time
I've wanted to write a reaction to that Time magazine article that everyone was talking about, but I never got around to reading it. I am both for and against attachment parenting, so I was sure the article would piss me off somehow.
We attachment parent rather by default. I prolonged breast-feeding Harvey, if you consider 22 months and through another pregnancy prolonged. (I do!) I didn't do it because I liked breast-feeding. I was pretty fed up with it, actually. I did it because I was lazy and weaning seemed like pain.
Harvey slept in our bed to 18 months. Zion sleeps in our bed now. I would prefer it if he slept in a crib and through the night, but I'm lazy and I don't want to go through the screaming that it would take to get him there. So, um, yeah. Hurray for co-sleeping.
What's the third part of attachment parenting? Oh yeah, baby-wearing. For heaven sakes, I can't believe there needs to be a theory around this. I wear the baby in a carrier all the time. Not because there are emotional benefits (unless you include my back pain as redemptive suffering and call it a benefit) but because it's easier than carrying him on my hip. Also, if he's fussy then sometimes it gets him to stop yelling.
So I wouldn't call myself an attachment parent. I'd just say that I have a really low tolerance for yelling.
The reason I'm against attachment parenting as a thing is I'm against needing to have a name and theory behind every stupid thing we do. Why can't we just tell the truth. Not everything we do in parenting is a careful weighing of the theoretical pros and cons. A lot is just personality and inertia.
I wish we could talk about child-rearing the same way we talk about cleaning a sink. You may use bleach and I may use lemon water (haha, I mean my husband would like me to use lemon water and I actually use nothing...) but when we talk about our different cleaning methods the stakes in that conversation aren't very high. When we talk about parenting, on the other hand, it feels very high stakes, as if my choices mean that yours are wrong or vise versa. Maybe the stakes are high, our children are precious delicate mounds of clay or whatever. But whatever, maybe they're not. Maybe many different parenting methods are fine. There are lots of different kinds of kids and parents, after all.
Beyond the basic right to breast-feed in public, do we really need to keep fighting about these things? Nobody has ever said anything to me about breast-feeding in public, and I've been at it for three years now. I don't even use a nursing cover. I even pull my boob right out the top of my swimsuit at the pond. Seriously, how else are you going to do it? Even with a tankini... would you rather see my stomach???!!! I've gained and lost a hundred pounds over two pregnancies! No, you would not rather see my stomach.
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I attachment parent out of laziness and low tolerance to crying too. Weaning is tough! And getting out of bed at 2am to try to put a crying baby back to sleep - no way, I'm not getting out of bed and there will be no crying baby keeping me up at night!