The Green Room

Part I is here.

There are three different approaches that all end up supporting an Attachment Parenting (AP) style. I'm labeling these three schools of thought as the psychological, Catholic, and biological. While they're not completely distinct (they do borrow occasional points from each other), they are coming from very different angles.

Psychological Angle

The psychological angle seems to be the most popular, epitomized by the Sears family and The Baby Book. (They also have a book specifically on AP which I haven't read.) The idea is that the baby's initial attachment to their parents is extraordinarily important, setting the stage for their future development. As Wikipedia explains it, "According to attachment theory, the child forms a strong emotional bond with caregivers during childhood with lifelong consequences. Sensitive and emotionally available parenting helps the child to form a secure attachment style which fosters a child's socio-emotional development and well being."

You can read more about the Sears' AP philosophy here. They refute the claims that AP will lead to spoiling: the child whose parents practice appropriate attachment (but not overindulgence) actually grows up to be more independent than the child whose parents practiced more restrictive parenting. Among other benefits, the AP child has a great deal of trust in their parents, and the parents and baby are more in tune with each other. Instead of crying, the baby is more often in a state of "quiet alertness" which enhances their development.

The Sears boil all this attachment down to The Seven Baby B's:

• Birth bonding
• Breastfeeding
• Babywearing
• Bedding close to baby
• Belief in the language value of your baby's cry
• Beware of baby trainers
• Balance

Catholic Angle

I was intrigued by the thought that there could be a specifically Catholic way to parent, different from Christian or non-Christian approaches. That is what is suggested in the Popcaks's book Parenting with Grace: The Catholic Parents' Guide to Raising Almost Perfect Kids.*

As I mentioned before, the Popcaks basically looked at the worldviews behind different parenting approaches and concluded that AP is the most consistent with Catholic theology. I'm a bit wary of wholeheartedly endorsing this, just because there are plenty of good Catholic parents who do not use this style. And so I'm going to include the Popcaks' disclaimer here:

"Which brings us to the one-hundred-bazillion-dollar question: Is there a Catholic way to parent? And if so, what parenting style is dictated by Catholic culture? It might strike some readers as rather odd to talk about parenting in a way that is consistent with Catholic culture. After all, we live in a big Church made up of many nationalities, many languages, and many customs. ...

Now, we admittedly have to be careful about this because the Church Herself has not officially endorsed any one parenting style over another. But the Church does have a tradition of strongly supporting certain parenting practices (for instance, the Church Fathers were very pro-breast-feeding and considered it a kind of icon of the Eucharist), and she does endorse particular values as being uniquely important to her - values that can be understood to be the essence of Catholic culture. While we cannot claim to present the one, right, Catholic way to parent (we have neither the authority nor the desire to do such a thing), we can enumerate some of the values that stand at the heart of Catholicism and introduce you to the parenting methods that research suggests will increase the odds of your children exemplifying those values in their own lives." (34)

They have two big things that they repeat over and over again. First, to focus on (self-donative) discipline rather than punishment. And second, to foster attachment, which "is ultimately demonstrated by your ability to make your child want to look more like you than his or her peers or anyone else" (26).

While the book itself doesn't focus on infancy but on discipline throughout every stage of childhood, I'll list some of their suggestions for parenting babies here, for easy comparison to the other two angles. They note that "The more a parent engages in practices that encourage entrainment - and the intimate, self-donative relationship that results - the more physically and emotionally stable the child will be and the more the child will have a solid physical foundation for his moral and spiritual development as well." They discuss the following ways to facilitate entrainment:

• Sleep-sharing (or at least room-sharing)
• Babywearing
• Responding promptly instead of crying it out
• Breastfeeding

Biological Angle

Finally we have the biological angle. I found Meredith Small's book on ethnopediatrics called Our Babies, Ourselves: How Biology and Culture Shape the Way We Parent to be a very interesting explanation of this. Small approaches parenting from both an evolutionary and an anthropological basis. She discusses the evolution of the human species at length and then more importantly discusses what that has meant for the care of babies and ensuing successful propagation of the human race. She discusses the biological actions and reactions of babies and parents and how different cultures respond to this.

She also discusses the various ways different cultures raise their children. Here's an excerpt that gives you a taste of this. (It's a bit long, but so interesting. It was originally a super long paragraph; I've broken it into several for better readability.)

"Consider the prominent Western caretaking package. Infants sleep in their own beds, are expected to sleep through the night as soon as possible and to feed in intervals; and once they are fed and changed, a delayed response by caretakers to crying and fretting is acceptable. Babies are pushed in strollers or carried in backpacks and are often set upright in stable seats to view the social action. Such parenting supposedly helps to foster independence and quickly put the baby on the right path toward self-reliance. ... Compared to other styles described in this book, the one just outlined might fairly be called "distanced."

