Darcy Lockman, ALL THE RAGE
[0:00]Hi, I'm Zibi Owens, and you're listening to Momstone Have Time to Read Books.
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[0:22]I'm here today with Darcy Lachman, PhD.
[0:24]She is a former journalist and clinical psychologist.
[0:27]Her first book, Brooklyn Dew, the Education of a Psychotherapist, Chronicle Deere.
[0:31]She spent working in the city's psychiatric ward.
[0:34]Her latest book, All the Rage, Mothers, Fathers, and the Myth of Equal Partnership,
[0:38]comes out in May.
[0:39]Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Rolling Stone,
[0:42]and Psychology Today, among others.
[0:44]She currently lives with her husband and daughter in Queens.
[0:46]So welcome to Darcy.
[0:47]Hi, so thanks so much for coming on Momstone Have Time to Read Books.
[0:51]Thank you for having me.
[0:52]I'm excited to be here.
[0:53]Oh, this is so great.
[0:54]So I wanted to know what made you decide to write all the rage, but first I want to hear
[0:58]a little more.
[0:59]You were starting to tell me about how you even got your writing journey in your retirement
[1:04]phone, and fact checking, and all that really interesting to me, so tell me how you,
[1:09]your whole, you know, go, you go, okay.
[1:11]So I moved to New York after college to be a magazine writer.
[1:14]I always wanted to be a writer, and I was never a fiction writer, so that was like,
[1:18]that seemed the avenue to go down.
[1:20]So I got a Rolling Stone internship, actually, when I was still in college, for post-graduation.
[1:26]So I moved here to do that, and then ended up getting a job at Water Media at the time,
[1:30]us magazine.
[1:31]So I started working in magazines.
[1:33]I worked kind of all around, you know, started as an editor-assisted answering phones,
[1:37]and then started writing quit my job a full-time freelance writer, which was a great
[1:41]thing to do in the late 90s, because publishing was kind of, it was a good point to make
[1:45]money that way.
[1:46]I know that you would be anymore.
[1:49]The web was new, so you could write all sorts of stuff for the internet.
[1:52]And then after freelance writing for a while, I wanted a little more stability, so I went
[1:55]to Vogue as a fact checker, which was great.
[1:58]It was such a wonderful place to work around the year 2000.
[2:01]And then went back to school to be a psychologist, because it started to feel like the
[2:05]stuff I was writing wasn't that interesting to me, and to make a living full-time as a freelance
[2:10]writer meant doing a lot of stuff that wasn't going to be that interesting to you, at least
[2:14]the track that I was on.
[2:16]So I stopped, but I always had the idea that I would write about psychology eventually,
[2:20]which isn't what this book is about, but it was always in the background writing, even
[2:24]though I was going down in a different road.
[2:26]We have a very parallel thing.
[2:28]I was a psych major.
[2:29]I thought I was going to be a psychologist.
[2:31]I interned at Vanity Fair.
[2:33]I mean, I thought I would be a freelance magazine writer.
[2:37]Anyway, so I feel like if we took one of those, you know, my first break test, we would
[2:43]probably be the same.
[2:44]What happened with psychology?
[2:46]Just because of where my life was, I couldn't commit to being in one place for five years.
[2:50]So I put it on hold, I ended up going to business school.
[2:52]But I used it more in analyzing consumer behavior and doing it more in the business side and
[2:57]doing marketing and things like that for a while, but anyway, this is not about me.
[3:01]Okay.
[3:02]Okay.
[3:03]So you became a psychologist, you wrote your first book, Brooklyn Zoo, tell me a little
[3:07]bit about that.
[3:08]So it's about the year I spent working at King's County Hospital on the psych ward.
[3:13]Every one at the end of their doctoral program in clinical psychology does a clinical
[3:15]internship.
[3:16]Usually works in a hospital for a year.
[3:18]So I kind of went into it knowing that I wanted to write an early career memoir that
[3:24]would be the category.
