How to Engage Men in Kinship Care

Have you noticed the unequal load—both seen and unseen—that grandmothers often carry, while searching for ways to bring grandfathers more fully to the caregiving table? You’re not alone. The gender gap in kinship care is real and significant, often leaving women overwhelmed and resentful, while men struggle to find their place and purpose in the caregiving journey.

I’m Laura Brazan, and on "Grandparents Raising Grandchildren: Nurturing Through Adversity," we get real about the deeply rooted neurobiology, social norms, and emotional dynamics that shape our family roles—especially in times of crisis. In this powerful episode, Dr. Anthony Silard, renowned researcher and author, helps us unpack the 750% disparity in household labor, the science behind why men and women approach caregiving differently, and—most importantly—how we can rewrite these scripts with compassion and creativity.

Together, we’ll explore actionable strategies to foster greater empathy, assertiveness, and active involvement from grandfathers, from creating men’s caregiving groups to launching fun, family-based competitions that root every member in connection and legacy. You’l

The 750% gap is real, but it doesnt have to be your family's destiny. We are gamifying the 'motherboard' to bring our partners and grandchildren back into the center of the mission!

Join us in The Grand Challenge!

What's your #1 survival tool? Listener Tina Patrick Pastorelli commented that after 6 years of raising her children that are not even biologically hers, "Just be the family they never had". It's a simple reminder that we don't need a perfect biological connection to create a perfect sense of belonging for these kids we're raising #kinshipcare #kinshipcaregivers #grandparentsraisinggrandchildren

In this special pre-roll segment, I’m sharing a moving letter from a member of our community, Laurel. Her story of loss, resilience, and raising her grandson after the unthinkable is a raw reminder that none of us are walking this path alone.

We want to hear from you. If Laurel’s story resonates with you, or if you have a journey of your own to share, join our private community. Your story might be the exact lifeline someone else needs to hear today. 

Thank you for tuning into today's episode. It's been a journey of shared stories, insights, and invaluable advice from the heart of a community that knows the beauty and challenges of raising grandchildren. Your presence and engagement mean the world to us and to grandparents everywhere stepping up in ways they never imagined.

Remember, you're not alone on this journey. For more resources, support, and stories, visit our website and follow us on our social media channels. If today's episode moved you, consider sharing it with someone who might find comfort and connection in our shared experiences.

We look forward to bringing more stories and expert advice your way next week. Until then, take care of yourselves and each other.

Want to be a guest on Grandparents Raising Grandchildren: Nurturing Through Adversity? Send Laura Brazan a message on PodMatch, here: https://www.podmatch.com/hostdetailpreview/grg

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Transcript

"Grandparents: Caregivers and Challenges"

SPEAKER_00 1:26

Why is it that when a family crisis hits, the grandmother holds the emotional motherboard together while the grandfather heads to the garage to fix a sink? Today in part two of our series with Dr. Anthony Sillard, we're looking at the neurobiology of the gender gap in caregiving. We are tackling the 750% disparity in household labor and most importantly, we're launching a national contest to fix it. Stay tuned to the end for the official kickoff of the Invisible CEO Grand Challenge. Welcome to Grandparents Raising Grandchildren, Nurturing Through Adversity. In this podcast, we will delve deep into the challenges and triumphs of grandparents raising grandchildren. As we navigate the complexities of legal, financial, and emotional support, I invite you to join us on a journey of exploring thoughts, feelings, and beliefs surrounding this growing segment of our society. Drawing from real stories and expert advice, we will explore the nuances of child rearing for children who have experienced trauma and offer valuable resources to guide you through the intricate journey of kinship care. We'll discuss how we can change the course of history by rewriting our grandchildren's future all within a supportive community that understands the unique joys and struggles. This podcast was made especially for you. Welcome to a community where your voice is heard, your experiences are valued, and your journey is honored. I've stood in my kitchen so many times, feeling like I was speaking a completely different language than my husband. I was tracking the trauma triggers while he was focused on the objects of our life. I used to think that it was just us until I saw the data. This conversation with Tony helped me see that the resentment many of us feel is systematic. But today we move past the resentment and into a game-changing strategy to bring our partners back to the table. Welcome back, Tony.

SPEAKER_01 4:08

Hey, Laura, it's wonderful to be back.

SPEAKER_00 4:13

Myself as well. I've finished your book, and there's so many wonderful questions that our listeners are asking. Um, today I really am looking forward to talking to you about this topic. So let's let's imagine we're standing in the middle of our kitchens and we're speaking two different languages. So this happens in my household all the time. We see a grandmother who's holding the emotional motherboard together while granddad's out in the garage fixing his sink because he doesn't know how to fix the situation. Why is it that we as men and women pivot to these two different departments of leadership in the moment of a crisis? And how does that affect the home?

