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This is a podcast about family, led by two sisters and their mom.
An experiment in generational nesting which is, in essence, the ways in which family holds together throughout the lives of its members, their joys, their hardships, their care, their living, breathing roots, and legacies in the making. It’s never too early or too late to add a twig to the nest and roost!
Today, we are talking with clinical social worker, author, psychoanalyst, and parent guidance expert, Erica Commissar, about those first 3 years in your kiddo's life and WELP, the teen years.
Music:Like a sparrow building shelter with branches for its young. My mother built a nest helping hands. The never empty nest, my mother always says. Spread
Nicole Garcia:Okay. Hello. Hello everyone. Welcome to never the empty nest. Here we are.
Nicole Garcia:It is me, Nicole, with mom, Yoda mom, Jackie. We are very excited about our guest, Erica Commissar, a clinical social worker, a psychoanalyst, parent coach, and author, but I will give a bigger introduction in a minute. I just wanna say that Vanessa could not be here today because we had some very heartbreaking news last night that a dear friend of our family, my sister's business partner and close friend's mother passed away last night. And she is with her and her family in this very difficult time. So we send love and light to her and her family.
Nicole Garcia:On a lighter note, mom is here with me in LA, which is great. Mom, how are you? Would you like to talk about the how it was a little difficult getting here, but you're finally here? She had a bit of a nightmare situation at the airport a few days ago.
Jackie:Happy to be here, Erica. Thank you for joining us. I can't say that enough and you'll know why later, but yes, the short of it. We had a 9:30 flight, 9:30 in the morning flight. We were trapped in the plane for 4 hours waiting for I don't know what.
Jackie:First, it was weather, then it was this or that. Finally and thankfully, we were taken back to the gate. The flight turned into a 2:30 flight, then 3, then 5. Finally at 7, We boarded again, and we left at 8:20. It was a very calm group.
Jackie:Thank goodness. Because being stuck in that plane for 4 hours was pretty intense. It was not fun. But here we are, and I couldn't wait to get here to be with the Angelenos here and excited. This is a dear subject in our family.
Nicole Garcia:Yes. And by the way, mom is here because my daughter, Lily, who's 9, is getting her first holy communion. So those Catholics out there who know about the sacrament, it's a pretty big deal. We're excited and and planning for that. Anyways, back to today, I would like to say a little something about Erica before we invite her into the conversation.
Nicole Garcia:Erica Commissar is a clinical social worker, psychoanalyst, parent coach, and author with 30 years of experience in private practice. She works to alleviate pain from individuals who suffer from depression, anxiety, eating, and other compulsive disorders By helping them live better lives and have richer, more satisfying relationships, she assists them in achieving their personal and professional goals and living up to their potential. She's a graduate of Georgetown and Columbia Universities and the New York Freudian Society. Erica is a psychological consultant bringing parenting and work life workshops to clinics, schools, corporations, and childcare settings, including the Garden House School, Goldman Sachs, Shearman and Sterling, and SWFS Early Childhood Center. She is the author of 2 books we're gonna talk about today.
Nicole Garcia:1, Being There, Why Prioritizing Motherhood in the 1st 3 years Matters, and Chicken Little, the sky isn't falling, raising resilient adolescents in the new age of anxiety. She's appeared on major media networks such as CBS, ABC, Fox, and NPR. She lives in New York City with her husband, optometrist, and social entrepreneur, doctor Jordan Casselow, with whom she has 3 teenage and young adult children. Erica, hi. Welcome to our nest.
Nicole Garcia:Thank you for being here with us and talking about such an important subject.
Erica Komisar:No. Thank you for having me.
Nicole Garcia:You know, we usually start our podcast, with the nest. So if you don't mind, can you tell us a little bit about your nest, where you grew up, what family life was like for you, and what led you to your line of work?
Erica Komisar:So I grew up in Connecticut. I'm the youngest of 4 girls, and, my parents were older. My mother was very chic. She was 45 when she had me. In those days, that just could happen.
