It’s official: Erica Komisar is my nemesis. I’ve been following her for a while. I even tried to read her book, but dropped it halfway through because I felt the science was not serious. I try to ignore her, but she keeps popping up on my feed. Then, 2 weeks ago she made an appearance on Diary of a CEO and the episode racked up 1.6 million views on YouTube (and probably many more if we count Apple, Spotify, etc). In other words, she’s become impossible to ignore. Every mom group I belong to is talking about it, and everyone is stressed out. Parents are tearing their hair out wondering if they’ve caused long-term psychological damage to their children by putting them in daycare, or by not being emotionally and physically present enough in the early years.
So it’s time to set the record straight.
Nothing quite stokes my rage like people using bad evolutionary science to justify 1950s gender roles, and Erica is a master of this. That doesn’t mean that I disagree with everything she says, or that all of her claims (even the painful and controversial ones) are completely unfounded, but this is a domain in which nuance matters, as does a willingness to admit that we’re not 100% sure about anything. Erica is 100% sure that she is right, and that’s what bothers me most about her content. That, combined with the fact that she seems to lack any empathy for the very real constraints that mothers face. In her world view, we are “the architects of our own lives,” and failure to make the right choices for the health and well-being of our children is the moral fault of individual mothers and not at all a systemic issue.
I believe the opposite. I believe that mothers are making the best choices for themselves and their families in a system that is totally fucked–a system that often leaves us with no good options–and that change will therefore require collective action. In other words, even if Erica and I reach some of the same conclusions, how we each get there matters. When you watch Erica speak, unless you know better, you come away with an overwhelming sense of guilt and personal responsibility for your shortcomings as a parent, and I refuse to support a person whose tools for change are guilt and shame, even if some of our end goals align.
So, for the next week or so, my Substack is going to be entirely dedicated to parsing out her claims on Diary of a CEO, one by one, to see whether there is any truth to them. These articles will all be free, but if you appreciate them, please consider becoming a paid subscriber to support the time and effort I am putting into this research behalf of all the curious and concerned mothers out there. If you can’t afford a subscription, consider sharing it with someone who would appreciate it (if you get others to subscribe, you earn credits, and you help spread true and useful information!)
Claim 1: For children to grow into mentally healthy adults, their mother must be physically present with them as much as possible during the first 3 years
Erica (quotes taken directly from DOAC):
“For children to be mentally healthy in the future, you [the mother, or primary caregiver] have to be physically and emotionally present for them throughout childhood, but especially in the critical period of brain development from 0-3…Much of a child’s development depends on their environment and you are their environment.”
“Our evolutionary drive is to create a feeling of safety and security for our children and to be as present as possible. From an evolutionary perspective, babies have always needed to have physical skin to skin contact with their mothers for the first year. In most parts of the world, babies are worn on their mother’s bodies. Mothers provide important biological functions…and attachment security.”
“We prioritize everything today except our children: our work, our material success, our personal pleasures, but what we are not prioritizing is children…if we don’t prioritize them, they break down…Society took a turn after the industrial revolution - women were forced into the workplace and separated from children for the first time - but really it goes back to the ‘me’ movement of the 60s and the feminist movement…when women decided that it was cool to go to work, and to work full time out of the home, everybody cheered…it was all about me, me, me…the problem is that children were dropped. They were abandoned.”
“You cannot be there for your children on your own time, you have to be there on their time. Meaning quality time is a narcissistic fantasy. Your child needs you all day long. You need to give them quantity and quality time. You can be physically present and emotionally checked out, but you cannot be emotionally present if you are not physically there.”
My thoughts:
Let’s start with what we agree on. Age 0-3 is indeed a critical period of brain development for children. The brain doubles in size during the first 3 years and reaches 80% of its adult volume by age three. Synapses also form at a faster rate during the first three years than at any other period (source).
Furthermore, the development of brain structures involved in emotional regulation (amygdala, prefrontal cortex, and hippocampus) are deeply associated with the quality of care received in infancy. More sensitive caregiving provides vital programming for these structures (source).
So, children need sensitive caregiving during the first three years of life, that much is solidly supported by the evidence, but does that sensitive caregiving need to come exclusively from the mother?
In hunter-gatherer societies, three is the typical age of weaning, meaning that for the first three years, babies and children can never be too far from their mothers for too long. After three, they are commonly integrated into multi-age playgroups and may spend most of the day away from their mothers.
