Rufus Griscom and Alisa Volkman: It's time to explode 4 taboos of parenting

157,696 views ・ 2010-12-16

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00:18
Alisa Volkman: So this is where our story begins --
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the dramatic moments of the birth
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of our first son, Declan.
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Obviously a really profound moment,
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and it changed our lives in many ways.
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It also changed our lives in many unexpected ways,
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and those unexpected ways we later reflected on,
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that eventually spawned a business idea between the two of us,
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and a year later, we launched Babble,
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a website for parents.
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Rufus Griscom: Now I think of our story
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as starting a few years earlier. AV: That's true.
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RG: You may remember, we fell head over heels in love.
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AV: We did.
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RG: We were at the time running a very different kind of website.
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It was a website called Nerve.com,
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the tagline of which was "literate smut."
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It was in theory, and hopefully in practice,
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a smart online magazine
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about sex and culture.
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AV: That spawned a dating site.
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But you can understand the jokes that we get. Sex begets babies.
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You follow instructions on Nerve and you should end up on Babble,
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which we did.
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And we might launch a geriatric site as our third. We'll see.
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RG: But for us, the continuity between Nerve and Babble
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was not just the life stage thing,
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which is, of course, relevant,
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but it was really more about
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our desire to speak very honestly
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about subjects that people have difficulty speaking honestly about.
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It seems to us that
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when people start dissembling, people start lying about things,
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that's when it gets really interesting.
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That's a subject that we want to dive into.
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And we've been surprised to find, as young parents,
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that there are almost more taboos around parenting
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than there are around sex.
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AV: It's true. So like we said,
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the early years were really wonderful,
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but they were also really difficult.
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And we feel like some of that difficulty
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was because of this false advertisement around parenting.
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(Laughter)
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We subscribed to a lot of magazines, did our homework,
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but really everywhere you look around, we were surrounded by images like this.
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And we went into parenting
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expecting our lives to look like this.
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The sun was always streaming in, and our children would never be crying.
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I would always be perfectly coiffed and well rested,
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and in fact, it was not like that at all.
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RG: When we lowered the glossy parenting magazine
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that we were looking at, with these beautiful images,
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and looked at the scene in our actual living room,
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it looked a little bit more like this.
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These are our three sons.
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And of course, they're not always crying and screaming,
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but with three boys, there's a decent probability
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that at least one of them will not be comporting himself
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exactly as he should.
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AV: Yes, you can see where the disconnect was happening for us.
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We really felt like what we went in expecting
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had nothing to do with what we were actually experiencing,
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and so we decided we really wanted to give it to parents straight.
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We really wanted to let them understand
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what the realities of parenting were in an honest way.
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RG: So today, what we would love to do
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is share with you four parenting taboos.
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And of course, there are many more than four things
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you can't say about parenting,
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but we would like to share with you today
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four that are particularly relevant for us personally.
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So the first, taboo number one:
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you can't say you didn't fall in love with your baby
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in the very first minute.
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I remember vividly, sitting there in the hospital.
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We were in the process of giving birth to our first child.
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AV: We, or I?
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RG: I'm sorry.
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Misuse of the pronoun.
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Alisa was very generously in the process
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of giving birth to our first child -- (AV: Thank you.)
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-- and I was there with a catcher's mitt.
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And I was there with my arms open.
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The nurse was coming at me
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with this beautiful, beautiful child,
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and I remember, as she was approaching me,
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the voices of friends saying,
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"The moment they put the baby in your hands,
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you will feel a sense of love that will come over you
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that is [on] an order of magnitude more powerful
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than anything you've ever experienced in your entire life."
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So I was bracing myself for the moment.
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The baby was coming,
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and I was ready for this Mack truck of love
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to just knock me off my feet.
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And instead, when the baby was placed in my hands,
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it was an extraordinary moment.
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This picture is from literally a few seconds after
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the baby was placed in my hands and I brought him over.
