The New Fatherhood Script with Richard Reeves

Richard Reeves I have this kind of real sort of strong sense of just the incredible awareness I had of his body, like in the car with me, kind of in the back seat and how I drove and how I felt about it. It was just the world I was traveling through felt very, very, very different and obviously I drove differently. And so every light car horn, every brake light, every intersection was just much more fraught. Like the world was suddenly full of peril and monsters and dangers. But the sense I had of my own almost cavalier view about my own physical safety was suddenly transformed into this unbelievable sense of physical protectiveness towards this newborn.

Michael Feigelson The world is exactly as it was before. The roads are the same, the intersections are the same, and yet somehow nothing is the same.

This podcast begins with a simple idea: when a baby is born, a parent is also born. And in that transition, just like their babies, parents’ brains and bodies team up to help them learn and adapt at high velocity, developing a set of skills and perspectives valuable for their kids and for society as a whole.

This is Birth of a Parent, and our guest today is Richard Reeves. He’s the founder of the American Institute for Boys and Men. Much of Richard’s work explores a question that feels increasingly urgent. As old ideas about manhood fade away, what should replace them? In recent years, that question has often led him to fatherhood.

For a long time, we’ve asked what children need from fathers, but Richard asks a different question. What do men get from fatherhood? And why do they need it today, perhaps more than ever before? To understand how you arrived at that question, we have to start with Richard’s dad.

Michael Feigelson I wanted to start with the image you had as a child of manhood and masculinity growing up.

Richard Reeves The overwhelming sense I had was that it’s a relational activity, that masculinity is defined through service and provision, right, being a provider, and so my own dad was clearly the breadwinner. There was this very important moment for me when he actually was unemployed, he worked in manufacturing in the 80s back in the UK and he lost his job a couple of times and one time he was out of work for a while and every day he would get up and he would shave and he would put on a clean shirt and have breakfast with us and then go off to type out his resume or whatever in the spare room. I said to him one day, I said, dad, why are you bothering to shave and put a show on? You don’t have a job. And he said, I do have a job. I have a jobs to get another job so that I can carry on taking care of you. And then for a period, he actually basically was away all week so that he could continue to work. The only place he could get work was a long way away. So he couldn’t, he had to do it like Monday to Friday so that I didn’t have to change schools. And he says, it’s just what you do. And then he was like a rugby coach. He helped with the scout group. He was on the school PTA. Both my parents were like, very, very engaged in the in the community. And so I don’t want to give the sense that he was some sort of overly earnest or anything, but I just saw my dad always giving a lot more than I felt he got.

Michael Feigelson Like me, Richard grew up with a very clear script for manhood. A man provided, a man served, a man took care of his family.

Michael Feigelson Was that unique or was that common among the men in your community?

Richard Reeves It wasn’t unique, but actually, there was something at the time about being an upstanding member of your community as a guy did actually require you socially to do stuff for the community, in a way that I think is a bit less true now. And in fact, even in the educational setting, like some of them, the biggest effect that some teachers had on me, three male teachers in particular was actually not in the classroom, it was the stuff they did voluntarily outside what music, one was music, one was sailing, one was rugby. And like that was just stuff they were doing pretty much unpaid. And so I do think this idea of being of service was kind of part of like what it meant to be a fully rounded grownup man.

Michael Feigelson Sounded a lot like the version of a good man I grew up with too.

