If you ever feel guilty about your inadequate levels of attachment parenting, you shouldn’t happen upon this young woman and her baby in the highlands of Sapa.
Not only are they both gorgeous, they both look utterly content. Your mind will bolt straight back to certain attachment parenting texts you’ve seen celebrating the origins of attachment parenting in traditional cultures. Because not only is this baby being carried around in the most beautiful hand-made sling ever seen, you can be sure that it has not gone to daycare, fed from a bottle, worn disposable nappies, slept alone, cried itself to sleep, or whatever other abominable thing it is you’ve done with your own child.
But, while hiking in Sapa you could come across this baby and a whole lot like it, being carried around on the backs of their five-year old sisters. Attachment parenting is (particularly) labour-intensive. (Carrying a baby all day can be back-breaking, especially if you are only five years old). All mothers work – either inside the home, outside the home, or both, like the mothers of Sapa. And so all mothers need to make some compromises with their parenting.
Don’t measure your parenting against false benchmarks.
Those babies also have turns of being carried by grandparents, aunties who don’t have their own kids yet, and so on and so on. Having a culture where only one person is responsible for all that childcare (like ours) makes attachment parenting a lot more grueling than it is in communities where people live with several generations under one roof and closer together.
When I go to the market I see grandmothers carrying sleeping babies in slings while working. But most Australian mothers don’t have a mother who can (because of the work they do) or wants to, take a turn like that. I think it’s really important to compare parenting apples with apples.
@ Kate: So true. My husband’s huge Chinese family constantly claims that their children were well behaved, constantly minded, quick to wean and independent. Never a day’s worry.
Then again they all lived together. They all had 3 kids a piece who played together each day. They all shared parenting responsibilities and even got help from childless cousins, aunts and all of the retired folks of the family. He says it was pretty common.
Families today aren’t structured this way too often in the US. A lot of us are not equipped with this sort of support system. Isn’t it a shame?
Brilliant, blue milk! It is so easy to buy into these false comparisons, and then to give ourselves grief when we don’t live up to it. I can’t hand my children over to my parents for a while – we live in different countries!
There’s another whole suite of false comparisons in child birth too… you know, the stories you get fed about women in other societies not experiencing morning sickness, and just giving birth simply and easily. I’m sure those stories are true, but I happen to live in an industrialised nation, and I do sedentary work. My whole lifestyle is completely different, so my experience of pregnancy and childbirth is different. Not wrong – just different.
We didn’t go down the attachment parenting route. My daughters seem to love me, and I seem to love them, and we seem to be confident in each other, and trust each other. And we seem to function very nicely in the society within which we happen to live.
Okay…
Oh I find this… difficult. I know there are a million successful ways to parent, attachment parenting is not my path. I have done every one of the things you listed, and never felt guilty. Should I?
[…] Your Support Group? by Summer M. I read this post on Attachment parenting guilt and thought it deserved to be shared. Sometimes we have this ideal image in our minds of what we […]
I almost long for the days that I didn’t know that I was fitting mostly into this actual parenting practice of “attachment parenting.” I was just doing what was cool for me and worked for the baby…and then when I started reading up on certain things, yeah, I felt good that I had support when I needed it, but I also did feel a little more pressure to be going all the way–“Oh, hell, I’m not using cloth diapers–I’m a fraud!” type of stuff…
Thanks for taking us way outside the box of the Western perspective on this with this post.
false benchmarks – Bravo Blue Milk. This work from home mom largely neglects the 2 year old while the 6 year old is in school. When the 6 year old is home she’s largely called upon to entertain her brother so mommy can work. Yeah, I’m a stay-at-home mom, but I think he’d be happier at daycare a few days a week where they would focus solely on entertaining and educating him.
I don’t compare. I think we all do the best we can. I agree 100% with Kate, that attachment parenting works much better in a village rather than a suburb but we play the cards we were dealt, right?
I wasn’t sure if I should mention this earlier. I will, but I want to preface this (in case anyone reading this is considering calling a lactation consultant) by saying I’ve had a couple of really good experiences with a lactation consultant and going the first time was the best thing ever. I also had one crappy experience (the original consultant was on leave). Fortunately when my kid was 4 months old, not a newborn. Because this woman would have put me off breastfeeding for life.
So, that done, let’s paraphrase: “Hi, I’m returning to work soon, expressing isn’t working for me very well and I want to know what my options are” “Blah blah, stuff you’ve already read that didn’t help, buy a pump you can’t possibly afford coz in Nigeria….”
Yeah thanks. I’m not in Nigeria. I think the research is really interesting, but I’m at a breastfeeding clinic, not a lecture. Make It Relevant To My Life Here. Which is what I was looking for when I came to see a specialist.
