Forget rigid regimes, attachment parenting is the natural way. Claire O'Connell reports
As most parents know, from pregnancy onwards, people have plenty of opinions on how you should raise your child. From how to feed them to where and how much they sleep, and even whether you carry them around too much, parents are often at the receiving end of well-intentioned but sometimes confounding advice.
But if parents were on a secluded island, with no one to advise them on how to tend to their children, they would probably adopt a back-to-basics and natural approach, according to US paediatrician Dr William Sears who will visit Ireland this weekend.
He and his wife, Martha, a registered nurse, advocate "attachment parenting". It's a style that meets a child's individual needs by getting to know them and responding appropriately. "Attachment parenting is what a mother would instinctively do with her baby on that secluded island," explains Sears at his paediatric clinic in California, where he is known to his patients as Dr Bill. "It's just mothering from the heart."
The Searses developed their attachment parenting approach by observing families they worked with, and through their own experience of raising eight children - two of whom are also paediatricians at his practice - and seven grandchildren.
Between them, Bill and Martha have written around 30 books about aspects of parenting ranging from general baby care to nutrition and breastfeeding, behaviour and the traditional parental bugbear of sleep. But instead of dictating yet more advice to worn-out parents, they offer suggestions and broad-stroke approaches that complement each other.
They ground their philosophy in a suite of parenting tools they dub the "Baby Bs", which they believe bring parents and babies closer together. These include bonding after birth, breastfeeding, and practising baby-wearing, or carrying the infant in a sling.
They also encourage parents to keep the baby close at night rather than lodging the infant down the corridor in a separate nursery. "Night time is a scary time for little people, so bedding close to a baby helps the baby to be more secure at night," explains Sears.
Other Baby Bs encourage parents to believe in the baby's cries and to be wary of baby trainers who prescribe inflexible eating and sleeping routines in early infancy. "A baby's cry is a baby's language and responding to the baby's cry builds trust between parents and baby," says Sears.
So, as you may expect, the let-them-cry-it-out brigade is not part of the Sears camp. "That type of rigid, unresponsive care causes a distance to develop between mother and baby instead of an attachment," he says.
And before the demands of this list beckon parents towards that other Baby B - burnout - the attachment parenting approach finally adds in the catch-all tool of balance to even up the mix.
"Balance means knowing when to say yes and when to say no," explains Sears. "The reason we added that is because some mothers will carry things to the extreme so they don't take care of themselves, and I tell moms that what your baby needs is a happy rested mother."
Sears admits that his own upbringing was "reasonably the opposite" to the attachment parenting approach he now espouses. The child of a single mother, he says she did the best she could under less-than-ideal circumstances. So to help him raise their eight children with Martha, he drew his inspiration from the parents of the children in his care as a paediatrician.
"Over the 35 years I have been in practice, I have noticed that when parents practise many of these Baby Bs, their children are happier, they are better disciplined," he says.
"Basically these attachment tools are ways of getting parents and baby started, and if you get them started right, then they will ease into a way of life."
But, however utopian this may sound, Sears does live in the real world. Appreciating that families and individual temperaments can need some latitude, which is often lacking in more prescriptive baby manuals, he suggests that parents use as many of the attachment tools as their situation allows. "Some can practise all of these Baby Bs, others just a few, but it's to practise as many of them as possible," he says.
And the approach can also help families where parents work outside the home, according to Sears.
"I think attachment parenting is even more important than it used to be because today's parents are busier, many mothers have to work outside the home, they are juggling two jobs," he says. "And these tools, these Baby Bs, are a way of helping mothers reconnect with their infants when they don't have as much time during the day with them."
Some of the foundations of attachment parenting, such as breastfeeding, carrying and sleeping close to the baby, run contrary to common practice in US and Irish culture, and Sears acknowledges that parents who choose to practise them can come up against considerable negativity from well-meaning relatives, friends and even strangers. But he suggests that parents frame the approach as an investment in their children.
"This is a way of really enjoying your baby, it's the best investment you'll ever make."
He also maintains that, despite the desert-island parallels, attachment parenting is grounded in good science, which is a recurring theme through his books.
"I am what they call a science-based paediatrician, I say show me the science," he says.
"And the science is overwhelming in support of attachment parenting as influencing how these children turn out."
The Searses will talk next weekend at an Attachment Parenting International conference in Maynooth, Co Kildare.
For more details see www.attachmentparenting.org/kildareconf.shtml