Tremendous responsibility lies in the arms of those who raise children. We are not only responsible for our children, but for the kind of people they will be and therefore the kind of world we will have. As parents, we are the ones who are literally raising the future of our planet – a staggering idea if you really think about it. The initiatives of environmentalists, politicians, activists for social change, human rights and animal rights, though essential, are completely at the mercy of the kind of people we raise. As I once told a group of environmental activists, “You can save a forest today, but if we don’t raise children consciously, it will be cut down tomorrow.” From this perspective we see that the well being of children sits at the root of every endeavour. With out happy, healthy children, we have no forest, no peace, and no world.
Conscious parents know this. Our desire to be good parents stems not only from wanting to love our own children, but also from an intuitive recognition of the global significance of good parenting. We are the guardians of the human legacy. And yet, with this tremendous task, we find ourselves in an economic culture directly at odds with our endeavours.
A powerful body of research grounded in the fields of neuroscience, psychology, biology and genetics points us towards the importance of the early years and how bonding, or the lack of it, dictates a child’s sense of his relationship to the world and himself (see special feature, pp. 16 – ? ). We as parents literally have in our hands, the ability to create a violent culture or a peaceful one.
The term Attachment Parenting was created to describe a method of parenting based on the theory that recognises bonding as the cornerstone to child development and children’s ability to reach their fullest potential as loving, peaceful, intelligent, intuitive beings. It is also loosely known as conscious parenting, non-violent parenting, empathic parenting or simply bonding. Extended breastfeeding, co-sleeping, baby-wearing and parental availability are just some of the practices endorsed by the AP model. The various practices act as a continuum of neurological imprinting that begin at conception and continue throughout childhood. That continuum gives infants a sense of connection to his universe (love). If the continuum is broken, say for example by bottle-feeding, then a sense of disconnection is introduced (fear). At the fulcrum of love and fear we, as parents, sit every moment. Formally, AP tends to be expressed in a mother-centred language because it recognises the maternal/infant bond as the primary force in an infant’s development. However with this language comes the risk of stopping there – with mother. The paternal bond, and other important and essential attachments to the child tend to be downplayed by various vested interests. At best, mothers are often left alone to deal with the primary bonding responsibilities, creating stress, isolation and depression. At worst, she must work for a living and leave her infant in long day care. Given this, it is easy to see why Australian birth rates have dropped so rapidly. The ideologies of baby-wearing and extended breastfeeding are virtually impossible to uphold in the one-parent or even two-parent models we see today.
Indigenous cultures, used often to illustrate the AP practices, as in Jeanne Liedloff’s groundbreaking book The Continuum Concept, are tribal, not nuclear. Social and psychological effects of the nuclear family, formed as a result of globalisation and poor economic policy, can best be illustrated by the Ladakhi culture. According to Helena Norberg-Hodge, Author of Ancient Futures, prior to industrialization, the children in a Ladahki community addressed all men old enough to be a father, as abba – meaning father. Caring for children was the job of the entire village; men and boys especially not embarrassed to be seen singing a baby to sleep. They did not differentiate between who was supposed to take care of the children and who is not.
But as the village becomes increasingly industrialized, roles become polarised and the nuclear family is created. Men are at work all day, women reside in the apartment, and materialism is valued over community, land and family. Working men are the only ones valued in the GDP while farmers and women are listed as “non workers” This shapes the public attitude which combined with the isolating nuclear structure has a deep psychological impact on the women and children.
Depression, once non-existent is now rampant. Imagine the developmental effects of being raised by a depressed mother.
The mother/infant bond cannot be seen in a vacuum and must be addressed not only as a family issue, but also as a communal issue if we are to support parents to create a peaceful society. The importance of multiple attachments, whether they be as a support for the mother in the early months or as a significant relationship to the child later must be stressed. An available community must be seen as compulsory to the definition of real Attachment Parenting in order for AP to prevail. Perhaps the word Attachment Parenting should be changed to Communal Parenting in order to encompass this understanding.
The language of AP, if we are not careful, will become a curse – pushing mothers more and more into ideologies that simply cannot be met, as social trends move us more and more away from community. In the present economic and social environment, AP begins to look increasingly unsustainable, not because we are not willing to devote this sort of time and attention to our children, but because lack of communal support renders us unable. We find ourselves between what we know we must do and where our culture is taking us – this leads to tremendous guilt and anger. Which further undermines our ability to parent consciously.
The language of AP can become a place where an uncaring society can hide from its responsibilities. Parents, and especially mothers, take a lot of heat when our children begin to show symptoms of a society in crisis. We are blamed for school shootings, obesity, suicides, bullying and eating disorders. But no one will take responsibility for the culture filled with violent media, corporate social manipulation, processed foods or skinny models in magazines. And every time a mother is told there is more she can do to safeguard her children from these trends, she sets her goal post a little higher, a little farther away. Society will let her – her children are not their business. She hangs herself on the martyred cross of conscious parenting.
Mothers who work are cast as materialistic and selfish. Fathers who work too hard are cast as unavailable and irresponsible. We blame ourselves as the economic treadmill pulls us farther and farther away from each other. I believe that most women work not for materialistic gain or equality, as we are told accusingly. They work so as to find community. As the neighbourhoods become increasingly sterile, the workplace becomes the only place where the need for belonging, contribution and socialisation can be met. The same could be said of men. I recently saw a stay-at-home dad being interviewed on television. The isolation and loneliness he said he faced was devastating. And yet, he loved being with his children.
Robin Grille, author and Sydney-based psychologist states, “The appalling overuse of day-care is a modern trend that I believe most parents would prefer to avoid. It is a tragic fact of modern living that an increasing number of parents in affluent nations find themselves with no choice but to tear themselves from their children, just in order to make ends meet. The cost of housing and other basics is getting pumped ever higher, beyond the reach of a growing sector of societies, by an unrestrained ‘market economy’. If this wave of separation of children from their families does not get arrested – and wound back – very soon, the social results will be catastrophic. The fragmentation of families is perhaps the biggest threat to the social-evolutionary gains we have created in the last five decades, and it is taking us back towards the kinds of societies we had during the era when wet-nurses reigned supreme.”
Thanks to globalisation, he says, while world income increased by 2.5% percent annually in the last decade of the 20th century, an extra 100 million people plunged into poverty (Stiglitz, 2002). We are working harder to get less. This fact plays directly into our ability to consciously parent or not.
But as Norberg Hodge says, it is not our greed or some innate evil tendency that pull us away from supportive nurturing communal environments where conscious parenting can happen. The most fundamental cause of social degradation is economic policy. This is good news, because changing policy is much easier than changing human nature! This is a very important and empowering point.
Economic policy, NOT human nature, is the reason that Attachment Parenting is not flourishing as it could and should. Theorists tend to view AP through a simplistic familial construct, generally not recognising that the economic structure must change in order to create a community that can support parents to parent consciously. Choices are seen as black and white and a covert judgment placed on those who seem to compromise. Expecting parents to parent non-violently without giving them the support to do so is as violent as the very parenting practices we are seeking to change.
Though we ourselves were raised in a violent culture, I think it is worth examining this idea that we are not capable or willing to make conscious choices for our children if given the chance. Setting moral high grounds for ourselves without understanding the economic forces that split our families only undermines us further.
Rather we unite, in recognition of our innate goodness, and recognise that mother bonding is just the beginning of a complex web of vital attachments necessary for every child and every member of the human family if we are to survive. And in this recognition, cast our eyes above the family dilemma and into the increased understanding of how the global market divides us from one another. Attachment Parenting then, becomes a global and political issue, not just a personal parenting choice, which is as it ought to be.