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E78: The Truth about Daycare, Nannies, and Working Moms · The Lila Rose Show

• 0:00
  I feel like women have lost their empathy for their
• 0:03
  children. Society depends upon healthy
• 0:06
  children that grow into healthy adults.
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  There is nothing more important than raising children.
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  What happens in those first three years casts such a long
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  shadow on the rest of your child's life.
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  If you think of it in those terms, then you say whatever
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  sacrifices we have to make in those first three years are
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  worth it. Hey guys, welcome back to the
• 0:29
  Lila Rose Podcast. I told some of you guys about
• 0:33
  our new guest for the today's episode on the live stream that
• 0:36
  we did on Friday in studio with Trent Horne.
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  And I think some of you are very excited about this episode.
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  It is with Erica Commissar, who is a clinical social worker,
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  psychoanalyst and a parent guidance expert.
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  I first learned about Erica by reading her book.
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  I think my sister recommended it to me a few years ago called
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  being there by prioritizing motherhood in the first three
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  years matters. And I remember reading her book
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  and I think I don't remember if it was pre children.
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  I'm pretty sure it was pre children are very on the cusp
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  when we were starting our family four or five years ago now that
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  I was deeply encouraged by the book, also convicted by the book
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  about, yeah, you have to be there in the first three years
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  of your child's life. And so we're going to get into
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  the practicalities. You know, Erica's done extensive
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  research on this, about what that means already.
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  I'm sure a lot of people have a lot of questions hearing me talk
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  about this because there's a lot of working moms in the world
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  today. There's a lot of working moms
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  who listen to this show. There's a lot of moms who
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  wonder, am I giving my kids what I need?
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  Can I give them the time that they need?
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  What do they need? And I want to 1st just start off
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  by saying this is not to shame or to judge anyone to make you
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  feel bad about your life. This is to lean on Erica's
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  extensive expertise and her experience and her practical
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  advice to help all of us maximize our current life
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  circumstances so we can be the best parents, mothers in
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  particular. We can be a very young and
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  beautiful children. If you don't have kids yet, I'm
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  sure many of you are interested in this.
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  I know I was before kids because you're thinking about how do I
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  do life? How do I, if I'm working, do I
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  still work when I have kids? I need to help provide for my
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  family. I know it's a little different
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  for men, obviously, because we don't have that same bond as men
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  with children that mothers do. So this is certainly about that
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  unique bond that mothers have. But there's implications for men
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  too. So hang in there, men, you need
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  to listen to this too. But Erica, thank you so much for
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  joining the podcast and coming in from New York today.
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  Thank you for having me. How was the flight?
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  It was wonderful and I'm happy to be here in beautiful
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  California. Good.
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  Well, it's we're so happy to have you.
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  I'm thrilled to have you in studio.
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  And you know, first starters, I shared very briefly the name of
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  your book. I know you've written a second
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  book, but give us a little bit about your background.
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  Well, I'm a psychoanalyst and I'm a social worker and I'm an
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  author. So I have for many years treated
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  parents and treated children. And I basically took what I
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  learned in those more than 30 years of experience, and I put
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  it into both of my books because you can't treat everyone.
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  And I wanted to to give that wisdom to people who might never
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  cross my path and then come into my office.
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  So what motivates you going down this particular line of research
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  and and therapy to helping mothers in particular and
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  working parents and stay at home parents be the best parents they
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  can be. What?
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  What's motivating that for you? Well, my history, if you will,
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  is that I was first a social worker and I worked in, in a
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  clinic in Brooklyn and I worked with very poor families and
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  mothers and children and, and sometimes foster mothers, a lot
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  of foster mothers and children. And what I was seeing is that
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  many, many mothers didn't have just basic skills in terms of
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  parenting, didn't have mothering parenting skills.
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  And so that got me on a track to really start psychoeducational
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  classes for mothers. And so that's how I got into
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  parent guidance, really. But the path that I'm on now in
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  terms of, you know, dealing with zero to three was because I was
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  seeing when I started my practice over 30 years ago, I
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  was seeing like a tidal wave, this epidemic of mental illness
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  in children and adolescents coming at me.
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  I was seeing an uptick in children younger and younger
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  being diagnosed for things like ADHD and behavioral problems and
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  early signs of aggression and being medicated as young as two
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  and three years of age. And I was seeing adolescents who
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  were, you know, where the suicide rates were going up
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  increasingly. And I became really interested
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  in why that was happening. And in my practice, I was seeing
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  it connected to the absence of mothers on a day-to-day basis in
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  children's lives. Meaning the children who seem to
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  have the greatest problems in my, that were coming into my
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  practice were the children whose mothers were the most absent,
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  either physically absent or physically and emotionally
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  absent. And so I started doing research.
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  I started looking at all of the neuroscience research from the
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  90s and up to to date, as well as epigenetics and attachment
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  research and, and psychoanalytic theory.
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  And I put it together. There is a field called
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  neuropsychobiology, which is the coming together of all those
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  sciences to really talk about the mental health of children.
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  And not just to keep putting out fires, which is what I was doing
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  in my practice, but to try to talk to parents about
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  prevention, which is how do you, how do you raise emotionally,
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  mentally healthy children from the beginning?
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  Because the foundation is the first three years and it really
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  matters. And so I really wanted to write
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  books that helped also preventatively.
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  Did having your own children? I heard earlier we were chatting
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  a little bit. You have three children.
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  Did having your own children also impact the research that
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  you were doing or make you more interested in the research that
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  you were doing? Yeah, I mean, absolutely.
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  I mean, as someone in the field, I obviously was very, very
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  interested in children and very interested in child development.
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  But I've always had just an incredible amount of empathy.
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  I think, you know, you'd say I didn't.
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  I didn't develop empathy because I'm a social worker and a
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  psychoanalyst. I am a social worker and a
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  psychoanalyst because I had this incredible empathy.
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  So my empathy always extended very much to the most vulnerable
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  and those without a voice. And that would be infants and
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  toddlers. And, and so, as my husband
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  always says to me, writing these books was giving a voice to
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  children because our society is very fixed on the needs of
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  parents. It's very fixed on the needs of
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  mothers. If you look at all the articles
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  that are written and a lot of the books, it's all about
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  parents and what do we need to do for parents and how can we
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  help parents and what do parents need to be happy?
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  But no one was really writing anything about what children
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  need. And so really what I was doing
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  was saying, look at, you know, the expression goes, you're only
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  as happy as your least Abby child, right?
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  And so if that's true, which it is true, then parents want to
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  raise happy, healthy children, resilient children.
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  And so these books were really, and this information is meant,
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  as you say, not to shame parents, but to really get them
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  to understand what it's going to require to raise those mentally
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  healthy, emotionally healthy children.
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  I think there is, it may be a tendency on this adult focused
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  approach we have as a culture. We have that tendency because
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  sometimes the answers are not what we would prefer culturally.
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  The answers of what it does require to be the parent that
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  you need to be for your kids. And in a way, there's the,
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  there's the hard truths. And I think, you know, you do
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  your book, I remember reading it and it's full of empathy.
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  It's very understanding. And I think that's how you you
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  come across. But I, why do you think, what is
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  your theory? I want to start with this
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  because it's where some people's objections may already be.
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  Why do you think there's this, you know, maybe a limited sort
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  of capacity people are feeling to be able to hear, Oh, my kids
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  need something more for me that I feel that I can't or I don't
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  want to give them. Well, I mean, I think that my
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  books do sometimes make women feel guilty, and I don't really
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  see guilt as a bad thing. Where is the rest of society
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  does see guilt? As a bad.
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  Thing because for me, guilt is a signal feeling.
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  So basically what it says is you're in conflict.
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  So like physical pain is another signal feeling.
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  If you hurt yourself, you know, break your ankle hiking or
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  playing basketball or whatever, you're going to stop.
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  You're going to go to the doctor, you're going to take it
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  easy. You're going to look at ankle.
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  You're not going to keep playing basketball on your ankle, right?
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  It's a signal feeling. So we say guilt is a signal
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  feeling that you're in conflict and you're meant to look at that
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  conflict and resolve it in whatever way you you resolve it.
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  But you're not meant to turn away from it.
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  And society tells women, no, turn away from it.
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  Guilt's not good. And, you know, excessive guilt
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  is what we say is neurotic, is not good, but guilt is actually
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  very helpful. It means our conscience is
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  working. So we don't want to just turn
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  away from our guilt. And guilt is about behavior.
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  So we feel badly. We feel conflicted about
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  behaviors that we may not be happy about, that we are engaged
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  in. Shame is a different thing.
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  So shame has to do with character.
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  Shame means that you feel like a bad person.
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  So if the things that I'm saying make you feel ashamed, it has
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  nothing to do with what I'm saying.
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  It has to do with something much deeper, something that has to do
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  with feeling like a bad person. But that doesn't have to do with
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  the guilt over leaving your child, which has to do with
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  behavior. And so, you know, they're both
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  important feelings, guilt and shame.
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  But I think we don't like to feel and we don't like to feel
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  any discomfort. And so, you know, sometimes we
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  have to feel discomfort to grow. We have to feel discomfort to do
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  the right. Thing Sometimes doing the right
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  thing is uncomfortable, and I think that we don't like feeling
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  uncomfortable today. In your introduction to your
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  book, Being There, Why prioritizing brotherhood in the
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  first three years matters, you wrote.
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  The truth is we can do everything in life, but not at
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  the same time. I think there was a famous
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  Atlantic article Why women Can't have it all.
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  Was it Anne Savage was her name. Why we can't have it all, at
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  least not at the same time. And you go on to say we cannot
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  raise healthy children if we are not there for them physically
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  and emotionally. We cannot be present for them
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  while being intensely involved with work or other interests
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  that make us less mindful of and attentive to the emotional needs
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  of our children. Now, the rest of the book, of
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  course, unpacks this. So let's unpack it.
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  Let's start with, let's start with the current status quo of
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  working parents and families. You saw this.
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  This is what got you into this line of research to begin with.
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  You saw children suffering. What are some of the statistics
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  you can share about how many mothers are working right now
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  and how many the different ways that children are being raised
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  and the outcomes that they're experiencing?
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  Well, how many mothers are working, I think in America, and
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  I get confused with the statistics because I work a lot
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  in Europe too, but I think it's 80%.
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  So a lot of women work. Full time or?
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  Some form of work? Yeah, some form of work.
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  And what was the other question you asked?
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  Oh, and to clarify, obviously all mothers work.
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  Yeah, I was going to say child, but we're talking about
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  employment outside of the home. That's right, significant
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  employment outside of the home. What is the So what have you
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  seen you you saw some of these trends in your own practice, but
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  in terms of the quality of children, their mental health
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  outcomes, their emotional outcomes after the first three
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  years, how do you see the correlation between big picture
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  mothers increasingly out of the home and children and their
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  outcomes of not having their mothers for quality and quantity
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  time? Yeah, well, the.
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  Pew Research Organization did a study to show that working
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  mothers spend on average no more than 90 minutes a day with their
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  children under the age of 1. I think and and just Simply put,
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  it's just not enough time to raise healthy children.
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  And what I mean by that is children are born neurologically
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  vulnerable. That's really important because
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  I think that we project onto very young children that they
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  are more capable, that they're more resilient, that they're
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  more independent and more self-sufficient than they
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  actually are. They're actually incredibly
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  neurologically and emotionally vulnerable.
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  There is the idea that they are born too early, that they should
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  probably be inside of us for another 8 to 9 months.
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  And so, you know, they're born in the world meant to be on our
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  body. So in other parts of the world,
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  mothers wear babies on their bodies for the first year as if
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  they're still in the womb. And there's a reason for that
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  because mothers serve in the first year is the central
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  nervous system to babies. So when we take a baby out of
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  our body and then within six weeks we put it in daycare into
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  a group environment with strangers and we remove it from
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  our body, or we put it in a crib in a separate room than our
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  room, or we let the baby cry it out at three months, what we're
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  essentially doing is we are putting stress on a neurological
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  system that's not meant to deal with stress.
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  It's meant to be buffered from stress.
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  So mothers are they serve a few really important biological
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  functions in the first three years.
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  One is they buffer children from stress. 2 is they regulate
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  children's emotions from moment to moment, every time a mother.
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  Soothes a baby or has skin to skin.
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  Contact with the baby, she's basically regulating that baby's
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  emotions and getting that baby's emotions from going too high and
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  too low to a state of homeostasis.
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  And that's really important because babies brains are not
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  meant to be under a great amount of stress, very small
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  incremental amounts, but not a great amount of stress.
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  So the cortisol levels or the stress hormone levels in babies
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  brains are meant to remain very, very, very low in the 1st 12
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  months. And what we're doing is by
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  separating them from us precociously and prematurely and
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  putting them into these daycare situations, we're essentially
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  exposing them to very high levels of stress.
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  The problem with that is that when we turn a stress system on,
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  a stress regulating system on before it's meant to be turned
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  on, because it's meant to really be offline for the first year.
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  When we turn it on too early, it becomes the amygdala, this
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  little tiny almond shaped part of the brain that regulates
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  stress in the brain, starts to grow and becomes highly active
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  when it's not supposed to. And sort of like a light bulb in
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  the kitchen or a balloon that gets overblown, it basically
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  blows out and tribbles up. And when that happens, it ceases
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  to be functional in the future, which is why you have things
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  like ADHD, which is not a disorder by the way, but which
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  is a hyper vigilance of the brain on stress.
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  It's a child's brain on stress. It's the flight response of the
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  fight or flight evolutionary response to stress.
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  As human beings, we either fight our predators that are running
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  after us or we flee from them. And ADHD is the flight part and
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  the aggression that we're seeing in children at a very young age
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  in school. Children who are put into
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  daycare at a very young age either become aggressive in
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  daycare or when they get to primary school.
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  There's high levels of aggression.
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  That's the fight part. So we're basically turning on
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  stress in our children's brain before they're supposed to have
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  stress, and then the brain doesn't regulate the stress
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  going forward, meaning it can't it can't regulate emotions, it
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  can't deal with adversity. Yeah, bad stuff.
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  So when you have, you know, your two year old tantrum is that how
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  does one navigate that? Let's say, separate from whether
• 16:46
  this child is being fully raised by a stay at home mom, part time
• 16:49
  working mom, part time nanny, But let's just say the child's
• 16:51
  tantruming. Is it possible for the child to
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  experience a lot of stress at two or three, even act out
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  violently hit their sibling or something like this?
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  And that's a natural form of development, as opposed to
• 17:05
  there's been some sort of trauma or an absence of care that that
• 17:09
  child needed. Right.
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  So tantrums are normal. Tantrums are what I would say is
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  tantrums are like emotional. Blown.
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  Fuses so and that's quite different than the kind of
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  aggression that we're seeing in children when they're in daycare
• 17:23
  or when they're neglected right. So those the aggression we're
• 17:28
  seeing would be more under the the kind of the the category of
• 17:32
  behavioral problems tantrums aren't behavioral problems.
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  Tantrums are blown fuses. Essentially what happens is
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  between the ages of. Two and three.
• 17:44
  Children start to internalize rules and structure.
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  So before then, you know, until about 18 months, you know,
• 17:51
  children, babies are, you know, you give them what they need,
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  you meet their needs. If they cry, you pick them up.
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  You know they're not being potty trained, that they really don't
• 17:59
  have much many rules, so to speak.
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  And then we start to say no to them, and then they start to say
• 18:06
  no back to us because that's what happens.
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  They mimic us. We say no, they say no, no, no.
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  And so that internalizing of structure causes them to be in
• 18:14
  great conflict, and that causes tantrums.
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  So it's conflict. So tantrums aren't the end of
• 18:20
  the world. Some children are more
• 18:22
  neurologically sensitive. So what we know from the
• 18:24
  research is that there are many, many children born with a gene
• 18:28
  they found for sensitivity. And sensitivity means
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  sensitivity to stress. Those children who were born
• 18:35
  with that sensitivity gene are more likely to have tantrums.
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  They're more likely to cry and be harder to soothe.
• 18:41
  And we've all had one of those children.
• 18:43
  If you have many children, and I always say to mothers, raise
• 18:45
  your hand. If you have one child who's more
• 18:47
  sensitive, who's harder to soothe and you know, it's more
• 18:50
  sensitive with touch and, and everybody raises their hand.
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  I have one, you know, maybe I have two.
