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Adam Fishman (author of a top business newsletter on Substack with 11K+ subscribers) interviews executives, entrepreneurs, and company leaders in technology companies who are also fathers. They discuss the tough aspects of work, parenting, family, the mistakes made and lessons learned along the way. All episodes at www.startupdadpod.com.
[00:00:00] Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan: Parents, even those who have relatively egalitarian views of what the ideal parental role should be like, they just slip into this across the transition to parenthood, and nobody's happy with it really. Dads aren't happy because they're not as involved as they want to be. They're not building that confidence. And moms are doing too much and they're overburdened. And it becomes a perpetuating cycle where one person is the expert because they've been doing it all.
[00:00:27] Adam Fishman: Welcome to Startup Dad, the podcast where we dive deep into the lives of dads who are also leaders in the world of startups and business. I'm your host, Adam Fishman. The biggest obstacle to a dad becoming more involved isn't laziness or indifference, but the invisible dynamics happening between two parents before the baby even arrives. Today, I'm joined by Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan, professor of psychology at Ohio State University and director of the Children and Parents Lab. Sarah has spent decades studying how families form and evolve, most notably through the New Parents Project, a landmark longitudinal study she launched in 2008 that followed nearly 200 couples from pregnancy all the way through their children's adolescence. She's also married to a statistician and is a mom of one. Today, Sarah and I unpacked the New Parents Project study and talked about a fascinating prenatal exercise involving a faceless doll and what an expecting dad's behavior in that moment can predict about his parenting months later.
[00:01:33] Adam Fishman: Why the gap between moms and dads in intuitive parenting behaviors isn't fixed and why no dad should panic if he feels unprepared or overwhelmed. The concept of maternal gatekeeping and the surprising truth that there are actually two gates, one that closes fathers out and one that opens the door wider. How a mother's own confidence and perfectionism can quietly shape how much space a father gets to grow into his role and what the division of labor at home really looks like after a baby arrives and why so many couples are caught off guard by the shift. If you like what you hear, please subscribe to Startup Dad on YouTube or Spotify so you never miss an episode. You'll find it everywhere you get your podcasts. I hope you enjoy today's conversation with Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan. Welcome Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan to Startup Dad. Sarah, it is my absolute pleasure having you here with me today.
[00:02:30] Adam Fishman: So thanks for joining.
[00:02:31] Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan: Yeah, great to be here.
[00:02:33] Adam Fishman: And of course, a special shout out to Richard Petz who introduced the two of us. I had him on not too long ago. His episode is one that's been doing some numbers on Startup Dad ever since it ran. So no pressure, but a tough act to follow that guy.
[00:02:50] Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan: Well, he has a tough act to follow. Richard's pretty great.
[00:02:53] Adam Fishman: Yeah. Okay. So I want to go to a thing that you've been doing for a while now. In 2008, you started this thing called the New Parents Project. You brought in about 180 couples who were expecting their first baby. They're in their third trimester. So I'm putting myself in their shoes and I'm like, oh boy. And you handed them a faceless doll that weighs about the same that a newborn baby weighs and you asked them to act out meeting their kid for the first time. What did you observe when you did this?
[00:03:25] Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan: Well, first I feel like I have to give some background about where we got this crazy idea from. It was actually a procedure developed by a research group in Switzerland that had studied families with infant children after the babies were born and used this kind of observation procedure with families. And then one of the members of their team developed a prenatal version, this idea, could we start looking at parenting and family dynamics before the child is on the scene? And so when I was starting the New Parents Project, I wanted to try that procedure, and I believe it was the first time it had been used in an American sample. And I was really convinced that the couples wouldn't be able to do it. I was convinced that they would start laughing so hard and that they couldn't take it seriously at all. And I mean, certainly we had a few couples that got the giggles, but for the most part it worked really well.
[00:04:23] Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan: And in the procedure, expectant parents are asked to imagine it's the first time they're meeting their child and they're asked to play in four parts. First, one of them plays with the baby, the doll, and then the other one, and then they play together. And then there's a little basket and they're supposed to put the baby to sleep in the basket and discuss what they've just experienced. And so the whole thing takes only about four or five minutes. But yeah, we got all of the 182 couples in the New Parents Project to do this in their homes in the third trimester, and we video recorded it and then we took a look at their behaviors.
[00:05:00] Adam Fishman: Aside from the laughter, the ensuing laughter, what were your researchers and what were you, the folks who were coding the exercise and keeping track, what were you watching for in those interactions?
[00:05:13] Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan: Sure. So a few things. We were looking for warmth, so warmth and affection between the partners that they were excited to become parents together. We also looked at how cooperative they were. Did they work together to put the baby in the basket or to hand the baby to the other parent and so forth? And the other thing we looked for was structure, which reflected whether or not the four parts of the play were present. Did both parents get a chance to play with the doll or was one parent excluded? Did one parent monopolize the doll and things like that? So we kind of got an overall picture of what we thought was sort of the beginning of the co-parenting relationship between the parents. Yes.
[00:06:03] Adam Fishman: And you noticed many things obviously, many patterns, but one of the things that you found was that expectant dads, so people like me, did a lot less baby talk and a lot less of what you would call instinctive parenting stuff. So was that a surprising finding or were you kind of like, "Oh yeah, men, of course, we get it. Can't do this very well."
[00:06:28] Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan: I don't think it was terribly surprising, but the important thing is that they did do it. And so these are intuitive parenting behaviors. That's another thing we coded from the interactions, which are holding the doll at the appropriate distance you would hold a real baby, using infant-directed speech is the technical term, parentese sometimes, or baby talk, even doing things like touching the doll's body, like you might have baby kind of like picking up a foot or a little arm or things like that you would do. And so yes, there was a statistically significant difference on average between moms and dads. But another thing I'd like to point out is that there were couples in which both mothers and fathers or expectant mothers and fathers in this case showed about the same amount of these behaviors, and there were also couples in which dads showed more than the mom.
[00:07:19] Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan: So sometimes the average difference obscures a lot of individual variation between couples. So it wasn't universally the case that in any given couple, the mom was super intuitive and the dad wasn't. That wasn't necessarily the case.
[00:07:35] Adam Fishman: Yeah. What I found most fascinating about this study was that how an expecting dad, and maybe mom too, but I was paying attention to the dad's side of this, but how they handled the doll in that third trimester was very predictive of, I think what you described as the quality of his parenting nine months later when the baby, or I guess not nine months, but several months later when the baby was real and they were holding it and things like that. After you control, of course, for personality, beliefs, job, all of those things, what should that tell us? Is that something that dad already has or something he's practicing or is it like your ingrained behavior kind of translates in a very real way to how you're going to conduct yourself a few months later?
[00:08:24] Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan: Actually, what we found was that when fathers showed more intuitive parenting behavior in the third trimester of pregnancy, they were more engaged with their three-month-old. So it was about six months later. So they had a couple months of experience with the real baby at that point, that they were more frequently engaged in developmentally appropriate activities like playing with the infant, maybe singing to the infant, things like that. So what I think the intuitive parenting behavior really is reflecting is sort of a preparedness for parenthood, something general. I don't know that it's these specific behaviors translating into specific behaviors after the infant is born, but what I think is probably that dads who show more of that intuitive parenting behavior are more excited, are more motivated, and also are sending signals perhaps to their partner that they are really ready to be actively engaged parents. An interesting feature, and this is something that we'll see in some of my other work in terms of a bit of a tension between mom and dad, is that the father's intuitive parenting primarily predicted his engagement in developmentally appropriate activities after the baby was born when mothers had relatively lower levels of intuitive parenting.
[00:09:43] Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan: And again, we didn't have moms who really acted clueless or anything like that, but when they were just a little bit lower, the dad's intuitive parenting seemed to make a difference. So as we'll see again in some of the other studies, it's good to be confident as parents for both moms and dads, but it also, if you have two highly confident parents or one highly confident and one much less confident parent, that can shape the dynamics of co-parenting after the baby's born.
[00:10:15] Adam Fishman: Yeah, and of course we're going to talk a lot about that and a lot about maternal gatekeeping and things like that. That's been a huge focus of your study and research for many years. I do want to ask for the dads listening to this who are like, "Uh-oh, what if I'm really bad at the faceless doll exercise?" Is that a problem? Can dads get better at this? If they're bad at the third trimester exercise, does it mean that all hope is lost or?
