April 15, 2024 • 42 mins
In this powerful episode, Gia engages in a thought-provoking conversation with Erica Komisar, a renowned clinical social worker and psychoanalyst.
Erica shares her expertise on the importance of prioritizing motherhood in the first three years and raising resilient adolescents in the modern age of anxiety.
Listeners will gain valuable insights into the impact of maternal presence on child development, the significance of attachment relationships, and the role of fathers in nurturing children. Erica delves into the societal pressures faced by women, the stigma around taking breaks in careers, and the need for intentional decision-making when it comes to balancing work and family life.
Erica's candid discussion on mom guilt, advocating for paid leave, and reevaluating societal norms will resonate with high-achieving women navigating the complexities of modern parenting and leadership roles.
Tune in to this enlightening episode to gain valuable perspectives on redefining success, prioritizing love, and finding balance in a world that often values material success over personal well-being. Don't miss out on this empowering conversation that challenges conventional norms and inspires listeners to embrace holistic living and intentional choices.
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Episode Transcript
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(00:00):
Welcome to Your Future Starts Now, the go-to podcast for
extraordinary women who are ready to step into their next chapter with
authentic confidence. I'm your host, Gia Lacqua empowerment coach,
motivational speaker, children's book author, and girl mom. Whether
you're a corporate powerhouse or an entrepreneur, this show is
designed for you. Your Future Starts Now is more than
(00:20):
just a podcast. It's a movement, a movement towards rewriting
the rules of success for high-achieving women. Are you ready
to get unstuck and step into your next chapter? If
so, you're exactly where you need to be. Your future starts
now. Welcome to Your Future Starts Now. I'm your host,
Gia Lacqua. I want to thank you for tuning in today. I am
(00:43):
thrilled to introduce you to Erica Komisar. Erica
is a clinical social worker, psychoanalyst, and parent guidance expert
who's been in private practice in New York City for over 30 years. She's
a psychological consultant bringing parenting workshops to clinics, schools,
corporations, and childcare settings. She's a contributor to
the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and the New York Daily News.
(01:05):
She's 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 Three Years Matters, and Chicken Little, The Sky Isn't
Falling, Raising Resilient Adolescents in the New Age of Anxiety.
Erica, so excited to chat with you today. Welcome to the show. Thank you
(01:27):
for having me. So today we are talking about
the most important job in the world, which is
parenting. So before we dive into that, Erica, tell
us a little bit about your backstory and what led you to the work that you're
Well, I'm a social worker and a psychoanalyst, and my
specialty is parent guidance. And how
(01:49):
I got into this work is about
35 years ago, when I started my practice, I
was seeing a huge
number of children, and it seemed to be getting bigger every
day, who were being diagnosed with mental disorders
(02:10):
such as ADHD or behavioral problems or even
depression and anxiety, things we hadn't seen in such young children. So
they were increasing in numbers at an
early age, but they were also increasing in numbers in adolescence and
the suicide ideation and suicide rates were
also going up. So I was seeing this happening many years
(02:31):
ago, decades ago, well before the
technology boom, well before COVID. So
even though there was a spike because of technology and a spike because
of COVID, this was already happening. And so,
and I, in my practice in New York was seeing a
connection between the children who seemed the most disturbed
(02:54):
and the kids whose mothers were the most absent.
And so I thought, huh, that's sort of interesting. I'm going to
look at some of the attachment research and the neuroscience. And
so I started delving for about 13 years into the
neuroscience research, the epigenetics research, the attachment
research, and reread all of my psychoanalytic books.
(03:17):
And really over those 13 years saw
that the research backed up what I was seeing, which is that The
kids that I was seeing that were really struggling were the ones who
had attachment disorders and had developed
sort of what we call pathological defenses in response to
(03:38):
feeling unsafe, feeling attachment insecurity essentially.
And so I decided I want to write a book because the number of
people I could reach in my practice was more limited. So I
wrote the first book trying to reach as many uh,
parents, social workers, policymakers, as I could, because
my intention also was to try to influence the
(04:01):
government, uh, with the idea of paid leave. Because,
you know, that's always used as a, an argument. You know, when I
wrote my book, everybody was like, well, you're an elitist. I'm like, I'm not an
elitist because I wrote this book. So we're not allowed to
talk about real true things if
they make people feel bad. But the reality is unless we
(04:22):
make people feel bad, unless we make the government feel bad,
no one changes. So we're in this sort of
position in our society where we're not allowed to say
anything that's uncomfortable to anyone. And yet sometimes
when we say things that are uncomfortable, that make people feel
uncomfortable, whether it's mothers who feel uncomfortable or fathers or
(04:43):
government officials, then we
have the possibility of change. So
that's why I wrote the first book. And then I wrote a second book called Chicken Little,
which was about adolescence, which is the second critical period of
brain development to help parents understand that you have
another, you have a second chance. If you miss the first window from
(05:04):
zero to three, you have from nine to 25 to make
a real difference in your child's ability to regulate their emotions and
Wow. Incredible. So in the first three
years of development, I know the research shows that children
need their mothers, right? And that that develops your
(05:24):
attachment type. I also am curious as to why specifically
the mother, right? Why not a father, a grandmother,
Well, I mean, what's interesting is I think if you ask most mothers
who is the primary attachment figure, what do you think most mothers are
going to say? They are, even if they
(05:45):
work 12 hours a day and are only home on
weekends, they're still going to say, well, it's me. And
the reality is John Bowlby says that the primary attachment
figure is the person that is there to sue the baby
from moment to moment throughout the day. The majority of the
time in the first three years, that is the primary attachment figure.
(06:08):
And babies need a primary attachment figure.
who is the center of their universe and
the source of their security. So
babies aren't like adults. Even adults need, we
couple, you know, we need to couple with someone. Why is an
intimate relationship with one person different than an
(06:30):
intimate relationship with many people? But babies
are not like adults. They can't, they can have
relationships with many people, but they have one
unique relationship with the person that is there may
pull, you know, the person around which they consider
the source of their security. It's
(06:53):
usually the mother. And there are reasons why, because mothers
are different than fathers in terms of nurturing behavior.
So children in the first three years, well, first
of all, mothers have a biological connection to their children if
they gave birth to their children. But even mothers who are
adoptive mothers have been shown to produce hormone
(07:15):
which women produce in great quantities called oxytocin. So
mothers produce it when they give birth, when they breastfeed, and
when they nurture their very young. And even mothers
who are adopted mothers can produce tremendous amounts of
oxytocin. But oxytocin is the love hormone. It's the
bonding hormone. It makes mother's behavior more
(07:37):
sensitive, empathic, and nurturing. That means
that mothers are very fine-tuned because of this
hormone. to tune into baby's distress, which
is critical for that baby to be healthy in
the future. So how we lay down the foundation for
that child's security is that we keep the
(07:58):
stress quite minimal in the first year
to three years. We keep it quite minimal. We introduce stress incrementally,
but we're basically there for them physically and emotionally. to
help them to get adjusted to this kind of harsh, cruel
world that they live in. They've come from the womb where they're completely
protected and surrounded, and now they're out in the world. But
(08:21):
the way we help them to understand that the world is tolerable,
that frustration is tolerable, that they can deal with stress, is that
we don't overwhelm their neurological systems
with stress too early. And that means that we keep them with skin-to-skin
contact. We keep them close to our bodies. we
soothe them from moment to moment when they're in distress. I mean, in
(08:43):
other parts of the world, babies are worn on their mother's bodies
in the front until the mothers can't carry them on the front anymore, and
then they're worn on the back. And then they're kept at the mother's heels for
the first three years. So this is an
evolutionary sort of thing that's happened over thousands of
years to help our young to feel secure in
this world, because as mammals, we're a mammal that probably
(09:07):
has our young for the longest period of time, so critically fragile.
And so, yeah, so mothers are biologically necessary. Now,
when fathers stay home, they produce a
little more oxytocin. Fathers don't produce as much oxytocin. But
when they do produce it, it comes from a different part of their brain, and
(09:28):
it has a different impact on their behavior. it
makes their behavior more playfully tactilely stimulating.
