We're here today with Dr. Warren Farrell. Dr. Farrell has recently put together a DVD
series called The Best Interest of the Child and that actually explores the research that
is out there that supports the idea that children need two parents in their lives regardless
of the parent's present marital status. And we just want to talk a little bit about that
today, Warren. So thank you for being with us. But before we do that, I want to say this
is Warren Farrell who has written numerous books on the relationships between men and
women. Your father and child reunion was really groundbreaking in the sense of saying this
is why fathers and children need each other in their lives and we appreciate your exploring
that. You know, Warren, we actually had a great time last night chatting and talking
and did a wonderful presentation. And could you just recap for us what it is that is so
important about children maintaining a relationship with both parents and the environment that
needs to be there in order for that to be successful?
Yes. I basically have taken research, I did a meta-analysis of research from all around
the world and found that they were amazing no matter what the methodologies were, whether
there was male or female or biases, that when a good study was done that there were very
many common denominators. And one was that, yes, it's true that the intact family is best
for children. That was affirmed. Secondly, though, that if there can't be an intact
family, I wanted to find out what then was best for children. And what turns out to be
best for children if there can't be an intact family is whatever comes closest to simulating
the intact family. And what comes closest to simulating the intact family is a 50-50
parent situation, not just shared parenting 80, 20, 70, 30. But for reasons that I'll
explain, it has to be very close to equal amounts of time for both men, for both the
man and the woman. Whenever the child has less than that, there are certain dynamics
that occur that undermine the potential for the child having really positive well-being.
There also needs to be no bad-mouthing that the child can overhear. And that basically
means the rule of thumb has to be you can never speak negatively about your spouse.
When a child is in the house, because even tones of voice are picked up by the child,
that end up having a negative impact on the child's belief that maybe if something is
wrong with daddy, therefore, since I'm growing up to be like daddy, maybe something's wrong
with me. Maybe if mom is a drunkard or a liar, irresponsible, maybe as I grow up and see
half of my body language become my mom's body language, that may be therefore I'm inherently
that way. And so children need to really be free from the bad-mouthing.
The third thing that has to happen if you want the ideal situation after divorce is
that parents cannot live more than about 15 or 20 miles from each other because that inhibits
the ability of the child to have, the child has to make a choice between friends and activities
on the one hand and the far away parent on the other hand. And the child, as it gets
older, has a very crucial need for friends, activities, and peer group is of course very
important. And so the child increasingly makes the decision to either not see the other parent
or resent when it does see the other parent. And so you never want to put the child in
that position. So we really have to think through, as judges, judges need to think through,
how crucial it is to establish enormous barriers for the parents moving far away from each
other.
So what are those three criteria again, just one sentence on the table?
Sure, absolutely. The first criteria is that the mom and the dad have about an equal amount
of time with the child. The second criteria is that there be no bad-mouthing. And the
third criteria is that the mom and dad live close enough to each other so that the child
does not have to make a decision between activities and friends on the one hand and
the other parent on the other.
You're really asking a lot of parents who are actually in a very stressful situation.
Do you see courts today facilitating your suggestions or how do you view the courts
and what they're doing today?
What I'm basically saying to the courts is we now have the data to know how the children
do the best. You and the parents have a decision. You can either forget about the children
or you can work in their best interests. But the outcome of forgetting about the children
is that there's going to be an increase in crime. There's going to be problems in 26
areas of your child's growth. The child is more likely to feel like a victim. They're
more likely to have temper tantrums. They're more likely to have ADD. They're more likely
to have ADHD. They're more likely to have problems with nightmares in the evening. They're
more likely to do worse in every single SAT score. They're more likely to do worse in
social skills. They're more likely to be depressed. They're more likely to be on drugs. They're
more likely to have sex outside of marriage, child outside of marriage while they're teenagers.
You name the nightmare and I'm not aware of a single major nightmare that has any environmental
as opposed to just genetic input that is not increased by the absence of one of the parents
from the child's life. Therefore, there's an enormous necessity to say, yes, we know
that you have a better job in such and such a place and you have a better job in another
place. But the two of you have to get together and figure out one place that you're going
to live if you want your children to have the best chance. Your child might grow up
okay despite this. It's just that it's like putting a child in a car and sending her
hand from Washington DC to New York and having the child be drunk. Now, there's a good chance
that the child will get there safely because you're increasing the chances that the child
will not get there safely.
So you're actually saying that the courts have a social responsibility to the rest of
our society to rise above these dissensions that are causing this couple to break up and
basically keep both parents operating on the same page. Now, are you finding that they're
doing that these days? Are you finding that that's a problem?