[00:10:43] Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan: Oh, heavens, no. No, no way, no way. In a lot of the research that I do, we find that something is predictive, that's probabilistic, right? It means that if you're more intuitive, then maybe you're more likely to be actively engaged. But there are plenty of dads who were not very intuitive and become actively engaged parents. So it's not diagnostic in that sense that we would say. I was just interested in what does this behavior, parents do this behavior, do differences between parents and that behavior before the baby's born reflect anything? But like I said before, I think it might reflect some underlying motivation, perhaps experience with infants. People differ in how much they might've had experience caring for siblings or in professional care settings or things like that. And so I think that that behavior reflects a lot of things and some dads may be really ready to go and others might have a steeper learning curve, but I think that can be true of moms as well.
[00:11:45] Adam Fishman: Yeah, it's really, really interesting. And I definitely want the dads who are listening to this who might not feel super ready to not think all hope is lost. I'll be okay once this thing comes along.
[00:11:57] Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan: No, no, no. You got plenty of time and opportunity to be involved and to practice learning to be a parent as all parents need to do.
[00:12:06] Adam Fishman: This New Parents Project, this cohort is still producing papers. You're still generating data and insights and research from something that is almost two decades old at this point, which is incredible. It has to be some kind of... I mean, there's probably longer academic studies, but I found that fascinating. It's amazing.
[00:12:26] Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan: Well, I'm glad you find it fascinating. It's the most exciting thing for me as a developmental psychologist. There are not as many studies that follow families or children really in this case from birth to adulthood. I mean, not as many as you would think, and actually not that many in the United States because we don't necessarily keep records of birth cohorts and things like other countries might, for example, in Northern Europe and things like that. The achievement I'm most proud of, I would say. The kids are now 17 and 18. Many of them are going to college this fall. Their parents probably moved them in or are moving them in this week. And one of my recent PhD graduates, Kubra, actually, for her dissertation study, did a follow-up on the families just this last year. So we actually are having more data on the parents and their firstborns, because of course, many families had additional kids after that, but we're still analyzing the data, but we actually were able to get over a hundred of the families to respond and provide information.
[00:13:39] Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan: And we got reports from the kids themselves too, from the adolescents. So we're really excited about that. So thanks for asking about it.
[00:13:48] Adam Fishman: Yeah, that's so cool. It's like the gift that keeps on giving.
[00:13:51] Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan: Yes, definitely.
[00:13:52] Adam Fishman: It'd be really interesting to then come back to those kids when they themselves are parents at some point and see how the generational cycle continues.
[00:14:02] Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan: Of course, it would be fascinating. I don't know. We'll have to see what the future holds.
[00:14:06] Adam Fishman: You might be retired by then. Who knows?
[00:14:08] Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan: Yeah, I might be retired by then. And of course, you will lose sample size and participants over time, but I'm really happy with what we've been able to accomplish.
[00:14:18] Adam Fishman: So I alluded to this concept of maternal gatekeeping, and I want to ask you about this piece that you wrote. So this piece you wrote for the National Council on Family Relations about, I don't know, let's say 15, 16 years ago, and it's called Maternal Gatekeeping: Listening for the Creak. And that sound is the sound of an actual gate creaking.
[00:14:40] Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan: Right.
[00:14:41] Adam Fishman: Yeah. And I think that what's interesting is I think generally a lot of people have heard of the concept of maternal gatekeeping, but your piece is really interesting because the thing that almost everybody misses is that there's actually two gates. There's this idea of closing a gate and opening a gate. Can you walk us through the two different gates or the opening and the closing?
[00:15:07] Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan: Sure. So one of my contributions in this area of the field has been to point out that just as any parent really or anybody who has responsibility for raising a child could close a gate and therefore prevent or thwart others' efforts to be involved. If there is a parent who by virtue of their expertise or their role has more control, they can also open the gate. They can also encourage and invite the involvement of the other parent or other caregivers in their child's life. Gatekeeping, as you mentioned, is often characterized as totally negative, just slamming that shut and standing here and not letting anybody else in. We have found that there is gate opening behavior that mothers can do and other parents as well that encourages the other parent or other caregiver's involvement with and building that capacity to become a highly effective parent.
[00:16:13] Adam Fishman: Yeah. And on that note of the negative one-sided view that a lot of people have, CNN many, many years ago ran a piece on your work and the headline. We love a journalistic sensationalist headline, but the headline was Maternal Gatekeeping: Why Moms Won't Let Dads Help. And I think that that framing then went everywhere, right? That's the kind of thing that gets sent around in all the text message threads and social media and stuff like that, comment sections under every video, et cetera. But I think that that's a relatively narrow view of your work. And so with this sort of dad recording, what I definitely don't want this episode to be, and I don't think you will let it be that, and I certainly won't, is 90 minutes of moms won't let us dads do something, so manosphere. What does that headline get wrong? It's not just about moms not letting dads do something.
[00:17:12] Adam Fishman: Dads are complicit and it's the opposite as you mentioned, right?
[00:17:16] Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan: Right. There's so many things wrong. I mean, we could have a whole episode about helping and whether parenting your child should ever be considered helping. Helping means that someone's in charge and the other person is just an assistant. So right there, that's setting up an unequal co-parenting dynamic for sure. But also gatekeeping, one of the reasons I keep studying it is not because I want to make friends in the manosphere, I don't, but because it's a really fascinating dynamic and it's one in which both, in the case of heterosexual couples, both mothers and fathers contribute to. So fathers, for example, might send subtle signals, even things they're not aware of that might suggest to mothers that they're nervous about parenting or that they're not sure they know what they're doing, all these other things, or that they're maybe more focused on their work, their paid work or something, and mothers may pick up on these signals.
[00:18:13] Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan: And then I think sometimes without even consciously being aware may just do things. For example, mothers may just do some parenting tasks without engaging the father, which contributes to a mental load for mothers and isn't a good thing either. Or they may feel like society is going to judge them especially harshly because they're mothers and so they might redo some things that the father did or feel like if they want it done right, they have to do it themselves. That doesn't mean that there aren't mothers out there who may be maliciously gate closing, but the families that I study, that's not typically what's going on at all. It's really just parents, even those who have relatively egalitarian views of what the ideal parental role should be like, they just slip into this across the transition to parenthood without even really... And nobody's happy with it really.
[00:19:09] Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan: Dads aren't happy because they're not as involved as they want to be. They're not building that confidence that maybe society hasn't given them in terms of their socialization and upbringing. And moms are doing too much and they're overburdened and it becomes a perpetuating cycle where one person is the expert because they've been doing it all. That's why I think it's fascinating. I've often thought about it as moms shooting themselves in the foot.
[00:19:37] Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan: So it's definitely not a story that is captured well by that headline.
[00:19:41] Adam Fishman: Yeah. And of course you mentioned a couple things in there that are super relevant to Startup Dad. One is you talked about mental load, and I had Allison Daminger on the pod maybe six months ago, and one of my most popular episodes ever, we talked all about her book and mental load. And so I'll link to that episode for folks. She was wonderful. She's a little bit earlier in her academic career.
[00:20:04] Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan: Yes, she's great. Yes.
[00:20:06] Adam Fishman: And then the other piece of it, and I'm really glad that you called this out, is the sort of societal pressure that exists that sort of force a lot of moms into what seems like a very rational response to getting blamed for not carrying the load or for something going wrong with the kid or whatever. It's usually not the dad who gets the finger pointed at them. And so you could see how instinctively gate closing behavior would creep into life if mom's constantly getting blamed for anybody's mistake, right? That's a tough place to be.
[00:20:43] Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan: It is a tough place to be. I mean, I hope that that is changing to some degree as dads being very actively and equally involved in parenting from the get-go becomes more normative. Hopefully that will break down and we'll have less of this people feeling like, oh look, it's so sweet. Dad's babysitting the kids or taking them out. So if we can get away from that, this again, the manager-helper dynamic, if you're the manager, you're ultimately going to be held responsible, right? So if moms are the managers, then they have to take on, yeah, you get to make some decisions, but if things go bust, that's on you. So I think that's really the dynamic that we need to break. And I do think it's somewhat rational for mothers to feel like they're going to be judged. I think that that is a real phenomenon.
