 So, obviously, the title, The Boy Crisis, is shocking on its face. What made you decide to sit down and write about such an important issue? Well, I was going around the world sort of speaking on my other books on book tours and like people and a teacher in Japan, I remember once came up to me and she said, you know, Dr. Farrell, you know, we have more problems with boys in our class and schools and all over Japan, we're having problems with the boys more than the girls. And, you know, in China, they were writing about things like, you know, girls up, guys down, like as if they were stocks, and in Australia, New Zealand, Canada. And then I started to see that in all 56 developed nations, boys were falling behind girls on every single academic subject, especially reading and writing, which are the two biggest predictors of success. And so I said, developed nations, what do developed nations have in common? And I realized that they had in common, they had enough mastery over survival that they could be more, give more permission for two things. One is for divorce. And the other one is for children to be raised by single moms if a single mom chose to do so. And so I started looking within those two groups of populations and those two demographics, the boys that were having the problems were the ones that were children of divorce who had minimal or no contact with their dads. If children were of divorce, but they had four things happening. That is, if they had equal amount of time with the mother and father. If the mother and father lived within about 20 minutes drive time of each other, if there was no bad mouthing from dad to mom, and both mother and father were attending relationship counseling, the children tended to do reasonably well. But of the ones that had minimal or no contact with their dads, those were the ones that were part of the boy crisis within the divorce group. And the other group were children being raised by single moms. And just to give you some perspective on this, in the United States currently, 53% of women under 30 who have children, have children without being married. Now they, which means the children either don't know who the father is or they know who the father is but see them very minimally, or the father and mother do live together when the child is born. But when I looked at that demographic, I found that 40% of those children no longer had much contact or any contact with their dad after four years. And so that I saw that the boy crisis resides where dads do not reside. This seemed sad, but I also know, I have a PhD in political science, and I knew a lot about history. And so I knew that the Moynihan report in 1965 had found that when they studied inner city crime and why children were having so many children were in prison, et cetera, that they thought it was going to be about race and blacks. But they found that it was not quite about race and blacks. It was among blacks that there was 25% of the children growing up in African-American families did not have their dads. So it was not among children who were growing up with dads in the African-American community that were having problems. It was children growing up without dads in the African-American community that had problems that the controlling factor was fatherlessness or dad deprivation or the lack thereof. And that's where the problem resides. Well, that was 25% children growing up in fatherless communities and fatherless homes in 1965. Today, in Caucasian homes, 32% of children are growing up without their dads. And in African-American homes, 75% are growing up without their dads. So you can get some, and it's within these demographics of dad deprived children that the problems are occurring. Now, I began to look at, you know, when I wrote the boy crisis, I researched 10 major causes of the boy crisis. And I was, you know, planning my initial book, the book, to be based on these 10 causes. But increasingly, I saw that the core hub cause was the dad deprivation and then other causes, like there being a few male teachers in schools. They were very, those were important causes, but they were secondary. Environmental causes were secondary. Mental health causes were outgross of the dad deprivation. They weren't the cause that the cause was more the hub of the problem was in the dad deprivation. Now, you talk about the purpose void in the book. And I found that to be so remarkable in a number of ways. And we'll get into that. But what do you mean by the purpose void? Historically, boys have had two senses of purpose. One was they were given social bribes to be called heroes, to be willing to be disposable in war. And so if your son was a nice, strong guy, you may be encouraged him to become a Marine to fight against the Nazis in World War II. And then even if he died, you didn't want him to die. But if he did die, he knew he'd be considered a hero. Maybe he had a grandfather or an uncle whose picture was on the TV or on the radio at that time. And the family members praised him because he gave his life in the Marines or in war. And so the boy knew that he could be this hero if he was willing to go to war and potentially die. The second group, the second sense of purpose was to be the sole breadwinner. And I certainly learned this when I was a kid. I was good as a writer when I was in high school. And my father made it really clear to me. You're like, Warren, yes, you're a good writer, but do not. You can't become a writer because only about 1% of writers find a publisher. And if you can't find a publisher, you're not going to find a wife. And so I said, well, what's the proof of that? He said, well, look at Zelda Fitzgerald. She loved F. Scott Fitzgerald, but she made it real clear to F. Scott Fitzgerald that until you have your first best-selling book, we don't get married. And so there were enough hints of that that made me realize that I had to become, I had to not do what I wanted to do. I had not to, I couldn't do what my passion was because if my passion was to be a writer or for other guys and musician or an artist, that the word starving artist was around for a reason. And then in Los Angeles, there's thousands of people who want to be actors and they all have the same name, waiter. And there is sort of, that if you're going to try something that's really creative and that you love and that's your passion, the more fulfilling a job is the less it pays because the more people are competing to do that work. And so that was really clear to me. And so boys and men, we got the second signal, which is if you want to be eligible as a dad, you have to find, you have to do something that's going to pay, that's going to have predictable, dependable income. So not because you love it, but because that's what it will take to support, to attract a woman who wants to have children and to support the wife and children as she decides that she wants to be full-time involved with children or part-time involved with the children. And so men, we often, and the feminist movement