When did Attachment Parenting go mainstream and why was I not told?

I should not be reading mainstream media during the last week of the semester (my only excuse: the silly-season makes a nice break from what actually matters in this world) but too late now. I just read something truly, mind-bendingly stupid in the Wall Street Journal's review of The Conflict (a book about how attachment parenting destroys women):

It is also worth highlighting France's grown-up attitude to sex. Co-sleeping and militant breast-feeding are aggressively antisexual; the mother is a mammal, nothing more. "A mother cannot be consumed by her baby to the point of destroying her desires as a woman," Ms. Badinter writes. "The devotees of extreme mothering have nothing to say on this score." Where French doctors ask, "Is Monsieur happy?" to check whether new mothers are exercising their pelvic floor muscles, American child-rearing specialists recommend that the baby establish dominion over the marital bed. Aficionados of progressive motherhood seem to view recreational sex within a marriage as essentially frivolous—a childish thing to be put away when the baby is born. This attitude is, rightly, met with incomprehension and slight disgust in France.

So, this will read as a rational rebuttal, but please know that my head just exploded.

(1) Asking a post-partum woman if monsieur is happy is not actually feminist.

(2) Something like two American child-rearing specialists recommend co-sleeping. Everyone else, including your child's actual pediatrician, urges parents not to do it.

So how many American parents are deliberately practicing co-sleeping? With their infants, and not their wakeful preschoolers at 3am? I don't know, but it's less than 13 percent.

Alert the feminists. Get those formula factories churning. We have a serious problem to solve.

[April has turned into the month when everything stupid pisses me off.]

Comments

[Ellie]

Less than 13% according to whom and what criteria was used in collecting that data? And can it truly be extrapolated to lay over the entire population of US parents of infants? I doubt it. Co-sleeping varies according to socioeconomic class, race, age of parent(s), marital status, and region in which one lives. I am also guessing that quite a significant number of parents do not answer such research questions with complete honesty, given the bias against co-sleeping. I would add that attachemnt parenting in both concept and practice is far and away more mainstream than it was a dozen years ago, or twenty (which is back when my first was a toddler).

Anyway, sounds like a very silly, brain exploding book indeed.

[Shandra]

Yet another in the French smackdown annals...I kind of wish I were French, I would publish a book telling X kind of North Americans that French people do it better, follow up with a reality show where a Brit smacks them around, and retire...to Bali. :)

[kristen]

Ugh. I get so annoyed when people insist on putting "militant" next to "breast-feeding." I am one of those "freaks" who nursed her kids for over a year...but I never once was militant about it! My kids didn't love bottles, and it just was so much easier. I was lazy, really.

(And is that not what the breasts are there for, in the first place?)

Most of my friends (99%, actually) didn't make that same choice, but we were all way too tired to care...and now a decade later, all our kids turned out just fine, no matter how they were fed. Not a malnourished mama's-boy in the bunch.

I will say that the local La Leche League didn't welcome me because I was a working mother who pumped. (nearly 4 years of nursing - my kids never consumed a single drop of formula...and I didn't make the LLL cut.) So, I'll give her that dig.

[jen]

Did you read the sort-of recent-ish NYT magazine? or maybe New Yorker? article on Badinter? Sometimes it's fun to be French and just make shit up. This book sounds like the women's equivalent of Bernard-Henri Levy's I too am Tocqueville/road trip around America book a couple years ago.

[Jennifer]

"Modern mothers have a serious problem on their hands, and it's other mothers." Puh-leez. If it weren't for other mothers, when my children were infants, I'd have gone insane.

[Lilian]

I just LOVED LOVED LOVED the title of your post!! :) What a crazy head-exploding quote indeed! And while I think that attachment parenting practices are becoming slightly more widespread (not so much accepted yet as always), I don't think they'll ever be truly mainstream.

[Philly Prof]

A thoughtful response to add to the conversation:

http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/college-ready-writing/sustainable-parenting

Note too that the reviewer for the WSJ is British and shows her ignorance of the American scene as well as the broader Anglophone world in her vapid piece.

[Swistle]

Whooo. I had to take a little moment to breathe, after reading that. It sounds like instead of being nothing but a mammal (we...ARE mammals), the mother is supposed to be nothing but a husband-pleaser? I mean, how wacky are our values, when exercising our pelvic floors is not our number-one priority?

And that part about American child-rearing specialists recommending co-sleeping caught my eye, too. Because they, you know, DON'T. And even if they did, I doubt they'd phrase it as recommending that a baby conquer and rule over "the marital bed."

I also don't remember anyone talking about recreational sex being silly after the baby is born. I remember WISHING that were the case, when I was still exhausted and touched-out. But noooooooo.