So, What is Attachment Parenting?

Although the term Attachment Parenting was coined by baby doc William Sears, my first exposure to the concept came in the form of an enthralling book called, “The Continuum Concept,” by Jean Liedloff, in which the author recounts her experience of spending several years with Stone Age indigenous people in South America, living with them and studying their parenting techniques.

Her theory is that these techniques or customs, which essentially comprise what we and Dr. Sears would call AP, is a method of fostering optimal levels of physical, mental, and emotional development in the lives of our children, beginning at or before birth, through the following essential practices:

• Maintaining near-constant human contact, particularly between mother and child.
• Co-Sleeping.
• Breastfeeding.
• Being continually “in-arms,” or carried all the time.
• Responding to verbal (crying) and/or non-verbal cues (squirming, hand & arm signals) without judgment.
• Fostering the child’s innate self-preservation instincts.

She contrasts the way these people raise their children with Western “mainstream” parenting with which many of us are so familiar, namely:

• Traumatic separation from the mother immediately following birth.
• Sleeping alone and isolated at home, babies often forced to cry themselves to sleep
• Scheduled formula feeding, without respect to needs or desires, or the natural sense of security that arises within the infant from this intimate activity.
• Being imprisoned in a variety of baby devices like swings, playpens, etc., excluded and isolated from adult activities.
• Ignored by caregivers or even parents when crying.
• Fostering fear and anxiety by short-circuiting baby’s self-preservation instincts and enforcing various tools to control their behavior.

Sounds horrible right? 

This book is incredibly illuminating, especially for a guy like myself who comes from a pretty conservative, “mainstream” background.  It made me excited for the arrival of our little bundle, filled with warm anticipation for laying the groundwork from or before day one for a “naturalistic” upbringing, truly supportive of our innate human desires and needs to connect with other humans.

Common Critiques

The most common observation or criticism of this technique that I hear from people in the mainstream is that raising your child with AP will make them overly dependent on you as parents.  “They’ve got to learn independence!” someone close to you might say when they observe you raising your children in a way they’ve never seen before.  This notion, when you really think about it, is almost laughable.  Granted, all beings must, and will, some day become independent, but not a four-week old!  There is a reason why babies are helpless, more helpless than the spawn of any other mammal in the animal kingdom: they are helpless because that is their nature!  They were designed to be dependent upon their parents for many years, much more so within the first 120 days or so, and gradually backing off a bit from there. 

What I’ve found is that AP creates the security and freedom for children to learn independence when they’re ready for it, always knowing that the safety of the arms of mommy or daddy is close by.  Now that our daughter is 18 months old, she is very independent: she spends the night out with Grandma every week, sleeps in her own “big girl” bed, loves to walk ahead of daddy when she’s outside, happily goes over to the baby sitter’s house, and gets along fantastically with other children.  I believe her well-adjusted nature is a direct result of getting plenty of time essentially attached to either one of us in those early months.

One Daddy Puts AP To The Test

After reading Liedloff’s book, I was ready to do everything I could as a daddy to support this experience.  Since my wife had to go through with a c-section, I provided a bulk of the constant human contact within the first several hours of our daughter’s life while my wife recovered.  We had to pay $400 per night – even though we didn’t have the money – in New York’s St. Luke’s Roosevelt to get a private room just so the two of us could begin co-sleeping with her from day one.  And when her blood sugar was too low, we had to fight to continue to breast-feed her, even to the point of the nurse on station threatening to deem us as “uncooperative” when we refused to allow our daughter to drink baby formula teeming with a laundry list of unpronounceable ingredients.

But it was after we got home from the hospital that the bulk of the AP work began.  I used a simple black Native Carrier to carry our daughter around while we were in the house.  I would get home from work and take her, tuck her in her cocoon, and then go about my business.  Sometimes she would be awake and simply take everything in that I was doing.  This is one of the benefits of AP: it gives your children the opportunity to experience the world at your level and observe all that you do, whether it’s cooking dinner, feeding the cats, or making the bed.  I was even able to clean the garage and do other “major” household tasks with my little one snug inside the carrier.  We went to restaurants and several movies, even though we were often the subject of judgmental stares while waiting in line to get our tickets.  Later, we’d file out of the theater and those same people would comment that they couldn’t believe she didn’t cry, or that they forgot there was even a baby in the movie theater.

When it came time to go nighty-nigh, we installed an Arm’s Reach Co-Sleeper onto our bed, so we could all be together, but still enjoy a decent amount of space in our Queen-sized bed.  Later, when she was about 6 months old, she began to sleep in between us, and did so until she was about 12-14 months old.  Some children who co-sleep stay in their parents’ bed longer, others are out sooner.  For us, it was just right.  A natural progression into her own bed.  Until then, she had been sleeping comfortably and securely knowing that mommy and daddy were close by.  This built trust and self-confidence.  Gradually, we started putting her down in her bed, first with my wife breast feeding her to sleep, and later, I began putting her to sleep as we slowly weaned her from nighttime feeding.  It was a perfect time to do this, my wife and I now ready to reclaim our space and our intimacy together in our bed.

Attachment Parenting Is A Commitment

AP is a commitment that doesn’t feel like a commitment.  It’s really a way of life, a way of supporting one another in our little family.  A way of demonstrating that we’ll always be there for one another.  I call it a commitment because it is likely, if you practice AP, that from time to time people: friends, neighbors, family members, might criticize your methods because they are unfamiliar.  I remember a family member who was several generations older once commented that we were crazy to always carry around our daughter, that we should instead place her in a playpen during the day.  I replied that I couldn’t because she would cry after a minute or two, to which she responded: “That’s what babies do, they cry.”  Unfortunately this is the extent of what many millions of Americans have been taught about raising babies.  Indeed, babies do cry, but not for no reason.  What AP taught me was that crying is a baby’s primary form of communication for the first year or so and that it was my duty to interpret, and often comfort these cries.  And often, as the poet Mr. Bruce Springsteen once said, all it takes “is a little of that human touch…”

Happy carrying!
Have a comment, question, or idea for a post?  Email Paul at paul@organicgreendaddy.com

In addition to founding www.OrganicGreenDaddy.com, Paul maintains a blog over at www.monkeyinmymind.com, commenting on politics, sports, film, and whatever else his Monkey has in store for him.