APtly Said – Page 38

Getting through the Paris attacks with an old neighbor

On November 13, 2015 — as I pushed through the realities of daily life with two young children — I coped with a lot of emotion: fear for my sister-in-law, who was in Paris on business…relief when she let us know she was unharmed…and sadness that something so horrible could happen.

As I scrolled through Facebook the next morning, I happened upon a post of inspiring quotes from Fred Rogers.

I’m a bit obsessed with Mr. Rogers. Like many of us, I watched his public children’s television show, Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, every day when I was young. When I became pregnant with my second child, I suffered from hyperemesis gravidarum (severe morning sickness), so I reluctantly allowed my older daughter more screentime than I would have liked while I was incapacitated. The slow pace, and gentle, educational content of Mr. Rogers’ show allayed many of my concerns about my toddler watching TV. I started researching Fred Rogers, a wonderfully loving man in all aspects of his life. I ended up buying books of his quotes and insights, and look to them frequently for inspiration. His love and acceptance of all people is an ideal I try to live up to everyday.

I opened the article. Mr. Rogers got me through preschool, a difficult pregnancy and the challenges of daily life. He could get me through Paris.

And he did:

“When I was a boy and would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, ‘Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.’ To this day, especially in times of disaster, I remember my mother’s words, and I am always comforted by realizing that there are still so many helpers in this world.” ~ Fred Rogers

As a mother and API Leader, Attachment Parenting is often on my mind — but usually in a very immediate sense. I answer questions about bedsharing and breastfeeding. I use positive discipline to get through a toddler’s tantrum. Mr. Rogers reminded me of why I chose Attachment Parenting in the first place: to raise empathic children who will be the helpers of this world…because what this world really needs is more people who grew up feeling deeply what Mr. Rogers always told us:

“I like you just the way you are.”

(Photo of Fred Rogers from Snappy New Day.com)

I am a present father

Attachment Parenting (AP) helps me every day to be a present father.

I am the father of 2 little boys: Dante, almost 3, and Gael, a 6-month-old baby. Right after my first son was born, I discovered Attachment Parenting. It made so much sense to me that it inspired me to not only become an API Leader and create an API Support Group here in Brazil — API Rio — but also to write and speak about Attachment Parenting.

Personally, the greatest thing about Attachment Parenting is that it helped me to find my way in my own parenthood. AP helped to show me how I could be the father I wanted to be. AP guided me to where I could find my place as an active and conscious father — an attached father.

I obviously can’t give birth or breastfeed, but I can foster the secure attachment I want to build with my sons through a whole lot of other actions. I can listen to my child’s cry and take his needs seriously, especially because a baby cries not only because he is hungry but also scared, too cold, too hot, tired, hurting or anything else. I can also carry my son in slings and sleep next to him at night.

Everything I learn about Attachment Parenting helps me understand my role as an involved father, not a mere helper. Being a father is way beyond just performing tasks and helping out. It is all about caregiving.

As kids grow, discipline starts taking a major place in our daily lives. I could do like other men and delegate the responsibility to the mothers and other caregivers, but Attachment Parenting shows me how I could take responsibility through positive discipline instead. I participate in understanding how the behavior of my kids reflect their needs and feelings. I get to genuinely help my older son get through frustration and temper tantrums. I get to be an empathic human being.

This is why I am so grateful to Attachment Parenting: It helps me to assume my real role and responsibilities as a father.

The root of bullying is shame

By Dr. Shefali Tsabary, PhD, clinical psychologist and founder of #EndShame. Reposted with permission.

There is a new “discipline” fad going around: Your kid does something “bad” — you post it on the Internet. You put a sign around their neck that defines their “crime” for all the world to see. After all, when they win trophies, we do the same, don’t we?

The Internet has taken on the form of the public shaming square. The belief is that communal shaming is far more powerful than shaming on a one-on-one basis.

The tragedy here is that responses have been “high-fives” applauding the parents for being brave to put their children’s limitations out there.

This doesn’t surprise me, given that millions just don’t know what to do when their kids’ behavior goes awry. Desperate, many are willing to try just about anything, which accounts for the popularity of many of these latest “discipline” fads.

