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No bottle feeders, no spankers | page 1, 2, 3
Outsider angst is commonplace, even in
cities, where slings are already
ubiquitous. "I get it all the time," one
young mother recalls. "People in my
family started right at the beginning:
'I can't believe you're having natural
childbirth. You're crazy.' I'm like,
'OK, I'm about to undertake the biggest
challenge of my life and you're giving
me shit.'" Also Today I believed in the breast The mainstream media, getting in on the game, has recently spotlighted the unorthodox -- for Americans, that is -- aspects of attachment parenting. Bed-sharing was unequivocally discouraged by the Federal Consumer Product Safety Commission this fall, despite its prevalence in much of the non-Western world; Rosie O'Donnell ridiculed attachment practices on her daytime talk show. The mothers, though, are fighting back. "On national TV the woman is saying, 'These people are all in one bed, they don't ever put the kid down, the kids never learn to walk,'" fumes Jennifer. "It makes me so angry. It's like someone telling you that the way you're having sex is wrong. "Attachment parenting is not never putting your child down or all sleeping in the same bed until the kid is 12. It's just using your instinct, doing what's right for your family." Beth, another attachment enthusiast, fired off a letter to Rosie "busting her butt." "We're doing something well," she says tartly. "Look at this child! He's flourishing and beautiful and happy. So how can anyone say that breast-feeding or bed-sharing is weird?" History also figures into the pro-attachment mix. "My grandmother had her first one at home," recalls Carrie, mother of 23-month-old Lola. "All her kids slept in the bed with her, she nursed them all until they were toddlers, and when she'd get pregnant the oldest would go sleep in the bed with the siblings. "Then again, her parenting philosophy was, 'Spare the rod, spoil the child.'" This selective harking back to The Way Things Used to Be -- or as one zealous mom-webmaster puts it: "The way parenting was meant to be since time beyond beginning" -- has tapped a nerve among '90s women. In the grips of millennial angst and/or postfeminist gloom, the way Grandma did it is looking better every day. After all, the appeal of the "supermom" has faded and with it the illusion that corporate America would develop an infrastructure to support working mothers. High-quality, subsidized day care remains a distant dream; lengths of maternity leave in the United States rank pathetically low compared to other countries of the "first" world. What has not changed, though, is our collective membership in, and reverence for, the cult of expertise. There is someone out there to advise us in all things: how to be healthy or successful, how to decorate or throw parties or get promoted. Attachment parenting is no exception. Thus the irony: A cottage industry is now churning out the knowledge mothers need in order to use their own instincts. "I'm almost embarrassed to say, I felt like I needed to read about it to legitimize it," admits Jessica Porter, mother of 9-month-old Emma and president of the Association of Labor Assistants and Childbirth Educators. "What we're doing is not mainstream," echoes Carrie, who refers to Sears' "The Baby Book" as "my bible." "Initially everyone we came across questioned what we were doing. So even though we're going by our instinct, we want to hear that what we're doing is OK." Formerly a publicist, Carrie is now a stay-at-home mom undergoing certification to become a doula. "We're paving our own way rather than taking Dr. Spock off the shelf and saying, 'This is what the book says, this is what we have to do,'" she offers. Ten seconds later, I ask her about La Leche League, of which she is a group leader, and wait while she digs around in her bookshelf. "Now where's my breast-feeding book?"
she wonders.
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