To print this page, select "Print" from the File menu of your browser salon.com > Mothers Who Think March 31, 2000 URL: http://www.salon.com/mwt/feature/2000/03/31/attachment No bottle feeders, no spankers Attachment parents stick to their guns. - - - - - - - - - - - - By Amy Brill The women in the room don't look particularly subversive, tattooed biceps and shoulder blades notwithstanding. Their children -- all 9 to 18 months old -- waddle, stumble, drool and tumble like other babies. "So if I eat M&Ms all day," one mom with childlike pigtails asks guiltily, "will my milk be, like, all sugar?" Faces turn to the front of the room where a lactation consultant fields questions over the din. All these mothers are breast-feeding. None of them works outside the home. Most of the babies were delivered on the premises -- the Elizabeth Seton Childbearing Center in New York -- by a midwife. When the little ones are in transit, they nestle in slings or other close-to-mom's-heart contraptions. "If you were a bottle-feeder or a spanker you probably wouldn't be interested in this," comments Beth, the cherubic 29-year-old mother of 16-month-old Santiago, summing up this representative sample of millennial moms. These are attachment parents. No bottle-feeders in these parts. These women have discarded most of the parenting strategies that dictated their own upbringing, and turned instead toward those that are considered "instinctive" by their proponents. Are these moms pioneers, bravely defending the designs of nature against the onslaught of science? Or are they people unduly obsessed with their kids? Are they fighting for the mental and physical health of a new generation? Or are they just riding a guilt-fueled parenting trend? A number of mothers say they didn't know there was a name for what they were doing until after they started doing it. They say that what is currently known as "attachment parenting" -- staying home with the kids, sharing a bed, long-term breast-feeding -- is what felt natural to them. But now that their private choices have become fodder for public debate, they're taking flak from all manner of authorities -- federally anointed and self-appointed. Suddenly, it seems, everyone has something to say about bed-sharing and breast-feeding -- much of it dismissive or even hostile. Attachment parents, though, have their own expert troops at the ready. Not to mention a claim on "instinct," a fairly impressive weapon in any debate. At the heart of the attachment parenting philosophy are five core practices. The "Baby Bs," as they are called, are birth-bonding, breast-feeding, bed-sharing, baby-wearing (in a sling or a harness like a Baby Bjorn) and "Belief in the signal value of an infant's cry." Coined by Dr. William Sears, a San Clemente, Calif., pediatrician and father of eight, the Bs seem simple enough, and the underlying premise both logical and comforting. As Sears explains to new parents: "You want to feel connected to your baby. My goal for you folks is to help you become an expert in your baby." And these days, anywhere an attachment-minded mom looks, a validating force stands ready to assist her. There are zillions of attachment parenting Web pages, associations and support groups. There are books by Sears and by Katie Allison Granju that cover all five of the Baby Bs, each of which has its own attendant court of experts. There are midwives and labor support doulas (who offer emotional encouragement and comfort during delivery) for the birth part; lactation consultants for the breast-feeding part. There are the trainers who train such people. There are support groups (La Leche League and Attachment Parenting International are big ones) and "Natural Attachment Parenting Products," which include organic hemp diapers in addition to the assortment of slings and pouches for the baby-wearing part. Best of all there is Sears himself, author of "The Baby Book" and two dozen other volumes that espouse intuitive, contact-driven child-rearing. "If you and your partner and your baby were on an island and had nothing to follow but your basic instinct, attachment parenting is what you would do," he explains. Sears sounds, at least on the telephone, disarmingly like Mr. Rogers: a kindly, vaguely creepy, almost spiritual figure. Sears says that women can get the basics of attachment parenting from, say, one class (never mind that he's sold around a million books on the topic to date). His next book, he says, will be titled "Kids Who Turn Out Well: What Their Parents Did." Which implies, of course, that if you don't do what Sears suggests you do, your kids may not turn out well at all. Sears, in fact, practically guarantees results. Attachment kids, he says, will grow up having advanced from the Baby Bs to the "Four Cs:" confidence, competence, caring and communication. "These kids," he intones, "will never shoot up a school." An attractive prospect, no doubt, to any parent of a school-age child in the age of Columbine. If said parent happens to be a working mother, though, her prospects become less rosy. In fact, she might find herself up against a wall of sanctimonious attachment types who don't support her choices, since, according to Sears himself, you have to be with your baby most of the time to get an authentic attachment experience happening. Here is Sears, for instance, on the dilemma of the working attachment mom: I say, "Forget the day you're going back to work" so they [don't] keep themselves from getting too close to the baby for fear it will be tough to leave. They come back for the one-month checkup, things are going great, they're real connected, baby's in a sling, nursing on cue, there's a real harmony. So mom says, "I've got to go back to work in about a month, Dr. Bill, would you mind writing me a little medical note so I can extend my leave a few weeks?" So I say, "Baby's allergic to formula" -- which is true, microscopically every baby's allergic to formula. I give them a medical reason to extend maternity leave. They come back in another month, they say, "I'm having trouble finding a caregiver." They come back by the third month and say, "You know what! I've decided to change jobs. I've started a home business." Riiiight. When approached with the question of what they would do should they need to return to work outside the home, many of the attachment moms I spoke with took a more pragmatic approach. "I'd pump," says Jennifer, mother of 17-month-old Carlyle and 6-week-old Maxwell. "People do it." Others, though, gave responses that exemplified the philosophical gulf forming between attachment moms and the other kind. How self-absorbed and cold appears the mother who can leave her 6-week-old baby in the hands of strangers! How cruel it seems to let an infant wail in a room alone, when you, the mother, are right there, listening in agony! How unnecessary the pacifier! How unnatural the crib! One begins to wonder how a working mother could ever forgive herself, or even be friends with these other mothers. Until, of course, you consider how incredibly Peter Pan the idea is that everyone can afford to hunker down at home with their kids 24/7. How smug indeed seems the middle-class full-time mom, arms folded over her life-giving breast, eschewing the workplace for the greater good of her brood. How easy it is to point to the expense of day care and the desirability of full-time mothering from the high perch of financial and conjugal stability. Or maybe the gap is, once again, generational. "A decade ago the big goal of women was to be in the workforce, and women were waiting until they were in their 30s [to have families]," is how one 25-year-old mom explained the attachment craze. "Now a lot of people are starting their families at an earlier age because we've seen what happened to those women." Ouch. Speaking of easy targets, the pithy jargon and inevitable crunchiness of the natural birth movement also lend themselves quite nicely to teasing, ridicule and general irreverence ("Draw your door to birth!" urges one book.) Attachment parents take plenty of heat, and not just from the media. Many have been challenged every step of the way by their parents, faithful adherents to laws laid down by an earlier crop of experts. 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.'" 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. salon.com | March 31, 2000   - - - - - - - - - - - - About the writer Amy Brill is a writer who lives in New York.