Transcript of Episode 515: Erica Komisar: The Parenting Myth Hurting Kids’ Mental Health

Hi, guys. It's Tony Robbins. You're listening to Habits and Hustle. Crush it.

Today on this podcast, we have Erica Comisar, who is really a leading psychoanalyst, a leading parent expert, a social worker. You're actually still a practicing therapist, which is what I love about you is because You actually have data that's in real-time. You're not just speaking in theory, which is why I was really looking forward to this conversation. So thank you so much for being on Habits & Hustle.

Thank you for having me.

Absolutely. Let's start with just overall, can you just give us what... You've been in practice for over 30 years. How would you describe what your intention, your goal is, your mission, so to speak?

Well, I mean, I've been in practice now, actually, let me think about it, probably 38 years, long time. And I would say that when I started as a young therapist, even before I was a psychoanalyst, I was a social worker, and I worked in a clinic before I got my psychoanalytic training. And in that clinic, I was treating a lot of children and foster families and a lot of alternative family structures, grandmothers raising children, but also parents. I was finding that they were lacking in certain basic parenting skills. I started designing and presenting these parenting workshops in the clinic. I loved doing it, and it helped a lot in the treatment of the families. When I left the clinic, I started doing them in big companies and banks and law firms and whatever. Then it It led to me doing more parent guidance in my practice. But really what happened is I was seeing... The reason I write about the things that I do is I was seeing this uptick in mental illness in children and adolescents in my practice. Children were being diagnosed and medicated at a younger and younger age, and I was really concerned.

I started looking at all the research, the neuroscience research and epigenetics research and attachment research. The conclusion that I came in my practice, it seemed to align with the research. That's when I started writing about it and writing books about it, which was that we had changed our societal structure around parenting, around mothering, and it had a very negative impact on children. When we deprioritized caring for our own children, when we deprioritized mothering, in changing that necessary structure that children needed, that nurturing, that essential nurturing, we were impacting their mental health in a negative way. You would say for the last 30 years, I've been trying to help parents understand how vital they are to their children's mental health, that children are not like self-cleaning ovens. They don't raise themselves. You can't just put them in daycare or give them to a nanny or leave them for 8 to 10 hours a day while you're working and expect them to grow up in a healthy manner. They require a tremendous amount of your emotional and physical presence if you want them to be mentally healthy. That's not something we've been telling parents, just the opposite.

We've been telling parents falsely, the false narrative that, your kids will be fine. You can do anything you want. You can do what's good for you as a grown up and leave them and leave them with anybody and any old caregiver will do. And that's had a very negative impact on children.

There's so much there that I wanted to ask you about, right? Because you have a whole... There's a whole theory here, right? Because I'm a working parent, you're a working parent, and you talk a lot about quality versus quantity. I think a lot of that is that parents, when they feel guilty, they justify their career by saying, Well, as long as when I am with my child, I am present. So therefore, the quantity doesn't matter. The quality of the time matters. And you basically say that's absolutely not true, correct?

Yeah, unfortunately. So they both matter. I mean, that is the ruse, is that I think this idea of quality time became a justification for leaving children for a long periods of time. The truth is that you need to be there both physically and emotionally to help children to learn things like emotional regulation or secure attachment or just how to regulate not only how to regulate emotions, but how to manage stress. All of that is a constant. It's a moment-to-moment process, meaning children can't be taught to regulate their emotions by being with them for an hour and a half a day and teaching them how to regulate. They're struggling with their emotional regulation throughout the day from moment to moment. Every time a child is in distress, it's a mother helping to soothe that child that actually regulates that child's emotions. It's only after three years that a child can even begin to internalize the ability to be able to regulate their own emotions. Right, The myth is that you can just pop in on your own time and help them to regulate emotions, and it should stick. It's not true. It's a false narrative.

It's a false narrative. I guess I've heard you say this also is an inconvenient truth, because we don't want to admit that sometimes. But let me ask you something on that same token. So number one, actually, before I do, what age are you talking about? Is there a particular between what and what is it necessary to have the quantity and the quality for a mom?

Well, The two critical periods of brain development, the most important is zero to three. Zero to three is what we call the first critical period of right brain development or social emotional brain development. So by your You're born with about 25% of your right brain developed. Your right brain, which is responsible for, well, everything. It's responsible for emotional regulation. It's responsible for the ability to manage stress. It's responsible for executive functioning. It's responsible for pretty much everything. Everything. The ability to root social cues. You're born with about 25%, if all goes well. But Between the birth and the age of three, you get to about 80 to 85% of right brain development. But only if the environment is right, only if the environment provides you with safety and security and emotional regulation and physical and emotional presence of a primary attachment figure, then you get to about 80 to 85%. Between three and about nine or 10, you get to Well, you get to quite a bit of full right brain development, even more than full right brain development. What happens then is you have a pruning process in adolescence. So think of like growing a garden, right?

