Babies and small children ‘require the physical and emotional presence of their mothers,’ and leaving them at daycare in the hands of strangers causes them immense stress, Erica Komisar told LifeSiteNews.
LONDON (LifeSiteNews) -- Psychoanalyst, clinical social worker, and parent coach Erica Komisar said that sending children off to daycare can have lifelong negative consequences for them.
In an exclusive interview with LifeSiteNews at the ARC Conference in London, Komisar explained that from the age of zero to three, children go through “the first critical period of right brain development,” during which they need their mother.
”Babies are not born resilient; they're born neurologically and emotionally fragile,” Komisar noted. “They require the physical and emotional presence of their mothers or primary attachment figures in the first three years to provide them with a sense of safety and security and trust.”
”So they go into the world having been protected for the most part from a great deal of stress because their mothers wear them on their bodies and breastfeed, and they remain very physically and emotionally close to their mothers, their primary attachment figures.”
“And what that does is it helps them to incrementally learn how to tolerate stress.”
However, if young children are given to daycares in the hands of strangers, it raises their cortisol level and causes immense stress, which is “very bad for an infant’s brain,” Komisar said.
“ So we know when we raise those cortisol levels, the babies go into a sort of hyper-vigilant state of stress, and they stay that way,” she continued. "It leads to things like anxiety, early signs of aggression, ADHD, and depression later on in the school years.”
Komisar stressed that her statements are based on “decades of research” into attachment, neuroscience, and epigenetics. She said longitudinal studies showed that most children who are not properly attached to their parents when they are one-year-old are also insecurely attached 20 years later, with a higher rate of anxiety, depression, ADHD, and behavioral problems.
Komisar said that if you have to let someone else watch your children, it is best to have a relative who is invested in the child watch him or her.
Asked about what parents should do if both of them have to work, Komisar gave a metaphor to show where the priorities should lie:
If you're in an airplane and the airplane can't carry the weight in the plane, and it's going down, what are you willing to throw overboard from the airplane or the helicopter to keep it flying? … Luggage, material things. You're not willing to throw people overboard. So, you're willing to throw just about everything materially out other than the people. In society, we've taught young people to throw the people out first … So, when you say they can't afford it, first ask yourself if you've thrown every shoe, every bit of luggage, every vacation, every clothing allowance you have, every dinner out, everything that is material if you've thrown that out before you throw your baby out.
