What Does Attachment Parenting Mean to Me?

It occurred to me that I have mentioned attachment parenting (AP) in several posts lately, but I’ve never really explained what it is, or what it means to me.

AP has been in the media recently because of that controversial Time Magazine cover showing a woman breastfeeding her son, who was standing on a chair next to her. It probably gave a slightly wrong impression of AP, but one aspect of this type of parenting is “extended” breastfeeding. I saw something the other day where a woman said, “if you’re still breastfeeding at a year, everyone knows about it; if you’re still breastfeeding at two years, only your husband knows about it. If you’re still breastfeeding at three years, only you know about it.” A lot of women do continue to breastfeed their children until they are toddlers, and just tend to keep it a secret to avoid the sort of outrage generated by that Time Magazine cover. I think I’m lucky, in that when I was reading about parenting styles after having S, I stumbled upon a group whose members were largely AP, and felt happy to stay there and stop looking for anything else. To me the idea of “extended” breastfeeding isn’t so awful, and why should it be? Breastmilk is full of vitamins, essential fats and everything a child needs for development, after all.

But AP is not just about breastfeeding. The Sears’ bestselling Baby Book quotes the seven “Baby Bs”: birth bonding, belief in your baby’s signals, breastfeeding, baby wearing, bedding close to your baby, balance & boundaries, and beware of baby experts.

Birth Bonding

I was lucky when S was born; although I was fairly out of it and a bit clueless as to what was going on and what I should be doing, a NICU nurse came down to tube feed her on that first day, and told me to undress my baby and put her down my top, and just keep here there as much as I could. For the two weeks we were in hospital, whenever I could I put S down my t shirt. She slept a lot more peacefully curled up on my chest, and I slept through a lot of other babies’ screaming with her laying there. Ward staff would pop their heads in to check on us and, seeing the empty fishbowl, ask me “where is your baby?!” Although “kangaroo care “ as they call it, is something actively encouraged in NICU, nobody really mentions it on the ward – and none of the other NICU nurses really mentioned it to me. I feel very lucky that I met that particular nurse on that particular day.

In the first few weeks of S’s life, she was held a lot. Her father held her whenever he was here, and when he didn’t have her, I did. I didn’t like to put her down in her bouncy chair because she looked so small and lost in it. I did start to put her upstairs to bed in her Moses basket in the evenings, but I spent most of that time going upstairs to check she was ok.

Belief in Baby’s Signals

This is a big one for me, because so many people out there seem to be adamant that babies’ cries should be ignored, lest we create a generation of manipulative attention-seekers. I remember S’s father telling me, while we were still in the hospital, that I was creating a rod for my own back by picking her up when she cried.

This is about more than just crying though; it’s about learning what a baby’s signals mean: are they tired? Hungry? Do they need a clean nappy? All babies are born with “attachment-promoting behaviours” – they are designed to be cute and precious so that we want to pick them up and hold them and coo at them and notice when they have a wet nappy. Parents are generally able to intuit what their baby wants, but often we ignore their signs: “he can’t be hungry, I only fed him an hour ago.”

It took me a while to trust my instincts with S, and to realise that I really did know what was best for her, and I did know what I was doing. I still have times where she’s whining and clearly wants something, and I can’t figure out what it is – and then after a few minutes I think “hang on, you’ve not changed her nappy for a while you eejit.” On the whole though, she is very good at letting me know what she wants, and I’m getting better at reading her cues and signals.

