Now that my son is five months old, I have had more opportunities to learn and reflect, and I’ve decided that I’m not as attached to attachment parenting as I used to be. If I erred, though, at least I erred on the side of babying my baby too much rather than too little. He’s only five months old, and I’m glad he got through his early, fussy months without crying very much. In a nutshell, however, I have come to believe AP can be bad for both the baby and the parents if it is taken to an extreme or misapplied. Why? Because a baby needs a happy Mommy and Daddy. Time to stop living our lives in fear of the fussies!

I have gotten Wyatt through his fussy phase by revolving my life around keeping him happy, but now it’s time for me to start living my life again while including him in it. I’ve even been limiting my car trips because Wyatt cries in the car seat if he’s in it longer than 10-15 minutes at a time. He will cry himself to sleep after a few minutes, but then if I stop at a light or a stop sign, he will usually awaken to begin the cycle again. But for awhile a thought has been bothering me in the back of my mind. If Mommy doesn’t have a life, baby’s not going to learn about life. Babies don’t only need security. They also need novelty. They don’t just need for their needs and cues to be responded to. They need leadership. Plus it helps their development of language and social skills if Mommy is animated and happy when playing with them and talking to them, rather than burned out.

Until he’s old enough to crawl, I still intend to have Wyatt in arms, lap or carrier most of the time when he’s not napping. I’m not going to run out and buy plastic contraptions such as walkers to place him in so that I don’t have to hold him. But I’ve decided to institute more balance by making our household a parent-led, not a baby-led, household. The difference in how I treat him now is not dramatic. It is a shift in attitude and perspective, with only subtle changes how I behave. I still breast feed him on demand. I still intend to delay solids until he shows signs of readiness. I won’t let him cry it out; I intend to follow the methods in The No Cry Sleep Solution.

But I will let him whine more at times. For example, today while I was showering, I had him in the bathroom in his infant seat with a toy to play with. He started whining. Ordinarily, I would hurry through the shower. I would not wash my face after getting out. I would postpone that until later. I would not clip my toenails if I saw they needed trimming. Today, I decided to let him whine while I washed my hair twice. I didn’t take my sweet time with everything, but I didn’t rush as if to put out a fire, either. I did everything I wanted to do, efficiently but not frantically. Occasionally, I would peek out the curtain and say, “Give Mommy just a minute.” When I stepped out of the shower, Wyatt was fine. He was quietly playing with his toy. Instead of immediately playing with him to make up for ignoring him for fifteen minutes, I put him in the pouch and went about my business. My husband commented that he looked really sedate inside the pouch. Far from being unhappy with how I had just treated him, it seemed to calm him.

For a little while now, I have begun to have doubts about the way that I have been implementing AP in our household. One thing that gave me pause was a tidbit of information my husband told me about his friend’s family life. Every time his friend’s wife goes to the bathroom, her toddler and three year old both pound on the door until she comes out. She is one of the few women in my circle of acquaintances who seems to have been parenting her kids the AP way. For example, when they were babies, her husband had to come home from lunch every day to bring her lunch, because she couldn’t put the babies down to feed herself. Now, I know that most AP parents don’t take things to this extreme. It was just the way that this couple did it. I certainly have not been living that way. But I have gone six months without getting a haircut. And I could really identify with the mother who blogged about feeling guilty about changing the kitty litter. (Halfway through, her baby cried. She had to finish up and wash her hands before she could comfort her baby, leaving her feeling guilty.) I also know what this mother means when she writes about how attachment parenting can become absurd in practice. And this Berkeley Parents Network thread was very interesting.

But do the leaders of the AP movement themselves really advocate for women to live a life of such extreme self-sacrifice and such extreme baby-centeredness in order to avoid doing permanent emotional damage to their offspring? I was surprised this evening to read on the web site of Dr. Sears himself:

“Attachment parenting is a question of balance –not being indulgent or permissive, yet being attentive. As you and your baby grow together, you will develop the right balance between attentive, but not indulgent. In fact, being possessive, or a ’smother mother’ (or father) is unfair to the child, fosters an inappropriate dependency on the parent, and hinders your child from becoming normally independent. For example, you don’t need to respond to the cries of a seven-month-old baby as quickly as you would a seven-day-old baby.