Parents truly believe that this sort of public shaming will leave a long-lasting impact on their children, ensuring that they will never engage in negative behaviors again. Little do they realize that these reactions do little to create the introspection necessary to limit negative behaviors and all to do with creating shame, which is the true driver behind them.

When we enforce discipline on our children, we are punishing them. We may not like to admit this, but these actions in the name of “discipline” are highly punitive — not just obvious ones but also our passive-aggressive ones.

Any “discipline” that is enforced by an action that the parent does to the child is punitive on some level. It is the opposite of allowing consequences to teach our children. And our children know there is something desperately askew in this method.

Children resent being punished, on a public level or on a subtle level — resent us for punishing them. To punish only develops shame, which transforms into hostility, while further into the teens can lead to serious acting-out. In contrast, allowing natural consequences to teach a child develops self-discipline, which is what we want in our children.

Enforced discipline does the exact opposite of developing self-discipline in our children. Punishment undercuts the teaching power of natural consequences.

Oh, it’s certainly true that you can bully kids into good behavior. And not just kids. Husbands and wives, bosses at work and some of higher rank in the armed forces have long bullied to get the results they want.

The fact is, bullying works — for a time. Then it boomerangs.

When we bully someone into conforming, we might well destroy what may be the last shreds of self-worth the individual has. Because it’s only from a low sense of their worth that any child engages in bullying another child — just as this is the only reason a parent bullies their own child, a spouse bullies their spouse or a superior bullies someone of lower rank in the forces…a topic we’re increasingly hearing about in the media.

While people can be bullied into behaving a certain way for a time, human beings only live a lifetime as good people doing good things for others when they feel good themselves. Feeling good begets doing good.

It’s long been believed that humans are fundamentally flawed and that they need to be forced into doing good. Nothing could be further from the truth.

We come into the world as wonderful individuals whose greatest joy comes from bringing joy to others.

Think about a time when you felt really great. Perhaps you just fell in love, or got a new job you really wanted, or got a promotion. Doesn’t the grass look greener, the sky bluer? Doesn’t it make you want to share your happiness with the world?

Sadly, through home life, school and society in general, we soon learn not to feel too good about ourselves. The less we feel great, the more we exhibit behavior toward others that’s not all that great.

So how do you bring about a change of heart?

We change the focus.

The focus till now has always been on the child. People want to know how to get their children to “behave differently.” This is where I believe we miss the point.

In my own life, I put the focus on myself. As a clinical psychologist who sees many parents and their children, whenever my daughter exhibits less than desirable behavior, I ask what this is saying about me as a parent.

Children are a mirror of our own unresolved issues. So if a child bullies, that child’s needs are in some way going unmet. No child who feels delightful within themselves — whose emotional needs are being met because they feel truly “heard” by the parent — bullies like this.

The bullying is the child’s scream for help, not for punishment, and certainly not for shaming.

Once you realize that a low sense of self-worth — stemming from not truly feeling valued by and connected to the parent — is at the root of the bullying, to lower how good the child feels about herself even more by shaming her could boomerang in a terrible way. How would the parent feel if the child no longer felt their life was worth living?

What we need to address as parents are:

Where am I, as the parent, failing to connect with my child?
What in the child longs to be recognized but is being ignored?
How can I help mitigate the feelings of inferiority and shame that my child experiences?
And most importantly, how am I projecting my own internal shame onto my child?

Unless we begin to turn the spotlight within and ask these difficult but essential questions, our children will live in the legacy of shame which will continue into future generations. And the epidemic of bullying will continue to soar.

How do we define success in a career-driven society, once we become parents?

According to Oxford Dictionaries, “success” is defined as “the accomplishment of an aim or purpose.” Synonyms include: “favorable outcome” and “triumph.” The antonym is “failure.”

Success looks different for each person — just as every person on this planet is unique in their likes and dislikes, what they find uplifting or oppressive. To be more precise, perhaps we should be defining “success” as a feeling, a sense of fulfillment or accomplishment.

Perhaps a better question would be: What in your life fulfills you? What has given your life meaning?

If you’re like me, that answer changed drastically once you became a parent.

