To think that I can have a full time job and still be an attachment parent?

[GingaNinja84]

All kicked off on my baby what’s app group. Basically I returned to work this week....couple days a week for a couple months, eventually going full time in the spring.

Mentioned this on my baby group what’s app, and another mum made a snarky comment about ‘how does it feel to be leaving all your work with attachment parenting behind?’

Am I wrong to be royally pissed by this, or is she right?

I get it. The main principles of AP imply that you’re barely supposed to be separated from your baby for those first few years. But I can’t afford that. I need to go back to work to pay bills and afford to raise my little one...and now this woman is making me feel like all of a sudden I can’t be attached to my baby any more?!

For the record....I’m still exclusively breastfeeding, babywearing, co-sleeping and everything else AP entails. I just won’t be with my little girl between 9am - 5pm Monday to Friday.

AIBU to believe I can be an attachment parent and still work full time? Or am I physiologically damaging my child by going back to work? She’s 11 months old.

And exclusive breastfeeding to also exclude dummies?! WTF has that got to do with the price of fish!

I exclusively breastfed both of my kids until they started solids at 6 months. They also had dummies!

Babywearing is the ultimate wank term. It's a mode of transporting your baby, nothing more, nothing less.

Interesting piece that may give you food for thought, OP.

www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2016/jul/30/attachment-parenting-best-way-raise-child-or-maternal-masochism

God! Hasn’t being a parent got complicated! My DDs are 27 and 24. We never had any of these terms then and neither did we judge others who chose to work and had DC looked after. There wasn’t the competition to parent in a certain way. No labels for putting baby in a pram! Or harming them (?) by using a childminder! It was such a simple way of parenting! I think we were all happier!

I know you've left the group but you should have texted back to the bitch that actually you feel pretty good about putting a roof over your child's head and good on the table.
AP is self indulgent bollocks. I'm plenty attached to my parents and they both had ft jobs. I'm a sahm and still wouldn't spend 24/7 physically attached to my DC. It's ridiculous - if nature intended that, it would have given us little pouches like kangaroos!
Bring a good parent is about loving your children and making life choices with their best interests at heart. That's the long and short of it.

Wow. Turns out you can be an attachment parent AND a massive arsehole. I'd rather be a kind decent supportive person than an "attachment" parent.

What a horrible woman she is. Fuck her. Good for you for leaving the group.

What's important is actually attunement. You can babywear and breastfeed forever but being connected and attuned to your child emotionally really counts.

You does realise "attachment parenting" as you describe, is a load of unsubstantiated nonsense?

Now will your child remain "securely attached" to you if you work? Of course she will.

Anecdotally, I'm a SAHM but most of my friends with DC work and their children are thriving just as mine are. My mum also always worked due to necessity but we all turned out to be successful adults who could not be closer to our mum if we tried! Focus on what's best for you and your family OP, she's no friend. No woman with an ounce of empathy would try to guilt another for returning to work after a full year of maternity leave.

I love all the faux naive “gosh hasn’t parenting changed since I was the best mother ever posts

Illustrating perfectly that parenting always has been and always will be full of barely disguised judgement.

Ah, what a load of shite. I entered motherhood fully wanting to do the whole attachment parenting thing. However, my baby refused to breastfeed and I hated wearing a sling. She slept in a crib next to my bed for 9m then was put in her own room and cot from them. Guess what? She's nearly four now, and our 'attachment' is as strong as can be, as are her attachments to her Dad, grandparents etc. I am her safe space, her security. I'm a sahm admittedly so I haven't had to go out to work but at the same time neither are we joined at the hip, she's attended playgroup 3 days a week since she turned three.

Second baby, I had no such daft concerns about any particular parenting 'style' and just got on with it. She was also a bottle fed baby, who only went in a sling a handful of times for convenience, who also moved to her own room at 9m child. Nothing wrong with her attachments either.

As long as you love your children, care for them, make them feel safe and secure in all environments if you aren't there- you won't go far wrong. They don't need to be constantly glued to you to get that.

Incidentally I know of one 'attachment' mother who is so committed to baby wearing (ick phrase) and breastfeeding whilst doing so (nothing wrong with still BF at all but it's pointedly done in the sling on the go constantly) that her 19m old child still can't walk and barely eats any actual food. Poor kid has never had the chance to learn it's always literally attached to it's mum!

According to google 60% of US kids have secure attachments. I think the percentage may be lower in the US because they don't have adequate paid maternity/parental leave and babies are placed in childcare at much younger ages than here. Note this isn't the parents' fault; it's a shitty system.

It’s a shame you had to leave the group. I bet most of the mums on there were perfectly normal and also thought WTF at that silly comment.
People will always criticise your parenting choices because for some doing something different to them feels like a criticism of their choices. It’s important to remember that when someone makes a different choice to you it doesn’t mean they think you’re doing it wrong just that a different choice works better for them.

I didn’t say I was the best parent ever. I just said it seems to have become so complicated and judgemental. Everyone I know just got on with it and we didn’t have social media to express views on others. It did make life easier and happier and I don’t think we had such “my way is the only good way” views anyway. These were left to he NCT on non intervention in birth. What you did after was what suited you and your family. What happened to tolerance?

