 George Bruna for the 21 Convention Patriarch Edition in Orlando, Florida, and I'm talking with Dr. Sean T. Smith. Welcome. Thanks for having me. Your speech this morning, give us some highlights of it. I was talking about the male instinct, the fatherhood instinct, to allow children to experience a little bit of friction in the world and how we tend to embrace risk on behalf of our children a little more than mothers do, and it's a wonderful balance. And the culture doesn't really understand our side of it. The culture seems to be actively working against our side of parenting. But, you know, guys really need to trust their instinct and hone those instincts because we really do have solid instincts for helping our children develop character. I'll give you an example. I think it's something that you touched on in your speech. One of the things that fathers do that seems to mystify a few women and a woman, a woman came into my office and asked me this question several years ago. She said, why is it that my husband gets her kid all riled up before bed and then expects him to calm down and go to sleep? And I didn't know the answer to that. So I had to go dig around and found out that it's a very common thing, like men all over the world do this. And the reason we do it, even though we don't know why we're doing, is that we're teaching emotional regulation. We're teaching children to go from a high level of activation to a low level. We're teaching them how to switch gears. And that's a really important skill in life. So if men can trust their instincts to to act on behalf of their children, their children are going to develop good character. How do we model that as fathers? How do we model that regulation that shifting gears in our family life? Well, ironically, we model it by doing some of the things that are under attack these days. We do it by being stoic when there's a time to be stoic. And knowing the difference between when there's a time to discuss what's going on and when there's a time to rub some dirt on it and move on. You know, this is a message that doesn't resonate very well, rub some dirt on it, doesn't resonate very well in my profession. But again, this is a very important skill in life. It's not the only skill in life, but it's a vital one. Mmm. I like to say delay your emotions, not deny them. Yeah. Is that something that can be learned? Children watch everything we do. So yes, and they imitate and you've had little kids. You know how they you'll see your child do something or hear them say something and you wonder where the heck they got it and then later on you discovered that they got it from you some little mannerism or speech pattern and yet no idea that you did that. But yes, they will imitate everything you do. Years ago there used to be a kind of an anti-smoking commercial of a father and a son. I don't know if you remember that and they're driving in a convertible and the dad puts his arm, you know, like on the outside of the the cars he's driving and the son he does that and the father and the son would do everything that the father was doing and the father would grab a pack of cigarettes and then the next shot was the kid grabbing for the cigarettes. I got to find that somewhere. I'm sure it's archived somewhere, but it it did show that they pick up everything that we do. Yeah, and especially sons and fathers and I don't have any data to back this up, but you know, you just see it. You see sons dressing like their fathers and acting like their fathers and saying what their fathers say they really want to identify with that masculine figure. I heard someone say I actually read this yesterday that they compared our view of masculinity is similar to our view of our fathers. Let's talk about that. Yeah, my father was a very masculine man, not a man that he was very stoic, not a man that would discuss emotion very often or very deeply and my natural inclination is in that same direction and I bet you have an inclination that matches your father's inclination. That's all we learned. Yeah. How about when a child starts seeing that there's different ways to act and react in the world? When they play sports, when they do extracurricular activities, when they're in scouting, when they're when they go off to college and they start seeing the way that other people act and then they come home and then we see the difference in their behavior and we can tell they've been around or if our kids are playing at someone else's house where there's a whole different hierarchy happening and then we feel like we have to reprogram them when they come back into our home. Yeah. Yeah, spoken like a father. You've been through this. You've seen your children come home with different behaviors and sometimes it's kind of baffling like who are you hanging out with where you learn how to say that or you learn how to do that? But at our house, it's always an opportunity to just discuss the way other people do things and you know, sometimes the conversations get really interesting. This is why it's so important to have those family dinners because those are the conversations that don't really happen in the car so much. I mean they can, they don't happen here at the store because there's other stuff going on. But you sit down with your kids and your family and you're gonna have these fascinating conversations like where where did you hear that phrase or what do you think about how that's working out for your friend and kids have wonderful insight into these things. They have a lot of thoughts. They're not just imitating. They're thinking about what they're imitating. There's times when I've caught this show on television called Blue Bloods with Tom Selleck