No, unfortunately, they're not doing that yet. And there's too much. The underlying assumption
is that almost every judge believes that the child does do best with both parents. That's
what almost every judge would want. But if a mom comes in there and says, you know, my
husband this, my husband that, then the judge listens very carefully to the mom. And most
judges harbor, in the case of conflict, well, per the side of the mom, unless the mom is
particularly bad and proven to be bad. And so, and that's a significant mistake because
the more conflictual the parent, the more the child needs both parents because the more
the woman says bad things about the man or the man says bad things about the woman, the
more that child is going to interpret the half of himself or herself that is the mother
or that is the father as a straw mom or straw dad. So if the dad is saying, for example,
your mom is unreliable, she's dishonest, she's a manipulator. And that daughter is going
to grow up and start looking in the mirror and saying, oh, I have a lot of characteristics
of my mom's because we all do of our parents. And she's going to wonder, I wonder if I'm
unreliable, I'm a manipulator or I'm whatever. Whereas if she lives half the time with the
mom, she'll begin to know her mom and therefore know herself in a way that gives herself much
more security about, here's the way I differentiate from my mom. Here is what my mom, here's why
my mom is being manipulative. Here's why my dad is being dishonest. Here's why my dad
didn't show up for that visitation. Here's what his side of it was. I'm not just inherently
dishonest like my dad. I'm not just inherently manipulative like my dad. And so the more
the conflict, the more the feeling in the part of the child that maybe the parent that
I see the least of is the shadow side of me that I don't know enough about. And the child
starts fearing that that shadow side of him or her is a significant side that is the dark
side that you don't know about because that's all it hears from the primary parent about
the other parent. And so that's one of the reasons that it's so crucial, the higher the
conflict for children to have both the more the conflict, the more the judge should be
saying it is my job to make sure that that child has some way of seeing both parents
equally. And the benefit for the child of that is?
The benefit for the child is that the child ends up not feeling psychologically rudderless.
The child ends up feeling like sheer he knows both halves of itself. The real right issue
here is the right of the child to know both halves of itself. Both halves of itself are
half its mom and half its dad. And the more the child knows about its mom and its dad,
the more it knows about the half of itself that is the mom and is the dad. And the job
of a child growing up is to discover who it is. Until that child discovers who it is,
that child can't go on and develop good social skills because social skills come on the foundation
of knowing who you are.
Great. Well, talk a little bit then about the contribution, if you would, that mother
brings to the relationship and the contribution that father brings to the relationship and
that contribution irrespective of their American status.
Yes. What I've found is that basically men and women are a lot like Republicans and
Democrats, if you will. Republicans hate Democrats. Democrats hate Republicans, but we all have
a sense that the country is a lot better off as a result of the checks and the balances
of the Republicans and the Democrats with each other. The same is true with mom and
dad. Mom and dad in divorce times may be saying, you know, the mom is this way, the dad is
this way, but the truth is that oftentimes the mom would say she's being very protective
of the children. That's the most typical. The dad might be saying, you know, when the
child falls down on the ski slope, sweetie, you get up and you try again and the child
may go to mom and say, mom, I don't want to try again. I want to, you know, and the mom
will go, okay honey, if you don't want to ski again, it's not a problem. I understand.
And the dad will say, no, when you fall, go up and try again. Well, what does the child
need? It needs both of those. It needs a mom to go to, to be able to say, I don't want
to ever do it again. And it needs a dad to go to saying, don't draw from that crying
the conclusion that the child should never do it again. Yes, mom, I need you around to
give that empathetic warm, you know, hugs that the child needs to feel protection and
security. And then mom needs to be saying, I need you around dad to be saying when that
when I've given that security to go out and try again, because if you don't try again,
you're going to be increasingly fearful of the world. And that fear of the world will
give you lower self-esteem. That will make you depressed. That will lead you to drugs
and compensating things like drinking. And you'll start becoming insecure and therefore
getting to be with controlling personalities, which is what happens, especially to girls
who don't have a lot of encouragement to go to the next level and to try harder. They
start falling in love with boys who are very controlling those boys because the boys who
are very controlling seem to be masterful. And so that the then those girls get weaker
and weaker and more and more depressed and more and more likely to have children out
of wedlock and then feel left by those boys and the anger toward men creeps in. So the
male and the female working together, especially when they disagree is so crucial for child
development. It sounds like a real question of balance that with parents that are both
actively participating, you can develop a balanced child that has the ability to interact
and react to the world in a way that's not extreme or skewed. So that would just follow
them that in the courts we need to keep both parents involved. What would you say, how
do we help couples that are actually in a high conflict situation to co-parent in an
environment when they're not together? Yes. First of all, the most important single
thing is that every couple needs very good communication skills, especially at the time
of divorce. And when I say good communication skills, what I mean is the first thing that
we need to be requiring is for a couple to go to couples communication classes, to learn
how to listen to each other and to have nothing from those couples communication classes need
to be reported in court. You can never allow a psychologist who has worked with a couple
to be reporting in a court that cannot be that you can have a psychologist who's working
with a couple to be reporting in court, but understand that the moment you have a psychologist
who's got to report in court what she or he got from the couple's experience is the moment
you make the couple's counseling very minimally effective because you're now not talking about