Before I became a mother, I would have identified myself as a career woman. I was a journalist who worked 50-plus hours a week, never missing the opportunity to take on the next big story. I was eager to climb the career ladder, with aspirations to manage my own news organization someday. I lived for praise from my editor and readers, and I was constantly on the lookout for a better-paying, more prestigious position. Like many young professionals, I was in a hurry to “prove” myself and would define success in how much readers admired my writing and how many possessions I could accumulate, how many friends I had, how many social gatherings I attended and how many vacations I took at Boutique hotel zermatt.

Then I became pregnant with my daughter Rachel, and I began to feel a tug in my heart. As I planned my maternity leave, I still thought that my life wouldn’t change nearly as much as it did. I thought that I would take off a few weeks from work, then put her in daycare and go back to my journalism job. The only difference is, I thought, perhaps I’d cap my hours at 40 per week and limit any overtime.

Rachel was born 10 weeks early due to a placental abruption. As I lay on the hospital bed, hooked up to an IV of magnesium sulfate so potent that I had to be on oxygen during the treatment, watching my baby’s heart rate bounce up and down on the monitor beside my bed, wondering what would happen to her, I had a thought: that what had defined success for me, up to that moment, doesn’t nearly measure up to what it means to be a mother. And what my daughter needed, and still needs 9 years later along with her 8-year-old sister and 4-year-old brother, is a mother who is devoted to her role as a parent more than to her career.

Three months later, after my paid maternity leave, I asked to meet with my editor and told him that it was critical to me that I be allowed to work from home. It is true that my premature daughter was still dealing with major health problems, but the bigger reason for my request was because I felt that neither she nor I were ready emotionally for separation. He declined, and totally unlike my people-pleaser nature, I quit that day. I decided to do freelance-writing from home.

It has worked out well. I don’t make the paycheck I did before I had children, but between my husband and myself, we make enough money — and save enough through our financial management — to live comfortably. I am happy with my choice to balance my children’s attachment needs and my family values with our financial needs and my career path, and know that as my youngest child grows beyond the critical early childhood years when attachment needs are strongest, I can always choose to go back to working outside the home.

I no longer live for my editors’ and readers’ praises. I live for time spent with my children. I don’t care about accumulating possessions, but rather memories with my family. The social gatherings that matter most to me are playing or cuddling with my kids. And instead of looking to the next rung on the career ladder, I focus on how to have a stronger, more secure attachment with each of my children and my husband.

I know that not everyone can, or wishes to, quit their jobs to stay home with their children, but I urge everyone to be mindful of how they can best balance their child’s attachment needs with their career aspirations and financial obligations. If you choose to continue working outside the home, understand that Attachment Parenting can be crucial for dual-income families. Preparing for parenting, Breastfeeding, Warm and sensitive responsiveness, Nurturing touch, Cosleeping, Positive discipline, Consistent and loving care, and Striving for balance in family and personal life — API’s Eight Principles of Parenting — provides a road map for establishing and maintaining secure parent-child attachment for all parents, but parents with limited daily time with their children report that Attachment Parenting is especially necessary to keep their close family bonds. The research fully supports this.

We at Attachment Parenting International (API) hope that you found inspiration to take parental leave from working seriously. The importance of parental presence didn’t end as the calendar flipped from October to November, and we invite you to continue exploring this topic all year long and into 2016. Parental leave is a topic just getting started in the United States, and national discussions are sure to pick up in the next few years. Feel free to refer back to API’s Research Paper for AP Month 2015 for talking points on “Parental Presence: Birthing Families, Strengthening Society.”

How API supports parents with — and without — access to parental leave

Editor’s note: Thank you for helping Attachment Parenting International (API) observe Attachment Parenting Month 2015 in October as we explored the theme, “Parental Presence: Birthing Families, Strengthening Society.” API Leader and API’s KnowledgeBase Coordinator Artimesia Yuen has compiled a research paper to help you continue discussions in your families and communities on the importance of parental leave following the birth of a baby and the incredible value of maximizing parental presence in early childhood.

API advocates knowledge and practices that value and maximize parental leave, recognizing parental presence with a child fosters early secure attachment and benefits families, businesses and societies.

Parental leave is an issue that touches the majority of adults around the world as parents are commonly employed outside of the home. Many countries have implemented national policies that prioritize and value the unique and irretrievable impact that parents have in the early years of their child’s development. The collective international policies represent a global consensus that the United States has not yet considered on a national level.

