EP5: Masculinity, Money and Parenting

An Interview with Brad Klontz / Financial Psychologist, Tik Tok Influencer and Lead Dad

HOSTED BY PAUL SULLIVAN

What holds some men back from becoming Lead Dads – or at least openly embracing the role? It starts with traditional perceptions of masculinity, of being the higher earner, of being the provider, of not engaging as much with parenting and family tasks. But it’s not something that’s hardwired. Men can become more comfortable being Lead Dads and still fulfill their potential. What does it take? Dr. Klontz discusses his findings.

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Transcript

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Hi, I'm Paul Sullivan, your host on the Company of Dads podcast, where we explore the sweet, sublime, strange and silly aspects of being a dad in a world where men often feel they have to hide, or at least not talk about their parenting role. I know this from firsthand experience as the lead dad to my three girls, three dogs, three cats, and some, remarkably, three fish who are still alive. I did this all while managing my career and striving to be an above average husband. One thing I know for sure about being a dad is it's not a normal role. You're not doing what dads have traditionally done. Going to work and leaving the parenting to mom or someone else. Nor are you always welcome into the world where moms are the primary caregivers. But here at the Company of Dads, our goal is to shake all that off and focus on what really matters. Family, friendship, finance and fun. Today, my guest is Brad Klein's TikTok influencer, money doctor and lead dad to his two sons. I first met Brad in 2009 during the financial crisis, when his comments about money that ended up in my New York Times column got both of us a lot of hate mail. He and I have continued talking. We end up doing some research together, and when he was at Kansas State, I went out there to have my financial thinking analyzed, complete with electrodes. He's a clinical psychologist by training who has worked with kids and families in Hawaii schools for over 20 years. He now lives in Boulder, Colorado, where he's built a reputation as a leading financial psychologist. As part of that, he went on TikTok to reach a younger generation, and his tongue in cheek videos have garnered him more than 5 million likes and 400,000 followers. Brad, welcome to the Company of Dads podcast. Paul, I'm very excited to be here with you. How are you doing today, buddy? I'm doing pretty good. Living the dream. I hear you are living the dream of bowling. I love it. One thing I'm setting out to do here with the company, dad, is to make the role of lead dad normal. Not something that causes people to sort of, you know, scrunch up their heads. I want to make it okay for man to take on the caregiver role and work their work around their schedule and support their, you know, spouse in doing it. Now you're the doctor here. Am I crazy? Yeah it is. It's a crazy thing, you know, as thinking about it, as prepping for this interview with you and thinking about my own life and my lead dad status, I realized, like, I didn't grow up with any model related to this. Like, I rarely saw my father. He was a work total workaholic, and I don't really have a lot of models to pin it on, so it's something that I feel like I've had to sort of create from scratch and quite alone, which is why what you're doing is so fascinating and interesting. You know, one of the things I want to delve into here, given your expertise, is how money and masculinity are intertwined and how it speaks to our identity. Maybe you can talk a bit from some of the research you've done, and your own sort of experience as to, you know, how strong that money and masculinity bond is. I think a lot of it has to do with how oriented we are to the traditional roles that have been around for, you know, decades and centuries and generations. I think your attachment to that in terms of your self-esteem, I think that's probably the biggest predictor in terms of how comfortable you are taking, you know, a primary breadwinner status or a shared one, or being the one who's not bringing in as much money into the relationships. I think a lot of it has to do with your attachment to that traditional role, versus your flexibility around how you perceive yourself and your value in your relationship and with your kids and your family. Are some people just going to be wired to be more, open to being, a dad, or is there a way we can do some sort of, you know, lead that boot camp and bring some of those other guys up to speed? Yeah, I think probably some of it is, is just how flexible are you? And you're thinking how, willing are you to go against the grain? Because, again, there's not a lot of role models. And so a lot of this has to be constructed on our own or with another group of dads. So I think it's flexibility and thinking, open mindedness is probably a huge component of it, because there's no doubt that, studies we've done related to this have been mostly around women who are, earning more