The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
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
Mon, 03 Mar 2025
Erica Komisar is a clinical social worker, psychoanalyst, and parent guidance expert with over 30 years of private practice experience. She is the author of books such as, ‘Chicken Little the Sky Isn't Falling: Raising Resilient Adolescents in the New Age of Anxiety’. In this conversation, Erica and Steven discuss topics such as, how the mental health crisis is impacting children, how attachment disorders are created in childhood, the dangers of the falling birth rate, and how daycare may cause future issues for your kid. 00:00 Intro 02:21 Erica's Mission 08:12 Who Are Erica's Patients? 09:35 How Have Social Changes Influenced Parenting? 13:00 Is the Role of a Mother More Important Than That of a Father? 16:30 Why Are Fathers Important From a Biological Level? 23:20 Erica's Unpopular Ideas About Parenting 25:17 Family Diaspora: Raising Children Without Extended Family 27:31 Can Raising Children Away From Extended Family Be Justified? 28:30 Voluntary Childlessness 29:25 Attachment Disorders 33:40 How Do Attachment Disorders Manifest in Adulthood? 34:54 Choosing a Partner Based on Attachment Styles 36:20 Predicting Relationship Success Based on Attachment Styles 37:53 Does Having More Children Correlate With Neglect? 39:19 Decline in Birth Rates 41:23 What Is Unique About Relationships With Your Own Children? 43:12 What Contributes to Growing Infertility Among People? 46:45 How Did Erica Manage to Balance Work and Motherhood? 48:48 Should Fathers Be the Stay-at-Home Parent? 51:18 Harlow's Study on Rhesus Monkeys 53:38 The Challenge of Motherhood in Poor Socioeconomic Conditions 57:36 Does More Paid Leave Equal Better Childcare? 59:10 Connection Between Upbringing and Success in Adult Life 01:01:40 ADHD: Why Has It Risen So Much in the Past Decade? 01:07:40 We're Medicating ADHD Wrong 01:09:26 The Top Stressors We're Exposing Our Children To 01:11:29 Is ADHD Hereditary? 01:16:50 What's Wrong With Medicating Children? 01:21:15 The Link Between Stress and ADHD 01:22:23 What to Do if a Kid Screams in a Supermarket 01:25:54 The Different Types of Trauma 01:32:43 Same-Sex Couples Taking Roles 01:38:50 What Should Career-Driven Mothers Do? 01:42:08 Not Everyone Can Do This Stuff 01:45:25 Children Don't Need Other Kids Until the Age of 3 01:47:00 Ads 01:48:59 What's So Important at 3 Years Old? 01:55:32 Can I Repair My Trauma and Brain Past My 30s? 01:58:44 Our Pain and Trauma Are Rooted in Childhood 02:02:33 Is "Daddy Issues" a Thing? 02:06:33 Are We Taking Men's Purpose Away? 02:10:42 Men's Testosterone Drops When They Become Fathers 02:13:03 What Happens When Men Become the Primary Caregiver? 02:16:22 Should We Split Schools Into Genders? 02:19:11 Testosterone Decrease 02:21:12 Raising Healthy Kids in a World of Technology 02:24:45 The Importance of Being Present With Your Child 02:25:48 What Should Employers Do? 02:27:22 Do You Realise How Controversial the Things You Say Are? 02:28:02 The Reason All of This Is So Personal to You 02:30:58 What Does Your Obituary Say? Follow Erica: Instagram - https://g2ul0.app.link/pwv9PCz0lRb Twitter - https://g2ul0.app.link/2EKsgfB0lRb Website - https://g2ul0.app.link/OPtiA4a8lRb Erica’s book - https://g2ul0.app.link/7rANACv0lRb The The Diary Of A CEO Conversation Cards here: https://g2ul0.app.link/f31dsUttKKb Follow me: https://g2ul0.app.link/gnGqL4IsKKb Independent research: https://stevenbartlett.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/DOAC-Erica-Komisar-Independent-research-further-reading.pdf Sponsors: ZOE - http://joinzoe.com with code BARTLETT10 for 10% off WHOOP - https://JOIN.WHOOP.COM/CEO Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Chapter 1: What is the main topic of this episode?
One in five children will not leave childhood without developing a serious mental illness. Anxiety, depression, ADHD, behavioral problems. And what pisses me off is that we're not really educating or telling parents the truth as to why.
Why is it that what you say is so troubling for some people?
Sometimes facts are an inconvenient truth. But everything I'm going to say is supported by research.
Erika Kumusar is a parenting expert and psychoanalyst.