Only very recently, a few U.S. city and state governments have offered forms of parental leave. The media has been tracking high-profile businesses that have been initiating their own parental leave policies. While the U.S. Federal government offers its own employee benefits, there is not yet a national policy providing these benefits to all U.S. parents.

Momentum is growing for parental leave in the United States, and we have the benefit of a wealth of examples and longitudinal research provided by initiatives in other countries. All of this experience and research, including of U.S. economic research, complements the findings of decades of attachment research.

The U.S. workplace culture, and that of many other countries, is such that even parents and decision makers who recognize the benefits of parental leave may still experience one or more of these pervasive cultural barriers or responses:

* Businesses offering or contemplating offering parental leave may experience real or perceived fears of:

Loss from temporary slow down or loss of valuable employees, skills and functions
Competitive disadvantage
Higher costs, lost opportunities and lost profitability.

* Employees taking or contemplating taking parental leave may experience real or perceived fears of:

Outright job loss
Inability to afford unpaid leave or severe financial difficulty
Inability to tolerate potential lower status and/or pay
Reduced earnings trajectory over time — i.e., work-cultural stigma.

Additional factors that can present barriers to parental leave may include:

Societal and cultural norms do not support and sometimes undermine leave.
Loss and risk aversion are well-known cognitive heuristics impact leave decisions.
Our nation and economy differ in significant cultural, political, economic and philosophical ways from other advanced nations that offer generous leave. The translation of other successes is not always clear for U.S. business and policy decision makers.
Time frames and incentives may be mismatched if leave decisions produce “fuzzy,” long-run results when policy makers and businesses seek clear impact over shorter time horizons.

Moving beyond these self-reinforcing fears will require more parents, employers and governments step up to “be the change.” These pioneers and would-be pioneers require support and a broad groundswell of advocacy to stand behind them and propose the policies that all U.S. families deserve.

For more than 20 years, Attachment Parenting International has been working to spread the knowledge that early secure attachment and consistent and loving care are vital to infant development and well-being. API not only brings this research to families, communities and professionals, but has also developed API’s Eight Principles of Parenting and accredited networks of local, personal support that helps sustain healthy parenting and care practices.

API’s Role in Parental Leave

Promoting the benefits of parental presence, attachment and parenting particularly after birth and in the early, formative years.
Continued work toward raising up the socially important, economically valuable role of the parents in child mental health and development.
Continued direct parent support around choices that favor healthy, close parent-child relationships.
Support parental goals toward long-run workplace change that benefit parents, children and family well-being as critical to societal success.

Support for parents who do not have access to parental leave:

API’s Eight Principles of Parenting provide support for parents in a number of ways to help provide healthy parent-child relationships, especially when parent-child time is limited. These supports might include the following practices:

Feed with love and respect — API supports parents in establishing and maintaining breastfeeding, pumping and evening reunions that support these practices in feeding and closeness as well as rest for the parents.
Use nurturing touch — API supports parents in healthy and affectionate touching, holding, cuddling and even carrying their young children in soft carriers as a way to regularly reconnect after being apart.
Ensure safe sleep physically and emotionally — API supports parents in healthy and safe ways to satisfy both the parent needs for required rest and their young child’s needs for closeness and reconnection after being apart. Safety is paramount.
Provide consistent, loving care — API supports parents in considerations for providing a healthy caregiving experience for their young children.
Strive for balance in personal and family life — API supports parents in considering the multiple ways parents can maintain and restore personal and family equilibrium through the many changes of childhood. Parents are supported in any general emotional experience that may result from being apart from their children sooner, earlier or more than desired.

