AP from the source

We started on the road to parenthood with the philosophy that we listen to various parents, read different books, and then would do whatever worked for us. Now, with almost a year of parenting under our belts, we’re mostly doing what’s generally called Attachment Parenting. I’d never read the book, and I thought it would be helpful for explaining to other people, and for knowing better myself what we’re doing and why. So here it is.

Attachment Parenting by William and Martha Sears It is really lovely to read a parenting book by the Sears. Their style is relaxed and reassuring, based on their own experience raising eight children, working in pediatrics for, um, 20 or 30 years, and backed up by research. They usually say, “This works well in our experience. Try it. If it doesn’t work for you, don’t worry about it.” So the idea of attachment parenting is that if you let yourself get to know your child, you’ll be able to trust yourself to give your baby what he or she needs. This book really focuses on the first year, which was actually disappointing for me, since we’re just about through that. What’s there is good info, though. They talk about the Seven Bs of attachment parenting –tools to try, not necessity. They are: Birth Bonding, Breastfeeding, Babywearing, Bedding close to baby, Belief in the language value of your baby’s cries, Beware of Baby trainers, and Balance. There’s also a chapter directed towards fathers, including very helpful advice on staying connected with your baby if you have to travel a lot and keeping the romance alive with your partner. And all through, the message: Trust your baby. Trust yourself. Take care of yourself. Your baby doesn’t need a perfect parent. Your baby needs you, doing the best job you can.

It’s a little late for Birth Bonding for us, but here’s some thoughts on aspects of this that are still relevant for us. The cry-it-out philosophy is so prevalent out there, and is one of the parenting issues that I’m least able to react rationally to. It’s good, then, to hear more rational arguments, seeing studies that show that responding to cries is healthy for babies. Thoughts like, if you want your baby to grow to be a person who will respond empathetically to people in pain, you need to respond to your baby in pain now. If you are feeling pushed to the edge by a baby who’s very needy at night and are considering cry-it-out, they say that in their experience, it’s mostly the easy babies that cry-it-out “works” for. And that yes, you don’t need to hop on an older baby’s cries quite so quickly as you do with one under six months. On bedsharing: no, you’re not a bad parent if you don’t do it, but since we are and it’s working for us, it’s very reassuring both to read about the multitude of studies showing its safety and positive results long-term, and to hear about the flaws in the studies that say it’s bad. (Mostly, they take any co-sleeping infant deaths as proof that co-sleeping is horrible, without looking at whether or not the parents were using safe co-sleeping practices, and not comparing that to the number of infant deaths in cribs, which is much higher.) Also, after that awful pediatrician told us that if we didn’t stop co-sleeping at five months, he’d be in our bed until 9 or 10 – Dr. Sears says that around 2 or 3, most children start wanting to be in their own beds. And on the other hand, if Dr. Sears, the originator of the term “Attachment Parenting” says that it’s OK to put your child in a separate room if co-sleeping doesn’t work for you, or to let your baby cry in Daddy’s arms if Mommy really needs a break – then I just don’t have to listen to the uber-AP types who say you can’t. So there.