Flowers Fall: September 2011

Back to School Quiz: What is Attachment Parenting, Anyway?

by Bethany Saltman, August 26, 2011

In the last two issues, I wrote about the anniversary trip T and I took to Italy without five-year-old A (who is going into kindergarten this month and will now receive the privacy of an abbreviation), and how A responded. Since part of my process included describing Naomi Aldort and her mega-attachment-parenting-style comments on so-called separation anxiety, quite a few people have opened up to me about their own parenting styles and thoughts about “attachment parenting,” the term coined by Dr. William Sears, the pediatrician who turned so many of us on to baby-wearing and family beds. While what Sears points to is true—yes, babies develop most happily within the secure base of a physically close, well-attuned caregiver—he has created an unfortunate schtick, making it seem like if you don’t follow his suggestions, you won’t be bonding with your child. As if there is any kind of parenting other than “attachment parenting.”

Research in psychology and neuroscience shows that attachment is a human process, for which we all hard-wired. And like other instinctive processes such as walking or talking, the process can go well, or not so well, depending on our parents, our genetics, or, according to other fine folks, our karma. I appreciate the good work Sears has done in sharing his, shall we say, streamlined approach to attachment, but I feel frustrated that it is presented in such a way as anyone might feel Oh, attachment’s not for me. When in fact, if we removed attachment from the parenting equation, however we manifest our own flavor of it, we are left with a pretty rote, if not sociopathic, mode of raising human beings. The point is this: We humans attach to others, to varying degrees of success. With our without Dr. Sears’ advice.

And so in honor of the upcoming school year, let’s take a quiz about where all this attachment stuff comes from.

1) In developmental psychology, “attachment” refers to:
A) The early bond between mother and infant.
B) Proof to some that women should not work “outside of the home.”
C) An instinctive, empirically study-able bonding style that babies learn in relation to their mothers that can be categorized (secure or insecure, and within insecure, attachment can be avoidant, ambivalent, or disorganized) and used as a predictor of later behaviors, and also repaired in adulthood.
D) All of the above.

2) “Cupboard Love” was a term used by Anna Freud (1895-1982), daughter of Sigmund and child therapy pioneer, to refer to:
A) Childhood obesity.
B) The fact that children love their mothers because they feed them.
C) When a young girl’s Oedipal urges are sublimated and surface as an obsession with food.
D) An early term for male homosexuality, which was considered the result of prolonged breast feeding. This evolved into the term “in the closet.”

3) What did attachment founder John Bowlby think most significant in a newborn duckling’s behavior, and how did this observation inform his radical concept of attachment?  (First choose what he noticed from column A, and then draw a line to how it relates to humans in column B)