General Interest – Page 66

API-Inspired Leadership: An interview with Kelly Shealer

In celebration of Attachment Parenting International’s 20th Anniversary, the four-part “API-Inspired Leadership” series honors the unique paths that inspired parents to pursue API Leadership. Read the first and second part of the series, recognizing Lauren Osborne of Alabama, USA, and Candice Garrison of Tennessee, USA. Following is the third part of the series:

There are many paths that lead parents to Attachment Parenting (AP). For many, like Kelly Shealer of Frederick, Maryland, USA, it was as natural as breathing but finding like-minded parent support isn’t always as easy. Kelly now serves as a leader of API of Frederick.

She also blogs for APtly Said and volunteers with the Attachment Parenting International (API) team creating the Tribute Presentation, to be narrated by Sir Richard Bowlby Bt (API Advisory Board member and son of John Bowlby, the “Father of Attachment Theory”) at API’s 2014 “Cherishing Families, Flourishing Children” Conference on September 26-28 at Notre Dame University in South Bend, Indiana, USA.

RITA: Thank you, Kelly, for your time. Let’s start by learning how you discovered AP.

KELLY: I first learned about Attachment Parenting from reading an article by Dr. [William] Sears (API Advisory Board member) during my first pregnancy. The article talked about different ways to practice Attachment Parenting, and as I read it, everything seemed so obvious to me. I couldn’t imagine doing anything differently!

As my son got older, I learned about new aspects of AP, such as positive discipline, which fit with my beliefs and just seemed right for me.

RITA: It sounds like AP was an easy choice for you. Do you find any aspects of AP to be challenging?

KELLY: The biggest challenges I’ve encountered have to do with my belief in positive discipline as opposed to traditional discipline. It’s difficult at times to watch how family members who aren’t familiar with AP interact with my children and are quick to use threats and punishments.

Also, when my children and I attend non-API playgroups, I feel like there’s something different about my parenting style that sets me apart from other people. Reading a lot of books and articles that come from an AP perspective has helped me to feel confident enough in my parenting style that this doesn’t bother me so much anymore.

RITA: So how did you come to API?

KELLY: I first learned about API at a La Leche League (LLL) meeting from one of our leaders who was also an LLL leader. I became involved with the local API group after a negative experience at a non-API playgroup where I felt I didn’t fit in with the other mothers. At the time, I was fairly new to the area and didn’t have any friends who also had children. It was important for me to find other mothers who I felt that I could connect with. Through API, I was able to meet like-minded moms and have made some of my closest mom friends.

RITA: What inspired you to become an API Leader?

KELLY: My API group had been so meaningful and helpful to me when my first son was very young. I had a real need for the support and friendship I found within the group, and as my son got older, I really wanted to be able to be more involved with the group. When our leader mentioned that she was looking for others to co-lead, it really felt right for me to take on the role of API Leader. I’d been looking for a way to help other moms, and this felt like the perfect way for me to do that since our group and API’s Eight Principles of Parenting are so close to my heart.

RITA: How did you find the API Leadership process?

KELLY: I enjoyed going through the process, because it helped me to reflect on my parenting beliefs and experiences, especially when considering how the Eight Principles of Parenting applied to me.

It was also through this process that I found some of my favorite parenting books, including The Science of Parenting by Margot Sunderland and Alfie Kohn’s Unconditional Parenting, which have had a big impact on my parenting.

Editor’s Note: Follow the discussion on these and more books through the API Reads program

RITA: Has API Leadership been as fulfilling as you were hoping?

KELLY: We live in a somewhat transient area, and a lot of the moms who find our group are rather new to the area and don’t know many other moms. I like providing an opportunity to help these new moms get to know others with similar parenting styles. I like that, through meetings and online support, being an API Leader allows me to help new parents with some of the more challenging parts of babyhood and early childhood.

At a recent meeting, one member talked about how good it felt to be around parents with similar viewpoints. I was really struck by her saying, “It’s been really hard constantly defending myself to others.” But at our meeting and with our group, she felt comfortable, normal and accepted. I’m so glad that our group can provide that sort of comfort and support to parents who may not have much support from their friends or family.