Gender, Work, and Cognitive Tendencies

"Empathy: Gender and Social Norms"

SPEAKER_01 4:54

Yeah, you always ask the best questions. There's a lot, there's a number of reasons. Let's start with some of the research on um how men tend to focus more on objects and women tend to focus more on people. So there's a lot of research on this. Literally, you can show uh you can show uh a boy and a girl infants at uh at at the age of two. You can show them pictures of faces and the girls pay more attention to the faces. You show pictures of of toy trucks and the boys pay more attention to the trucks than than do the girls. So some people have said, well, okay, but at two years old, they've already been socialized by their parents. Well, what those people don't realize is I said at the age of two. I didn't say years. It said the age of two days. You're already seeing these differences. And this has a lot of effects, of course. I think you can you can put a man in a job where he's really focused on how objects interact with each other. So it could be developing a manufacturing product, it could be software, and that guy can spend years just content doing that. Well, women, on the other hand, and of course, anything we're gonna say today about I'm gonna say about men and women, males, females, we have to keep in mind that this is based on averages, large national and international samples. We're looking at averages. So on average, the average guy is more interested in objects than the average woman is, and the average woman is more interested in people than the average guy is. But there are many people that don't fit these uh these norms. It's like a normal curve. And so it's not true for any individual. But but this is what we see when we run the numbers looking at large samples. This is how it how it plays out. So you get these situations where where men can be focused on how objects interact or how an object works and just spend tons of time on that and and be just fine. And women, on average, get really bored with that because part of this is because women tend tend to have a lot more what's called cross-hemispheric neuronic traffic. Let me explain that. There, they women tend to fire more neurons from one hemisphere of the brain into the other hemisphere. And they go, they go back and forth. Men's neuronic emissions tend to stay in one hemisphere. Really? So one of the so I'm working on a book on gender and how we develop relationships. And one thing I've found in a lot of the research is that men tend to have more cognitive focus than women, and women tend to have more cognitive flexibility. So if you look at occupations that involve people, psychology educators, social workers, and so forth, you know, 85, 90 plus percent women. If you look at occupations that are really focused on objects, whether, you know, like construction, plumbers, uh, you know, many sort of manual labor type jobs, these tend to be uh more men. And so there have been studies and and and ethnographic studies, for example, in Israel, there were studies on the on on a few kibbutzes where they said, you know, we don't we don't want men and women to be set, you know, like segregated this way, objects versus people. So we're going to we're going to put women in positions where they're doing construction and they're doing a lot of the work involving objects. And we're going to put men into roles of like early childhood educators and psychologists and so forth. And you know what? Within three months, they just go right back to what they're used to. It's really, it's really just interesting how that plays out. So, yeah, so you have the grandfather at home and he's he's fixing things, and the grandmother who's focused on relationships and everyone getting along. So this is this is uh very, very common.

SPEAKER_00 8:49

Aaron Powell Well, how do those gendered scripts trap us in our judgment about each other? How does that create resentment?

