Tag Archives: attachment parenting

Emma explains: Night-weaning

20 Oct

Daisy asked me a little while ago to write something about my approach to night weaning my nearly three-year-old, as she knew I tend towards gentle methods. I’d been putting off writing this, as I’d been wavering between the ‘wait for her to do it in her time’ approach or the ‘let daddy take over at night’ approach.

‘Fairytale night’ by Iridescent Happiness on Deviantart.

My general parenting philosophies are to let my children develop at their own rate and to go with the flow unless something is a problem. My daughter had been in our bed and breastfed when she ‘asked’ every night since she was born and for the most part this had not caused a problem for us – she didn’t wriggle, and would just need a quick feed for her (and I) to drift off to sleep again. I hardly even had to wake up. This meant no crying and more sleep for all of us, including her older brother. I didn’t keep track of feeds. Some nights I’d feel like we swapped sides many times, other times I’d wake up stiff from not moving which meant she’d only fed once or twice.

My son had started sleeping through with no help from us around six months old. Some nights he’d need a comfort feed while teething, but once the tooth was through he’d go back to sleeping through again. However, he also spent most of the night in his cot and weaned completely at around 15 months when I was pregnant with my daughter, so the second time around has been a bit different.

I’d still been confident that she’d sleep better in her own time, and around her first birthday she did spend most of the night in her cot and I was hopeful that was going to be it. Then teething hit – she didn’t get her first tooth until just after her first birthday – and sleep went out the window. Since then it had never felt like the right time to change anything with nighttimes. The status quo was mainly working, we were waiting for all her teeth to come through, and it just seemed like too much effort. I hadn’t been feeling sleep-deprived, and I didn’t feel tied to the house, as she was quite happy to go to sleep for my husband if I was out. Another factor is that our spare room is not insulated and freezing and damp during the winter so it wasn’t a nice prospect to camp out there.

Image from The Vintage Moth.

Lately, however, I’d been getting more and more irritated by her feeding during the night. She would help herself and get annoyed if she couldn’t. I was feeling touched out and resenting the night feeds. She also didn’t seem to actually be drinking much, as she’d been dry overnight for months. The spare room had warmed up and had been aired out after winter. It was time to make a change.

So two weeks ago I told my daughter that mummy’s breasts were feeling too tired at night to give her ‘boowa’ anymore and that daddy would give her cuddles during the night instead. She took this really well and repeated it back to me. Night one I fed her to sleep as usual and she was still asleep as I went to bed. I lay awake for ages, unable to get off to sleep in a different bed and away from her, and I kept waiting for her to cry. The first time happened around midnight but didn’t last long, then she had another short cry maybe an hour later. I fell asleep and woke at 6am not having heard anything else and thought it must have gone really well. It turned out she’d woken a few more times and had a little cry then attached herself like a limpet to my husband when she realised I wasn’t there. My husband was tired but knew it was for the best.

‘Sleeping child’ by Bernardo Strozzi (17th century)

The second night started off the same but she woke around 9.30pm for a comfort feed. She fell asleep and I tried to transfer her to our bed but she woke and got really upset, asking me to stay with her. I felt terrible but left her with my husband and went to the spare room and she was quiet within a minute or so. Then I didn’t hear a peep out of her all night! She did apparently stir a couple of times but went back to sleep with a quick back rub. The next few nights went even better – still waking a few times but no crying, and she fell back asleep after a cuddle. ‘We’ve cracked this,’ I thought.

Then on night 6 I woke to hear her hysterically screaming and asking for me and ‘boowa’. This was completely different to the other nights and didn’t seem to be stopping, so I reluctantly went downstairs and hopped into bed and fed her. I lay there worrying that I’d undone the good work of the past few nights. However, I thought there was also a good chance her last molar was coming through and that she really needed the extra comfort that only my breast could provide. I needn’t have worried, though, as the next night was fine and she slept well. Even better, on night 8 she slept through for the first time ever! She’d stirred at 10.30pm for a quick cuddle then slept till 6.30am. Success! We had another ‘sore teeth’ night a couple of nights ago where I needed to go in and feed her, but last night she slept from 10pm to 7am again.