a couple being free to exhaust their vulnerabilities in front of the counselor because those vulnerabilities
are going to be used against them in court. And so you need to have a portion of the time
that the court assigns a mother and father that are high in conflict in a couple's communication
sessions that teach them how to hear each other and have none of that be reported in
the court. So your recommendation and very specifically with respect to the high conflict
couple and their need for counseling versus the need for the court to have an evaluator
with respect to the custody situation would be? Yes, the number one is the need for counseling
because if anything can be done to keep the couple together, that's great. But even if
the couple can't be kept together, the couple has to be, they have to know how, when they
hear their partner speak, how to immerse themselves in their partner's point of view. Now that's
not only going to be wonderful for the parenting, but it's also going to be an incredibly important
model for the children. When my kids come up to me and I say, you know, do this, they
say, oh, I know what you're talking about because your mom, you already do that with
mom. And I don't even realize that they know that I do that with mom because I think that
they're sort of not observing much of anything. What children really do model and model what
they see? Yes, they model what they see much more than anything else. And if you're bad
at mouthing, the other parent and the child's overhearing it, you are really hurting your
child for life. And not just because of bad communication modeling, but also because the
child is again in absorbing the negative information about the other parent as if it were negative
information and criticism about itself because that child, as it gets older, will discover
that it is half that dad and the half that mom. And that's the really crucial reason
that the children need to be kept in contact with both parents about 50-50. Part of it
is for balance, but the other part of it is even if both parents are wonderfully balanced
and even if you have a fantastic stepfather or stepmother working with it, you say, okay,
we have the mom and we have a stepfather, that's all the child needs and that's all
the balance. No, no, no. What the child needs is more than a good stepfather. I've been
a stepfather twice to two families. I found that I was not adequate, meaning that the
child does not work off of worrying about who it is in relation to me, the stepfather.
The child worries about who it is in relation to the biological parent because that is who
it is. Okay. All right. Well, that makes a lot of sense. In that context, just going
to a field here a bit, what's the role of the stepparent in this particular paradigm
that you've described? First of all, the stepparent is 85% of the time a stepfather, not a stepmother.
And a stepmother, the stepfather will only be as effective as the stepmother allows him
to be. The biological parent is the ruler, but much more frequently the biological parent
is a woman and the female who's a divorced female in charge of the child, children,
will oftentimes gatekeep the stepfather into a very minimal, often bread-winning or friendship
type of role. That's a mistake. A stepdad or a stepmom really should be a part of the
family structure and the two of them should work together to agree or disagree on various
issues and discipline roles. And the child does best when the stepmom and dad is working
together in the family. But a fantastic stepfather and mom relationship, biological mom relationship
does not substitute for the bringing in of the father and vice versa. A fantastic biological
father and stepmom does not substitute for bringing in the biological mom. And you show
me a case where there's a fantastic couple that is a parent and the biological parent
is absent. I won't necessarily show you a child that's hurting, but the chances statistically
are much greater than that child will. Even if they're doing well in school in order to
get the approval of the biological parent and the stepdad, they'll often be doing emotionally
and be having troubles inside of themselves. It only makes sense that children want to
know where they've come from. Yes, exactly. You see that in the case of adopted children.
You see this so clearly in the case of adopted children. One of my daughters, Ms. Deptorges,
is an adopted child. I was explaining last night about a story about her hearing. A friend
of ours talked about being a farmer. And the farmer was saying that the chicken had brought
up the ducks because the mom duck was killed. And so there came a day when the chicken and
the ducks were going down the hill and there was a big pond there. And all the ducks jumped
into the pond. And the chicken was going, you can't do this. And my adopted daughter
said to my mom, mom, that's the way I feel. I feel like I'm a duck and you're a chicken.
And that there's something fundamentally different about us. I know that you love me. I know
you care. But you don't understand that I can jump in that water. And you, biologically,
you can. Because I come from a different set of genes than you do. And it was really a
powerful experience, a powerful moment in my life to hear her say that and realize how
important the biological parent is.
Well, that leads us into another question. And it seems fairly routine in the family
course today that the movement ways are granted if one parent wants to move them. We're really
not considering the interests of the child at that point. It's more the idea that if
this is beneficial for the parent, there will be no benefit to the child. Could you just
discuss a little bit this idea of the move a ways and how this plays into the whole idea
of shared parenting?
There is nothing worse. Aside from sexual abuse and physical abuse, there's nothing worse
than one parent moving away.
Are you saying this categorically?
I'm saying this because this is a very strong statement, as you'll ever hear me make, meaning
that when you have one parent moving away, you have the absence of that biological parent
to the child, because the child, as it gets older, will not, will want, if it's going
to be a healthy child, is going to want to have friends, is going to want to have activities.
Activities require consistency. You can't be at a soccer game one day and then miss
it the next day and be any part of a team. So you miss all that benefit of teamwork.
You can't be with a friend one week and then not show up at their birthday party the next
week because you have to go to your dad's or your mom's a thousand miles away. You start
worrying about being able to form close friendships because you can never keep a close friendship
because one week you're here, one week you're somewhere else. You can never be a consistent,
close, dependable, caring, connected friend when you don't have that practice when you're
younger.