has turned this on its head. And rather than saying thank you men for going out there and fulfilling this responsibility and obligation to earn money so that the children and I could be better supported, they said, ah, men earn more money than women for the same work. Not true. What is true is that dads earn more money than women, not for the same work, but because when they become dads, they are more likely to give up doing what they want to do and do what they feel they need to do to support their family. So if they're driving it, if you go outside and you want to go from where you are today to and call it an Uber, the chances are fairly good that about 90% of the Uber drive, while actually 90% of the Uber drivers are male. They're not doing this because it's about power. They're doing this to be able to earn enough money to do the things that they need to do in their life. If your garbage is collected in the morning, it's likely to about 99 to 100% to be a male that's collecting your garbage, not because they feel like getting up at three in the morning and the sleet and snow and rain is about power, but because it's about what their obligation is. And so this is some of the distortions that have led to many men being criticized if they don't earn money and then looked at as having male privilege and male power if they do earn money. And something that struck me interesting that was in your book is not only are we having that and we're here in America, but culturally to any of the first world nations there was a specific term, two fathers who basically worked themselves to death. Yes, yes, absolutely. There's in Japan, there is the death from overwork. The name for that is Karoshi, K-A-R-O-S-H-I. And in Japan they have a game as called Mr. Karoshi. And the purpose of the game is to try to get your character, Mr. Karoshi to the top of the ladder as fast as you can to be the first one of the top of the ladder. And the reward for being the first one of the top of the ladder is that you get to commit suicide. So the wisdom of the youth in Japan is that the normal pathway of becoming a man to try to get to the top of the ladder is a way of committing suicide or doing death from overwork. And so that's one of the reasons that many of the young people are not motivated because they know that that traditional pathway to becoming a man was that men have learned to define power as feeling obligated to earn money that someone else spends while they die sooner. And the young Japanese males are saying, no way, I'm out of that. That's not a ball game I wanna play. And they recognize that that isn't not about power. But I wanna go back to something that you asked about about the purpose void. I was mentioning two senses of purpose that boys traditionally had, which was the warrior or soul breadwinner. Today, we have fewer men that are needed in war and we have fewer men that need to be soul breadwinners because women are helping to share that burden. And so what we have is so therefore a purpose void for many men. And the purpose void is actually a wonderful thing if you have a father and a mother that can help guide you to discovering your sense of purpose and then help you to have the discipline to achieve that sense of purpose. But when there's both a purpose void and a dad void that the boy does not get well guided usually to have that sense of purpose. Moms often are very good at helping the boy discover their talents. But what is missing often without dad style parenting added to mom style parenting is the discipline. Dads are far more likely to do boundary enforcement. Boundary enforcement encourages postpone gratification. Postpone gratification gives boys the discipline to be able to fulfill their dreams. If a boy has a lot of dreams or a girl has a lot of dreams but they don't have the discipline to fulfill it each time they go about trying to get their dreams. He wants to be an actor. He wants to be a basketball player. He wants to be the top notch in school valedictorian. He continues without the discipline. He continues to fail. After a while he becomes afraid to dream. So he notices that he's not getting a good feedback from his teachers, from his parents are not proud of him in the way they are maybe of his sister or some kid down the block. And the boy feels a bit ashamed when it comes to boy girl time the boy starts feeling like, gee you know the girls are not dating they're dating all the winners and the football players the student body presidents and so on they're not dating the losers like me so that he can't get any satisfaction sexually so he begins to withdraw into porn because porn has access to a variety of attractive women without fear of rejection at a price he could afford. And so he starts but the problem with porn aside from the moral issues is that he becomes addicted. His dopamine only becomes stimulated by increasing amounts of doses of more risky behavior with females. And so then he gets to the actual first real life woman and it begins to find that that real life woman is feeling treated like an object because she is. And so she withdraws from him he feels rejected returns to porn and the whole cycle continues. And the meantime the anger that festers in this boy if he's a single mom boy he's usually sensitive and he then becomes very sensitive to being rejected and very angry that girls are not interested in sensitive boys. They're interested in the performers and the winners not the sensitive boys who are the losers from many girls perspectives. And so these types of things create this festering hostility. And then I found that the mass shooters are oftentimes dad deprived boys. When I say oftentimes more than 90% dad deprived boys because in this boy develops this enormous anger and feeling that nobody pays attention to me and a desire that I'll get people to pay attention to me. When I do this shooting people will say I could have prevented that shooting if I had only maybe paid a little bit of attention to Nicholas Cruz or Dylan Roof or Elliot Rogers or Adam Lanza or one of the shooters. Right. And we will definitely get there. I wanna just jump back a little bit to this purpose void cause two things you brought up there. One, you know this role of the risk taker, the warrior and even the breadwinner is dying. It's evaporating. It's not something that is available to us as society advances with automation. There's less and less risk out there in the workforce and on top of it you're seeing pay become more and more equitable and there are relationships where oftentimes the male is not the sole breadwinner let alone the one who is bringing home the most money. So that's creating this void. And then the other thing I wanna touch on is and obviously we're here in Hollywood. So, you know Hollywood is not doing us a service either in their portrayal of the hopeless hapless dad who doesn't really have a role other than being the bumbling idiot. And obviously, you know that's carrying on in our minds as okay that's the role