Michael Feigelson Hello?
Mom Hi, Mike.
Michael Feigelson Yeah. Yeah. How’s it going?
Mom Good, I’m getting ready to watch a movie.
Michael Feigelson Any good movies?
Mom I can never find anything that I like.
Michael Feigelson What are you looking for?
Mom What are you looking for?
Michael Feigelson I’m, well… I was calling because I’ve been talking to someone about how the fatherhood scripts have changed over time.
Mom You mean the way fathers are depicted in film or the cultural expectations of fathers or what?
Michael Feigelson Yeah, like that kind of stuff, that that’s changed over time.
Mom Oh yeah, absolutely, it has. I’ve seen men doing things with babies and children that they’ve never done before, not when I was growing up or when you were growing up. Men walking the babies, men feeding the babies. Playing with the babies, they never did that before.
Michael Feigelson What was dad’s script?
Mom Dad’s script was: go to work, care for your family, no excuses.
Michael Feigelson That’s a pretty short script.
Mom Well, he was a man of few words.
Michael Feigelson And you think you think he was happy?
Mom Yeah, absolutely.
Michael Feigelson And how do you know? How could you tell?
Mom Well, you could just feel it. You could tell the older he got the more he smiled
Michael Feigelson What made him smile the most?
Mom The most, always: babies, dogs, and me.
Michael Feigelson What did you do to make him smile?
Mom I loved him.

Michael Feigelson The model Richard and I inherited was simple. A good man is someone who shows up for other people. But it wasn’t until Richard became a father himself that he could fully see his own father’s legacy.

Michael Feigelson You’ve said that fatherhood changed the way you thought about masculinity and manhood. What were the changes that it led you in terms of how you saw manhood?

Richard Reeves I’m at risk here of sort of projecting back, I should probably date this my eldest son just turned 30. And my youngest son is 24. So we’re a ways back now. And I think the truth is that I was just muddling through and dealing with all kinds of other issues in my own identity, right. And it was, you know, it’s messy. Life becomes much more relational. I honestly think that one of the biggest changes for me was looking at my own father through new eyes, kind of looking up the generational tree as much as looking down. And there was this moment, we have this photograph framed actually of my father holding my eldest son for the first time and capturing him with tears in his eyes and just like holding him. And actually it was weird to me that I actually felt at that point that he was kind of reacting more like stereotypically how I was reacting. I mean, but when my dad first got to hold him, it was a beautiful moment, and I suddenly thought, wow, he held me like that too. And he has been looking after me all these years as well. And so in some ways for me, if I’m being completely honest, it was the birth of my own father that occurred to me. Realizing that my father was my father was something that really happened with a kind of clarity when I became a father. And I started to see everything about him differently. And I think what it did was it made the relational nature of mature masculinity, just much more in your face, right? You’re suddenly in the thick of relationships on an hourly basis in a way that maybe you aren’t before.

Michael Feigelson And, once again, Richard and my stories converge. My father, Eugene Benjamin Fegelson, was born in a small mining town in Alabama, and he grew up in a time and place where men were taught to keep calm and carry on.

When he first held Mila, he was standing there, smiling in a way that felt completely unfamiliar to me. My first reaction was, who is this guy? My second was the smile. My third to cry. Then I spoke with my older sister and she said, he did that with you too. And suddenly I was able to see my father in an entirely new light.

Michael Feigelson You talk a lot about this sort of disappearing script for fathers. And one of the ideas that I read in your work is this idea that we feel disoriented because these old scripts don’t work and new ones haven’t settled. So if you could take us on a quick tour, a historical tour in the deep sense of how we got to this place. What were the scripts before we understand where we are now?

Richard Reeves Yeah, so depending on how far we want to go back, there have been different scripts for fatherhood at different periods in human history. And I think, I think to some extent, like we’re always having to rescript, you know, fatherhood. But we’ve just gone through a profound period of change, whereby a pretty stable script for at least a while of the father as the provider, protector, quotes, head of household as a result of that, got torn up pretty quickly. I mean, the world… I was 10 in 1979. And in 1979, only one in 10 women earned more than the typical man. And now it’s 40% of women earn more than the typical man, 40% are breadwinners in the US are now women, again, four times more than in the 70s. Most couples both partners were not to the same extent and not in the same way, but like it’s nonetheless, there’s been an economic revolution.

Michael Feigelson So, in a single generation, the economic foundations of family life were completely transformed. And, although the old division of labor didn’t disappear overnight, it gradually stopped being the default.