The reason people have secure or insecure attachment styles is because of the style of parenting
Nothing to do with childcare. Lots of people (shock horror) are not good parents at the best, and shitty abusive parents at the worst. Just look at threads of here from people who are NC. Or have serious issues regarding from how their parents treated them.

That’s nothing to do with nanny or nursery.

People who are abusive can quite easily be sahps too or parents who to the outside world look perfect and happy.

So to say that attachment issues come from childcare is just really bollocks.

Attachment issues can come from a lack of stability and continuity of care. If a child goes to childcare from 8-6 5 days per week from 3 months as is common in the US they are not receiving sufficient one to one care from a stable, regular attachment figure. This isn't going to cause an attachment disorder but may lead to the baby developing a less secure attachment relationship with their parents/carers.

Personally I think that’s utter bollocks
But we are all allowed our opinion.

www.webmd.com/mental-health/mental-health-reactive-attachment-disorder

As long as a child has a consistent loving stable care giver then they will be ok. It doesn’t say they have to have that caregiver 24 hours a day. That’s just crap. Anyone with an ounce of common sense would know that.

@aroundtheworldyet that was an interesting article. I didn’t know the Sears background was fundamentalist Christian

Personally I think that’s utter bollocks
But we are all allowed our opinion.

Attachment is fairly well researched and understood, I work in that area so my 'opinion' is fairly evidence based.

The article you linked to relates to reactive attachment disorder which is a very rare disorder experienced by a very small number of children who have experienced abuse and/or neglect.

Children can develop insecure or avoidant attachment styles for a variety of reasons, and inconsistent care giving in their early life is one.

Attachment parenting is about how you manage your relationship with your child during the time you are together , and what governs decisions you make for the time you are not . It's not about how much time you spend - you could be with your child all day and not be an attached parent .

“Attachment parenting” is a meaningless bullshit buzzword.

All I can say OP that, following the publication of Sharon Hays' Intensive Mothering work, countless bodies of work within feminist sociology have critiqued these cliques and intensive styles of mothering, and the ways in which these have historically tied women to children within the logic of patriarchy. There are endless studies on childbirth, infant weeding, food related maternal labour, return to work and much else, where these intensive pressures on women (and women alone) to tie themselves to the child have been studied, and the detrimental effects on women noted. Some useful reads in this context -

Sharon Hays - The Cultural Contradictions of Motherhood
Douglas and Michaels - The Mommy Myth
The Centre for Parenting Culture Studies - which does work around the world on these intensive, women-tied-to-child parenting rituals, cliques and groups

In any case just wanted to say that the sociology of mothering and motherhood is a longstanding area of work and that these cliques and labels and tribes harm women profoundly is long established.

Live life, enjoy work, enjoy your baby, and watch her grow up to be a wonderful human being. Leave these tribes behind.

The rise of the fetal celebrity, the reduction of woman to the mother-vessel, the disappearance of the woman's identity outside of Mother, the imperative on the woman to intensively take on the raising of the Priceless Child on whom society's future is pinned - it all works within the logics of patriarchy. Numerous images and text around pregnancy, controlling pregnant bodies, policy advice, birth related rhetoric on online groups all bear evidence to this tendency to tie women to child. You encountered some lived reality in this context and it is excellent that you are now moving forward.

I am far too old to even know what "attachment parenting" is but I went back to work very full time when DS1 and DS2 were 6 weeks old. they are now 29 and 27 and we couldn't be closer.

My mum was an attachment parent with me back in the 80s before it was a Thing. It turned me into a child who hates being away from home.

I wouldn't stay the night at friends houses, refused all school residential and had a nervous breakdown when I started university. Even now as an adult I don't like going away.

Your child needs to be apart from you, to be in the care of other adults and have their own time and space to grow. I truly believe that.

I'm so glad I found this thread! I'm going back to work earlier than planned after being offered a better job. I agonised over the decision as I thought it made me a bad mum. I still have my wobbles and wonder if I've made the right decision. This has made me feel like I definitely have. I'm already very attached to her and will be able to provide for her better going forward...it doesn't have to be a choice!

What matters is that a baby/child feels secure with its caregivers and has its needs met.

My upbringing was very far removed from "attachment patenting" in just about every way. DM had to RTW when I was 3 weeks old and I ended up being raised by extended family long term. But I had security of relationships and would like to credit myself as being emotionally stable. I knew I was loved.

Go into any school playground and you won't have a clue about who was in a pram/ woven wrap, BFed/ FFed, nursery/ CM/SAHM or just about any other infancy method of parenting. You might at best be able to work out who has a permissive "gentle" parent if they struggle with instructions, but even they stand a chance to being trained by the school if "Mamma Bear" isn't too zealous about complaining about everything.

Most people just parent to the child they have and the circumstances they are in, and wanky labels like "attachment parenting" usually end up evolving into some kind of best-fit survival strategy anyway. I say this as someone who happened to find that BFing, "baby lead weaning", using slings and cloth nappies just happened to work for us, and did encounter the more evangelical lifestyle/ philosophy types within fb groups.