[3:26]So I spent the year that I actually, part of the reason I picked that hospital because
[3:29]you ranked places is I wanted somewhere really interesting.
[3:32]You know, so I remember being on my interviews and loving Beth Israel, but I thought, oh,
[3:36]like, this isn't going to be interesting, you know, for a book.
[3:38]I thought, you know, King's County, I think that's the place to be a Bellevue was sort
[3:41]of the place where people had typically written these kind of books about, but seemed overdone.
[3:45]And I think, well, anyway, so part of my thinking in going to that particular hospital
[3:50]was it would be a good like a really rich place.
[3:53]And it ended up being a great place to train just because you see so much that you don't
[3:58]necessarily get the chance to see in a different setting.
[4:01]But I took really copious notes all year.
[4:04]I would get on the subway after my day at work and just write down everything that had
[4:07]happened during the day.
[4:08]And I also had notebooks with me during the day and I would, I would take notes, which
[4:13]probably seemed a little strange sometimes, but you know, we were learning.
[4:16]So it was acceptable.
[4:17]And then, so I wrote a proposal for that book when my internship ended and sold it and
[4:24]wrote the book, which was a lot of fun.
[4:25]I really enjoyed doing it and I know I wanted to write another book.
[4:27]And then how did you arrive at this topic for all the rage?
[4:30]Well, I arrived in the first hill, this nurse, a little more about what all the rage is
[4:35]about.
[4:36]I know the subtitle I read already in the intro, but it's Mother's Fathers and the myth
[4:39]of equal partners.
[4:40]Yeah.
[4:41]I actually thought you would arrive here looking very angry.
[4:43]Oh, really?
[4:44]You know, I thought you'd be, but no, no, no.
[4:47]My kids are older now.
[4:48]So there's a lot, there's a lot, there's a lot less stress on our family.
[4:51]How old are you?
[4:52]How old are you kids?
[4:53]There's six and nine.
[4:54]Okay.
[4:55]And at the point when I started to write the proposal, they were six and three.
[4:59]Okay.
[5:00]So it's a really different phase of life.
[5:02]I arrived at this topic by having children with a man.
[5:07]I, you know, my husband and I are both like fairly progressive.
[5:11]There was never any thought that I would be a stay-at-home mother.
[5:13]We met in grad school.
[5:15]We graduated with so much debt that there was no way that even if I had been inclined
[5:20]to be a stay-at-home mother, that that would have been something that we could have thought
[5:22]about, though I wasn't particularly inclined to do that.
[5:24]It wouldn't suit me temperamentally.
[5:27]But when our first daughter came along, though my husband was in love with her and totally
[5:32]involved with her, I began to see that all the work kind of around her was following
[5:38]to me, like from finding a preschool, to making sure she had everything she needed, to
[5:42]being the one who remembered diapers when we went anywhere.
[5:45]And I was really surprised.
[5:47]We were living in this kind of way that felt kind of retro to me and didn't align with
[5:53]our values.
[5:55]And I saw it going on around me as well.
[5:57]You know, you meet a lot of moms when you have a kid.
[6:00]So the mothers I would meet would, and they were, you know, because most of the mothers
[6:05]I met were from our preschool, they all worked full-time pretty much.
[6:09]And they had the same complaints that I did, and I thought this is so weird.
[6:13]You know, we didn't think we were going into parenting in 1950, but we found ourselves
[6:17]parenting in 1950.
[6:20]And I just kept thinking, why is it this way?
[6:22]What is going on?
[6:24]Why is this?
[6:25]And I think because I come from a journalism background, I thought, well, I can really use
[6:29]my journalistic tools to dissect this problem.
[6:32]I was really just very curious, like, I really wanted to know, how is this that this
[6:37]is going on?
[6:38]So that was the genesis of the book.
[6:39]Wow.
[6:40]You have a great scene in the beginning where you're talking about a mom in the 1950s who
[6:45]wanted to go into the theater, but her husband said, you know, she said, my husband wants
[6:50]me home in the evenings.
