An Unscientific Reason to Attachment Parent
Posted February 28, 2010
Attachment Parenting
If you attachment parent (AP), then you believe in the principals laid out by Attachment Parenting International. This type of parenting has been popularized, in large part, by Dr. William Sears, who has his own list of "Baby B's." AP emphasizes on bonding with your newborn, breastfeeding, co-sleeping, and responding to your baby's cries. In essence, it means following your natural instincts as a parent - to snuggle and love and soothe your baby.
Baby Training
Baby training (BT) methods, which often go hand-in-hand with letting babies "cry it out" (CIO), follow a very different style of of parenting. Made popular in books like Babywise, these methods encourage parents to resist the "temptation" to "give in" to the desire to feed, hold, or soothe their crying babies. Attention is dispensed according to a disciplined schedule designed to teach babies when it's okay to need food, diapering, or human contact.
You Can't Actually Train a Newborn
BT promotes the idea that a baby's needs can be managed and controlled. This can be a welcome idea for overwhelmed, tired new parents. Unfortunately, it's not true. The needs of a baby, especially a new baby, are very high and cannot be "managed" away. New babies are also biologically incapable of being trained to sleep or eat on a schedule, so training a baby is simply not a realistic goal.
You Can Train A Parent
Parents, unlike new babies, can be trained. If a new mom is instructed not to "give in" to her baby's cries, and this type of "disciplined" parenting is encouraged by everyone around her, she can be conditioned to repress her natural urge to hold and soothe her baby. Her baby won't actually learn to need less human contact - he will still cry. He'll just be ignored. A continually ignored baby may finally become detached after enough isolation - giving up on the parents who won't "give in" to him, but many babies will just keep crying - hoping for those moments when the BT schedule decides their cries will be answered.
Will Your Early Parenting Style Decide Your Child's Fate?
Does BT, CIO style parenting turn children into cold, psychotic delinquents? No. Does AP guarantee happy, successful, loving children? No. So many parents who argue the relative merits of these parenting styles (and the continuum between them) focus on whether or not a kid can "turn out just fine" one way or the other.*
Your choice of early parenting style will certainly affect how your baby relates to you and likely reflects how you feel about your child or having children in general. Your choice of parenting style will have some impact on your child's personality, too, but it will get mixed in with hundreds of other factors in determining how he "turns out," including general health, genetics, education, peer group, siblings, environment, cultural influences, talents, preferences, and many other things.
Why Bother Attachment Parenting, or Even Breastfeeding?
So why bother attachment parenting? Why even bother breastfeeding for that matter? Breastfeeding, of course, has a more direct, objective impact on health and intelligence (some studies debate aspects of the IQ claim, but most research supports it). There are, however, plenty of formula-fed children who "turn out just fine" by adulthood. For the sake of argument, let's even pretend that baby-trained, formula-fed kids "turn out" no different that breastfed, attachment-parented ones.
More Effort, More Commitment, and More Awesome
Guess what? Attachment parenting is still a much nicer way to live. Yes, it's more work. It takes more time, and more commitment to being a mom or dad. Breastfeeding alone is a huge undertaking, especially if you have to go back to work while your kids are still little. The thing is, you had a baby. Don't fight the situation - enjoy it! Snuggle him, comfort him, hold him, love him, play with him. Forget your hairdo and miss the call. Let him take up your time and invade your life, you'll be glad you did.
I'm not talking to the parents who are just trying to survive and cannot AP or breastfeed for reasons beyond their control (working two jobs to pay rent, medical problems, etc...). They probably don't have time to read parenting and breastfeeding blogs. I'm talking to people who spend so much time and energy trying to manage their children and protect some highly marketed idea of "my precious child-free time" that parenting becomes a miserable chore.
Babies Are Not Evil
We all have times we just want to take a long, quiet bath or finish writing a blog post or have a uninterrupted conversation with our spouse. We all want to put on nice clothes and go out for a glass of wine with friends on occasion. What I don't understand is the fearful, defiant reaction some people have to attachment parenting and the sadly common attitude that babies are selfish manipulators trying to horn in on the lives of their parents.