Who uses over 30 years of research.
To challenge the societal norms on parenting and early child development.
There's 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 in the first three years for emotional security.
Can a father do that?
So 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.
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Chapter 2: Why is Erica Komisar's perspective controversial?
But hitting that follow button, which is usually in the corner of the app or a little tick, is the reason this show will stay free forever. Forever. Thank you so much. If you do that for me, thank you so much. I really appreciate it. Back to the episode. Erica, you're clearly on a mission.
And I get that energy from you that there's really an idea that you believe that much of the world doesn't believe or is struggling to accept in some way. But it's an important idea. What is the mission that you're on?
I like to think of it as three Ps, presence, prioritization, and prevention. And I'll go through each of them. My mission is to educate parents and policymakers and clinicians and educators about the
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 0 to 3 and 9 to 25, 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 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, you know, 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 until 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, 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 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 to stress and adversity in the future?
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Chapter 3: How do attachment disorders affect adult relationships?
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. And 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.
We're going to go through all of that today. I'm very excited to learn more about all of this. I'm not a parent myself. From all the investigative research we've done, you have three very well-adjusted children. So congratulations for that. And I hope to have successful children myself one day. But I'm also just really interested in
understanding myself through the work that you've done and the work that you continue to do, because we're all at one point children and much of the fingerprints of that early experience still exists in us today.
So I'm keen to understand how things that might have happened to me or anyone listening today when we were younger may have shaped us in pro-social, anti-social ways or productive or unproductive ways. You mentioned that you still see clients and patients today. What kind of patients do you see? What are they struggling with and who are they? Are you seeing the parents, the kids, both?
Well, I have a very large parent 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 I, you know, 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 You know, 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 parent guidance work.
And they come to you typically because they're noticing something is not right with their child.
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.
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Chapter 4: Is modern parenting contributing to mental health issues?
And I noticed that on your first book, which was written in 2017, being there, on the cover it says, why prioritising motherhood in bigger letters? in the first three years matters. Scientifically, evolutionarily, with studies and research, how can you make the case to me to make me believe that the role of the mother in particular is essential versus a father or other caregiver?
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 hormones. 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-to-skin contact and eye contact and the soothing tone of her voice, she's leaning into that baby's pain and she is regulating that baby's emotions.
And the way I like to think about it is that, you know, when babies are born, they're born emotionally disjointed. Think about sailing in the Atlantic. This is how babies' emotions go. They'll go from zero to 60 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 mother's because they soothe 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, 85% of the right brain is developed. And by three years of age, babies can then start to internalize the ability to regulate their own emotions. Now, if mothers aren't present and as the primary attachment figures to do that mirroring of emotion, to do that soothing of their emotions. 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 baby's 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 boo-boo. Let me kiss the boo-boo. that actually raises the oxytocin in the baby's brain, which then protects the baby from cortisol.
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Chapter 5: Why are birth rates declining globally?
I want to go out to work. I want to make money. I want to be free. 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 a 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 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.
What exactly are you inconveniencing with your truth?
What are the ideas that you're... That you have to sacrifice time and money and freedom. 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
always raised children in history in extended family circles, right? 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 in their own houses 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.
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Chapter 6: What role do mothers and fathers play in child development?
At ages when babies really can't tolerate that kind of separation, when a parent comes, when the primary attachment figure, usually the mother, comes home and the baby turns away from you and turns toward the babysitter or just turns away, that baby has the beginning of what's called an avoidant attachment disorder.
Now, that's correlated later on with things like depression and difficulty forming attachments later on. The next kind of attachment disorder is called an ambivalent attachment disorder, and the mother then comes home, and the baby clings to the mother for dear life because the internal voice in that baby is, my mommy's going to leave me again, so I have to hold on to her.
Now, that baby is fractious and can't be soothed and will not let go of that mother, you know, holding on for dear life, what I call like the rhesus monkeys did to the wire cages, right? And that's correlated later on with anxiety in youth. The disorganized attachment disorder is different than the other two in that the other two have a strategy. So think of an attachment disorder as a strategy.
A child who's left for too many hours by their parent or whose parent is physically present but emotionally checked out. That baby has to cope, has to have a strategy. Turning away from the mother is a strategy. And the internal narrative is my mommy isn't. present for me, isn't here for me, won't be there for me. I can't trust my environment.
And that baby says, and I'm going to have to cope on my own, what we call learned helplessness. So the ambivalent attachment disorder, you know, that baby is the strategy is, you know, I'm going to hold on because if I don't hold on, she's going to leave again. Disorganized attachment disorder is the hardest to treat because the baby has no strategy. So the baby cycles through many strategies.
