In a world obsessed with material success, career advancement, and personal achievement, we’ve forgotten the most fundamental truth about raising healthy children: your physical and emotional presence matters more than anything else you can provide.
Clinical social worker Dr. Erica Komisar has spent three decades working with families and watching a mental health crisis unfold in real-time. Her message is both urgent and uncomfortable: the shift toward prioritizing work, independence, and self-fulfillment over hands-on parenting has created a generation of struggling children. And the data backs her up.
The Science Is Clear: Physical Time With Parents Is Critical
“For children to be mentally healthy in the future, you have to be physically and emotionally present for them throughout childhood, but particularly in the two critical periods of brain development, which are zero to three and nine to 25, which is adolescence,” explains Dr. Komisar.
This isn’t about “quality versus quantity time.” It’s about both. Children need you there, not just when it’s convenient for you, but when they need you. “You can’t have a fabulous career and then come home and be present for your child on your time. It needs to be on their time,” she emphasizes.
The foundation for future mental health is what psychologists call “attachment security,” and it’s built through consistent physical and emotional presence. Dr. Komisar describes it through what she calls “the three P’s”: presence, prioritization, and prevention.
The First Three to Five Years Are Everything
By age three, 85% of a child’s right brain (responsible for emotional regulation) is developed. This narrow window is when children learn how to manage their emotions, handle stress, and form secure attachments that will affect them for the rest of their lives.
“Babies need their mothers to spend the first three years for emotional security,” Dr. Komisar states plainly. From an evolutionary perspective, babies have always needed physical skin-to-skin contact with their mothers for at least the first year. “Most parts of the world babies are worn on their mother’s bodies because mothers perform a number of really important functions for babies that are biological functions.”
What happens during these critical early years? Every time a mother soothes a baby with skin-to-skin contact, eye contact, and a soothing tone of voice, she’s doing something profound: she’s teaching that baby how to regulate emotions. Babies are born “emotionally disjointed,” as Dr. Komisar puts it. They go from zero to 60 in three seconds with their emotions. Through repeated soothing and presence, parents help children learn to navigate their emotional landscape.
Without this foundation, children struggle. They may break down at three, at eight, or not until adolescence. “But eventually they break down,” Dr. Komisar warns.
Mothers and Fathers: Different Roles, Equal Importance
One of Dr. Komisar’s most controversial positions is that mothers and fathers are not interchangeable. This isn’t sexism; it’s biology. And understanding these differences is crucial for child development.
The Mother’s Role: Emotional Regulation and Security
Mothers are driven by oxytocin, the “love hormone,” which makes them highly attuned to sensitive, empathic nurturing. When babies are in distress, mothers instinctively soothe them, which regulates the baby’s emotions from moment to moment. This isn’t just comfort, it’s brain development.
“The more a mother nurtures with sensitive, empathic nurturing, meaning when the baby cries, the mother goes, ‘Oh, sweetheart, let me see the boo boo. Let me kiss the boo boo,’ that actually raises the oxytocin in the baby’s brain, which then protects the baby from cortisol,” the stress hormone.
Mothers help babies regulate sadness, fear, and distress. They buffer babies from stress by being present and physically available, particularly in the first three years.
The Father’s Role: Exploration and Risk-Taking
Fathers also produce oxytocin, but it has a different effect on their brain. It makes them “playful tactile stimulators of babies”, like throwing the baby up in the air, tippling, rough housing, running after them.
This rough-and-tumble play isn’t frivolous. It encourages exploration, risk-taking, and separation. Most critically, fathers help children regulate excitement and aggression.
“When fathers aren’t in the house, when there are single mothers raising children without a father, often little boys develop behavioral problems… they can’t regulate their aggression,” Dr. Komisar explains. Fathers help children, especially boys, learn impulse control and how to manage aggressive feelings.
Fathers also produce vasopressin, the “protective aggressive hormone,” which makes them attuned to external threats while mothers are attuned to the baby’s distress. Both are evolutionarily essential.
“Fathers and mothers are both critical to the development of children, which is a very controversial thing to say today, because if you’re raised without one, you are missing a piece.”
The Workforce Revolution: An Unintended Consequence
Perhaps Dr. Komisar’s most provocative claim is this: “When women decided that it was cool to go to work and to work full time out of the home, you know, everybody cheered and said, great, you know, women have the same rights as men and now everybody can be in the workforce and be independent and make money and do their own thing. Me, me, me, me, me. The problem is that children were dropped.”
She saw the mental health crisis coming 30 years ago. “There was an uptick in mental illness in children going back decades. And it had everything to do with the shift in society towards self-centeredness, towards narcissism, towards individualism, towards me, me, me.”
Today, one in five children will develop a serious mental illness before leaving childhood: anxiety, depression, ADHD, or worse. While social media often gets blamed, the roots go much deeper. Institutional daycare, separation from mothers in the first year, sleep training, leaving babies for hours on end—all of these practices put stress on developing brains at their most vulnerable stage.
“What we’re doing now by separating mothers and babies, by putting babies into daycare with strangers, by sleep training babies, all these weird things that we’re doing to babies” turns on the amygdala response and stress-regulating systems in ways that create long-term problems.
The Hard Truth: You Can’t Have It All
This is the message nobody wants to hear, but it’s the reality: “You have to sacrifice time and money and freedom. If you want to raise healthy children, it’s going to require discomfort and frustration and sacrifice.”
Dr. Komisar is clear-eyed about this. She acknowledges that not everyone needs to have children to have a satisfying life. But “if you’re going to have children, you need to be equipped to care for them. Because having children alone without really understanding what it means to care for them and being prepared to take on that responsibility is causing our children to break down.”
The sacrifice is especially intense in the early years. Dr. Komisar herself took six months off with each child, then only worked an hour and a half a day for years. “I had the kind of career by choice that I could have control over and it could be flexible.” This isn’t possible for everyone, which is why she advocates for better policies: “In any way that we can give families the choice to care for their own children, particularly in the early years, we will create a population of healthier children.”
When Your Child Is Stressed: Acknowledge First, Fix Second
Even with the best parenting, children will experience stress. What matters is how you respond.
The instinct for many parents is to immediately fix the problem or minimize the distress. But Dr. Komisar teaches a different approach: acknowledge the feelings first.
This mirrors what mothers do instinctively with babies, “Oh, sweetheart, let me see the boo boo”, before trying to solve anything. When children feel heard and validated in their distress, their stress response calms. They feel safe. Only then can problem-solving begin.
This approach teaches children that their emotions are valid and manageable, setting them up for better emotional regulation throughout life.
The Bottom Line
Your physical and emotional presence is irreplaceable. Not a nanny. Not daycare. Not the best preschool or educational toys. You.
“Attachment security is the foundation for future mental health,” Dr. Komisar states. And that security is built through thousands of small moments: soothing a crying baby, kissing a boo boo, wrestling on the floor, being there when they need you, not when it’s convenient.
We prioritize work, careers, material success, and personal desires. But children need to be at the top of that list, especially in their first years.
The time you spend physically present with your children, especially in those critical first three to five years, is the most important investment you’ll ever make. Not in their college fund. Not in their extracurriculars. In your presence.
That’s the gift that shapes a brain, builds resilience, and creates the foundation for a mentally healthy life.
References
- Dr. Erica Komisar interview: “Clinical Social Worker: Hidden Dangers Of Daycare, It Might Be Causing Future Issues For Your Kid! Birth Rates Are Plummeting, It’s Terrifying!” – The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
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