So you really need to keep both parents together. Secondly, is that, you know, I was talking
last night about the Clark Hayward, Clark Stewart and Craig Hayward work on Hangout
Time. And what both of them found was that children who do best, especially daughters
who do best, but both boys and girls as a rule who do best, are ones that have a lot
of hangout time with both parents. And almost every parent intuitively knows this. You ask
your child, you know, how did you do at soccer today? And the child goes, OK, well what happens?
How many more would happen? Oh, nothing much. It was a good game. You know, you get these
really short, terse answers, you know, but you have a lot of hangout time with your child.
And the child starts, you know, you meet the child after they're doing homework and watching
TV and you meet the child in the kitchen. They go, Mom, you know, if daddy, if you're
playing soccer and there's a, and you were good last weekend, you prevented a goal from
happening, but this weekend allowed to be the goalie, why does the coach do that? Well,
now the child through that hangout time is beginning to open up because the child needs
trust and security and longevity. And that does not come from flying into a parent's
home for a weekend or even a week. And knowing that after that week, you're going to be not
seeing that parent again for a month or two months. You need to know that your dad and
your mom are accessible and frequently available to develop that type of security emotionally
that comes with hangout time. So Hayward and Clark Stewart discovered that for, especially
for young girls, this hangout time was more important than any other single characteristic.
But those are just two little tidbits among many pieces of evidence that all lead to the
conclusion that if you want your child to have the best chance of being academically sound,
emotionally secure and socially competent, that you need to have both parents involved
in the process. There's no escape. Money doesn't substitute for daddy or mommy. And it sounds
also like quality time is not what it's been made out to be. You need quantity as well
as quality. You need quantity and quality. You need quantity. Quality is important because
it is important for children to know that you not only have boundaries set but you have
boundaries enforced. One of the great gifts of fathers is that children, the more they
spend time with their dads, the more likely they are to be empathetic. Now, observe what
I said here. Here what I said here. I said time with fathers all over the world and every
study that I've seen that's responsible in March shows that the more time the child
spends with fathers, on average, the more likely they are to be empathetic. And you
say to yourself, or I said to myself, well, dads are not more empathetic than moms. I
mean, maybe 10% are, but not as a rule. And what I discovered as I researched further
was that empathy does not come to a child as a result of a parent giving empathy. Empathy
comes to a child as a result of good boundaries being enforced so the child has to discover
what somebody else needs. So if mom and dad are, if dad is rough housing with a child
and the child is going kicking the dad and poking the dad and doing other things and
the dad says, you can't do that. And the child goes, okay. And then they start rough housing
again and the child continues to do that. And dad says, now, I think I just told you
you couldn't do that. Then the child knows, uh-huh. Dad told me I couldn't do that a second
time, but I'm getting away with it. So I'll just continue this. But most dads don't do
that. They say after they've told the child once, okay, no more rough housing. And the
child goes, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. And then, well, you continue that. There'll be no more
rough housing tomorrow either. Oh, okay. So the child learns from boundary enforcement
that it has to consider somebody else's needs other than its own. When boundaries are not
enforced effectively in that example, for example, the child learns that manipulation
gets me both to win in that little wrestling match my way. And I don't get any real, I
can make it chastise, but who cares about chastising? And I can do what I want to do.
So the child who doesn't have good boundary enforcement learns that manipulation is for
winners. But the child that gets good boundary enforcement learns that I lose when I manipulate
that. Manipulation is for losers. The child that has good boundary enforcement learns
that it has no option but to consider other people's needs and feelings besides its own.
That's the power of good boundary enforcement. The mom tends to say, you know, I only have
a short amount of time with the child. You know, I'm not going to force the child to
finish its peas before it gets ice cream and if it's going to lead to a big fight.
I want this quality time to be precious. And so I'll give in. I'll let the child have
the ice cream before it finishes its peas. Then the child learns, and that's understandable.
And anyone with an ounce of understanding, they are the argument there. But what the
child learns is anytime my mom says something, I can negotiate a better deal. So the child's
focus is not on what its mom says and how to obey it. The child's focus is how to negotiate
a better deal than what my mom says. And if the mom has that attitude, the child will
soon learn to play a little bit of guilt and to work more and more subtle manipulation
skills and will outdo its parent.
You know, mom's sitting here thinking, well, I've given in and I'm trying to teach the
child at this point that there's ability to negotiate. And the child's looking at this
going, you know, not this was a nice thing that mom did, but oh, this is the way that
I can go about getting more and more of this. And the relationship with the father helps
build the boundaries within which kids will learn empathy and learn socially responsible
behavior.
Precisely. So then that child goes to school and the child brought up by the mom, you know,
sort of learns that when there's this, you know, when I'm playing baseball, I can just
whine and complain if I, you know, if I get tagged out and the teacher or the other kids
will, you know, sort of like give in to me, well, maybe, but whether or not that works
as a manipulative technique, the child has ended up not being like as liked at school
as the one that's respectful of the boundaries and the needs of other kids. And so then that
child who has good boundary enforcement, usually from the dad, will end up getting a becoming
getting along better in school, less likely to be depressed, less likely to more likely
to have positive self esteem and a whole series of things evolve from that. People with
less depression, more positive self esteem, less likely to drink, less likely to be on
drugs, less likely to join gangs. And so you have a huge amount evolving from that tough
child enforcement.
