Komisar also says repeatedly in her book and elsewhere that mothers have lost empathy for their children, implying that before the advent of modern feminism mothers were more sensitive and attuned.
When I talk to my Grandma (she's 85) about how she was raised and about how she parented, it's obvious that children today are treated with more empathy than ever. My grandma was spanked and slapped at home AND at school (this was considered acceptable). My grandma smacked her kids in the face from the time they were toddlers because that's what all the Moms did! "Sleep training" wasn't in the lexicon but that was because parents just left their kids to cry and nobody found it unusual. Notions of sensitive and gentle parenting, and the concept of cosleeping, were not accepted. In my grandma's day, very few mothers breastfed either. Yet there was no wave of kids born from the '50s - '70s with ADHD.
I think this part in your series is one of the most needed on the heels of this interview. As someone who was diagnosed and medicated for years with ADHD... in my early 30's I invested in testing with a Functional MD. I was diagnosed with severe intestinal permeability (aka leaky gut), something that until only recently was considered a "non-thing" by traditional medicine.
Simultaneously that year my car broke down and I was forced to bike everywhere. I was privileged enough to make radical changes to my diet, while getting ridiculous amounts of exercise and lo and behold... I went off all ADHD meds with zero blowback. I have been med free for 15 years.
This is just my story, and I'm not making broad claims about others. I was compelled to share this here however, because for me the "environment that pulled the trigger" was not my mother. My body was overburdened by a diverse toxic load, and my gut/ brain axis was all in disarray. It has also uniquely provided me with a much healthier frame around how I view my parenting... one I wish I could share more with other mommas.
Honestly, I think the type of work Komisar apparently does is based in the usual human problem of wanting to control the uncontrollable. And for when someone chooses to put themselves in the public sphere, that is a harsh burden on their own offspring (I don’t know whether Komisar does or not, and I’m thinking here all the mummy content creators as well as people who put themselves forward as experts).
I did all the “right things” with my eldest son, from homebirth, cosleeping, extended breastfeeding to organic food, loads of art, treeclimbing etc. He didn’t go to nursery and gamboled about in the countryside with his siblings until he started school, where he was an entirely normal child until mid-adolescence. Lest this all sound too try-hard, I did these things because I absolutely delighted in his company and it all came easily to me. Being present, attuned and interested brought me great joy, and we were, frankly, a superbly functional unit. I worked too, so it wasn’t as if I focused my entire life around him. I really was what sounds like Komisar’s ideal “be this mother and your kid will be fine” person.
And my son, now 22, has a whole host of issues inc undiagnosed but extremely likely ADHD.
So my point is, we have way less control than we think we do, and we can do all the “right” (or indeed “wrong”) things, by whatever metrics society measures that and/or we do ourselves, and our children are still unique individuals whose neurobiology, genetic etc etc interact witu external environmental factors interact in cascades of complexity. Science is going to have to come up with far more sophisticated tools than it currently has in order to measure all of that and to find causes for things such as ADHD. In the meantime, I would personally love it if we could just level with each other and admit: parenting is hardest thing most of us ever do, and pretending any one of us has all the answers is ridiculous.
This is exactly it. In Erica’s worldview we have total control. She even says it explicitly at one point: “we are the architects of our own lives!” I understand why some people find that comforting or empowering but it’s just not true, and the problem is that then everything becomes a personal failing or responsibility- and the implications for mothers are the worst. It’s funny that she feels this way as the mother of 3 because personally I have never felt so out of control since having children. They are their own people. Which is not to say that parenting does not matter. But it’s a small piece of a bigger puzzle.
Also, I wanted to say: I’ve been musing on this this morning in a whole new way, after literal years - YEARS - of obsessing about my son’s wellbeing, which I have sometimes likened to a kind of virus, a colonisation of my own selfhood. (By which I mean, my sensitivity towards him means that the boundaries are very blurry, and especially when he is anxious/depressed/lonely/in mid-level crisis, I literally feel that in my own body.) Because I think this is the flipside, right, to parenting that styles itself “attuned, sensitive” etc - that we unknowingly construct an identity around that behaviour, and when our child acts in ways that do not seem congruent with what we have “given” them, that causes terrible pain and possibly a serious identity crisis.
At least, that has been my experience. I can see now that as well as having made parenting choices because I genuinely believed they were in my childrens’ best interests, I was also trying to fix the outcome, and I was extremely, heavily, possibly even unhealthily invested in the outcome.
