The Truth About: ‘Difficult Kids’ and What Attachment Science Really Says with Dr. Jessie Stern

What if your child isn’t “difficult” — just wired differently?

In this episode, we’re joined by Dr. Jessie Stern, assistant professor of psychology at Pomona College and co-author of Beyond Difficult, to break down what attachment theory really means, how child temperament works, and why so much parenting advice oversimplifies complex human behavior.

We talk about secure, anxious, avoidant, and disorganized attachment styles — what they are, what they aren’t, and why they’re not permanent labels. Dr. Stern explains how attachment forms through early relationships, how it can change over time, and why attachment styles are adaptive strategies, not diagnoses.

We also explore why children are often born with distinct temperaments, including sensitivity and emotional reactivity, and how parents can respond without shame or self-blame. This conversation is especially helpful for parents raising highly sensitive kids or navigating emotional regulation when both parent and child are overwhelmed.

This episode covers:

• The science behind attachment theory and parenting
• Why temperament is largely innate — and how environment shapes outcomes
• Emotional regulation strategies for parents and kids
• The neuroscience of “mom brain” and parenthood
• Why attachment parenting trends don’t always reflect attachment research
• How community and support impact parenting and mental health

A must-listen for parents, caregivers, educators, and anyone interested in child development, attachment, and evidence-based parenting.

We hope you enjoy the episode!

Guest: Dr. Jessie Stern, PhD
Assistant Professor of Psychology, Pomona College
Co-author of Beyond Difficult: An Attachment-Based Guide to Dealing with Challenging People
Instagram: @drjessiestern | @australianpsychologist

Topics Covered:

• Attachment theory explained (secure, anxious, avoidant, disorganized)
• Nature vs. nurture in child behavior
• Sensitive children and emotional regulation
• Parenting without shame or labels
• Brain changes in parenthood
• Why community matters more than perfection

Chapters

• 0:00 Meet Dr. Jesse Stern & The Book
• 2:28 Falling In Love With Child Development
• 4:03 Why Everyone Should Learn Development
• 5:52 Neuroplasticity In Parenthood
• 7:48 Emotion Regulation Starts In The Body
• 9:28 Teen Friendships As Caregiving Training
• 11:48 Nature, Nurture, And Sensitive Kids
• 13:48 Sensory Overload And Meltdowns
• 15:20 Regulating Yourself To Co‑Regulate Kids
• 16:48 Community As A Secure Base
• 19:48 Friendship, Seasons, And Grace
• 22:38 Boundaries, Help, And New Moms
• 25:48 Temperament 101 And Parenting Fit
• 28:48 Birth Order Myths And Small Effects
• 31:48 Attachment Styles, Not Diagnoses
• 35:48 Disorganized Attachment And Context
• 38:48 Systems, Stress, And Kids’ Security
• 40:48 Practical Introvert Parenting Tips
• 42:28 Curiosity As A Parenting Superpower
• 43:48 The Science And Joy Of Touch
• 45:28 Closing And Where To Find Jesse

Transcript

SPEAKER_02: 0:56

Welcome to the podcast, Jesse. Can you tell our listeners a little bit about who you are and about the book?

SPEAKER_00: 1:02

My name is Dr. Jesse Stern. I'm an assistant professor of psychology at Pomona College in Claremont, California. And I co-authored a book called Beyond Difficult: An Attachment-Based Guide to Dealing with Challenging People with a wonderful friend and therapist in Australia, Rachel Sampson. And that book was kind of the product of a long-term friendship and some mutual interests in parenting. I'm a parenting researcher. And Rachel works a lot with parents and kids in her clinical practice. So we cultivated a friendship kind of in a funny way, randomly at the University of Minnesota, and just decided to, you know, make a book. We call it our book baby. And it's been fun to have it out in the world and just sort of hear people's responses to it.

SPEAKER_01: 1:49

What drove your interest in parenting?

SPEAKER_00: 1:52

So when I, when I was an undergrad actually at this institution at Pomona, I really wanted to be an educator. So I knew from a pretty early age that that was something that lit me up and made me feel alive. And at the time, so I'm a millennial. I was very much a band nerd as a kid. I thought I wanted to be a music educator. And kind of on a whim, I took a child development class with someone who would become my mentor, Pat Smiley. And I just fell in love with child development. I thought it was so interesting what made kids different one to the next. And as a result, I started doing some research in a lab that was run by Dr. Jessica Borelli, who's now at UC Urbine. And a lot of what we did was interview parents and kids about their relationships separately. So a lot of my job was to interview parents. And here I am, this undergrad who's never had a kid, right? And just learn about their experiences. And in particular, we were asking them questions about, you know, what is it like when your child feels certain emotions? So we'd ask, tell me about a time when your kid felt upset. How did you feel? How did you respond? And these primarily mothers were just so different one to the next. And I became completely fascinated by what they were talking about in their personal experience. So I very quickly shifted majors and have just been diving into parenting and child development ever since.

SPEAKER_01: 3:18

That's cool. Yeah, that's really interesting. We actually we spoke with Tova Klein yesterday and we were talking about how it's kind of crazy that we are not educated in child development unless we specifically pursue a career in that and how interesting it would be if we maybe had to take a few classes in high school or in class. Because I'm sure that when you started studying this, you realize that there's just so much that's just kept out of the realm of, you know, public knowledge and conversation.

SPEAKER_00: 3:49

It's so true. I mean, I I really think that everybody and anybody could benefit from knowing a little bit about how development occurs, in part because it's a lifelong process. So even as an adult, don't you want to know how to change for the better or change relationships that you have with the young people in your life? So a lot of what I ask my students on the very first day is how many of you might want to become parents someday? And usually people are a little shy, but they'll raise their hands. And it's like, well, this is so relevant to just, you know, being a parent, but also being a person in a child's life. So even if you're not a biological parent, maybe you're part of a village where there are young kiddos and hopefully that knowledge serves you well. But it is a shame that it's not just part of our general curriculum. And I also think that cultivating healthy relationships should just be part of our education system and imagine the different world we might live in if that were the case.

SPEAKER_02: 4:47

Yeah, everything you're saying would be helpful for just even as a human growing. Like I wish I would have known what I was doing to my serotonin receptors when I was doing MOLLE when I was in high school, you know, like I would do all this research, but okay, I well, I guess it wasn't called Molly. It was called ecstasy back in the day. But like if you, if we knew how the brain developed, like obviously I know it was bad, but or that I knew didn't know my brain was not gonna be erg. When is a woman's brain fully developed, like 25 and a man's is like 28 or something like that? I think even that knowledge and like what you're doing to it, how it can affect receptors and your relationships and everything, I think, you know, early education is good for just being a human.