It Takes a Village

Editor’s Note: This post was originally published April 20, 2008, but its immortal message continues to ring true today, more so than ever in this ever-increasing Internet Age.

We’ve all heard the saying, “It takes a village to raise a child,” and it is still true, even in these modern days of computers, mobile phones, dial-a-pizza and TV on demand. In fact, I would say now, more than ever, we all need our little village.

Before our daughter was born, I never really thought much about how isolated our lives had become. After her arrival, I started to actively seek out a village for her. We moved closer to my parents and sisters, back to the town I grew up in. I started going to mother-and-baby groups, La Leche League meetings and other breastfeeding support groups, sling-meets, anything really where babies were, hoping to find like-minded mothers who shared our way of parenting.

And I started to realize that the village is needed, not so much for the little baby, but to support the parents–to help and nurture them. In doing so, the parents can be free and feel confident raising their little baby, learning about all her little quirks and celebrating this new little life.

I began to realize that a village doesn’t have to be a physical location. I tentatively began to wander around online forums and entered the wonderful world of blogging. I’m a computer programmer by trade. Before I started on my parenting path, the Internet had always been a work tool, a research or holiday planning guide. Now I began to see a different aspect to it.

Very quickly, I found like-minded people, mothers who breastfed past six months, parents who coslept, fathers who were wholeheartedly involved in parenting, parents who believed in gentle discipline and, best of all, parents who admitted that, yes, their babies didn’t sleep through the night and that it was okay, they would in their own time. I found a name for our parenting beliefs: Attachment Parenting.

And I made friends.

I hadn’t really believed that you could make friends online before this. But you can, and you often share a lot more with these friends than with the person who lives next door to you. So with these discoveries my online, worldwide village began to grow. It has been a huge support for me.

I know when I’m lying awake feeding my teething daughter for the 10th time during the night in the middle of winter, that my friend in Australia is awake playing with her daughter in a beautiful summer’s day. At the same time, my friend in England is probably also awake, feeding her daughter as she is also teething at the moment. Maybe the women I know in America are only getting ready to go to bed now and are nursing their children to sleep or reading just one more story. Or it might be bathtime or dinnertime. But it is good to know that we’re all there, busy parenting our little ones as they go about the busy business of growing up.

Locally I have met many wonderful mothers and fathers, many of whom do not share my parenting approach. Some are still breastfeeding; some react with amusement when they see my 17 month old nursing. Some cosleep; most do not. Many have sleep-trained their babies; most react with shock when I mention that my daughter doesn’t sleep through the night. Several of them practice gentle discipline; many do not. Many gasp when they see me carrying my daughter in a sling; some happily show me their own slings! But each of them has a child whom they love, and this love brings us all together into a little village so that our children will have friends and so that we can sit down with a cup of tea and chat aimlessly for a while as the children play.

Both my real-life village and my online global village are very important to me. They both nurture and support me, in very different ways. I sought out my online village as I needed to connect with other people with similar parenting beliefs. I sought out my local village so that my daughter would have a community. And I have made friends in both villages, both with people I have everything in common with and with people I have almost nothing in common with!

While my daughter reaps the benefits of our real-life village, playing joyfully with all her friends, and I enjoy a nice cup of tea and a chat, I am also happy in the knowledge that if I need advice–or a moan–I can go to my online community and get help, real help, where the other parents understand why we parent the way we do, how it can have its difficulties, but also how it can be full of joy! It feels good to know that there are other people who feel the same way you do, who are raising their children in a similar way, who are creating secure and compassionate families. It is great to be able to ask for help and have other people give you advice that comes from the same parenting beliefs. Attachment Parenting International’s many online resources are opportunities for us all to add a few new friends to our global online villages.

Looking to connect with more AP-minded parents? Read more than six years’ worth of parents’ stories here on APtly Said, begin sharing in the API Neighborhood or start following discussions on API Reads, for starters. And don’t forget to check out if there’s a local API Support Group near you–to add to your real-life AP village.

