Modern Wisdom (Conversations) · Chris Williamson

#1081 - Erica Komisar - Why Children of Divorce Grow Into Broken Adults

April 6, 2026·2 hr 31 min·5 clips

Psychoanalyst Erica Komisar explains why her message on a mother's crucial presence in a child's first three years is seen as anti-feminist.

The central question is uncomfortable. The guest says her work became controversial because it says the quiet part out loud about early attachment, a mother's presence, and divorce. She pushes back on the anti-feminist caricature. As she frames it, the argument is not that women should not work. It is that babies need a physically and emotionally available mother, or primary attachment figure, as much as possible in the first three years. That distinction does a lot of work here. The conversation then turns to divorce, where the guest says 50-50 arrangements need more scrutiny because children can start to feel like property being divided up. Children are not contract negotiators. They feel practical changes as emotional facts, especially when homes, schools, and holidays start shifting. The host asks for specifics: how honest should parents be when they want to spare children adult realities without building a story that later falls apart? Her answer is careful, but it bites. Children, she says, know when adults are lying, so reassurance has to be sensitive without becoming conveniently false. Guilt is where things go wrong fastest. A parent may promise that holidays will stay the same or that the family will not really change because the guilt is unbearable. The child hears something bigger. When the promise fails, that reassurance becomes another breach of trust on top of the family rupture. The bluntest moment comes when she is asked to design the worst possible divorce for a child. She does not treat it like theory, because she says she has handled cases like that. The close gets practical: her book is framed as a guide to raising emotionally resilient children through separation, with the focus on limiting disruption and preserving trust.

As heard by us

A direct discussion of attachment, divorce, and the promises adults make to children.

Erica Komisar makes a forceful case for attachment, divorce, and the burden of telling children the truth without making promises adults cannot keep.

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Why you'd press play

If you want the blunt case for why divorce can damage a child's trust when adults make promises they cannot keep, press play.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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