Why Prioritizing Motherhood in the First Three Years Matters

Today's Valuable Resources/Links:

·        Website: https://www.ericakomisar.com/

·        FREE resources to help you https://muckrack.com/erica-komisar/articles

Summary

In this episode, I introduce you to ERICA KOMISAR, LCSW.

Erica is a clinical social worker, psychoanalyst, and parent guidance expert who has been in private practice in New York City for over 30 years. A graduate of Georgetown and Columbia Universities and The New York Freudian Society,

Ms. Komisar is a psychological consultant bringing parenting workshops to clinics, schools, corporations, and childcare settings. She is a contributor to The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post and The New York Daily News. She is also a Contributing Editor to The Institute for Family Studies and appears regularly on Fox and Friends and Fox 5 News.

Erica is the author of Being There: Why Prioritizing Motherhood in the First Three Years Matters and Chicken Little the Sky Isn't Falling: Raising Resilient Adolescents in the New Age of Anxiety.

Today she speaks about:

Motherhood and its importance in early childhood. (0:09)

Mothering and child development. (2:42)

The importance of early mother-child bonding and repairing brain development. (11:10)

Parenting and emotional regulation. (16:23)

Attachment disorders and breastfeeding. (23:13)

Motherhood, bonding, and childcare. (32:28)

Join me for this episode of Mommy Heal Thyself to learn the importance of prioritizing motherhood..

Transcript
(Note, this was transcribed using a transcription software and may not reflect the exact words used in the podcast)

Intro  0:00 

Welcome to Mommy Heal Thyself.  We featured guests that provide you with the tools, resources and strategies you need to say no to a life of pain and suffering all forms of preventable disease, toxic drugs and unnecessary surgeries. We hope to inspire you to boldly reclaim your ability to heal, and to serve ones to love.

Dr Michelle  0:30 

Welcome, ladies to another episode of mommy heal thyself. Today we are going to tread into some interesting waters. And I would like to start the conversation because we're going to be talking about certain issues that a lot of us have taken for granted, the way we think and I'm going to challenge that or should I say our guest is going to challenge some of our ideas of who we are as women as mothers. My guest today is Erica Komisar. She is a clinical social worker, a psychoanalyst and a parent guidance expert. Who has been in private practice in New York City for over 30 years. She's a graduate of Columbia University's and New York University and Georgetown University sorry, and the New York Freudian society. Miss commissar is a psychological consultant bringing parenting workshops to clinics, schools, corporations, and childcare settings. She is a contributor to The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post and The New York Daily News. She's also a contributing editor for the Institute of Family Studies and appears regularly on Fox and Friends and Fox five news. Erica is the author of being there. Why prioritizing motherhood in the first three years matters. And Chicken Little The sky isn't falling, raising resilient adolescents in the new age of anxiety. Oh, wow. I'm so excited to have you here. Erica, thank you for joining us this morning.

Erica K  2:10 

Thank you for having me.

Dr Michelle  2:12 

Now, we're gonna get into the nuts and bolts of what you were talking about in terms of re looking at motherhood and the importance of motherhood, especially for the first three years of a child's life. I'm curious as to how you got into this particular field. What was coming up in your world that made you say, hmm, I need to take a look at this.