Loneliness and Men's Mental Health

SPEAKER_01 8:57

You know, the old saying, you know, familiarity breeds contempt. I think familiarity also breeds children, right? And and so what often happens is we have children and we sometimes feel many negative emotions toward each toward each other. We're talking about like in a heterosexual relationship or marriage, because the other person's not more like we are. So, you know, we we don't see others as they are, we see others as we are, and that's a big mistake. We expect others to be the way we are. And I think also there's a lot of resentment because, and this I think is is is what sort of takes this issue and like blows it up and makes it extremely important, especially today, is that these gender differences influence how we approach our social relationships. For example, if women focus more on people, you would think that women more are more empathetic than men. Well, it turns out that if you look at the most extensive cross-cultural study of empathy across like 70 countries, there's not one country in the world where men are score higher in empathy than women. In almost all the countries, women score higher in empathy. Now, the interesting thing though is that again, we don't just see others as instead of as they are or as we are, we see ourselves as we expect ourselves to be based on societal norms. So part of the reason women exceed men in empathy is because they think they're expected to be empathetic, but it's not always true. In fact, there's a really interesting, and I think this is this is super funny, there's one way to erase the empathy gap between women and men. If you show women and men a video and you ask them, what emotions is the protagonist expressing? And women are gonna blow men out of the water, like in terms of, okay, yeah, she she's feeling sad, he's feeling disappointed, so on and so forth. Well, there's one way to erase the empathy gap, and it preys on one way that that men tend to excel more than women, and that's in being competitive. Men are extremely competitive, and and especially with other men. And so what you do is you make it a contest and with a prize, and you say, okay, I want you to to speculate which emotions um the is the protagonist expressing, and we're gonna have a winner and it's gonna receive like a$50 prize. Now all of a sudden, there's no difference in in the in the uh empathy scoring. Uh so it's interesting. I I think a lot of guys are more empathetic than we give them credit for, but they just kind of it just becomes like a latent ability that they don't really practice. But I think what, you know, going back to social relationships, this is extremely important now because I think, you know, we're we're seeing men just really being kind of decimated by women in terms of social relationships. And if you look at loneliness, loneliness in especially in older men is so much higher than it is in women. And this is really causing problems. So the the most significant cause of death of men 45 and older in the UK today is suicide. And we're seeing also in the US and around the world these deaths of despair, especially in older men. And one very interesting study found that if you take a 60-year-old woman and a 60-year-old man, and each of them loses their spouse, the chances of that woman living another year are much higher than that man living another year. Why is that? Okay, for the woman, her 60-year-old woman, her spouse passes away. This is so sad, this is so tragic. She's distraught. And then, okay, what am I gonna do? Friends, right? She's gonna call her friends, she's gonna get support. The guy who's 60 and his wife passes away. Well, all of a sudden, he's like, okay, this is tragic, this is sad, what am I gonna do? There are no friends. You see, the wife has her friends, the husband has his wife's friends' husbands, and that's something different. He's got his wife's friends, husbands, that he really never felt he had much in common with, but felt like this is, you know, this is the easiest way to have a social life. And so let's all we'll go out with couples, we'll go out if they have kids, we'll we'll have them over and go to the go barbecue at their place. But he never felt that close to that guy. And he never wanted to make the investment in a lot of those really close friends he had when he was growing up. You see, a lot of men experience, I don't know if you've ever heard of the musical cliff or the artistic cliff, which is like once we get through high school and college, if you're playing, you know, you've been taking piano lessons or you play guitar or you're really into painting, that just goes right over a cliff for guys. It's like after that, it's like, okay, it's work and family, and that's it. You see, you see, you see, only prioritize what I call the four priors. The four PRs are to procreate, produce, provide, and protect. Men focus almost 100% of their energy to procreate, produce, provide, and protect. So it's all work and family. And they attach their worth to their work. Within that equation, there's nothing there about friends. There's nothing there about hobbies. It's just all about out-compete other guys at work and whatever women are there and spend time with your family. And it tends to be more on work and less on family.

SPEAKER_00 14:52

Well, what is the solution then for us to rebalance this load that we have as grandparents and grandmothers and grandfathers, men and women, to get over triggering the defensive mode or or or defensive scripts so that we can accomplish what it is that we're trying to do for our grandchildren to I mean, women are bearing the load much more than men when it comes to caretaking for their grandchildren for their children.

SPEAKER_01 15:23

Is that is that what you're referring to?

SPEAKER_00 15:25

Aaron Powell And I I think that's a that's an obvious reality. I would tell you that 99% of our listeners are grandmothers. And there is resentment about the fact that they are carrying that load. It feels even greater when you're in your 60s than it does when you're younger. I know that with younger generations, this load is becoming a little more balanced in many relationships, but what can we do as grandmothers to balance the mental load for ourselves?

Mental Load, Resentment, Social Convoys

SPEAKER_01 15:59

Okay. Once again, wonderful question, Laura. Thank you. So I want to share with your listeners a negative and a positive about the really Herculean load that grandmothers bear much more than grandfathers. Okay. So, first of all, let's let's start with a negative. We usually like to start with a positive, but but here the negative is so much more obvious. So actually, it's not true that this is getting a lot better. Let's first look at that. So a Pew Research Center study with American couples, married couples, what they did was it was a time-use study. So they looked at how much time the wife versus the husband was spending on different kinds of activities. And so they looked at um housework and childcare as two of these activities. So housework and childcare is like the explicit cognitive load of caretaking. So these are, these are, these are, this is not the invisible one. So the invisible, we'll get to that in a moment. But the the visible, explicit cognitive load, housework and childcare, what they found is that if you take a fully employed woman and her unemployed husband, he's not working at all. She's out at work all day, he's at unemployed at home. So the first question is well, is he doing more housework and childcare than she is? So actually he is six hours more per week. So he's at home all day, she's at work all day, he's doing six hours more of housework and childcare combined than she is. Now let's switch roles. Now we've got a fully employed husband and an unemployed wife. Well, how many more hours of housework and childcare is she doing per week? 46 hours more per week. This is a 750% difference. So we are not out of the dark ages whatsoever of gender discrimination, of gender inequality. It's still just just as it always was. I think we just now, because of all the news about, you know, and the interest in like gender fluidity, it's really common in our discussions. But if you actually look at who's doing the work, it's still almost all of it at the home in the home is done by women. So that's the visible cognitive load. The invisible cognitive load is not even counted there. That's like the mental load of keeping track of doctor's appointments and making sure the kids have food before they go to school, play dates, sports events, all the other, making sure that they have clothes to wear. All of this is almost all done by women. So this creates a lot of resentment. And I think one of the first things men needs need to do is to step up in terms of in terms of both the visible and the invisible cognitive load. But before we go there, let's talk about the positive side of this. So is there anything good in this for grandmothers?

unknown 18:46

Right?