Think about this caretaking package in comparison to the way !Kung Sang parents raise their children. !Kung San babies are continuously held, sleep in contact with others, and feed continuously. Every peep receives a response, 92 percent within ten seconds, and every cry is answered with the breast. From the Western perspective, such caretaking might be labeled "indulgent."

An even more striking comparison is the way Efe pygmies of the Ituri forest of Zaire raise their children. Their parenting style fits neither the "indulgent" category nor the "distanced" model. From the moment of birth, Efe infants are passed among a number of group members, starting with the group of midwives attending the birth. Other lactating women nurse the infant for the first few days until the mother's milk comes in. Once the mother is mobile and back at work in the forest, babies are carried to the work site but child care is shared among various members of the work party. All women respond to the fussiness of babies, including placing the baby at the breast even if it is not her child. ...

Like San parents, Efe group members respond within ten seconds to infant fussing; but the difference is that the responder could be the mother or any of a variety of group members, and the nipple offered might well not be the mother's. The Efe caretaking package, as anthropologist Edward Tronick explains, is one that meets the infants' needs in much the same way as the continuous care of the !Kung San - babies are always carried, receive quick responses to fussing, and are fed continuously. The only difference is that Efe infants experience a variety of reactions from a variety of adults. Such caretaking might be called "multiple caretaking." It is a style, as might be expected, that nicely fits the way of life of a highly social interactive band in which communal connections are the basis of their subsistence pattern and the foundation upon which their social system operates... .

More significant, the Efe caretaking package proves a point - there are a variety of caretaking styles that humans practice which meet the needs of the infant and also reflect, and reinforce, the social or economic needs of the community and culture. "Distanced" Westerners and "indulgent" !Kung San might be placed on two opposite ends of a caretaking continuum; and there are any number of styles that fall in between, with resulting trade-offs and compromises." (pages 215-217)

Cultures base their childrearing practices (which can and do change) on what is important to them; for example, on perceptions of independence or community. Like a good social scientist, Small refuses to evaluate any culture's childrearing practices as "good" or "bad." However, she does explain how some cultures' approaches (namely ours) are now at odds with how babies have evolved.

"Perhaps the most startling finding of ethnopediatrics so far is the fact that parenting styles in Western culture - those rules we hold so dear - are not necessarily best for our babies. The parental practices we follow in the West are merely cultural constructions that have little to do with what is "natural" for our babies. Our cultural rules are, in fact, designed to mold a certain kind of citizen. ...

[I]nfants can be at a disadvantage when these culturally imposed ways conflict with baby biology. Human infants are all biologically very similar in their needs; that is, they need food, sleep, and emotional attachment. However, parents and cultures can unwittingly twist those needs to their own ends. There is nothing sinister or selfish about this - all parents want the best for their children - but clearly cultures disagree about exactly what that "best" might be." (pages xvi-xvii)

Again, she is not so much critiquing these cultures as she is pointing out that they're not congruent with how babies (and parents) are biologically wired. They vary in how they meet babies' needs. Small then devotes a full chapter to three of these needs: sleeping, crying, and feeding. Here are the highlights in a nutshell:

• Sleep, biologically: "Co-sleeping, with all its entwined movements through various levels of sleep, and its physical checkpoints, may be exactly what nature intended to make sure babies survive through the night as well as learn how to sleep and breathe on their own." (130-131)
• Sleep, anthropologically: Almost all cultures around the world both today and throughout time have had a baby sleep with an adult, and children sleep with other children or adults.
• Crying, biologically: It's a sign of distress. Early on there is no such thing as a fake cry.
• Crying, anthropologically: Non-Western babies do not cry as much as Western babies, and colic is unheard of.
• Feeding, biologically: Breast milk is best for babies for a myriad of reasons. "As history and cross-cultural studies show, when artificial feeding is more fashionable, more babies die, especially where artificial feeding is not practiced under sanitary conditions." (207)
• Feeding, anthropologically: "Insufficient milk" is essentially a made-up problem only found in the West.

What I took away from it all

I have to say, the completely secular biological approach is actually the one that sold me most. Psychological theories come and go, and the Catholic Church has never officially claimed there is one right way to parent. In the end, I tend to think that there's something about the natural law supporting what God intended for us. Psychology and theology help to explain our biology.

I came away from all this parenting research with two thoughts. First, that it's important to be intentional. To think through what our priorities are for our children and to make parenting decisions based on that, as opposed to based on "that's what my neighbor/mother/everyone else does." Second, to do what feels natural and instinctual. (Leave it to a PhD to research the heck out of parenting only to conclude that she should do what feels natural.) What a combination, huh? What's interesting is that even though these two conclusions seem diametrically opposed - "intentionally think through what you're doing" and "don't overthink it, just do what comes naturally" - they both end up promoting the same Attachment Parenting style.

* A couple of you said you were looking forward to my review of this book, so I feel like I need to qualify that this is more of an overview of the book's philosophy than an actual evaluation of the content. Most of the book discusses discipline for specific ages and stages.