Babyproofing your Marriage

Daddy Clay: Hey, welcome to the DadLab.  I’m Daddy Clay.  Today we are very fortunate to have in the lab with us the authors of Babyproofing Your Marriage, How to Laugh More Argue Less and Communicate Better as your family grows.  We’ve got here with us Kathy O’Neill and Julia Stone and Stacy Cockrell.  Ladies thanks very much for venturing into the dad territory.

Kathy: Thanks for having us.

Stacy: Thank you.

Julia: Thanks for letting us in.

Kathy: It’s fabulous.

Stacy: It’s good to be here.

Daddy Clay: It’s a little scary.  But it’s really nice to have some moms in the house.

Julia: We’re not afraid.

Stacy: You should’ve seen their bathroom.

Julia:  That’s scary!

Stacy: You don’t want to go in there.

Daddy Clay: You know, I’m really getting tired of the women ignoring the signs that are all over the studio.  Okay, I’ve got to say this.  This is my favorite marriage advice and self-help book that I’ve ever read.  It’s also – well – the only one I’ve ever read.  But this is good, this is really good if you’re only ever going to read in your life, gentlemen, one marriage and self-help book, this is the one.  It’s a great book for guys.  There are a lot of reasons for that.  This is a really well written book.

Stacy: Thank you.

Daddy Clay: So the first thing I want – I open the book and I start reading.  And there’s like swears in there.

Kathy: There’s a few, there’s a couple.

Daddy Clay: There’s like a lot of swears.  Did you guys get in trouble for putting, like, swears in the book?

Kathy: No..

Stacy: You’ve got to keep it real.

Kathy:  Well – we do the bleep, bleep, bleep type swears.

Daddy Clay: I mean, it’s a parenting book.  What the ‘bleep’.  That’s bull ‘bleep’.  This is like parenting.  This is a serious subject, you can’t ‘bleeping’ say ‘bleep’.

Stacy: People said it, we typed.  You know, you gotta be real.

Daddy Clay: So you’re not owning the swears, you’re just saying that you….

Kathy: There’s a few of our own in there as well.

Stacy: Yeah

Kathy: We want to reflect the reality of parenting.  There’s so many books out there that sort of sugar coat it and gives you this sort of soft focus image of what happens after you have kids.  We wanted to present – look, this is the real world, this is what it’s really like and occasionally a curse word does slip out and their included in there.

Julia: We occasionally lose our tempers and say get me bleeping diaper.

Stacy: Exactly.

Daddy Clay: You can say it.

Julia: No.  I’m not going to say it.

Stacy: Good try.

Daddy Clay: Alright, well anytime if you get more comfortable here in the DadLab and it just sort starts sinking in, you just go – you drop and F-bomb.  You go mom – you drop an F-bomb.  You can.  That’s another reason I think this makes a really comfortable read for dads.  It’s really modern and the tone is sort of relaxed and pretty earthy.  Now I just want to say I read the whole thing, okay, and I read it in order.  Even though you implied that most guys will skip to the sex chapter first.

Kathy: Well, you’re a real professional, Clay.

Daddy Clay: Well, clearly.  So, guys will skip to the sex chapter?  Is that guy MO?

Julia: I think that’s fair enough to say.

Stacy: I think so.  We talked to hundreds of men across the country and asked them.  What’s really important to you?  And they said – okay, it’s a three letter word – sex.  Hundreds said the same thing and if they go longer than a week the sky’s falling down, the wheels are coming off, if they’re rejected it’s soul destroying.  So, hey, go to chapter four because we talk about a lot of ways that we can meet each other in the middle.

Kathy: Guys are going to turn to in for a couple of reasons.  One is it can be hugely comforting to realize you’re not the only one not getting any or not getting as much as you used to.  So that can be enormously comforting.  Yeah.  Maybe present company excluded from that.  Then you can also see that if you have those questions of why isn’t my wife as interested as she used to be, why do I feel I’m at the bottom of the family totem pole at the moment.  The answers are in chapter four.  And it explains how women feel about sex after we become mothers and what men can do to rekindle our interest and bring back the girl we used to be.  Because we’re still there.

Julia: It also gives guys some tips for not to do.  Like this (arm around the shoulder) at the end of a long day.  The ten o’clock shoulder tap.  That’s the last thing a woman wants after she’s had kids hanging all over her for 24 hours.  She’d like a little conversation; she’d like a little more interest in connecting before, not after.

Daddy Clay: Well, you know… this whole thing with guys being obsessed with sex, I’ not sure that I …. You guys are hot by the way – I’m not kidding.

Stacy: Alright – I like this show.

Daddy Clay: Oh, I’m sorry.  What was I talking about?  Oh right – men and sex, men and sex.  I do think, guys, you need to buy this book just for the sex chapter and let me say that one of the big … I’m a huge fan of a number of the suggestions in here and so you need to buy this book and keep on the bedside.  Just for that reason.  So, you’re all moms obviously, but you’ve all had successful business career, you’re not all stay-at-homes.  You’re still working right.

Kathy:  Yeah, I kept working.  I pretty much got right back to it pretty quickly after my first one was born.  I’ve got two little girls now and don’t work as much as I used to.  I used be a lawyer, fled the practice of law got into a _________ where I met Stacy and then I started doing consulting business for legal firms.

Daddy Clay:  And, you guys might be staying at home, but you’re MBA’s.

Julia: We met at business school at study group.

Stacy: We were in the same section …

Julia: Stacy helped me pass Accounting.

Daddy Clay:  So you guys sort of straddled that line, huh-uh – sorry.  Okay so I was noticing, I was reading this book and a lot of what’s valuable in there comes in the form of quotes. Like, between almost every paragraph you there’s quote from a mom or dad, they’re being very open, honest.  So tell us a little about the interview process, how many people did you talk to and what kind of skills are required to get these great responses from people.  Because I suck as an interviewer.  Frankly.

Julia: As Stacy said, we talked to hundreds of men and women across the country and we would typically do a group of men or a group of women.  We’d take over a book club for a night, or guy’s poker night.  And, you know – the women were very happy to open up.  But the first time we did a men’s group we were so worried.  You know – guys aren’t going to open up and talk to us about this stuff.  There’s no way.  You know – how’s your marriage, dude??  But they were – like within minutes, pounding on the table and one guy was up pacing around the room and another one or two ended up in tears by the end of it.  And it was incredibly eye opening for us too, to hear the stories they had to share and to understand that they care just as much about their marriages and doing right by their kids and their wives, and we should give them credit for it.

Stacy:  And there’s been no forum before for this so far in talking about the impact kids have on your marriage, right?  And so when we had these focus groups what was really interesting is people stayed late.  We couldn’t get them to stop talking about this and they… it was just one of those times  where they could say, oh you’re feeling that too, I’m not alone.  I thought I was the only one in my marriage experiencing this.  So again, it just opens the floodgates to know that we’re all hanging on by a thread.

Kathy: And what was nice for us was obviously, the starting point for this book was our experiences, the three of us and our experiences with our husbands.  But it was also wonderful to get ideas and tips and different perspectives from people and they’re all in the book as well.

Daddy Clay: Speaking of husbands, how did they feel about this experience?  I mean you guys are very open, you’re very frank about your lives and your husbands are definitely probably featured in the book.  How did they feel about all this stuff?

Kathy:  They like to say they hope men everywhere will learn from their mistakes.

Daddy Clay: That sounds really familiar.

Kathy: That’s kind of their standard line when they’re asked.

Stacy: They stood behind us making sure we got their side of the story right.  You know if we didn’t get the perspective right we asked, hey what do you think?  And we changed it.  We wanted to make sure men were represented fairly.

Julia: My husband gave me a diagram of everything I’d gotten wrong in Chapter three, so it was very helpful.

Daddy Clay: Very helpful.

Julia: It was very helpful.

Daddy Clay: Well, that’s interesting.  I wonder if your backgrounds in business helped you understand men, from your experience in the workplace.  I mean, do you feel like because you spend that time in the workplace it helped you understand the male mind a little bit better?

Kathy: Not necessarily.  Only as much as it helps to understand the female mind as well, because there’s men and women at work.  So we understood both perspectives.  I think maybe the business backgrounds helped in terms of sort of – let’s get straight to the point, let’s put bullet points instead of super wordy paragraphs here.  You know we’ve got lots of illustrations.

Daddy Clay: That’s true.

Kathy: To hold peoples attention, to use visuals wherever we can and I think that probably came from our background.

Julia: And I would think to break up the text too might help with the male attention span.  And you know, the sleep deprived mom’s attention span as well.

Daddy Clay:  What?  Oh, hi.  And we’re back.  That’s great.  So I’m curious – do you think – and you guys were obviously successful in the business world – do you think guys…that women have made huge progress in the last couple of generations in this area.  You guys have really sort of changed a way the genderal like what’s expected of women, what’s been made possible.  Do you think that men can be as successful in parenting – sort of turning that modelized head – do you think that me can be as successful at parenting as women have been at business?

