Note: Personal experience and research combined are pretty dang persuasive and compelling. There are lots of people who are still very resistant to attachment parenting and sometimes consider it extreme. I know because when my daughter was first home from China I practiced this style of parenting. Being responsive to her wants and needs and cues was priority number one because she'd been in an environment where her needs weren't always met. However, had I not adopted and learned about attachment I know I would have been far more worried by and influenced by the people who thought and told me I was coddling, doting, overprotective and worrying too much. The truth is, I did worry that she'd never be independent because she did take longer than many of her peers and so I did second-guess myself.
Parents need support to be this attentive and available, physically and emotionally, especially if we have our own ACEs or our children do or both! Many of us doubt our instincts which might fly in the face of family or society ideas about what is best for a child. And it's hard if we don't have enough time off from work or reliable childcare.
We need to do more to support parents who are doing the important work of parenting. And doing it while often deprived of adequate resources. I love reading pieces like this which can support us in prioritizing attachment when we are getting resistance from others in our lives.
“Don’t you ever put that baby down?”
“Aren’t you going to spoil him?”
“Start teaching him to self-soothe now, before it’s too late.”
Yup, these were things actually said to me when my babies were newborns. Nope, not even when they were a few months old. When they were itty-bitty babies fresh out of the womb, I had strangers, family members — and yes, even doctors — question whether I was going to spoil my babies by holding them all the time.
Looking back, I know how absurd these statements were. My boys are 4 and 9 now, and whiz by me so fast I have to beg them to sit down and cuddle in my lap like they did all those years ago. At the time, though, I didn’t know for sure that my babies would be totally independent eventually, so the critique definitely got under my skin.
The thing is, holding my babies almost 24 hours a day like I did in those months was not exactly a choice. It was a necessity. If I put my babies down, they wailed their little heads off.
Maybe I could have let them do that, and maybe they would have learned to soothe themselves somehow, but every instinct in my body told me that if my baby was crying, he needed to be picked up. And I went with those instincts, despite the fact that I sometimes received dirty looks and judgment.
Turns out, my instincts were absolutely correct. Babies do need to be held whenever they fuss — and not just because they’re sweet and cuddly and their hair smells like heaven. It turns out there’s a ton of research out there to back up the claim that you literally cannot spoil a baby. In fact, holding babies is actually vital for their health and development.
Just a few weeks ago, a study came out in Pediatrics that looked at the effects of skin-to-skin contact on premature infants. It took the long view, looking not just at the immediate effects of holding preemies against your skin in their early weeks, but also how it affected these babies 20 years down the road. Read More
Comments (0)