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  But those children, the research shows if those children are
• 19:00
  given sensitive, empathic nurturing from their mother, if
• 19:03
  their mothers are physically and emotionally present, and if they
• 19:07
  are very empathic and sensitive, it neutralizes the expression of
• 19:10
  that gene. So those children have as great
• 19:12
  a chance of being emotionally healthy later on as children
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  born without that gene. If those children are not given
• 19:18
  that sensitive, empathic nurturing, if they're put in
• 19:21
  daycare, those children then go on to develop things like
• 19:24
  anxiety, depression, ADHD. So we've mentioned, you've
• 19:28
  mentioned daycare a few Times Now and I want to go through
• 19:31
  this exercise, which again, I think is very controversial
• 19:35
  today, but I think it's incredibly important and I so
• 19:38
  value the work you've done on this, this exercise of the
• 19:41
  varying styles, I will call them.
• 19:45
  I know in many cases it, it can feel like in a necessity or it
• 19:48
  can be a necessity. So not trying to make make light
• 19:51
  of it by calling it a style, but the various ways of managing,
• 19:55
  let's call it childcare, raising of 1's very young children.
• 19:59
  Daycare obviously is on one part where you drop your child off at
• 20:03
  a daycare sometimes 10 to 12 hours a day, depending on the
• 20:06
  career or I've, I don't know if there's more, but I've
• 20:09
  definitely heard 11:50 and then we're going to go all the way
• 20:12
  to. Stay at home mom who has no work
• 20:16
  or really many activities outside of raising this child
• 20:21
  because there are stay at home moms who have a lot of hobbies,
• 20:23
  activities, social life that takes them out of the home.
• 20:26
  There's jobs that have varying degrees of taking you out of the
• 20:29
  home. I want to go through all of it.
• 20:31
  Talk about nannies to Ala parenting grandparents.
• 20:34
  You get into all of this in the book and talk about the
• 20:36
  different pros and cons, which I think people need to know.
• 20:40
  So the the purpose of this is to give people the evidence based
• 20:45
  research, the facts about how these different forms of dealing
• 20:50
  with childcare impact kits. Yeah.
• 20:52
  So ready for this exercise. I know you've done this many
• 20:54
  times. So you guys, I'm very picky
• 20:56
  about my skin care. I always have been.
• 20:58
  I tried a lot of products, high end products, low end products,
• 21:02
  all different kinds of products over the years and it's been
• 21:05
  very hard for mine to find a line that I like multiple
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  They've got great sourcing of their ingredients, but they're
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  So when I tried their product for the first time, I was
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  I love their moisturizer, which I use every night.
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• 21:52
  That's Mimi skincare.com. All right, so how shall we
• 21:55
  start? Maybe start with if you could
• 21:59
  the optimal what you see to be the optimal way to raise a child
• 22:04
  for maximum positive outcomes. A very young child.
• 22:09
  Well, what I say is more is more.
• 22:11
  The more emotionally and physically present you can be
• 22:14
  for your children in the first critical period of brain
• 22:16
  development, which is 0 to 3. The the greater the chance your
• 22:21
  child will be mentally healthy and having a primary attachment
• 22:25
  figure. Because attachment security is
• 22:27
  really what we're talking about South, having a primary
• 22:30
  attachment figure available to you to soothe you when you're in
• 22:34
  distress and help bring you back to that homeostasis whenever you
• 22:37
  need it. As you're starting to explore
• 22:40
  the world, to be able to come and touch base with that, you
• 22:44
  know, secure object and be able to then go off and toddle and
• 22:47
  explore again, that's the ideal. And I think it's hard because,
• 22:52
  you know, we're not allowed to talk about the ideal today in
• 22:54
  anything. I don't know when that happened.
• 22:58
  Because you know, if if things are less than ideal, often
• 23:02
  they're easier to deal with The first we understand what the
• 23:05
  ideal is, right? So if we can't talk about the
• 23:08
  ideal, we can't repair, we can't work through and resolve the
• 23:12
  conflicts that come from the less than the ideal.
• 23:15
  So the ideal is having your primary attachment figure,
• 23:18
  usually your mother, as present as possible in those, but not
• 23:22
  just physically present. Because as I say, you can be
• 23:25
  physically present and be emotionally checked out.
• 23:27
  You can't be emotionally present if you're not physically
• 23:29
  present. It's just not happening.
• 23:31
  So the idea of quality time is a ruse.
• 23:33
  It's a myth. It doesn't work for children.
• 23:36
  They need both your physical presence and your emotional
• 23:39
  presence. That's the ideal.
• 23:43
  If you can't be there. I want to, I want to actually
• 23:46
  sit with the ideal for a moment more because I, I agree with
• 23:49
  you. It's not talked about enough in
• 23:50
  some circles. It is talked about, you know,
• 23:52
  stay at home mom in the context of, you know, the ideal for
• 23:55
  childbearing. It's like stay at home mom is
• 23:57
  the best. OK, well, what does that mean?
• 23:59
  You know, how, how does that mean?
• 24:00
  What does it mean to be the ideal stay at home mom for your
• 24:03
  kids? What are those activities look
• 24:04
  like? So I want to unpack that a
• 24:06
  little more. You mentioned quality and
• 24:08
  quantity time. There's a difference between the
• 24:10
  two, as you said. I think in your book children
• 24:13
  need both. Let's start with the quantity
• 24:17
  word 'cause I think that's the most sticky for people.
• 24:20
  I think I, I, I don't know if it's 144 hours in a week.
• 24:24
  If I have that number correct, Waking hours for a child is I
• 24:28
  don't know if it's eighty. I remember doing this exercise,
• 24:32
  by the way, I think after reading your book quantity.
• 24:36
  So for that mother, when you say it, the more is more.
• 24:40
  Is it ideal then for a mother, You know, if she has activities
• 24:43
  outside the home, even grocery shopping, OK, we're just doing
• 24:46
  the ideal exercise here. Or she has friends or she has,
• 24:49
  you know, she works out, she does, you know, whatever those
• 24:52
  activities are is the ideal ideal.
• 24:55
  The child accompanies for all of it during waking hours.
• 24:58
  Well, again, if you look at other parts of the world,
• 25:01
  mothers wear their babies. It's baby wearing for the first
• 25:04
  year. And so ideal, ideal would be
• 25:08
  that you wear your baby and you carry your baby with you and
• 25:11
  your baby goes with, you know, there was a researcher that I
• 25:13
  interviewed for my book. Her name is Judy Messman, and
• 25:17
  she's a very famous researcher. She goes around the world and
• 25:20
  she looks at mothering behaviors in other cultures to see if it's
• 25:23
  culturally relevant or whether it's universal.
• 25:28
  And she found in all the countries she went to many,
• 25:30
  many, many countries that it's universal.
• 25:32
  Mothering behavior is universal. But what she found is that
• 25:35
  babies in other parts of the world don't cry like babies in
• 25:39
  the West do, particularly in America, because we have this
• 25:43
  very strange and perverse idea that baby should be separate
• 25:47
  than us at a very young age. Whereas in other cultures, they
• 25:49
  understand that infants that are just out of your body are meant
• 25:55
  to be physically skin to skin close to you because that forms
• 25:58
  attachment security. So the ideal, the ideal is for
• 26:01
  the first year, for the most part to have your baby with you,
• 26:05
  right? And then, you know, it doesn't
• 26:09
  mean every single minute. Because the other thing that we
• 26:12
  don't do in this country is we don't raise our children in
• 26:14
  extended family situations like other parts of the world.
• 26:18
  Now that's changing in other parts of the world, sadly,
• 26:20
  because they're following our model and they really shouldn't
• 26:22
  because our model sucks. Excuse me, but we have this kind
• 26:27
  of family diaspora where people move away from their families
• 26:31
  and they raise children in isolation.
• 26:33
  They move to the suburbs, they raise children in isolation.
• 26:36
  It's all about isolation. So this weird kind of ethos of
• 26:40
  individualism and isolation and self-sufficiency, and it's all
• 26:44
  part of our suppose it's part of our American culture.
• 26:47
  Not not the good part. I love America, but this is not
• 26:49
  the good part of our American culture.
• 26:51
  This idea that, you know, we're all meant to live independently
• 26:55
  of one another. Actually, no, because
• 26:56
  independence is not the goal. It's interdependence and that
• 27:00
  means that we never raised children in isolation.
• 27:02
  We always raised children with grandmothers and aunts and, and
• 27:05
  next door neighbors who were called aunt and, and so those
• 27:09
  people could hold the baby because that you asked about Ala
• 27:12
  parenting. Ala parenting is not giving your
• 27:15
  baby to someone when they're in distress and you know, going out
• 27:19
  and you know, to the supermarket at that moment.
• 27:23
  It's giving your baby to to someone who the baby knows
• 27:26
  really well who's an alternative attachment figure who can
• 27:29
  entertain the baby and hold the baby when the baby is in a state
• 27:33
  of homeostasis. But when the.
• 27:34
  Baby is in. Distress.
• 27:35
  In other parts of the world, the baby is handed right back to the
• 27:38
  mother. And so.
• 27:39
  Mother not gone. Yeah, the mother's not gone that
• 27:42
  long and so, you know. How long is not long?
• 27:45
  So it depends on the baby, right?
• 27:47
  If you have a sensitive baby who really can't bear, who cries
• 27:51
  when the baby is away from you, then you know you know you have
• 27:54
  a sensitive baby and you have to be more present if you have a
• 27:56
  slightly less sensitive baby. And that's the individual baby
• 28:00
  God gave you. Then you might be able to leave
• 28:03
  for a few more minutes, you know, And the idea is that if
• 28:07
  you have trusted alternative attachment figures like
• 28:10
  grandmothers or a single surrogate like a babysitter, you
• 28:17
  know, it is also important for mothers to have breaks.
• 28:19
  So this is, you know, the other thing is that it's important for
• 28:23
  mothers to be able to take a shower, to be able to go for a
• 28:25
  walk, to be able to do a 20 minute yoga class by themselves.
• 28:29
  To be able to just not be within the the sphere of the baby for a
• 28:34
  few minutes, you know? And so that's important too.
• 28:38
  But somehow we've taken that idea of, you know, the dance of
• 28:42
  closeness in space with a newborn baby.
• 28:45
  And we've taken it to an extreme because don't we do everything
• 28:48
  to an extreme in America? And we've taken it to an extreme
• 28:51
  where we say, well, I can go to back to work for 8 or 10 hours a
• 28:54
  day or leave my baby in daycare. And no, I mean, it's sort of
• 28:58
  loses the nuance of it. So think about closeness and,
• 29:02
  and separation in space is a dance.
• 29:04
  And with a newborn baby, I would say there's.
• 29:06
  More closeness than space. And then as the baby gets older,
• 29:09
  increasingly there's a little more space, but there's still
• 29:11
  closeness. You mentioned aloe parenting.
• 29:14
  You said, you know the the neighbor that's like the odd or
• 29:17
  the sitter that's really well known or the grandparent.
• 29:22
  It sounds like in the ideal, we're talking about the ideal
• 29:24
  again, then we're going to walk away towards reality of what
• 29:27
  people are dealing with in the day-to-day today.
• 29:29
  But in the ideal, there is an extended family unit or there's
• 29:33
  a community at minimum that's trusted that can form meaningful
• 29:38
  quality and quantity Time bonds with very young children to be
• 29:42
  another caretaker for that child.
• 29:45
  Not just to permit the babe, the the mother to have space to do
• 29:50
  something else for her own care or whatever her obligations
• 29:53
  might be, but also is this good for the?
• 29:55
  Is this good for the development of the baby?
• 29:58
  I mean, it can be if the, if the grandmother or the aunt or the
• 30:03
  father or whoever is watching the baby when the baby is in a
• 30:07
  calm state doesn't get possessive over the baby when
• 30:10
  they're in a distressed state. So sometimes what happens today,
• 30:13
  and I've seen this happen many times in the families I work
• 30:16
  with, is that a father will feel competitive because of all this
• 30:20
  gender neutrality quality stuff. The father feels competitive
• 30:24
  with the mother, the grandmother feels competitive with the
• 30:28
  mother where she says no, no, I can.
• 30:30
  I can help the baby. I can deal with the baby's
• 30:33
  distress, whereas the mother saying no mom, it's OK, I the
• 30:36
  baby is in distress, the baby needs to be with me.
• 30:39
  So, you know, I encourage mothers to be a little forceful
• 30:42
  with their own mothers and aunts and whoever's helping them and
• 30:45
  babysitters because babysitters and can be quite forceful and
• 30:49
  say no, no, I'll take the baby. And no, I'm like, no, no, if the
• 30:52
  baby's in distress, really in distress, that baby goes back to
• 30:55
  the mother who is the primary attachment figure because that
• 30:59
  is the go to person when that baby is in distress.
• 31:02
  So that kind of competitiveness is also something that you want
• 31:06
  to make sure it doesn't exist in your family.
• 31:09
  And so we're talking right now when you say the baby, I think
• 31:12
  we're talking largely the first year of life.
• 31:14
  Yeah. All right.
• 31:16
  What about when you when the baby hits two?
• 31:18
  Yeah, my 2 year old, we still call him the baby sometimes.
• 31:22
  They're still very, very little. So little.
• 31:24
  So the right brain. 85% of the right brain is developed at the
• 31:30
  age of 3. So between zero to three, that's
• 31:35
  the critical window. So the first year is a year of
• 31:39
  really the the the the height of neurological vulnerability.
• 31:44
  But the next two years, so people get people.
• 31:47
  It's interesting. People get the idea of
• 31:49
  attachment security. Confused.
• 31:50
  They think attachment security happens after a few days.
• 31:54
  A few weeks, a few months, you know, oh, I can go back to work
• 31:58
  at three months because my baby's fully attached and I'm
• 32:01
  like, no, the baby is bonded with you.
• 32:04
  But attachment security takes a good three years of repeat,
• 32:10
  repeat, repeat. Reassurance, reassurance,
• 32:13
  reassurance. So every time the baby goes off
• 32:16
  to toddle off, and that's why they call toddling, they toddle
• 32:19
  off to explore the physical world and they take risks.
• 32:23
  They're actually looking back at their mothers for security to
• 32:27
  know if they should keep going or they'll come back and get a
• 32:30
  hug. It's what Margaret Mahler, a
• 32:31
  very famous psycho psychoanalyst, called
• 32:34
  rapprochement or emotional refueling.
• 32:36
  So that emotional refueling process, which is reassurance,
• 32:39
  repeat, reassurance, repeat, reassurance, repeat is the
• 32:43
  foundation of attachment security.
• 32:45
  It's not one and done. It's not, oh, I made the baby
• 32:48
  bond to me. Now the baby's great.
• 32:51
  No, it's actually reassuring the baby over and over again till
• 32:54
  the baby internalizes the idea that the world is a secure place
• 32:58
  and the environment can be trusted and you're the
• 33:00
  environment. So what does that practically
• 33:02
  look like in terms of how one spends one's time, quality and
• 33:07
  quantity time with a 2 to 3 year old?
• 33:10
  So I think it's really important because we don't live in
• 33:13
  extended family situations unless you do.
• 33:17
  We're talking about the ideal here, yeah.
• 33:18
  That you have friends. But if you, if you're not living
• 33:22
  near your family, that you have friends and those friends have
• 33:25
  babies and you're getting together and you are the,
• 33:28
  you're, you know. It's not for the.
• 33:29
  Babies, mind you, the babies are are not not needing stimulation.
• 33:33
  That's also a myth that babies under the age of three need to
• 33:36
  get together and group situations and they just don't
• 33:39
  because they do something called parallel play.
• 33:41
  They don't really care about anybody but you, but as a
• 33:44
  mother, so you don't lose your mind.
• 33:45
  It's important that you have stimulation too.
• 33:47
  And it's important that you have other adults around that support
• 33:50
  you and tell you you're doing a good job and you can compare
• 33:53
  notes with. And so I always encourage
• 33:55
  mothers groups, like I think mothers groups are really,
• 33:58
  really important. We're mothers and babies, you
• 34:00
  know, and there's all kinds of things that we've done with it.
• 34:02
  Mothers massage, baby massage groups or, you know, Gymboree
• 34:07
  classes or music classes or, you know, those are more for mothers
• 34:11
  than they are for the babies because and they stimulate the
• 34:14
  babies a little too, you know, but sometimes they over
• 34:17
  stimulate the babies. The truth is they're for the
• 34:19
  mothers. So I think mothers need other
• 34:21
  mothers. I think that's that is the truth
• 34:24
  that we need to have a support system, we need to have a
• 34:28
  community and we've lost that community in raising children.
• 34:33
  And so one of the reasons that mothers do get postpartumly
• 34:36
  depressed, I mean, there's many reasons why mothers get
• 34:38
  postpartumly depressed, but one is the isolation.
• 34:42
  And 1 is that the expectation is that we're supposed to sit in
• 34:45
  our homes in the suburbs alone. And raise children in isolation.
• 34:51
  And that's just never the way it was.
