I’ve also been browsing the Dr. Sears library – attachment parenting on discipline. As a slightly older and less freak-out-able parent, I am more able to see the places where the Drs. Sears, although well meaning, have not been entirely clear in their essays about childrearing. There are a number of places where Dr. Sears suggests that parents must do what works for their child – that the essence of attachment is being attuned. This is sometimes lost in a fog of ’suggestions’ that look like prescriptions. Which don’t work for everyone.

Reading the book is helpful, now that I have more critical space. That’s for sure. However the ’suggestions’ look like doctrine, and in that need to be taking with a large grain of salt. (In one amusing place, Sears says that attached parents use the word “child” more than “kid”, and then admits his own use of “kid”… He’s definitely associating “child” with respect and “kid” with playful disrespect, though. He doesn’t take into account at all that not everyone uses language the same way: that the connotations of a word change with generation, class, and culture – if I wasn’t thinking critically, I might be a little freaked out.)

One of the things that rather strongly bugs me in these books, as the child of a narcissist, is the insistance on empathy. Now, let me clarify: I believe in trying to get behind the eyes of your kid. Having sympathy (which Sears devalues as lesser). Or having compassion – where compassion would be the parallel experience of emotion.

However, empathy I’m a little worried about. I think that anyone who’s grown up with a personality disordered parent (or caregiver) might be a little bit weirded out by too much “empathy”, which is literally vicarous experience of emotion. This is actually far trickier than just feeling for a person. The person experiencing “empathy” can be utterly off base: the attachment parent’s clarion call “I know my child” makes me squirm. Really? All the time? Infallibly?

In the case of a well meaning person, especially a parent, incorrect “empathy” can frustrate or recast a kid’s experience. Ripley is definitely a different individual than I am. He’s got his own set of responses. I can give my best guess, and I can sympathize when he’s angry or sad or happy because I have my own sense of those emotions – but I think it would be arrogant in the extreme to believe I truly understand how that feels, exactly, for him. This is the legacy of my own past, I know. In the case of a narcissist, or other personality disordered individual, the “empathy” becomes ownership, so that the observer thinks they know better than the original person who’s having the feelings.

Now, for those who don’t know any antisocial or borderline or dependant or avoidant or narcissistic folks – or other disorders on that tree – let me say that the personality disordered, in my experience, are very good at getting in to your emotion space. It’s not autism – these folks can usually read emotions pretty well – unless it’s directly to do with them or at cross purposes to their main motivation. So they can’t tell you’re angry at them if you’re being passive, for example: but they can read that anger if it’s other-directed.

My mom recently said similar things in a different manner – that it annoys her when people tell her they know how she would feel. So maybe it’s just contact with the personality disordered that makes us wary.

Still, one of the things I really want to give to Ripley is a sense of good boundries. This doesn’t mean that as an infant I demand that he explain himself, obviously. I do believe in trying to be in tune with where he’s at a lot of the time: I can usually read his primary emotions, if not the subtle shadings. I believe in mirroring, and suggesting – obviously I have to assume a bit, since I’m giving him his emotional language.

However, I would like him to grow up knowing that he is his own person and that he’s got to be clear with himself about his needs and wants, and learn what he can comprimise and what he has to stick to his guns on. If I’m there interpreting for him all the time, there’s a problem. So I suppose that the very basic actions of myself and a Sears-o-phile attachment parent are the same in many respects, but I have a totally different internal dialogue about it. I assume I’m failing at knowing where he’s at all the time, but will muddle through until he’s old enough to tell me otherwise. There’s a certain smugness in the books about attachment parents deeply knowing their kids’ motivations that bothers me.

Even more importantly, it finally hit me that Dr. Sears is using “attachment parenting” in response to the *psychological* concept of unattached/attached children. Whoo boy! That’s a different kettle of fish! Attachment is done with mirroring of emotion. With parental responsiveness. However, there’ve been attached kids since well before Sears, and that’s not because they’ve all been breastfed/co-slept/been baby-worn. Think warm and nurturing environments with sensitivity towards the kids and lack of abuse. This could be Mary Poppins in relatively strict governness style. This could be an emotional, yell filled home, where everyone yells but everyone trusts mom and dad to have their best interests at heart.

In fact, assuming that breastfeeding or co-sleeping or baby-wearing are necessary components may very well backfire. Not all Moms and Dads are going to be comfortable with these sorts of techniques! I can think of a number of situations where that much intimate physical contact might in fact get in the way of emotional intimate contact. Let’s name one: imagine that there’s a mom who hasn’t gotten over childhood sexual abuse issues, and is hesitant with the intimate sharing of body and breast and bed. Especially in the case of *children*. If she’s getting triggered, she’s less empathetic and responsive, not more so. Should she get over those issues? If they’re bugging her and preventing her from living her life, sure. But not because she can’t attach to her children otherwise. Because there have been lots and lots of good moms with that sort of unresolved history.

There’s also just plain culture. You may not like the lack of physical contact of some societies, but it does exist. In most western cultures that I’m aware of, it’s pretty much okay to hug and cuddle your small kids. That may not extend to constant contact or bedsharing. This doesn’t lead to “insecure attachment” in the psychological sense, although it could very well be a cultural problem if you would like a different CULTURE. Those are different issues, though: one is psychological, the other political. Probably Sears is right: that these sort of parenting practices turn out different sorts of adults. Teenagers who hug their parents. Adults who have no problem crossing the physical boundry line. You can have strong physical boundries without necessarily having strong emotional boundries and vice versa: I would argue that these traits are not linked. There are lots of non-abused hippie kids who got lots of snuggles but no boundries and have “ambivalent attachment”, which is a sub-form of insecure attachment.

As someone who co-slept for a time and breastfed for a time and baby-wore for a time, it’s not as if I’m against those practices – they worked for me. However there is a cultural and political component to that – I have no doubt that other ways of creating security and attachment also work.

Sears is also a little too dependent on old gender roles, for me, but hey. That could be said for anyone. At least he supports male nurturance.