[00:21:33] Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan: However, in some of my work, this is the psychologist part of me, I guess, people do differ in terms of personality and related characteristics. Some people care more about what other people think about them, how their family looks, how they present themselves. And if you're a person who doesn't care, if you're a mom who doesn't care and you have these egalitarian ideals, you're probably going to be far less likely to gatekeep, I would suspect. But if you care about how you look and how people see you and whether they're judging you and whether they think you're a good parent or not, and you're perfectionistic in that way, as a mom, you're going to be more susceptible to gatekeeping, especially gate closing.
[00:22:11] Adam Fishman: Yeah. And of course, social media doesn't really help us in this regard by any stretch. So we'll come back to that one later. There's another study that we're going to come back to that you have later in the episode, which is titled Co-Parents Behaving Badly, which made me laugh out loud when I came across it. So hold onto that one because we're going to revisit it. But you just started there to talk about some of the things that are predictive of gatekeeping behavior. And I think one of the poor assumptions that folks have are incorrect uninformed assumptions that it's basically just traditional gender roles, retrograde beliefs about who belongs in the kitchen and who brings home the bacon and all that sort of stuff. But you went searching for that and it's not what you found. Instead, you found things like perfectionism and psychological distress.
[00:23:04] Adam Fishman: So can you describe a little bit what the details of what you found are that sort of weren't necessarily the traditional gender roles driving this behavior?
[00:23:15] Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan: So I want to say that I don't think that traditional gender roles have nothing to do with it, but what I would say is that they are not as strong of a predictor in our work as I might have expected or as others might have expected. And in some ways I think that makes sense because we see these gatekeeping patterns. We see unequal division of childcare in couples who have very progressive egalitarian beliefs. First of all, that's one piece of evidence. And instead of traditional gender role beliefs or attitudes, what we found in our research are personality factors like psychological distress and high levels of parenting perfectionism. Maybe people didn't realize that there are many different types of perfectionism and you can actually be perfectionistic about being a parent. And it makes sense because it's something people value very highly. And so we found that mothers who had higher parenting perfectionism were more likely to gate close.
[00:24:15] Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan: We also found that this is kind of interesting, that mothers with high parenting self-efficacy, and what that means is high confidence in your own parenting. You think, I know what I'm doing, I've got the expertise. Mothers who are highly confident actually had a greater tendency to gate close, which again, I think makes sense if you think you're the expert on anything and someone else has less expertise, in this case maybe your partner, then maybe you're going to be more controlling. You're going to control that a little more. And I think the most interesting, at least to me the predictor we uncovered of gatekeeping, in particular gate closing, was when mothers had less confidence about the future of their relationship with the child's father, they were more likely to gate close. You can interpret this in many different ways, but I think it could be that mothers invest heavily in parenting and during the pregnancy period, I mean from a psychobiological perspective, mothers have already made a huge investment.
[00:25:16] Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan: And so perhaps if they have this sense, a feeling that this relationship may not make it, they may be protecting their investment in the child or maybe thinking in the future, I don't want to lose or give up any of my time and my bond with this child. Again, this may not be conscious. I'm not saying it's conscious, but you can actually even think about evolutionary psych there and how that might make some sense given the burden that mothers bear during pregnancy and childbirth.
[00:25:44] Adam Fishman: Yeah, I was thinking about the sort of cave people instinct there, the protection. I got to protect my thing here because I may end up being on my own with this baby or something.
[00:25:58] Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan: Yes, the future is uncertain.
[00:26:00] Adam Fishman: And it's less that your husband's going to be eaten by a saber-toothed tiger and more that it just may not work out or something like that. Right.
[00:26:06] Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan: Exactly. Yes.
[00:26:08] Adam Fishman: So what's interesting is the other thing that you said there, which is that mothers who had higher confidence or self-efficacy in their own parenting tend to close the gate more. Did you find anything sort of underlying that that sort of drove that kind of response from mom?
[00:26:27] Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan: I don't think we did find anything, but I will say that on the father's part, when fathers had low confidence in their parenting, mothers were also more likely to close the gate. While we didn't quite analyze the data in this way for other reasons, it seems like a combination of a highly confident mom and a less confident dad is probably more likely to set the stage for a gate closing dynamic. And again, because it reinforces itself.
[00:26:53] Adam Fishman: Yeah, this does become a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy. And I talked about this with Allison, I talked about this with Darby Saxby, with postpartum brain development and dads and things like that too. It's very, very interesting. So last year, one of your students, the name escapes me, but you probably will remember, ran this sort of meta-analysis. I think it was one of your grad students.
[00:27:15] Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan: Yes, this is Kubra. Yes.
[00:27:18] Adam Fishman: Yeah. And so she did 18 studies with 8,000-plus people. What was she looking for? I think you ended up, did you co-author this or sort of worked on this with her? Yeah. So what did you find from the meta-analysis study?
[00:27:36] Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan: So the goal of what she was trying to do was in our own research with our own sample from the New Parents Project, we had found that traditional gender role attitudes weren't a major predictor of gatekeeping, but there were plenty of other studies out there that had found an association between those variables. And so what she was trying to do with this meta-analysis technique is kind of do a study of all these studies, summarize across all of them statistically and figure out is there an association between traditional gender role attitudes and maternal gatekeeping and how big is that association is basically the point of a meta-analysis. And so what she found is that there was an association for gate closing, not a really big association there, which is consistent with our research too, meaning there's plenty of factors that can influence gatekeeping and not just traditional gender role attitudes or gate closing in that case.
[00:28:30] Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan: For gate opening though, there was no association between traditional gender role attitudes and gate opening. And so again, it's a part of the story, at least with gate closing, but it's certainly only a small piece of the story. And the conclusion is we can't assume that traditional couples are having gatekeeping dynamics and more egalitarian couples aren't. That's not what seems to be going on.
[00:28:54] Adam Fishman: Yeah. When you published this study, did it get any pushback? Did people who had previously found something challenge your assertions or anything like that?
[00:29:04] Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan: No, not really. It's been only pretty recently published. So a lot of the ways that academics might come back, maybe somebody is working right now on a different analysis of some of the same data and they're going to come out and say, "No, actually this is a more important factor." One of the limitations of the research is that so much of it has been conducted in the US or Europe or Israel. Kubra, my student herself is from Turkey, and so she has a lot of interest in cross-cultural research and research in context in which traditional gender roles are stronger, have a stronger influence on the society. And so I think that we certainly can't conclude that they don't matter at all, and they might matter a great deal in populations that researchers just haven't really studied well yet.
[00:29:55] Adam Fishman: Yeah, that is fascinating. I'll have to dig into more of the sort of international experience. I find that I'm very US centric, as you might imagine, just look at me.
[00:30:06] Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan: I mean, me too. I haven't collected data myself, at least outside. I have some international collaborators, but it is tricky.
[00:30:14] Adam Fishman: Good excuse to do a visiting professorship somewhere exotic, I think.
[00:30:17] Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan: Oh yes, always.
[00:30:20] Adam Fishman: There's another finding or set of findings in your research that I found really interesting, which was your work on mothers' perceptions of their own mothers' gatekeeping. So grandma's gatekeeping basically. Is this behavior something that gets handed down across generations? Is this learned behavior in some way or observed behavior?
[00:30:41] Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan: Yeah, that's really interesting. There's very little research on honestly grandparent, parent, the intergenerational transmission of co-parenting dynamics. I would consider gatekeeping a co-parenting dynamic. And so this was actually a former student of mine, her master's thesis, her name's Jingi Wong, and she's an assistant professor at the Hong Kong Institute for Science and Technology now in Hong Kong. And she, coming from a culture where it's very common for grandmothers to be involved in caring for grandchildren, was interested in this issue. And so we had actually asked some questions in the New Parents Project about grandparent gatekeeping. She used those data in the study and then published it. And what we found was that there wasn't a direct connection necessarily between the grandmother's gatekeeping and new mom's gatekeeping, which I guess is a good thing. So I would say like many aspects of parenting or things that can get transmitted across generations, you probably have a mix in there of some mothers who are modeling their own mothers and other mothers who are striving to do the exact opposite.
[00:31:56] Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan: That's what we find a lot. I mean, other researchers have found that with dads too, does their own dad's involvement predict the next generation's involvement as a dad? And it can go both ways. Some fathers model their fathers and other fathers for various reasons do not at all. So I think that's probably why we didn't see a straightforward association between grandmother gatekeeping and mother gatekeeping.
