What attachment parenting means to me

Everybody's going crazy about this Time Magazine cover. I've had a lot of thoughts about it and read a lot of responses. Fortunately, most of them are of the "we all need to just shut up and stop judging each other because there is no one right way to parent" variety. However, some of them (and some of the comments accompanying them) grossly mischaracterize the Attachment Parenting philosophy. Here's a representative sample:

[P]arents must wear their babies as an appendage at all times, sleep with their babies lest they feel abandoned for 8 hours, breast-feed for at least one year to even be considered a mom, and pretty much arm your children with zero independence, no self-soothing skills and ensure that they need mommy and daddy for ev-er-y-thing until they at least 15.

OK, so maybe this blogger is being a little tongue-in-cheek, but this seems to be a pretty common (mis)conception of AP.

As someone who believes in Attachment Parenting, this bugs me. So I'd like to straighten a few things out.

First off, AP is by no means proscriptive. It is a philosophy, not a strict practice. There are no "musts." At first I thought maybe I was misremembering things, so I consulted my dog-eared copy of The Baby Book and I was right. Time and time again throughout the book, Dr. Sears emphasizes and re-emphasizes that not all techniques work for every family. The point is to do whatever works for your family to engender a secure attachment between you and your kids, which is the real aim of AP. That is the real message of The Baby Book, and the heart of Attachment Parenting: the idea that if you trust your instincts, respond appropriately to your kids' cues, and treat your child with respect and understanding, parenting can be more successful and rewarding. That seems pretty straight-forward to me, and not at all controversial. I am sure there are militant AP-ers out there who take things too literally and too far and just ruin it for everyone; but I don't personally know any, and I know a lot of AP moms.

So here is what AP has meant for me, following the main tenants of attachment parenting:

1) Birth Bonding
I chose to take an active role in the births of both my girls, not just because I am very interested in childbirth (shocker!), but because taking ownership of the births helped me feel confident as a mother from the get-go. Although neither birth unfolded exactly as I imagined (they never do), I was able to confidently mother my girls from their earliest hours, something I believe would have been more difficult if I hadn't taken on an active role during their births. In fact, although Freya's birth was just as long and intense as Ren's, my greater sense of agency during Freya's birth definitely helped me be a more confident mother to her sooner than I was able to do with Ren.

2) Belief in the signal value of your baby's cries
I don't believe that if I let my baby cry, she'll develop brain damage. Although Dr. Sears is accused of promoting this idea, I also don't recall reading about it in his book. (I have read stuff on how being left to cry can be stressful for a baby, but not to the level of brain damage). Anyway, the reason I respond as soon as possible when Freya cries is the same reason I respond when Erik asks me a question: I think it's rude to ignore someone who is trying to communicate with me. Ignoring her sends the message, "I don't care what you need right now" and I just don't want to send that message to someone I love. Plus, the crying stresses me out physically as well as emotionally and it's just easier on all of us if someone tends to her needs.

With an older child like Ren, of course she can communicate without crying, and she can also try to manipulate me. But fortunately after 4 years of watching closely and responding promptly to her cues, I have a very good sense of what she's trying to communicate at any given time, whether she's faking it, and how to respond. Being responsive can be emotionally and mentally demanding, and sometimes physically demanding, as when a child needs to be held or rocked for long periods. But ultimately I've found that for me it's made parenting more joyful and less confusing and anxiety-inducing.

However, being responsive does not equate to being lenient. This is another big misperception. I have no problem telling Ren "no" if I need to, even if it breaks her heart. She hears "no" a lot. But I'm willing to work to figure out what she needs, and I'm not going to deny her something she truly needs if it is in my power to give it to her, even if it might be inconvenient for me. If her needs and my needs clash, then I figure out a compromise, just like any other two people who love each other might have to do.

3) Breastfeeding
Breastfeeding works for our family. I get that it does not work for all families. In a different situation, say if I had had to work full-time away from home when Ren was an infant, I would have supplimented or formula-fed with no guilt. You gotta do what you gotta do to nourish your kids and keep yourself sane. But for me, breastfeeding is the best, easiest and most fun way to feed my babies. And seriously the laziest. No way I was going to deal with formula and washing bottles if I didn't have to, let alone preparing bottles in the middle of the night. Ugh. Kudos to the moms and dads who choose to do it, or who do it because they don't have a choice.