than their male husbands and partners. And some of the pressure they get and stress they get from family and friends and people around them that, you know, you're stepping out of the traditional role and he's stepping out of the traditional role. And so you have to be willing to surround yourself with people who are more open minded or living, you know, more of a, egalitarian approach to parenting, if you will, or you're going to be succumbing to some of that pressure and a lot of that gets internalized and you start to wonder, am I doing the right thing? Am I living up to the standards that I'm supposed to be living up to? Yeah. You know, I believe strongly in naming things. That's why I talk about lead dads. But I also, you know, back to those, schoolhouse Rock days when we were kids. You know, knowledge is power. When you look at that survey and the research you've done on the impact of women earning more in the relationship, what are some of the positives that come from that dynamic? And then, of course, what are some of the negatives that come from that dynamic? Yeah, I think the modeling is is good. It's a positive thing that, you know, we can be flexible in our roles because the bottom line is, and you know this, Paul two, that many of us are going through multiple socioeconomic status throughout our lifetime. And so you might go through periods of time where, you know, you're making more than your female partner, and then it switches and then a business, you know, crashes and burns and someone else is carrying the load or you're funding each other's school. So there's a lot of flexibility in a lot of different circumstances that are happening right now. And so I think the modeling for that for kids is really, really good. The downside is that people report less relationship satisfaction in general. And I think a big part of that has to do with some of that social pressure. And, and I know this too. It really comes down to this. How do you feel about your the role you're taking on? That's really, I think, the determining factor on whether or not you're going to feel good as a stay at home dad or stay at home mom, or whatever that balance is. It comes down to how you feel about it. And I got to tell you this too, like coming from Hawaii, much more traditional in terms of gender roles in Boulder, one of the things that's been great is there's so many lead dads over here. So when I'm taking my kids to sports or music class or whatever, it is, there's dads in the room with their kids. So it's actually one of the things I really enjoy about being here, because I got to tell you, I, I purposely put a lot of time into being with my boys, taking care of them. You know, I'm not working on the weekends, and, you know, each night, I'm, I'm I'm a huge part of it, as you know. And but I felt kind of alone around that in Hawaii, where things are more traditionally oriented. And so I really enjoy being around other dads or dads, and I just feel less alone, to be honest. I mean, you've done so much research on, you know, finding our tribe, as it were, of how we sort of identify with certain groups. I mean, there's a place like Boulder, which is more open to different, you know, gender roles around parenting. Does that make it easier for for men to be dads and women to, you know, fulfill their own potential? And how they want to do it? I think it does. And I and I'd be remiss if I didn't mention, some socio economic status that that really relates to this. I mean, when you are in a lower socioeconomic group or stress around money, it's tough to show up for your kids. Bottom line. Right? I mean, because you need to show up to, to make money to pay that, you know, pay for the clothes on their back. So I'm recognizing that, you know, part of my ability to do that is embedded in some economic privilege, to be quite honest, you know, and and I know there's more of that in Boulder here too. And so for me, like wealth and what I've really been working for in my own life, wealth to me is owning your time and being able to make decisions on what you're doing with your time that are in line with your values and goals. And I've spent much of my life trying to not be a workaholic and not, you know, and to show up more for my kids because that goes back generations of my family. So, it's something that I really appreciate and something I've worked really hard to get is, is owning more of my time so I can spend it the way I want to. Which for me is with my family. You know, I've always been sort of a pragmatic person. You know that about me. You know, it's a long time. But, you know, for me, it just made sense. My wife, you know, she works in asset management, but really, she has a very inflexible schedule. If somebody says, I need to talk to you, they need to talk to you. Now, when I was a journalist for 25 years, I had a very rigid schedule. And so it allowed me like I knew when my deadline was and I knew what I had to do. And I could plan somewhere around 90% of my life around it. But I was, you know, pragmatic. And a lot of the other, leaders I've been talking