So you grow a garden and it overgrows. And it's just as important, the planting is important, but it's just as important to prune the garden. And so what happens in adolescence, which is the second critical critical period of brain development is the garden is pruned. And that pruning of the excess cells that you no longer need is just as important to write brain development. So you have these two critical periods, which is zero to three and nine to 25. Adolescence is 9: 00 to 25: 00. We call it the second critical period. So I have two books. One is on the first critical period of brain development, the other is on the second critical. And so the reason I wrote two separate books is because if I had written one book, it would have overwhelmed parents. And also parents who are dealing with infants and toddlers, they're not thinking about adolescents. And parents who are raising adolescents are not thinking about infants and toddlers.

Right. That's so true.

So the truth is that you really need to be there critically from zero to three, but you also need to be there throughout your children's childhood because they are learning and reinforcing regulation of emotions throughout childhood. So it's not as if three happens and then you can go back to work 12 hours a day, bye-bye, and see them for an hour. No, it doesn't work like that. But if you're asking me what are the critical periods, those are the two critical periods. So then people say, Well, what happens between 3: 00 and 9: 00 or 10: 00? And the point is that that's also really important. But we don't call it as vulnerable or critical a period because the brain is not as... There's a lot of plasticity in these two critical periods. But you have to be there, really. Until your child is 18, you have 18 years to really make a difference. That doesn't mean you can't work. It doesn't mean you have to sit there and stare at them all day. But you have to be there to help to regulate their emotions and be as emotionally and physically present because what they're experiencing from moment to moment in their lives, even when they go to school, what they're experiencing experiencing socially, academically, experientially, physically, when they get to even early adolescence, they need help processing it.

So again, we moved from a place where we realized that children were vulnerable to a place where we started treating children like they were not vulnerable and like they were self-cleaning ovens.

Did you say 9 to 25?

That's adolescence, yeah. So we say that the prefrontal cortex or the part of the brain that is responsible for things like emotional regulation, management of stress, executive functioning, that all finishes in development around 25, really even a little later in boys. It's a little later in boys. But yeah.

So that's really interesting in the sense that you're right. I think that because you talk about this a lot, about women career working. I mean, that's a massive amount of time. That's literally 25 years then. And so when you say to people, you could have it all, but not all at the same time, your youth is basically 25 years. It's not going to be... Are you asking women to either choose to be a mother or to have a career? Is that more or less your point?

The truth is In our culture, children leave home at around 18.

Yeah.

So by 18, and by 18, when your child is no longer living with you, you have less influence over them. And so you really have about 18 years. Now, does that mean you can't work in those 18 years? Of course you can work, but it's how you work. It's the work you choose. It's the intensity and degree of the work. If the work is being prioritized over your children in those first 18 years, then your children, something has to give, something will be sacrificed. In the end, it's not about working or not working, even though people misinterpret my book that way. It's about prioritization. Can you be a CEO when your children are zero to three? Sure you can, but who's going to get sacrificed? Is it going to be your company or your child? Because being a CEO requires you to be fully in. It's really the work you choose and the intensity with which you choose to do it. But it's not working or not working.

What are the careers that you think work best for mothers while they have kids then?

Ones that allow them to prioritize their family over their work and to work part-time. Because I think that any mother would recognize that raising a child is a 24-hour, seven-day-a-week, 365-day-a-year job.

So then what do you say if- It's more than full-time job.

So if you have a more than full-time job, more than full-time already, and you take on another more than full-time job, now you have possibly three full-time jobs. If you think of it this way, that sure you can work. Here's the paradigm, is either your children have to fit into your work or your work has to fit into raising children.

Right. What have you seen? Because I want to talk to you about guilt, right? Because I think guilt's a real thing. What have you seen? Because what I was saying earlier is you actually still practice over a very big span of time, 38 years you're saying. Do you have concrete evidence that you can point to that shows that mothers who work more demanding jobs or more hours than, let's say, a part-time job. How does that show in their children later on?