Breastfeeding

When I was pregnant, I asked my mum whether I and my siblings were breastfed. She replied yes, for at least a year. S’s father’s response to this was “what? A year? Disgusting!” I suppose because I was the second of six children, and all of my younger siblings were breastfed, it just never occurred to me to formula feed. A friend advised me before S was born that I should use formula because then you can see exactly how much milk the baby is getting and make sure they get enough on each feed. At the time I didn’t fancy the idea, purely because I wasn’t sure about all the bottles and sterilising and things – I knew I would worry about germs. I’ve posted on here before about how I found breastfeeding hard in the first few weeks, but a friend pointed me in the direction of the group I mentioned above, and the ladies on there proved invaluable in their advice and wisdom. I read about the benefits of breastfeeding, and found that actually, I’m one of those people who is likely to be found banging on about how all babies should be breastfed, and formula companies not allowed to advertise at all, until the cows come home. I feel very strongly, not just that newborns should be breastfed, but that breastfeeding should continue for as long as possible. S is seven months old now, and people often seem surprised I’m still breastfeeding her and say “oh well done!” as if it’s some great achievement. Really, it’s not. Once I was over that initial hurdle, breastfeeding became the lazy option for me. A couple of people have asked me when I will be moving her onto formula, but I have literally no idea why I would do that. Why feed my child a product that’s been synthetically engineered to imitate something my body already produces? I have no plans to give up breastfeeding any time soon. For one thing, it burns a lot of calories, and I eat a lot of chocolate. A LOT of chocolate.

Baby Wearing

This one, I stumbled into. I live on the first floor, and I found I was unable to get the pushchair up and down the stairs without help. This meant I was housebound, unless S’s father came round, which he didn’t do every day. A friend sent me a wrap sling which she’d not been able to get on with for her little girl, and I fell in love with it. I put S into the sling, and off we went. All of a sudden I was free to wander off out as and when I pleased. Because S settled so well in the sling, I started wearing it around the house too, which meant I could do the washing up, cook some dinner, go upstairs to the toilet etc without having to leave her. I even started feeding her while she was in the sling. As she grew heavier, the way that sling tied across my stomach hurt my belly, so I invested in an Ergo sling. These days, we use the Ergo when we go out, but I still use the wrap sling at home sometimes, and we did use it the other day to wander down to the post box. It’s great for cuddly times. The Ergo is more structured, and can be worn in several different ways. It has straps like a back pack, and a pocket for my keys. S loves to be in the sling when we go out because she can see so much more – even when she’s facing my chest, she can look around and above her at the trees and people, and I chat to her constantly. She developed good head and neck control from an early age, and I think this has a lot to do with the fact she was always in the sling, looking up at me. She is quite the little chunk these days, and it does hurt my back to carry her around so much – but I still prefer the sling to the buggy, and miss that closeness if we’ve not used the sling for a few days.

Bedding Close to Baby

When we first came home from hospital, S slept in a Moses basket next to my bed. When she woke up I would sit up and feed her, then spend what felt like a lifetime trying to settle her back to sleep in her basket, and then go to sleep myself. I was fairly zombiefied by this point. One morning around 4am, I decided that since she was showing no signs of settling into her basket, I would just prop myself up with some pillows, and have her sleep on my chest like she used to in the hospital. She went to sleep in no time, and for a couple of weeks, every time she woke at 4am I would have her in bed with me. Then I decided to try feeding her laying down, and it was an instant success. After that, once she woke for the first time during the night, I would just bring her into bed with me and feed her laying next to me. It wasn’t long after that I decided there was no point in putting her in the Moses basket in the first place, and she’s slept in my bed ever since.

People tend to frown on this one, and think it’s terribly dangerous. If you follow basic safety precautions though, it’s really not. In fact there are studies to suggest having them that close to you can cut the risk of SIDS by a considerable amount. Mothers really do have a sixth sense as to their child’s position in bed next to them, and I’m not a particularly active sleeper any way. If I fall asleep laying on my side, that’s exactly how I wake up. If there was a man sharing my bed, I probably wouldn’t have S in it because I would worry about him rolling over on her – though to be honest, I’m more likely to remove the man than my daughter!

There is nothing better to see first thing in the morning than a great big, cheesy grin from someone to whom you are the entire world.