That said, even in these traditional hunter-gatherer societies, where breastfeeding is critical to the survival of the child, children under three, and even infants, may spend as little as 25% of their daytime hours with their mother. For instance (as I discussed in my last post) among the Agta, a hunter-gatherer society living in the remote mountains in the Philippines, mothers account for just 25% of infant care, fathers for 7%, brothers for another 7%, sisters for 8%, grandparents for 6%, extended family (such as aunts and cousins) for 11%, distant relatives for 14%, and completely unrelated individuals for about 23% (source).
How this is compatible with breastfeeding is something I would love to ask the researchers, but I imagine it works something like this: everything, even gathering, is a group effort, and the mother hands off the baby to someone else when she is working and takes it back only to breastfeed. As such, the mother and the baby are never far from one another, and the baby is probably being held or supervised by someone at all times, but this person is not always the mother–far from it. The Agta are an extreme example, but in every traditional hunter-gatherer society, even those with the highest levels of maternal primacy (like the !Kung) infants still spend a whole lot of time being held by people other than the mother. This was a matter of survival. It was how mothers got work done.
Erica does briefly mention that mothers used to have more help from extended families, but she underestimates the extent to which parenting is collective in traditional, non-Western societies. To make matters worse, she makes it sound like it is somehow our fault that we don’t parent this way in modern society. As she puts it, “Today, we have a family diaspora, which is to say that people will move away from their families of origin, which is bizarre and anti-instinctual. People are choosing to live geographically distant from their families of origin because they have passions…they have a career.” There is very little acknowledgement of the economic constraints families face in being forced to live apart from their relations. The implication is that, once again, mothers are making selfish choices to the detriment of their children.
She also completely fails to mention the critical importance of unrelated helpers in our evolutionary past (at least 23% of infant care in Agta society). If you are going to make the argument that what is natural is best for babies, and that we should all be leaning into our evolved instincts, then you need to also acknowledge that our instinct has always been to mother within extended networks of helpers, both related and unrelated. In fact, if Sarah Hrdy is right, and humans are actually “cooperative breeders “ (as I have written about here) then a mother’s drive to have help in caring for her babies is just as strong as her drive to remain close. Mothers in our evolutionary past were busy digging tubers, processing food, building shelters, and keeping themselves and their families alive! Sure, they were probably in close physical proximity to their children more than a working mother today, but they certainly weren’t sitting on the floor playing Legos, giving their children their full and undivided attention 24/7. That kind of mothering is a post-industrial invention, and there is no evidence to suggest that it is in any way necessary for the healthy psychological development of your child. I fail to see how, in the modern context, handing your child off to a trusted nanny or friend is any different from what the Agta do.
Critics will argue that there is a world of difference between being physically near your child throughout the day, even if you are only doing 25% of the daytime active caregiving, versus being away at an office for eight hours. Being away for that long muts surely be harmful and unnatural?
This is an empirical question, and one that has been well-studied, and if Komisar were scientifically serious she would address it head-on. We don’t need to do things the way that the hunter-gatherers do in order to guarantee our children’s psychological well-being, even though I think a lot of mothers would like to do things this way, because many of us enjoy breastfeeding and being physically close to our babies. There’s a big difference between saying: wouldn’t it be nice for moms to have the option to work in close physical proximity to their children (as I often advocate for) versus saying that spending too much time away from them does inevitable, long-term psychological damage.
The largest, longitudinal study on this topic ever done in the US context, was conducted by the NiCHD and published in 2006. This was a high-quality study of thousands of children in various caregiving arrangements and was conducted by a team of highly-qualified child development experts. The conclusion was that “children who were cared for exclusively by their mothers did not develop differently than those who were also cared for by others.” Furthermore, “the features of the family and of children’s experiences in their families proved, in general, to be stronger and more consistent predictors of child development than did any aspect of childcare.”
In other words, the quality of your relationship with your child is much more important than the amount of time you spend with them. That much is solidly supported by the data. Even if you work a full work week, you can spend quality time with your children in the mornings, evenings and on weekends. Erica says that “quality time is a narcissistic fantasy” but the data strongly suggest otherwise. If you have a loving relationship with your child, then you don’t need to be with them 24-7 for them to feel the support of that relationship.
