One in five children will not leave childhood without developing a serious mental illness, anxiety, depression, ADHD, behavioral problems, and what pisses me off is that we're not really educating or telling parents the truth, his two eyes. Why is it that what you say is so troubling for some people? Sometimes facts are an incoming injury, but everything I'm going to say is supported by research. Erika Kommasar is a parenting expert and psychoanalysts.
We use this over 30 years of research to challenge the societal norms on parenting and early child development. There's some myths that really have to be debunked about how to raise a healthy child, and the first is, daycare is good for children for socialization. No, it's so bad for the brain, and it's a known to increase aggression and behavioral problems of attachment disorders because of babies. Need their mothers for first three years for emotional security.
Your father did that? So fathers are important in a different way, and I'll go through all of that. But they're both critical because if you're raised without one, you are missing a piece. And then there's quality versus quantity.
Myth. You need to be there a quality of time as well as quantity of time. 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 and there's more.
And we're going to go through all of them. But are there any areas of privilege that you need to acknowledge? Maybe someone who doesn't have a partner there? Or someone who is in an extremely difficult economic situation?
They do, but there are ways to creatively deal with it, and I'll go through each of them. So there's... I want to keep the Diova CEO free and not behind any kind of paywall or subscription model forever. And the way that we do that is that you guys choose to follow and subscribe to the show.
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Forever. Forever. Thank you so much. If you do that for me, thank you so much.
I really appreciate it. Back to the episode. You're clearly on a mission. And I get that energy from you that there's really an idea that you believe that much of the world doesn't believe or is struggling to accept in some way.
But it's an important idea. What is the mission that you're on? I'd like to think of it as three Ps. Presence, Prioritization and Prevention.
And I'll go through each of them. My mission is to educate parents and policymakers and clinicians and educators about the fact that 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. So in those two critical periods of brain development, particularly zero to three, much of a child's development depends on their environment and you are their environment. So I run around the world talking about the importance of physical and emotional presence, attachment security.
Attachment security is the foundation for future mental health. Prioritization. We prioritize everything today other than our children. We prioritize our work, our careers, our material success, our personal desires and pleasures, but we're not prioritizing these children.
And that's a problem because if we don't prioritize them, they break down. They may break down at three. They may break down at eight, or they may not break down until they're in adolescence. But eventually they break down and prevention.
There's so much that we can do. We have a mental health crisis now in the world. It varies to a certain degree in America. One in five children will not leave childhood without breaking down at some point without developing a serious mental illness, anxiety, depression, ADHD, behavioral problems, suicidal thoughts.
So we have a problem in the UK, it's one in six, and America's one in five. Around the world, it's about one in five. That is a shocking figure. And the truth is we can do a great deal to prevent that.
The idea that we are trying to put out fires without talking about what is the origin of these issues. The way that the mental health care system works now, it's like what I call cutting the grass. Children are medicated, which is basically just pain management. They're given CDT therapy, which again is just pain management.
But why aren't we asking the important questions, which is where does emotional regulation originate? Where does it come from? When does it start? How do we foster development in children from a very young age to promote resilience to stress and adversity in the future?
And so those are my three missions. And for someone who doesn't know your work and isn't aware of you, they might be thinking, how would you know, Erica? How would you know the answer? So I'm a psychoanalyst.
I'm also a social worker. I started as a social worker and then became a psychoanalyst. I'm also an author of books on parent guidance and parent education. And I've been in practice seeing patients.
So the majority of my work is still seeing patients. I have a full time job of seeing patients. And as someone who is also a parent, I have three children of my own. And so as a parent, as a clinician, as an author who has for the past 20 years been researching, and what I did is I collected research in epigenetics and attachment theory and neuroscience and wrote my first book being there.
Because what happened is I was seeing this uptick in mental illness in children. And this is really how I got into it about 30 years ago. I started practicing about 36 years ago, but I was probably five years into my practice. And I was seeing that the families that were coming to see me had younger and younger children that were being diagnosed with very serious mental illnesses and being medicated at a very young age, basically silencing their pain.
And what I was observing in my practice is that those children who were doing the least well were the ones whose mothers were the least present in their lives. So their primary attachment figures were the least present in their lives. And so then I started looking at the research. I looked at all the neuroscience research since the 90s and all of the new research that had come out.
And I looked at the old detachment theories which have been around since the 60s and I looked at the epigenetic research which was rather new to. And I saw this trend. I saw that we were abandoning our children for our own desires, for our careers, for material success. And it was a great deal of misunderstanding about the irreducible emotional needs of children.
We're going to go through all of that today. I'm very excited to learn.