Balance and Boundaries

This is the one I have problems with. Because it’s just the two of us, and there’s not somebody here to take over rocking her when she’s having a bad time, I do tend to neglect myself from time to time. Over the last month or so S’s sleeping has been pretty bad, which has meant mine has been too, and I’ve not had the break I usually get in the evenings. Things like cleaning the kitchen and tidying the living room have fallen by the wayside as I’ve had to prioritise the list of things I would have liked to get done in a day. In all honesty though, I do think this has been an exercise in letting go for me. I don’t need to get downstairs and watch that TV show, the washing up is not important in the grand scheme of things, the world will not end if I don’t update my blog tonight. I decided that as long as I’ve had some dinner, the rest can wait, and once I’d adopted that mindset it made things a lot easier to deal with. It is difficult to maintain any real balance when you are the only one doing the balancing though!

Beware of Baby Experts

When you’re a new mum, everyone has advice for you. Everyone knows an old foolproof trick their mother used to get baby to sleep, or the best way to do this or that. People want to be helpful, and don’t take too kindly to being told “thanks, but I’m going to do this my way.” I’ve found that people also tend to think that because I’m a first time mum, and they’ve raised however many kids themselves, I can’t possibly know what I’m doing, and I should be doing what they did. It’s difficult to say “no, I know best” without sounding as if I’m judging them for what they’re doing, or insulting them in some way.

There are endless books and experts out there who will tell you exactly how to get baby to sleep, when to feed, how to train them to do this and that. It’s difficult to turn your back on them all, and you might not want to. I did though. I don’t want to force S into a schedule, I don’t want to train her to self-soothe, I don’t want to use controlled crying or leave her to cry it out.

When someone has raised ten kids, or is considered sufficiently expert on the subject that they have published several books on how to look after babies, and you’re just a woman who’s been handed this bundle and told to raise it into a well-adjusted adult, it’s easy to think they know best and you’d better do what they say. Turns out I’m quite stubborn though, and I read lots. I might not have the practical experience, but I know a lot of the theory and I have my instincts and for the most part, I’ve found that my instincts are backed up by quite a lot of scientific fact. I’ve decided I’m going to follow my instincts as to what is right for S, and the experts can go and sell their books elsewhere.

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Why I Will Never Leave S to Cry.

The other day I posted a status on Facebook that S had gone to bed but cried when I got my dinner, so I had a cold dinner again. It seemed to attract several comments (not on the status itself, but to me personally via texts, emails and in person) telling me I was doing the wrong thing by going to her when she cried. This is my response to those statements.

Babies cry in order to get their carer to help meet their needs. Babies, certainly those under a year of age, do not know how to manipulate, and cannot be spoilt. The can’t say, “so sorry, I’m feeling a bit crap, I’ve woken up suddenly and it’s dark and I’m alone and I don’t like it; could you just give me a quick hug and help me get back to sleep?” They cry instead; it’s their only way of letting us know they need us.

A baby’s cry is supposed to be loud, and grate on your nerves, and make you feel emotional, so that you will want to make it stop – by doing whatever it is the baby is crying for, not by closing the door and turning the TV up. Evolution did not make babies cry in this way so as to make you ignore it until it stops; surely if a baby’s cry was meant to be ignored, it would be easier to do so?

In the 1970s, Mary Ainsworth and Sylvia Bell conducted a study into how mothers responded to their babies’ crying and how this affected the child’s later behaviour. They found that the more quickly a mother responded to her crying infant, even if she wasn’t able to stop the child from crying very quickly, the less the child cried later. They also found that “close maternal contact” was the most effective way of stopping a child from crying. The more responsive I am to S’s crying, the less she will cry in future. For me this is evidenced in the fact that actually, she cries very rarely.

There have been numerous studies into attachment theory (different from attachment parenting, which is an approach to parenting; attachment theory is the study of relationships between humans), and the overwhelming finding is that the more responsive a parent is during the first year of a child’s life, the more securely attached the child will be, and therefore the better the relationship between parent and child going forward.