"Differences in Perceptions of Dancing"

SPEAKER_01 18:46

That's the million that's the million-dollar question, isn't it? Well, let's look at Antonella's research on social convoys. As you guys all know, a convoy is like a group of vehicles traveling together, right? That's a physical convoy. A social convoy is the close relationships that travel with you through life. Okay, so a social convoy is a wonderful thing to have. If you have a strong, robust, meaningful social convoy, you have a group of people who count on you and who depend on you and who care about you. They care where you are. We all want people to care where we are. That's that's one of the greatest ways to kind of keep loneliness at bay. Well, so if we look at this, women's social convoys blow men's social convoys out of the water. That's why you have these deaths of despair. That's why you have this astronomical levels of loneliness for older men, but not older women. So we're seeing a situation where, even, for example, let's suppose that a couple gets divorced. Let's look at the social convoys of the children as the children become adults and the couple becomes grandparents. Women are almost always a very strong presence in the social convoys of their adult children. Men, it's hit or miss. After divorce, sometimes they're still in the social convoys, sometimes they're not. Let's look at also like how women develop relationships versus men. Let me give you a personal example.

SPEAKER_00 20:11

I think that's why men get bored when they get retired when they're retired.

"Pressure on Women Across Ages"

"Women's Evolving Social Networks"

SPEAKER_01 20:15

Oh, yeah. Because look at the look at the four PRs, right? To procreate, okay, well, they've already procreated, that's done. They're not going to procreate again, likely, once they're grandparents, right? So there's to produce, to provide and protect. Well, to produce, if you're not working, you're not producing as much as you were before. To provide and protect, if your grown children are providing and protecting for themselves, which is the whole plan, right? Once they leave the house, that they become self-self, you know, economically, then what's left to do? And so you see, like, for example, I think it was, I think it was, uh I forget the name. I think I want to say George Eastman, but I may have it wrong. Uh, but it was the former uh CEO of of uh Kodak, or it was Kodak or Polaroid. I don't want to mess this up completely, but it was very high-level CEO, I think, of one of the photography companies. Pretty much once he retired, he committed suicide a few weeks later. His suicide said, My work is done, why wait? And this is really sad. This is this is just depressing. That for a lot of men, if they're not working, if they're not providing, then and they're not producing, well, what is there? So let me to see how men and women see the world differently. Let's take a couple that's out on a date, okay, and they're going dancing. So remember, men's focus, the four priars, right? So for the woman, they're out dancing, and and you ask her, how did you, how do you see this dancing with your partner? And and she might say, you know, it's a really beautiful activity we do together. It's really so graceful. And we're really, we're just showing our community that we care for each other and what we are as a couple. I think it's just really something beautiful. You ask the guy, hey, so how do you, how do you perceive this dancing? How does it, how does it feel for you? And the guy says, you know, I just don't get it. If we're gonna have sex later anyway, why do we have to do this? Yeah. You know, so these are of course, of course, again, not all women or men are like this, but I think there's a huge differences here. And we we have to find ways, especially for men, to really man up and knowing that being a man, being masculine today, look, you know, your physical strength's not as important as it used to be in our new sort of technologically mediated society. Right. So for men, it's it's these socio-emotional abilities that it's either learn them or you end up hanging out with your wife, with your with your wife's friends' husbands, not having much in common and just becoming lonely, right? So a lot of it too is that for men it's it's hard because if you're a guy and you go up to another guy and you're like, hey man, let's, you know, I enjoyed talking with you, let's go grab lunch sometime. Well, if you do that as a woman, it's just natural. It's like, okay, sure. You know, if for for guys, it's like, oh, okay, what does this guy want? Is he is he weak, pendant? Is he things are not going well for him in his life? That's why he's asking me. Or um, is he is he gay? Is that why he wants to get together with me? So a lot of a lot of men have this natural resistance to other men's social overtures because it doesn't really fit the competitive male model. So it's like if you if you're doing so well, why would you ask another guy to go out and do something socially? So we need we need to get over that. Let me just give you this one example and then I'll stop on this. But so when I was living in California, I formed a men's group with this other friend of mine. He and I kind of co-founded it. And it took us about five months till we got about eight or 10 guys who agreed, we're gonna come over once a month to someone's house, we'll rotate houses, we're gonna do a potluck dinner, and then we're gonna spend a couple hours just talking about life. Each guy gets like 10 or 15 minutes, and that was the plan, right? So after five months, it really worked. We did this for four years, it was fantastic. So uh my wife, oh, and by the way, if you're gonna do uh if you're gonna do a men's group for you grandfathers out there, don't make it a potluck. Because lesson learned for me, potlucks don't work with guys. I'm like, look, bringing a bag of chips does not count as a dish at a potluck. You guys have to explain this to these guys. So once we got over that, though, it went very well. Well, my wife saw this, and she actually had done something similar when we lived in Barcelona years before. And so she thought in California, she's going to do the same thing. So she makes some calls, sends some text messages, some WhatsApp messages. And I kid you not, Laura, the next morning there are 15 women sitting in a circle in our backyard. So women are just much more natural at being able to create these relationships. And I think again, it really uh it's really, it really becomes difficult for men as they're later in life. I think for women, it's often the really difficult part of being like expected to become the social fabric of our society for women is earlier in life. If you look at 14, 15, 16-year-old girls, ever since the iPhone came out, from two like it was 2007 when the iPhone came out, and then the first Android phone in 2008. From 2009 to 2015, every single year, 18% increase in emergency room visits based on over 400,000 visits around the US, 18% increase in emergency room visits for self-harm, only for girls. No increase at all for boys. That puts immense pressure on them younger in life, but then they reap the benefits much more later. So as a grandmother, if you're looking at it going, hey, why I have to do, I'm doing all this caretaking, sure, there's research on caretaking where if you feel obliged to do it, like it's that it's required of you and you're not choosing it, it it really decreases well-being. But if you if but for people who feel like caretaking is a choice, it actually actually increases their happiness rather than decreases it. So I think that's the real challenge here is okay, well, what are the benefits of it? And first of all, should your husband be doing more of it? Well, absolutely, for his own well-being more than more than anyone's. But then also acknowledging that, well, there are certain benefits to being that caretaker, huge benefits in terms of the social relationships you develop with your grandkids. All the research on on happiness, there's only really one or two things that all happiness researchers agree on. The first one is that the greatest purveyor of long-term happiness is your social relationships. So if you're by your building those social relationships and you know, grandchild calls for you, grandma, and not for your husband, grandpa, that feels pretty good. That your that grandchild wants to call you when they're facing a challenge or they want to celebrate something from school or later when they're in college. So those that's priceless. And that's part of this how social connection really generates happiness.