There is, however, a bit of nuance worth acknowledging. According to the study, “children who averaged 30 hours of child care or more each week during their first 4 years were somewhat more likely to show problem behaviors in kindergarten, according to caregiver reports (but not according to home reports).” However, “time spent in child care did not predict clinical levels of behavior problems of psychopathy,” which is what Erica is claiming (and we will dig into this more in this series). But, the researchers emphasize, “Once again, family features were stronger predictors of children’s social behavior and development than was the quantity of childcare.”
Take that, Erica.
I hope you enjoyed this piece. Stay tuned for more debunking.
Next up: Can fathers be full-time primary caregivers? Have we taken away men’s purpose in life, which is to hunt and protect? Is the reason why men are depressed because we make them nurture too much, which lowers their testosterone and libido?
Elena, I love your work but this is misguided. By arguing against mothers as primary nurturers, you’re both ignoring the neuroscience behind our changing brains being uniquely designed to care for babies, and trumpeting the misogynist (and neoliberal) ideology that women are only valuable or respectable if they don’t act like mothers (ie. sensitive and nurturing.) The renowned Italian neuroscientist Lisa Mosconi has written: “When women become pregnant, the brain’s very architectural design and internal connectivity are all recalibrated; a neural overhaul to equip a new mother with some nearly superhuman abilities: the precision to distinguish her own child among a sea of faces; an enhanced auditory sense to detect the softest of whimpers; the unparalleled capacity to empathize with her baby, comprehending their needs and emotions based solely on non-verbal cues.”
I don’t see how advocating for mothers, or trying to push policy (or relatives and friends) in the direction of *more* support, is achieved by saying that what we do—what we’re biologically designed to do—is actually not true. Or shouldn’t be emphasized. Or even asked of us. Or worst of all: not viewed as beneficial. Disparaging the research of mother-infant co-regulation is doing a disservice not only to mothers and babies, but to progressive society in general. Truly right-wing politicians and pundits will use any dismissal of the science to say “See. The first three years don’t actually matter. Why fund them.” If moms are stressed and asking for support? It’s their fault. They should just chill out /ignore or leave their child. A woman leaving her baby with strangers or alone in the dark sends her body reeling? "Oh, she’s just hysterical." (Sorry, the research shows this aversion is ingrained.)
It’s hugely convenient to the patriarchy (and late-stage capitalism) to pretend that these critical years don't matter. Whether it’s men on the neoliberal left who think the solution is for babies to attend 8+ hours of daycare with underpaid staff doing this inconvenient-to-effecient-markets work so their wives can get back to raking in more dough, OR men on the religious conservative right who believe an isolated mother can do all the cooking, cleaning, care work, and never complain because they’re “paying for everything”. (Again, this other end is flat out abuse—as you rightly point out—but it’s *so obscenely* far from where we are today in most WEIRD societies.)
Woman shouldn’t have to have their babies literally pulled out of their arms while crying by a daycare worker, so they can have a friend group or “be socialized.” And woman shouldn’t have to play with them all day in isolation because there are no other kids or moms around in the neighborhood (as being a full-time mom is increasingly rare.)
Parents need a third option: a way to raise our children in community as HG populations do. A way to be able to remain around our kids AND other mothers, playmates, and helpers. Whether this is having a work/living space daycare hybrid, or mass ECE workers, midwives, nurses and nannies to support mothers at home. This can be achieved in the same way we fund our military (extensively). Tons of funding, training, and selecting those best suited to the job—just as the military selects for skill and endurance.
Because these years matter. They are critical for building healthy adults. We need to start putting forth solutions to the lack of village, not dismiss the importance of mothering in our early years.
It’s critical that—rather than be useful idiots for the whitewashing of attachment science—we instead highlight this research to show our policymakers why they should fund these years. Raising healthy, stress-resilient children requires a tremendous amount of time, attention, emotional regulation skill, and knowledge. Another neuroscientist once put it to me frankly: “In the first three years, expect them to need you intensely.”
You’re right about proximity for breastfeeding, but the first 3 years matter for other reasons. Relative to other mammals, the human species is born prematurely in order for our large heads to fit through the birth canal. The reason that 0-3 is known in neuroscience as “infancy” is because it’s a time when a million neural connections are built every second and wire in response to the relational stimuli in the environment: how negative or positive, secure or insecure they are.
