Child Psychology - How I Discovered Attachment Parenting

I was raised in what I percieve to be a typical 1970s/1980s American Midwest home. My dad worked as a bread delivery man, and my mom was an elementary school teacher. I was nursed for about 10 days, before my maternal grandmother finally convinced my mom that I would probably starve to death if she didn't switch to formula. I never slept with my parents in their bed. My mom was a substitute teacher after I was a year old, and by the time I was 5, she was back to fulltime teaching. I was a latchkey kid by the time I was in fourth grade, and the following were staples in my home: koolaid, toaster pastries, boxed Kraft Macaroni and Cheese, Oscar Meyer Bologna and ketchup sandwiches on wonder bread, and generic oreos/hydrox sandwich cookies.

I went to college deciding whether I wanted to be a special ed teacher or work in clinical psychology. During my junior year, one class I took spent a lot of time on theories of attachment and non-attachment. Eriksen's Theory of Personality really resonated with me, though it was not at all the way I had been raised:

from Erik Erikson on Wikipedia

The Erikson life-stage virtues, in the order of the stages in which they may be acquired, are:

1.hope - Basic Trust vs. Mistrust - Infant stage. Does the child believe its caregivers to be reliable?

2.will - Autonomy vs. Shame and Doubt - Toddler stage. Child needs to learn to explore the world. Bad if the parent is too smothering or completely neglectful.

3.purpose - Initiative vs. Guilt - Kindergarten - Can the child plan or do things on his own, such as dress him or herself. If "guilty" about making his or her own choices, the child will not function well. Erikson has a positive outlook on this stage, saying that most guilt is quickly compensated by a sense of accomplishment.

4.competence - Industry vs. Inferiority - Around age 6 to puberty. Child comparing self worth to others (such as in a classroom environment). Child can recognize major disparities in personal abilities relative to other children. Erikson places some emphasis on the teacher, who should ensure that children do not feel inferior.

5.fidelity - Identity vs. Role Confusion - Teenager. Questioning of self. Who am I, how do I fit in? Where am I going in life? Erikson believes that if the parents allow the child to explore, they will conclude their own identity. However, if the parents continually push him/her to conform to their views, the teen will face identity confusion.

6.love (in intimate relationships, work and family) - Intimacy vs. Isolation - Young adult. Who do I want to be with or date, what am I going to do with my life? Will I settle down? This stage has begun to last longer as young adults choose to stay in school and not settle.

7.caring - Generativity vs. Stagnation - the Mid-life crisis. Measure accomplishments/failures. Am I satisfied or not? The need to assist the younger generation. Stagnation is the feeling of not having done anything to help the next generation.

8.wisdom - Ego Integrity vs. Despair - old age. Some handle death well. Some can be bitter, unhappy, dissatisfied with what they accomplished or failed to accomplish within their life time. They reflect on the past, and either conclude at satisfaction or despair.

It made sense to me to meet the needs of babies and children as they came, and to not supress them or hurry them to another stage. This primarily has to do with stages 1 and 2 of Erikson's theory of Personality.

I was also influenced, after researching this information, by the work of Thomas Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth, which you can read about here: Attachment Theory

During my several months dating and engagement with my husband, we became close with a couple who practiced attachment parenting. The husband was my (then) boyfriend's boss. They had 3 sons when we met them, and their youngest was 18 months old, and still nursing. She had given birth to him at home with a midwife, and also had a homebirth with her next son. Hers was the first and only real life example I'd had of following a child's lead for sleep, for nursing, and fulfilling all of his wants on demand as often as she was able. Her other boys were not spoiled, dependent, clingy fellows, and I assumed that it would not be the case with their new baby either.

During my first pregnancy, I became a research NUT. I read everything I could get my hands on about pregnancy, its potential complications, childbirth, breastfeeding, vaccination, and childrearing. By the time our baby was born, I was convinced that I would breastfeed until she self weaned, I would not be letting her cry herself to sleep because of the potential for raising cortisol in her brain to dangerous levels, that the best and safest place for her to sleep was next to me, that we would delay her vaccines indefinitely until I had more chance to read and to talk to our pediatrician, and that we would be following the general tenets of Attachment Parenting to raise her.

As it turned out, she was a high need, constantly nursing, screamed if you put her down, stimulus seeking sort of baby. Just the exact sort of child who benefits greatly from the use of Attachment Parenting principles.

I am so glad that I was prepared to recieve the child with the personality that needed me to be open to attachment parenting. I have used many of the features of AP with our subsequent children, though I don't think any of them "needed" it as much as our first did.