Ultimately, it was my two-year old daughter’s goggles that acted as the inspiration for this article, but my experiences with attachment parenting began years before I had either of my children.
I graduated from my Biological Sciences degree in 2003, with a future husband, open eyes and a new found love of organics. I’d become an avid reader of the Ecologist
magazine, and it was here that I first read about sustainable parenting. Shortly after graduating I got a part-time job for a small family-run mail order business, who specialised in natural and organic baby clothes, nappies and children’s toys. It was from their shelves during my lunch breaks that I first read Green Parent magazine, and although I was years away from having children, I knew that I’d found the approach to parenting that I would take.
This was further compounded in 2007, whilst watching a Channel 4 documentary series called ‘Bringing up baby’. The series charted the experiences of families following three very different parenting methods, the authoritarian (and very disconnected) Truby King method from the 1950s, the more moderate Benjamin Spock approach, and the Continuum Concept. The more I watched, the more I was hooked and I knew that when I eventually had my babies, I would be an attachment parent. However, there was one element I didn’t feel I could buy into, co-sleeping. I was completely in awe of the fact that even young babies could apparently root and latch on by themselves, often without even waking their mother, but how was this possible? Surely babies were tiny and helpless? So tiny and helpless that they were surely just waiting to be rolled on and crushed by their slumbering parents?
So as it was, I became pregnant three years later and I had my parenting future nicely mapped out. I read Green Parent and books on attachment by Doctor Sears, growing ever more confident in our decision, all the while glossing over the co-sleeping sections. I felt so passionate about everything I was reading, but that was just too dangerous, a step too far. I’d read the SIDS guidelines and too many articles on the risks, I was going to be an attachment parent, just not a bed-sharing one.
The Babymoon period
I was very fortunate that my pregnancy was very straight forward and I had the peaceful labour in our local midwife unit that I had planned. My beautiful daughter was a large and sleepy baby, and not a bit interested in feeding. I felt the first (now familiar) pangs of maternal panic, what if I couldn’t breastfeed? I’d spent nine months reading about the benefits and it was such a fundamental backbone of the parent I wanted to be. Thankfully after a few days and nights under the care of midwives and after much patient instruction, we both finally got the hang of it. Things went well at home, a blissful month of my husband being at home with us, a sleepy milky baby and our first forays into stretchy wraps, which my daughter loved.
Sleeping troubles
Everything was going to plan until we hit the four-month sleep regression phase and literally overnight she stopped sleeping. I tried and tried, but every time I laid her back in her moses basket, her eyes would open and she’d start to cry. Eventually, after nights and nights of little sleep and an increasing level of sleep-deprivation induced hysteria, my husband suggested I feed her in bed and we let her stay there with us. What about the dangers? What about everything I’d read? What about the fact I was almost certainly going to roll on to her and smother her? But I was tired, so very tired and I started to remember all the things I’d read that said it was safe and natural, so I lay in bed next to her, she fed and we both slept peacefully for the rest of the night. For a while we carried on trying to get her to settle in the moses basket, but it was just so much easier to have her in bed with us and I was feeling so much better for sleeping, so eventually it came about that she started the night off with us and stayed there and I realised that we were in fact co-sleeping attachment parents.
The family bed
I loved it so much, although it was such a guilty pleasure. I tried to side-step any conversations about “Is your baby sleeping through?” with other mums, through fear of what they’d think. Sometimes I would confide guiltily that she slept with us, most often being met with looks of disapproval and a plethora of well-meaning advice on how to ‘break the habit’. The truth was I didn’t want to stop, I loved having her close to me and I can still remember now the feeling of my eyes burning with tiredness, but forcing them to stay open so I could watch her just a little bit longer as she lay her head on my breast and slept deeply, snuggled up tight to me.
She slept in our bed until she was two and a half, when we were gifted a beautiful hand-me-down white child’s bed, which she was eager to use. So we would start the night with her in her own room and then at some point during the night she would pad down the hall and crawl into bed with us until morning. This worked well and enabled me to honestly answer the “Is she in her own bed now?” question.” I would confidently answer in the affirmative, and just omit the fact that it wasn’t all night.
Self weaning
At two and a half she also self-weaned, a beautifully calm experience for both of us. We had already stopped the night time feeds, she had got into the habit of lying on top of me and feeding constantly and neither of us was getting enough sleep. I prepared myself for the worst and nights of tears and heartache, but I wore a bra (to hinder access!) and explained to her that the “milkies” didn’t work at night anymore, but they would always be available for cuddles. Much to my amazement, she accepted that without any questioning and not a tear was shed. Her day feeds had started to drop as she got busier and eventually we were down to just the bedtime feed. One night she told me that she was having trouble getting any milk out, so I explained that one day soon my milk might run out, but it would be ok and we could still have cuddles. A few nights later she turned to me and said “Mama, they’ve stopped working”, so I asked her if she’d like milk in a cup from now on instead, she agreed and that was that, she was weaned.
Thankfully I didn’t have long to mourn the end of our breastfeeding journey, as four weeks later I was pregnant with our youngest daughter. Our eldest continued to come into our bed at some point during the night, which admittedly got a bit cramped by the time I was heavily pregnant. We had an amazing natural home birth and our youngest arrived calmly at home in our living room. We knew it was too risky to have a toddler share a bed with a baby, so our youngest started off in a moses basket and I would get up to feed her in a chair. This worked for the first few weeks, but soon the tiredness of looking after two kicked in, along with the fact I would often wake our eldest up when I returned to bed, so I would be in a cycle of getting one child back to sleep just as the other woke and so on.
