Mark Greene is fed up with the binary generalizations that run rampant in articles like Ms. Pollitt’s.
Recently, I came across a nasty polarizing screed on attachment parenting by Katha Pollitt at the Nation.
Ms. Pollitt goes out of her way to attack attachment parenting as another patriarchal plot bent on “pulling women back into the home.” And what sources does she base most of her critique of attachment parenting on? She cherry picks tone and commentary from Time Magazine and Newsweek as bookends to discuss the hidden agendas of attachment parenting and the state of women’s lives in general.
Time Magazine and others have encouraged readers to frame attachment parenting as an “extremist” approach to parenting. The story goes that women are expected to give up their professional and personal lives in exchange for an obsessive helicoptering enslavement to their babies. It’s some sort of Stepford Mom version of parenting. This makes for lots of ad traffic and blog posts but its simply not accurate. Its the equivalent of saying that all soccer mom’s are compulsively obsessive in their pursuit of their child’s soccer success. Some soccer moms (and Dads) are nuts, most are not. Go interview the (seemingly) overzealous soccer parents and viola, you’ll sell more magazines.
Ms. Pollitt is doing none of us any favors by taking a swing at the big fat attachment parenting piñata Time Magazine has hung out there for her. Time Magazine, Newsweek and other mass media outlets have shown time and time again that they’re about sensationalizing gender issues and creating binary uproar in order to sell magazines. You need look no further than the famous breast feeding cover. Attachment parenting, breast feeding, gay parenting, alternative lifestyles and anything else that smacks of change is not going to get a fair shake. And Ms. Pollitt’s cherry picking a Time magazine story in order to comment on gender is the worst kind of intellectual laziness. Of course, shooting fish in the Time Magazine barrel is more fun than doing real research on the issues involved, but it promotes damaging narratives and ultimately re-entrenches the very forces Ms. Pollitt seeks to overturn. Attachment parenting isn’t the enemy.
I’ll give Ms. Pollitt points for transparency. She states, “I was originally going to write this column as an attack on women who have fallen for the attachment-parenting spiel, which makes them feel endlessly guilty and then encourages them to project that guilt outward onto more relaxed mothers.”
In my experience, almost every discussion of attachment parenting I have seen online or been involved in in person has offered attachment parenting up as one path among many for raising children. As an attachment parent myself, I have NEVER passed judgement on a parent who chooses to have their baby sleep separate from them. I know lots of parents who just got tired of being kicked at night. Having a two year old in your bed is not for everybody. But maybe those same parents do decide to get a baby sling instead of a stroller. Maybe that appeals to them. Attachment is about choosing to be closer to your baby in what ever ways make sense to you. I have never heard any attachment parent criticize another parent’s decision to take a different approach with their child. And if I did, I would tell them its wrong to do so. Its a deeply personal decision how you raise your child. Love can be expressed in a wide range of ways.
Furthermore, attachment parenting is not a lock step movement with a strict set of rules, governed by sneering elitists who look down their noses at others; as much as Ms. Pollitt would like to conjure up that binary. Its absolutely not the case. Attachment parenting is a philosophy of child rearing that says, quite simply, the closer you keep your child in the first years of their lives, the more independent and secure they will be as they move out into the world later on. How parents choose to do attachment parenting varies widely. And for the record, relaxed or partial attachment parenting is commonly practiced. In fact, the case can be made the attachment parenting in all its forms is more relaxing. Because it creates more comfort and security for parents and babies alike. That stuff about babies crying less? Or not at all? It’s true.
Ms. Pollitt writes, “Now, according to Time, women are giving up on careers to embrace attachment parenting – breast-feeding their kids till age three or more; having Baby sleep in your room, if not your bed; and “babywearing” – carrying your baby in a sling every minute of the day and never, ever letting it cry.”
Deconstructing the thinly veiled contempt in this comment, conjures images of some 19th Century Dickensonian matron scowling down at cowering children who should be seen and not heard. Ms. Pollitt goes on to launch wide ranging attack on everyone who is party to any aspect of attachment parenting. The article is literally awash in confrontational binary generalizations. And not even particularly creative ones. Dr. Bill Sears, a leading voice in attachment parenting is dismissed as a “devout Christian.”
And the reactive binary observations just keep on coming. I’ll share a few here but you can go graze for more if you’re feeling particularly masochistic.
Let’s return to Ms. Pollitt’s view of women: “Women are so eager to blame themselves and one another about, well, everything – weight, looks, clothes, sexual behavior (you haven’t lived till you’ve heard a seventh-grade girl refer to another as a “ho”), marriages and, of course, baybeez, every wrinkle of whose behavior is directly attributable to their mothers’ having made some small but fatal mistake.”