SPEAKER_00: 5:27

Absolutely. I mean, even what you just said about how the human brain is not really fully developed until at least age 25. And insurance companies know this, which is why you can't rent a car until that age. But then there's this, there's actually another window of plasticity that opens up in a beautiful way during the transition to parenthood. It opens in an amazing way for mothers, even during pregnancy, when all of these hormones are causing our brains to kind of reorganize themselves. And sometimes that's called mommy brain in a pejorative kind of way. But actually, what your brain is doing is so adaptive. It's it's restructuring itself to focus on kid-related stuff. So, yeah, you do have some memory loss for like a grocery list, but you actually have some cognitive gains when it comes to thinking about and remembering anything related to having a baby. So that's kind of fascinating. And then, and actually, dads have this too, but it usually happens after the baby is born, where the brain and a lot of the hormones in a man's body get very radically changed by virtue of that transition. I certainly think like knowing the basics of neuroplasticity is actually kind of like a hopeful thing for most people. Like, oh, I can do certain things and intentionally change the way my brain works. And I have actually longer to do that than I thought.

SPEAKER_02: 6:50

Yeah. That's, I mean, I didn't know that any of that that you just said. So I would have loved to know that because then you can kind of reframe things as you're going through postpartum to be like, oh, I'm not just dumb. My brain is just relearning. It's kind of like, you know, a caterpillar and a butterfly, you know, how it turns into liquid and then comes out as a butterfly. That's what it makes me think of.

SPEAKER_00: 7:12

That's a great metaphor. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 7:15

It's also like I think we're so quick to chalk things up to mom brain, but there's so many other things like sleep deprivation or not sitting down and eating a proper meal or not being hydrated that can affect kind of how you function. And you know, I think we we just have very little interest in actually researching women's health and giving women the information they need about their health. So it's not terribly surprising that we don't talk about these things enough.

SPEAKER_00: 7:41

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, one of the things we talk about in the book is the importance of emotion regulation. But part of that is also just physiological regulation, meaning, like, if you're a parent, you can't pour from an empty cup. Like you do actually need to be fed, hydrated, have um as much sleep as you can have if you want to show up in the way that you want to show up as a parent. And the same is true for so many of our relationships. Certainly like with a romantic partner. If um if I'm at the end of my workday and I haven't eaten lunch or something, you bet I'm gonna snap at my husband in a way that I later regret, right? So I think knowing what our bodies need, but also what our emotional cups need to show up in relationship with our kids and with our co-parent is crucial.

SPEAKER_02: 8:34

I was just laughing, kind of smiling, because my husband had never heard the term fill your own cup until he became a dad. He was like, I heard this brilliant thing. And me and my friends were looking at him and we're like, what? Like it's just so interesting a man's experience in life versus a woman's.

SPEAKER_00: 8:49

No, and I I actually I feel badly for men who kind of don't get those um forms of like emotional education in the way that women do, because I think a lot of it comes from our friends oftentimes. So those friendships, we we actually have some interesting research from um Joe Allen's lab, which has studied a group of teenagers from the time they were 13 and now they're 37 and having kids of their own. So it's like an amazing look across multiple generations. And one of the really interesting things is that peer relationships, when you're an adolescent, actually predict how empathic you are toward your own kid. So there's some kind of really important learning happening in teenage friendships that's kind of like a training ground for later in life, including the way you parent. So I think it does tend to happen more in female friendships. We talk about emotions more. We're sort of socialized to feel like that's good, that that's okay. And I think boys sometimes get the short end of the stick in that regard, where it's more taboo to have a guy friend who you really confide in emotionally. So I certainly think all men are fully capable of cultivating those skills. It just might take more effort.

SPEAKER_02: 10:11

Yeah, it's like whenever my husband goes out with his best friends from high school, because they're all, you know, they were roommates, they're all best friends. I'll ask them him stuff. He knows nothing. So I have to text the wives and be and like, what is going on? Like, why can't you just um yeah. So to go back to something that you said about it predicts like the those relationships predict, what do you what do you mean by that?

SPEAKER_00: 10:35

Yeah, so um uh in one of our papers, what we found was that when we we observed parents and teens together in these support interactions. So we basically asked teens, talk about something um with your parent that you could use, some help or advice about. And in this case, I'll focus on mothers because that's what our um our paper was about. Mothers who showed more empathy during those conversations when their teen was young, like 13 years old. Those teens were better able to kind of pay it forward and they were more supportive in turn to their closest friends, basically across adolescence. So until they were 18 years old, the teens who had experienced firsthand their mothers showing empathetic support when they needed it, they could pay it forward. They had that skill set in their friendships. And then when we looked at teens' ability to do that when they were about 18, so teens' capacity to show empathy and support when their friends really needed them. I mean, that's a caregiving skill, right? So it translated for those teens who had kids, they were more empathetic toward their own child. So what we're seeing, and actually they also reported that their kid was more empathetic. So what we're seeing is that there's a cross-generation pattern. If you have this firsthand experience of receiving empathic care, you are better equipped to give it to other people. And that includes your own kids. So to me, one of the lessons there is number one for parents, especially with teens, because I think sometimes it's hard to empathize when you feel like your teen's dream being dramatic. But you can't just tell your teen to, like, oh, be a good friend. You should be kind, you should be empathic. Like they have to have a firsthand felt lived experience of that from you. That is how they learn and internalize that skill. And then what happens is in their friendships, they can practice it because friendships are kind of this way that teenagers start to have horizontal relationships, like relationships between equals, where I'm supporting you, you're supporting me. And ultimately, what they're learning is caregiving skills. They're learning caregiving skills from caring for their friends in these kind of low-stakes contexts. So when they become parents, they're taking all of that learning with them. So teenage friendships aren't for nothing. You know what I mean? Like I think parents should really be encouraging their teen to spend time with friends as long as the peer group is good, obviously, because they're there's amazing social emotional skills that then they carry into their adult lives.

SPEAKER_02: 13:11

That's super interesting. One thing that my husband and I always talk about is nature versus nurture. So, how much of that, because obviously, if you're empathetic, you're and you're modeling that for your child, they're going to pick it up, like you're saying, but also how much of that is like kind of in your DNA and your ancestral lineage? Because something I've noticed since having a parent is uh how much stuff is really truly just nature. Like our kid came out how he was on day one and he has not changed. Um, and obviously we can influence it, but what's what do you think about like kind of the split between nature and nurture on that thread you were just talking about?