There's quantitative research that shows that children who are put into daycare for long hours suffer a lot from mental health issues. And there is some research that was done by a researcher years ago who, when he wrote articles and tried to write about it, was literally chased out of this country. He literally went to Europe because he said it was so hard to do that research because there was such pressure on him. But I think the point is I also use my practice in addition to the neuroscience research that shows that the The absence of a primary attachment figure in a child's life impacts their neurological development. But I also use my practice as a way to, and in my books I do as well, to show how when I see parents for parent guidance, and they come in and they talk about their children's issues, and I help them to understand that they have to be there physically and emotionally. It can literally turn many of the stories around very quickly, shockingly quickly. Meaning children's behaviors and the beginnings of mental health issues can be turned around very quickly when parents change their The way they think about children and how many hours they spend with children and the amount of emotional and physical presence they give to their children.

It was after, gosh, I didn't write Being There until I was in my late '40s, early '50s. I had been practicing a long time and had gathered a lot of clinical evidence to show that these theories were, in fact, true in a clinical sense.

What do you see, though? Give me some examples of what you would see.

Children have ways of signaling their parents that they're not getting what they need from their parents. The way I would describe it is that babies first complain. They, what I call, kvetch. They know it. Yeah, kvetch. You don't have to run to pick them up when they kvetch. But then if they don't get picked up, they start to cry. If they still don't get picked up, they cry louder. If they still don't get picked up, they start to scream and get enraged. Then if they still don't get picked up, they go silent. What we're seeing in kids is kids are going when they're not getting emotionally and physically a feeling of security and safety. Because remember, babies are born incredibly physically, emotionally mentally and mentally neurologically fragile, really fragile. The fact that parents can't look at a baby and see fragility, that they project onto the baby, that they're not fragile, that they can be given to strangers in a day care at six weeks of age, suggests to me that they can't see the fragility of their babies. But babies are born incredibly fragile and incredibly intensely in need of emotional security and the physical security of their primary attack.

You are their entire universe, and it is you that makes them feel safe and secure. Only after three years can they internalize that safety and security. And so I don't think that's something we teach mothers and fathers. We teach them the opposite, that babies are resilient from birth, and you can do anything with them and hand them to anybody, and it'll be fine. But that isn't the case, right? So what we know is that we need to be there physically and emotionally as much as possible in those first three years and throughout their childhood if we want them to be healthy.

I was just more asking, not as a baby, but where have you seen when their parents are not... And when you say parents, you really focus on the mom, not the father.

So they go into what we call fight or flight mode. So the fight or flight response is our evolutionary response to stress. When we are under threat, we either become aggressive and fight or we flee. Fleeing for children can be distractability, it can be attachment disorders where they turn away and dissociate. But what we're seeing in children where their parents are handing them over to other caregivers or putting them in daycare or not spending enough time with them or distracted themselves, what we're seeing in those children is that they're going into fight or flight. They're either developing behavioral problems, becoming more aggressive. We see this because preschools are reporting higher amounts of children who are biting and hitting and throwing chairs. They either go into fight or they go into flight. So ADHD is not a disorder where there's a whole movement to take the D off of and just say it's attentional issues, are the flight mode of a stress response to feeling unsafe. When children feel unsafe, they either fight or they go into flight. That's what we're seeing. When mothers and fathers recognize this and they say, What can we do? I They say, Well, one of you has to be there to help them to regulate their emotions, to provide that feeling of safety, to be the touchstone for them from moment to moment again when they're in distress, to have the skin to skin again to really calm down their nervous system.

The fight and the flight modes, if it's not too extreme, the fight and the flight modes calm down pretty quickly.

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So mothers and fathers are not fungible. I think this is where, again, the popular narrative is that men and women are exactly the same. In many ways, they're equal. I always say equal A little bit different is my motto. We're equal in intelligence. We're equal in ambition. Men and women can be as ambitious as capable in work and business. But when it comes to nurturing, which is a biological, mammalian biological function, nurture. We've survived for thousands of years as a species because we have the capacity to nurture our young and we have a system. There's a system. There's an evolutionary system in all mammals. Mothers who carry babies, who give birth to babies, who who breastfeed babies, who raise babies, they produce a lot of a hormone, a neurotransmitter, a hormone called oxytocin. Oxytocin, which is euphemistically called the love hormone, the bonding hormone. When mothers give birth, breastfeed, nurture, they produce a lot of it, and they pass it along to the baby. Then there's this wonderful exchange of this oxytocin between the mother and the baby through a behavior called sensitive empathic nurturing. Mothers are very attuned to baby's pain and distress, and they don't turn away from it.