[6:51]And then you wrote, it sounded just so very long ago or did it.
[6:55]And I love that line because I feel like I've heard that said many times.
[7:02]Oh, he doesn't let me do this or I can't do this or he needs this or he needs that or
[7:06]whatever.
[7:07]It depends on the relationship, but I feel, you know, that could have just as easily been
[7:12]this morning.
[7:13]You know, it's funny because I had never heard anyone talk that way, like my husband won't
[7:16]let me do that.
[7:18]But when I looked back at my relationship with my husband, you know, we'd been together
[7:22]probably six years before we had kids.
[7:25]And there were little things along the way, places where I kind of acted in a deferential
[7:30]way toward him that I don't think either of us would have tagged in the moment.
[7:36]In retrospect, I kind of saw them and I, you know, he would, he would probably laugh
[7:42]to hear me say that because I am not, I'm like no shrinking violet when it comes to
[7:46]speaking up for myself, but there were ways in which I took care of him and of us that
[7:50]were sort of more of like from a housewife kind of era.
[7:54]And I had other friends too who who would call themselves feminists like, you know, happily
[8:00]and shout out from the rooftops, but found themselves cooking for their husbands all the
[8:03]time and things like that.
[8:05]So I think, you know, people do get surprised by how this stuff comes out in heterosexual
[8:11]relationships.
[8:12]And you know, I certainly was.
[8:13]So but again, when I read that, I was like, oh, this is so, or actually I heard that
[8:17]woman on a podcast, as you said, and it's like a way to second.
[8:20]Maybe this is an amen.
[8:21]I mean, this is like more extreme than we would be, but there are remnants, right?
[8:25]There are remnants of it still, even today.
[8:27]And you sprinkle throughout the book, little anecdotes from your own life in addition
[8:31]to all the research, which most of taking you, I mean, you have a lot in there.
[8:35]I was impressed.
[8:36]Thank you.
[8:37]Yeah.
[8:38]Good reporting.
[8:39]Yeah, everything.
[8:40]Thanks.
[8:41]I spoke a long time.
[8:42]I can tell.
[8:43]I can tell you, it's been a long time.
[8:44]It's a lot of information.
[8:45]And it's great and really well organized.
[8:46]Thank you.
[8:47]But you get a lot in there.
[8:48]It's awesome.
[8:49]But then you have your own story throughout which I was particularly interested in hearing
[8:51]about, including just this one scene where you had gone away or you were out all day
[8:56]with the kids and then you were giving them a bath.
[8:58]Well, you just you can tell the story.
[9:00]This was like, I loved putting the story in the book because I think this is so illustrative
[9:04]of the way this happens.
[9:06]We were at the beach all day, it was a great day at the beach.
[9:09]But you know, it's a long day.
[9:10]The kids are tired.
[9:11]They haven't had dinner.
[9:12]We're driving home.
[9:13]And we decided that we'll make chicken nuggets from the freezer for dinner so they can
[9:16]eat quickly and go to bed.
[9:17]But they're covered in sand and they need baths.
[9:20]This was last summer.
[9:21]So my older daughter was eight.
[9:22]My younger daughter was five.
[9:23]The eight-year-old baits herself, but the five-year-old needed some help.
[9:26]So we get into the apartment and I go into the bathroom with my younger daughter to get
[9:30]the sand off her and bathe her.
[9:32]And my husband walks into the kitchen.
[9:34]So I assume he's going to put the chicken nuggets in.
[9:36]Don't even say anything because we've already said this is what they're going to do.
[9:39]So you know, I bathed tests, my younger daughter.
[9:42]And you know, a few minutes later, come out of the bathroom and my husband is standing
[9:45]in the kitchen drinking a beer.
[9:47]And there are no chicken nuggets in the toaster oven or even having the gun in the freezer.
[9:51]It's like he just doesn't.
[9:54]And you know, my husband is a hard-working guy.