to, they share a similar pragmatism. You know, my wife, learned more, I learned less, or my wife has to work, x number of hours at the hospital, and I can do this is is it is pragmatism part of this, or is it just that, you know, the dads are are wired differently or they look at parenting and there's really that pragmatism that drove me to become a dad. And then I found out that, you know, there's a lot of fun. I actually really enjoy being the guy taking my girls all around. Yeah, that's a fascinating concept. I feel like it's it's it's that pragmatic aspect for me that allows me to do it because for me, in my wiring, I do see myself as I want to, you know, to contribute to the family and make money for the family. I feel that is part of one of the roles I've taken on, my wife also, who's a clinical psychologist also. So she's a high achiever and, and has a business that she runs to, and, you know, in this last week where my youngest son got diagnosed with, Covid, you know, no symptoms. But we've been doing a lot of juggling. So I'm very pragmatic. So we have a shared schedule and it's like, boom, I'm watching the kids during this period of time while she's working. She's watching the kid during this period of time, while I'm working. And I appreciate it, I like it. It's very pragmatic, though, because there's a lot of moving parts. When you have two clinical psychologists in a relationship, do you even do you even bother to argue? I mean, does anybody win or do you just just know all the tricks and you go around? Yeah, I know it's you know, we have to actually bring our clinical psychology skills to the relationship because it's not automatic. I'm like, okay, I need to listen. All right. And then of course, and you have a college fund, but you also you've got to have that therapy fund because like, what are the chances that your kids are going to come out of this unscathed. With two clinical psychologists. There's no way. No way. Exactly. Oh boy. That's great. Yeah. One of the interesting things that happened to me when I had this final story run in the New York Times, is that I'm leaving, I'm starting this company. It wasn't named the Company of Dads at that point. It was. It might have been not public, but I talked about it. And people in my my town, in my area in southern Connecticut, guys that I'd known for years, years and years, five, six years. A few of them came up to me and said, hey, you know, I really like what you're doing. I like to be part of it, but could I ask you something? Yeah, sure. Whatever. Like, I don't want you to name me. Don't. Don't use my name as, like, you know that this is a group. This is a community where, like, the dads are going to come together and we're going to drink beer and watch ESPN and do all the things that guys do. But we're just going to be the lead dads who go to ballet. It's okay. We're not like, you know, taking puppies, throwing them in a bag and tossing them into the river. You know, this is not and I and they look at me like, yeah, I know, just don't use my name. Just be quiet. Why why do you think, you know, they want it. They want to be part of this community. They want, you know, the support that the company of dad is, is offering. Yet they're not fully comfortable to sort of publicly say, as I have, obviously, that I'm a dad and this is what I'm doing, and it's awesome. And obviously there are parts that are not awesome, but what do you think? Hold some of these guys back from, you know, like being public with with what they're already doing privately? Yeah, I think it comes down to that traditional gender role stuff, where the further you feel like you're moving from it, the more you're worried about other people looking at you as if you're doing something wrong or you're not showing up in the way, you should be showing up. And what's what's interesting to me and and thinking about it too. And you know that I talk a lot about the tribal brain and how that relates to our relationship with money. I think it's kind of a new thing in terms of humanity. I think for 99% of our time on Earth, we were around our kids as fathers. We were in a tribe of 150 people. The kids were with us all the time. They were with the mothers. Sometimes they were with us. There wasn't. This dad goes off to work for 60 hours a week or 40, and you never see dad and that's a that's a new thing. So I think. Just like back then, like when you didn't see dad, it was because, like, a wooly mammoth had eaten dad and you probably weren't going to see him again. Is that what you're saying? Exactly that. Exactly. It was every day was take your kid to work day. Right. And it's been it's been. And protect him and protect him from a lion. That's right. And teach teach him how to hunt. Right. So I think it's a it's a relatively new thing where we send people off to work like that. But I feel like a lot of it is the social pressure. And in the research we did on women who earn more, that was that was a big part of it. Like, you know, people will talk, you know, I'm worried that someone is going to talk bad about my husband that did