When as a baby to expect to be responded to by my parents?

[BooseysMom]

Just reading a rather upsetting book DH got me for Mother's Day called 'The Book you wish your Parents had read' by Philippa Perry, a psychotherapist married to the artist Grayson Perry.

One chapter on pregnancy covers attachment parenting and the different versions of this. I'll try to keep it as brief as i can .. basically it's saying if as a baby you were left to 'cry it out' you are likely going to develop neurosis in later life and have a negative outlook and life experiences and not be able to form relationships easily ... all because as a baby your needs were not met and you were left to cry for hours. This really got to me and left me wondering whether my late DM left me for hours which is why i tend to be anxious and find it hard to be positive. I clearly remember her telling me to ignore DS when he was just 6 weeks old! I was utterly flabbergasted .. how can a tiny baby be left to cry? Of course she was the one i ignored! Last night was bad and during my regular insomnia i just kept going over it in my head. I mean, in the old days the advice was to leave babies to cry ..so surely that means most of our generation are in some way screwed up?!
What do you think? Is this woman right to state this? Should i just step away from the book now?!

I was left to cry it out in the 70's and I'm not an anxious person at all. I did the same with my daughter. She is one of the most laid back un-anxious (not sure that's a word!) people you could meet. She doesn't need hand holding, she doesn't need constant reassurance. She just went off to boarding school for the first time and is loving it and looking after the sad ones...

But, we may have let her cry it out, but she knows she is loved and if she has been upset over anything else, we have always helped her. So I don't think it's one thing that makes an anxious person, it's a mix of genetics and many other factors.

This ethos of blaming someone else for all you woes (in my humble opinion) just doesn't seem healthy. Yes, we are formed by many things, some of them are sad and should never have happened, but there comes a point (and I speak from experience) when you say okay, that was crap, but I am my own person now and I can overcome it and I will not let it define the person I am now.

Apart from anything else, what an odd gift to give you for mother's day.

Step way from the book, anxiety can come from so many places, not necessarily behavioral just a disposition for want of a better word.

I can understand you want to have a 'reason' for it though.

There is a massive difference between a baby whimpering for 3-4 minutes as it goes to sleep versus a child in a Romanian orphanage left to cry for hours with no proper attachments. I can tell the difference between my baby’s going to sleep cry and her ‘I need you’ cry.

The thing is sometimes babies just cry. Mine was a colicky newborn and no amount of cuddling, shushing, swaying etc would settle her. She spent hours crying in my arms. I don’t believe that will affect her in later life.

Attachment theory is just that - a theory developed by pyschologists to try and understand infant development and it has grown and developed over the years. One very important thing to remember is that just as leaving a child’s needs unmet too often and too long will cause neuroses, so will meeting them too quickly. A child whose carer anticipates and fulfills their every requirement instantly will not develop resilience or empathy, they will find it difficult to tolerate disappointment and won’t learn to communicate their needs.

So leaving them to cry for too long, too,often is harmful but never leaving them to cry is equally harmful. Like so many things in life a happy medium is the best. As long as you are a ‘good enough mother’ who mostly does the right thing at the the right time you will be doing a good job. And don’t expect to raise a perfect child. We all have our quirks and neuroses. Anyone who says they don’t is propbably the most damaged of all!

My mum lost the baby before me to stillbirth.

Which means that during her pregnancy with me and during my early months of life, she was extremely anxious.

I, however, have no anxiety at all, barring the usual 'nervousness at new events' type. Certainly no social anxiety or high stress. So I'm not at all sure that parental anxiety can pass down quite that early.

Our kids will probably look back on how on earth we did attachment parenting. I don't know what will be criticised about it - too hard on mothers' mental health? Lack of independence? I dunno, but you can be sure the fashion will have changed and they'll be judging us.

My own view is that a lot of the women who currently think that you will never have any future problems with a child's mental health ever so long as you aren't one of those dreadful selfish sleep training parents are going to get a big shock in a few years time when they have teens. I think the practices of attachment parenting are fine if they work for the baby and the family at the time (and some of them - like baby wearing or cosleeping - are often the most practical option) but that people have very high expectations that the relatively large sacrifices they require will lead to some future pay off and that's very unclear. My own prediction is that there will be a 'but we coslept, how can you be unhappy now!' thread on MN to replace the 'but we took you to stately homes' in a decade or so's time.