that the dad has which clearly is not serving the boys or the girls that they're raising. Yes, this is a perfect lose lose situation between I've been with my wife now for 25 years but 25 years ago when I met her until I met her between marriages I was dated mostly women who were single mothers. And the word I heard most frequently from the single mothers was the word overwhelmed. They felt they couldn't do anything the way they wanted to. They weren't good at it. They weren't the person at work that they wanted to be they weren't as good a focused mother as they wanna be. So here you have these overwhelmed moms. You have dads who are undervalued and often discarded. You have dads who have to fight for the right to be with the children while women have the right to be with the children and then you have the children who are suffering from a lack of dad involvement. So there's a lose lose lose thing happening right now. And you know, and there's not a sense of there being no one understands what exactly dads do that lead to children who have their fathers doing so much better in get this more than 60 different areas. Children that have father involvement are far more far less likely to be obese. They're far less likely to have ADHD. They're far less likely to do worse in every single academic area. They're far less likely to be depressed, commit suicide. The suicide rate of boys and girls at the age of nine is equal, but between 10 and 14 the suicide rate of boys is twice that of girls between 15 and 19, four times that of girls between 20 and 25, four and a half times to five times that of girls. And so we are, and I could go on and on with the other variables as well. The mass shooters, 90% likely to be dad-deprived boys. The prisoners, 93% males, but of that 93% males more than 90% are dad-deprived. The ISIS recruits studies of both male and female ISIS recruits, trying that both the males and the smaller percentage of females are dad-deprived. And so there's the amount of things that happen when a boy or girl is dad-deprived are enormous. Girls suffer in most of these areas too, but girls have two or three things that boys do not have. They have a same-sex role model, and they have much more societal permission to ask for help, to cry, to express feelings that boys do not have. And so when boys are in college, for example, 75% of the people who see psychologists in college and share a suicidal ideation are females, but 75% of the boys, the people in college who commit suicide are boys. And so the boys are far more likely as a result of dad-deprivation to do the things like committing the suicide or doing things that are disruptive. Boys who hurt hurt us. And this is partially because we have not, the purpose for that we were talking about before, the sense as a purpose that boys had in the past was training to be a hero by being disposable. Well, that created heroic intelligence. But not heroic intelligence was preparation for a short life. Health intelligence is preparation for a long life, preparation to share your feelings, say what's bothering you. Not do it often, taking the best of masculinity and femininity. You learn to tough it out with the masculine part of you, but you also learn that when the going gets tough, the tough get going sometimes. And other times when the going gets tough, the tough get going to a therapist, other times. And you learn that right balance. That's the balance that keeps you alive, functional and successful the most. But we haven't taught boys emotional skills because what we've depended upon boys in the past for is to be willing to provide money, do what they needed to do to tough it out, or to be willing to die and be disposable. And so those things have created heroic intelligence, not the emotional intelligence and the physical health intelligence that will be needed and desired by girls and women in the future because the more money women make, the more they're gonna want emotional intelligence from men in addition to about equal amounts or greater amounts of money. And that's what we were talking about before we kicked this off, you know, for the last 12 years we've been working mostly with male clients, we just opened our doors to women and we found that for many of our clients, the first time they realized they're lacking in this emotional intelligence is when they're dating and when they're trying to connect with the opposite sex and now this emotional intelligence is just gonna become more and more in demand. Yes. One question that sort of popped into our mind as we were prepping for the show that's always so fascinating. And you know, obviously we live in California and gun laws are very strict here and without getting into the politics of gun laws, every time we talk about these mass shootings, you know, it seems like the media focuses on the weapon of choice and does not focus on the perpetrator and what led to that place that he would choose to make that decision. And oftentimes when we talk about the perpetrator, it's he's psychotic, he's a sociopath, he has all these mental illness. Why is it that we're not confronting the root of the issue here that you've been on the forefront and why is the media not paying attention to this? Yes, I think it is so much easier to sort of look at the fact that, you know, that the boy has a mental illness. Well, yeah, you know, like that's like, you know, that's taught, you know, it's redundant. You know, if a person, you know, kills people, they're gonna have a mental illness. That's what that's about. It's just one manifestation of it. If, you know, if we wanted to stop mass shootings, we would do two things. One is the, we would, because more than 90% of the mass shooters are dad deprived, we would focus on getting dads involved. If you look at the mass shooters, you know, we often say it's about guns. It's about family violence. It's about violence on TV or in the media. Well, women have the same access to the same guns, the same access to the same family values, the same access to the same TV, the same access to everything else. They live in the same home, but women are not doing the shootings. Boys are, and it's not all boys that are doing the shootings, obviously. It is more than 90% of the time dad deprived boys. There's two easy solutions to about 99% of the mass shootings. One is, dad's in, the other is guns out. Do you want to say, that accounts for almost all the mass shootings. In Australia, there's practically, there used to be about as many mass shootings per capita as there were in the United States, and they got guns out to a large degree, and nothing else changed, but they almost eliminated the mass shootings. In the United States, we know now that the mass shootings are among boys who are dad deprived, and there is much easier access to guns than there is in any other place in the world. And we have more mass shootings than any other place in the world, I feel, for those two reasons. And so the solution is right in front of us, I talked last weekend