In a high conflict situation, though, what happens is the father says, I can't enforce
those boundaries effectively because the child will then go back and say, daddy always makes
me do this. I want to be with mom or the dad, the child will say to dad, you know, you keep
that up, basically. And I'm going to choose to be with mom. And if the dad is worried
about that, it not only loses his he not only loses his effectiveness as a parent, he loses
the contribution that fathers bring to children.
So it just sounds like raising children is a two parent job.
Raising children is a two parent job. And it's a two biological parent job. And I say
this again, for anyone that worries about this, me, I have never had a custody battle.
I have never had a difficulty in this. And I have been only a step parent. So my research
was biased in my mind, in favor of the potential for the step parent, I found that there was
no evidence to back up my bias as the biological parent that really is crucial.
Talk a little bit further about the evidence that you found, because for as esteemed as
you are, people will still come back and say, well, I'm hearing from Warren Farrell and
his biases are built into this. Would you just talk a little bit about the empirical
evidence that exists to support these premises that you're offering?
Yes, there are studies from Denmark, the United States, from all over the world, Australia,
New Zealand, England, and almost all developed countries. The evidence shows basically that
when children have after divorce, the involvement of both parents about equally, or the I didn't
ever get to complete, I'd never allow myself to complete the second and third things that
are good for children. And if you can have both parents equally, then the father, the
children raised primarily by fathers do better than the children raised primarily by mothers
on most of 26 different areas of measurement.
You're stepping on a lot of sacred ground when you start to make those type of assertions.
This is very, very, veryumparently supported. And the best study on this, there are a lot
of studies on this that all add up to this. But the best study is in Denmark where half
of the children being raised by single fathers were studied, and compared to an equal number
of children being raised by single mothers and measured on 26 different variables. The
The last couple of variables was the stress of the parent, and they found that mothers,
single moms, raising children were far more stressed, far more likely to be depressed,
far more likely to be overwhelmed than single fathers raising children, even though the
single mothers were more likely to get government money and government support from that.
And that basically boils down to single, you know, if somebody is listening to this in
terms of parenting skills, the single biggest reason is in the gap between boundary enforcement
that the fathers tend to do more effectively than the moms.
But in the other 24 or so areas of measurement, except for homework, children tended to do
better growing up with their dads.
When I say except for homework, the moms were as effective in getting their daughters and
sons to do homework as dads were sometimes slightly more effective.
But the children did slightly better grade-wise, raised by dads in all grade areas, much better
on their SATs and much, much better on SATs in math and science, raised primarily by
dads than by moms.
And they did better in all social areas, less likely to be depressed, less likely to have
discipline problems, less likely to be drinking, less likely to be on drugs, more likely to
be obedient, less likely to be disobedient, less likely to be delinquent.
These are all just concrete, you know, measurable data on these issues.
The children were, the fathers were more likely to take on children that were problem children
to begin with.
Not that the, and when I say this, that children with developmental disabilities that were
at the age of one or two were 15 times more likely to be taken on by dads than they were
by mom.
And so, and then children that are in trouble in pre-teenage years living with mom are much
more likely to be transferred over to the dad at that point in time.
So as a rule, dads tend to get the more trouble children, and yet statistically speaking,
they do better with them.
So the tendency is, let's call dad when the children are starting to have problems, where
if we keep dad in the mix right from the very beginning substantially, we eliminate or less
than the likelihood of those downstream problems.
That is accurate.
That is exactly accurate, but let me defend moms here for a moment.
I'd like you to speak, if you would, to the benefits to mothers of having dads involved
when this child ring is going on.
Yes, okay.
I'll just defend moms and then talk to the benefits to moms.
Understand that this does not say that men are better as dads than women are as moms,
because the type of father that's involved is self-selected, is highly motivated.
He's a little bit like the woman who was involved as a medical doctor in the 1950s, so you can't
just say, and as a rule, fathers that are involved are a little bit older, as they're
not usually teenage fathers, those men tend to get out of the picture at everything, and
they tend to be more educated, and they tend to have more income, so we're not talking
about an equal demographic here.
But we are talking about if you have a father who's willing to be involved, for heaven's
sakes, involve him, because if he has that type of self-motivation, then the children
do well.
Now, the benefits to mom.
