Q. Many people feel that a woman's employment away from the home renders attachment, or responsive, parenting impossible. You demonstrate in your book that this is not the case...
Attachment parenting is the way that mothers have always taken care of babies. When you look at mothers, through time and across cultures, who do practice attachment parenting, they do so in large part to make it easier to get their work done! It's easier to carry a baby on your back when you have a lot of work to do. It's easier to breastfeed; it's easier to have the baby sleep with you. It's easier when you have a forty-hour work week in front of you to raise the baby this way than any other way. When you look at the number of ways that nature has given a baby to attach to his mother during the first hour after birth, you realize that nature has provided a number of ways to ensure that this mother and this baby bond so that the baby will survive. In fact, nature over insures because, chances are, one or two methods of bonding aren't going to happen - for example, a mother may be too tired to look in to the baby's eyes and make that initial eye contact. Attachment parenting is like that - when you look at cultures that practice this method because that is simply the way that you take care of babies, they aren't saying that you absolutely have to practice all attachment techniques: sleeping with baby, breastfeeding, baby wearing, responsiveness. These are things that come naturally, and if one of these doesn't happen, that is all right because there are a number of other practices that will encourage mother-baby bonding. To be dogmatic, to say that you have to do all or nothing, this is not what nature has intended.
Q. So why do you believe that attachment parenting is especially beneficial to the working mother and her baby?
Because it can compensate for the separation that takes place - there are a zillion ways you can work with your baby
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