Oh yeah, I was a member of the Mothering.com forums for a little while. I posted a description of all the childhood diseases that they don’t want to vaccinate for, and got a warning for it. You get your damned information out of here! We don’t want to know what kind of damage we’ll be doing to our kids if we listen to a man who has been completely debunked and disbarred as a doctor!
Oh, beautiful. Capito. So I assume the no-playpen thing (new one on me) was because it’s abusive to restrict the child’s freedom to interact with the wonders of the world around him?
IIRC from my experience with the MDC types, it’s because a playpen allows the parent to put the child over there —>, while she does something else over here. The child should be taken with you and held at all times, and included in the activity preferably. Not focusing on the child at any point is sign of being a Bad Parent.
Wait, what? I’m supposed to hold my child while I poop? While I shower? While I chop vegetables for dinner? Well, I’m going to wear my Bad Parent crown with pride while I am on the toilet alone, TYVM.
I didn’t go into details with her, but it was pretty clear that it was some combination of what the two of you are guessing. She just “can’t do it”. So she gets up before the baby to shower, and does all her housework after he goes to bed at night.
Which begs the question, what does she do during his naptimes, hold him while he sleeps? 'Cuz attachment parenting advocates that, if your baby ever has trouble falling asleep. At any age.
In a sling, yes. Dr. Sears guesses that you may be feeling stressed out by parenting. He suggests you take a hot bath. With the baby. Or take a nap. With the baby. Or have a night out on the town–with the baby in a sparkly dress-up sling.
I wish I was joking. Dr. Sears is assuaging the feminist confusion of women who have chosen to stay home with their children instead of working outside the home; he figures that we can stay home without feeling guilty about not bringing in a paycheck if we are dedicating every single second to the kids and not taking any time for ourselves. And a ton of women are swallowing it, hook line and sinker. Frankly, he’s done more to wreck feminist progress than any other person I know (and I don’t really know much about the Evangelical movement, maybe they’ve got him beat.)
I have never been on mothering boards, and I have never read any of his books, but as a six foot, 220lb man, his sling was the only one I found that worked well taking a 1-2 year old through an airport or on long hikes. I liked the front carriers when my sons were smaller, but the sling was extremely helpful and all the other brands did not fit.
I never had a playpen and never saw them round my friends’ houses either. They came up in conversation a couple of times at the toddler group, and nobody particularly wanted them. The women there were pretty practical, not that into baby gurus and crap like that.
Either the baby crawls around with the parent, the baby’s napping, or it’s occupied playing with a toy, or playing in a door bouncer, or with the other parent or older sibling, all sorts of things - it never seemed to be a big deal. Just because a child’s not in a playpen doesn’t mean it has to be held constantly.
Or you do housework (some of it) with the baby in a sling if it’s very young and it’s in the kind of mood where it needs holding anyway, so you might as well put it in a sling and get on with stuff at the same time.
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with playpens per se - I mean, they can be abused, but they can be used safely too - but there’s nothing wrong with not using them either.
You’re doing just what people do on those judgmental mommy boards! Naughty Sattua! Go to the time-out step for the number of minutes there are in your age! :mad:
I think those door bouncers didn’t even exist when I was little; I had a playpen at home, my paternal grandparents had one in theirs as well. My sister in law had a door bouncer, she bought one for her kids. Turns out both of her kids hate, hate, hate the door bouncer (The Nephew’s reaction to being put in one was a few seconds of being stunned followed by howling that shook the windows; The Niece didn’t wait to actually be in one before she started yelling). The playpen was fine in their view.
Like so many other things involving human beings, mileage is all over the map.
I had some friends who practiced elimination communication. It worked until the baby actually developed an opinion. The kid didn’t toilet train after that until he was about 4.
My biggest issue with the article, though, was the lady let her kid pee in a public sink. Since when is that ok?
Don’t forget sewing! Everyone knows that sewing is incredibly relaxing for us wimmen.
I love the sparkly sling idea. I can still recall that section in Attachment Parenting where he claims that, “And no one had any idea my wife even was holding a nursing baby at the black tie event!” Right. A sling looks like a sling, especially when it has a curiously body-shaped object in it.
I couldn’t handle the pregnancy boards.
The general lack of respect for actual knowledge was upsetting.
Culminating in a “I ate an icecream at McDonald’s and only found out an hour later that pregnant women aren’t supposed to, and went to the emergency room, and THEY WOULDN’T DO ANYTHING. MY BABY COULD DIE!!!” thread that made me :smack:.
Sears is not only anti-feminist he’s also an anti-vax nut who pretends otherwise. His lousy rotten “alternative” vaccine schedule has been roundly criticized:
