October is Attachment Parenting Month

"The long-range vision of Attachment Parenting is to raise children who will become adults with a highly developed capacity for empathy and connection. It eliminates violence as a means for raising children, and ultimately helps to prevent violence in society as a whole." - Attachment Parenting International

I was going to differentiate between AP (Attachment Parenting) and NFL (Natural Family Living, or Crunchy) but my friend TopHat beat me to it and did a good job of it. You can't do NFL without AP, but you can be AP without doing NFL.

Just look at Dr. Williams Sears. He coined the phrase "Attachment Parenting," but his books are lukewarm about homebirth and ambivalent about circumcision, don't even mention cloth diapering, and his website pushes the rotavirus vaccine, which has been causing intestinal telescoping in babies. Dr Sears is NOT NFL.

Attachment Parenting is about encouraging closeness, not discouraging it with mommy substitutes. It honors the baby as a human being with needs worth honoring, not an inconvenience that needs managing or training. It also escalates the role of the parent as important and worthwhile.

It's also practical and far less expensive.

Most importantly, it rejects the idea that babies are liars or manipulaters or spoiled. Of course she's crying just so you'll pick her up! SHE WANTS TO BE PICKED UP FOR A REASON!!! She's a helpless person who cannot get her own drink or come up with her own explanations for the strange sounds coming in the window.

But - Attachment Parenting isn't just about babies and toddlers. Attachment Parenting ambraces appropriate autonomy and appropriately gentle discipline for the toddler, child, and teenager. It rejects the idea that all twos are terrible, that all teenagers are rebellious and impossible. It creates a bond of trust between parent and child so that when the teenage years arrive, the child feels safe talking about things and working through those challenges.

The book Hold On To Your Kids is a boring and repetitive book, but it is an important and life changing book that talks a lot about this very thing - children are wired to attach to something, and if it isn't you it IS going to be whatever you've sent them running to - the teddy bear, the babysitter, the television, the kids at daycare, the friends at school, or worse, the older guy who gives your complement-starved daughter the affection and closeness she is missing at home. Push detachment when they are young, and you will get what you asked for when they are older and you wish they would be a little more attached.

Speaking of attachment, mine need some...