and the show always ends with them around the dinner table. And then they're just talking and then there's even his father who is at the table and you see three generations of men at this dinner table at the end of every show. Very fascinating dynamics there. Yeah, did you have that growing up the dinner table conversation? I did. Yeah, I did. What do you think you took away from it? I would say I learned a lot of things. I learned how to be sneaky. Things that I didn't want to eat. You know, I'd put them under the plate or put them in my napkin or something like that. Did you have a dog? We didn't have a dog, but I know a lot of people who did. That's a good way to dispose of this, because you don't want to eat. And the dog knows who's going to give them the treats under the table. I think one of the things that I learned growing up, my father, if I complained about what was for dinner in any way, one of the things that I heard was this isn't a restaurant. You're going to eat what's put on the table, or you're going to eat what your mother makes. And I know a lot of families where the mom is like, what do you want to eat? The kid says, I don't want hamburgers. Okay, I'll make you chicken wings. Right. That didn't happen in my family. It was, if you don't eat what mom makes, you don't eat. And if you're not there at 5.30 or whatever it was, you're not eating. You don't come home later. This is when dinner time is. Yeah. And that's one of the wonderful ways that the masculine and the feminine blend to raise a child, because you have that nurturing mother who of course wants to make the child comfortable and make sure that they're fed. Then you have the father who typically is willing to let their children sit with a little more discomfort of the world. There's a structure here, kiddo, and this is the structure we live in, and we don't change the structure for you. And I hope you can join in. I really do. I want you to join in. But hey, if it doesn't work out and you can't be here at 5.30 for dinner, okay, there's always tomorrow. And that's something that a father would say that very few mothers would ever venture into. And we have a whole generation of people that are raised by their moms who only see dad on the weekends, every other weekend, and one night or two nights during the week, who don't get that structure. Yes, or they get a little bite of it, and then they have to go back to where there's much looser structure. And kids can learn how to navigate these things, but you know, better to have that consistent structure and know what's solid and what isn't. And one of the things I talk about today is that kids, especially little kids, you know, they're dropped into the world and they're dropped into this situation called life. And there's all these rules and they don't know where the rules come from or why they exist, like you're supposed to put your socks away, but you're not supposed to bite your friends and none of this stuff really adds up. And so they have to push and they have to test and they need a consistent, a consistent structure that says this is what's solid, this is what's negotiable, this is what's going to hurt, this is what's going to feel good. And when they're raised exclusively by women, women being wonderfully nurturing creatures, they tend to get a lot more of, well, here's what feels good, you should do what feels good. That doesn't always work out well in life. How about the parental reply? Because I said so. Does that work? I think it's one of those Trump cards that can work once a year, maybe, in certain situations. I'm not a fan of it. You know, I want my kid to understand why we do what we do. And that means that someone like me coming from where I came from, I had to go out and learn a lot more words than I grew up with, so that I can explain these things to her. What are your thoughts on, because I said so? I never liked it. I felt like it was, I think it plants seeds of rebellion, because I feel like there's nothing explained. There's no rationale. And children can be reasonable. And I think that because I said so is more for the benefit of the parent who feels like they have no options. Yes. And has no options, maybe is too tired, too lazy to do it, which is why I say maybe once a year, because you're going to have that moment where now is not the time to explain it. But even then, I think you guys will talk about it later. But I think you keyed on a really important issue, that when you create something for them to rebel against, they're going to rebel. That's what people do. They push. Yeah. So why create that? Why not create an environment where you're on their side? You want them to succeed. I like that. You talked about the tachometer. I did talk about the tachometer. I talked about how on my daughter's head, she has this little imaginary tachometer right here. And it's her emotional tachometer. And I can see how emotional she's getting. And one of the things I was talking about was helping your children solve problems, push up against the world a little bit, but managing the amount of the world that they're experiencing so that they can succeed. And one of the times children don't succeed is when that emotional tachometer red lines and they get immobilized and hopeless by the level of emotion. And when you're a present father and you grow up around these little people, you can get a sense for when they're approaching red lines. So you know when to step in because even though fathers are much more willing in general than mothers to let the world rough their children up a little bit, not to the point where they get hurt, but to the point where they learn that some things are out of reach and you have to push