turned out just fine and solely your child so let's take some questions anonymous we got a lot of anonymous this week right um anonymous writes in to office hours at Arthurbrooksh.com. How do you overcome bad habits that come from having an emotionally distant father? So now we're not talking about this from the point of view of the father. We're talking about this from the point of view of the adult child, which is an interesting

Starting point is 00:39:14 question when they hear quite frequently. What really happens in the brain is someone healing from wounds of their parents? I had a great dad and my parents loved each other. And I didn't have this experience. My wife came from a broken home where her father left when she was a little girl, as a matter of fact. And she did have this experience. And it, And I've seen the studies, and I've talked to my wife. And so what do we know? Knowledge is power. You're not programmed into any particular behavior, notwithstanding the bad behavior of your parents.

Starting point is 00:39:44 It can be a problem. The modeling is a problem, per se. But if the modeling is great, great. If the modeling is poor, then it actually becomes incumbent upon the adult child to get beyond that. And what we know is that the executive center of the brain actually absolutely can get beyond that. That means that we have to act according to our aspirations. And frequently, one of the ways that we do that, by the way, and I've talked about this with a lot of people that had a bad family background, they'll say, I think about what I would like to do right now.

Starting point is 00:40:13 I think about what my father would do right now, and I do the opposite. That's the opposite signal strategy. So if you had an absent father or an abusive father or a father was really troubled, that might be the way that you do it. I'm not sure you have to decide that for yourself. But the truth is also that a lot of people who had absent fathers, they do just find because they find a good role model even as an adult. It's interesting, you know, as a Catholic, one of the things it's often recommended is that to go to St. Joseph, you know, the foster father of Jesus and have him as a role model in some way, shape, or form. Is that too diffuse? Is that too abstract for you? Maybe.

Starting point is 00:40:51 But it's actually been helpful for a lot of people and find somebody in real life or not in real life who can actually be a role model for you. and don't let your background or your history actually dictate your future. Second, again, from anonymous, different anonymous. How to parent our oldest son, 19 years old, who's dating someone who's pretty toxic and causes division in the family? We try to be welcoming, but their communications are bad and our son gets thrown into the middle to advocate and fight for his girlfriend. I don't know how to parent at this stage.

Starting point is 00:41:22 Okay, hectoring won't help. This I can tell you. What's going to help is loving him unconditionally. But that's the best insurance policy against really catastrophic things happening. Now, we have this wild situation in our country and probably around the world where we have a no contact movement where people are, every manipulative activist appears to be telling people or therapist appears to be telling young adults that your family's toxic. You got to have got to go no contact with them. Some no doubt are from abandoned men or abuse. but it just becomes so excessive on what's actually going on.

Starting point is 00:41:58 And what you want to stay away from is doing something that creates a whole lot of ongoing bitterness that will give an opening to your son's partner to go no contact with you. And so the way to deal with that is unconditional love. If you're religious, I strongly recommend a lot of prayer on this. And make your values clear, even if they're living in a particular way that you don't, that you don't agree with, making your values clear without condemning his or hers. for that matter. One of the big points in the research that I found again and again and again, and I've taught this for years, is that you can actually have behavioral differences, but if you don't

Starting point is 00:42:34 have values condemnation, you tend not to have generational schism. So live your life and live your life in the way that's appropriate. Love unconditionally your son. And if they're behaving in a particular way that you disagree with, love him nonetheless, making your own values clear, but not condemning his values because he will interpret that as condemning him and that will be an opportunity for a no contact situation and that's the worst thing and that's the thing to avoid. Last, not anonymous. This is from Nadia. It writes into the website, how can we help 12-year-olds build discipline of happiness,

Starting point is 00:43:10 build a discipline of happiness in a way that feels motivating rather than forced? You know what I'm going to say because that's what I talked about this whole episode. Model it. Don't tell them to go do happy things like write your gratitude list. You know, you know. model it, write your gratitude list. Behave in a way that shows that you're working to become a happier person, notwithstanding your feelings, that you're a self-governing individual.

Starting point is 00:43:32 Talk about what you're actually doing to struggle to make that. So ask for suggestions from your 12-year-old on how you can model it better. Bring your 12-year-old into your own personal challenges, your own adventure in the science of happiness. And that's what's actually going to do it. Now, that said, a couple of other things, just practical matters. want to build a discipline of happiness, you need rules around screen time. That's a very practical thing.

Starting point is 00:43:57 I've talked about it again and again and again. There are unmitigated, unlimited use of screens will destroy your child's happiness. Sure as I'm sitting here, that's the case. It will suck the happiness out of your child's life. It will lead to depression and anxiety and loneliness and all kinds of problems, meaning that beyond your modeling happiness, which by the way, means modeling good screen behavior on your own part, it means that you need rules around that. Okay. Second is I recommend what do you do with all that time you're not spending behind screens.

Starting point is 00:44:30 I recommend time in sports, in the arts, and in outside. That's what I recommend. If you read the meaning of your life, my last book, you'll know all the reasons neurophysiologically why I recommend those things, but they really, really, really work. And that means you need to model it by getting interested in those things and doing them with your kid. If you follow these particular rules, you're going to be doing about as much as you possibly can. So Nadia, let me know how it goes. Let me know any of your thoughts at the email address, office hours at Arthur Brooks.com.

Starting point is 00:45:02 Like and subscribe on Spotify, YouTube, Apple, leave a comment. I promise I'll read it. Even if it's negative, it's great. I want to know what you should think about this. And we want to make the show better and better and better because we're doing it for you so that you can actually teach this material as well. Please follow me on the socials.

Starting point is 00:45:17 Let's redeem the socials. Let's make them a good source of love. love and happiness, and that's what I'm trying to do. I know you are as well. Instagram, LinkedIn, all the other platforms, order the meaning of your life, go get the newsletter, go to the website, take the surveys, and keep the conversation going. Share these ideas with other people, share them with your kids, love them unconditionally, and have a great week.

Office Hours with Arthur Brooks - The Three Secrets to Raising Great Kids

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