Are Mothers Actually Necessary?

Recently my wife, Patricia, and I were with some friends who told the story of the difficulties surrounding the birth of their grandson. Because of physical issues, the child had to be kept for a protracted period in the hospital prior to an operation. The child’s vital signs had been running dangerously off the charts, and the doctor could not perform surgery until they were normalized. 
It was at that time that the doctor commanded: Bring me the child’s mother. Under the existing circumstances, that was difficult to do, but it was accomplished. Our friends told us that despite the extended period of separation, miraculously, within 10 minutes of the baby’s being on the mother’s chest and in the mother’s arms, all his readings on the chart dropped from the red band into the green … and the child became peaceful … and relaxed.
Our friends’ experience came to mind as I read an interview in the Oct. 27, 2017, Wall Street Journal by James Taranto with a psychoanalyst in New York about what she had learned in her studies of infants. Her name is Erica Komisar, and she has written a book entitled “Being There: Why Prioritizing Motherhood in the First Three Years Matters.”
Her work in the field has led her to conclude that for proper development, mothers are biologically necessary for the first 1,000 days of a child’s life, and particularly the first nine months.
“Every time a mother comforts a baby in distress, she’s actually regulating that baby’s emotions from the outside in. After three years, the baby internalizes that ability to regulate their emotions, but not until then.” With that in mind, mothers “need to be there as much as possible, both physically and emotionally.”
“The regulatory mechanism is oxytocin, a neurotransmitter popularly known as the ‘love hormone.’ Oxytocin, Ms. Komisar explains, ‘is a buffer against stress.’ Mothers produce it when they give birth, breastfeed or otherwise nurture their children … The baby’s brain, in turn, develops oxytocin receptors, which allow for self-regulation at a later age.”
Ms. Komisar has worked 30 years with families as a social worker and later as an analyst. “What I was seeing was an increase in children being diagnosed with ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder) and an increase in aggression in children, particularly in little boys, and an increase in depression in little girls.” She was observing more and more children being diagnosed with social disorders and symptoms resembling autism – “difficulty in relating to other children and having difficulty with empathy.”
What she observed was children whose mothers weren’t with them on a daily basis was one of the triggers of the disorders. She studied scientific literature in depth and found her intuition reinforced.
If the mother cannot be with the child, for whatever reason, Ms. Komisar recommends a single surrogate caregiver, as opposed to daycare. She believes that daycare is overstimulating for children under 3, given their neurological underdevelopment.
As an example, one of the studies corroborating her conclusions was the Strange-Situation experiments, “devised in 1969 by developmental psychologist Mary Ainsworth, a pioneer of attachment theory: A mother and the baby are on the floor playing. The mother gets up and leaves the baby in the room alone. The baby has a separation-anxiety response. A stranger walks in; the baby has a stressed reaction to the stranger.”
“Researchers sample the infant’s saliva and test it for cortisol, a hormone associated with stress (and inversely correlated with oxytocin). In a series of such experiments, in which Ms. Komisar herself participated, ‘the levels were so high in the babies that the anticipation was that it would . . . in the end, cause disorders and problems.’”
* * * * *
As Komisar states, “Babies are much more neurologically fragile than we’ve ever understood.” Further, we know there is an increased incidence of disorders in young children. May I suggest, if you are planning a family, let the sketchy outline above cause you to research best practices; time invested up front may change the child’s entire life.”