SPEAKER_00 26:59

Our socioeconomic whole ways of being has been totally upended in these situations because, first of all, as women, we've lost a lot of our our friendships. But for women, we need one or two great friends to get through these difficult times. But we're not throwing cocktail parties and dinners and that sort of thing because it's just all we can do to manage our homes. I do think that as wonderful as I feel that my grandchildren want to come to me for something, I do think that we as grandmothers want our spouses more involved in the process because we still want that loving, liberating experience of being retired. And when too much of the burden falls upon us, we do have resentments. I I think that from a systematic standpoint, this bias is difficult for us and one we have to resolve as strategic leaders because I do think we are leaders in this movement. And it's obvious by the amount of women that join these communities. This is our social network now. You know, that's why I'm trying to reach out to so many caregivers because we as women want a community. This is our new community. The conversations that we want to have are more taboo than the ones we might have had with the women in our social groups in our 50s and 60s had we not had these grandchildren. And I think that that's a good thing in many ways because we're talking about the difficult things that a lot of people just don't want to talk about. But how from a from a leadership standpoint, we have to diversify the responsibilities in a home and engage our spouses to be more involved. And I heard you say something earlier that maybe I need to refer back to. Men are looking at the physical objectives. So, with keeping keeping that in mind, if we look from a male's perspective, how is the best way to engage them as leaders?

Grandfather Caretaking Accountability Group

SPEAKER_01 29:19

So let's first look at it, Laura, at a study that took place in England where it was an ethnographic study of a very small town, and they and they looked at what are men doing in the town, what are women doing. And they found that with no variance whatsoever, no exceptions, when if you looked at who was washing the windows of the houses, the insides of the windows were always being washed by women, by the by the wives. The outsides of the windows were always being washed by the husbands.

SPEAKER_00 29:47

And I think we actually have a rule in our house that the outside is his department. The inside is.

SPEAKER_01 29:52

Exactly. Okay, so so the thing about men is that you know, women do intimacy much better than men do. But men are really into sociality, which is different. So men care about having an important role in a group. So being in a group, having a role in the group, that's really important to men in the and that and that you know the rules are being observed and and it's fair. So for example, if you if you if if you get a group of like eight women at a table and a group of eight men, and you drop a deck of cards in the middle, and you say, Okay, we're gonna play a new game, and you explain, you write down the rules to the game, right? And make it a little bit of a complex game. What's likely to happen is you come back in an hour and a half, the women haven't even played the game. They're just talking to each other, right? Now, the men haven't played the game either, but the reason is because they've been arguing about the rules of the game the whole time.

SPEAKER_00 30:43

Gosh.

