Attachment parenting - My personal journey
A good place to begin is by sharing something about my own path. Below I reprint an article which appeared at www.consciouslivingseminars.com in June 2005 (Conscious Living Seminars Journal, Volume 5 Number 6):
“Attachment parenting: art or science?A personal statement” (Saturday, 25 June, 2005 )
“Attachment parenting” is the name given, in the 1980s, by William Sears, a paediatrician, to a style of parenting that can be recognised by signs such as extended breastfeeding (two or more years), sleeping with the baby and carrying her around so that there is constant body contact and consistently responding to their cries by picking them up and comforting them. It often begins with natural childbirth in a birthing centre (occasionally in the family home) without medication or medical intervention of any sort. Mothers who practise “attachment parenting” generally, though by no means always, care for their babies and toddlers full time during the first three years of her life. Institutional “childcare”, or “day care”, is rarely used by such parents (see William Sears, Creative parenting: How to use the attachment parenting concept to raise children successfully from birth through adolescence, 1987; Katie Allison Granju, Attachment parenting: Instinctive care for your baby and young child, 1999; William Sears and Martha Sears, The attachment parenting book, 2001; Robert Karen, Becoming attached, 1998; Deborah Jackson, Three in a bed: The benefits of sharing your bed with your baby, 1989 and 1999; Jan Hunt, The natural child: Parenting from the heart, 2001; Linda Folden Palmer, Baby matters, 2001. See also http://www.atlc.org/; http://www.attachmentparenting.org/; http://www.babyreference.com/; www.continuum-concept.org).
As may already be apparent from some of the subtitles, however (eg “parenting from the heart”; “instinctive care for your baby and young child”), “attachment parenting” has less to do with specific practices such as “co-sleeping” or “babywearing” or, even, extended breastfeeding and much more to do with an approach to or a style of parenting. “When I first began using the term ‘attachment parenting’ nearly twenty years ago”, wrote William Sears in 1999, “I felt ridiculous giving a name to a style of baby care that parents would naturally practise if they followed their own intuition rather than listening to the advice of others” (“Introduction” to Granju, Attachment parenting, 1999: xix). He continues:
“Attachment parenting is a high-touch, responsive style of baby care that brings out the best in both baby and parents … The five features of this style of parenting are what we call the ‘baby Bs’: birth bonding, breastfeeding, bedsharing (sleeping with your baby), babywearing (carrying your baby in a sling) and belief in the signal value of your baby’s cry” (ibid).
Other names for this approach are “continuum parenting” (Jean Liedloff, The continuum concept, 1975/1986), “natural parenting” (eg Jan Hunt, The natural child, 2001), “empathic parenting” and “conscious parenting” (our personal preference; see also Lee Lozowick, Conscious parenting, 1997). The approach was given an impetus by the seminal work of John Bowlby and his school of “attachment theory” (John Bowlby, Attachment and loss, three volumes, 1969; 1973; 1980; see also The making and breaking of affectional bonds, 1979; and A secure base: Parent-child attachment and healthy human development, 1988).
Below I present a personal approach to the questions raised by the practice called “attachment parenting”. As always, I begin with some personal history, for the simple reason that, for me at least, “attachment parenting” has nothing whatsoever to do with science and everything to do with the very core of what it means to be human. It is, therefore, highly personal.
It was on this day, forty years ago, that I met the person who would become the mother of my two children – Michelle and Vivienne – and, much later, the grandmother of my two grandchildren – Veronika and Hannah. We met, on a blind date, on Friday, 25 June, 1965 . I was attending Sydney University , enrolled in the first year of an Arts degree, planning to go on to a combined Arts-Law degree and become a lawyer. My “blind date” had recently arrived from Denmark (where her family had fled from Hungary a decade earlier) and was employed as a “junior” in an office. She was sixteen; I was seventeen. We were so much a product of the times – the sixties – filled with idealism and romanticism, vowing not to make the mistakes our parents made and imagining a better world, not only for ourselves and for our children (if/when we had them), but for everyone. We recognised ourselves as refugees, not merely from the political turmoil of the Hungarian revolution of October, 1956 but from our unhappy childhoods. Her parents had been deported to the concentration camp at Auschwitz in 1944 and their wounds had become her wounds. My parents fared better, but not my mother’s family. My mother’s wounds had become my wounds. My future wife’s parents had divorced and remarried. Mine stayed together physically but were divorced psychologically. Our school experiences had simply exacerbated the unhappiness we experienced at home.
So, from the very beginning, we had shared our hopes and dreams. We would never divorce. Our children would be spared the pain that we had experienced as children. We would not send them to school, those cold, artificial institutions where children were stifled, but educate them ourselves, at home, in a warm, loving atmosphere, respecting their individuality, encouraging their creativity and fostering their natural vitality and curiosity. Ten years later, our relationship was over. We separated, then divorced. The dream was shattered. Though our children attended an alternative school, the atmosphere of which did, at times, match what we had hoped we would provide at home, our children were not spared pain after all.
It was a humbling experience. “Everyone is doing the best they can”, write dozens of New Age philosophers. Given our background experience, our knowledge and our skills, “we’re doing the best”, they say. Did we do our best? I wish I could be as certain of that as many others seem to be – and as we are exhorted to feel. Could we not have done better? The one thing we certainly managed to get right was to find an appropriate school for them. Where we had dreamed of creating a home and a family that would be a haven in a world that did not meet children’s needs, the school we discovered in 1975 became a haven from family life, over an eight-year period. Yinbilliko was a godsend, an environment in which some of our children’s wounds could and did heal. But not all.