SPEAKER_00: 13:51

Yeah, you are completely right that there is a genetic component to almost any kid behavior, actually. But what we know about human traits like empathy is usually it's a combination of nature and nurture. There used to be a big debate in child development, like everything is nature, everything is nurture. And really what the science shows is that for any kid, it is a combo of both, except in the cases of like genetic disorder. On the nature side, there is a genetic contribution to empathy. One of the interesting things, though, is that kids who are more sensitive in their temperament, so they tend to react more to their environment. They pick up on subtleties in the social environment. They might actually be more fussy as kids. So sometimes these infants are called irritable. Um, I was probably one of them myself. But um I think a better term is sensitive because what that genetic trait ends up doing is it makes a kid sensitive to their environment for better and for worse. Meaning if they receive good parenting, they're nurtured, they're supported in their sensitivity, they can thrive above and beyond less sensitive kids and they tend to be the most empathetic kids. So if you have a highly sensitive kid very attuned to their environment and they have a secure attachment to their parent, they tend to be the most empathic kids. But those same sensitive kids, if they've been abused or maltreated, or even just at the more subtle level, just kind of ignored or shut down in terms of their emotional capacities. Like, we don't, why are you reacting to everything? Like stopping so sensitive, that kind of shuts down that learning process. So those kids tend to be the least empathetic. So that's what I mean by for better and for worse. It's you have a combination. It's nature and nurture working together.

SPEAKER_02: 15:44

That makes a lot of sense. Yeah. Um, my son would be on the sensitive path, and my husband is on the non-sensitive path, and I am also sensitive. So I totally get that. Zara, what about what about your kids? Are you are they sensitive or are you sensitive?

SPEAKER_01: 16:00

I'm pretty sensitive. And I think my kids are just sensitive in different ways, if that makes sense. I think I have one kid who kind of notices everything, and then I have another kid who is more like he'll say things like, Oh mommy, I just really don't like seeing someone sad, or things like that. I remember I threw up one time and he saw it, and he would just like sat there for a solid 10 minutes and he's like, Mommy, I really didn't like that. I really didn't like seeing that. So they're they kind of exhibit it in different ways. But I'm also their mom, so I might be biased.

SPEAKER_00: 16:33

I think that's a beautiful example of high sensitivity in a nurturing environment. And probably something he's seen modeled by you in some way, like when he's been sick and you've noticed, I think that really matters for sensitive kids. They pick up on it.

SPEAKER_02: 16:49

Is it true that it's about 20% of the population, animals and humans are sensitive and it's evolutionary, where it's, you know, you need the sensitive people to pick up on threats, and then the rest of people, it's a little bit more dulled down so like our society can function in general, or is that just like a myth?

SPEAKER_00: 17:06

No, you're you're totally right about that. So the trait of sensitivity is something that we share with other species. So there are highly sensitive primate relatives of ours, like chimps and bonobos, and you can really see, like, even among chimp babies, how different they are in that regard. So, yes, it is something that is biological, it's evolutionary. Typically, we think of sensitivity as on a spectrum. So we're all on the spectrum of very low sensitivity to very high sensitivity, with most of us falling somewhere in between. It's not as though there are these two dichotomous, like, oh, you're not sensitive and I am, but it is really a spectrum. But just for the sake of being able to talk about it in a shorthand, we do sort of choose an arbitrary cutoff and say, yes, about 20 to 30% of the population is highly sensitive. And so that's just to say that you're a little bit further on one end of that spectrum. But there are also certain environments, because again, it's always a combination of our environment and our nature. There are certain environments that elicit it more. And you can also dial it up and down. So I find if, you know, if I have to kind of have a thick skin about something, I can maybe dial down my sensitivity and not notice quite so much about a difficult situation. But I can also dial it up if I'm really trying to understand what someone's going through and be very attuned to a social dynamic. So there's there is a little bit of wiggle room along that spectrum.

SPEAKER_01: 18:37

Are sensitive people more sensitive to things like sensory, like noise and lights and things like that?

SPEAKER_00: 18:44

Yeah. And actually, you see this a lot in kids. So sometimes a kid who kind of looks like they're having a meltdown or throwing a tantrum, especially if they're sensitive, there might be something sensory that is overwhelming their system in some way. So for some kiddos, that's bright light or fluorescent light. For some kids, it's a sensory feeling like they have an itchy tag on their clothes and it's making them really restless. And sometimes it's kind of a combo where they're doing okay for the most part, but then like the classroom that they're in gets a little bit too loud and suddenly you see the meltdown. But it was sort of this like one thing after another sort of overwhelmed their nervous system. So sometimes what looks like a kid meltdown is actually a sensitive child trying to regulate their nervous system when it gets overwhelmed.

SPEAKER_01: 19:37

I still have a hard time with that. Yes.

unknown: 19:40

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02: 19:41

That's actually something we asked Tova yesterday. And I don't know that there was an answer to it, but how are we supposed to regulate or help our children regulate when we can't even regulate ourselves? Like what are your tips on? Do you have any tips on that?

SPEAKER_00: 19:56

That's a tough one. To me, the mantra that I often think about is safety first, meaning like the very first thing that you can do is get you and your kid into some kind of safe place. So if like if a meltdown is happening at a grocery store and you're overwhelmed and they're overwhelmed, not saying a grocery store is unsafe, but I'm just saying if you can see that if you can get through the checkout line, right? And like go stand under a tree with them and just not have other people in your space, that's probably number one for both of you. So safety first and making sure that, you know, your kid is not running into traffic would also be like a safety first moment, right? Even if that means taking charge in a stern way. And then I think second is taking a deep breath because it takes two seconds. So for a parent, there's a lot of physiological regulation that happens through breathing. If you can take a deep breath and let it out through your mouth, there's also something. Called the physiological side, where you breathe in a full breath and then you take a slightly, slightly more of a breath and then breathe it out. Um, and other species do this. So, like a dog who's falling asleep will go, you know, something like that. So taking a breath, taking a pause before you respond to them. So even just like counting, like closing your eyes and just counting to three is sometimes enough to help you calm down to show up. And then I would say if your kid is comfortable with touch, if that helps, that would be a third way. So maybe taking them by the shoulders or if there's like a soft stroking motion that helps them calm. Depends on the age, obviously. I'm talking about little kids. But if you have older kids, there might be something different. Hand on the shoulder, whatever it is. There's a section in the book called emotion regulation that kind of goes through all of these different techniques. But one of the hardest things in any relationship is when two people are dysregulated at the same time. But as the parent, it is kind of our job to like be the bigger person because you literally are. And so when you can regulate yourself first, then the kid can regulate. So often parents who are just modeling calm, that's sometimes enough for the kid to also feel calm. I would say that leave reasoning, logic, and lectures until after the kid is calm enough to hear them. Um, and until you're calm enough to say something that you feel good about and won't regret. Often, like I feel like the logic and lectures can be overrated unless you are from doing it from a calm place.

