By Leanna Pankratz (The Cascade) – Email
Print Edition: June 6, 2012
When Time Magazine released its May issue, public outcry was heard over the cover story, featuring the image of a North American mother breastfeeding her toddler, emblazoned with the headline: “Are you Mom enough?” The article detailed the concept of attachment parenting, often described as extreme motherhood.
Attachment parenting is a child rearing concept that often includes a natural childbirth, baby wearing, co-sleeping, natural health, stay-at-home parenting, homeschooling, and practicing discipline in a gentle and sensitive manner. Women who practice attachment parenting believe in child-led weaning, allowing the child to breastfeed more or less wherever he or she wants to. This is sometimes called “extended” breastfeeding.
While the article has provoked heated debate on the concept of attachment parenting, it is extended breastfeeding that has produced perhaps the most ardent duality of the conversation. Is it truly healthy for a child to be encouraged to rely completely on his mother?
My own mother took a missions trip to Kenya in her early years as a nurse, and told me stories of impoverished mothers who, without other means to feed their families, breastfed toddlers – and even children up to the age of seven. Seven-year-olds would run up to their mothers, and tug on their dresses to be fed. For North Americans, whose average age to wean a child is one year, this might seem very odd. But for those Kenyan mothers, extended breastfeeding it is a necessity.
This, perhaps, is just a difference of cultural and economic lifestyle. When faced with desperate circumstances, a culture will naturally grasp hold of a more primal way of life to survive. This can mean feeding their children in the only way available to them, demonstrating what was natural for humans to do before economic and social development.
This extended reliance on parental support due to limited means seems natural in that situation. But what about in a home that has more than enough food for the children?
A common argument is that it’s a natural progression, and with humans being the only species on earth to not practice attachment parenting, it must make sense for us to return to our roots.
In our society of abundance, however, where most children grow up healthy, with everything they need at their disposal, the concept does ring strange.
I question whether or not it would be detrimental to a child. There are numerous animals on our planet that do not coddle their young, or keep them closer than is necessary. Mother birds push their babies out of the nest in order to teach them to fly. How else would they if they didn’t fall to the ground a few times and experience the rush of something new, and perhaps something a little bit dangerous.
Parents who practice attachment would heartily disagree, stating that a child should stay as close to his mother as possible, until he sees it fit to distance himself. But what if the age he sees fit is 13? Would a 13-year-old schoolboy pining to cuddle in bed with his mother appear to be normal?
Skeptics, according to The Globe and Mail, state concerns that “attachment parenting can have negative effects, such as baby not learning that there must be boundaries or exhaustion in overly-available moms who must wear many hats in a day. They challenge whether a culture of total motherhood should be seen as the ideal, as it can lead to anxiety, guilt and depression.”
As demonstrated by last year’s Tiger Mom phenomenon, parents who take their domestic careers to the opposite extreme, any method of unorthodox parenting will be met with either disapproval, admiration or some combination of the two. Attachment parenting has proven to be no different.
I still find the idea of a seven-year-old latching onto his mom’s breast on the Skytrain a little disconcerting, but to each their own.
