New mothers need the whole story about AP.

[wenchystrumpet]

I believe some attachment parents are being disingenous when they say their approach was easier for them (compared to other ways one can be a loving mother).

AP approaches are associated with severe and long term sleep deprivation. So, AP may have other benefits, but is being easier generally one of them?

I acknowledge that AP may well be experienced as easier by some individuals.

My contention is that out of the chorus of voices saying "I'm so lazy" there must be a fair few who have hurt their backs from wearing a sling or got depressed from being housebound and are just not acknowledging this part of their experience.

Why is this a problem? It's a problem because I think new mothers are being told only part of the story about AP. Having had no experience of parenting at all, they hear many (but no doubt not all) AP advocates suggesting that this is an easy way to be a mother, when in fact it is a very intense way to mother.

Mothers with mental health concerns, for example, may not find it easier to scale back their work in favour of spending long hours mothering without the balance that work outside the home can provide.

And yes I know AP is an 'approach' or a 'toolkit' but everyone knows certain ways of doing things are considered preferable.

So, OP, as you obviously have huge amounts of experience in motherhood, why not divulge your pearls of wisdom, rather than blanket slagging off other women.

I wait with baited breath.

Oh, and before you start anything, I didn't ap either of mine. I just did what suited us all best.

Why would we give people an income for raising their own child? Don't have children if you don't want to support them, they are not compulsory. Sorry, giving up you financial independence to rely on the goodwill of one man will never strike me as a feminist choice. Fair enough, do what you want, but all women's choices are feminist & it is a bit doublespeak to try & pretend they are.

I had severe enough and to need hospital treatment after dc1 (now 16) was born - and it was following swmnbn routine that put me there, after dc1 would not conform to the book.

After that I took a much more relaxed approach to parenting, but was expelled from an email chat group (showing my age!) which was an AP group (i thought my co-sleeping, breastfeeding, cloth-nappy using, sling wearing would do) for daring to vaccinate my children.

There are extremes both ways. There are people who will take it to extremes both ways. Every way.

AP style parenting saved my sanity, though!

not and - PND!

The issue for me with feminism and parenting styles is that they are all (or rather objections to them are all) used as a stick to beat women, and women specifically, with.

AP? "You're failing your child by not instilling boundaries, failing your man by not getting the marital bed back to its correct, i.e. sexualised, function fast enough, failing society by not contributing to the GDP through the paid workplace..."

Routine based? "You're failing your child by not giving them emotional well being, failing society by producing maladjusted children." (I'm sure there must be some way in which you're failing your man too...)

None of these criticisms are ever turned outwards at the rest of society (well, they are, but only in feminist circles). Where are the Daily Mail articles on men doing the boring bits of childcare (the sandwich making, the sock sorting) as well as cherry picking the good bits (he's a hero because he takes the kids swimming while I do the weekly shop)? Where are the Economist articles critiquing the culture of presenteeism in the workplace and its detrimental effect on working mothers (when there's plenty of evidence-based research to show that presenteeism is counterproductive in terms of productivity)? Where are the articles in the Daily Telegraph pricing up the cost of replacing a SAHM's workload with a fulltime paid nanny and paid housekeeper to free her husband up to earn a 6 figure salary?

OP's post strikes me as a classic situation of not seeing the wood for the trees. Yes, we get that you hate attachment parenting. But you're failing to see that it is not attachment parenting in and of itself that is the problem, but the way it fits, or doesn't fit, into a whole interlocking set of other attitudes.

Incidentally, I have to quote this from the beginning of the thread: "Incidentally, AP often causes sleep deprivation which often causes depression which does not exactly lead to women having a full social calendar." I think you'll find, OP, that it is being the mother of a small baby which does this to you! Regardless of how you choose to parent.

I grew up in a family where the previous generation were pretty much on the AP spectrum, including my mother.

It was my normal for babies to sleep in their parents' beds, to breastfeed until toddlerhood.

I didn't feel judged by them when I chose to buy a cot and have my babies sleep nearby but not in my bed.

I got a ton of support when I initially struggled to breastfeed, and think I would have given up if it hadn't been for that sense of it as normal.

I have certainly seen some pretty nasty attitudes to mothers who prefer routines on MN.

I prefer them. That's just how I am - I fall into routines.

I genuinely can't imagine not structuring my own sleeping and feeding times as a matter of course.

When my eldest was just out of hospital and I was struggling to breastfeed and pumping milk to feed with a spoon or a bittle and sterlising everything and never knowing when I could sleep, I was barely eating because I couldn't find the time.