SPEAKER_02: 22:38

Yeah, I think this also kind of illustrates the importance of community too, because as you were talking, I was thinking about okay, how do I regulate my child and all of that? And when there are other people around, like my partner, or you know, my husband, you know, our friends sometimes, you know, your child isn't gonna listen to you, but it might listen or they might listen to a friend. So that is what we rely on often too, is like, yeah, if we're on vacation with friends, you know, my son wouldn't come to the dinner table. And I didn't even fight him. I was like, okay, cool. And I sent our friend in, I was like, could you handle that for me? And then the next morning her son didn't want to go to the breakfast table. And then I was like, I've got this. And so I think there is something about we because I we are gonna get just regulated by our children, much easier. Like I, he can push my buttons so easily, but they're kid, my friend's kids, it's much harder for them to get under my skin.

SPEAKER_00: 23:28

100%. I think the the emphasis on community is exactly right. And from an attachment point of view, you're as a caregiver, as a parent, you don't give up your need for a secure base or a person who is supporting you. So you're doing a lot to support your kid, but you also need a community of people around you who are holding you up too. And across every culture that I know of that has been studied about this, mothers and fathers who are more supported by their community tend to be able to be better caregivers themselves. And we've kind of lost that in Western culture, you know, like we have the nuclear family as somehow held up as this great unit, but it's actually a very recent invention. So, like the nuclear family was not really a common family structure until the 1950s when there was a lot of government support for housing and um, you know, you could actually afford to be a homeowner with just one income. And if you were white, right? Like there was also a lot of racism that informed the way we think about the nuclear family. But it's kind of actually a myth that that's the way that humans should live. For most of our evolutionary history, we lived in small villages where care of infants in particular was communal. You had older siblings, but you also had cousins, aunties, grandparents, like a whole village network that would help you raise your kid. And so I there's a wonderful researcher, Sarah Blafford Hurdy, who argues that it really is not all about mom and kid. It's about community. And if we can reclaim that, I think it's better for parents' mental health and it's probably better for our kids too.

SPEAKER_02: 25:19

100% for the kids as well. Because if the parents are happy, right, isn't that doesn't that help the attachment? I mean, I know when I'm happy, I'm a much kinder parent.

SPEAKER_00: 25:31

Absolutely. And not just happy, but like resource, where you don't feel like you're just barely hanging on to the end of your rope, but that if you need somebody, they're there for you to lean on. And that's really the definition of feeling secure in your relationships is the confidence that when you're stressed, when you need somebody, someone has your back. That's really all it is. And so absolutely, adults who have that feeling of security, who feel like I do have somebody I can call upon in this moment where I'm feeling stressed or dysregulated, you are in a much better space to be a caregiver for somebody else.

SPEAKER_02: 26:13

Okay. I I have a question, but it's actually from Zara. So about friendships. Do you want to talk about that social media?

SPEAKER_01: 26:20

I don't know if you've seen a lot of this discourse on social media, but there is an influencer who has five sons who posted that in this season of life, she is, in her words, a bad friend. And I think a lot of what she said was actually pretty reasonable. You know, she was talking about how she values quality over quantity at this point in life, um, her energy and her time, she's protective of. But a lot of people are not a fan of what she's saying and that they're talking about just how important female connections are, which I absolutely agree with. And I've also I'm a journalist in the space, so I've looked at a lot of the research about the benefits of female friendships. Um, but I'd love to hear your thoughts. I mean, how can we navigate this fact that at certain points in life, especially in parenthood, we just don't have as much time for friendship and for social connection. But it's maybe the most important time of all for us to actually have those communities.

SPEAKER_00: 27:22

Yeah, I think it's so tricky and probably very individual. So I can mostly speak just from my own personal experience. So my closest childhood friends are still my friends to this day. And one of them now has three kids. She was the first to have kids in our friend group. And it kind of used to be that she was the glue who kind of brought all of us together. And she'd sometimes have us to her house, particularly after I moved away and would kind of come back to visit. And after, I think particularly having the third kid, that was no longer possible for her. And it did take a toll on our friendship. But what ended up happening was another person from our friend group who didn't have kids kind of stepped up and created the opportunities for us to continue to connect. And sometimes my friend with kids would be part of that, and sometimes she couldn't be. And we tried to give her a lot of grace around that. So the bottom line is many years later, we're we're still connected. I don't have as frequent of interactions with her, but when I do, I really do cherish them. And I think from my point of view, so I'm pregnant with my first child. Congratulations. Congratulations. Thank you. And one of the things I've appreciated is the way in which my female friends who have already had children have really been a source of community and support. I had to buy zero maternity clothes because people gave me so many and there was a buy nothing group. And anyway, it was like this beautiful community kind of blossomed in the prenatal period. And I've been thinking a lot, especially as an introvert, how am I going to maintain this sense of community in the post-partum period when probably a lot of my energy is going to be totally spent and where there might reasonably be a period where you need to kind of withdraw. So I didn't answer your question, but I'm just sort of opening the question for my own sake. And I think everybody is a little bit different. Distance also matters. So if you're lucky enough to live very close to your friends, that might make a more casual kind of meetup much more possible for folks who are doing long-distance friendships. One of the things that has been most fun is to leave little voice memos or to leave short videos of here's an update from my day in like a shared album. And then whenever somebody has time, they'll go in there and hear the update and then maybe respond. So it means that we don't all have to be online at the same time or available at the same time. But it's a way to kind of have these little nuggets of check-ins. So that that so far has worked well.

SPEAKER_01: 30:10

Yeah. I'd love to hear your thoughts on there's a lot of discourse online right now about if you are going to visit a new mom who's just had a baby. Don't ask, can I hold the baby so you can clean up? Don't ask, can I hold the baby so you can shower? That sort of thing. Just get in there and clean her house for her so she can bond with the baby. Do you think that gets a little too conditional?