that type of thing. And so I think it's really real. Yeah. If you think about, you know, company or you think about the military, they hire all kinds of different people who come in and you work for, you know, Apple and not everybody's designing the next iPhone. People are doing all kinds of different. Some some people are selling them. Some people are coming up with the advertising, some people are doing the marketing, public relations, and everybody is looking, if you're Apple, you want your employees who should be in the highest and best use of of their time. You want them to fulfill their potential. If you know, in our personal lives, the highest and best use of our time is for one person to be out there, you know, working in a, in a less flexible career. And, and that happens to be the mom and the other person to take, you know, on more of the parenting roles and, and work his work schedule around that and be the dad. Why is it easier for us to accept those different roles at work? You know, the head of marketing is not going to design the next iPhone, at Apple. Why is it easier for us to accept those roles at work and more challenging not just at home, but in our community more broadly? Yeah, I think it's modeling. And, you know, so much of what kids learn is not by what they're told by, but by what they observe. And so our sense of identity related to our gender orientation and what we've observed growing up, it has a really profound impact on us, even on a deeply subconscious level. And so there's a sense that this is what I need to do to be who I am. And the big irony here, too, Paul, is we're talking about, you know, your lead dad status or lead mom status is very time limited. We're not talking about this is who you are for your for your entire life. It's a and I look at it this way, like, I, I know when my kids were younger, I'm kind of like, hurry up, you know, hurry up so I can go to sleep through the night. And I've got a, four year old, an eight year old. And I want time to go extremely slow right now. Like, I don't really want to be. Yeah, but that's because they can sleep through the. They can sleep at night. Now it's really you got to get past that hurdle because like you do for that first year you're like oh all right a four year old is really fun. Right? Right. You know when you're first starting to you're like, please let me go to work so I can take a nap and drink some coffee. But yeah, I know, I mean, for me too, it's like it's a time limited thing. This isn't like you. You get this opportunity or you're stuck with this role however you want to look at it for forever. This is a very time limited thing. And for me, I find that really energizing because I this is where I want to invest my time, because they're not going to be under my care for very long in terms of the scope of my entire life and what I'm doing. And what's the impact been on me? Your career is going fantastically, but what's the impact been on your work? Or is it just the type of work you do that you're able to balance? You know, being a dad and being a real, you know, top financial psychologist as well? Yeah. So I've worked really hard to have some flexibility in my schedule and some passive income. So so I don't have to worry about paying the bills if I take the afternoon off to spend time or take my kids skiing or whatever. So I really, by the way, that strategy, since you've known me for a while, since in my 20s, like I am going to own my time so I, you know that that is a big deal to me. Being able to do that. And and the big part to is for me is it's the pragmatic thing is I have to schedule in and I have to be much more efficient. So for example, today, like I had four hours and then the other four hours, I'm going to go watch watch my youngest while my wife works. And so I have to become much more efficient and much more flexible on when I can get the work done. So sometimes I'm up late at night doing it, sometimes I'm up early in the morning. But being there with the kids for me anyway, even sort of selfishly, I know this is a limited time and they're so precious, and so it's something I purposely, dive into and enjoy. I know exactly what set my calendar looks like, something that my four year old drew because it's all color coded and you're just like, okay, I know that blue means this in green means this in yellow means this. And that's, you know, just to kind of, you know, go one after another. One thing I'm thinking, you know, the response to the company of dads, it's been, fortunately, sort of very positive from three of the four groups. And the fourth is not negative, but the positive has been, you know, men who identify as lead, that's who really doesn't want to be part of this awesome, women were, senior women, working women, working moms who have a lead dad at home. They're like, yeah, this is great. I want to sign my husband up. Super helpful. This works. HR executive, HR people at all kinds of different companies. They've been very positive because, you know, come on, employees and talk to our workforce. Explain how this works. And that's