Is Attachment Parenting a “Prison for Mothers?â€
By Babble.com | Parenting – Wed, Nov 10, 2010 5:09 PM EST
Is motherhood - and attachment parenting in particular - a prison for modern women? It is according Erica Jong, the novelist, essayist and poet best known for her bestselling book Fear of Flying.
In a provocative essay in the Wall Street Journal, Jong argues that attachment parenting, the brand espoused in William and Martha Sears' bestselling The Baby Book sets unrealistic goals for mothers - especially working mothers.
"You wear your baby, sleep with her and attune yourself totally to her needs. How you do this and also earn the money to keep her is rarely discussed," Jong writes.
More on Babble: Dear Erica Jong, We Parent in a Vacuum, not a Prison!
Strict attachment parenting, for instance, doesn't allow for multiple caregivers and not all women are able to breastfeed or pump at work (or at home, for that matter).
"It seems we have devised a new torture for mothers-a set of expectations that makes them feel inadequate no matter how passionately they attend to their children," writes Jong, saying that modern mothers are bound to feel guilty when they can't live up to this unrealistic ideal.
Jong's argument recalls Elisabeth Badinter's best-selling French book Le Conflit: La Femme and La Mere which also suggests that the enormous pressure on women to be super-moms imprisons women.
Jong recounts her own experiences as a single mother (to future writer Molly Jong-Fast). There was no way she would have been able to be an attachment parent and a successful author and lecturer, she argues. Instead, she hired nannies to watch her daughter and "felt guilty for my own imperfect attachment."
I found Jong's essay to be compelling and persuasive on several points. Mommy guilt is ubiquitous and it often seems as if women are damned if they do, damned if they don't … If they breastfeed more than a year, they're deemed a hardcore lactivist. If they breastfeed less than a year, clearly, they didn't try hard enough. If they stay-at-home, they're lazy. If they return to work, they're selfish. Sometimes, it seems as if moms can't win.
More on Babble: Single Mom Busted in Bed with Neighbor, Says 10-Year-Old Should Have Knocked
Jong also raises the point that the cult of motherhood has had political implications as well. A woman who is fully engaged in child-rearing focuses all of her energy on cleaning cloth diapers, making her own baby food and carrying her baby. She has no time to devote to changing the world (I am guessing that so-called Mamma Grizzlies like Sarah Palin are not attachment parents).
Still, while Jong's claims about attachment parenting are overblown, I wholeheartedly agree with her closing point that women "need to be released from guilt about our children, not further bound by it. We need someone to say: Do the best you can. There are no rules."
What do you think? Is attachment parenting imprisoning women? Or do the potential benefits of attachment parenting outweigh any temporary limitations on mothers?end quote from:
http://shine.yahoo.com/parenting/is-attachment-parenting-a-a-prison-for-mothers-a-2409003.html
If you want to bond with your child for life and to home school them and to have them be a part of your life the rest of your life then Bonding with them can do that if you are up to it. I bonded with my son who is now 37 almost 38 and a nurse. So, even though he has been married twice he has been living here with my wife and younger daughter and I since about November. His divorce is going through the courts and he is moving on with his life. But the fact that he is still in my life came from bonding with him when he was little. Even when his mother left him when he was 3 I had to figure out how to raise him alone. Luckily for a couple of years my mother stepped in as Step mother until I married a lady with two kids a couple of years older than my son.
But the point is that attachment parenting tends to prevent infant death syndrome for one thing. Because your kid isn't left alone necessarily. Your kids join you in the family bed and often kids nurse until they are 4. Also, often parents who are bonded this way with their kids choose to home school them also. I home schooled my son and his step brother and step sister and they are now a Fire Captain, a lawyer and my son is a nurse. So, all of them have at least a bachelor's degree. And they were all parented by the bonding method. But the bond with my son has been the best. After my 2nd wife and I divorced I married again and had another daughter with my 20 years ago new wife. My wife bonded with our now 16 year old daughter and nursed her also until she was at least 4. My son was nursed only until his teeth came in which was about 9 to 12 months which is the same as my experience with my mother in 1948. Somehow my 2nd wife and my 3rd wife nursed my daughters both for about 4 years as a bonding experience.
However, if you use the techniques of attachment parenting or the "Bonding" experience as I prefer to call it just remember that the family bed is a mixed thing both good and bad. The good thing is community and a lot of laughter. The bad thing is mommy and Daddy don't have privacy for "Quality time" so Mommy and Daddy have to be very mature to deal with this. Also, if you don't want your nose broken during the night or you don't want a black eye it is good to put your back to the children in the bed because then they can do a whole lot less damage to you when they suddenly move in their sleep. I have had my nose almost broken by a descending heal in my sleep more than once before I learned the "Protective stance" for family bed parents which is put your back to the children to protect your organs and face and nose from damage especially between the ages of 2 and 10. At about 6 or 7 most children are really lethal in their sleep when you least expect it. You can still get injured but it is less likely to break your nose or hurt your groin, stomach, or vital organs or eyes.
Also, I once woke up and realized I was laying on my back on top of my then 2 year old daughter. "My waking thought was "oh my god I've killed my baby daughter!" But what had actually happened was that she had got cold and had snuggled up to me and then I turned on my back. But she was fine and warm. But I realized from that experience that I could never allow myself to sleep on my back with a 2 year old in the bed. So this took some discipline but I learned to do this. Dads can do anything if they have to.
Another thing I trained myself to do was to jump out of bed in an emergency and run to help someone even if I was asleep still. The worst time this occurred was when our mostly feral cat called "Pampus" accidentally knocked a stick holding open a window we left open for him to climb through during the summer from outside. So, when he knocked the stick the window came down with a bang and broke his tail. So, he was hanging a foot or so off the floor in the kitchen hysterical and having reverted to the feral wild cat he was when we first got him. So, when my wife got up to help him he was in so much pain with his broken tail caught in the slammed down window that he bit right through my then wife's hand. Now when I heard not only Pampus screaming but also my wife screaming I jumped out of bed running and got there and opened the window and Pampus ran away for a week. But having done this I then threw up in the corner to have done that in about 2 seconds from a deep sleep. But this is the kind of thing you have to learn to do as a Dad in the middle of the night or anytime. Luckily, several stitches later my wife's hand was sort of okay because Pampus hadn't severed any tendons completely so her hand was okay within about a month from the day he bit all the way through it.
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