Attachment parenting is not about being a
martyr, about sacrificing parents and their needs in the best interests of
children. That is not in the best interests of children at all. It is about
attachment, the strong loving resilient bond that sustains and nourishes both
children and their families, and in fact humanity. That allows us to feel
compassion for others because at our earliest, at our most vulnerable and
impressionable, we have experienced it ourselves.
.
Before my daughter was
born, we envisioned the parade of relatives. Offers of help so frequent they’d
be annoying. Many loving hands helping us guide our baby through the world.
Instead there was a
half hearted flow of cards and meeting of my daughter, a general whiff of
suspicion about our responsive parenting approach, jibes about spoilt brats and
a general impression that we were pretty much in this alone. Thankfully I found
a community of like minded mothers in a Birth and Babies group organized by the
Maternity Coalition, and this open circle of hands and hearts made the first
intense few years of parenting feel warmer and safer.
Then recently this
little gem of research surfaced. I’ll give you a few moments to have a look.
Intense mothering.
Sounds bad. Sounds… overdone. Way too much of a strain, all that responding to
needs and putting your children first. No wonder mothers like that aren’t
happy.
What a terribly enlightening
piece of research that isn’t.
It focuses on mothers
who believe, ‘that women are better parents than men,
that mothering should be child-centred, and that children should be considered
sacred and are fulfilling to parents’, and reports that the mothers studied in
the survey based research also
felt that ‘good’ mothers sacrifice themselves for their children. There is a
huge area of crossover here with attachment style responsive parenting even
though advocates of responsive parenting make it clear that parent’s needs must
also be met rather than sacrificed, and that involved parenting is
intrinsically joyful and satisfying for parents as well as babies. And that bit
about women being better parents. Well, not that either…
I know, though, that
mothers who are responsive and focused on meeting their children’s needs are
commonly seen as martyrs.
What this study does
do not, to my mind, do, is convince me that mothers who care and respond are
putting themselves at risk of mental health issues, although this is at the
crux of how most people would read it. What it does do though is to highlight
that mothers as a whole are being failed.
The research is biased
in the sense that it is based in a set of cultural norms that are recent in
origin (they are really largely a symptom of the industrial revolution) and
blinding in scale. It makes the assumption that detachment parenting, with baby
fed artificial milk, sleeping in a cot alone (left to cry if s/he protests),
and wheeled about in a box rather than carried by parents, is normal. It’s not.
It’s recent and it’s become what society expects.
It isn’t what babies
expect.
Instinctively it isn’t
even what mothers expect, but we have become so used to the idea that it’s hard
for the vast majority particularly of new mothers to go against the social
grain and instead flow with their parenting instincts and their baby’s needs. If
mothers do choose to do that, then social approbation and support for their
role as a mother will in large be withdrawn, will in fact be replaced by the
strong message that they are harming their child in various ways. This leaves
parents alone at best, and isolation of this sort leads to doubt, depression,
anxiety and burnout.
Parenting in a vacuum
isn’t what parents should have to expect either.
It isn’t what we, a
highly social and communal species, has evolved to expect or to need.
Our babies are born
extremely underdeveloped, with only a quarter of our brain development in place
at birth as compared to the half that even higher primates have, simply because
our heads would be too large to fit through the birth canal any later in our
development. This is a trade off; we get extremely complex, clever brains when
they’re finished, but we have to put a lot of energy into protecting and
raising our completely vulnerable young until that happens.
Our babies know this
too. They’re extremely good at surviving, hence we’re around at all, and the
way they do that is to make sure that they’re with a protective, regulating
parent all the time. The thing here is that this is probably at the crux of why
we are so social. One pair of parents alone simply struggle to parent properly
and survive at the same time. It isn’t what we were meant to do. We support
each other, form communities, parent together.
Not so much any more.
Quoting professor
James McKenna on co-sleeping with babies;
‘An evolutionary
perspective forces us to consider the potential consequences of the recent
shift away from social or co-sleeping arrangements to solitary ones in western
industrial cultures, thereby altering the adaptive fit between the human
infant’s extreme neurological immaturity and social support environment that
presumably made such immaturity possible – or at least safer.’ (1)
In fairness, the
research article I linked to above focuses on mums who have a major belief that
is anathema to attachment parenting. Attachment parenting is not about
sacrifice of the self being for the good of the child. Quite the reverse, it’s
about getting everyone’s needs met, it simply recognizes that one person in the
pair, the bub, cannot meet his / her own needs and is entirely reliant on
loving attentive parents to do so in order to survive and thrive.
There’s another bit of
research that’s rather suggestive to me. This little gem here;
I find interesting.
It suggests that women
find attachment parenting … empowering! That women who self – identify (another
online survey) as feminists tend to also be attached parents to their own
children. This study takes pains to designate the idea that feminism is anti
parenting as being merely a stereotype, but I think that the evidence of
history shows us that it was, at least, a reality. Ina May Gaskin, the seminal
birth educator and midwife (who’s ‘The Farm’ birth community boasts a 1.4% c
section rate) relates in her book, ‘Birth Matters’ that when she spoke about
empowered woman centred birth to university students in the 1970’s, she was met
with stony silence or horrified responses. Feminists don’t have children, it’s
enslavement to the domestic treadmill.
So something has
changed. Women now who identify as feminists also put their hands up for
attachment parenting. No doubt that’s because they tend to think and research
more than their peers, but I also think that it’s because of a recognition that
mothering, and the right to do so in a supported loving community, is as much
an integral part of being a strong empowered woman as is the right to equal
access to quality education and employment. The pendulum has swung, and perhaps
a woman’s right to raise her children in a loving responsive and satisfying way
is one of the newest feminist issues.
Why? Because
responsive parenting that allows parents to follow their instincts, slow down,
spend the time to really enjoy their children and their role as parents, is
deeply rewarding for both. Because skin to skin contact, breastfeeding and
keeping babies close gives mothers (and fathers) a beautiful oxytocin based
hormonal high. Because birth in an undisturbed safe setting, birth completed by
mother and baby together, is one of the most exhilarating and empowering experiences
that a woman can have and the strongest start to motherhood.
Because the fact that
the leading cause of maternal death in the year post partum in Australia is
suicide, is appalling.
Parenting in a vacuum
may be symptomatic of the things we have lost, but perhaps attached responsive
parenting can begin to show us the way back. Initiatives like Mamabake, where
mothers co-operate to produce food, and Birth and Babies that supports new
mothers to parent instinctively, create genuine community and empower women to
raise children whose needs are met, and whose lives are a joy to themselves and
to their families.
Attachment parenting
is not about being a martyr, about sacrificing parents and their needs in the
best interests of children. That is not in the best interests of children at
all. It is about attachment, the strong loving resilient bond that sustains and
nourishes both children and their families, and in fact humanity. That allows
us to feel compassion for others because at our earliest, at our most
vulnerable and impressionable, we have experienced it ourselves.
Perhaps instead of yet
more research to point out the blindingly obvious, we could direct our energies
into creating the sort of social support for loving parenting that made our
species so incredible and so successful in the first place.
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