What does that mean? The mother will tune into the baby's
distress and kneel down and give the baby a hug and reflect
the baby's sadness and fear and help regulate
those emotions and bring that baby back to homeostasis. Whereas the
(09:51):
father, it will tickle the baby, distract the
baby out of their mood, throw the baby up in the
air. It's all about moving the baby away from pain as quickly
as possible. And they're also very good at teaching
through play. Resilience to stress and
exploration helps them to take risks and separating, basically.
(10:13):
But you don't want to teach a baby to separate when they're supposed to
be attaching. Separation comes later and it
comes at the skirts of the mother. So the
baby knows the mother's there and then the baby can play with the father, but
the baby can always go back to the mother for comfort.
So, and if you doubt this, you go to the park and you look at
(10:36):
the way father's mother and the way mother's mother.
You're laughing because that is what happens. It is so true. There
was research done where mothers and fathers lay side,
because I know you have a big population that listens to your podcast that
are, you know, top executives and they're women and they're like, my
(10:58):
husband raises the baby and it's the same thing. Well, I'm going to tell
you right now, it's not the same. As much as you'd like
to believe that and justify that it's the same thing, It's not
the same thing. There was research done in England where
mothers and fathers lay side by side in bed. And when the
baby cried a distress cry, the mothers woke up
(11:18):
immediately and got up and sued the baby. The father slept through
the distress cry. But when the leaves rustled outside
the window, the fathers woke up and the mother slept through it. Now what's that
about? Because fathers produce a different hormone called vasopressin.
Mothers also produce a little bit of it, but it's not as prevalent in
mothers. It's called the protective aggressive nurturing hormone. And
(11:41):
what it does is it makes fathers more, just as it says, protective
and aggressive against predators. So
fathers are important too. And fathers are also
critical when it comes to encouraging separation.
So what I'm finding in my practice is that there are a lot of single mothers
by choice. or single mothers and
(12:03):
who are not by choice. Those children of
those mothers have a much harder time separating than
the children who have fathers. They also have a harder time
regulating emotions like aggression and risk-taking behavior
that fathers help to regulate. So, you
know, basically we're fooling ourselves by thinking that
(12:25):
mothers and fathers are fungible. They're not fungible. They're
different. So why we need to be the same, I'm
not sure. I think it's a justification for leaving our children, either
fascinating, the biological component and the hormones. It's
so interesting. So we're talking to,
(12:49):
as you mentioned, what I like to refer to as the do-it-all
generation of women. And with very
good intention, we were told, you can do
it all. At a very young age. At a very young
age. And again, with good intention, but somewhere along
the lines, we internalize that message to
(13:10):
mean we to do it all. And
we find ourselves rising to that challenge. Yeah, I can
do it all. And then it isn't until once our physical and
mental health start to deteriorate that we
then question, do I really want it all? Is
this what I'm striving for? And so, you
(13:33):
know, it's an important topic because as you mentioned, Women
who are trying to juggle it all and be perfect in every facet of
life, show up at work at 100%, have a successful career, and
be a good spouse and a great mother,
it doesn't set us up for success. And
I love that you talk about these hard topics. I mean, the work that you
(13:55):
do, it's a hard truth, but it's an important truth. And
that's what we do on this podcast. And so the mom guilt is
very, very real.
(14:59):
So I would love to just talk about
the mom guilt aspect of knowing that we
need to be there, knowing we should be there. But in a lot of cases,
we also have to work. It'd
be a second income. Maybe we're the full-time income. Maybe we're the breadwinner in
the family. So what are some tips, tools, strategies
(15:24):
Well, so one thing I would say is that you can have it all. You
just can't have it all at the same time. So what we tell young women
is that you can have it all at the same time. And
that's a lie. because you can't. You'd say
you're only as happy as your least happy child. And what's happening is
children are breaking down because they're not being prioritized. Right.
(15:46):
So the prioritizing of children in the first, particularly in these
critical periods of brain development, is
critical to their mental health. And no one's saying that. That's why
I speak out, because it was disturbing to me that out of political correctness
for the women's movement, We weren't saying what was obvious, which
is you can be a very successful professional woman. I'm
(16:08):
a professional woman, but in the years that I was raising my
children, I put my career pretty much aside. I kept my
toe in it. I mean, really like a little bit, like
one patient a day, um, as
they got older, two patients a day. So when my children were still home
and not grown teenagers, I was seeing 10 hours of patients a
(16:30):
week. And you'd say, well, how did I afford that? And it was something my
husband and I had planned, took planning. We
didn't take vacations much at all, very, very little,
minimal vacations. We didn't do fancy
stuff. We took all the fancy stuff off. We weren't buying new clothes.
We weren't buying new strollers. We weren't spending
(16:52):
a lot of money in those years. My money that I earned was
to pay uh, a nanny, cause
I had three children to be beside me and co-parent. Cause my
husband was busy and he would come home and he would love our
children, but he wasn't really helping to raise them. Um, weekends he
was there. So it was me and the nanny and our three kids,
(17:12):
and we were doing tag team and, you know, and we were doing it together.
And she was about 58 years old when I hired her. So she was like, my
mother was ill. And then my mother passed away. Uh, my
father passed away when I was young. So, you know, I didn't really have a
lot of family. I paid my nanny to be my mother. Essentially
because my mother was ill. So, you know, I, I guess what
(17:32):
I would say to women who are professional is that, you
know, you have a long, long life to do
whatever you want to do professionally and be successful. I would say my
career didn't take off until I was about 50. And
I interview a lot of people for the book. You know, Nita
Lowey, one of the most longstanding members of the House in
(17:54):
Washington, didn't start her career until she was in her forties
in politics. She raised, I think, four kids, five
kids. She didn't start her career until she was in her forties. So
I don't know what the rush is. I don't know why, you know, we can have very
highly successful careers before we have children. Then once we have
children, take kind of a break or maybe work part time or
(18:16):
reduce the intensity of our work or maybe take time off and
then go back. And you know, what I say is that if you go back after
you have children, you often end up finding that
your priorities are different. So it's something about
the mentality of working women that they feel nothing
should change. There's no transformation. When you have a baby, everything
(18:37):
changes. Your priorities shift. You transform. If
you're healthy. If you've had a healthy enough upbringing yourself or
a healthy enough attachment to your own mother, then when your
baby is born, you feel what we call maternal preoccupation, a
pull towards your baby, not a pull towards your work. If
you can't wait to get away from your baby, that means you probably suffered
(18:58):
from an attachment disorder yourself or had some kind of conflict with
your own relationship with your mother that needs to be looked at.
That's not a normal reaction to having a baby. The normal reaction instinctually
is to be drawn to your baby. and to be preoccupied with
your baby and when you're away from your baby to feel guilt. So
people think guilt is a pathological response. It's actually a
(19:20):
signal feeling like pain if
you break your ankle and your ankle hurts. You're not supposed to
keep walking on your ankle and no one's going to tell you, oh, just ignore the
pain, keep going, keep walking. You go to the doctor, you
get it checked out, you get in a boot, you have to take it easy, you can't run on
the ankle, right? So guilt is sort of our
(19:41):
way of signaling that we're in conflict. It's
our way of signaling that we're in pain because of the conflict. And
so society tells us because they want us all out in the workforce and
making lots of money, they don't care about children. Society tells
us just ignore the feeling. And I'm telling you right now, don't ignore
the feeling. It's an important feeling. It's an instructive feeling.
(20:05):
Um, you may not be able to stop working entirely, but maybe
by looking at that internal conflict, you come up with a better resolution than
the one you have. Right. Yeah. And so, you
know, we as a society don't really understand what guilt is. Guilt
is actually, if it's excessive, if even
when you're there with the baby, you feel guilty, then maybe there's
(20:26):
a neurotic thing going on. Maybe there's something to look at. But guilt in
and of itself means our egos are working and our conscience is
working and that we're attached to our baby. So why we tell
mothers it's not healthy. You know, the other thing is at
a young age, we tell young women that careers
should be primary in their lives. And we tell them pick
(20:47):
a career right now at 15 years
old, anywhere between 15 and 21. Pick
a career that you want to go gung-ho with. Okay.
