 What he represents is patriarchy. We're here to do work as men, as patriarchs. There's nothing more natural than being a father. Welcome back to the 21 convention 2019 patriarch edition of Orlando, Florida. Our next speaker is a returning speaker to the 21 convention. He first spoke last year in Orlando at our event back in October. He is the author of The Tactical Guide to Women, How Men Can Manage Risk in Dating and Marriage. He's actually the author of several more books beyond that too, including A Few for Women. Our next speaker is also a, he's been a clinical psychologist in Denver, Colorado for a few decades. He was one of my favorite new speakers last year, and I'm really glad he's here. He's a father of at least one. I think he might even have more kids than that. A proud patriarch. Anyway, without further ado, please help me welcome to the stage Dr. Sean T. Smith. Let's come back, sir. Good to be here. Thank you. Good morning. Man, Hunter got me fired up this morning. How are you feeling? And how about George? George is the kind of guy you meet him for the first time. You feel like you're meeting an old friend. So I'm going to try to add something useful to this today. Maybe give you some skills that you can take home and try out on your little ones. And if you'll indulge me, I have to rely on my notes, cards a little bit, because I didn't prepare quite as much as I wanted to. But in my defense, I was drunk and failed to see how that's my responsibility. So I'll do the best I can here. My wife, I make her a little edgy sometimes because I'll approach her with these questions. And she knows that I'm looking for something, but she doesn't know exactly what I'm looking for. And I hear her with one the other day. I said, what is the mothering instinct? And she said, she got kind of tense because she knows I'm after something. And she said, well, I guess it's the desire to bond with your children and so that you'll keep them alive. And I said, OK, well, let's make it more specific. Let's say that if there's a mothering instinct that there must be some kind of evolved adaptations that get passed down through our DNA that lead to certain behaviors and traits that create this desire to keep your child alive. And so what might those be? And the first thing she came up with was to create a safe and nurturing environment. And I think that was spot-on. So she relaxed a little bit. And the reason I think that's spot-on is because it's what I see among mothers. And it's what I hear in the culture is that the mother's job is to create safety and nurturance. Now, how many people here think that there is a fathering instinct? I do. You don't hear much about it, really. You hear a lot about mama bear. But you don't hear much about papa bear besides that toilet paper commercial. But I think that there is a fathering instinct. And I think one part of that is the instinct to provide. And this is something that's been under attack in our culture. It's called patriarchal. It's called hegemonic that we go out and we kill things and we bring it back to the cave and we feed our families and we become sort of a leader in that regard. And that is seen somehow as a slight against women in certain quarters. But there's an interesting paper that came out just earlier this year in this handbook called the Paul Grave Handbook for Male Mental Health came out of England. It's a really good handbook. And one of the chapters in that book talks about the fact that just the act of providing, going out and killing something and bringing it back, that that creates a series of neuroendocrine responses within the body that lead to other behaviors that create bonding between father and child. So that's clearly one aspect of the fathering instinct. Another aspect that I've noticed because a little bit about me, as Anthony mentioned, I'm a clinical psychologist. I started off a long time ago just working with anxiety disorders because I like working with anxiety disorders because it's a very clear fix to them and so a high success rate when you work with anxiety disorders. But also over in my career, I got really interested in relationships, this male-female thing and what makes it work and how to fix that. So over the years, there is this certain point of tension that shows up in my office on occasion between mothers and fathers. And it is this tension between safety and risk. I think another second big part of the fathering instinct is to allow our children to experience some of the friction in the world. And that's what I want to talk a little bit about today is that innate understanding that fathers seem to have that we have to push against something to get stronger, to build character, to build resilience. It's sort of like astronauts when they go up into space and they don't experience gravity and they're not pushing against the earth. What happens to them? Well, their muscles atrophy, their bones become less dense. It's a real problem. It can last for years. It can dog them for many years after they come back to earth. And fathers seem to understand instinctually that our children need to push against something. They need to experience the world whereas mothers are generally trying to protect them from the world. And this is the tension that I see showing up. We seem to understand better than they do that pushing against the world creates character and it creates resilience and it creates courage. So I want to tell you a little story in this regard. I want to tell you about a friend of mine that I went to high school with. He