The Flower Shop (Why You Should Attachment Parent)

The Flower Shop
(Why You Should Attachment Parent) By Dr Jay Gordon




I started to write generic answers about Attachment Parenting and Cherri, the co-proprietor of this site, caught me at it. I have been a pediatrician for over twenty years and the vast majority of my patients co-sleep and take their babies with them rather than leaving them. They respond as fast as they can to crying and they also listen for more subtle cues.
I support this type of parenting for reasons almost too numerous to list, but I'll try.
Intrauterine babies have the last "free lunch" and once they are out, they try to continue that incredibly tight relationship and continued influx of calories and food. They want to nurse at all hours of the day and night and want to be hugged and cuddled and carried and are 100% "non-spoilable."
You can spoil a three year old if he cries for a cookie and you give him a cookie; he will learn to cry for a cookie. When your baby cries, it is her highest level of communication and she's speaking about the most basic human and physiologic needs: hunger, warmth, trust, cuddles. If you tell her to wait because it's only 3:45 instead of four o'clock, the feelings you engender are that she's not as important as she thought and . . . you're not as smart as you looked!
Turn this upside down: "What do you want and when would you like it and omigosh! you still want more?" This will set your family up for that time toward the end of the first year of life when you can say, "Waitaminit . . . please." You can look your baby right in the eye and tell her that she is still the most important powerful person in that he world but that you fibbed a little when you told her she was the Queen of England. She can handle a "demotion" to family member instead of autocrat. The foundation for that "behavior modification" comes from extra love and cuddling during the first year, not from letting her cry it out when she needs more food or hugs. Conventional American childrearing gets this whole concept backwards.
Safety is the most important aspect of attachment parenting for many people. A baby in the Family Bed, worn in a sling or similar device and not left in the care of non-parents during the early months is the safest possible baby. I realize that many people have babysitters or other help may not want to "wear the baby" but I certainly strongly support those who do.
My best example: After nine months of planning and hard preparatory work, you open a flower shop. Of course, you have to get up at 3 AM to go to the market downtown to get the best flowers and the best buys and then you have to get set up and open your store by 9AM. The profit margin is not high so you have to work the store yourself for 10-12 hours and then do the books, make the deposit, clean up and more. With any luck, you may be in bed at some reasonable hour and get a few hours of decent sleep--although you may wake up in the middle of the night with worries about this new endeavor. Your life will be fuller and rewarding but it's not easy to appreciate this when you are sleepless and concerned about making this work. (Your friends and family think you're nuts for doing this because they have other conventional ways of running their lives.)
By the end of the year, you have the prettiest, happiest little flower shop and countless people remark on it being the finest they have ever seen. They make comments like, if I knew that I could start a business which turned out so well, I would open one myself!
Your friends, your occasionally unsupportive friends, are now laudatory and filled with compliments for your flower shop and the way you have done it.
All of this . . . for a flower shop. If you put the same time, effort and love into raising your baby, people get upset that you seem to be tired too much and hardly ever join them for lunch. Oh, well.

Love it!

great post!!!

Excellent!

I like it. Thanks for posting. xo

:) great post! Thanks for sharing

Gave me an extra boost while I was rocking my 8 month old, 9kg baby to sleep to know that I am investing in her future & making her feel safe & loved (not to mention the great arm workout!)

Thanks for posting it! :clap:

great post i loved it xx thx

When people say how lovely my preschool DS is, especially those who scoffed at our co-sleeping, extended BFing, gentle parenting ways, I wish I had the guts to say "well that's attachment parenting for ya!" ;)

Excellent - do you mind if I borrow to send as an email to my well meaning friends and family?

I've been tossing up co-sleeping and baby-wearing and whilst I've really wanted to do it, I've been a bit apprehensive about it as well. This article is really simple, straight to the point and great reinforcement. DH will be given this to read tonight!

Thank you!

No worries, I thought it was great!

If you google the author's name he has a website with some other great articles too :)

Yeah, Jay Gordon's great. His suggestions on night weaning are amongst the most useful I have encountered - I (and my DS) personally found them more workable than the No Cry Sleep Solution.

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I've been tossing up co-sleeping and baby-wearing and whilst I've really wanted to do it, I've been a bit apprehensive about it as well. This article is really simple, straight to the point and great reinforcement. DH will be given this to read tonight!

Thank you!

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Persephone, you'll find this is a really intuitive, natural way of parenting - you'll be surprised that its not the norm. You wont regret co-sleeping and baby-wearing, it really is the way women for millenia have been raising their babies. Detachment parenting is the new fangled Western way of doing things and seems out of tune with the nature of babies and mothers. Anyway, you can always try co-sleeping & baby wearing & if it doesn't work for you, try something else!

Ah, after reading that I feel so much better now and confident that I'm doing the right thing - as DS is lying asleep next to me in our bed! Thanks Heaven for the read :)

Persephone - to add to what Winter has said, you can always try things, and if one AP technique work for you but another doesn't, then that's fine too.

I babywear (toddlerwear now) and follow other AP principles but never co-slept. I loved the idea in theory but DS is a noisy, kicky little bed hog who likes his space. :rofl:. We all sleep better when he is in his own bed, and being well rested (or less tired, anyway) gives us the energy to devote to him in other ways, which we couldn't do if we dogmatically adhered to the idea that co-sleeping is an essential part of AP, even though it doesn't work for us.

The nice thing about AP is that it is more of a philosophy than hard and fast rules - I know many AP parents, all of whom do some things slightly differently according to what works for them and the specific needs of their child.

Oh, man, I adore my two flower shops!
And, yes, I DO get people who have seen me parent my first child from day one (who were highly skeptical when I parented 'against the norm') say that whatever I did has paid off...well, it was free and all I did was what came to me naturally (not automatically, I had to make an effort to let my intuition reign free), not via some apparent expert on my child :p Co-sleeping, baby wearing, comforting, demand-feeding...I have a confident child who commands the attention of his peers with his beautiful, unchecked charisma - a real leader and presence because he's allowed to be himself without 'punishment' or restriction :)
Yay for our flower shops, I mean, babies!

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I've been tossing up co-sleeping and baby-wearing and whilst I've really wanted to do it, I've been a bit apprehensive about it as well. This article is really simple, straight to the point and great reinforcement. DH will be given this to read tonight!

Thank you!

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Persephone, you won't regret it, it's such a lovely and enjoyable way to parent. I never set out to 'do' attachment parenting, I fell into it because I just loved cuddling and holding bubs and that's what made him happy to. Co-sleeping happened by accident when we went away for a weekend with no cot, and once I discovered it I wondered why I didn't do it from the beginning. So much easier, nicer and so much more sleep. It's not for everyone but we LOVED it. I didn't even know what we were doing was attachment parenting until I stumbled accross some info on the net.

The results of attachment parenting, a secure, happy, emotionally well-adjusted and communicative child, speak for themselves. Now I always think to myself, I'm so glad that I didn't waste a precious minute trying to train him into independence. He's become an independent toddler too damn fast!! And now that we've gone through the process, I realise that respecting and nourishing their need for dependence is what fosters a healthy sense of independence which comes out when they are developmentally ready.

So yeah, just wanted to say you wont regret it, which turned into a bit of a ramble xx