Quality Time With Children, Is It Enough?

As mothers we live such harried lives, running from one thing to another, never focusing on our children exclusively. We take pride as modern mothers in being multi-taskers and living by the mantra that we can do it all and have it all, all at the same time. Quality time has become our excuse, our justification for being busy.

In fact, as a mother of three teenagers and a psychoanalyst and parent guidance expert, I say hooey. I believe we are failing our children and shortchanging ourselves. We have as women created a paradigm that depletes us, exhausts us and makes us feel guilty that we are not doing anything well.

The problem as I see it is that we have bought in hook line and sinker that unless we are high achieving, high earning and on a professional escalator going up that we are worthless, and not modern. Society tells us as women that mothering and nurturing is not valuable work because it is not paid when it is in fact the most valuable work of all.

Freud said we have to have “love and work” to be happy but love always came first and we seem to have forgotten just how important relationships are to our overall happiness in life. The 77 year grant study out of Harvard University for nearly 8 decades studied just what makes people happy and it took an academic study to tell us what we should have already known, that love and human connection is the secret to happiness not professional or material success.

As a mother I have seen what my physical and emotional presence has done for my children’s well being. I too was that woman in her 20’s who dreamed that she would take on the world and was focused on my own ambition and couldn’t imagine how having children would rock my world. I too imagined I could do everything well all at the same time. Then I gave birth and realized that this tiny vulnerable little boy was mine to love and care for forever and his emotional health was my responsibility. So I rewrote the script I had written in my own narcissistic way and my world was turned upside down in a good way. Yes, I took off the time in the beginning, 6 months to be exact, and then reentered the world of work but gingerly and at my own pace always checking to see how my absence was impacting my newborn son. So when I was gone too long he would tell me with his whole body and being. And then I had to pull back from my work to accommodate my son. My personal ambitions of being a master of the universe faded and were replaced by my desire to give my child the best of me I could give him. And that meant being as physically and emotionally present as possible.

My journey as a mother took me to a place I could never have realized or anticipated until he was born. A place of slowing down to his pace, being in the present rather than living my life thinking about all the things I could have, would have, should have done that day. When you get off the fast-paced treadmill we are all on, take the break to be home with your baby, and allow yourself to get into the rhythm of sleep, play, eat it is quite an enjoyable break from the harshness and expectations of modern life. It is a meditation which centres you on gratitude and what is most important, connection to your baby and to yourself.

Yes, there are hardships. No one tells you that mothering is the hardest job you will ever do. No sleep for 5 years (that’s right not 3 months or 6 months but 5 years), a routinized existence, the emotional rollercoaster of regulating a baby’s emotions from moment to moment which takes patience, energy and the ability to tolerate a great deal of frustration. Then there are dirty diapers, picking up toys endlessly and your baby spitting up in your hair regularly.

But then, ah, the sweetness of your baby’s smell, the softness of their skin, the delicious sound of their laughter and the way they can look deeply and lovingly for hours on end into your often tired but loving eyes. There is not greater or more valuable work you can do than being a mother, so get with the program society, no work outside the home is more valuable, period!

So what is wrong with the idea of quality time because you are overcommitted outside the home. Quality time is on your time and terms not on your baby’s time when they need you which is all the time.

Research shows that mothers provide two really important functions for babies throughout the day which gives them the best chance of being emotionally secure and mentally healthy going forward. From moment to moment mothers protect their children from stress which lays down the foundation for that child to become resilient to stress in the future. In addition, mothers regulate their baby’s emotions so the baby does not go too high or too low. So every time a baby cries and a mother soothes that baby she is actually regulating that babies emotions which is then internalized by the baby after three years so they can balance their own emotions. This is particularly critical in the first three years because it is the critical window of right or social-emotional brain development. By three years old a child’s social-emotional brain is 85% developed, which means you have a very short time to have a very important influence on your baby’s emotions for life.

So when we leave our babies for long periods of time either because we are working outside the home or are invested in other activities, our babies don’t sit on the counter like vases waiting for us to come home to regulate their emotions and protect them from stress. They are vulnerable all day long and needing us to function as Myron Hofer of Columbia University called “their psychobiological regulators”.

We have a view of babies as being resilient from birth which is a myth. Babies are not born resilient, rather they become resilient because we have been present enough of the time both physically and emotionally. In fact, there is a theory that suggests that babies are born 9 months too soon and are much more fragile than previously thought and that mothers are the nervous system or the emotional skin for the baby in the first year.

When we accept the modern day version of parenting which is - just be there when you are there - we miss the mundane, and ordinary moments of your baby’s life which make you intimate emotionally. It is only through accepting a baby’s intense dependency in the first three years that we can be emotionally close with our baby.

There are no perfect mothers or perfect babies, and the truth is that many babies and mothers may not be perfect matches for one another. And many mothers today suffer from postpartum depression. Research shows that 1 in 6 mothers suffer from postpartum depression and those are only the ones that are diagnosed. In reality, there are many who slip through the cracks and never get the help they need. When a mother is bored, resentful, ambivalent or overwhelmed to the point that they would rather be at work than with their baby they are told by society go back to work, your baby will be fine. Well in my practice I am seeing that many of the babies are not fine and their mothers are not fine.

There is a rise in emotional disorders in children who are being diagnosed and medicated younger and younger with disorders related to stress and emotional regulation. Depression and anxiety are disorders of emotional regulation and I believe are connected to the absence of mothers in babies’ lives on a daily basis. So our children are not fine with quality time alone and in fact need more of our quantity time and attention as well.

We have to make up our minds as mothers. We say our children are our priority but we then spend more hours away from them than with them. It makes sense that what we prioritize we spend the most time on, and our children need us to prioritize them in the first three years. Even working mothers can prioritize their children and it doesn’t have to be a working versus non-working issue. As we expect to live longer and longer lives we have a great many years to be high achieving materially and professionally but we only have a short time to have a critical influence on our children that will cast a long shadow for their lives.

Erica Komisar, LCSW is a psychoanalyst, parent guidance expert and author of "Being There: Why Prioritizing Motherhood in the First Three Years Matters".