We had a super day today — took the TTC downtown and had lunch with a friend and checked out his [art] studio, then walked down to Future Bake Shop for some cake, then walked further down to the museum where we bumped into one of Nefarious’s classmates (a pleasant surprise that happens surprisingly often in a city so large), and then a street dog on the walk to pick up a package that DHL told me would be waiting. That was the only part of the day that failed, because it was a new DHL location and the depot operators didn’t know they got their shipments at 7PM (I’d been told 11AM). But still a very full, fun, and tiring day. We actually have a really good weekend planned, including her aerial dance class and some friend activities.
* * *
A few weeks ago, my friend and fellow parenting blogger Gillian got in a fight with some other mommyblogs over her hardcore [pro] stance on attachment parenting. To paraphrase, she essentially made the statement that “cry it out” (ie. occasionally letting your child cry out whatever is upsetting them) was tantamount to child abuse. I think that in a perfect world, most people would attachment parent, but I think in the real world very few parents haven’t occasionally let their kid cry it out… I think also that almost everyone is insecure about their parenting, so as you can imagine, it really ruffled some feathers!
Anyway, while I do agree that attachment parenting — something that I certainly fell far short of myself* — is what we are evolved to do and should aspire to, I wouldn’t personally call it abuse to fail at that. However, looking at some of the blogs of parents that she was arguing with, what deeply disturbs me is that so many parents are willing to write negatively about their experiences as a parent. Complaining about how hard it is, things their kids did that were difficult or annoying, revealing various embarrassments and shortcomings, and so on. Now that is tantamount to child abuse in my opinion.
What I think these parents don’t realize is that one day, probably when they are most vulnerable, their kids will read these blogs, and have the angst-y belief: “my parents hated me.” Or perhaps some other kid that doesn’t like them will find it and tease them about it. It attacks ones own child’s self-worth. Publicly blogging anything that could be used against or might be difficult for a child to understand subjectively is completely unacceptable. It’s my feeling that parent-blogging must be a celebration of parenthood. If you can’t write something nice, don’t write, or write in a private forum.
And here as my entry illustration is a great drawing by Nefarious of a mother attending to a crying baby!
* Right now Nefarious is in another room hollering, “can you come here? can you come here? do you have an injury or something that is stopping you from walking? can you come here? are you traveling in mexico right now or something and you can’t hear me? can you come here? can you come here?” Hilarious…
14 Comments
Looks like she has two more on the way.
Mmm…future cake…
I can report to you that you in particular were attachment parented by your mother and were so demanding that one Maggie Brucker had to stand in or its not unlikely Kathleen would died in the task of keeping you from crying and me from shouting.
Remember you were born in Victoria when I was doing the Amalgamation of the Medicare for the NDP so as a consequence all our friends without exception were serious card carrying socialists, tree huggers and friends of green peace. No “Kill a Whale for Jesus” bumper stickers in your zero to six… The first two years of your life were lived in a Tudor Mansion in Sannich. It was a big place plus a lot of grounds to care for. Goldfish the size of catfish. Once I was out the door in the morning your Mother could not set you down without you belting out a caterwauling that had her carrying you around till about 3:00 pm in the afternoon by which time Maggie would show up – and between them they would blitz the housework the grounds and Kathleen would start dinner – I knew nothing of this till years later when kv was lamenting that while I had not done a damn thing – true – never changed a diaper – the children knew nothing of her sacrifices in contrast with my program of enslavement – true – putting you to work programming, and Devon bringing in the firewood and so on.
To shorten this up – Devon got less of this pure attachment parenting which you demanded and got. Maybe it had something to do with us moving into Victoria or the dynamics of being a 2nd child. Devon never did that. Is it something primal like the more Adults around the safer I am. By the time Ashleigh was born – as the photo record attests – she had four parents – you and Devon adored her and ten years her senior did a lot of great parenting as you are so plainly doing with Ari.
Were I to join this argument it would be to the point that if you the parent ain’t enjoying it then why are you doing it. Get a Maggie Brucker to do it all. Hire a nanny. Or ship the kid off to Havergail or as with Ashleigh – Albert College – but boarding not day.
