Politics, Policies, Science, and Parenthood

I found this article at the Wall Street Journal interesting for several reasons. Let’s start with an excerpt:

Ms. Komisar, 53, is a Jewish psychoanalyst who lives and practices on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. If that biographical thumbnail leads you to stereotype her as a political liberal, you’re right. But she tells me she has become “a bit of a pariah” on the left because of the book she published this year, “Being There: Why Prioritizing Motherhood in the First Three Years Matters.”

The premise of Ms. Komisar’s book—backed by research in psychology, neuroscience and epigenetics—is that “mothers are biologically necessary for babies,” and not only for the obvious reasons of pregnancy and birth. “Babies are much more neurologically fragile than we’ve ever understood,” Ms. Komisar says. She cites the view of one neuroscientist, Nim Tottenham of Columbia University, “that babies are born without a central nervous system” and “mothers are the central nervous system to babies,” especially for the first nine months after birth.

What does that mean? “Every time a mother comforts a baby in distress, she’s actually regulating that baby’s emotions from the outside in. After three years, the baby internalizes that ability to regulate their emotions, but not until then.” For that reason, mothers “need to be there as much as possible, both physically and emotionally, for children in the first 1,000 days.”

The regulatory mechanism is oxytocin, a neurotransmitter popularly known as the “love hormone.” Oxytocin, Ms. Komisar explains, “is a buffer against stress.” Mothers produce it when they give birth, breastfeed or otherwise nurture their children. “The more oxytocin the mother produces, the more she produces it in the baby” by communicating via eye contact, touch and gentle talk. The baby’s brain in turn develops oxytocin receptors, which allow for self-regulation at a later age.

Women produce more oxytocin than men do, which answers the obvious question of why fathers aren’t as well-suited as mothers for this sort of “sensitive, empathetic nurturing.” People “want to feel that men and women are fungible,” observes Ms. Komisar—but they aren’t, at least not when it comes to parental roles. Fathers produce a “different nurturing hormone” known as vasopressin, “what we call the protective, aggressive hormone.”

One of the aspects of the story that I found interesting is that I think it’s practically a Rorschach test for political views. If you’re an absolutist about equality between the sexes, I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if you found this story highly objectionable. So what if men and women are different?

A traditionalist conservative on the other hand will probably read this story as a vindication of his or her views of gender roles and the family. And so on.

It seems to me that, assuming the claims made in the article are correct, the empirical questions are what are the implications of this for child development and how persistent are they? Are the social changes of the last thirty or forty years in the developed world producing lasting psychological or emotional problems for our people? It would seem to that these matters should be verifiable but in all likelihood so politically volatile that they’re unlikely to be investigated.

The question it raises for me is that, again assuming that the claims made in the article are correct, there is no substitute for the relationship between mother and child, and that the harm is lasting, is what is the correct policy?

In the areas of parental leave and maternal leave the United States is, as in so much else, an outlier. Although employers may provide paid or unpaid parental or maternity leave as a benefit, they are not obligated to do so. Every OECD country other than the United States provides for some sort of obligatory paid maternal, in many cases paid by social insurance, i.e. the government. I hasten to note that by the standards articulated by Ms. Komisar (9 months after a child’s birth) no OECD country’s policy provides for adequate maternal leave.

I also don’t see how a reasonable policy governing maternal can be formulated without goring an entire herd of sacred cows. What I think is clear is that our present policies are inadequate.