Attachment Parenting - So where's the argument?

Cases of flat backs of heads are increasing, not necessarily because the babies are laid down too much, but because babies are now routinely put on their backs to sleep. It’s a good practice, with sometimes a weird side-effect.

Attachment parenting is fine with me, as long as you don’t get all superior about it. Breastfeeding is certainly great stuff for those who can do it, and not limited to APers. Personally, I find that crib sleeping after the baby is a couple of months old helps everyone in my family get more sleep, and my daughter loves her jumpy chair (though she also loves being held, which she gets plenty of). I never found a sling to be comfortable, but I do like Snuglis.

It is important to respond to babies’ needs, of course. But after a while, it is also important to let them figure out how to comfort themselves; it’s difficult sometimes, but happier for everyone once the baby can stick her thumb in her mouth (or whatever) without even waking up, instead of waking and crying for snuggles every few hours. And no, I am not advocating leaving the baby to scream alone for 30 minutes at a time.

Responding to your child’s cries is the most natural thing you can do. I had my first child in 1984 and had never heard of attachment parenting. I was 16 and knew nothing about babies but I did know that when he cried he needed me. He is now an honour student in his first year at university and may I say a Straight Doper!

My second child is two years old and I have responded to his needs, carried him in a sling and nursed him until recently when his nose has been so congested that he can’t nurse and breathe at the same time. He throws the occasional tantrum and is completely unreasonable at times but for the most part I have a great two year old.

Let your child know you are listening. Be close and loving. Be interested in their stuff (from “Bob the Builder” to “Ever Quest”). Know who they are talking to and why. Start when they are in the womb and they will never say “Why do you care?” or “None of your buisness!”.

Attachment parenting is common sense. Hold them close, love them and show them the way. Simple.

The argument? It is inconvenient and a huge PITA at times. Anything that puts the whims of an infant ahead of the convenience of an adult is going to have detractors. Also, all methods of child rearing have followers who are smuggly vocal about their method being best. If there were a method that was actually perfect, it would gain enough smuggly vocal followers to create a backlash that would get the developer of the method hanged. Also as with any method there are those that take the principles of the method to silly or even dangerous extremes. Since I have not read up on AP, I have no idea what the silly extreme has been found relating to it, bet you a nickel there is one though.

I don’t find the co-sleeping death statistics compelling. The latest big alarmist study that came out was debunked. Cosleeping is done all over the world without a rash of infant suffocations. With a little common sense about bedding and the like, it’s a perfectly acceptable sleeping arrangement. As I understand it, some of the deaths attributed to cosleeping happened because the parents compromised safety in other ways (intoxicated in bed, fluffy bedding, etc).

I think AP is controversial because it runs counter to the typical American way of parenting (which we somehow came to believe is empirically proven to be THE way to raise children). Also, its expectations are high. That makes some people defensive (as has been mentioned) and makes others feel it is unrealistic. It is hard to do because you don’t get a lot of support. People think you’re weird, even criminal, to do child-led weaning; they think there’s something vaguely sexual about the family bed; etc., etc. I mean, we live in a country so backwards about some of this stuff, a mom might be told to go to the bathroom to breastfeed! AP is much easier when you’re surrounded by people who buy into the importance of your role as an AP parent and will work to help you succeed, rather than question you.

I think it’s a great, loving way to raise children. It wasn’t possible for us for a number of reasons, but the tenets of AP informed many of the choices we made.

I didn’t do AP, but don’t have any problem with people who choose to. When my babies were very youn (under 6 months), I would sometimes let them sleep in our bed for several hours a night, because we would both (baby and I) fall asleep during nursing. But when baby woke up and nursed again, it was back into the cradle for her! Frankly, I felt that the sexual relationship between hubby and I would suffer if we coslept, and didn’t want that to happen (I’m not saying it affects all people this way, just that this is what would probably have happened to us). Babies slept in a separate bed in our room until about 2 months old (all my babies were big, and outgrew cradles/bassinets at about this age), and were moved into crib in separate room. I also “sleep trained” my babies at 4 months. This is where you teach them to put themselves to sleep by letting them “cry it out” for short periods of time (usually about 5 minutes). Other than that, I held them a lot, loved them bunches, and responded to their needs in ways that I felt was appropriate.

My 16 year old has troubles, but I don’t think it has anything to do with the way she was parented as a baby. My other two are just fine.

Walking around, you’re right, but in a moving automobile?

We stuffed our primates into slings–much easier to lug the lumps than in a “carriage” or “seat” with a handle on it. They howled less, too. Likewise, when they were infants, we came a-runnin’ when they cried. As they got older, they didn’t become spoiled or demanding (we get remarks on how unusually well-behaved and polite they are).

Any good primatologist will tell you that we are designed specifically to do “attachment parenting”–it’s what primates do. We are not sea turtles, designed to “fire and forget” our offspring.