You have articulated so well what has been bothering me for so long about some of the parenting blogs out there! Would any of these negative bloggers talk in public, in front of their children, about such embarrassing negative things? Probably not. Yet they record them in much more public — and as you so importantly point out, PERMANENT — ways on the interwebs! Thanks for this post.
Diapers are terrible; you made the right decision!
when i was the president of the Parent Association at Albert College I remember a parent in particular who was sending all his kids thru Albert as boarding live-ins
he wasn’t super rich and it was costing him a ton. I remember him and the dynamic between himself and the kids – well by then high school albeit he had some younger kids in the junior school
my sense is that they would have rather been day students like Ashleigh but they all believed it was better to board
the point is – it was working and i am sure it works still because those kids know how much love is driving their parents to not attachment parent
i don’t think my father even noticed me till i was old enough to drive a ten ton grain truck and double clutch and work a six speed transmission with a two-speed eaton rear end.
this was back when the hills – really ancient river banks were 20-30 degrees steep and the only way you make the grade is to hit the bottom of the bank at 75 mph then make 10-12 shifts down as you climb the bank with the truck
if you miss a shift the brakes won’t hold you’ll lose the load and if your lucky your life as you don’t want to explain it to you dad.
child abuse. i don’t think so.
The thing I hear repeatedly from parents who are trying “cry it out” type methods on their kids is: “it’s hurting me to hear my kid cry like this.” So for me, as a parent, when you feel the alarm bells go off, when you feel it’s unnatural, it probably is. I think most humans could stand to listen to their natural instincts about what their children need a little more often. I feel this ability has to have evolved with us to ensure the survival of the race.
After all, there are plenty of books and seminars on how to raise children, but there are no books or seminars on how to raise my children.
The idea that infants should be left to cry their problems out disturbs me. I should emphasise that my expertise here is limited. I’m not a medical doctor or clinical psychologist. I’m a philosophy PhD working on infant language acquisition and cognitive growth, who has done some work on the nature of affective interactions between infant and caregiver, and in particular on the possible contributions of these interactions to the infant’s cognitive growth.
There is some evidence that an infant’s affectively structured interactions with its peers are fundamental to its cognitive growth. This doesn’t just mean language acquisition; it also includes non-linguistic social interactions.
Even very young infants seek out emotional engagements with others, and it appears to matter a great deal to them that such relations should be maintained. Infants whose attempts to engage affectively with their caregivers are not met can become withdrawn and stop attempting to interact to the same extent. The concern here is that much infant learning is social in nature, such that anything that undermines the infant’s social interactions may have implications for its learning.
Many of the milestones of cognitive development are social in nature – for example, joint attention. This emerges around 9 or 10 months and is when infant and caregiver both attend to the same object, and to one another’s attention to that object. It appears to play a necessary role in language learning. (It is also something not done naturally by apes, and something that autistic kids struggle with.) It’s plausible that what makes joint-attention between infant and caregiver possible has its roots in affective interaction – in particular, in the infant’s desire to share its experiences with others. It strikes me as possible that anything that undermines these interactions could have damaging repercussions for the infant’s development.
In some very extreme cases, infants whose social interactions have not been nurtured properly have developed autism-like symptoms. The extremity of these cases should not be under-emphasised – the best evidence is drawn from the infants in orphanages in Ceaucescu’s Romania, where infants received astonishing levels of neglect and where ASD symptoms were massively higher than normal. However, less dramatic effects have also been seen in infants of bi-polar mothers, the qualities of whose social-interactions can suffer. These cases have best been described by Peter Hobson, in his book ‘The Cradle of Thought’. I’d recommend it highly.
Now of course, there’s a big difference between wholesale neglect and leaving your infant to ‘toughen up’ by letting it cry. But if the radical neglect cases risk leaving your infant retarded, then it would seem not unreasonable to suspect that the milder cases could still be damaging. I won’t speculate on what these might be, since that extends beyond what I know about. But I would say that the evidence points to the fact that affective interaction, grounded in responsiveness to emotional needs, should be nurtured. They seem to play a hughely significant role in explaning human cognitive development – albeit a role that is not yet fully understood.