If they're healthy, they turn toward it. Fathers, when they nurture, they can produce oxytocin, but it comes from a different part of their brain, and it affects their behavior differently. Instead of tuning into the distress, they become very playful and distract away from the distress, Because fathers play a role that is of helping with the separation process later on. The play and the playful tactile stimulation that is the response to oxytocin in a father's brain is not the same as the sensitive empathic nurturing that is produced in a mother's brain. If you ever doubt it, go into a playground and watch when a baby falls down in the playground. If the mother is healthy, I say, if the mother's healthy, the mother rushes in to say, Honey, are you okay? Let me see your knee. Let me kiss it. Let me put it. Let's fix the booboo. Let's get a bandaid. Let me give you a hug. The father goes, You're okay. Come on, get up. You're fine. Come on, get back on the horse. And there's a reason for that. It doesn't mean the father isn't nurturing, but the father's role was always what we call protective aggression.

The father produces a lot of something called vasopressin, which is the protective, aggressive hormone, which makes fathers very protective against predatory threat. So while the mothers are down on the ground going, Oh, honey, how are you doing? The fathers are looking for predators. There was a study that was done in the UK where mothers and fathers lay side by side. If the baby cried at night, the mothers were very vigilant to the distress of the babies, whereas the father slept through it almost every time. Whereas if there was a rustling of leaves outside the window, the fathers woke up right away and the mother slept through.

See, I understand that. We're in a different time. Very much now, there's a very You're a boss, you're a boss. Women are very much equal, if actually not more than men in their careers. Women are making more money than men ever before. This never happened before recently, right? Women seem to have more successful careers. Men have become very... I don't know, is it a word to say demasculin? Or women have become more masculine?

Emasculated. Yeah, emasculated. That's why they're all being depressed. All the men are depressed. Yeah, they've lost their purpose.

No, but I think, but isn't it also the men? I think women have become more masculine, men have become more feminine. There's been a role reversal Yes.

Yeah.

And it's become praised for women to be these boss babes, these boss, these badass bosses. And so it's affecting everything. I don't think it's just affecting the children, because I think a lot of people aren't even having children like they used to. They're having definitely less children. People aren't dating as much. They're not getting as married as much. I think the whole culture in society has shifted a lot of the gender roles. Can you talk about this? Can you tell us about how that type of culture, though, has affected, not not just our family, but our overall, our procreation, our everything, our dating.

Well, I think as you say, society reflects what's happening now. I think fewer women and men are wanting to have children. I mean, roles have shifted so much that people don't want to have children at all. I mean, 50%, I think 45% of women don't want to have children at all. I think that I suppose you could say maybe it's a societal course, correct? Maybe it's going to reduce the population. Maybe it's going to... I don't know what it implies long term is that the children that are being born, unless there's an adjustment back to some evolutionary correction, our children are suffering from this. We may change society after a millennium. We may try to change society in 75 years and change it up quickly. But that doesn't mean that in an evolutionary way, our children are going to just follow along and be healthy. I think that's what's happening. I think we tried to... We see gender roles as a societal construct. There's aspects that are societal constructs. But when it comes to nurturing, it's not a societal construct. It's an evolutionary mimele construct. I think it's strange when the whole idea of nurturing is considered to be a societal construct because it's not.

The research shows it's not. It's biological. I mean, there's a biological aspect to how we nurture our nurturing behaviors and our nurturing hormones, which makes us very different, men and women. It would take thousands of years to change that. These things don't change overnight. I think that's what's happening. You know what growing pains are when you say that your bones grow faster than the soft tissue? We are in a period of really intense growing pains when it comes to these changes in society, and I think our children are suffering from it.

But what happened? You You say women should work part-time. I've got two things to that. What happens if you can't... Things are expensive. What if they can't afford if it's a one-income household? If people are a divorce family, there's only one parent, or both parents have to work full-time put food on the table. Does that automatically make for the child to grow up with mental health issues?

Well, I have a book coming out in March on divorce. What I would say about divorce is 50% of marriages end in divorce. I think we haven't really looked at that. I think we've just accepted it instead of really examining it. I think it's taboo to examine it and talk about it and say, Should it be that high? I mean, it has to happen sometimes. But have we set our bindings on our skis to beginning? So we hit a bump and the bindings, the skis pop off so easily. I mean, if we're going to have children and make the commitment to have children, isn't there a commitment to try to work through those conflicts? So I think there's that piece of it that we haven't really looked at. Why are there so many single parents raising children? That's the first piece of it, because that already adds a stress. And listen, my book is about the fact that divorce is inevitable, and a good divorce is better than a terrible marriage. But having said that, and there's a way to do it without doing less harm to your children. But I think the idea that you just said is that there's so many people that are raising children in not not in units.

