What is attachment parenting?
Attachment parenting is a philosophy of parenting that is based on nurturing practices. These practices create strong emotional bonds between parent and child, and are known as “secure attachment”. Parents who use the attachment parenting style respond to their infant or child’s emotional needs and develop trust in their children that their needs will be met. This results in children who are secure, empathetic, peaceful, and who have strong relationships with their parents and peers. Attachment parenting is based upon “attachment theory”. Attachment theory describes people’s enduring patterns of relationships from birth to death. The assumption in attachment research on infants is that the “sensitive responding” by the parent to their infant’s needs results in an infant who demonstrates secure attahcment, and lack of “sensitive responding” results in insecure attachmet (Lamb, Thompson, Gardner, Charnov, & Estes, 1984). What is “Sensitive Responding”? Sensitive responding is reacting to
A. Attachment parenting is a style of parenting which is all about responding to your child’s cues and following your parental instincts. This incorporates really getting to know him, and not being afraid of “spoiling” or setting up “bad habits”. It is more an attitude than a list of instructions. The usual trademarks of AP, such as breastfeeding, co-sleeping and sling wearing, are in most cases a natural response to the way an AP parent thinks and feels about his/her child. Attachment parenting is about allowing the child to be “attached” to his parents, to be as dependent as he needs to be. APers let their children separate from them rather than the other way around. Q.
by Jan Hunt, M.Sc. Attachment parenting, to put it most simply, is believing what we know in our heart to be true. And if we do that, we find that we trust the child. We trust him in these ways: • We trust that he is doing the very best he can at every given moment, given all of his experiences up to that time. • We trust that though he may be small in size, he is as fully human as we are, and as deserving as we are to have his needs taken seriously. • We trust that he has been born innocent, loving, and trusting. We do not need to “turn him around”, to teach him that life is difficult, or train him to be a loving human being – he is that at birth and all we need to do is celebrate that, and support and sustain it. • We don’t have to give him lessons about life – life brings its own lessons and its own frustrations. • We recognize that in a very beautiful way, our child teaches us – if we listen – what love is.1 • We understand that if a child “misbehaves”, instead of reacting to the b
At the root of attachment parenting lies attachment theory. Attachment theory stems from psychologist John Bowlby’s studies of maternal deprivation and from animal behavior research in the early 1950s. Attachment theory posits that an infant instinctively seeks closeness to a secure “attachment figure.” This closeness is necessary for the infant to feel safe emotionally as well as for food and survival. Early animal studies found that baby primates preferred a warm, terry-cloth “mother” doll over a wire doll that dispensed food but lacked warmth. Attachment parenting is based on the idea that babies learn to trust and thrive when their needs are consistently met by a caregiver early in life. Children who never experience this secure attachment early in life, according to proponents, don’t learn to form healthy attachments later in life. They suffer from insecurity, lack of empathy, and, in extreme cases, anger and attachment disorders. More recent attachment theory is based on research