These are the specific references to back up what I am saying here:

• Bell SM & Ainsworth MSD. Infant crying and maternal responsiveness.  Child Development (1972); 43: 1171-1190.
• Ainsworth MDS. The development of infant-mother attachment. In BM Caldwell & HN Ricciutti (Eds.), Review of child development research (1973) (Volume 3, pp 1-94); Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Egeland B & Farber EA. Infant-mother attachment: Factors related to its development and changes over time.Child Development (1984); 55: 753-771.
• Isabella RA & Belsky J. Interactional synchrony and the origins of infant-mother attachment: A replication study.  Child Development (1991); 62: 373-384.
• Isabella RA, Belsky J, & von Eye A. The origins of infant-mother attachment: An examination of interactional synchrony during the infant’s first year. Developmental Psychology (1989); 25: 12-21.

Many will say that the “cry it out” technique works – after a few torturous hours of screaming the baby “learns” and no longer cries. But what has the baby learned? Most probably, the baby has learned that crying does not work, and nobody will come to help them. If you view a baby as a creature trying to manipulate and trick you, then you would see this as a success. But it has serious implications. This is a psychological term called learned helplessness. Once infants have learned that they do not have control over their surroundings, they stop trying to affect them in any way; they stop interacting. Acting as if a child is trying to manipulate us when it’s crying removes the child’s control over their situation and risks their losing interest in interacting with the world. Studies by Dr Kevin Nugent of Boston Children’s Hospital have found that babies whose cries are routinely ignored show symptoms of depression. There is also evidence that leaving a baby to cry can impede their development. I don’t know about you, but if I’m stressed out, I’m not really able to concentrate on learning new things.

This Guardian article discusses how leaving a baby to cry can result in developmental damage. And here is another post about how excessive crying is harmful to infants.

I am not telling you that what you are doing/have done for your child/children is wrong. What you do is your own business. But stop telling me to leave my child to cry, because you are wasting your time. I know that when I am crying and need some support, I don’t like to be ignored. I know that if I feel shitty, I can ask a friend for help. My baby can’t speak yet; her only way of communicating that need is by crying. And yes, sometimes it is tiring and draining, and I’d rather be sitting downstairs eating a hot meal than spending my evening running up and down the stairs to console a crying baby – but that doesn’t mean I’m going to ignore her for the sake of a hot meal. What I do now affects what will happen tomorrow, and I’m happy to have a few cold meals if it means my child will be happy, both now and in the future.

Short version of this post: don't tell me I'm doing the wrong thing and expect me not to answer you with facts and studies. 

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On The Absence of a Man

One of the main issues I have with being on my own with S is that she only has me to look after her.

For the most part, that is a definite plus in our lives: we have half the bed each (well, to be fair I think she takes up more than half a lot of the time), we don’t have to share each other’s time with anyone else, and we’ve developed a very strong bond.

My friend says I have First Baby Syndrome: I use the sling more often than the push chair; I carry S everywhere with me; I rarely leave her with anyone. In fact, I’ve probably left her less than a dozen times, each for no more than an hour. Depending on who you speak to, this is either a really good thing and means we’ll have a firm bond that will last S long into adulthood, or it’s really quite bad and S will be some weird mummy’s girl forever tied to my apron strings. 

When faced with the choice between Gina Ford and Dr Sears’ Attachment Parenting, I’ll opt for Sears every time. Being on my own means I’m probably making life very hard for myself by going down this route. S is never left to cry if I can help it, and I get quite irate if someone I leave her with lets her sit and cry. She is breastfed on demand, and I have no interest in trying to find ways of tricking her into sleeping through the night before she is ready. As a health visitor pointed out to me not so long ago, if you decide you’re going to exclusively breastfeed, on demand, for the first six months, you kind of just have to accept that your life is not your own for that time. There are several people with whom I would happily leave S for extended periods of time, but at the moment there is no point exploring that avenue, because I need to be nearby to feed her every few hours; more when it is hot out, or she is teething or feeling otherwise unwell. I am perfectly happy with this. If S turns out a weirdo because of it, well then all the Gina Ford subscribers can have their perfectly-trained toddlers pelt me with copies of her books.