• 34:53
  It's not the way it's meant to be.
• 34:55
  You know, we're meant to live in villages and communities.
• 34:58
  We're meant to have people around us that support us and
• 35:01
  hug us and, and, you know, put their arm around us and tell us
• 35:05
  we're. Doing a great job as a mother
• 35:06
  and breastfeeding is hard, but you go, girl, you're doing a
• 35:09
  great job and and we just, we lost that.
• 35:13
  We've really lost the the community that was part of
• 35:17
  raising children so. I think community is a very
• 35:20
  important part of mothers being happy as mothers and also, you
• 35:24
  know, so the idea of being in your house all day with your
• 35:27
  child alone, although some of that does.
• 35:30
  Feel nice and feels kind of cocooning.
• 35:32
  I think it's got to be intermingled with kind of
• 35:36
  socializing with other mothers and interacting and having a
• 35:39
  community. So for those we talked about
• 35:42
  year one, which largely the advices, you know, wear the
• 35:46
  baby, take the baby everywhere. That's it.
• 35:48
  And you know, I'm thinking right now in context of say the
• 35:51
  working mom myself, I my first year, I had pandemic baby with
• 35:55
  my first one. The second one was kind of a
• 35:57
  semi pandemic baby. A lot of it, the work I did do,
• 36:00
  baby was right there or on my lap and there was typing going
• 36:03
  on or phone calls or whatever. The second year though, is, is
• 36:07
  different. Your baby is exploring.
• 36:08
  Your baby is not just sleeping as many hours a day still
• 36:12
  snapping, but there's a lot more needs and interest that that
• 36:15
  little now toddler has. What is the back to ideal it?
• 36:20
  So it sounds like the ideal for babies two to three.
• 36:23
  We talked about, you know, before that the ideal is if the
• 36:27
  mother is doing other things, she's still taking the baby, the
• 36:31
  toddler. Is, I mean, I, I was asked to,
• 36:34
  to get involved in Australia with a coworking situation where
• 36:39
  you could bring your children with you and you could have toys
• 36:43
  in the center and you could have a couple of care.
• 36:46
  Mother's helpers, not nannies, mother's helpers, where the
• 36:50
  mothers are still around the circle, you know, in their
• 36:52
  separate cubicles. The babies can play and have
• 36:56
  the, the mother's helper caregivers in the center, but
• 37:00
  come to the mother's when they're in distress.
• 37:02
  And so I thought that was a really interesting idea.
• 37:04
  It was sort of a circular office with mothers in cubicles and
• 37:08
  babies in the middle with A and so, you know, bring your, bring
• 37:11
  your baby to work, I mean. Could that fit within the ideal?
• 37:14
  Because in that situation, she's still, she's got to focus.
• 37:17
  I mean, let's be real, right? Let's say real.
• 37:19
  Most jobs require some level of focus.
• 37:22
  So the idea, the ideal is probably to be with your baby as
• 37:26
  much as possible in the first three years.
• 37:28
  And if you're going to work, then it would be to have a
• 37:31
  single surrogate caregiver, a nanny or a babysitter if you
• 37:35
  don't have kinship bonds. So the first would be kinship
• 37:38
  bonds would be a grandmother or an aunt.
• 37:40
  If you don't have kinship bonds, it would be a single surrogate
• 37:43
  caregiver, and then after that it would be sharing a caregiver
• 37:47
  when you have to work. You know it.
• 37:50
  It's an interesting question that I'm asked a lot.
• 37:52
  Is it better to have another person there that's with the
• 37:56
  baby when you're working or to be working and distracted and
• 38:01
  not paying attention to the baby?
• 38:03
  And the reality is it's better to have a mother's helper or
• 38:07
  someone with you that can pay attention to the baby and while
• 38:13
  you're on the phone or have to do your work part time or
• 38:16
  whatever you're doing. So rather than doing your work
• 38:18
  and ignoring the baby. So that's probably not great in
• 38:21
  terms of how the baby, you know, because the problem is when
• 38:25
  we're really intensely working, it's very hard to pick up on the
• 38:28
  cues of babies. Babies don't need attention
• 38:32
  every single minute. Babies need it's a dance.
• 38:35
  They need attention and then they need space.
• 38:38
  And you'll see if you have a baby, they look away, they suck
• 38:41
  their thumb, they look at the light, you know, sometimes
• 38:43
  they're very hay lying on the floor looking at their mobile.
• 38:46
  They need space too. But when they look back, if you
• 38:50
  are looking at your phone or at your computer, that baby feels
• 38:54
  lost, right? So it's the idea of I can't be
• 38:57
  staring at my baby all day, but I have to be tuned enough in
• 39:01
  that when the baby is looking at me, I know the baby's looking at
• 39:06
  me, right? So it's probably better than to
• 39:09
  have somebody with you, a mother's helper, I call them.
• 39:12
  You could even have a young girl, you know, who's playing
• 39:15
  with the baby, sort of like Alloy parenting.
• 39:17
  That's what they do in other countries, You know, you might
• 39:20
  have other family members or young family members playing
• 39:23
  with the baby so the mother can, you know, peel the potatoes.
• 39:28
  Or. Is in the fields picking, you
• 39:31
  know, vegetables and their little brother is playing with
• 39:35
  them and then when the baby's in distress, the baby has.
• 39:39
  Access to the mother, That would be the ideal.
• 39:41
  So shooting for it again to the 2 year old, you know, so so that
• 39:46
  two year old and staying in the realm of the ideal again.
• 39:49
  And then we're going to ease out of this realm to more of the
• 39:52
  practical realities. But let's say, does it fit
• 39:55
  within the ideal based on the research that you've done for a
• 39:59
  mother to work part time with A2 plus year, let's say a 2 year
• 40:03
  old or whatever, but it's from home largely.
• 40:06
  If she leaves the 2 year old, it's for how many hours can
• 40:09
  still fit within the ideal. Well, you have to look for the
• 40:13
  signs that it's too much for your individual child.
• 40:16
  And what I would say is that, I mean, this is a silly formula
• 40:20
  and I don't like to give it to people, but I'll give it to you
• 40:23
  since you asked because I don't like to give specific times
• 40:26
  because it depends on the baby. But I would say take the age of
• 40:30
  the baby and say you can't leave them more than that number of
• 40:32
  hours a day. So if you've got a 2 year old,
• 40:35
  don't leave him for more than two hours a day would be the the
• 40:38
  number you would say? That's it.
• 40:39
  You got a three-year old 3 hours a day.
• 40:41
  And if you've got a particularly needy 2 year old that might be
• 40:44
  less, would you say a swore for some or you would say really
• 40:47
  stick close to that? I would say stick close to that.
• 40:50
  And then back to the ideal for the three-year old.
• 40:54
  I mean, it sounds like similar application what you just gave
• 40:57
  us that rubric for the 2 year old you would give for the
• 40:59
  three-year old? Yeah, and then by the time they
• 41:00
  go into nursery school, or we used to call it nursery school,
• 41:03
  now we call it preschool, I guess, you know, I wouldn't do
• 41:07
  anything at the age of 3 / 3 days a week for a few hours a
• 41:11
  day. 3 hours a day? Yeah, it would be that that.
• 41:14
  No more, no more than that because there's a lot of.
• 41:17
  So what happened with child care, it's really child care
• 41:21
  because it's not school, is that it was supply and demand.
• 41:24
  So, you know, 30 years ago, nursery schools did not offer
• 41:30
  children under the age of three anything because they said a
• 41:33
  child shouldn't be in a school situation until they're three
• 41:36
  and then only a few hours a day, a few days a week when they're
• 41:40
  three. And then because they used to do
• 41:42
  half days, right, they would say three days a week, you want the
• 41:45
  mornings or the afternoons, they'd say that's all the
• 41:48
  preschools did. And then at 4:00, they'd say,
• 41:50
  OK, we'll do 5 hours a day, five days a week to get them ready
• 41:53
  for kindergarten, right? And so that was what it was.
• 41:57
  And then supply and demand, Mothers wanted to work.
• 42:00
  Mothers wanted. So it became daycare.
• 42:03
  And they started taking children and excuse me, they started
• 42:06
  prostituting themselves, if you ask me.
• 42:08
  I mean, that's I mean, that's a terrible word I'm using, but I'm
• 42:10
  going to say that for money. They started doing what was
• 42:13
  developmentally incorrect for children, which is they started
• 42:16
  taking children younger and younger and calling it school.
• 42:20
  I want to get into objections and then practical ways to live
• 42:26
  out what's healthiest for a child with other competing needs
• 42:29
  and demands. But I want to go back to the
• 42:32
  ideal one more time and lay it out because this is
• 42:35
  controversial and you know, people know I work now.
• 42:39
  I'm very blessed to have this work from home gig.
• 42:42
  I work for a very friendly organization and my podcast.
• 42:45
  I do it on my time, but I have time away from my kids.
• 42:48
  Obviously I'm here, my children are not in the room and if they
• 42:51
  were might not be developmentally appropriate or
• 42:54
  good for that. But I, I do want us to really
• 42:57
  let the ideal that you're presenting here based on the
• 43:00
  research that you've done, be clear.
• 43:03
  I want to be clear because I think we sometimes, because
• 43:07
  we're, again, we know this can make people uncomfortable.
• 43:09
  We know that it, it can be challenging.
• 43:12
  And for some people, they feel it's not even possible.
• 43:14
  So it feels depressing to them. You know, we, we don't even want
• 43:17
  to say what the ideal fully is, but I want to just, you've laid
• 43:20
  it out. I want to just make sure it's
• 43:21
  clear. First year of life, be there.
• 43:25
  Yep. Wear that baby as much as you
• 43:27
  physically can, and if you're gone, you're gone. 20 minutes,
• 43:30
  maybe up to an hour. But if the baby's crying, get
• 43:32
  back to that baby. Yep, because you are.
• 43:34
  You are the one that's going to soothe that child, not the
• 43:36
  sitter. And I am not.
• 43:37
  Even a husband. Yeah, and I advocate for paid
• 43:39
  leave for a full year in this country.
• 43:41
  I've been trying for years and that's I was trying to use the
• 43:43
  book for that. I still try to use the book for
• 43:45
  that. It's really hard in a country
• 43:47
  that isn't willing to put the money where its mouth is.
• 43:51
  They do that in the Netherlands and other countries up to two
• 43:53
  years. Three years and three years.
• 43:56
  Amazing. Hungary is such a pro family
• 43:57
  country. It's amazing that's that's
• 43:59
  that's a that's a very compelling point because I've
• 44:01
  looked at hungry Hungary's pro family policies and gotten
• 44:05
  excited about some of the things they're doing.
• 44:06
  All right, So that's for the first year.
• 44:08
  By the time they're two, there's a little more independence, but
• 44:11
  you still, if you're going to leave that child, you want them
• 44:12
  to be with an aloe parent, someone that they have some sort
• 44:15
  of bond with that's significant. That's trusted, ideally family,
• 44:18
  if not family, that nanny or that sitter or that neighbor
• 44:21
  that's really trusted. And then that rule of thumb,
• 44:24
  right, that don't be gone more than an hour at a time.
• 44:27
  And, and let's actually ask that question to be super clear here,
• 44:30
  an hour at a time. What if in the morning she has a
• 44:32
  doctor's appointment, In the afternoon she has a phone call
• 44:35
  and that's two hours for that one year old.
• 44:37
  I say once in, once out, once in.
• 44:41
  What does that mean? Meaning every time you leave a
• 44:43
  very young child under the age of 3, it's a major loss for
• 44:47
  them. You're their entire universe.
• 44:49
  I can't emphasize it enough. You, as their mother, are their
• 44:52
  entire universe. They may not be your entire
• 44:57
  universe, although some others feel that way, but you are their
• 45:01
  entire universe. When you leave, their world
• 45:04
  falls apart and it feels like a major loss to them and they have
• 45:08
  no sense of the future and they haven't internalized.
• 45:11
  Many of them haven't haven't developed object constancy, so
• 45:15
  they haven't internalized that you'll come back.
• 45:17
  And so when you leave, you've left.
• 45:20
  And so you want to make sure you don't abuse that and you find a
• 45:25
  way to, I say, clump together your errands and things you need
• 45:28
  to do and once out, once in. And so what's really hard on
• 45:33
  children is are the mothers, and I'm from New York and this is
• 45:36
  the thing that mothers. Do they say, oh, isn't it
• 45:39
  better? I'll just go out and come in and
• 45:41
  go out and come in and I've got a yoga class and I'm going to go
• 45:44
  do make a call and I'm going to go have lunch and I'm going to
• 45:46
  go out to dinner tonight. And that's the worst thing for
• 45:49
  babies because what it's like treating like babies attachment
• 45:53
  like it's a yo-yo. And babies are very sensitive to
• 45:56
  loss. And so the idea is babies.
• 45:59
  Can handle you going out if you go out for two hours when
• 46:02
  they're 2, they can handle it, and they can handle it
• 46:05
  particularly if you say goodbye. You never leave without saying
• 46:08
  goodbye. Never, ever leave without saying
• 46:10
  goodbye. Even if you feel guilty,
• 46:12
  especially if you feel guilty, and then you repair it right
• 46:15
  away when you come back and you tell them when you're going to
• 46:18
  come back and you never make a promise that you can't keep.
• 46:21
  And they start to trust you. And they say, right, Mommy's
• 46:24
  coming back in two hours. And you leave them with a
• 46:27
  trusted, loving, sensitive, nurturing adult, a babysitter or
• 46:31
  a grandmother, right? And so they can be left for
• 46:35
  short periods of time when they're 2:00 and 3:00, as long
• 46:39
  as you don't abuse that. And I think a lot of mothers, I
• 46:42
  mean, I think I find with the work that I do, I'll be very
• 46:46
  frank with you, I think you find that mothers have lost the, the
• 46:51
  original title of being there was The Lost Instinct.
• 46:57
  And I liked that title. They thought it was too
• 46:59
  technical or scientific or, but then they, they liked being
• 47:03
  there, whatever. It's also a good title.
• 47:06
  But The Lost Instinct really said what I meant, which is that
• 47:10
  I feel like women have lost their empathy for their
• 47:13
  children. They no longer feel for their
• 47:18
  children. Something has been disrupted
• 47:23
  because of generational expression of attachment
• 47:26
  disorders in the last 7580 years.
• 47:30
  Something has really been disrupted in terms of mother's
• 47:34
  ability to feel for the distress and the pain and the longing and
• 47:40
  the loss of their children. Do you think that you mentioned
• 47:45
  generational? I think attachment, it's because
• 47:50
  we were raised away and we thought, well, we're fine.
• 47:54
  Yeah, we're, we're OK. We got some issues.
• 47:57
  And so we we we emulate, inadvertently or intentionally,
• 48:02
  how we were raised. I mean the.
• 48:05
  Or we see other people raising kids a certain way.
• 48:07
  So I'm a byproduct in a good way of the women's rights movement
• 48:11
  of the of the sexual revolution. And I'm a lot older than you.
• 48:15
  So I really am. I did.
• 48:16
  I was a beneficiary of it in many ways.
• 48:20
  But the way it was structured by Gloria Steinem when it was
• 48:24
  first, you know, conceived was, Gloria Steinem said If you don't
• 48:30
  go out to work, you are you betray.
• 48:34
  The the movement of feminism, you betray the women's rights
• 48:37
  movement. And she said, when you know
• 48:39
  babies will be fine, don't worry about them.
• 48:42
  Put them into daycare, give them to a babysitter.
• 48:44
  You need to go out to work. You need to be soldiers in this
• 48:48
  war that we're waging. And women just soaked it up
• 48:54
  hook, line and sinker. Meanwhile, Gloria Steinem never
• 48:57
  had children, so she could say that because she never had the
• 49:02
  conflicts of being a mother, she never felt the oxytocin pull.
• 49:06
  She never was attached to a baby.
• 49:09
  But it really that message was very destructive because it
• 49:13
  didn't say and now all movements have.
• 49:17
  There's an extreme to them when they first begin, you know, and
• 49:21
  and I guess she saw it as a war, but it was a war that was waged
• 49:25
  not just against men, unfortunately, it was a war that
• 49:28
  was waged against babies. And that is really what happened
• 49:32
  because then women for generations after.
• 49:37
  So what we know is that. Attachment disorders are passed
• 49:40
  down generationally. So if you develop an attachment
• 49:44
  disorder because your mother isn't, isn't emotionally present
• 49:47
  for you or you know, is disinterested or then that gets
• 49:53
  passed down to the next generation.
• 49:56
  So the next generation is one step away from feeling the
• 50:00
  attachments sort of to their babies.