My ability to cope really improved when I stopped "going with the flow" and started thinking

• I will get up at X time

• I will eat around X, Y, Z times

• after each feeding attempt I will do A, B, C

• I will try to leave the house every day

I needed a structure to my day. That's who I am. So it became who my babies were.

Not because I expected them to, but because there's a certain gravity to a domestic routine, and they adjusted to it easily.

I have been judged for having nap times and bed times and regular meal times.

I don't really give a shit about the judgement from people who think their way is "natural" (for natural, read superior), but it is a bit disingenuous to pretend it doesn't exist.

So we should bash AP parents and label them as haggard and sexless to help them understand AP is bad for them?

I never read anything about parenting prior to having my son, but looking back I would probably have fallen into the AP category. I just followed my instincts and did whatever I could to keep my baby happy while staying sane. That included co-sleeping and wearing a sling when it worked for us.

I don't think we should be attacking any parenting styles. Babies are hard and we should be supporting mothers to trust their instincts, whether they feel they need a routine or to be completely baby-led, and helping them figure it out when it's not working.

As long as people believe that their way of parenting is the "natural" one, we are miles off not putting pressure on women to things our way.

Even the phrase "baby led" is full of implied superiority.

"I'm doing what my baby wants. You are doing what you want."

BLW (which I mostly did) as a movement is all about a rejection of "unnatural" utensils.

In the real world, how many people think their way is the only way? My circle of friends (which varies from AP to routine based) would probably all admit that it's driven by a mixture of our personalities as parents and the personalities of our children. My co-sleeping would drive at least one of my routine based friends nuts, because she (not the children) likes routine and organisation in all aspects of her life; she lent me GF while I was pregnant, I read it, handed it back saying politely "I've got some ideas from this" while privately thinking "Oh god no, that is so not me." My DC was one who would drop of to sleep anywhere (once the initial clingy first 6 months was over - he once memorably fell asleep over my shoulder in the checkout queue in Sainsbury's and I had to lie him on the floor while I packed my shopping); another friend had one where any deviation from routine would leave him unsettled for days (this was entirely driven by his personality, not his parents). I have friends with children somewhere on the AS - again, a whole different set of parenting skills are needed. I don't know anyone in my circle of friends who takes any view other than "shrug, more than one way to skin a cat..."

(My parenting is probably best described as "slack" with appropriation of whatever method from whatever source seems to work at the time - hence I coslept purely in order to get a decent night's sleep, and potty trained by bribing with chocolate buttons - which pretty much every parenting guru seems to think is "a bad thing", but did restrict daytime naps in order to manipulate night time sleeping to my advantage...)

I think there are an awful lot of people who think their way is the right way.

This is just another 'AP mothers are mean and nasty' thread.

I could repeat myself from the other thread and say how we ended up BF and co-sleeping and not spoon feeding but what's the point when I'll just get lumped in with all those other AP mothers 'being disingenous'.

The most stressed mums in our baby group were the routine focused ones. They were the ones driving round for 45 minutes 3 times a day to try and get their baby to sleep.

I think a bad sleeper will be a bad sleeper no matter where they sleep. Sometimes it can be made slightly better by moving where they sleep, whether that be into or out of the parent's bed. But some adults are light sleepers whereas I could sleep through most things.

But I find that it's the routine touting experts who are the ones insisting that their particular method will work for all babies as long as you follow The Rules. AP says feed your baby when they're hungry not because it's 6:45pm.

But AP can mean routine, if that's what mother and baby are happy with. But it's about finding your own routine rather than trying to impose one on both your lives. It wouldn't have worked for me but I know it has for others. Because everyone's different.

They were the ones driving round for 45 minutes 3 times a day to try and get their baby to sleep.

Kind of proving your nasty point with that.

The parents I knew who were drivibg their children around to get them to go to sleep were the ones pretty near the end of their tether and most sleep deprived.

I never sought to blame it on their parenting choices.

I have always felt lucky not to have ever found myself takung out the car to get an hour's break or to get an exhausted baby to drop off.

Didn't it occur to you that their "focus" on routine came from their knowkedge of what their vaby needed?

Or us that something you can only have if your baby sleeps at different times each day?

"They were the ones driving round for 45 minutes 3 times a day to try and get their baby to sleep.

Kind of proving your nasty point with that."

That's not nasty. It's just pointing out that getting too one track minded about a routine can make you do things like this- because the book tells you that your baby has to be asleep for X minutes at Y time and you feel as if you're failing if they aren't.