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And you can see, our eyes were glistening.
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I was overwhelmed with love and affection for my wife,
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with deep, deep gratitude
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that we had what appeared to be a healthy child.
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And it was also, of course, surreal.
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I mean, I had to check the tags and make sure.
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I was incredulous, "Are you sure this is our child?"
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And this was all quite remarkable.
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But what I felt towards the child at that moment was deep affection,
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but nothing like what I feel for him now, five years later.
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And so we've done something here
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that is heretical.
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We have charted
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our love for our child over time.
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(Laughter)
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This, as you know, is an act of heresy.
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You're not allowed to chart love.
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The reason you're not allowed to chart love
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is because we think of love as a binary thing.
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You're either in love, or you're not in love.
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You love, or you don't love.
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And I think the reality is that love is a process,
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and I think the problem with thinking of love
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as something that's binary
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is that it causes us
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to be unduly concerned
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that love is fraudulent, or inadequate, or what have you.
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And I think I'm speaking obviously here to the father's experience.
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But I think a lot of men do go through this sense
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in the early months, maybe their first year,
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that their emotional response is inadequate in some fashion.
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AV: Well, I'm glad Rufus is bringing this up,
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because you can notice where he dips in the first years
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where I think I was doing most of the work.
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But we like to joke,
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in the first few months of all of our children's lives,
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this is Uncle Rufus.
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(Laughter)
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RG: I'm a very affectionate uncle, very affectionate uncle.
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AV: Yes, and I often joke with Rufus when he comes home
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that I'm not sure he would actually be able to find our child in a line-up
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amongst other babies.
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So I actually threw a pop quiz here onto Rufus.
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RG: Uh oh.
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AV: I don't want to embarrass him too much. But I am going to give him three seconds.
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RG: That is not fair. This is a trick question. He's not up there, is he?
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AV: Our eight-week-old son is somewhere in here,
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and I want to see if Rufus can actually quickly identify him.
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RG: The far left. AV: No!
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(Laughter)
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RG: Cruel.
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AV: Nothing more to be said.
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(Laughter)
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I'll move on to taboo number two.
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You can't talk about how lonely having a baby can be.
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I enjoyed being pregnant. I loved it.
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I felt incredibly connected to the community around me.
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I felt like everyone was participating in my pregnancy, all around me,
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tracking it down till the actual due-date.
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I felt like I was a vessel of the future of humanity.
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That continued into the the hospital. It was really exhilarating.
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I was shower with gifts and flowers and visitors.
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It was a really wonderful experience,
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but when I got home,
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I suddenly felt very disconnected
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and suddenly shut in and shut out,
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and I was really surprised by those feelings.
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I did expect it to be difficult,
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have sleepless nights, constant feedings,
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but I did not expect the feelings
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of isolation and loneliness that I experienced,
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and I was really surprised that no one had talked to me,
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that I was going to be feeling this way.
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And I called my sister
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whom I'm very close to -- and had three children --
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and I asked her, "Why didn't you tell me
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I was going to be feeling this way,
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that I was going to have these -- feeling incredibly isolated?"
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And she said -- I'll never forget --
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"It's just not something you want to say to a mother
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that's having a baby for the first time."
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RG: And of course, we think
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it's precisely what you really should be saying
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to mothers who have kids for the first time.
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And that this, of course, one of the themes for us
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is that we think
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that candor and brutal honesty
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is critical to us collectively
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being great parents.
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And it's hard not to think
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that part of what leads to this sense of isolation
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is our modern world.
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So Alisa's experience is not isolated.
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So your 58 percent of mothers surveyed
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report feelings of loneliness.
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Of those, 67 percent are most lonely
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when their kids are zero to five -- probably really zero to two.
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In the process of preparing this,
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we looked at how some other cultures around the world
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deal with this period of time,
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because here in the Western world,
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less than 50 percent of us live near our family members,
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which I think is part of why this is such a tough period.
