My Family and Other Globalizers | Parenting theories have a counterpart in fad diets – both lack common sense balance

For his first six months in this world, my son had rarely slept more than half-an-hour at a time. And his long waking hours were passed crying inconsolably. I remember wondering what I was doing wrong. I was constantly by my baby’s side trying to soothe him, and yet could not seem to do so.

This left me with a conundrum. Was my baby crying because I was not doing enough to meet his needs, or because I was doing too much? My husband seemed to believe the latter. “Just put him down and let him cry for a while,” the spouse once said offhandedly, after having watched me bounce, sing, and sway Ishaan for hours into the early morning.

Exhortations like these used to make me furious – feeding the “mom rage.” The idea of just leaving the baby to bawl was like asking me to chop off a body part. I felt I’d already failed on so many counts:  failed to have a happy and content baby; failed to enjoy him uncomplicatedly. What my husband was asking me to do, to just put Ishaan down and walk away, would have felt like the greatest failure of all.

What’s more, I couldn’t believe that my “other half” had even dared to suggest it. It felt like an unhelpful, lazy idea that stemmed from some kind of male callousness, which I couldn’t begin to fathom. I had dark thoughts about male polar bears and komodo dragons eating their offspring.

This was all around the time that I’d encountered the “attachment parenting” philosophy espoused by William (Bill) Sears, an American pediatrician of considerable repute. Attachment parenting advises co-sleeping and breastfeeding on demand. Mothers are told to embrace the fact that they will no longer sleep well for a few years. Instead, they are advised to immediately, and sensitively, respond to their babies’ needs, holding them, stroking them, and singing to them. In the absence of this total devotion to the child, a mother risks causing emotional and development damage to the baby.

Attachment parenting has a wide following around the world. It is essentially a verbal elaboration of the kind of mother and baby pictures that fill glossy magazines, selling everything from moisturizing lotions to towels. The emphasis is on the gentle, fluffy, glowing. The look on the mother’s face in these shots is invariable infused with a transcendent joy. They convey the message that women somehow ascend to a different plane once they become mothers: and there they should stay, bathed in God’s grace and the approval of attachment parenting advocates. There is no room for rage here.

There is also scant room for the father. This is the first text I came across when I’d googled “attachment parenting, role of dads,” (or at least the first one where the link worked. Dr Sears’ page devoted to fathers, had fittingly refused to open):

“Practically speaking, Dad can do a lot: in addition to nurturing Mom, he can do everything other than nursing. Dad can change diapers, bathe, carry, hold, rock, sing, read books, play... However, most of the time his contact with the baby needs to be in the presence of Mom until it is obvious that the baby delights in spending time alone with him… If too often when the baby sees Dad, he loses Mom, he may resent and fear him, and try to avoid him. Fathers need to be the connection, not the disconnection.”

Even when the father is “involved”, the mother had to remain physically present. There was no escape for women from the heaven of motherhood.

More than a decade on, I can see attachment parenting as just one of a smorgasbord of parenting theories, all of which claim to have the answer. They have a counterpart in fad diets – eat fat, eat meat, don’t eat dinner, and so on. What both lack is common sense balance.

Mothers come in all shapes, sizes, and temperaments. Yet, the vast majority respond to their baby’s needs sensitively and as promptly as feasible. Sometimes, however, they might need to go to the bathroom before settling down to breastfeed, or to answer the telephone and talk to a friend for a while. They might even have to finish a work-related deadline, because they might actually want to work on something other than catering to the baby.

As a first-time mother to a cranky baby, however, I was vulnerable to the guilt implicitly manufactured by Sears’ writings, which I consumed voraciously. They resulted in much self-hate. If the only way to “bond” with my baby was to spend all 24-hours attending to his never-ending needs, with a smile on my lips, calm in my heart and no other expectations of my life, I felt I’d made a terrible mistake. I was not cut out to be a mother. Ergo: Mom Rage.

With hindsight, these feelings seem laughably overwrought. In the intervening years, the great truth revealed is that everything passes. My husband had tried to get me to see this early on. I remember him attempting to cheer me up after I’d managed to wrestle Ishaan to sleep following a six-hour crying jag. “I’m sure by the time he goes for a college interview he’ll have stopped crying,” he’d joked. But I hadn’t smiled in response.

The question that I’d wanted answered was: when would things change? And would I have been changed irrevocably by then? The answers, of course, were: ‘soon,’ and ‘yes – it’s called growing up'.