– Half Pint Pixie

Editor’s Pick: Dr. Patricia Nan Anderson on “Helping Kids Lose”

“It’s not competition that’s the problem, it’s comparison. The truth is, only one child can be the best at any one thing. Everyone else is not. That’s an awful lot of losers, if children are raised to believe that winning is the only important thing. If children spend their time comparing themselves to others and slotting themselves into a hierarchy, they are certain to be disappointed, discouraged and sad.” ~ Dr. Patricia Nan Anderson, “How to Help Kids Lose“

As a kid, growing up, I thrived on competition. That is where I derived my self esteem. Though there were many things I did well at, and was the best at, I had a difficult time getting over the fact that I was the very last student picked for the team every day in my school’s physical education class. I didn’t know how to think confidently toward myself as long as I kept losing, and the thought at the time was that it was just the way it was.

I want something different for my children. I can’t change society’s value of competition, and really competition isn’t the problem, as Dr. Anderson states above. What I needed most as a child was to learn how to handle losing in a way that didn’t damage my self esteem. Dr. Anderson’s post, “How to Help Kids Lose,” helps parents, teachers, coaches and others learn how to do just that for our children.

I have long known about Dr. Anderson through her articles and find her to be a reliable expert in child development. Besides contributing to others’ websites, she blogs at Interplay about family, school, community and children. She is a mindful parenting coach and consultant with more than 30 years’ experience in programming and guidance of parents and teachers of young children. With a doctorate in Educational Psychology and a master’s degree in Education, she has been a Professor of Early Childhood Education for more than 15 years at the National-Louis University in Chicago, Illinois, USA, and the Walden University nationwide. She is also the author of Parenting: A Field Guide. and host of the radio program, Parenting: A Field Guide Live! Her free time is spent at home in Seattle, Washington, USA, where she dotes on her grandchildren.

And so, here’s a taste of Dr. Anderson’s post:

How to Help Kids Lose

Everyone likes to win and little kids are no exception. But you cannot win them all and losing often throws young children (and older ones) into a tailspin. How can you help your child learn how to lose? Read on to learn…

Learning to Live in the Moment

Becoming a mother has taught me the real meaning of “living in the moment.”

Before I became pregnant with our daughter Zara, I really thought living in the moment meant squeezing every possible drop of productivity out of my day. It meant getting up before dawn to commute 12 miles by bicycle to work where I’d spend all day in my feet grooming my dogs from irish doodle puppies Atlanta (where the raise the highest quality Goldendoodles and Irish Doodles), only to hop back one of my Wisper Bikes, ride home, take my own dogs for a rigorous hike, come back home, cook dinner, fit in some schoolwork for my latest online college course, fall asleep studying and wake up to do it all over again next day.

Then, along came those two blue lines, and suddenly “my” time didn’t belong to just me anymore.

Zara is almost 8 months old now, and these past eight months have been both the fastest and the slowest of my life.

Fastest, because at times it feels like last week that I came shuffling gingerly out of the hospital into the frigid early-January air. My husband George buckled our tiny fragile bundle into the car seat, while I sat in the backseat beside her. She began to cry from the shock of the cold — her first real wailing cry since her birth two days before, and I felt hot tears flooding my own eyes as I realized how utterly helpless she was. And I wondered how I would find strength and courage enough to protect her.

Slowest, because my daughter, like all babies, is truly living in the moment and these moments simply can’t be rushed. Like yesterday at the library, it took a full 45 minutes from the time we got into the car until we actually pulled out of the parking spot. I spent most of that time nursing Zara to sleep, then ever so delicately sliding her into her seat, at which point she inevitably woke up, so the remainder was spent with me leaned over her in the seat with my shirt hiked up while she nursed back to sleep and finally released my nipple, enabling me to climb over the center console and into the driver’s seat without risking the opening and shutting of any noisy car doors.

In these eight months, I have slowly been gaining that courage I worried about when we first began this journey. But it’s turned out to be courage of a different sort than I imagined. I am finding courage to open my heart to the rhythm of the moment instead of stubbornly insisting on imposing my own flurried beat, courage to let go of rigidly held agendas and just listen.