The benefits to mom are that many women underneath it all emotionally are fearful that when they're
divorced, when they are divorced from their husband, that they're still dependent and
tied to their husband based on his paycheck, and even though the government will come down
on the husband, a good, manipulative husband can be passive aggressive about paying, can
do all sorts of things to undermine and make it difficult on the woman, it is much more
empowering for a woman to be able to say, rather than think of my children as my job
and my child support as my paycheck, to have the children raised 50% of the time by the
dad and have me use that time to go out and develop my own economic independence, which
increases the mom's self-esteem, increases the mom's sense of empowerment, and increases
the mom's sense of freedom from being controlled, as she often feels she is, by the dad's willingness
to send that child support check on time by her own being torn between taking him back
to court and therefore risking all sorts of conflict, because mothers are afraid of conflicts
just like dads are, and so it is to the mother's benefit, the child's benefit, and the father's
benefit.
It's the father's benefit.
I've been talking about the child's benefit, but children, fathers who are without children
after divorce, they are much more prone to suicide, much more prone to depression, because
a father's basic deal in life is in the traditional family, is if you produce the money, I, dad,
produce the money, I'll get the love of my family.
So he often goes during his married years, the way he gets love is to be away from love,
that is he gets the love of the family by being away from the family at work.
So that's working for him for a number of years, and then it begins to break down in
a process called divorce.
And so afterwards the formula changes, so many women look at dads and say, the only
reason that he wants time with the children, he never wanted time before, the only reason
he wants time now is because he wants to avoid child support payments, misses the whole
understanding of what men are about.
The deal has changed, the deal was, before if I went off and I raised money, I got the
love of you, my wife, and my children.
Now it's money, I see that that doesn't work, I haven't gotten the love of my wife anymore,
and now you're telling me I'm going to take the children away, but men after divorce feel
an emotional vacuum, men are not good about communicating their feelings and getting support
from other men, that's why they're ten times as likely to commit suicide after divorce as
women are to commit suicide after divorce.
So they say that again, because what people need to hear is that.
Men after divorce are ten times as likely to commit suicide as women are after divorce.
Men after the death of a spouse are also ten times as likely to commit suicide as women
are.
The statistics I gathered from Augustine Copasau at the University of California at Irvine,
they're all documented in father and child reunion, but the important thing to know there
is that the formula changes in a man's head once there's a divorce.
The children that got his love by having him support them economically, he now needs their
love in order to not commit suicide or not get depressed.
Here's what suicide is about.
Suicide occurs when people feel that there's nobody who loves me, there's nobody that
needs me, there's no hope for that changing.
And so when a man feels that the children are being taken away from him and turned against
him emotionally, and his wife, he's lost his wife, he's saying there's nobody that loves
me, there's no hope, there's no, but if it needs me, there's no hope for that changing.
That's why sometimes you'll hear about a man killing his wife, killing his children, then
killing himself.
He almost never just kills his wife and his children, he usually kills himself.
It's a suicide and homicide combined.
And almost always if you look in the paper, you find out the family of that man, that
man is in a divorce situation and he feels that there's nobody that loves him, nobody
that needs him, no hope for that changing, and therefore he commits suicide, and in this
case a homicide because he feels or he shoots a judge as well because he feels the whole
system has been turned against him and it's his wife's fault.
Is it an oversimplification then to say that in a divorce situation men are terrified of
the loss of relationships and women are terrified of the loss of the economics of what that
goes through?
Yes.
And then has that balanced in the way we are operating in our courts today?
Has that fear, those fears been alleviated on one side, not on the other?
Is there a skewing here?
Because it appears that, you know, it appears that in most court cases today, if you're
a non-custodial parent, you will lose whatever it is that you most value, whether it's the
relationship or the economic support, and if you're with a custodial parent, you will,
if there is such a thing as a winner, derive those particular benefits.
So for men to lose relationships, women to lose economic support, is that accurately
described what's taking place in the courts today?
After a divorce, the biggest fear of men is emotional deprivation.
After a divorce, the biggest fear of women is economic deprivation.
The courts handle, to some degree, women's fear of economic deprivation, but women still
have the fear of economic deprivation, despite the courts working for them.
Because even though the courts work economically in favor of women, the amount of time that
children take means that the woman is usually very dependent just on the husband's paycheck,
and that still leaves her in fear of economic deprivation and still in conflict.
Because the courts don't say, father, take the children half the time, mother, develop
your economic skills.
Most women are very smart, and in a service industry, in a world that is service-oriented
as opposed to physically-oriented, women have major advantages, even overpoppable men.
Which they can never realize if they're saddled with childry all of the time.
And moms oftentimes love their children, almost always, but when they're around the children
all the time, it's neither good for the children, nor good for the mom, nor good for the children
to have the model of a mother who is basically using the children as a job and her source
of income as opposed to mothering with a balance between other sources of income and a job.
You want to model, moms, you want to model for your daughters a mother who is not dependent
upon a man for a source of income, because increasingly, as this world goes on technologically
and people become more and more independent, that's a bad modeling behavior for a child.
It's limiting for your daughter.
It's limiting for your daughter, and it develops in your son contempt for women, because he
begins to fear that he gets older and anything happens as a divorce, that he's not going
to have his children, he's not going to, and he's going to be supporting a woman.
So what does that tell him about what's the incentive for him to be married himself?
Do you think this is actually attributed to the idea that we see now where younger men
are more hesitant to marriage and to marry to the informed families?