They're raising children alone. And the question is, why? Why is there so much of that that put so much stress on parents, financially, emotionally, logistically? And if we are going to be a modern society that accepts that half of parents are raising children as single parents, then maybe we need to reembrace extended family. Maybe single parents should be living with their parents again or their extended family, so we're not raising children alone. We have more choices because what you're saying is people don't have choices.

I'm saying more about economically. I'm saying people don't have it.

I'm talking Economically, too. I'm saying that if we are raising children alone, and it's not... I don't think it's always inevitable. That's all I'm saying. I don't think it's always inevitable. But when parents must work, Then there are better forms of childcare and less good forms of childcare for children. I think the party line that we have been feeding women and men for the last 75 years is that daycare is a good form of childcare. I think that is another myth and another false narrative. It is gaslighted parents to the extent that we have a lot of children who have suffered a lot from that. The best forms of childcare when a parent must work, first and foremost, would be kinship bums, extended family, would be, even if you don't get along with your mother, Live next door to her. Tough noogies. If you don't get along with her, if she's going to be a good babysitter and is going to have a similar investment and maybe take less money for it, and you know that she's going to treat your differently than a babysitter who you pay. So there's a narcissism today, right? So we want to do it our way and do it by ourselves, and we don't get along with our parents.

But I'm like, Yeah, but if you have children and you're raising children alone, honestly, the best is often kinship bonds. Not always. If you have psychotic parents, if you have abusive parents or alcoholic parents, the bet's off, right?

Or don't have parents who live near you.

Or don't have parents, right. Then you can create extended family. The way you create extended family is you hire a single surrogate caregiver, a nanny or a babysitter who is sensitive, empathic, will care for your child in your home, not in an institutional setting, what I call day orphanages, daycare. If you can't afford that, then you share that caregiver with one other woman. Now You've made it more financially available to you. Now it still provides that child with more consistency. You have more control over who you hire and what they're doing with your child throughout the day. Now you've created a support system with another woman because you're sharing the care with another woman. There are ways to do it more responsibly. But what I'll say is the best for children is still to have more time with their parents, more time. We're only given 24 hours a day. If we blow our wad, if you will, we come home and we don't have the internal resources, the energy, the patience, the love, the attention, the time to give to our children because we've blown it at work, then our children are the losers, and we are the losers because our children will suffer.

You only get 24 hours in a day. No matter what you do professionally, and I always say, you have to be careful what work you choose. If you're going to have children, you don't necessarily do the same work you did before you had children. Either you choose a different work or you do it at a different intensity, and you give up the ego gratification and the vanity of being at the top of your with your work. Something has to be sacrificed, right? And you don't want it to be your children.

What is the amount of time that you think is necessary to spend? I quantified, give me something that people can listen to this and say, Okay, you're saying it's not an hour and a half a day. But I also want to talk more between nine and, let's say, the older kids, nine and 18, because I think I understand I understand what you're saying between zero and three. When kids are in school and they have a ton of activities, kids at that place, they're not looking to spend an ungodly amount of hours with their parents. They're too busy at that point. What do you think is a good amount of time to do that? What should parents be thinking about?

When they're home, you should be home. When did teenagers get out of school?

3: 30 or so.

Okay. That gives you from 8: 30 in the morning when they go to school until 3: 30 in the afternoon to do work. You can do a lot of work in that period of time.

Right. You're saying basically when Kids are a home, you're a home, right? Yes.

That's an ideal. You're asking me what's ideal. That's ideal.

That's an ideal situation.

I'll tell you why. Because kids, when they are in the transitions, Going to school, coming home from school, waking up in the morning, going to sleep at night. These are what we call the transitional points of life. That's when kids are most vulnerable. That's when they're most likely to share what's going on with you. That's when their defenses are down. If you're not there at those points, you're less likely to be close to that child, and you're less likely to be able to help them to process all the emotional things that they have to process growing up.

Because there's so many activities. So this is where it gets a little confusing, right? Because let's talk about the mental health crisis. Anxiety's up, depression's up. And I think that there's been a lot of research that shows it's because of social media. I've heard you say before that you don't think it's just social media that's causing all this excess depression and anxiety.

So that doesn't mean that social media is good for children because it's not.

No, it's terrible, of course.