Erica Komisar:Why I went the path that I did was that I was really had tried a lot of things when I was very young, and 1 thing or another led me to becoming young therapist. And what I saw was there was sort of a piece missing, which was that many of these families were so traumatized through generational trauma that they didn't have basic understanding of parenting skills. So, I went to my clinic director, and said I'd like to start psychoeducational workshops for the parents that we treated because it's this parent guidance piece is, is an important piece of therapy, but there just seemed to be certain basic things that they didn't know. And I really loved the work, and then I took it to corporations and law firms and anyone who would let me do it. And then I integrated it in a big way into my practice because as I started practicing in my private practice in the early 90s, I was seeing this flood of very young children who were being diagnosed with ADHD and behavioral problems and early signs of aggression, and many of them were being medicated.
Erica Komisar:I saw depression and anxiety in children under the age of 5 that, you know, things that we just hadn't seen before in my field as much, and you know, it was a rare occasion. It was becoming a commonplace thing. So in my practice, I connected that to the absence of mothers in these children's lives. Meaning when mothers were not available emotionally and physically to their children, these children didn't do as well, and so they were starting to show signs of what we call stress disorders, where they were going into a fight or flight state.
Jackie:Right?
Erica Komisar:They were either becoming very aggressive or becoming very distractible, and a lot of it had to do with going into a evolutionary stress position, you know. And so, you know, I started researching it. And in fact, the research proved what I knew to be true, which is all the attachment research and the epigenetics research and all of the, neuroscience from the nineties on showed that mothers are biologically necessary to children. And then I said, well, why aren't we telling this to people? Why is it that we consider mothering second class work to be delegated to less skilled laborers who, you know, aren't paid very well, and we consider that being out in the world and making money or whatever doing work outside the home was more important.
Erica Komisar:When children were clearly the most important things in our lives, and were reacting to being abandoned essentially. That we had prioritized everything outside the home rather than at home. And so that's when I started to write books and articles and write for papers and things. So that's my story.
Nicole Garcia:Wow. Well, I I wanna start with being there because it it talks about the 1st 3 years being so necessary. You know, in our culture, it's a radical concept. And you tell us how necessary and important it is for a mother to be physically and emotionally present in those 1st 3 years and prioritizing your child. And, you know, and and everything else takes a back seat.
Nicole Garcia:Your career, dreams of advancement, everything kind of, you know, on hold. By the way, for me personally, I decided to stay at home with my kids and it was, for me, a very natural, easy decision, something that I always wanted to do and just felt very natural to me. But it was it's not nowadays the popular thing, and I got a lot of advice and a lot of comments from all types of people, but I I am happy that I that I did. Can you share with our listeners the importance of being there emotionally and physically in those first 3 years? I thought it was really, really interesting that it's that as you said, that it's it's a biological need.
Jackie:In our family, the attachment is something that we fiercely believe in and practice, but we understand that all nests are different. And so if we can share in this platform, how we're all doing it and what works, what doesn't work, we thought that was important. And when we discovered your work, as Nikki was saying, it first validated us because throughout the years, we find opposition. And sometimes these are very well intentioned, very smart. And, sometimes these factual things that they throw at you makes you think, am I doing it right?
Jackie:Did we do it right? Because it's sort of done at least with me. But then, you know, I I fiercely passed it on to them, and and you always think, is this the right thing? And then we discovered your work, and we're very excited, and we're very grateful that it's out there.
Nicole Garcia:So we'd like to hear from you enough of us. If you could kind of talk a bit about why it's so important, those first 3 years.
Erica Komisar:Well, the first 3 years is what we call it the first critical period of right brain development. And so the right brain is responsible for a bunch of important things. 1, it's responsible for emotional regulation, which is the ability to not allow our feelings to go too high or too low, to get our feelings back to a state of homeostasis. And that's not a given. You're not born with that, nor are you born resilient to adversity or stress because mothers also perform another important function, which they buffer children from stress in the 1st 3 years.
