Ep 07: Why Motherhood Matters and Why We Should Prioritise it with Erica Komisar

**Kat Kuczynska** (0:02)
Welcome to Wisdom Rebellion, where we are figuring out how to improve our health, relationships, and family life with the help of the world's leading experts in how we get there. One challenging conversation at a time.
My guest today is Erica Commissar, a clinical social worker, a psychoanalyst, and a parent guidance expert who's been in private practice in New York City for over 30 years. A graduate of Georgetown and Columbia Universities and The New York Freudian Society, Mrs. Commissar is a psychological consultant bringing parenting workshops to clinics, schools, corporations, and childcare settings. She is a contributor to The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and The New York Daily News. She is also a contributing editor to The Institute for Family Studies and appears regularly on Fox and Friends, and Fox 5 News. Erica is the author of Being There, Why Prioritizing Motherhood in the First 3 Years, Matters, and Chicken Little, The Sky Isn't Falling, Raising Resilient Adolescents in the New Age of Anxiety. Today's conversation covered the consistent devaluation of motherhood in modern times, the importance of nurturing and caregiving, as well as the impact of feminism on children, motherhood, and a family unit. We also discussed why some women struggle with motherhood, the hormonal and instinctual responses that mothers and fathers have towards their babies, the impact of troubled upbringing on the maternal attachment, and why the first three years are the key stage in a child's development. We know that the work of mothers is seen as less by the economy, but we delved deeper into the reasons why that is, why the policymakers are refusing to address a glaring problem of skyrocketing rates of mental health issues in our children, and finally, what the optimal raising of resilient children looks like. Without further ado, I give you Erica Commissar.
Why don't we value mothering anymore?

**Erica Komisar** (2:17)
We don't value mothering in modern times because we value things like self-sufficiency and independence and self-determination, nurturing, caregiving.
We don't value these things in the Western world. And I also think that the women's movement of the 60s, although it did a lot of good for women, a lot of great things for women in terms of giving them freedom, it also did a lot of terrible things for children because the messaging should have been, work outside the home, is something you should have the right to choose.
It should be something that brings meaning to your life and brings money into your home, but it shouldn't replace nurturing your children. And that if you have young children, they need you, but you can do everything in life, you just can't do it all at the same time. That should have been the messaging.
The messaging of if you're a mother, maybe you can work part-time and still be there to be with your children. But it basically de-prioritized children. I mean, Gloria Steinem never had children. And so she said to the world, children don't matter, essentially. They'll be just fine. But she didn't have children. She wasn't a mother. She didn't have the oxytocin in her body. Maybe she shouldn't have been a mother. Maybe some people shouldn't be mothers. And that's fine, too. But if you choose to have children, as Penelope Leach says in her work many years ago, if you choose to have children, then you need to care for them. And that's not a message we got when the women's rights movement came around.

**Kat Kuczynska** (3:57)
There was something about the feminist movement that really, maybe not at the beginning, but certainly after a few decades of the feminist movement sort of being active, it really started pushing for a very, very specific woman. That was usually a single woman trying to make it in a corporate career instead of the one that actually wanted to marry, having a career that she wants or she likes or she enjoys doing.
And at the same time, having family and actually getting these two completely separate words meet.

**Erica Komisar** (4:41)
Yeah, I mean, in our country, there was a TV show called The Mary Tyler Moore Show, and she was a very famous actress in America. And the show was about a single journalist living in Minneapolis, I think, and living her best single life, being a career woman. And this was in the 70s, I think, 60s, 70s. But when Gloria Steinem went to Mary Tyler Moore and said, will you be the face of my feminism, even Mary Tyler Moore, who loved being a mother? She said, I can't be the face of your feminism as you want me to be. She said, my show speaks for itself, but I can't be the face of your feminism because you de-prioritized being a mother, and that's a very important role. So, you're right, it sort of was, it masculinized women. It's interesting because I always say that feminism took women from patriarchy to patriarchy.