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Saturday, Jul 11, 2009
Sanctimonious parents, who preach "breast is best" and tell you that sleep training is cruel and unusual punishment, should keep their ideology to themselves.
Aug 15, 2005 | Once when my son Abraham was 6 weeks old I was standing in line at my local bakery. I had him in a sling and I was feeding him. The sling's fabric was twisted and my hair was caught in the knot, but the baby had finally taken his bottle and I was loath to adjust anything for fear of disturbing our tenuous peace. I rocked a bit on my heels. The baby paused in his sucking, and I held my breath. Suddenly, a voice behind me said, "You know, breast is best." I turned. The speaker, a woman a few years older than me, smiled pleasantly.
Now, the correct response to that comment might have been a stern rejoinder to mind her own business. It might even have included a series of expletives. Instead, what I did was burst into tears and launch into a long explanation about how the milk in the bottle was my own, pumped at 4 in the morning while everyone else in the house was asleep. I had in fact been pumping breast milk for Abraham every two hours, I told this stranger, because my son was born with a palate abnormality that made it difficult for him to suck properly from the breast. I had weathered plugged ducts and breast infections; the milk in that very bottle was colored a faint shade of purple, from the gentian violet I'd been applying to treat a brutal case of thrush. To establish my breast-feeding bona fides I even told her how especially traumatizing my failure to feed this baby was, given that I'd successfully nursed three children, one for nearly three years.
She gave me absolution. I was doing great, she said. Keep it up. Because, you know, breast really is best.
I'm sure that there are women who circumcise their sons, use disposable diapers and feed their infants formula who are smug, snarky and unpleasant. But there seems to be a particular brand of sanctimony practiced by those who choose to exclusively breast-feed, use a family bed, and wear their babies in slings -- choices generally associated with attachment parenting. Of course, the majority of devotees of Dr. Sears are marvelous, generous people whose sole interest lies in doing the best they can to raise contented, secure children. But why are there so many others who are so very self-righteous?
The 12,000-member Berkeley Parents Network is an online community founded and directed by a woman named Ginger Ogle. The advice posts are some of the site's most popular -- hundreds of people post every month seeking guidance on everything from potty training to how to deal with a philandering spouse. There are hot-button issues on the message board -- moderators are warned that discussions of breast-feeding, co-sleeping, immunizations, spanking, stay-at-home moms, circumcision and television have a history of generating "emotional responses." One issue in particular seems to draw out people's ire. In September 2003, in response to a desperate mother's plea for advice on how to sleep-train her wakeful baby, an anonymous poster referred to all non-Sears-sanctioned mothering styles as "Abandonment Parenting." Here was a mother driven to distraction by the fact that her baby had not allowed her more than a couple of hours of sleep in months, and her attempt to seek succor and support was greeted with an accusation of child neglect.
In a letter to subscribers, Ginger responded, "[W]e seem to have an ongoing problem on the newsletters with some of our attachment-parenting subscribers making the assumption that the rest of us have missed the boat and need to be instructed on the proper techniques of parenting ... for whatever reason, it is not a problem we have on the newsletters with those who hold other views -- just the attachment-parenting people." Things were quieter for a bit after Ginger's note, but soon enough the scolding resumed.
A blogger named Julie, who publishes A Little Pregnant, about her struggles with infertility and the premature birth of her son, received a similar tongue-lashing when she posted about how her pediatrician had recommended a mild sleep-training regimen that included allowing the baby to cry for a short period. One reader told her that her son "feels abandoned and his primal instincts kick in for self-preservation (I'm alone in the world, I must conserve energy or die)." "On message boards I got called everything from negligent to monstrous," Julie told me. "I was accused of everything from lying about his neonatologist's advice to not loving the child I'd worked so hard to have." (I feel Julie's pain. I run afoul of the mama-Web-scolds every couple of weeks, at least as often as this column runs.)