I can’t speak for my children’s mother, only for myself. By the time my second daughter was born, in 1973, I was moving away from behaviourism, toward a more responsive style of parenting which today is called “attachment parenting” (or “continuum parenting” or “natural parenting”) and a more natural way of educating children that was then called “progressive education” or “humanistic education”. Eighteen months later my transformation was complete. My teachers in this process were my children. My older daughter, Michelle, who had been born in May, 1971, was my first teacher. She inducted me into the magic of childhood. Two years later, my second daughter, Vivienne, born in March, 1973, continued the process. Much of what I had been learning in my first two years of Psychology (1971-1972) seemed irrelevant to what was happening at home. The two major schools of thought – Behaviourism and Psychoanalysis – were unable to provide me with a framework in which I could make sense of my children’s growth – or mine! There was, of course, the so-called “object relations” school within Psychoanalysis – founded by Melanie Klein and based on Sándor Ferenczi’s heresy – the main spokesperson for this school being John Bowlby. But I’ve never regarded Bowlby as a Psychoanalyst, even if he thought of himself as one. Other “psychoanalytic renegades”, such as Wilhelm Reich, Bruno Bettelheim, Erich Fromm, Erik Erikson and Harry Stack Sullivan, also helped me to understand my children’s development within the context of our family dynamics. Two others, sometimes said to belong to a “third force” – Carl Rogers and R D Laing – were even more helpful. And, of course, there were dozens of books by John Holt (How children fail; How children learn; What do I do Monday?; Freedom and beyond), A S Neill (Summerhill: A radical approach to child rearing), George Dennison (The lives of children) and Herbert Kohl (36 Children).
But the role of the authors listed above was only to provide me with a language in which to articulate my experiences with and observations of my children and their mother between 1971 and 1974, rather than to teach me anything new. My real teachers were my children. Once they began to attend Yinbilliko (1976) they were joined by several more children in this learning process (mine, that is). What I had learned from my experiences with my children between 1971 and 1973 – reinforced, from 1976, by the Yinbilliko experience, was not so much a philosophy as an attitude to children (and adults). I learned to trust children – and I had at least begun the process of learning to trust myself. I had internalised and made my own the lesson that Rousseau had taught in Émile, namely, as he wrote to a correspondent in 1764, “that human beings are naturally good” (Émile was, he later wrote, “a treatise on the original goodness of human beings”. This, I had learned, was the essential nature of children. Therefore, it followed that they could be trusted. It also followed, however, that parents could be trusted, provided that the barriers that restricted their ability to be themselves were removed. These barriers were environmental and psychological).
But, already, I need to retrace my steps a little. When I was sixteen years old and in my final year at High School (1964), I discovered the poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley and, through him, Romanticism, Philosophy and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. I read a biography of Shelley some six months after my mother’s death, while in the midst of the depression that had descended on me about three months after her death. Shelley’s poetry and his life spoke to me and moved me deeply. The following year (1965) I enrolled at university and, through my study of Philosophy, Government and French literature, continued the inner process begun the year before. Rousseau’s Confessions was prescribed reading, though I do not recall actually reading it – in either French or English (I still have my copy of the French). During 1965 – but also during 1966 and 1967 – Rousseau’s Social contract was required reading in both Philosophy and Government. But I do not recall Rousseau being treated as a serious philosopher. What I recall during both 1965, when I was introduced to the rich literature of the French people and 1966, when I had to repeat French, was that the spirit of Romanticism in general and of Rousseau in particular, infused virtually everything that was taught; from the poetry of Mallarmé and Baudelaire to the unforgettable novels of André Gide – but even the novels written by the post-war existentialists like Albert Camus – Rousseau’s writings formed a quietly-whispered background to everything else. In my recollections, at least, Rousseau’s novel, Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse, was the yardstick by which every other work of art was measured. His Confessions, as his Émile, were an ever-present, if at times quietly-spoken, reality.
“God makes all things good: people meddle with them and they become evil”. These were the opening lines of Émile, first published in 1762. “Tender, anxious mother”, he continued a few lines down, “shield (the baby) from the crushing force of social conventions … [R]aise a wall round your child’s soul … ” Mothers should follow their babies’ “natural tendencies”, since these could be trusted. Rousseau encouraged mothers to breastfeed their babies, as “Nature” commanded. Indeed, in the late eighteenth century, breastfeeding became popular and was referred to by some as caring for a baby “à la Jean-Jacques”.
All of this affected me emotionally, intellectually and spiritually, in ways too complex to commit to paper.My lectures, tutorials and seminars (and the very little reading that I did at this time) combined with lunchtime talks and even movies, in ways I am unable to articulate, to begin a slow transformation in my consciousness (but including my unconscious), a consciousness that had been the result of everything that had happened to me since my birth, indeed, since my conception. All of this was combined, during the three-year period from the beginning of 1965 to the end of 1967, with my introduction to the British empiricism of Locke, Hume and John Stuart Mill and my sense of “something gone wrong” – both within myself and in the world at large, to produce a deeply felt need for change. Education – as something that meant not merely the formal process of schooling but the natural process of growing, from birth to death – became the means of reform. I was fascinated, for example, with John Stuart Mill’s early childhood, as recounted in his Autobiography (which I was aware of as early as 1965, though I did not actually complete reading it until 1970-71).