What we know today, due to advances in neuroimaging technology, is that attuned and responsive mothering in these years affects the functioning of the HPA-axis as well as the brain’s stress alarm bell, the amygdala. Reliable mother-infant co-regulation is critical for building early brain architecture. This presence wires neurons toward an adaptive response to stress for life. The academic literature illustrates how a prompt and warm response to a baby’s cries builds stress resiliency by activating the oxytocin system (and building/strengthening it when these responses are repeated.) This system—a “cascade” of oxytocin followed by dopamine, serotonin, endorphins and GABA—is crucial for mental health and recovery from external stressors. It's essential to bring babies back down to physiological homeostasis, where mitochondria and telomeres are no longer being damaged.
Of course, a father, grandmother, and even a nanny can do all the above. But an attuned mother is highly-credentialed for the job. She was made for it. Given a breast pad soaked in a mother’s milk versus another woman’s, an infant will turn toward the mother’s. There is biology underpinning a baby’s preference for the mother. Again, this isn’t just attachment "theory” as you have said before, this is shown in the academic literature out of Yale University’s Child Study Center, the University of Toronto’s SickKids’ Infant and Early Mental Health Promotion, and a litany of other prolific research centres.
BUT. The above is time intensive and energy sucking. No one advocating for mothers says they should do this all alone .. in isolation .. with no help. Even Komisar. She often laments the lost community of other moms to raise our babies in community with. And far from saying that “only mothers” can do this, she consistently speaks of a hierarchy of care, with the “best option” being the mother, then father, grandparent, nanny—but yes, placing daycare at the bottom due to the low ratio of caregivers, as well as the long hours away from the mother.
Yes, she’s often harsh, but she does this to push back on a society that guilts mothers (at best) or mocks, sneers at and derides mothers (at worst) back into the workforce or relegates them to lower class or lower intelligence if they're merely "caregivers.” There’s no denying that moms are chronically ridiculed in popular media. And I’ve heard from so many whose own parents say things ranging from them staying at home being “the dumbest decision,” “lazy,” or “anti-feminist.” That last one is huge. It’s as potent as calling someone racist. And it stings hard. These women are all leftist, Democrats, and big L liberals. Erica’s work (and popularity) is merely pushback to this. She sits on the other side of the pendulum, trying—almost in isolation—to illustrate to women that they shouldn’t have to go back to work in order to maintain respect from a society that increasingly has less and less respect for mothering ... even when the science overwhelmingly supports its importance.
Lastly, to your comment on the NYT piece which you continue to note was “great.” That piece was dangerously wrong. Telling parents to ignore their children runs counter to over 30 years of cutting-edge research on brain development. When a parent in a nuclear household is at home alone with a baby, habitually disengaging with that child is not good. In our Western context, there are no relatives or alloparents to jump in—as there would be in these HG societies—and that lack of engagement, if prolonged, significantly harms a child. Contrary to popular belief, we don’t have the brain parts to “self-soothe” during infancy: Babies need the voice, eye contact, smell, skin, etc of a loving caregiver in order to be soothed—wiring this oxytocin system in a healthy way. Not having an attuned parent for these vulnerable first months and years impedes healthy limbic development. We know babies breathe better, pump blood better, and sleep better when held. These interactions are not only critical for the early architecture of the limbic system (which includes the amygdala, hippocampus, hypothalamus—regions responsible for the functioning of neuropeptides and hormones), they also help wire the prefrontal cortex, which pilots our emotional regulation and governs impulse control.
I suggest your readers brush up on “serve and return” interactions out of Harvard’s Center on the Developing Child. These vital social interactions are necessary for humans to thrive. So advising parents to ignore their children in the West should not be celebrated.
When a mother in HG societies “ignores” her child, the community steps in. An older child entertains them, another mother picks them up. But in a Western household, increasingly with fewer children and relatives inside, parents ignoring their babies (effectively leaving them without these critical brain-building serve and return interactions) is borderline cruel. Mother’s should not be faced with the horrible decision between their own health and that of their child. But the burden of a burnt-out parent should not be placed on a vulnerable infant who can not survive without attuned care; it should be placed on society. It should be a call to action for politicians, civil servants, family members, friends, and neighbours. Parents need more help, but more daycare—and more separation from the mother or family—is not the answer.
I feel the same way about Komisar. I had to laugh when I listened to an interview she did in which she claimed to have an unusual amount of empathy. I think she comes off as a bully, and that's coming from a stay-at-home Mom!