26 | February | 2011

Tags

attachment parenting, attachment theory, myths, parenting, psychology

I am somewhat ashamed to admit that until @NotMaryP over at Daycare Daze made this post, I had no idea that attachment parenting was so despised by the very people who practised it.

I read Daycare Daze specifically because I admire her excellent authoritative parenting style and wish desperately that I lived close enough to send Babby to her daycare when he is a year old. But I recently found out that to her, Attachment Parenting is four-letter phrase. Since my foundation is in Psychology and Biology, I learned about Bowlby long before I ever heard of Dr. Sears and so I missed the whole attachment parents = permissive hippies connection.

My understanding of attachment theory comes psych courses, rather than from popular culture. I’ve always been a bit of a shut-in, so this isn’t the first time I’ve realized that I missed something big (I found out when I was 14 that there had been this guy named Kurt Cobain, who was now dead, and that his band Nirvana had started a whole movement called “Grunge” and I was like “What happened to the Beatles?”).

Apparently, to most people, “Attachment Parenting” as considered to be the name for what Perfect Husband and I call “Please Parenting” – the kind of parents who beg their tiny children to behave and alternately scold or coddle during tantrums rather than calmly enforcing proper boundaries.

Ironically, this actually violates attachment theory.

This is how I feel when I encounter Fundamentalist Christians. As a child, I learned about Christian forgiveness, about the dangers of wealth, and about accepting the differences of others. The fact that Christianity is now largely associated with Republican mysogynist, homophobic, and capitalist agendas baffles me… because it seems completely in opposition to the whole point of Christianity.