I could have been the women on that Time magazine cover, except I'm not nearly as attractive as she is. But I did nurse Ren until she was 3 and a half. I didn't plan to breastfeed as long as I did with her. As she got older, there just never seemed a good reason to wean. It made her so happy and was not really any trouble to me, so why not keep going? Then when I got pregnant and it was painful every time she latched on and she didn't seem as dependent on the comfort it provided, we weaned. It really was never a big deal one way or the other, although apparently I'm an outlier and a freak and possibly a pedophile... Anyway, we'll see what happens with Freya. She might go longer than Ren did, she might self-wean at 18 months. I might need to stop nursing for some reason, medical or otherwise. Either way, we'll stop just as soon as one or the other of us is ready to stop. But I will forever cherish the time I spent nourishing them, with them in my arms looking up at me. I'm sure all parents feel that way, whether their baby was on the other end of a breast or a bottle.

Oh, and I don't believe I ever nursed standing up and looking defiant while Ren stood on a chair looking huge and a little shell-shocked. Seriously, they found the most gargantuan three year old they could for that picture, didn't they?

I feed on demand because that is the way I eat. Eat when you're hungry; stop when you're full. (I still need to work on that second one). It just never made sense to me to impose a somewhat arbitrary schedule on a baby or a kid, and this belief links back to #2.

4) Babywearing
Helps me get stuff done around the house, and it's a lot easier to slip a baby in a sling than to lug 20 pounds of baby + car seat around. I'll happily use a stroller when going long distances if it's a place where the stroller isn't a PITA.

5) Bedding close to baby
Once again, laziness. Ren could not sleep alone. Not would not; could not. For all of our sanity, she had to be in the bed with us. On the other hand, Freya will happily sleep in her bassinet, so that's where she is for the first part of the night. When she wakes up hungry, I take her out of the bassinet, put her next to me, stick a boob in her mouth and go back to sleep. We all get the most sleep this way. If co-sleeping equals sleep-deprivation for your family, DON'T DO IT! It's dangerous to bedshare if you're sleep deprived, anyway.

6) Balance and boundaries
This is the one the "AP is EXTREME! It's anti-feminist! It's for martyrs!" folks forget about. Yet it's one of the main tenants of Attachment Parenting! It's right there in the book: it's about "knowing when to say yes and when to say no, and also having the wisdom to say yes to your own needs." This has served me well and really cuts down on the mama-guilt factor. So, yes, I work part-time while the girls are at daycare, I go out with my friends, I have an occasional drink, I take a night off once in a while to be by myself, and I sometimes let the baby cry while I am in the bathroom or the shower. I still call myself AP with no hesitation.

7) Beware of baby trainers
At heart, this just means follow your own instincts and take every one else's advice with a grain of salt. I'd be utterly lost without my instincts, paralyzed by anxiety. If I didn't trust myself to be a good mom, I'd have nothing to fall back on in an emergency or when my situation deviates from the norm. Which is all the time, because no one's parenting situation is totally "normal." There is no one-size-fits-all parenting plan, so you've got to trust yourself to craft a style that works for your family.

This last point sums up all the others for me: I follow numbers 1-6 to one extent or another not because The Great Dr. Sears tells me to, but because that's pretty much what feels right to me anyway. If any of it didn't feel right or didn't work for my family's situation, I wouldn't do it.

Note that these foundations of AP do not address cloth diapering, eating organically, intactivism, elimination communication, home schooling, or any of the other things commonly associated with "the AP lifestyle."

I have benefited from the philosophies behind attachment parenting in a lot of ways. It has helped make me a more confident, happy, well-balanced mother. I think it's doing good things for my kids, too. Certainly no one who knows Ren could say she has "zero independence, no self-soothing skills" and she "need[s] mommy and daddy for ev-er-y-thing." I don't think AP is the only way to raise happy, well-adjusted children, but I do think that if you want happy, well-adjusted children, then having confident, happy, well-balanced parents is a great place to start.