on Sunday to Eric Swalwell, who has a big gun restriction law about this. And he was saying, it's all about guns. I said, no, Eric, it is not just all about guns. It is all about, that 90%, some odd percent of the mass shootings are about dad deprivation as well. And he sort of stopped in his tracks and said, just like his face turned blank. And it was like, he hadn't thought about it. And so both of those things have to be considered. Yeah, it seems like a massive blind spot that we have culturally, politically right now, to not pay attention to that. To go with that, one of the things that I see on the media when this happens is it's always pointed out, and then they're always going to focus on this. He was white, and he was mentally ill, and then there's issues. And they're acting as if this sort of thing is not happening. And they're acting as if this sort of thing is not happening in the black community, which it is, but culturally it comes out. It seems to me that it comes out a little bit differently because the hero risk reward in the black community comes out through and finding belonging in a gang and finding leadership and belonging in that environment so that the violence, it just comes out, it's still there, but it's coming out in a different form. Yes, in the black community, the boys who are dead deprived are also much more likely to shoot, but they don't do mass shootings. They shoot each other. They shoot each other for territory. They shoot each other for drugs, for access to drugs. Somebody violates, they have a group or a territory where they get drugs and therefore they get money, therefore they can get cars, therefore they can attract women. Somebody violates that, they get shot. So blacks kill each other with whites and particularly whites and suburbs. There's expectations on them that are far greater and pressures on them that are far greater than there is in the average African American inner city home. And when the boys feel disappointed that they haven't fulfilled the expectations of their parents to be the mother, particularly in a single mom family, the mother would usually likely say, sweetheart, you have such sensitivity. You care so much. You're such a wonderful boy. You know, just make use of that by doing well and doing your homework in school. But because moms tend to protect more and not enforce boundaries to the same degree, the boy very sweetly figures out of manipulation, so he can play a video game or get involved in responding to a text rather than completing homework and then eventually doesn't achieve as much and then begins to feel ashamed and sorry about himself and that creates the withdrawal. I think it's so important for dads to, I started to see when I was doing the research for the boy crisis that there's about nine differences between dad style parenting and mom style parenting. And dad style parenting is more like this. I'll give you an example. Dads and moms will set boundaries exactly the same way. They'll both say things like, sweetie, you can't have your ice cream until you finish your peas. Kids test the boundaries in the same way. They go, some like, can I have, I had some peas now, can I have some ice cream? And moms will usually respond by saying, sweetie, I said you couldn't have your ice cream until you finish your peas, but mom is thinking to herself, but I'm not gonna get into a huge argument over a few peas. I'll tell you what, sweetie, finish half the peas, then you can have your ice cream. So now the kids realizes I can manipulate a better deal. So he finishes half of the half of the peas and mom says to herself, well, you know, he tried, okay. And so the kid knows, there's what I can do at any time. 25%, I got my mom clear. Show the effort and you're good. I showed the effort and you're good. He tried, okay. With dad, it's like, excuse me, we've got a deal here. The deal is, you don't get your ice cream until you finish your peas. You know the deal, I know the deal. You know that I know the deal. Oh, you're so mean, mom's not like that. You can continue whining. There'll be no ice cream tomorrow night either. Oh man, but now what does the boy do or a girl do? They have no choice, but to finish the ice cream, to finish the peas before they get the ice cream. So they end up finishing the peas. Now you look at the analysis of what the outcome of that is. Children raised predominantly by dads. Only 15% of them have ADHD. Children raised predominantly by moms, 30% have ADHD. If you look at that example with the mom, the child doesn't learn to focus his attention on what he has to do in order to get what he wants to do. So he doesn't learn attention focus. He learns attention deficit. He learns to manipulate and be coercive. So mothers find themselves much more likely to describe themselves. Single mothers far more likely to describe themselves overwhelmed, exhausted and coerced by their children. Far more likely to feel like they're victims of a child that is rebellious and shouting at them and almost bullying them. Dads much less likely to describe that type of behavior when they're the primary parent. And so the, but the most important aspect of what I just described was the teaching of the child postponed gratification. And so the, that child with the dad is learning. I can't have what I want the ice cream until I do what I need to do. That's the behavior that's taken to school to do the, you know, to become successful. The postponed gratification as we all know is the single biggest predictor of success. And so, and boys who are successful are honored. They're appreciated by everyone and they don't feel a need to drift off into video game addiction and so on. And so that's, but I'll give you another one more example that is really more fun. One of the dynamics between moms and dads is rough housing. Dads will tend to sort of take the three kids and throw them on the couch. And the game is, okay, the three of you, your job is to jump onto my back and turn me over and pin me down in a wrestling match before I pin the three of you down together. Okay, yeah, we got it, we got it. In the meantime, mom is, you know, looking on and she's going, oh my God, I feel like I have just one more child to monitor. But mom is saying to herself, oh, okay, now, be good. The kids are having fun. You don't want to interfere. You don't want to be, I know you want your dad to get involved, but she's also fearing that sooner or later it's gonna be somebody crying or somebody's gonna get hurt. Well, she's only about 99.9% likely to be right. Sooner or later, somebody gets hurt and it's crying. And so now mom's thinking to herself, all right, now dad's gonna learn his lesson. He won't do this rough housing anymore. But dad doesn't learn his lesson. He says to the children, you know, Jimmy or Jane, you can't stick your elbow in your sister's eye in order to run it rough housing. You've got to, you know, do what you can use leverage. You can fake the person out. You can do this and that, but not this. Okay, dad, okay, we