for them, that it's important to know when to step in before they start to red line and they get locked up because as much as the motherhood done wrong is like too permissive and too protective and it breeds a sort of helplessness where a person never has to push up against the world. They don't learn how to push up against the world. Fatherhood gone wrong is the opposite of that where you let the world just beat your child into submission and just hopeless misery and failure. That's the fatherhood instinct gone wrong and so we don't want to veer into that neighbor. We always want our children to succeed as much as possible. They need to fail sometimes and that's where team sports is a great activity because they get to fail and they get to learn how to fail. But when it comes to big questions in life, like how do you deal with other people? How do you deal with questions like Instagram and sex and drugs? We want them succeeding. We don't want them failing. Right. Do you think the modern digital age creates emotional children? How so? In the sense that there's more emotional triggers that we have no control over. In the same way that a child can come back from a friend's house where they're very, where they don't have a lot of rules and you see your child misbehaving or acting in a way where you're thinking, gosh, where'd you learn that? If they spend too much time watching social media, interacting on social media, they're encountering things that they would never encounter in the home. How do you manage that? That is a real, it's real. I see it as a new problem, the social media, but it's also a very old problem because children have always been going out and interacting with other people. One of the toughest parts of our job as the father is to get rid of them. Like from day one, we're trying to help them go out and leave us, which is a heartbreaking thing, but it's also a beautiful thing because we do it right. They never really leave us, come back. That's a little secret that we know, but they've always been faced with challenges of bullying and bad behavior and people behaving poorly. The area where I think fathers have to really step up their game now is that the piece that goes missing is the immediate feedback. When you're out in the real world, face to face like we are and you're dealing with another human being, you get feedback and you also get some protections because people generally try to avoid fights face to face. In the digital world, they don't. The digital world rewards aggression and so the father has to be able to step in with nanny apps and with conversations and with safeguards that build in that other piece that goes missing, which is the immediate feedback of your behavior and how you provide immediate feedback to someone else's behavior because so many of those protections are gone when there's a digital wall between two people. Is there any way we can protect our children from outside influences? I suppose you could go to the motherhood gonron extreme and just keep them home. And never let them experience the world. Bubble boy. Yeah, bubble boy. Not a great option. Not a good option. We don't want to see our kids hurt. We don't want to see them go astray. We want to see them make right decisions. How do we apply our experiences to guiding our children and helping them navigate life? One of the things that people love is stories and children love stories and I don't know if you ever told your kids stories about how you handled situations or what happened that day and it was kind of an interesting thing because this person got mad at me or I found this strange situation or I found this dog or whatever it is. Up to a certain point now sometimes you get into the teen years and you become an idiot as the father, but up to a certain point children love those stories. So you can tell the stories that impart the moral and that's something that we do a lot in our home. We just talk about what's going on and how we handle things and kids will lock into that because they want to know what the conclusion to this story is. I like that. We've lost the art of storytelling and I guess they used to call oral tradition. The story of what the roast, where the bone was bigger than the pan, where the young person asks his mother, why do you cut that bone off the roast before you put it in the pan? I don't know, that's the way my mom did it. So he goes over to his grandmother and says, grandma, why do you cut the bone off before you put it in the pan? She goes, I don't know, that's the way my mom did it. So little boy goes to his great-grandmother and says, grandma, why do you cut the bone off before you put it in the pan? She says, the pan was too small. I love that story and I don't know if you noticed, but I was locked in. I wanted to know where this was going and this is the mindset that little kids can get into. Where is this going? This is kind of cool and you're a very eloquent speaker. You don't have to be as eloquent as you are to tell the story of what you struggled with that day and how you handled it. Do you think kids innately know answers to things? For instance, if you kind of do this questioning with them, like if they did something wrong and you sit them down and say, what do you think you should have done? Do you think they have it within them to know what's right and wrong? I think they do if you've been having that conversation all the way along from day one. What do you think? I think if it's been modeled. I think if options have been modeled. Yeah, and family values, these little conversations that happen here and there about how we do things in our family, kids will walk in on that stuff. These little idioms, what do they