[00:32:20] Adam Fishman: Okay. Well, now since you mentioned dads, let's talk a little bit more about dads and dads' responsibilities in gatekeeping. I would say the title of this section is dads are half of the gate. And so you mentioned earlier that a father's confidence, a general confidence in child rearing and comfort is an input into their partner's behavior and that you found that fathers with lower confidence in their own parenting do elicit some more gate closing behavior. So it's not something that just happens to dad. Dad can tug on the gate a little bit. The other piece of this that I wanted to ask you about is another student of yours has a paper that found that dads who believe themselves that moms are just inherently better caregivers ended up with lower caregiving confidence after the baby came and therefore they were sort of less leaned in.
[00:33:17] Adam Fishman: Does that mean that the belief itself is kind of contributing to the deficit that it's describing? Is this a self-fulfilling prophecy for some dads?
[00:33:27] Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan: I think that yes, this belief, this maternal essentialism, this idea that mothers have a natural advantage over fathers in parenting, to me, this is a more interesting type of belief to study than general gender role attitudes because you survey people like Americans today. I know we have this rise in the sort of trad wife culture and things like that, but still generally you survey people like should parents share parenting equally? Over time, people have come to believe this, to believe that fathers are important to children's development, to believe. But if you really drill down, people really still believe in these essential differences between men and women. Many people do. And that especially with parenting, with mothers going through pregnancy and childbirth, that they just naturally have an itch. This is a very, I think, strong and deeply rooted belief that people have. And yes, so when fathers believe this, they are essentially saying that they have a steep learning curve ahead of them and it might lead them to not take that on.
[00:34:37] Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan: They might feel like it's too much, I can't learn it. So then they're not engaging with their infants. They're not spending time one-on-one with them, so they build confidence and therefore they end up less confident. So yes, I think that's exactly what happens. And then you can think about maybe gatekeeping enters in there, but I don't even think that has to be part of it at all. In this case, it's like the dad's doing it to himself because of this belief that no matter what he does, pretty much he's not going to be as good as the mom. The kids are going to prefer the mom, the kids are... And so I think that that belief, it's more specific than just the general attitudes about gender roles, which I think have become more progressive over time. But I think that that specific belief is very ingrained in some populations and it's a sticky one and it definitely is a risk for lower father involvement and lower engagement.
[00:35:34] Adam Fishman: So if a dad's listening to this and he is like, "Ooh, I'm worried that that's going to be me just given how I am today and I don't have a kid yet, but I'm a little uncomfortable around babies and I don't know how to change a diaper." What should dad do or what can dad do before the baby comes that'll help him change his odds of his involvement post-baby?
[00:35:58] Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan: Yeah, absolutely. I think that what a dad can do is try to network with new dads or other expectant or new dads. There are various programs in various places in the US that can provide that kind of companionship where dads are with other dads. In some of these groups, new dads might bring their babies, so it can be kind of a safe environment for a nervous dad or nervous expectant dad to start to feel more comfortable. That's a great thing. I think that listening to a podcast like yours where there's research-based information like Darby Saxby's work that suggests that dads' brains change too and their interactions with kids, that dads are also biologically set up to be able to be nurturing. It doesn't mean they're absolutely identical to moms, but they don't experience an absence, a total absence of preparation for parenting compared to moms.
[00:36:56] Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan: And so I think hearing that for expectant fathers who are a bit nervous or have a less confident feeling going into parenthood, I think that could be really helpful.
[00:37:07] Adam Fishman: Yeah. And you also have a paper on traditional masculinity and new fathers' observed parenting. And of course, I talked to Richard Petz about this a little bit because he studied this and he found that the more dad subscribes to the masculine code, the less involved he is and the harsher he gets. And there are some nuances to that too that he and I talked about on that episode. But what did you find when you studied this? Because I think his was more survey based and yours was more observed research, like first party observation. So what did you find?
[00:37:45] Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan: Yeah, so we studied masculinity in a somewhat different way. So what we did is we actually asked the expectant fathers in our study to rate themselves on different adjectives associated with masculinity. So things like courageous, adventurous, dominant, aggressive, let's see, stands up for self, things like that. And what we found is that among the fathers in our study, those that rated themselves higher on those stereotypically masculine, but generally positive, generally positively perceived in our society characteristics were actually observed to be more engaged with their infants when we video recorded them with their babies at nine months postpartum. I should say we also measured another aspect of fathers' attitudes, nurturing parental role beliefs. So when fathers believed that fathers are very important to children's emotional development, that how they treat their kids has lifelong effects and that they should be engaged in not just playing, but also some of the nurturing behaviors of parenting, those dads were also more engaged and sensitive with their infants.
[00:38:59] Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan: So what I take away from it is yes, there are some aspects of traditional masculinity that are negative and that probably do exactly what Richard's research suggests they do, which is not good things in terms of being a nurturing parent who's going to contribute positively to the healthy development of children. However, I do think that there are attributes that we do associate with masculinity that are more positive and that may reflect a degree of mental health among fathers. I would say that it helps them to be engaged in confident parents. We talked a lot about confidence. Well, if you consider yourself to stand up under pressure, to be dominant, to be courageous, I mean, especially some of these words are very positively valenced. And so if you see yourself like that, maybe you're a courageous dad. Maybe you're courageous in breaking down norms and getting in there and engaging with your kid and sharing parenting responsibilities.
[00:40:00] Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan: So I think that the conversation around masculinity, we probably don't have enough days or hours to ever go into that, but I think that it would be too simplistic to assume that all aspects of masculinity are bad. And I think people have come around to that. But as we talked about, whenever these conversations, I don't remember when I first heard the term toxic masculinity, but things just get way out of hand and the nuance gets entirely lost. So we were measuring some more positive aspects of a masculine identity. And when dads felt better about themselves in that regard, they engaged with their children in a positive way.
[00:40:41] Adam Fishman: And of course, like I mentioned earlier, social media doesn't exactly appreciate nuance, so it's not doing us any favors here on the discourse.
[00:40:51] Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan: Definitely not.
[00:40:52] Adam Fishman: Speaking of which, I do want to talk about, there's some interesting numbers that I've seen lately. There's been graphs flowing around on Twitter or whatever the heck we're calling it these days about hours of involvement for men and women. And you and Claire Camp Dush and Jill Uvarsky did a time diary study with couples, and you had them basically record once on a workday and once on a day off before the baby and again after the baby, how they were spending their time. What happened to that split? What was the high level of what you observed there?
[00:41:29] Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan: So we did a couple different analyses of these data in a couple different papers. The biggest one, I think what we found is that these couples that we studied, their division of paid and unpaid work before the baby was born was relatively equal. A lot of prior studies had found differences in say housework time, and we didn't find that before the baby, but after the baby, the differences emerged and mothers were doing a lot more unpaid work, housework actually, and childcare than fathers were, even though mothers did not reduce their paid work hours. So they had more childcare and housework and just as much paid work. So we found a big gender disparity there that appeared after the transition to parenthood. And that paper is one of my most highly cited papers. And I think that's why, is because we found this really dramatic change, this really dramatic effect that many people kind of felt was true, but didn't necessarily have the numbers to back it up.
[00:42:32] Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan: The other thing that was really cool about that paper is that we compared these time diary estimates where people basically wrote down everything they did in a 24-hour period and they didn't know what we were looking at. We said we were just interested. We asked them about everything, whether they were cooking, whether they were driving, whether they were sleeping or anything. And we compared the estimates of their paid and unpaid work time from those diaries with survey measures that ask more globally, how many hours per week do you spend on this type of task or this type of task or that type of task? And what we found is that people are terrible, or at least the couples in our study were terrible about estimating how much time that they spend on various activities. And in particular, both mothers and fathers way overestimated how much time they spent even after the baby was born on housework and childcare.
[00:43:26] Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan: Men did overestimate more than women did, but both, everybody overestimated because I think it feels so overwhelming. It feels like your life is entirely shifted and changed. And so that kind of affects people's perceptions. Even interestingly, mothers reported that they were working less, doing less paid work than before. That actually wasn't true. That was so interesting. And so these perceptions also fell along sort of gendered lines in that way. And so another takeaway is be careful of global survey estimates when you ask people how they're spending their time because they are bad at estimating it. And most of the previous literature on division of housework and childcare has relied on some of these survey measures. So they're not great at if you want accurate estimates.