• 50:03
  And this is we know this from lots of mammalian research.
• 50:07
  So yeah, we, we suffer from, we've suffered a lot from that.
• 50:11
  I have a T-shirt that I love. I'm a feminist.
• 50:14
  I work, I do helping profession work, you know, I always have.
• 50:18
  And and I have a T-shirt that says maternal feminism, which is
• 50:22
  that I believe in women's right to choose a career.
• 50:28
  Or not a career, or the ability to work.
• 50:30
  Or but that. Comes with responsibility we can
• 50:35
  Freedom always comes with responsibility.
• 50:38
  And so we have a responsibility if we decide to have children
• 50:42
  not You don't have to have children to live a satisfying
• 50:44
  life. You can have a very satisfying
• 50:47
  career like Gloria Steinem did. But if you're going to have
• 50:51
  children, Penelope Leach said it many years.
• 50:54
  Before me, she said in her book, she said, you know, anybody can
• 50:57
  have a child. Don't have them if you don't
• 51:00
  want to care for them. The holidays are almost here and
• 51:04
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• 51:07
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• 51:59
  Ideal, last question, I think, I think on ideal we'll probably
• 52:02
  end up back here. But what about date nights?
• 52:06
  What about, I mean separate even from work?
• 52:10
  There's no job, but there's obligations.
• 52:13
  Girls night, I don't know, you know, there's time where maybe
• 52:16
  someone else is putting baby to sleep and that routine is 345
• 52:19
  hours, you know, by the time you leave 5:00 PM and then babies up
• 52:23
  past, you know, 8 or I'm just saying maybe a 2 year old.
• 52:26
  I'm trying to come up with, you know, a scenario here, but I
• 52:29
  know even stay the the stay at home moms that I know many of
• 52:33
  them, they're still that evening out occasionally or there's also
• 52:37
  the weekend away, you know, with my spouse if I'm trying to do
• 52:41
  something with them and I leave the kids with the grandparents.
• 52:44
  And this is a 2 year old, you know.
• 52:46
  What about those scenarios? So one, it depends on the
• 52:50
  relationship that your child has with their grandparents and how
• 52:53
  close they are. And if they're they aren't
• 52:55
  grandparents, if they're trusted, loving, sensitive,
• 52:57
  empathic, nurturing, babysitter. So the relationship matters, how
• 53:02
  close that relationship is to your child.
• 53:06
  And I would say don't abuse it. So date night is important
• 53:09
  because it solidifies a relationship in a marriage,
• 53:11
  which is also important, right? So it's not as if the ideal is
• 53:17
  being glued to your baby every second.
• 53:19
  It never was that. It was always that you were in
• 53:22
  an extended family community where you got support.
• 53:25
  So most, mostly mothers would take their babies out to the
• 53:29
  field. Even now, if you go to Africa or
• 53:32
  India or Asia and you go into the.
• 53:34
  Fields, you'll see mothers with babies on their bodies and
• 53:36
  they're picking vegetables and they have their two year old
• 53:39
  there. You know, it's all done much of
• 53:41
  the much with their babies, but the reality is you can go out on
• 53:45
  a date night for a couple of hours.
• 53:47
  It's the idea of of just not abusing it and being sensitive
• 53:52
  to the child you have. If you have a very sensitive
• 53:55
  baby, then one night a week out with your spouse is it.
• 53:58
  You know, I always say that when you go out at night, it's some
• 54:02
  of the hardest time for children, young children, and
• 54:06
  because it's a transition time. So the hardest time for all
• 54:09
  children, but even more for sensitive children are
• 54:12
  transition times. That means waking up in the
• 54:15
  morning, that means going to sleep at night.
• 54:19
  Those are the two big ones. And then all the transitions
• 54:22
  during the day when you go to work or when you come back from
• 54:26
  work or when they go to school or when they come back from
• 54:29
  school. And that can that that's
• 54:31
  consistent throughout childhood. So whether you have a A1 year
• 54:35
  old, an 8 year old or a 15 year old, they're very sensitive to
• 54:39
  transitions. Children are very sensitive to
• 54:42
  transitions and the more sensitive children are even more
• 54:45
  sensitive to them. So as parents, if you can be
• 54:48
  there as much as possible physically and emotionally
• 54:51
  during those transitions. So the most important transition
• 54:54
  is waking up in the morning and going to sleep at night, right?
• 54:57
  Particularly going to sleep at night because it's when they go
• 55:01
  unconscious and that's a very scary thing for children.
• 55:04
  And they need the person who provides them with their the
• 55:08
  most security in the world present for them when they're
• 55:11
  going unconscious because it's so scary to go unconscious.
• 55:15
  I mean, 50% of adults in America take some kind of sleep aid,
• 55:19
  whether it's Ambien or melatonin or something stronger, they
• 55:22
  drink alcohol or because they can't go unconscious because
• 55:26
  they're afraid to. No one talks about.
• 55:28
  It So are you recommending in part that you are there while
• 55:31
  the child falls asleep? Yes, as opposed to goodnight.
• 55:35
  Yes, absolutely. The idea that you just, you
• 55:39
  know, again, this is part of the myth of America, that we just
• 55:44
  were raising little soldiers, little independent soldiers that
• 55:48
  we put in a room and shut the. Door and they cry it out.
• 55:51
  I have a YouTube video just it's just a few minutes long on the
• 55:55
  neurological damage that you do to your children when you make
• 55:58
  them cry it out under the age of 6 months.
• 56:01
  And even after six months, you have to be careful with it.
• 56:05
  What about the? 2 1/2 year old who wants their
• 56:07
  back rub while they fall asleep every night.
• 56:09
  Again, that's their transition. That's how they feel safe.
• 56:12
  They're telling you I'm scared. They're not doing it to be
• 56:15
  manipulative. They're doing it because they're
• 56:16
  scared. You know, it's also not natural
• 56:20
  for children to sleep alone. In no other culture in the world
• 56:23
  do children sleep in their own bedroom alone.
• 56:26
  They sleep in rooms full of people, adults, other children.
• 56:30
  They sleep on top of one another's.
• 56:31
  They sleep in beds. You know when a child says to
• 56:33
  their parents that you know it's not fair, mommy, that you get to
• 56:37
  sleep with daddy and I have to sleep in my own room alone and
• 56:40
  it's scary. They're absolutely right,
• 56:43
  because in no other culture do we force children to sleep alone
• 56:47
  like that. So this ethos of ours that it's
• 56:50
  so good to be a soldier, actually soldiers, when we make
• 56:56
  soldiers, they actually are more vulnerable to breakdown later
• 57:00
  on. So, interestingly, it sort of
• 57:03
  backfires. Well, I think there is a fear of
• 57:05
  coddling. There's a fear that they're
• 57:08
  going to be so dependent that I'm going to be rubbing this
• 57:11
  back at six years old. I've heard this expressed often.
• 57:14
  My husband and I talk about this sometimes, like what are the
• 57:17
  ways to do this to prepare them for life?
• 57:20
  What are your thoughts on? That so I always say to parents
• 57:22
  who come to me for parent guidance, 8 year olds don't
• 57:25
  sleep with their parents unless there's really something wrong.
• 57:28
  So you know, if you're afraid that your 8 year old will be
• 57:30
  sleeping with you every night, it just, it doesn't happen in
• 57:33
  about 99% of the situations, meaning children have their own
• 57:38
  organic developmental line where they're capable and you'll know
• 57:42
  it. It's, you know, the, the, the
• 57:45
  Italians when they're cooking spaghetti to know whether it's
• 57:48
  cooked, they throw it against the.
• 57:49
  Wall if it. Sticks.
• 57:50
  Then they say it's cooked, and if it doesn't stick, they say,
• 57:52
  well we'll try later. That's the attitude.
• 57:55
  So if you want to try, quote UN quote, helping your child to
• 57:59
  sleep on their own, you try it. You know, you see, you see if
• 58:03
  they're ready, if there's a readiness to it, there might be
• 58:05
  a little catchiness and a little bit of crying, but it's not
• 58:08
  going to be real distress. And if it's real distress, that
• 58:11
  means that they're terrified. And so there's the lack of
• 58:14
  empathy again, the ability to, in a skitzwayed way, shut your
• 58:18
  door and shut out the intense distress of your child.
• 58:22
  Is very disturbing to me as a therapist.
• 58:25
  What typically is the age that you think independent sleeping
• 58:27
  becomes developmentally normal? You know, by the age of five, I
• 58:32
  would say to parents, until five you're not going to sleep.
• 58:35
  And if you do sleep, it'll be by accident.
• 58:37
  Because the truth is, whoever told you you're going to sleep
• 58:40
  at three months or six months, again, that's the myth.
• 58:43
  The the truth is that between zero and five, there's so much
• 58:47
  happening developmentally. Even after the critical period
• 58:50
  of brain development, between 3:00 and 5:00, there's Oedipal
• 58:54
  development, which is sexual development.
• 58:56
  There's going to school for the first time.
• 58:58
  There's major separations. There's becoming more
• 59:01
  independent and being scared of becoming more independent.
• 59:04
  All of that makes children anxious and fearful.
• 59:08
  And so between zero and five, there's so much that happens
• 59:11
  developmentally, physically that it interrupts sleep.
• 59:15
  It doesn't interrupt it every minute.
• 59:16
  You might have a nice run and then it'll get interrupted
• 59:19
  again. So, you know, the idea that you
• 59:21
  have to expect a lot of inconsistency for the first five
• 59:24
  years after five years after they get settled into
• 59:27
  kindergarten and they about, you know, six years old, you know,
• 59:30
  life, Freud used to call it the latency period between 3:00 and
• 59:35
  9:00. But basically, life gets pretty
• 59:37
  boring for children in a good way.
• 59:39
  If a child is a good secure, stable environment, they're
• 59:43
  learning their letters and their numbers and they're going to
• 59:46
  school every day. And there's a consistency, and
• 59:48
  it's a kind of boring, in a good way boring, consistency of
• 59:52
  learning competency and developing confidence.
• 59:55
  And then at 9, everything falls apart because then it's
• 59:58
  adolescence. So you have between 3:00 and
• 1:00:00
  9:00, which is this kind of nice stable period.
• 1:00:02
  So I would say by about 5:00 to 6:00, children start to be able
• 1:00:06
  to sleep more. So, you know, maybe it's just
• 1:00:08
  that we tell mothers the wrong things.
• 1:00:11
  We give them expectations. That aren't realistic.
• 1:00:14
  And I think that goes back to what you're saying about
• 1:00:16
  feminism, which is, you know, this idea that we should be able
• 1:00:20
  to do everything that your typical man does, forgetting
• 1:00:24
  that we're women and men don't have babies.
• 1:00:27
  And we're so different. I mean, our nurturing behaviors
• 1:00:30
  that are tied to our hormones are so different than men's
• 1:00:34
  nurturing behaviors, which are tied to their hormones.
• 1:00:37
  And they're both critically important to children, but
• 1:00:40
  they're different in an evolutionary way, were made
• 1:00:44
  differently to to fill different needs in a child's emotional
• 1:00:48
  life. So the idea that we're just
• 1:00:50
  fungible and generic and interchangeable is just, again,
• 1:00:54
  another myth. So let's move from ideal into
• 1:00:59
  some of the real world stuff. I want to start with because
• 1:01:04
  we're going to go down to kind of the worst case scenario.
• 1:01:07
  But you know, a lot of women work part time and they work in
• 1:01:13
  and out of the home. I mean, some women maybe they're
• 1:01:15
  doing a shift and other women in their home.
• 1:01:17
  And you kind of walk us through the difference, like let's say
• 1:01:19
  the nurse who's doing part time nursing, so it's a 10 hour shift
• 1:01:23
  versus the part time job where maybe there's four or five hours
• 1:01:27
  of phone call and computer time during the day.
• 1:01:29
  So I always say to to mothers that the best jobs are those
• 1:01:32
  which are which they have control and flexibility over and
• 1:01:35
  where they can go for short periods of time, not long
• 1:01:38
  periods of time. So mothers get confused that
• 1:01:41
  it's better to have three full, full, full days away from their
• 1:01:43
  child and then have two full days with their child.
• 1:01:47
  But actually that's incorrect. It's better to have short.
• 1:01:51
  Remember we talked about as an ideal, you know, if your child
• 1:01:55
  is 2, spend 2 hours a day away from them.
• 1:01:57
  If they're three, spend 3 hours a day a day away from them.
• 1:02:01
  So if you think about it, an 8 or 10 hour day, that's much more
• 1:02:04
  than two or three. So it's almost better to really
• 1:02:07
  work five days a week, half days, than to work 3 full days.
• 1:02:12
  That's far better for children in terms of the idea that
• 1:02:16
  children can accept and then you can repair your absence, but not
• 1:02:22
  if it's for these long periods of time.
• 1:02:24
  It's just too traumatic for them.
• 1:02:26
  And you mentioned repair a few times and saying goodbye.
• 1:02:29
  Talk to me more about if you have to leave your child,
• 1:02:32
  whether for work or some other obligation or grocery shopping,
• 1:02:35
  that for whatever reason you can't bring them.
• 1:02:37
  What is the proper goodbye and the best repair for maximally
• 1:02:43
  helping that child's development?
• 1:02:45
  Well, repair is the word because, you know, we used to
• 1:02:48
  say if you had a hole in your sock and you darned your sock,
• 1:02:51
  the darning spot was stronger than the rest of the sock right
• 1:02:54
  where you darn the sock. So repair is is really
• 1:02:57
  important. It's important that you do it as
• 1:02:59
  soon as possible, that you don't wait.
• 1:03:02
  So in other words, the the. Reunion moments when you come
• 1:03:06
  home from being away are the most critical moments, so that
• 1:03:09
  those first moments of reunion are really important.
• 1:03:14
  So when mothers come in from work and they say, oh, I've got
• 1:03:18
  a call or, oh, I've got to go to the my bedroom for a few minutes
• 1:03:21
  and they say to the the babysitter, you take care of the
• 1:03:23
  baby. I can't see the baby.
• 1:03:25
  I mean, if you were that baby's entire universe, then when that
• 1:03:29
  baby is standing at the elevator or at the front door waiting for
• 1:03:32
  you, that moment of reunion is a critical, critical moment where
• 1:03:38
  you really are sensitive to the baby's emotions.
• 1:03:41
  Don't project onto the baby that they're happy because mothers
• 1:03:44
  who feel guilty come home and they go, ah, hi, baby.
• 1:03:48
  Instead of looking at the baby and see what the baby's face
• 1:03:51
  reads. If the baby is not happy, then
• 1:03:54
  you mirror that baby's emotions and you say, oh, I see you're
• 1:03:58
  upset with mommy because mommy was gone today.
• 1:04:00
  But I'm here now, honey. Here I am.
• 1:04:03
  Right. You see, the mother should
• 1:04:04
  assume that and verbalize that because maybe the baby's upset
• 1:04:07
  because the baby has a tummy ache.
• 1:04:09
  No. What do you recommend in terms
• 1:04:11
  of the the verbalization of what the baby might be?
• 1:04:13
  If the baby is reuniting with the mother, then it's about the
• 1:04:16
  mother and so look to the baby to mirror or reflect.
• 1:04:21
  You know, just like looking in a mirror.
• 1:04:22
  If you look in a mirror. And I do this exercise with
• 1:04:25
  mothers who have never been mirrored themselves.
• 1:04:27
  You know, there's a lot of mothers who had very
• 1:04:29
  narcissistic mothers themselves. And having children is really
• 1:04:33
  hard because no one ever really mirrored them.
• 1:04:35
  So they don't know how to mirror a baby because no one ever
• 1:04:38
  mirrored them. I literally get a mirror and
• 1:04:40
  have them look in a mirror with me and say look at your face,
• 1:04:43
  tell me what you see. Because they often can't read
• 1:04:47
  the social cues. Remember, the first three years
• 1:04:50
  is a period of building the ability not only of emotional
• 1:04:53
  regulation and buffering from stress, but also the ability to
• 1:04:57
  read social cues and feel empathy.
• 1:04:59
  That happens in the first three years.
• 1:05:01
  If you didn't get that from your own mother, then you can't.
• 1:05:04
  You might not necessarily be able to give it to your own
• 1:05:06
  baby. So mothers will come home and
• 1:05:09
  just project onto the baby what they want the baby to feel,
• 1:05:13
  which is happy, but you have to look.
• 1:05:15
  Or they're distracted or not even engaging with where the
• 1:05:18
  baby is emotionally. Right.
• 1:05:20
  So if the baby's turned away from you when you come home.
• 1:05:23
  So there's certain things to look for in terms of attachment
• 1:05:26
  disorders, which I think are really important for women to
• 1:05:29
  know because then they'll know that they've been away too long.