Erica Komisar:They keep the stress regulating part of the brain very quiet and inactive in the 1st year. So, by the time it starts to come online towards the end of the 1st year, it's incrementally introduced. Stress is incrementally introduced, and that child then builds a resilience or a resistance to that kind of a healthy set of defenses to that kind of stress. But the idea that we are forcing neurologically vulnerable, neurologically immature little people to the amounts of stress that we are is because we project onto them in modern society that they're more capable of managing stress than they actually are. They're actually completely incapable of managing stress in a healthy way.
Erica Komisar:That doesn't mean that if you separate from a neonate who is incredibly, emotionally, and neurologically vulnerable, they won't develop defenses. They will, but they develop what we call pathological defenses, which don't serve them in the future. They develop things like attachment disorders. And so it's not that so parents could say well I let them cry it out at 3 months and look they're fine. They may seem fine, but what you may have done to them and probably did do to them by making them cry it out at 3 months is that you forced them into a state of learned helplessness, which then has many consequences in the future for them in terms of their ability to connect with others, to trust the environment that they're in, to emotionally feel resilient in the future to stress.
Erica Komisar:So the damage you may be doing you may not see immediately, but in many cases you will see ultimately. So mothers serve as, I guess you could say they are bioregulators for babies, psycho bioregulators for baby. They both regulate a baby's emotions. They also help to regulate a baby's the the physical because we know that the physical and the emotional are connected, and in most parts of the world, mothers carry babies on their bodies for the 1st year to regulate their emotional and bodily functions. 1 of the researchers in my book, Being There, that I interviewed goes all around the world observing mothering behavior said, the babies in the west, particularly in America, but in the west too, Western Europe, cry more.
Erica Komisar:They cry more than babies in any other part of the world because babies in other parts of the world don't need to cry because they're worn on their mother's bodies. So the mothers serve as regulators getting them back to that state of homeostasis without them having to get into a stressful state. After a year, babies cry when they're frustrated, babies cry when they're sad, babies cry when they're angry. But the idea that for the 1st year, crying is not something that babies are meant to do a hell of a lot. And so we in the West say, let them cry.
Erica Komisar:It's good for them. No. It's not good
Nicole Garcia:for them.
Music:Right. Spoil you're gonna spoil your baby.
Erica Komisar:It's a false narrative to suit the adults and to help the adults around those babies to justify their own independence.
Nicole Garcia:There's something in the book that says, and I don't remember who exactly, said it, but to become truly independent, a child must be very dependent.
Erica Komisar:Yes.
Nicole Garcia:And I really loved that. And also that, you know, that human touch reduces stress hormones, cortisol. And, I don't remember where in the book, but about carrying them on your left so that they can literally feel your heart beat, calms them down. It's just all so interesting to me. And but, I mean, my kid was on top of me all day long, and sometimes I would be like, Mom, is this okay?
Nicole Garcia:Because I just feel like it's, for me, it was easier. I'm like, you know, we bed share. By the way, my daughter is 9. I don't know if it's right or wrong, but my kids still sleep with me. They're 79, but they they just don't seem ready, and they get really freaked out when I even mention it.
Nicole Garcia:And it's like, it's not bothering me, so if it ain't broke, you know, I think every kid is different in that way. But, yeah, at first, I was like, oh my gosh. Is this I I would call my mom, and my mom would be like, don't worry. Just let it be. Go with the flow.
Nicole Garcia:Don't worry about the timing because then that would stress out about the timing and the feedings because the world, books, and even doctors tell you, get them on a schedule and everything has to be, you know and it that would stress me out even more, to be honest.
Erica Komisar:Instead of listening to your instincts, instead of the doctors telling you to listen to your instincts. And again, the idea of feeding babies on demand versus feeding babies on a schedule. Food isn't just for physical hunger. Food is for emotional sustenance. It's for emotional comfort and soothing.
Erica Komisar:So when a baby cries to be breastfed, they're not just crying for food. They're crying because they feel fearful, mostly. They're scared, and they need to be comforted. And so when you deny a baby what they need, again, you're forcing a baby to develop kind of a learned helplessness pathological defenses path. And so you need to know that when you do that because society is not telling you the truth.