I also don’t see where the controversy comes from in this. Indeed, looking at previous generations’ “Professsional” advice, I see an awful lot of nasty rationalizations that smack heavily of the propagandizing given to proles in regards to industrial labor and sending their children off to die in foreign misadventures. Stiff upper lip, don’t let those lads’ bellyaching prevent you from raising good soldiers to serve the Queen-Empress/Free World/Fight the Cold War/etc.

Some people ought not have children. There is a difference between an utterly helpless infant and a demanding three-year-old.

All three of our sons got flat-head when they were infants. They all grew out of it as they learned to roll over on their own.

Steel belts to reshape heads? That should be classified as a form of torture. Yes, I know, and I disapprove of binding babies heads with boards, too.

You want the neurobiology/neuropsychology behind attachment theory? The basis of how it works, now that we are starting to understand the human brain? Here it is:

http://www.healthychildrennetwork.lu/html/conferences/conference2000/papers/schore_luxembourg.html

Or you can explore it more in depth here:
http://www.trauma-pages.com/schore-2001a.htm (same author, more in-depth analysis, with footnotes, see page b for the implications of attachment failures)

The basics are that human brains develop in relationship to their environment. They are not created/developed by just nurture, and nor just nature. It is the intersection between need and response, basic structure and environmental reaction, that develops the patterns for future relationships, emotional processing, resilience, and mental health.

If you want to know more about what happens when things go wrong in that, you can look on the web for attachment disorder info, especially on adoption websites. They deal with it all the time.

The basics of AP are ‘respond to your child’ because this gives them the basis for feeling safe and at home in the world, and for knowing that they have and can rely on relationships with others. It is against forcing independence on young children and infants, but rather encouraging them to expand from a safe foundation.

As for cosleeping, you can check out a variety of research, but most of it does not examine confounding factors in SIDS and suffocation, safety, etc. This one is a good one for looking at how to do it safely: http://bmj.com/cgi/reprint/319/7223/1457

Also: you have to register at this site to get the article, (free), but it shows that long-term impact of cosleeping isn’t negative. It isn’t a HUGE bonus, but it has some benefits: http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/440156_print

The best sum-up of AP that I’ve heard, one that skips all the ‘you must’ stuff that not everyone can do, is this: The child IS the book. Read them, and they will teach you how to be their parent. I am a different parent for each of my kids, and I change over time, because I read my children as the book on themselves. One child needs deadlines, but flexibility in schedule inside the deadline. The other responds to consequences more than management. For the first, explaining why something is necessary enhances compliance. For the second, explaining what will happen if he doesn’t comply (for him and others), the consequences of his acts, enhances compliance. I didn’t learn those from books. I learned them from my KIDS.

You don’t have to breastfeed to be an AP parent. You don’t have to cosleep to be AP. You can use a stroller and still be AP - if your child responds to it favorably, if your family situation is such that this is the best way to meet YOUR child’s needs, then it is, and that is AP.

Oh, right. :rolleyes:

So, by definition any good parenting is attachment parenting?

Many do use the Ezzo method and use techniques like Parent Directed Feeding for infants under 6 months. Sure the methods have been connected with failure to thrive and deaths, but they are convenient. People who don’t think they are bad parents use PDF and the Ezzo method. I think they are bad ideas, but the followers don’t.
OTOH: People are wrong when they say that all infants under 6 months are too young to be pusnished or disiplined with any positive effect. Since day two or three if my daughter bit down on my nipple hard enough to cause pain, I removed my nipple from her mouth for thirty seconds to a minute. She did learn not to bite. Also a sharp no and little one minute time outs for things like grabbing someones lip tightly and then pulling with her fingernails sunk in has worked to reduce or eliminate those behaviors. When an infant realizes they can affect their environment and they react to the emotional state of someone else, they can benefit from disipline in the form of time outs and firm nos.

You utterly missed her point. She spent significant time and effort adding useful information to this thread (and I suspect she is one of the most qualified people on the boards to answer this question), and she was rewarded with rolleyes?

hedra’s point was that when you asses whether or not your parenting style is AP or not, you don’t need to go down a checklist and say, “Oh, we used a stroller, so we didn’t really do AP.” I believe that hedra was advocating we see it a little more flexible than that, and that if your parenting style embraces the general principles of AP, then you can probably say you’re an AP parent, even if all your parenting practices don’t mirror those of other AP parents.

hedra, forgive me if I’ve put words in your mouth

I couldn’t agree more. There are so many arguments on both sides of the co-sleeping issue and ultimately, each family has to decide for themselves. The theory that co-sleeping reduces SIDS is based on the assumption that the mother’s breathing helps regulate the baby’s breathing. The arguments for co-sleeping are persuasive enough that when I do have kids, I want to keep them near my bed for at least the first few months of their life. The thought of accidentally smothering my baby in their sleep petrifies me, so I’m not so sure about actually co-sleeping myself. I do love the idea of the side-car crib arrangement though - best of both worlds. You can pull the baby over to you to nurse at night without getting out of bed, but the baby is still in it’s own sleeping space. One other important thing to note is that to co-sleep safely, one should never co-sleep under the influence of acohol, sleeping aids, or other drugs. You’re also not suppose to use a pillow or comforter, just dress yourself and the baby in warm pajamas to decrease the chance of the covers smothering the baby.