Support for parents who have access to parental leave:

API’s Eight Principles of Parenting provide support for parents in a number of ways to help provide healthy parent-child relationships in situations where parent-child time must transition, even when it’s maximized. These supports might include the following practices:

Feed with love and respect — API supports parents in establishing and maintaining a variety of strategies in response to changing parent and child needs around breastfeeding, pumping, feeding over time and the relationship with feeding and parent-child reunions.
Use nurturing touch — API supports parents in healthy and affectionate touching, holding, cuddling and even carrying their young children in soft carriers as a normative way to be together as well as a way to satisfy reconnection needs after being apart.
Ensure safe sleep physically and emotionally — API supports parents in healthy and safe ways to satisfy both the parent needs for required rest and their young child’s needs for closeness and reconnection after being apart. Safety is paramount.
Provide consistent, loving care — API supports parents in considerations for providing a healthy caregiving experience for their young children and support for transitions to non-parental care.
Strive for balance in personal and family life — API supports parents in considering the multiple ways parents can maintain and restore personal and family equilibrium through the many changes of childhood and the parent work status. Parents are supported in any general emotional experience that may result from being apart from their children sooner, earlier or more than desired. Parents are supported in any general emotions around the differences in the pace of life and competencies that may exist between career and 24/7 parenting.

Interested in learning more? Read API’s AP Month 2015 Research Paper in full, including results from selected research studies.

Going back to work, but not the way I expected

Editor’s note: Attachment Parenting International (API) recognizes the amazing creativity of parents to balance their children’s attachment needs with their financial needs and/or career in order to provide consistent, loving care especially in the first few months postpartum but also throughout the early childhood years when parental presence is most critical to establishing a secure attachment relationship. This year’s Attachment Parenting Month focuses on the theme: “Parental Presence: Birthing Families, Strengthening Society.” We thank API Leader Tina McRorie for sharing her story of how she was able to balance working with her child’s attachment needs.

When I was pregnant with my first child, I was a social worker in the foster care system. I had recently earned my master’s degree in clinical psychology and was on track to become a Marriage and Family Therapist (MFT). I was working for a nonprofit, which predictably didn’t pay a lot, but it did provide me with a supervisor who could sign my log sheets, getting me closer to my 2,000 hours so I could take the licensing exam.

After only 4 months at the agency, I learned I was pregnant. I knew I would not want to go back to work there, since the commute was too long, so I did the responsible thing and informed my employers and clients that I would be resigning near my due date. Unfortunately, this disqualified me from receiving the only paid leave we had in California at the time: state disability leave.

I was annoyed that I was being penalized for doing the right thing, but fortunately, my husband made a good income in Silicon Valley, so my integrity didn’t hurt us too much in the wallet. We estimated that I could take 7 months off before finding a new job nearer to our home.

When my boy was approaching 7 months, I found a daycare center after — I admit — not much research. I did what many mothers do, taking him there for a few hours at a time, a couple of days a week to get him used to it while I started looking for a job. Well, I didn’t find a job, and he most emphatically did not get used to it. He cried and needed to be held most of time. I found it hard to pump enough milk for him. After a couple of months, the director let me know that they would not be able to meet his needs.

My husband and I decided that we should keep him home for the time being, and I could look for work again in a few months. I did continue sporadically to look for work, but I didn’t ever put him in daycare again.

When he was 18 months old, I learned I was pregnant again. At that point, I did the math and realized that if I went back to work when the new baby was 1 year old, even logging the maximum number of allowable weekly hours, I wouldn’t be able to get the 2,000 hours in the 6 years allotted since I had registered as an MFT intern. I had fallen off the therapy wagon.

I had been an advocate for children since college. My plan had been to help adults process their childhood traumas and find healing. Now I was changing my perspective. As a parent, and as a member of API, I was seeing that many childhood traumas could be prevented through secure attachment with better-informed, better-supported parents.

Though I still believe that therapy is an important part of preparing for parenting, there are many therapists who can help.

I reflected that the foster parents I had worked with were told that they could make a huge difference in the lives of the children in their care by allowing the children to bond to them, but we did not tell them how to do that. I remembered learning about attachment in college — noting that psychologists, social workers, and a whole range of researchers and professionals in the child-development field knew about Attachment Theory, the protective power of a secure attachment and the specific parenting behaviors that built a secure attachment, but that knowledge was not making its way to the public in any significant way.

I decided that focusing on parent education and support as a volunteer API Leader was how I wanted to spend my energy. It would not make me any money, but it would allow me to make a positive impact on my community and be where my kids needed me: with them.

Fortunately, we were able to stretch my husband’s income much farther than we originally thought. Although I did not contribute money to our equation, I was able to spend much less than I would have if I had gone back to work. First, I wasn’t paying for childcare. As my children got older and more comfortable with being without me, we started having playdate childcare trades with a few families we knew from our API group.