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So to take one example among many:
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in Southern India
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there's a practice known as jholabhari,
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in which the pregnant woman, when she's seven or eight months pregnant,
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moves in with her mother
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and goes through a series of rituals and ceremonies,
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give birth and returns home to her nuclear family
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several months after the child is born.
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And this is one of many ways
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that we think other cultures offset this kind of lonely period.
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AV: So taboo number three:
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you can't talk about your miscarriage -- but today I'll talk about mine.
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So after we had Declan,
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we kind of recalibrated our expectations.
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We thought we actually could go through this again
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and thought we knew what we would be up against.
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And we were grateful that I was able to get pregnant,
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and I soon learned that we were having a boy,
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and then when I was five months,
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we learned that we had lost our child.
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This is actually the last little image we have of him.
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And it was obviously a very difficult time --
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really painful.
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As I was working through that mourning process,
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I was amazed that I didn't want to see anybody.
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I really wanted to crawl into a hole,
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and I didn't really know how I was going
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to work my way back into my surrounding community.
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And I realize, I think, the way I was feeling that way,
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is on a really deep gut level,
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I was feeling a lot of shame
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and embarrassed, frankly,
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that, in some respects, I had failed
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at delivering what I'm genetically engineered to do.
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And of course, it made me question,
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if I wasn't able to have another child,
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what would that mean for my marriage,
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and just me as a woman.
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So it was a very difficult time.
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As I started working through it more,
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I started climbing out of that hole and talking with other people.
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I was really amazed
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by all the stories that started flooding in.
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People I interacted with daily,
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worked with, was friends with,
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family members that I had known a long time,
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had never shared with me their own stories.
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And I just remember feeling all these stories came out of the woodwork,
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and I felt like I happened upon
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this secret society of women that I now was a part of,
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which was reassuring and also really concerning.
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And I think,
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miscarriage is an invisible loss.
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There's not really a lot of community support around it.
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There's really no ceremony,
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rituals, or rites.
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And I think, with a death, you have a funeral, you celebrate the life,
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and there's a lot of community support,
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and it's something women don't have with miscarriage.
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RG: Which is too bad because, of course,
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it's a very common and very traumatic experience.
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Fifteen to 20 percent of all pregnancies result in miscarriage,
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and I find this astounding.
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In a survey, 74 percent of women said
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that miscarriage, they felt, was partly their fault, which is awful.
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And astoundingly, 22 percent
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said they would hide a miscarriage from their spouse.
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So taboo number four:
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you can't say that your average happiness
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has declined since having a child.
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The party line is that every single aspect of my life
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has just gotten dramatically better
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ever since I participated
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in the miracle that is childbirth and family.
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I'll never forget, I remember vividly to this day,
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our first son, Declan, was nine months old,
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and I was sitting there on the couch,
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and I was reading Daniel Gilbert's wonderful book, "Stumbling on Happiness."
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And I got about two-thirds of the way through,
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and there was a chart on the right-hand side --
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on the right-hand page --
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that we've labeled here
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"The Most Terrifying Chart Imaginable
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for a New Parent."
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This chart is comprised of four completely independent studies.
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Basically, there's this precipitous drop
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of marital satisfaction,
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which is closely aligned, we all know, with broader happiness,
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that doesn't rise again
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until your first child goes to college.
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So I'm sitting here looking at the next two decades of my life,
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this chasm of happiness
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that we're driving our proverbial convertible straight into.
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We were despondent.
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AV: So you can imagine, I mean again, the first few months were difficult,
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but we'd come out of it,
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and were really shocked to see this study.
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So we really wanted to take a deeper look at it
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in hopes that we would find a silver lining.
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RG: And that's when it's great to be running a website for parents,
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because we got this incredible reporter
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to go and interview all the scientists
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who conducted these four studies.
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We said, something is wrong here.
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There's something missing from these studies.
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It can't possibly be that bad.
