(LifeSiteNews) — A prominent psychoanalyst warned in a recent interview that daycare is “absolutely terrible” for children age three and younger due to their spike in stress levels resulting from separation from their mother.
“Daycare is terrible for children, absolutely terrible for children and their developing brains,” Dr. Erica Komisar told John Anderson, former Deputy Prime Minister of Australia, in a recent interview.
Komisar said she intentionally calls daycares “warehouses” and “day orphanages” because of the truth these terms represent because daycare does “incredible harm.”
From birth until age three, children are “incredibly neurologically fragile,” she began to explain. “They are not born resilient. They are not born capable of managing stress very much at all.”
“And it is the skin-to-skin contact of their primary attachment figure, usually their mother, it is the soothing of that baby from moment to moment that helps that baby to learn emotional regulation, how to keep their feelings from going too high or too low,” Komisar continued. “And to give them a deep, deep sense of safety and security.”
She compared infants with horses, who are very skittish — easily scared — because they are prey animals. “Babies come into the world very much like that. Receptive to connection but very, very fearful,” Komisar remarked.
Our brains are wired this way as a mechanism of survival, she pointed out.
“Humans have to be cared for by their mothers for a very long time before they’re capable of managing the stress of a very stressful world,” Komisar said.
“(S)tudies show that babies who are put in daycare have very, very high salivary cortisol levels,” she pointed out, referring to the main human stress hormone.
These cortisol levels are “through the roof in babies who are separated from their mothers or primary attachment figures under the age of three.”
“And so when you raise those levels of stress hormones in the brain, it actually doesn’t allow the brain to develop in a normal way. It ends up forcing the brain to develop in a pathologically adaptive, neurologically compromised way,” Komisar warned.
She said longitudinal studies show that 72% of children who are insecurely attached at 12 months are still insecurely attached 20 years later, demonstrating the often-permanent damage that daycare inflicts. Insecure attachment is “correlated with all kinds of mental illness,” according to Komisar.
When babies are insecurely attached, they develop “a shell of defenses that helps them to cope in the moment but makes them very susceptible and fragile in the future to breakdown. And that is what we are seeing,” Komisar said.
She believes that if parents and policymakers were taught this, they would no longer choose or promote daycare.
“A child who is given a deep sense of security is hopeful. Is optimistic. Who seeks the good in human beings. Who trusts others and trusts the world around them,” Komisar said. “So we teach children to either trust your environment, and your environment is their mother and father, or we teach them to distrust it.”
During the full interview with Anderson, Komisar said she believes ADHD is a stress response activated during early childhood when an infant is separated from his or her mother. She believes distractibility is a chronic “flight” response.
Komisar also believes that childhood trauma, including neglect, has contributed to the growing number of young people who say they don’t want children because they have experienced “no positive modeling of what safety and love and security looks like.”