Attachment parenting
Attachment parenting owes many of its ideas to older teachings, such as Benjamin Spock's influential handbook The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care (1946).
[6] Spock had advised mothers to raise their infants according to their own common sense and with plenty of physical contact – a guideline that radically broke with the preceding doctrines of L. Emmett Holt and John B. Watson, which recommended discipline and emotional distance.
She argued that infants, speaking in terms of evolution, have not arrived in the modernity yet, so that today's way of child care – with bottle feeding, use of cribs and baby carriages, etc.
In the accompanying article "The Man Who Remade Motherhood", journalist Kate Pickert tried to argue that even if William Sears' positions are much less radical than those of his followers, they are ‘misogynistic’ and give mothers a chronically guilty conscience, and that they frequently disagree with relevant research results.
[24] The first book that carried the term attachment parenting in the title was written by Tammy Frissell-Deppe, a mother who gave an account of her personal experiences and of those of her friends and acquaintances.
All three books stood – with their opposition against a crude behavioristic infant anthropology – in the tradition of Spock, but radicalized the concept of a contingency-oriented parenting on the one hand, and incorporated Liedloff's idea of an instinct-guided resp.
[35] William Sears argues that breastfeeding greatly accommodates mother-child-attachment because it triggers the release of oxytocin in the mother which supports her emotional bonding with the child, notably in the first ten days after childbirth.
Both the physical, emotional and mental development of children and the preferences of women for a feeding method are strongly determined by socioeconomical factors such as the mother's ethnicity, social class, and education.
[74] Attachment Parenting International issued a response which stated that the data referenced in the Consumer Product Safety Commission statement were unreliable, and that co-sponsors of the campaign had created a conflict of interest.
[79] Parents are challenged to "read" the crying – which is initially generalized – and to provide the child with empathic feedback in order to help them to differentiate and elaborate the repertoire of their signals gradually.
[88] He suggests a whole package of measures that aim to prevent an emotional burnout of the mother, like the prioritization and delegation of duties and responsibilities, streamlining of daily routines, and collaboration between both parents.
[90] Sears finds the burden of attachment parenting just and reasonable, and describes the opponents of this philosophy as "authoritarian males ... caught up in their role of advice giver".
[92] Mayim Bialik, too, considers attachment a feminist option, since it constitutes an alternative to the – male dominated – superiority of physicians who traditionally shaped the spheres of pregnancy, childbirth, and motherhood.
[95] But in contrast to many AP parents, he isn't fundamentally opposed to confrontative methods (firm, corrective response), and he gives high significance to child obedience and conscience.
Despite the lack of a consistent theory, William and Martha Sears consider attachment parenting scientifically proven: AP is not only common sense, but also supported by science.
[106] As early as in the late 1940s, Donald Winnicott gave a detailed account of the development of the child's attachment; at the latest after the sixth month, healthy children begin to disengage from the mother-child symbiosis quite normally.
In 2000, T. Berry Brazelton, a pioneer in the field of newborn psychology, and child psychiatrist Stanley Greenspan published their book The Irreducible Needs of Children, in which they re-assessed the term for pediatrics.
[130] In resilience psychology, too, there is broad agreement today that it harms children if their parents keep any stress away from them indiscriminately; by doing so, they suggest to the child that everyday problems are painful and overall to be avoided.
[145] If you were on an island, and you had no mothers-in-law, no psychologists, no doctors around, no experts, this is what you would naturally and instinctively do to give your baby the best investment you'll ever give.William Sears, who owes his formative impressions to Jean Liefloff, points to mammals, primates, "other", "primitive", and "traditional cultures", namely on Bali and in Zambia.
[146] Developmental psychologist Heidi Keller who comparatively researched the mother-child relationship in a large bandwidth of cultures, disputes that attachment parenting can be described as a return to a "natural motherliness", like many supporters advertise it.
[153] The Searses promise parenting results such as increased independence, confidence, health, physical growth, improved development of the motor and language skills, good manners, conscientiousness, social competence, sense of justice, altruism, sensitivity, empathy, concentration, self-control, and intelligence.
[137] Similar to the German catholic Albert Wunsch, Sears therefore ranks among those parenting advisors whose philosophies reflect stray aspects of their religious beliefs, but result in a purely worldly target.
In the year of the publication of the Attachment Parenting Book, Wendy Mogel, by contrast, suggested her own very influential concept of character education that was straightforwardly based on her Jewish faith (The Blessings of a Skinned Knee, 2001).
[163] Hamburg, the movement's central point in Germany, hosted a first Attachment Parenting Congress in 2014, under the patronage of Federal Minister of Family Affairs, Manuela Schwesig.
[166] In Sweden, fantasy and science fiction writer Jorun Modén solicits attachment parenting, which she refers to as nära föräldraskap ("proximal parenthood").
[170] In France, Élisabeth Badinter argued that over-parenting, obsession with washable diapers and organic, home made infant food, and parenting practices as the ones recommended by Sears, with breastfeeding into toddlerhood, bring women inevitably back into outdated patterns of gender role.
[198] Still, gynecologist Amy Tuteur (formerly Harvard Medical School) stated that attachment parenting amounts to a new subjection of the woman's body under social control – a trend that is more than questionable in the face to the hard-fought achievements of women's movement.
[199] As Erica Jong observed, the rise of attachment parenting followed a surge of glamourized motherhood of popular stars (Angelina Jolie, Madonna, Gisele Bündchen) in the mass media.
Hays saw the motives for the overloading of motherhood in the idealistic endeavor to cure an overly egoistical and competitive society through a counterbalancing principle of altruistic motherliness.
Through what is called "bottle nursing", fathers and other caregivers who cannot breastfeed hold the infant touching their bare torso and feed gently and intimately, focusing their attention on the baby.