SPEAKER_00: 30:33

To me, that sounds like something that you can ask in such a way where a parent could say, This is what I would like.

unknown: 30:40

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 30:41

Because there will probably be some moms who really just want to hold their kid the whole time, but really need help cleaning the house. And there will be other moms who are like, please take him.

SPEAKER_02: 30:51

That would be me.

unknown: 30:53

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02: 30:53

Get this kid away from me.

SPEAKER_01: 30:55

I think it would have been out to have someone cleaning my house, you know, because then they they're keep they're coming over to you, like, oh, where do you want this? What do you want to do with this? I think that would have been more stressful for me.

SPEAKER_00: 31:06

I I really think that all of those needs are completely legitimate. Yeah. And really being able to express them is the greatest gift. But we have to be brave enough to do it. We have to be brave enough to say, here's my boundary. I really would prefer that you not do this, but this thing would be so helpful. Can you help me? And I think sometimes we get uncomfortable actually stating what our needs are.

SPEAKER_03: 31:30

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 31:30

But but when we leave a person to guess, then we end up with boundary violations that we didn't know or that we didn't anticipate. So I think communicating boundaries that we've got, this is another thing we talk about a lot in the book. A boundary has to be communicated. And you might also think about internal boundaries for yourself, like here's what I'm willing to do and not do in that early period when someone comes over to my house. But until you communicate it to somebody, they have no way of knowing.

SPEAKER_01: 32:00

Yeah. I also see online a lot of this thing of people are saying, Don't ask to spend time with my child without me. Like that's a red flag. And then I'm not sure.

SPEAKER_02: 32:10

Your algorithm is so weird. I haven't seen any of it weird. Did you refresh yet? Because you're I did. Okay.

SPEAKER_01: 32:18

Okay, good. I've seen a lot of this, like, you know, grandparents who ask to spend time alone with their grandkids or a red flag. And then I'll see, don't expect me to ask you to babysit. You have to offer. So, you know, I think that I'm really hesitant to blame parents for everything, but I do think that there has to be a little bit, a little bit less rigidity around some of this. Everything.

SPEAKER_02: 32:40

Yeah, around everything.

SPEAKER_00: 32:43

Yeah. Yeah. Some of these things I'm sure are on social media to be provocative, and that's the point. Yeah. And then there are other things that are just personal preferences that a parent has that they want to express. And there's enough of a community of people who are like, yeah, that's I see myself in this person's experience. And from that point of view, I think it's totally valid. Like as a parent, I often hear that folks feel kind of isolated in whatever their journey has been. That was true for becoming a parent for me. I felt very isolated until I started talking to other women about their experience. And all of a sudden it was like, oh my God, same. So I think part of it is a desire, it's coming from a desire to feel validated and less alone. But also that these are legitimate preferences that sometimes people feel uncomfortable expressing directly to the person who they actually need to communicate with. So then it ends up online.

SPEAKER_01: 33:39

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 33:39

To me, it's like, well, if you're complaining to a friend or a spouse about your difficult in-law who wants to spend time alone with your kid, it's can probably just be directed into how do I kindly but firmly say, this is what I feel comfortable with, with you and my kid. I feel comfortable with you coming to the house, but I don't really want you driving them anywhere. Like whatever the boundary is, it needs to go to the person who's otherwise going to continue to violate it and drive you nuts. But I think a lot of those posts probably come from a place of a legitimate need or a legitimate preference, I should say. Um, and just trying to feel less alone in that preference. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02: 34:26

Back to the social media thing. I I just thought of something, Zara. I think you know how I feel about this. I don't prioritize my friendships right now because I am in a motherhood phase. So my friendships who don't, my friends who don't have kids and who don't live by me have kind of fallen by the wayside. Sometimes not. But like if we don't have things in common, like TikTok is one of me and one of my girlfriends are thing. We always share TikToks back and forth. But if I don't have like a connection like that with a friend, even though they're my best friend, my true friend, I've been friends with them for a decade. Where my life is right now, and I empathize with this woman. She homeschools five kids. You know, she's very, very busy. I know there's people are on it because of political reasons, but like somebody who is on a different political side, like me, I still don't have time to prioritize those. I talk to my mom friends about things, and it's like, oh, let's do this play date. Oh, let's get together. And it's our kids playing together, and then we're building our friendship and the dads are building their friendship. And so that's who I'm really close with right now and who I lean on. But it's not like I don't value my other friendships. It's just right now where I'm this season, I just only have a certain capacity and that's that's where it is. So I and I feel like a lot of parents and people in general are the same. Like if you're building a company, you're gonna want to talk to founders and be around founders if you're you know, whatever it is. So um I think we have to give people a little bit of grace for yeah, because I feel like a bad friend all the time.

SPEAKER_01: 35:56

It's also just like this bounce back culture, which I think we feel is just about how your body looks, but I really think that there's more to it because we live in a system that's just not set up to support parents, and so we expect them to go back to work in six weeks or two weeks or 12 weeks or whatever the case is. And I think there's this idea that you have to get all parts of your life back to what they were before you had a kid, including your social life. And that's just not it's not feasible for most people.

SPEAKER_00: 36:24

Absolutely. I I think we can think about the transition to parenthood not just as you're becoming a parent, but as your whole life shifts. It's like an earthquake, right? And things take different priorities afterward. And that's a very normal part of becoming a parent who has to keep this kid alive, right? So I think it's very natural to have priorities shift and also just the time and bandwidth that you have go through a big transition. Hopefully, the friends who really truly matter to you understand that. I mean, same with one of my closest childhood friends who I described, we really tried to give her grace. And then there are certain moments where if it's important to me that she shows up, I have to tell her that. And that's on me to say, you know, this is a funeral for this person who was in my life for a long time. I would really love it if you could be there. I'm giving her an opportunity to show up as a friend during key moments, but I don't expect her to be there all the time for me because that's not reasonable for her. And I think similarly, um, thinking about my own transition to parenthood, Sam, I will like, I think I will probably, you know, feel very, very similarly where the friendships that I have bandwidth for are those that are happening in the context of parenting and having kids who like each other. And then maybe that will shift as your child gets older and becomes more independent and wants to do more with their friends, like as a teenager, and you can be a little bit more hands-off or encouraging their autonomy. And that might be another moment where things shift and actually you want to reconnect with this person. I think the one thing that I would say is there are little moments that help a friendship survive difficult periods where you're not as available. And one of those is just the, hey, I'm thinking of you. So if you're if you're in the store, if you're thinking of some friend you've had that you haven't spoken to in a while, just telling them, I was just thinking about you the other day is huge for just maintaining the quality of that bond.