It’s not always easy, especially when I start to frantically scroll through the endless list of to-do’s in my mind and imagine that anyone besides me cares about checking them off. In those moments, I take a deep breath; I summon my courage. I look down at my baby girl, and she looks up at me with eyes that say, “Mom, I need you now. Right here and now.” And in an instant, the list, the plans, the all-encompassing itineraries evaporate.

There’s no place else I’d rather be.

API-Inspired Leadership: An interview with Candice Garrison

In celebration of Attachment Parenting International’s 20th Anniversary, the four-part “API-Inspired Leadership” series honors the unique paths that inspired parents to pursue API Leadership. Read the first part of the series, recognizing Lauren Osborne of Alabama, USA, here. Following is the second part of the series:

I can relate to so much to what Candice Garrison of Knoxville, Tennessee, USA, has to say about stumbling upon Attachment Parenting (AP), finding local parent support and discovering Attachment Parenting International (API). Candice now serves as the leader of API of Knoxville. API is grateful to all of our API Leaders working on the “front lines” of the Attachment Parenting movement, providing attachment-minded education and support to families in their local communities.

RITA: Thank you, Candice, for your time. Let’s start by learning how you discovered AP.

CANDICE: Prior to having children, I was full of ideas about what kids needed and how I would parent. Once I actually became pregnant, the sheer amount of overwhelming love I felt towards my unborn child radically shifted my entire world. My perspective on parenting and children was altered in a way I could not have foreseen prior to my son’s arrival. I realized that all of my ideas were the result of societal influence and the way that I was parented. Once I had this realization, I knew that I wanted something different for my children. I approached my new shift on parenting with three foundations:

Love
Intuition
Science.

These foundations ultimately led me to Attachment Parenting.

RITA: That sounds a lot like my journey to AP and, like you, giving birth to my first child turned everything upside-down. Have you found any aspects of Attachment Parenting to be challenging?

CANDICE: I was not raised in an AP environment, and changing behaviors ingrained since my own infancy has proved, at times, to be quite challenging. The advice that you are given from well-meaning family and friends is often a direct counter to the AP approach. The number of times that I heard I was spoiling my son or was asked when would we wean, what daycare were we choosing, did he sleep through the night yet and so on was immense. During this time, when I shared openly my own research and countered much of what I was told, I found that my choices were often met with a surprising amount of aggression. I found that people took my choices as a personal challenge to their own decisions. This was, and sometimes still is, ultimately the biggest challenge of parenting in a non-mainstream way.

RITA: When did you find API?

CANDICE: When I decided to stay at home, I left my eight-year career with the same company and quickly lost my social circle. My work friends who had children and chose to stay home weren’t always comfortable with my parenting decisions, and vice versa, leading to awkward play dates and social interactions. Most of my other friends didn’t have children at all, and I wasn’t up for ladies’ night out anymore. My own family isn’t close enough to be a part of our daily lives, and I was starting to feel surprisingly lonely despite never being alone. This is when I reached out to my local API group and found a sense of community for the first time since leaving my job.

RITA: What inspired you to become an API Leader?

CANDICE: Less than a year after I joined API, the existing group’s leadership retired and there was a hiatus while a new leader applicant began the API Leadership process. During that time, I reached out to some mainstream mommy groups and was uncomfortable participating in their activities. There was a near constant level of disrespect toward children in the forms of yelling, ignoring and even openly spanking that I couldn’t tolerate and was very uncomfortable for my young son.

Once I left my second mommy group, I decided to undertake API Leadership myself. My son and I needed a community, and I was ready to help create it if needed. I met with several other ladies who were still considering the process, and we started our group.

RITA: How did you find the API Leader Applicant process?

CANDICE: I was quite nervous to undertake it. Ultimately while long and sometimes intense, it was a great process. I learned a vast amount about parenting and communication, and it was incredibly beneficial in my personal family life.

Reading Nonviolent Communication [by Marshall Rosenberg] was an amazingly therapeutic experience for me. I grew up in an environment where almost all communication was violent at some level, and I didn’t realize how much of that carried into my adult life and interactions. I wish that book was required reading at a public education level, because I think it has the potential to change our society in such a positive way.