got it. Okay, now go back and try again. And so the kids go back and they, but they violate the, in what they call, what psychologists call the getting emotional intelligence under fire. They all want to agree with what dad is suggesting or requiring, but when they get excited, they forget about their sisters and brother's needs and they just push and get to what they want to do. So then dad stops if he's a good dad and says, okay, I warned you, now there's no more rough housing. Oh, we forgot dad, we forgot. No, no more rough housing until tomorrow night. Now, so mom is looking at this and going, wait a minute, you didn't learn the lesson. The kids cried, then you told them what to do. Then they didn't get it again. And you're still rough housing and promising more tomorrow night. You are in fact a child, I have to monitor. What dad doesn't explain is that tomorrow night is what it's all about. Tomorrow night, he says the same thing. And if the children violate the agreement, there's no rough housing tomorrow night, but usually the children tomorrow night don't violate the agreement because the children have learned that when they don't consider their sisters or brothers needs, they don't get their needs met. They don't get to do what they wanna do. They don't get the excitement of the rough housing. So for the, with the dad, giving up pushing their sister or brother aside is worth it because if they don't do that, they lose what they want. So now the studies of children rough housing with dads show children are more likely to be empathetic. Well, I've never heard a dad say to a mom, I'd like you to let me rough house because this will teach the children empathy. And if he did, it's like what? Empathy seems pretty counterintuitive to rough housing, but you can see it's not the rough housing per se that creates the empathy. It's the rough housing combined with the boundary enforcement and the requirement that there will be no more rough housing if you don't think of somebody beside yourself. The same with the assertiveness versus aggressiveness. The second or third time around the kid may say, well, you know, I didn't push him or her. And then dad is able to say, that's what pushing is. That's to, that's where the assertiveness became the aggressiveness, not in those words, but you can't push that way, that hard, that type of thing. Well, mom can say that intellectually a hundred times. Dad could say it intellectually a hundred times, but the child doesn't learn it until she or he experiences it. Right, it's the experience. So that's what teaches the difference between being assertive and aggressive. So now we have the data to show that children who rough house form a bond with their dad, the bond allows the dad to set the boundaries and enforce the boundaries without there being resentment because that bond is so strong, kids know that they're gonna go back to the roller coaster and they also, and get the boundaries enforced and they're gonna have a lot of fun. So they wanna play the game with dad, whereas mom will be more likely to repeat the command over and over again. Moms will tell me, you know, I really feel sort of upset in a way that dad can say something once and the kids will do it. I have to repeat and repeat and repeat and repeat. You know, I spend more time with the kids than the dads do. And yet I'm the one that has to repeat things over and over again. Why is that? And the reason that it is, is because a repetition of a requirement without a consequence tells the kids, mine might as well go ahead and continue pushing my sister aside or being aggressive because, you know, I can handle a little, I can handle a little verbiage from my mom. I can just ignore that and go on, be passive aggressive about it. Yes mom, do anything you want. Go back and do what I really want, what I want. And so that's sort of like, you know, a typical, this is just one example of nine different styles that dads have versus moms have and what I'm encouraging dads to do. I'm not blaming dads for not sharing this with moms. I don't know of any parenting magazine that explains this. But on the other hand, I'm not blaming moms either because moms can't hear what dads don't say. Well, this one piece with the rough housing and how it is creating this bond and building this respect between the father and the children. Look at the building blocks that this puts together for now the child goes to school and they're in the school yard and now they're trying to put together diplomacy in order to put some games together to play some football, to play some soccer. And with those skills, they're able to put teams together, set the rules, have this game. And now these children are forming these bonds on their own and now they feel safe because they have the acceptance and the approval and the attention of their peers and now they're for good. Without that skill, they're going to be left out of that school yard. And now because there has been these children, we were finding Jim and PT time is being taken from schools because there are some kids who are unable to build these blocks and now we have to take it. So they're gonna go how far, we were just talking about this, of diplomacy and this leadership and this emotional intelligence. And they're not even finding out about this. Sometimes it comes to dating, sometimes it's even later to when they're in, finally in a position at work and a career on the top of a team and they're unable to put it together. And lost. And the other part that we were laughing about, both of us grew up with our dads, single dad for me and dad's divorce. Mom was out of the picture, she was abusive. And Johnny chose to live with his dad after divorce. And outside of that angle, we also developed this resilience, right? This grit that dad enforces. And I always felt that if there was a boo boo, if I went to any of the women in my household, I would be treated in a much different manner than if I had a boo boo with dad. And that style of parenting is often frowned upon, right? Dads get yelled at for these behaviors saying, what's your problem? Why are you letting them beat up on each other, hurt each other and not understand the underlying importance of these activities to build the grit, resilience and diplomacy and leadership that it takes to excel in your career. So now we're raising children who are getting to a place of their feeling lost. The parents are exasperated and often they don't share in the dynamic at all. They're getting upset with each other. And we talked about violence, we're also seeing at the other end with the drug epidemic and the opioid crisis and children just withdrawing from society and not having any purpose or meaning in their life. You're absolutely right. And if you take it right back to what you were talking about, John and AJ, about the building blocks, the building blocks that we just described with the rough housing, you take those building blocks to school and who are the kids gonna like more at school? The