I’m not arguing here for a return to practices that I personally believe to be harmful, to the parent if not the child. An awful lot of what has been handed down as accepted parenting wisdom looks like casual cruelty from some angles, and certainly, the one and only time I tried sleep training, I felt damaged in some profound way, as though I’d compromised my humanity by wilfully inflicting suffering on my son. But most of us are caught up in reactivity and the pendulum swing to giving over our entire being to a child with no expectation of any kind of result, and maintaining a healthy relationship with them as they grow and with ourselves… that seems to me, from my vantage point, a very, very tall order. I aspire to it and fail at it at some level every single day.
We are always going to be invested in the outcome of our parenting, of course. I doubt that parents who physically or otherwise harm their children are less invested than those of us who lavish attention on them; that’s just a different way of orienting to the issue. But I also think that there is tremendous psychological; even, if you wanna go there, psycho-spiritual, danger in giving over our responsibility as an adult to a child in the ways that the kind of parenting Komisar seems to point towards. It potentially breeds co-dependency as a by-product, and that is a whole mess that no one should wish to inflict upon a child, let alone ourselves. Co dependency is not, in my book, love.
I parented (mothered) my kids exactly as you describe Jo and as Erica recommends. My eldest has just been assessed as having ADHD symptoms at university, aged 18. The key missing piece for me here is that even though I managed to pull it together enough to parent in the best way I possibly could, which meant meeting all my child's needs and being present etc, due to having no help, I did not feel safe in a motherhood space. For example, if I fell over and passed out at home, no one would know until 8pm when my husband came home from work and my kids would be left screaming all day. Or if I was ill, there was no one to look after the kids and let me sleep and recover, so I had to somehow continue to function. This meant I was highly stressed all the time, in a state of crisis and exhaustion, with a high-needs baby, even though on the outside I probably didn't look it. It is not biologically normal to have a mother in a permanent state of stress, and I'm sure that this affected my son's brain-wiring - even though it wasn't something that was picked up by, or visible to the outside world. We are the most stressed and stretched generation of parents. As well as going through an epic matrescence transformation, I was coming to terms with the devastating fact that, it didn't matter how desperate for help I was, no one (mother or mother in law) was coming, so there was grief as well. A baby and mother in traditional society, with help and company, would presumably be buffered from these intense highs and lows. So the 'blame' should not be with the mother herself, but with the conditions in which we are left to mother in the West.
Also, in Gabor Mate's interview with Mel Robbins he says that the genetic component of ADHD is the level of sesitivity of the child. Some children are born more sensitive than others, so they feel and process things more deeply and are more likely to be affected by ADHD. Not sure if this is true for others but my son is a deep and sensitive one.
oodness, thank you so much for sharing this. I’m weeping in public as I type because it landed so precisely.
I think you articulate something very important here.
Since my son’s initial crash I have probably examined every interaction I can remember having with him prior to then, searching for an accurate, honest perspective on how much responsibility I have for it. It was a phase of reckoning and, painful though it was and not a little ridiculous at times - was his unhappiness “caused” by exposure to my postnatal depression after the birth of his younger brother who, I worried at the time, was literally suckling on my misery? When was the seemingly insignificant moment I wounded him through too much of something, not enough of something else? etc etc – I have come to know, and accept myself, better for it.
Currently I feel that my assumption that I, as one person, am powerful enough to create something like ADHD in another being, no matter how involved I am in their life, is naïve and even egotistical. The interplay between humans, our fellow humans and other beings; between our systems and structures and environments, is complex, nuanced and ever-changing. That’s the case for all of us no matter our parenting choices and circumstances. And yet, I feel there is something to what you say, and wonder about Komisar’s own background as regards this.
Because, yes, my son was highly sensitive from birth, would not sleep unless moving or in-arms (or on-breast) - and also had what I can only describe as a powerful current running through him that meant he was physically strong, mentally alert and emotionally aware from an early age. I adapted to his needs, took enormous joy in his uniqueness and beauty, and found (still find) great meaning in the opportunity offered every day to learn about myself – and the world - through being his mother. I choose to orient towards it as an honour. And, I recognise a seemingly bottomless well of rage and grief around the utter lack of support or even interest in supporting me (us) from society at large. I resourced myself well and worked hard at parenting, and mostly kept a lid on my rage when my children were young; was only dimly aware of it simmering away, but that lid blew off when I hit menopause – which coincided with my son’s crash. My resources pretty much ran out, which is really the point, I think – we’re not islands. I come from a long line of hardworking, chronically under-resourced women, and I honestly believe that could only be kept at bay for a finite period of time.