[9:56]He's thoughtful.
[9:57]He's considerate, you know, typically.
[10:00]just doesn't think about the kids needs sometimes
[10:02]in ways that are so astounding to me
[10:04]because when I get home and they need to get into bed
[10:06]and have dinner first,
[10:07]like that's all, like I'm not gonna do anything
[10:09]until that's taken care of.
[10:11]And this just so typifies the way we parent together
[10:15]where he's not really the one who feels responsible
[10:18]because of what has gone on between us
[10:20]and the norms that have kind of been established
[10:22]without ever talking about them.
[10:25]So what did you do in that kitchen?
[10:26]Oh, so that kitchen.
[10:27]So I walked into the kitchen,
[10:29]I see him standing there having a beer
[10:31]and I'm just like, I wasn't mad, you know,
[10:34]because I was working on this book.
[10:36]You know, the book started with a history of us
[10:39]really fighting a lot.
[10:41]You know, these were huge fights between us
[10:44]and things were tense for a while
[10:45]cause I was pretty unhappy with the way things were going
[10:48]in that area.
[10:50]But this was just almost funny to me.
[10:52]I mean, I think cause we'd had so many fights about it.
[10:55]I was just like, this is just,
[10:57]so I got the nuggets out of the freezer,
[11:00]open the box, put them in the house there.
[11:02]He didn't even flinch.
[11:04]He didn't say, oh, oops, like there was just no.
[11:07]So we didn't have a fight about it.
[11:09]I don't even think we talked about it,
[11:11]but it's just one of those clarifying moments where you're like,
[11:14]this is just, we don't think the same way
[11:17]in relationship to our children.
[11:18]You know, he adores them, he does stuff for them,
[11:21]but does not think about their kind of care and feeding
[11:24]in the same basic way or at least takes it for granted
[11:27]someone else is gonna take care of it.
[11:28]I think that's the probably the biggest difference.
[11:30]Do you think part of it is in the communication?
[11:32]Like, it sounds like if you had been like,
[11:34]hey, throw those nuggets in the oven,
[11:35]he would have been like, okay.
[11:37]Yeah, no, he absolutely would have.
[11:38]But it is at the point that you were the one
[11:40]who has to be lost, but I didn't intentionally not tell him
[11:43]cause we had just talked about it.
[11:45]And when I get home with two hungry children
[11:47]and it's bedtime, it wouldn't,
[11:49]like there's no way I wouldn't think to do that immediately.
[11:52]You are like a calmer woman than I am.
[11:54]Yeah, no, I take back that are similar tender to me.
[11:57]I don't think I would have responded
[11:59]into a chill, observant way to a scene like that.
[12:03]Trust me, we've had our moments.
[12:05]And I have not always responded in such a chill,
[12:07]observant way, but it was just,
[12:10]if I'm not there, he's on it.
[12:12]But if I'm there, I think he just takes it for granted
[12:15]that I'm gonna take care of it.
[12:16]And it is based on a history of me taking care of it,
[12:19]but why was I taking care of it?
[12:21]It's, you know, it's a dynamic between us
[12:23]and I think a lot of couples
[12:24]that I know a lot of couples.
[12:25]So you observe this dynamic and then you decide
[12:29]to throw yourself into all the research on this
[12:31]that you possibly can.
[12:32]I did, yeah.
[12:33]The best argument filter possible.
[12:35]Exactly, like I'm really gonna find out
[12:37]why we're still living this way.
[12:38]You know, we think it's 20,
[12:40]I mean, I started running the book
[12:41]and I think I started the proposal in 2015.
[12:45]I took a year to write the proposal.
[12:46]I was kind of admixed feelings about doing it.
[12:49]It had been such a contentious thing between us
[12:52]that I thought and we had sort of gotten
[12:53]to a better place with it.
[12:54]I thought do I really wanna pursue this
[12:56]and kind of throw this wrench into my marriage.
