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Dr. Erica Komisar

lines on the record: 181
first: 2025-03-03
most recent: 2025-03-03
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“You just said it. What if they have passions? What if they have a career? The problem is children do best in extended family situations, so you know you can have a fabulous career and move far away from your family. And when you're young and single, and I even call it single when you're married but don't have children, you're still really single. You know what I say to parents is that your life won't be so fabulous if you have children and you're not present for them physically and emotionally, particularly in the early years, because what happens is they break down and the expression goes that a parent is only as happy as their least happy child. And so there is no fabulous life if your children are breaking down. And that's what families are learning is that, you know, all of that freedom and all that fabulous me time comes at a cost if you have children.”
2025-03-03 · The Diary of a CEO · Child Attachment Expert: Hidden Dangers Of Daycare, It Might Be Causing Future Issues For Your Kid! Birth Rates Are Plummeting & Its Terrifying! Dr Erica Komisar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Away from their families of origin when they have children, which is very bizarre and anti instinctual, so the world's become a global place and we can move wherever we want, but doesn't it make common sense? Isn't it a reasonable plause that you would want to move closer to your extended family, even if there are pain in the neck, unless they're abusive? Because it provides you with support. It provides you with extended family support, but that's not what's happening. People are choosing to live geographically distant from their families of origin, and so it's making it harder for families. It's making it harder for women. It's making them feel more isolated.”
2025-03-03 · The Diary of a CEO · Child Attachment Expert: Hidden Dangers Of Daycare, It Might Be Causing Future Issues For Your Kid! Birth Rates Are Plummeting & Its Terrifying! Dr Erica Komisar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Interestingly yes and no to your question? People who have less economic resources are in general less isolated, but they are also isolated today. You have a lot of single mothers raising children not in an apartment with other family members who've had to move to other cities or countries to make a living who are really isolated. You know, again, I think it crosses socioeconomic lines. But with wealthier people, more affluent people, they're opting for isolation, many of them. They're buying big houses. They're living in the suburbs, or they're not wanting to lean on anyone, right? So we have what I call a family diaspora. It's really what it is, which is that people will move.”
2025-03-03 · The Diary of a CEO · Child Attachment Expert: Hidden Dangers Of Daycare, It Might Be Causing Future Issues For Your Kid! Birth Rates Are Plummeting & Its Terrifying! Dr Erica Komisar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“in history, in extended family circles. They weren't isolated. And today parents are very isolated. So you would have your mother staying with you or you'd have your sister staying with you or you'd live in a big house and there'd be people to support you. I started a nonprofit recently because I found that so many mothers, it's called attachment circles, so many mothers feel so isolated that dealing with the pain and the discomfort of mothering alone is too much for them. So there is that so we live in a very strange society where people are separate from one another and their own house is and apartments and they don't depend on one another because dependency is a bad word but there is also this issue of How are we producing such fragile youth that even the discomfort and the frustration of raising children is too much for them?”
2025-03-03 · The Diary of a CEO · Child Attachment Expert: Hidden Dangers Of Daycare, It Might Be Causing Future Issues For Your Kid! Birth Rates Are Plummeting & Its Terrifying! Dr Erica Komisar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That you have to sacrifice time and money? That if you want to raise healthy children, it's going to require discomfort and frustration and sacrifice. And what's interesting is that what's also happened is because we're raising our children in such a selfish, self centered environment. Young people are more fragile. They are more emotionally fragile. More of them have attachment disorders. They can't bear frustration. They can't bear pain. They can't bear sleeplessness. You know, the idea that you have to get a baby nurse because you can't get up in the middle of the night with your own baby, and that's become the norm in certain socioeconomic circles. I mean, so. Women and men.”
2025-03-03 · The Diary of a CEO · Child Attachment Expert: Hidden Dangers Of Daycare, It Might Be Causing Future Issues For Your Kid! Birth Rates Are Plummeting & Its Terrifying! Dr Erica Komisar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Decisions for ourselves, for our children, for our families. But when we turn away from those conflicts, we tend not to make good decisions, and those tend to have long-term consequences.”
2025-03-03 · The Diary of a CEO · Child Attachment Expert: Hidden Dangers Of Daycare, It Might Be Causing Future Issues For Your Kid! Birth Rates Are Plummeting & Its Terrifying! Dr Erica Komisar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The part of you that wants to do whatever you want to do, I want to go out to work, I want to make money, I want to be free. You know, and the other part of you that says wait a second, but my baby, my baby needs me. Look at my vulnerable baby, look how sad, look at the distress that my absence is causing that baby. So if we don't feel guilt, then our species is lost. We're lost. Now, excessive guilt is another thing. If you're a good enough mother or good enough father and you still feel guilty, then we call it anxiety. But for the most part, what I say makes a lot of women and men feel guilty. And again, I don't see that as a bad thing. And I think when we tell parents to turn away from their guilt instead of turning toward it, when we turn towards our internal conflicts, we tend to make better decisions.”
2025-03-03 · The Diary of a CEO · Child Attachment Expert: Hidden Dangers Of Daycare, It Might Be Causing Future Issues For Your Kid! Birth Rates Are Plummeting & Its Terrifying! Dr Erica Komisar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Guilt is a sign that your ego is functioning. It's a sign that the part of you, the part of your ego called the super ego can identify something that feels right and wrong. So if you look at a baby who's crying, who's your baby and you feel nothing, that means that there's a part of you that is dead inside. There's a part of you that is unempathic towards your own young. And we would say that that doesn't make that person a bad person. It makes that person someone who probably had some early trauma themselves, right? It means that they probably have some kind of attachment disorder where they can't be attuned to their baby's pain, right? So when you are guilty, it means you have internal conflict. It means two parts of you are struggling with each other.”
2025-03-03 · The Diary of a CEO · Child Attachment Expert: Hidden Dangers Of Daycare, It Might Be Causing Future Issues For Your Kid! Birth Rates Are Plummeting & Its Terrifying! Dr Erica Komisar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's an inconvenient truth to quote Al Gore. It's an inconvenient truth. Sometimes facts are an inconvenient truth. Just like climate change is an inconvenient truth. This is an inconvenient truth. It inconveniences people. It also makes people feel guilty. I don't believe that guilt is a bad feeling. I don't believe that guilt is a bad thing.”
2025-03-03 · The Diary of a CEO · Child Attachment Expert: Hidden Dangers Of Daycare, It Might Be Causing Future Issues For Your Kid! Birth Rates Are Plummeting & Its Terrifying! Dr Erica Komisar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, so the thing is, none of the books I write are based on opinion. So I'm very skittish about saying anything that isn't backed up with research. So everything that I write about and speak about is supported by research.”
2025-03-03 · The Diary of a CEO · Child Attachment Expert: Hidden Dangers Of Daycare, It Might Be Causing Future Issues For Your Kid! Birth Rates Are Plummeting & Its Terrifying! Dr Erica Komisar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Environment, they are different. Now, does that mean that a father can't raise a child and be a sensitive empathic nurture? It doesn't mean he can't take on that role, but if as a society we can't acknowledge the differences, then a father can't learn to be a sensitive empathic nurture, meaning these are instinctual behaviors. And so that infant, if that father is going to stay home with that baby, acknowledging the differences allows that father then to become a sensitive empathic nurture.”
2025-03-03 · The Diary of a CEO · Child Attachment Expert: Hidden Dangers Of Daycare, It Might Be Causing Future Issues For Your Kid! Birth Rates Are Plummeting & Its Terrifying! Dr Erica Komisar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And the baby cries, it was out of the UK this study. The baby cries and the father sleep through the baby's distress cries, but the mothers wake up right away. But with the rustling of leaves outside the window, the mothers sleep through it and the fathers wake up right away. Because the fathers are attuned to predatorial threat. So our nurturing hormones make us different. I mean, the fact that we can say that there are many things that are similar between women and men of course we're both intelligent, we can both be ambitious. But I think the idea that we want to kind of make everything the same when it's just not factual. It is the inconvenient truth that mothers and fathers nurturing hormones dictate that if they are healthy and they've been raised in a healthy”
2025-03-03 · The Diary of a CEO · Child Attachment Expert: Hidden Dangers Of Daycare, It Might Be Causing Future Issues For Your Kid! Birth Rates Are Plummeting & Its Terrifying! Dr Erica Komisar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Often little boys develop behavioral problems is what we're seeing, that they can't regulate their aggression because fathers help little boys, in particular but little girls too to regulate aggression. So when fathers aren't around, you'll often see little boys who are more impulsive, who are more aggressive. So the answer is fathers and mothers are both critical to the development of children, which is a very controversial thing to say today because if you're raised without one, you are missing a piece. But they're not the same. And they're not the same because our hormones dictate they're not the same. Fathers produce a hormone in great quantities called vasopressin. And what does it do? It helps fathers to protect their family. There was a study that was done where mothers and fathers lay in bed.”
2025-03-03 · The Diary of a CEO · Child Attachment Expert: Hidden Dangers Of Daycare, It Might Be Causing Future Issues For Your Kid! Birth Rates Are Plummeting & Its Terrifying! Dr Erica Komisar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“throwing the baby up in the air and tickling the baby and running after the baby in rough housing. And so that's important for a variety of reasons. First, it encourages things like exploration and risk taking, it encourages separation and fathers do this really important thing, which is they help the baby to learn to regulate certain emotions. So mothers help to regulate sadness, fear, distress. Fathers help to regulate excitement and aggression. So when fathers aren't in the house, when they're single mothers raising children without a father,”
2025-03-03 · The Diary of a CEO · Child Attachment Expert: Hidden Dangers Of Daycare, It Might Be Causing Future Issues For Your Kid! Birth Rates Are Plummeting & Its Terrifying! Dr Erica Komisar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So now, fathers, why are fathers important? So fathers also produce oxytocin, but it has a different effect on their brain. So for mothers oxytocin makes mothers sensitive empathic nurturers, very vigilant to the baby's distress. When fathers produce oxytocin, it comes from a different part of their brain, and it makes them more what we call playful tactile stimulators of babies. What does that sound like to you?”
2025-03-03 · The Diary of a CEO · Child Attachment Expert: Hidden Dangers Of Daycare, It Might Be Causing Future Issues For Your Kid! Birth Rates Are Plummeting & Its Terrifying! Dr Erica Komisar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Then babies don't learn how to regulate their emotions. The other thing that's important that mothers do is they buffer babies from stress by wearing them on their body for the first year and then by being as present as possible for three years they actually protect babies brains from cortisol, the stress hormone. So there is a hormone called oxytocin. It's the love hormone. And it is protective against cortisol. The more a mother nurtures with sensitive empathic nurturing, meaning when the baby cries the mother goes Oh sweetheart you know let me see the booboo let me kiss the booboo that actually raises the oxytocin in the baby's brain which then protects the baby from cortisol.”
2025-03-03 · The Diary of a CEO · Child Attachment Expert: Hidden Dangers Of Daycare, It Might Be Causing Future Issues For Your Kid! Birth Rates Are Plummeting & Its Terrifying! Dr Erica Komisar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“contact and eye contact and the soothing tone of Know when babies are born, they're born. Emotionally disjointed, think about sailing in the Atlantic. This is how baby's emotions go. They'll go from zero to sixty in three seconds with their emotions. And where we want to get babies is to sailing in the Caribbean, not flatlining, but we want them to be able to regulate their emotions, but they're not born that way. And so mothers, because they sued the baby from moment to moment when they're physically and emotionally present enough in the first three years, they help a baby to learn how to regulate their emotions. So by three years of age, eighty five percent of the right brain is developed.”
2025-03-03 · The Diary of a CEO · Child Attachment Expert: Hidden Dangers Of Daycare, It Might Be Causing Future Issues For Your Kid! Birth Rates Are Plummeting & Its Terrifying! Dr Erica Komisar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So in fact, in the book it talks about the difference between mothers and fathers, because that's an important question. And the reason I wrote about mothers is not because fathers are unimportant, but fathers are important in a different way. So there's a whole debate in society about this kind of idea of gender neutrality that mothers and fathers are interchangeable. But actually from an evolutionary perspective, as mammals, they're not interchangeable. They serve different functions. And those roles and those behaviors are connected to nurturing hormone. So mothers are really important for what we call sensitive empathic nurturing when children are infants and toddlers. That means that when children are in distress, mothers soothe babies and therefore regulate their emotions from moment to moment. Every time a mother soothes a baby with skin discomfort.”
2025-03-03 · The Diary of a CEO · Child Attachment Expert: Hidden Dangers Of Daycare, It Might Be Causing Future Issues For Your Kid! Birth Rates Are Plummeting & Its Terrifying! Dr Erica Komisar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I saw coming thirty years ago, and it was already, you know, so I have friends and colleagues like Jonathan Haid who says, oh, well, it didn't start till social media, and that's false because I was seeing this uptick. And if you really look, there was an uptick in mental illness in children going back decades. And it had everything to do with the shift in society towards self-centeredness, towards narcissism, towards individualism, towards me, me, me. And so, you know, and I always say that you don't have to have children, period, to have a satisfying life. But if you're going to have children, you need to be equipped to care for them because having children alone without really understanding what it means to care for them and being prepared to take on that responsibility is causing our Children to break down”
2025-03-03 · The Diary of a CEO · Child Attachment Expert: Hidden Dangers Of Daycare, It Might Be Causing Future Issues For Your Kid! Birth Rates Are Plummeting & Its Terrifying! Dr Erica Komisar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so, what that means is they're not born resilient. And today what's being projected onto babies is they can handle a lot, they can handle stress, they can handle separation, they can handle you going back to work after six weeks or three months and leaving them in daycare with strangers or, you know, and from an evolutionary perspective. Babies have always needed the physical skin to skin, contact with their mothers for the first year. Most parts of the world babies are worn on their mother's bodies because mothers perform a number of really important functions for babies that are biological functions based on our evolutionary need to provide our babies with what we call attachment security. So, you know, society took a turn and it's caused a lot of damage. I mean, this mental health crisis in children”
2025-03-03 · The Diary of a CEO · Child Attachment Expert: Hidden Dangers Of Daycare, It Might Be Causing Future Issues For Your Kid! Birth Rates Are Plummeting & Its Terrifying! Dr Erica Komisar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And also the feminist movement. Both of those movements, which had a tremendously positive impact on society in one way, also had a tremendously negative impact on society. When women decided that it was cool to go to work and to work full-time out of the home, you know, everybody cheered and said, great, you know, women have the same rights as men, and now everybody can be in the workforce and be independent and make money and do their own thing. The problem is that children were dropped. They were abandoned, and their needs, which are not needs that are going to shift because society shifts, because they have irreducible neurological emotional needs. So we know that babies are born neurologically and emotionally fragile.”
2025-03-03 · The Diary of a CEO · Child Attachment Expert: Hidden Dangers Of Daycare, It Might Be Causing Future Issues For Your Kid! Birth Rates Are Plummeting & Its Terrifying! Dr Erica Komisar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sometimes they'll come preventatively because they want to raise a healthy child and there's so much white noise in society, there's so much of misinformation. Our instincts are to lean into our children, our evolutionary drive is to create a feeling of safety and security for our children and to be as present as possible and to soothe them when they're in distress and to be there to teach them our values. But society took a turn. It took a turn in the, I suppose you could say going back to the Industrial Revolution. If I really want to go back, I'll say the Industrial Revolution was a time when women were forced into the workplace, into factories and cities. You know, they were separated from children for the first time. But really the turn that society took that I think has a lot to do with what's happening today is the me movement of the city.”
2025-03-03 · The Diary of a CEO · Child Attachment Expert: Hidden Dangers Of Daycare, It Might Be Causing Future Issues For Your Kid! Birth Rates Are Plummeting & Its Terrifying! Dr Erica Komisar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I have a very large pair and guidance practice because of the books that I write and the articles I write. I also write for the Wall Street Journal and other newspapers. So people find me through my writing and then they reach out for help. And so the parent guidance basically means people come to see me, either both parents or one parent because they have questions about their child's development or something's going wrong, their child's starting to develop symptoms and they don't want to medicate them and they want to understand what's really at the root cause of the issue. And so that's a good portion of my practice, but I also see individual patients for depression and anxiety. And I see couples and the joke about psychoanalysts is we're all specialists in depression and anxiety. But yeah, so I see individuals and couples, but a lot of parengidance.”
2025-03-03 · The Diary of a CEO · Child Attachment Expert: Hidden Dangers Of Daycare, It Might Be Causing Future Issues For Your Kid! Birth Rates Are Plummeting & Its Terrifying! Dr Erica Komisar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I saw this trend, I saw that we were abandoning our children for our own desires, for our careers, for material success, and there was a great deal of misunderstanding about the irreducible emotional needs of children.”
2025-03-03 · The Diary of a CEO · Child Attachment Expert: Hidden Dangers Of Daycare, It Might Be Causing Future Issues For Your Kid! Birth Rates Are Plummeting & Its Terrifying! Dr Erica Komisar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Years ago, I started practicing about thirty six years ago, but I was probably five years into my practice, and I was seeing that the families that were coming to see me had younger and younger children that were being diagnosed with very serious mental illnesses, and being medicated at a very young age, basically silencing their pain. And what I was observing in my practice is that those children who were doing the least well were the ones whose mothers were the least present in their lives, so their primary attachment figures were the least present in their lives. And so then I started looking at the research. I looked at all the neuroscience research since the 90s and all of the new research that had come out. I looked at the old detachment theories which have been around since the 60s and I looked at the epigenetic research, which was rather new too.”
2025-03-03 · The Diary of a CEO · Child Attachment Expert: Hidden Dangers Of Daycare, It Might Be Causing Future Issues For Your Kid! Birth Rates Are Plummeting & Its Terrifying! Dr Erica Komisar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I'm a psychoanalyst. I'm also a social worker. I started out as a social worker and then became a psychoanalyst. I'm also an author of books on parent guidance and parents education. And I've been in practice seeing patients. So the majority of my work is still seeing patients. I have a full time job of seeing patients. And as someone who is also a parent, I have three children of my own. So as a parent, as a clinician, as an author who has for the past 20 years been researching, and what I did is I collected research in epigenetics and attachment theory and neuroscience and wrote my first book Being There happened is I was seeing this uptick in mental illness in children and this is really how I got into it.”
2025-03-03 · The Diary of a CEO · Child Attachment Expert: Hidden Dangers Of Daycare, It Might Be Causing Future Issues For Your Kid! Birth Rates Are Plummeting & Its Terrifying! Dr Erica Komisar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Suicidal thoughts. So we have a problem. In the UK, it's one in six, in America it's one in five around the world, it's about one in five. That is a shocking figure. And so And the truth is we can do a great deal to prevent that. The idea that we are trying to put out fires without talking about what is the origin of these issues. The way that the mental health care system works now, it's like what I call cutting the grass. Children are medicated, which is basically just pain management. They're given CBT therapy, which again is just pain management. But why aren't we asking the important questions, which is where does emotional regulation originate? Where does it come from? When does it start? How do we foster development in children from a very young age to promote resilience?”
2025-03-03 · The Diary of a CEO · Child Attachment Expert: Hidden Dangers Of Daycare, It Might Be Causing Future Issues For Your Kid! Birth Rates Are Plummeting & Its Terrifying! Dr Erica Komisar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“for future mental health. Prioritization, we prioritize everything today other than our children. We prioritize our work, our careers, our material success, our personal desires and pleasures, but what we're not prioritizing is children. And that's a problem because if we don't prioritize them, they break down. They may break down at three. They may break down at eight or they may not break down till they're in adolescence, but eventually they break down. And prevention, there's so much that we can do. We have a mental health crisis now in the world. It varies to a certain degree in America. One in five children will not leave childhood without breaking down at some point, without developing a serious mental illness, anxiety, depression, ADHD, behavioral problems.”
2025-03-03 · The Diary of a CEO · Child Attachment Expert: Hidden Dangers Of Daycare, It Might Be Causing Future Issues For Your Kid! Birth Rates Are Plummeting & Its Terrifying! Dr Erica Komisar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like to think of it as three peas presence, prioritization, and prevention, and I'll go through each of them. My mission is to educate parents and policy makers and clinicians and educators about the fact that for children to be mentally healthy in the future, you have to be physically and emotionally present for them throughout childhood, but particularly in the two critical periods of brain development which are zero to three and nine to twenty five, which is adolescence. So in those two critical periods of brain development, particularly zero to three, much of a child's development depends on their environment and you are their environment. So I run around the world talking about the importance of physical and emotional presence, attachment security, attachment security is the foundation.”
2025-03-03 · The Diary of a CEO · Child Attachment Expert: Hidden Dangers Of Daycare, It Might Be Causing Future Issues For Your Kid! Birth Rates Are Plummeting & Its Terrifying! Dr Erica Komisar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Some myths that really have to be debunked about how to raise a healthy child, and the first is daycare is good for children for socialization. No, it's so bad for their brain, and it's been known to increase aggression, behavioral problems, attachment disorders because babies need their mothers for the first three years for emotional security. Fathers are important in a different way, and I'll go through all of that, but they're both critical because if you're raised without one, you are missing a piece. And then there's quality versus quantity time. Myth. You need to be there a quality of time as well as a quantity of time. You can't have a fabulous career and then come home and be present for your child on your time. It needs to be on their time and there's more.”
2025-03-03 · The Diary of a CEO · Child Attachment Expert: Hidden Dangers Of Daycare, It Might Be Causing Future Issues For Your Kid! Birth Rates Are Plummeting & Its Terrifying! Dr Erica Komisar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One in five children will not leave childhood without developing a serious mental illness, anxiety, depression, ADHD, behavioral problems, and what pisses me off, it's that we're not really educating or telling parents the truth as to why.”
2025-03-03 · The Diary of a CEO · Child Attachment Expert: Hidden Dangers Of Daycare, It Might Be Causing Future Issues For Your Kid! Birth Rates Are Plummeting & Its Terrifying! Dr Erica Komisar · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT