“Beyond the Sling is a delightful look into the parenting journey Mayim is making with her husband. Her family-first stories are an inspiring reminder of how we navigated these waters ourselves. We have learned that when parents choose to parent with attachment in mind, they make a lot of other good, holistic decisions regarding the health and well-being of the family. She invites her readers to understand attachment parenting, see how it is working for her family, and choose what can work for their own.”
—William Sears, MD, and Martha Sears, RN, coauthors of
The Baby Book and The Attachment Parenting Book
“As an outspoken advocate for childbirth choices, I have worked tirelessly to educate parents about their birthing options. With Beyond the Sling, Mayim Bialik has developed a fantastic guide to birth and to parenting that is packed with invaluable wisdom. At once conversational, informative, and progressive, this book should be compulsory reading for anyone who has even considered becoming a parent.”
—Ricki Lake, executive producer of
The Business of Being Born and author of Your Best Birth
“Beyond the Sling goes beyond the scope of the standard books to enhance the parenting experience. Mayim’s warmth, dedication, and professionalism are felt throughout this wonderful book.”
—Lauren Feder, MD, author of
Natural Baby and Childcare and The Parents’ Concise Guide to Childhood Vaccinations
“Drawing on her education as a neuroscientist, her instinct as a mother, and a community of support, Mayim has passionately embraced attachment parenting principles for raising her children. In Beyond the Sling she shows how the secure attachment relationship that she has developed with her children has given her the confidence to define her own natural parenting style.”
—Barbara Nicholson and Lysa Parker, cofounders of
Attachment Parenting International and
coauthors of Attached at the Heart
Beyond the Sling
A Real-Life Guide to Raising Confident,
Loving Children the Attachment Parenting Way
This publication contains the opinions and ideas of its author. It is intended to provide helpful and informative material on the subjects addressed in the publication. It is sold with the understanding that the author and publisher are not engaged in rendering medical, health, or any other kind of personal professional services in the book. The reader should consult his or her medical, health, or other competent professional before adopting any of the suggestions in this book or drawing inferences from it.
The author and publisher specifically disclaim all responsibility for any liability, loss or risk, personal or otherwise, which is incurred as a consequence, directly or indirectly, of the use and application of any of the contents of this book.
Beyond the Sling
First published in the US by Touchstone, a Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc 2012
This edition published in the UK by Pinter & Martin Ltd 2014
Published by arrangement with The Foundry and Abner Stein
Copyright © 2012, 2014 by Mayim Bialik
Mayim Bialik has asserted her moral right to be identified as the author of this work in
accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.
All rights reserved
ISBN 978-1-78066-195-7
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade and otherwise,
be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in
any form or binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar
condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
Set in Fournier
Photograph on page 16 designed by Maia Rosenfeld.
Other photographs courtesy of the author.
Printed and bound in the UK by Ashford Colour Press Ltd, Gosport, Hampshire
This book has been printed on paper that is sourced and harvested from sustainable forests
and is FSC accredited.
Pinter & Martin Ltd
6 Effra Parade
London SW2 1PS
pinterandmartin.com
For Miles Roosevelt (Meir Rosh) and
Frederick Heschel (Ephraim Hirsch)
who made me a Mama
“Guard your tongue from evil and your lips from speaking deceit;
Turn from evil and do good, seek Peace and pursue
It.” Psalm 34
Foreword by Mayim Bialik
Introduction by Jay Gordon, MD
Part I: Trust Your Instincts
1. You Know More Than You Think
2. What Is Attachment Parenting?
The Science of Attachment and Intuition
Part II: What Baby Needs
3. Baby Needs a Smooth Entrance: Birth
4. Baby Needs Milk: Why We Breastfeed
5. Baby Needs to Be Held: How Will You Ever Get Anything Done Ever Again?
6. Baby Needs Nighttime Parenting: Gentle Techniques and Co-sleeping
7. Baby Needs Potty: Elimination Communication
Part III: What Baby Doesn’t Need
8. Baby Doesn’t Need All That Stuff: Figuring Out the Essentials
9. Baby Doesn’t Need Unnecessary Medical Intervention: When (and When Not) to Call the Doctor
10. Baby Doesn’t Need Pressure: Letting Kids Be Kids
11. Baby Doesn’t Need Punishment: Understanding Gentle Discipline
Part IV: What Mommy Needs
12. Keeping Your Relationships Strong: Staying “You” When You Become a Parent
13. Balancing Work and Family: Different Families, Different Choices
Resources
Acknowledgments
Index
When Beyond the Sling was first published, my sons were four and seven years old. I was employed part-time as an actress on The Big Bang Theory, I was married, and I had just emerged from managing my younger son’s toddler years with a certain amount of grace and a healthy dose of frustration, combined with an acute feeling that I had just survived a major war.
My boys are now six and nine. I am employed full-time on The Big Bang Theory. I have been divorced for over a year, and the phases of my sons’ lives no longer feel as challenging and potentially tragic or tantrum-inducing (on their part and mine!) as they used to. I rarely think about my sons’ births. Breastfeeding ended two years ago. I have not worn a child in a sling in almost three years. My boys sleep on their own all through the night, with some exceptions here and there! So many aspects of attachment parenting seem to be a thing of the past.
What I have found, though, is that the core beliefs that guided me and my ex-husband to decide to pursue a lifestyle of attachment parenting remain as significant, prominent, meaningful and fulfilling as ever, even though our sons are not babies anymore. No matter how old they are, no matter that we no longer share a home as a couple, and no matter what obstacles we face as a family, the foundational belief that children are consistently looking to have their needs met in the most reasonable way possible guides all of our behavior as parents. And the confirmation from experience that we are programmed by millions of years of evolution to parent intuitively and without parenting guides and manuals—which this book most certainly is not!—remains the most powerful gift I have been given as a parent. I know how to parent, and you do too.
The belief in a baby’s cry which we were told to have in the early months and years of our sons’ lives is the same belief that guides us now to hold our sons through their pain, nurture their development in safe ways, and reap the benefits of our efforts as they become independent, adventurous, sensitive and interesting people. They love to be loved. They expect to be loved. They see cruelty in society as an injustice to be fixed; not a situation they don’t know how to tolerate.
Attachment parenting seeks to raise children who want to be caring because they have been cared for. That’s a lovely thing. And it’s not impossible. Read on.
We can do better.
I’ve seen far too many articles and books about so-called good enough parenting. Why settle for “good enough”? This book will show you how to excel at parenting—and how to enjoy yourself and your baby along the way—through a parenting style called “attachment parenting.”
As a pediatrician, I occasionally have very difficult two-month-old checkups with new parents who seem to confront and dislike every step of the first weeks of life: “How could she need to eat again?” or “How could he need another diaper?”
I try to gently guide them into realizing that at 3:00 a.m. there are options: you can clench your teeth, roll your eyes, and sigh during those wake-ups (and probably lose another half hour’s sleep from worry and agitation). Or you can wake up with a big grin to greet your child and say out loud, “Hello, my sweet hungry baby. Again!”
A true story: some years ago I had two consecutive two-week exams scheduled one morning. I picked up the first chart and read my nurse’s notes about a very unhappy and stressed mom and dad. Their beautiful little girl had gained 3 to 4 ounces over her birth weight (which is just fine!). But during our appointment they tearfully told me how they couldn’t believe that their baby needed to eat every two hours all night long, and how she slept only brief intervals during the day, and everything was just so hard, and they hadn’t expected this, and they weren’t sure Mom had enough milk and . . . It was a tough visit. I think we finally reached a little smiling time at the end as we tried to focus on wonderful weight gain, good pee and poop, and normal milestones.
In the next room, the second two-week-old had also gained a few ounces over birth weight, but the nurse’s notes read, “Sleeps through the night.” That’s physiologically abnormal and a little worrisome. I was sure something was wrong.
They told me no, they were giving her only breast milk, frequent feeds, lots of pee and poop, and yes, she slept through the night. I argued for a few minutes. Finally this tired mom and dad insisted yes, she sleeps straight through the night. They said, “She gets up to feed every couple hours or so, but she sleeps through the night!”
I wished I had a little camera running to shoot this. The second family’s perception of their nighttime adventures feeding their weight-gaining, developmentally sound, and happy daughter was that—in spite of their being awake every two hours or so for nursing—the baby was sleeping through the night! They were learning to adjust to their baby’s rhythms with love and a relaxed (albeit sleep-deprived) equanimity about their daughter’s needs. I think the first mother and father had either read the wrong books, had some tough-love advice whispered (shouted?) in their ears, or just weren’t quite prepared for the relentless emotional responsibility of caring for a newborn.
