In the crunchy, left-leaning circles I generally move in, attachment parenting is all the rage. In prioritizing breastfeeding on demand, baby wearing, bed sharing, and lots of close physical contact throughout the preschool years, attachment parenting seems to dovetail nicely with anti-authoritarian ideals, valuing maternal instinct over the rigid, patriarchal schedules valued by pediatricians and parenting experts of previous decades. It goes right along with preferring farmers markets to supermarkets or championing “slow food,” right?
I know that when I was a baby, I slept in my parents’ bed and nursed enthusiastically, to the point that my first word was “switch”—as in, breasts. My mother also grew and purchased organic food—and packed it in my lunchbox—way before it was cool. I always assumed I’d do more or less the same with my own kids, someday. Many of the ideals of attachment parenting seemed so obvious. Of course you should respond lovingly to your kids’ emotional needs. Of course breast milk was exponentially better for babies than wicked, industrial, chemical baby formula.
But when I was pregnant and for some reason spent my time anxiously reading up on different parenting styles rather than taking endless naps and reading long novels while I still could, a few things about the history of attachment parenting gave me pause. Take La Leche League, the big name in breastfeeding advocacy organizations (the CDC takes into account “number of LLL leaders per 1,000 live births” in its annual “breastfeeding report cards.”)The name of La Leche League did not originate, as I had hazily assumed, in some kind of groovy, radical-for-the-time cross-cultural consciousness-raising circle that included women of different linguistic and class backgrounds. It was a coded reference to the Virgin Mary, because La Leche League was founded as a Catholic housewives’ organization.
Well, no big deal. Many excellent institutions have religious origins. Still, it was enough to set off a small red flag. I read a little more and discovered that La Leche League had a long history of exhorting women not to work outside the home and otherwise championing rigid gender roles. The 1981 edition of The Womanly Art of Breastfeeding read:
“Our plea to any mother who is thinking about taking an outside job is, ‘if at all possible, don’t.’”
and
“the needs of their babies are not only for mother’s milk, or mother’s breast, but for all of her.”
Well, that seemed much less warm and fuzzy than I had led to believe. And it only got worse. I learned next that Bill and Martha Sears, popularizers of the attachment parenting movement, were fundamentalist Christians whose work was motivated by their conviction that traditional gender roles were God-given. In The Complete Book of Christian Parenting and Childcare, Martha wrote:
?Mother-infant attachment is a special bond of closeness between mother and baby. Mother’s care enables the young of each species to thrive and, for human babies, to reach their fullest potential. Babies come equipped with behaviors that help mothers deliver the right kind of care. God has placed within mothers both the chemistry and the sensitivity to respond to their babies appropriately. This maternal equipping is what is meant by the phrase “mother’s intuition.” It helps her get attached to her baby."
and
“Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything… and the wife must respect her husband.” The Greek word translated “submit” is derived from the same word meaning “to yield” in the sense of yielding to another’s authority.”
The Sears do not refer to this motivation elsewhere in their many books and publications on attachment parenting, perhaps judging it will scare off women who don’t subscribe to similar fundamentalist worldviews. As it should.
Like it or not, two of the major entities promoting attachment parenting practices have their root in the desire to promote patriarchal gender norms. The advice they give about what babies need is inseparable from their views on how women ought to behave.