The baby will go from clinging to avoiding to being enraged and even slapping or hitting the mother and then cycling through again. And that baby that develops a disorganized attachment disorder, those babies, it's correlated later with borderline personality disorder. And we're seeing a huge rise in borderline personality disorders.
And those are the kids who are cutting themselves, who are trying to commit suicide. We have a mental illness crisis, the likes of which we've never seen in history. And it has everything to do with how we're raising our children.
You seem pissed off under that calm demeanor.
Pissed off? Yes, I suppose I am. I'm not pissed off at the people. I'm pissed off at a society that is lying. We're not really educating or telling parents the truth.
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Chapter 7: How does stress relate to ADHD, and what are the alternatives to medication?
And in the UK, research indicates that one in eight women, listening to this now, and one in 10 men aged 16 to 74 have experienced infertility, which is defined as unsuccessfully attempting pregnancy for a year or longer. And I've spoken to a lot of people actually that have tried to have kids.
Yeah.
For years, two years.
It's very sad. When people want children and they can't have children, it is incredibly sad.
When you think about what's contributing to that, how do you diagnose that infertility challenge?
There are a lot of theories. Some are environmental. Some are the fact that we're delaying having children. We're lying to women and to men. We're telling them, freeze your eggs. In fact, this is a little disturbing. I'll tell you about this. That law firms now are paying for the freezing of their young female associates' eggs. I find that disturbing.
Saying, freeze your eggs, work really hard for us. Yeah, you can have children later. And the truth is a lot of them can't because when you freeze eggs, it's not a guarantee of fertility. It's not a guarantee that those eggs will turn into embryos. It's not a guarantee that those embryos will turn into babies. So there's the age piece.
There is also, and there's the environmental piece, there is also the stress piece, which we are not talking about. There's a component to getting pregnant that is about stress. We have more stress. on both men and women. You know, it used to be that men died sooner because they had more stress. But now I think it's evened out the odds.
I think women may die sooner because they have the stress of working and raising children for the most part. But the point is that the stress that young adults face because they're trying to, you know... We should talk about some of the other myths. What's another myth? We'll weave it through this talk. Another myth is... You can do everything all at the same time and do it well. Myth.
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Chapter 8: Can socioeconomic factors influence parenting styles?
Right. And that's what's happening to humans today. If we don't lick and groom our babies, I mean, you know, take it for whatever. If we don't lick and groom our babies, we don't pass on resilience to stress and adversity, but we also don't pass on the desire to lick and groom to have babies.
Your story, going back to your story, which we were talking about, are there any areas of privilege that you need to acknowledge that someone else listening to this now goes, yeah, but that's all right for you?
Because, you know, maybe someone who didn't have a partner there or someone who is in a difficult economic situation, extremely difficult economic situation, living in the projects in Harlem or something. I really want to... I'm saying this because...
Well, it's not the mothers and the projects in Harlem, because I'll tell you, the mothers and the projects in Harlem stay home with their babies. That's what's interesting. Very poor people in America. So let me just say, I love America. America sucks. And I'll tell you why America sucks from my perspective. And I say this internationally.
I go around the world saying America sucks, and I'm going to tell you why. We are the only country in the world other than Papua New Guinea who does not have a paid job. parental maternity leave. We do not have paid maternity leave. Nobody cares about children. They care about the GDP and the bottom line.
And the people who are out there talking about this stuff are economists saying, women have to work, work, work for the economy. Nobody cares about children. Because if we cared about children, our tax money would be In paid leave, not for three months, not for six months, for at least a year. In Hungary, they have three years. Slovenia, Slovakia, Estonia has three years.
Hungary, I think, has two years of paid leave. Sweden, I have some issues with Sweden, but Sweden has 14 months. Sweden, after 14 months, makes women go back to work full, full, full time and put them in institutional care, and all those babies are breaking down. So 14 months isn't even enough. But if we could even get to a civilized place of one year of paid leave in this country—
And then the next two years, some way that parents could be complemented so they could work part-time, supplemented so they could work part-time. I'm a reasonable, realistic person. I know this country is never going to go for three years of paid leave, even though I would love them to.
I also know that this country isn't going to go for an entitlement called paid leave because that's the kind of country we are. We talk a big game, but we don't want to put our money where our mouth is. There is the possibility, now that the Republicans are in, of a creative solution, which is potentially using things like Social Security in advance, borrowing from your Social Security.
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