Lisa Belkin writes a really cool blog on parenting for the New York Times called Motherlode and she posted late this afternoon with a piece that, frankly, got my dander up. Not what she said, because Belkin does seem to buy into common sense more often than not, although she’s still affected by the fear mongering that seems to be the basis of a lot of writing about parenting these days.
She was writing about a Consumer Reports blog in which writer Don Mays said that two products – a special contraption to enable safer co-sleeping (that is, sleeping with your infant in your bed) and slings – were not very safe and possibly dangerous. However, a host of parents immediately began to attack him as a bad human being who hated parents.
There is a branch of parenting theory called Attachment Parenting that holds that infants need to be kept as close to their parents as possible in the first few years of life. Strollers are verboten, as are cribs, etc. If you need something to hold your infant in, then you use a sling.
I want to be clear that while I have nothing against Attachment Parenting per se, I do have a big issue with the name-calling parents who attacked Mays who wrote that the safety of two products the Attachment Parents apparently find useful was questionable. Now Consumer Reports is usually pretty good about testing stuff and basing their claims on the results of their tests. But that doesn’t mean they automatically get it perfectly right every time.
That being said, how much credibility does someone have who defends their position by calling someone else names? Yes, I have a problem with Attachment Parenting’s claim that their practices are based on thousands of years of natural wisdom and culture. Admittedly, it is somewhat limited, but my study of everyday life in Seventeenth Century England and the American Colonies seems to suggest that if co-sleeping was happening, it was a function of dire poverty – as in there was no money for a cradle or place to put it.
It kind of reminds me of when I went to nursing classes when I was pregnant with my daughter and I was told that before formula women had to nurse their children or the babies would die. Perhaps in the relatively rare isolation of frontier America. But, hello? Anybody hear of wet nursing? And I know for a fact that wealthy women in Medieval Europe hired wet nurses rather than nurse their own, whether they could nurse or not.
But even if I have issues with Attachment Parenting’s claims of historical practice, that doesn’t mean I bash the practitioners or the practice as a whole. Yet, the opposite happened to Mr. Mays because he pointed out that there is a history of problems with two products they like to use. So whose word am I going to believe? I’m sorry, but Mr. Mays’ words bear more weight, if for no other reason than that he chose to take issue with a very specific product and while the headline said that parents shouldn’t buy the products because they were unsafe, he did not directly attack anybody who chose to use them
The other thing I don’t get about these virulent types who went on the attack is how is that attitude going to help their children form healthy attachments – which I assume is the point of their practice. Since when is intolerance and name-calling healthy?
Ultimately, what does this have to do with media? Well, in some ways, everything. The glory of the wide breadth of ideas presented to us in every which way is that you get exposed to other ways of thinking than your own. The catch is that not everyone presents those ideas in a way that is credible and/or balanced – myself included, at times. So we as parents really need to model good media behavior, even when we don’t agree with what we’re seeing or hearing. Nobody says we have to agree. But the healthy response is to treat everyone with the same respect we’d like to receive ourselves. Or maybe even more respect. Not all of us had Attached Parents, you know.
Anne Louise Bannon
Your Family Viewer