I think trying to super-impose any parenting style on what you would naturally do as a parent is a health risk. Obsessing over having baby 'settled to sleep at 7pm and never allowing baby in your bed could be as unnatural and exhausting as feeling your baby must never be out of the maternal cocoon of your arms.

What would be helpful is, when choosing which bits of parenting guidance to follow, parents had enough confidence and self-knowledge to say 'That looks ideal for baby but I would never cope, so we need to try something else.'

Having done the full AP thing with one child and the own-bedroom/formula/cc thing with another child, I feel I can confidently say that having children leads to poor quality sleep.

OP, I had a baby who cried all the time. I tried everything. I was lazy. I vaccinated my kids, even for chickenpox! I couldn't be arsed to spend two weeks tending to a whiny toddler. I exclusively breast fed because I didn't want to faff around with sterilising bottles. I never bought or made baby food, but just put whatever I was eating in a little hand grinder. I was cavalier about salt and sugar. I put the first baby in a sling because she liked it and it stopped her from crying. My second liked the pr and that was good too. I coslept with both babies because I got much more sleep myself. The fact that it may have curtailed my sex drive was irrelevant to me, and my husband wasn't a selfish jerk. Cosleeping was really subversive at the time too. The NHS basically told you that your baby would die of SIDS and it would be your fault.

I suspect that most parents who coslept do it for their own convenience.

Now the hysteria over "screen time" looks like a genuine feminist issue to me. The minute a woman can eat a meal in peace or get her hair done without drama the whole western world seems to go into a moral panic. I let both my kids watch CBeebies quite a bit because it was good for my mental health.

Oh, and, of course, I used disposable nappies!

Here is a good citation
Breastfeeding parents get 45 minutes more sleep a night.
^www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17700096^

Well, at three months. We might see quite different results if we looked at the amount of sleep breastfeeding mothers of babies less than a couple of weeks old are getting compared to formula feeding mothers, particularly given that the latter will have the option of passing on feeding duties entirely. For some reason, the comparison when the baby is very young doesn't seem quite as attractive a topic for research.

With that said, I don't think the long term sleep deprivation comments are particularly helpful. That has no doubt happened to some individuals but there's no evidence it's more likely. Actually I don't think the term 'AP' particularly is helpful either. It includes so many practices, particularly if you also add the things that aren't AP but are often associated with AP and wrongly assumed, sometimes by AP advocates themselves, to be part of it (BLW, extended rear facing etc). Surely a majority of mothers have done at least one of wanted an unmedicated vaginal delivery if not had one, breastfed for a while, coslept, used a sling, not had much of a routine, fed on cue, not left baby to cry where possible and tried to use at least some 'gentle parenting' methods (loaded term but I don't know what else to use here). I don't consider myself AP but I tick several of those boxes. It just seems too broad to be helpful.

"The parents I knew who were driving their children around to get them to go to sleep were the ones pretty near the end of their tether and most sleep deprived."

Exactly! Because they were told that they shouldn't let their baby fall asleep feeding, or by cuddling. That they had to go to sleep by themselves. That when baby was falling asleep feeding, they felt they had to put baby in the cot and when that didn't work, they resorted to the car.

When this thread starts by declaring that all AP mothers are stressed and sleep deprived, I don't think it's nasty to give an example of a case where the opposite was true.

If it makes you feel better, they didn't do the driving thing for very long. They relaxed their routine and everyone was happier and slept better. But the book still said they were doing it wrong. So they got rid of the book.

I think a bad sleeper will be a bad sleeper no matter where they sleep.

Yes! Ours is. I am too. So is my mum. His dad is a great sleeper. My dad has slept through an earthquake as well as a major explosion by the house.

Agree about screen time too. It's a good example. Like play pens, bouncers etc, a few cartoon nursery rhymes for fifteen minutes while you empty the dishwasher/have a cup of tea or just sit and regroup to save your sanity is not harmful. It's a tool.
Dumping a kid in front of the telly for hours isn't a great idea, but berating women for needing two minutes to Get Shit Done is anti feminist.

We cannot win can we? If we work we are neglectful - have you ever heard anyone use the phrase 'working dads'? Nope. Me neither. Never heard an man asked if he will be cutting down his hours once the baby is here either.
If we sahm we are lazy gold diggers. If we sleep train we are tyrants. If we don't we are too soft. It just never stops and it's for everything. Every choice we make is public property. It's exhausting and I'm absolutely fucking sick of it.