Erica K  2:42 

Well, originally it was because I was a social worker in a clinic in Brooklyn. And I was working with parents and children and foster parents and children. And I found that there was some basic lack of knowledge of nurturing and parenting that existed in previous generations, interestingly, and I felt the need to do psychoeducation I felt like I couldn't treat them psycho dynamically or in therapy, that also doing some psycho educational groups for for mothers and parents. And so I started doing them and I love them. And I love talking to mothers about mothering. And it really helped and it supported the treatment tremendously. So that's really how it started. And that was about 35 years ago. And since then, and then I went on to do parenting workshops, you know, as alongside my practice because I'm a psychoanalyst, but it started doing parenting workshops and big corporations trying to bring into all kinds of people, you know, from all kinds of backgrounds. But what I was really seeing about 20 years ago, in my practice, because I've been in practice for about 30 to 33 years, but I was really seeing in my private practice was that there was this tidal wave of mental illness in children and adolescents that you know, I found the need to explain to myself and to others because it was the rates of younger and younger children being diagnosed and medicated for behavioral problems for ADHD, for depression, anxiety for very young children were killing themselves in a way that we had never seen before. Adolescents are killing themselves in great numbers, suicidal ideation and psychotic events have gone up. So it was something where I could see it coming. No one was really talking about it. And no one no one was talking about the causes of it. There was a lot of medicating children. Just quiet their pain like Shush, shush, shush, Lena how mothers say to babies when they're crying. I'm like, no, no, don't say she tried to soothe the baby and help them figure out what's going on. But Don't shush them. We were shushing children. And so yeah, I started looking at all the research the the epigenetics, the neuroscience research from that started back in the 90s. That's still going on wonderful neuroscience research, psychoanalytic reading again and a lot of attachment research. And I found that what I was seeing in my practice was true, which is that based on all this research, that the absence of mothers in children's lives or the deep prioritizing, of mothering in children's lives, had caused children to go off the rails, quite literally, that we had, you know, in trying to create an equitable society and trying to create a society where women had opportunities and choices and we have forgotten about children, essentially. And although it's important to focus on women and our rights and you know, goodness, where would we be without that? In forgetting children? A lot of damage in our wake of our freedom, we left a lot of damage and so we don't want to take back our freedom, want to have choices, but we have to take a good long look at what we've done and try to repair it now.

Dr Michelle  6:15 

So what is it that is so essential in the mothering process that is important to development of a child to avoid things like the anxiety, the depression and all of those types of situations?

Erica K  6:33 

So children as you know, children because you're a doctor, children are born neurologically fragile, emotionally fragile. In our desire to be independent ourselves is when we projected onto children that they were independent to that we could leave them earlier and earlier. The reality is that they're not capable of being independent or self sufficient or regulating their emotions or dealing with stress. They're incredibly neurologically vulnerable and fragile. In other parts of the world, mothers carry babies for a full year on their bodies on their front first and under fact that what we call skin to skin contact, because what it does is it regulates all of the biological and emotional parts of a child that they can't do for themselves. It buffers them from stress, which keeps the amygdala or the stress regulating system, which is important in the first year. It regulates their motion. So if you see babies and other countries where babies are worn on their mother's bodies are kept close physically to the mothers. Don't cry as much. Western babies cry a lot and they cry a lot because we force them into this position of having to develop these defenses at a very young age, which then become things like attachment disorders and pathological defenses. So the first three years is what we call a critical period of brain development by the end of three years 85% of a child's right brain, where the social emotional part of their brain is developed in that three year period. They're very sensitive to their environment and their environment is their mother, meaning their primary attachment figure is still usually and so that person has the greatest impact on helping that child to learn to regulate their emotions and learn to manage stress in the future. It's only by really, the mother doing that for them, kind of like dialysis does for someone who has kidney issues. It's only by the mother doing it for them that after that three year period, they can then start to internalize the ability to do it for themselves. We've gotten it all wrong you see because we've basically a treat to babies adult like characteristics that they don't possess.

Dr Michelle  8:59 

So some people will say, Well, you know, I can put my child in daycare, and they will have somebody that can take care of them. Just as just as good as I can while I go and work. Is there something wrong with my thought? That way?

Erica K  9:19 

Yeah, babies don't form arbitrary attachments to adults, and if they do, that's actually a problem. We don't want babies to form in indiscriminate attachments to strangers. We want them to be focused on a primary attachment. figure which is their sense their deep sense of security in the world. So there are in other parts of the world something called allo parenting, which is often used as an excuse in this country for daycare. Allo parenting is when a mother is surrounded by extended family, grandmothers, aunts, sisters, cousins, next door neighbors who you call and these people are more invested in that child emotionally more of a similar investment pair because they're going to be in that child's life forever. But even in Aloe parenting countries, countries where mothers have other people that are alternative attachment figures for the child. You'll notice that in those countries when the baby is in distress, the baby is handed to the mother, not forcefully managed by a stranger, but will who is a stranger even a grandmother will say oh, the baby needs to the grandmother will bring the baby to the mother to breastfeed or bring the baby to the mother to suit in this country. We've perverted that we've created some perversion of that, that any any old person can take care of the baby. Babies form a very unique attachment. You know, we're animals, we're mammals, no different than any other mammal. And we form very specific attachments, not indiscriminate ones, and when we do form indiscriminate attachments, it's not healthy.