This would all make a great research topic were I a scientist, or indeed if scientific funding valued parenthood: What are the links between maternal support and their offspring’s wellbeing and how does that manifest? And also, it is so obvious that I want to scream, because surely we’ve known forever – certainly since ADHD was part of the conversation – that MOTHERS NEED SUPPORT, and that does not look like YouTubers, online forums or self-appointed experts spewing opinions.
Wishing you and your son well, and, contrary to my disparagement of online environments, thanks for helping me to unpick some of the tangle.
Interesting; thanks for filling in the gaps here - I didn’t care to look Komisar up hence not knowing whether she actually has children (and remembering that Gina Ford, whose methods were the debating point for my generation, does not….). But honestly it makes sense to me that someone might come to the conclusion that doing x produces y result in terms of parenting: that is the basic worldview we all operate in until we’re disabused. Also, parenting is a path of maturation if that’s our orientation. If we’re interested in questions like: who am I? What is it to be alive? What is “other” and how do I relate to that concept? it’s an amazing growth opportunity. Those questions have to cede to the imposition of control and authoritarianism for some, which in my view is about fear. Chuck in some pseudoscience, a dose of self-belief and social media and you’ve got a powerful combination.
I dread to think how this affects and will affect her actual children. The pressure on them to be walking adverts for Komisar’s worldview, writ large of course across the internet, will surely be very difficult, especially as they get older. It’s easy to think you are getting a certain result when children are little, simply because of what you’re doing. When they’re out there in the world, making their own choices - which must include unwise, irrational, and downright stupid decisions as that is how humans learn - then it’s a whoooole other ballgame for mothers.
This whole “we make our lives” thing is nothing but the neoliberal agenda. And it is absolutely everywhere, this worldview, woven into the highest levels of government and inculcated into us so thoroughly that we willingly replicate it in the ways we relate to the world. As the antithesis of actual relationship it’s a death knell for attunement, sensitivity and responsiveness, ironically for Komisar’s shtick!
Thank you Thank you Thank you for this labor. I was a stay at home mom, and even I was aware many day care providers were providing better care than I was some days, and then many other mothers I witnessed. Child care experts have a level of expertise... they have the 10,000 hours everyone talks about to achieve mastery. Being good with children is a skill. Like any other skill it is developed with time, intention and practice. This isn't a slight to mothers, but let's be real. Even for a very engaged mom there's a learning curve. I was bad at being a mom before I became good at it. Certain aspects of being with children took me years to master. During the years I spent at home with my kids, we ran into all kinds of other kids at museums and parks, some with their parents, others with nannies, and even more on day care field trips. Seven out of 10 times the nannies and the day care providers we more patient and more developmentally appropriate to children than the parents were. It was also clear many of the professional child care providers really liked children. The parents... not so much. Just because you got pregnant doesn't mean you like children.
The idea that even stay at home moms must give their children 100% of their attention and not even do chores is beyond insane. How would that work with more than one kid? What about moms before modern technology? It’s just so dumb.
I saw the DOAC episode and i began to believe some of it because she’s “an expert”. But wow you changed my whole perspective and some previous beliefs/understandings of these matters. Thank you for speaking up! And against those that discuss things from a one-sided narrative!
Well I think I reached 5k people with this post (versus EK's 1.5 million) but I do what I can! Thanks for reading. We'd all do well to have some healthy skepticism, even from "experts."
Thank you again for continuing to do the work to refute Komisar's bad science and sweeping generalizations. I'm horrified by the comments on the YouTube video, which largely seem to be in support of her pseuo-psychoanalysis and reinforce the idea that women who go back to work are the absolute worst. ARGHHHHH!
I think it would be useful in this discussion to differentiate between actual ADHD, and those who exhibit ADHD symptoms. Essentially, innate vs acquired.
At puberty, I developed a host of symptoms that got me put on ritalin, when what I actually needed was treatment for anxiety and heavy menstruation, likely iron deficiency (my main symptom was an inability to focus). I do believe that C-PTSD influenced what I characterize as a misdiagnosis. My familial dysfunction helped foster chronic anxiety, and this convenient ADHD diagnosis led to an easy excuse not to examine our internal family system. We were told at the time that this was a physiological problem, pure and simple, and that was and is not true. I am sure I am not alone in this.
So while I don't agree that genetics are completely unrelated in all cases, I personally experienced what it is like to be labeled with ADHD and have that (wrong) diagnosis actually have roots in my poor physical health AND poor familial health from my parents, and in my case, my mother in particular. There is something useful in taking those cases into consideration.
Hi Elena, I am a School Psychologist. A major part of my job is identifying kids with educational disabilities such as ADHD and Autism. I love the way you explained the nature vs nurture element of these disabilities. I found the way you explain epigenetics aka genes loading the trigger and the environment pulling it both accurate and digestible. Your take aligns with both the research and my anecdotal experiences over the last 10 years. I also completely agree with how severe adverse childhood experiences (aka Abuse, neglect, and extreme poverty) can contribute to these disorders, but not parenting choices such as choosing high quality child care or not reading enough bedtime stories. Kudos to you! Keep this information coming.
I was recommended that Komisar video recently (my son is around 2). Having been partly down the mildly anxious -> granola mom/attachment parent -> anti-science pipeline (maybe "pipeline" is the wrong metaphor here, it's more like a whole sewage system), I thought I had a good BS detector for this stuff. For whatever reason though her words were really laser-pointed right at my worst insecurities as a mother. Maybe part of it is that, as an anxious mom, I see a lot of room for more research to better understand these topics, ex. the impact of full-time daycare in early childhood, but like everything these days it's framed as this like, life-or-death polarity. It feels like there's no end to the people looking to fill that empty research space with opportunistic fear-mongering--which then sparks this well-intentioned, but equally science-blind, oppositional reaction that, "Everything is fine and the kids are great, actually!" As a layman and regular curious person, it's stressful.
Very glad to find your blog which seems to want to live on the edges of these problems, which is where we always find the truth (or at least the right questions to ask).
(Also, thank you for linking the article about hyper-curiosity theory. I read the first paragraph and will probably get back to it after I finish the first paragraphs of these ten other tabs I have open...)
No clue who this Erica is, and I am thankful to the algorithm for it, but still pausing sometimes to read/hear your responses.
I (as a mother who is on the socials a bit too much) do find this statement "lack of evidence is not evidence" confusing sometimes. For example, doctor says, teething does not cause fevers, yet every mother I've ever spoken to disagrees. So I need specifics which I know is hard in short form..but.. does the science that exists not show causation, or has the science not been done? Were results inconclusive or methods weak? Or is it just factually physiologically impossible?
I think it's easy to listen to anyone's version of correlation, causation, and logic? if you don't have a clear and confident framework in which you review such statements. So thank you for providing some long form!
Patient-centered research (medical research reflecting the patient’s priorities) is rarely an investigator’s priority.
I used to manage an ASD pediatric research cohort. Parents are generally concerned with regression. Guess what the majority of PIs are completely uninterested in studying? Guess what is NOT the priority of the funders, whether private or public?
There’s SO many examples of this. Literature on primary lactation failure and prevention of lactation failure is another example.
Science *funding* (I wouldn’t say science itself) is highly, highly politicized. It’s not that the scientific method doesn’t work, given sufficient time, but there’s major gaps in our knowledge because the funding isn’t there or the investigators who might study these gaps simply don’t exist. If you want to be really radicalized here, look at the examples of intentional fraud in Alzheimer’s research… and look at the *incentives* for fraud…. there’s, um, a lot of them.
This is an inaccurate overview of the "refrigerator mother" theory and the evidence for and criticisms of it. And there actually do not appear to be any studies "overturning" or "debunking" the refrigerator mother theory -- I notice that you, like pretty much everyone else who claims it's debunked, do not provide a citation. The "refrigerator mother" theory was marginalized for two reasons: 1) Pressure from parent activist groups, and 2) The vaccines-cause-autism hypothesis.
This essay is about a lot more than just the refrigerator mother theory (I go into all the major theories of autism, including genetics, vaccines, diet, and other environmental and pharmaceutical possibilities), but I give an overview -- with citations and a discussion of the neuroscience on brain development that supports it, as well as the issues with it -- here:
I think diet plays a large role in the development of ADHD, which of course is a societal and cultural problem too. I wrote an article years back on the ADHD/diet connection here (I did not write the title): https://grist.org/article/2011-03-28-adhd-its-the-food-stupid/
*mic drop* to Erica. Sharing her views which aren’t evidence based like she has on such a large public platform & spreading misinformation is infuriating & down right wrong! Elena, I wish you could go on diary of a CEO to set the record straight
Komisar also says repeatedly in her book and elsewhere that mothers have lost empathy for their children, implying that before the advent of modern feminism mothers were more sensitive and attuned.
When I talk to my Grandma (she's 85) about how she was raised and about how she parented, it's obvious that children today are treated with more empathy than ever. My grandma was spanked and slapped at home AND at school (this was considered acceptable). My grandma smacked her kids in the face from the time they were toddlers because that's what all the Moms did! "Sleep training" wasn't in the lexicon but that was because parents just left their kids to cry and nobody found it unusual. Notions of sensitive and gentle parenting, and the concept of cosleeping, were not accepted. In my grandma's day, very few mothers breastfed either. Yet there was no wave of kids born from the '50s - '70s with ADHD.
I think this part in your series is one of the most needed on the heels of this interview. As someone who was diagnosed and medicated for years with ADHD... in my early 30's I invested in testing with a Functional MD. I was diagnosed with severe intestinal permeability (aka leaky gut), something that until only recently was considered a "non-thing" by traditional medicine.
Simultaneously that year my car broke down and I was forced to bike everywhere. I was privileged enough to make radical changes to my diet, while getting ridiculous amounts of exercise and lo and behold... I went off all ADHD meds with zero blowback. I have been med free for 15 years.
This is just my story, and I'm not making broad claims about others. I was compelled to share this here however, because for me the "environment that pulled the trigger" was not my mother. My body was overburdened by a diverse toxic load, and my gut/ brain axis was all in disarray. It has also uniquely provided me with a much healthier frame around how I view my parenting... one I wish I could share more with other mommas.
Honestly, I think the type of work Komisar apparently does is based in the usual human problem of wanting to control the uncontrollable. And for when someone chooses to put themselves in the public sphere, that is a harsh burden on their own offspring (I don’t know whether Komisar does or not, and I’m thinking here all the mummy content creators as well as people who put themselves forward as experts).
I did all the “right things” with my eldest son, from homebirth, cosleeping, extended breastfeeding to organic food, loads of art, treeclimbing etc. He didn’t go to nursery and gamboled about in the countryside with his siblings until he started school, where he was an entirely normal child until mid-adolescence. Lest this all sound too try-hard, I did these things because I absolutely delighted in his company and it all came easily to me. Being present, attuned and interested brought me great joy, and we were, frankly, a superbly functional unit. I worked too, so it wasn’t as if I focused my entire life around him. I really was what sounds like Komisar’s ideal “be this mother and your kid will be fine” person.
And my son, now 22, has a whole host of issues inc undiagnosed but extremely likely ADHD.
So my point is, we have way less control than we think we do, and we can do all the “right” (or indeed “wrong”) things, by whatever metrics society measures that and/or we do ourselves, and our children are still unique individuals whose neurobiology, genetic etc etc interact witu external environmental factors interact in cascades of complexity. Science is going to have to come up with far more sophisticated tools than it currently has in order to measure all of that and to find causes for things such as ADHD. In the meantime, I would personally love it if we could just level with each other and admit: parenting is hardest thing most of us ever do, and pretending any one of us has all the answers is ridiculous.
This is exactly it. In Erica’s worldview we have total control. She even says it explicitly at one point: “we are the architects of our own lives!” I understand why some people find that comforting or empowering but it’s just not true, and the problem is that then everything becomes a personal failing or responsibility- and the implications for mothers are the worst. It’s funny that she feels this way as the mother of 3 because personally I have never felt so out of control since having children. They are their own people. Which is not to say that parenting does not matter. But it’s a small piece of a bigger puzzle.
Also, I wanted to say: I’ve been musing on this this morning in a whole new way, after literal years - YEARS - of obsessing about my son’s wellbeing, which I have sometimes likened to a kind of virus, a colonisation of my own selfhood. (By which I mean, my sensitivity towards him means that the boundaries are very blurry, and especially when he is anxious/depressed/lonely/in mid-level crisis, I literally feel that in my own body.) Because I think this is the flipside, right, to parenting that styles itself “attuned, sensitive” etc - that we unknowingly construct an identity around that behaviour, and when our child acts in ways that do not seem congruent with what we have “given” them, that causes terrible pain and possibly a serious identity crisis.
At least, that has been my experience. I can see now that as well as having made parenting choices because I genuinely believed they were in my childrens’ best interests, I was also trying to fix the outcome, and I was extremely, heavily, possibly even unhealthily invested in the outcome.
I’m not arguing here for a return to practices that I personally believe to be harmful, to the parent if not the child. An awful lot of what has been handed down as accepted parenting wisdom looks like casual cruelty from some angles, and certainly, the one and only time I tried sleep training, I felt damaged in some profound way, as though I’d compromised my humanity by wilfully inflicting suffering on my son. But most of us are caught up in reactivity and the pendulum swing to giving over our entire being to a child with no expectation of any kind of result, and maintaining a healthy relationship with them as they grow and with ourselves… that seems to me, from my vantage point, a very, very tall order. I aspire to it and fail at it at some level every single day.
We are always going to be invested in the outcome of our parenting, of course. I doubt that parents who physically or otherwise harm their children are less invested than those of us who lavish attention on them; that’s just a different way of orienting to the issue. But I also think that there is tremendous psychological; even, if you wanna go there, psycho-spiritual, danger in giving over our responsibility as an adult to a child in the ways that the kind of parenting Komisar seems to point towards. It potentially breeds co-dependency as a by-product, and that is a whole mess that no one should wish to inflict upon a child, let alone ourselves. Co dependency is not, in my book, love.
I parented (mothered) my kids exactly as you describe Jo and as Erica recommends. My eldest has just been assessed as having ADHD symptoms at university, aged 18. The key missing piece for me here is that even though I managed to pull it together enough to parent in the best way I possibly could, which meant meeting all my child's needs and being present etc, due to having no help, I did not feel safe in a motherhood space. For example, if I fell over and passed out at home, no one would know until 8pm when my husband came home from work and my kids would be left screaming all day. Or if I was ill, there was no one to look after the kids and let me sleep and recover, so I had to somehow continue to function. This meant I was highly stressed all the time, in a state of crisis and exhaustion, with a high-needs baby, even though on the outside I probably didn't look it. It is not biologically normal to have a mother in a permanent state of stress, and I'm sure that this affected my son's brain-wiring - even though it wasn't something that was picked up by, or visible to the outside world. We are the most stressed and stretched generation of parents. As well as going through an epic matrescence transformation, I was coming to terms with the devastating fact that, it didn't matter how desperate for help I was, no one (mother or mother in law) was coming, so there was grief as well. A baby and mother in traditional society, with help and company, would presumably be buffered from these intense highs and lows. So the 'blame' should not be with the mother herself, but with the conditions in which we are left to mother in the West.
Also, in Gabor Mate's interview with Mel Robbins he says that the genetic component of ADHD is the level of sesitivity of the child. Some children are born more sensitive than others, so they feel and process things more deeply and are more likely to be affected by ADHD. Not sure if this is true for others but my son is a deep and sensitive one.
oodness, thank you so much for sharing this. I’m weeping in public as I type because it landed so precisely.
I think you articulate something very important here.
Since my son’s initial crash I have probably examined every interaction I can remember having with him prior to then, searching for an accurate, honest perspective on how much responsibility I have for it. It was a phase of reckoning and, painful though it was and not a little ridiculous at times - was his unhappiness “caused” by exposure to my postnatal depression after the birth of his younger brother who, I worried at the time, was literally suckling on my misery? When was the seemingly insignificant moment I wounded him through too much of something, not enough of something else? etc etc – I have come to know, and accept myself, better for it.
Currently I feel that my assumption that I, as one person, am powerful enough to create something like ADHD in another being, no matter how involved I am in their life, is naïve and even egotistical. The interplay between humans, our fellow humans and other beings; between our systems and structures and environments, is complex, nuanced and ever-changing. That’s the case for all of us no matter our parenting choices and circumstances. And yet, I feel there is something to what you say, and wonder about Komisar’s own background as regards this.
Because, yes, my son was highly sensitive from birth, would not sleep unless moving or in-arms (or on-breast) - and also had what I can only describe as a powerful current running through him that meant he was physically strong, mentally alert and emotionally aware from an early age. I adapted to his needs, took enormous joy in his uniqueness and beauty, and found (still find) great meaning in the opportunity offered every day to learn about myself – and the world - through being his mother. I choose to orient towards it as an honour. And, I recognise a seemingly bottomless well of rage and grief around the utter lack of support or even interest in supporting me (us) from society at large. I resourced myself well and worked hard at parenting, and mostly kept a lid on my rage when my children were young; was only dimly aware of it simmering away, but that lid blew off when I hit menopause – which coincided with my son’s crash. My resources pretty much ran out, which is really the point, I think – we’re not islands. I come from a long line of hardworking, chronically under-resourced women, and I honestly believe that could only be kept at bay for a finite period of time.
This would all make a great research topic were I a scientist, or indeed if scientific funding valued parenthood: What are the links between maternal support and their offspring’s wellbeing and how does that manifest? And also, it is so obvious that I want to scream, because surely we’ve known forever – certainly since ADHD was part of the conversation – that MOTHERS NEED SUPPORT, and that does not look like YouTubers, online forums or self-appointed experts spewing opinions.
Wishing you and your son well, and, contrary to my disparagement of online environments, thanks for helping me to unpick some of the tangle.
Interesting; thanks for filling in the gaps here - I didn’t care to look Komisar up hence not knowing whether she actually has children (and remembering that Gina Ford, whose methods were the debating point for my generation, does not….). But honestly it makes sense to me that someone might come to the conclusion that doing x produces y result in terms of parenting: that is the basic worldview we all operate in until we’re disabused. Also, parenting is a path of maturation if that’s our orientation. If we’re interested in questions like: who am I? What is it to be alive? What is “other” and how do I relate to that concept? it’s an amazing growth opportunity. Those questions have to cede to the imposition of control and authoritarianism for some, which in my view is about fear. Chuck in some pseudoscience, a dose of self-belief and social media and you’ve got a powerful combination.
I dread to think how this affects and will affect her actual children. The pressure on them to be walking adverts for Komisar’s worldview, writ large of course across the internet, will surely be very difficult, especially as they get older. It’s easy to think you are getting a certain result when children are little, simply because of what you’re doing. When they’re out there in the world, making their own choices - which must include unwise, irrational, and downright stupid decisions as that is how humans learn - then it’s a whoooole other ballgame for mothers.
This whole “we make our lives” thing is nothing but the neoliberal agenda. And it is absolutely everywhere, this worldview, woven into the highest levels of government and inculcated into us so thoroughly that we willingly replicate it in the ways we relate to the world. As the antithesis of actual relationship it’s a death knell for attunement, sensitivity and responsiveness, ironically for Komisar’s shtick!
Thank you Thank you Thank you for this labor. I was a stay at home mom, and even I was aware many day care providers were providing better care than I was some days, and then many other mothers I witnessed. Child care experts have a level of expertise... they have the 10,000 hours everyone talks about to achieve mastery. Being good with children is a skill. Like any other skill it is developed with time, intention and practice. This isn't a slight to mothers, but let's be real. Even for a very engaged mom there's a learning curve. I was bad at being a mom before I became good at it. Certain aspects of being with children took me years to master. During the years I spent at home with my kids, we ran into all kinds of other kids at museums and parks, some with their parents, others with nannies, and even more on day care field trips. Seven out of 10 times the nannies and the day care providers we more patient and more developmentally appropriate to children than the parents were. It was also clear many of the professional child care providers really liked children. The parents... not so much. Just because you got pregnant doesn't mean you like children.
The idea that even stay at home moms must give their children 100% of their attention and not even do chores is beyond insane. How would that work with more than one kid? What about moms before modern technology? It’s just so dumb.
I saw the DOAC episode and i began to believe some of it because she’s “an expert”. But wow you changed my whole perspective and some previous beliefs/understandings of these matters. Thank you for speaking up! And against those that discuss things from a one-sided narrative!
Well I think I reached 5k people with this post (versus EK's 1.5 million) but I do what I can! Thanks for reading. We'd all do well to have some healthy skepticism, even from "experts."
Thank you again for continuing to do the work to refute Komisar's bad science and sweeping generalizations. I'm horrified by the comments on the YouTube video, which largely seem to be in support of her pseuo-psychoanalysis and reinforce the idea that women who go back to work are the absolute worst. ARGHHHHH!
I think it would be useful in this discussion to differentiate between actual ADHD, and those who exhibit ADHD symptoms. Essentially, innate vs acquired.
At puberty, I developed a host of symptoms that got me put on ritalin, when what I actually needed was treatment for anxiety and heavy menstruation, likely iron deficiency (my main symptom was an inability to focus). I do believe that C-PTSD influenced what I characterize as a misdiagnosis. My familial dysfunction helped foster chronic anxiety, and this convenient ADHD diagnosis led to an easy excuse not to examine our internal family system. We were told at the time that this was a physiological problem, pure and simple, and that was and is not true. I am sure I am not alone in this.
So while I don't agree that genetics are completely unrelated in all cases, I personally experienced what it is like to be labeled with ADHD and have that (wrong) diagnosis actually have roots in my poor physical health AND poor familial health from my parents, and in my case, my mother in particular. There is something useful in taking those cases into consideration.
Hi Elena, I am a School Psychologist. A major part of my job is identifying kids with educational disabilities such as ADHD and Autism. I love the way you explained the nature vs nurture element of these disabilities. I found the way you explain epigenetics aka genes loading the trigger and the environment pulling it both accurate and digestible. Your take aligns with both the research and my anecdotal experiences over the last 10 years. I also completely agree with how severe adverse childhood experiences (aka Abuse, neglect, and extreme poverty) can contribute to these disorders, but not parenting choices such as choosing high quality child care or not reading enough bedtime stories. Kudos to you! Keep this information coming.
I was recommended that Komisar video recently (my son is around 2). Having been partly down the mildly anxious -> granola mom/attachment parent -> anti-science pipeline (maybe "pipeline" is the wrong metaphor here, it's more like a whole sewage system), I thought I had a good BS detector for this stuff. For whatever reason though her words were really laser-pointed right at my worst insecurities as a mother. Maybe part of it is that, as an anxious mom, I see a lot of room for more research to better understand these topics, ex. the impact of full-time daycare in early childhood, but like everything these days it's framed as this like, life-or-death polarity. It feels like there's no end to the people looking to fill that empty research space with opportunistic fear-mongering--which then sparks this well-intentioned, but equally science-blind, oppositional reaction that, "Everything is fine and the kids are great, actually!" As a layman and regular curious person, it's stressful.
Very glad to find your blog which seems to want to live on the edges of these problems, which is where we always find the truth (or at least the right questions to ask).
(Also, thank you for linking the article about hyper-curiosity theory. I read the first paragraph and will probably get back to it after I finish the first paragraphs of these ten other tabs I have open...)
No clue who this Erica is, and I am thankful to the algorithm for it, but still pausing sometimes to read/hear your responses.
I (as a mother who is on the socials a bit too much) do find this statement "lack of evidence is not evidence" confusing sometimes. For example, doctor says, teething does not cause fevers, yet every mother I've ever spoken to disagrees. So I need specifics which I know is hard in short form..but.. does the science that exists not show causation, or has the science not been done? Were results inconclusive or methods weak? Or is it just factually physiologically impossible?
I think it's easy to listen to anyone's version of correlation, causation, and logic? if you don't have a clear and confident framework in which you review such statements. So thank you for providing some long form!
Patient-centered research (medical research reflecting the patient’s priorities) is rarely an investigator’s priority.
I used to manage an ASD pediatric research cohort. Parents are generally concerned with regression. Guess what the majority of PIs are completely uninterested in studying? Guess what is NOT the priority of the funders, whether private or public?
There’s SO many examples of this. Literature on primary lactation failure and prevention of lactation failure is another example.
Science *funding* (I wouldn’t say science itself) is highly, highly politicized. It’s not that the scientific method doesn’t work, given sufficient time, but there’s major gaps in our knowledge because the funding isn’t there or the investigators who might study these gaps simply don’t exist. If you want to be really radicalized here, look at the examples of intentional fraud in Alzheimer’s research… and look at the *incentives* for fraud…. there’s, um, a lot of them.
This is an inaccurate overview of the "refrigerator mother" theory and the evidence for and criticisms of it. And there actually do not appear to be any studies "overturning" or "debunking" the refrigerator mother theory -- I notice that you, like pretty much everyone else who claims it's debunked, do not provide a citation. The "refrigerator mother" theory was marginalized for two reasons: 1) Pressure from parent activist groups, and 2) The vaccines-cause-autism hypothesis.
This essay is about a lot more than just the refrigerator mother theory (I go into all the major theories of autism, including genetics, vaccines, diet, and other environmental and pharmaceutical possibilities), but I give an overview -- with citations and a discussion of the neuroscience on brain development that supports it, as well as the issues with it -- here:
https://thecassandracomplex.substack.com/p/what-causes-autism
I think diet plays a large role in the development of ADHD, which of course is a societal and cultural problem too. I wrote an article years back on the ADHD/diet connection here (I did not write the title): https://grist.org/article/2011-03-28-adhd-its-the-food-stupid/
*mic drop* to Erica. Sharing her views which aren’t evidence based like she has on such a large public platform & spreading misinformation is infuriating & down right wrong! Elena, I wish you could go on diary of a CEO to set the record straight