We don't tell young women to think about their whole
life. We don't tell them to think about create
a life for yourself, not just a career. And so what
(21:09):
these young women do is they say, I want to be a Supreme Court judge. I
want to be CEO of a major Fortune 500 company. I
want to be a partner
in a law firm. I want to be an attending at a major hospital. And
they go, that's great. I want to be a doctor, a lawyer, whatever. But then they
don't think about the whole life that goes with those careers. So
(21:29):
when I was 20 years old, 19 years
old, I started doing internships in different fields. I
must've done five or six internships. I worked in TV production.
I worked in Capitol Hill. I worked every year.
I did a different, I worked in PR and the arts. I worked in
PR and in, uh, in cosmetics. I worked, I
(21:50):
tried different things because I wanted to
see not what the work was like, but what the life
was like. And I wanted to see if I could find role models of
who I wanted to be when I grew up, because I knew I wanted children and
I knew I wanted a family. And I left all those
fields, not because the work wasn't exciting, because
(22:11):
the work was exciting and manic, but because the lives
that these women had were terrible. And
so instead I thought, what can I do as a career that
satisfies me, that I would like, but also
that would help me have a whole life? I don't think we talk
to young women like this, because if they thought about the fact that
(22:33):
when you have children, you want to have control and flexibility.
And to be honest, you don't want a boss. You
want to be the boss. You don't want to have a boss. If we
instructed young women of this, maybe they would choose more service fields.
Maybe they would choose speech pathology. Maybe they would choose social
work or being a therapist. Maybe they would choose being
(22:55):
a coach. Maybe they would choose anything within
the service field. where you have more
control and flexibility. Maybe they would say,
I want to be a lawyer, but I'm going to work, not
have to be a partner. Maybe I start my own little thing and make some
money while I'm raising kids. But I think we
(23:16):
really do young women a disservice when
we tell them that the only thing you should think about is
your career. Because if you don't think about
your whole life, you end up going
It's a great point. And I think you're right in the sense that we
(23:38):
tend to deny our own realities. And it's
very sad. It's a sad place to be when you think about it.
And I love what you said about this holistic concept of planning your
life. Nobody teaches us that at a young age. And
it is very singularly focused on careers, which is
great to know that, you know, as a woman, you can be anything you want. You
(23:58):
can be very career driven, but nobody prepares us
for how do you balance that if you also wanna have a
If you also wanna- That's the key. If you wanna have a
family. So the women's rights movement gave us choices. That's
right. And the choices were, you don't have to have children.
You can be like men. Let's just say
(24:21):
what it is, okay? You know, I always say that
Gloria Steinem told us that we had to work
in the work world to get away from the patriarchy of men. What
she didn't tell you is that she pushed you into being the
patriarchy of men. So she said, be like
men. And that was the wrong message. The message should have been,
(24:44):
be the best women you could be out in the world, in
a way that still allows you to be the best woman and the best mother.
But she didn't say that. She said, get away from the
patriarchy. And she ended up pushing women into the patriarchy, where
they work harder than men sometimes to prove that they're as good
as men. And they abandon all the goodness of being a woman.
(25:07):
So the best is that you have choice. You don't have to have children
to have a generative, happy life. You can have
a life without children, be a CEO of a company, have
a linear career like men have, become a
partner in a law firm without a beat, right? Without
taking a step or a beat away from it. And
(25:29):
if you're going to have children and you try to be on that path, what
I was seeing in my practice is those children were suffering
greatly. And if they don't suffer when they're little, they suffer when
they're older. And, you know, the best way to
know is not if your children break down in the first three years, but
do you get through the first 25 years without your children breaking down?
(26:00):
Sometimes the damage doesn't show up until they're in adolescence. Yes.
And, you know, and again, it's not as if there's nothing you
can do. In adolescence, you can make different choices, too. But
Yeah, but it's good that to know that we have that second window. And, and,
you know, I love what you said about, you know, the patriarchy. And
(26:23):
I can tell you from personal experience, you know, over 20 years ago, when
I started in corporate America, I remember distinctly having
this concept of in my mind of be like a man. Don't
wear bright colors, don't wear pink nail polish and
act like a man. And I think it's incredibly
fascinating that 20 plus years later now we're talking about what
(26:45):
is good leadership and we are talking about being vulnerable
and being authentic and having empathy and
compassion. And those
were all the things I threw out the window. because I
thought it wasn't work-like, it wasn't professional.
But we're still talking about the bottom line. We're still
(27:07):
talking about the bottom line. And the bottom line is a male concept. So you'd say,
again, there's nothing wrong with going that path, but then don't
have children. Right. Don't do that to your children, and don't
do it to yourself, because in the end, you're going to be miserable if
you have unhappy children or mentally ill children. Yeah. Don't
have children. Get dogs. Even dogs are good. You
(27:29):
know, the concept is that we really don't
think about the whole of things. We
just think in parts. We're almost obsessionally caught
Yeah, it's easier, but certainly not beneficial by
any means. And so on this concept, while we're talking about leadership,
(27:53):
I know that you do some work in this area
as well. I would love your thoughts on because I'm very passionate about this
as well. How parenting is
really a training ground for being a good leader and
Well, think about all the things that mothering teaches you.
(28:13):
It teaches you about emotional regulation because
you can't be a good enough mother unless you can regulate your own emotions. And
if you start by going into parenting without
the ability to regulate your emotions, if you blow up a lot and
you get super angry about small things and you're very
impatient and you can't tolerate frustration, pretty quickly
(28:35):
you learn that that's going to do a lot of harm to your children. And
you end up coming to someone like me and saying, please help me. I realize I
am impatient. I get, I get, I rise to
anger quickly. Um, I get bored around my children.
So it teaches you patience. It teaches you emotional regulation. Uh,
it teaches you prioritization and what's really important. It
(28:58):
recenters your value system. Uh, it
teaches you about relational dynamics. You know, if you
have a, uh, not just between you and your children, but
between your children and other children, between your children and their siblings,
you know, within the family. So, um, it
even teaches relational dynamics between you and your spouse and
(29:19):
how to negotiate as leaders of the family, working together
as a team, you know? So there's a lot of good things, um,
about being a mother that then lend themselves to quote
unquote, if you want to go into business later, if you want to be a leader. You
know, the other thing is we have so deprioritized
mothering that we see
(29:43):
it as lesser work. So if on your resume, it
says you took three years off to take care of your children, that
should be a compliment to you, or that should be
an asset to your resume. Because now the employer
says, ha, this is a person who has good values, who
values caregiving and values
(30:05):
family, and understands that
she needs to be all into something. And I'm going to reward her
by giving her a chance to come back into the work world. And I'm
even going to offer her part time so she can still sort
of stick by her values of her family. Why
aren't we doing that? Instead of an employer looks at the resume and
(30:25):
goes, ah, you know, she took time off. Who is she? She's mothered.
What's mothering? It's not, I mean, really we've, we
live in such a damaged society that deprioritizes the
most important role, which is that of caretaking. whether
it's caring for your children or caring for ill parents or
caring for ill relatives, or, you know, we really deprioritize
(30:48):
the most important things. So when a woman wants to take time off to
be a caregiver, she's looked down upon, right?
Instead of, as you say, valuing all of the things she's
Yeah. Huge, huge lessons in motherhood that
I know personally and other women have brought. to the workplace
(31:10):
that have been incredibly valuable. So it is an important consideration.