SPEAKER_01 30:43

You know? So so this difference between intimacy and sociality, let's together, Laura, come up with a really, really clever solution to get men to do more caretaking. So here's what I wanna, here's what I'd like to propose, and and then you can we can co-create. All right. I'd like to propose is that since we saw that men will express just as much empathy as women, if it if there's some competition involved, and we're also seeing how much men care about groups and being uh and being an esteemed member of a group, here's an idea. So you develop a system where every time either the grandmother or grandfather is going to be taking care of the kids, they send the other a text, like I've started, right? And then and then when they finish, they send a text saying finished, and maybe they just say a word a couple a sentence or something about what they've been doing with the kids. Okay. So you get the men into you, you try to help your the grand your husband, the grandfather, to form a group of just men, okay? And so if you have like, let's say four or five couples that are that have grandchildren, and with each, with this men's group, they have to share with the other men two things. What have they been doing in that time they've been taking care of their grandkids? Have they they share best practices? What clever games have they come up with or other ways to really engage their grandchildren? And they have to share what percentage of their wife's caretaking time has their care taking time been.

SPEAKER_00 32:15

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 32:15

And you try to set like a like a like a like try to set like a like a bar, like say, okay, this should be at least, you know, maybe you start with um with a third, and then you try to work up to half, you know, like that, or something like that. And then so in their men's group, they meet every week or every few weeks, and they have to share. So one, they're gonna develop more friendships, and two, there's my daughter waving, hey. And two, they're going to, she just so here I'm in my in my home office, and she just jumps up to the window so I can see her, right? So yeah.

SPEAKER_00 32:48

So the great thing about working from home.

Family Movie Night Discussion Idea

SPEAKER_01 32:51

Exactly. So so now they're making better friends, number one. Two, they're thinking more creatively about it's not just the quantity of time, but it's the quality and how can they really engage their their grand their grandchildren. And maybe they ask the grandchildren what type of activities would you like to do, right? And then they have to report it to these other guys. I don't know about you, but I can tell you, uh I'm 58, I'm not a grandfather yet, but I wouldn't want to be the guy who's there saying uh 15%. Right? I'm gonna be embarrassed.

SPEAKER_00 33:22

Okay. I love this idea because we'll make it a contest and then we'll put we'll try and get the grandmothers to maybe even video some of these things.

SPEAKER_01 33:31

We can have a little men like to win competition going. I'll tell you, I'll tell you what. I have a I have a video course called Managing Loneliness, and which it's available at theartoflivingfree.org. Um our our website. And I'll give for the five grandfathers that try something like like this or something similar and can really demonstrate and maybe journal about the changes that are taking place and do so in a in a compelling way, an honest way. I'll give them the course is usually like like$65. We'll give it to them for free.

SPEAKER_00 34:05

I love this idea because I think a very important way that my husband and I find quality time is through fun games. Things get very serious in the world that we live in now, whereas we used to spend a lot of time having fun being retired. And I do find a lot of fun when we get together with the kids and play games. And so maybe we can even make it a contest that the children are involved in because they pull their granddad in, and that might be because of what you're saying, because of their value. They feel more valued when their grandchildren need them. So a different way for them to see this is an opportunity for their kids to be proud of them for winning a contest that helps their grandmothers.

Prioritize Self-Care for Caregivers

"Redesigning Retirement Gender Roles"

SPEAKER_01 34:58

Exactly. Yeah, and and and and also, you know, there's the saying like women tend, men teach. Men be remember the difference in intimacy and sociality. Men really like to have an important role in a group, and being a teacher is one way to do that. Right. So one thing that we do, and my wife, I have to admit, is the brainchild behind this. She put this together, not me. It's a movie night that we do where we have our friends bring over, uh, you know, usually there's about 10 or 15 kids from their school. They all come over. And my wife screens for film. She looks at Common Sense Media, which is a great, uh, a great platform where they'll tell you, okay, does this movie have sexual content? Does it have profanity? Other kind of, does it have other other kind of scenes that could be disturbing for children? And so, you know, you can find some movies there. So what you could do, these grandfathers could put this together, is they they bring over their grandkids to bring their friends over and they watch a movie, and then afterwards, the grandfathers facilitate a conversation where they have a series of questions to ask the kids about the movie. And so it's a great way. Um, it's a great way to like this like one movie we watched recently, Young Woman in the Sea, which I think is on Netflix, if I'm not mistaken, but Young Woman in the Sea, it's got the the the uh Daisy Ridley, who was in the Star Wars films as Ray. So it's a great film. It's about um, it's about the first woman to to to swim the English channel. Um it's Trudy Eberly, I think is her name. Anyway, it was it was it was really well done. And so she literally gets through like she's swimming and her and her and her male coach doesn't want her to be able to do it because he's very sexist and he couldn't do it himself, and he tries to poison her. Um, and there's all these other, you know, sees that can lead to very good questions that your grandchildren can discuss. And and the grandfather could facilitate that. So that's just one example, but there's a lot of different ways that I think for men, once they get once they get engaged in it, they'll they'll love it. The other thing is I would I would refer to both grandmothers and grandfathers that are listening here, that there's uh Carl Pilmer, he's a researcher at at Cornell University, psychologist. And he did this study where he went and interviewed people that were, that were elderly, like seniors from his, you know, like 80s, 90s, a few centenarians also. I think from 70s through through through, so not necessarily elderly, but just people that are older in years, going from 70s up to the into a few in their hundreds. And he asked them, okay, so is there anything you regret in life? Is there anything you wish you had done differently that we could learn from you? And what's interesting is that what men often respond is that in in his studies are that they wish they'd spent more time with family. And I think we have to acknowledge that a lot of grandfathers out there, they want to be more involved. They are lonely, they want the social connection, they're not sure how to do it.