• 1:05:32
  And one of those is if the baby turns away from you in the
• 1:05:35
  reunion. Another is if the baby
• 1:05:37
  excessively clings to you and starts crying and won't let go
• 1:05:41
  of you. Almost like a.
• 1:05:42
  Monkey. You know, the rhesus monkey
• 1:05:44
  experiments with the wire, the fabric covering the wire.
• 1:05:47
  So if they cling to you like that, the other is if they look
• 1:05:51
  away from you and then they cling to you and then they slap
• 1:05:54
  you or get angry at you and they cycle through.
• 1:05:56
  These are attachment disorders and avoid an attachment disorder
• 1:06:01
  is upon reunion. If a baby turns away and prefers
• 1:06:04
  the nanny or seems not to want to make eye contact with you,
• 1:06:08
  that baby is angry at you and that baby is saying you weren't
• 1:06:11
  there for me and I don't trust you.
• 1:06:14
  So in that case, for the and I want to again, practical
• 1:06:19
  realities is the advice to the average mother of that young
• 1:06:23
  child, if there's any way to not be doing this work, esecially if
• 1:06:29
  this work is outside of this realm of ideal that we just
• 1:06:31
  talked through just don't do. It yeah.
• 1:06:34
  So is that the the ideal is if you can stay home for three
• 1:06:37
  years, that's the ideal. If I had my druthers, I would
• 1:06:40
  have a policy in this country that allows women to stay home
• 1:06:44
  for three years and get support, maybe not full support, but get
• 1:06:48
  support from the government, get support, you know, whether it's
• 1:06:52
  in the form of Social Security that they get in advance.
• 1:06:55
  And they, I don't know how we're going to do it.
• 1:06:57
  I have lots of good ideas that I talked to Congress and senators
• 1:07:00
  of the Congress people and senators about.
• 1:07:02
  But that would be my ideal, that every woman has the choice to
• 1:07:06
  stay home with their children for the first three years.
• 1:07:08
  That's the ideal. At minimum the choice.
• 1:07:10
  But then there's this other thing of responsibility, right?
• 1:07:13
  Because I think some women may have the choice.
• 1:07:15
  I know, I know many working couples and my situation as a
• 1:07:20
  working mom, again, I'm, I, I, I don't, I don't want to make it
• 1:07:23
  too personal to me because I know I have an exceptionally
• 1:07:26
  unique situation that I get the flexibility that I have.
• 1:07:28
  And I don't want to assume other people have that.
• 1:07:31
  But there are couples who individuals who just really like
• 1:07:36
  their work and it's really hard for them to imagine they're
• 1:07:39
  like, well, I'm just not good at the mothering thing or I don't
• 1:07:43
  approach it the way maybe your other woman does.
• 1:07:45
  And so I'm out for X amount of hours or X amount of hours a
• 1:07:50
  week. And so that's it's, they have
• 1:07:52
  maybe the choice technically, like they don't have to do the
• 1:07:55
  dual income. They could move or they could
• 1:07:58
  downsize. What would be your?
• 1:08:00
  I mean a mother who says I'm not good at mothering has an
• 1:08:03
  attachment disorder. Explain.
• 1:08:06
  Explain that more. Well, I mean, she either feels
• 1:08:09
  she really isn't good at mothering and that means the
• 1:08:12
  generationally something was missed with her that there's
• 1:08:17
  pain there because it's not instinct.
• 1:08:19
  It it it's not unusual for women.
• 1:08:23
  To not be interested or to be bored with other people's
• 1:08:26
  children. So I mean, I love children
• 1:08:28
  because it's the field I chose and I love all children and but
• 1:08:32
  not everybody's a therapist or a nursery school teacher, right?
• 1:08:35
  I mean, so if it's your profession, it's.
• 1:08:38
  One thing, but it's anti instinctual to not be interested
• 1:08:41
  in your own children. So if you have a mother who
• 1:08:45
  feels she has trouble connecting with her own children.
• 1:08:48
  It's a sign of. Part of depression.
• 1:08:50
  He's disinterested with her young children, not even her
• 1:08:53
  baby or two year ration. That's a sign of depression.
• 1:08:56
  Or it would be a sign of a detachment order?
• 1:08:58
  Or maybe both. Postpartum depression comes out
• 1:09:00
  of an attachment disorder. So the there's, there's an
• 1:09:02
  uptick in, in postpartum depression.
• 1:09:05
  I think the statistic is something like 30% of women now.
• 1:09:11
  Maybe even up to 40% are developing postpartum
• 1:09:14
  depression, and that's as a result of attachment disorders,
• 1:09:17
  meaning mothering feels boring to them, even mothering their
• 1:09:21
  own babies. So when you have a baby, I, it's
• 1:09:24
  what I call a psychotic experience, right?
• 1:09:27
  This little person, this little alien grows.
• 1:09:29
  Inside of you and then pops out. And so if you think about it, if
• 1:09:33
  you're very healthy, you go, this is the most amazing.
• 1:09:35
  Miracle in the whole world, but it is it can cause literally a
• 1:09:38
  psychotic. Break in a lot of women where
• 1:09:41
  they don't attach to their babies, where they see the baby
• 1:09:45
  as foreign, like a foreign body, not as not as part of them, but
• 1:09:50
  actually as separate from them, where they don't feel.
• 1:09:53
  Connected and they actually resent this intruder.
• 1:09:56
  They see the baby as intrusive. And that is it.
• 1:09:59
  That's a sign of. That's a sign of postpartum
• 1:10:02
  depression, which is the result of an attachment disorder.
• 1:10:05
  But there are varying degrees of this thing, right?
• 1:10:08
  Because there's obviously I've seen postpartum depression or
• 1:10:11
  disorder and it's can be very extreme, like you, you know,
• 1:10:15
  lethargy, you know, you know, negative, horrible thoughts,
• 1:10:19
  obviously huge detachment from your own baby.
• 1:10:22
  But then I think you're speaking to something else too that I
• 1:10:25
  want to explore more, which is maybe they're not super
• 1:10:28
  depressed. Maybe they seem fine actually
• 1:10:31
  they want to go out and go riding or go back to work or do
• 1:10:34
  whatever, you know, go out for coffee.
• 1:10:36
  They just don't want to spend so much time with their baby or
• 1:10:40
  they have trouble spending a lot of time with their little one
• 1:10:42
  because it feels overwhelming. So there's something with that.
• 1:10:46
  There's something called maternal preoccupation, which is
• 1:10:50
  hormonally connected, which it means that we and it's natural,
• 1:10:55
  it's a natural connection to attaching to your baby.
• 1:10:59
  And we produce something called oxytocin, which is a
• 1:11:02
  neurotransmitter. We produce it when we are
• 1:11:04
  pregnant, when we give birth and when we breastfeed.
• 1:11:07
  And in mothers who so having a baby opens up a portal.
• 1:11:13
  To your past, whether you had a very healthy connection to your
• 1:11:18
  own mother or you didn't and something gets.
• 1:11:23
  Turned on or not turned on when? You have a baby, some door gets
• 1:11:28
  opened and either gets opened to a past that was joyful and and
• 1:11:35
  attached and. And or it gets, it gets open to
• 1:11:39
  a door of loss. And so a lot of these mothers
• 1:11:42
  don't feel the connection to their babies because they may
• 1:11:46
  have had a narcissistic mother. They may have had a mother who
• 1:11:48
  resented mothering, or who was physically absent, or who was
• 1:11:52
  depressed or. Who was just weighed down?
• 1:11:55
  I mean, I think that a lot of, you know, there's so many single
• 1:11:57
  moms today. But a lot of them are depressed.
• 1:12:00
  And a lot of them are depressed. Yeah, they're overwhelmed.
• 1:12:02
  It's depression, yeah. So, you know, it's so, so
• 1:12:05
  essentially, maternal preoccupation is normal.
• 1:12:09
  And so when we don't see it, it's that lack of empathy that
• 1:12:13
  we're talking about. You know, babies are born
• 1:12:18
  incredibly dependent, incredibly vulnerable, incredibly in need
• 1:12:21
  of you. And they're meant to turn
• 1:12:24
  something on in us where we feel vigilant.
• 1:12:28
  They're meant to turn on oxytocin.
• 1:12:30
  They're meant to turn on another hormone called vasopressin,
• 1:12:33
  which is a protective, aggressive hormone.
• 1:12:35
  And if those don't get turned on, there's a reason for it.
• 1:12:40
  So what are some studies that a mother who would like to spend
• 1:12:44
  more time with her child, but she feels she has to justify it
• 1:12:47
  to someone she's working, maybe even her spouse or her partner
• 1:12:53
  about Why? No, it's worth it for us, for me
• 1:12:56
  to quit my job and maybe dramatically change our
• 1:12:59
  lifestyle or put extra pressure on the partner, on the husband
• 1:13:03
  to figure this out. Or we'll figure it out together.
• 1:13:05
  But you've got to really be the one to pay the bills here so
• 1:13:08
  that I do not have to work. So, you know, there is an
• 1:13:13
  unfortunate thing I do like to talk about reality.
• 1:13:16
  We used to be a country that you could have one working person
• 1:13:20
  and it could support the family. And it's become increasingly
• 1:13:22
  harder that we need to working, you know, in, in.
• 1:13:26
  In certain families to to working members of the family to
• 1:13:30
  support the family. But I think, you know, aside
• 1:13:33
  from the, the really practical issues of that, I think that
• 1:13:38
  it's really important for young women and young men to talk
• 1:13:41
  about these things before they have children.
• 1:13:44
  It's not that you can't address these things, these conflicts
• 1:13:48
  once you're married and once you have a child.
• 1:13:51
  And again, as you say, sometimes you don't know you want to be
• 1:13:54
  with your child until after you have a child.
• 1:13:57
  Meaning you make a promise to your husband and he makes a
• 1:14:01
  promise to you that you're going to work, work, work and work is
• 1:14:04
  going to be the most important thing.
• 1:14:05
  You're going to make lots of money and you love your.
• 1:14:07
  Work, work, work outside the home.
• 1:14:09
  And then you have a baby and it transforms you and that door
• 1:14:12
  gets open to the joy of having had a wonderful experience of
• 1:14:16
  being a baby and having a wonderful mother.
• 1:14:18
  And then you want to be with your baby.
• 1:14:20
  And then you go back to your husband and you say, I really
• 1:14:22
  want to stay home. And he says, but you promised
• 1:14:25
  and we bought the house and we bought the car.
• 1:14:27
  So I always say, you know, prevention is worth a pound of
• 1:14:31
  cure if you can talk about these issues.
• 1:14:34
  I want to stay home. I want the option of staying
• 1:14:37
  home when I have children. I want the option of working
• 1:14:40
  part time when I have children. I want to take the first year
• 1:14:44
  off before I go back part time. I want the option of saying I
• 1:14:47
  don't want to go back part time. And so that's a really important
• 1:14:51
  discussion for young couples to have before they choose to have
• 1:14:54
  children. If it happens that you are
• 1:14:57
  transformed after, then I think you have to, I would say you
• 1:15:03
  stick to your guns as a woman and you, you say this is what's
• 1:15:07
  best for our child. If we need to go into couples
• 1:15:10
  therapy to understand that this is what's best to understand
• 1:15:14
  that all relationships sometimes need to be renegotiated.
• 1:15:17
  All contracts sometimes need renegotiation.
• 1:15:21
  And if I signed a contract, I'm sorry, but I need to renegotiate
• 1:15:25
  it now. Or what if we need to go into
• 1:15:27
  debt? Or what if we need to sell the
• 1:15:28
  house or move out of the city? Or.
• 1:15:31
  Maybe we only need one car. Maybe we, you know, don't.
• 1:15:34
  Maybe we can rent out a room in our house.
• 1:15:37
  Maybe we don't need vacations for a couple of years.
• 1:15:39
  Maybe we can just go to our mother in I always say it, what
• 1:15:49
  happens in those first three years casts such a long shadow
• 1:15:52
  on the rest of your child's life and then the rest of your life.
• 1:15:56
  Because again, if your child's not happy and healthy, you're
• 1:15:59
  not happy and healthy. So if you think of it in those
• 1:16:03
  terms, then you say whatever sacrifices we have to make in
• 1:16:06
  those first three years are worth it.
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• 1:16:49
  Another question about practical realities in family.
• 1:16:52
  Court in the case of divorce or separation.
• 1:16:54
  Often custody is given kind of de facto 5050.
• 1:16:59
  It's including for very young children.
• 1:17:01
  I fight this site, do expert testimony around the country so
• 1:17:05
  I know exactly what you're talking about.
• 1:17:08
  What are your, what are your thoughts?
• 1:17:09
  And then also, you know, children who are in foster care
• 1:17:13
  and that's another aspect of this, are moved around.
• 1:17:16
  Yeah, sometimes very frequently at very young ages.
• 1:17:19
  Let's start with custody disputes, divorce settlements.
• 1:17:22
  So I think that the courts are incredibly ignorant.
• 1:17:26
  I think most judges are incredibly ignorant about
• 1:17:29
  attachment security. I've had judge judges of gun
• 1:17:32
  cases that I've worked on laugh about it and say, you know, hold
• 1:17:37
  babies on their lap and say, oh, look at this baby, he'll attach
• 1:17:40
  to anybody. I mean, just complete and total
• 1:17:44
  ignorance and insensitivity and lack of empathy.
• 1:17:48
  And so I think we need to educate the court system,
• 1:17:51
  including the judges, particularly the judges, as to
• 1:17:55
  the fact that, you know, this idea of fit, you know, 5050 is
• 1:17:59
  never even Steven. And so 5050 may be a way to
• 1:18:03
  describe we're both very involved in that child.
• 1:18:06
  So we're both equally involved in that child's life.
• 1:18:08
  But in terms of the overnights and breastfeeding, I've had
• 1:18:12
  mothers who are breastfeeding 3 month old.
• 1:18:15
  Babies where the judge says 5050 to the father.
• 1:18:17
  Now the baby sleeps, you know. No breastfeeding, let's bottle
• 1:18:21
  feed. You know it just so cruel,
• 1:18:24
  incredibly cruel, incredibly ignorant, incredibly frustrating
• 1:18:29
  for me that there is such a lack of sensitivity and understanding
• 1:18:34
  that babies are not a sack of potatoes, they are not a vase
• 1:18:37
  that can be passed from one house to another.
• 1:18:40
  They're human beings with an incredibly fragile neurological
• 1:18:44
  system, and they they. Cannot be treated like a sack of
• 1:18:47
  potatoes. Another practical reality for
• 1:18:50
  many women. We talked about this to some
• 1:18:52
  extent, but curious your take on that.
• 1:18:55
  This motherhood can feel isolating, more lonely.
• 1:18:59
  You know, the suburban we're in our little house, you know, at
• 1:19:03
  least feet from other houses. I might not even know my
• 1:19:05
  neighbors. I don't really walk anywhere
• 1:19:07
  during the day. I don't really see anyone in my
• 1:19:09
  average daily routine. I'm in this house for most of
• 1:19:13
  the day unless I go to the park or maybe the grocery store, but
• 1:19:16
  I'm not. There's not a village I'm
• 1:19:18
  interacting with on a daily basis as part of my routine.
• 1:19:20
  Maybe once a week I'll see a friend or talk to a family
• 1:19:22
  member or see a family member. Many women choose to go back to
• 1:19:26
  work because it is emotionally and intellectually stimulating.
• 1:19:30
  I mean, I understand that. You know, we say in New York,
• 1:19:32
  Robert Moses, like was the destruction of families.
• 1:19:36
  Interesting. Because he, you know, he
• 1:19:39
  invented the suburbs outside of New York.
• 1:19:41
  And, you know, yeah, it's, it's not how we're meant to raise
• 1:19:45
  children. So to that woman who let's say
• 1:19:49
  separate from economic realities, she's just
• 1:19:53
  struggling, what recommendations would you give to her about how
• 1:19:57
  she can and is is part of her struggle?
• 1:20:00
  When is the struggle? Oh, I'm not raising my child in
• 1:20:03
  a village versus the struggle is it's attachment disorder I have
• 1:20:07
  from the way that I was raised. Well, and maybe it's both for
• 1:20:10
  many. Here's here's an interesting
• 1:20:11
  question is because normally I would say to that woman.
• 1:20:16
  Form your own communities, get together the mothers in your
• 1:20:20
  neighborhood and it you know, if you're not invited to a party,
• 1:20:24
  have a party yourself and invite everybody else and you know
• 1:20:28
  everybody's feeling like you are.
• 1:20:30
  So organize the mother's Group 3 * a week or every morning you do
• 1:20:34
  a mother's group. Every morning you have a
• 1:20:36
  routine. You all get together.