For me, two weeks of mostly uninterrupted sleep has been fantastic. Although I hadn’t been feeling deprived, I’m sure my ‘normal’ state has been slightly sleep-deprived for the last 4.5 years (from when my son was born), so I’d just got used to it. My patience and tolerance levels have risen, and I feel more ‘on to it’ in general. I’m also less annoyed by my daughter’s day feeds, and it seems to have improved her nursing manners. My breasts weren’t engorged in the slightest despite cutting night feeds, so that confirmed that she was hardly drinking anything anyway.

Cover for ‘The Land of Nod’ by Margaret Evans Price, 1916.

I’ll camp out in the spare room for a bit longer to make sure this new development sticks and once she’s sleeping consistently the plan is to try and get her sleeping in her own bed in my son’s room. As much as I enjoy co-sleeping, a nearly three-year-old takes up a lot of space in a queen-sized bed, and it will be nice to reclaim it for ourselves.

I’m glad we waited till this point to make a change, as she had the reasoning ability and maturity to cope well with it. So my experience of night-weaning has been remarkably painless, and should give some hope to any other long-term, night-feeding co-sleepers out there!

Emma

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A review, belatedly

22 May

Yay, my mum sent me the infamous Time article! Thanks, Mum! I feel very ‘attached’ to you right now! heh.

The New Zealand version does not feature Jamie Lynn Grumet – it features an especially awesome (apparently) cricket player. Cos, you know, New Zealanders would much read about dudes who play cricket than the way humanity is choosing to nurture its next generation, right?

Caution: contains misinformed opinions on normal weaning age in humans

Unfortunately, that dodgy editorial decision seems to reflect the tenor of the piece itself.

This version contains five pages of text and doesn’t feature a single woman with her boobs and/or toddlers hanging out.

As has been said a million times elsewhere all over the internet, it’s one-sided bit of journalism that basically derides and pokes fun of Dr William Sears. It blames him for the recent ‘fashion’ for attachment parenting, which it postulates as a kind of fly-by-night cult that effectively chains women to their children at the expense of their careers, their marriages, the feminist movement and even the wellbeing of the children themselves.

One example, from the introduction:

… the prevalence of this philosophy has shifted mainstream American parenting toward a style that’s more about parental devotion and sacrifice than about raising self-sufficient kids.

Look. Attachment parenting Parenting to me, at the stage we are at (Miss Bee is 17 months old) is about listening to my daughter and providing her with what she needs using the easiest, cheapest, most natural tools I have at my disposal as a human being: the warmth of my arms, the calming and constant sense of my breathing close to her ears, the milk from my breasts – when she needs it.

I will teach my daughter self-sufficiency by encouraging her to go out and explore the world and making sure that she knows that when it gets scary (and hell, of course the world gets scary), she can come back to all this good parent-y stuff – arms, the soothing closeness of my breathing, milk, love – if she needs it. The alternative, I guess (the non- ‘extreme’, less ‘trendy’ way?) is to use the first few months of her life to embark on a crusade to teach her that she must get used to living away from me?

I started collecting more examples of things I wanted to argue against from this article, but goddammit I got too het up about it. Read the article yourself (or one of the bazillion reviews out there) if you enjoy being het up – I don’t, really. I am going to go and cheer myself up by giving my daughter a great big cuddle. God, look at me – clearly all I care about is the coolest new parenting Thing!

Me and Miss Bee and our carrier,  ‘now on every list of must-have baby gear’ according to Time. I’m all about what’s hot right now.

I will make one last snide observation though: Kate Pickert’s article makes just enough mention of Jean Liedloff’s The Continuum Concept (AP-ish seminal text, published in 1975) to make the implication that she couldn’t know jack about parenting because she never had kids (‘Despite her deep interest in the connections between mothers and babies, Liedloff never had children. She died in 2011 on a houseboat in Sausalito, Calif., where she lived with her cat, Tulip’). WTF Kate Pickert? You wrote a cover story for Time magazine on parenting, making all sorts of judgy-wudgy observations on the topic, and you never had kids!*

Daisy

*Full disclosure: clearly I’m not a professional journalist like Kate Pickert, because I only have one piece of circumstantial evidence for this fact: the fact that her Twitter account mentions she is ‘owner of a delightful pointer/lab mix’, which (to give her the benefit of the doubt) I don’t think she’d highlight like that if she had spawned.