[12:59]But he was, you know, he thought it was a great idea.
[13:01]So that made it easy to proceed.
[13:04]But I did, yeah, definitely.
[13:06]I was gonna really figure out why this was going on.
[13:08]What is like the condensed answer to the question.
[13:11]What did you find?
[13:12]The condensed answer is patriarchy.
[13:15]I think we just, we grow up in a society
[13:17]that teaches us that men's desires and aspirations
[13:21]and comfort is more important than women's.
[13:24]I think there's no way to kind of grow up
[13:26]in our society and not internalize that.
[13:29]Even in a time that's more feminist
[13:32]than 50 years ago or 30 years ago or 20 years ago,
[13:36]it's all around.
[13:37]And there's, you know, there's little stuff
[13:38]in the book to kind of illustrate that.
[13:40]So even if you're raised in a home
[13:43]where your parents kind of act like equals,
[13:45]and I feel like I was, I mean, in the 70s and 80s,
[13:48]my dad did a ton.
[13:49]My mom went back to school when I was in third grade.
[13:51]So he was really left responsible for quite a lot.
[13:54]So it's not like I grew up in some,
[13:56]leave it to Beaver House.
[13:57]But all around you, you see men in power,
[14:00]you see men elevated, you know,
[14:02]there's this story in the book about statues,
[14:05]not story, but like most of the historical statues
[14:07]in the US are men.
[14:09]So what do, what do little girls see growing up?
[14:12]My daughter, I remember looking at change
[14:14]for the first time asking me who the presidents were.
[14:16]And it's like, obviously they're all men.
[14:17]So I don't know how you don't internalize the idea
[14:21]that you are the second sex, that you are,
[14:24]that you come second.
[14:25]That's interesting.
[14:26]But I don't think you realize it, right?
[14:27]Cause it's like juxtaposed against this idea
[14:30]of equality that we sort of hold,
[14:33]not everybody, but that a lot of people hold
[14:36]just to be evident, right?
[14:38]And, you know, there was always this part of my thinking
[14:41]like with all of this, who should do what in their marriage
[14:45]and, you know, just society getting it right
[14:48]or getting it wrong.
[14:48]And you said sometimes I think that women are just
[14:52]hardwired to be parents, like to my mother,
[14:56]and I'm like, yeah, why is there all this focus
[14:59]all the time on the things that the guys aren't doing?
[15:02]These are not as good as it.
[15:03]I am like totally happy to admit that I am not a skilled
[15:06]in some areas as perhaps most men,
[15:09]just spatial relations or all the stereotypical things
[15:13]that come from somewhere, right?
[15:14]I'm not gonna be able to pick up a toolbox
[15:17]and know what to do with it.
[15:18]And I feel like maybe men pick up a diaper bag
[15:20]in the same way that I hold a toolbox
[15:22]and they're like, I don't know.
[15:23]Yeah.
[15:24]You can show me, like try to teach me how to do this.
[15:26]So I wonder, is it biological?
[15:28]Yes.
[15:29]But then you have in your book this whole section
[15:31]with Louise Elliot who says, you know, no way.
[15:34]Yeah.
[15:35]So what do you think?
[15:35]What did you make of the research?
[15:36]Parenting skills are learned.
[15:38]They're not innate.
[15:39]And I interviewed anthropologists and primatologists
[15:42]and there's no jury that is out on this.
[15:45]These skills are learned.
[15:46]So you could learn to use a toolbox.
[15:48]Your husband could learn to use a diaper bag.
[15:51]If we believe that these things are innate,
[15:53]we're gonna be less inclined to pursue them fully.
[15:56]So I think there is a lot of kind of misconception
[16:00]that women are just innately better at this.
[16:03]In fact, both males and females have evolved
[16:05]to be involved parents and evolutionists.
[16:09]Hardly my expertise.
[16:11]So going back to primates, non-human primates,
[16:15]there are hormonal changes even in male.