Parenting is a lot of work. My advice: don’t shy away from it. Instead, attach yourselves. Wrap your lives around your newborns’ lives and rhythms and realize that, rather than returning to “normalcy,” this is the new normal.
Try to just plain love the increasing responsiveness and the extra eye contact and the teeny attempts your baby makes to smile at you in those first few weeks. Get absolutely delighted when those tiny (gassy?) smiles turn into big purposeful grins at you in the fifth or sixth or seventh week. Love the poop. Love the poop?! Yes, even the poop!
A parent’s instincts will guide you and even comfort and reassure you better than the advice of any doctor, grandparent, or friend. If your baby looks good, nurses a lot, pees, poops, makes eye contact, smiles some weeks later, moves and squirms and cuddles to sleep in Mom’s arms and Dad’s arms? That’s a great baby.
Attach yourself to this baby and embrace his or her nascent relationship with you as the family grows. Some bestselling books actually ask you to make your relationship with your baby smaller month by month: “Try to get your infant to eat a little less, sleep a little longer, be picked up a little less.” They say, “Don’t feed her because she’s hungry, feed her because it’s exactly two o’clock. Don’t pick him up when he’s crying; he has to learn that you’re going to teach him to soothe himself back to sleep.” And what does that teach your baby . . . that his mom and dad, the two people in the whole world you can count on day and night, 24/7, to be there and love you, really aren’t there when you’re scared at 3 a.m. or hungry a little earlier than the books say you should be?
How have we let “crying it out” and schedule feeding become the cultural norm? How have we convinced parents that loving their children consistently and persistently when they need us will spoil them? Now, I do believe that you can spoil a three- or four-year-old child if he whines and yells and gets a cookie. But you can’t spoil a baby! When babies cry, they’re really just talking to us, expressing the most basic human and physiological needs for nourishment, warmth, cuddles, trust.
Break this cycle. Buy this book and learn and feel how wonderful it is to respond and hug and cuddle and nurse and listen to your baby’s new “words” and facial expressions and so much more.
I’ve seen “detached” families, too. They don’t function well. The parents don’t know their kids that well, and when it comes time to set important limits and boundaries, the foundation just isn’t there.
Build the biggest possible relationship for when it does come time to set some boundaries and limits for your older baby or toddler. You might pick nine or twelve or fifteen months of age to look your baby in the eye and express the sentiments that she’s not actually the empress of a large nation but instead a very, very beloved member of a family . . . and that she might have to wait four or five minutes while oatmeal is being cooked or apples are pureed. And try as you might, she may cry. But I view this as demotion from a ten-foot pedestal to a nine-foot pedestal. And at these ages, you have a big, powerful little baby or toddler who can withstand that demotion based on the astounding amount of love, closeness, and attachment of the first year of life.
This book has everything: it has the science, the feeling, the emotion, the logic, and the best advice you’ll ever receive about . . . harder parenting?? No!! Intuitive, loving parenting leading the sweet, smart, happy baby, toddler, child, teen you always knew you’d raise.
This is a very personal book. Mayim has written about her own family, Miles and Fred, the most active, self-confident boys you’d ever want to meet. In the midst of a pleasant conversation, you realize that’s it just four or five people sitting around talking, all of us expressing our thoughts and feelings and more. A closer look reveals that two of the people are only three or four feet tall and a little less articulate than the rest, but they’re people, raised to reflect the respect and love they’ve felt and been immersed in for years. They understand communication and they understand limits and they are just plain fun to hang out around with. They have been raised by attachment parents, and I think you’ll like this style and this book a lot.
JAY GORDON, MD, FAAP
Ah, parenthood. Guiding a little soul through its infancy. Caressing tiny chubby fingers by moonlight. Molding a person from start to finish, and seeing only goodness and satisfaction reflected back at you every single time that your child breathes, speaks, and smiles. Creating a miniature version of you, only better, smarter, wiser, and more fashionable! Isn’t this what your life as a parent looks like?
Yeah, I didn’t think so. Mine doesn’t look like that, either.
Don’t get me wrong: I love being a parent. My two sons have stolen a piece of my heart and brain; they occupy a sacred part of my entire being and will do so forever. However, I also find parenting incredibly challenging, utterly exhausting, downright frustrating, and often crazy-making.
Part of what is so confusing is all the conflicting advice we parents get, from all angles: our parents, our friends, our doctors, our baby books, various “experts,” even perfect strangers on the street. Everyone’s got an opinion, and no one is shy about sharing it with us.
But if you are anything like me, you don’t have a predetermined set of decisions about child rearing laid out. Furthermore, you get confused when you are given dozens of different answers to one mingly simple question, especially if each answer sounds reasonable, is backed by research, and is delivered by someone you like and trust. A whole parenting industry has been created, it seems, solely to confuse us.
We are told to hold our babies—but don’t hold them too much! Or should we hold them more? (There’s research supporting both assertions.)
We’re advised to sleep close to them—but not too close! (You’ll find vocal supporters on both sides of this argument as well.)
We’re recommended to hold them and comfort them—but not too much, because they have to also learn to self-soothe! (But how much is too much? And is my kid the same as yours?)
And on and on and on. It’s enough to make you wonder how anyone ever reaches first grade without the need for a pediatric psychologist living in their home to help sort through all of this insanity.
Parenting books number in the tens of thousands, each promising you comprehensive help raising the “best” child in the quickest amount of time, and specialty books seeking to solve “once and for all” the most persistent of parenting concerns such as sleep and feeding. I read those books when I was first pregnant, and I have read dozens of them throughout the past seven years. Some of what I read has helped me, but most of what I read has made me feel overwhelmed, incompetent, and sometimes wrong for doing what I wanted to do. I know I’m not alone in feeling this way.
This is not that kind of parenting book.
What I have discovered, and what I seek to share with you, dear reader, is this: you already know the majority of what you need to know to be an incredible parent. It was only when I believed this and began to apply it consistently to my growing family that my anxiety, worry, and exhaustion began to lift. It was then that I truly began to enjoy being a parent and to see myself as a successful parent; not a perfect parent, and not always the most patient parent, but a sensitive, loving, and confident parent who truly loves this life I have chosen. That’s really what this book is about: empowering you to make the best choices for your kids.
So what exactly have I chosen for my kids? I have figured out what works for our family, and the basic idea is this: hundreds of thousands of years of evolution have prepared all of us, should we so choose, to be a parent. A good parent! Not a perfect parent but the best parents we can be. The knowledge we need is already programmed into our DNA.
But trends in the past two hundred years or so of Western culture have convinced us that we need a lot of help: help giving birth; help choosing what to feed the baby; help “teaching” our baby to sleep, to eat, and to learn; help making the baby independent as soon as humanly possible; help just being a parent. I propose that we, for the most part, need very little of this kind of help in these matters. By understanding basic theories of attachment and infant development, by surrounding ourselves with a community (and a culture) that seeks to support healthy and natural choices that make intuitive sense, and by trusting that everything a baby needs is communicated honestly, simply, and without malice or manipulation, we can truly be the parents that nature intends us to be.
A baby tells us exactly what he needs in his own language. Our job is to learn to speak that language. That’s what this book is all about.
So did all of this come naturally to me? Am I some sort of natural “earth mother” who was effortlessly able to tap in to my children’s innermost needs? Was I raised in an immersive attachment parenting environment, a style of parenting that I simply mimicked when I was blessed with children?
In a word, no.
Before I had kids, I had decided that parenting was not going to be that hard. People who talked about their kids all the time tended to bore me. I questioned their choice of time management as I shook my head sadly at their apparent lack of adult recreational activities. Did they really want to use all of their time reading about parenting? Perhaps they had social problems or maybe even an anxiety disorder, since they clearly had nothing better to do than hang out with their babies while their friends went to Las Vegas or relaxed at the spa. Had they not read “the book” on parenting? Why were they making it all seem like such hard work? In my opinion, they were giving parenting a very bad name.
The knowledge I have now came from backing off on my defensiveness and judgment, opening my mind to hearing new ideas, doing a lot of reading and study, and talking honestly with both friends and experts. Much of my formulation of parenting, though, has come as the result of a lot of hard-won practice and experience raising my two young boys, Miles and Frederick.
My grandparents were immigrants from war-torn Eastern Europe preceding World War II, and they came to America poor, uneducated, and brokenhearted because of the life and family they had to leave behind. My parents were born during World War II and were raised in the Bronx as assimilated American Jews. From what I have pieced together, my grandparents’ style of child rearing was strict, assertive, and somewhat authoritarian. Both of my parents attended public college in the 1960s in New York, and they soon became part of the political and social upheaval of that era that made them more enlightened, more open-minded, and more liberal than anyone in their families. They ate health food and lived a bohemian lifestyle in the West Village, making documentaries against the Vietnam War and traveling to Washington, DC, for antiwar protests.
Okay, I’ll just say it: my parents were hippies.
My liberated feminist mother, once she got around to convincing herself that having kids would not end her life (or convincing herself that all the fun was over anyway, so why not have kids), delivered me with no pain medication or interventions of any kind. She tried cloth diapering, but I was allergic to her detergent. When she stopped breast-feeding me, she fed me soymilk instead of cow’s milk, because she didn’t want to feed me “the milk of another animal,” as she put it. Pretty ahead of her time, right? And when I requested bottle after bottle at night, my mother sweetly obliged rather than let me “cry it out.” Looking back, she wishes she had the support to bring me back into her bed.
My parents’ progressiveness did not extend to all aspects of child rearing. Blessed as I am to have these wacky, funny, and irreverent people as my sperm and egg donors, certain aspects of their parenting style looked more like their parents’ than even they would have liked to admit. It was a pleasant dictatorship of sorts with a lot of perks to the subject (me), but for the most part, my parents usually told me when I was cold, tired, hungry, upset, or happy, even if I didn’t necessarily agree.
This parent-centered style of that era continued into my adolescence and young adulthood, as my precocious (and, looking back, rather naive) interest in being an actress took me in two short years from success in an elementary school play to a critically acclaimed role as the young Bette Midler in the 1989 film Beaches. Shortly thereafter, I was starring in my own NBC sitcom, Blossom.
My parents guided my career and managed every aspect of it, which was appropriate, helpful, and necessary. Their parenting style carried over into their management style: our relationship continued to be hierarchically structured, with me as the one in the relationship with a somewhat “lower” status, since, being a child, I indeed knew less than my parents about both show business and adult interactions. People are often surprised to hear that my parents and I functioned this way before I became an actress and that my career did not precipitate their being as authoritative as they appeared; it was actually as if our “pleasant dictatorship” was designed to manufacture precocious sitcom actresses! I look back at those years fondly, and I felt that I was protected by my parents as much in my home as I was on a television set.
At the end of the five-year run of Blossom, at nineteen, I decided to leave acting and pursue a degree in neuroscience and Hebrew and Jewish studies. My parents were supportive, but had I not been a legal adult, they might have liked me to continue acting. As an undergraduate at UCLA, I met a tall and quiet young man who looked like Elvis Costello, liked racquetball as much as I did, and seemed to enjoy my cooking, my intellectual interests, and my oddball sense of humor. We dated for five years and both started graduate school in 2000: me in neuroscience specializing in hormones of bonding, attachment, and obsessive-compulsive disorder; and he in political science, specializing in American politics. We married in 2003 and had Miles while still in graduate school. Frederick was born ten months after I submitted my thesis (can you say “celebration baby”?).
Now, I am sure you are saying, “Look at your list of successes: you turned out okay despite the parent-centered philosophy of your upbringing!” (while secretly hoping that you, the reader, turned out okay, too), and I suppose that this is largely true. However, when I talk with my mother, my former husband Michael’s mother, and many women of this era, they often report that they spent their first years as parents utterly confused, frustrated, and overwhelmed with feelings of inadequacy. They were told that babies eat only every four hours, but we were hungry every two. They were told not to sleep with a baby, but we cried when we were not held close. They were told to get back to life and “get over” their doubts, their questions, and their sense of unease. But something tugged at their minds, and at their hearts, and they could not simply get over it.
It is this kind of tug that I argue ought to be listened to. Parents today are still being told the same kinds of things by authority figures with fancy degrees: when to hold the baby, when not to hold the baby, how to hold the baby, how not to hold the baby, why to hold the baby, why not to hold the baby, and so on. Parents hear this advice from doctors, nurses, and passersby on the street alike (I know I did and still do):
“You’ll spoil the baby if you hold him too much.”
“Babies won’t learn to crawl if you don’t frustrate them by letting them fuss and struggle in a crib; they’ll never be motivated.”
“If you meet all of a baby’s needs too promptly, she’ll never learn to ask for anything and may have speech delays.”
“Your child has to reach these milestones or he will have to see a speech therapist/physical therapist/occupational therapist.”
“If you don’t start solids now, your baby will never eat.”
Really? Something didn’t seem right about a parenting style governed by fear and uncertainty. There had to be a better way.
Attachment parenting (AP) is the loose set of guidelines that started to resonate with me both as I did research about parenting and as I pursued my degree in neuroscience. As a “green” person in regard to how I ate, shopped, and cleaned my apartment, I came to understand that there is also such a thing as “green parenting.” A green style of parenting seeks to create a generation of children who love and respect people and the earth because they have been loved and respected by their parents. Look to societies where the environment is neglected and abused, and you will find that children’s well-being is also often neglected. Look to countries where environmentalism is a way of life for all people, and you may be surprised to find that these countries also spend tremendous resources to ensure the optimal development of happy and bonded families.
So what is attachment parenting really about? Attachment Parenting International (API) identifies AP as guided by eight principles. The practical application varies greatly but it often looks something like this:
It should be noted that no one does all eight perfectly, nor do you have to subscribe to all of them to benefit from these principles. These are simply guidelines that can serve as a jumping-off place for your decision-making. There are families who differ in many aspects of these principles, and there are no “attachment police” who revoke your membership if they catch your child asleep in his own bed. In addition, attachment parenting is not, contrary to popular belief, a parenting style just for people who are wealthy or who are at-home parents, nor is it for people with an abnormal or superhuman amount of patience. It is for people from all walks of life who seek to parent gently and who believe that an independent adult is one who was allowed to form a healthy dependence and attachment to her caregiver in her formative years.
What I discovered as an observer of families who lived by the principles of attachment parenting was that they did not bow to those who tried to coerce, threaten, mock, or cause fear about the most natural and instinctual event on the planet: being a parent. The relationships they had with their children were reciprocally considerate, respectful, loving, and authentic. The adults made choices about their pregnancies, births, and lifestyles out of a sense of faith, courage, and empowerment. They did not yell or use force to be heard by their children, and their children were receptive to being guided in their activities and behaviors without being afraid to assert their needs.
What I discovered about attachment parenting as a neuroscientist was even more surprising and led me to a sort of internal revelation: these principles make sense evolutionarily. They foster brain development, promote healthy and secure attachment, and produce relationships that are scientifically proven to be sound in terms of infant health, psychological achievement, and the ability to truly thrive. By this reasoning, everything I had been taught from evolutionary biology all the way up to advanced neuroanatomy and neuropsychiatry supports the following: these principles do not need to be taught. Rather, they are innate, having been whittled down and programmed into our genetic code over hundreds of thousands of years of trial and error. The first Homo sapiens knew the same things I know about how to be a parent, even if it seems that I only intuitively know that the baby needs to stay alive and that it’s my job to make that happen.
My training in neuroscience and years of anecdotal observation led me to the crux of the style of parenting I will describe in this book: there is something in us that already knows what our babies need. As prospective parents, we are bombarded with conflicting evidence, staggering statistics, threats of babies “too clingy” or “not securely attached” or—worse yet—psychologically harmed forever by our best intentions. We meet with obstetricians, midwives, pediatricians, child development psychologists, marital counselors, and preschool administrators. We turn to friends, books, and even well-meaning family members to help us parent the “right way,” but what is right for one family is not always right for another. And there is a primal, ancient, and elegant instinct that we can tap in to to be the best parents we can be. This is not an easy task. Our instinct has been buried and smothered in recent years. It has been dismissed, mocked, ridiculed, and slandered. It has been the basis of spousal disputes, family battles, and internal wars. How do we get this instinct back?
When I started along the path of attachment parenting, the documented resources available to me were scant. Mothering magazine, La Leche League International (LLLI), and our brave and brilliant pediatrician were our only sources for facts, figures, advice, and support. Organizations like the Holistic Moms Network and API gained my membership because these communities were open to sharing attachment parenting wisdom and experience free of judgment. But I did not find books by real moms or dads about what this lifestyle actually looks like.
It occurred to me that others might like to hear how it works for us, and that’s really how this book was born. I do not claim to have the formula for raising the perfect child. My kids are flawed and they make plenty of mistakes, as do I. My kids are not always polite, patient, clean, wise, and quiet; nor am I, for that matter. If there were a formula for raising the quietest/happiest/gentlest/easiest/best/ sweetest/most generous and polite child, it would have been figured out thousands of years ago, and we would all be following it and getting the same results. (We’d also be much less sleep-deprived.) Every parent is different, every baby is different, and children are more the products of family and societal dynamics than of one particular style of parenting.