Richard Reeves What that means is that the script that my father had, and that I partly had, but even by the time I was doing this, it was mostly gone, which is if like your primary role is as the economic provider, if you’re bringing home the bacon, then you are meeting a huge part of the job requirement of a father. That’s just so much less true today to a radical degree. And so the script for my mom, which she’s still mad about, was you’re gonna be the homemaker. And she was a great homemaker and she loved it. But like, she was the only one in our family not to go to college, right? She was mad as hell about that and still mad as well about that in her 80s now. And she should be mad as hell about that. But there was a clarity of the gender roles, there’s a clarity in the division of labor and there’s clarity about what the primary function of my father was. So my father lost a job, he had to get another job. There was no quest, no discussion about whether or not he then became the homemaker and my mom became the breadwinner. It was like, that would have been crazy talk at the time. And I do think we’ve successfully rewritten the script for moms, for good and for ill, and I mean, obviously mostly for good with the economic power and so on too, but there is then this question of how do you manage both like in the stress that a lot of parents feel, especially moms might feel. And at the same time, of course we tore up that script for men of primary provider and I don’t think we replaced it.

Michael Feigelson For generations, fathers knew what was expected of them. The division of labor may not have been fair or desirable, but it was clear. So, what happens when that clarity disappears?

Richard Reeves And so, there is this question now about, okay, so what does it mean to be a father now? Is there a difference between being just a co-parent and a father? If the distinct paternal contribution, the thing I’m bringing isn’t obvious and measured in dollars and cents, then what is it? And I do think that that’s left a lot of fathers somewhat uncertain about how to be comfortable in their own skin as a dad, given that the script that probably worked well for their fathers and certainly their grandfathers is not the one that is appropriate today and that most of them don’t want either, right? This is not like being forced on us, right? We want a different kind of fatherhood. So I think we’re just in this very murky transitional space now and we’re trying to figure out what the new script for fatherhood is. And my own work has led me to believe that it does need to be a script for fathers. I do think that the appeal to be an androgynous co-parent is not a very effective one for dads.

Michael Feigelson For Richard, the disappearing script for fatherhood wasn’t just a cultural shift, it was a personal one too. When his children were young, he and his wife made a choice that would have been unthinkable a generation earlier.

Richard Reeves It would be dishonest of me not to acknowledge that being the stay at home, being the primary parent, which we did, my wife and I basically took it in turns, right? Because I think like, trying to run two high stress jobs and raise kids at the same time is just at best an experiment in control chaos. And at worst, just something’s going to break. And so we would pretty much take it in terms. And I’ll be honest that even as a like I consider myself super enlightened, that was definitely some discomfort around that, right? I do not think my sons will feel that. So I think that my dad would have been like, well, he couldn’t have the choice, right. But the idea that he would have been at home while my mom… it was almost unthinkable. For me, it wasn’t absolutely not just thinkable, but doable. And we can do it, but it did come with some discomfort, I felt like I was going against the script. And honestly, it’s also partly because just like most of the other parents, it was mom’s the same way it’s hard to be a woman in a male dominated space. Sometimes it can be a bit difficult to be man in a female dominated space and so there was some discomfort with that for sure. I’d be lying about that and so it was part of me that was like life would be easier. But at the same time my wife was killing it at work and it was great and I was very involved and proud to be a great homemaker, and I thought good at what I was doing, but yeah, there was some discomfort.

Michael Feigelson This experience forced him to rethink something he had long believed.

Michael Feigelson You said, though, that you used to believe the future is androgyny.

Richard Reeves I did.

Michael Feigelson So I’m curious what changed?