and I have been buddies for 30 something years now. And this is one of my favorite stories and he tells it better than I do. I'll do my best with it. But I want to tell you a little bit about our relationship. One of the reasons we connect is because our fathers were very similar. Our fathers were older gentlemen when they had both of us and they were similar in temperament and they were very big personalities. But they were not the kind of fathers that were prone to giving a lot of guidance. You know, when you see the beginning of the old Andy Griffith show where they're walking down to the lake together father and son and he's imparting some kind of wisdom that you can't hear because somebody is whistling that that was not our fathers. They were great fathers but that was not them. And the only reason I say that is to illustrate the point that my friend and I didn't get a lot of training and so that makes this story about him all that much more poignant because clearly what he did with his children on a particular day came from instinct, came from his DNA. And here's the situation. This was about 20 years ago. He had a couple of kids ages like six and seven and so when you're six and seven, what are you doing? You're starting to go out into the world into preschool and kindergarten. There's all this new structure and all these new rules that you have to try to contend with as your little kid. And he noticed that there was a little contention developing between him and his kids. A little bit of adversarial relationship because what was happening is the morning routine was getting a little bit competitive. The way it usually worked was mom would go to work really early and then he would gather up the kids, drop them off at school, then he would go to work. He had to be at work at a certain time. And so the tension that was developing was that the kids were starting to get resistant. Like they were starting to him and Hall in the morning. They weren't getting dressed on time. They weren't brushing their teeth on time. And it was starting to encroach on his professional life because he was starting to run the risk of being late, which would threaten his ability to come home with the prize at the end of the day. And as he saw this developing, this tension, he had a wonderful intervention. And when you think about, well, let me tell you what he did first. He went to them one morning. Actually there was one evening, the evening before one morning. And he said, we got a new plan for tomorrow. The plan is that I have to be at work on time. And so what I need for you from you kids is for you to be dressed and in the car and ready to go at 7.30. Because I'm going to leave at 7.30. And I hope you're with me. But if you're not, that's okay. You can stay home. And it probably won't be a very fun day for you because I don't know what you're going to do for lunch. And your teachers aren't going to be very happy with you. But you'll get through it. And so next morning rolls around. And he had even explained. He reviewed the clock with them. Like this is what 7.30 looks like. We've got the minute hand down here. We've got the hour hand right next to it. And we even have a digital clock. It's a different kind of clock. It has a 7 and a colon and it has a 30. So he explained all of this to them. And he said about 7.25. You probably better be on the way of the truck. And he said about 7.25 rolls around. And guess who's not ready to go? The kids are not ready to go. They're testing. And when you think about the world from a kid's point of view, this makes sense. Because they're thrown into this situation called life. And it's very confusing. And they're trying to piece it all together. Like apparently you're supposed to fold your clothes and put them in the drawer. But then apparently when your friend steals your toy, you're not supposed to bite them. And the rules seem kind of arbitrary. And so it makes sense that they would test and try to find out what's solid and what isn't. So the next morning they're testing. And they're trying to find out what's solid and what isn't. And is my friend going to be solid? Well, 7.25, he notices that they're not ready. And he says, gosh, it's getting kind of late. Are you two coming with me? Oh, yeah, yeah. We'll be there. They're really not attending to the urgency of the situation. And in the morning at 8.28, they see him grabbing his backpack and walking out to the car. And he's ready to leave them. Now is he really going to leave them? No, he's got to see, he's smart. What he did was he has a neighbor around the corner. We didn't have cell phones. I mean, he had a neighbor around the corner who loved his kids. And he had talked to her the morning before and said, hey, if I come knock at your door at 7.32 tomorrow, can you go over to my house and make sure the kids are okay and we'll work it out from there. So he had the safety net in place and he was ready to go. So they see him walking out to the car. Now suddenly it's starting to get real. Their testing is yielding a result. And the result is that dad is serious. Like he's actually going to leave us here. And it starts to register. And they start to get kind of activated and agitated. And I don't know what was said between them, but he picks up on their emotion. And he sees that they're starting to spin out of control a little bit because he thinks they think he's actually going to leave them, which he is. And they don't know what to do because they're not dressed and they're not ready for school. And my friend says, well, here's