[00:44:17] Adam Fishman: I find that this even applies in my own life. I am terrible at estimating certain domestic tasks, for example. I think like, oh, I got to empty the dishwasher again and it's going to take me an hour. And then I actually am like, no, it's a five-minute task. What are you doing at? I'm like, "This is fine." So I think you also found some interesting differences between weekday and weekend or workday and non-workday stuff. So what did you observe there?
[00:44:46] Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan: Right. Well, we observed that the differences in how men and women or mothers and fathers were spending their time were bigger on non-work days. Or for our sample, this was primarily weekend days than they were during workdays. And I think at first blush, that might seem surprising because workdays are so busy and so packed and everything like that, but I think that's exactly why. I think people just have fewer options, less wiggle room on their workdays. Work has to get done, kid has to be taken care of, kid goes to bed, we go to bed. There's less wiggle room. And on the non-workday or weekends, I think people's choices and how to spend their time enter into it more.
[00:45:34] Adam Fishman: Yeah, that's really interesting. And then they kind of reverted to a little bit more traditional behaviors on the weekend. This isn't necessarily like dad going off and playing six hours of golf, but mom definitely did more household labor and child-oriented labor than dads on the weekend where it was more maybe egalitarian during the week, I guess, because it's all hands on deck on the weekdays.
[00:45:57] Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan: I think that's it, yes. And I also think that, so in one of our other analyses where we looked at in the study, so the time diaries were completed, we asked participants to complete them on their most recent workday and most recent non-work day. So these could have been the same days for both members of the couple or they could have been different days. So in one paper, we actually reduced the sample to just couples who reported on the exact same days. So we could basically, in a much more sophisticated data analysis framework, but basically line up their diaries and say, "Okay, this dad's doing this while mom says she's doing this and this kind of thing." And when we did that, we found a gap, especially on the non-work days in terms of leisure, where when mom was doing leisure, dad was also doing leisure maybe together, but when dad was leisuring, mom was often doing housework and childcare.
[00:46:51] Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan: She ended up getting a leisure deficit. And again, I don't see that necessarily. I mean, maybe in some cases as dad taking off to go do what he wants to do, but maybe that mom is just choosing to do more things with the kids on the weekend or moms just might feel like they can't just take time for themselves. I mean, they might feel like now it's the weekend, so what it is time now is time to really engage with the kids because especially in couples or both partners are working for pay, you feel like you don't have enough time. And so moms are the ones who are probably leaving the least amount of time for themselves to just be or do what they want to do.
[00:47:34] Adam Fishman: Yeah. I want to come back to sensational headlines. So the Washington Post got a hold of this study of yours and then they sort of paraphrased it and published an article about it under the headline Study: Men Are Lazy to Their Core, which of course, you did a very careful longitudinal time diary study of first time parents. And if you read it, that is not the conclusion and not the headline that you would come away with. And then the New York Times ran something that was a bit more balanced, go figure, which is Men Do More at Home, but Not as Much as They Think They Do, which I think is more appropriate. That one seems more closer to what your study actually found than the WaPo clickbait basically.
[00:48:21] Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan: Yes, absolutely. And in the study, we did find this difference between mothers and fathers in terms of their housework and childcare time after the child was born, but it wasn't like it was the same size difference you would've found in 1950 or something. And the American Time Survey, which is a national survey that uses this time diary method, I mean, they have found these disparities as well. They're typically looking at households with any child under age 18 or something like that, but they have showed over time that the disparities between mothers and fathers are shrinking. So I think that those headlines are just, especially the WaPo one was just clickbait, and that is not what we're saying at all. I would never say that.
[00:49:08] Adam Fishman: Right. That's nowhere to be found in the research.
[00:49:11] Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan: No, it's just people falling into these, I would argue, some traps and some roles that they might not really want to be living.
[00:49:21] Adam Fishman: Yeah. On a sort of personal and professional overlap note, you teach academics, probably a younger generation of academics, how to write for a non-academic audience. And I find that people learning to do that has made me so much more likely to consume academic literature. I think it's amazing. When you see headlines like that from the Washington Post, is that a frustrating thing or are you kind of like, "Oh, I'm used to it. That happens all the time now?"
[00:49:48] Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan: When I first started out and was first in the media, it did bother me a lot. And I would say that I got some great advice from a colleague. We have had a great tradition at Ohio State of science writing. So we've had a wonderful group of journalists who write about the work of the faculty at OSU and students at OSU. And that's part of the reason why I think my work has gotten a lot of attention is that we have these great science writers, and one of them, Jeff Grabmeyer, who recently retired, he sort of mentored me in a way in this, "Don't read any of the comments." And yes, no matter what we write, he was always so great because when we would write a press release, he would write it and then I would give my feedback. And we were very careful to always have basically the correlation is not causation statement, the statement about how this sample doesn't represent the population of parents because it's very hard in the kind of work I do to have representative samples.
[00:50:50] Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan: We would take such great care and it would all go out the window. But I think what I learned to do is at least I really try when I'm talking or I'm on a podcast or I'm talking to a journalist, I try to make all of these points, but at some point it's out of my hands. And the alternative seems to be just not telling anybody about the research, but then people aren't going to know and things won't change. So it's just a balance, I think. But I have learned to let go a bit, especially certain publications and so forth. It's just no matter what you do, they're just going to make something clickbait. I've mostly gotten over it.
[00:51:29] Adam Fishman: Yeah. I want to get to co-parents behaving badly, and I'm going to get there in one second. But before that, you wrote some things with Richard Petz about parental leave, and obviously he's written a ton about that. It's one of his primary fields of studies. But I wanted to bring it back to, so the audience of this show is a lot of people who are starting companies and they're founders and they are often men and sometimes a little unaware of the world of parenting, and yet they will be aware of it at some point when they become parents themselves. So if you're talking to someone who is thinking about parental leave policies, which many of these founders are, they're writing the policy or they're maybe now asking ChatGPT to write it for them, what would you advise? What are a couple of pieces of advice that you would give somebody who's writing a policy for the first time based on what you've seen in your research for co-parenting relationships?
[00:52:31] Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan: I would say that, and obviously every family's different and not every family is going to have a dad and a mom who are the primary parents. But if we assume that, I would make the pitch that for fathers, leave is just as important as it is for mothers. It provides them time to learn how to parent, to be effective in that role and to feel confident as a parent to also support their partner and vice versa to develop a good co-parenting relationship. I mean, Richard's research and there's lots of research out there suggesting that leave has benefits for fathers as well as for mothers. So I think that, first of all, get rid of the assumption that it's all about mothers and that dads don't really need more than a couple days or a week. That's not humane. And you got to try to play the long game too, right?
[00:53:24] Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan: If you want to keep top employees, you're going to need to provide them with the tools they need to be able to balance work and family life as well. So I think that that is a win, even though I understand that in the short term it might seem really expensive, I would guess. The other thing I would say in terms of crafting policies, I mean, a lot of this research actually comes out of Sweden because they're a country that explicitly values gender equality and they have done a lot of tweaking of their paid parental leave policy over the years in order to try to get dads to take more of it. So one cool thing they do is there's a certain amount that's a dad allocation, and basically if dad doesn't take the leave, you lose it. So there's some things you can do to not just provide the leave, but really kind of shape it in such a way that you're going to get more dads to take it.
[00:54:18] Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan: So I guess I'd say there's two things. First of all, it's offering it, but it's also getting dads to take it. A lot of that too is the culture, the workplace culture, having people, maybe longer term employees or more senior folks model taking paternal leave. I think if dads see other successful men taking paternal leave, they will be more likely to take it because I think a big reason that dads might not take it if it is available is that they think it's going to harm their career prospects or it's going to make them look like they're not invested in their careers. Just as many women have had good reason to worry that becoming mothers or taking time off to care for children makes them look less dedicated and less invested. It is a real concern for people. So I think it has to be modeled and normalized in the workplace.
[00:55:06] Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan: Also, some of our research found that it definitely has to be paid. I mean, the idea that people are going to take unpaid leave, especially fathers, it's very unlikely to happen. And so it needs to be paid. It needs to be fairly generous, more than just a token amount of leave. And I think it needs to be normalized, taking the leave within the workplace is what I would say.
[00:55:28] Adam Fishman: Fantastic advice. Founders, pay attention. Okay. Co-parents behaving badly. I've been waiting all episode to get to this.
[00:55:37] Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan: Well, then you're going to love this. I got a story about it.