It was during the early phase of the above process that I met the sixteen-year-old young woman who is now a grandmother to our grandchildren. She introduced me to Russian literature, especially to her favourite, Maxim Gorki and his My childhood. She touched my heart and soul as well as my intellect and this hastened the process of transformation. When she became pregnant five years later we were introduced, at the hospital, to the revolution that was then taking place in the fields of obstetrics and pediatrics. We heard of Grantly Dick-Read and his book, Childbirth without fear (and, later, of Frederic Le Boyer). We learned of the writings of John Bowlby, whose Attachment and loss, Volume 1 had been published the previous year (1969). I quickly became obsessed with the idea that a baby represented a new beginning, a new possibility – not only for a better person but for a better world. It was at this time that I read John Stuart Mill’s Autobiography and was full of enthusiasm for the possibility that we could provide for our baby the kind of environment for growth provided by James Mill, John’s father. When Michelle chose to be born on John Stuart Mill’s birthday, the omens were clear.
Then came my studies in Psychology (1971 to 1974), described in Andrew’s Story, the birth of a second baby (1973), my introduction to the “progressive education” literature (1973-1974), the separation from my children’s mother, Yinbilliko, postgraduate studies (1976 to 1983) and my experiences as a single father. During this time I read the works of Wilhelm Reich (especially on childbirth and child rearing), Frederic Le Boyer (Birth without violence, 1974/1975), Jean Liedloff (The continuum concept, 1975), Virginia Axline (Dibs: In search of self, 1964) and (in early 1978) Arthur Janov (The primal scream, 1970, The primal revolution, 1972; and The feeling child, 1973). In 1976, I taught on an introductory “Behavioural Science” course at Macquarie University and, through this, met several staff members teaching the Anthropology and Sociology components. One of these was Anette Hamilton, who had spent 18 months with an Aboriginal community and who discussed her experiences in lectures and in the staff room. She eventually (1981) published a book on child rearing in an Aboriginal community (Nature and nurture: Aboriginal child-rearing in north-central Arnhem Land . Canberra : Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies, 1981).
Over an eight-year period (from the beginning of 1976 to the end of 1983) my experiences as a single father, a Yinbilliko parent and a post-graduate student researching the history and dynamics that took place in Yinbilliko during the years 1976 to 1983 consolidated the learning that had occurred in the years after my children had been born (1971 to 1975). The focus, during this period (1971 to 1983) had been my children, though it inevitably involved considerable self-reflection as well. This emphasis was reversed during the years 1984 to 1987 when I became involved with Self Transformation Seminars (ST). Here, the focus was clearly on myself and my own personal growth, including reliving early childhood experiences. My ST experiences further consolidated my earlier learning about growth and development, in the context of my understanding of my own childhood and, in particular, my experiences as a baby whose needs had not been met. This process of learning was only tangentially cognitive or rational; it was fundamentally experiential, almost cellular.
The whole process described above, which had taken place between 1971 and 1987 was further transformed by my experiences with Aboriginal people – first, during my four years working in the Department of Aboriginal Affairs (from the beginning of 1985 to November, 1988), but more fundamentally during my four years of “community development” work while living on an Aboriginal reserve (1989 to 1993).
I don’t know if I necessarily “learned” anything that I genuinely did not already “know”, during my years working with and relating to Aboriginal people. Rather, I was daily – and from the very beginning – confronted by my own unconscious racism, arrogance and ignorance. Even though I had thought that I had rejected my culture’s beliefs, values and practices, I discovered that, at a level deeper than even my “ordinary” unconscious, I still believed in them. Aboriginal people taught me to look at my culture with Aboriginal eyes. Although I had already come to believe that my culture’s way of doing things was crazy, now I came to SEE and FEEL this craziness, in every aspect of social life, in a way I had not seen or felt before. In particular, their natural way of being with babies and young children, the way everybody cared for everybody else – including the very old, the very young and the disabled – the things they valued and the way they thought and acted, transformed not merely my consciousness but my very being. I have never felt comfortable in my own culture ever since. But the point of my writing the above is that, without the “benefit” of the formal education we provide in our schools and universities and without the “benefit” of exposure to what we call the “science of attachment parenting”, Aboriginal people – not only mothers – knew exactly how to handle babies and young children. What our society has decided to label “attachment parenting” was practised by them naturally, spontaneously and unconsciously, as if there was no other way.
Why have I gone into so much personal detail? The reason is that, in August, 2003, I discovered that a way of being with babies and young children that had become second nature to me had a name. A way of relating to and caring for babies that was as ancient as the human race had received a label some time in the 1980s and had become widely-known during the 1990s: “attachment parenting”, sometimes called “continuum parenting” because of its obvious connection with Jean Liedloff’s wonderful book, The continuum concept.
I was grateful for the discovery of the “attachment parenting” literature because, with the birth of my grandchildren a year earlier, I had been shocked to hear the sort of advice my daughter was receiving from the professionals. Now I discovered that not only was The continuum concept still in print (revised edition, 1986) and widely read, but that a whole spate of books had been published more recently.
