Being There: Why Prioritizing Motherhood in the First Three Years Matters - Hardcover

Erica Komisar

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0143109294 ISBN 13: 9780143109297

Publisher: Tarcher/Putnam,US, 2017

Synopsis

In this important and conversation-starting book, veteran psychoanalyst Erica Komisar offers a provocative and compelling premise: a mother's emotional and physical presence in her child's life--especially during the first three years--means that her child has a greater chance of growing up emotionally healthy, happy, secure, and resilient. When that essential presence goes missing, the child is at higher risk for social, emotional, and developmental issues, both immediate and long term.
Compassionate and balanced, and focusing on the emotional health and well-being of children as well as that of the mothers who care for them, this book shows mothers and fathers how to give their children the best chance for developing into healthy and loving adults. Based on more than two decades of clinical work, established psychoanalytic theory, and the most current and cutting-edge neurobiological research on caregiving, attachment, and brain development, the book explains:
- How to establish emotional connection with a newborn or young child--regardless of whether you're able to pause your career to stay home
- How to select and train quality childcare if necessary--and how to ease transitions and minimize stress for your baby or toddler
- What's true and false about widely held beliefs like "Babies are resilient" and how to combat feelings of post-partum depression or boredom
- Why three months of maternity leave is not long enough--and how women and their partners can take control of their choices to provide for their family's emotional needs in the first three years

About this title

About the Author

Erica Komisar, LCSW is a clinical social worker, psychoanalyst and parent guidance expert who has been in private practice in New York City for the last 25 years. A graduate of Georgetown and Columbia Universities and The New York Freudian Society, Ms Komisar 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 lives is New York City with her husband, optometrist and social entrepreneur Dr. Jordan Kassalow, and their three teenage children.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Being There

Why Prioritizing Motherhood in the First Three Years Matters

By Erica Komisar

Penguin Publishing Group

Copyright © 2017 Erica Komisar
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-14-310929-7

Chapter 3

What Does It Mean to Be a Present Mother?


How Do We Define Presence?

You are sitting on the floor with your one-year-old, close to him but giving him room to play. You make eye contact frequently and lovingly touch him often. You watch him play, cooing and observing and describing his emotions and actions to him. You smile when he smiles at you and wait patiently when he needs to look away or at an object, ready to reengage when he gives you the cues he is ready.

When he is frustrated or angry, you mirror his feelings using your voice and facial expressions. It is helpful to try to imagine your own experience of discovery and wonder as a baby looking at and touching an object for the first time, experiencing it with your own mother. You are enjoying sitting on the floor, playing with your baby and being engaged in the experience, not thinking about the dishes in the sink or your email. You and your baby are involved in a dance of connection and space, attachment and separation, engagement and disengagement, rupture and repair. Sometimes your baby leads and you follow, and sometimes you lead and your baby follows. This playfulness and intimacy helps shape your baby’s developing brain and personality. To do this you must be in the moment, let go of all the adult means of distraction and stimulation. You need to focus on eye contact, touch, your tone of voice, facial expression, body language and awareness of your own mood and emotions.

Sometimes you may get bored or sleepy when playing with your baby, feeling understimulated yourself. This is as natural as when your baby looks away for a moment to collect himself and take a break from you. If you wait, then this moment passes and you reengage with your baby.

The Oxford dictionary defines presence as “the state or fact of existing, occurring, or being present.” Physical presence is the most obvious form of being there; certainly without a mother’s physical presence there is no emotional presence for a child. However, it is important to note that a mother can be with her child physically and still be emotionally checked out.

For a mother to be present, she must first be self-aware about and accept her own (sometimes conflicted) feelings about motherhood. In addition, she must be willing to make her child a priority in the time she spends with her. This means not only spending as much time as possible with a child during her first three years of life but also focusing on how that time is spent. We’re addicted to multitasking—reading our email while watching TV, sneaking a peak at our text messages at the dinner table. Yet researchers like Earl Miller, a neuroscientist at MIT, have shown that, in fact, that kind of divided attention is both destructive to relationships and stressful to individuals.

Presence also means emotional engagement. Dr. Beatrice Beebe, of Columbia University, and Dr. Miriam Steele, of the New School for Social Research, have done a lot of research in attachment and infant–mother interaction. They described in great detail the importance of the attunement of a mother to a baby in the early years. Attunement is another way of describing the dance of emotional interaction between a baby and a mother. When we dance, we need a partner who is present, responsive, and interactive, or else we are essentially dancing alone. This dance is how a mother helps her child learn to negotiate relationships and to develop a secure sense of herself in the world.

Presence means finding enjoyment in the experience of being with your baby and being able to tolerate the boring moments. Discovering the beauty and fascination in the little things throughout the day that your baby is learning. Presence means pleasure.

Finally, presence means that when a mother cannot be there, she is sensitive to the cues of her child when she returns, she is aware when she has been away too long or is too disconnected. Children are wise beyond their years. They are born with an innate sense of their essential needs and a pace of development that is unique to each of them. The director of the New School’s Attachment Research Center, Dr. Howard Steele, defined sensitive mothering as the capacity to respond promptly with appropriate care and concern to a child’s distress. When a mother is present for her child, she learns to read and interpret her child’s subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) nonverbal cues, which will tell her what that child needs and how he is coping with separation. A mother’s sensitivity will alert her to whether those needs are being met, or not, and can instruct her in how to help her baby upon her return. For example, when a baby is extremely anxious and clingy or turns away from his mother after a separation, a sensitive mother recognizes this as her child’s experience that she has been gone too long, and she needs to repair the rift.

We do not live in a perfect world, and there are times when we cannot meet all of our children’s needs, emotionally or physically. When this happens, we need to know how to repair the misalignment of their needs and our ability to meet those needs. You have to accept that some of these failures can be healed and some cannot. Repairing the separation makes a baby emotionally stronger and more resilient; immediately addressing the damage created by absence and temporary disconnection is the most successful approach to repairing it, but it is never too late to do so, even with older children. I will address how mothers can learn to repair these misalignments in Chapter 8.
 

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Excerpted from Being There by Erica Komisar. Copyright © 2017 Erica Komisar. Excerpted by permission of Penguin Publishing Group.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Tarcher/Putnam,US
• Publication date: 2017
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0143109294
• ISBN 13: 9780143109297
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 288