Author: Art

Art Yuen is the KnowledgeBase Coordinator for Attachment Parenting International (API), a member of API's Board of Directors, and was a longtime leader of API-NYC in New York City, USA, where she lives with her 2 children and husband.

AP Month 2010 Blog Carnival – Full of Love

October is Attachment Parenting Month! The theme for AP Month 2010 is “Full of Love: parenting to meet the emotional and physical needs of children” with a focus on preventing childhood obesity.

During AP Month 2010, parents are challenged to re-examine their daily physical activities, nourishing routines and habits, and learn new ways to fuel both healthy emotional and physical growth.  The “envelope” in which we deliver guidance to our children provides the underlying degree of emotional connection and feeling that can become associated with physical nourishment and activity.

Explore with us the challenges we face in raising children who know the healthiest ways to be nourished in every aspect of life.  Participate in our Attachment Parenting Month blog carnival and share your experiences in keeping our children “Full of Love.”
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Parent Support is Prevention

Lydia and Zariah Schatz and children like them need our help now.  Their story underscores the critical urgency for evidence-based parenting support and information to counter physically and emotionally dangerous parenting tactics that proliferate.

Our hearts were ripped open to learned of the torment that Lydia Schatz,7, and her 11 year old sister Zariah suffered at the hands of those who were entrusted to love and nurture them safely into adulthood.  For Lydia, we are too late and we wish for her and other children like her, sweet peace and love at last.  For Zariah and other children, there is still life and hope here in our midst. **

Billions of dollars in public funding goes toward the physical health, crisis interventions, treatments and the related judicial processes for children and youth in our country.  Comparable spending and intense focus indicates that education is considered a real solution to the problem of helping children.  Meanwhile, it’s a well known secret that early experiences -especially parenting – are the most profound influences on learning capacity and social, emotional and psychological functioning.

Parents and caregivers are not passive guardians of children in the earliest years; we’re active participants in building their learning foundations and we need support, not blame, in this extraordinarily important role.  In the most simplistic view, spending on education can only be as successful as its antecedent:  early care. The void in parent education and support cannot be back-filled by more education and what’s more, the social pressure of school that many children face without a secure foundation can compound the challenges.
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