My parents left me to 'cry it out' and their parenting style was the exact opposite of attachment parenting. I had my own bedroom almost immediately from birth, I wasn't breastfed or cuddled much, when I cried I was ignored as my parents are big believers in self soothing. I am an anxious and insecure person and I really believe that this is largely as a result of my childhood and their parenting style which, now I have my own kids, I view as frankly cruel. Personally I co-sleep, never, ever leave my child to 'cry it out', hold them whenever they want to be held, wear them rather than push them in a pram, etc etc - everything my parents didn't do, and I can honestly say that my DC are happier, calmer, and more secure than I am already!

Incidentally I am quite anxious as a person (though - and I know this is unusual - it's massively improved since having children) and I do think it's quite traceable to my (lovely, loving) mother, but in that I'm very similar to her. I don't know if it's nature or nurture that I seem to have 'inherited' so many anxious traits, but it is something I'm consciously trying not to model to DS - so I'm thinking carefully about choices I make for him but then trying very hard not to obsess over them, and even harder not to let him see me worry and dwell on them.

Wow! Thanks all for your input. Ok ok.. hands up, I shouldn't be reading these books! I blame DH for giving it to me and i can't get rid as he's written a lovely msg in the front for me.

But yeah i agree with pps who say we can't possibly all be messed up because of this practice, can we? It was the advice back then and as MatildaTheCat says it may even have helped to develop resilience. DM certainly used to say it was done to encourage independence. But i was a total attachment parenting freak so she was dead against my ways!

Then there are those whose DCs have anxiety issues and yet were attachment parented like my DS.
BettyBottersBitterButter is right about there being a genetic factor

BarbariansMum.. yes you're spot on! DH def says this..that i inherited a dose of worry genes! DM was a horrendous worrier.

What SleepyKat says is scary about the GP actually telling her parents to lock her brother in his room..but it's not uncommon as my sil did the same to her two. She never bf and I think that's why it was easy to do as there was no hormones at work but even she seemed to lack any bond at all with her kids! Weird!

She never bf and I think that's why it was easy to do as there was no hormones at work

I breastfed and I still think this is an absolutely horrible, insulting comment

My parents and ILs who would be 105-ish if they were still alive were of the generation who believed that it gave your lungs a good work out if you were left to cry but that would only be after they'd checked that you weren't wet, cold or thirsty etc first.

I don't think my generation (mid 60's) is more neurotic but I wouldn't know about others' hidden worries. Ignoring a crying baby is pretty horrible and stressful in itself.

It isn't possible to reason backwards as you are doing. The fact that you are anxious does not automatically mean that your Mum was not attentive to your needs.There are other reasons why anxiety develops.

My eldest was bottle-fed after only 6 weeks as we just couldn't get into the swing of things but I breastfed my other two for over three years, so these are the ones I let out of their rooms.

My opinion is probably slightly controversial but I think this may be one of the reasons for a steep increase in MH problems in the UK.
The culture is very much centred around leaving baby to cry and forcing independence on baby at a young age.
It’s a complicated area of study and I’m by no means an expert but during the ‘blooming and pruning’phase in childhood - connections in the brain used most often are strengthened. My understanding is, if a baby/child experiences too much stress or anxiety in their environment, the part of the brain responsible for fight or flight response becomes extra sensitive - in order to ‘prepare’ that baby for the next threat it experiences. This can continue in to adulthood making some people more prone to anxiety and depression.
This is very much armchair physiology though so don’t quote me. It’s my belief that the way we are treated as young children does impact our mental health later on in life. I’m a bloody mess - and my parents were bordering on neglectful.

Not sure breastfeeding has anything to do with it! Mothers in general are programmed to respond to their baby regardless.

The most 'attentive' parent I know (literally the minute her baby makes a sound she dashes to him) feeds formula. I breastfeed but I don't co-sleep aside from when we occasionally fall asleep together for naps, but she is evicted from my boob before we do, I rarely babywear (mostly as she weighs a ton and I have a bad back) and she does get left to whinge if I'm in the middle of something.

I couldn't lock any baby in a room and ignore them! I breastfed but I find the suggestion that this would be easy to do if hormones weren't at work quite offensive.

Your anxiety is making you overthink this, as though it's a prescription of your life, rather than one POV from one psychotherapist, who's best known these days as a talking head on TV programmes and a magazine agony aunt. This is a book intended for a popular readership, not a peer-reviewed paper, so don't put too much faith in it. If you read someone else like Oliver James, your personality would be 'explained' via your position in the birth order of your siblings, or with some other determinant.

Your mother can't be consulted, and frankly, if she could, she'd be unlikely to say 'Yes, I left you to cry for hours, and that is the root of your problems'. And if she did?