[16:18]Like, I'm not gonna get the sneer line,
[16:20]but monkeys neurobiological experiences
[16:22]and babies gestate.
[16:24]Right, exactly.
[16:24]So you think, well, women's bodies change
[16:27]during pregnancy, obviously.
[16:29]And the hormones are affected in all this stuff.
[16:31]What I didn't know, and I don't know if this is more
[16:34]common knowledge than I realized,
[16:35]is that men's hormones also change
[16:37]when they're spending time with a pregnant partner.
[16:39]So if you like get a woman pregnant
[16:41]and never see her again, it's a one night stand,
[16:44]your hormones don't change, right?
[16:45]Because there's no feedback loop that would make that so.
[16:49]But spending time with a pregnant partner
[16:51]raises a man's level of, I think,
[16:55]progesterone prolactin,
[16:57]the same pregnancy-related hormones
[16:59]that spike in women also spike in men,
[17:02]not to the same degree.
[17:03]But Sarah Hardy, who's a really renowned anthropologist
[17:07]and primatologist talks about this in her book, Mother Nature,
[17:11]about how primates evolved to be involved parents,
[17:15]both male and female.
[17:16]So this idea that only women change
[17:19]during pregnancy and childbirth isn't true.
[17:21]Men are also primed,
[17:22]hormonesally, to parents.
[17:24]And you had said somewhere
[17:25]that only three or five percent of all males.
[17:29]Yeah, species.
[17:30]Like the only three mammals.
[17:32]Yeah.
[17:32]Of mammals, actually take care of their younger.
[17:35]Right, only three to five percent of mammals.
[17:36]So it's primates, both human and non-human.
[17:39]And then like, I think wolves,
[17:41]there's some mice.
[17:44]It's in the book, and I don't remember exactly the information,
[17:46]but yeah, only three to five percent of male mammals.
[17:48]I've got to do anything.
[17:49]That's the right thing.
[17:50]That's the right thing.
[17:51]Yeah, I mean, I didn't find it surprising only
[17:53]because I had no knowledge of that.
[17:55]Right, right.
[17:56]Fish are really involved parents as our fathers, as our birds.
[18:00]Really? Yeah.
[18:01]Yes.
[18:02]There are, in fact, there's some birds
[18:04]where the males do like most of the parenting,
[18:08]including sharing, sitting on the eggs.
[18:11]So all of this is learned.
[18:14]It's cultural patriarchy from the statues all around us.
[18:18]What are we supposed to do now?
[18:20]Yeah.
[18:21]Well, you know, the people I talked to
[18:24]who were navigating those more successfully were on top of it.
[18:28]I think if you, you know, my husband and I went into parenting,
[18:31]just taking for granted that we were going to share things equally.
[18:35]And he would say the same thing.
[18:36]We never talked about what that was actually going to look like.
[18:39]And then I just ended up kind of taking most stuff on.
[18:42]And I don't know if it was because there was a vacuum
[18:44]where he wasn't taking stuff on.
[18:46]Or, you know, was it, I think part of it is just me assuming
[18:51]that women are going to do this stuff.
[18:52]And then we never kind of course corrected
[18:54]because we never said, wow, we're really sexist, right?
[18:57]We needed to kind of sit down and say,
[18:59]we're really sexist and this isn't working.
[19:01]It wasn't working for me.
[19:02]It wasn't working for him because I was mad at him quite a lot,
[19:05]which is no way to live.
[19:06]So staying on top of it and paying attention to one's
[19:10]kind of implicit biases is I think the key to not letting things
[19:15]get to out of control.
[19:16]A woman I talked to who was doing this well
[19:18]made a spreadsheet with her husband.
[19:20]And they kind of like sat down and said,
[19:22]who's going to do what and they divided it.
[19:25]And that was something that people who study work places
[19:29]will also say because women also end up taking on
[19:32]most of the drug work at work.
[19:33]There have been studies that look at this.
[19:35]And so the question is asked, like,
[19:37]how do we deby as people in the workplace?
