APtly Said

Good parents don’t get mad. They’re never tempted into power struggles with their children, no matter how violent a toddler’s tantrum or how venomous a pre-teen’s backtalk or how silent a teen’s cold shoulder. Good parents never have to raise their voices or say “no.”

Who is this good parent? It certainly isn’t me. But there is this myth about Attachment Parenting that we don’t get angry, that no matter what our children do, we are always calm and don’t experience the strong emotions that parents not practicing AP do.

Being an attached parent doesn’t mean we don’t experience emotions like anger, disappointment, and frustration. Oh, we experience them – just like any parent does! What being an attached parent means is that we choose to express these strong emotions in ways that don’t hurt our children. We choose to look inward to ourselves when we’re feeling angry, instead of blaming others, in order to see the real reason for our feelings. Instead of “You make me mad when you throw your bowl of food on the floor,” we teach ourselves to think, “I feel angry when you throw your bowl.” No one can “make us mad” – we make ourselves mad. It is our expectations we place on situations that don’t get met, and that is what makes us mad.
Continue reading “It’s OK to Get Mad”

I first came to Attachment Parenting like most parents do – because it felt wrong to let my baby cry herself to sleep and it felt good to hold her all the time. And I came to Attachment Parenting International, because gosh, there are a whole lot of people in the world who feel compelled to criticize the way I raise my children.

It was through my membership to API, plus a whole bookcase full of parenting books and neuropsychology texts, that I learned exactly what Attachment Parenting is: that it isn’t just a feel-good approach to parenting. It is a set of eight parenting principles proven by science to raise our children to be well-adjusted, emotionally healthy members of society who are able to establish and maintain secure attachments with other adults and their future children. (Read Attached at the Heart by Barbara Nicholson and Lysa Parker to learn more about what the research says.)

We hear a lot about these attachments. What exactly are they, and why are they so important? Attachment is the emotional bond between two people in a relationship – in this case, between the parent and child. A relationship can either be healthy and stable, producing a secure attachment; or it can be stifling, violent, or otherwise dysfunctional, which indicates an insecure attachment. Relationships are absolutely vital to our individual happiness in life – they determine our success in school, our careers, our friendships, and our marriages – and our ability to attach to other people in a healthy way and maintain that attachment over the long term is absolutely vital to our relationships.
Continue reading “The Meat of AP”

A few weeks ago, Justine wrote about coming to terms with an unexpected pregnancy.

I’m coming to terms too, but I’m not pregnant. Instead, I’m coming to terms with the fact that I won’t be having any more babies.

There’s nothing wrong with me, nothing wrong with my husband, nothing wrong with my fertility. We have two children, a boy and a girl, and we have decided that those two will be it.

Sometimes it’s an easy choice to come to terms with. Like when we’ve spent an exhausting day with two cranky children and bedtime didn’t go as planned and tempers are flaring and we’re burnt out and the idea of one more kid is just too crazy. Continue reading “The End Of Fertility”