• 1:20:38
  You go to each other's houses with the babies, you know, they
• 1:20:41
  used to call them coffee clutches or in the 1950s.
• 1:20:44
  But churches, synagogues, you know, faith-based communities,
• 1:20:52
  if you live in the suburbs, get attached to your church.
• 1:20:54
  Find, find a way to start a mother's group in your church.
• 1:20:58
  You know, I mean, I think the idea is that if you're not
• 1:21:01
  invited to a party, make a party.
• 1:21:03
  But you can't be alone because we're not meant to be alone.
• 1:21:07
  That that's what I would say. And in the ideal, I know there's
• 1:21:10
  a ton of moms who do side hustles, part time jobs, gigs,
• 1:21:14
  work from home. And in the ideal ideal for the
• 1:21:18
  economic sake of the family, it could be we're getting together
• 1:21:21
  with our other young working mom, our working mom Co worker,
• 1:21:25
  and we're doing this thing as a project.
• 1:21:28
  And it's not, again, it's it's a limited time.
• 1:21:30
  So I'm still with my baby, but I'm doing this creative work.
• 1:21:33
  It's bringing in some resources. I mean, it's kind of like the
• 1:21:35
  description that you had earlier.
• 1:21:37
  Absolutely. It's the modern version of going
• 1:21:39
  to the field with the baby on the back and the two year old
• 1:21:42
  with other women with their babies on the back and the two
• 1:21:44
  year old and you're doing something economically important
• 1:21:46
  for the household because I do think.
• 1:21:48
  It's called social entrepreneurship.
• 1:21:50
  It's called social entrepreneurship and in other
• 1:21:52
  countries that's what it's called.
• 1:21:53
  And absolutely entrepreneurship. Women are capable.
• 1:21:57
  I'm going to say this, it's women and men are not the same.
• 1:22:00
  Women are incredibly capable of entrepreneurship because
• 1:22:06
  they're, they're capable of multitasking and they're capable
• 1:22:10
  of holding various aspects and relationships in their mind at
• 1:22:15
  the same time simultaneously. And so they're very, very expert
• 1:22:20
  entrepreneurs. And so the idea of forming
• 1:22:22
  co-ops like they do in other, in other countries, you know, or
• 1:22:26
  you know that in fact, that's what like Avon ladies and
• 1:22:29
  Tupperware parties. And, you know, the idea was how
• 1:22:32
  can we make money but be with our children, children and do
• 1:22:36
  something in the community? And it's the creativity.
• 1:22:40
  I think I would say that women were never really meant to be in
• 1:22:45
  the corporate world. And that's a very radical thing
• 1:22:47
  to say. But the corporate world was
• 1:22:49
  designed by men for men, about men.
• 1:22:52
  And so when the women's rights movement came along, we all
• 1:22:56
  wanted to be like men instead of being the best women we could
• 1:23:00
  be. And, and that's unfortunate
• 1:23:03
  because there's many, many ways in which we can be productive
• 1:23:06
  outside the home and bring in money and be in helping
• 1:23:09
  professions. What they used to call women's
• 1:23:11
  work was the best kind of work because it gave you control and
• 1:23:14
  flexibility. You know, if you were a nurse,
• 1:23:17
  if you were a teacher, if you were a speech therapist, if you
• 1:23:19
  were a psychotherapist, you know, or being an entrepreneur
• 1:23:22
  where you have control and flexibility.
• 1:23:24
  But working 9:00 to 5:00 in a company was really designed for
• 1:23:28
  men. Do you think that it is really
• 1:23:32
  good for men too to do that? Do you think that that's good
• 1:23:35
  for men? You know the economy is shifting
• 1:23:39
  and you know the gig economy is changing or it is just changing.
• 1:23:42
  I would say that it's probably not good for anyone to work
• 1:23:46
  11:50 hours a day in an office. I don't think it's good for
• 1:23:49
  their health. I don't think it's good for
• 1:23:51
  their relationships. And I think you're right, I
• 1:23:54
  think it's shifting. So men have other other ways of,
• 1:23:57
  of, of working and thinking about work.
• 1:23:59
  So. But the point you're making is
• 1:24:01
  that men and women are different, and men can go off
• 1:24:05
  for eight, maybe up to 10, you know, but a significant chunks
• 1:24:09
  of time away from the family. And historically, there's been a
• 1:24:13
  degree that this has happened, let's say in the fields or the
• 1:24:16
  shop and there's significant amount of time.
• 1:24:17
  Or hunting, I mean, men went off to hunt for sometimes weeks at a
• 1:24:21
  time in, in tribal communities. They still do.
• 1:24:25
  And they come back and, and, you know, but the women hold down
• 1:24:28
  the Fort, you know, and they take care of the children.
• 1:24:31
  So there have always been an inevitable evolutionary way
• 1:24:33
  different roles and our our hormones influence our nurturing
• 1:24:37
  behaviors. There are many men now who want
• 1:24:40
  to have closer relationships with their children.
• 1:24:43
  And I think that's wonderful because fathers are necessary to
• 1:24:46
  children, particularly to little boys, but to all children.
• 1:24:49
  And, but, but I think fathers are more capable of spending
• 1:24:54
  more time away from their children, whereas mothers, when
• 1:24:57
  they spend more time away from their children, it disrupts that
• 1:25:01
  attachment security, you know, unless the father is the primary
• 1:25:04
  attachment figure, which in some cases happens today.
• 1:25:08
  It's not impossible, you know, but does that.
• 1:25:10
  Work within the ideal. It can I what I would say is
• 1:25:14
  that because mothers and fathers nurturing behaviors are so
• 1:25:17
  different tied to hormones, then you have to at least educate a
• 1:25:22
  father about sensitive empathic nurturing because father's
• 1:25:26
  response to distress is different in young children than
• 1:25:30
  mothers response. Fathers distract fathers.
• 1:25:33
  So when fathers produce oxytocin, when mothers produce
• 1:25:38
  oxytocin, it makes them sensitive, empathic nurturers,
• 1:25:40
  so it makes them tune into the distress of the baby.
• 1:25:43
  When fathers produce oxytocin because they stay home, and they
• 1:25:46
  do, they produce higher levels of oxytocin, It makes them more
• 1:25:50
  playful, tactile stimulators of babies, like throwing the baby
• 1:25:53
  up in the air and tickling the baby and running around and
• 1:25:56
  encouraging the baby to explore and and be resilient.
• 1:25:59
  And it's just not what very young children need.
• 1:26:02
  It's what slightly older children need to separate, but
• 1:26:06
  that early attachment. So you have to teach fathers,
• 1:26:09
  no, the baby doesn't need you to tickle them and jiggle them and
• 1:26:12
  throw them up in the air. They need you to hold them and
• 1:26:15
  soothe them and talk to them quietly and give them skin to
• 1:26:18
  skin and take off your shirt when your bottle feeding them.
• 1:26:21
  And it's possible. It's just we have to.
• 1:26:24
  Then first you have to acknowledge that we're not the
• 1:26:26
  same, and then you can educate Father.
• 1:26:28
  Back to the ideal, even in that scenario you're describing where
• 1:26:33
  the father maybe is more naturally empathetic anyways and
• 1:26:36
  willing to do the stay at home thing and wanting to do it.
• 1:26:38
  And he's willing to train himself kind of dormonally to
• 1:26:42
  manage the cues of the child and be there, you know, really be
• 1:26:46
  there being there like your book is.
• 1:26:48
  But the mother gone for 8 to 10 hours.
• 1:26:51
  What's going on with her that she's comfortable being in the
• 1:26:55
  being a woman, being the mother with leaving her infant for 8 to
• 1:26:59
  10 hours, that would speak to possibly an attachment disorder
• 1:27:02
  or it's some other issues she's facing.
• 1:27:05
  So even then, even in the case where it's working, he's doing
• 1:27:08
  great. The kids seem to be doing pretty
• 1:27:10
  well. What's going on with her?
• 1:27:12
  Well, again, you know, what I would say is that maternal
• 1:27:16
  preoccup, this is the way I'll say it.
• 1:27:17
  And that way it's not judgmental.
• 1:27:19
  Maternal preoccupation is very healthy and it's very normal.
• 1:27:25
  And if you don't have it, it means something.
• 1:27:29
  And maternal preoccupation is. Means you want to be with your
• 1:27:33
  baby more than you want to be doing anything else when you
• 1:27:36
  have a young baby. And if as a woman you don't
• 1:27:39
  experience maternal preoccupation as you defined it,
• 1:27:42
  then what should she do? Get help.
• 1:27:45
  I see a therapist and talk about the fact that she doesn't feel
• 1:27:49
  that she can't feel, that she doesn't feel as drawn to her
• 1:27:53
  baby as she does to her work. So if you really struggle
• 1:27:59
  financially or you're a single mom, you know what I say is
• 1:28:03
  children benefit from their mother's feeling sad when they
• 1:28:10
  can't be with them. As a mother who feels sad and
• 1:28:13
  feels remorse actually is more likely to be able to repair
• 1:28:19
  their absence with a child. And the child is more likely to
• 1:28:22
  forgive the mother if the child really feels that the mother
• 1:28:26
  really wants to be. I can give you an example.
• 1:28:29
  Of that so my, my nanny that we had for our, for our children,
• 1:28:36
  who was really more like a mother's helper because I
• 1:28:38
  worked, as I said, the two hours a day, but she was there with
• 1:28:42
  me. I had three kids and we would do
• 1:28:44
  it together. We'd go to the park together.
• 1:28:46
  When she was raising children, she couldn't be with her
• 1:28:50
  children. She was a single mother and her
• 1:28:52
  husband left her and she had three children.
• 1:28:54
  And what helped her in her relationship with her children
• 1:28:58
  is her children felt her sadness and she told them about her
• 1:29:03
  sadness and they share that. And she would repair it.
• 1:29:07
  Every day she'd come home and say, I missed you today and I
• 1:29:10
  really wanted to be with you. And I'm so sad I couldn't be
• 1:29:13
  with you. I'm here now.
• 1:29:15
  And so that helped the children to forgive.
• 1:29:19
  It's the mothers who really say either consciously or
• 1:29:23
  unconsciously to their children, and children can feel it.
• 1:29:27
  I really would rather be someplace else.
• 1:29:30
  And those mothers aren't bad people.
• 1:29:32
  Those mothers were. There's something in their own
• 1:29:35
  childhood. There was neglect, there was a
• 1:29:37
  narcissistic mother, there was abuse.
• 1:29:40
  There was something happened to those children to to interrupt
• 1:29:47
  that instinct. I want to ask this question
• 1:29:50
  again. We've kind of covered it, but in
• 1:29:51
  it may be a different way because it is.
• 1:29:53
  So it's so controversial today. People don't want to believe
• 1:29:58
  that the answer to this question could possibly be no, and it is.
• 1:30:04
  Are men and women? Are mothers and fathers
• 1:30:07
  biologically interchangeable for a young child?
• 1:30:10
  No, not at all. And so that young child needs a
• 1:30:16
  mother. And does that young child need a
• 1:30:19
  father? But it needs the mother more.
• 1:30:21
  Needs a mother and a father. So we could do a whole other
• 1:30:24
  show about why fathers are important.
• 1:30:26
  Because fathers are necessary, because mothers regulate
• 1:30:30
  emotions like sadness and distress and fear.
• 1:30:35
  Fathers regulate aggression and they regulate excitement.
• 1:30:40
  And so particularly for little boys, if they don't have
• 1:30:43
  fathers, they don't learn to regulate aggression, and they
• 1:30:47
  often end up with things like behavioral issues and early
• 1:30:51
  signs of aggressive behavioral issues, right?
• 1:30:54
  So the idea is that fathers model how to regulate aggression
• 1:30:59
  for little boys. How?
• 1:31:01
  When do you say little boy? How old are you speaking?
• 1:31:03
  Todd 3, Todd 2/3 So, so essentially fathers start out
• 1:31:09
  with infants. They attach to infants, not like
• 1:31:12
  mothers do, but you know, they have a relationship.
• 1:31:14
  And today in particular, there's definitely an encouragement of
• 1:31:17
  having a a very loving relationship with your infant.
• 1:31:21
  But it's not until children really begin to separate.
• 1:31:23
  The fathers become really important because they seduce,
• 1:31:26
  they seduce the baby away from the mother.
• 1:31:29
  What we're finding is there's so many mothers who are single
• 1:31:32
  mothers by choice today. What do you mean by that?
• 1:31:35
  It means that they go to sperm banks and they have children on
• 1:31:39
  their own and, and so, so we know that those children are
• 1:31:43
  having trouble separating. So in our practices, we're
• 1:31:46
  seeing more children with separation issues because they
• 1:31:49
  may attach fully to those mothers.
• 1:31:51
  They may be sleeping with those mothers far too long because the
• 1:31:55
  mothers attached to those children almost as partners.
• 1:31:58
  I mean, it's, it's, it's it if you are a single mother and you
• 1:32:02
  don't. Have a partner?
• 1:32:04
  That you're raising your child with that what can happen is you
• 1:32:06
  can, you know, take that baby into your bed and you say,
• 1:32:09
  right, I'm so attached to this baby, but you also need.
• 1:32:12
  So there are two books that John Bolby wrote.
• 1:32:15
  John Bolby was the father of attachment theory.
• 1:32:17
  He had a big book on attachment, yet another big book on
• 1:32:21
  separation. And the truth is they're both
• 1:32:23
  important. You could say mothers are the
• 1:32:26
  objects of attachment and fathers are the objects of
• 1:32:29
  separation. Fathers lure babies away from
• 1:32:32
  mothers in a healthy way and say, come on, come out and play.
• 1:32:35
  The weather's fine, let's go take some risks.
• 1:32:38
  It's OK to go on the monkey bars and right, because mothers are
• 1:32:41
  very vigilant about safety and right, they get very vigilant.
• 1:32:45
  Fathers are less vigilant. And so they're both necessary,
• 1:32:48
  but they're not the same. And the problem.
• 1:32:51
  Is if you ask a single parent, whether it's a mother or a
• 1:32:54
  father, to fulfill both of those roles, that's very complicated
• 1:32:59
  to fulfill both of those roles. What is your to the in the
• 1:33:04
  practical reality universe, what would be your advice to someone
• 1:33:10
  who is working full time and they're both working full time,
• 1:33:16
  the two spouses and they plan to pull back and so maybe they're
• 1:33:21
  going to go to part time. But how would you recommend the
• 1:33:25
  calculus of, you know, we talked about the one to two to three
• 1:33:28
  hour rubric in terms of providing other material
• 1:33:33
  opportunities or things for the child, for example, because I do
• 1:33:37
  this work and maybe it's not 2 hours, I'm gone, I'm gone four
• 1:33:40
  or five. But now we can afford to live
• 1:33:43
  close to the biological parents. You know, these are the kind of
• 1:33:46
  decisions that are being made. Excuse me, the grandparents.
• 1:33:49
  Or now we can afford to, you know, send you to this school
• 1:33:53
  that we know is going to be really important for you in a
• 1:33:55
  couple of years or we're saving up to actually buy our home.
• 1:33:58
  So we know we have this level of security that we wouldn't have
• 1:34:02
  otherwise. Any recommendations on those
• 1:34:05
  sorts of practical, those pragmatic decisions that people
• 1:34:10
  have that people are making every single day?
• 1:34:12
  Yeah. Like pushing the envelope.
• 1:34:13
  We're not going to the two hours.
• 1:34:15
  Feels really stressed. We're going to do 5, but it
• 1:34:18
  means these other things for our family.
• 1:34:21
  You know, what I would say is I would still prioritize your
• 1:34:24
  physical and emotional presence over any of those things.
• 1:34:27
  Again, you know, I understand and there is a number, I think
• 1:34:32
  there's actually a financial number.
• 1:34:36
  There's studies to show if you make this much money as a.
• 1:34:40
  Family in America. Then you know you are in another
• 1:34:45
  category and I can't remember and it's probably a different
• 1:34:48
  number according to different parts of the country.
• 1:34:50
  So I don't want to judge parents who are making very, very hard
• 1:34:54
  decisions. There are some very hard
• 1:34:56
  decisions families have to make. But what I will say to you is
• 1:35:00
  children don't care about the school they go to.
• 1:35:03
  They don't care about the house they live in.
• 1:35:05
  They don't care about the car they drive.
• 1:35:07
  They don't care about vacations. They don't care about nicer
• 1:35:10
  clothes, they're happy to wear hand me downs just if you're
• 1:35:13
  there for them in those early years.
• 1:35:16
  I want to go now to the harm you mentioned daycare a few times at
• 1:35:19
  the beginning of the interview and the harm that is the child.
