Attachment Parenting, Guilt, and Letting Children be Children

Today I had one of those light bulb moments, while perusing my ongoing spate of 3 or 4 parenting reads. You know, the moment when you break through all the “what to do” and “what not to do”, and an attitude takes hold of you?

As this moment came over me I was reading one book by an older venerable parenting source, Waldorf educator Rahima Baldwin, and one more recent: the Sears family. As I made connections between the two, I hit upon a little parenting mantra.

The Original Definition of Attachment Parenting

Both sources reminded me that when doing our best at parents, especially when adhering to and advocating for a a particular philosophy or style of parenting, such as Attachment Parenting, we tend to think that we “know it all,” or at least that we should pretend we do! We pat ourselves on the back and congratulate ourselves for being so informed. Or, we watch ourselves like hawks, checking for any sign that we’re “devolving” into parenting methods that go against our stated philosophy, our “oath” to our children.

Occasionally, however, I think it’s important to remind ourselves that the initial goals of Attachment Parenting were not so much to do the “right thing” but simply to allow us the freedom to follow our intuition and listen to the needs of our children in the most natural way possible. A quote from The Baby Sleep Book from the Sears Parenting Library reminded me of this:

Even though we started using this term in 1980, attachment parenting (AP) is not a new way of raising children that we and others have dreamed up. It’s what mothers and fathers would do instinctively if they were raising their baby on a desert island without the advice of sleep books, in-laws, and psychologists.

Reading this quote, you’d never think that it was Attachment Parenting that led to the backlash of criticisms labeling it “intensive parenting” and “impossible to achieve.” But, given our desire to do what’s best for our kids, and the well-meaning advice of some ever-observant outsiders, it’s easy to see how that happens. UdderlyMom’s honest and open post on motherly coping tells the story well:

I researched and “knew” how I wanted to do things, but you throw in sleep-deprivation, shaky self-confidence in this newfound role as “MOM”, and a baby who wasn’t “textbook” and it will have you doubting and questioning yourself like crazy.

And don’t get me started on the books. I have read a TON of books on baby sleep, attachment parenting, etc. It’s funny how even the so-called experts disagree with one another. There can be invaluable information and ideas in there, but when you are in a state of mind (previous paragraph) such as the new mommy fog - DON’T read the books. I read Dr Sears and felt that my baby who was held pretty much all the time wasn’t being held enough. I worried that because she still cried and didn’t “forget to fuss” that we weren’t attaching or I was doing something wrong.

For myself, having raised a child before the internet (can you believe it?) and raising one now in the midst of “mommie-bloga-palooza”, I find myself perpetually self-questioning my own identity. Silly things go through my brain, like: “I say I’m an attachment parent, but I only had him in the sling while I was out today, does that count?”

When I had my first son, I was at 25 and the only parent I knew. My mother was a thousand miles away and all my friends were recent art-school grads and had not a thing to say about my parenting. So all there was to do was to wander around Berkeley, browse the hippie stores, buy a sling, some used diaper covers and the one book I could afford (not the Sears title, they weren’t in vogue yet then), and just wing it!

Newfangled Attachment Parent Mama, Meet Rudolph Steiner

The one book I could afford back then, over a decade ago, was Rahima Baldwin Dancy’s You Are Your Child’s First Teacher. I can still remember strutting over to the bookstore across the railroad tracks in West Oakland wearing my first pair of tennis shoes I had worn since I was about 14. (Somehow while carrying a baby, my art school rebel footwear just didn’t cut it.) The book had hippie written all over it. Rahima wore a nice outdated 70’s hairdo on the front cover and there were rainbow highlights dotted about. The publisher? Celestial Arts. (Cue bells and crystal shards.) Rahima’s bio? Waldorf educator, midwife, and current resident, Ann Arbor, Michigan. Oh, yeah, this was the book. This would be my Bible, I thought.

Today, after dusting it off a bit, I decided to rediscover the title, and I was not disappointed. Bring me back, Rahima:

All parents want to do what is best for their children, to give them the best possible start in life. But what is best?… The art of mothering was replaced by the science of parenting, yet many parents have come to question the values their own parents embraced in such practices as bottle feeding every four hours and letting the child “cry it out.”