And now I'm seeing, um, I think there's a official
term on LinkedIn that women are using for when they do take that maternity
break to label the years that they did take off, which is nice to
see instead of just having that blank space. Erica,
what advice do you give to parents who are struggling with the challenges of
(31:31):
modern parenting, the external pressures of society? How do
Well, if you're talking about changing society, I would say I still don't
understand why every woman in America isn't on
board in a group with really advocating for
paid leave. So every woman has the ability to stay home with
(31:51):
their child, at least for the first year and up to the first three
years, at least of part-time work. Uh, why we
don't advocate for that as a group, I think, because we've split into
two groups, working women and stay at home women, and
they don't seem to get along. They look down upon each other. And
so I'm thinking, is this what we need? No, we need to
(32:13):
pull together and say, whether or not you want to have
children, whether or not you want to raise your children, uh, every
woman should have the ability to stay home with their children because
it's better for children. And it's better for mothers that they're not torn
into pieces by feeling constantly in a state of
conflict. And so, yeah, that would
(32:34):
be the first thing. Advocate, whether, you know, grab
hold of a friend of yours who's a stay-at-home mom, if you're a working mom,
and say, we're not different, we're the same. We may
have made different choices in the short run, but in the long run, we want the
same choices for women. We don't do that. So
did women split women or did men split women? Or
(32:56):
did Gloria Steinem split women? I mean, who split women
in half? So we feel in a binary fashion,
so sort of discrepant from
one another, right? So
that's the first thing. The second thing is take a
look at your whole life and think about how happy
(33:17):
you are. Because I would say most women who work full, full, full
time and have children, most of them are not very happy. And
if they are quote-unquote happy, as soon
as they hit a bump in the road, whether it's one
of their children starts to show signs of struggle, or one of their children
is diagnosed with ADHD, or one of their children is
(33:41):
not coming out of their room and feeling very depressed and
maybe talking about suicide, everything stops for
that woman. So I would say stop,
pause, pause, a pause is a good thing, and really
reflect with your partner, whoever
that is, your spouse, reflect on, am
(34:03):
I happy? Is this life the life that I want to live? Is
this a balanced life? Am I really able
to prioritize what is important to me? And
listen to yourself. If
the answer is no, I'm not happy. No, my children are not happy.
Open your eyes, listen to yourself, take action. And
(34:27):
that doesn't mean, as you say, some women have to work to support
their families. We're not talking about not working. We're talking about the kind
of work you do. We're talking about the amount of work you
do. We're talking about the intensity and degree of the
Yeah, I think there's also incredible stigma for women who have been
working towards climbing that ladder, and then for them to either
(34:50):
pause or take a step back. Terrible, terrible
stigma. I have women coming to me who are at a point
in their career where they've been striving, striving, striving. They say, I think I'm okay
coasting right now. And there's such stigma attached
It's very sad. So, you know, again, intentionality.
(35:13):
That's what I would say. I think we end up in these careers without
great intentionality. We end up with blinders on. Yes.
And I would say like when I was 18 and I was 19 and
20 and looking at all these different women and all the lifestyles and
how they were leaders and what they were leading. And, you know, I was already
putting the pieces together that these women weren't
(35:35):
really that happy. They were overworked. They
didn't have space for themselves. If they had children, someone
else was raising their children, nannies, fathers, or
daycare. And don't get me on the subject of
daycare. So no one was happy. And
(35:56):
I was like, gosh, this is miserable. Let me find a career where I
can control it. Let me find an entrepreneurial pursuit
where I have control over how much I
work, how intensely I work,
how much I earn. So why we're not telling
young women to think in terms of that, I'm not sure. Instead,
(36:18):
we tell them to go into the corporate world, which is still primarily, even
if it's not run by men, it's a male structure. It's
a structure designed by men that women take over and say, we can do
it better than men, but they end up doing it like men. It's
a perfect structure. If a woman says, I want to work part-time, they're
like, no, you can't work part-time. Work full-time. Or
(36:42):
I need to take a year off. No, you can't take a year off. You have three
months off. So what is that? That's a male
structure. That's not a women's structure. That's not for women or for
Agreed 100%. And the other thing I would add to about what you just said is
I think it's also important for women to support women and men to support women in
those decisions, right? Because it's really hard in those pivotal moments when
(37:04):
we have to make a hard call of, you know, taking a break, taking
a sabbatical, stepping back in a job, not taking the
promotion that we've been offered and just supporting whatever
of the decision and really just supporting each other and where we are in our point,
which is young men are also taught that women
(37:26):
are, quote, unquote, equal in every way, should carry
their burden of the finances of the family. And so
what it doesn't talk about is complementarity when you're raising children,
doesn't talk about division of labor. It says
we're both the same. And what that ends up doing is corrupting marriages.
And I'll tell you why. Because you have two people who are competing
(37:48):
for the same role. Never a good thing. Imagine two CEOs,
co-CEOs. That never works, right? Co-CEOs. Because
you want a CEO and you want a CFO and you want a COO. The
reason is you don't want two people trying to do the same job. You want
two people in a team doing different roles. I'm in marketing, but
you're in finance. And we do different things. But
(38:11):
for some reason, when it comes to families, we've told young men and young women
that we're exactly the same. We're going to bring in exactly the same amount of
money. And women screw themselves over. They
promise young men, I'm going to work forever and
make tons of money. And we're going to get our second home and a second car.
And we're going to go on vacations that are fancy. And we're going to send our kids
(38:31):
to prep, whatever. They promise men this instead
of thinking holistically, you know what? I'm going to work really hard now
before we have children. But when I have children, I may want to take off. I
don't know how I'm going to feel. And I want that space. So whatever we need to do
financially to make sure there's not so much pressure on us, I
want to have choices when I have children. And that doesn't mean
(38:52):
I'll never work again and never make money again, but I want to have choices.
That's the promise that young couples should make to one
another. And that's not what's happening. Yeah. Young men go into
it thinking we're going to get this expensive mortgage and two cars and
fancy vacations and schools. And then they say, you broke
your promise to me. So I
(39:13):
would say to young women, don't make that promise to
the men that you're going to marry. Make sure it's a litmus test
of how good a quality person that young man is. When
we have children, I want to have choices. So let's not get ourselves into
a financial situation that we feel trapped in. Yeah.
(39:33):
Because then you don't have that agency and you don't have the agency. Yeah.
Great advice. Such great advice. And I love the advice around the intentionality and
taking that pause. So no matter where you are in your journey, you have
the ability to step back and take a moment to evaluate holistically
to your point. Am I happy? Am I living my purpose? Am I where
I want to be? And it's OK to say no. It's scary. It's
(39:54):
scary to admit to yourself that the answer might be no, but it is
so critical, right, that you can shift and you can take a
different path. Such incredible advice. Erica, I
would love to know in this podcast, we talk about redefining success. I
would love to know how you define success for yourself and
Well, I'm glad you used that word success and not happiness. But
(40:17):
yes, so success is defined, I think,
also in a very perverse way today. I think success today
is defined materially. how far
you've gone in your career, how much money you have, how much material
success you have, how much fame you have. And
I'm going to say, in the end, success is, as Freud
(40:39):
said, success is defined this way. First,
love. Secondly, meaningful work.
But meaningful work always came second. But it is
an important aspect of life. First, love and meaningful work.
Meaningful work isn't necessarily highly paid work. Meaningful
work doesn't mean being famous. Meaningful work could mean being
(41:02):
a kindergarten teacher. Meaningful work could be being
a speech pathologist. Meaningful work could mean
being a lawyer who does family law
for women who don't have access to it. Meaningful work can
mean many things. Meaningful work could be being a banker. But
the idea is that love has to always come first. And
(41:31):
Beautifully, beautifully said. Thank
you for that. Erica, where can our listeners learn more about you and
www.ericakomisar.com. You
can reach out to me there and you can buy my books there and it
tells you all about me there. And then you can also follow me on Instagram,
(41:52):
ericakomisarlcsw, and also Twitter. Perfect.
So Erica, thank you so much for being here, for sharing your insights and expertise. This
was truly an incredible conversation that brought tears to
my eyes. And I want to say also, thank you for normalizing
the mom guilt. Such valuable advice
and insights. Thank you so much. And of course, you can visit my website
(42:14):
at gialacqua.com, reach out to me on Instagram at gialacqua. And
don't forget to subscribe, rate, and leave a review. This is Gia signing off
with gratitude for your time and energy. Our mic drops, but the movement continues.
Until next time, your next chapter is waiting. Take care. That
concludes another empowering episode of Your Future Starts Now.
Before we wrap up, I want to thank this incredible community of high-achieving women.