But it's not causing this mental health crisis. It's exacerbating it. If you take a fragile child who is not emotionally secure, who is not healthily, securely attached, who does not have physically and emotionally present parents, they are more vulnerable to external stressors. What are other external stressors? School pressures, social pressures at school, social media, bullying and teasing, Yeah, there's lots of stressors out there. If we say that social media is a stressor, then we have to think. Think of it like this. If you build a bridge that It says, Don't drive a truck more than 2 tons over this bridge. But you drive a 4-ton truck over that bridge, then the bridge is going to collapse. We want to build bridges. We want to foster in our children emotional security, the ability to cope with stress and adversity, resilience. We want to foster these things. To foster those things, you have to be there to help build their egos, to help build... In other words, that resilience is not something they're born with. You have to build that in them. The way you build it is through sensitive, empathic nurturing, through your emotional presence, through processing their emotions with them.

It's not that things like social media aren't adversities, because they are, but it's not going to crash the... The bridge isn't going to crash. I think the idea is, I think we're not thinking about the origins of resilience, which we need to think about, which is we are the origin of resilience. Our presence, our relationship with them, our intimacy with them, our closeness, Their ability to share with us and process what they're going through. That is the origin of resilience. And so social media matters. It certainly matters. And I think everything Jonathan Hyde is doing is amazing, and I support it. But I see it as an adversity rather than the cause of these breakdowns.

So you're saying the cause of the mental health crisis and the anxiety, depression, and all the things going so high is more because of the bond between the parents and the kids at home is basically lacked?

We're producing more fragile kids. We're producing more fragile kids.

Because we're not available.

Who are more susceptible to adversity.

So what's interesting is what I think I've seen a lot of is more helicopter parents, parents who are way too overly involved, who helicopter, who over schedule.

Those are anxious parents. Those aren't available. Those aren't emotionally present. So people get that confused. An anxious parent is not an emotionally present parent. An anxious parent isn't a parent who can actually help child to process their emotions because they can't process their own.

Right.

Yeah.

Okay. I'm just trying to understand for my audience, too. So you're saying the helicoptering and being Overscheduling your kids is a problem.

Well, let me just... Let me stop before I forget. When you say overscheduling, you're not talking about parents being present. You're talking about parents delegating out that that child to others because they struggle with just being with their children. Children don't need tons of activities. It's good for children to have interests. It's good for children to experiment. It's good for children to enjoy extracurricular activities, whatever they are. But this idea of overscheduling is avoidance. It's a avoidant behavior in parents who have trouble just allowing children to to do nothing and also to be with them, to be with them in a way that isn't achievement-oriented, right?

Yeah.

Children don't need as many activities as parents are scheduling. For them.

Well, they're doing it because they don't want the kids to be on iPads, right? Or on their phones.

They're doing it because they struggle to be with often. They don't want to just be with their children and/or Or set limits with their children. So if what you're saying is they are avoiding setting limits with their children at home around technology by scheduling activities, that means that there's something in that parent that they're struggling with. So, yeah, helicopter parenting is not present parenting.

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Adolescents need you when they need you. They don't need you all the time, whereas zero to three, they need you all the time. Zero to three, they need you all the time. Adolescence don't need you all the time, but when they need you, they need you intensely. If If you're not there when the door opens, and I mean that literally and figuratively, if you're not there at the transitional points, because when they're most likely to talk about their day, if you are too busy working and you're coming home on your time after they've been home for 2 hours and they're in the room and the door is closed and you go, Knock, knock. I'm here. The main show is arrived. I'm ready to talk to you. Your child is going to go, Get out of here. But if you're picking them up at school and you're walking home and you're stopping and getting an ice cream cone, or you're walking the dog with them after school, or you're sitting at the kitchen counter giving them a snack, then you're more likely to get the low down on what's going on. It's as subtle as that.

Then when they go to their room, if you're there, when the door opens again and they come out to take a pee, or they come out to have another snack. Or if you're there at night when they're talking to their friends on the phone, if you're out at a dinner and you're not there when they're having drama with their friends, it's being there. I used to say it's like being like wallpaper with adolescents, but that's not quite right because wallpaper makes you sound like you're passive. But it's wallpaper that's ready to come in and help when needed, anything. The truth is they need you when they need you. The more physically and emotionally around you are, the more likely you'll catch the moment, and the less around you are. A lot of parents misconstrue. They misunderstand their children's need for independence with not meeting them. Children need independence just as much they need to touch base and be dependent. They They need to snuggle with you on the couch and watch a TV show after they're done with their homework as much as they need to close their door and say, I want to be alone now.

But it's that back and forth. Because parents take it so very personally when their children shut the door and say, I want to be alone. Parents then misconstru and say, Well, they don't need me anyway. I might as well go back to work full-time and go out to my dinners again. So they misunderstand understand that it's practicing. Kids are practicing independence, but that doesn't mean they don't need you. In a way, there's a worm hole between toddlerhood and adolescence, which means that they need you almost as intensely as they did when they were a toddler in those moments. And so if you're not there for those moments, you're going to miss the boat.