I do know that my parents did leave me to cry, because I have an excellent memory, and remember it still going on as a three-year-old and older -- but what am I going to do with that information? They did the best they could, and unfortunately that was often not very good.
They were (and are) decent people, but from extremely poor and dysfunctional backgrounds themselves, they had no idea that a child needed more than food and basic care, and to this day get very impatient with anything child-centred, which they see as 'silly'and indicating 'notions'. I'd have had to reinvent them as human beings to get them to parent baby me differently.

I can't let it define me in adulthood. I am responsible for how I deal with what has happened to me.

Reading these kind of daft and dopey books is not necessary at all. I don't recall any reading matter on babies,parenting and the likes when I had my children in the 70's era. A baby crying for a short while,is easy to rectify by giving comfort. A baby left to cry for a very long time,is very stressful to the baby and the Mother or Father, and I don't ever remember anyone letting that happen.

I have heard many women over the years,discussing babies and childcare,and a lot of them seem to be quite neurotic about how to bring up a child etc.. Common sense has gone out of the window for some of them.

I agree with the posters who have said you are overthinking things. Whether or not your mother did this, you can't change it now. I know my parents tried to tell me that i gave my kids too much attention and they'd learn to manipulate......as babies. I finally did get them to realize how foolish that thought was. My parents are and were excellent and attentive, but very strict and disciplined with their approach so no doubt if they believed that crying it out was in our best interest, that's what they would have done. There are studies done mostly in extreme circumstances where children are left in orphanages and develop reactive attachments disorders. I doubt that what was done by the average parent who thought it was the thing to do is going to cause something that rises to the level of neurosis, or we'd all be so irreparably screwed up. Maybe we have some issues, but I think they can be addressed and not have to be life destroying.

Every generation thinks it has the answer to making perfect children. Sometimes it means snuggling babies every minute. Sometimes it means ignoring their cries. These experiments have been going on for centuries. And yet we have never had a single generation of notably truly happy or unhappy people. Currently we treat our children tenderly. I know I do. And what is the end result? We are accused of helicopter parenting and our children are grow up to be delicate flowers who have a hard time launching themselves into life and obsessed with nonsense like the pronouns strangers call them. But honestly, it isn't all the parents' faults. Everyone, parents and children, are strongly pulled by what other people of their generation are doing. And everyone, both parents and children, have their own reaction to that pulling.

My opinion is probably slightly controversial but I think this may be one of the reasons for a steep increase in MH problems in the UK.

The problem with your opinion isn't that it's 'controversial' but that it doesn't fit the facts - the fastest increase in mental health diagnoses are among people of the age where parenting was moving much more towards attachment and responsive methods. In fact, you could try and draw a conclusion there - but I think it would be silly to do so, it's much more complicated than that.

Hailey that’s basically what the book says, to be honest.

She tries to reassure people that their parents probably did their best, and that it’s done now. The idea she puts forward is that some of the reactions you have to your kids are echoes of how you were parented. You can decide how you parent though. I do some things my parents did, but avoid others.

@BooseysMom your sister in law not breast feeding would not have been why she had no bond with her child.

I can assure you the hormones and bonding are still their for those that don’t , likely hold she had pnd or just doesn’t like kids

1forall74 I don't think it's as simple as a whole generation of parents jettisoning common sense. I think it has been the shift from understanding of the individual as a unique individual who is a product of their own personality and desires to an understanding of the individual as someone who comes in to the world as a blank sheet and for whom any inadequacy can, from here on in, be levied at the mother.

The useful thing about this approach is it can fill a library with lucrative manuals about how to get things right. The disadvantage is that any imperfection in a child is considered an outcome of imperfect parenting - and you see that right throughout Aibu - and it leave parents feeling constantly observed and judged.

You would think the more recent forcus on genetics and their influence would effect a return to 'parent as custodian' approach rather than 'parent as author' but I think we're too far gone now and it doesn't translate into easily readable money spinners.

I think it has been the shift from understanding of the individual as a unique individual who is a product of their own personality and desires to an understanding of the individual as someone who comes in to the world as a blank sheet and for whom any inadequacy can, from here on in, be levied at the mother.

A good book on this is 'The Carpenter and the Gardener', which is written by a scientist of child neurological development and who argues that we need to stop seeing 'parenting' as a verb with a fixed outcome (producing a child who 'fulfils their potential') and instead should see it as a relationship and a process - she argues for exactly the shift you're describing