What I can offer you are stories about what our days and nights are like, why we choose to do it this way, and what we see as the benefits for us, our kids, and our community and beyond. I have presented our stories, struggles, and successes in an accessible and simple manner by boiling down all of parenting to five things your baby needs and four things your baby doesn’t need (even though people will tell you that they do). Babies need: 1) a smooth birth, 2) food, 3) holding in the day, 4) holding at night (new parents: beware!), and 5) to go potty. Babies don’t need: 1) a lot of stuff (frugal parents: rejoice!), 2) unnecessary medical interventions, 3) pressure to achieve too early, and 4) harsh discipline.
Each chapter uses our family’s personal experiences and my reflections and perspectives. I will offer you the research, discussions, and benefits that our decisions were based on, as well as where you can go to learn more and make your own informed decisions. I will tell you what we have found surprising, and in some cases, I will share what hasn’t worked for us and why. But this is not a parenting book. If it is, it’s not like any other parenting book I have read. Parenting books proclaim, “I have figured out how to (fill in the blank as to what you want your baby to do/be/think/feel). Come read this book and you can be just like me!” Parenting books make me feel that I am failing and inadequate since I can’t—or won’t—get my baby to (fill in the blank again). I guarantee you that I don’t know how to raise your kids; I know how to raise mine. This is not a judgmental book. This is not a book in which I explain to you why what you have done or want to do is wrong, and why your children will be forever scarred by your selfish and outrageous parenting. You and your family are the only ones who can decide how to parent.
Finally, this is not about an incredibly difficult or expensive way of life, nor is it a celebrity-telling-you-how-to-live-from-the-privilege-of-luxury-comfort-and-round-the-clock-assistance book. I am sharing my life and my parenting with you simply because I believe in it and I do it every day, every hour, every minute. I do not have housekeepers, nannies, babysitters, extended family, chefs, and personal trainers helping me to be the parent I claim to be. Michael and I were the only caregivers for our kids, and we had no outside help. We had been on three dates in six years, and the only vacations we took were with our kids. We had not been away on a romantic getaway since I was pregnant with our first son, and that wasn’t terribly romantic, since I was so pregnant that I practically needed a stretcher to move around . . . and why I thought a maternity bikini was a good idea eludes me now.
What worked for our family was for me to complete my degree but not pursue a position in academia, since it did not allow us to parent according to the principles we held true. Returning to acting as I have done since our second son was out of infancy allows me flexible hours, no interruption in nursing our son on demand, nor change in our sleeping arrangements since we travel only as a family unit, and I have the ability to see my children most of the day, even when I am working. My courageous and patient former husband completed his master’s degree but did not pursue a doctorate, choosing instead to be home with our children so that when I am called to work, our boys’ caregiver is their devoted, competent, and loving father.
Parenting using the principles of attachment theory is truly about getting back to basics, valuing the choices you have made, and reaping the benefits of those choices so that you can be present with your kids, loving with your spouse, and content with your life.
As you dive into this book, I implore you to forget what you have been told; forget what the conventional books say. Start with a blank slate, which is actually not very blank at all. It contains billions upon billions of amino acids all lined up and ready to go: your genetic code, your DNA, contains the foundation for every thought, desire, and action you will ever hope to make. The wisdom is there; you just need to learn to trust yourself and unearth your instincts.
I know that most aspects of parenting may not strike you at all as natural or intuitive. After all, what seems natural about propelling an eight-pound baby out of your body? Why would it feel instinctually appropriate to not sleep longer than three hours at a time for years? Read on with an open mind, since incredible introspection can come from such open-mindedness. And when you feel a tug as you are told something by a well-meaning friend, doctor, or stranger that does not sound okay to you, that is evidence that your DNA is struggling to be heard above the din of “popular” parenting advice. With the knowledge and support that every parent on this planet deserves, harvesting your intuition won’t make being a parent easy; but it can make it meaningful, pleasurable, and life-affirming. The rewards are waiting for us if we follow our intuition.
When people hear that I have a PhD in neuroscience, they assume I’m really smart. I like to tell people that I’m not smart, just very persistent. I also let people know that I usually only use the “Dr.” title when calling myself Dr. Mom, since the bulk of my time is spent observing, studying, problem-solving, understanding, and loving my two kids. When people learn about my choices in parenting, they either don’t associate my degree with my parenting style, or they fear that one needs my level of education to successfully implement this style of parenting. Both are wrong.