Our eldest felt understandably unsettled with the arrival of her new sister, so we took the decision to bring her bed into our room and let our youngest sleep in our bed. This worked out well and everyone was happy and more rested. When our youngest was a few months old we moved house, so returned to co-sleeping a way of reassuring our eldest and for the first few months in the new house we all shared a family bedroom. Our eldest eventually grew confident enough to return to her old room and she would happily sleep through.
This was working well until a few weeks ago, when during the holidays, the impending return to school meant she started to wake with anxiety several times a night. Our eldest is highly sensitive, flinching at the slightest drop of water on her clothing, wonky sock seam or scratchy label, so once again we brought her bed into our room and used co-sleeping as a tool to reassure her. She immediately started sleeping through again, and we will stick with this arrangement until she feels ready to return to her own room.
Our youngest turned two last month, and is now very much at the wriggly toddler stage of sleeping, but she is still tucked up with us in our bed. We had a brief spell of me feeding her to sleep and then transferring her to her own room, but ironically, I just couldn’t sleep. I’d lie awake listening out for her, knowing that at some point soon she would be calling out for me. I missed her by my side and I definitely missed the dose of sleep-inducing oxytocin I got from feeding her. As it turns out, I need the bedtime feed to sleep as much as she does! So back in with us she came.
All Together
Part of me is anxious about what others may think, the fact that we share our room with our 5-year-old and our bed with a 2-year-old, but the truth is I love us all being together. I’m usually the last to bed, and I feel tremendously reassured as I close our bedroom door at night, that the people I love the most are safely tucked up in one room. I don’t have to strain to listen out for calls in the night, or worry about the tossing and turning of bad dreams. I can listen to them quietly breathing and snuffling and I know all is well.
I think that’s a cornerstone of attachment parenting, the fact it’s parenting by instinct. Humans are all too ready to shake off our animal ancestry, but in real terms we are not so very far removed. I am a happy mama bear when I have my cubs with me.
Choosing to attachment parent may not be an easy choice for some, there’s no doubt that it can be hard work to be available all the time, day and night. Being a calm and positive parent doesn’t always come easy, especially after a busy day at work. Parenting has tested my patience more than I ever thought it could, and there have been too many occasions where tiredness has given way to grumpiness and I haven’t responded to them in the way I would have liked. However, attachment parenting has been such a strong and guiding principle for me that it acts to anchor me, when tiredness and overwhelm threaten to engulf me. It has given me the skills to know when I could and should have done better, and given me the good grace to always apologise to them when I haven’t been the best mama I could have been.
My youngest still wakes for night feeds, sometimes seeming to feed for hours, I know I could make life easier for myself and I should probably think about night-weaning her, but I am so reluctant to let breastfeeding go. Our youngest will be our last, and I find myself a little melancholy at the prospect of the impending change in parenting seasons. I know with a heavy heart that the baby days are coming to an end, but new challenges await and I am so grateful that I have attachment principles to guide us on our way as we have the privilege of raising our beautiful girls into strong young women.
I’d read about the Green Parent writing competition with much excitement, having had a long-held ambition of making a success of writing. Attachment theory fascinates
me and the scientist in me was keen to write an informative and well referenced piece, but I realised that I am time poor, and I simply would not have the time to research a detailed article. I was growing increasingly disillusioned at my inability to think of topic, and was musing on this whilst getting my youngest daughter and I changed after swimming. She had just had some new goggles that day, and even though she was now dry and dressed she refused to take them off.
As I was getting myself dry, I bent down and she stretched up and helped herself to some milk, as she is oft prone to do when I am unencumbered with clothes. I looked down at her, on tippy toes, latched on whilst attempting to smile, resplendent in bright pink goggles and I laughed out loud to myself. Look what I would have missed had I not chosen this parenting path?! It was then that I knew what I wanted to write, something from the heart, something that summed up the past 6 years of pregnancy and breastfeeding and explained how much attachment parenting has meant to me.
What Attachment Parenting has Given Me
Attachment parenting has given us so much, co-sleeping has provided endless hours of cuddles and time to reconnect after I returned to my part-time job, babywearing has given me freedom and connection and the blissful heavy feeling of a baby transitioning into sleep on my chest and extended breastfeeding has given me connection, cuddles, a way to soothe away tears and the opportunity to hear my daughters thank me for the “Delicious milkies from inside Mama”. I still breastfeed my youngest to sleep, which is probably frowned upon by most conventional parents, but I think being fed to sleep in the arms of someone you love every night must be a pretty special feeling.
Most of what is written about attachment parenting is about the numerous benefits to babies and children, but do you know what? I think the benefits are as great for the parents themselves. It has given me confidence to trust my instincts and be the best parent I can be. The positive feedback flows both ways, I need this connection as much as they do. When I look back at my days of mothering young children, I think I will see that I was constantly and earnestly attempting to do the right thing, and succeeding some of the time at least, and I know that I have attachment parenting to thank for that.
Gemma lives in mid-Devon with her husband and two daughters, aged 5 and 2. Gemma has a Biological Sciences degree and currently works part-time for an agricultural college, but aspires to a simple homemade life with her family, full of creativity, good food and hygge.
