Debunking Erica Komisar’s Bad Science, Part 1

"Only moms can provide quality care for kids 0-3"

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?