And do you think that the father needs to be around as much in the adolescent years, or is it still the mother?

So in the early primary attachment figures really refers to the first three years. And then what happens is, we say it goes from dyad to triad. So it goes from 2-3, right? And then the father becomes very important Because the father helps with separation, and particularly the little boys, the father becomes a role model, and there's a lot of identification going on. Then the little girls, there's an edible thing going on. Fathers become very important, too. You'd say in the early years, it really is the primary attachment figure that's the most important. But that doesn't mean the dad isn't important as well. But then in adolescence, it's really both parents. It's the availability of both parents. Again, the more present you can be, the better.

What about this whole idea about women and feminism, where now, like I said, there's more emphasis, there's more power more powerful women than there were before, more career-driven, to be honest. In certain places, I know more successful women than I do men at this juncture, right?

Yeah, I mean, 60% of universities and medical schools, they're all women, right? That's also not great for society, right? So it may be great for women, but it's not great for the balance between women and men. So the research shows that men will marry at their educational level and below. Women will only marry at their educational level and above. The concept is that more women are saying, We have no men to marry. Somehow we've The balance is off. The balance was off the other way. You'd say there weren't enough women who wanted to be in the workforce that could be. Now we've shifted the pendulum. Now there's more women than men. I always say that balance is a good thing. The idea that somehow we rebalance... In nursery school, in preschool, they call it balancing the classroom. Why does nobody give them a hard time about that? Why does nobody say to nursery schools, Half boys and half girls in this class? Nobody gives nursery schools a hard time about that. Do you hear anybody saying, Oh, my God, DEI, preschools shouldn't do that. They It should be more girls, and the girls are smart.

Nobody does that. We just call it balancing the classroom. Why does that stop?

I don't know. I want to know from you. Yeah.

I think we went nuts with this idea that Because women felt less than, now they should feel more than. And I don't think anybody should be less than, and I don't think anybody should be more than. I think balance is a good thing. And so the idea is that... And the other is that people get my work confused with me being an antifeminist. I am very pro-feminism, but I am more pro-children. Meaning, do I advocate for women's rights over children's rights. Nope, those children didn't ask to be brought into this world. Their rights have to come first. But that doesn't mean women don't matter. There are a lot of women who are saying, I don't want children. I just want a linear career like men. I don't think there's anything wrong with that. If you know you cannot make the sacrifices necessary to prioritize children over yourself and your career, then I think it's better you don't have children, honestly. But I think there is a way to have everything in life. I'm a good example of that. I think I have had everything. I'm 61. I think I've had a lot, but I didn't have it all at the same time.

You know the marshmallow test? I don't know if the listeners know the marshmallow test. Go ahead.

Yes, tell us.

It's an old test, right, about frustration, tolerance, and waiting.

Delayed gratification.

They said to children, You can have one marshmallow now, but if you wait, whatever, 10 minutes, whatever, you can get two more marshmallows. The kids who demanded the one marshmallow in a longitudinal study did less well academically, less well in life. The kids who could wait for the two marshmallows had everything. I think the idea is that what we've told women is that you don't have to wait for anything. That's just, again, a false narrative. It's a myth. You can have everything in life. You can have a brilliant career when you're young. You can take up, as Niharush says, you can take a power pause. You could pause and raise children or titrate your career down so it's very little and your children are very important. Then when you get to perimenopause or menopause, when your estrogen goes down and your testosterone goes up, when your husbands are sitting on the golf course with no energy, but other than playing a few rounds, and your testosterone has gone up and their testosterone has gone down, you can take on the world. So when should you be a CEO? Before you have children and after your children have gone to college.

That's Those are the best times to be a CEO. Now, I'm using CEO, but- I know what you're saying. When are the best times to write a book? Probably not when your children are zero to three and probably not when your children... But after they go to college, great time to write a book, great time to get your ideas, great time to start a company. I think we just haven't communicated that you can have everything in life. You just can't have it all at the same time.

Well, I think it's been like... It's been like the narrative is that you do it young because you have more energy, you're more viral, you know what's going on more as you get older. But I know, but I'm saying you're saying it's all a reverse. We should reverse this ideology because then also men and women, they can compete, right? Like in terms of- Well, they don't have to compete.

That's the thing. So my husband always says that when I was raising children, he was out there taken on the world with his career. I really had minimized my career, so it was this big. And my children were the majority of my life. And then as my kids got bigger, I was able to increase incrementally. And And when my kids went off to college, then I started writing books and speaking publicly and whatever. And he always says that he's going to be sitting in the background, enjoying a little space. So that's not a competition. That's called teamwork.