an option. We still have two minutes. If you can gather up your clothes and run out the door, I guess you could change in the car and then he walks out. He gets in his car. He starts it up. He starts backing down the driveway. And this is the part that he tells better than I do. And what does he see in his rear view mirror? He sees these kids. He pants in one hand, lunchbox. One kid drops a shoe. He has to go back and pick it up. But they open the door and they pile in, and they change on the way to school. And it was a success. Now, let me tell you about the tone of my friend. He's a very low-key kind of guy. And the beauty of this intervention is that there was no anger. There was no lecturing. There was no shaming. He was on their side the whole time. From the night before, he was their ally. Very low level of emotion. Now, they had a high level of emotion at one point, but he was always right down here. How would a mother typically handle this situation? High level of emotion, right? Begging, bargaining, pleading, anger, frustration. And you've seen this. You've seen this in the grocery store. You've seen the mother who says, I'm going to count to three. And then she counts to three and nothing happens. And then she has to count to four, whatever it is. And I'm sure that somewhere there are men who do that. But of all the dozens of women, I've observed that within the grocery store, I've never once, not one time have I ever seen a man do that because we have different instincts. Now, is it because we're better parents than them? No, we're just different parents than them. We understand the value of friction. And what my friend did that day was he allowed the world to encroach on his children's life a little bit. But he did it in a very controlled fashion. Now, here's the beautiful thing about this instinct that we have to allow our children to experience friction. We very rarely need to be the source of friction. Some of our fathers were a little confused. They thought that they needed to be the source of friction. They needed to provide anger and frustration and lecturing and shame. Some of our fathers didn't. My father didn't do that. But we don't usually need to be the source of friction because there's plenty of friction coming from the outside world. Now, sometimes they bump up against us personally and we then become the source of friction. I'll give you an example of that. A few years ago, my wife made me, for my birthday, a big pile of beef jerky. And she went all out. She went to Whole Foods, got the best cut of meat. Had them sliced at thin. She marinated it all night. And then whenever I wasn't home, she was out at the smoker, cooking this up slowly. And it was a beautiful gift. This was easily like $75 worth of beef jerky. And one day I went into the refrigerator to get some of this delightful spicy beef jerky. And I noticed that the bag was pretty light. And it turns out that certain nine-year-old daughter had been getting after this stuff like a ravenous wolf. And so she and I had a conversation because she had affected me personally. We had a conversation about being part of the family and consideration because don't get me wrong, I would take a bullet for this kid, but there's a pecking order with the beef jerky. So we discussed it. And I shared the beef jerky with her, of course I did, because she's the light of my life. So that kind of situation aside, we don't need to be the source of friction. And the beauty of what my friend did was he provided his little kids with three things. And if you take nothing else from my little talk today, take these three words. Structure, warmth, and success. The structure that he gave his children was the clock, the car, and the clothes. That's it. Three things that they can manage. They didn't have to worry about putting gas into the car. They didn't have to buy food for their lunchboxes. They didn't have to provide their own clothes. They just had to manage those three age-appropriate things. He controlled everything else and he allowed that much structure from the world to come into their lives. He didn't invent the structure. That's the structure of the world. The warmth he gave them was being on their side from the beginning, from the night before saying, I think you kids can do this. I'm with you. I know we've been having some trouble, but I'm on your side. And even toward the end, when things were starting to melt down, he gave them the third component, which was success. When they were starting to melt down, when they thought that they were down and out, he gave them a little solution, an age-appropriate solution. You can grab your stuff and you can get into the car. So even when they thought they had failed, he allowed them to succeed. It was such a beautiful intervention. It's one of my favorite stories, and this is why, because he gave them those three elements, structure, warmth, and success. And it was such a beautiful lesson that he gave them that day because he gave them a couple of very important things. Number one, he gave them a little lesson in character that is really important, that we keep our word with people. And as I've watched his kids grow up, they're in their 20s now, they're both doing great things. One of them is off to a stellar career in the military, and I have to imagine that some of that ability to thrive in that environment goes back to that random Wednesday morning when he gave them this gift of character, a little gift that just carried on. And the second thing that he gave them, which is so important that we men give our children, is that when they thought they were down and out, they learned that they can always come back fighting. That's something that mothers can do, but not nearly as naturally as we do it. It's in our blood, it's in our DNA. So this is a lifeline process. This isn't something that you start when they're 14. That's way too late. This starts when they're making their first decisions in life, when they're deciding that they can move their body from there to there, little decisions. And as you watch fathers in these situations, they're very good at titrating reality and controlling how much reality and how much risk comes into that kid's life. If there's a set of stairs there, there's a little cliff right here. The father's going to be the one that very effectively steps in and controls these risks. But it's also the father that says, all right, you're ready for the stairs now. And usually the father says it before the mother is comfortable with it. And the reason we do these things, I'm convinced of it. I have not been able to find many studies on this because my profession is not terribly interested in fathers, very interested in mothers. But I'm convinced that the reason we do this so naturally is so that when we're challenging our little one to handle the stairs and to handle outlets and to handle all these little dangers that are in the world, that we're building in them a set of skills that carries forward so that when they are 14 and they're facing Instagram and smartphones and sex and drugs, we have this set of skills for managing the risk because they've learned how to do it from the time they were a little one. Now there are moments when we get to step in and rescue. That's the other bright side of this, is that yes, we're always making them a little uncomfortable, and not always, but we're typically making them a little uncomfortable, allowing them to sit with some risk and danger in the world. But there are times when we get to be Superman. And it only happens when we've done the first part of this job correctly. When I was about 10 years old, I had a cousin that was about 16. She lived in Kansas, and I would go out there for the summer sometimes. And she had gotten her driver's license. Of course, she was real proud of that. And we decided one night, well, they decide I'm 10. I wasn't deciding anything, but they decided one night we're all going to go to a drive-in, just the kids. She was going to drive, and all this younger cousins were going to go with her. And I don't know if you remember, old drive-ins are what they look like, there's a big parking lot and there's a big movie theater screen up there. And then in the parking lot, at intervals, there are these heavy metal poles, like galvanized steel poles. And on these poles are these big metal speakers. And you'd pull up next to a pole close to it and you'd reach out and you'd grab the speaker and you'd hang it on your window so that you could hear the audio for the movie. So the movie ends and we're pulling out and she's at the wheel, obviously. And she starts to turn and we hear this long metallic scrape right along the back of the car, the back door and the back quarter panel. And what happened, she turned too close or turned too tight and she hit that metal pole and made a really big scratch right down the, scratch end down right down the side of the car. And this was my uncle's car. And my uncle, very big, masculine man, booming voice, kind of a stern father, she was distraught. She didn't know what to do about this. So we went home, we had this pact of secrecy, nobody was going to tell my uncle like that was going to fix it somehow. Maybe he would wake up the next morning and the dent fairies will have taken care of it. I don't know what we were thinking, but he woke up the next morning and of course he found it. And he didn't know what happened, but he know who did it. And so he went to my cousin and she's distraught. She's in tears. She hasn't slept all night. She has no idea what to do with this situation. And my uncle, this stern man, what do you think he did? Put his arm around her. Sorry, it's just a car. And I don't know why he responded that way because I've never asked him about it. But I have to imagine that he saw two things, the kind of things that I see in my daughter sometimes. Number one, she was at such an emotional level that there was nothing he could possibly add. Anything he added would have just added to the sense of misery and failure that was overcoming her. She felt horrible. I didn't want to add to that. There's no value in adding to that. And the second thing is that she really had no way to solve this problem. She's 16. She's making 3 bucks at the Tasty Freeze or whatever. And she would have had to work for weeks, maybe months to come up with enough money to do this body work. And it's really not an option for her to do that. So my uncle in his wisdom I think he saw this high level of emotion and I think he saw that the problem was beyond her solution and so her ability to solve it and so he gets to step in and be the hero. And it was kind of a nice moment for them. I think it was a moment that kind of shaped their relationship. It was one of those turning point moments where she was going from a kid to an adult and she's learning that no matter what, the old man is going to be here and I can depend on him. Now my daughter right now is 12 and in my imagination my 12 year old daughter has a tachometer right here on her forehead and it's an emotional tachometer and I can see how