15/09/2022
If you're ever doubting taking a more gentle, less authoritarian approach to parenting, take a read ⬇️⬇️
“What I want to know is, why the novel resistance to a set of parenting practices that are not just older than our culture, but older than our species? A set of conditions under which our fundamental evolved and which remain prevalent everywhere outside of the developed world?”
“I’m talking about the individual practices laid out in those books — , skin-to-skin contact, vaginal birth, avoidance of coercive discipline strategies — which have established science supporting them. What, exactly, is the problem with these things?”
“I struggle perpetually, as a skeptic and as a person of logic and science, with the way that Attachment Parenting is treated in our culture — as if it is anti-science. Often such commentaries come from people who have not, in fact, read the Sears books, which originally gave attachment-style parenting a name and popularised it. Because it is popular with parents who identify as “ ” or prefer a style of discipline that they call “ ” and psychologists call “ ,” and because it is counterculture, it tends to be viewed as a permissive, deviant parenting style. People refuse to admit that their ideas about parenting (Attachment Parenting included) are culturally-constructed. Yes, Attachment Parenting is based on a well-tested theory of social development, and on widely-accepted theories such as behavioural ecology and life history theory.”
“In my view, and in the author’s view it seems, popular criticism of Attachment Parenting isn’t based on science so much as on cultural constructions about what the “goals” of parenting should be, and scientific illiteracy in terms of how those goals can be achieved…That is to say, the general population is poorly educated in the psychological and evolutionary sciences that form the foundation of Attachment Parenting ideas.”
“—the principles of Attachment Parenting have less risk associated with them than conventional Western parenting approaches such as spanking, cry-it-out, unnecessarily interventionist childbirth models, and forced early weaning. Within the scientific community, there is no debate over the role that breastfeeding plays in optimal infant development. There is no debate over the benefits of a positive, democratic approach to the discipline of older children. There is no debate over the need to reduce c-section rates in the United States. There is a debate over bed-sharing within the medical community, but not really in the community. But even the medical community agrees that same-room is preferable to separate-room sleep in early infancy, and that is still not consistent with the cultural norm.”
“—we are in serious need of a cultural come-to-Jesus moment about precisely what sort of humans we want to raise in an increasingly unstable and unsettlingly -starved world. What sort of person do we want to have the nuclear launch codes forty years from now? What sort of leaders do we want advising that person? What sort of doctors do we want treating patients? What sort of CEOs do we want to be working for? If you want those people to be people with high levels of empathy, a history of behaviour, and the ability to behave compassionately towards people who live on the other side of the planet from them, then I have great news for the American public: There are well-supported, scientific ways to go about that.” –Bridget McGann
http://evolutionaryparenting.com/guest-post-attachment.../
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[ID: a mother gazes down smiling at her child cuddled up to her contentedly, while in a front baby backpack carrier. The words “In recent years science has churned up a lot of new evidence in support of behaviours such as breastsleeping and babywearing, which are behaviours so chronologically ancient that our infant biology has evolved to expect them.” –Bridget McGann is written on top of the image.]