This woman basically instructed me to:
* Buy an electric pump (I’d just told her I was job hunting, but she assumed I had a few hundred bucks lying around for something that wasn’t guaranteed to work)
* Co-sleep and feed all night (she hadn’t asked anything about my sleeping arrangements, if she had she’d have known we’d tried and rejected co-sleeping, partly because sleep deprivation was making the bonding loving thing impossible)
* Be like a Nigerian street sweeper and take my kid to work on my back (unfortunately that is kinda frowned upon in most office type environments in Australia, I’d explained that the kid would be with my Mum)
Finally, I don’t think there’s ever been a human culture where such a large proportion of parents expected their kids to be supervised, educated and entertained in their every waking minute before. Kids do need stimulation, but they also need to have time left to their own devices to figure stuff out for themselves. Our grandparents had significantly larger areas of their cities and towns in which they were free to roam than kids do now. And they roamed in packs of unsupervised kids far younger than we would let our kids out. My great-grandmother was much too busy keeping her house in order (and sewing all the clothes for its occupants) to watch or plan my Grandpa’s every move. The result, I have to say, was better than average.
I have always considered my style of parenting “quasi-AP”. But to do it the way Dr. Sears suggests would be overwhelming to parents with no support system (like us), and I can’t imagine comparing myself to that benchmark. But then, no “idea” really ever is ideal, is it?
Great post.
You took something that can make me feel so bad and turned it into something that made me feel so good. Thanks, Bluemilk.
Brilliant observation. I’ve met many women who idealize motherhood in other cultures and in history. Bottom line is that different things work for different people.
“I don’t think there’s ever been a human culture where such a large proportion of parents expected their kids to be supervised, educated and entertained in their every waking minute before”
This is so right on.. Where is the balance?
[…] have certainly struck a kind of strong leaning towards guilt in my attachment parenting circles, but I don’t think, as some comments on that post suggest, that they have any kind […]
I unknowingly practiced AP for years. Now with a new baby in tow i swore not to do it like that again- i didnt sleep for years and my back is shot (but the kids are fine ;-)) It pays to bear in mind that women in cultures who baby wear also have considerably shorter life spans!
Guilt. The currency of motherhood. I just cant get past the term attachment parenting. Why would feminist mothers define some mothers as unattached. If you are the kind of parent who likes to encourage independence, courage and comfort around a lot of people, that does not make you less attached. Possibly it makes you less needy. All loving mothers are emtionally attached to their children, even if they hated breastfeeding, never allowed co-sleeping (what a creepy term) and kids went into day care at 6 months. It is possible to be a loving, attached mother if these things are not for you.
Erm, “creepy”?
I think there is a strong argument to be made along the lines of certain societal pressure actively discouraging mothers from doing what works for their families, actively discouraging mothers from listening to their own connection with their child.
Constant berating about causing “bad habits”, “making a rod for your own back”, insisting on scheduled feeds being the only appropriate and healthy and scientific option, breastfeeding being “perverted” after a few months of age, co-sleeping being shock horror dangerous and perverted and putting your child’s needs ahead of your husband’s (ew), babies “needing” to cry because it’s “good for their lungs”, babies “can’t possibly be hungry in the night” after four months, carrying a baby “spoiling” it … the list goes on and on and on.
I see the more sensible aspects of the current-day attachment parenting community to be simple resistance against these anti-mother pressures. It would be nice if loving mothers who are emotionally attached to their children – which, as you say Lilith is most mothers – weren’t actively undermined at every step, and told that if what their connection is telling them to do is harmful, creepy, and damaging to her child and to herself.
hmm, creepy term (not act) i meant, so apologies if that was taken wrong way. but i agree. just wish we could find a less alienating term than ‘AP. I consider myself attached, but am not a carrier/bed-sharer, etc
[…] Attachment parenting is not about being a martyr or using false benchmarks to measure your parenting. […]
[…] lives. But leave the blanket statements prescribing exactly how mothers should parent behind. Attachment parenting needs feminism because without feminism women’s lives have a tendency to …decontextualised and devalued, and that isn’t good for mothering. Mothering is an act that […]
[…] lives. But leave the blanket statements prescribing exactly how mothers should parent behind. Attachment parenting needs feminism because without feminism women’s lives have a tendency to …. Mothering is an act that occurs in a relationship, with all the compromise that implies. It is not […]
[…] First, I was really surprised to learn that those things actually work for some babies (I thought they were like Nigerian scams). A little too well, she told me. She still felt guilty about a perceived over-reliance on the neglect-a-tron to soothe the baby while she tended to the other child. Second, I was surprised to hear the guilt. If it worked, I told her, it couldn’t have been so unpleasant for the baby, where’s the harm? Because we’re attachment parents, she said, we’re supposed to be holding our babies. […]