I had my first son five years into my doctoral program at UCLA. I had been planning to become a research professor specializing in the role of hormones on obsessive-compulsive disorder in children with special needs, which was the topic of my thesis. However, once I had Miles, my worldview shifted dramatically, and the things I wanted from life revolved around wanting to be with him most of the day, not with a laboratory or classroom full of someone else’s kids. What helped me make this very personal decision was the information I learned from studying neuroscience—specifically, developmental neuroscience and the endocrinology of attachment behavior in humans, both of which were required as background for my thesis.
Do you need to be a doctoral candidate in neuroscience to use the concepts of attachment parenting? No—especially since I have already gone ahead and done that for you! My training merely helped me support my decisions with facts and a perspective that has given me a certain degree of confidence. The style of parenting I espouse is not an indulgent way of life for those with a lot of time, money, or a staff of nannies; it is an evolutionarily beneficial commitment that optimizes healthy brain and social development through what is called “secure attachment.” Let’s learn a little bit in everyday terms about what the brain needs, what babies need, and why the style of parenting our family lives by helps meet those needs easily and successfully.
Human beings have brains that are made for loving, cuddling, and secure attachment. Here’s why.
We are born with underdeveloped brains. This means that over hundreds of thousands of years of evolutionary trial and error, the skills and intelligence we have—the ability to speak and to reason; to love and to memorize and encode complex things like how your beloved grandmother smelled and how smelling her perfume even in a bottle reminds you of the pound cake she made that you loved to eat while sitting perched on her cozy lap—all of this takes up space in the brain. If the brain had to accommodate all of those capabilities at birth, the baby’s head would not fit through the vaginal birth canal because the brain would be too big. There is simply not enough room in the newborn brain to hold all of that stuff in its mature form.
Nature has designed it so that a baby is born with a brain that finishes growing in the first year of life, when the baby is outside of the mama. So now you know why it’s such a tight squeeze to get the baby’s head out of your body: nature has given us the biggest possible head that will eventually accommodate the biggest possible brain. If it were any smaller, we would not be as smart as we are, and if it were any bigger, baby simply wouldn’t make it through the birth canal! Thank you, Nature, for making labor a little bit easier, but maybe in another million years contractions can come in the form of sound waves?
Sometimes advances in science occur because of very unfortunate and even tragic situations. For example, injuries on the battlefield during the Civil War led to vast improvements in our knowledge of surgery and amputations. An example that is relevant to our understanding of attachment comes out of the harsh political and social climate in Romania over the past thirty years, which led to thousands of babies born to families unable or unwilling to care for them. The result was that tens of thousands of babies and young children were forced into crowded and underfunded orphanages, where they were often left to their own devices to meet their physical and emotional needs. This devastating tragedy led to a secondary one: these children were largely not able to succesfully have their needs met, and they became examples of how the lack of touch, care, and love can lead to children who fail to thrive—they waste away, they become very ill, and they are emotionally traumatized from being denied adequate attention. This trauma is often irreversible.
It would seem intuitive to understand, but this “accidental” experiment (and others’ situations like it that can be found in various pockets throughout the world) provides concrete proof that children must have their needs responded to in order to flourish and reach their fullest potential. Although we rarely encounter situations this dire in our daily lives, the infant brain is a sponge for learning all kinds of information; the lessons we teach in the first months and the first years serve as an imprint for all future psychological experiences. Children who are used to being responded to learn that their needs are responded to when they express them, and they learn that using effective communication gets their needs met efficiently and consistently. Children with this knowledge are not spoiled, manipulative, or coddled; rather, they know that they are important to someone who loves them, and they learn to return that kindness through their behavior and their interactions with others.
You may have heard people say that in the first year, a baby’s wants and a baby’s needs are the same thing. This means that in the first year especially, the things babies indicate they want (usually by crying or “whining” until their language develops further) ought to be considered needs. The easiest ones to understand are the desires or wants to eat and sleep. However, wanting to be held, cuddled, caressed, and cooed to is also a need. These interactions help a baby’s brain develop, they establish a healthy concept of reliability and care, and they lay the foundation for a lifetime of expecting good things, asking for them appropriately, and being able to give back when others express their needs.
Psychologist John Bowlby defined attachment as the “lasting psychological connectedness between human beings.” He noted four things:
Bowlby studied a lot of children and a lot of parents. He studied families with problematic situations as well as “normal” families. His research led to the identification of four main types of attachment.