Attachment Parenting: Instinctive Care for Your Baby and Young Child [Paperback]

Katie Allison Granju (Author), Betsy Kennedy (Author), William Sears (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 1, 1999

Grow a secure attachment with your children by listening to your heart

Popularized by bestselling pediatrician Dr. William Sears, "attachment parenting" encourages mothers and fathers to fully accept their babies' dependency needs. According to the growing numbers of attachment parenting advocates, consistent parental responsiveness to these needs leads to happy and emotionally well-balanced children.

This practical, comprehensive, and first-ever guide to today's most talked-about nurturing style, Attachment Parenting shows how some conventional childrearing advice can be detrimental, and urges you to trust your instincts on such important matters as:

• Responding attentively to your baby's cries

• Minimizing parent-child separation

• Avoiding "sleep training" for infants

• Breastfeeding according to your baby's cues instead of a schedule

• "Wearing" your baby in a cloth carrier rather than relying on "baby gadgets" such as plastic carriers and carriages.

In addition to expert advice from pediatricians, lactation consultants, and anthropologists -- as well as words of wisdom from hundreds of real parents -- Attachment Parenting includes an exhaustive list of print, Internet, and support-group resources. It's an indispensable, hands-on reference that allows you to confidently and joyfully develop a secure and loving bond with your young children.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

"Attachment to and dependency on parents... is a normal, healthy aspect of childhood and not something that needs to be discouraged." This quote from Attachment Parenting: Instinctive Care for Your Baby and Young Child sums up the attitude behind the growing shift in many Western cultures toward a labor-intensive but arguably more rewarding, effective, and "natural" way to raise children. This philosophy, termed "Attachment Parenting" by its champion, pediatrician and father of eight Dr. William Sears (author of the popular child-care manual The Baby Book, among others), sees infants not as manipulative adversaries who must be "trained" to eat, sleep, and play when told, but as dependent yet autonomous human beings whose wants and needs are intelligible to the parent willing to listen, and who deserve to be responded to in a reasonable and sensitive manner. As with Sears's books, there are no plans or schedules here, no specific prescriptions for what to do with your child. Techniques to facilitate connection and communication are outlined, but mostly the book is an exhortation to listen and to trust yourself, and to trust your child's ability to convey to you what he or she needs.

Information is provided in a well-organized format that parents will find useful. Common questions regarding some of Attachment Parenting's less orthodox tenets are answered, and each section of the book provides lengthy reading and resource lists, Web sites, and e-mail addresses. This book also provides a fairly broad discussion of how working parents can incorporate such a "high-touch" style of care into their busy schedules. The authors are sometimes painfully straightforward about the cost-benefit analysis parents must go through when deciding to work outside the home, but they do not patronize working parents by glossing over this difficult decision. They show how Attachment Parenting can be especially beneficial to these families and give advice on choosing child care, breastfeeding after returning to work, and the techniques for creating a breastfeeding-friendly workplace.

Given the overwhelming cultural paradigms that parents must resist if they are going to adopt this compassionate methodology, the book's sometimes defensive tone can be at least partially excused. As a whole, parents will find this a good overview of some compelling arguments for Attachment Parenting and a wonderful resource for delving deeper into the issues it addresses. How much of it they choose to integrate into their lives is, as the book emphasizes, their decision to make, with their baby. --Katherine Ferguson

From Library Journal

Drawing on the literature of Dr. William Sears, who provides the book's introduction, Granju (with the help of Kennedy, R.N., M.S.N.) offers a mother's insight into the concept of attachment parenting. Rather than the typical child care approach that provides a list of generic "do's and don'ts" during certain phases in a baby's development, the attachment theory posits that parents know their child better than so-called experts. Granju examines breast feeding, baby wearing, and the family bed as natural concepts conducive to raising healthy children. She relates numerous experiences of mothers pulled from Internet listservs. Patrons may be well served by using these addresses to engage in their own Internet discourse, but, unfortunately, these rather flat anecdotes, along with extensive lists of attachment parenting resources, comprise the bulk of the book. Attachment Parenting adds nothing that Sears hasn't already covered in more detail in his many respected and groundbreaking works. Purchase for public libraries where demand warrants.ALisa Powell Williams, Moline Southeast Lib., IL
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 336 pages
• Publisher: Atria Books; Original edition (August 1, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 067102762X
• ISBN-13: 978-0671027629
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.6 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (128 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #118,277 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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