It is absolutely the case that many, many men, I mean I speak to younger men and they
say, you know, my mom and dad were divorced and the man goes, you know, my dad never
had access to me.
I'm just beginning to learn now in college that my dad actually loved me and maybe he
really wanted to have access to me, and maybe he was prevented from this because my father
was unwilling to talk to me about this until recently, I just thought he didn't love me.
And so this is, and so then he begins to start, you know, projecting the son his own life.
Now most men are blinded by love and feel that their new wife or woman friend will be
different than that, but still there's another part of them that wants to be a lot more careful
than he would have been without that experience.
Does that hurt commitment and relationships?
It definitely hurts commitment and relationships and it really therefore hurts love because,
you know, what the lack of commitment is about is basically the fear that you'll eventually
be rejected and therefore you're afraid to really love fully because, you know, because
ultimately the closer you get, the more you'll be hurt by the rejection or divorce.
You know, we've kind of strayed a little far afield here of the shared parenting, the
dynamic and the children.
I want to come back to just a question that seems to be on a lot of minds these days,
and that's the role of the phenomenon of child abuse.
And is child abuse being driven by the single parent, the single parent environment that
we see more kids being raised in?
How does the involvement of two parents actually provide a protection and lessen the likelihood
of child abuse?
Yes, child abuse is definitely the least in intact families.
And it's definitely the least in families, whether it's both an active mom involvement
and an active dad involvement.
Regardless of marital status?
Regardless of marital status, but the least amount of child abuse is in a biological mom,
biological dad living in an intact family.
The most amount of child abuse is where you have a single mom.
And the second most amount of child abuse is where you have a single mom involved with
a stepfather.
Most amount of sexual abuse is single mom stepfather.
Those are sort of the largest parameters.
The important thing to understand about all domestic violence, whether it's, let me, before
I say this, to say that moms are far more likely to be physically damaging to their
daughters and sons than fathers are.
That is, there's far more children killed by moms than by dads.
There's far more children physically hurt by moms than by dads.
And this is especially true of boy children by moms.
That's the very...
Very counterintuitive what you're saying.
Yes.
I mean, this goes against what we think socially are the norms.
And here is why, here's the thing that helps everyone understand this, is that domestic
violence, whether it's from parent to child or mother and father toward each other, one
has to understand before I say this too, is that domestic violence, every single major
domestic violence study has found that men and women are about equally abusive toward
each other, or that women are slightly more abusive toward men than the other way around.
But the important thing about all of this is that domestic violence is not about power,
it's about compensation for powerlessness, meaning that domestic violence is about an
act of power that compensates for powerlessness.
Let me illustrate that.
Let's say a mom is bringing up a child and she's not good at enforcing boundaries and
the child becomes very manipulative.
And everything the mom does to try to get the child to do what it wants, the child frustrates
or manipulates or is passive aggressive or whatever.
And finally the mother loses it and just slaps the child.
And because the mother's given in and given in and been sweet and been compromising and
is being taken advantage of and taken advantage of and finally the mother loses it and slaps
the child.
And the mother usually does that when she's tired, when she's hungry and that type of
thing.
So now what do we just describe?
We describe a mom that feels what?
Powerful or powerless?
Powerless.
And so it's that feeling of powerlessness that led to total frustration that led to
the child being slapped and then, and that was the, so the domestic violence was a momentary
act of power, slapping the child to compensate for the deeper experience of powerlessness
that she's feeling.
Well, the reason that men and women batter each other about equally is because men and
women frustrate each other about equally in relationships.
And then when neither one can, you know, when somebody feels overly frustrated and powerless
and doesn't know how to communicate effectively, doesn't know how to hear their partner effectively,
oftentimes they lose it as they hit their partner and that happens equally from women
to men and men to women.
You know, what's so interesting about what you just said is that I can remember in my
own family life as a child where, and this is a common experience that you don't have
in single mother-headed households where if a child was misbehaving, the mother would
say, wait, your father gets hope and the father would handle that.
Now we need to create an environment from what I'm hearing where even if the parents
aren't living together in an intact relationship, mother has that release and outlet to say,
wait till I tell your father about this and that provides a level of balance and so to
speak a release of this energy that may otherwise manifest itself as a slap or, you know, or
some other kind of physical manifesto.
And the only way that dad can do anything about this is if he's not worried about the
father, the child, saying, I want to be at mom's and the court's saying, OK, wherever
you want to be child, you can be.
The court should not be awarding the children who are young to the parent that it wants
to be with.
The children always want to be with candy, the children, but candy ruins teeth.
And so, you know, when children want to be with one parent, particularly when the children
are very young, be suspicious of that, you know, because if that parent is not, is feeling
like it has to be the do everything for the child and is afraid of the child because it's
afraid to lose the child, a parent who is fearful of losing the child is no longer
an effective parent.
Well, isn't it interesting, too, and have you found that fathers who are in a position
of very limited time with their children don't want to fulfill the discipline role because
of the effect that it has on their relationship with the child that becomes the lens through
which the child sees the father.
