The Case Against Attachment Parenting

The last thing I want is to tell another mom that she's doing it wrong. The point of this blog has been that mothers shouldn't judge themselves so harshly, or feel so deeply vulnerable to outside judgement.

So I'm torn about writing a post about attachment parenting and the whole genre of "naturalistic" parenting that goes along with it.  On one hand, for me, attachment parenting was a potent source of judgement and guilt, and I want to spare a new mom that suffering if I can.  On the other hand, I do understand that some moms really love attachment parenting, it really makes sense for them, and they feel comfortable using it as a guiding rule.  So, I'll just start by saying that what follows are the reasons attachment parenting didn't work for me and doesn't make sense to me anymore.  If it works for you, more power to you.  It's a good choice for some people.  There are people I love and respect who still use it.  However, if you're struggling with balancing the goals of attachment parenting with the reality of parenting in your household, if you feel overwhelmed and insufficient, this post is for you.

I was a very strongly-committed attachment parent when I was pregnant with Penny and followed it strictly for the first 14 months of her life.  It was hard.  I spent a lot of time severely sleep-deprived, feeling painfully guilty for failing to achieve or enjoy the selfless goals of attachment parenting, finally gave up, and then discovered that I could be a good mom, a better mom, a happier mom, when I wasn't trying to be a perfect "natural" mom.

Ironically, letting go of the strict naturalism of attachment parenting allowed me to behave more naturally with my kids.  It allowed me to laugh at myself and my parenting travails instead of feeling that every misstep was an unnatural error that would have lasting impacts on the mental health of my daughter.

With a little distance, I was able to figure out what it was about attachment parenting that didn't make sense to me.

This is what I've come up with:


1. The "Primitive" Parent: There is something unsettling about a parenting theory that idealizes ancient parenting practices, cites impoverished third-world cultures as ideal practices for western cultures, and suggests that humans should be more like animals in our childrearing.  Particularly when we're talking about women in western cultures, these examples don't apply.

We're missing the whole picture when we idealize these practices that are usually accompanied by undesirable environments.  A quick look at the maternal and infant mortality numbers in ancient and third-world cultures makes it clear that there are some things about these cultures that we absolutely do NOT want to replicate.

A few months back, a New Yorker piece talked about the ideal behavior of a 6-year-old in the Matsigenka tribe in the Peruvian Amazon, gushing about how self-reliant and respectful she was in comparison to privileged Western 6-year-olds.

It made Western parenting practices seem terrible, until you read the comments section.  A bunch of New Yorker readers familiar with the Matsigenka culture wrote in to explain that the idealized 6-year-old almost certainly has a deeply insecure life, with little sense of safety or security in her home.  Her "helpful" behavior is drawn from being tragically forced to grow up very quickly, confronting hunger, vulnerability and danger on her own before any child should have to.

I really think we need to be careful about idealizing these "natural" practices.  They don't necessarily indicate a perfect culture or create happy children.

When it comes down to it, I don't feel comfortable being compelled to imitate a specific element of a wide-ranging culture I know little about and have little in common with in all other realms.  I can understand that it would be nice to be able to nurse, comfort and care for my child whenever she needs me.  In a cultural vacuum that sounds like a good idea.  But most mothers in western cultures who have jobs and equal status and respect in their households don't have a village of supportive women around them.  And a village of supportive women seems required for the amount of childcare required by attachment parenting.

The cultures that universally practice child-wearing, co-sleeping and nursing on demand are also generally cultures in which women are supported by large groups of other women.  Mostly because women don't have jobs outside the home and face major, MAJOR problems in terms of sexual equality and security.  I'm not trading sexual equality and security for a village of women.  It would be nice to have both, but until I do, I'm not taking on the entire burden of childcare alone.  It's not natural.


2. Intolerance of Crying:  I don't believe that leaving a child to cry for a few minutes causes lifetime anxiety disorders.  And it turns out that neither do scientists.  We're not that vulnerable.  Saturate your child with love, affection, respect and honesty in her waking hours and she will flourish.  No matter how you get her to sleep at night.  If she spends a few minutes (or more) crying, you have not ruined her.


3. The Blissful Solitary Mother: It is empowering to feel like you're the only one your child can find real comfort from.  It's also exhausting, frustrating, and sometimes distressing.  But the attachment parenting culture makes it feel like mothers are best at comforting babies (because of their breasts), and that they should find comfort, joy and empowerment in that often-solitary responsibility, no mention of the negative emotions that might come up.  So when they do come up, you're on your own.  In fact, I found it much more empowering and comforting to have a partner who can reliably comfort our child when I'm sick, traveling, tired or just in a bad mood.   Being the only one who could properly care for a child was not empowering for me, it was frightening and vulnerable.


4. The Selfless Mother: Attachment/naturalistic parenting tends to focus very little on the emotions of the mother.  The emotions of the baby (and future adult the baby becomes) are considered very, very important.  A lack of proper emotional attachment to the mother is considered to be a surprisingly easily-inflicted psychological injury that can impact the child for years, if not a lifetime.  But the emotional security and health of the mother goes relatively unmentioned.  In fact, kids are happy and well-adjusted when their moms are happy.  A mother who selflessly sacrifices her sleep, time and breathing space to devote all her energy to a baby is rarely happy.  The revelation for me was that this sacrifice affects the baby too.  When I was wiped out and frustrated, Penny was clingy, weepy and angry.  When I was rested, happy and fulfilled by a lunch with a friend or some time working, Penny was relaxed, happy and confident.  A mother's mental health is just as important, if not more important than the immediate emotional state of the baby.  A sleep-deprived, angry mom is not doing anybody any favors.


5. The Temple of the Breast:  The most overwhelming element of attachment parenting might be its unwavering insistence on breastfeeding.  At one point in Mabel's nursing life, I suffered from a "supply problem."  I wasn't making enough milk.  I googled the problem and came up with dozens of sites, mostly sponsored by La Leche League or naturalistic parenting groups, that suggested hundreds of ways I could increase my supply.  Most, with a friendly, encouraging tone, informed me that I would have to devote a few full days, if not a week straight, to nursing and pumping every 2 hours, in order to increase my supply.  Most bits of advice signed off with a cheerful "good luck"!  Nowhere did anyone say, "if this is too much for you and you just don't have time or energy, your baby will be fine if you supplement with formula, or gradually stop nursing altogether.  It's not worth despairing over."  The implication was, if you can't do this, you probably should despair.  But good luck!

Then I read this article.  For the first time I've ever seen, an intelligent woman took to the medical journals and catalogued the actual evidence for and against breastfeeding.  The results were decidedly mixed.  It turns out that if you use formula, you are not destroying your child. And you should absolutely not destroy yourself and your mental health to maintain a practice that probably is only marginally better for a baby than formula.  In fact, if you sacrifice your own happiness and mental well-being enough in your quest to maintain exclusive breastfeeding, you might actually be doing more harm than good.


6. The Feminist-Naturalist Mom:  Most feminists tend to defend their own bodies with ferocious determination.  However, when it comes to our babies, it turns out that most feminists are actually on board with attachment parenting. I consider myself a feminist, and I fell easily into the theory.  I'm not sure exactly why feminism resonates so well with attachment parenting, but it's not a productive pairing.

For me, attachment parenting was capable, almost like nothing else, of making me feel guilty for putting my needs and ambition into my family's time equation.  My role as a mother became so important that any time I spent not mothering began to feel supremely selfish.  Even if it was necessary and important to me as a person.

Maybe it's something about the quasi-anthropological idea of naturalistic parenting that appeals to feminists.  Maybe it's the allure of the power that comes from being the only person your baby turns to for comfort.  Maybe it's the temptation of "conquering" motherhood in addition to all the other impressive achievements we've attained, or just the infinite attention and energy we can devote to childrearing instead of to careers that are often unsatisfying.  I don't know.  But I do know that there is something about the naturalistic approach to motherhood that did, in fact, undermine my confidence, despite its reassurances that it was giving me support.  And I know it harms the confidence of a lot of other moms too.  That's not good for feminism.


For over a year, attachment parenting kept me very busy trying to attain the goal of parenting as if I lived in a different time, with a different community and a different set of options ahead of me.  I was trying to fit myself and my family into a world that we didn't live in.  We're not a rural Peruvian family.  We're not ancient hunter-gatherers.  We're not bears.  But I was trying to parent like we were.  And I was, unsurprisingly, defeated over and over again.  I took it personally.  Maybe the key to successful naturalistic parenting is not taking any of your failures personally.  I don't know how a mother is supposed to do that, but it would help.

I think a lot of attachment parents would argue that nobody wants to go back to living in ancient hunter-gatherer society.  Rather, they're taking a few of the good ideas from those more naturalistic cultures and using them in our modern society.  It's like the Paleo diet.  But the truth is that any modern practice has to fit into modern life.  And when a practice doesn't fit (because it comes from a different time or place), there has to be forgiveness and compromise and leeway.  Attachment parenting manuals are all phrased in very comforting and kind language, but its responses to breastfeeding reluctance or sleep training are generally not very forgiving.  Using ideas from "naturalistic" cultures can be a good idea, but we have to allow that we live in a very different time and place, we're happy that we do, our kids are lucky that we do, and parenting happens where it happens.  No parenting technique is perfect, and whatever style you choose,  the kids will be ok.  All kids, through all time, have needed love, food, sleep and play.  How you accomplish those things is pretty much gravy.  I'm officially done with being told otherwise.