Mostly, this literature deals with issues – like natural childbirth, extended breastfeeding (2½ years or longer), co-sleeping (Deborah Jackson, Three in a bed) and comforting babies when they cry – in an informal, natural, humane way. But not all. Many books stressed that attachment parenting was scientific, proven, “new”, even. A book that was published earlier this month, not only claims that “attachment parenting” is a “new” approach, based on the most modern, cutting-edge “scientific” research but that the human race is on the verge of a “revolution” in child-rearing as a result (I have decided against naming the book, or its author, because what I wish to discuss are the ideas – which are held by many in the field – rather than a specific book). The further back we go in our history, we are told, the worse our parenting, indeed the history of child-rearing is replete with neglect and abuse and even abandonment and infanticide. This is as true for “primitive” or “traditional” or “modern hunter gatherer” societies, the author claims, as it is in our own, Western society. Indeed, the incidence of infanticide and other forms of abuse, neglect and abandonment is so universal that, it is claimed, the very idea of a “maternal instinct” is untenable. Not only are infanticide and other forms of child abuse universal we are told, but so is wide-scale destructiveness, war and even genocide. “Evil”, in the form of violence, cruelty, genocide and infanticide is part of our genetic makeup, says the author, with a clear evolutionary purpose. All of these traits are to be found in the animal kingdom, including chimpanzees, our closest genetic relative (we share 98% of our DNA with the common chimpanzee), according to the author.
The fact that such a characterisation of the human condition could be written, in 2005, by someone claiming to champion the cause of “attachment parenting” is not only disheartening; it is simply bizarre. The fact that a book containing such irreverent, dangerous nonsense has been praised by several well-known authors in the “attachment parenting” community has finally brought home to me the dangers inherent in linking parenting and child-rearing (including “attachment parenting”) with science and with the institution of scientific research. This marriage between “attachment parenting” and science has always made me feel extremely uncomfortable, for several reasons. The main one is that the institution we call “science” and the rituals and practices associated with scientific research are inextricably bound up with modern society and its institutions. The kind of approach to children and parents that has received the label “attachment parenting”, on the other hand, is ANCIENT. It is the way human beings have cared for the young for more than 99% of our existence on the planet – and this was the main message of Jean Liedloff’s Continuum concept. It is not only part of our human heritage; it is part of our primate heritage; indeed, it is part of our mammalian heritage. If there were no “maternal instinct”, the human race would simply have died out, together with our mammalian relations. To say that mammals, including primates, including humans, have evolved some sort of a genetic predisposition to abandoning, neglecting, abusing and even killing the young of the species is simply too bizarre to treat seriously. Such a view depends on a highly-selective use of highly-selective observations, not of normal, natural mammalian behaviour, but of bizarre aberrations that occur when nature is interfered with. It would simply be tedious to go through the motions of demonstrating something that ought to be blindingly obvious. Primatologists who have spent years – sometimes decades – living with chimpanzees, gorillas and orang-utans, for example, paint a very different picture of their behaviour – while noting that the aberrations cited do, indeed, occur. Our closest relation is not the common chimpanzee (Pan troglodyte) but the bonobo, or pygmy chimpanzee (Pan paniscus). We actually share 99% of our DNA with the bonobo, the most peaceful and cooperative creature on the planet. And no wild monkey or ape mother has ever been observed to harm – and certainly not to kill – its baby, unless it has first been put into a highly artificial environment and treated inhumanely. In addition, anybody who has actually spent time living with indigenous people would find the above characterisation incredible. My own experience with Aboriginal people makes such a characterisation laughable. Finally, far from child-rearing improving over the course of human history – “evolving”, as it is claimed – it has been getting progressively worse, so that today we have 30% of babies being born via a caesarean section, virtually all the rest being born in hospitals, with medication and medical intervention (only 2% are born in birthing centres!!); these babies are vaccinated with far more vaccines than ever before, breastfeeding has become “a mother’s choice”, institutionalised “childcare” often begins in the first few weeks of a baby’s life and “controlled crying” and “behaviour modification” are as popular as ever. The result is an epidemic of ADHD, autism, aggression and depression, as well as severe psychiatric disturbances. Every one of the so-called “mental disorders” has been increasing over the past fifty years (there has been a ten-fold increase in the incidence of depression in children and a thirty-fold increase in the incidence of autism).
Therefore, to link “attachment parenting” with some sort of mythical “progress” or “evolution” in human society and, in particular, to link it with advances in scientific research, is both mistaken and dangerous. The cornerstone of “attachment parenting” is not scientific evidence but TRUST – trust in babies and trust in parents, especially in the mother’s natural instincts to care for her young. These instincts do not operate in a vacuum, however, but need the support of the father and other people, so that mothers are not isolated in suburbia and given the impossible – and unprecedented – task of caring for their babies alone. The point is though, it is unhelpful to replace the harmful “expert” advice of a previous generation (“let them cry”; “wean them as soon as possible”, etc) with another set of equally rigid prescriptions called “attachment parenting”. Neither set of “experts” trusts mothers to do the mothering but wants to tell them how to do it properly. The reality is that, given the artificial world in which we live – the “modern world” – given the dysfunctional nature of our society, mothers, fathers and their babies simply have to come to some sort of a working arrangement, one that meets as many needs as possible – of the parents as well as the babies and young children. If mothers, instead of being subjected to the ill-informed advice of experts, were simply given the support they need – and valued for the invaluable, if unpaid, work that they perform – they are more likely to bond with their babies, to fall in love with their babies, to listen to their babies and, most important of all, listen to and hear their own inner voice. If they do that, they will be practising “attachment parenting” without realising that they are doing any such thing. It is the caring and nurturing that flow from this bond – this attachment – that defines “attachment parenting”, not a set of prescribed scientific principles.