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Emma Explains: A note from an ‘extended’ breastfeeder

20 May

Hi everyone,

We love Emma so much (see this post, and this one) we’ve given her her own column. We’re calling it ‘Emma Explains’ because Emma’s tends to like to post when she gets a bit bolshy about something. Often some misunderstanding that’s becoming pervasive in regards to attachment/crunchy/(ahem)normal parenting: a philosophy that Emma approaches very practically. Emma gets bolshy so very eloquently that we reckon everyone can benefit from her explanations. Here’s one to get the ball rolling!

Miss Bee having some mummy time in the sunny time, 16 months. This little black duck ain’t gonna be giving up her ‘mook’ any time soon!

(Apologetic note: Emma wrote this in the eye of the s***storm that went down when the Time cover was first doing the rounds – ideally, for currency’s sake, I should have posted it sooner. Indulge me and read it anyway – I strongly feel that a story like this is always relevant, no matter what’s happening in the wider world – or what the media tells you is happening.)

Daisy

I’m Emma, and I breastfeed my 2 ½ year old. Shocked? According to a large number of Stuff commenters this is disgusting and  tantamount to child abuse. Although it’s saddening to read these sorts of comments, it’s par for the course in a society that doesn’t value breastfeeding and sexualises breasts. I know that nothing I could say would change the opinions of this sort of commenter, but I like to think that by quietly going about my business, and breastfeeding my daughter wherever and whenever, I’m doing my bit to normalise natural-term breastfeeding (a more appropriate term than ‘extended’ breastfeeding, which has negative implications).

Mother and Child by Quin Sweetman

I started out breastfeeding not because it was ‘best’ or in order to get all the touted benefits of breastfeeding but because I’m a mammal, I have breasts and milk to feed my young, and I could. I don’t think breastfeeding should be seen as anything remarkable or special –
it’s just the biological norm. That’s not to say I haven’t had problems. However, I was lucky to have access to good support, and once I got over any initial problems, I found it easy and convenient.

Just like breastfeeding in general is a biological norm, so is natural-term breastfeeding. The average age of weaning worldwide is said to be around 4 years old, and in general children who are allowed to self-wean do so between 3 and 4. Kathy Dettwyler, an anthropologist who’s studied natural weaning age, has looked at comparative weaning age in other primates and found they generally wean before their offspring’s permanent molars come in: the equivalent would be around 6 for humans. So there’s no fixed age where a child ‘should’ wean, but it’s certainly a lot longer than 6 months or a year (when people commonly stop).

One common argument against natural-term breastfeeding is that you can’t breastfeed once your baby has teeth. This is nonsensical – some babies are born with teeth, some don’t get them till after 1. At any rate, their teeth are covered by their tongue when they feed (try sucking on your own finger and you’ll see what I mean). Some babies will bite, but there are ways around this and it’s not inevitable.

The Breastfeeding Mother – Marguerite Gérard (1761-1837)

Another argument is that it’s ‘disgusting’ once a child can walk over and ask for a breastfeed. Well, even newborn babies ‘ask’ to feed by displaying feeding cues like mouthing, sucking on their hands, headbutting your chest etc. Why should it be any worse for a child who can verbalise the same thing? I think it’s sweet when my daughter comes up and asks “Can I have some “boowa” (milk), please?”

Many comments on Stuff also stated that breastfeeding is unnecessary once a baby is on a good diet of solid food. The problem with this view is that it sees breastfeeding as just about food, when it’s actually so much more. A breastfeed can be a snack, a drink, pain relief, quiet time, or just a little comfort in a big and overwhelming world. Breastfeeding for comfort is seen as being a bad thing, but it can be such a useful tool in your parenting arsenal when you have a toddler. And far from making them clingy, it can help foster their independence: they know they can always come back to mum when they need. Yes, some breastfed toddlers are clingy, just like some non-breastfed toddlers are clingy. Personality is more of a factor than feeding method.

Breastmilk also continues to be a good source of nutrition and immune support after 1. It doesn’t suddenly turn to dishwater, like some people, including doctors, seem to think!

The most offensive view about natural-term breastfeeding is that it’s just for the mother’s benefit and is somehow sexual. Some commenters even went as far as saying it was child abuse!

Anyone who has breastfed a toddler will know that it’s not for the mother’s benefit. Breastfeeding a toddler can be lovely at times, but also very frustrating. They’re so much bigger and more wriggly, and can be very demanding (teaching nursing manners can help with this). At times, I’d be happy if my daughter stopped tomorrow. She still loves it though, and I can’t see her stopping any time soon. I love our snuggly, quiet moments together too. She’s such a busy toddler that it’s nice to reconnect in this way a few times a day.

The sexual thing is just plain wrong. It’s not even remotely sexual when they’re a little baby, so why should it be any different as they get older? You see your child naked every day, wipe their bottoms when they’re toilet training, kiss them, hug them – none of these are sexual, so why would feeding in a way they’ve always done be? They have no idea that breasts are dual purpose, or that other people view them as sexual.

Amamentação: Breastfeeding, Camboinhas, Niterói. Tribo Tekoa Mboy-Ty – Ruy Barbosa Pinto

Despite all this, I didn’t necessarily start out intending to be breastfeeding a 2 ½ year old. I decided I’d aim to get to at least 2, as recommended by the WHO, and then see how things went. When you’re breastfeeding your child every day you don’t notice them changing and getting older. In some ways, it’s no different feeding her now to when she was a baby. She just takes up more space on my lap! My older son stopped feeding when he was 16 months. The thought of him feeding any time after this seemed weird to me, as that was no longer part of our relationship. So I get why people who aren’t feeding their own toddler would see it as weird.

They’re welcome to their opinions as long as they don’t stop me from doing what I’m doing.

Emma’s little girl and her boowa

I don’t know when she’ll stop wanting to breastfeed. As I said, we’re just taking it one day at a time. We’re not having any more children, so when she does stop it will be bittersweet.

Any frustration of feeding a toddler is swept away when I look down at her half-asleep and smiling, having some of beloved “boowa”. I’ll treasure those moments forever.

Emma

Note: Most images in this post come from the awesome Beautiful Breastfeeding.

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Lize’s word on the web: let’s take boobs seriously.

12 May

This post was never going to happen.

Then “the Time breastfeeding cover story drama” unfolds and it reminds me of how annoyed I am with our Western society at large.

It all started two weeks ago when I read this article by Emma Pickett.  Found it wonderfully inspirational, made me want to “fight for our right to party” and allow all that fabulously feminist notions to bubble all up out of me and go into full on rant mode:  society has gone mad, boobs are for babies too.
(It’s really so insulting to me that I am of such limited capacity that I can only be a ‘breastfeeding mum’ at one moment in time and that I can’t be a woman, thinking/craving sex the next.)  I love how Emma (I’m going first name basis, I like this woman) really fleshed this idea out and made me want to get mad at society for being  (allow me to indulge in this Kiwi endearing saying) dicks.  Boobs are for “your man”. What?!
It also mentions the delightful read Fresh Milk
(thank you Z for lending it to me).  I too can highly recommend Fiona Giles’ masterpiece.

The reading tied in quite nicely to this horrific 60 Minute insert
I watched with one eye on the telly (whilst working late) just a few nights prior.  Are women getting breast enlargement for the sake of the Western world’s bizarre(?) insistence on defining beauty as having a large-pair-of-knockers.  Yes other cultures too go to extremes: Chinese women too put themselves through hell to satisfy their men’s desires (foot binding), so it’s not just “us”…. except that the act of surgically enlarging your breasts through dangerous surgery is absolutely normalized in today’s culture and foot binding is absolutely not-  Time’s have changed and after all…. well guess what.  Times should be changing for the Western culture and the impact it has on our women.
Mmm, I’ve accidental made it sound like I don’t want you to get breast implants.  I guess I don’t mind if you want to get a breast implant, none of my business. it’s not really about that, it’s about how our decisions and choices are influenced, much like how Breastfeeding campaigners are saying, they’re arguing for breastfeeding and not against you bottle feeding.  It’s all about cultural perception.  aka Please people.  Why are we still living in “a man’s” world.  Don’t get me wrong.  I LOVE “the man”.  I think “he’s” awesome.  I think our society benefits from both sexes equally (obviously), and don’t want to “bash” “the man”… I just don’t want “him” to define me us a woman and influence my decisions on what-it-means-to-be-a-woman so completely that I can’t determine my own destiny.

Why are the young women growing up to believe that they’re only as awesome as their breast size?  And then when it comes time to feed your baby with your beautiful full breast of gorgeous milk and nutrients they ask you to leave the restaurant or pool or park or any-public-area-where-you-might-offend “the general public”.  Yes people, we live in a world where 5 years ago this was the case, right here in New Zealand, first country to give women the right to vote. Breastfeeding in public to be a legal right?!! World gone mad.

“The Human Rights Commission has heard astonishing examples of negative reactions to breastfeeding in places such as swimming pools, food courts and schools.” Photo / Herald on Sunday

To end the conversation here. Today.  Women give birth to a child.  They then breastfeed their child.  Civilization as we know it today would not have survived if Mr. Caveman felt uncomfortable with this concept.

I have gone so far off topic, why did “the” Time article inspire me to “throw in my two cents worth”.  I think the one end of the debate focusing on a woman breastfeeding her child beyond what is seen to be the norm, irritated me.  But then there’s so many aspects of the comments on this cover that upsets everyone.  Breastfeeders, non-Breastfeeder, Attachment Parent-ers, non AP-ers, feminists, non-judgmentalist, crunchies, non-crunchies.  EVERYONE is annoyed.
I can tell you what annoys me this morning, after the dust has settled a bit… is that now we’re labeling what is in my opinion a very natural way of parenting as Attachment Parenting.  More labels.  argh will it never end.  Yes I do most of the things that AP suggests is “the right way to parent” but my mum did it too and she never read a book on parenting… she didn’t have time to… she was too busy raising her children.
Which is what I should be doing right now.  Why am I even giving my (half arsed, boring, rushed) opinion on this media fueled frenzy of a nonsense story.

D&Z you better edit/delete/cut/slash this post.  Rambling of a crazy person.

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it’s Time … to breastfeed your very large child

11 May

So the internets are buzzing with this Time article, and particularly the cover, featuring blogger and natural parent Jamie Lynne Grumet. Attachment parenting adherents everywhere are up in arm at the provocative question ‘Are you Mom enough?’ and disgusted with the one-sided coverage of the piece.

To my profound annoyance, I can’t get my hands on this article to read (I only ever pick up Time at my parents’ place, on the other side of the world from me right now), so I can’t offer a review here …

but I almost wonder if I need to?

Recently I have only been disappointed in Time‘s coverage of the big issues I feel passionately about (I’m thinking in particular of this article on how the ‘first nine months’ determine lifelong health) – there’s never much more insight than I tend to get out of a two-and-a-half-minute Google on my own initiative, and nothing that makes me rethink my own convictions. My dad, in typical granddad fashion (he’s really embracing the role), has been mumbling for a while about the declining usefulness of Time, and I suspect he might have a point.

Another Time cover, another provocative image of motherhood

But I have another suspicion about all this up-in-arms-ness (this article is typical of the general reaction).

It’s utterly pointless.

With very little exception, the parenting blogs I read, all the Facebook and Twitter activity I witness in the parenting sphere, all the random articles I find my way to elsewhere online (and ok, ok, to a certain extent I’m seeking them out) are grounded in the philosophies of attachment parenting. Especially the ones where people are passionately trying to explain the merits of a particular philosophy, arguing their own points of view, using their own experience to back this up, or (it has to be said) judging other parenting choices.

Because I think that, to a large extent, the mummies who read – and when a modern mummy reads parenting stuff, it’s online, largely Facebook and Twitter-directed – are the ones who come to believe in the benefits of attachment parenting.

And so a huge discourse has developed. Mummies passionately expounding the benefits of AP: babywearing, BLW, EBF, cloth nappies, water birth and encapsulated placentas. Mummies forwarding heartwarming little stories about mothering in third-world nations. Mummies sharing images of triumphant water births. Have any of us ever noticed that no one is arguing back?

A triumphant water birth.
Good lord I feel blasphemous.

That we are, perhaps, the only ones who are listening to each other?

Welcome to the internet; also known as the Crunchy-verse?

Attachment parents all over the internet are up in arms about this piece, worrying about what it’s doing for their cause. It’s my suspicion that, overwhelmingly, those who are not ‘doing’ attachment parenting are not going to be reading Time magazine. At most, people who don’t know about AP, even the people who should know about it (and we all want to spread the message) are going to look at that cover picture somewhere online, and have a gut reaction to it.

My gut reaction = Jamie Lynne Grubet is beautiful. I love the expression on her face. It’s not the expression you usually see on the face of a beautiful blonde woman on the cover of a magazine: that is, it’s not ‘Come to bed with me’, it is  ‘I am feeding my kid, and I believe that is a good thing, and I don’t give a shit what you think’. It is pride. And her son is beautiful, and this image warms my heart and makes me feel proud to be an AP mummy, and one who breastfeeds a toddler, and hell, a woman at all.

To that extent, I’m glad it’s out there.

Daisy

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Lize’s word on the web: I found it – the secret’s out!

2 Apr

Seriously - do we NEED this - really?

The Analytical Armadillo has such a lovely bunch of followers, always so active on Facebook too.  This is where I found the Robopax baby rocker, the perfect solution, the answers to all our wishes come true =

“Sleepless nights and stressful days are at an end for parents of young babies”.
How it works:
an automatic baby rocker designed to recreate the comforting conditions experienced in the womb” takes care of your child.  It’s “an extra pair of hands that will rock your baby leaving him/her happy and contented so busy parents can get on with other things or get some undisturbed sleep”. Easy, Done.
um.
no.
I’m not usually overly opinionated in these entries, but forgive me, I have to sympathise with some of the opinions voiced on this post.  Even if you weren’t a die hard AP (attachment parent), surely you would see straight through this marketing malarkey…. UNTIL pointing out that, yes maybe it is a little ridiculous, but isn’t it also true (tragically) that before you had your fist child you too bought the bouncer and the play mat, the expensive baby bath, the newest model buggy, and and and only the best…
Yikes.  it’s so easy to judge… isn’t it.  still, I hope new-parents-to-be understand and expect that holding your new baby is a big part of this parenting business.  it’s a joy, sometimes a bit (insanely) tiring, but over O so very very fast.
Good luck, hang in there and sweet dreams all.
Lize.

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What’s the Word on the Web: “crunchy parenting”

3 Feb

We a delighted to introduce a new snazzy segment from the infamous Lize – enjoy!

Daisy & Zelda

Why have I only now come across the term “crunchy” or “crunchy parenting” when referring to folks who choose a (for lack of a better term) “natural parenting” style?

Image c/- totalchunk.com

I found ‘Just West of Crunchy’ through Mama Eve’s FB page…. mmm ok I guess I just gave it away… I’m a bit of a crunchy myself it seems, although (since this is my first post) I must set the record straight:

I do not like to define my parenting style as X, Y or Z. And I do not like to interfere with yours. I like to read EVERYTHING and take what I like/need/approve of… Not judging is this great new thing I’ve discovered, especially since becoming a new mum. I don’t like to close myself off, relax into a philosophy and slip into a comfortable state of knowing that I’m right and you’re probably wrong, if you don’t belong to my chosen named parenting path. Respect is the name of the game.

hmmm crunchy (image c/-fiddlersgreenfarm.com)

So back to “crunchy”. What does it mean? Since there isn’t a wiki entry for it yet, I thought I could take a crack at explaining it from the quick research I managed. “Crunchy” like “granola” refers to a person practicing a healthy, natural style of living like recycling and eating organic foods, maybe even growing their own tomatoes… so you don’t have to have children to be crunchy. Families that are crunchy (not even sure i’m using the term correctly here! “that are”?) tend to do the “natural parenting” STUFF like use cloth nappies, make their own baby food, practice Attachment Parenting, wear their babies etc. Hence “crunchy parenting”.

So there you go. Crunchy. And the real reason I wanted to know what it means – cause I thought this really funny!

Sh*t Crunchy Mamas Say

(Cause sometimes you have to laugh at yourself a bit!)

- Lize

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