We need to begin to see the child in a new way, one which takes into account physical, emotional and mental development, as well as the less tangible spiritual dimension of the human being. Once we begin to perceive the whole child and how he or she unfolds, then our choices will begin to have coherence. No longer wanting a cookbook of “how to’s,” we will trust our own decisions, based on our understanding of the developing child and observation of the resultant flowering of our own children.

We have lost touch with natural processes in child development, convinced that we have to “do something” rather than allowing the child’s own inner process of unfolding… Rudolf Steiner had tremendous confidence in the natural processes of development and reminded us that “That which is asleep will awaken.”

Rahima’s book centers around remembering that children are not tiny adults, and recognizing that they do not need to be pushed. As parents, if we trust in ourselves and our children, they will unfold. We do not know more than the tiny baby does about learning to crawl or learning to talk. This they will do without us, for they do know how to do it. We simply need to be there to care for their needs, love them and support them. As Julia Flyte put it, in her Amazon review of You Are Your Child’s First Teacher:

It is nice to find a book that says that you are doing a good job just by being there for your child. I was also intrigued by the idea that I should be doing less, not more for my son. That children need space to do their own thing and to observe what you do as an adult more than they need you crawling round on the floor with them or taking them to gymbaroo classes.

I’m looking forward to reading the rest of the book, which though it supports allowing the child unfold, also has great ideas for play activities and developmentally appropriate objects and toys related to the Waldorf and Montessori methods.

Defending AP Parenting With Science

What I think we need to be aware of, as attachment-style parents, is that we don’t fall into the traps that attachment parenting is created to avoid. Because we feel the need to defend ourselves against criticisms, we seek scientific evidence supporting our actions. Summer at TheAttachedMother discusses the need to defend the AP parenting style:

I know that in my own experiences many of the negative responses are generally emotion-based. Often fear and guilt being the two major emotions that stir people to tell me how I am doing damage to my children without any solid evidence to that fact. [The Science of Attachment Parenting] is an article to pull out in defense.

Parents who use attachment parenting tools often pull out the “instincts” card. And I am certainly not knocking that, I am a huge supporter of using your instincts while raising your child. If your gut is telling you not to do something that everyone else is doing, I say follow your gut. Unfortunately that is often turned around on us and claims are made that we are not thinking rationally, not looking at the facts. So in those moments when science and my instincts line up it’s worthy of a tiny celebration.

I do agree that, as activists for what we believe in, scientific evidence is an important weapon to wield, and that it’s good to have some scientific information handy for when you need it. I say as much in posts I’ve written regarding vaccinations and defending your choices.

But we walk a bit of a tightrope. In defending ourselves it’s important that we don’t begin to wear the costume of our critics. It was, after all, a (patriarchal) medical establishment that originally propounded the notion that infant formula would “free” mothers from the chains of breastfeeding. It has taken years of yet unfinished work to return the duty of proper infant nutrition to its rightful place — in women’s hands (er, well, not exactly her hands), not scientists!

In that same vein, the goal of today’s little mantra is to remind me that I don’t follow Attachment Parenting or any style of parenting simply to follow it, simply because its best. I practice what I practice because it fits me, my beliefs, my instincts as a mother who is connected intimately with what I intuitively feel will benefit my child. And scientific research, thankfully, does support the notion that a parent’s instincts and desires for the well-being of their offspring are powerful indeed, and their presence make the difference between a healthy organism and an imbalanced one.

Today’s Parenting Mantra: Toward “Getting Out the Guilt!”

And so, drumroll… as I considered all these words, and found myself really wanting to give myself a bit of credit, the parenting mantra I invented for myself today, is this:

Trust your child, but also trust yourself.

In a way it’s a “let children be children” but also “let parents be parents” mantra. I realized that, although I could turn to books to give me ideas, it was time for me to remember that parenting is partly about “just winging it” as I did with my first son. Sometimes we pull out our hair, we don’t know where to start, and we need the voice of an outsider to give us a little juice or a push to head us off into a direction that sounds good to us. But above all we must trust ourselves, we must let our own wisdom shine, and the wisdom, of all things, our children.

I’m not in it to win any contest, just to help make my kids become the happiest people they can be, and hopefully responsible citizens of our society and the planet. I can’t help them get there unless I believe in myself.

Here’s to that inner wisdom,

Mama Hope

Love this article? Give it a tweet!