Throughout the article, Ms. Pollitt paints a picture of women unable to make their own informed decisions. Her modern women is wracked with socially induced guilt, ping ponging between culturally imposed priorities of family and career, a dichotomy within which she can only frantically flail about while men pull her puppet strings from the unattainable corner office. In a word, a victim. A frame which is crucial to her construct of men as the villains in Ms. Pollitt’s narrative.
As she serves up this comically disempowered portrait of women, Ms. Pollitt tosses in her contemptuous spelling of the word “baybeez,” baiting parents everywhere with her seeming contempt for anyone who would lower themselves to something as intellectually demeaning as child rearing. What is even more amazing, Ms. Pollitt has permanently recorded in the public discourse a sentence in which she brutally judges woman as being, well… judgmental. The irony is just too much. Why all this contempt for women who choose to raise kids? And then, why the almost compulsive need to paint a picture of women doing so alone while their husbands continue to go off to work? When in fact, the opposite is just a likely too be the case?
Ms. Pollitt writes: “It’s true that only a tiny number of families practice attachment parenting to the full – there are only 5 million stay-at-home mothers in the whole country, and most of them are either very wealthy or very poor – but its ideals are pervasive: As Badinter puts it, Baby is king; Mom is servant.”
Ms. Pollitt seems to have left a few million parents out. She clearly hasn’t caught wind of the Stay At Home Dad tsunami that is sweeping across western culture. Possibly because Time or Newsweek hasn’t made a poorly reported, binary-inducing cover story out of it yet? The fact is MILLIONS of men are raising children full time, often in partnerships with their wives or while their wives go to the office and pursue their careers. To state otherwise is to promote the invisibility of Stay at Home Dads in collaboration with the very mass media she has so much contempt for. And what’s worse, from a women’s rights perspective, is it also makes women’s choices to pursue successful careers while their male partners stay home invisible as well.
In the US, 20% of fathers with children under age five are the primary child caretakers in their family. Period. Thank you very much. Which means Ms. Pollitt’s five million stay at home mom’s are getting a real run for their money.
Ms. Pollitt goes on the reinforce her own willfully ignorant bias, writing “And only tangentially are child-raising fads about fathers; men are more “involved” now than 50 years ago, but you won’t catch them beating themselves or one another up over not making organic baby food from scratch.”
Attachment parenting is not a fad. And fathers across America are fully engaged in the practice. The only thing an attachment parenting father can not physically do is breast feed their baby. But as for organic baby food, obviously, Ms. Pollitt hasn’t seen mine or the tens of thousands of other organic gardens that dot upstate New York. Gardens in which we taught your little ones how to plant kale and cilantro, peppers and tomatoes, which we harvested and ate with them, sitting on our front steps in the warm morning sun.
As for Ms. Pollitt’s other ideas of what work men do or don’t do in the home, she hasn’t seen a bathroom cleaned until she’s seen me clean it. She hasn’t seen a breakfast served up until I serve it. She hasn’t seen a load of laundry done, a basement play area painted, a child’s book collection organized, a kids birthday party thrown or a baby’s bottom diapered until she’s seen me do it. The fact is, men are amazing parents. We love the work of caring for children. We are doing it by the millions all over the world. And if Ms. Pollitt were to choose to do so, she could easily learn just how engaged all men are in the lives of their children. And how many men are taking on full time and part time parenting, specifically to empower their wive’s careers.
Frankly, I’m disgusted by the polarizing generalizations that run rampant in articles like Ms. Pollitt’s. I’m sick of millions of primary parent Dads being rendered invisible by ideologically rigid partisans like Ms. Pollitt. And most of all, I’m sick to death of people promoting the idea that one set of life choices are inevitably in opposition to all other possible life choices. They are not. There are many ways to live in the world. Ways which can exist comfortably alongside a range of possible alternatives. Unless somebody decides to make a binary issue out of it; to stir up arguments where none need exist, usually for personal profit or self promotion.
Women and men are engaging a vast range of self affirming life choices. Attachment parenting is one of those choices. To deny the existence of those vast changes in our culture, in order to promote yet another binary reframe of the gender wars is to play the same game as the worst elements of the status quo. Namely selfishly defending your own rigid ideological turf by disingenuously attacking the choices of others.
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Image of An unused, new party piñata courtesy of Shutterstock.