SPEAKER_00 37:49

Grandmothers just have to be smart enough to figure out how to get them.

SPEAKER_01 37:53

Exactly. Exactly. And then and and but and so this also I think for you for you grandmothers listening out there, what they t what they tended to to respond to Pilmer, like uh anything they regret, is that they hadn't paid more attention to their own needs. And so I think when we talk about that you that caretaking can lead to your to increased happiness if you choose it, but it will derail your happiness if you feel you're not choosing it. I think for you to choose it means you also need to choose to do things that nurture yourself. So whether it's listening to to grandparents raising grandchildren, Laura, Laura Brazan's um podcast, whether it's reading books, whether it's doing yoga, whether it's going out for walks, going out for nice meals, you know, cooking with friends, spending time with friends, playing a musical instrument, time for yourself, a lot of women just don't do it because they feel all of these pressures. And maybe that could be a very candid conversation you could have with your, with your husband, as well as also playing this podcast for him, that the that for him to be able to step up and be with his with his guy friends in a men's group, saying, Yeah, I do 40% of the care, you know, 40% of what my my wife does in caretaking, or I do even 50 or 60 or 70%, for him to be able to do that means you're gonna have more free time and you can start feeling you're being more authentic and also serving your own needs, which, you know, it's like the you know, the in-flight presentation when you get on a plane where where they say like if there's turbulence and the masks come down, like put the mask over your own mouth first. So you're gonna lose your capacity to care for your grandchildren if you don't pay attention to your capacity to care for yourself.

SPEAKER_00 39:31

Yes. I'm going to make that a note as well. For the women that are listening to today's show. Uh I've been asking everyone three questions, and I think we answered my systematic question, which was basically we acknowledge the fact that women silently absorb the caregiving li labor. Well, the result of that is that there's resentment for the time that we lose and the fact that as we see that grandfathers are feeling a loss of maybe being contributing the way that they would like to contribute, then that it it works both ways. My taboo question was why it's so t taboo to admit that men and women grieve the loss of their retirement differently? Well, we each are finding our losses in different ways. So I think we answered that question, but I do have a policy question for you that I'd like you to answer for us today. If you were the COO of the country and you were redesigning the support system, what one policy do you think you would implement to recognize the male motherboard, ensuring that grandfathers have more specific pathways to lead that aren't just carbon carbon copies of the way women have support?

"Prioritize Love and Connection"

SPEAKER_01 40:50

Thank you, Laura. And that's also an excellent question. I think we need to move away from really strict gender roles and cause because it's just not working. In our highly advanced technological society today, if men just focus on procreate, produce, provide, and protect, rather than also really cooperation, collaboration, commiseration, spending time connection, time with others, they they end up in a really bad place. I don't think that's fair to them. I don't think it's fair to their because if they're lonely and depressed and anxious, well, it's not gonna be good for their wives either. So it's not fair to anyone. Neither is it fair for them at the age of 14, 15 to confer all of the uh of the sort of the hard work of socialization onto women and just say, well, I'm just gonna go along and whatever, you know, my girlfriend and then later my wife wants is cool. Um and then they're you know, and then they end up with just their wives, friends, husbands, which is which is not only pressing, it's insulting. You know, really the wives are like are like, oh John, do you know that Fred also likes hamburgers? He loves to barbecue. So you know, it's like it's like it's like talking to two dogs, right? You know, and and I think men men can be more than that. And I think uh I think uh we in the end, each of us needs to balance empathy and authenticity into one composite whole in our character. And so we can't just say that like women lead in empathy and men were gonna be, you know, women are gonna be empathetic, nurturing, caring, men are gonna be assertive, strong, firm, and hey, that's cool. That's how that's how our society's gonna run. Because it just doesn't work. It this is what we're seeing in Pilar studies. It doesn't work for the men because they because in the end they regret they didn't have closer relationships, which the empathy helps facilitate. And and women later on life are like, don't feel like they've ever really been assertive, strong, resolute about meeting their own needs. And that's not really that's not fair for them at all either. So I guess I'd say the one policy would be women have to put assertiveness as a priority. Men have to put empathy as a priority, right? And I think both are going to create much healthier connections. What I call compassion, com at compassionate, meaningful, sustainable relationships, CMSR. For us to have these kinds of healthy, meaningful relationships that are sustainable. And so we don't end up feeling disconnected and and and lonely and isolated later in life. We just have to make that as a priority. We have to find, you know, and it also may mean that that prioritizing friends who also are able to balance empathy and assertiveness. Because if someone is just empathetic all the time, that does, you know, what I teach my the participants of my converts more than anything is I say all dichotomies are false dichotomies. If you're just empathetic all the time, you become a doormat. Everyone walks all over you. If you're just assertive all the time, you become narcissistic, toxic, and abusive. So we need to find a balance. We need to know how to switch back and forth between empathy and assertiveness. And that I say would be the policy is that we need, we need for both women and men to balance empathy and assertiveness and to and develop a healthier, more, more holistic personality where they're able to really manifest both in the way they interact with others.