[19:39]And one of the women who did one of these studies
[19:42]was talking and she said, you know,
[19:43]you don't have to deby as anyone.
[19:45]Just like make a list and split stuff up.
[19:47]Don't ask for volunteers.
[19:48]Don't assign people to tasks.
[19:50]Because women volunteer more and women are assigned
[19:52]to this kind of work more.
[19:53]You have to kind of just like go about it in a really
[19:55]like micromanaging way and say, here's everything.
[19:57]Here's how it's going to break down.
[19:59]So I think if you know.
[20:00]Well, how sexism has been internalized for you
[20:03]and your spouse inevitably,
[20:05]you can deal with this from the get-go.
[20:08]Interesting.
[20:09]Good to know.
[20:10]You also have your daughter testing
[20:12]that there's a scene where you say kids are more important
[20:15]than grown-ups.
[20:17]And then you have a whole section on basically
[20:20]giving, viewing all the kids with so much power
[20:22]and the family.
[20:23]Tell me a little more about that.
[20:24]One of the concepts that I read about
[20:26]in doing my research was intensive mothering.
[20:29]We are so, I think, as a culture right now,
[20:33]focused on being really involved parents in a certain way
[20:37]and especially mothers.
[20:38]There's a lot of pressure to be putting your own needs
[20:41]second to your kids all the time.
[20:43]And clearly they need to be fed and clothed and hugged.
[20:47]But their needs do come first.
[20:50]I mean, I wouldn't say my kids are in charge,
[20:52]but our lives are sort of arranged around their schedules
[20:54]and their, and they don't have schedules,
[20:55]but around their needs.
[20:56]And they sense that.
[20:58]And then they get a real, I want to say an inflated sense
[21:01]of their own importance because kids need to feel important
[21:04]certainly to develop healthily emotionally.
[21:07]But there is something that feels a little bit too
[21:10]compulsive about it for, I think,
[21:12]especially mothers these days.
[21:13]And this isn't to blame women for it.
[21:15]It's just in the culture, like how do you not do that?
[21:17]When all around you, it's what everybody is doing.
[21:19]How do you not do that and not feel like a bad parent?
[21:23]So her saying that, like, wow, like,
[21:26]I don't remember if I responded to that,
[21:28]I said, no, actually, we're all important.
[21:30]So she wouldn't have bought it
[21:32]because we can have her lives
[21:33]or arranged around her needs.
[21:35]That's fine.
[21:36]So you are a practicing psychotherapist as well as a writer.
[21:41]On your website, you say that you offer a 10 session workshop
[21:44]for expecting couples called Bringing Baby Home,
[21:47]which has been shown to improve relationship satisfaction
[21:50]and decrease the chance of divorce.
[21:52]Tell me about this.
[21:53]What are like a couple of bullets from this workshop
[21:56]that any relationship can use?
[21:59]Yeah.
[22:00]So John and Julie Gottman are the therapist
[22:03]who've kind of pioneered this method.
[22:06]They've come up with it.
[22:07]And it grew from their work with couples and families.
[22:12]And they created this workshop
[22:14]and then looked at it empirically.
[22:16]So they had people do it and they had control groups
[22:18]and people had done it and hadn't done it
[22:20]and they started their marriages.
[22:22]So there's all this empirical work
[22:23]that shows that people who've done these,
[22:25]like pre-parenting workshops, things go better.
[22:27]And the divorce rate, it's like in the first five years
[22:31]of the kid's life, I don't think they have data
[22:32]that goes beyond that.
[22:33]But it was significantly lower in couples
[22:35]who had taken the workshop.
[22:36]Isn't it also to the, I don't have any to get you off.
[22:38]Like people who are gonna go in and take a workshop
[22:40]on this might care more than the people who don't.
[22:43]Yeah, you know, I don't know how they recruited their subjects.
[22:47]So I'm not sure if it was like
[22:49]or maybe it was a referral land.
