Fear of Crying… Attachment Parenting on the Couch (or on the Hot Seat?)

I knew Erica Jong from my furtive erotic readings of pre-pubescence.  Fear of Flying sat modernly on my parents’ bookshelf, right next to The Happy Hooker (“What did she do with the German Shepherd?” was one of our eternal in-joke lines between my brother and our two best friends, also brothers).

Fear of Flying was less than satisfying to the curious and vaguely horny tween in the elephant-bell early 70s—I suppose it was more intelligent than The Happy Hooker, but for intellectual-sexual I could better relate to Portnoy’s Complaint.  All I really remembered from The Fear of Flying was the concept of the “zipless fuck” (I apologize if you carry a fear or repulsion at the F-word, but Erica started it).

Imagine my surprise, all these years later, to learn that Erica Jong was weighing in on, of all things, attachment parenting.  I learned of the controversy from the blogosphere, but then went to the source—The Wall Street Journal (another unexpected place to host a heated, and rather misinformed, debate on parenting)… but now that Rupert Murdoch owns it, the call to controversy may have resounded in those venerable halls.

I also read the counterpoint to Erica’s diatribe against her understanding of attachment parenting at Lisa Belkin’s Motherlode (see, in particular, Erica Jong’s response to the kerfuffle at Motherlode.

As I contemplated the whole absurd situation—lurid sex and neurosis writer railing against her perception of attachment parents—I thought again about Jong’s “zipless fuck.”  To be honest, I had mostly skimmed Fear of Flying, looking for the naughty bits.  Thus I had mistakenly thought that a zipless fuck was something that happened when two people on a train looked at each other and had sex in their imaginations.  This made sense to me personally, since it was the sort of sex I was mostly having those days, except that the other person wasn’t on a train, she was usually sitting in front of me in honors English.  And I’m pretty sure even my zipless fucks went utterly unrequited.

And then, thanks to Wikipedia, the irony finally struck me:  what Jong actually meant by “zipless fuck” was the notion of full-on sex but with no attachment.

So it may be no wonder that the doyenne of non-attachment in the bedroom (or airplane lavatory, or cheap motel) would be a natural champion of non-attachment in the mommy and me world.

But like some vaguely addled remnant of the sixties/seventies, Jong’s good politics get all jumbled up with her absolute misunderstanding of attachment parenting.  But then nobody’s perfect, as the final line of Some Like it Hot goes; hey, I missed the boat on the zipless fuck and Erica Jong misses the point of attachment parenting—perhaps we might all meet in the middle, kiss, make up and sing Kumbaya in our global parenting village.  There’s no winning in war, not even in parenting philosophy wars.

There is no doubt that Jong touched a nerve with her essay.  These days parenting is big business, and the key way the money is made is by stirring up fears and then offering solutions—suggesting that you are not a good parent and that if you really love your child you will do x, y and z for them.

I’m interested in attachment parenting, but as a psychologist my interest harks back to people who did not write parenting books.  Whether the Sears go too far or not is fine to debate, but they did not invent attachment parenting—mothers did, in Paleolithic times (and if they hadn’t, humans would not have continued to this day and our diverse opinions).

So while it’s fine to rail against fear-driven parenting, guilt-driven parenting and helicopter parenting, none of those are in keeping with the actual and natural spirit of attachment parenting.  In fact, while we don’t need new terms to confuse the issue, I might offer up “Containment Parenting” as a potential way of re-thinking enmeshed over-involvement in favor of unobtrusive presence, as being there only as much as our children need, not too little not too much.

In the service of clarifying some of the misconceptions Erica Jong seems to carry and promulgate, (on our way to kissing and making up), we might contemplate some of the incendiary words that the fearless flier tossed off in her Wall Street Journal piece:

“Attachment parenting, especially when combined with environmental correctness, has encouraged female victimization. Women feel not only that they must be ever-present for their children but also that they must breast-feed, make their own baby food and eschew disposable diapers. It’s a prison for mothers, and it represents as much of a backlash against women’s freedom as the right-to-life movement.”

I hear strains of Rosanne Rosanadana here, a hot rambling build up to a chastened “never mind.”  I mean, really, this is just plain ridiculous.  Yes our culture is overly competitive, but being with our children is not a threat to freedom—attaching and bonding with children in order to create security and allow later independence is more of a solution than problem.

In fairness, some of the things Jong rails against, such as helicopter parenting and narcissism, truly do represent a bit of a disaster in enmeshed and anxious parenting; yet practicing attachment parenting is really about creating security in the first months of life, a philosophy that leads to increasing autonomy as a child develops.  Parents who cannot let go of college-aged children may be guilty and confused, but they are not practicing attachment parenting.

Jong tosses off an odd statement:  “I liked breast-feeding. My daughter hated it.”

This sounds like a problem in attachment, yet I doubt if this represents an accurate understanding of her daughter’s true feelings as a newborn.  I could better empathize if Jong were to now realize that perhaps it was she who did not really want to nurse (as she had a hot career to pursue) and who then projected this “unacceptable” feeling onto her child.