person who shows some empathy, the person who knows the difference between being assertive versus aggressive or the one that is not empathetic that is self-centered, that is aggressive. And of course, it's a rhetorical question. Children will associate with children that are more empathetic and that children that know the difference between being assertive versus aggressive. And so therefore those children end up having more friends. Children with more friends end up with better social skills, emotional skills and there's a whole cycle of building on that friendship but they're much more likely to be less depressed. They're more likely to sort of feel good about themselves, succeed in school, have the energy to complete things with they have the postpone gratification as well. And so you have a much happier child that withdraw the anger, the anger, the hood over the head, the taking of drugs, the being able to be seduced into doing something destructive. Boys who don't have their testosterone can channel constructively, usually by a dad and mom together will almost invariably channel their testosterone destructively. This is why you have to have about an equal amount of fathers, sorry, male and female teachers in school at least as many male teachers in the grammar school for a second, third grade. When you have children going from mother-only homes to female-only schools and then you ask, why did that boy get attracted to a drug dealer? Why did he get attracted to a gang leader? Well, he's looking for structure. He's looking for leadership, looking for respect. And he needs to get that respect constructively, not destructively, to wonder why he's attracted to some type of form of authoritarian figure. We have known this for a long time. Hitler Youth sought for Hitler Youth. Dad deprived boys, because the boys that needed searched for some type of father figure to give them guidance. And so we, as I said before, the Moynihan report, we saw this, the Coleman report, we saw this. Over and over again, we have seen this effects of dad deprivation. And yet no one is paying attention when I was talking to the Democratic, I went to Iowa this weekend to talk to 11 Democratic candidates about this issue. And a few of them like John Hickenlooper and Andrew Yang were very responsive. And so was Tim Rand, but a number of them sort of like, looked at me like, well, yeah, boys having a problem? No, no, boys will become men. Men are the dominant force in society. They don't have a problem. We know what, dad deprivation, what do you mean, lack of dads? No, I don't think that's an issue. We want women to have the right to raise children by themselves if they want to. We don't wanna bring that issue up as our issue. And so, you know, if Democrats and liberals consider this, don't understand this issue. They're gonna be losing a lot politically because many, many fathers and mothers who have children that have problems want some candidate. They feel ashamed that their children have problems. They're afraid to speak about these issues. They need a candidate either on the political left or the political right that says, I understand that boys are having problems. I understand that's a need for dads. And then most people care more about their son than they care about a party label. We lightly touched on this with the porn problem that you were talking about earlier, but this is not just porn. We're looking at this dopamine system that is being manipulated and a lot of us aren't even aware of it. It's invisibly happening with these devices in our pocket and all of these distractions that are wiring our brains for behavior that is not healthy. And you talk about this in the book, that this inhibited dopamine function in the brain leads to a cascade of issues for boys and girls. And I'd love for you to talk a little bit more about that because I know it's been something that John and I have talked about a lot on the show. And I don't think enough people realize it. Absolutely. John Gray, who is the author of the book, men are from Mars, women are from Venus. He did five chapters in the boy crisis book on ADHD and how to prevent it. And without using drugs, the drugs are just, it's like there are like crutches that many of the drugs are very similar to cocaine and other really negative drugs that will solve the problem for a while, but will increase the problem. And after a while, for the reasons you just mentioned, what can be done though, is five chapters worth of solutions to this, mostly ideally preventive solutions, but also you can reverse ADHD and exercise is the number one way of reversing ADHD. But that doesn't mean suggesting to your children that they exercise. It means requiring your children to exercise. When I was bringing up our daughters and our daughter said they didn't want to play soccer and I had a dialogue with the mom and said, no, this is not an option. You don't have to play soccer, but you have to do something physical, some type of team sport, learn how to interact with other children, get your body physically moving. Well, for girls, that's important. For boys, that's even more important because boys' brains are more receptive. They're more settled down. They're more cooperative when they have physical activity. Michael Gurian is very good at this, of knowing the differences between boys and girls' brains operate and he's training different schools and different teachers to understand these differences. And so we need to get that type of training happening and knowing what prevents the carbs, the propensity for carbs and sodas. These are all things that are poisoned to the brain that reinforce ADHD, the impact of hot baths and many other things that are, so many things can be done to reverse ADHD. And so if your son has ADHD, take a look at those five chapters in the boy crisis book. The other thing that's so important for the correct dopamine balance is family dinner nights. We've all heard that the children that do better are ones that have a lot of family dinner nights. But I've seen that there's a refinement of that. There are family dinner nights and there's also family dinner nightmares. And so as I began to start interviewing families, I began to see that there's about five things that families do that lead to family dinner nights being extremely constructive. And if they're not done, they can become extremely destructive. And so one of those, for example, is knowing how to make sure that there are no electronics at the table. Some parents come up to me and say, Dr. Ferrell, my children, they always want electronics at the table. I don't know how to get rid of them. Well, I know something immediately when the parent says that, which is that the parent is in charge of the children. Not that the children are in charge of the parent. Not that the parent is in charge of the children. We're laughing just thinking about that. If we told our dads, no, the iPad stays at the dinner table. Oh, he's done it. No way. Talk about a boundary. Well, it didn't even go along with that. My dad had this thing and I was laughing about this one because during summer vacation, if I was home playing computer games, I was in trouble. But if I was out on skateboarding, my dad didn't care where I was, what I was doing. As long as I was out on skateboarding, he was fine. But if he came home and I was in playing video games, it was, he would find chores for me to do. So I learned very quickly, let's find some. Where the reward is, it's not in front of the computer. Yeah, so that was how he went about making sure that I was outside playing and not behind the computer screen. My dad hid the Sega Genesis. I was all excited. I invited my friends over. I had the Mortal Kombat code so I could see all the blood and violence. And I go into my bedroom with my buddies and there's no Sega. And I'm like, what the hell? And my dad's like, no, you've been playing this too much. Get outside, grab a basketball, do something. But I find that parents right now are so protective of their children being injured and getting into this rough housing and going outdoors is almost anathema to being a parent these days. It's like, no, we wanna keep our kids close and moderate, we need this device on them so I know where they are. And it's just fostering this dopamine dysfunction that we're talking about. Yes, you're absolutely right. Here's an example of, particularly in divorce, there's a lot of misunderstandings that happen this way. And these are genuine misunderstandings. So for example, a dad will have the children. Let's say he only has the children during the weekend and it's Sunday. And on the Sunday, there's a good NFL game. And so the dad, the kid says, can I go to the playground and pick up a game? Dad goes, yeah, no problem. And so the kid goes to the playground, be careful or whatever, but the kid goes to the playground, picks up a game and maybe the kid gets into a fight with the kids that he hangs out with on the playground. And so the kid comes home after a fight, maybe has a black eye or some sort of remnant from that fight. And then mom picks him up and says, how did you get that black eye? How did you get that bruise and scrape whatever? And they sit at the playground. Well, why wasn't your dad there? Oh, he was watching an NFL game. So now mom is convinced two things, that A, dad has no consciousness of safety and protection for the child. A, B, dad cares more about an NFL game or the finals in a basketball tournament than he does about his son. And convincing her that it's really dangerous to leave the child with the dad. Whereas dad doesn't articulate and say to her, what is going on in his mind? And for most dads, it's something like this. If the child goes to the playground and gets into a fight and I come back and the child comes back and it's apparent that he or she has been in a fight, now I talked to the child about what created the fight. What was your first red flag? Who did you talk to? Maybe you played a pickup game, a basketball and one of the kids pushed another kid aside. Well, is that a red flag of the type of kid you do or don't wanna be playing with? Maybe they offer you a little, a few years later, maybe they offer you a drink. Is that a red flag of somebody you do or don't wanna be playing with? The dad would rather have the kid get beaten up, not badly beaten up. Nobody wants the children badly beaten up but pushed around or maybe beaten up and then be able to come home and then talk about what happened. And then so that the child has a support system to know what are the red flags that prevent me from getting into trouble in the future. Dad does not want the child to grow up and not have that type of information and that type of experience. Dads feel that if you protect a child too much, you're leaving a child unprotected for life. And so, but dads again, don't explain that to moms and moms can't hear what dads don't say. And even when dads do explain it to moms, moms often think the dads are crazy and just making up an excuse to not pay attention to the child to a greater degree. But so this has to all be, I put this in the boy crisis because there is this information, this way of thinking about what I call checks and balance parenting. The best, the children that grow up the best are not ones that have just dads or just moms. They're ones that have an active tension between dads and moms around how much protection, how little protection, when can my son or daughter climb the tree? If so, if they can climb the tree at a younger age that mom would like, what type of protection do they need when they climb the tree? Do they need dad out there to sort of make sure they don't fall and really hurt themselves? Does dad need to be out there with or without a cell phone? When we talk about these issues on family dinner night, what makes that family dinner night into a family dinner nightmare? And one of the things that makes that family dinner night into a family dinner nightmare is not having each person in the family be fully listened to no matter what their opinion, no matter what they say, no matter how they say it, the first job of every family member is to allow each person in the family, children and parents to feel completely heard by the other one. So you create what I call the e-pluribus unum experience, e-pluribus meaning that every person in the family, pluribus is heard. And unum that when everyone is heard, you feel the unification of the most important phenomenon that human beings have invented, a united family. Now it is Father's Day and celebration of Father's Day. What can we do as parents, whether it's dad, mom, or to support obviously growing children that are healthy? And I know for a lot of us, we're starting out as parents, we're thinking about children and we wanna be the best parents. Maybe we've learned some things from our parents that we don't wanna do. How can we show up and be better parents? The number one thing that parents can do is learn how to handle personal criticism without becoming defensive. Get to, I started teaching couples communication courses around the country because I found that when, the boy crisis was oftentimes a phenomenon of divorce. Divorce was a phenomenon of the mother and father not being able to handle criticism without becoming defensive. Therefore it made it unsafe for their partner to be able to share their real feelings and concerns. And so both sexes of mom and dad felt like they were walking on eggshells. And so that would either lead to a divorce or it would lead to a legal divorce or it would lead to a psychological divorce or it would lead to a minimum security prison marriage, which is very sad for everybody. So I started teaching that, but it's important. Not I teach it to adults. It's very important for parents to have that because most of the time children mimic the style of communication that their parents do. That's pretty common sense. But it's also important for us to be teaching that to our first, second and third grade children, both boys and girls. So the bully, bullies that are picking on a kid when they see what the feelings and the real full personality of the child that they're picking on and how that made them feel, they stop bullying to a much greater degree. When the bully is listened to as well, he or she doesn't feel as insecure and therefore bullies less. The bully and the bullied have in common, both of them have low self-esteem. They have a lot of characteristics in common. And as they listen to each other in first, second and third grade, where this has been done in Denmark, they find that there's a significant reduction in bullying in school and also other dysfunctional behavior. And there's an increase in emotional intelligence that you were talking about before AJ as being so crucial, not only to getting along with children, but eventually in male, female relationships or in the same sex relationships, emotional intelligence is probably the most important single skill you can get. And the fact that we're teaching, I have learned far more from teaching the couples communication courses than I ever learned, even though I was good enough at math to be teaching math in the eighth grade, but I haven't learned nearly as much from math as I have from couples communication skills and communication skills. Absolutely. And we love to wrap every episode with a challenge for our listeners and with it being Father's Day, we love the exercise you outlined in the beginning of your book, inquiring about your dad's glint. Could you walk our listeners through this exercise so that they could do it as well? I can do a mini version of that, absolutely. So if you're listening to this, just close your eyes for a moment and just visualize a time in your life when you saw your dad with a glint in his eye. By glint in his eye, I mean he wasn't worried about lecturing you, correcting you, telling what you were doing right or wrong. He didn't seem to be worried about anything for those few minutes. Maybe he was telling a joke he told a dozen times before or a story he told a dozen times because he knew that when he told that story or that joke, he would feel like people would laugh at him and that relaxed him and he knew exactly how to tell it or maybe he golfed or maybe he fished or maybe he sang in a chorus or maybe he played a musical instrument or maybe you didn't ever see that glint in his eye but you saw it in a picture of your father when he was just on a honeymoon with your mom and the glint in his eye you could see in that picture. Maybe you didn't know your dad. So if you didn't know your dad, imagine what might have created the glint in his eye. So maybe it came from cooking or flying a plane around sunset and just feeling the poetic emotional power of that. So when you capture the glint in your father's eye, compare that with what your father actually did for a living. So if you're saying, well, my father, he had a glint in his eye when he cooked turkey for Thanksgiving. So he became a chef. So he did for a profession what created the glint in his eye. No, that's not the same. When he was cooking for Thanksgiving, the glint in his eye came because he was cooking for his family. When he was a chef, he was cooking on Thanksgiving and he was away from his family. What you do as a profession, you do what needs to be done. You don't do what creates a glint in the eye. And so I'll ask you to imagine when you're the first child in your family was born, your mom and dad thinking, we know how many children we want and should we do something that created the glint in your eye? Should you just do more fishing, more playing with the children, more making things in the garage that you're creative, more being singing in the chorus at church, or should you do what you actually did for a living? Which would make more money? Doing what created the glint in his eye or doing what he actually did for a living, maybe selling insurance or whatever. The chances are the selling insurance did not create the glint in his eye. He may have been proud of what he did, but if you really searched for the glint in his eye, you would have found something else that created more of a glint for him. And most of our dads, when the children were born, gave up the glint in their eye, the true glint and did something that they liked doing less. They loved education, but they gave up being a teacher because they knew they'd make more money as a superintendent of schools, as a principal or as an assistant principal, or selling product X to place Y. They gave up selling locally because they could make more money managing a national sales, being a national sales rep. So as you look at what dads did, your dad did on Father's Day, think about what created the glint in his eye and maybe ask your dad if he's still alive. Dad, what created the glint in your eye and direct him toward helping him discover his own glint. I had one person in a workshop become angry at me because I suggested this and he said to his father, you know, dad, I wanna know what creates the glint in your eye and his dad ripped him apart for going to these Warren Ferrell type of New Age workshops where, you know, oh, you wanna find out what the glint in your eye is for very nice. And he said, you know, when you become a man, John, you're gonna do what you need to do, not what you're gonna learn what you need to do, not what you want to do. And so he was furious at me and then he saw his dad a few minutes later start to cry and he said, dad, you know, I haven't, what's happening here? And he had never seen his dad cry except when his mom had died and he was really scared. And he said to his dad, what's happening? And he said, I guess I thought nobody would ever care enough to ask. That's the gift you can give your dad on Father's Day. I have, you know, that's, I've given you a little synopsis of that, but if you wanna know more about how to direct that and how to work out what a glint is and how to distinguish that and how to ask that question. So I have a whole section on that, as you know, in the boy crisis. And where can our audience find more about the book and everything that you're working on in these fantastic workshops? If you, if money is an issue, then I'd suggest Amazon, which has it at a 30, somewhat percent discount. So if you're a guy or a woman who drives a lot or works out at the gym, it's an audible forum. It's also now in paperback or hardcover. So Amazon is definitely the least expensive place to get it. If you're, if you have a bit more income and you can afford to buy it at a local store or support your local bookstore for the boy crisis book. And if you want to know more about it, you can look at warrenferral.com. That's my website and that's not Ferrell, like Will Ferrell. And we'll link it up in the show notes. I haven't been making you laugh, so you know it's not Will Ferrell. Different podcast episodes. Thank you so much for joining us today. It's been a real pleasure. It's been a pleasure for me too, you guys are just wonderful.