My wife & I are preparing for our first born and in the deluge of parenting books, we have been reading Dr. William Sears' Attachment Parenting book. When I saw Time magazine's cover article this week about the same topic, it seemed the perfect opportunity to share my own opinion of what has recently become a controversial topic. Child rearing is itself already an emotionally charged topic, and Attachment Parenting both has it's disagreements with the "prevailing wisdom" and it's own set of opinionated hard-liners.
Like any topic which enters the public debate, each side focuses on criticising the extremists on the other side. It's easier to look good in an argument with a fanatic than with if your opponent is reasonably-opinioned and actually willing to discuss the grey areas between black and white.
I was first interested in a non-traditional parenting model after reading the Continuum Concept by Jean Liedloff. While I thought that her opinions of the indigenous cultures that she studied were somewhat idealized, the emotional honesty which her subjects exhibited inspired me to research modern applications of her concept. She describes people who are able to live life honestly and forthrightly, living confidently in the moment without holding onto the bumps and bruises that we all get along the way any longer than necessary. That is the way I want to live my life.
As much as we want to belive otherwise, morality is as much about fashion as the latest shoe styles, albeit on a much slower timeline.
So, what is attachment parenting?
In one sentence, Attachment Parenting means learning how a child communicates his/her needs, and responding to those needs in a way that creates an expectation of safety and trust.
This style of parenting takes advantage of the intuitive wisdom of human/child relationships.
This mirrors my attitude to technology in general: modern western technology allows us to manipulate a great deal of our environment, but our tendency, since we percieve that we can control our selves & our environment to our satisfaction, is to do so, to wield the magic wand we have discovered. The great oversight in this action is that we often times end up ignoring the millions of years of free Research & Development that Mother Nature has already undertaken. Recent trends in biomimicry are starting to reverse this trend - to incorporate the evolved wisdom of many many generations of trial & error.
The recent discovery of mirror neurons demonstrates that we humans are hared-wired to be social, empathic creatures. Why not take advantage of this existing circuitry? I'm about to be a father, and people ask me all the time if I'm "ready." My answer is always vague, usually conaining the words "excited" and "terrified." One of my comforting thoughts is appreciating the fact that I and my family have so many advantages already going for us. My wife & I are skilled in highly-demanded work, and have the opportunity to be well compensated for our labor. We live in a country which grants a great deal of freedom of In summary, a lot of people have, for thousands of years, been successfully raising children with far less education, resources, and support than we have now.
Confidence is a tricky game. You want to be confident enough to I feel I also have to acknowledge, especially as a first time parent, that this is all experimental and I may well decide that, after not sleeping for 2 months, it's more realistic to teach my son early that hey, it's a tough world out there and you don't always get what you want. But for now, I'm going to try to love him the best way I know how.
This post was originally left as an unpublished draft. Published as work-in-progress in November 2026 for historical reference.