Andrew Reiner
27 June, 2005
“Attachment parenting: art or science?A personal statement” (Saturday, 25 June, 2005 )
“Attachment parenting” is the name given, in the 1980s, by William Sears, a paediatrician, to a style of parenting that can be recognised by signs such as extended breastfeeding (two or more years), sleeping with the baby and carrying her around so that there is constant body contact and consistently responding to their cries by picking them up and comforting them. It often begins with natural childbirth in a birthing centre (occasionally in the family home) without medication or medical intervention of any sort. Mothers who practise “attachment parenting” generally, though by no means always, care for their babies and toddlers full time during the first three years of her life. Institutional “childcare”, or “day care”, is rarely used by such parents (see William Sears, Creative parenting: How to use the attachment parenting concept to raise children successfully from birth through adolescence, 1987; Katie Allison Granju, Attachment parenting: Instinctive care for your baby and young child, 1999; William Sears and Martha Sears, The attachment parenting book, 2001; Robert Karen, Becoming attached, 1998; Deborah Jackson, Three in a bed: The benefits of sharing your bed with your baby, 1989 and 1999; Jan Hunt, The natural child: Parenting from the heart, 2001; Linda Folden Palmer, Baby matters, 2001. See also http://www.atlc.org/; http://www.attachmentparenting.org/; http://www.babyreference.com/; www.continuum-concept.org).
As may already be apparent from some of the subtitles, however (eg “parenting from the heart”; “instinctive care for your baby and young child”), “attachment parenting” has less to do with specific practices such as “co-sleeping” or “babywearing” or, even, extended breastfeeding and much more to do with an approach to or a style of parenting. “When I first began using the term ‘attachment parenting’ nearly twenty years ago”, wrote William Sears in 1999, “I felt ridiculous giving a name to a style of baby care that parents would naturally practise if they followed their own intuition rather than listening to the advice of others” (“Introduction” to Granju, Attachment parenting, 1999: xix). He continues:
“Attachment parenting is a high-touch, responsive style of baby care that brings out the best in both baby and parents … The five features of this style of parenting are what we call the ‘baby Bs’: birth bonding, breastfeeding, bedsharing (sleeping with your baby), babywearing (carrying your baby in a sling) and belief in the signal value of your baby’s cry” (ibid).
Other names for this approach are “continuum parenting” (Jean Liedloff, The continuum concept, 1975/1986), “natural parenting” (eg Jan Hunt, The natural child, 2001), “empathic parenting” and “conscious parenting” (our personal preference; see also Lee Lozowick, Conscious parenting, 1997). The approach was given an impetus by the seminal work of John Bowlby and his school of “attachment theory” (John Bowlby, Attachment and loss, three volumes, 1969; 1973; 1980; see also The making and breaking of affectional bonds, 1979; and A secure base: Parent-child attachment and healthy human development, 1988).
Below I present a personal approach to the questions raised by the practice called “attachment parenting”. As always, I begin with some personal history, for the simple reason that, for me at least, “attachment parenting” has nothing whatsoever to do with science and everything to do with the very core of what it means to be human. It is, therefore, highly personal.
It was on this day, forty years ago, that I met the person who would become the mother of my two children – Michelle and Vivienne – and, much later, the grandmother of my two grandchildren – Veronika and Hannah. We met, on a blind date, on Friday, 25 June, 1965 . I was attending Sydney University , enrolled in the first year of an Arts degree, planning to go on to a combined Arts-Law degree and become a lawyer. My “blind date” had recently arrived from Denmark (where her family had fled from Hungary a decade earlier) and was employed as a “junior” in an office. She was sixteen; I was seventeen. We were so much a product of the times – the sixties – filled with idealism and romanticism, vowing not to make the mistakes our parents made and imagining a better world, not only for ourselves and for our children (if/when we had them), but for everyone. We recognised ourselves as refugees, not merely from the political turmoil of the Hungarian revolution of October, 1956 but from our unhappy childhoods. Her parents had been deported to the concentration camp at Auschwitz in 1944 and their wounds had become her wounds. My parents fared better, but not my mother’s family. My mother’s wounds had become my wounds. My future wife’s parents had divorced and remarried. Mine stayed together physically but were divorced psychologically. Our school experiences had simply exacerbated the unhappiness we experienced at home.
So, from the very beginning, we had shared our hopes and dreams. We would never divorce. Our children would be spared the pain that we had experienced as children. We would not send them to school, those cold, artificial institutions where children were stifled, but educate them ourselves, at home, in a warm, loving atmosphere, respecting their individuality, encouraging their creativity and fostering their natural vitality and curiosity. Ten years later, our relationship was over. We separated, then divorced. The dream was shattered. Though our children attended an alternative school, the atmosphere of which did, at times, match what we had hoped we would provide at home, our children were not spared pain after all.
It was a humbling experience. “Everyone is doing the best they can”, write dozens of New Age philosophers. Given our background experience, our knowledge and our skills, “we’re doing the best”, they say. Did we do our best? I wish I could be as certain of that as many others seem to be – and as we are exhorted to feel. Could we not have done better? The one thing we certainly managed to get right was to find an appropriate school for them. Where we had dreamed of creating a home and a family that would be a haven in a world that did not meet children’s needs, the school we discovered in 1975 became a haven from family life, over an eight-year period. Yinbilliko was a godsend, an environment in which some of our children’s wounds could and did heal. But not all.