[00:55:40] Adam Fishman: So the emotional center of this idea is jealousy, but it's not jealousy of another adult. Tell me about co-parents behaving badly and what kind of jealousy did you see emerge here?
[00:55:57] Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan: So it's called jealousy of the partner-infant relationship. So it's really jealousy that centers on feeling left out because your partner is close to the baby or is spending all their time and energy and affection on the baby, and that you feel like both perhaps that you're not getting the love and affection you want as a romantic partner, but also that perhaps that you are feeling excluded from that parent-child bond, that perhaps you don't have as close of a bond with your child as you would like to have. And so it's an interesting type of jealousy. I think people don't consider that this is a thing because it sounds so terrible, right? How could you possibly be jealous of an infant? This makes you sound like a terrible person, but you're not a terrible person. These are just normal human emotions. It's a big change as we've already established, and you are developing a new relationship with your child, your partner's developing a new relationship with your child, your relationship together is changing.
[00:57:05] Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan: So it's a very tumultuous period. I wanted to study this type of jealousy because to me it makes a lot of sense. It's something that I think if you're aware of it and how you're feeling and you can sort of accept the feeling, then you can work on why and to try to avoid any negative consequences. And hopefully it's transient and you won't feel like that forever. In our study, yes, Co-Parents Behaving Badly. That was the title of a poster we presented at a scientific meeting. The article has come out. It's published now in the Journal of Family Psychology, but the reviewers suggested we change the title because it was a little too provocative and behaving badly sounded too harsh.
[00:57:44] Adam Fishman: Too Washington Post, not enough academic.
[00:57:47] Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan: Academics, some academics, I don't know how they do it, but they're great at crafting wonderful article titles, even for scientific papers, and somehow they get them published. So I've always wanted to be one of those people. So this was one of my attempts that—
[00:57:58] Adam Fishman: I love the title.
[00:57:59] Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan: Yeah. Yeah. I know. Well, yes, I was trying to have a bit of fun, but in the end you want the paper to be published, so you're like, "Okay, fair point. We'll change it. We'll be serious and scientific." So in that particular paper, we were interested whether this type of jealousy might prompt greater gatekeeping behavior by mothers. And so we looked at jealousy of the partner-infant relationship at the third month postpartum, and then we measured gatekeeping, gate opening and gate closing, both via survey and observation at three months and nine months postpartum. And indeed, we found that when mothers experienced more jealousy of the partner-infant relationship, they were observed to close the gate more over time.
[00:58:47] Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan: In this case, we actually controlled for earlier levels. So that's basically the best thing you can do in a non-experimental study to try to look at cause and effect. It's not perfect. There are other things that could enter in there, but we did find for more jealous mothers that there was an increase in gate closing. So our explanation was, well, maybe mothers who feel jealous feel like the dad isn't giving her much attention and it seems really close to the baby and is really into the baby, then maybe they're trying to claw back some maternal control over the child in that sense, because perhaps they feel like, "Oh, I'm not a good mother or I'm not..." Again, it doesn't have to be that they're doing it on purpose, but they might feel uncomfortable with their relationship with their partner and their partner's relationship with the child.
[00:59:37] Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan: And also we found that when fathers expressed more of this jealousy that they perceived greater gate closing. So that's interesting too. So they perceived that the mother had this really close bond with the child and they felt more excluded or left out, then they perceived more gate closing, which I think is really interesting. So they might interpret, some dads might interpret gate closing in the context of this really close mother-child relationship or that the mom is spending a lot of her time and energy and affection on the infant. I think it's a pretty interesting study and one of the few that combines both survey reports by parents, which are obviously critical because parents' perceptions of their relationships and their interactions are important, but also observations and found somewhat of a similar pattern across both. So I think that strengthens my sense that this jealousy could be a contributing factor to gatekeeping dynamics.
[01:00:34] Adam Fishman: Yeah. And of course, one of the things that you found, and I can't remember if it was in this study or just other research that you've done, is that there is a nuance to the kind of type of involvement of the dad. So when dads did more play type things, the relationship got warmer a year later. It was actually a good thing. But when dad just did more of this sort of caregiving, like diapers and teeth brushing and wiping butts and things like that, the relationship kind of got worse a year later. So of course, this is a deeply inconvenient result probably for most of the moms listening to this too. It's—
[01:01:12] Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan: Deeply inconvenient.
[01:01:13] Adam Fishman: Yes. Yes. So what's happening here? What was underlying that? That's really interesting to me.
[01:01:18] Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan: Yeah, that actually is an older study and it wasn't based on the New Parents Project sample. It was based on a previous sample of parents with preschool-aged children. That's kind of what got me fueled on studying gatekeeping because I thought that, again, for some moms, not all, that dads being involved might lead to some conflict. And in some ways, if you want to avoid conflict, having one parent do everything and the other parent not do much or just focus on paid work, it could reduce conflict. So conflict also isn't always bad. I think we tend to think that conflict means that this is terrible. These weren't especially high levels of conflict. And what I would've expected, in that study, we only followed the couples over one year's time. That was the first study I did when I came to OSU. So I had a little bit of funding, but not that much.
[01:02:09] Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan: I think if we had followed over time that probably for at least some of those couples, the conflict would've declined again. It might be a result of fathers increasing their involvement and then it's like, whoa, okay, we got to figure this out. But that's natural. Some conflict is going to be unavoidable when you have people working together. I think it sounds bad, but I don't think that's necessarily the case. And another analysis of data from that study, we found an effect where it also depended to some extent on the beliefs of the parents in terms of parent roles, how egalitarian their beliefs were. And so if they had more traditional beliefs and the dad was doing more childcare, that was bad, but it wasn't necessarily bad if what the parents were doing in terms of their involvement was consistent with their beliefs. So I think that's another factor as well, but it's just hard in some of these studies.
[01:03:03] Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan: You can't absolutely account for every factor in every paper. And also I should say that that sample I think had more, for a variety of reasons, their overall roles and beliefs were more traditional than say the New Parents Project sample. In the New Parents Project, we excluded couples in which one parent was expecting to be a stay-at-home parent. I mean, we focused on dual earner couples where both partners expected to return to paid work after the birth of their child. And that older study had a portion of families in which there was a stay-at-home parent. And I think those were all stay-at-home moms. So I think also that might explain that finding. Well, I do think it's important. I don't want to discount it because I do think it's important in that it spurred a lot of my research on gatekeeping, which I think is a dynamic that might've been at play there.
[01:03:55] Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan: And also I think suggests that we have to take conflict. Again, conflict is nuanced, conflict isn't all bad. Sometimes conflict is a temporary state until you figure things out. So I think that those are the takeaways for me anyway.
[01:04:11] Adam Fishman: Yeah, fascinating. All right, we're bringing this home here. I want to talk about everybody's favorite topic, which is social media and specifically Facebook. So about 10 years ago, 2016, you published a study on new mothers and Facebook. 98% of the moms in your sample had posted pictures of their baby on Facebook. The typical mom did it within a week of giving birth, which not surprising to me in today's era. And 80% of them had made their kid their profile picture, which a little weird, but hey, 80% of people, that's a lot. What was it that you were testing there in this study?
[01:04:52] Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan: I have to give a shout out to a former student of mine, Mitchell Bartholomew. When we launched the New Parents Project, I was not on Facebook yet at all. I was not very interested in social media. I had never done anything with MySpace or anything like that. But one of my grad students, Mitch, was like, "We really need to study this social media stuff. We need to ask them about this. This is a phenomenon. This is happening." We worked together to create a survey where we asked questions about Facebook use tailored to new parenthood. So I think we kind of captured it at almost a golden moment where it was really taking off. Funny thing is that we actually asked about MySpace on the survey too, but nobody was using MySpace. It was like everybody had shifted. So we never even analyzed the data because nobody was using it.
[01:05:42] Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan: Everybody had shifted to Facebook, and this was still before a lot of concerns were raised about whether it's right to post pictures of your kids and whether they should get a say in it as they get older. All those kinds of concerns that have led, I think, some people to not post any picture of their kids now or to severely limit or to even give up social media altogether. So we captured this golden moment when Facebook was the thing and the thing to do was to put all the details of your life online for many people. And so yes, in our sample, we had people posting pictures very soon. It seemed like mothers were the ones primarily taking responsibility for that, which is interesting. Maybe perhaps another mental load is your child's social media presence or lack thereof. And the profile picture, I don't remember how we came up with it, but I had noticed it.