RITA: So many parents who go through the API Leadership process say that it helped them grow as a person and a parent as much as a parent support leader, myself included. I’m glad you found it beneficial. So, now as an API Leader, what do you enjoy about providing local parent support?

CANDICE: I love everything about it. I didn’t think I would enjoy it quite as much as I do, being an introvert with social anxiety, but if anything, it’s given my social life a purpose that helps to calm my nerves. I feel like I am making a difference and have found purpose, something lacking at a personal level in my previous job as an accountant.

RITA: Do you have any stories you can share?

CANDICE: Just yesterday I came full circle in my API experience, from member to leader.

At the very first meeting I attended, I was anxiously waiting for Q&A time at the end. I asked about my son’s sleep habits, hoping for some words of wisdom that would fix what I perceived as our problem. I was having to stay with my 10 month old at all times while he was sleeping. If I tried to get up after he fell asleep, he woke up and we had a hard time getting him back to sleep. So I was anxiously anticipating some instruction on how I could sneak away and what I got were a lot of “Oh, I’ve been there” and “Don’t worry, it will pass.”

These weren’t the answers I anticipated, but it was exactly what I needed. Since no one in my family had a family bed and I had no references for normal sleep behaviors without crying-it-out, I felt like I must be doing something wrong. All I needed was someone to say “Me, too” and “I’ve been there,” and I got the validation I was needing to keep meeting my son’s needs.

So last night, while my now 3-year-old son was asleep beside me but not yet asleep enough for me to leave his side, I gave a first-time mom the same advice I’d been given at my first meeting. I assured her that there was nothing wrong with her 9 month old needing her constant presence, that I had been there, too, and that this would pass all too quickly.

RITA: Have you encountered any challenges to being an API Leader?

CANDICE: As of now, I am mostly a solo leader. Our group took off and grew quickly and has taken on a lot of activity at a very young age. If I’m not careful, I can get caught up in my desire to do more than I am capable of balancing.

I also feel that I struggle to lead a formal study of topics during our support group meetings. I was assured during training that this is something that gets better with practice, and it has, but I am excited to add some more leaders to our group and find people who can help balance that.

RITA: Have you found any API resources helpful?

CANDICE: We have a very active Facebook group, and I link back to the API website quite often.

I also fall back quite a lot on the training process I went through and particularly NVC (Nonviolent Communication). It’s incredibly useful to go through the NVC process when giving advice and helping someone in their parenting journey. All too often, people have reached a high level of frustration before they reach out for help. Recognizing that and giving a sense of validation with that acknowledgement of someone’s feelings has proven to be incredibly important in opening up people to API’s Eight Principles of Parenting.

RITA: Thank you, Candice, for your insights. A final question: Has API Leadership inspired any other projects in your life to raise AP awareness?

CANDICE: I certainly hope it does in the future! I am very new in my position as a leader with API, so as of now, I am just enjoying the experience of taking on this role and working with my group. I am hopeful that once my family is complete and my children are older, I can use this experience to take on a career with AP or pursue something that will utilize all of the skills I am excited to build.

Editor’s Pick: Children Growing on “Toddlers and Wonder”

“One of the best gifts you can give your toddler and yourself is to find time to join him where he is in that expectant openness, to slow down, to see what they see and hear what they hear, to let go of deadlines, plans, goals, wishes, to just be together.” ~ Kim Allsup, Children Growing

“One of the best gifts you can give your toddler and yourself is to…just be together.” Wow, doesn’t that just sum up Attachment Parenting, not only for the toddler years but for all ages and stages of our children, from in utero through adulthood?

Kim of Children Growing brought her post, “Toddlers Blooming in the Garden: Finding Wonder (Part 2 of 4),” to my attention earlier this month. While APtly Said posts original material, Attachment Parenting International recognizes select blog posts and articles related to Attachment Parenting (AP) through API Links and occasionally through reprints in the Attached Family magazine. But I just had to share this one on APtly Said, and so we are beginning a new series called “Editor’s Pick,” where we recognize outstanding AP posts from bloggers beyond APtly Said. Anyone can request a review of their blog post.

After reading Kim’s post, I was very interested in learning more about her and inviting her to blog for APtly Said. I hope we get to see more from her soon!

