Jan Heirtzler (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
jan_andrea) wrote2005-02-23 01:42 pm
jan_andrea) wrote2005-02-23 01:42 pm
Salon has failed me ... sob!
Well, not really, but they ran this article about yet another "what parents are doing wrong these days" book, which included this line in the introduction:
Give me a break. I wrote this letter in return:
I will be surprised if they publish it, but if they do, you read it here first :)
Like some of her predecessors, she blames such factors as the popularity of the "attachment parenting" philosophy (which holds that even brief separations from a mother can scar young children)...
Give me a break. I wrote this letter in return:
Katy Read's introduction to "Perfect Madness" included a great deal of hyperbole, but the one that got me the most was her characterization of attachment parenting, which she claims, "... holds that even brief separations from a mother can scar young children." That's not even close. Children need their *parents*. A child can be just as attached to his father as his mother. Attachment parenting strives to promote healthy families, and sometimes, a healthy family includes a mother who gets out of the house without the kids from time to time. I am very much an attachment parent, but I also have a life beyond my children, and I know that when I leave them with their father, they are getting just as much caring and love as they do with me. And when we go out together, I know they are safe and secure with their aunts and uncles. Attachment parenting isn't about scaring parents that they'll "scar" their children; it's about helping parents listen to their childrens' -- and their own -- needs.
I will be surprised if they publish it, but if they do, you read it here first :)
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Congratulations, babe. Have your fifteen minutes. :)
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The problem with Salon is that it's nearly always a middle-class lens and therefore assumes a lot of things about the parents.
To my mind, the Word about attachment parenting needs to be spread to the undereducated, to the poor, to mothers with children in foster care, to daycare workers. To talk about how to comfort a child rather than saying "they'll get over it", to discuss forming important mother-and-baby-only rituals, to explain that you always have a special bond with your child and how to reinforce it.
Very few women who are home all the time with their children are instinctively going to go against attachment parenting -- if anything, most of them need to stop thinking of it in terms of parenting and avoiding therapy for their kids and instead think of it the way our parents did, "as having kids". Spend time with your children. Involve them in what you do. Listen to them patiently. These are instinctive and you don't need books to do it, nor do you need to get in the mothering.com or hipmama.com battle of one-upmanship of Look How I AP My Kid More Than Yours. THAT's what goes into that attitude, and that's why I totally agree. Alicia has a blog of her own and updates it occasionally, and trades e-mails with her cousin. Julianne uses an old keyboard sometimes and sometimes helps me "pick" which key to use. It's integrating my children into my life, not ending my life in favor of my children, which is what a lot of fanatic APers try to do, often out of a sense of adult deprivation -- because they can't meet their own tests and ideals, deprived of adult hierarchy, they instead make their kids their hierarchy, which is a Really Bad Idea and leads to the spoiled-rotten brats the author spoke of.
Whereas the mothers I worked with at WIC or the ones I work with now as a CASA need that word. "There are things only your child can do or feel with you." Hold your child while they're having a bottle. Snuggle them at nighttime if that's when you're available. Have songs that only you two sing together. Let your child help with everything, no matter how messy it makes the kitchen or the house. They don't know these things for lack of supportive parenting models, and THEY need it.
In general, college educated or graduate educated women who are generally at home with their kids know this anyway, and they need to find something they enjoy doing in the evenings to keep that Adult Feeling, and also avoid the maternal chauvinism that often dominates their relationship with their children and their husbands, and detracts from their husbands' ability to father.