Why a Mother’s Nurturing Is Critical to a Child’s Development and Future Relationships

Psychoanalyst Erica Komisar explains why the mother’s presence in a child’s first three years of life has a huge impact on the latter’s emotional health.

Erica Komisar has spent decades researching and studying parenting and children’s behavior. Adhiraj Chakrabarti for American Essence

Over the last decade, studies, data, media commentary, and personal experience have made many Americans aware of the ever-growing mental and emotional health challenges faced by young people, from preschoolers to college students. Research has attributed this rise in the rates of anxiety, depression, and general unhappiness to a wide range of factors, from academic pressures to the negativity of our daily news to the damages inflicted by widespread addiction to screens.

Psychoanalyst, social worker, and writer Erica Komisar is shining a light on another, often overlooked cause for this decline in mental and emotional health among children, teens, and 20-somethings. “Parents teach children that they can feel safe and secure through something called attachment security,” she told American Essence, “which is being physically and emotionally present for a neurologically, emotionally, and physically fragile infant. It’s those first three years that lay the groundwork to feel safe.”

The First Three Years of Life

Komisar, 61, began her professional life as a young social worker counseling children in Brooklyn before she trained and began practicing as a psychoanalyst. She explained: “I was noticing that children were being diagnosed and medicated with mental disorders … as young as 2, 3 years of age. They were having labels put on them, behavioral issues or attentional issues, and they were medicating children very, very young.”