Attachment Parenting – the most child-centered, child-friendly, child-obsessed, time-consuming, all-consuming, self-consuming, beauty-consuming, body-consuming, sex-life-extinguishing, shower-extinguishing, wouldn’t-do-it-any-other-way parenting style.
AP is different and questionable in our culture, but really it’s completely normal – just not in our modern world. I mean, in a world where we drive around with our kids in car seats to buy food (so we don’t walk to the village with babe in arms)… and we associate bed and bedtime with sex because that’s the only place and time we screw (so we don’t sleep with our babies)… and we sit all day at a desk or a couch so we’re out of shape and have back problems (so we stick our kids in strollers instead of carrying them)… in this world of daycare and television we’re disconnected from our kids and that’s normal. So is living in suburban hell, not knowing our neighbor’s names, being disconnected from our tribe.
But our babies didn’t get that memo. They come out of our bodies expecting the sorts of thing baby humans received 50,000 years ago: a single human to bond with and keep them safe. And that single human needs a village to back her up. (Yes, “her.” Whether you like it or not, breastfeeding is what babies need. Period.) Babies don’t know, lying alone in a crib, they won’t be eaten by a lion. They need to feel an adult right there to protect them. Sound crazy? Ask a screaming baby who eventually gives up desperately asking for their biological need for human contact – ask them 20 years later when they’re in therapy saying, “I just can’t seem to trust anyone.”
OK, OK, it’s not our faults our kids are fucked up. It’s lots of other stuff like public school and drugs and gangs and modern technology. And Elmo.
I parented the children when they were babies the way I like to eat. I thought about what works in nature. What did my ancestors do? Not my grandmother, but people in Africa many, many years ago – before Trader Joe’s and Teletubbies and cribs and separate bedrooms and hospitals. Before all that, women breastfed – for a long time. They birthed with dignity, privacy and calm. They carried their kids. They slept with their kids. They weren’t so freakin’ focused on Needing A Break and Adult Time.
I got news: We’re animals. And we need to relate to our children like really smart animals – who have really-crucial-to-fulfill needs when they’re born. Do you know why babies flail their limbs upward for a second sometimes when they’re sleeping? It’s not some kind of baby electrocution tendency. It’s evidence of baby’s need to connect with mama – specifically in the way that monkey babies latch on tightly to an adult who’s running. Why do you think babies like to be rocked to sleep? Because they’ve always been carried around – for safety, for community, and for convenience – and sleep is a side effect. Babies don’t want stuff that replaces us. That’s nature’s law, and we’re fucking with it big time with all these high tech gadgets that only serve to disconnect us.
And, yes, you can contact my kids when they’re 20 and see what they’re talking to their therapists about. It won’t be about Elmo.