I can’t speak for my children’s mother, only for myself. By the time my second daughter was born, in 1973, I was moving away from behaviourism, toward a more responsive style of parenting which today is called “attachment parenting” (or “continuum parenting” or “natural parenting”) and a more natural way of educating children that was then called “progressive education” or “humanistic education”. Eighteen months later my transformation was complete. My teachers in this process were my children. My older daughter, Michelle, who had been born in May, 1971, was my first teacher. She inducted me into the magic of childhood. Two years later, my second daughter, Vivienne, born in March, 1973, continued the process. Much of what I had been learning in my first two years of Psychology (1971-1972) seemed irrelevant to what was happening at home. The two major schools of thought – Behaviourism and Psychoanalysis – were unable to provide me with a framework in which I could make sense of my children’s growth – or mine! There was, of course, the so-called “object relations” school within Psychoanalysis – founded by Melanie Klein and based on Sándor Ferenczi’s heresy – the main spokesperson for this school being John Bowlby. But I’ve never regarded Bowlby as a Psychoanalyst, even if he thought of himself as one. Other “psychoanalytic renegades”, such as Wilhelm Reich, Bruno Bettelheim, Erich Fromm, Erik Erikson and Harry Stack Sullivan, also helped me to understand my children’s development within the context of our family dynamics. Two others, sometimes said to belong to a “third force” – Carl Rogers and R D Laing – were even more helpful. And, of course, there were dozens of books by John Holt (How children fail; How children learn; What do I do Monday?; Freedom and beyond), A S Neill (Summerhill: A radical approach to child rearing), George Dennison (The lives of children) and Herbert Kohl (36 Children).
But the role of the authors listed above was only to provide me with a language in which to articulate my experiences with and observations of my children and their mother between 1971 and 1974, rather than to teach me anything new. My real teachers were my children. Once they began to attend Yinbilliko (1976) they were joined by several more children in this learning process (mine, that is). What I had learned from my experiences with my children between 1971 and 1973 – reinforced, from 1976, by the Yinbilliko experience, was not so much a philosophy as an attitude to children (and adults). I learned to trust children – and I had at least begun the process of learning to trust myself. I had internalised and made my own the lesson that Rousseau had taught in Émile, namely, as he wrote to a correspondent in 1764, “that human beings are naturally good” (Émile was, he later wrote, “a treatise on the original goodness of human beings”. This, I had learned, was the essential nature of children. Therefore, it followed that they could be trusted. It also followed, however, that parents could be trusted, provided that the barriers that restricted their ability to be themselves were removed. These barriers were environmental and psychological).
But, already, I need to retrace my steps a little. When I was sixteen years old and in my final year at High School (1964), I discovered the poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley and, through him, Romanticism, Philosophy and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. I read a biography of Shelley some six months after my mother’s death, while in the midst of the depression that had descended on me about three months after her death. Shelley’s poetry and his life spoke to me and moved me deeply. The following year (1965) I enrolled at university and, through my study of Philosophy, Government and French literature, continued the inner process begun the year before. Rousseau’s Confessions was prescribed reading, though I do not recall actually reading it – in either French or English (I still have my copy of the French). During 1965 – but also during 1966 and 1967 – Rousseau’s Social contract was required reading in both Philosophy and Government. But I do not recall Rousseau being treated as a serious philosopher. What I recall during both 1965, when I was introduced to the rich literature of the French people and 1966, when I had to repeat French, was that the spirit of Romanticism in general and of Rousseau in particular, infused virtually everything that was taught; from the poetry of Mallarmé and Baudelaire to the unforgettable novels of André Gide – but even the novels written by the post-war existentialists like Albert Camus – Rousseau’s writings formed a quietly-whispered background to everything else. In my recollections, at least, Rousseau’s novel, Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse, was the yardstick by which every other work of art was measured. His Confessions, as his Émile, were an ever-present, if at times quietly-spoken, reality.
“God makes all things good: people meddle with them and they become evil”. These were the opening lines of Émile, first published in 1762. “Tender, anxious mother”, he continued a few lines down, “shield (the baby) from the crushing force of social conventions … [R]aise a wall round your child’s soul … ” Mothers should follow their babies’ “natural tendencies”, since these could be trusted. Rousseau encouraged mothers to breastfeed their babies, as “Nature” commanded. Indeed, in the late eighteenth century, breastfeeding became popular and was referred to by some as caring for a baby “à la Jean-Jacques”.
All of this affected me emotionally, intellectually and spiritually, in ways too complex to commit to paper.My lectures, tutorials and seminars (and the very little reading that I did at this time) combined with lunchtime talks and even movies, in ways I am unable to articulate, to begin a slow transformation in my consciousness (but including my unconscious), a consciousness that had been the result of everything that had happened to me since my birth, indeed, since my conception. All of this was combined, during the three-year period from the beginning of 1965 to the end of 1967, with my introduction to the British empiricism of Locke, Hume and John Stuart Mill and my sense of “something gone wrong” – both within myself and in the world at large, to produce a deeply felt need for change. Education – as something that meant not merely the formal process of schooling but the natural process of growing, from birth to death – became the means of reform. I was fascinated, for example, with John Stuart Mill’s early childhood, as recounted in his Autobiography (which I was aware of as early as 1965, though I did not actually complete reading it until 1970-71).