The only problem comes at times when it would be useful to have a second pair of hands. For example, if I’ve not had my dinner before S goes to bed (most nights), and she’s having trouble settling to sleep (every night at the moment), it can get fairly frustrating to spend an hour or more trying to get her to sleep when my stomach is growling and I’m tired and fed up. She is teething at the moment, and has had some fairly miserable, grizzly days when I’ve had no choice but to feed her Calpol and Nurofen every couple of hours and spend large portions of time with her sitting on my lap, chewing my hand through a muslin and crying whenever I try to put her down and sneak off to the toilet. I actually ended up putting a Bumbo chair in the bathroom in the end, so that I could just take her to the toilet with me. (incidentally, I hear that’s a good thing for helping them to toilet train early, but still, I’d rather pee in peace sometimes, ya know?) 

Also there are times when I could do with just popping to the shop to get some milk, or to post a letter, but I don’t bother going because it is too much bother to get S into the sling, and she usually falls asleep in it any way, which makes for trouble at bed time, which is something I have to then deal with on my own. 

Taking S out in the pushchair is also an ordeal, being as we are, on the first floor. It would be handy to have someone to help carry the pushchair up and down the stairs. Someone to carry the shopping, someone to help with the housework, someone to play with S when I want to spend more than 5 minutes in the bath in the morning, someone to answer the door when I am breastfeeding (that’s a sure-fire way to get rid of unwanted callers, let me tell you), someone to whom I can say, “wow, did you see what she just did, that was awesome!” 

I have been sitting here racking my brains to think of other examples of when it would be useful to have a partner, and can come up with none. Obviously it would be nice for me to have some adult company and hugs and kisses and suchlike. But realistically, when S is awake my attention is on her. History attests to the fact that I have, at best, shoddy taste in men. I would not consider having any potential new beau around while S is awake. My evenings are fairly full, what with housework, decorating, two Open University modules, a blog, and an unhealthy addiction to several TV series via Netflix. If I were to acquire myself a young man, realistically they could only spend one or two evenings a week (from 8 til 10pm at most) here. And since S shares my bed, there is no space for a man in it.

Obviously, S doesn’t know any different, so it’s not like she feels that she’s missing out. When her father first cleared off, I had major concerns about her missing out on having a daddy and feeling like she only had half a family. But actually, when you look around you these days, it’s not like when I was a kid and everyone lived at home with mummy, daddy, a dog, one or two siblings and a white picket fence. In fact, by the time I was a teenager probably a lot of my peers’ parents had divorced. The modern family is no longer a heterosexual, married couple with 2.4 children; in fact, one of those is quite rare these days. Many families are made up of children from past relationships, step-siblings, half-siblings, extended family either living together or spending a lot of time together, and neighbours or friends who are no relation at all spending more time with the child than one or both parents. The options I was faced with when S and I came home from hospital meant that either I maintained a strong bond and a good routine with her, or she spent time with her father. There was no middle ground to be had. Since then other details have come to light which mean that, even if he were to attempt to locate that middle ground, I would be having none of it.

From a financial point of view, I am probably better off being on my own with S. I know a lot of women who have had to go back to work after having a baby a lot sooner than they would have liked; many perhaps would have liked to stop work altogether and focus on their child, but they cannot afford to do so. For me, being a single mother, I will be skint whether I go to work and pay for childcare, or stay home and live off benefits for a couple of years until S is in pre-school. In that way, I probably have more of a choice than most women. 

I have no qualms about living off the state for a few years, until S is in school. I have paid my taxes all my life specifically for this reason, and while I am actively raising my child I feel I am still contributing to society by not producing a delinquent for the system to deal with. I am also studying for a degree, and looking at the possibility of taking on freelance work if I decide not to go back to my job. I may still opt to go back to my job, and if that happens I will be spending a lot of time making sure wherever she goes while I am at work is offering her a better environment than staying at home with me. It has to be worth her while for me to consider leaving her.

It looks like it’s taken me less than 1500 words to convince myself that S and I are fine on our own, and do not need a man about the house, her father or otherwise.