Not having a job also allowed me to spend less money on gas, food, clothes and other expenses — like a better breast pump. I did other in-kind trades; for instance, I did childcare once a week for my Jazzercise monthly pass. As the kids grew to preschool age, I enrolled them in a co-op preschool, which was much more affordable because I assisted in the classroom one day a week. Then I found an excellent alternative public school where parents were expected to volunteer on a regular basis. My husband had started talking about private schools soon after our kids were born, so I count this as a major savings that my being home afforded us.

After several years, my API coleader decided she wanted to follow her dream of opening an educational lending library, and I wanted to take my education and training and become a parenting educator, teaching attachment-focused parenting. We tried to find members to take over the leadership, but when none came forward, we regretfully closed the group.

I spent a year or so procrastinating on writing my curriculum — well, I did have 2 kids keeping me busy — then I learned that API’s cofounders had written a parenting curriculum! So I started on the road to becoming re-certified as an API Leader, opening a new API group and building infrastructure and awareness of Attachment Parenting in my community.

When the co-founders presented a training in Los Angeles, I jumped at the chance to take the next step in my plan! I learned so much about meeting parents where they are and giving them evidence-based information about what children need for optimal development — that nevertheless often runs counter to the cultural norm. Meeting API Cofounders Barbara Nicholson and Lysa Parker, and other API Leaders as well as other helping professionals, was very inspiring.

I am excited to be poised to use the workshop format to reach parents-to-be and parents of young children in my community. I believe that learning about the importance of secure attachments and API’s Eight Principles of Parenting will make a difference in the lives of many families, as it has in mine.

My two sons are in middle school and high school now. I know that I am very privileged to have been able to stay home with them this whole time. My volunteer work for API, as well as at my kids’ schools, has allowed me to feel belonging and significance — to borrow a phrase from positive discipline — while balancing my work and family life with a degree of control that is not affordable to many.

The API Support Group that I started 5 years ago, Monterey Bay Parenting, will always be free for anybody who wants the information and support, because that’s how we roll at API.

However, I will soon be able offer “Attached at the Heart” workshops on a tuition basis. This will make my husband happy, especially since he’s still paying off my college loans! It will also allow me to set my schedule so that I am there for my kids when they need me. As teenagers, they need to stretch their wings and feel their independence, but they also need connection and guidance as much as they always have.

Nurturing peace, in our parenting and for our world

“Raising children with secure attachments and empathic hearts is essential to the future of mankind.” ~ GreatNonprofits

Is world peace possible?

When we talk about the potential for Attachment Parenting (AP) to change the world, we are referring to a ripple effect: Our children growing up to be compassionate and empathic, becoming parents who foster secure attachments with their children, whose children then grow up to repeat the cycle of peaceful living both in and out of the home.

Just as what our society experienced with La Leche League International’s breastfeeding revolution, begun more than 50 years ago, we at Attachment Parenting International (API) hope to be looking at a different kind of society in coming generations — one where disconnection is discouraged and healthy, securely attached relationships are valued above competition and shame.

API is working every day to better support and educate parents on establishing and maintaining secure parent-child attachments. And parents are striving every day to put API’s Eight Principles of Parenting to practice in their relationships with their children.

Many parents understand the challenge of adopting the new mindset needed to fully grasp how Attachment Parenting works. This parenting approach requires looking at the world, your child, your role as a parent and the way you live through a different lens — one that not everyone is able to see. API’s core ethos is a frame of mind that we promote as a practice: respect, empathy, compassion and reflection in thought, speech and action toward yourself and others.

We believe that parents who practice these habits of mind will tend to practice parenting in ways that resemble API’s Eight Principles of Parenting. Likewise, we believe that parents who practice the behaviors included in API’s Eight Principles of Parenting are capable and more likely to practice API’s ethos.

Once you “get” API’s ethos, Attachment Parenting can become much easier, much more “natural.” I liken it to stepping into an alternate reality of sorts. You’re able to view the world, your community, your home, your and others’ relationships in a whole new way and you can then make life choices from a point of compassion, trust, empathy and peace.