Stacy:  Yes.  I think there a lot of successful men out there and they’re successful fathers too.  But what we’ve noticed with our own husbands is sometimes men just don’t get it, right?  My husband would come home and go, gosh why is this so hard for you?  It’s just one baby.  She took a couple naps, you know what’s the bid deal?  And he just didn’t understand that 24 hour, seven day a week taking care of a baby.  So what we recommend in Babyproofing Your Marriage is give him a training weekend.  And again, a lot of these fathers they know how to change the diapers, they know how to take the football for 20 minutes or so, but when they don’t have a full two days to  really understand the whole experience that’s where you get that – hey, he doesn’t really understand.  After that training weekend – my husband 48 hours with my baby, light bulb went off. 

Kathy: I think where a lot of us women make a mistake in terms of our husbands parenting is we expect them to be another mommy.  Or, you know, assistant mommy.  And men – our husbands – are totally capable of looking after our kids.  But we need to stand back and actually let them parent the way they want to parent.  My husband would be the first to tell you that I was terrible.  I would critique how a diaper was changed, I would get mad at him if he bought the wrong kind of formula even if what he bought was actually fine.  So, yes – they can be just as good as we are.  But us, as women, we have to stand back and let them take the reigns.

Daddy Clay:  Yeah, I think it’s interesting to think about the kind of social support that went along with this sort of shift.  Allowing women to become more active in the workplace, that there needs to be some kind of cultural support for men too as we sort of take on the uncomfortable, gender awkward parenting roll that we need to, and that’s really fun.

Julia:  It’s kind of – we’re converging here and you men are converging this way and maybe we’ll achieve co-parenting nirvana in our lifetime.

Daddy Clay: Okay, I’ve got one last question for you.  So lately in all this kind of parenting blogosphere out there we’re hearing a lot about these hip parents.  Grupster parents.  We had Alternadad author in the studio.  What do you guys think about this?  Are you guys hip parents?  Do you think that being hip and being parents are…

Kathy:  What’s a grupster?  Is that a name for a child?  It’s like you have hip parents and you have your grupsters.  Do you guys know what a Grupster is?

Julia: No

Stacy: No

Kathy: So what’s a grupster?

Daddy Clay: Well, a grupster is another word for hip parents. They’re grup – grups is a sort of a word that journalists dubbed these young parents who are not quite fully grown up, they’re grups.  And they’re also hipsters, so they’re grupsters.  And these are hip parents and that’s the end of the grupster lesson 101, which I guess means …

Julia: We’re not hip.

Daddy Clay: You’re not hip.  Sorry to say. 

Stacy:  I think when you have two or more kids, when you have two – it’s over.  Right?

Daddy Clay: Right.  You want to be cool, you want to listen to cool music, I mean do you feel an obligation to your old self to try and be like hip and cool, to try and preserve some of your pre-kids … Um, I’m sensing no.

Stacy: When you have one kid, right?

Kathy: Yeah.  With one kid you can kind of straddle both.  You can sort of keep one foot in your old life, and one foot in your new parenting life.  The realization the three of us came to was once you had that second or third, it’ over. 

Julia:  Yes.

Kathy:  You know you have to surrender to this new life.

Stacy: Embrace your new life.

Daddy Clay:  You’re not play the Ramones for the kids, what?

Kathy: No

Julia: Yeah

Daddy Clay:  Instead of Baby Einstein.

Kathy: It’s the Wigglies, or what they call the Wiggles.

Julia: But I wouldn’t think the Ramones are hip.  Speaking from one 40 year old to another.

Daddy Clay:  Uh, Troy – she mentioned the Wiggles.  Can we keep on with the interview or do we need to cut??  Okay, I’ve gotten the okay to continue the interview – just, not again.

Kathy: Sorry.

Stacy:  Fruit salad, yummy, yummy…

Daddy Clay:  That’s – that’s really awkward.  But anyway, I want to thank you guys for coming into the studio.  Really appreciate it.  Again, the book is Babyproofing Your Marriage, How to Laugh More Argue Less and Communicate Better as your family grows.  We want to thank Kathy O’Neill, Julia Stone and Stacy Cockrell for coming into the DadLabs today.

Julia: Thank you.

Kathy: Thank you so much.

Stacy: Thank you very much.

Daddy Clay: Thank you ladies.