Dr Michelle  11:10 

You know, one of the things that I I love about what you're saying is that it's really reinforcing the importance of motherhood. You know, it's not just oh you give birth to a baby and then you you know, you hand it off to somebody else. That's just as good as you are. Really and truly the mother is indispensable, indispensable.

Erica K  11:35 

indispensable.

Dr Michelle  11:38 

You know, we used to think that it was just a matter of nursing, you know, breastfeeding and so they came up with the invention of well, we can do the breast pump, and therefore you can just expel your breast milk and then we don't need you anymore Mom, you're just the you know, the local cab, squirting out the milk. That's all we need from you. Somebody else can take it from there. But again, you're emphasizing the fact that that relationship between the mother and the new baby for the first three years is critical. And I would like to add to that that it is so critical to the point that you can't make up for it later on. When the damage is done, it's done there. Can you speak more about why that time period that specific time period is so critical that that those things that happen in the development process? Once it's hijacked at that age, you know, just like folic acid in pregnancy, you know, if it wasn't available in the first couple of months of pregnancy, even if you make a dosage at the end of pregnancy, the damage has already been done.

Erica K  12:57 

Well first giving us a physician. I mean, I know you can and I can appreciate the importance of breast milk for its immunological properties. But as you say breastfeeding is much more than just milk. It has to do with the attachment. And so you know, you know we're made in such a way that it's very hard to feed a baby with our breast without tuning into that baby. It's very hard to feed a baby with your breast without I mean mothers have have challenged this by looking at their phones and looking at TV and doing things that mothers never did before they will they were breastfeeding, but it's still very hard because you're actually the baby is right there. So it's very hard not to tune into the baby. So we're sort of made in such a way that it forces us one it forces us to have skin to skin contact even if we're not looking at the baby even better if we're looking at and tuning into the baby. But we're made in such a way that it forces us to attach to our babies, whereas meaning you can stick the bottle and I've seen it many times in the baby's face and the baby can face out and there's absolutely no contact. It's sort of sanitary, absolutely sanitized, no skin to skin, no physical touch. Literally it's it can be like that. So what we know is that breastfeeding is a lot more than the milk it has to do with the attachment in terms of repair. I like the word repair because sometimes if we darn a soft, it makes it stronger. The issue with repairs you have to get to that repair as quickly as possible. But you know, the thing that we understand is that the brain is plastic it can heal to a certain extent but it will never heal completely and will never heal fully. There will always be something there. So you know what that is to say to give mothers hope who didn't? Weren't there for the first three years I wrote a second book called Chicken Little The sky isn't falling, raising resilient adolescents in the new age of anxiety that's about there's two critical periods of brain development zero to three and nine to 25. In those periods, it leaves a lot of room for repair and everything in between three and nine leaves a lot of room for repair. But can you repair everything No, you can't repair everything that you can repair and the sooner you get to the repair, the better off your child will be.

Dr Michelle  15:25 

So let's talk about that. What are some things that we as mothers can do if we were not able to be there for our children? In those critical years of zero to three?

Erica K  15:39 

Well, a lot of it has to do with what you didn't do in the first three years you do now. Meaning you know your child may not be an infant or a toddler anymore, but what you can do is you can do a lot of emotional regulation. And what that means is really being attuned to children's emotions, not dismissing their emotions, not ignoring their emotions, but really being you could say being a receptive person to their emotions, receiving them and then being able to communicate translate those emotions back to them. And we call that reflection. So reflection is what you do with babies when you see that they're sad. You look sad. You look like they're looking in the mirror. So what we say is that a baby's first happens in the first three years is not just emotional regulation, but it's the beginning of the development of the cell. And what that means is when a baby looks at the mother's face, when they're sad and the mothers faces for the first time in their lives that baby sees themselves. They can see themselves in the eyes, the reflective eyes of their mother. But if a mother has what we call discrepant emotions where the mother doesn't reflect the baby's emotions, meaning if the baby is sad that mother can't bear the baby sadness and goes through and tries to cheer the baby up and come on, you're fine. That's cool, discrepant emotions. And what that does is then the baby looks at the mother's face and can't find themselves and they get confused and it doesn't build emotional knowledge. It doesn't build a sense of self. It doesn't build on the idea of how okay, how do I regulate this emotion of sadness needs to be accepted, and it needs to be identified and then I can work my way through it to get back to what we call homeostasis. So reflecting baby's emotions, being as physically and emotionally present as possible. So you are the go to person for the most part when they're in distress. And what mothers do in the first three years is they are from moment to moment. Soothing, babies when they're in distress, and that's what we call emotional regulation. So we keep baby's emotions from going to Too high and too low. It doesn't mean they're flat. You know, all of us as human beings should be more in this range, more like more like sailing in the Caribbean than sailing in the Atlantic where the Pacific right. So we don't want to be sailing in the Atlantic. Specifically, we want to be in the Caribbean and this is what mothers do all day long by soothing babies in distress. So this is another thing you can do is you are helping that child and by the way you do this straight through adolescence, helping them share their emotions.