(42:37):
Your energy, resilience, and commitment to growth are the driving force
behind what we do. If you enjoyed today's episode, please rate
it, leave a review, and don't forget to subscribe so you never miss an episode. Your
feedback fuels our mission to empower high-achieving women just like
you. And of course, share Your Future Starts Now with the extraordinary women
in your life who are also on a journey of healing and empowerment. Connect
(42:59):
with us on social media, share your thoughts, let us know what topics you'd like to
explore in future episodes. Stay connected on Instagram at
Gia Lacqua. I encourage you to carry the energy of this conversation
into your day and keep on supporting the incredible women around you.
Welcome to Your Future Starts Now, the go-to podcast for
extraordinary women who are ready to step into their next chapter with
authentic confidence. I'm your host, Gia Lacqua empowerment coach,
motivational speaker, children's book author, and girl mom. Whether
you're a corporate powerhouse or an entrepreneur, this show is
designed for you. Your Future Starts Now is more than
(00:20):
just a podcast. It's a movement, a movement towards rewriting
the rules of success for high-achieving women. Are you ready
to get unstuck and step into your next chapter? If
so, you're exactly where you need to be. Your future starts
now. Welcome to Your Future Starts Now. I'm your host,
Gia Lacqua. I want to thank you for tuning in today. I am
(00:43):
thrilled to introduce you to Erica Komisar. Erica
is a clinical social worker, psychoanalyst, and parent guidance expert
who's been in private practice in New York City for over 30 years. She's
a psychological consultant bringing parenting workshops to clinics, schools,
corporations, and childcare settings. She's a contributor to
the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and the New York Daily News.
(01:05):
She's 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 Three Years Matters, and Chicken Little, The Sky Isn't
Falling, Raising Resilient Adolescents in the New Age of Anxiety.
Erica, so excited to chat with you today. Welcome to the show. Thank you
(01:27):
for having me. So today we are talking about
the most important job in the world, which is
parenting. So before we dive into that, Erica, tell
us a little bit about your backstory and what led you to the work that you're
Well, I'm a social worker and a psychoanalyst, and my
specialty is parent guidance. And how
(01:49):
I got into this work is about
35 years ago, when I started my practice, I
was seeing a huge
number of children, and it seemed to be getting bigger every
day, who were being diagnosed with mental disorders
(02:10):
such as ADHD or behavioral problems or even
depression and anxiety, things we hadn't seen in such young children. So
they were increasing in numbers at an
early age, but they were also increasing in numbers in adolescence and
the suicide ideation and suicide rates were
also going up. So I was seeing this happening many years
(02:31):
ago, decades ago, well before the
technology boom, well before COVID. So
even though there was a spike because of technology and a spike because
of COVID, this was already happening. And so,
and I, in my practice in New York was seeing a
connection between the children who seemed the most disturbed
(02:54):
and the kids whose mothers were the most absent.
And so I thought, huh, that's sort of interesting. I'm going to
look at some of the attachment research and the neuroscience. And
so I started delving for about 13 years into the
neuroscience research, the epigenetics research, the attachment
research, and reread all of my psychoanalytic books.
(03:17):
And really over those 13 years saw
that the research backed up what I was seeing, which is that The
kids that I was seeing that were really struggling were the ones who
had attachment disorders and had developed
sort of what we call pathological defenses in response to
(03:38):
feeling unsafe, feeling attachment insecurity essentially.
And so I decided I want to write a book because the number of
people I could reach in my practice was more limited. So I
wrote the first book trying to reach as many uh,
parents, social workers, policymakers, as I could, because
my intention also was to try to influence the
(04:01):
government, uh, with the idea of paid leave. Because,
you know, that's always used as a, an argument. You know, when I
wrote my book, everybody was like, well, you're an elitist. I'm like, I'm not an
elitist because I wrote this book. So we're not allowed to
talk about real true things if
they make people feel bad. But the reality is unless we
(04:22):
make people feel bad, unless we make the government feel bad,
no one changes. So we're in this sort of
position in our society where we're not allowed to say
anything that's uncomfortable to anyone. And yet sometimes
when we say things that are uncomfortable, that make people feel
uncomfortable, whether it's mothers who feel uncomfortable or fathers or
(04:43):
government officials, then we
have the possibility of change. So
that's why I wrote the first book. And then I wrote a second book called Chicken Little,
which was about adolescence, which is the second critical period of
brain development to help parents understand that you have
another, you have a second chance. If you miss the first window from
(05:04):
zero to three, you have from nine to 25 to make
a real difference in your child's ability to regulate their emotions and
Wow. Incredible. So in the first three
years of development, I know the research shows that children
need their mothers, right? And that that develops your
(05:24):
attachment type. I also am curious as to why specifically
the mother, right? Why not a father, a grandmother,
Well, I mean, what's interesting is I think if you ask most mothers
who is the primary attachment figure, what do you think most mothers are
going to say? They are, even if they
(05:45):
work 12 hours a day and are only home on
weekends, they're still going to say, well, it's me. And
the reality is John Bowlby says that the primary attachment
figure is the person that is there to sue the baby
from moment to moment throughout the day. The majority of the
time in the first three years, that is the primary attachment figure.
(06:08):
And babies need a primary attachment figure.
who is the center of their universe and
the source of their security. So
babies aren't like adults. Even adults need, we
couple, you know, we need to couple with someone. Why is an
intimate relationship with one person different than an
(06:30):
intimate relationship with many people? But babies
are not like adults. They can't, they can have
relationships with many people, but they have one
unique relationship with the person that is there may
pull, you know, the person around which they consider
the source of their security. It's
(06:53):
usually the mother. And there are reasons why, because mothers
are different than fathers in terms of nurturing behavior.
So children in the first three years, well, first
of all, mothers have a biological connection to their children if
they gave birth to their children. But even mothers who are
adoptive mothers have been shown to produce hormone
(07:15):
which women produce in great quantities called oxytocin. So
mothers produce it when they give birth, when they breastfeed, and
when they nurture their very young. And even mothers
who are adopted mothers can produce tremendous amounts of
oxytocin. But oxytocin is the love hormone. It's the
bonding hormone. It makes mother's behavior more
(07:37):
sensitive, empathic, and nurturing. That means
that mothers are very fine-tuned because of this
hormone. to tune into baby's distress, which
is critical for that baby to be healthy in
the future. So how we lay down the foundation for
that child's security is that we keep the
(07:58):
stress quite minimal in the first year
to three years. We keep it quite minimal. We introduce stress incrementally,
but we're basically there for them physically and emotionally. to
help them to get adjusted to this kind of harsh, cruel
world that they live in. They've come from the womb where they're completely
protected and surrounded, and now they're out in the world. But
(08:21):
the way we help them to understand that the world is tolerable,
that frustration is tolerable, that they can deal with stress, is that
we don't overwhelm their neurological systems
with stress too early. And that means that we keep them with skin-to-skin
contact. We keep them close to our bodies. we
soothe them from moment to moment when they're in distress. I mean, in
(08:43):
other parts of the world, babies are worn on their mother's bodies
in the front until the mothers can't carry them on the front anymore, and
then they're worn on the back. And then they're kept at the mother's heels for
the first three years. So this is an
evolutionary sort of thing that's happened over thousands of
years to help our young to feel secure in
this world, because as mammals, we're a mammal that probably
(09:07):
has our young for the longest period of time, so critically fragile.
And so, yeah, so mothers are biologically necessary. Now,
when fathers stay home, they produce a
little more oxytocin. Fathers don't produce as much oxytocin. But
when they do produce it, it comes from a different part of their brain, and
(09:28):
it has a different impact on their behavior. it
makes their behavior more playfully tactilely stimulating.
What does that mean? The mother will tune into the baby's
distress and kneel down and give the baby a hug and reflect
the baby's sadness and fear and help regulate
those emotions and bring that baby back to homeostasis. Whereas the
(09:51):
father, it will tickle the baby, distract the
baby out of their mood, throw the baby up in the
air. It's all about moving the baby away from pain as quickly
as possible. And they're also very good at teaching
through play. Resilience to stress and
exploration helps them to take risks and separating, basically.
