One thing I’ve learned about human beings, including very tiny human beings, is that we are amazingly adaptable. So Katie’s response about her guilt over having given her child formula for a while struck me as a particularly instructive response. As parents, we do the best we can, but we can’t always do things exactly as we wish we could. And we need to be as tolerant with ourselves as we wish other people would be about Attachment Parenting.

A friend’s daughter can’t use a baby sling because of severe chronic back problems. Will this blight her child’s life? No. Is Katie’s little one going to suffer irreversible harm because of ingesting some formula? No. If a baby has to cry it out because Great-Uncle Frank had a heart attack and Mom had to give him CPR until the EMTs arrived, will that baby be scarred forever? No. Is (Heaven forbid) something terrible going to happen to FeministBreeder’s (love that name) son because he’s been vaccinated? I don’t think so. Is the fact that as a single mother who needed to support herself and her son, Cate was unable to breastfeed past ten months going to ruin his life? No. She made a wise judgment that only she could make between stress and sanity and which would be harder on her little boy, as well as a recognition that she couldn’t keep her milk supply going.

Attachment parenting is about much bigger issues than these: it’s about generally being available, loving and responsive to our little ones.

When I had my first baby – at home – thirty-five years ago this week, I breastfed her (and her younger sister) for three years. We co-slept with both of the kids and I carried them around in a front-pack or backpack until they got too big for me. I wasn’t following a particular “creed” of infant parenting; those things just seemed – I hate to use the word, natural – to me and to my friends who had babies around the same time. My mother gave birth without medication, breastfed all of her five children for at least a year, and while she’s no longer alive to ask about co-sleeping when we were infants, my younger sister and I slept in our parents’ bedroom until we were 4 and 7 and the next baby came along. I don’t know why my mother was breastfeeding her first baby in 1935, when few middle-class women did, but my guess is that it just seemed like the obvious thing to do. And having watched her style of parenting, it just seemed to me to be what you did.

It’s been interesting to watch my daughter mother her now four-year-old son. She was dogmatic about Attachment Parenting, and a loving, stimulating mother. Sometimes she wore herself awfully thin trying to be a perfect AP mother. She’s expecting again, and tells me she plans to loosen up somewhat this time, or she will go nuts. I think that for her, at least, this is a wise course. If we stress ourselves out too much, we stress our babies out. Be as gentle with yourselves as you would like other mothers to be with you.

Thanks for the post!

As an early childhood professional, I’m always considering the unique needs of each family.

I’m sort of caught because I believe the best place for children is with their family and community, but I realize how many families need childcare and preschool services, so I try to provide the best play-based, exploratory-based, child-centered environment.

Like you said, for example, “It is great to educate about elimination communication (EC) as long as you understand that many families don’t have the luxury of that time spent with their tot. Just be open to understanding the “other side”.”

I work with another teacher who is from India, and when she brought up EC as the norm in India, everyone rolled their eyes as if to say: “That’s nice, but that’s not how we do it here.” And of course, with 5-19 children in one class (depending on age), even with 2 adults at all times, it’s not something we can do at school, either.

Thanks for the analogy of attracting flies with honey. I know how important it is not to alienate parents, and it’s always good to have some reminders!

But there is a deeper problem with AP advocacy that you’re not addressing. APers tend to think that because the method resonates with them, it must be the ideal parenting method for everyone, and something every parent should strive toward even if they have a sufficiently vaild (in your eyes) ‘excuse’ not to out some of the tenets into practice. Frankly, all this talk about honey and vinegar and converting parents to AP and feeling sad about how “There are still babies who never experience the joy of being worn”… it’s not any less judgemental than those elitists you decry. The judgement may be implicit rather than explicit, but it’s no less there. Proselytiizing is all about judgement, as any born-again Christian handing out Chick tracts on a street corner could tell you.

I think that I speak for a growing segment of mothers who’ve looked at the evidence for practicing AP and found it…underwhelming, to say the least. While we may breastfeed, use a sling when convenient or have ‘natural’ births, we don’t feel the need to buy into the ideology that by doing so, we’re remaking humanity into a kinder, gentler species.

You might consider that the best way to gain acceptance for your parenting practices would be to be equally accepting of. Not as a last resort or needing a good excuse, but because what they do woroks for them the same way what you do works for you. And perhaps say, “if whatever you’re doing isn’t working, here’s something that worked for me that you might try”…

Great Day!!

Cindy Tanady

All Parenting Secret