That's a very lucky circumstance that you guys were able to help do that with each other. Unfortunately, in a lot of situations, it doesn't work that nice and pretty, right? And And what I was going to say, though, what I wanted to ask you was about the modern dating affecting how this idea of having to have a career. What I've seen also is that, yes, you can have what happens. I've seen with a lot of my who are these powerhouses, but they can also be... They lack in the other areas. So they're very dominant in their career, but their personal lives have suffered, their dating life has suffered. They're not getting married to have kids because they've made a choice or they thought they were making a choice for a time period. Have you seen any type in your practice, how it's affected women on the personal side when they've had a bigger career?

So first, I'm going to say it It wasn't luck at all in my situation. It was intentional.

Intentional, I know.

No, but it's important because I do a lot of premarital counseling now, which is premarital counseling to ensure the health of children. It's really interesting. Healthy marriages produce healthy children. The concept that it's still better to raise children in a marriage than not. That may be a controversial thing to say, but all the research research backs it up. To say that the choices we make define our marriages, if we inform and educate young women and young men at a very young age, what to look for if they want to have healthy marriages, if they want to raise children together, if they want a collaborative teamwork marriage as opposed to a competitive marriage. What's happened is we've created a competitive environment between men and women where they don't collaborate, where they don't perform as a team, because teams don't mean that we're both thriving in our careers at the same time. One of us might be tending the home, one of us might be out there thriving in our career, and then we might switch. But the idea is that we have fostered competition between young men and young women instead of teamwork and collaboration. So it is not good luck, it is intentionality.

And I don't think young people ask the right questions, and I don't think they look for the right things when they're looking for a partner. And I think that's what ends up happening with all these divorces.

No, I think that's 100% accurate. I think that... I was kidding around. I think that you got lucky by meeting a good man that is happy for women's success. But we talked about earlier, there's a lot of men feel emasculated by women's success, and therefore there's a hole imbalance is why they're basically not even trying as hard. Women have surpassed them. The whole imbalance, right? That's why we're saying women who are more successful, they don't want to date below their socioeconomic place. They want to go above. So when women are so high, it's very The amount of men that they have to choose from is much less. Then what ends up happening is they're not dating anybody. The men have much more of... Then the men, the whole pattern has... There's a ripple effect to all of that.

Yeah. No, society is definitely out of balance right now. Yeah, it's out of balance.

What do you tell your patients? How does that get rectified? What can an individual do about that in real-time to try to rectify that?

Yeah. I mean, again, I think things like individual therapy and couples therapy. I mean, I do think there's a place for therapeutic intervention. And colleagues like Suzanne Banker, friends of mine who write books about that, what you're talking about. I'm sure maybe you've had her on your show or you should have her on your show if you haven't. What's her name? Suzanne Banker. She writes books about this idea of creating a society where men and women compete with one another as opposed to collaborate with one another. So they say that when you find the right partner, It means that you find somebody who admires your successes and doesn't compete with them and who feels you admire them and their successes. Mutually, they bring out the best in you and you bring out the best in them. Again, I think that we have pumped up our young women to really feel that they're competitive with men. As opposed to saying, Right, this is not a competition. It's collaborative. I think that there's a time and a place in a team for people to take different roles. I think we really have gotten it all wrong and don't teach young women and young men that it's not a competition.

And so that competition is what is really driving a lot of these marital collapses. And as you say, women not being able to find men and men not being able to embrace women's power and all of that. I mean, the truth is that there's a time in life for men to be powerful, and there's a time in life for women to be powerful. And for them to support one another. I think that's what we should be supporting.

Yeah. Thank you. Listen, this has been a very fascinating and very interesting podcast. So, Erika, thank you so much for being my guest. Thank you for your pleasure. Well, you Oh, my God. I loved having you. I apologize again for the technical snafu, but will you please come back when you have your new book, or you said it comes out in March. Would you please come back and talk about that because that sounds like a great topic.

I would love to.

Thank you. Thank you, Eric. I appreciate it. Everyone, where do you find... Do you want to just tell people where they can find more information with you?

At www. Comisci. Com. Com. Com. Com. It's komisar. Com. It's K-O-M-I-S-A-R. Com. And there you can find links to my books, and you can find interviews I've given, and articles I've written, and lots of information, and ways to contact me clinically if you want an appointment. It's all on that website.

Thank you so much, Erica. Thank you. Bye-bye.

Bye.