(10:13):
But you don't want to teach a baby to separate when they're supposed to
be attaching. Separation comes later and it
comes at the skirts of the mother. So the
baby knows the mother's there and then the baby can play with the father, but
the baby can always go back to the mother for comfort.
So, and if you doubt this, you go to the park and you look at
(10:36):
the way father's mother and the way mother's mother.
You're laughing because that is what happens. It is so true. There
was research done where mothers and fathers lay side,
because I know you have a big population that listens to your podcast that
are, you know, top executives and they're women and they're like, my
(10:58):
husband raises the baby and it's the same thing. Well, I'm going to tell
you right now, it's not the same. As much as you'd like
to believe that and justify that it's the same thing, It's not
the same thing. There was research done in England where
mothers and fathers lay side by side in bed. And when the
baby cried a distress cry, the mothers woke up
(11:18):
immediately and got up and sued the baby. The father slept through
the distress cry. But when the leaves rustled outside
the window, the fathers woke up and the mother slept through it. Now what's that
about? Because fathers produce a different hormone called vasopressin.
Mothers also produce a little bit of it, but it's not as prevalent in
mothers. It's called the protective aggressive nurturing hormone. And
(11:41):
what it does is it makes fathers more, just as it says, protective
and aggressive against predators. So
fathers are important too. And fathers are also
critical when it comes to encouraging separation.
So what I'm finding in my practice is that there are a lot of single mothers
by choice. or single mothers and
(12:03):
who are not by choice. Those children of
those mothers have a much harder time separating than
the children who have fathers. They also have a harder time
regulating emotions like aggression and risk-taking behavior
that fathers help to regulate. So, you
know, basically we're fooling ourselves by thinking that
(12:25):
mothers and fathers are fungible. They're not fungible. They're
different. So why we need to be the same, I'm
not sure. I think it's a justification for leaving our children, either
fascinating, the biological component and the hormones. It's
so interesting. So we're talking to,
(12:49):
as you mentioned, what I like to refer to as the do-it-all
generation of women. And with very
good intention, we were told, you can do
it all. At a very young age. At a very young
age. And again, with good intention, but somewhere along
the lines, we internalize that message to
(13:10):
mean we to do it all. And
we find ourselves rising to that challenge. Yeah, I can
do it all. And then it isn't until once our physical and
mental health start to deteriorate that we
then question, do I really want it all? Is
this what I'm striving for? And so, you
(13:33):
know, it's an important topic because as you mentioned, Women
who are trying to juggle it all and be perfect in every facet of
life, show up at work at 100%, have a successful career, and
be a good spouse and a great mother,
it doesn't set us up for success. And
I love that you talk about these hard topics. I mean, the work that you
(13:55):
do, it's a hard truth, but it's an important truth. And
that's what we do on this podcast. And so the mom guilt is
very, very real.
(14:59):
So I would love to just talk about
the mom guilt aspect of knowing that we
need to be there, knowing we should be there. But in a lot of cases,
we also have to work. It'd
be a second income. Maybe we're the full-time income. Maybe we're the breadwinner in
the family. So what are some tips, tools, strategies
(15:24):
Well, so one thing I would say is that you can have it all. You
just can't have it all at the same time. So what we tell young women
is that you can have it all at the same time. And
that's a lie. because you can't. You'd say
you're only as happy as your least happy child. And what's happening is
children are breaking down because they're not being prioritized. Right.
(15:46):
So the prioritizing of children in the first, particularly in these
critical periods of brain development, is
critical to their mental health. And no one's saying that. That's why
I speak out, because it was disturbing to me that out of political correctness
for the women's movement, We weren't saying what was obvious, which
is you can be a very successful professional woman. I'm
(16:08):
a professional woman, but in the years that I was raising my
children, I put my career pretty much aside. I kept my
toe in it. I mean, really like a little bit, like
one patient a day, um, as
they got older, two patients a day. So when my children were still home
and not grown teenagers, I was seeing 10 hours of patients a
(16:30):
week. And you'd say, well, how did I afford that? And it was something my
husband and I had planned, took planning. We
didn't take vacations much at all, very, very little,
minimal vacations. We didn't do fancy
stuff. We took all the fancy stuff off. We weren't buying new clothes.
We weren't buying new strollers. We weren't spending
(16:52):
a lot of money in those years. My money that I earned was
to pay uh, a nanny, cause
I had three children to be beside me and co-parent. Cause my
husband was busy and he would come home and he would love our
children, but he wasn't really helping to raise them. Um, weekends he
was there. So it was me and the nanny and our three kids,
(17:12):
and we were doing tag team and, you know, and we were doing it together.
And she was about 58 years old when I hired her. So she was like, my
mother was ill. And then my mother passed away. Uh, my
father passed away when I was young. So, you know, I didn't really have a
lot of family. I paid my nanny to be my mother. Essentially
because my mother was ill. So, you know, I, I guess what
(17:32):
I would say to women who are professional is that, you
know, you have a long, long life to do
whatever you want to do professionally and be successful. I would say my
career didn't take off until I was about 50. And
I interview a lot of people for the book. You know, Nita
Lowey, one of the most longstanding members of the House in
(17:54):
Washington, didn't start her career until she was in her forties
in politics. She raised, I think, four kids, five
kids. She didn't start her career until she was in her forties. So
I don't know what the rush is. I don't know why, you know, we can have very
highly successful careers before we have children. Then once we have
children, take kind of a break or maybe work part time or
(18:16):
reduce the intensity of our work or maybe take time off and
then go back. And you know, what I say is that if you go back after
you have children, you often end up finding that
your priorities are different. So it's something about
the mentality of working women that they feel nothing
should change. There's no transformation. When you have a baby, everything
(18:37):
changes. Your priorities shift. You transform. If
you're healthy. If you've had a healthy enough upbringing yourself or
a healthy enough attachment to your own mother, then when your
baby is born, you feel what we call maternal preoccupation, a
pull towards your baby, not a pull towards your work. If
you can't wait to get away from your baby, that means you probably suffered
(18:58):
from an attachment disorder yourself or had some kind of conflict with
your own relationship with your mother that needs to be looked at.
That's not a normal reaction to having a baby. The normal reaction instinctually
is to be drawn to your baby. and to be preoccupied with
your baby and when you're away from your baby to feel guilt. So
people think guilt is a pathological response. It's actually a
(19:20):
signal feeling like pain if
you break your ankle and your ankle hurts. You're not supposed to
keep walking on your ankle and no one's going to tell you, oh, just ignore the
pain, keep going, keep walking. You go to the doctor, you
get it checked out, you get in a boot, you have to take it easy, you can't run on
the ankle, right? So guilt is sort of our
(19:41):
way of signaling that we're in conflict. It's
our way of signaling that we're in pain because of the conflict. And
so society tells us because they want us all out in the workforce and
making lots of money, they don't care about children. Society tells
us just ignore the feeling. And I'm telling you right now, don't ignore
the feeling. It's an important feeling. It's an instructive feeling.
(20:05):
Um, you may not be able to stop working entirely, but maybe
by looking at that internal conflict, you come up with a better resolution than
the one you have. Right. Yeah. And so, you
know, we as a society don't really understand what guilt is. Guilt
is actually, if it's excessive, if even
when you're there with the baby, you feel guilty, then maybe there's
(20:26):
a neurotic thing going on. Maybe there's something to look at. But guilt in
and of itself means our egos are working and our conscience is
working and that we're attached to our baby. So why we tell
mothers it's not healthy. You know, the other thing is at
a young age, we tell young women that careers
should be primary in their lives. And we tell them pick
(20:47):
a career right now at 15 years
old, anywhere between 15 and 21. Pick
a career that you want to go gung-ho with. Okay.
We don't tell young women to think about their whole
life. We don't tell them to think about create
a life for yourself, not just a career. And so what
(21:09):
these young women do is they say, I want to be a Supreme Court judge. I
want to be CEO of a major Fortune 500 company. I
want to be a partner
in a law firm. I want to be an attending at a major hospital. And
they go, that's great. I want to be a doctor, a lawyer, whatever. But then they
don't think about the whole life that goes with those careers. So
(21:29):
when I was 20 years old, 19 years
old, I started doing internships in different fields. I
must've done five or six internships. I worked in TV production.
