Attachment Parenting
Attachment parenting is the name Dr. Sears has given parenting styles that involve closeness, intuition and listening to the baby's needs and desires rather than centering baby's routine around the parents' needs. Baby-wearing, breastfeeding for as long as possible, and the family bed are all mainstays of attachment parenting. It can be a beautiful thing when it works as advertised, and it can inflict guilt when it doesn't. Some might argue that the emphasis on closeness and breastfeeding imposes an undue burden on the mother who needs or wants to return to work earlier than six months after the child is born.
Dr. Sears assures readers that his tenets of attachment parenting are only an ideal, not something every parent must live up to all the time, though his assertion that you can't adhere to every principle all the time because "nobody's perfect" may lead you to suspect that full adherence to attachment parenting is in fact perfection. Dr. Cohen warns that trying to interpret a baby's every cry can drive a parent nuts. But Dr. Sears might tell you, that if your kids are acting up and you're going nuts because you don't know why, something's awry with your parenting style.
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