[22:51]Yeah, it was, I'm not gonna remember.
[22:54]But yeah, now that's a really good point.
[22:56]So I actually, for the book and for my practice,
[22:59]I went and got trained in the method
[23:00]because if you're a clinician,
[23:01]you can get trained in it.
[23:02]You go to these things.
[23:03]But it's, I mean, I went to this workshop in,
[23:07]I think it was in Virginia.
[23:08]They mostly work on a Seattle,
[23:09]so a lot of other stuffs on the West Coast.
[23:11]They were like, I couldn't believe it.
[23:13]There were people from around the world at this workshop.
[23:15]There were people from Thailand, Australia.
[23:17]It was really amazing.
[23:18]So it's actually gotten a really good reputation
[23:21]among clinicians.
[23:22]One of the things that it emphasizes
[23:24]and one of the reasons I think it's so successful
[23:26]is that it talks about how important father involvement is.
[23:29]You know, if you go to Loma's class,
[23:31]which is really the only thing people typically do
[23:33]before getting birth, right?
[23:34]Most people do some sort of childbirth, education class.
[23:37]There's no sense, I mean, you know,
[23:39]the father's kind of an important partner,
[23:41]but everyone knows he's second, right?
[23:43]And childbirth, obviously.
[23:45]This workshop emphasizes the importance of fathers
[23:48]in the early weeks, months,
[23:49]and years of caring for a baby.
[23:51]Because our sort of cultural conventional wisdom
[23:54]pushes us in the other direction.
[23:55]So the workshop emphasizes communication
[23:58]and father involvement.
[23:59]And it's usually taught in two-day format
[24:02]and like a big workshop I've offered it in my office
[24:04]because I haven't done the workshops yet
[24:06]that my husband, who's also a psychologist
[24:08]and I have been thinking about trying to do some
[24:10]because it just because the results are so impressive.
[24:12]Yeah, yeah, it's important.
[24:14]So what do you have coming next?
[24:15]You are gonna do another book or what do you wanna do next?
[24:18]Yes, I'd love to write another book.
[24:20]I don't have any ideas right now.
[24:22]So I'm not working on anything.
[24:23]But this was so fun.
[24:24]Doing all the research was awesome.
[24:26]I got to spend a year basically just reading
[24:28]all this stuff that was super interesting
[24:30]and articles and books and interviewing people.
[24:32]It was really fun.
[24:33]Anything I need research now, I am going to send to you.
[24:36]I have an idea that I can't research.
[24:41]You are going to be my expert research resource.
[24:43]So you know.
[24:44]Ripping questions, I think.
[24:45]I need a grouping question.
[24:46]You're related to motherhood.
[24:47]Yes, right.
[24:48]I don't know any grouping questions right now.
[24:50]I need one.
[24:51]I miss working on it.
[24:52]It's like postpartum.
[24:53]Do you have any parting advice to aspiring authors?
[24:56]Let's see.
[24:57]I think more than non-fiction writers.
[24:59]Yeah, non-fiction is totally different.
[25:01]I think my advice would be find a gripping question.
[25:04]Because you really live with a book
[25:07]for the time that you're working on it.
[25:08]I mean, I was really immersed in this stuff.
[25:11]And I think to maintain your enthusiasm
[25:15]and your ability to push ahead,
[25:17]you really have to be fascinated
[25:18]with what you're doing and what you're studying,
[25:20]what you're learning about.
[25:22]So that's my advice.
[25:23]Thank you so much for coming on mom's time to read books.
[25:26]Thank you.
[25:26]This is really fun.
[25:27]This episode has been brought to you by Boombox Gifts.
[25:30]Memory boxes filled with personal messages and photos
[25:33]from friends and family for your next special occasion.
[25:35]BoomboxGifts.com.
[25:37]Thanks to Ryan and Steve at Texture Sound
[25:39]for the audio editing and mixing.
[25:41]Thanks for listening to mom soon.
[25:42]Have time to read books.