Attachment Parenting

In the chapter on “Gender, Culture, and Fatherhood” of his book Family Man, Scott Coltrane blasts Robert Bly for his “mythopoetic” men’s movement, spearheaded by the book Iron John. This movement seeks to heal the emasculation of men (by their mothers, girlfriends, and wives) by reinventing male-only rituals and having men embrace fierce masculinity as a healthy spiritual opposite to soft femininity. Coltrane says, “What intrigues me here is not that Bly portrays men and women as different, but that he elevates whatever differences might exist to the level of spiritual essence and violent opposition.” This attitude fits nicely with the world view of attachment parenting, as promoted by “Dr. Sears” (a.k.a Dr. William Sears and Martha Sears, a registered nurse) and the La Leche League. Attachment parenting elevates the (biological) mother-child bond to a mythical and spiritual status. Breastfeeding becomes not a way to give a baby nutrition and comfort, but the way to bond with a baby. Breast milk is promoted as a great panacea, healing all wounds. The bond between the breastfeeding mother and the infant is seen as the most important thing in a baby’s life. We are encouraged to look to tribal cultures and to animal behavior to see the natural beauty of continuous, exclusive, and extended breastfeeding.

Attachment parenting often preys on women’s fears of not being good mothers, and gives a solution – an emphasis on breastfeeding, having constant physical contact with the baby (through co-sleeping and “wearing” the baby in a sling or wrap), and having the baby bond closely with the mother. The trouble is these things increase the workload of child-rearing and decrease the likelihood that parents will do significant sharing of childcare duties. That is not to say that it is not possible to share care and subscribe to attachment parenting – I know people who do it. And, for full-disclosure I'll say that my wife and I co-slept, wore our baby, and breastfed. I am saying that attachment parenting has a troubling emphasis on the role of mothers and breastfeeding that strikes me as anti-feminist. However, when you look at feminists raising kids, you see quite a lot of attachment parents.

Coltrane notes that in the Victorian era, “As women began to perform jobs that men had previously performed, and as men’s jobs became increasingly ‘feminized,’ romantic visions of halcyon days arose.” (p. 195) I think we’ve also seen that in the modern era (e.g. see arguments in The Mommy Myth). As women have taken to the workforce and challenged the power dynamics of the status quo, we suddenly have a new reason to take our shoes off and spend all of our time in childrearing. When I was preparing to go back to work after the birth of my daughter, I was nervous about pumping breastmilk and got Nursing Mother, Working Mother out of the library. Among the suggestion is that book are to get your infant on a schedule in which it feeds only during the evening and nighttime hours. So, as I was deciding how to go back to work and cope with my new family structure, I was told that a good mother would be eager to forgo sleep in order to care for an infant. I wonder what impact that would have had on my career.