With the data now available, we realized just how important the early years of life are for a child. We know now that children need affection, safety, and security—loving eyes that know them and familiar arms to hold them. But mother and child, instead of being understood as the most fundamental of all human relationships, have been splintered and pitted against each other.
The spectrum of mental health issues our culture is navigating point to some very serious consequences when children are not properly attached to a mother or other surrogate caregiver. “A mother’s love is unique and critically important to the development of a child’s sense of themselves as valuable and loveable,” Komisar explains. It is also connected to a child’s capacity and later an adult woman’s capacity for empathy, “to think about and feel for others and their deep emotional ability to be related to and be intimate with others.”
This lack of emotional stability by parents has also led to a dramatic rise in attachment disorders among adults today, which often leaves adults in a childlike mental state. Cluster B personality types, which includes antisocial personality disorder, borderline personality disorder, histrionic personality disorder, and narcissistic personality disorder are all exacerbated. Children who have not properly attached to an adult are not able to properly regulate their own emotions. Narcissism, in particular, Komisar notes, is a “disease of deficiency” that also makes it difficult for an adult to then feel empathy for others, truncating the full range of emotions. Psychiatrist Hannah Spier has pointed out that compassion and understanding of others’ pain “can only blossom when a person has her own emotional stability.” This is not to suggest that every woman who calls herself a feminist has these issues, but only that the issues have played a role in feminism’s proliferation.
The damage in detaching mother from child isn’t limited to children. Dr. Spier has recognized stages in women’s lives when feminism’s proposals frustrate the natural desires of the female heart, often leading to anxiety or depression. Using her native country of Norway as an example, a land which enjoys very generous childcare and maternity leave, Spier says government efforts haven’t made women happier or solved the birth rate collapse. “Norwegian mothers,” Spier explains, “are increasingly unhappy. In 2021, 76 percent said they didn’t get enough time with their babies, and nearly half took additional unpaid leave on top of the eight months already provided by the state.” Despite the data, the Norwegian government isn’t changing course but is doubling down. These policies, Spier adds, “were never about helping families. They were built on a deeper ideological project, one that treated women’s attachment to home and children as a problem to be solved.”
Meanwhile, Spier asks a troubling question about the women she has seen recover from depression and anxiety. Were these women really suffering from mental illness? The answer for many of these women was to find a good man and start a family. “Does this count as a clinical diagnosis,” she asks, “when the cure is simply marrying a man low on the neurotic scale and having a child with him?” The solution is something as basic as real attachment, real affirmation, real relationships.
Finding Home
Tara Isabella Burton, in her book Strange Rites, speaks of this now ubiquitous sense of being lost in the general population today. She chronicles the rise in mixing and remixing various occult, mainstream, and traditional practices in ways that impart meaning to the lives of those who feel lost. They are looking, Burton says, for four elements: “meaning, purpose, community, and ritual.”
Burton’s own life experience plays this out; prior to her conversion she was deeply involved in one of these mixed occult communities.
I remember, vividly, sneaking awkwardly and still sober out of a literary journal party…where I knew nobody, only to all but sob with relief when I entered that red room [a bar where the occult group met]. I…had found a place I felt “at home.” I remember telling myself that I wanted to live…in this place where everything seemed meaningful, where everything mattered. A place that—although, despite nearly a decade of academic study, I did not have the language for it yet—was sacred.
Burton and her new companions grew up around places that engaged in “strange rites” and were attracted to the sense of meaning and community that was rich enough for Burton to describe it as a “homecoming.” Later, Burton would find her real spiritual home, Christianity, but she describes well the restlessness of unmoored people looking high and low to find meaning in their life. They are looking for a home.
The idea of home is imprinted in our soul, starting first in the safety of the womb, then, hopefully, the place where we are safe and treasured in our early childhood. The desire for a sacred place of belonging, as I wrote in the book Theology of Home, “is part of the spiritual sleight-of-hand, where God has placed within our hearts the desire for a perfect home—the perfect home: heaven. The yearning or even homesickness we feel for the Father’s home is curious because it is a longing for something we have never seen.” Even those who have never had a good home or who are homeless have an awareness of what a good home is like, or what it is like to be embraced in one.
The Industrial Revolution coupled with the disvaluing of female gifts created a vacuum that the feminist ideology easily moved into. The simultaneous loss of home and mother eliminated the glue that holds Western civilization together.
The Truth about Home
Sophia Gilbert, in her 2025 book Girl on Girl, offers an example of how the patriarchy is still feminism’s favorite boogeyman when it comes to women’s work. Gilbert contends that women are getting shafted when it comes to power and influence because men continually leverage whatever is necessary to make sure women don’t gain more of their turf. Citing the fact that the all-female version of Ghostbusters was, well, a bust, Gilbert concludes that truly men just aren’t ready for a female president. “If America wasn’t ready to even temporarily cede a fictional world of hearse-driving, ectoplasm-dodging paranormal investigators to women, it could hardly have been expected to give one of us the nuclear codes.” Gilbert doesn’t seem to be aware of another option: the possibility that the all-female Ghostbusters left much to be desired. Instead, Gilbert concludes that “the system is resolutely rigged against us.” But women have to keep trying, according to Gilbert’s point of view, because “to be deprived of ambition, is to be infantilized.”
But does the absence of ambition infantilize women? Are we defined by a never-quenched grasping for more? Happily, an increasing number of women today are spotting the cracks in Gilbert’s theory and are increasingly unwilling to sacrifice their families on the altar of personal ambition. The former editor of Teen Vogue, Samhita Mukhopadhyay, wrote the book The Myth of Making It, which “unpacks the lies we tell ourselves about work.” Here’s the problem:
We’re overworked, underpaid, burned out, uninterested in being girl bosses but also not entirely thrilled by the prospect of frittering our one wild, precious life away working in lazy girl jobs. So now what?
[Mukhopadhyay] takes a hard look at the narratives we tell ourselves about work and success, and considers how we can begin to undo the worst of them. Mukhopadhyay lays out how women in particular have been sold a brand of corporate feminism that prioritizes individual ambition and advancement while requiring us to constantly make sacrifices for work, pretending our lives outside the office don’t exist.
More and more women, particularly younger women, are beginning to question the blind obedience women have to their careers and reclaim aspects of their personal lives.
Editor’s Note: This article was adapted from a chapter in Something Wicked: Why Feminism Can’t Be Fused with Christianity by Carrie Gress, available from Sophia Institute Press.