Dr Michelle  18:41 

So you said that this journey actually started when you started noticing things 30 years ago. What is it like now, in comparison to 30 years ago have things gotten better or worse? What are the signs that make you think this?

Erica K  19:00 

I mean, it's worse because even though I have a voice, I mean, my book came out about 2017 So about seven years ago. And so, one would ask what you know what's happened in those seven years have I been able to make an impact? I mean, my hopefulness is that the people I touch, spread the word to the people they touch. And so that's, you know, one thing we know in our society is that change is a process. And so, but but in terms of the statistics, the statistics have gotten worse. I mean, the numbers have gotten worse. Still shushing our children. We're still telling our children that they should take medication and that there's something radically wrong with them as people. It's not them. It's us. And so we as parents, we have not wanted to a society and this parents, not just parents are at fault here, that society's messaging policymakers, economists, I blame them because their messaging is so clearly, money matters, and children don't matter. And so and we've bought into this hook, line, and sinker, right, we say work matters more than our families. And so as long as we believe this, the statistics will keep going through the roof.

Dr Michelle  20:24 

I want to emphasize what you're saying in terms of the messaging that we have, which is that money matters more than our families, because the reality is that for hundreds of years people have had to choose between making money and taking care of their children. And some way somehow, prior to say 1960s We were able to get along with much less in the family and take care of not one child not to child children, but sometimes four or five, six, even, you know, my former husband, he came from a family of 12 His mother was not making that much money. So I think we keep on telling ourselves that the money is what is important because with the money we can get to stuff to give our kids quote unquote, the things that we didn't have in life. And I'm wondering if really and truly we need to start to think about well, what about giving our kids the things that we did have in life? Some of us

Erica K  21:40 

you know, I say that the poorest in America actually stay home with their children. This is what's interesting, the poorest in America are not what we're talking about. You would think that's the issue that actually isn't the issue because the poorest in America have I mean, this is not ideal, mind you but what's interesting is there's an interesting kind of gap here, which is the wealthiest and the poorest. Have can be home with their children, but everybody in between what I call the working poor the middle class. There is a gap there because, you know, I'm gonna say and I know people who listen to this are going to say, well, we don't have any support in those years like they do in other countries. This is one of the things one of the reasons I wrote the book was to try to change policy, you know, that people in Washington, they, they talk a big game about how family matters, but they really don't care. Because they don't want to spend money on it. So how we know that we care is we're willing to spend money on it. That's how we know what we value. So when someone comes to me for therapy, it's expensive to go to therapy. But if you value it, you spend money on it. If you're gonna spend money on that maybe you don't take a vacation or maybe you don't get a new car or right so or maybe you don't get a new you know, new new coat that winter or, but it's what we value that we spend money on, which I think is really interesting. So what we're really saying is we don't value our children as much as we value other things.

Dr Michelle  23:12 

And as you were saying, when we look at other cultures, other communities have babies just like we do. One of the things that they hold on to well, everything is shifting in this world. They used to hold on to like when I was in Japan, is that extended family, you know the mother, or maybe an auntie or someone else who is not necessarily out in the work field but can take care of the child in a relationship that is going to extend long beyond nine to five and long beyond those couple of years. It's a relationship that is for life and even if we look at our history as African Americans in this country, we didn't have government taking care of us. We didn't have government saying oh, we're going to give you a check. You know, prior to the 1960s what it was were communities were coming together, women were coming together helping each other out, you know, okay, I'll I'll go and work at this point in time so that you can stay home with your child and you know, swapping things out. But now we're in a society where we're so isolated. We don't have those extended families. And we have created a vacuum for ourselves that lacks the support, which is why we have our organization. It takes a village to encourage people and give people the ability to recreate that village structure starting with the family extending that family maybe instead of putting mom in a nursing home, you know, have mom coming live with you.