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So Liz Mitchell did a wonderful job with this piece,
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and she interviewed four scientists,
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and she also interviewed Daniel Gilbert,
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and we did indeed find a silver lining.
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So this is our guess
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as to what this baseline of average happiness
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arguably looks like throughout life.
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Average happiness is, of course, inadequate,
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because it doesn't speak
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to the moment-by-moment experience,
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and so this is what we think it looks like
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when you layer in
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moment-to-moment experience.
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And so we all remember as children,
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the tiniest little thing -- and we see it on the faces of our children --
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the teeniest little thing
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can just rocket them to these heights
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of just utter adulation,
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and then the next teeniest little thing
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can cause them just to plummet to the depths of despair.
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And it's just extraordinary to watch, and we remember it ourselves.
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And then, of course, as you get older,
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it's almost like age is a form of lithium.
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As you get older, you become more stable.
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And part of what happens, I think, in your '20s and '30s,
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is you start to learn to hedge your happiness.
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You start to realize that
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"Hey, I could go to this live music event
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and have an utterly transforming experience
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that will cover my entire body with goosebumps,
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but it's more likely that I'll feel claustrophobic
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and I won't be able to get a beer.
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So I'm not going to go.
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I've got a good stereo at home. So, I'm not going to go."
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So your average happiness goes up,
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but you lose those transcendent moments.
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AV: Yeah, and then you have your first child,
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and then you really resubmit yourself
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to these highs and lows --
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the highs being the first steps, the first smile,
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your child reading to you for the first time --
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the lows being, our house, any time from six to seven every night.
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But you realize you resubmit yourself
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to losing control in a really wonderful way,
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which we think provides a lot of meaning to our lives
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and is quite gratifying.
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RG: And so in effect,
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we trade average happiness.
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14:45
We trade the sort of security and safety
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of a certain level of contentment
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for these transcendent moments.
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So where does that leave the two of us
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as a family with our three little boys
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in the thick of all this?
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There's another factor in our case.
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We have violated yet another taboo
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in our own lives,
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and this is a bonus taboo.
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AV: A quick bonus taboo for you, that we should not be working together,
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especially with three children --
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and we are.
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RG: And we had reservations about this on the front end.
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Everybody knows, you should absolutely not work with your spouse.
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In fact, when we first went out to raise money to start Babble,
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the venture capitalists said,
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"We categorically don't invest
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in companies founded by husbands and wives,
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because there's an extra point of failure.
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It's a bad idea. Don't do it."
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And we obviously went forward. We did.
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We raised the money, and we're thrilled that we did,
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because in this phase of one's life,
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the incredibly scarce resource is time.
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And if you're really passionate about what you do every day -- which we are --
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and you're also passionate about your relationship,
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this is the only way we know how to do it.
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And so the final question that we would ask is:
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can we collectively bend that happiness chart upwards?
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It's great that we have these transcendent moments of joy,
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but they're sometimes pretty quick.
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And so how about that average baseline of happiness?
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Can we move that up a little bit?
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AV: And we kind of feel that the happiness gap, which we talked about,
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is really the result of walking into parenting --
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and really any long-term partnership for that matter --
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with the wrong expectations.
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And if you have the right expectations and expectation management,
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we feel like it's going to be a pretty gratifying experience.
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RG: And so this is what --
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And we think that a lot of parents,
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when you get in there -- in our case anyway --
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you pack your bags for a trip to Europe, and you're really excited to go.
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Get out of the airplane,
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it turns out you're trekking in Nepal.
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And trekking in Nepal is an extraordinary experience,
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particularly if you pack your bags properly
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and you know what you're getting in for and you're psyched.
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So the point of all this for us today
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is not just hopefully honesty for the sake of honesty,
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but a hope that by being more honest and candid about these experiences,
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that we can all collectively
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bend that happiness baseline up a little bit.
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RG + AV: Thank you.
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(Applause)
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About this website

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