Defending Our Choices September 22, 2008
I have been talking to a lot of parents this past week about their choices as parents, particularly the decision to practice Attachment Parenting.
According to the API Website “The essence of Attachment Parenting is about forming and nurturing strong connections between parents and their children. Attachment Parenting challenges us as parents to treat our children with kindness, respect and dignity, and to model in our interactions with them the way we’d like them to interact with others. Attachment Parenting isn’t new. In many ways, it is a return to the instinctual behaviors of our ancestors. In the last sixty years, the behaviors of attachment have been studied extensively by psychology and child development researchers, and more recently, by researchers studying the brain.”
So what’s the drama all about? I actually got an email from a mom in Michigan who, although a psychologist herself is afraid to have her son taken to a therapist because she knows she will have to defend her parenting practices. Co-sleeping is attacked as unsafe, nursing past infancy seen as just weird. Mom’s wearing their babies are warned they will never walk. Prioritizing your child’s emotional needs is somehow threatening to some people.
Now that we are long past babywearing and nursing, and the kids crawl into bed in the wee hours but we don’t really co-sleep- attachment parenting at my house is almost all about discipline or behavior or something like that. I hate calling it discipline when the whole point is I don’t use consequences, threats or bribes and it isn’t really about behavior because almost always the behavior is related to feelings. So mostly what makes my family weird out here in Apple Valley is that I parent around cooperation and relationships and emotional needs. And despite what others might think, that means I do want all members emotional needs to be met- even mom’s and dad’s.
I don’t need to tell anyone how to parent although obviously that is often exactly what my work entails. I believe that Attachment Parenting honors us as parents, allows us the kind of relationships we want with our kids and helps us build powerful, creative, healthy families. We have a lot of work to do in order to get this information out to the families who need it. Kristin was telling about speaking with some African immigrants who approached her about wearing Alma. They told her that they loved to see her wear her baby the way that their mothers had worn them. When she asked if their wives do the same, they said no. They wanted to be modern American women. What an ironic circle.
So let us honor parents for their commitments and choices and support them in choices that foster strong family connections.
Maureen
mailto:parentingoasis@gmail.com