Our society tends to shy away from the concept of peace. To many, the idea of world peace is seen to be purely idealistic. We know it as the standard answer of pageant girls competing for Miss America. We also know that there are numerous ways touted to be the answer for world peace, from literacy to racial equality to democracy to certain religions. In reality, for world peace to be attainable, it must take a combination of factors from all levels of society. To many people, that may seem impossible.

Yet peace is what all of our souls crave. It is a sense of contentment, safety and security. It is a joy that doesn’t follow emotional highs and lows, that doesn’t fade when the excitement of instant gratification falls away. Peace allows us to feel centered and to find our balance quickly when we lose our equilibrium. Peace gives us a sense of purpose and control of our life’s direction. When living in peace, people have space in their lives to focus on bettering not only their lives but those around them.

But peace can be elusive. Many people simply do not know how to get to a place of peace in their lives.

For parents who come to API seeking support and education about Attachment Parenting, we offer a way. Secure attachment, promoted through API’s Eight Principles of Parenting, can help families find peace. A person whose attachment needs are met is able to think beyond the basic, day-to-day physical and mental survival and the “need” of trying to keep up with the hectic pace of society, in order to experience greater personal well-being and family enjoyment.

API is doing its part in promoting world peace. We truly believe in our mission to educate and support all parents in raising secure, joyful and empathic children in order to strengthen families and create a more compassionate world. And we truly believe in parents’ ability to do just that — to raise their children to be secure, full of joy, with the ability to empathize with and show compassion to others.

In the latest issue of The Attached Family, we explore “Nurturing Peace,” both in ourselves and our children, with features on:

Conscious Living with Lisa Reagan, a member of API’s Resource Advisory Council, editor of Kindred and cofounder of Families for Conscious Living – through whom we learn about the inspiration for this issue’s cover, “the Blue Marble,” and how each of us are involved in public policy everyday of our lives just by living the choices we make…such how we choose to take parental leave after the birth of our baby
How to talk to our children about world tragedies, why its important for our children’s development to protect them from adult concerns and what our children actually hear when parents mention starving children in Africa to try to convince their children to finish the food on their plates — by Tamara Brennan, executive director of the Sexto Sol Center
The Dynamic of Disappearing Dads with Meryn Callander, author of Why Dads Leave – through whom we learn the generational result of disconnected parenting of boys, and how wives and partners can better support new fathers in healing their emotional wounds to be able to bond with their baby and fulfill their role in the family.
ACEs with Jane Stevens, founder of ACES Too High and ACEs Connection Network – through whom we learn what ACEs are, how they are just as prevalent among families in poverty as well as middle class, and how resilience-building practices such as Attachment Parenting can both heal and protect people from the consequences of ACEs.

We hope that this issue of The Attached Family will inspire your efforts to nurture peace within yourself, your family, your community and, yes, even the world.

Kim John Payne is tonight!

Today is the day! Kim John Payne is speaking on “Simplicity Parenting” tonight at 9:00 pm EST/6:00 pm PST during a special API Live teleseminar as part of the 2015 Attachment Parenting Month: “Parental Presence: Birthing Families, Strengthening Society” — helping families worldwide put in practice what we know is critical for investing in early secure attachment.

Very basically, our lives cannot be too busy for our children. But in our very busy lives, what can we do to slow down and simplify in order to give our children the presence they need to thrive?

Kim John Payne, world-renown author of Simplicity Parenting, is the very expert to inspire any family — no matter their life circumstances — on how to give a bit more presence to their children. He helps parents look at 4 realms of their home life to reduce stress on both children and their parents, allowing room for connection, creativity and relaxation:

Decluttering
Increasing predictability
Soothing schedules
Unplugging.

Kim John Payne and his Simplicity Parenting is a vital link in connected parenting. This API Live teleseminar promises to renew your focus on life balance, both for yourself and your family!

Enjoy this huge value for only $9 for API Members. (It’s free to join Attachment Parenting International (API), and you can join before you register for the API Live teleseminar to enjoy the discount!)

Register now to get a “seat” to tonight’s event — from the comfort of your own home or wherever you happen to be, as you join the audience via your phone. And if you can’t be on the teleseminar tonight, register anyway — everyone who registers gets a recording of this API Live teleseminar to listen to at their convenience.