Erica Komisar:Society is saying, don't worry about it. Let them cry. They'll be fine. And what I'm telling you is as a mental health professional, our kids are not fine.
Nicole Garcia:And that carries on to we'll get to the adolescents later, but it is connected to, I think, how they handle stress as adolescents. I'm not there yet, but I feel like I'm getting there because my daughter's 9 and we're gonna get to that. But, can you get a little more into like the the uniqueness of the mother? Like, you know, biologically fathers and mothers nurture differently.
Erica Komisar:We just had Mother's Day. So I can say that, you know, in some way, the contradiction to say mothers don't matter, and yet we celebrate Mother's Day. In other countries like Sweden, they they're not even allowing you to use the word mother anymore, But in our country, we have this weird contradiction. We still celebrate mothers and say, get your mother's flowers and, you know, acknowledge your mothers, and which is right, because mothers are unique and mothers are different than fathers. There's a Father's Day, fathers are also unique and incredibly critical and important, but Hormonally, mothers and fathers respond to Hormonally, mothers and fathers respond to their nurturing hormones with different behaviors.
Erica Komisar:So if you want to say that parenting is a set of behaviors that in response to our hormones, it absolutely is because we're mammals, and mammals all have certain young. And for mothers, whether it's, you know, rat mothers or human mothers or monkey mothers, it's all the same. We're just a mammal, and that is that we produce something called oxytocin, and oxytocin is a love hormone, euphemistically called the love hormone, but it helps in the bonding and attachment process. It also reduces cortisol levels, so there's an inverse relationship between high levels of oxytocin, this bonding hormone, and the reduction of stress hormones or Cortisol. So when we nurture our young, when we're sensitive, empathic nurtures, when we breastfeed, when we're when we're physically and emotionally available to our young, it reduces the stress levels in those children and in ourselves.
Erica Komisar:And interestingly, all of this going out into the workplace so early and sort of what I call drop and run, like you drop a baby at the hospital, and then within 6 weeks you run. And that's causing tremendous stress to mothers too, even the anticipation of it. So we say, what is postpartum depression? It's not an easy thing to define, but postpartum depression is it's both hormonal but environmental. And what I mean by that is if you take a mother who's vulnerable, either vulnerable because she had past losses and traumas, and you now overlay onto her the expectation and the anticipation that she has to feel conflicts about staying home with her very young baby.
Erica Komisar:Now you have a formula for postpartum depression, depression, and it's deeply unconscious to those mothers, but those mothers now feel incredibly conflicted about that baby and caring for that baby. So, you know, we have increased the chances of postpartum depression in women because we're separating mothers and babies so early, but that oxytocin is so very important in the bonding and attachment process. Fathers produce oxytocin too, but when they nurture their young, it comes from a different part of their brains, and it produces a different behavior. With mothers, it makes them more sensitive nurturers, meaning the correlating behavior is that they tune into babies' distress and want to soothe the baby in distress. You'd say they're hyper vigilant to soothe babies in distress, whereas in fathers it makes them more playful tactile stimulators of babies.
Erica Komisar:Fathers are the love objects of play and separation, but not of attachment because fathers aren't as good at soothing babies in distress. It's not hormonally in their makeup. Doesn't mean they can't learn it, but it doesn't come instinctually to them. What does come instinctually to them is playful tactile stimulation, throwing the baby up in the air, tickling the baby, distracting the baby, making them smile, but not tuning into the distress. Fathers are good at something else, which is, protective aggression.
Erica Komisar:There's a hormone called vasopressin, which is more prevalent in fathers. There was some research done in the UK, where mothers and fathers lay in bed, and when the baby cried, the mothers woke up, the father slept through it. There's the oxytocin, makes mothers vigilant to babies' distress. But the father slept through the babies' cries. But when there was the rustling of leaves outside the window, the fathers woke up, and the mother slept through it.
Erica Komisar:So meaning, fathers are very attuned to predatorial threats, which is why they have a lot of what's called vasopressin. Mothers and fathers are not the same. They're different, and they have different strengths, and they have different important and critical, and necessary parts to to their jobs, but they're not the same.