YY hubbles!

Because they were told that they shouldn't let their baby fall asleep feeding, or by cuddling.

No.

Not all babies fall off happily to sleep when you feed and/or cuddle them.

Some babies genuinely struggle to settle at all.

Presuming that the parents of those babies are stupid/routine obsessed/rigidly sticking to a book/not cuddling their babies enough is incredibly unfair.

It's as blinkered and patronising as saying "all he needs is a strict bedtime and to exercise his lungs".

My bf had truly, truly horrendous sleepers. She co-slept, she cuddled all night, but still THEY DID NOT SLEEP.

Feeding to sleep was my magic trick - no driving around, no midnight walks around the block, no pacing the room.

Just lovely dozing off on the boob. Worked every time.

Because I was lucky and I never had to try a million other ways to get them to sleep.

Babies do need to sleep, ideally a lot. If they won't, that is not great for anyone.

But nor is it an easy problem to solve (and I do believe it is a problem) if your baby doesn't sleep easily.

In the end my bf tried something completely mad that nobody (including her) thought would work, and she pretty much quadrupled night time sleep overnight. (It did not involve any crying) (or cuddling).

The difference in both parents and children was enormous.

There is no one true way when it comes to sleep.

There is good luck and bad luck.

If you have never considered taking your car out at 4am to settle a baby who can't sleep, then you don't get to suggest obvious solutions like feeding or cuddling. Most people have already tried those things before they opt for aimless driving.

Attachment parenting is bullshit.

You do not need to be attached to your baby all day and night. Babies will not develop an attachment disorder by having a routine.

Babies who are in danger of developing an attachment disorder are those who are severely neglected. The babies that get taken into care and then adopted. Then you would need to establish an attachment to that baby/child but that wouldn't mean bf, no routine, everything "natural" and all that rubbish.

Attachment parenting is another way for mothers to feel inadequate and beat themselves up with. It's also damaging as it makes mothers feel guilty and stuck with a baby attached all the time. I also think it can damage a marriage.

We know that. RTFT.

"Not all babies fall off happily to sleep when you feed and/or cuddle them."

I never said they did.

"Some babies genuinely struggle to settle at all. "

I know, I've met babies like that. I live with a toddler who still struggles to get to sleep at night. For him, boobs help. Please note that I am not saying that all babies must be fed to sleep.

"Presuming that the parents of those babies are stupid/routine obsessed/rigidly sticking to a book/not cuddling their babies enough is incredibly unfair."

I never presumed any of those things about all parents of all those babies. I mentioned some specific families who themselves felt they were too routine focused. Presuming that I think that based on one sentence is incredibly unfair.

"It's as blinkered and patronising as saying "all he needs is a strict bedtime and to exercise his lungs"."

I agree it would have been.

"My bf had truly, truly horrendous sleepers. She co-slept, she cuddled all night, but still THEY DID NOT SLEEP."

I haven't suggested anyone continuing to do something that isn't working for them.

"Feeding to sleep was my magic trick - no driving around, no midnight walks around the block, no pacing the room.

^Just lovely dozing off on the boob. Worked every time.

Because I was lucky and I never had to try a million other ways to get them to sleep."

YY, it did for my DD. Mainly because as a newborn she'd only feed for 5-10 minutes before falling asleep. It was amazing. Then DS turned up and would only boob to sleep at night, not for nap times. Thank fuck for those night times though!

^"Babies do need to sleep, ideally a lot. If they won't, that is not great for anyone.

But nor is it an easy problem to solve (and I do believe it is a problem) if your baby doesn't sleep easily."^

I agree. My point is that if your routine isn't working, then it's more likely to be a problem with the routine than with the baby or the parent.

"In the end my bf tried something completely mad that nobody (including her) thought would work, and she pretty much quadrupled night time sleep overnight. (It did not involve any crying) (or cuddling).

The difference in both parents and children was enormous."^

They changed something they were doing that wasn't working for them, and then everyone slept better. That's pretty much all I'm trying to suggest.

"There is no one true way when it comes to sleep."

Again, never said there was.

"There is good luck and bad luck."

Yes.

"If you have never considered taking your car out at 4am to settle a baby who can't sleep, then you don't get to suggest obvious solutions like feeding or cuddling. Most people have already tried those things before they opt for aimless driving."

I didn't suggest those things to those particular parents, as those were the things they were trying to avoid.

Anyway, as an AP mother I'm far too sleep deprived and stressed to possibly type any more, I should probably go for a lie down