On this episode of Inside Policy Talks, I speak with Erica Komisar LCSW about what children actually need in the earliest years of life, as it is often the subjective preferences of adults that are deemed more important in our culture of seemingly unconstrained rights-based entitlement.

We discuss the importance of maternal presence and stable family life in early childhood, the effects of daycare and family instability on child well-being, and the broader collapse of kinship, connection, and support networks. I question whether liberal ideas have contributed to an androgynous society, in which the neglect of sex differences in social norms and policies are having damaging consequences. We also cover the pressures on women whose cultural script tells them to do everything at once, and how our distorted ideas of freedom, work, and fulfillment have contributed to a wider care and connection deficit that I recently wrote about for Fairer Disputations.

Erica has sage advice, saying that you have a whole life ahead of you, and can work many of the goods of family and career into different stages, along with policy proposals for the nexus of issues around sex relations, family formation and caregiving.

If we want to address rising loneliness, anxiety, family breakdown, and social fragmentation, I’d say we need to think much more seriously about the conditions that allow strong families and healthy children to flourish. Macdonald-Laurier Institute