• 1:35:21
  Can you walk us through some of the research on the harm of
• 1:35:24
  leaving your child for more than the 2-3 hours a day to the
• 1:35:28
  extreme of 8 to 12 hours a day? So daycare, the children in
• 1:35:33
  daycare have higher salivary cortisol levels.
• 1:35:36
  So they test their salivary cortisol levels, the stress
• 1:35:40
  hormones, they have higher stress hormone levels.
• 1:35:43
  And the research shows that children who who are put in
• 1:35:47
  daycare at too early an age are have higher levels of behavioral
• 1:35:51
  problems, early signs of aggression and and ADHD like.
• 1:35:56
  Symptoms later on in the school years.
• 1:35:59
  That's what the research shows. And this is daycare for how many
• 1:36:02
  hours? You know, again, I can't give a
• 1:36:05
  specific number, but we say less is more in this case.
• 1:36:09
  So I usually say more is more because more is more in terms of
• 1:36:12
  presence. But you would say no daycare, in
• 1:36:15
  my opinion, is good daycare in California.
• 1:36:18
  You, you are the ones who started this share the care
• 1:36:21
  movement, which is if you can't afford a babysitter, who is?
• 1:36:24
  Going to be consistent. You remember that when you put
• 1:36:28
  your child in daycare, you're putting them in a group setting
• 1:36:32
  with transient daycare workers who are underpay paid,
• 1:36:37
  undertrained, overwhelmed and often absent.
• 1:36:40
  So there's a lot of absenteeism in daycare workers because
• 1:36:46
  because they get overwhelmed. So, and the best way I can
• 1:36:48
  describe it to you is the ratios in daycare are usually not less
• 1:36:53
  than 5 to 1, sometimes 8 to one. In Sweden, they're 12 to one.
• 1:36:58
  And if you have a daycare worker that's out, even in America, it
• 1:37:01
  can be 8 to 1. And so I want you to imagine
• 1:37:04
  every mother who's listening to this.
• 1:37:06
  I want you to imagine whether you would have the ability as a
• 1:37:09
  daycare worker to soothe even 5 babies who are in distress from
• 1:37:17
  moment to moment, to regulate their emotions and get them back
• 1:37:20
  to homeostasis and make them feel secure.
• 1:37:23
  Inevitably you would lose your mind and you'd end up taking
• 1:37:27
  days off and those babies would be in in like transient care and
• 1:37:33
  care with many different people and and also the wear and tear
• 1:37:39
  on those daycare workers means they don't last.
• 1:37:42
  For very long. But the most important thing is
• 1:37:44
  you're putting your very neurologically fragile child in
• 1:37:47
  a group environment that's over stimulating, has too many
• 1:37:52
  people, too much noise, too many environmental stimulus, too many
• 1:37:58
  people coming in and coming out. And so that's not what babies
• 1:38:03
  babies need. Quiet, calm, peaceful, playful,
• 1:38:10
  secure environments. And I can't emphasize enough
• 1:38:14
  that daycare is not that. What's your advice for single
• 1:38:18
  moms who feel this is? Grab a friend and live.
• 1:38:21
  If I really want to say what my advice is, live with your best
• 1:38:24
  friend who is also a single mom. Grab one or two other single
• 1:38:28
  moms and get a. Group House.
• 1:38:30
  And live with your children together.
• 1:38:33
  There was a great book by Anita Diamond called the Red Tent.
• 1:38:37
  It was a biblical book. It was about the sister, one of,
• 1:38:40
  you know, with the book, it was about whose daughter, Jacobs,
• 1:38:45
  one of the Jacobs daughters, the one that's never talked about.
• 1:38:48
  And, and basically it was a book that talked about in biblical
• 1:38:53
  times, women lived in red tents with their children.
• 1:38:56
  They raised their children together.
• 1:38:58
  There were women, you know, they lived in Group environments.
• 1:39:01
  If you don't have extended family, you make an extended
• 1:39:04
  family and that will be your family.
• 1:39:08
  And you can even share caregiving.
• 1:39:10
  Maybe you say I'll work on Monday, Wednesday and Fridays.
• 1:39:13
  You work on Tuesday and Thursdays.
• 1:39:14
  You watch the kids on Monday and Wednesdays.
• 1:39:17
  I'll watch the kids on Tuesday and pay the rent.
• 1:39:19
  All pay the rent. And we'll cook dinner together.
• 1:39:22
  We'll raise our children together.
• 1:39:23
  And, you know, community, not isolation.
• 1:39:28
  It's a powerful. Thing you're recommending
• 1:39:30
  replacing all the daycares because there are a lot of
• 1:39:33
  single moms. I think the number is 1/4 of all
• 1:39:35
  children are being raised by single moms today.
• 1:39:38
  And, you know, all different circumstances that they're
• 1:39:40
  facing. And imagine if they all had this
• 1:39:44
  sort of, you know, system set up to really be there for each
• 1:39:48
  other. Obviously, that doesn't mean
• 1:39:50
  people that outside of the single mom group should be
• 1:39:52
  helping single moms and supporting them.
• 1:39:54
  That work of raising a child is some of the most important work
• 1:39:57
  you could do in the world. But I think it would.
• 1:39:59
  It would. Do you think that would
• 1:40:00
  radically change developmental outcomes for kids?
• 1:40:03
  Radically, I also think that if people got hired babysitters or
• 1:40:09
  nannies, it's more consistent. Meaning you know when you hire
• 1:40:14
  someone, first of all, you know who you're getting because you
• 1:40:16
  picked them. You have a close relationship
• 1:40:19
  with them. You don't have a close
• 1:40:21
  relationship with your daycare workers.
• 1:40:23
  These are strangers to you, really, who smile at you when
• 1:40:25
  you come in and you have no close relationship.
• 1:40:28
  These are close relationships. The people who come into your
• 1:40:30
  house, what I call come into your underwear drawers and fold
• 1:40:33
  your laundry for you. They you have a very close
• 1:40:35
  relationship with them and they're consistent.
• 1:40:38
  You get somebody who's going to be with you for years, who's
• 1:40:41
  going to have an investment in your child, who's not just there
• 1:40:45
  in a transitory way, but who's going to be invested in your
• 1:40:47
  child and share the cost of that caregiver with another family.
• 1:40:52
  This has been so powerful and I'm sure a lot of people
• 1:40:54
  listening have all kinds of questions about, OK, what do I
• 1:40:58
  do now? Maybe it's just triggered
• 1:41:00
  something in them that they think, OK, the situation, the
• 1:41:03
  way we're doing our child raising right now is a problem.
• 1:41:06
  Or maybe I'm walking into danger zone because I want to get
• 1:41:09
  married and have kids or I'm about to get married and have
• 1:41:11
  kids and my life is not set up for what you're describing to to
• 1:41:14
  pursue that ideal. What are some resources?
• 1:41:17
  I'm going to start with the women who are working or part
• 1:41:21
  time or full time who just the idea of staying home with their
• 1:41:24
  kids all day long sounds really hard.
• 1:41:29
  What is some practical advice that you have for them for how
• 1:41:32
  they can overcome maybe what is going on in their own childhoods
• 1:41:37
  or their own mental health or emotional health, in addition to
• 1:41:41
  maybe the lack of community that they're experiencing.
• 1:41:44
  How can they? Join a mother's group First
• 1:41:46
  thing join a mother's group as soon as your baby has gotten its
• 1:41:49
  shots is which is about 8 weeks. Join a mother's group and get
• 1:41:53
  together with those mothers on a regular basis.
• 1:41:56
  If you can get a therapist who leads the mother's group, hire a
• 1:41:59
  therapist. Share the cost of a therapist to
• 1:42:02
  come in and lead the group and and the other days when the
• 1:42:06
  therapist is not there, then get together anyway with your babies
• 1:42:10
  and sit on the floor. And the, the issue really that's
• 1:42:13
  happened in our country is that so many mothers go to work that
• 1:42:19
  the mothers who stay at home feel even more isolated because
• 1:42:23
  they don't have a community. They have nannies or who daycare
• 1:42:27
  workers. I mean, who do they have to to
• 1:42:30
  to to form these groups? With.
• 1:42:31
  So find other women. Like minded women form
• 1:42:35
  communities of like minded women who there's an organization that
• 1:42:40
  I love called Big Ocean Women out of Salt Lake City, UT woman
• 1:42:44
  named Carolina Allen. She formed it and it's basically
• 1:42:47
  a resource. It's it's women's groups all
• 1:42:50
  over the world. It formed mothers groups,
• 1:42:53
  mothers getting together, talking about mothering and
• 1:42:55
  supporting one another. That's that's the T-shirt I have
• 1:42:58
  that says maternal feminism comes from them.
• 1:43:01
  But you know, the idea that you have to find like minded women
• 1:43:05
  of a similar value system. I mean isn't that always the
• 1:43:08
  way? We have to find like minded
• 1:43:10
  people of a similar value system who share our values and then
• 1:43:14
  form mothers groups? And those mothers groups, I
• 1:43:17
  think a lot of women do have some sort of a mother's group.
• 1:43:20
  Maybe it's once a week. Not enough.
• 1:43:22
  How? How many times a week?
• 1:43:23
  Structure it, have it be every more coffee klotches.
• 1:43:26
  That's what they did in the 50s. They start every day with
• 1:43:28
  coffee. Start your day with coffee with
• 1:43:30
  moms. It's what?
• 1:43:32
  It's what? You know, we find the moms you
• 1:43:33
  share values with so that they're not boring every day.
• 1:43:37
  Every day they're you feel connected every day.
• 1:43:40
  Form form a structure form a routine every day.
• 1:43:43
  And then what about those mothers who are struggling to be
• 1:43:48
  to to want, even if they have the community it, they're still
• 1:43:51
  struggling to want to be with their kids.
• 1:43:53
  Their work is really interesting.
• 1:43:55
  They really love. They like the intellectual
• 1:43:57
  stimulation. They love it.
• 1:43:58
  Then then think of it. Think of it as titrating it.
• 1:44:03
  Meaning know that life is long and you can you'll be successful
• 1:44:08
  in your career. I mean, if we all live till 120
• 1:44:12
  like Moses, which I think you know, with science and
• 1:44:15
  technology the way it is, we probably all will to live till
• 1:44:17
  120. You have three years to really
• 1:44:21
  create this. Foundation for your child's
• 1:44:23
  mental health and personality. Right, But you may have 70 years
• 1:44:28
  to work in your life. So don't think of it as a linear
• 1:44:31
  process of working. Think of it as what can I do now
• 1:44:35
  to stay involved in my career, but not be so driven in it.
• 1:44:40
  Think of it as regulating your own excitement about your work.
• 1:44:44
  So you do a little bit of it, but you don't need to do it in
• 1:44:47
  an intense way. And as your children get older,
• 1:44:49
  then you pick it up and you do it more intensely.
• 1:44:53
  But yeah, that's my best advice would be to to find a way to do
• 1:44:57
  to it in a very regulated way that's maybe not that maybe
• 1:45:02
  you're not famous in your field, maybe you're not making tons of
• 1:45:06
  money, but at least you're keeping your toe in your work
• 1:45:09
  and you know that for later on. You'll be able to return to it.
• 1:45:13
  For those two to three hours a day over cover it, whatever it
• 1:45:15
  might be, OK. And then I'm sure there's
• 1:45:18
  someone listening right now who they have a four or five or six
• 1:45:23
  year old and those first three years are gone and they're
• 1:45:27
  thinking I made so many mistakes and my kids seems OK.
• 1:45:33
  They're not like we have seen, like we have a good
• 1:45:35
  relationship. What would be your advice to
• 1:45:37
  them? Well, what I would say is some
• 1:45:40
  kids are OK. So, but a lot of kids don't show
• 1:45:44
  the signs that they're not OK until they hit adolescence.
• 1:45:47
  So there are certain vulnerable points in development where
• 1:45:52
  children breakdown and one of those.
• 1:45:53
  Points is adolescence, so meaning if things happen in the
• 1:45:57
  first three years, sometimes those issues will submerge and
• 1:46:02
  not come out and be repressed until adolescence because
• 1:46:06
  adolescence is a kind of trauma that opens up, you know,
• 1:46:09
  vulnerability again. And a lot of the things that
• 1:46:12
  happened, that's what my second book is about, is about
• 1:46:14
  adolescence, because adolescence is the second critical window of
• 1:46:17
  brain development where a lot of the same things are happening
• 1:46:19
  that happened in Zero to Three. So you have a second chance.
• 1:46:22
  So the second book was called Second Chances and they didn't,
• 1:46:26
  they didn't take that. They didn't take my title for
• 1:46:28
  that one. I think it's called Chicken
• 1:46:30
  Little. The sky isn't falling, raising.
• 1:46:33
  Chances of much chances, but the.
• 1:46:36
  Truth is that you have so the brain is plastic, meaning you
• 1:46:42
  have an opportunity to try to repair things with your child at
• 1:46:46
  any point as long as they're still under your roof.
• 1:46:49
  The truth is that the prefrontal cortex doesn't stop developing.
• 1:46:53
  The emotional regulating part of the brain doesn't stop
• 1:46:55
  developing till 25 and women till 28 and men.
• 1:46:59
  So technically you have until then to influence your children,
• 1:47:02
  but once they move out of the. House, you've lost a lot of your
• 1:47:04
  influence. I guess you would say don't boot
• 1:47:06
  your kid at 18 automatically. No, no, absolutely.
• 1:47:09
  Again, that could be a whole other.
• 1:47:11
  That's your third. Book that's yeah, but the.
• 1:47:13
  Until 2528. Well, but, but I mean, some kids
• 1:47:16
  aren't ready. And you said, just to clarify,
• 1:47:18
  you said the girl's, the female's brain is not fully
• 1:47:21
  developed till 25 and the male's 28.
• 1:47:23
  Up to 28, yeah. And so and then and that's
• 1:47:26
  continuing or completing the process that was opened up
• 1:47:28
  during, right. So you really have a decade plus
• 1:47:32
  of adolescence. You do, but where?
• 1:47:35
  When they're under. Bonds with the parent can.
• 1:47:37
  Yes, Very, very influential. Very important and obviously you
• 1:47:41
  have more influence when they're under your roof.
• 1:47:43
  So I would say take advantage of up till 18 or 19 when they're
• 1:47:47
  still living with you. You know, the way our culture
• 1:47:49
  is, many move out after that either to go to college or get a
• 1:47:53
  job or whatever. So, you know, take advantage of
• 1:47:56
  those 18 years to repair it at whatever point you enter in is a
• 1:48:01
  good. Point to enter.
• 1:48:02
  Better than nothing. Better than nothing and a lot
• 1:48:04
  can be repaired. You'd be surprised how much can
• 1:48:07
  be repaired. And what about someone listening
• 1:48:10
  who is not at the adolescent stage yet?
• 1:48:12
  They have that younger child and they're in that maybe submerged
• 1:48:15
  years. Use that word.
• 1:48:16
  They're submerged. So the things that might have
• 1:48:18
  gone wrong in those first three years will not really appear as
• 1:48:21
  obvious until adolescence. Any advice for how they can?
• 1:48:25
  Maybe this child's in school now, Maybe that mom's back at
• 1:48:28
  work or she's always been at work.
• 1:48:30
  Things seem OK. What can that mom do to maximize
• 1:48:35
  the bond and the attachment? Transitions, be there for as
• 1:48:39
  many of those transitions in your child's life as possible.
• 1:48:42
  So if you work, you know, I always think when children go to
• 1:48:46
  school, primary school, primary school in America is 6 to 7
• 1:48:51
  hours a day. It's actually a long day for a
• 1:48:53
  little kid. Too long.
• 1:48:55
  No, it's, it's, I mean, for seven-year olds, 6 hours.
• 1:48:59
  But by the time, you know, they're finished, it's probably
• 1:49:01
  six to seven hours. That's a long time to work.
• 1:49:05
  That's a lot. That's a lot of hours to work.
• 1:49:07
  I mean, so, you know, the other thing is that women can also
• 1:49:10
  organize their work around their children's work.
• 1:49:13
  So if you say that, Maria Montessori said children don't
• 1:49:15
  play, they work. I think they play and they need
• 1:49:18
  to play, but their work is school.
• 1:49:21
  And so when they're in school, that gives you all those hours
• 1:49:23
  to work. So if you can organize your work
• 1:49:25
  around their work, that's what women used to do.
• 1:49:29
  They used to drop their kids off.
• 1:49:31
  They used to drop their kids off at school.