emotional she is based on where the needle is and she's a girl so she tends to idle a little fast and she's emotionally. She tends to be pretty ambivalent and happy, ever-vescent, loud but she can very quickly turn to upset, concern, anxious. She tends to be a little high strung and me being the father I'm okay with letting her emotional tachometer start to rev over to like 7, 8, 9,000 because I know that even if she's getting emotional she can still usually solve problems. I've lived with her for 12 years and I've got a sense of where her line is. I don't like it when she redlines she starts getting up to 12,000 RPM emotionally because I know that when that hits she's immobilized. She can't solve problems at that point so I have learned when she's approaching that red line that's when I need to be attentive and I need to start maybe offering solutions and rescuing and helping her through that and the mom, my wife beautiful woman, I've noticed that I don't know if she sees the same tachometer that I do but I've noticed that she doesn't want to intervene at around 3,000 RPM much lower level because she has that wonderful mothering instinct to create a safe and comfortable and nurturing environment so this at times has been a little point of contention between us but not really because we talk about it and these are conversations that you don't want to have when little Timmy is on the top row of bars because it's a high tense high stakes situation. They're conversations that you want to have over dinner when things are calm, when nobody's in danger and she and I have this little metaphor that's mostly me, it's in my head it might be like the imaginary tachometer but I'm the sales department of the company and she and I'm the boss and she's the accounting department so sales department is out in the world killing things, bringing them back and the accounting department is a little more risk averse a little more conservative she's not too risk averse she's actually pretty tolerant to me letting the kid struggle a little bit but we have these two forces we have the risk takers and we have the safety oriented people so we have risk and safety and they're wonderful together because either one, too much of either one is not a great thing because you have too much of the risk and too much of the willingness to just let your kid beat up get beat up by the world and overwhelmed by the world, what you end up with is one kind of helplessness it's called learned helplessness where a kid learns that no matter what I try I'm gonna fail, I'm gonna get beat up and so they become immobilized by that and they stop trying then on the other end, the conservative end you have a different kind of helplessness and this is the helplessness of over protection this is the person who never learns how to take a risk because they've always been protected and that's an entirely different kind of helplessness and it's very dangerous because they go out into the world and they get their ass kicked in a really unpleasant way they wind up knocked up or on drugs or they succumb to these challenges that they were never prepared to handle and so when you have the sales department and the accounting department working together it's a beautiful thing and I'm always of the mindset that if the accounting department is saying those guys are a bunch of idiots all they do is they just want to have fun and they have no attenuation to risk management they're sinking the ship if the accounting department is saying that about the sales department more often than not that's a failure on behalf of the sales department because they never articulated the mission now sometimes the sales department articulates the mission and the accounting department doesn't listen then that's a problem on behalf of the sales department but when they're working together what you have is this wonderful balance what your children need from you is to trust this instinct and to refine it because she's not going to get it she's not predisposed to get it any more than I can understand why my wife wants to intervene when my daughter's revving at 3000 rpm let her solve the problem like it's beyond me why she wants to intervene that I love that nurturing nature she doesn't get it why I want to let my daughter struggle as much as I do and I'm never going to let her get hurt I'm always going to be the safety net but she doesn't get that about me and worse than that we live in this culture where there are organized forces telling you that this instinctual thing that you bring that what you are that your male DNA is toxic by nature do you hear a member of the American Psychological Association I'm not I don't see any hands so I think that makes zero in this room the American Psychological Association wrote this report a set of guidelines earlier in the year I'll talk about them in a minute but that's one set of forces working against us and working against our masculinity anybody here have a closet full of delightful Gillette products I don't I used to I'm not boycotting them they're boycotting us and so that's fine because it turns out there's a lot of great alternatives out there let me talk about this APA thing for a minute I've been very vocal some of you have mentioned that you've seen my videos about the American Psychological Association I don't like the report or their set of guidelines for working with men and boys because essentially what they have done is they've said that masculine traits and masculine instincts are toxic to a mental health disorder and in their