Attachment Parenting Mommies

Posted by Summer M

June 17, 2007 |

I don’t hide the fact that I fall into the Attachment Parenting (AP) group in how I parent my kids. It is just what feels right to me and the way that works the best for us. During my first son’s pregnancy we were living in a tiny apartment and had no cable or internet access. The first 3 months of his life we had moved on to a bigger house, but were still living without TV or internet. Not having many friends with children I had to follow my gut a lot. At the time I hated not having the large support group helping me through the difficulties. Now I am glad for that solitary time as it forced me to stop listening to what everyone else said was the right right to do things, and instead to follow my own instincts.

Though I do choose to label myself as an AP mom there are many who follow the idea but avoid the label. And on the flipside there are some who cling to the label without actually embracing the lifestyle. The hippie with a minivan talked about this very thing on her blog in her post The Lable of Attachment Parenting (part two). A lot of the parents who embrace AP because it is trendy or hip end up tossing the ideas behind it by the wayside as soon as their children can talk. The loving attachment of infancy suddenly becomes a hard detachment as parents fall into the set rules that they think children should fall into. Too many parents say ‘Act your age!” when they mean “Be a mini-adult!”. The hippie says it best:

There seems to be a sad misconception that Attachment comes through the physical stuff in infancy but that at a certain age things just can’t work that way anymore… as kids grow up the unrealistic expectations of what a child “should” be doing step in… weaning, too big to be carried, parents think that the child should be in their own bed etc… the physical practices that defined what AP was in the past just fizzle away and AP can’t be practiced anymore. The problem as I see it is that people get stuck on the physical stuff and don’t learn or haven’t been modeled the theory of attachment.

attachment parenting, parenting, children, kids