As your baby grows, you become more expert in reading her cries, so you can gradually delay your response. Say, for example, you are busy in the kitchen and your seven-month-old is sitting and playing nearby and cries to be picked up. Instead of rushing to scoop your baby up, simply acknowledge your baby and give your baby ‘it’s okay’ cues. Because you and your baby are so connected, your baby can read your body language and see that you’re not anxious, so you naturally give your baby the message, ‘No problem, baby, you can handle this.’ In this way, you’re being a facilitator , and because of your close attachment you’re actually better able to help your baby delay gratification and ease into independence.”

And the author of The Continuum Concept, Jean Liedloff, goes so far as to recommend that AP parents be parent-led, not child-led, in how they go about it. She recommends holding or carrying your baby, but not focusing on him or her. She points out that babies want to learn how their parents live. They are looking to their parents for leadership. If the parent is always focusing on the baby, the baby is not getting to see the parent in action. In fact, she believes that taking the child-led philosophy too far will result in babies becoming less, not more, secure. This is because they will sense the lack of confidence in their parents. Their parents are looking to them for leadership, but how can they lead? They are babies. They will fuss. Toddlers and older children will continually test boundaries trying to find out where the boundaries are. See the online article, “Who’s in Control? The Unhappy Consequences of Being Child-Centered“.

EDIT 7/21/08: There can be pitfalls to trying not to be child-centered, as Scott Noelle points out in his online article, “Where’s My Center“. He cautions that if it feels wrong to make a conscious effort not to pay direct attention to your baby or child, listen to your heart. He notes the fascinating observation that mothers in hunter-gatherer societies actually pay more attention to their babies than what appears to the eye of a Western observer. This is because in hunter-gatherer societies, people communicate in a liminal way, with subtle cues. They have to, because they rely upon it for their survival. The real problem, says Scott Noelle, is not giving babies and children too much direct attention. It is giving them the wrong kind of attention, the kind that makes it seem to them as if we do not know what we are doing and we are looking to them for guidance.

Somehow, I think I must have missed this type of nuance when I was pregnant and reading the literature, and then after I gave birth and consulted it again (in my two minute windows of time). In The Baby Book, I remembered reading that if a mother will respond to her baby’s signals before he cries, it will teach the baby to communicate. I also recall reading in The Happiest Baby on the Block that babies in many non-Western cultures almost never cry. Several articles I have read have cited the scientific finding that it is bad for babies to cry, because it floods their bodies with the stress hormone cortisol and deprives them of oxygen. Put this all together with my new mother feelings of “Oh, God, he’s crying, he’s about to die!” and you get a new mother who lived her life in fear of the fussies for four months. And I don’t exxaggerate that or say that tongue in cheek.

But my concepts were not formed only by books and articles filtered through a new mother state of mind. They were also formed by other AP mothers in the online forums. Over and over again I read horrific threads about exhausted mothers who are living tortuous existences in service of their young. For example, one woman has terrible hip pain plus severe sleep deprivation from co-sleeping with her 17 month old baby who nurses every 1-2 hours all night long. But she won’t stop doing it. The message is clear between the lines. You have to live with the pain because if you don’t, you will do permanent emotional scarring to your own child. That’s how I interpret it. Would it really be a greater evil for this woman to allow her 17 month old baby to cry a little bit for a few nights so that his mother could stop being tortured? Is all her pain really necessary for her baby’s well-being?