[01:06:36] Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan: And as a psychologist, I was like, well, that's really interesting. Your profile picture in theory should be you. It should be your picture of your face. I would think that's what we would expect. But if you make something your profile picture, that means it must be so important to you that it is in front of you. It's in front of yourself. In lieu of posting a picture of yourself, you're posting a picture of, I don't know, your pet or in this case, your baby. This is really important. And so yeah, we thought that mothers would do that more frequently and they did. And we also found that mothers with certain characteristics, like mothers for whom motherhood was very central to their identities, they were more likely to have report having put their child as their profile picture. So thanks for bringing that up. That's one of my favorites because I felt like it was a moment of insight to go, oh, what does that mean when someone does that?
[01:07:26] Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan: What are they saying about themselves and about their role? And so we had a few cool papers about Facebook use, but those data are definitely outdated by this point, but it was so interesting and fun.
[01:07:40] Adam Fishman: Yeah. Well, I mean, it's interesting. Some stuff is probably outdated for sure, but there's the rise of other types of social media now. And I think one thing that's really interesting, if I think about say the Instagram and TikTok generation, which is the modern mom now, that there's something there that you published in your study that said that one of the easiest ways for a woman in the country to get validation is still through being a mom, because a lot of the other roles that she takes on aren't valued as much. Now that is changing, but not that fast. And the other thing you pointed out in your study is these weren't stay-at-home moms. These were all types of people. They all had jobs that they could have pointed to instead of the picture baby. Many of them had—
[01:08:26] Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan: Years of education. I mean, even beyond bachelor's degrees, yes.
[01:08:30] Adam Fishman: Yes. And so I find that to be really fascinating. So maybe not as much has actually changed in the last 10 years as we think.
[01:08:38] Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan: I think that's probably true. I just think the social media landscape in some ways looks different. I remember the biggest issue we had when we were trying to publish some of those early papers was after Facebook changed from just a like, just a thumbs up to the different reactions, a set of different reactions. We're like, oh my gosh, is our research now outdated? It turned out no. We concluded in the end that it hadn't really changed anything that much. But when things are changing so fast, it is hard to know what is really going to change in such a way that it really fundamentally alters how things work versus something that's a more superficial change.
[01:09:17] Adam Fishman: Yeah. And of course now with social media, which you didn't have 10 years ago, you have both mom and dad influencers on Instagram and TikTok and things like that, which we could do an entire podcast on that one. So I'll punt on that. The last thing around technology is I always do this section that I call AI corner, and I tried to think about how might I work that into this conversation? And so one of the things that you talked about is this idea that conflicting parenting advice is a thing that really wears parents down. And I mean, I feel that very, very acutely in my life. So I wanted to ask your take on this, which is now that we have AI, which is this magical genie of a tool that always answers and never gets tired and always gives us very confident answers, a lot of parents are turning to AI to ask for parenting advice.
[01:10:13] Adam Fishman: Does that feed into this wearing down? Because you may get conflicting things from AI tools. Does it make it better or worse for parents that this thing exists now that you can get twenty four seven answers to your questions?
[01:10:28] Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan: Wow.
[01:10:29] Adam Fishman: That's a deep topic. I know.
[01:10:30] Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan: That is a deep topic. I'm not a huge adopter of AI at this point. I'm pretty skeptical about it, but I'm also really skeptical about parenting advice, which sounds like a weird thing for a parenting researcher, but I don't know that the availability of information even before AI on the internet has necessarily been a net positive, at least all the time. I certainly think knowledge about developmental milestones, about what typically happens in development, I think, and AI can probably, I'm assuming, produce that pretty easily like, oh, when should I expect my child to start walking or something like that, factual stuff. And that's important for people to know because certainly people don't always know those things and that's important because it's important to know what to expect, but that's not really what people want. What people want is someone to tell them what to do and what's going to help and what's not going to harm their kid.
[01:11:28] Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan: And I think that's just much, much more difficult because I think good parenting is incredibly nuanced, incredibly specific and tailored to the particular child that you're dealing with. And so I think that it's going to be really hard, I think, for AI to provide that kind of parenting advice. And I would just be really skeptical. I think there are some general principles of parenting that are important, but what people always want are the specific answers. And anyone who's providing you with confidence, such specific answers that doesn't know your child, doesn't know you and your whole history and your family and your beliefs and your values and all these things about you, it couldn't possibly provide the right advice. And also all this advice is incredibly anxiety inducing. It really is. And I don't think we need to make parents any more anxious than they already are.
[01:12:28] Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan: I mean, everyone's anxious. The kids are anxious, the parents are anxious. So I guess my overwhelming reaction is just sort of skepticism. I'm very skeptical, even in my own personal life with friends who have kids and they'll say, "Oh, I heard this." I'm always like, "Be skeptical. Okay, it's a piece of information, but then you have to..." A lot of times in parenting, I really do think you have to go with your gut. That sounds like a terrible thing for a scientist to say. I'm not saying it shouldn't be informed by evidence. It should be informed by evidence, but you also do have to kind of know your child. And the only way you can do that is by engaging with them and being present with them and learning about who they are as you're learning more about yourself in the parenting journey.
[01:13:15] Adam Fishman: Yeah. I want to end with a couple of final topics. One is, I think, now I need you to verify if this happened, but did you get a chance to meet with the surgeon general on a Zoom a few years ago?
[01:13:31] Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan: Yes.
[01:13:32] Adam Fishman: Okay. This is Vivek Murthy, so this is not RFK Junior or whatever, but you got to meet with him in January, you and Jay Fagan. Is Jay Fagan a research partner of yours or—
[01:13:41] Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan: Yes, we collaborated some. He's a fathering researcher. I think recently retired, yes.
[01:13:45] Adam Fishman: Okay, awesome. Maybe I'll have him on the show.
[01:13:48] Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan: You could ask him. He's great.
[01:13:49] Adam Fishman: You got to talk to Vivek about fathers, families, and health. What was your lead? What did you lead in with in that conversation? And also, he seems like a wonderful and very intelligent person. So how was that conversation with the surgeon general?
[01:14:03] Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan: It was a great conversation. Jay and I put together a presentation where we really just talked about all the ways that fathers, active involved fathers benefit not only children, but benefit men themselves, that active engaged fathering benefits men because one of Dr. Murthy's areas of concern was loneliness and especially loneliness and despair among men. And so the angle we were kind of taking was, you know what? This is good for everybody, that engaging fathers more in parenting, supporting them helps their children, it helps their partners, it helps mothers too. It helps men themselves and it therefore helps our society be a healthier society. So that's what we were talking about.
[01:14:50] Adam Fishman: Oh, awesome. And hopefully it was well received and if we ever get—
[01:14:55] Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan: Oh yeah, it was great.
[01:14:56] Adam Fishman: If we ever get back to science-based administration, we'll do something with it. So that's very cool. Okay, last thing. I wanted to end with this question. So let's say there's a guy listening to this dad, he's on a walk with his stroller, he's tired, he's on his 17th cup of coffee. He's four weeks into having a newborn and he's starting to feel a little bit like the backup parent in his house. Maybe there's some unintentional gatekeeping happening or gate closing. What do you tell him? What's the pep talk that you give that dad?
[01:15:34] Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan: Absolutely. I would say hang in there. Those early weeks are really, really tough on everybody. I would also say that I think communication for couples is really, really critical that many expectant new parents, because they're tired, they're so busy, they don't talk enough about their experiences. And so I would encourage that dad as he is able and feels comfortable in sharing his feelings with his partner and using the good old I statements. I recommend trying to communicate regularly for couples about new parenting, how they're feeling, whether their expectations are matching the reality, because if you don't talk about these things, that's when resentment can build and trouble can emerge. So I think communication is really key. I also would encourage the dad to really step it up even further, honestly, to say, "Hey, can I..." I mean, he's out there with the stroller. Maybe he volunteered to do that.
[01:16:37] Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan: Maybe that's just part of the routine. But honestly, sometimes you can just say, "I'd really like to do this with our baby. I'm going to go take the baby for a couple of hours." Really put it out there that you are here and you want to be involved or ask your partner if there's some aspect of parenting, maybe you're not as comfortable diaper changing or something. Maybe that's not something. Say, "Hey, can you show me how to do it?" And then I'm going to practice, really step up. I know that might seem like a lot, and maybe that's flipping the script here. I'm not putting it all on mom, but putting it all on dad. But I think that if the dad takes those steps, I think that in most good relationships that the mom is going to relax, is going to relax a little bit.