The big controversy about AP is usually around the co-sleeping issue, but sometimes around extended breast-feeding as well. Most Americans find nursing longer than one year to be creepy.

One of the other major points of AP is that babies don’t just cry randomly - the cry because they need something they can’t provide for themselves. When they become old enough to meet some of their own needs themselves, such as playing alone, then the parent can reassess how to respond. But thinking that changing a crying newborn’s diaper immediately when they start crying will cause them to be spoiled is ludicrous.

Here is the website for Dr. Sears, a forerunning proponent of AP. His site has links to other AP websites and organizations.

WAG: when someone is giving apparently obvious (parenting) advice, its because the opposite used to be the norm, and they are arguing against it.

I’ve heard arguments that you should always respond to a child crying asap so they feel safe and only cry when they need something, and arguments that you shouldn’t reward crying unless they immediately need feeding, burping or changing else they’ll learn to cry to get more attention. I don’t know what’s best.

We did the cosleeping thing and it seemed completely natural to us. It made things much easier when all our daughter had to do was roll over to nurse in the middle of the night. If you think about it, what other primate would put an infant in a completely diffrent room, alone in the dark every night? Any deaths or injuries from cosleeping generally occur when one or the other parent is drunk or on drugs and not as alert. We were always hyper-aware of where our daughter was in the bed (like SnoopyFan said you tend to sleep very lightly and any slight motion or noise will wake you up) and never once came close to rolling over on her or anything.

We didn’t do the sling but we have done some of the other AP stuff and she’s turned out pretty healthy and happy (she’s four now).

I would agree with something tom said. We had to break ourselves from anticipating her needs and wants in order to encourage her verbal and cognitive skills.

I’m glad you said that, CrankyAsAnOldMan, because I thought hedra’s post was lovely.

And what Diogenes and tomndeb say about not anticipating every need every time makes a lot of sense, too. Seems consistent with what lee is saying about setting some boundaries via a really gentle approach.

Plus, really, I always thought it was bizarre to place a newborn in a room all alone. Unless it’s because the parent needs a little time-out, which is perfectly understandable.

Now my mother, who hasn’t dealt with an infant in 35 years, thinks co-sleeping is utterly wrong. That in itself is reason to give it a try :).

Cranky, that’s exactly what I was trying to say. Thanks. :slight_smile: But in a sense, mrsam is right - I’ll get to that in a moment.

lee, there’s also a difference between a logical consequence in the cause-and-effect sense and punishment. Certainly infants LEARN all the time! In fact, that is a big part of why people advocate AP - because infants ARE learning. They learn that if they bite, they get no more milk. They also learn that if they cry for help, they get help. Or they learn that if they cry for help, sometimes they get help, and sometimes they don’t. If they don’t have the skills to understand why, how are they to learn to trust that help will come when they need it? So your point ties in directly with the AP approach.

Certainly, the first time Gabe bit me was the last - I yelled, entirely without planning it. Nearly screamed. It HURT. I took him off the breast, too, because I wanted to see if my nipple was still attached, if I was bleeding, etc. Fortunately, no major damage (but it felt like it!), but sure enough, Gabe was deeply upset by the reaction. Bite=>Bad Sound=>and No milk. I never got bit again. He also wouldn’t actually suck again for more than 4 hours - he wasn’t entirely sure that it wasn’t something about nursing at all that was the cause of the bad things, so he just left his mouth open and sat there, watching me like he was expecting another bad thing to happen. Sometimes they learn things you didn’t try to teach, too.

Shade, I think the problem you are struggling with stems from the question of what is the truth of an infant’s experience. Because if they are just physical machines, then responding only to their physical needs and ignoring the rest should work. But they aren’t. They are primarily emotional machines, with physical needs. The dominant processes are emotion-based for the first 3 years (read the neurobiology links, above). So if you don’t respond to a real situation (even emotional), like fear, loneliness, anger, etc., they will indeed stop crying for help when they feel those things. Because they know there is no help coming.

Kids DO cry less when you ignore their cries more. Good research backs that up. But because crying is their main form of communication, they learned to communicate less on those subjects. Not exactly what I want to teach my kids. Responding teaches them that they will be listened to. It teaches them that there is more that is important than just ‘are you clean, dry, fed?’ - responding to your child’s emotions, not overly, but promptly, tells them that the emotion is important information that other people take seriously, even if they don’t find it to be as scary as you do.

Again, if you read the neurobiology, you’ll find that the old parenting ‘trick’ of responding to outbursts somewhat less intensely than the child’s immediate response tends to decrease the child’s response intensity over time (but you still have to respond), and responding more than the child increases the child’s response intensity over time. You’ve probably seen experienced parents wince when a new parent over-reacts to a fall or minor boo-boo, oh-poor-you-ing the child, scooping them up, etc. Neurologically, that tells the child’s brain ‘this is worse than I thought!’ so they tend to freak out more the next time - they reset their stress reaction to the reaction of the caregiver. And if the parent responds calmly with ‘oh, did you fall? That was kinda scary, but you seem to be okay’ their brains set falling to ‘ok, not as bad as I thought.’ The infant and child brain are functionally using the caregiver brain as part of their own stress management system. The vocal, physical, and facial responses they get tell their systems how to respond. The research on this is fascinating, and the reaction time is in fractions of seconds… we are not separate beings in infancy and early childhood, and as we’re discovering as more research is done, we aren’t as separate from other people even in adulthood as we think. All that reflective behavior, mirroring body language, facial expression, etc., is part of our own brain’s system, even if it is outside our body.

Really, this is one of the key things in AP in infancy that I resonate to - that the caregiver’s brain is functioning as a stress-moderator for the infant. If an infant is not responded to within a fairly short timeframe, their stress levels go up. And up and up and up. They don’t have the neurological function to shut down their response until they reach a critical point, whereupon the shut down completely. They will ‘go to sleep’ by withdrawing from the situation entirely. Dissociation. The stress hormones also do something else - they prune neural pathways. And yes, infants have billions more neural pathways than they need, so they can withstand rather a lot of pruning events. But repeated pruning, with repeated stress events, leads to less flexible brain development - those pathways have a natural timeframe for pruning, and pruning them prematurely isn’t ideal. Where the line is for each child (as to whether it is too much, too soon) is individual, but over time, premature pruning does have an impact. A few disasters here and there will not make a difference, and in fact may be beneficial - normal life, even with attentive responsive parents, has breaks, problems, mistakes, disasters, and times when baby just is not gonna be first on the priority list. But repeated, systematic stress events (which may be marked eventually by a pattern of dissociation instead of crying), isn’t exactly ideal for brain development.

Read the neurobiology research. It really does show how and why responsiveness has an impact. You don’t have to respond to them that way forever, but while their brains are in that early burst, letting them cry without a response isn’t functionally good for them. NOTE, however, that responding is voice, face, and touch, and even if the bad situation doesn’t improve, it is the response that makes the difference. So colicy babies, who cry and cry and cry because they hurt (or whatever is causing it), they aren’t having their neural pathways pruned constantly, because as soon as they get a comforting response (voice, face, touch), the stress hormones go down. Even if they are still hurting, even if they are still crying, the stress is not the same.

Think of it this way. You break your ankle in the woods, alone. It hurts like hell, enough to make you cry. Scenario 1: Someone comes by and sits with you, tells you that it is gonna hurt for a while, but the rangers are bringing a medic kit and will help you. How do you feel now? Scenario 2: Nobody comes. You can hear people walking by and talking just out of sight, but when you yell, they ignore you - maybe they don’t hear you, maybe they do. You can’t walk, and you can’t get help for yourself. How do you feel? Now imagine a baby, scared, uncomfortable, or even just lonely, and unsure whether the bad feeling will go away. Which would you want to give that child, in response?

When they get older, and can understand more, can help themselves more, and so forth, then you start dealing with that reality separately. The response grows with the child. I work around my child’s needs in infancy, manage them more in toddlerhood, work through negotiation in preschool, and have much more firm and fast rules from Kindergarten, up - by child. I still respond to the needs, though. Emotional and physical, both. And there are some rules that are hard and fast from birth - health and safety first, and then respect is added as soon as you get into intentional actions with any kind of comprehension of expected reactions. Emotions are the basis of the education at first - how you feel, how others feel, why, what we call them, and how we respond to them. Always raising the bar, but not too far to get to from where they are.

and mrsam, if you consider good parenting to be responsive to the child, taking their needs into account fully, but working within the limitations of the family, your idea of good parenting at least overlaps into AP, even if it isn’t a complete match. Frankly, most of the people I know who would qualify as AP don’t even know the term. They are just trying to be thoughtful, attentive, responsive, emotionally mature, responsible, respectful, loving, caring parents. Most of them have a sense of egalitarianism in family life, that all members of the family have needs that must be met, and they recognize that those who cannot meet those needs themselves must have their needs attended to for them. You don’t have to be officially AP to be in tune with the same tenets. Some people I know who qualify call themselves intuitive parents, or instinctive parents. Some call themselves natural parents. AP is just a term that was coined to cover the behaviors that foster attachment the most fully, across the board, and exclude behaviors that damage attachment bonds, such as non-logical/natural consequences (certain forms of punishment), systematic non-response to crying, etc. AP intentionally includes things that are outside our expected norms in the US, drawing in behaviors and tools that come from other cultures (and our own past history), like cosleeping and sling use and not-weaning-based-on-an-arbirtary-age-limit. Those are often seen as weird, because they aren’t what grandma did (or at least if she did, she isn’t telling because she felt bad about doing it). And the ‘weird’ part is what gets a lot of attention.

I really need to get going, but last note: If you looked at the structural details of my life, you’d be unlikely to peg me for AP. I work, and I have a long commute. My husband, epeepunk also works. My first son was in a crib in another room at 4.5 months, and he rode in a stroller a lot. I don’t do purely child-led weaning, negotiating down to what works between the two of us as time goes by (after 1 year, anyway). But I still fall under the heading. My first son was miserable in our bed, so we stopped. I slept in his room a lot after we moved him, because he often needed company to feel safe, but couldn’t stand to be right next to a warm body. We worked it out based on his needs, and what I could function with, together. I extended nursed both boys, because it was important to them, and functional for me. I am a different parent for each child, because they teach me to be the parent they need. I respond to their calls for attention in infancy even before crying starts, and listen to both their demands for independance and their demands for connection. That means that one child was often in a stroller, because he didn’t like being in a sling, and the other was always in the sling, because he hated the stroller. And so forth. Always responding, always learning from the child, always moving to stay in response to their level (and yes, encouraging verbal skills, etc.). I have some of the features of ‘typical’ AP, on the outside, and all the features of fundamental AP, on the inside. And some people don’t care whether I am AP or not, and just consider me a good parent. ::shrug::

Thank you, hedra.

Sure beats the hell out of the content of most “baby boards”.

(the links are cool, too)

It seems I’m much more in agreement with you than I originally thought, hedra. Sorry for jumping to the wrong conclusions. I think I may have misunderstood the relationship between attachment theory and attachment parenting. Could someone please give me a precise definition of attachment parenting?

Attachment theory is something I am reasonably well acquainted with, having been introduced to it through the works of John Bowlby, and it is my opinion that while there have been some very important discoveries in this area the implications to the practice of parenting are minimal and misinterpreted. Firstly, when I read this cite of hedra’s alarm bells started to go off. Hedra states:

which is more or less what the article says. However, the way the story words that section leaves me highly skeptical:

This would suggest to me that no results were found and they are grasping at straws to legitimise their field of research, which they have more or less debunked but are not willing to admit it. It resembles the kind of comment I’ve seen in this situation in other journal articles. JMHO and YMMV of course, and it would be very useful if someone could copy and paste the results section of this article:

Dev Behav Pediatr. 2002;23(4):1-10

which I could not find.

To further labour this point, here’s a quote on the matter:

Lamb and Nash (1989) Infant-mother attachment, sociability, and peer competence Peer relationships in child development p219-245

As is often the case in developmental psychology, there is also the problem of causation. The mother and child share 50% of their genes, so what makes attachment a more likely hypothesis than a similar temperament being passed down genetically? Another problem is how to distinguish between parent-child effects and child-parent effects; as you have already stated different parenting styles are warranted for different children.

The problem I have with this statement is that it doesn’t strike me as attachment theory. This is a behaviourist principle, and I am not aware of any popular developmental psychology theory which doesn’t hold this principle. So I am in agreement with you, but I am against the use of such a broad definition of attachment parenting for reasons I will get into later.

Here’s an analogy to how I see your definition of attachment parenting.

Now, with the exception of point 5 that’s a fairly reasonable if perhaps overly basic model for the treatment of depression. I have many problems with such a broad definition though. For starters, it occurs to me that some things in attachment parenting, while they don’t hurt, are like point 5 in that they do not have anything to do with the way the child turns out. Trust me, if I were to conduct a sufficiently large multivariate analysis of depression treatments using certain techniques I could find bizarre results, such as perhaps sipping pina coladas whilst staring at the mona lisa for 30 minutes a day causes a statistically significant increase in the remission rate of depression. This proves nothing other than if you employ divide-and-conquer statistical analysis techniques enough times to large bodies of data, you’ll eventually find a result with a p<0.05 so you can print your result in a journal. The empirical evidence seems to more or less negligibly in favour of AP and I await the results section of that article to prove otherwise.

Another problem with this definition is that it is ridiculously inclusive; whilst there are undoubtedly some good principles in there from what I’ve seen referenced in this thread (which seem to be stolen from other schools of psychology, but I digress) the idea that one can pick and mix from this broad definition irks me. If there are a clear set of principles that will help you be a better parent then I want everyone to know them, but let’s prune out the junk. There’s a lot of intuitive rubbish in there.

My problem with such a broad definition eventually gets down to these points:

  1. People feel obliged to adhere to these sets of rules to do the best for their children. This can create prejudice against parents who don’t adhere to these principles, or it could make parents who are unable to comply with these principles feel they are neglecting their child. When the research seems to debunk these theories, I see no reason to cause unjustified stress to such people.

  2. It promotes the idea that parents are largely responsible for the way their children turn out. This is not the case. While it is important you treat your child well for the sake of your relationship with them; research has demonstrated that behaviour outside the home is not correlated with any parenting style. Let me say this one more time, because it’s very important: There exists no study with controls for shared genes with correlates a behaviour with a parenting style. In spite of many, many attempts. This is directly contrary to what attachment theory predicts. Certain social circumstances allow for an exception to this rule (when familial interactions are considered group rather than dyadic) but this is rarely the case in western culture. This creates a climate where much more is blamed on bad parenting than is truly the case, and it causes unnecessary heartache for many.

  3. The label “Attachment Parenting” becomes so broad, it’s meaningless. It becomes a theoretical basis for common sense. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but it renders the theory totally and utterly meaningless. If some counterintuitive methods of parenting are useful, I want to know which ones.

Ooh, an actual good discussion of the topic! Cool. :slight_smile:

So, I also have not found the source article for the medscape link (I’ve looked before). I also am interested in what it says, in detail, because of how the article was titled - basically, they couldn’t find anything wrong with cosleeping (as part of a general natural/egalitarian parenting approach), but not a whole lot on the plus side, either - and of course, without the article, I can’t assess whether the researchers were looking for something in particular. I did read another review article about it that states something along the lines of the main benefit being a higher rating of self esteem for boys in middle school, and beyond that only impacts verging on barely statistically significant. That might be in that article, too. Basically, I included that because there are no studies I can find that say that cosleeping is harmful in the long-term social/developmental world, but most people (that I deal with) tend to assume it is bad because, well, it just IS. They know it. Nothing to back it up, but colseeping just is wrong, and everyone can see that. Right? So I have one study that seems to have checked, and said it isn’t bad. Maybe not the be-all and end-all, but not bad, either. Habitual skew on my part, in presenting it, but there you go, I ain’t perfect. (BATW, most AP parents I know see cosleeping as a pleasant, useful way to get more sleep, thanks. Not as a way to make their kids perfect.)

The definition of AP according to the API website is:

AP is a theoretical approach, just like all parenting ‘philosophies’, including ones based on order and absolute parental control (such as BabyWise/Ezzo). Which means they don’t have proof, they have philosophy. It happens to be one I think has sufficient merit in current research to support itself over at least some other approaches, but hey, my mom thought similar things about the approaches she used. I’m gambling on this approach being of more benefit than harm until further hard-ish (this being parenting, after all) evidence shows up. Being a philosophy, there is no guarantee. I’m okay with that. I happen to think it is useful.

The article you quoted regarding there not being much empirical evidence to support attachment bond affecting peer behavior is rather old. I’d like to see something in the late 90’s at least, when more research was actually ongoing, before using that to challenge it. Also, from what I know, attachment bonding issues have more effect on mental health overall than on peer behavior, and while that first relationship is the ‘basis’ of further relationships, so is mental health. I don’t have the time at the moment to go looking up all the research on that (again), but I recall there being fairly sound evidence that attachment failures do cause long-term problems. NOTE, however, that within ‘normal’ ranges, the differences are probably subtle and moderated by other events, genetics, etc. And I’ve argued that on AP forums, as well - that there is no hard 1-to-1 causality here, that we are far too complex to have it be just one factor equalling one result. But that within the factors that play a role, I think we have enough evidence to say that if there is an option, choosing to aim for the AP approach, trying hard to support the attachment bond within a given situation is probably wise. Just as aiming for good nutrition is wise, and aiming for good healthcare is wise, and so forth. Can we do it all the time? Not hardly. Can everyone do it to the same degree? Nope. Still makes a difference when we can, even if the difference is subtle. Take nutrition, for example. Undernutrition, even mild, impacts how we handle illness, and affects our chances of dying from disease, especially in childhood. There was a very good article (again, on Medscape) about the numbers of deaths that could be prevented worldwide by upgrading moderate nutrition levels to closer to optimum levels. Even though the deaths in these cases are not from malnutrition, nutrition level does play a role. Even when the kids are not sufficiently undernourished to set off anyone’s alarms, clinically, it still plays a role. Same for attachment - it plays a role even in the middle ranges of the norm. One factor among many. Or so I think the evidence suggests. Proof positive? Nope. But strong supporting research that leans that direction, in my interpretation. Philosophy, remember.

The developmental psychology issue you pointed to (the biting example) is indeed part of many parenting theories. The main focus for AP is not that kids learn, but that learning to trust is a major part of early parenting, and that side of it is what is AP - the focus on the trust relationship to the parents. There are people out there who are concerned that the baby learn the rules, the behaviors, and what will and will not be tolerated, as the only use of this basic learning pattern in childhood. Hitting a toddler for throwing food will teach it not to throw food, in other words. AP notes that this also teaches it that getting caught is bad, that hitting is allowed, and that the contol is in the hands of the person who is biggest or hits hardest. That’s not attachment parenting’s use of the learning process. That MOST parenting philosophies share the ‘please be developmentally appropriate when teaching your child’ approach doesn’t keep them from claiming it as their own, either. So, yes, that is broad, but it is broad the same way that all the others are, so I don’t see an issue there. Parenting philosophies don’t skirt around the developmental psychology and say ‘hey, that one is one that already exists, so we’ll not even mention it’ - they say ‘we believe that these things are true, including x, y, and z (which happen to be part of basic developmental psychology).’

I had a response to the depression model thing, but it escapes me at the moment. I’ll see if it comes back… Oh, wait, I got it - that situation kind of correlates to the colseeping thing - look at that color, do that thing, might or might not make a difference. But the point with AP is that while cosleeping is encouraged, it isn’t an absolute. It is more: Take your meds, get your exercise, and if it makes you feel good, look at the color aquamarine. IF. IF cosleeping helps you get more sleep, AND you can do it safely in your situation, THEN go for it, and don’t let people tell you that you are hurting your child by doing so. The point is less ‘do this’ than ‘approach it like this, try things outside the either-or scenario, learn to trust yourself as a parent, and see if you can find a solution that is non-punitive’. Some people consider co-sleeping to be essential to bonding. I don’t think it is. I think it is a useful tool, like many others, but just like breastfeeding, not doing it isn’t going to be the factor that makes your child into a mass-murderer, or even someone who struggles with depression. However, establishing a pattern of not looking for a solution that meets your child’s needs isn’t going to be much help for teaching them to consider the needs of others, either.

Moving on.

I see we are in agreement with more, again. Point 1) People feel obliged to adhere to these sets of rules to do the best for their children. This can create prejudice against parents who don’t adhere to these principles…

Um, yep! And it bugs me. There are AP forums I will not post in, because it is all about ‘either you are following the rules, or you aren’t one of us, and if you aren’t one of US, then your kids will make the world an awful place, and my kids will suffer for it…’ UGH. Let me say again, UGH. The point of AP as a philosophy is to get parents to THINK about what they are doing (IMHO), and work with what they have in a way that fosters attachment, not force them to cosleep, breastfeed, and use a sling just because that’s on the ‘master list’.

For example, the AP forum I post on regularly has parents who use strollers, who did not breastfeed (but feed as part of a social process, with attention), who do not cosleep, who did not let a child self-wean, who night-wean to get more sleep, who work, whose kids are in large corporate daycares, etc. There are periodically snits where someone says ‘all parents who don’t do exactly what I did are idiots’ and there’s a big storm, lurkers pop up and complain, regulars go off in huffs, and we all eventually get back to basics, that it isn’t the details per-se, but the approach, attitude, intent. Getting back to that increases the inclusivity, reduces the guilt and angst, etc. And we also get some great conversations out of it, where we discuss how to apply logical consequences with a child who will climb the refrigerator to get at the knives, without damaging the attachment relationship (and in that case, a little short-term damage to the bond is worth containing the safety issue, n’est ce pas? But you can still do it without beating them black and blue.).

I think some people confuse the idea of PHILOSOPHY with METHOD. AP isn’t a method, it is a philosophy. Which means it is the underpinnings for your decision-making, not the framework for the material details of your life.

As for 2), AP promoting the idea that parents are largely responsible for how their kids turn out, I disagree. On the surface, that is true for any parenting method/philosophy. But a lot of the AP parents I know are there in that zone because they feel that their parents punitive, control-based approach had MORE influence on how they turned out than it should have had, and not in good ways. That is, that they felt their selfhood and individuality was limited by their parents’ approach, and they want to step back from that, because they feel that kids have more to say in their development than was getting said in the parental generation.

Case in point: Us. Our tag reaction for when people tell us that we ‘are doing a good job raising decent kids’ is ‘All we are doing is not breaking them - who you see is WHO THEY ARE. They were born that way. We’re just keeping out of the way of that.’ Kids are who they are.

But also, the more we learn about brain development, the more we discover that nature and nurture are true partners in the dance of growth and change and individuation. Parents do play a role. And so do peers, and so do schools, and so does culture, nutrition, sleep, genetics. But parents can also cause immense damage, and that sure as heck plays a role in how kids turn out, at least in the surface details. Yes, you have to go to the abusive end of the spectrum to see it, but that end of the spectrum is still PART of the spectrum. Not a different animal, an extreme version of the same animal. The technical variations on how that comes out vary, and you are always working with the ingredients they come with, but I have yet to see good research saying that child development isn’t a recipe that includes parents (and that last one that came out that said that ‘peers play a larger role, because they can’t track the same exact issues and influences to two siblings and therefore it isn’t the parents’ makes me laugh - if ANY parent is the same parent twice to two different kids, I’ll give you $100. Never seen it. Never will - the simple differences of number of kids in the household, changes in parental relationships, resources, and response to the individual personalities of the different kids is more than enough to account for the variability between sibs. If more than half comes from varying factors, that can still be parental.)… anyway… Every philosophy says IT is best at getting kids to behave and grow up well. I can’t think of one that doesn’t at least imply that. But the people who I find are attracted to AP the most strongly are the ones who know already that they want their kids to express themselves as themselves, and want to apply principles rather than enforcement, to guide, not to ‘form’, who their kids become. So the ‘you have to do this to get that’ issue is a risk with any parenting philosophy, but in the long run, philosophies that tell parents to trust themselves as the experts on their own kids will also be the least likely to keep parents there, feeling that adherence to X, Y, and Z (or lack of adherence) are the cause and the reason for their child’s outcomes.

As for item 3) - whose intuition are you talking about? Yours? Because yours fits with this approach. Yes, it is common sense. Many big “DUH” moments abound. But it is common sense to me, and to you. Not to the people who think that spanking an infant is appropriate. Not to the people who think that using shame to force compliance is the way things are done, the right way, the way their parents did it. Not to people who believe that a good beating will acheive compliance and that’s all we want anyway, quiet, compliant children who don’t sass back. Not to people who believe that imposing the parental will is the key to a happy home. Not to people who believe that children must wait for their parents’ attention because it will teach them to be independant. Not to people who believe that 2-year-old boys should be spanked for crying, because they are ‘too big for that’. … Intuition on what is good and what works and what is appropriate really varies.

Your intuition seems to agree with mine. But I sure as heck know people who don’t agree, and whose jaws literally drop when I say I’ve never had to hit my sons to get them to behave. OF COURSE you have to hit them. That’s how they work! And infants need to be trained to sleep through the night, because they are just trying to control you, and you can’t let them do that. (You probably haven’t read BabyWise, either, I’m guessing…) AP is attempting to re-calibrate that intuition, retrain people’s thinking closer to what current developmental psychology supports. It isn’t the only way, but for some people, it is the way they need, the strong break from what they were taught or how they were treated, the opening up of the intuition they learned to distrust because they were told over and over that it was wrong, they would ruin their kids unless they exerted dominance over them, etc.

I call myself AP, because it is, for me, a useful label. It does include some broad philosophical bases, that can cover other parenting approaches. But I don’t find it useless at all. One of the things that is repeated over and over on the (IMHO) “good” AP forums is that AP is about leaning into your instincts, ignoring the cultural teaching that emotions are less valuable than logic and that science trumps instinct all the time, getting past what you were taught just because you were taught that, avoiding the trap of relying on ‘what the experts say’ exclusively, thinking hard about the implications of your choices, and trying to discern from your child’s immediate responses (and longer-term responses) whether your choice (last time) was appropriate or not, and then learning from the mistakes, and moving on and trying again. There are paradoxes there - don’t listen to experts, even the ones that tell you to trust yourself more than the experts. But they are useful paradoxes. There are people who go nuts on the ideas, too. But we all need our outliers to show us what zones we think are in range of the norm.

Some people will always play ‘you didn’t do what I did, so you are an awful mommy’ (many grandparents do this to their kids, IME). And some parents will always wonder if they caused their child to be the way they are, or praise themselves for it as if they generated some trait on command. I can’t stop that, and that’s not what AP is trying to stop, exactly, either. It is beyond the scope. The first step is to get people to value emotions in interaction with children, understand how infancy functions, how relationships are established, that the things their grandma thinks are weird and wrong aren’t necessarily bad at all, that they are the expert on their child, that there are many many many many ways to handle any situation, and violence or coercion or punitive measures aren’t necessary most of the time (some say never, but I am not terribly comfortable with absolutism), etc. Learning that is what AP is about, IMHO.

And in being that kind of parent, you teach that life can have peaceful resolutions to conflicts, that you can always look for another solution, that relationships are a primary part of our lives and should be treated with respect, that responding to others with empathy is a normal and useful way of being… Come to think of it, all that is taught by modeling (hadn’t thought of it that way, but hey, I’m learning all the time). Will it always stick, will they turn out just like you ‘planned’? Quite possibly not (who hasn’t been taken by surprise by something of who their child becomes?), they are individuals, after all. But because AP models those things, and we know that kids echo a lot of the behaviors that were modeled by their parents, you’ve got a better shot at it.