Erica K  25:01 

We've traded one institution which was a healthy institution which was the institution of family and we traded it for the institution that's lying to us. Because basically, government is lying to you when they tell you it's good for children to go into daycare. They need socialization at the age of one and two. No they don't they need attachment security until the age of three they need socialization after the age of three and only incrementally. So you know, when you trade a really healthy institution for an institution that, you know is basically telling you things that may not be true, but you're buying into it right. And so that's really a problem is that we we make basically gave up the institution of family and we lost our instincts. I mean, the original title of my first book was called the Lost instinct and the publishers liked being there better, but I still think the lust instinct describes right, what really is happening is that women are getting generationally removed from their instincts, right. So we know. You know, I don't know if you've ever interviewed Kimberly seals, alors alors seals, she's a she's a black woman who writes about how particularly in the black community, women have lost breastfeeding as something they do. That they were told it's better to bottle feed and go out to work. And you know, even if they're home, it's better to bottle feed so they stopped breastfeeding, particularly black women in the black community. So so she's fighting to get breastfeeding back into the black community. She's wonderful. If you haven't interviewed her, I recommend her but she but you know this is the kind of thing that we were told. And I can't tell you how many people come to see me in my practice. And the first thing they ask is, you know, we believe that daycare was actually better for our children that the government and that institutional care could could better raise our children then we did it was giving them something. And then I said, Oh my God, are we in Romania? Well, like what is this? Of course, it's not better than what you can give your child in those early days. So this is what kind of what we're dealing with.

Dr Michelle  27:16 

It is it is opening a can of worms. And as you said, we are going to start looking even into the breastfeeding issue because now there's really weird messaging going out that saying, Oh, we shouldn't shame women who can't breastfeed. So they're doing this kind of gaslighting to make us rethink breastfeeding. And as you said, I'm also curious as to what is happening to our motherly, motherly mothering instincts, where you have more and more women that say, Ah, I don't even feel an urge to breastfeed, or I don't feel an urge to be there with my child. I would rather go out and work than be at home with my child. So that's what we used to think of as just being natural, motherly instincts. is kind of fading. And it's very, very interesting to question is that because of what has been done in terms of creating the epigenetic dynamics, and or is it because of the messaging that has been so pervasive over the past 50 years? Yes,

Erica K  28:30 

and yes. So what we know is that attachment disorders are passed down generationally, they're generationally expressed. So, Michael meany did some important research on licking and grooming the animals who licked and groom their young passed on to their young the ability to look and remarry. But if they didn't look and groom, they're young. They didn't pass that down. Because they didn't pass down oxytocin receptors. So oxytocin is a love hormone. And we need that love hormone to connect with our children. We produce it when we breastfeed when we give birth. When we raised our children when we're sensitive, empathic nurturing is tied to RT, Joseph. It helps us to bond we know that you need oxytocin receptors so you just like baseball, you throw the oxytocin but you need someone with a catcher's mitt on the other side of the oxytocin receptors in the brain, or the catcher's mitt. And what we know is that you can lose generationally, you can lose oxygen, now they can be re stimulated, right. They can be repaired and re stimulated. But we have generationally passed down attachment disorders to our daughters, who then pass it down. To their daughters who pass it down to their daughters. And that is what we're seeing.

Dr Michelle  29:47 

Wow. You know, that answers the question that I've been wondering about, why is it that so many women and it seems to be more and more women each year are having difficulty with nursing and I think it would probably go into the same category of, if you were not nursed, then it makes it more difficult for you to turn around and nurse and subsequent generation after generation after generation. It's mind boggling. So

Closing: Thank you for tuning in for this episode of Mommy Heal Thyself, if you liked what we're doing here, please share subscribe, like us and leave a comment. Your feedback is very much appreciated.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai