The Worst Ages for Kids to Experience Divorce, with Erica Komisar
ManTalks Podcast
Connor Beaton
4.8 • 598 Ratings
🗓️ 22 June 2026
⏱️ 47 minutes
🔗️ Recording | Apple Podcasts | RSS
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
I sit down with Erica Komisar to talk about divorce, attachment, parenting, and the values shaping modern family life. We explore what current research says about separation and child development, why timing matters when divorce happens, and how early relationships influence who we become as adults. Erica also shares her perspective on motherhood, identity, emotional regulation, and the cultural shifts affecting relationships today. If you're navigating family decisions, raising children, or thinking deeply about what creates a meaningful life, this episode offers plenty to reflect on.
SHOW HIGHLIGHTS
00:00 - Introduction
01:11 - Is Divorce Better Than a Bad Marriage?
02:47 - Why Are Divorce and Child-Free Living Being Celebrated?
09:06 - Development, Narcissism & Modern Relationships
15:45 - The Pressure Between Career and Family
16:09 - The Best and Worst Ages for Divorce
22:47 - Stability, Attachment & Child Development
23:03 - The Research Behind Early Attachment
28:56 - Emotional Regulation and the First Three Years
35:13 - What Stress Does to Children
40:23 - Identity, Motherhood & Modern Culture
44:00 - Production, Achievement & Meaning
46:16 - Where to Find Erica’s Work
***
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | All right, Erica, welcome to the Manning Talk Show. How you doing? |
| 0:09.8 | I'm good. How are you doing? |
| 0:11.3 | I'm very, very good. I'm good. I'm excited to have you here because I've actually tuned into a bunch of your interviews before and followed your work. |
| 0:19.0 | And my wife has as well. She's a marriage and family |
| 0:22.3 | therapist. And we have like have great conversations about some of your, some of your talks and |
| 0:27.5 | your books. And so I'm excited to dive into this. So in your, in your latest book, you dive into |
| 0:33.6 | everything kind of surrounding separation and divorce. And you make this, this case that it's better to go through a good divorce |
| 0:41.8 | than it is to have a bad marriage. |
| 0:43.8 | Can you sort of just unpack that a little bit for us? |
| 0:46.8 | Well, it was that the old research from many years ago |
| 0:51.1 | said that all divorce is bad for children. |
| 0:53.4 | And the reality is that divorce is bad for children. |
| 0:56.0 | I mean, it's not as if what I'm saying is everybody should get divorced because it's great for children. |
| 1:01.0 | It's not good for children. |
| 1:03.0 | At the same time, there's more recent research that shows that when children live in situations where there's intractable conflict and where |
| 1:13.0 | parents basically hate each other and can't resolve the conflicts, you know, children are not |
| 1:18.4 | strangers to conflict around their parents. I mean, in fact, some conflict, as long as it has an arc of |
| 1:24.6 | resolution, conflict is good to show children because it's good to show |
| 1:28.0 | children that when you're intimate with someone, there's conflict and you resolve the conflict. |
| 1:32.7 | But when the conflicts can't be resolved and there's sort of these intractable conflicts, |
| 1:37.3 | then what the research really shows is that it's probably better for children if they're not in those situations, |
| 1:44.5 | if they're with two parents who co-parent well and have a more peaceful and harmonious situation. |
... |
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