I agree with killita, my roommate has a baby she breastfeeds everytime she whines because the mom won’t allow her to have a pasiphire, and holds her constantly, if the baby sees anyone new or grandma and friends try to hold her all hell breaks loose. This mom constantly holds this baby in a baby sling… I’m sorry but I have other friends with baby’s that parent the old school way and their baby boy same age never does that,.. Americans are strange with their parenting skills, no wonder a lot of their kids turn out to be disrespectful… ick… Read more »
The opposite of attachment parenting is “ferberization” which is discussed in this classic Slate.com article. “Why, exactly, is it bad to sleep with your kids? Learning to sleep alone, says Ferber, lets your child “see himself as an independent individual.” I’m puzzled. It isn’t obvious to me how a baby would develop a robust sense of autonomy while being confined to a small cubicle with bars on the side and rendered powerless to influence its environment.” Sadly we are becoming in more and more ways a “Ferber” society, a technocratic regime, where we are told that freedom means cutting of… Read more »
Not sure you’ve noticed, but this is a feature of instituational feminist power—not a bug.
This is a feature of all these social impoorvement movements, going way back into the early 1800s. It’s a feature of high-minded bougeois women with not enough to do interfering in what they see as the untidy and dysfunctional lives of thier “inferiors” whom they have a natural right to regulate. This was a feature of the Temperance movement and a whole raft of others. It is an occupational hazard to being a social justice type. Some mange to avoid this trap, but not all.
Mark, she had a better article up at the Guardian, or if it was the same article, it didn’t get my feathers up like this.
She made a very good point in that article, that none of this talk about “attachment parenting” (otherwise known as “normal parenting” in a lot of families) seems ever to include fathers. She says she doesn’t see men beating themselves up this way, as if to tell women to do likewise. She is right, men don’t get mentioned. She doesn’t call ths mommy-blocking, but it is.
Hey Ginko, The point I really need to stress here is that, in my experience, attachment parenting is not the insane amount of over the top effort its being painted as. In many ways, its EASIER than other approaches to parenting. For example. If you do breast feed and share a family bed, like we did, the baby isn’t down the hall in a crib. What does this mean? Well, when the baby wants food he or she doesn’t have to cry loud enough to wake his or her parents a room or more away. In our case, our son… Read more »
“The point I really need to stress here is that, in my experience, attachment parenting is not the insane amount of over the top effort its being painted as. In many ways, its EASIER than other approaches to parenting.” Yes! That’s what rings so false ot me in all this. these people are mystifying something that is perfectly natural and telling the rest of us we aren’t doing it right. i know what is going on, and it is wicked. http://www.genderratic.com/p/1715/misogyny-%e2%80%93-attachment-parenting-and-mean-girls/ “We never suffered from lack of sleep. Ever. If my son had a bad dream I would often hear… Read more »
The description of “relaxed attachment parenting” just sounds like parenting. Why stick a fancy label on it? I’m not a parent but I have to admit, when I read about attachment parenting, co-sleeping, extended breast feeding, and all the other modern requirements for being a good mother, even if “relaxed,” I’m glad I don’t have children. I’m a very independent person and I feel there is no way I could ever be a good mother, or even an adequate mother, by any of these standards! My sister and her husband let their kids sleep with them for like 10 years…… Read more »
Hear hear! I really enjoyed this. 🙂 Not a parent so I won’t comment on method or philosophy, but dads rock.
Wow, I guess we did the “attachment parenting” thing and didn’t know there was a name for it. My daughter, around the age of 4 or 5, struggled with sleeping in her room. Inevitably, she ended up in bed with mom and dad. My son would wake up in the middle of the night and join us. Yeah, it was sometimes uncomfortable but was real cool having them with us. Eventually my son made the choice to just stay in his room and my daughter stopped crawling into bed but instead would sleep on the love seat in our room.… Read more »
Bravo. I’m a working dad – my wife is a stay at home parent. We BOTH practiced attachment parenting and, when I’m home I am an absolutely equal parter. We arent poor but we arent wealthy either.
The issue is simple- people like Badinter and Politt have issues with any woman who chooses not to pursue feminist “approved” choices. Their derision for parenthood spills over to ANYONE (SAHDs, SAHMs or involved working parents).
Forgive me, I have never even heard of attachment parenting. I do live in a bubble. Before founding GMP I had never heard of the MRA either nor understood the distinction between cyber feminism and what my mom taught me in the 70s. Here’s what I would say. For years I had my big kids (when they were small) on my own as a divorced dad. Inevitably my son would end up in bed with me. That was from about 6 months until he was probably 8. He’s now 16 so not so much anymore. But I got remarried and… Read more »
You help make Mak Greenes’ point Matlack. Attachment Parenting isn’t a structered movement with a strict set of rules, butrather a heartfelt phyosophy. Since I was never one to ‘let them cry it out’ kind of parents (It just felt SO WRONG!) and all my kids were welcomed in my bed (boy, did it get crowded sometimes!), Iguess you could say I and the Missus, were somewhat ‘attachment’ parents. And this was long before the pharase was even invented! (My oldest is 32!)