SPEAKER_00 44:22

And perhaps by implementing some of the things that we've spoken about today, we as grandparents and grandmothers can help us lead our grandchildren by example, how to make that balance happen with men and women as they grow.

"Parenting Insights with Melissa Schultz"

SPEAKER_01 44:36

Absolutely. And at the end of the day, it's all about love. I mean, love, especially as we're getting older in life, you know, love is the only thing that, in in my per in my opinion, love is the only thing that we take with us. It's the moments we shared with others. So we need to prioritize that because that's what we end up valuing the most. It's what we value the most now. Um, in in love and suffering, you know, my most recent book, focusing on how do you develop your relationships through acceptance, forgiveness, gratitude, and love. And and as I mentioned in your last show, Laura, I want to offer two free books to all of your listeners, which also these books will help a lot, especially the second one about how to develop closer relationships. So the first book is called The Myth of Happiness, How Your Definition of Happiness Creates Your Unhappiness. The second book is The Myth of Friendship, how your misunderstandings about friendship keep you lonely, dealing with some of the issues we we talked about here today. So if you want to download those two books, it's super easy. Just go to theartoflivingfree.org slash free happiness and friendship books. Again, theartoflivingfree dot org slash free happiness and friendship books.

SPEAKER_00 45:48

Thank you, Tony. And I will add those to the show notes as well. Thanks again for your time. Lovely conversation.

SPEAKER_01 45:54

I really love our conversation. So thanks. I was really an honor to be here with you again and and uh I appreciate you.

SPEAKER_00 46:00

Thank you. So I want you to step into The reflection room with me. Tony challenged us to balance empathy with assertiveness. This week your mission is simple: the 10-hour mission. I'm issuing a challenge. We know there's a 750% gap between the time we spend with digital objects and the time we spend with the people we love. It's time to bridge that gap in your own home. Athena and I just launched the Dream Big Kitchen, and we want you to be our co-producers. We are officially launching the Invisible CEO Grand Challenge. Grandfathers, dads, grandkids, this is your mission. Spend 10 hours together over the next three weeks. We want the kids to teach the adults a modern skill inside the house. Maybe it's a recipe or a tech trick, and we want the adults to teach the kids a legacy skill outside the house. Our first place winners will be the official faces of the Dream Big Kitchen with custom aprons and chef's hats for the whole family. A$100 grant and a copy of Dr. Anthony Silard's book. Second place wins a$50 grant, custom aprons, and a chef's hat. And all three of our top winners will be featured in our national newsletter to inspire the rest of the 2.7 million. We aren't just surviving, we're building a production team. Click the link in the show notes to download your mission log. I can't wait to see what you cook up. Join us next week as we sit down with the 2025 Parenting Coach of the Year, Melissa Schultz. If you're raising a child who's strong-willed, highly sensitive, or neurodiverse, you know that traditional parenting advice often falls flat. Melissa is a board certified behavior analyst who specializes in turning those high-friction daily struggles into calm, connected leadership. We'll be discussing how to apply behavioral infrastructure to your home to ensure every member of your family, no matter how sensitive, can thrive. The mission continues. We are 2.7 million strong, still nurturing and still here. Today we've looked at the data, we've acknowledged the gap, and now we are building the bridge. To the grandmothers holding the motherboard, release the silos. To the grandfather's stepping into the mission, claim your seat at the table. Your legacy isn't just in the objects you leave behind, it's in the social convoy you lead today. Download your mission log, start your 10 hour challenge, and let's show the world that the most resilient leadership in the country happens right at your kitchen table. Keep nurturing, keep leading, and I'll see you in the next boardroom.