Attachment and Detachment

I’m not one to blindly follow any parenting theory. I do believe that parents should continue to think critically and intelligently about the decisions they make with regards to raising their children, and there are a lot of books and resources available to help with that. But I don’t think there is any one method that will work equally well across the board with every parent and every child, and so primarily my parenting philosophy can be summed up like this:

1. Know your child, as well as you can.
2. Give your child what they need.
3. Find room for what you need.
4. Find compromises that work for your family when those things are in conflict.

Don’t ask me about discipline, I’m still figuring that out.

Anyway…

By and large I’ve found that a lot of the things that work for me and my family belong to a family of ideas and methods known as “attachment parenting”. I have never had a problem being identified as an Attachment Parent, because by and large I understood the term to refer to my rule #1: Know your child. Obviously, spending lots of time with your child will help you pick up their quirks, preferences, dislikes, and needs, particularly in infants who don’t have the language to communicate any of these things. I do a fair bit of babywearing, and I breastfeed longer than the average American breastfeeding woman (22 months with The Bug, 16 so far with Sweet Pea). I generally don’t start my newborns on a schedule, preferring to let them work out their own (which I then regularize, and which changes about every 8 weeks).

But then, there are a whole host of other things AP moms do that I don’t do, or don’t have time for, or don’t have patience for, or that seem to backfire with my kids. There’s something called “positive parenting” that is popular in the same circles and which is as foreign to me as Chinese and makes me wonder if there really are children like the ones described. (There are. I’ve met a few. Tried some playdates with one little girl who was perfectly well behaved and responsive to her mother – a beautiful thing to see – but she was terrified of The Bug so there was never a second one.) Somewhere it dawned on me that some of my parenting instincts – a certain laissez-faire attitude about dirt and germs, a preference that my kid hash out disagreements with other children himself when possible, a strong appreciation for natural consequences, and a reluctance to schedule my kid in classes, playdates, etc. – made me somewhat of an oddity in many of the circles I travel in.

Is there something wrong with me that I worry more about some nosy neighbor thinking I’m neglectful than I worry about what my 4 yr old might get up to playing – mostly unsupervised – on the sidewalk in front of the house with his 5 and 7 yr old friends? That I don’t put sunscreen on the boys for every run to the grocery store? That I haven’t thrown out all the phthalate-containing plastic containers and dishes in our house?

I’m a homeschooling SAHM, but I let the kids play, mostly unsupervised and undirected, for an hour or more a day while I do housework. And sometimes I read a book instead. I make them both nap in the afternoon every day I can, whether they need it or not, so I can spend time online. Recently, when I had a bit of work, I spent most of a day distracted and on the computer and read not one book to The Bug until bedtime.

Is there something wrong with that? Does it make me a bad mommy?

I don’t think it does. And I don’t think there’s anything wrong with my friend Jen either, who wrote on her blog recently:

Things keep shifting in my life right now, and I can’t always see where they are going or landing. Life as a mommy of young ones is constantly changing. I’m not always the best at it, but sometimes my best has to be good enough, and accepting that I’m less than perfect is sometimes what represents the best of my best. I think, sometimes, being less than perfect but relieving my kids of fulfilling my every emotional and egotistical need is a good trade. At least it feels that way, to me.

I think it’s tempting sometimes to think of life-as-it-is-right-now as some sort of aberration from life-as-it’s-going-to-be, or life-as-it-really-is; that what we are doing when the unexpected pops up and life changes again and we’re thrown off balance is a temporary situation that we merely endure while waiting to regain equilibrium – and that REAL parenting takes place in that equilibrium. As though our job as parents is to provide our children with a predictable, regular, mostly unchanging environment, one with green lawns and soccer practice and maybe a puppy, and if we don’t have that we aren’t really parenting. Or something.

But life is always in flux. The appearance of unchanging stability? An illusion. Even families that seem to have it all figured out are vulnerable to the lost job, the career change, the mortgage-in-default, the sudden illness or the hidden weakness. Not to mention that children grow and change and need different things with every year.

No, the parenting we do now, in the midst of the chaos, is real parenting. And, I’m convinced, the most important part of that parenting is the part where our children learn by being, as children are, keen observers of their parents. How I deal, how Jenn deals, when life is shifting; who we become, how we take the circumstances in front of us and act and react and make something both of our lives and of our selves; that IS the lesson to our children, that IS the parenting we do when we are too harried, hurried, and harassed to take time to sit on the floor with our children or plan and supervise their every, enriching, activity.

This is both scary and reassuring.

Scary, because what if I fall short. What if I screw up? What do my children learn if I am sour, disappointed, crabby, distracted, selfish?

Reassuring, because IF I keep my mind on each day, take each task, not as a means to some mythical balance where real life can finally start, but as a chance to BE and BECOME that model for my children…then there is no division between living and loving, no division between supporting my children and raising my children, no split between being ME and being Mama.

“I think, sometimes, being less than perfect but relieving my kids of fulfilling my every emotional and egotistical need is a good trade.”

I didn’t even go where I wanted to with this post – I wanted to talk about expecting our children to fill our emotional needs, about freeing our kids of the burden of being our fulfillment. I wanted to talk about the way we talk about the choice to birth children and about how that has changed, and what that change has done to our expectations for parenting and mothering in particular. I was going to draw a connection between perceived “freedom” and perceived responsibilities with regards to childbearing and childraising.

I was going to link to FreeRangeKids and talk about childhood autonomy, about training children to be adults rather than grooming children to be better children, about ‘safety’ and the force of public disapproval.

I’d even thought of working in a reference to recent research showing how women have become less happy, both relative to men but also absolutely, over the last 50 years. I wanted to speculate about how as women’s freedoms have increased so has the pressure on all sides – including the parenting front – making it virtually impossible to ever succeed in that way that lets you say to yourself, “well, I did everything anyone could expect from me.”

But, you know something? I think you all can make those connections. I can write more about it another time, or not. Right now, I need to get back to imperfectly raising my two kids.

Later.