SPEAKER_02: 38:44

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 38:44

It doesn't have to be like, oh, let's catch up for two hours, but just letting the person know that they're in your heart and mind can be really magical.

SPEAKER_02: 38:52

Yeah. Or sending them a picture of a snack that they like. You mentioned the grocery store because that is something ideal. I'll be like, oh yeah, remember this. We haven't even gotten into beyond difficult or really, you know, we have so much to talk about. And I'm really curious about this idea of temperament that you mentioned with before we started recording. And temperament is something that I did not believe in as much until I witnessed it. I was like, oh no, the parents are messing them up because I was so judgmental before becoming a parent. I'm like, this is my parents' fault for this. And now I'm like, I have, I'm like, oh, my parents did the best that they could, and this is just who I am and who, you know, and and my son is just who he is, and he has always been that way. And so I want to learn from you about temperament and but I have one question before that because I tend to do this. I'll like bake 15 questions into one. Do difficult people tend to go into sales? Because not no offense to any sellers out there. I've been in sales basically my entire career, sales or sales education. But do you do you see certain careers that people who have more difficult or fussy temperaments go into?

SPEAKER_00: 39:59

I haven't seen anything about that, but it wouldn't surprise me. As someone who just got a car, it doesn't surprise me. Yeah, that's the worst.

SPEAKER_01: 40:08

You have to be willing to kind of push past people's boundaries a little bit, right? If you if you're working in sales.

SPEAKER_00: 40:15

Yeah, unfortunately, so there there is some data that CEOs who have a little bit more of the psychopathic traits going on, like not caring a whole lot about other people's feelings, Machiavellianism, like kind of using other people to get ahead, they tend to earn more, which is super depressing. So there is data about that.

SPEAKER_01: 40:35

Isn't there in our political climate?

SPEAKER_00: 40:38

No, it's not.

SPEAKER_01: 40:39

Sorry to take it there.

SPEAKER_02: 40:40

Isn't there also data about psychopaths tend to be CEOs, doctors, attorneys? There's like people on the psychologist, I think there's a book called The Psychopath Test, and they like studied, and maybe it's narcissists or but I think it's psychopaths, but they were saying there's a high percentage in Certain careers. I don't, I didn't check the source or validate it, but I think there's a book about this where it's like you have to be okay. Like, think about it from a doctor's perspective. You have to be okay with somebody POB like dying on your table and being able to move on. And yeah. Um, but back to my original question here about temperament. I want to learn more about child temperament and are they all just the way they are when they come out, or do we have influence over that or combination?

SPEAKER_00: 41:27

Yeah, it's such a good question. I think for any parent who has had more than one child, temperament is probably very evident to you, especially if your kids are different, right? So from the time a child is born, they have some natural proclivities in terms of how much sleep they need, even in terms of their activity level. I have a hunch that my daughter will be very high activity in terms of her temperament, because boy, does she move around a lot already. So things like activity level soothability, like how easily your kid calms down, and then this trait of sensitivity that we focus on in the book, which is how reactive the child is to their environment for better or for worse. Those are some of the temperamental traits that we can assess really, really early on and that tend to be pretty darn stable. So a kid who's sensitive when they're a year old is very likely to be sensitive as a teenager, is very likely to be sensitive as an adult. But the way that that shows up in their actual behavior depends a lot on how their sensitive temperament is meeting their environment. So for sensitive kids, um, it tends to be a better situation if they have a secure base, a parent who is available to them, meets their emotional needs, and really accepts their temperament, accepts their sensitivity and doesn't try to talk them out of their feelings or say, don't be so sensitive. And that can come from a less sensitive parent. It doesn't have to be that the kid's temperament and the parents' temperament match, because that's not always what happens. But those sensitive kids tend to benefit from more empathic discipline, so less harsh and a little bit more explanatory and scaffolding. Like, maybe let's put the toy over here this time rather than you need to go to your room right now and think about that. But that more firm style works really well with a less sensitive kid. So if you have a fearless kid who's just all over the place and really exploratory and really excited, high activity level, low sensitivity, they're gonna need actually a more firm discipline structure to feel safe and to develop the kind of skills that you hope they have later in life. So the needs might be different. And I think parents stress a lot about, oh my God, I'm treating my two kids differently. Well, sometimes your kids have very different temperaments that they came into the world with and they need something different from you as a parent, which is a little bit more challenging because then you have to kind of be flexible in the way that you respond to their needs. So, what I would say is when you're trying to figure out why my kid behaves this way, especially if it's difficult behavior, like why is my kid being so difficult? There's usually a combination of temperament and then something in the environment that are interacting with each other.

SPEAKER_01: 44:22

I'd love to talk to you about birth order a little bit. Do you think some of the stuff that we talk about about, you know, firstborns are cautious and secondborns are like the gonna rule the world type of kids. Is there any truth to that or is it more anecdotal that we're kind of noticing these things?

SPEAKER_00: 44:41

The science of birth order is a little bit underwhelming. So there are very mild birth order effects. The oldest kid and only children, I'm an only child myself, so am I, tend to be very similar in a lot of ways, high responsibility, academically motivated, maybe a little bit more irritable, but not always. But the effect sizes are so small, we're really not that different from the kids who are elsewhere in the birth order. And youngest tends to be more socially skilled by, again, just by a little bit. So when you're a younger sibling, you're actually learning certain social skills a little bit earlier because you have the benefit of observing an older sibling. Now it kind of depends on like how spaced out the kids are, right? So if you're a two-year-old and you get to watch your four-year-old brother do something and you really want to be like him, you might develop those particular social capacities a bit earlier. So there's something called theory of mind, where a kid understands that people have different points of view than they do. This person has a different mind and a different opinion than I might. And it turns out that younger siblings who have an older sibling living with them tend to develop it a little bit earlier. But on the whole, I think birth order is probably talked about in ways that are uh overinflated based on what the actual evidence shows.

unknown: 46:09

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 46:09

I haven't shown we probably sorry, we could probably parent differently from being a first-time parent to being a second or third or fourth time parent, right?

SPEAKER_00: 46:19

100%. Yeah. A lot of times with the firstborn kid, parents are much more cautious. They also have more time to focus on this one amazing child. And then by the second, a lot of times parents relax. They're like, okay, I can keep this being alive. I can let them do stuff. I can let other people hold them. It's not as big of a deal. And I'm so tired from parenting my other one. I actually have to take my foot off the gas pedal. So I mean, it really depends on the parent, of course. But I do think that there are differences.