It was during the early phase of the above process that I met the sixteen-year-old young woman who is now a grandmother to our grandchildren. She introduced me to Russian literature, especially to her favourite, Maxim Gorki and his My childhood. She touched my heart and soul as well as my intellect and this hastened the process of transformation. When she became pregnant five years later we were introduced, at the hospital, to the revolution that was then taking place in the fields of obstetrics and pediatrics. We heard of Grantly Dick-Read and his book, Childbirth without fear (and, later, of Frederic Le Boyer). We learned of the writings of John Bowlby, whose Attachment and loss, Volume 1 had been published the previous year (1969). I quickly became obsessed with the idea that a baby represented a new beginning, a new possibility – not only for a better person but for a better world. It was at this time that I read John Stuart Mill’s Autobiography and was full of enthusiasm for the possibility that we could provide for our baby the kind of environment for growth provided by James Mill, John’s father. When Michelle chose to be born on John Stuart Mill’s birthday, the omens were clear.
Then came my studies in Psychology (1971 to 1974), described in Andrew’s Story, the birth of a second baby (1973), my introduction to the “progressive education” literature (1973-1974), the separation from my children’s mother, Yinbilliko, postgraduate studies (1976 to 1983) and my experiences as a single father. During this time I read the works of Wilhelm Reich (especially on childbirth and child rearing), Frederic Le Boyer (Birth without violence, 1974/1975), Jean Liedloff (The continuum concept, 1975), Virginia Axline (Dibs: In search of self, 1964) and (in early 1978) Arthur Janov (The primal scream, 1970, The primal revolution, 1972; and The feeling child, 1973). In 1976, I taught on an introductory “Behavioural Science” course at Macquarie University and, through this, met several staff members teaching the Anthropology and Sociology components. One of these was Anette Hamilton, who had spent 18 months with an Aboriginal community and who discussed her experiences in lectures and in the staff room. She eventually (1981) published a book on child rearing in an Aboriginal community (Nature and nurture: Aboriginal child-rearing in north-central Arnhem Land . Canberra : Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies, 1981).
Over an eight-year period (from the beginning of 1976 to the end of 1983) my experiences as a single father, a Yinbilliko parent and a post-graduate student researching the history and dynamics that took place in Yinbilliko during the years 1976 to 1983 consolidated the learning that had occurred in the years after my children had been born (1971 to 1975). The focus, during this period (1971 to 1983) had been my children, though it inevitably involved considerable self-reflection as well. This emphasis was reversed during the years 1984 to 1987 when I became involved with Self Transformation Seminars (ST). Here, the focus was clearly on myself and my own personal growth, including reliving early childhood experiences. My ST experiences further consolidated my earlier learning about growth and development, in the context of my understanding of my own childhood and, in particular, my experiences as a baby whose needs had not been met. This process of learning was only tangentially cognitive or rational; it was fundamentally experiential, almost cellular.
The whole process described above, which had taken place between 1971 and 1987 was further transformed by my experiences with Aboriginal people – first, during my four years working in the Department of Aboriginal Affairs (from the beginning of 1985 to November, 1988), but more fundamentally during my four years of “community development” work while living on an Aboriginal reserve (1989 to 1993).
I don’t know if I necessarily “learned” anything that I genuinely did not already “know”, during my years working with and relating to Aboriginal people. Rather, I was daily – and from the very beginning – confronted by my own unconscious racism, arrogance and ignorance. Even though I had thought that I had rejected my culture’s beliefs, values and practices, I discovered that, at a level deeper than even my “ordinary” unconscious, I still believed in them. Aboriginal people taught me to look at my culture with Aboriginal eyes. Although I had already come to believe that my culture’s way of doing things was crazy, now I came to SEE and FEEL this craziness, in every aspect of social life, in a way I had not seen or felt before. In particular, their natural way of being with babies and young children, the way everybody cared for everybody else – including the very old, the very young and the disabled – the things they valued and the way they thought and acted, transformed not merely my consciousness but my very being. I have never felt comfortable in my own culture ever since. But the point of my writing the above is that, without the “benefit” of the formal education we provide in our schools and universities and without the “benefit” of exposure to what we call the “science of attachment parenting”, Aboriginal people – not only mothers – knew exactly how to handle babies and young children. What our society has decided to label “attachment parenting” was practised by them naturally, spontaneously and unconsciously, as if there was no other way.
Why have I gone into so much personal detail? The reason is that, in August, 2003, I discovered that a way of being with babies and young children that had become second nature to me had a name. A way of relating to and caring for babies that was as ancient as the human race had received a label some time in the 1980s and had become widely-known during the 1990s: “attachment parenting”, sometimes called “continuum parenting” because of its obvious connection with Jean Liedloff’s wonderful book, The continuum concept.
I was grateful for the discovery of the “attachment parenting” literature because, with the birth of my grandchildren a year earlier, I had been shocked to hear the sort of advice my daughter was receiving from the professionals. Now I discovered that not only was The continuum concept still in print (revised edition, 1986) and widely read, but that a whole spate of books had been published more recently.