And that actually stands in the way of the other attributes that the father brings to
that situation.
That's precisely correct.
Basically, when a father has a minimum amount of time with a child, what you do is you ruin
for the child the experience of a father because the experience of a father involves the ability
to enforce boundaries effectively with the child.
Well, if the father says, you know, I'm sorry, you can't have that piece of candy that's
not good for your teeth, and then the child sneaks the piece of candy and the father is
afraid to say, as a result of that, there will be no taking all the candy away from
you.
And the child goes, you do that.
I'm going to go to mom.
And the father goes, oh, boy, I'm afraid to lose the child to mom.
I'm afraid the child's going to say, cry to mom this, and this is going to come in court.
You just undermine the value of that.
So it sounds like the way our court is currently operating, our court is creating manipulative
and controlling children, because they're limiting that access to the parent that provides
that level of balance, but they're also undermining that parent in their role as a parent.
They are undermining both parents.
They're getting both parents to be prisoners of children, and they're particularly undermining
the tendency of fathers to be the more effective boundary enforcers, which is the single most
important ingredient in getting children to be good at their studies, good at social skills,
less depressed, and having less of the 24 different other areas of problems that children
tend to have when they don't have boundaries enforced very well.
But again, children also need that nurturing.
It's just that the nurturing isn't so likely to be as undermined by the court saying that
the child is going to be able to be with whatever parent it wants to be with, or if it complains
because nurturing tends to not contribute to immediate complaints.
But interestingly, children that get that structure and discipline as they get older,
they tend to realize that that is a value to them.
I was saying to my daughter, just this issue, and she was saying, yeah, I know that.
But yes, she never acts like when we're disciplining her that she knows it, but as soon as I, you
know, she says, oh, yeah, we know, we know, well, all kids know that.
And so on some level, even though the kids are resisting the discipline, they know on
some level that that's about love, that's about structure, that's about getting the parents
being strong enough to getting to care enough about the kids and being courageous enough
to not be afraid of conflict with their children.
Well, you know what, Dr. Ferrell, we could go on and on and on about this.
I just appreciate you're being generous with your time today.
And I'd just like to ask, is there anything else that you'd like to say that we haven't
covered today that we could speak to, or just anything that you is undermined that you'd
like to say?
Well, maybe if I were to summarize some things, if you're a dad listening to this, you have
to do your homework.
Meaning you've got to not only understand, contribute time, but you have to be able to
explain to the mom what the value is of what you do.
When you let a child climb a tree, when you roughhouse with a child, when you let a child
play in a playground and maybe get into a fight, you need to explain to the mom why
what you're doing increases the child's potential for better social skills, increases the child's
IQ as risk-taking does.
You need to be able to share with the mother why protection of a child is not the only
form of contribution of parenting.
Moms, you need to know that if you have a motherhood instinct anywhere inside of you,
let that motherhood instinct prevail to know that the child needs the dad operating as
a dad does in balance with you not operating under your gatekeeping instructions about
how a dad should operate.
Your dads have unique contributions that can only be made if you let them make them.
They will make from your perspective mistakes that will in fact not be necessarily mistakes
when you understand more what the value of the risk-taking and the stress and the willingness
to cry and the willingness to discipline all amount to.
Work with your dad, free yourself to have your own life with other men and with work
and with other interests that you have and to balance that with the life of your children.
Don't make your children your job.
When you make your children your job, you make your children the prisoner of only you
as a parent.
Your children need to have both the mom and the dad.
No stepfather is a substitute for a father.
No matter how good your relationship with that stepdad is.
As a stepdad, I know this that the best thing I have done as a stepdad is to work toward
keeping the biological dad involved with the children.
Warren, I want to thank you again today.
This material that you've just presented in this conversation, much of this is available
in your work, Father and Child Reunion.
You've just developed a DVD series called The Best Interest of the Child that talks
a lot about this empirical evidence and goes into and in more depth the things that we've
just had a brief opportunity to touch on today.
Could you tell folks how they could get that material and where they could go to order
that?
Sure.
I couldn't remember anything very complicated, so they gave me as my website, WarrenFeral.com.
The Feral is spelled F-A-R-R-E-L-L, two R's and two L's, and then both the Father and
Child Reunion book and the DVD, The Best Interest of the Child are on there.
The Father and Child Reunion book is best if you want all the data.
Everything I've been saying is very carefully documented, and that's all in Father and Child
Reunion in this documentation form.
The DVD is best if you want to have somebody be able to listen to this in conversation form
like you and I are doing here and get a sense of the, it's easier to absorb and take in
although the Father and Child Reunion is written very clearly as well.
Okay.
Well, I'll tell you what.
I just want to thank you.
For everything that you've done for families, you know, your depth of commitment and passion
and compassion just come shining through, and I really appreciate all that you've done
for us.
And I really want to reciprocate on that comment with your work with ACFC.
You have really made ACFC one of the most powerful organizations in this country and
on behalf of children.
Thank you.
