James Taranto<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\nMotherhood used to be as American as apple pie. Nowadays it can be as antagonistic as American politics. Ask Erica Komisar.<\/p>\n
Ms. Komisar, 53, is a Jewish psychoanalyst who lives and practices on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. If that biographical thumbnail leads you to stereotype her as a political liberal, you\u2019re right. But she tells me she has become \u201ca bit of a pariah\u201d on the left because of the book she published this year, \u201cBeing There: Why Prioritizing Motherhood in the First Three Years Matters.\u201d<\/p>\n
Christian radio stations \u201cinterviewed me and loved me,\u201d she says. She went on \u201cFox & Friends,\u201d and \u201cthe host was like, your book is the best thing since the invention of the refrigerator.\u201d But \u201cI couldn\u2019t get on NPR,\u201d and \u201cI was rejected wholesale\u2014particularly in New York\u2014by the liberal press.\u201d She did appear on ABC\u2019s \u201cGood Morning America,\u201d but seconds before the camera went live, she says, the interviewer told her: \u201cI don\u2019t believe in the premise of your book at all. I don\u2019t like your book.\u201d<\/p>\n
The premise of Ms. Komisar\u2019s book\u2014backed by research in psychology, neuroscience and epigenetics\u2014is that \u201cmothers are biologically necessary for babies,\u201d and not only for the obvious reasons of pregnancy and birth. \u201cBabies are much more neurologically fragile than we\u2019ve ever understood,\u201d Ms. Komisar says. She cites the view of one neuroscientist, Nim Tottenham of Columbia University, \u201cthat babies are born without a central nervous system\u201d and \u201cmothers are the central nervous system to babies,\u201d especially for the first nine months after birth.<\/p>\n
What does that mean? \u201cEvery time a mother comforts a baby in distress, she\u2019s actually regulating that baby\u2019s emotions from the outside in. After three years, the baby internalizes that ability to regulate their emotions, but not until then.\u201d For that reason, mothers \u201cneed to be there as much as possible, both physically and emotionally, for children in the first 1,000 days.\u201d<\/p>\n
The regulatory mechanism is oxytocin, a neurotransmitter popularly known as the \u201clove hormone.\u201d Oxytocin, Ms. Komisar explains, \u201cis a buffer against stress.\u201d Mothers produce it when they give birth, breastfeed or otherwise nurture their children. \u201cThe more oxytocin the mother produces, the more she produces it in the baby\u201d by communicating via eye contact, touch and gentle talk. The baby\u2019s brain in turn develops oxytocin receptors, which allow for self-regulation at a later age.<\/p>\n
Women produce more oxytocin than men do, which answers the obvious question of why fathers aren\u2019t as well-suited as mothers for this sort of \u201csensitive, empathetic nurturing.\u201d People \u201cwant to feel that men and women are fungible,\u201d observes Ms. Komisar\u2014but they aren\u2019t, at least not when it comes to parental roles. Fathers produce a \u201cdifferent nurturing hormone\u201d known as vasopressin, \u201cwhat we call the protective, aggressive hormone.\u201d<\/p>\n
Whereas a mother of a crying baby will \u201clean into the pain and say, \u2018Oh, honey!\u2019\u00a0\u201d a father is more apt to tell the child: \u201cC\u2019mon, you\u2019re OK. Brush yourself off; let\u2019s go back to play.\u201d Children, especially boys, need that paternal nurturing to learn to control their aggression and become self-sufficient. But during the first stages of childhood, motherly love is more vital.<\/p>\n
Ms. Komisar\u2019s interest in early childhood development grew out of her three decades\u2019 experience treating families, first as a clinical social worker and later as an analyst. \u201cWhat I was seeing was an increase in children being diagnosed with ADHD and an increase in aggression in children, particularly in little boys, and an increase in depression in little girls.\u201d More youngsters were also being diagnosed with \u201csocial disorders\u201d whose symptoms resembled those of autism\u2014\u201chaving difficulty relating to other children, having difficulty with empathy.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
By James Taranto Motherhood used to be as American as apple pie. Nowadays it can be as antagonistic as American politics. Ask Erica Komisar. Ms. Komisar, 53, is a Jewish psychoanalyst who lives and practices on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. If that biographical thumbnail leads you to stereotype her as a political liberal, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":197,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-70573","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n
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