guidelines they actually had a couple of good and useful things like one of the useful things they did was they gave a nod to fatherhood and they cited some of the data out there that says that children who have involved and attached fathers do better in life from beginning to end they do better in math classes they do better with avoiding drugs and they do better with their families and they do better in school they just do better they excel everywhere when the father is present but then the same organization turns around and says the traits that create those outcomes are bad and why do they do that well part of it is because they're shameless ideologues but another part is that I don't think they understand I don't think they understand what we are I don't think they understand what we bring to our children I think they look at outcomes and they say well that's nice but they're not really piecing together what it is about us I'll give you an example of something they don't understand lady came into my office a few several years ago and she asked me this question and she wasn't really upset about it but she was very curious about it she noticed that her husband had this habit of getting her children revved up before bed and then expecting them to go to bed and I was gone a few minutes ago I think that George talked a little bit about this but she was really curious about what this behavior is like why does a man get children revved up with lots of horseplay and lots of activity and then expect them to calm down and so she started asking her friends and their husbands did it too and they started to get stymied about it and she came to me with this question and said why do you people do this and I said I don't know but let me go check it out I'll see if I can find an answer so I looked and I looked and I looked and it turned out that there had actually been a study on this and the reason men do this the thinking is that we're teaching emotional regulation this isn't just some destructive thing that we're doing to our children when we get them revved up and expect them to change gears when we take them from high energy to low energy and we walk them through that process we're teaching them how to manage their emotions out there in the world and this is a very important lesson and clearly it's not a lesson that mothers are as predisposed to give them, they give them wonderful other things but they don't give them this and right now I guarantee you there's some guy in India getting his children all revved up before bed and aggravating his wife and then expecting them to calm down because he understands at a molecular level how to be a father your children need you to refine this instinct and to trust this instinct and by the way when I'll be doing a workshop later Kin is a therapist in Denver top notch clinician and he's going to be talking a little bit about how to refine this instinct and how to listen to this instinct particularly if you didn't have the greatest role models to teach you how to do this and I'll talk a little bit about managing the anxiety that shows up in your household because whether you like it or not you are the managers of anxiety and emotion in your household and you guide the conversation but if you want to come to the workshop that's what we'll be discussing she's going to question you the culture is going to question you APA is going to question you Gillette is going to question you but we need you to follow your children need you to follow this instinct one last quick story here some of you know because you've mentioned it to me that I co-hosted a little call in show and couple weeks ago this is to help guys manage risk and avoid making wrecks of their lives couple weeks ago a lady called in with a cautionary tale and she was a mother and the situation was that her 19 year old son had gotten engaged to a 28 year old woman and the concern that this mother had being a protective nurturing mother doing a wonderful job and wanting to warn the rest of the world about this is that she noticed that um this woman who had gotten her hooks into her son didn't have any interest in being a wife didn't have any interest in having a husband and she probably liked the idea of it but that wasn't what she was after she wanted a wedding day and she wanted children and her son had fallen into this almost fall into this trap turned out that he saw the you know he saw the warning signs to get out but as the conversation unfolded the question came up what is your son's father think about this situation and she said well his father says he'll figure it out and I wanted to track this guy down and say you big stupid dummy your kid 19 his brain has not grown in yet he's about to get thrown to the wolves completely disengaged gosh I wonder how this happened your kids need you to stay engaged with them they need you to stay engaged with this process of guiding them through the dangers of the world because they're everywhere and they need you to have fun with it too because this is another beautiful aspect of this is that it's a wonderful experience it's a lot of fun and I tell you the folks at the APA and the made the Gillette commercial and all those nannies and all those gender studies professors if there's one thing they can't stand is to see men like us having fun it's the best revenge so I think that um that wraps it up for me and hope to see some of you after lunch and thank you for the time what he represents is patriarchy we're here to do work as men there's nothing more natural than being a father