Kim introduces Children Growing as “a teacher’s blog about the art of helping children grow–at home, at school and in the garden.” Kim is a classroom and gardening teacher at The Waldorf School of Cape Cod in Bourne, Massachusetts, USA. She has been growing children for 43 years, including 21 years as a teacher, and gardening for 40 years. She is passionate about helping parents to return to their own memories of their childhood in order to re-experience wonder of the natural world with their own children.

And so, without further ado, here is Kim’s post:

Toddlers Blooming in the Garden: Finding Wonder (Part 2 of 4)

“If a child is to keep alive his inborn sense of wonder, he needs the companionship of at least one adult who can share it, rediscovering with him the joy, excitement, and mystery of the world we live in.” ~ Rachel Carson

Wonder in the first years of life creates the roots of self-motivation. It is the foundation of a personal connection to the world, the nexus of the self. Wonder cannot be scripted. It arrives unbidden. And while we cannot call forth wonder just when we want it, we can be expectant. The best a person can do is to be always listening, always watching, open to the possibility that something amazing might come our way, aware that it is possible, or even likely, that the marvelous will arise out of the commonplace, amid the happenings of everyday life. This openness to wonder is a transcendent state we aspire to as adults, yet it is the natural state of young children.

One of the best gifts you can give your toddler and yourself is to find time to join him where he is in that expectant openness, to slow down, to see what they see and hear what they hear, to let go of deadlines, plans, goals, wishes, to just be together. There is no better place to do this than the garden. You might head to the garden with the intention of meandering with your child at her speed, following her interests. Or, you might be working in the garden with your little one nearby, sensitive to noticing a moment that calls you to put down your rake so you can kneel on the damp earth and let your toddler lead the way to the discovery of a blossom or a butterfly or a strawberry or the green spikes of the emerging corn he planted himself.

A toddler’s mood of wonder can be fragile. Protect it by moving slowly, by dwelling in the fullness of silence, by noticing your child’s focus, using only a few carefully chosen words. Above all, don’t direct, explain or praise. When you find your way to becoming a companion to your toddler in an experience of wonder, you will find that time seems to stop. You may enter this realm for only four or five moments, but if you truly connect, if you drink in your child’s amazement, you will return to a place you once knew, a place where you lived as a child, where you feel beckoned to return. It is ironic that grown ups seek distant gurus to guide them to a consciousness of expectant, awareness when focused attention with a toddler, perhaps in a garden, might satisfy our mysterious yearning, might lead us back to the forgotten mindset our own early years. For, wonder is our first home.

Toddlers and young children usually live in a sense of wonder that is not shared with adults. If you think back to your own early years, perhaps you can remember moments of fascination that you did not share, that you could not share, for you did not have the words. Once you re-enter a toddler’s world of wonder, you will be awed by the value of this consciousness. You will want to provide your child with undisturbed time in nature, in a forest, by the sea, in a garden. For many families, a garden is the most accessible natural area. It can be on a balcony, of a tall apartment building, or a single garden bed in a tiny back yard. For a child, it is a place to witness the magic of growth, to know the beauty of life, to find wonder.

Hold on to Your Kids

By Lysa Parker, cofounder of Attachment Parenting International and coauthor of Attached at the Heart

For me, Attachment Parenting (AP) has been like a life preserver in a cultural sea that is constantly in turbulence and posing many dangers.

While AP provides us with tools for holding on to your kids, once they enter the world at large you hope your children will stay connected, but we’ve found it continues to take effort on our part as parents. The bottom line is that all relationships take work — even with our spouses.

At every stage of our children’s lives, we hoped that we just could relax and enjoy the fruits of all the efforts we put into them in their early years, only to find out that the relaxing part comes in spurts.

Of course their successes, joys and triumphs become yours as well, but it can be so hard to watch them find their way in this world. Their struggles and pain become your struggles and pain. You know they have to go through the realities of life; they have to learn through their own experiences and decisions.

I wish we could just turn off our emotions and brush our hands and say, “We did our job as parents and now it’s up to them,” but you can’t — not when you are connected. As children grow into their teens and even adulthood, it takes a conscious effort to keep that connection…everyday!