Mostly, this literature deals with issues – like natural childbirth, extended breastfeeding (2½ years or longer), co-sleeping (Deborah Jackson, Three in a bed) and comforting babies when they cry – in an informal, natural, humane way. But not all. Many books stressed that attachment parenting was scientific, proven, “new”, even. A book that was published earlier this month, not only claims that “attachment parenting” is a “new” approach, based on the most modern, cutting-edge “scientific” research but that the human race is on the verge of a “revolution” in child-rearing as a result (I have decided against naming the book, or its author, because what I wish to discuss are the ideas – which are held by many in the field – rather than a specific book). The further back we go in our history, we are told, the worse our parenting, indeed the history of child-rearing is replete with neglect and abuse and even abandonment and infanticide. This is as true for “primitive” or “traditional” or “modern hunter gatherer” societies, the author claims, as it is in our own, Western society. Indeed, the incidence of infanticide and other forms of abuse, neglect and abandonment is so universal that, it is claimed, the very idea of a “maternal instinct” is untenable. Not only are infanticide and other forms of child abuse universal we are told, but so is wide-scale destructiveness, war and even genocide. “Evil”, in the form of violence, cruelty, genocide and infanticide is part of our genetic makeup, says the author, with a clear evolutionary purpose. All of these traits are to be found in the animal kingdom, including chimpanzees, our closest genetic relative (we share 98% of our DNA with the common chimpanzee), according to the author.
The fact that such a characterisation of the human condition could be written, in 2005, by someone claiming to champion the cause of “attachment parenting” is not only disheartening; it is simply bizarre. The fact that a book containing such irreverent, dangerous nonsense has been praised by several well-known authors in the “attachment parenting” community has finally brought home to me the dangers inherent in linking parenting and child-rearing (including “attachment parenting”) with science and with the institution of scientific research. This marriage between “attachment parenting” and science has always made me feel extremely uncomfortable, for several reasons. The main one is that the institution we call “science” and the rituals and practices associated with scientific research are inextricably bound up with modern society and its institutions. The kind of approach to children and parents that has received the label “attachment parenting”, on the other hand, is ANCIENT. It is the way human beings have cared for the young for more than 99% of our existence on the planet – and this was the main message of Jean Liedloff’s Continuum concept. It is not only part of our human heritage; it is part of our primate heritage; indeed, it is part of our mammalian heritage. If there were no “maternal instinct”, the human race would simply have died out, together with our mammalian relations. To say that mammals, including primates, including humans, have evolved some sort of a genetic predisposition to abandoning, neglecting, abusing and even killing the young of the species is simply too bizarre to treat seriously. Such a view depends on a highly-selective use of highly-selective observations, not of normal, natural mammalian behaviour, but of bizarre aberrations that occur when nature is interfered with. It would simply be tedious to go through the motions of demonstrating something that ought to be blindingly obvious. Primatologists who have spent years – sometimes decades – living with chimpanzees, gorillas and orang-utans, for example, paint a very different picture of their behaviour – while noting that the aberrations cited do, indeed, occur. Our closest relation is not the common chimpanzee (Pan troglodyte) but the bonobo, or pygmy chimpanzee (Pan paniscus). We actually share 99% of our DNA with the bonobo, the most peaceful and cooperative creature on the planet. And no wild monkey or ape mother has ever been observed to harm – and certainly not to kill – its baby, unless it has first been put into a highly artificial environment and treated inhumanely. In addition, anybody who has actually spent time living with indigenous people would find the above characterisation incredible. My own experience with Aboriginal people makes such a characterisation laughable. Finally, far from child-rearing improving over the course of human history – “evolving”, as it is claimed – it has been getting progressively worse, so that today we have 30% of babies being born via a caesarean section, virtually all the rest being born in hospitals, with medication and medical intervention (only 2% are born in birthing centres!!); these babies are vaccinated with far more vaccines than ever before, breastfeeding has become “a mother’s choice”, institutionalised “childcare” often begins in the first few weeks of a baby’s life and “controlled crying” and “behaviour modification” are as popular as ever. The result is an epidemic of ADHD, autism, aggression and depression, as well as severe psychiatric disturbances. Every one of the so-called “mental disorders” has been increasing over the past fifty years (there has been a ten-fold increase in the incidence of depression in children and a thirty-fold increase in the incidence of autism).
Therefore, to link “attachment parenting” with some sort of mythical “progress” or “evolution” in human society and, in particular, to link it with advances in scientific research, is both mistaken and dangerous. The cornerstone of “attachment parenting” is not scientific evidence but TRUST – trust in babies and trust in parents, especially in the mother’s natural instincts to care for her young. These instincts do not operate in a vacuum, however, but need the support of the father and other people, so that mothers are not isolated in suburbia and given the impossible – and unprecedented – task of caring for their babies alone. The point is though, it is unhelpful to replace the harmful “expert” advice of a previous generation (“let them cry”; “wean them as soon as possible”, etc) with another set of equally rigid prescriptions called “attachment parenting”. Neither set of “experts” trusts mothers to do the mothering but wants to tell them how to do it properly. The reality is that, given the artificial world in which we live – the “modern world” – given the dysfunctional nature of our society, mothers, fathers and their babies simply have to come to some sort of a working arrangement, one that meets as many needs as possible – of the parents as well as the babies and young children. If mothers, instead of being subjected to the ill-informed advice of experts, were simply given the support they need – and valued for the invaluable, if unpaid, work that they perform – they are more likely to bond with their babies, to fall in love with their babies, to listen to their babies and, most important of all, listen to and hear their own inner voice. If they do that, they will be practising “attachment parenting” without realising that they are doing any such thing. It is the caring and nurturing that flow from this bond – this attachment – that defines “attachment parenting”, not a set of prescribed scientific principles.
Andrew Reiner
27 June, 2005
posted by Andrew Reiner at 1:30 AM
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