SPEAKER_02: 46:52

Well, there's also that idea of community, right? Once you have two, like as you start getting more and more kids, then you do get more of that intergenerational vibe. I have heard though, I need to check the source on this, that there is data around the fourth child being the most likely to be a professional sports player. So that interesting. Yeah. So um for whatever reason that is, but I need to check the source. But that my husband and I were talking about that. He when he was telling me about it. That's fascinating. Which makes sense because if you think about it, they're learning from their older siblings the entire time and just have to get pushed into that.

SPEAKER_01: 47:29

Um Are there any misinformed ideas you see on social media about attachment that you'd like to clear up?

SPEAKER_00: 47:40

Where do I start? So I think one is that if you are insecurely attached, that that is a label you carry with you forever. And it's not. So attachment is pretty stable over your lifespan, but it's always capable of change. So when we think about kids who might have had initially an insecure attachment with their parent, if their caregiving environment changes, in other words, if their parent changes the way they interact with their kid, their kid will move toward more security with the parent. So there's always flexibility, but it requires a change in your social environment. So there might also be like romantic relationships where you felt super anxious and like worried that this person was going to cheat on you all the time because that matched their behavior and it was adaptive at the time to adopt this more anxious style of attachment. But now you're in a completely different type of romantic relationship and your attachment style might have changed. So when your environment changes, your attachment style can change. Sometimes that means for yourself working to explore some of your own patterns, it does take effort and work. But what I tell my students is you can't choose your family, but as emerging adults, like you can choose your partner, you can choose your friends. So choose the people who make you feel safe, seen, and secure. That's one. The second is that insecure attachment is a type of mental illness. It's not. Having an avoidant attachment is nowhere in the diagnostic or statistical manual. There's no psychologist who's going to be like, you're avoidant. And that's that's your diagnosis. All avoidant attachment means is when you were young, the best strategy you had for staying close to your parent who might have been a little bit more aloof or a little bit more emotionally unavailable. The best strategy you had to stay close to that person was to downplay your emotions and to act cool and to act like you didn't need anything unless you were really, really hurt. But that was the best that you could do in that environment. That might no longer serve you in your current relationships. It might get in the way of intimacy, for example, if you're not willing to share vulnerability. But at the time, that was just an adaptive strategy for being in a relationship with your caregiver. So it's not mental illness. It is true that anxious and avoidant attachment or insecure attachment puts you at slightly increased risk for things like anxiety and depressive symptoms, but it is certainly not determinative. Like not everybody who's anxiously attached has anxiety. Those are different things. So it's, I like to think of attachment styles as just the strategy that you adopted to stay close to people you cared about. And it might have been an imperfect environment growing up. And so you did your best. And now the question is, does that still serve you well? So that I think those are my top two. But the third one, one more attachment is not the same as attachment parenting. So the attachment parenting movement, where you have to go sleep, you have to breastfeed until whatever age you have to baby wear, that's not related to the actual science of attachment. Although if parents want to do those things, you're welcome to. And none of them seem to enhance or inhibit kids' attachment security. So regardless of what a parent chooses in terms of baby wearing, in terms of co-sleeping, it doesn't have a very strong, if any, connection to whether their kid is secure and secure. So those two things are kind of separate. Attachment theory from John Bullby and Ray Ainsworth has 60 years of research behind it. And then I think the attachment parenting stuff is maybe a little bit more, we're not sure what the outcomes are quite yet.

SPEAKER_02: 51:44

Well, and it's also from, you know, our villager days when we carried our babies around and stuff. Like I could imagine that that's probably good for them. And sleeping is probably good for them. You know, but it's, I think those things are harder to quantify, like you mentioned. So you're saying that somebody who is anxiously attached is not necessarily borderline and somebody who's avoidant is not necessarily a narcissist. Is that what you're saying?

SPEAKER_00: 52:07

Absolutely. Okay, okay. Maybe I can give a better description of each of those. An avoidant attachment style involves discomfort with emotional closeness and intimacy. Those are the main two traits in adults. In kids, what this looks like is um not showing as much emotion and not seeking closeness to the parent, even if they might actually want it. So what you'll see is if a kid is separated from their caregiver, they still get upset by that. So I'm talking about like infants and toddlers. An avoidant kid still gets upset if their parent leaves. But then when the parent comes back, often what they'll do is kind of like pretend they don't care. They won't go to the caregiver. And sometimes what you'll see is they even kind of turn their body away. So like, I don't need you. I was fine the whole time. So the question is, where does that come from? Oftentimes it comes from a caregiver who dismissed, minimized, or rejected vulnerable emotion. So don't be a crybaby. Or it got really, really uncomfortable anytime the kid had a need for them. Go be independent. So that kind of pushing kids to not need me, I am not comfortable with your emotions, just go over there. That tends to make the kid go, okay, if I want a relationship with this person, I better not be needy. I better take care of things on my own and not rely on other people. So that's kind of the that's the avoidant vibe, but avoidant people are capable of change. For anxiously attached folks, the main characteristic is worrying about abandonment. Is this person going to be there for me? Do you really love me? I need a lot of reassurance. I'm going to text you all the time. If you don't respond, I feel like, well, where are we? And I might feel a lot of anxiety about whether my partner is cheating on me or not. So that's in the adult realm. In the in the kid realm, what you'll see is let's say a parent, you have a separation from the parent, and they come back, the kid is often really inconsolable. So they'll go to the parent, they'll be very, very clingy and sometimes also angry, like, how could you leave me? So you might see them hit the parent. If a, if the parent's kind of like offering them something, like, hey, you want to look at this? And they're like, no, I don't want to look at that, because you left me. F you for leaving me is basically the vibe, right? And what we think this comes from is parents who were inconsistently available. So sometimes I'm here for you, sometimes I'm not. So now the kid's like, the only way I know that I can rely on you is if I'm really clingy and dependent and I don't let you leave me. And so if that pattern continues, that's why, you know, you can imagine an adult worrying a lot about their relationships. The secure pattern is I feel comfortable depending on other people. I feel comfortable with other people depending on me. In general, it's easy for me to get close to people. That's kind of the vibe in adulthood. And for kids, if they're separated from the parent, they'll still get upset. When the parent comes back, they'll seek proximity. So they'll they'll go to the parent, which is different from those avoidant kids. But different from the anxious kids, they'll calm down pretty quickly. And pretty quickly they'll be back to playing. They're like, okay, I got my cup full. Thanks, mom. Like, go out and play more. So those are kind of the three main patterns.