I commented on G’s blog, along the same lines as what you have said. If they are that bothersome, why have more than one and why write such negative things constantly about your children. There are so many negative parenting blogs. The children of these parents will one day find the blog and will not understand the ‘sarcasm’ that is claimed to be the basis of the blogs. They will be hurt by the words their own mothers use to describe them and their interactions.
Parenting is full time, regardless of what time the clock says it is. My son has never cried it out, he will be two this month and is so independent, confident and bubbly. I couldn’t imagine raising him any other way, it would feel unnatural.
I think many mothers need to realize the HUGE sacrifices that are required when becoming a parent. It is not a part time gig, not something that can be checked out of whenever you want and certainly not something that is easy to fit into an adult schedule. We are creating human beings that will need to find a way to get along and thrive in this world, we need to be able to offer them every emotional advantage we can, and crying it out is not one of them! It is unnatural and human beings are the only species that attempts this harmful way to train our babies.
Thank you very much richkanu . Any of the readers or posters here who have over the years read Shannon’s blogs or now Ashleigh’s know that in their own words that they grew up in a continuous environment of “attached parenthood” to total acceptance by their mother when they were tiny – they don’t know it – I tell them that again and again – I need not speak of their later enslavement but that’s because they don’t “know” their care in the first few years of their lives in the exact way they know their later experience. Each of us know when we began to remember events. Mine are simply wonderful as because they were farm memories – we all moved from success and happy in Victoria to a farm on an Island. We named the farm Castlehom. It has a flag and while Shannon is the artist in most of your minds – the flag was the creation of Devon who was taught how to tie dye silk by kv much as shannon is doing similar with ari.
In my case it my explicit memory begins when I was three years old and some of those memories are as important and as vivid as what my cup of expresso tasted like yesterday. What about you?
Thank each of you who has posted for not accusing us of suggesting “if you are hungry why don’t you eat cake” but having said that – I am thanking you and wishing you well in the completion of your PhD as that will you a professional voice to say something that should be common sense.
BUSYBEE – you wrote – It is unnatural and human beings are the only species that attempts this harmful way to train our babes.
Yes “human beings” are not like most other living things but it you look hard enough and long enough you’ll discover that nature tries everything and if it works – there it is. If a little baby wolf does not shut the fuck up either his dad is going to eat him or the cougar his caterwauling has attracted to the den. Shannon’s “attached parenting” was a dirty little secret between himself and his mother. It was a power struggle he won. Now being a “tooth and claw” guy – I approve this message and his victory.
You must be aware of a phrase “learned incapacity” something that can happen to any of us when we are too young to defend ourselves. By the time Shannon went to school he was an artist able to create and had created paintings very much in the style to which he has evolved.
I can remember a few months into school he came home with these horrid stick figures as the teachers were teaching him how not to draw. Well a parent home-schooling their kids could do the same thing if they too were unable to draw or paint. It just happens that Shannon’s mother can paint and can play a piano (that’s a new pt) – if you have the unwisdom I had to wish to burden your children with winning (more about that later) – do three things early –
1./ Teach them to draw 2./ to play a musical instrument – and better a violin than a piano – and 3./ how to catch a ball (hand to eye).
A second language but when they are babes (damn – I’m up to four things and better stop counting). If you are over twenty – learning a 2nd language might be a practical thing to do – I mean if you’re boating to Cuba – learn some Spanish but don’t expect it to do as much for you as it can do for a babe during that zero to six period (the most critical time)
For making the best of what you got at birth.
Thank you for linking to Gillian’s blog, a very interesting topic. They are a beautiful family, and look quite happy in their photos on Flickr.
Is this the same couple that bit each other’s fingers off? Because her hands look intact in her flickr photos, just wondering. Gillian is gorgeous in her wedding photos and I noticed 10 well manicured nails unless I am counting wrong. Thanks
The “bit each others fingers off” story was actually an April Fools story, but yes, that’s them, and much of the romance part of that article is true… Really was a love at first sight sort of thing and I continue to be very happy for them.
Well you had me fooled.
We had most people fooled. ;)
One Trackback/Pingback
[...] Post a comment or leave a trackback. [...]
Post a Comment