Time breastfeeding cover: Attachment parenting vs. an attached parent (+video)

With all the hullabaloo over Time magazine's cover story on attachment parenting (not to mention the omg-did-you-see-that cover photo of a mom breastfeeding her 3-year-old son) I went to go find my well-worn copy of  William Sears’s “The Baby Book.”

Stephanie Hanes

Correspondent

Stephanie Hanes is the lead writer for Modern Parenthood and a longtime Monitor correspondent. She lives in Andover, Mass. with her husband, Christopher, her daughter, Madeline Thuli, a South Africa Labrador retriever, Karoo, and an imperialist cat named Kipling.

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Sears is the focus of the Time article, and is often described as the father of American “attachment parenting” – a philosophy, Time’s Kate Pickert writes, that has “helped redefine the modern relationship between mother and baby.”

“The Baby Book” has become a bible of sorts for moms like the ones in her story; moms who breastfeed their children through toddlerhood, who eschew date nights with husbands in favor of nursing, who never leave their children (ever), and who happily give the marital bed over to the baby.

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Indeed, attachment parenting, as Ms. Pickert describes it, is based on three tenets: baby wearing (no bouncy seats or strollers here – baby goes in a sling next to mom), breastfeeding (as long as possible) and co-sleeping (baby in bed).  As such, this “demanding brand of child rearing” asks a lot of moms, she writes, and also slips into the anti-feminist, since being a good mother in this philosophy seems to require a rather large dose of self-annihilation.

Hmmm.

Where’s that darn book?

Because, I’ll admit it, I consider myself an attachment parent. I cuddled or wore Baby M in a sling for most of her first months. (“Are we going to a Star Wars convention?” one friend asked as I expertly criss-crossed the Moby wrap around my shoulders.) She slept next to our bed in a cradle. I nursed her on demand.

But I don’t see myself in this story.

It’s quite possible, I guess, that I’m just a slacker attachment parent. I mean, ever since the baby was a week old I put her down when I wanted to take a shower.  (All that new mom talk about not having time to bathe? I’m telling you, just put the kid down. It can’t move yet.) And although we spent the better part of her first year letting her take naps on us, we never let her sleep in our bed at night. That was our space; no squirmy kiddos allowed.

Still, I carried Baby M enough that one of my grandmothers worried about her future independence.  I encountered more than my share of “you’re still nursing her??” To this day I haven’t let her “cry it out.” We spend an awful lot of time snuggling.

And she’s just a perfect, confident, happy little nugget.

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