[01:17:25] Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan: Or if he says, "Hey, I'm feeling a little left out. Can we talk about ways that I could do things? Or can I pick up some of these things?" I say be proactive, be proactive about being more involved, be proactive about your communication. Make sure that your commitment to being an involved dad is very obvious. You may have it on the inside, but make sure that it's obvious to your partner and then see what happens. I would say that would be your next step is to go big or go home. And also to all parents, I always recommend my advice is to play the long game too, try not to sweat the small stuff and try to play the long game. But the long game here is dad wants to have a close relationship with his child and to be more involved maybe than his dad was or previous generations of dads.
[01:18:15] Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan: And so that is something that's important, then you need to really lean into that.
[01:18:20] Adam Fishman: Awesome. Well, that is an excellent place to end before lightning round. So how can people who want to follow along with your research or be helpful or volunteer to participate in a future study, how can people follow along with you?
[01:18:36] Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan: I'm on Instagram. My lab also has Instagram. It's the Children and Parents Lab at Ohio State University in the Department of Psychology. And yeah, I can send you all that—
[01:18:46] Adam Fishman: Information. Awesome. Well, we will link to all the places that people can follow you on the internet. All right. Do you have a couple minutes for lightning round?
[01:18:54] Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan: Yeah, sure. Yeah, that's fine.
[01:18:56] Adam Fishman: Okay. This one, I modified this one to be more personal to your backstory, things that I found about you on the internet.
[01:19:02] Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan: Okay. Yeah, I think I saw some of this. Okay.
[01:19:04] Adam Fishman: Okay, so here we go. I'll caveat with why I asked you this question right after, but who is the best speller in your household? Is it you, your daughter, or your husband?
[01:19:14] Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan: Oh, my husband, definitely.
[01:19:16] Adam Fishman: And of course, the reason I asked is because I saw that your husband was in the Scripps Spelling Bee competition or something back in the day.
[01:19:22] Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan: Yes, he was. It was one of the pieces of information that led me to believe that he was the one, because I was in spelling competitions also as a child. I never made it to the National Spelling Bee. I think I made it to a regional one, but that was one of the key pieces of information. I was just like, "Seriously, you were in the spelling bee?"
[01:19:44] Adam Fishman: Yeah, that's amazing.
[01:19:45] Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan: That's—
[01:19:46] Adam Fishman: Amazing. Okay. Can you explain the naming convention for the cats in your household?
[01:19:52] Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan: Oh, yes. Well, this is hard to explain, I guess. Well, I think they're mostly named after women in film or TV or literature that we admire. So the current cats, unfortunately, Clarice Starling Sullivan passed away last summer. She had kidney disease, which afflicts a lot of—
[01:20:14] Adam Fishman: Cats.
[01:20:15] Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan: But named after the heroine from Silence of the Lambs, right? Currently, we have Ginny Weasley Sullivan from the Harry Potter series. She's our oldest cat currently, and for many years, Charlotte, our daughter, was very into Harry Potter. And we also have, oh, Beverly Marsh Sullivan is named after the character in the Stephen King novel, It.
[01:20:39] Adam Fishman: Yep.
[01:20:39] Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan: And then we have their newest addition, she's just about a year old, is Olivia Benson Sullivan named for the longstanding character on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit.
[01:20:53] Adam Fishman: Yes, I love that. Such great names. Okay. You said in your free time that you still fantasize like it's the 1980s. Why is that?
[01:21:04] Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan: It's probably a nostalgia trap, really. But I would say since even college, we were listening to... I went to college in the 1990s. We were listening to early '80s music as sort of retro flashback. I think I was fortunate to have, in many respects, a good childhood, and especially in terms of... I loved all the pop culture. I just love popular culture. I mean, if I hadn't majored in psych, I could have majored in American studies or something like that. I love popular culture, and especially the popular culture of the '80s. I love anything that's old. My whole house is like a museum. It's filled with stuff that I get at flea markets and estate sales. The '80s are special to me because those were the years when I grew up, and I have a lot of good memories from those years, and I have an Atari 2600 and video games.
[01:22:00] Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan: Awesome. I have a tattoo of Pac-Man and—
[01:22:03] Adam Fishman: Oh, that's amazing.
[01:22:05] Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan: And a Q*bert tattoo on my—
[01:22:07] Adam Fishman: I don't—
[01:22:07] Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan: Know. It's the popular culture, and I think it's just... There was some old research. I couldn't tell you who did it, but it suggested that people tend to have the greatest nostalgia over things that happened, like songs and stuff when they were in their early to mid-teens. And that stuck with me, and I feel like that's true of me. At some point, I just stopped really incorporating new stuff, and I'm just all '80s all the time.
[01:22:32] Adam Fishman: Okay. Well, speaking of nostalgia, what was the first nostalgic movie that you forced your daughter to watch with you?
[01:22:41] Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan: I mean, when she was really young at '80s nostalgic, because probably the first nostalgic movie was The Sound of Music, I'm pretty sure because I grew up watching that or The Wizard of Oz, those sort of classics. But she definitely has been schooled in the John Hughes movies of the '80s, for sure. Excellent. Although I put a major content warning on Sixteen Candles.
[01:23:01] Adam Fishman: They have not aged well, especially that one.
[01:23:04] Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan: That especially for multiple reasons is really... And also warning to the parents out there, whatever your childhood movies are, you won't remember how disturbing some of it is.
[01:23:19] Adam Fishman: Correct.
[01:23:20] Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan: And then you go back. I mean, I wasn't a child at all when American Pie came out, but went to watch that, and I was like, "Whoa, I don't know." So your perception will change with time. So you need to consult a source or re-watch it before you necessarily—
[01:23:34] Adam Fishman: Introduce—
[01:23:34] Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan: Your kids—
[01:23:35] Adam Fishman: To it. Go review it on—
[01:23:36] Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan: Not even because it will harm them, but my daughter has always been very outspoken, and if something smacks of rape culture, whatever, she'll call it out. So my biggest concern was that she would be disappointed in me and mad at me.
[01:23:48] Adam Fishman: Yeah. Well, fair. Fair assessment. Okay, two more for you. True or false, there's only one correct way to load a dishwasher.
[01:23:58] Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan: Oh, that's false. I think you can load the dishwasher any which way—
[01:24:01] Adam Fishman: You want—
[01:24:02] Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan: To. If someone's loading my dishwasher, I don't care how they load it, just that it's loaded.
[01:24:07] Adam Fishman: The only correct way is if somebody else loads it, that's the correct way. Yes, yes, that's—
[01:24:10] Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan: Right. Exactly.
[01:24:11] Adam Fishman: Okay. And finally, what is your take on minivans?
[01:24:15] Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan: I love a good minivan. We had a minivan when I was growing up, and I actually really, really loved it. I mean, I definitely prefer minivans to SUVs for sure, but I think the best thing would be an old school station wagon, definitely.
[01:24:30] Adam Fishman: Okay. Like wood paneling.
[01:24:32] Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan: Yes, of course, of course.
[01:24:33] Adam Fishman: And the door in the back where you can face the back or sitting—
[01:24:34] Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan: There.
[01:24:35] Adam Fishman: That's right. Yeah. I—
[01:24:37] Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan: Still remember riding in one of those as a kid, and I thought that was the height of adventure.
[01:24:41] Adam Fishman: Oh, I agree. They're so great. Well, Sarah, it has been my absolute pleasure hosting you today. This was really, really fun. Thank you so much. This has been—
[01:24:49] Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan: Really fun. I mean, the time flew by, so thank you.
[01:24:52] Adam Fishman: Awesome. And I wish you all the best on your research, your family life, and raising those cats as we go forward this year. They're my—
[01:25:00] Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan: Empty nest babies now.
[01:25:02] Adam Fishman: Yeah.
[01:25:03] Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan: Awesome. Yeah, and good luck to you with your kids getting into the teen years and onto the beyond.
[01:25:09] Adam Fishman: Thank you again, Sarah, and—
[01:25:10] Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan: It's been great. Oh thank you so much.
[01:25:11] Adam Fishman: Thank you for listening to today's conversation with Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan. You can subscribe and watch the show on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts. Visit www.startupdadpod.com to learn more and browse past episodes. Thanks for listening and see you next week.