Latest / The Family Teams Podcast / The Maternal Instinct Is DYING - Here's How 3 Generations Killed It ft. Erica Komisar

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The Maternal Instinct Is DYING - Here's How 3 Generations Killed It ft. Erica Komisar · The Family Teams Podcast

0:00
All right, everyone.
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I'm so excited today to have Erika Komisar on the podcast.
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Erika is a clinical
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social worker, a psychoanalyst, parent coach, and author.
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She's got over 30 years of experience
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in private practice, and she's the author of a book called Being There, Why Prioritizing
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Motherhood in the First Three Years Matters.
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So I wanted to dive in first to being there,
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your thesis of this book.
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And I know that one of the things you've mentioned is that there was a
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different title that you originally were thinking about.
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I think there's something about like the
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instinct of a mother?
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Maybe tease that out a little bit.
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How do you think about motherhood
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from the perspective of kind of culturally what we're saying to women in particular about that
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instinct of motherhood?
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Well, the instinct is an evolutionary instinct.
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It's an instinct that
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we've had for thousands of years, which is to nurture our own children and to not leave them
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when they're incredibly fragile and vulnerable.
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So that's the instinct.
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And as sort of an experiment,
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the societal experiment, we've challenged that instinct to see how long it takes to kill that
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instinct.
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And I would say about three generations is what's killed that instinct in many women,
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but not all.
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And so you find that young women are challenging the societal narrative that work
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outside the home is more valuable, more important than nurturing their own children.
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You know,
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I think the messaging is so confusing to young women about, and young men, about why it's important.
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So, you know, because I think that the whole modern narrative was don't stay home.
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It's not meaningful and valuable.
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Don't raise your own children.
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You know, don't be controlled by men.
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You know, it's something about staying home with your child in those early years is some issue of control with men.
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It's not actually about that.
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I mean, the power to say, I'm going to stay with my child is, in fact, has to come from
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the mother.
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And the mother has to be the leader in the family in that way.
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And that's not giving men power.
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That's taking power back.
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So I think young women today are going, wait a second, I can have both.
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I can have a career and I can be a mother in those critical years.
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I just can't do everything all at the same time intensely.
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You know, maybe I can work, but I can't work intensely if I'm mothering a very young child.
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I don't want to leave that very young child.
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So the idea that we have told young women for decades now that that pull towards their children is something they shouldn't listen to, that the guilt they feel about leaving their child is something they shouldn't listen to, I think is really destructive.
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rather than saying, no, you can do everything in life.
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You just can't do it all at the same time.
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And if that pull is a pull towards your child in those early years, it's okay to listen to it.
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You have permission to listen to it and take your power back and say,
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this isn't about being controlled by men.
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This is about making a decision that's best for me and my child.
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Yeah.
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Well, I think you're one of the first people I've ever heard try to push back on the idea
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that when a mother feels guilt, that might be a signal instead of something just to suppress.
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So like talk about that a little, because I think that's obviously very difficult for people to hear.
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They think, oh, you know, guilt and shame are always bad.
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And so we've got to overcome those
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things.
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Those are just, those are all, those are false signals.
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And I don't know, like,
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where did that narrative come from and how do you think about how to deal with that?
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I suppose shame is a bad thing.
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So shame is characterological.
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So we say that you have to be very careful when you raise children not to shame them.
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So when you're helping children to build their egos, which is the superego is the part of the personality that helps a child determine what's right and wrong.
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Right.
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So we teach children what's right and wrong, and they internalize that in a very extreme way, which softens over time.
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But the idea that when our ego is functioning, when that part of us is functioning, when something doesn't feel right in our behavior, something behaviorally we're doing, we feel guilty.
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and so that's not a bad thing because that's we're trying to help children to feel a little
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guilty about smacking their sister or their brother over the head with a toy or taking
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something from their parents stealing or we're trying we're trying to instill in them some sense
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of right and wrong and the behavior that feels right and doesn't feel right um shame is a different
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thing so shame you never want children to feel shame i don't think you want human beings to feel
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shame because that's not about behavior.
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That's about their person.
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You're basically saying you're
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a bad person.
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We never want to say that children are bad people or human beings are bad people.
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So essentially, I think all faith believes that people are essentially good, or I hope it does,
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and that we're all good and that we may sometimes do bad things.
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And so, yeah, that's the idea is
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that guilt is a healthy signal feeling like pain.
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So if you say physical pain is a signal feeling.
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So if you, I don't know, you know, break your ankle playing basketball and your ankle hurts,
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you know, no one would ever say play on that ankle.
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You'd say, stop, see the doctor, you know,
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get treatment for that ankle.
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But for some reason, that's a signal feeling just like guilt is.
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Guilt
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It says that we have internal conflict that we're not looking at.
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And so we tell mothers, don't listen to it.
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It's like telling someone to play basketball on a broken ankle.
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I mean, no, the pain, the emotional pain of guilt is signaling you that something's not right, that you're in conflict over a decision.
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And rather than say to parents, just ignore the conflict.
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And I suppose that's what society is about today.
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It's a little bit about telling parents, you know, just ignore their conflicts.
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And that ignoring your conflicts causes depression and anxiety.
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So as a psychoanalyst, we say the definition of depression and anxiety is internal conflict that's never been dealt with.
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So you don't want to tell people to bury their conflicts.
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You want to tell people to look at their conflicts, to talk about their conflicts, to resolve their conflicts in a healthier way.
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Yeah.
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So let's not bury that signal.
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Let's try to understand it.
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Let's make sure that we're properly processing it.
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I think one of the collisions that I'm really struggling with, and I'm curious what your thoughts are about this.
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So I feel like our culture is having a very interesting conversation about the nature of empathy.
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So one of the things that you've said about, you know, this female instinct is, hey, pay attention.
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That empathy that you have for that six-month-old child when you're leaving them at daycare or not really engaging with them the way that you just instinctually want to, like, you've got to pay attention to that.
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On the other hand, we're having this conversation both in the political world, but also in the parenting world about, hey, you know, don't set boundaries for children.
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Like, you know, the desire to empathize with a young child in some way, like any kind of training, any kind of feedback, you just, you know, kind of untraining.
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So is that a false?
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Because I think we're having this conversation like culture wide about like identities and everything like more empathy.
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And then you've got Gadsad just wrote a book recently about suicidal empathy, just like our culture has kind of gone off the rails in our attempt to become empathetic towards minority groups or whatever.
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And so I think we're getting very conflicting messages about how to think about that.
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Sometimes we're being bewitched by language.
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Maybe we're using the wrong words.
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I think so.
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I think it's semantics.
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Empathy is critical to the survival of the human race.
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OK.
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We won't survive.
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if we can't feel for our own and others.
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If you look at the Bible, you want to look at the Bible, I'm Jewish.
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There's a very famous speech that it was the actual parasha for my son's bar mitzvah.
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And we say it in the Reformed Jewish community on Yom Kippur.
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We say it every year.
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We say the prayers about it, which is it's Moses speaks to the people of Israel and says,
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welcome others in our tent.
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I don't know how we've lost that, where that's gone into today's
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society.
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All the immigrants, welcome into our tent.
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You don't need to be of our religion.
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Welcome.
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Okay.
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So empathy is critical to our physical and emotional survival, to being human.
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So it's
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empathy should not be conflated with discipline because they're not mutually exclusive.
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We can empathize.
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We must empathize for our children's pain.
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When we turn off that empathy, we have so many young schizoid parents who drop their children at daycare and just turn off their feelings for their child.
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That is devastating to that child because you've just abandoned that child.
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You might as well have left them on the doorstep of a church and said they're an orphan.
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When you turn off your feelings for that child, they are all but lost.
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Right.
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So we always must have empathy.
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That doesn't mean we also don't set boundaries.
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They're not mutually exclusive.
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And I always say when you're disciplining, you're missing an opportunity to really educate your child because, you know, the word discipline means disciple comes from the word disciple, which I guess is a Christian idea.
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But the idea of teach by example.
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What are you teaching your children when you turn off your empathy?
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What are you teaching your children when you discipline them without empathy?
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All you're teaching them is to be scared of you.
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What you want to teach them is that they have to have boundaries, but that you feel for them.
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So empathy must always precede discipline.
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And an example of that would be, you know, your child wants the 10th toy for the day while you're out with them.
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and you say to them, I can see how hard it is for you not to always get something that you want in
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that moment.
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It must be so hard, but you can't always, you know, get a toy, you know, toys are
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expensive.
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And so the empathy precedes the boundary.
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You're setting a firm boundary, but
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you're never setting a boundary.
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So this is what I can give parents that are listening today.
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Yes, of course you have to set boundaries, but empathy must always proceed.
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Understanding a
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child's feelings always has to precede that boundary unless the child is in a dangerous
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situation.
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For instance, if your child is running out in traffic, you're not going to go, oh, honey,
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I know you're going to say, stop it.
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Or the child's going to put their finger in a light
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socket or they're going to fall off of a bookshelf that they've climbed.
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Then you go into another
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urgent, emergent parenting role.
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Otherwise, always empathize.
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Try to understand the child's feelings
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before you set the limit.
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You know, the expression from Mary Poppins, a spoonful of sugar helps the
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medicine go down.
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It's also more effective.
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Yes.
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It also works better.
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Yeah.
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And do you think that
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part of the tension that we're feeling is that we're not understanding maybe the different roles
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of mother and father, because I had a rabbi on the podcast, and he pointed something out to me
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I'd never heard before, which is he said the word parenting doesn't exist in the Hebrew Bible.
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He
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said that parenting, or even the word parent in Hebrew, it's always mother and father.
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Honor your
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mother and father.
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And so you're always either being mothered or fathered.
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You're not really
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being parented.
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And so we've created this third word, which is totally legitimate.
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I mean,
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obviously parenting is a thing and it's in the, it's in the new Testament, but it's not, it's,
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it's like, it's not as foundational as there are these two roles.
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And I'm curious how you think
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about empathy.
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How does it work between a mother and a father?
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And cause I I've spent a lot of
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time in the middle East, particularly in Jewish communities to try to recover an idea of what,
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what the separation is between these things, because it seems like it's getting lost and
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we're going to parent one, parent two, and I don't know what's going on there, but, but yeah,
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talk to me about how do you see these, the mother and father as, as playing into this conversation
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and empathy?
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Well, I mean, the family is a unit.
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And I suppose in modern society, there's a gender
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neutralizing, which is what the word parents comes from.
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You know, if you go to like the
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Northern European countries, they're trying to take the word mother and father out of their
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doctrine and just have parent.
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And so that's all part of this movement of stripping away the
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differences between men and women.
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And, you know, it's problematic because men and women
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play different roles because they have different nurturing behaviors, because they have different
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hormones that control their nurturing behaviors.
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We have different evolutionary roles.
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All mammals
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do.
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It would be like questioning why mammals serve different roles in the nurturing of their young.
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We're mammals.
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We're just mammals.
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We're just animals, really.
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We're higher, higher level
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animals, maybe our brains are bigger, but we're mammals.
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And so all mammals have differences in
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their roles, you know.
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But I think that use, the use of the word parents, I suppose on a positive
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side, it brings mothers and fathers together to be on the same team, to think of themselves as a
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team.
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But I think mothers and fathers always thought of themselves as teams in the past.
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I
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think it's today that they think of themselves as separate entities, individual entities.
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And so
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maybe the word parents today brings them back together in a strange way.
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But I think, yes,
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mothers and fathers are not exactly the same.
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They're equal in importance.
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Okay.
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At different
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stages of development, they're equal in importance, but they play different roles.
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So the question is,
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do you ever have two CEOs of a company?
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Or do you have a CEO and a COO and a head of marketing and a
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CFO?
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You know, it never quite works to have two CEOs.
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So you don't want two people competing for
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the same job.
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You want collaboration, you want cooperation, you want teamwork, you want people
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working together.
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But you don't want two people fighting over the same role.
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So that's also part
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of the problem with this modern concept that mothers and fathers are exactly the same.
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So
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mothers have more of a nurturing hormone called oxytocin, which they produce in great quantities
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when they give birth, when they breastfeed, and when they nurture.
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And it makes them more
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sensitive and pathic nurtures.
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It turns on a vigilance in them to make sure that the baby
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isn't in distress, which is very important because the human brain of an infant, of a neonate,
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is not supposed to go into a stress mode at all in the first year.
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This is why babies are held
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close to their mother's bodies in most parts of the world.
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They're worn on the front,
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then the back, because the mother's body regulates the stress, right?
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It buffers the stress,
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keeps the stress hormones down.
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And those babies don't cry very much.
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The babies who are held on
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their mother's bodies don't cry very much.
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They don't go into that distress state because their
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brains can't handle much stress.
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After a year, incrementally, the baby starts to be held by other
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people and be sort of crawl around.
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And so the idea that there are tiny bits of stress, that
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it's introduced incrementally, right?
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So the baby develops a psychic immune system or the ability
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to cope with stress.
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That's the mother's role is to soothe the baby in distress and be vigilant to
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keep the baby's stress levels down.
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The father's role is to protect and provide in those early
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years, but also to be a buddy to the baby.
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As the baby starts to grow, the idea is not to replace
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the sensitive empathic nurturing of the mother, but to be playful with the baby.
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The playful
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tactile stimulation is how fathers express oxytocin.
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So oxytocin is produced in father's
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brains, but it comes from a different part of the brain and has a different effect on their
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behavior.
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So it makes them playful, tactile stimulators, throwing the baby up in the air,
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tickling the baby, chasing the baby.
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So this play helps to regulate certain emotions in that baby.
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It helps to regulate excitement and their impulses and their aggression.
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Whereas mothers regulate
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other feelings.
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They regulate sadness, distress, fear.
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So they play different roles.
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And fathers
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are also very critical when it comes to babies starting to separate.
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So when they're starting
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to explore the world, fathers encourage the separation because otherwise the babies would
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never leave the mothers, right?
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And the mothers would never let the babies leave.
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And this is
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happening in single parent homes where children have trouble separating because mothers don't
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let them go and there's no father to encourage that separation.
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So they play different, they're
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like the CEO and the CFO or the CEO and the COO.
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They play different roles, but they're both very
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important.
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So very important that fathers are present, very important that mothers are present,
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but this competition over playing the same role is a modern kind of trope that I think that we
17:55
have to really look at because it's doing a great deal of harm to families.
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I would say the high
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divorce rates.
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There have always been high divorce rates, but there's high divorce rates
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for different reasons now.
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Before it was because people were mismatched.
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Now it's because young
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couples compete with one another.
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They're literally in competition with one another
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over how much they make over and they're not really working together for the benefit of that
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child.
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They're sort of individuals that are competing with one another, and that's causing
18:31
great marital strife.
18:33
Yeah.
18:34
Yeah, this is one of the confusions that I've worked through,
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and that's why we call those family teams.
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Everything you just described, there's something
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that was lost, which is this, we have different roles, we're on the same team, this team has an
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expression within the couple, within the nuclear family, within the extended family, in the
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a multi-generational family.
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And as you think about things in those terms, it creates or gives
18:56
rise to a very different kind of family.
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One that I saw very frequently in the Middle East,
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one that I see very infrequently in kind of modern Western, particularly where I grew up in Seattle
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on the West Coast.
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It was just like, I was like, I didn't know this kind of multi-generational
19:11
family team even existed until I kind of got out into the wider world and saw, oh no, this is
19:16
actually very normal.
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Um, and, uh, but man, yeah, it's, it's, it's very abnormal today.
19:21
So, um,
19:23
yeah, I just kind of raising that signal that, yeah, we are, we're playing these different roles
19:26
and they're very, and that, that sort of persists.
19:28
Like now I'm, you know, grandfather at four
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grandkids and, you know, I do find myself just constantly, I just was playing with my six month
19:35
old grandson and, you know, just, I just want to like mess up his hair and like, yeah, I just
19:39
always want to like do something tactile to, to kind of like get his attention.
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And I don't know,
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that just comes out of me.
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You mentioned something that I don't know if I've ever heard before on the
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idea of young boys and their particular emotional fragility.
19:55
I've got two granddaughters and two
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grandsons that are all there.
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And I've watched them.
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And what you said has come to mind many
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times.
20:05
I'm like, oh, man, like that little boy meltdown.
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It has a different character to it
20:13
been any, you know, and so I'm curious, like, what does the science say about this?
20:16
And what
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does this mean for the way that we are fathering and mothering young boys?
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I mean, there's quite
20:23
a bit of research.
20:24
Some of it is sort of put together by, I mean, Alan Shore is a very famous
20:29
neuroscientist from UCLA, and he writes about this.
20:32
But there's quite a bit of research now
20:35
in the neuroscience field about the neurological sensitivity of boys.
20:40
You know, more, more,
20:43
more boys are born in the world, but more girls survive.
20:46
And so that has to do with the fact that
20:48
boys are sensitive neurologically and physically, they're much more fragile.
20:53
And, you know,
20:54
testosterone is an important hormone, but it also increases that fragility.
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And so what that means
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is they're more sensitive to stress.
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So when boys, it becomes even more important to buffer boys from
21:08
stress than girls.
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And so, you know, what we're doing and how we're raising our children today,
21:14
boys and girls, but particularly boys are hardest hit by this because, you know, when you, I don't
21:20
know if you know the figure, but I think about 25% of American families put their children in
21:25
daycare as early as two weeks of age.
21:27
So when you hand over a neurologically fragile infant
21:31
into a strange situation with strangers away from the mother's body, again, we're mammals,
21:37
away from the mother's eyes, face, voice, smell, skin, you're raising their cortisol levels.
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You're elevating their cortisol levels.
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And you put them into daycare where they're crying excessively.
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Remember, they're meant to be held on the mother's body to soothe the baby in advance of the stress, not after the fact.
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So, you know, we are stressing our children out and stressing boys out does even greater harm than stressing girls out because boys have less ability to handle that stress, meaning it's even more important to keep the cortisol levels down in boys because they go into what we call survival mode.
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And survival mode is the fight or flight response of the brain to stress.
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When they feel in danger, when it's perceived a real danger, human beings go into fight or flight.
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That is our evolutionary response to stress and to threat.
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And so babies, when they perceive of that threat, they either become incredibly aggressive, which is what's happening with little boys, or they become very, you know, they go into flight, which is the attentional issues that we're seeing.
22:52
You know, the movement and the excessive movement and attentional issues that we're seeing are flight, right?
22:57
So what are you going to do if a sable-toothed tiger is chasing you?
23:00
You're either going to run or you're going to stand and fight.
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And that's what we're forcing our children to do by putting them into survival mode so early.
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You know, as the brain matures and we have incrementally exposed that baby's brain to stress,
23:17
they can begin to internalize a sense of security that is the foundation for them being able to cope with adversity and stress in the future.
23:25
little bits of stress, inoculate them.
23:28
Think of inoculating babies with stress.
23:30
We are not
23:31
inoculating babies, particularly boys.
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We are basically the house is falling on them, you know,
23:36
sort of like the Wizard of Oz, we're throwing a house on them.
23:39
We're not inoculating them.
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And what they'll do is they'll often respond in a defensive way.
23:46
So those defenses, you know,
23:49
we say defenses aren't a bad thing if they're healthy defenses.
23:53
But what we're doing is we are
23:55
fostering very early, unhealthy, pathological defenses in very young children that they carry
24:03
with them into toddlerhood and childhood and adolescence and adulthood.
24:08
And that leads to
24:09
mental illness.
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So remember that the sensitivity to stress is in all children.
24:15
All children are
24:16
sensitive to stress.
24:18
But there are some children that are born with the sensitivity gene.
24:22
There's
24:22
actually a gene that's been found, which is a sensitivity to stress gene.
24:27
And that when a child
24:29
is born with that sensitivity, those children cry more, they're harder to soothe, they're harder to
24:37
put asleep, they don't like to stay asleep, they're more clingy, potentially, they need more of you,
24:43
they're more demanding.
24:44
Everybody knows if they have multiple children, if they have a sensitive
24:48
child.
24:49
Now understand that all boys have sensitivity to stress.
24:54
Yeah.
24:55
And it really
24:55
is different based on their hormones.
24:58
Yeah.
24:59
That is so helpful.
25:00
And I, we see it.
25:01
This is one of
25:02
the areas where I feel like, you know, our gender sensitivities can, can actually cause us to become
25:08
less empathetic.
25:09
Like, oh, they're a boy, you know, get over it.
25:11
You know, like we can be that
25:13
way without actually understanding the underlying biology of what's actually happening.
25:18
So,
25:18
So Eric, one of the things that you represent that I find really interesting is you seem to be pulling from at least three large bodies of material.
25:27
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25:28
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25:55
Like you're very rooted in the biology, very rooted in psychoanalysis and Freud and a lot of the history of that.
26:04
And you're also rooted to an ancient tradition of Judaism.
26:07
And, you know, when you say things like we have a moral obligation to our children,
26:13
when we have them, there are certain basic obligations we need to attend to.
26:17
I don't hear that from people that are rooted in just two of the,
26:20
like,
26:20
I think,
26:20
I think there's something about the fact that you,
26:22
you have,
26:23
you're pulling from all three of these.
26:24
I wanted you to reflect on that because I,
26:26
I feel like it's going on in our day and age where,
26:29
where if you are only rooted in the biology,
26:31
we're like,
26:32
well,
26:32
there can't,
26:32
we just socially,
26:33
like,
26:33
I know,
26:34
I know you can get to some of these conclusions from the biology,
26:37
but I just,
26:38
I don't see people getting there if they're not rooted in some of these
26:41
other,
26:42
these are particularly a religious tradition.
26:44
And so I'm curious what your thoughts are about,
26:46
about how that plays a role today?
26:48
Well, I suppose I'm rooted in even more traditions
26:50
to confuse things.
26:51
So as a psychoanalyst, my orientation is as a psychoanalyst, right?
26:59
As a
26:59
clinician, I'm a clinician first and foremost, and I still see 35 hours of patients a week.
27:05
So I'm
27:05
primarily still a clinician.
27:07
And it was because I was a clinician that I was seeing these trends
27:11
in my practice and my colleagues' practices.
27:15
That was what drove me to look at the research.
27:18
And so then my orientation changed because I became interested in this field of neuropsychobiology,
27:24
which is already complicated because it brings together four orientations, neuroscience,
27:31
epigenetics, attachment theory, and psychoanalysis.
27:35
And it's a field called neuropsychobiology.
27:38
So
27:38
So psychoanalysis didn't make sense for me, seeing what I was seeing all of the emotional regulation issues in children that were kind of popping up.
27:49
It didn't make sense to me with just thinking about psychoanalysis alone.
27:53
So I had to dig into the fields of neuroscience and epigenetics and attachment theory to understand why, you know, why we were seeing such dysregulation in children and what was going on.
28:05
And so I suppose you could say it was already a combination of the real environment of the child and the internal environment of the child.
28:13
Right.
28:13
So you have to look at everything.
28:15
And then you have to mix in with that, that I am a person of faith, that many psychoanalysts say they're atheists.
28:22
I'm not sure.
28:23
I think it's because Freud struggled.
28:26
You know, we should all struggle with our faith.
28:28
I think everybody should struggle.
28:30
And it's an interesting thing.
28:32
Jews are always struggling.
28:34
We're always questioning.
28:35
We never take things rote.
28:38
You know, you get 10 Jews in a room, they're going to disagree about everything.
28:43
And you'd say, you know, much of the Old Testament is written with different perspectives,
28:48
with people arguing about, you know, and so we should always struggle with our faith.
28:52
So the
28:52
fact that Freud struggled with this faith doesn't concern me.
28:56
You know, he did struggle.
28:59
I don't struggle, but in the sense that I'm a person of faith, but I respect people who struggle with their with their faith.
29:08
I suppose that orientation helps me as well, because in Judaism is a very practical religion.
29:16
It's it's mostly practical.
29:18
If you look at the Old Testament and the Talmud and it's mostly practical, like it's laws.
29:24
It's, you know, my rabbi is a lawyer.
29:27
First, he was a lawyer who then on his wedding night said to his Ami Hirsch, he said to his wife on his wedding night, guess what, I'm going to be a rabbi, not going to be a corporate attorney called switch and bait.
29:41
And so, but the idea is that law and the rabbinic are not, they're not different because Judaism is about laws, you know.
29:52
So Judaism had a lot of wisdom about raising children because it had thousands of years of an experimental lab to raise children.
30:02
And so it's a lot of practical stuff, you know, even the stuff related to the family.
30:08
It's interesting.
30:09
Judaism is practical.
30:12
If you have parents who abuse you, I don't know if you know this little bit of knowledge.
30:16
If you have parents who, and I learned this from my rabbi, if you have parents who abuse you, the mandate is not to care for those parents when they get old and fragile yourself.
30:26
But your mandate is to make sure someone is caring for them if they've abused you.
30:31
Isn't that interesting?
30:33
So it's very practical.
30:35
It doesn't expect human beings to be not human.
30:39
It allows humans to be imperfect.
30:42
The whole Old Testament is not about idealizing humans.
30:46
It's about saying we're all imperfect.
30:48
We all have feet of clay and real stuff happens.
30:52
And how do we deal with it?
30:56
And so that is the basis, that practical wisdom is the basis on which I'm sure how I have come to where I've come to.
31:06
It's an ingredient.
31:07
But as you can see, there's many pieces to my brain.
31:14
Because I think that part of what I sense from you is, okay, I can see the damage that these messages are having on young children.
31:22
but I think something else rises up inside of you that feels like this is fundamentally unjust
31:27
toward those children and I think that's the edge I don't hear what I hear from other people is okay
31:31
this is a biological problem maybe we'll come up with a pill or some new tactic we'll find some
31:36
way to get to what we want to get to as a society or as biological creatures without having to force
31:43
you know a class of people women in this case to make unnecessary sacrifices and I think that
31:49
that before you get there, like, let's just endlessly innovate our way into some brave new world.
31:54
There's like, we're doing something, we're damaging children.
31:57
Like, this is not fair.
31:59
This is unjust.
32:00
And I think that that is something that needs to be said, but it's very difficult to say.
32:05
Yeah, I'm curious how you think about that side of the tension that we're in right now as a culture.
32:13
Well, I want to go back to empathy.
32:16
because empathy is not something we're born with.
32:21
It isn't.
32:23
It's something we learn.
32:25
It's called generational expression.
32:27
There was a researcher who did named Michael Meany,
32:30
who was very famous,
32:31
who did licking and grooming research.
32:34
He found that the animals who licked and groomed their young
32:38
had young that licked and groomed their young,
32:41
who had young who licked and groomed their young.
32:44
He also found that the young that were licked and groomed were more resilient to stress than the ones who weren't licked and groomed.
32:54
Okay, why is that important research?
32:57
We teach our children to lick and groom by licking and grooming.
33:02
It's our empathy as parents that we pass on to our children, that they then have empathy for their children, and so on and so forth, and on and on it goes.
33:13
the survival of our species is dependent upon that empathy.
33:18
Children do not want to have children
33:20
because we have forsaken the empathy towards our children.
33:25
We have turned off the distress calls
33:30
of our children.
33:31
We have shut them out.
33:33
We have put earmuffs on.
33:35
And as a result, our children
33:37
grow up without the capacity to deal with stress, but also without the capacity or desire
33:45
to have children and empathize with those children.
33:49
We have destroyed the bond between
33:51
mothers and children with this modern narrative that caring for children is not valuable,
34:00
is insignificant.
34:02
Mothering is not work.
34:04
And so we've destroyed, in destroying the value,
34:10
we've destroyed the generational bond, right?
34:13
So empathy is the thing that keeps us going as a
34:18
human race.
34:20
And when that empathy is gone, so goes the human race.
34:24
Yeah, there's a lot at stake.
34:26
And it's interesting that you are seeing this in the research that the empathy really is a multi-generational thing.
34:35
It comes down, you can be destroyed by generation.
34:38
And this was the thing that kind of blew my mind when I was 23, a single guy, and I was studying modern and biblical Hebrew in Jerusalem.
34:47
And I just kept seeing this strange phenomenon of like men and children within the Jewish culture, just having lots of children, like talking about their kids.
34:58
And one of the things that I noticed that was really remarkable is the Shabbat dinner, the having three or four generations around a table on a weekly basis.
35:10
There was something going on there.
35:11
And I, you know, now we have this really interesting situation where Israel, I think today is now the only developed country with an above replacement fertility.
35:21
Yeah.
35:22
And I think that potentially it has to do with this multigenerational family vision.
35:27
I know there's a lot of other geopolitical motivations going on, but I think that that that's what I find so unique and that that has gotten disrupted badly in the Western world.
35:37
You know, my parents were a part of these kinds of meals on Sunday afternoon when they were growing up, but none of my friends were a part of these things.
35:45
We've all sort of like adopted a nuclear family idea and the multi-generational family idea has gone away.
35:53
And so what you're describing is there are things that need to be passed on generationally.
35:58
And maybe we're not just in an individual game or even a nuclear family game, but we're playing something across generations.
36:05
And that when that got disrupted, when we're no longer building multigenerational families, we no longer have connections between these generations, which I think is, you know, when it talks about honor your father and mother, I think that's the most basic commandment to try to say you must preserve the multigenerational family.
36:21
the essence of what that means.
36:23
The future and your children and your ability, as the commandment
36:26
says, to live a prosperous life depends upon whether or not there's honor going between
36:34
generations.
36:34
And I feel like we've destroyed that somehow.
36:36
And it's like, how do we rebuild that?
36:38
And do you see that as being a part of the root problem?
36:42
Well, I mean, I also think that
36:45
if you go to Israel, you know, those families, their main focus is the family.
36:53
I mean, I hate
36:54
to say they work fathers, you know, in very religious Jewish families in Israel, you know,
37:02
the Hasidim, the father's study, and this is, you know, this is complicated too.
37:08
And often the
37:09
mothers will have to go out to work, you know, it's not perfect.
37:12
I'm going to say, you know,
37:13
So don't idealize it completely.
37:14
It's not there's nothing that's perfect.
37:17
And human beings are imperfect.
37:19
What it does have is it it's it values family over everything else.
37:24
So the family is always really the most important thing in their lives.
37:30
And in modern society, again, family is not the most important thing in people's lives, so much so that young people don't even want to have family.
37:39
They say that we can have great lives without family.
37:42
So what we've taught them is that everything else is more important.
37:46
You know, the family is the accessory to life.
37:50
But the real what's on the main stage is your career and fame and your success.
37:56
And, you know, it's, you know, do you have the lifestyle?
38:01
It's what's on the main stage, right?
38:03
So for those Israeli families you're talking about that have a lot of children, what's on the main stage is family.
38:11
And they do have work and they have to survive.
38:13
And usually it's the women who go out to work, not the men, which is also problematic.
38:20
But yeah, it's what's on the main stage.
38:23
And I think that's what's helped them to survive.
38:25
It is multi-generational too.
38:27
There's a lot of factors, right?
38:28
A lot of pieces to the puzzle.
38:30
But it's that family is still valued above everything else.
38:34
We've lost that.
38:35
I mean, so much so that young people are questioning why would they ever want to have kids, you know, because it's responsibility.
38:44
And, you know, so in Judaism, the responsibility itself is the pleasure.
38:51
The responsibility is the state of grace.
38:54
And so, but that's changed in modern society, you know, where it's, you know, family is not at the center of what is going to make us happy.
39:05
And every book that's out now, every modern philosopher is saying the same thing.
39:12
We're all saying the same thing, which is that relationships are the most important thing in life.
39:18
And if you're valuing work and materialism and individualism and fame, they did a survey in America where they asked young people.
39:28
It was like a thousand young people.
39:30
And I want to say I may get this wrong.
39:33
So I apologize if I got this wrong.
39:35
Maybe it was an MTV study or it was like some survey.
39:38
And it basically asked, what are you living for?
39:41
What are the most important things that you aspire to in life?
39:45
And most of them said, fame and money.
39:51
Yeah, that's unbelievable.
39:52
And I think that says it all.
39:54
I mean, I think you don't need to say anymore.
39:56
If our young people are saying what they're aspiring to in life as being successful is fame and money.
40:04
I mean, there it is.
40:06
Yeah, that seemed to have happened generationally.
40:08
Like I said, what was so interesting to me, and I agree with what you're saying about the culture in Israel, that there's lots of things broken.
40:14
But man, it just seems that your identity of father and mother is so elevated.
40:20
Everybody wants that.
40:21
Everybody wants a family.
40:22
And somehow, yeah, we've created a culture where individualism, lifestyle design, and all these things are becoming so important.
40:30
So I want to ask you one last question, Erica.
40:32
Thank you so much for your time.
40:33
This has been amazing.
40:34
But I had just one personal question I wanted to dive in with you.
40:37
And that is, as you've been saying these things in public that I believe the culture wants to hide.
40:44
like yeah there's a desire to hide the things that you've been exposing and i don't know what that
40:52
what that means for you like how have you absorbed that um what happens when somebody tries to
40:58
go out because you know you're you're a mother you're a clinical psychoanalyst and you're writing
41:03
these books and publicly saying things that are very difficult for people to hear that i think
41:07
are absolutely essential truths that we are desperately needing but i i think the forces
41:11
that exist to try to stop these truths from getting out are incredibly powerful.
41:17
And so I really appreciate that you've done this, but I want to know at what cost or
41:22
how is this going for you?
41:24
You know, I suppose my training as a psychoanalyst was helpful because
41:28
we're trained to deal with conflict and not take it personally.
41:31
So I don't take it personally when
41:33
people are critical.
41:34
And I understand that it comes from their own particular sort of
41:39
defensiveness or whatever, whatever I, I am saying, which is my rabbi says to me, just keep
41:45
speaking the truth.
41:45
You know, I, you know, he always comments on my articles when I write an
41:49
article or whatever.
41:50
And he says, you know, you just have to, you have to keep speaking the truth.
41:54
That's it.
41:56
I suppose I was always that kind of annoying kid who, you know, always spoke the
42:01
truth, right.
42:02
You know, and, and couldn't stop speaking the truth, even though everybody would
42:05
say, shh.
42:06
And even my daughter says to me, my, my grown daughter is like, do you have to be so
42:10
direct?
42:10
You know?
42:11
So I, I suppose that is my, that, that is who I am.
42:15
And so it's more, you know,
42:16
just, I live with who I am, which is if I see something, I say something.
42:21
And this was something
42:23
that I saw very early on.
42:25
I started seeing this 30 years ago in my practice.
42:28
And, you know,
42:29
to be honest, I would go to cocktail parties.
42:32
This is how the story goes.
42:34
I would go to cocktail
42:34
parties with my husband and I would just couldn't stop talking about what I was seeing.
42:39
And I was
42:39
so upset about it.
42:41
And I would talk about the absence of parents and children suffering with
42:44
their mental health.
42:45
And my husband finally said to me, you have to stop.
42:48
We are going to lose all
42:49
our friends.
42:50
We're not going to have any friends anymore.
42:52
Write a book, go put it right at, you
42:55
know, so that's sort of how it happened because I think I would have lost everybody.
42:59
So I, I don't,
43:02
I don't internalize the public criticism and I try to understand where it comes from.
43:07
I think
43:07
it's, these are really hard messages for people to hear.
43:10
It's hard for people to hear that, um,
43:14
that they, that sacrifice and self-awareness and, um, you know, really understanding that
43:22
generational transmission is really important if you want to raise healthy children, that your
43:26
presence is really important.
43:29
And that these are hard messages.
43:31
So I understand that people
43:32
struggle with them.
43:33
It's like struggling with faith, right?
43:35
I mean, you struggle with these
43:36
hard and truthful messages.
43:38
Yeah, man.
43:39
Well, easy to get out there.
43:41
I picture thousands and
43:42
thousands of young infants that are having their mother with them because of what you've done,
43:47
Erica.
43:47
Thank you so much for that.
43:49
I think that it's absolutely worth it.
43:52
Wow.
43:53
It's just been
43:53
so encouraging to me to hear this message and it has affected, I think really is beginning to,
44:00
to, to change the moral compass of this next generation.
44:03
So thank you for all your work.
44:05
I appreciate it.
44:05
Thank you for having me.
44:08
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44:10
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