great. But the one group that I won't say negative, but more questioning, and that is, you know, working moms, senior women who are in the workforce who do not have, the dad at home who have that, you know, we've read a gazillion bits of research on the second shift. And, you know, even if, you know, the the husband and the wife both work and even if the wife has a, more strenuous job than the husband, you know, all the a lot of research shows that she's still coming home and doing the bulk of the parenting. And so what that group is asking, you know, part of it is cynical, like, yeah, good for you, buddy, I don't care. But another part of it is genuinely questioning of and asking, how can you help me make my husband more of a leader? Now he may be doing 5% and, the way I look at it, you get from 5% to 25%. That's enormous. If you got from 5% to 45%, it'd be an almost unrecognizable change. But how? When you think about strategies that the listeners can sort of employ, either, you know, the moms who are hearing this or the dads think, hey, maybe I do. You know, I can't be the full on the dad, but I might have some more lead qualities. What are the strategies that you'd suggest that they employ to become more of a dad? Yeah, so that is fascinating because I think that group that you're getting some of the cynical pushback is the group that most desperately would benefit from. Yeah, from this organization. Because I think what's happening there is that the their their father, the father, their husband probably doesn't have a good role model. Like doesn't really know how this works. Like, you know, you want it to you want me to take the kids to the birthday party? Well, I'm going to go there. It's just going to be a bunch of moms and me, and I'm going to feel out of place. I'm going to feel it's going to be kind of weird. I mean, it just just all of that sort of, self-talk going on. And I think, I think a big part of it is like, it's one of the things that makes me really excited about it. Paul and I want to hang out. I want to drink beer. And what I love to do is go to a house with those other guys and they bring their kids to, you know, because that's the other thing that, I don't think we've done traditionally, in our culture. And so for me, anyway, I think the best intervention is probably modeling and the social media. It's one of the things I love that you're doing related to this effort is social media posts around what's happening. And you see these gatherings with with men and their kids and talking about it, talking about your role as dad, something that's really, really important. One last question for you. You talked about modeling, and I know this as a dad. Like I could talk to on Bloomer Face, but if I'm not doing yeah, if I, if I'm telling my kids, you got to be grateful and then I'm a complete jerk when I go out and order a cup of coffee, did the person give me a cup of coffee? My kids are going to call me out on it. But when you think about modeling around, you know, financial behavior and it you and I are both wired the same in that we're super savers. But when you think about the modeling that a dad is doing in his role for the financial behavior of his son or daughter, what are some of the key modeling that that lead dad needs to be doing, even if he's not the primary breadwinner, if he wants to impart really good lessons to to his son or daughter? I think it's it's first of all, it's taking on that responsibility. Like looking at it like, this is something I need to do because it's not, you know, your kids are going to learn nothing from you just leaving and coming back, you know, and and bills get paid, that kind of thing. So I'm always trying to think, how can I model this? How can I structure it? How can I make it, tangible? And so just a quick example. I have an eight year old to has a lawn care business. And by the way, he wasn't very excited about that. So I made him create a lawn chair business. And, I, we went to the neighbors and we're mowing lawns, and he's complaining about it. But he's starting to get into it because now he's making money. And I set it up so that the neighbors actually handed him money. Like, here's the money. Thank you. You know, it's not like. A Venmo, not a Venmo. They I didn't want to. Touch the cash. You know, because he's looking at he's like wow look at this. And so now that he has the cash now I'm like, okay. So now we're going to learn about investing. And so just last night I'm putting them to bed. He's like dad how are my investments doing. You know. So we look them up. And then he got really upset because the market's crashed a bit. But then I get to talk to him about that. Right. So I mean, for me it's, it's it's doing that on purpose, modeling it, talking it through having those discussions. But I think first and foremost, it's like this is something that I need to take on. This is something I need to teach my children. I think that it starts with that. Doctor Brad Clontz, thanks for being a guest on the Company of Dads podcast. I really enjoyed it. My pleasure as always, thank you.