Nicole Garcia:So interesting, And it makes so much sense. What can you, because not every woman can stay home. I I feel very lucky that I was able to. Not that it not that it wasn't a sacrifice. I mean, you know, in other ways.
Nicole Garcia:But there are women that just don't have that option. And what advice can you give those listeners?
Erica Komisar:Yeah. Mothers who have to work. I think if you know this information, you have to be constantly reevaluating your own behavior and your own choices. Sometimes people will say, oh, she's so elitist because she says not all mothers, you know, can stay home. And and this is, of course, true, which is why I advocate for a full paid leave in this country of at least a full year, if not more.
Erica Komisar:Such a hard thing to get in this country. You wouldn't believe it in every other part of the world. It's not, it's just assumed that there's a paid leave. So we really are the worst.
Nicole Garcia:It's awful.
Erica Komisar:Yeah. But having said that, some mothers have to work. But all mothers have choices of some kind. Maybe that choice is how many hours they work, maybe that choice is what kind of childcare they choose, maybe that choice is if they go out after work versus coming home. You know, there are many ways in which mothers make choices, even mothers who have to work.
Jackie:That's, you know, a lot of food for thought. Okay. We wanna sort of move to the Chicken Little and the Sky Isn't Falling. Your other book, Raising Resilient Adolescents in the Age of Anxiety. Tell us about first, I love the title.
Jackie:What made you choose the title of the book?
Erica Komisar:Well, interestingly, the original title was called Second Chances. You know, the publisher gives it the title, but they liked the title. I actually came up with Chicken Little because when I was little, that cartoon, I just had that in my head. It was that anxious little bird thinking that the sky was going to fall at any moment, is sort of what our teenagers are feeling right now, and what parents are feeling. So the truth is that the book is written for parents.
Erica Komisar:So is it the little bird that is running around saying the sky is falling, or is it the parents running around saying the sky is falling? So the book is really for parents, but they can share the information with their children. And I think the idea is that parents are running around thinking the sky is falling. And parents need to be well versed. They need to be well educated.
Erica Komisar:They need to understand. They need to be able to change, which is why I wrote the book. Parents can change. I have a lot of faith. I do a lot of parent guidance in my practice.
Erica Komisar:It's a big part of my practice. Parents come to me to talk about their children. Parents have the capacity to change, and it's only if parents change that children can change because the truth is that any child therapist worth their salt will not see a child without also seeing the parents for therapy, not together but at a separate time in the treatment. Because if you help a child with the family dynamics, but then you send that child back into the family with the same dynamics, you're basically undermining all the good work you've done. Only if you change a child's environment can that child sustainably change.
Erica Komisar:So you have to work with the parents. So that's why I wrote the book that I did. Because if parents can learn and change, then their children will have an easier time changing too.
Jackie:It's a scary moment, adolescence for parents. I think that what we parents don't understand sometimes it's how scary it is for them and how vulnerable it is for your adolescent. We live and we feel that this is the age of anxiety. Can you expand on that? You work with that in the book and how it affects our adolescents, this age of anxiety.
Erica Komisar:Again, the second book is about the second. Adolescence is the second critical period of brain development. And it's no coincidence that it follows the first because the first period of 0 to 3 lays down the foundation for a child's mental health. The second period synthesizes it, consolidates it, confirms it. And so if you didn't get what you needed in the first 3 years, you go into adolescence which is a small t trauma for any child.
Erica Komisar:You go in more vulnerable to breakdown. So the reason that it's the age of anxiety is not necessarily, I mean, there's social media, there's climate change, and there's all these things. But if you look at my generation, we had 3 Mile Island blowing up and nuclear power plants melting down and the end of the Vietnam War and then we had the Iraq War. And we had a lot of tough stuff to deal with too. We had high murder rates in New York City and it's not as if it was such a wonderful world before.
Erica Komisar:Social media has changed things a lot, but it's not really why the kids are breaking down. It's a factor. It's a very important contributing factor, but the kids are going into adolescence more vulnerable. And that's the key. If you go into adolescence more vulnerable with all of the pressures today, many of which are greater, then you're more likely to break down.