You're expected to hope and pray for a beautiful baby, but the second that baby comes out you'd better "watch out" for that kid.** It's like your baby is some menacing stalker. With a deadly serious look, someone will warn you, "Too much coddling and before you know it, they'll want to be held all the time!" Quick - file a restraining order! Or just leave them alone in a crib sobbing their little heart out, that'll teach 'em. I don't get it.
Throw All the Science Out the Window and AP and BF Still Win
Yes, there are lots of scientific (psychological and medical) reasons to attachment parent and breastfeed. But the argument for attachment parenting practices - like breastfeeding, cosleeping, and lavishing your child with love - doesn't hinge on those studies. That's why articles like Hanna Rosin's "The Case Against Breastfeeding" and "gotcha" press releases like this one (describing one study that indicates increased intelligence in breastfed babies may be due to genetics) have little impact on my views of parenting. Attachment parenting and breastfeeding aren't about winning a medal or creating a perfect child, they're about giving yourself permission to love your children and enjoy the awesome experience of being a parent.
*I have noticed that "turn out just fine" is a phrase used a lot by people defending a parenting practice they don't feel good about.
** common parental advice, but do we really need to "watch out" and protect ourselves from helpless infants?
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Comments
Well, speaking for myself...
I found the whole AP movement was exceedingly *unhelpful* when it came to following my instincts as a parent. Everything I read about it seemed to focus on this checklist of things I was supposed to be doing. Sure, there'd be some passing comments about how really it was all about following instincts, but there was this *huge* focus on the importance of exclusive breastfeeding for six months and breastfeeding for at least two years (child-led weaning preferred) and on getting everything exactly right for the birth experience and breastfeeding in the early weeks because anything else would put my chances of breastfeeding in jeopardy and on carrying the baby everywhere because of all the reasons this was supposedly better for him or her. And this focus on motherhood as a series of things that had to be done 'properly' just, I found, overwhelmed the whole idea of trusting my instincts. During my son's early months, I wasn't focusing on getting to know him – I was focusing on getting the breastfeeding to go properly and stressing over whether or not I'd hit the goal of keeping him exclusively breastfed for six months.
Even though the breastfeeding was the only specific issue at the time - I didn't actually believe that carrying my baby everywhere or always taking him into my bed would make the difference that AP-ers were claiming it would - I can also see in retrospect that the whole attitude of AP that there's a Right way to parent your baby and that if you don't do it their way you must be doing it Wrong had huge influence on me. Instead of relaxing and enjoying getting to know my baby, I was stressing over every detail – was it really all right to do things that way? Could I trust myself when I believed that this whole idea of one single Right way to bring up a baby just wasn't true? What if there was such a way and I was missing it and doing things Wrong?
Years before I ever heard of AP, I read Penelope Leach's 'Your Baby And You' – a book that really *does* focus on getting parents to trust their instincts. Details such as breastfeeding, bedsharing, and carrying the baby around are dealt with in context and sometimes even in passing), not as some kind of vitally important first-and-foremost checklist. Looking back, if I'd only stuck with the attitude that book promotes and never encountered AP, I'd have had a much more relaxed, fun time during my first child's first few months.
I disagree with the language
I disagree with the language of this article. I don't think AP has to be an all or nothing approach as laid out above. I know plenty of people who are working two jobs, both parents working, or have medical problems, etc and do whatever AP they can manage like cosleeping and/or bfing overnight to get in the bonding time missed during the day. Or the parent working fulltime wears their child at home while preparing dinner. Or they practice gentle discipline, etc. Whatever you can work into your lives to connect with each other. I don't think AP has to be extra work, it can be made accessible and easier since it eases connection within family.
Take it from a Working Mom - AP is Not All or Nothing!
Thanks for your comment. I was certainly not trying to imply at any point in this article that AP is all or nothing, so thanks for allowing me to clarify. I, myself, work full time and have done just what you describe - cosleeping and BFing at night, wearing my kids while cooking and doing housework, also nursing and holding them while I type (like right now). This post is about schools of thought - general parenting philosophies, not the details of how one works toward them. For me AP is about your attitude toward your child, and as a working mom I do the best I can to lavish love on my kids and respond to their needs.
My comment about those who really can't AP or participate much in the parenting process was in reference to those for whom just getting through the day is a difficult struggle because of severe poverty, major medical issues or other extremely serious problems. I did not mean people who have to work, but rather those in truly desperate situations.
Heather