I have been told things by several women in response to my (I think) rather moderate and tepid posts about seeking more balance as a new mother. One woman admonished me that I should always put my baby’s needs ahead of my own. Another told me severely that since I chose to have the baby, I was responsible for doing whatever would give the baby the best start in life. You would think I had just written a post saying I wanted to go out drinking and flirting with men while I left my baby at home in a dark room, alone, crying, hungry, in a poopy diaper with a diaper rash. But no. All I had written was that I was going to start being a leader to my baby and that I was hoping for my baby to become more independent of me so I could get away more. Another woman told me that if I’m a leader to my baby, I’m not AP, because AP is about being child-led.

These few women did not reflect not the majority. The majority of women who responded to me were more empathetic and flexible and less judgemental. But their responses were geared toward helping me continue to do as much as I possibly can, along the lines of what I have been doing, without getting burned out. It’s okay to have balance if you are weak enough to need it, because it’s better than being depressed and exhausted. That’s sort of the message I get, but maybe that’s just my warped perception. That it’s okay not to be perfect but the ideal is still very clear. The ideal is still do your utmost to sacrifice yourself for baby, so that baby will turn out to be as emotionally wonderful as possible.

I think the ideal itself needs a little adjustment.

I’m clear now on that, but I still have lots of questions about the nitty gritty everyday implementation of my modified AP concepts or whatever they are (I don’t care if they’re not truly AP). I still wonder how I can keep my baby happy being carried and focusing on my life when my life is so boring and isolated, and I still wonder how my life can get less boring and isolated, given that I have such small windows of time in between feeding him and getting him to nap.

I get him to observe whatever I can. When his Daddy works in the garden, I go outside, and he watches. Today he even watched me pull a few weeds from inside his pouch. I had not yet done that because I didn’t want to get my hands dirty because, if he fussed, I wanted to be able to remove him immediately and comfort him, without taking the time to wash my hands first. Wow! I was actually brave enough to pull weeds and get my hands dirty five months after giving birth! I wonder what I will be brave enough to take on next now that I feel newly liberated not to make my baby the constant center of attention and keep him happy every second.

When I was pregnant, I used to fantasize about my cool life as a new mother, going around wherever I wanted, while my baby rode with me in a sling or pouch of some kind. I thought baby could feed, nap and learn while I socialized, shopped, hiked trails, walked beaches, and did everything except have sex. I also imagined I could have a home based business while baby learned from watching me. Somehow I had gotten this impression from some of the AP and babywearing literature. Mommy-baby utopia! How easy it would be, and how win-win.

The reality is that babies, when they are worn in a carrier - if they even consent to being worn - like constant motion and action. So if I have a home based business that involves sitting on my ass in front of my computer, I can’t wear my baby more than five minutes while doing so, unless he is in a deep sleep. I have to get on my computer while he sleeps at night. This illustrates one difference between a stone age culture and our culture. If I were gathering all day, my baby would be easy to keep happy. The mothers in The Continuum Concept did not try to have internet businesses. And this is why being a mother is still not easy in spite of my new “Baby Whisperer” attitude.

EDIT 7/21/08: My mother says it will get easier once baby is crawling, which should be coming up soon! And a woman in a WAHM forum said that it becomes possible to work at home, even while baby is not sleeping, once baby is walking.

Other Posts Categorized as Personal:

• Month Eight of New Mommydom and an Assessment of Attachment Parenting - October 18th, 2008
• The Name of the Game for the Pre-Crawler: Keep 'Em from Getting Bored - August 8th, 2008
• So It's Not Always This Difficult - I Have a High Need Baby - April 5th, 2008
• Wyatt's Birth Story - February 29th, 2008
• What I Did on My Summer Vacation - September 14th, 2007
• Getting Caught Up on My Online Novel Writing Class - July 4th, 2007
• Getting Used to Feeling Productive - January 7th, 2007
• My First Home-made Smoked Turkey - December 23rd, 2006
• Can the Simple Potato Candy Recipe Be Improved? - December 5th, 2006
• I've Been Martened, Tarted and Torqued - November 18th, 2006