SPEAKER_02: 55:32

I've heard of disorganized attachment. Is that the same as anxious, or is that a different one?

SPEAKER_00: 55:39

Yeah. So disorganized attachment is its own category. In kids, often this comes from abuse or neglect, but not always. But it's a fourth category that was discovered a little bit later. And what these kids show when parents separate and then come back is a mix of kind of conflicting behaviors. So they might run toward the parent and then run away screaming, or they might kind of start to go to the parent and then kind of freeze and look maybe a little bit fearful. So they're showing kind of conflicting behaviors and or fear of the parent. And now sometimes that's because the parent has been unpredictable or maybe has been a source of threat or stress in the past. But you also see this for kids who have been raised in institutional settings like orphanages, where they've got so many different caregivers that they don't really know how to predict just one. So they haven't really had a chance to form a good attachment bond with a predictable presence in their lives. In adults, often what you'll see with disorganized adults is kind of a mix of anxious and avoidant. So there's no like coherent strategy for staying close to people. It's like, I don't really know your sense of self might change a lot. Like sometimes I feel okay about myself, and other days it's like I have no sense of self-worth. And sometimes I just withdraw from relationships altogether because I find them overwhelming. I don't really understand how this close relationship thing works. So disorganized is one of those categories that is like very broad and it really depends on the person's history how they tend to show up. But disorganized kids are most likely to have behavior problems. And oftentimes, if you can get the parent to be a little bit more stable, a little bit more available, they'll move toward a secure attachment over time. So still, you know, there's always room for improvement and for intervention.

SPEAKER_02: 57:38

That just makes me so sad thinking about like people who, you know, right now, especially in the US who, or actually all over the world, but who don't have access to like stable housing or food, or, you know, they're leaving their kids at home because they don't have another option while they go to work or they have, you know, addiction problems. It just makes me so sad for what that's doing to that child for the rest of the child's life and and to society in general, because it's that's so sad.

SPEAKER_00: 58:04

No, 100 100%. And I think you're right to point out that what's happening in the broader world is part of what can lead to disorganized detachment, among other things. Being in a war-torn country, not knowing if your parents are going to be deported. And all of those things are what what's happening in the culture is what's happening in the family.

SPEAKER_02: 58:28

Now I'm gonna go cry. Not we have taken up so much of your time. We do like to wrap up with a couple questions, but I as a fellow introvert, I'd love to give you some unsolicited like mom advice for somebody going to be a good thing. I would love that. Yes. So when so I needed a lot of alone time and I didn't get any and I didn't really know how to ask for it, or that I needed it because you're like, well, my kid's just right there. If you can send your spouse out on Saturdays to a class, like a mommy and me or daddy and me, my husband took my son for to gymnastics every Saturday, and it's where we met my one of my best mom friends once I started going, but it got them out of the house. They would go to gymnastics in the morning and then to farmers market and breakfast. So I got like four hours to myself and it was life-changing. Either that or once they do become friends with another kid or whatever, get the dads to take them out, and then they can get all their playing out, and then and that's probably as they get a little bit older, so you know who they like. But that was life-changing for me. So, as somebody who needs a lot of time to recharge, and then don't clean during that time.

SPEAKER_01: 59:35

Don't clean, just run. That's the hard part. I love that. Thank you.

SPEAKER_03: 59:41

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 59:41

Absolutely. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02: 59:44

Um, we have talked about like a lot of different things. What is the advice that somebody has given to you about parenthood so far or in your research that you've seen that you're like, this is, I would like to pass this advice along, you know, to our listeners.

SPEAKER_00: 1:00:00

I think one thing I've been thinking a lot about as somebody who studies parenting from a scientific lens, but is just now becoming a parent. I really appreciate the reminder to be constantly curious, curious about my child, what's actually going on with her, but also curious about other parents' experiences in as much as I can, a non-judgmental way. I really want to know what other people's experiences are like, why they make the choices they do. So, some of my researcher lens, I also want to bring into relationships I have with parents and just be constantly curious about what makes parents come alive, feel like their cup is full, what they do to recharge, just like you said, like having that alone time. I love that advice. So I think bringing curiosity into the parenting process and not presuming that I know anything. Thing. You know, that I think that kind of curiosity and humility will will be valuable.

SPEAKER_01: 1:01:03

What's the part of parenthood you're most excited about?

SPEAKER_00: 1:01:06

There's a lot of great research about the value of touch, not just for little infants, but also for recovering moms postpartum and for dads and their bonding. Um, and I am a a high-touch person. I think social touch is helpful to our nervous systems and helpful to our moods. So I'm very excited to hold my baby.

SPEAKER_03: 1:01:29

W when are you due?

SPEAKER_00: 1:01:31

I'm due October 24th.

SPEAKER_03: 1:01:33

Wow, you're close. It's very close, yeah. How are you feeling?

SPEAKER_00: 1:01:40

I'm feeling good. It's been a long journey to get here. That's for another podcast, but I feel very grateful to be at this point. And the only complaint I have is my shoes don't fit anymore. Not to mention my pants, but that was a while ago.

SPEAKER_02: 1:01:56

Yeah. The shoes is something, yeah. My my feet are a full size different than they were before.

SPEAKER_00: 1:02:01

Yeah. It's so wild.

SPEAKER_02: 1:02:03

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 1:02:04

Apparently the hormone and relaxin that helps your your hips widen. It's responsible for all this stuff I don't like.

SPEAKER_02: 1:02:12

Yeah, the back pain, all of that, all of all of the things. Well, thank you so much for taking the time. I know it took us a while to get you scheduled. So I am so excited to share all of your knowledge. And we'll make sure to link where people can buy the book and any of your other links. Um, but if they want to follow you, what is the best Instagram or TikTok, or what is the best social media they can follow you at?

SPEAKER_00: 1:02:33

So on Instagram, I'm at Dr. Jesse Stern and my co-author, Rachel, is at Australian Psychologist. She's much more active than me. So you should follow both of us, but definitely follow her.

SPEAKER_02: 1:02:46

Well, thank you again, and we're excited for your parenting journey.

SPEAKER_00: 1:02:50

Thank you, Sam. Thank you, Zara. It was so lovely to meet you both.

SPEAKER_02: 1:02:54

It was so nice to meet you.