Erica Komisar:It's the best way I can phrase it to you is, you know, with all these bridges breaking down, I'm gonna say I'm gonna use a bridge metaphor, which is if a bridge is vulnerable, if it's not well structured from the beginning, if it wasn't built well and you exceed the weight limit on the bridge, then that bridge is gonna become more and more fragile over time and eventually fall into the river. Right? That's what happens. And children are like bridges. If they are built well in the beginning, then they're gonna be more fragile and think of adolescence as a huge amount of weight excess on that bridge.
Erica Komisar:So you have to build the bridge well from the beginning. But if you missed building that bridge well, the second book I wrote, Chicken Little, was about the fact that you have another opportunity as a parent to do a kind of a do over. It's not exactly a do over. You can't ever do over. But you do have another chance to repair a lot of what happened in your absence.
Erica Komisar:You have a chance to, in many ways, do a lot of the things that you couldn't do when they were 0 to 3. Some parents don't realize what they've done or haven't done until after their kids are out of that 0 to 3 window because their kids are having emotional problems or mental health problems. And then they realize, oh, my gosh, I wasn't there. I kinda neglected my kids for my work, for my outside interest, because I was depressed, because I was distracted, because whatever. And so a lot of parents don't realize till they're out of that window.
Erica Komisar:And this book was meant to say it's not the end of the world. You have another chance because the brain is in a similar state of flux as 0 to 3. In truth, the way I would describe it is that 0 to 3 is a period of neurogenesis of cell growth. And then 9 to 25 or adolescence is a period of cell pruning, cutting back the cells you don't need. And in both cases, the brain is very vulnerable to the environment, and you're the environment.
Erica Komisar:In adolescence, there's much more to the environment. There's school, there's friends, there's social media, but you're still the biggest part of their environment.
Jackie:That was so wonderful that you get a second chance to repair it. I'm sorry. I I interrupted you.
Erica Komisar:No. But but you have to be willing to change. I mean, that's the thing. You can't do it the same way you did it, and you can't be defensive, and you can't be justifying your existence. You have to really be vulnerable.
Erica Komisar:So if if you wanna create a different path for your kids, then first you have to allow yourself to change. You have to be vulnerable to change and you have to take responsibility. I I would say the most important thing is to take responsibility. When you say to your kids and adolescents, you know, I'm really sorry I wasn't there for you when you were little. I was distracted.
Erica Komisar:I was ill. I was depressed. I was working. I thought work was more important than raising kids. And I was wrong and I'm so sorry.
Erica Komisar:And I wanna be here now. That goes a long way for kids. They may not forgive you right away, but that goes a long way. Taking responsibility goes a long way towards forgiveness. 1 would say there is no forgiveness unless the person that you're forgiving has taken responsibility for their part in things.
Jackie:It's so true. I I've learned now in my old age that when I have a challenge in front of me, I have a good friend who who actually told me, why don't you ask yourself, how am I complicit in this situation? Whatever it is, it that that phrase can fit anywhere. I know Nikki has something to say, but what stood out and made so much sense, actually, for the 3 of us was the ages of adolescence and how adolescents may start at 9 and end at 25.
Erica Komisar:A little bit later in boys, probably up to 28 in boys. Yeah.
Jackie:That explains so much if we are aware of that reality on how we interact with our children and how we continue to raise them throughout that. They're they're not fully baked. They're not using Vanessa's words.
Nicole Garcia:Right.
Jackie:So can you tell us a little bit I know that there's I know we're almost at the end of our show and but I think this would be a great positive way because for me, it was illuminating. Oh my god. This is why all the you know, we we tend to make judgment, right, of of them, but it's premature. We're like the premature society. We want everything before it's really ready.
Erica Komisar:Well, our expectations of our children are a lot of what influences them, right? If we project into them that they're fully baked before they are, again, they have to develop defenses that aren't necessarily organic. We all need defenses. People come into therapy and they think that, oh, this therapist is gonna leave me defenseless. I'm gonna be defenseless.