I worked in Capitol Hill. I worked every year.
I did a different, I worked in PR and the arts. I worked in
PR and in, uh, in cosmetics. I worked, I
(21:50):
tried different things because I wanted to
see not what the work was like, but what the life
was like. And I wanted to see if I could find role models of
who I wanted to be when I grew up, because I knew I wanted children and
I knew I wanted a family. And I left all those
fields, not because the work wasn't exciting, because
(22:11):
the work was exciting and manic, but because the lives
that these women had were terrible. And
so instead I thought, what can I do as a career that
satisfies me, that I would like, but also
that would help me have a whole life? I don't think we talk
to young women like this, because if they thought about the fact that
(22:33):
when you have children, you want to have control and flexibility.
And to be honest, you don't want a boss. You
want to be the boss. You don't want to have a boss. If we
instructed young women of this, maybe they would choose more service fields.
Maybe they would choose speech pathology. Maybe they would choose social
work or being a therapist. Maybe they would choose being
(22:55):
a coach. Maybe they would choose anything within
the service field. where you have more
control and flexibility. Maybe they would say,
I want to be a lawyer, but I'm going to work, not
have to be a partner. Maybe I start my own little thing and make some
money while I'm raising kids. But I think we
(23:16):
really do young women a disservice when
we tell them that the only thing you should think about is
your career. Because if you don't think about
your whole life, you end up going
It's a great point. And I think you're right in the sense that we
(23:38):
tend to deny our own realities. And it's
very sad. It's a sad place to be when you think about it.
And I love what you said about this holistic concept of planning your
life. Nobody teaches us that at a young age. And
it is very singularly focused on careers, which is
great to know that, you know, as a woman, you can be anything you want. You
(23:58):
can be very career driven, but nobody prepares us
for how do you balance that if you also wanna have a
If you also wanna- That's the key. If you wanna have a
family. So the women's rights movement gave us choices. That's
right. And the choices were, you don't have to have children.
You can be like men. Let's just say
(24:21):
what it is, okay? You know, I always say that
Gloria Steinem told us that we had to work
in the work world to get away from the patriarchy of men. What
she didn't tell you is that she pushed you into being the
patriarchy of men. So she said, be like
men. And that was the wrong message. The message should have been,
(24:44):
be the best women you could be out in the world, in
a way that still allows you to be the best woman and the best mother.
But she didn't say that. She said, get away from the
patriarchy. And she ended up pushing women into the patriarchy, where
they work harder than men sometimes to prove that they're as good
as men. And they abandon all the goodness of being a woman.
(25:07):
So the best is that you have choice. You don't have to have children
to have a generative, happy life. You can have
a life without children, be a CEO of a company, have
a linear career like men have, become a
partner in a law firm without a beat, right? Without
taking a step or a beat away from it. And
(25:29):
if you're going to have children and you try to be on that path, what
I was seeing in my practice is those children were suffering
greatly. And if they don't suffer when they're little, they suffer when
they're older. And, you know, the best way to
know is not if your children break down in the first three years, but
do you get through the first 25 years without your children breaking down?
(26:00):
Sometimes the damage doesn't show up until they're in adolescence. Yes.
And, you know, and again, it's not as if there's nothing you
can do. In adolescence, you can make different choices, too. But
Yeah, but it's good that to know that we have that second window. And, and,
you know, I love what you said about, you know, the patriarchy. And
(26:23):
I can tell you from personal experience, you know, over 20 years ago, when
I started in corporate America, I remember distinctly having
this concept of in my mind of be like a man. Don't
wear bright colors, don't wear pink nail polish and
act like a man. And I think it's incredibly
fascinating that 20 plus years later now we're talking about what
(26:45):
is good leadership and we are talking about being vulnerable
and being authentic and having empathy and
compassion. And those
were all the things I threw out the window. because I
thought it wasn't work-like, it wasn't professional.
But we're still talking about the bottom line. We're still
(27:07):
talking about the bottom line. And the bottom line is a male concept. So you'd say,
again, there's nothing wrong with going that path, but then don't
have children. Right. Don't do that to your children, and don't
do it to yourself, because in the end, you're going to be miserable if
you have unhappy children or mentally ill children. Yeah. Don't
have children. Get dogs. Even dogs are good. You
(27:29):
know, the concept is that we really don't
think about the whole of things. We
just think in parts. We're almost obsessionally caught
Yeah, it's easier, but certainly not beneficial by
any means. And so on this concept, while we're talking about leadership,
(27:53):
I know that you do some work in this area
as well. I would love your thoughts on because I'm very passionate about this
as well. How parenting is
really a training ground for being a good leader and
Well, think about all the things that mothering teaches you.
(28:13):
It teaches you about emotional regulation because
you can't be a good enough mother unless you can regulate your own emotions. And
if you start by going into parenting without
the ability to regulate your emotions, if you blow up a lot and
you get super angry about small things and you're very
impatient and you can't tolerate frustration, pretty quickly
(28:35):
you learn that that's going to do a lot of harm to your children. And
you end up coming to someone like me and saying, please help me. I realize I
am impatient. I get, I get, I rise to
anger quickly. Um, I get bored around my children.
So it teaches you patience. It teaches you emotional regulation. Uh,
it teaches you prioritization and what's really important. It
(28:58):
recenters your value system. Uh, it
teaches you about relational dynamics. You know, if you
have a, uh, not just between you and your children, but
between your children and other children, between your children and their siblings,
you know, within the family. So, um, it
even teaches relational dynamics between you and your spouse and
(29:19):
how to negotiate as leaders of the family, working together
as a team, you know? So there's a lot of good things, um,
about being a mother that then lend themselves to quote
unquote, if you want to go into business later, if you want to be a leader. You
know, the other thing is we have so deprioritized
mothering that we see
(29:43):
it as lesser work. So if on your resume, it
says you took three years off to take care of your children, that
should be a compliment to you, or that should be
an asset to your resume. Because now the employer
says, ha, this is a person who has good values, who
values caregiving and values
(30:05):
family, and understands that
she needs to be all into something. And I'm going to reward her
by giving her a chance to come back into the work world. And I'm
even going to offer her part time so she can still sort
of stick by her values of her family. Why
aren't we doing that? Instead of an employer looks at the resume and
(30:25):
goes, ah, you know, she took time off. Who is she? She's mothered.
What's mothering? It's not, I mean, really we've, we
live in such a damaged society that deprioritizes the
most important role, which is that of caretaking. whether
it's caring for your children or caring for ill parents or
caring for ill relatives, or, you know, we really deprioritize
(30:48):
the most important things. So when a woman wants to take time off to
be a caregiver, she's looked down upon, right?
Instead of, as you say, valuing all of the things she's
Yeah. Huge, huge lessons in motherhood that
I know personally and other women have brought. to the workplace
(31:10):
that have been incredibly valuable. So it is an important consideration.
And now I'm seeing, um, I think there's a official
term on LinkedIn that women are using for when they do take that maternity
break to label the years that they did take off, which is nice to
see instead of just having that blank space. Erica,
what advice do you give to parents who are struggling with the challenges of
(31:31):
modern parenting, the external pressures of society? How do
Well, if you're talking about changing society, I would say I still don't
understand why every woman in America isn't on
board in a group with really advocating for
paid leave. So every woman has the ability to stay home with
(31:51):
their child, at least for the first year and up to the first three
years, at least of part-time work. Uh, why we
don't advocate for that as a group, I think, because we've split into
two groups, working women and stay at home women, and
they don't seem to get along. They look down upon each other. And
so I'm thinking, is this what we need? No, we need to
(32:13):
pull together and say, whether or not you want to have
children, whether or not you want to raise your children, uh, every
woman should have the ability to stay home with their children because
it's better for children. And it's better for mothers that they're not torn
into pieces by feeling constantly in a state of
conflict. And so, yeah, that would
(32:34):
be the first thing. Advocate, whether, you know, grab
hold of a friend of yours who's a stay-at-home mom, if you're a working mom,
and say, we're not different, we're the same. We may
have made different choices in the short run, but in the long run, we want the
same choices for women. We don't do that. So
did women split women or did men split women? Or
(32:56):
did Gloria Steinem split women? I mean, who split women
in half? So we feel in a binary fashion,
so sort of discrepant from
one another, right? So
that's the first thing. The second thing is take a
look at your whole life and think about how happy
(33:17):
you are. Because I would say most women who work full, full, full
time and have children, most of them are not very happy. And
if they are quote-unquote happy, as soon
as they hit a bump in the road, whether it's one
of their children starts to show signs of struggle, or one of their children
is diagnosed with ADHD, or one of their children is
(33:41):
not coming out of their room and feeling very depressed and
maybe talking about suicide, everything stops for
that woman. So I would say stop,
pause, pause, a pause is a good thing, and really
reflect with your partner, whoever
that is, your spouse, reflect on, am
(34:03):
I happy? Is this life the life that I want to live? Is
this a balanced life? Am I really able
to prioritize what is important to me? And
listen to yourself. If
the answer is no, I'm not happy. No, my children are not happy.
Open your eyes, listen to yourself, take action. And
(34:27):
that doesn't mean, as you say, some women have to work to support
their families. We're not talking about not working. We're talking about the kind
of work you do. We're talking about the amount of work you
do. We're talking about the intensity and degree of the
Yeah, I think there's also incredible stigma for women who have been
working towards climbing that ladder, and then for them to either
(34:50):
pause or take a step back. Terrible, terrible
stigma. I have women coming to me who are at a point
in their career where they've been striving, striving, striving. They say, I think I'm okay
coasting right now. And there's such stigma attached
It's very sad. So, you know, again, intentionality.
(35:13):
That's what I would say. I think we end up in these careers without
great intentionality. We end up with blinders on. Yes.
And I would say like when I was 18 and I was 19 and
20 and looking at all these different women and all the lifestyles and
how they were leaders and what they were leading. And, you know, I was already
putting the pieces together that these women weren't
(35:35):
really that happy. They were overworked. They
didn't have space for themselves. If they had children, someone
else was raising their children, nannies, fathers, or
daycare. And don't get me on the subject of
daycare. So no one was happy. And
(35:56):
I was like, gosh, this is miserable. Let me find a career where I
can control it. Let me find an entrepreneurial pursuit
where I have control over how much I
work, how intensely I work,
how much I earn. So why we're not telling
young women to think in terms of that, I'm not sure. Instead,
(36:18):
we tell them to go into the corporate world, which is still primarily, even
if it's not run by men, it's a male structure. It's
a structure designed by men that women take over and say, we can do
it better than men, but they end up doing it like men. It's
a perfect structure. If a woman says, I want to work part-time, they're
like, no, you can't work part-time. Work full-time. Or
(36:42):
I need to take a year off. No, you can't take a year off. You have three
months off. So what is that? That's a male
structure. That's not a women's structure. That's not for women or for
Agreed 100%. And the other thing I would add to about what you just said is
I think it's also important for women to support women and men to support women in
those decisions, right? Because it's really hard in those pivotal moments when
(37:04):
we have to make a hard call of, you know, taking a break, taking
a sabbatical, stepping back in a job, not taking the
promotion that we've been offered and just supporting whatever
of the decision and really just supporting each other and where we are in our point,
which is young men are also taught that women
(37:26):
are, quote, unquote, equal in every way, should carry
their burden of the finances of the family. And so
what it doesn't talk about is complementarity when you're raising children,
doesn't talk about division of labor. It says
we're both the same. And what that ends up doing is corrupting marriages.
And I'll tell you why. Because you have two people who are competing
(37:48):
for the same role. Never a good thing. Imagine two CEOs,
co-CEOs. That never works, right? Co-CEOs. Because
you want a CEO and you want a CFO and you want a COO. The
reason is you don't want two people trying to do the same job. You want
two people in a team doing different roles. I'm in marketing, but
you're in finance. And we do different things. But
(38:11):
for some reason, when it comes to families, we've told young men and young women
that we're exactly the same. We're going to bring in exactly the same amount of
money. And women screw themselves over. They
promise young men, I'm going to work forever and
make tons of money. And we're going to get our second home and a second car.
And we're going to go on vacations that are fancy. And we're going to send our kids
(38:31):
to prep, whatever. They promise men this instead
of thinking holistically, you know what? I'm going to work really hard now
before we have children. But when I have children, I may want to take off. I
don't know how I'm going to feel. And I want that space. So whatever we need to do
financially to make sure there's not so much pressure on us, I
want to have choices when I have children. And that doesn't mean
(38:52):
I'll never work again and never make money again, but I want to have choices.
That's the promise that young couples should make to one
another. And that's not what's happening. Yeah. Young men go into
it thinking we're going to get this expensive mortgage and two cars and
fancy vacations and schools. And then they say, you broke
your promise to me. So I
(39:13):
would say to young women, don't make that promise to
the men that you're going to marry. Make sure it's a litmus test
of how good a quality person that young man is. When
we have children, I want to have choices. So let's not get ourselves into
a financial situation that we feel trapped in. Yeah.
(39:33):
Because then you don't have that agency and you don't have the agency. Yeah.
Great advice. Such great advice. And I love the advice around the intentionality and
taking that pause. So no matter where you are in your journey, you have
the ability to step back and take a moment to evaluate holistically
to your point. Am I happy? Am I living my purpose? Am I where
I want to be? And it's OK to say no. It's scary. It's
(39:54):
scary to admit to yourself that the answer might be no, but it is
so critical, right, that you can shift and you can take a
different path. Such incredible advice. Erica, I
would love to know in this podcast, we talk about redefining success. I
would love to know how you define success for yourself and
Well, I'm glad you used that word success and not happiness. But
(40:17):
yes, so success is defined, I think,
also in a very perverse way today. I think success today
is defined materially. how far
you've gone in your career, how much money you have, how much material
success you have, how much fame you have. And
I'm going to say, in the end, success is, as Freud
(40:39):
said, success is defined this way. First,
love. Secondly, meaningful work.
But meaningful work always came second. But it is
an important aspect of life. First, love and meaningful work.
Meaningful work isn't necessarily highly paid work. Meaningful
work doesn't mean being famous. Meaningful work could mean being
(41:02):
a kindergarten teacher. Meaningful work could be being
a speech pathologist. Meaningful work could mean
being a lawyer who does family law
for women who don't have access to it. Meaningful work can
mean many things. Meaningful work could be being a banker. But
the idea is that love has to always come first. And
(41:31):
Beautifully, beautifully said. Thank
you for that. Erica, where can our listeners learn more about you and
www.ericakomisar.com. You
can reach out to me there and you can buy my books there and it
tells you all about me there. And then you can also follow me on Instagram,
(41:52):
ericakomisarlcsw, and also Twitter. Perfect.
So Erica, thank you so much for being here, for sharing your insights and expertise. This
was truly an incredible conversation that brought tears to
my eyes. And I want to say also, thank you for normalizing
the mom guilt. Such valuable advice
and insights. Thank you so much. And of course, you can visit my website
(42:14):
at gialacqua.com, reach out to me on Instagram at gialacqua. And
don't forget to subscribe, rate, and leave a review. This is Gia signing off
with gratitude for your time and energy. Our mic drops, but the movement continues.
Until next time, your next chapter is waiting. Take care. That
concludes another empowering episode of Your Future Starts Now.
Before we wrap up, I want to thank this incredible community of high-achieving women.
(42:37):
Your energy, resilience, and commitment to growth are the driving force
behind what we do. If you enjoyed today's episode, please rate
it, leave a review, and don't forget to subscribe so you never miss an episode. Your
feedback fuels our mission to empower high-achieving women just like
you. And of course, share Your Future Starts Now with the extraordinary women
in your life who are also on a journey of healing and empowerment. Connect
(42:59):
with us on social media, share your thoughts, let us know what topics you'd like to
explore in future episodes. Stay connected on Instagram at
Gia Lacqua. I encourage you to carry the energy of this conversation
into your day and keep on supporting the incredible women around you.
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