There are so many temptations in our world, so many “wolves” just waiting to attack the hearts and minds of our children. We not only have to build their strength and confidence to face these challenges, but we have to do it for ourselves so that we can be there when they need us and be strong. That’s where having a strong AP community as your extended family can be a safety net.

Attachment Parenting International cofounder and Attached at the Heart coauthor Barbara Nicholson and I often talk about our sons, how we’ve raised sensitive young men who are creative and very independent. While these are wonderful qualities, some of our children are finding it very difficult to find their place in this world and it’s taking a lot longer than we thought. We have no doubt that they will, but it’s not as easy as it seems for others.

We can’t help ourselves from wondering, worrying about them finding the right person to share their life, to bear their children. Will they choose AP as their path or go the opposite way? Will they stay close to our family? Will they all be healthy and happy?

My husband will half-jokingly say that when he turned 18, his parents ran away from home. Our parents’ and grandparents’ generation thinks it is very odd for a child over the age of 18 to live at home. But more importantly, our high-touch, sensitive children require close connections at home to help them maintain their stability.

I recently listened to an interview with Dr. Robert Epstein who said, in reference to the turmoil and troubles many teens and young adults are having in our Western culture: “Any culture that severs the connection between young people and older people creates this problem.” He went on to say that no other teens in the world experience the problems with drug abuse and suicide like we see.

The point I want to make is that while we may make great improvements in our parenting from previous generations, the AP way of life will not always protect our children or prevent them from making mistakes in judgment. If there are generations of abuse or addictions in your family, changing that course will likely take more than one generation. Still, we can affirm to ourselves that we are on the right path to breaking the cycles of dysfunction that so many families have endured for generations.

Our job as parents is to maintain our connection to our children, to be there when they fall, to be their rock and their compass and bring them back home to a circle of security that will refresh and strengthen their hearts. Attachment Parenting gives us the strength, the wisdom and support to do just that.

Seeking an Answer, Being the Answer

A mother of a son, who was already married and had a family of his own, told me of the time he was much younger and in love with a young woman who rejected him. This happened during his army service, and he would call his mother night after night, sometimes at 2 or 3 in the morning, to talk to her about his loss and sorrow, until eventually he recovered.

The reason this mother shared her story with me was because of a different soldier in her son’s unit who also had a love who rejected him, but the relationships in his family were broken and he had no one with whom he was close to unburden his sorrow and be comforted. He could not recover from his loss; it cut too deep, and he committed suicide.

Suicide is one of the many faces of aggression – self disparagement and self attack. It is rooted in deep frustration that cannot find its way out through a period of mourning, and it cannot find its way to the thoughts and feelings that can temper its expression. The processes of first finding our sadness and then our tempering elements are human processes that help us keep our perspective on life and develop the resourcefulness and resilience we need to adapt to the circumstances that come our way. In helping children grow up, our thinking must be oriented toward supporting these processes and paying attention to the signs of them becoming stuck.

A teenage girl who was coping with many different sorts of problems wrote her mother the following note:

“I have no reason to live. If this is what my life has to be like, I would rather not go on with it. I am not depressed. I just don’t believe my life will ever be any different and so it’s not worth living. But I know what that would do to you. And so I live for you.”

Of course we want our children to have their own reasons for living. We want them to wake up in the morning and look forward to living their lives to the fullest, setting goals for themselves, feeling excited about their direction in life, defining and working toward fulfilling their dreams. It takes time for a growing child to find his own reasons to live. “And so I live for you” is a pretty good place to start.

As the mother of the young man who lost his love, recovered and continued building his life, we want to be the answer for our children. This mother discovered and felt deep gratitude for the power of the relationship she had developed with her son over the years. We want to be that place where our children can turn when life is dismal and all seems lost. This is the shield from the pain cutting too deeply. We want to be a safe haven of warmth and comfort.

Being this person is the essence of being a parent. It means finding this capacity deep within our hearts. It requires compassion and a yearning to be able to give this of ourselves. Out of this grows our children’s own individuality, vitality and will to live.