Erica Komisar:I'm gonna have nothing. I'm gonna be exposed. I can't do that. We don't do that as therapists. What we do is we examine people's defenses together with them.
Erica Komisar:We're not doing it separately. We're doing it with them. We examine people's defenses with them and then evaluate which of those defenses are healthy and which need to be replaced with healthier defenses. So more like driving a shift car. We don't take away people's defenses.
Erica Komisar:We help to replace them with better and healthier defenses. So think of defenses as something that we grow organically. And adolescence is a period where organically kids grow healthy defenses but only if they can continue to use their parents as a way to process what they can't process. So there's so much between 925 that they cannot process on their own. Feelings, experiences, things that overwhelm them, things that confuse them, things that are still dangerous to them.
Erica Komisar:So things like judgment and perspective, that's part of right brain functioning, executive functioning, that's part of right brain functioning. So all those things don't develop until the mid to late 20s. And so as a result, they still use us when they need us to process certain feelings and experiences. So think of yourself as a parent like a kidney. What would you do without your kidneys?
Erica Komisar:You'd die without your kidneys. You need your kidneys to process toxins that you put into your body so you can be healthy. You could say there's many things in an adolescent's experience in life that they cannot yet process. And so you'd say that parents are still the digestive system or the kidneys for children under the age of 28, let's say. Boys and 25 for girls.
Erica Komisar:And so when we're not present because we assume and project onto them that they can handle much more than they can, and we get angry at them because they didn't have good judgment or they didn't have perspective, then we're the ones who are not informed, not them. That's the best way I can describe it. They still need you to help process what is unprocessable for them.
Nicole Garcia:I took away also because you say this, that honesty and openness is the key to helping ease this transition and this time of adolescence. And I always say, like, it's just a lot of talking and listening and talking and listening.
Erica Komisar:That's a very big piece of it. But, you know, a lot of it is processing.
Jackie:Mhmm.
Erica Komisar:It's it's interpreting. It's helping them to connect their actions to their consequences. And there's a lot in the book that can help parents, I think, to to understand. But, yeah. I mean, you basically are their kidneys.
Nicole Garcia:And there's 3 phases within because it's such a wide range. I mean, 9 is so different from 25 even though it's adolescence. I mean, I didn't even realize that there's 3 different, the early, the middle, and the later adolescence. I, for example, quickly, my daughter's 9. And I actually shared this with my sister and mom the other day.
Nicole Garcia:Like, I think Lily is prepubescent. I didn't go through it that early, but I feel like she's starting to get potty odor and she's her moods, like, sometimes, like, the overreactions over certain things. And I don't wanna undervalue what she's feeling, but I feel like it's a lot of feelings. And then, you know, she knows women get pregnant and have the babies, but what is sex? And, you know, all this stuff is starting to come up at such an early age.
Nicole Garcia:But now that I read that it can start at 8 or 9 for girls, I mean, that's amazing to me. But also, can you help me and those listening that have young young children starting this whole transition into adolescence, like, how much information do you give?
Erica Komisar:I will tell you this. If you don't tell them at home, they'll learn it at school. It'll either be forcefully fed to them at school, or it will be fed to them by their friends. And it will be the wrong information. So in my generation, we started to talk about sex at around 5 or 6, but in a very gentle and non intrusive way, the difference between boys and girls and men's and women's bodies.
Erica Komisar:And you started with when mommies and daddies are in love, they get together and their bodies get together and they make a baby. And then you wait for the questions. Well, how does that happen? And then you start to get the books out, and there are some wonderful books where you just start to show them the difference. And you describe it very perfunctory in a very like this is factually, this is what happens, you know, there's a sperm, there's an egg, and this is what happens.
Erica Komisar:And then you wait. The problem with today is it's TMI. And it's TMI at a very young age.
Nicole Garcia:Okay, yeah.
Erica Komisar:He's in 5th grade are learning about anal sex. They're learning about vaginal warts. So I think like it's somehow it went from this is a sperm and this is an egg and this is a woman's body and this is a man's body and men and women who love each other produce babies in love. You know, this is how it started 75 years ago, and somehow it's become almost hyper vigilant about the sordid parts of sexuality. And I think that's really sad because the truth is that sex is a beautiful thing and making babies is a beautiful thing and it's nothing to be ashamed of.