say? There's more than one way to skin a cat and I don't know where that came from. Who'd want to skin a cat? But just kind of shows that there's more than one route to a desired location. There's many different ways of doing things and the way granddaddy or grandmom did it, isn't always the way. It might be that they felt that their options were limited as well. Now we're kind of getting beyond. Do you think that the immediate family has more exposure to the extended family than they used to or less? I don't know. That's a really interesting question. A little group of three or four people, parents and children, do they have more or less connection to cousins and aunts and uncles? Yeah, I don't know. What do you think? I guess a lot of it depends on if you're born in a city or a town or whatever. I know a lot of small town people say, I can't wait to get out of this town. I'm from a small little town where everybody knew each other and they despise that. Several years ago I moved from a town in Pennsylvania. Now I'm living right near the city in Philly, but I lived in a town where there were people who were born in that town, went to school in that town, worked in that town. This town was no more than two miles in length. It was a small town. They went to school in that town, they worked in that town, they retired in that town, they died and were buried in that town. The next town over was, it would be like going on a long trip. Those little towns had a men's clothing store, a shoe store, a hardware store, a barber shop, a beauty parlor, that kind of thing. There really wasn't a need to go out anywhere. The next town five miles away was like a big thing. Yeah. I grew up with a similar thing in my family. It was little towns in Kansas and a similar type of thing. We're going to the next town was a big thing, but it was always a point in this branch of my family that we keep in touch. We go see our cousins and we spend Christmases together and we fly to another state so that we can connect. It's an interesting thing with Facebook and that sort of thing. In a way, I think it's created more connection. I don't know if it's ultimately created more distance because there's less of a need to go see someone, but I don't know. I'm more of an optimist. I'm not really into the whole despair of the internet. I know the Roman roads delivered good things and Roman roads also delivered bad things. The internet is the same way. I choose not to look at it with despair. For instance, Facebook, like you said, if I would write a letter to my relatives, my cousins in Italy, it would take two weeks for a letter to get there. Now I know what they had for breakfast today. In that sense, I'm celebrating little victories that my extended family are having when the child is born. I can see pictures of that child on the day that it was born, mother and child. In the past, you'd wait for pictures to be sent. There is an immediacy that the internet brings that I like. One of the things that falls to fathers, mothers too, I don't know if this is exclusively fathers, but falls to parents to show children how to filter this stuff because you can pick the good things, unlike the Roman roads where what comes down the road comes down the road. With the internet, you can really pick and choose what comes into your brain and modeling for your children, what's healthy and what's not. What's helping you advance in school and get through life or solve problems versus what's just bringing you down. Let's go to your work. You work with people in Colorado. What is your main area of expertise? Used to be anxiety disorders. That's why I started out as a clinical psychologist and I liked working with anxiety disorders because very high success rate. People are motivated to fix it and there's a clear path and you can solve this problem. I became increasingly interested over the years in this male-female thing. I started pretty early in my career expanding in that direction as well. One of the things I noticed that I'm not really sure how it's escaped my profession, but there are a lot of men out there making the same mistakes that their neighbor made, that their cousin made, that their brother made, and choosing the wrong women and allowing the wrong people into the life and then just ending up in a train wreck. My mission has become helping men make wise choices, manage risk. You can't eliminate risk. If you're going to have women and relationships in your life, if you're going to walk out the door in the morning, you're embracing some level of risk, but I want to help men avoid the mistakes that dog so many men that really cause them to end up in bad places. Give hope to fathers right now and fathers to be. What word of hope would you give them? The word of hope is that there is something in our DNA that gives us instinct, evolved adaptations, if you want to use fancy words, that lead to traits and behaviors that give us an innate understanding of how to care for our children. It sometimes conflicts with the female nature, but more often than not, it goes like peanut butter and jelly. It's just a wonderful combination, the masculine and the feminine. Children need both of these influences. There are some forces out. There's some organized forces that are telling men that their instinct and their character and their innate qualities are toxic and they need to be suppressed. This is not going to help children. The message of hope is that you can refine these qualities and these traits and you can use them to benefit your children and the world around you and you can ignore the people who are telling you that you're toxic. I love that. Thank you very much. Dr. Sean T. Smith. George, thank you.