In this episode of Family Matters, Simon interviews Erica Komisar – a clinical social worker, psychoanalyst, author, coach to parents, a mother, New Yorker and much sought after commentator across television, radio, and international conferences.
Erica stresses the vital importance of a child’s attachment to its parents, arguing that parents should do everything they can to be the ones raising their child – not early childcare, not the government, or others.
She explains that children aged 0-3 years of age are undergoing critical brain-development and in which children need one primary attachment figure—usually the mother, with attachment beginning in utero—to provide physical and emotional safety, stress buffering, and emotion regulation.
Erica notes that a person’s social-emotion system is about 85% developed by age three and that insecure attachment – where parents have not been close to their child during the first 12 months – is clearly linked to a child’s later mental health and resilience problems.
She argues modern culture promotes a “fantasy” of self-sufficient children, where they can just be left with anyone or any facility.
Simon and Erica discuss the growing role of government in encouraging parents to put careers first, and their children second. Erica strongly notes that government do not have the best interests of children in mind when they set policies. She notes that much of the modern culture elevates careers and GDP over relationships, pushes gender-neutral competition between men and women, and overloads women with impossible expectations. For the children, the culture is wrongly prioritising cognition ahead of social-emotional foundations, overstimulation and early academic pressure. As Erica puts it, it is like putting “shoes on before socks”.
Through her clinical work and research, she says separation from attachment figures elevates fear, the stress hormone cortisol, and survival-mode stress that can inhibit brain architecture, and warns that poor early attachment can impair empathy across generations.
Erica then shares with Simon and viewers suggestions for parents, urging they to provide bodily presence (touch, soothing voice, eye contact), reduce work if possible, and prioritising the idea of “being” with children rather than simply “having” them.
Erica also stresses that government’s need to be putting the child and parent first, enabling them to be together – and not what we are currently seeing in the likes of New Zealand, where money and effort is going towards separating the parents and child, so the former can return to work.
Simon wraps up the interview discussing Erica’s books, including her latest and just released book on children and divorce. In this, she notes divorce is now common and can be handled in more child-centred ways if parents collaborate and put children first.
For more details of Erica’s work:
Website: https://www.ericakomisar.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/EricaKomisarLCSW/
X: https://x.com/EricaKomisarCSW
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ericakomisar
Substack: https://substack.com/@ericakomisarlcsw
Books
Being There: Why Prioritizing Motherhood in the First Three Years Matters
Chicken Little the Sky Isn’t Falling: Raising Resilient Adolescents in the New Age of Anxiety
The Child-Healthy Divorce