Richard Reeves Well, maybe it was partly fatherhood. I do think that I realized through the process of raising my sons, and especially as they got older, into those kind of early adolescent years and then older, that actually, there were some pretty big differences in the instincts that I had, and that the instincts and approaches I was bringing to parenting from my wife, and it took me quite a while to think, “you know what, that’s okay.” Because I did as a kind of good feminist of my generation, I did tend to think like, actually, we should be minimizing differences and maybe that maybe the future is androgynous. But it’s certainly something actually like our gender socially constructed, you know, we’re going to get past all of that. And I’ve come to think that’s not true. And I do think that my experience as a sort of dad and feeling as a dad quite different to how I feel quite convinced I would have been as a mom, and just watching moms and dads interact, has led me to believe that whilst most of what we do is very similar, – there’s no feminine mystique to changing a diaper, right? Let’s be clear about that – but I’ve also kind of come to believe that somehow shrugging off the differences or the distinct contributions that we bring is a mistake both empirically but perhaps even more important, I think it’s a mistake culturally. If we want dads to feel good about being dads, then telling them they have nothing special to offer as dads doesn’t strike me as a very useful cultural approach. And if we think fatherhood is a bit more of a social construction, then the question is what are the construction materials? And one of them is the story about what dads are good for. If we decide that dads aren’t really good for anything in particular, I think that we pay a cultural price for that.

Michael Feigelson Listening to Richard, I found myself thinking about myths, stories that guide us, that help us understand who we are and what is expected. If for 300,000 years being a father and a provider was the central story for most men, well then its rapid disillusion must be quite a shock to the system. But then, Richard shared a new fact that kind of blew my mind. Human history did not contain quite as many fathers as I had assumed.

Michael Feigelson I think you said half of all men who ever lived never had kids.

Richard Reeves Correct.

Michael Feigelson So first, could you just explain this fact and what script were they living by?

Richard Reeves Well, you’re right that we can go, when we talk historically, like, the 1950s are very, very recent. And here we’re talking about much more kind of an evolutionary time. But yeah, it is, this is a great sort of, if the conversation lulls over a dinner table or something, this a good brain teaser, which is that we have twice as many female ancestors as male ancestors, across the course of human history, or twice as many women. In the history of humanity, if we were to kind of take all of it, as there are men, twice as many.

Michael Feigelson How does that happen?

Richard Reeves Yeah, well, this is why it’s a good brain teaser, right, because we’re like, wait, how does that work, right? You need a man and a woman, right to have a kid, right. So how can we have twice as many women? And the answer is because women have been twice as likely to reproduce as men. But historically, men had only about half 50, 50 chance of reproducing. So if you think about that, every generation, half the men don’t reproduce, but the women almost all reproduce. But the basic point is that for men, throughout most of human history, whether or not you became a father was probably a coin toss. But not actually a coin-toss in the sense of being a bit random, it was going to be about your status. It was gonna be about access to resources, et cetera. And of course, the context for this is that 95% of the human societies we know about historically were polygamous, 95%. So only one in 20 societies have had this weird idea that you’d have one man and one woman, this whole idea of monogamy, right? Having kids together, that’s a very odd and recent modern invention. And I think that kind of explains some of the differences in evolutionary psychology, which probably will remain even to this day. But yeah, I think the idea that being a father was something that used to have to be won, rather than assumed.

Michael Feigelson One of the implications of Richard’s dinner party fact is that fatherhood as the default is a pretty recent phenomena. For most of human history it was the aspiration, something men had to earn, and showing they could provide materially for their family was the path.

Which may help explain why removing the path without replacing it with another one can be so destabilizing. For many men, it raises a question. What is my unique contribution to my family and my community?

Richard believes deeply in equality, but he also rejects the idea that mothers and fathers are simply interchangeable. In fact, he argues that acknowledging the differences and emphasizing men’s unique contribution is critical to modern fatherhood.

Michael Feigelson Typically when you emphasize the differences, you also start by saying I’m totally committed to equality. Some people I would imagine see some tension or conflict between those statements. I was curious what kind of feedback you’ve gotten and how you respond to those kinds of critiques.

Richard Reeves Yeah, I mean, I think the way I respond to it is by saying that the job here is to be showing equal effort, right? Maybe a specific example would help, right, because we know that moms and dads and couples are putting in about the same number of work hours. When they have kids, it’s just that the dads tend to do somewhat more paid work hours and the moms tend to do more unpaid work hours. Now, that gap is narrowing pretty rapidly, but it hasn’t gone away. And particularly when there are young kids around, it doesn’t look like it is going to go away. There’s just something about about being with young kids in particular, that’s a bit different, maybe less so with older kids, I think actually dads come into their own a bit when the kids are pre adolescence and adolescence show your daughter’s 12. And so like my reading of the evidence is that like, right, you are going to be pretty important to her in the next few years, Michael.

Michael Feigelson This is my moment?

Richard Reeves Ah, kind of. I just, I do think dads are important and awesome all the time. But I think like if there is a period where it looks to me, and the dads do seem to kind of shine in particular, when it helps that stage of going out into the world, right, of preparing kids to go out into the world in a way that like the dads are most likely outfitters, right, equipping you with the skills that you need to go out. And so, first of all, you say, of course, these distributions overlap. But I think it’s, we’ve got to now where it’s unhelpful to suggest that in order to have equality, that it means every task associated with parenting at every stage of parenting must be divided exactly 50-50. And I just think that’s wrong. Andrea Doucet’s work, Do Men Mother?, has had a big impact on me here. And I think you have to be quite careful about who’s defining equality on what terms. And so the challenge here, look, it’s much easier to go one way or the other. The easy thing is I say “look, men and women are different. So they’re gonna do different things. Hallelujah.” That’s the more socially conservative position. That’s nice and clear, very easy. Everyone gets it. Or there’s the “everything is socially constructed and one day gender will eventually evaporate and mums and dads will be indistinguishable from each other, right? And they’ll just be doing exactly the same things all the time.” Those are the two easy positions to take. The difficult position to take is no there are differences. There are gonna remain differences, but we also want equality. Can we do both? Yeah, I think we can but it’s a much tougher ask. I think what that has on its side, the idea of having equality without androgyny, is that it’s true. It’s true in the sense that we want equality and we’re moving towards it, but it’s also true in a sense that we are not androgynous and that most people don’t think we are. And so it’s hard, but it’s true.

Michael Feigelson If you’re keeping score while listening, Richard has now managed to alienate both sides of the argument. He doesn’t want us to return to the 1950s, but he also thinks that having the same expectations of mothers and fathers is a bad idea. He’s trying to occupy a narrow piece of intellectual real estate between those two positions.

Michael Feigelson The way I read some of your work is that the core challenge right now with many men is. It’s unclear to them who needs them. Does that feel like a fair characterization of the of the problem? I’m asking this as a preface to kind of how does fatherhood help solve that? You know, solve that problem.

Richard Reeves Yeah, I think it’s a fundamental truth that we need to be needed. We talk a lot about having our needs met. And of course, that is kind of hugely important. But, I think one of our greatest needs is to be needed, is to have this kind of sense of other people kind of relying on us, that the tribe needs you, the community needs you. It is just massively important. I think the challenge for a lot of men now is that the ways in which they knew they were needed. The supply of neededness, if I can put it that way, was pretty clearly articulated, right? Through the economic provision, through the way the workplace worked, et cetera. Like, my dad never had to doubt for a second that we needed him, right, even when, and perhaps especially when, he was unemployed. That was even clearer to him then. How many of them and I think what’s happened now is that as we have for all these amazingly good reasons, hollowed out that kind of main provider role for men and said, okay, well, your job is to be the writer and it quite rightly insisted that women should have that role too. And maybe at the margins, we’ve also started to say, and we’re not even sure that actually dads as dads bring anything special, and workplaces are like, well you know what, we don’t need people who can lift heavy stuff anymore, which is true. Then a lot of men might be looking around at their community or their tribe and saying so do you guys still need me? Or not? And the ‘or not’ there is where a lot men I think are falling

Michael Feigelson Richard’s argument starts with a broader claim about human nature, that one of our deepest needs is to be needed, and that men today aren’t sure if they are. And that this may be behind another trend Richard has noticed among men, a growing sense of what he calls ‘baby hunger’.

Michael Feigelson I heard you say that you find, I think in your research, that it’s more common that men say they wanna have kids than women.

Richard Reeves It is now.

Michael Feigelson And I’m wondering, as I listen to you speak, if you think that’s precisely because of this sort of feeling that a desire to be needed, to be seen as valuable and absent these other options, fatherhood becomes an opportunity for that. Do you think there’s any truth in that?

Richard Reeves Yeah, I think that it’s true that mature masculinity, to use that term for now is quite socially constructed. It’s a cultural messaging, and that most men know that they need to be needed. And I think, that’s one potential explanation for the fact that like men do seem now and some recent surveys to be saying that they want to get married and put in to have kids at high and higher numbers and women are, and I think it’s because at some level there is this knowledge among men that they need that, that their lives will go better if there are people who, little people around, who need them to keep their shit together and get stuff done. And I think they’re right. It’s true. I mean, all the evidence is really strong on that, there is just this quite big transformation in the trajectories of men’s lives and when they become fathers. And so the the great irony here given a lot of the sort of cultural tropes about women and babies and there was this book ages ago Sylvia and Hewlett I think it was baby hunger I’m dating myself 20 years ago and I remember writing a piece at the time saying dads have baby hunger too and I actually now think I might even kind of write dads have more baby hunger than moms because it’s weirdly counterintuitive to say this but I think that having babies is more important. To men’s well-being than women’s well being.

Michael Feigelson Richard is arguing that fatherhood may be a vital public health intervention for men. It may sound like a joke, but the more I listen, the more it starts to sound like a serious evidence-based prescription.

Richard Reeves In a weird way, precisely because women can have children. So their kind of value, if you like, to the society is more baked in. Whereas for men, it has to be kind of one, proven, constructed, right? That actually the fact of becoming a father, the fact that having kids, and what that does to your identity, the dad identity in the dad community, is actually kind of more important to kind of anchor men in the world and anchor men in the community, and offer that cultural reassurance that you matter. Which I don’t think women need as much. Whereas I think for men, we kind of have to be shown that we matter. And I think that’s where kids are probably, as I said, more important. So if anything, what we’d want is we’d want to reverse the historic ratios we were just talking about earlier, and make sure that all the men have kids. The outcomes for men who haven’t had kids by the time they get to the 40s and 50s are not great in terms of employment, in terms of health, etc. The outcomes for women who have not had kids are not that different to the women who have. And so you do see this kind of massive divergence in the life outcomes of men who have kids and men who don’t, which does just appear to be as true for women. I’m not saying there’s no difference for women, but it’s nothing like the same. So I have an empirical basis for what I’m saying as well. But it’s just more for me a strong sense that the communication to a man that he is in fact a man now and mature and that he has needed comes so powerfully from from the institution of fatherhood. And I think that is why fatherhood is such a load bearing wall in our societies.

Michael Feigelson Richard’s argument is that fatherhood doesn’t just help raise children, it helps raise men. That if we want to improve society, we need to do a better job raising men. And that to do that well, we have to offer them something he calls ‘ontological security’.

Richard Reeves I’ve come to believe, and this is a mistake, a really big mistake I’ve made in my previous work. I’ve actually come to believe that it is actually just as important for men. And that one of the things that makes fatherhood so important for a flourishing society is not just what it provides for kids, but what it provides to the fathers themselves, which is this sort of sense of structure and mattering and neededness. I quote this guy saying that what men lack today is ontological security, which is a terrible bumper sticker, right? What do we lack?

Michael Feigelson What is ‘ontological security’?

Richard Reeves Exactly. It’s just not a great sound bite, is it? Like ontological, it just means groundedness, ontology is like your sense of yourself in the world. I think that kind of sense of like men lacking that security of where they are sitting and how their identity is located and grounded in the world. I think that’s true. And I think it’s that’s upstream of many of these problems we see for men being disengaged, being disenfranchised, being disenchanted, et cetera. And so, being a dad, and in particular being an engaged and kind of involved dad, I’ve come to believe is the answer to many of our problems.

Michael Feigelson Ontological security may be a terrible bumper sticker, but the idea behind it is simple. When we have a strong sense of self and we feel safe and happy, good things can happen.

Michael Feigelson One of the ideas that we’ve explored in this series is that this kind of hands-on caregiving trains us in skills that we may undervalue historically, but are really important, like emotional regulation, creativity, negotiation. You know, long-term thinking, do you have any evidence that engaged dads acquire these kinds of skills?

Richard Reeves Yeah.

Michael Feigelson And did you, did you see these effects in your professional life?

Richard Reeves I think it’s pretty strong evidence that having kids and being a parent, I should say, improves your relational skills and some of your emotional regulation. And you see that playing out in dads more generally. I mean, just the impact of something like the moment your partner becomes pregnant, your chances of committing crime, half or something. Now, that’s all kinds of stuff going on there, of course, I’m not suggesting that kind of overnight, you’ve suddenly developed more emotional regulation. But this idea that you’re living for another just hugely changes the way you think about things. I think it’s true that being a father improves your relational skills. One of the things I think used to happen, as does marriage or any intimate relationship is, it used to happen that men would develop those relational skills through marriage and children. But now they’re expected to have those relational skills as a prerequisite to marriage and children, right? And I think about my own parents in this regard who got married and they were 21, who got pregnant when they were 22, and there is no question that my father did quite a bit of his growing up through the process of becoming a husband and then particularly becoming a father, right? So he had two kids by the age of 24 or something, right. And I think that focuses the mind. I think it provides a certain amount of stress but also structure to your life, right, and was developing relational skills kind of along the way. But I’m just sharing with you something I worry about quietly quite a lot, which is maybe actually historically in our cultures, we actually, it is a training ground. And if that’s true, then by definition, you’re not that well-trained before you do it. So if you’re waiting for the fully trained guy, you might have a long wait.

Michael Feigelson Here I was thinking we were headed out of the conundrum and there goes Richard raising a new paradox. Women may be waiting for the men to become the very people that marriage and parenthood once helped them become.

So I asked Richard to give me his take. If fatherhood is a training ground, what is the skill set we acquire when we take on this role?

Michael Feigelson If you imagine a new dad listening to this, how would you describe to that guy the superpowers that await him if he does this work?

Richard Reeves This will sound like a weird one, but I do think that the development of patience and the ability to kind of manage your own emotions through time is huge. And I think that that then will that superpower to be able to just, a, just put up with a lot of stuff, right? It’s tough. It’s like bootcamp. I mean, I sometimes think of like, to be honest, like, if you think about an industrial workplace, like a kind of really manly, like a factory basically. If you think of an industrial workplace as a place where you work incredibly long hours on very little sleep for very low pay, for really kind of like, you know, shitty bosses, and the work is dirty and or dangerous. There are no workplaces like that, or very few workplaces that are left now. But that’s the home of a couple with young children. That is the industrial workplace, right? And so it is like the most, it’s the manliest work left, honestly, if you want to work really long shifts for terrible pay, and then dirty smellies. Smelly circumstances and welcome, welcome to fatherhood. But if you can get in the sorry, I’m supposed to be being inspiring. But

Michael Feigelson No, I like it. I like the new mine. This is the new minne. Yes, this is the new mine. Yeah. You want to work in the mine?

Richard Reeves Okay, this is like, it’s like mining. It’s… it’s very similar.

Michael Feigelson It’s mining, except people shit on you.

Richard Reeves Except people will poop on you. Yeah, maybe not quite as dangerous, but certainly as dirty.

Michael Feigelson Richard’s answer started with patience, but that’s not where it ended..

Richard Reeves But the real super power is this sense of just so much of the bullshit and the stuff in your head are just falling away. It’s just this, the clarity that kind of comes as a result of it. The worries that you will have would be just, the real worries, that’s such high quality. It’s like the trivial stuff will drop away. It’s a bit like the clouds clearing and you’ll have so much more clarity of vision. The mere facts of knowing how needed you are. And the mere fact that the stakes just went up by an order of magnitude, right? The stakes of your life just quintupled. There are now creatures in the world for whom you will not even have to think about whether or not you would give your lives for theirs, but your body will just do that for you. I had this moment with my own son, where he was in a situation of great peril, he was lying flat, and there was a surfboard on snow, heading straight for a metal tip, four people on it. And it was closing on him, they’re screaming at him. And if it hit him, he would kill them. And I’m screaming at them to lift his head up. It ended up lifting his head just in time and it took out his arm instead and he had multiple multiple twisted fracture on his arm and so he had to multiple surgeries on his arm but it hit his arm not his head but if it did he probably would have been killed instantly. And I’m watching this happen in front of me and iIm trying to get to him i’m screaming at him and and and all I could think about was would I get there in time to be able to put myself throw my body uphill of him so that it hit me instead of him now I would try to throw in such a way I would have hit my back but but it but I don’t… I remember I wasn’t even thinking that, right. I was thinking get up get up screaming him, but as I was trying to get to him my body was literally propelling me across the snow so that I could if at all possible put myself in his place and that sounds like a dark thing to have said but the truth is that knowing that your life is nowhere close to being the most valuable life in your life anymore is the most unbelievable liberation. It is a narcissism killer, it is a bullshit killer, it is cloud clearing vision to suddenly have that feeling. And it’s ancient stuff. Something ancient happens within you, within your brain, within your body. When you become a dad, LA Paul writes, it is impossible to explain to someone on the other side of that transformation, what it’s like. And so there’s those who’ve been on the other side of the transformation. This is the best I can do in terms of saying I’m not saying it’s all upside. I’m not even saying you’ll be happier. That is not that isn’t oh, you’d be so happy. But you don’t know it’s gonna like what’s what’s Jennifer Senior’s book All Joy and No Fun. But I am going to say that your life will make sense to you. In a way that I think Nothing else can replace

Michael Feigelson My father had a script. Richard’s father had a script. I had a script. Whether we realize it or not, all of us inherit one version or another. But children have a way of disrupting whatever story we thought we were living.

They don’t care about narratives. They don’t care whether we’ve figured ourselves out. They just show up, hungry, curious, tired, needing something. And in responding to those needs, many parents find themselves becoming someone they didn’t expect to be.

Richard worries that we’ve lost an old script for manhood, but listening to him, I found myself wondering whether the story of fatherhood is actually a story of variability. I get the importance of scripts.

I agree with Richard that the old ones aren’t landing and the new ones feel uncertain. And I do think we need them. Improvisation all the time is not sustainable. It’s why we have stories, rituals, culture.

But perhaps the new script for fatherhood could be a kind of choose your own adventure or variations on a theme. A familiar melody over which we can adjust rhythm, Harmony. Tempo and instrumentation.

Perhaps the challenge is not replacing the old script with a new one, but grounding ourselves in an ancient melody and letting the new scripts emerge from there. Perhaps the question then is, what is this melody?

And on this question, I’m not sure there is a need for creativity and innovation. On this question I think the answer is inherited and universal.

I think the answer is service.

Richard asks, what new stories fathers need? Next week on Birth of a Parent, Franklin Leonard helps us think about the stories we tell about parenthood in the first place. If parenthood is this powerful, why are so many of the stories about it so thin?

Franklin Leonard What does it mean to become a parent? How does that change your worldview beforehand and where does it leave you as you sort of begin the process? But like to identify those periods of transition, those inflection points, I think that’s what capital D drama is.

Michael Feigelson If you’d like to support this series, the best way is simply to follow Birth of a Parent on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen. It really helps more people discover the show. Thanks for listening.