Erica Komisar:But it's also not something that you go into great depth with their young children. And generally, they don't ask for too much because they can't handle that much. So the rule about topics like sex is that or what we call more difficult topics sex and death is you give enough information to satisfy them, and you wait for questions, but you don't volunteer more information than they can handle. You have to be patient and wait for the questions, right? And I think some of these curriculum at school at such a young age are forcing these children to be overstimulated with information that they're not ready to handle.
Erica Komisar:My 14 year old son came home, and he went to 1 of these parties in the end of middle school, beginning of high school. They called them fests. And they are parties that don't allow alcohol in the school, but in in these parties. But, you know, I'm sure the kids do alcohol before whatever. But what they are is they're dance parties or whatever.
Erica Komisar:But my son came home and said, I kissed a girl. We said to him, that's great. Tell us about it. And he said, well, all the boys and girls were kissing each other on the dance floor. It was like it was almost like a thing.
Erica Komisar:Like you'd kiss someone and then you'd go to someone else and kiss. And we said, honey, you haven't kissed your first girl. Because kissing is an intimate thing and that wasn't intimate. Come back to us when you've really had somebody that you care about that you're going out with and you care about and you kiss that girl, you come back to us and tell us about that. So a year later, he had a girlfriend and he came back and he said, mom, I really kissed this girl that I really like.
Erica Komisar:I said, now you've had your first kiss.
Jackie:Oh, that's a beautiful story. We read it.
Erica Komisar:Yeah. The point is, you know, I mean, I think that if if you allow them to teach it at school, they're going to teach it in a very detached, very, salacious, I hate to say it, but talking about like sexually transmitted diseases and anal sex and perversity. And I just think that that's not how you wanna teach your kids about sex initially. They're gonna hear it at school eventually about that, but as you say, openness and non nonjudgment, That's the key really, not judging your child.
Jackie:Oh, Eric, I think that this is a perfect segue to unfortunately end our conversation. But I think that as parents, you know, you know how we need and we have to go to school for everything. You know, you have you wanna drive, you have to have your license. You have to renew your license. You wanna be a doctor.
Jackie:You wanna be a property manager. Whatever it is you wanna be, you're gonna have to go to school. You have to get educated, and someone's gonna have to say you passed. Right? Well, 1 of the most valuable things that I take away from your books is that there's a lot that we need to learn and that it's our responsibility as parents or parents to be, even caregivers, to find that information for the benefit of our children.
Jackie:And again, we have the tendency in general to say this youth, this is I'm so happy that you brought up all the horrible things in our generation, that were there and just say, well, how am I complicit? How can I help this? And it's not easy, but, you know, we need to learn. And, being there is a great word to start in your book. And then, Chicken Little, obviously.
Jackie:Follow that because there are 2 very, very specific stages in a child's life. So thank you very, very much.
Nicole Garcia:Can you tell us if you're working on anything now?
Erica Komisar:I am. I'm working on a book about divorce. Basically how to go through a divorce and do the least harm to your children, how to raise healthy children in spite of getting divorced. And that's a really important thing because it's a child centered divorce where you have to put your own feelings of pain aside to prioritize your children's health.
Nicole Garcia:That is amazing and wonderful and so important. And I come from a divorced home, and I was 13. My sister was 15. So I know that's gonna help a lot of parents for sure and children. Thank you so much for talking to us, Erica.
Nicole Garcia:And I am excited to read your new book whenever it comes out and maybe we'll have you on again.
Erica Komisar:That would be
Nicole Garcia:great. Amazing. Thank you so much, and goodbye, everyone. We'll see you next time. Have a good 1.
Nicole Garcia:Take care. Bye.
Music:Be here when it's time to see you again. And if you fall, she says, if someone breaks your heart, I'll
Jackie:mend your wounds in
Music:this nest of Never the empty nest, my mother always says wherever you may go to grow this will always be your home.