In this episode of Family Matters, Simon interviews Erica Komisar – a clinical social worker, psychoanalyst, author, coach to parents, a mother, New Yorker and much sought after commentator across television, radio, and international conferences.

Erica stresses the vital importance of a child’s attachment to its parents, arguing that parents should do everything they can to be the ones raising their child – not early childcare, not the government, or others.

She explains that children aged 0-3 years of age are undergoing critical brain-development and in which children need one primary attachment figure—usually the mother, with attachment beginning in utero—to provide physical and emotional safety, stress buffering, and emotion regulation.

Erica notes that a person’s social-emotion system is about 85% developed by age three and that insecure attachment – where parents have not been close to their child during the first 12 months – is clearly linked to a child’s later mental health and resilience problems.