There's no doubt that parenting provides some
environmental choices. Do you go the disposable diaper route, or opt for
cloth? How about organic baby food? Can you transport your little ones without using tons of fossil fuels? Are there any safe plastics, from baby bottles to pacifiers? So when I sat down to read
this article on environmental parenting, I was interested to see what the author recommended.
A little ways into the article, I read this: "Attachment Parenting is a much kindler, gentler alternative to the old 'let them cry it out' school."
Um, okay. So part of raising a "natural" baby is attachment parenting? And what exactly does this have to do with environmentalism? I'll answer my own question with "nothing" unless your crib was made from thousand-year-old rain forest trees and asbestos.
Since the author brought it up, here's my stance: I think attachment parenting is great, as long as the parent or parents are happy with it. I don't think babies who co-sleep are going to develop into whiny, dependent little parasites. However, I also don't believe that babies who sleep in a crib and are sleep-trained are traumatized and full of abandonment issues. Oh, and from where I stood, when I did some sleep training with my daughter, it was the kindler, gentler way to go. Take my word for it. Because of course, one of the little secrets of parenting here is that it's a balance between your child's needs and your own needs.
I think the connection in the article is supposed to be a groovy, get-back-to-nature kind of parenting philosophy that embraces eco-conscious choices. Problem is that when you create a dogma based on unrelated things, you lose some folks. Like me, for example.
One of the things that really irritates me is when some proponents of attachment parenting like the author claim it's the right thing to do because it is practiced all over the world. Yeah, so is child labor. You know, in many parts of the world, people co-sleep because they have a one-room house. But there's this creepy tendency to want to pick and choose which things we're gonna romanticize as "natural" and which we ignore because they don't fit that romantic notion. And by the way, "instinct-driven" my ass. So I guess those of us who didn't go the baby-wearing, co-sleeping route are ignoring our natural instincts. Because no secret primal knowledge convinced me that it was a good thing for me to be pissed off all day long because I was the milk vending machine every fifteen minutes at night.
Now if you will excuse me, I need to go recycle something.