• 1:49:33
  They'd work for six hours and then they'd pick them up from
• 1:49:36
  school and they'd make cookies and they'd help them with the
• 1:49:39
  transition back to home. And that would be the time that
• 1:49:42
  your children were most vulnerable and shared with you
• 1:49:44
  what happened during the day. Because if you don't catch them
• 1:49:47
  in the transitions, they close up like clamps.
• 1:49:50
  And to clarify, this is 4 at the youngest, but really 5 year olds
• 1:49:54
  that you're talking about going after school and the four year
• 1:49:56
  old you would say maybe go to school for four hours, not much
• 1:50:00
  more? I would say, you know, I would
• 1:50:01
  say most preschools in America, by the time they're between 4:00
• 1:50:05
  and 5:00, they do between 4:00 and 5:00 hours a day, five days
• 1:50:09
  a week as as getting them ready. And you don't have to do that.
• 1:50:12
  I mean, preschool is optional, but I would say, you know, no
• 1:50:16
  more than that. No, after school, No, you know,
• 1:50:19
  And if I would say less is more, less is more.
• 1:50:24
  Homeschool moms. There's homeschool moms
• 1:50:25
  listening. You're like, OK, good, I'm I'm
• 1:50:29
  there and I'm there at 45678. Is it more?
• 1:50:33
  Is it optimal? Is it back to the ideal?
• 1:50:36
  Is school part of the ideal? Going to a school at six years
• 1:50:40
  old for six to seven hours? Going to a school at 8 years old
• 1:50:43
  for 8 up to 8 hours. Is that optimal?
• 1:50:46
  So it depends on the child because there are some children
• 1:50:50
  that benefit and do well in social environments when it
• 1:50:53
  comes to preschool, I mean when it comes to primary school.
• 1:50:57
  And there are other children who are neurodivergent who are have
• 1:51:02
  developmental issues, who may have something just that's a
• 1:51:06
  little bit different about them physically or emotionally, and
• 1:51:09
  they can suffer a lot. So it depends on the child.
• 1:51:13
  I think some children actually really benefit from
• 1:51:15
  homeschooling if they're struggling socially.
• 1:51:19
  And if kids are doing well socially, then school's a good
• 1:51:22
  thing. So it really depends on the
• 1:51:23
  child. But I think this idea that
• 1:51:25
  one-size-fits-all and we take a square peg and we stick it in a
• 1:51:28
  round hole, we take a hammer and we hit the hammer until the
• 1:51:31
  square peg, which is how we think about school.
• 1:51:34
  And so a lot of kids suffer because the kids who are
• 1:51:37
  neurodivergent or the kids who have, you know, other physical
• 1:51:41
  attributes that make them different, or maybe they're, you
• 1:51:45
  know, maybe they're on the spectrum or, you know, those
• 1:51:48
  kids actually are often really tortured in, in school.
• 1:51:53
  And so those kids actually tend to do better if they're
• 1:51:56
  homeschooled. And then if as a as part of the
• 1:51:59
  homeschooling, they haven't, they have a community.
• 1:52:01
  So I never, ever recommend homeschooling in isolation
• 1:52:05
  because children need to separate from their parents, but
• 1:52:09
  they can be homeschooled and still separate from their
• 1:52:12
  parents, but they need a community.
• 1:52:14
  They need other adults. In other words, if it's only all
• 1:52:17
  the time with your parents, that's not good for children.
• 1:52:21
  But if they have a community of other kids that they get
• 1:52:24
  together with on a regular basis or learn with or other parents
• 1:52:28
  who are teaching them too, it sort of creates a community.
• 1:52:31
  I guess that the key is really community.
• 1:52:34
  Any advice for, you know, scripts or things that you
• 1:52:38
  recommend moms or women can say, not just so we talked about the
• 1:52:43
  husbands or the partners earlier, but to people who
• 1:52:48
  question their choices. I mean, I know there's even some
• 1:52:52
  there is some shaming of stay at home moms to some degree.
• 1:52:56
  Weirdly, you know, I think feminism, unfortunately, it's
• 1:52:59
  one of the toxic implications of feminism that you're less than
• 1:53:03
  if you just stay at home, you're not doing as interesting things.
• 1:53:08
  I think there's a sense of judgement that some women feel
• 1:53:11
  for being passionately committed to.
• 1:53:12
  I'm going to, I'm going to make sacrifices and our family's
• 1:53:15
  going to make sacrifices. So I'm physically at home.
• 1:53:18
  That's my whole job. I think that's a kind of I've
• 1:53:21
  always thought that's a kind of projected guilt.
• 1:53:23
  So in other words, the women who don't enjoy being with their
• 1:53:28
  children or don't want to be with their children.
• 1:53:31
  I. Think there's a secret longing
• 1:53:34
  there that's not? Well, I think there's conflict.
• 1:53:36
  I think there's a lot of conflict.
• 1:53:38
  And conflict means that there's aggression and that aggression
• 1:53:43
  gets projected on to women who stay at home because, and it
• 1:53:47
  could also be envy, you know, secret unconscious envy, because
• 1:53:51
  those women really enjoy being with their children.
• 1:53:54
  And so the idea is that you envy what you can't be.
• 1:53:59
  Or what? Who you?
• 1:54:00
  Aren't and so part of it may be that some of that aggression
• 1:54:04
  that they feel, some of that conflict they feel is projected
• 1:54:07
  on to those women who stay at home.
• 1:54:08
  And I think some of it's also envy.
• 1:54:11
  I don't know if that helps those women who because I do know
• 1:54:13
  that, you know, you go to a cocktail party.
• 1:54:15
  This is what I always hear. And this is again.
• 1:54:18
  What do you do? Yeah.
• 1:54:19
  What do you do? And then raise, I raise my
• 1:54:22
  children. Everybody turns away and turns
• 1:54:25
  right. And so and and so, I think we
• 1:54:27
  all need to be aware. Of that and that.
• 1:54:29
  Raising children is probably the most important job anyone can do
• 1:54:34
  because in the end, you know, society depends upon healthy
• 1:54:41
  children that grow into healthy, responsible, loving adults.
• 1:54:47
  And so there is nothing more important than raising children.
• 1:54:51
  And so somehow we've gotten it. So Freud said that to be happy
• 1:54:57
  you need love and meaningful work.
• 1:55:00
  He always said love first. But in our society, we've turned
• 1:55:03
  it around. You need work and maybe some
• 1:55:06
  love. You mentioned earlier, and I
• 1:55:09
  want to close with this because I, I mean, this has been
• 1:55:12
  amazing, Erica, and I'm, I know people listening.
• 1:55:15
  There's been so many aha moments.
• 1:55:18
  The you mentioned earlier the, you know, mother groups and
• 1:55:23
  community and the importance for mothers to have these things to
• 1:55:26
  deal with. Maybe the temptation to just
• 1:55:28
  want to go back to work because it's so boring or whatever it
• 1:55:30
  is. They lack that community aspect.
• 1:55:32
  But back to the event. And, you know, we we were just
• 1:55:35
  talking about the woman that maybe she's judging the other
• 1:55:37
  woman for being the stay at home mom because she, you know, looks
• 1:55:41
  down on a mother so invested moment by moment in her child.
• 1:55:46
  It feels smothering to her. Or maybe there's a deep envy
• 1:55:50
  that she can't enjoy it the way that mother is.
• 1:55:52
  How can a woman rediscover her maternal instinct?
• 1:55:57
  Which, by the way, I think would have been a great title for that
• 1:56:00
  first. Book.
• 1:56:01
  I I think that you, you need, you can't do it on on your own.
• 1:56:06
  You have to get help. You have to start to uncover old
• 1:56:10
  losses and old kind of wounds because basically if we have
• 1:56:18
  traumas and losses and conflicts from our childhood, we don't,
• 1:56:24
  they don't just, it's not like you bury them and they're gone.
• 1:56:28
  You bury them and they, so we, so we say in my field,
• 1:56:32
  repression is a wonderful defense if it lasted a lifetime,
• 1:56:36
  but it rarely ever does. And so you need to uncover those
• 1:56:41
  losses. You need to uncover that pain
• 1:56:44
  and you need, that's the only way you get better.
• 1:56:47
  You can't just skate over superficially and hope that
• 1:56:51
  things are going to get better another day.
• 1:56:53
  You really have to go back and you have to look at your own
• 1:56:56
  childhood and you have to look at the the relationship you had
• 1:56:59
  with your own mother. Because the basis on which we
• 1:57:02
  form our relationship with our children for good, for bad, is
• 1:57:08
  the relationship we had with our own mother.
• 1:57:10
  And if it wasn't perfect, as most relationships with our
• 1:57:14
  mothers aren't, then we go back and we look at it and we resolve
• 1:57:18
  the conflicts we had about it, and then we become better
• 1:57:20
  mothers as a result. But what if even it is a fact?
• 1:57:25
  Most people, they don't remember anything from those first three
• 1:57:30
  years. Maybe they have some good
• 1:57:33
  childhood memories and they still don't enjoy mothering
• 1:57:36
  though. Or it it they enjoy aspects of
• 1:57:38
  it, but it's overwhelming. It's not they don't see, they
• 1:57:42
  don't seem to experience that same enjoyment that other women
• 1:57:44
  they perceive have. How does one really grieve
• 1:57:48
  something they don't remember? Well, you, you act.
• 1:57:51
  When you go into therapy, you start to remember.
• 1:57:53
  It's an interesting thing. It starts to turn the lights on
• 1:57:57
  again. So it makes space to remember,
• 1:58:01
  yeah. And, and you can't do it alone
• 1:58:03
  because if you, you could say that you, you're not mothered
• 1:58:07
  alone. And my, my colleagues would
• 1:58:09
  probably kill me for saying this.
• 1:58:10
  But what I do is I give women a therapeutic experience that is
• 1:58:18
  an emotionally reparative experience.
• 1:58:21
  So it's like being remothered. Do you think that's key?
• 1:58:25
  Yeah. Is experiencing mothering from a
• 1:58:28
  from a woman who is like a surrogate mother.
• 1:58:31
  Mothering you didn't have it is so you know how to give it to
• 1:58:34
  someone else then. And so you feel loved yourself.
• 1:58:36
  I mean, most women who can't love their children did not feel
• 1:58:39
  loved by their mothers in one way or shape or form.
• 1:58:42
  And that doesn't mean that on some perfunctory level, they
• 1:58:45
  didn't think they're the. I mean, you ask most women, they
• 1:58:47
  say, Oh, my mother loved me. But if you really dig deep into
• 1:58:51
  the details, you find that, you know, well, my mother was kind
• 1:58:54
  of resentful. Well, my mother really would
• 1:58:56
  rather be not there. And my mother, you know, she was
• 1:58:59
  forced. To be a mother and you know.
• 1:59:01
  Or she was busy. Or she was.
• 1:59:02
  Busy. Or she was not a lot.
• 1:59:04
  Distracted or she was in distressed or she was very
• 1:59:07
  narcissistic or so you know, you just have to scratch a little
• 1:59:12
  below the surface and you find a great deal.
• 1:59:15
  Erica, this has been awesome. Thank you so much.
• 1:59:18
  Where can people find your work and read your excellent books?
• 1:59:22
  Www.komisarkomisar.com and you can see a lot of things on my
• 1:59:29
  website. You can see the books, you can
• 1:59:31
  order the books, but you can also see all the articles I've
• 1:59:34
  written in on different topics. Any final thoughts you want to
• 1:59:38
  leave us with? I would say to women who are
• 1:59:41
  struggling with this that it's raising children is the hardest
• 1:59:46
  thing that you'll ever do. It's also the most rewarding
• 1:59:49
  thing that you'll ever do. And if you're questioning it,
• 1:59:53
  allow yourself to question it. If you're feeling guilty, allow
• 1:59:56
  yourself to feel guilty. Allow yourself to explore these
• 1:59:59
  feelings now, while you still can, and while you can still
• 2:00:03
  make a difference in the relationship with your children.
• 2:00:07
  11 more question. Actually, I should have asked
• 2:00:09
  this earlier. You, you talked about guilt
• 2:00:11
  earlier. There may be people feeling
• 2:00:13
  guilty right now. You said guilt is a sign of
• 2:00:16
  something. Explore it.
• 2:00:17
  Don't just run from it, right? Is it possible to feel guilt for
• 2:00:22
  something that's not wrong, but there's something else going on
• 2:00:27
  there? And in your experience, based on
• 2:00:28
  what you know of our culture and your clients, how often is the
• 2:00:31
  guilt a true sign of something wrong that needs to be explored
• 2:00:36
  versus it's the mommy guilt that every mother has to some degree
• 2:00:40
  or another? So all guilt is healthy.
• 2:00:42
  It's not. It's not something to run away
• 2:00:44
  from if it's excessive. It's unhealthy so.
• 2:00:49
  If you have a woman who is always feeling anxious that
• 2:00:53
  she's not doing enough but she is, that would be a sign of
• 2:00:56
  it's. It's about intensity and degree.
• 2:01:00
  So there are many mothers who are wonderful mothers who just
• 2:01:03
  never feel that they're good enough.
• 2:01:05
  But again, that has very little to do with mothering and has
• 2:01:08
  much more to do with self esteem and feeling good enough inside
• 2:01:12
  as a person. So again, those are older.
• 2:01:15
  There's a wonderful article called Ghosts in the Nursery.
• 2:01:18
  Those are older and deeper ghosts to grapple with.
• 2:01:22
  But generally speaking, the guilt of a mom is a healthy
• 2:01:26
  sign. Vigilant society everything to.
• 2:01:30
  Resolve. Yeah, it's a sign of your
• 2:01:32
  conscience working. It's a sign of feeling vigilant
• 2:01:34
  around your baby. It's a sign of preoccupation
• 2:01:37
  with your baby. And you do not want to turn away
• 2:01:40
  from those feelings. Those are important feelings.
• 2:01:42
  If it's excessive and it's making you feel anxious, you
• 2:01:45
  need to get help with it. Erica, thank you so much for
• 2:01:49
  taking the time. This has been awesome.
• 2:01:52
  Everyone definitely pick up Erica's book.
• 2:01:55
  I like your original title, but it's called being there and I'm
• 2:02:00
  excited to, I hope do this again and talk about your other book
• 2:02:04
  because I'm I'm not in the adolescence phase with my kids
• 2:02:07
  and I haven't even read that book yet, but I think this first
• 2:02:10
  step of being there is the foundation for those first three
• 2:02:14
  years. So thank you so much, Erica,
• 2:02:15
  you're. So welcome, thank you for having
• 2:02:17
  me. Thanks so much for listening to
• 2:02:19
  this episode of the Lila Rose Podcast.
• 2:02:22
  Wow, what a great conversation that was with Erica.
• 2:02:25
  I felt that I learned a lot even more from the book.
• 2:02:27
  I mean, getting to talk to her in person is such a privilege
• 2:02:30
  because you get to actually engage with the ideas that she
• 2:02:33
  presents in the book in more specific level of detail and ask
• 2:02:37
  those practical questions. I'm sure this opened up a lot of
• 2:02:40
  food for thought for people listening.
• 2:02:42
  I want to hear what you think. Please e-mail me at
• 2:02:44
  lila@gtbmedia.com. I'd love to hear from you.
• 2:02:47
  You can always leave a comment on the YouTube channel.
• 2:02:49
  You can, of course, always leave a review.
• 2:02:50
  Please give us five stars if you listen on Spotify or on Apple.
• 2:02:54
  Don't forget to subscribe if you haven't already to the YouTube
• 2:02:57
  channel and to the podcast. It helps the podcast reach more
• 2:03:00
  people. And also feel free to reach out
• 2:03:02
  to Erica. You got her website.
• 2:03:03
  It'll be LinkedIn, the bio as well.
• 2:03:05
  But she's doing an amazing and unique work because her voice
• 2:03:09
  and what she has to say, it is in some ways unpopular.
• 2:03:12
  It's not hurt a lot, but I think it's very, very important
• 2:03:15
  because at the end of the day, what is most important, what's
• 2:03:17
  most important is our kids. What's most important is the
• 2:03:20
  bonds of love that we have with each other.
• 2:03:23
  And I want to just send this message to myself, to moms
• 2:03:26
  listening. You are enough as a mother to
• 2:03:29
  mother your kids, and your child is enough as a child to deserve
• 2:03:35
  your full attention and your love.
• 2:03:37
  And I don't think that any woman should feel bad because of the
• 2:03:41
  pressures from whether it's feminism or society or whatever
• 2:03:44
  else, to really want to be and do everything in her power to
• 2:03:48
  really be there for her baby. So thank you again to Erica for
• 2:03:52
  such a compelling, compelling episode.
• 2:03:55
  Send me your thoughts. Thank you all so much and we'll
• 2:03:57
  see you next time.