Jong says, “I try to imagine what it would have been like for me to follow the suggestions of attachment parenting while I was a single mother and full-time bread-winner. I would have had to take my baby on lecture tours, in and out of airports, television stations and hotels. But that was impossible. Her schedule and mine could not have diverged more. So I hired nannies, left my daughter home and felt guilty for my own imperfect attachment.”

She felt bad, and yet she turns around and implies that it was the concept of attachment parenting that made her feel bad, rather than the ruptured bond between her and her child.

Maybe she had no choice, but to be sad and conscious might be more persuasive than to attack the notion that parents should be there for kids if at all possible, even if that means making sacrifices.  Jong comes from the “me” generation—the generation that left social security empty for the rest of us, the generation that leaves us with a big mess (and now the assertion that it is we, the younger folks who are greedy and overly focused on nurturing)—all while actually believing that they were making things better with greater and greater production of goods and mass pursuit of luxury and pleasure.

Worst of all, Jong strives to make attachment parenting a political issue:

“Indeed, although attachment parenting comes with an exquisite progressive pedigree, it is a perfect tool for the political right. It certainly serves to keep mothers and fathers out of the political process. If you are busy raising children without societal help and trying to earn a living during a recession, you don’t have much time to question and change the world that you and your children inhabit. What exhausted, overworked parent has time to protest under such conditions?”

I don’t see attachment parenting as a tool of conservatives.  Parenting, more than anything else we collectively care about, is a chance for us to come together across all sides of the spectrum around loving our own children, and each other’s children.  Such politicizing of parenting as Jong stirs up is bait we parents must not take.  No matter your politics, your faith or atheism, I choose to stand united with you for the good of all our children.  There is plenty of room for vigorous debate on all this, and Erica is a part of that debate, but we must ask ourselves, when we encounter various voices, “whom are they seeking to serve?”

If Erica is serving to support burned out parents who feel shamed by the imagined demands of “perfect parenting,” then I join her in wishing love and relief to such parents.  But controversy for the gain of those who fan the flames is at the heart of many of our social problems—of fighting in the media and fighting in Washington (none of which serves the people, much less the children).

Thus I don’t wish to dish against smart-smart sexy Erica Jong, rather to say that if she pushes our buttons as parents we need to ask ourselves, “what is the threat?”  The threat, I believe, is that we all want to be our best Selves as parents; and we all fear that we are falling short.  I can relate to Erica on the topic of parenting being hard; I can relate around guilt and concern; I cannot see the gain for kids or parents in mothers burning their nursing bras.

Attaching and attachment parenting does not, as Erica suggests, mean that you have to make your own baby-food or be as glamorous as a supermodel.  Erica appears out of touch with what modern moms actually feel (other than over-burdened and sometimes guilty); moms need societal support to be able to stay home and bond with their babies.  Challenging the value of attachment parenting flies in the face of what Jong seems to want for parents; you can use her argument to cut maternity leave and “support” moms to get right back into the workforce (where they have the “power” to do what?  To run on a hamster wheel?).

Power is the power to attach.

Jong continues:  “Our cultural myth is that nurturance matters deeply. And it has led to “helicopter parenting,” the smothering surveillance of a child’s every experience and problem, often extending as far as college. It has also led to pervasive anxiety (among parents and children alike) and the deep disappointment that some parents suffer when their kids become less malleable during their teenage years.”

Nurturance does matter—and I challenge the notion that it’s a “myth.”  Young children die without nurturance.  How is that a myth?

Is Jong really saying that nurturance leads to pervasive anxiety?  Perhaps she herself is so anxious that she doesn’t know what helps someone feel safe and calm.

Parents who are smothering their children need the same thing as parents who abandon their children:  love and accurate understanding.  Parents cannot transmit security to children by way of a parenting theory; they must themselves become secure (otherwise they are teaching what they do not know, and this may be at the root of anxious parents raising anxious children despite all the love and good intentions).

Despite Erica Jong’s inflammatory rhetoric, I suspect that most of this tempest in a teacup is due to semantics and erroneous misunderstandings (or perhaps deliberate controversy-mongering).  Parents do try their best; still, our culture does not adequately educate children, it does not adequately support parents nor foster trust and community; the people and institutions with the most power (including government, media, publishing) are adept at maximizing profits for stake-holders—and this has NOTHING to do with assuaging fears and facilitating confidence in parents.

The revolution in parenting will not be televised… and so long as you stay plugged into the big corporate fear-mongering freak show you will miss it.

If we feel we’re overstressed as parents, or overdoing things, or struggling because we go without, let’s support each other to know that we do care about each other, and know that we are cared about, if not by everyone, at least by plenty of quiet, loving, compassionate people.

Jong opines:  “Giving up your life for your child creates expectations that are likely to be thwarted as the child, inevitably, attempts to detach. Nor does such hyper-attentive parenting help children to become independent adults. Kids who never have to solve problems for themselves come to believe that they can’t solve problems themselves. Sometimes they fall apart in college.”

Again Jong confabulates attachment with hyper-attentiveness.  An inability to let go and facilitate independence as kids grow ought not to be blamed on attachment parenting any more than the Inquisition should be blamed on Jesus.

Finally, Jong gets to a true social point:  “Our obsession with parenting is an avoidance strategy. It allows us to substitute our own small world for the world as a whole. But the entire planet is a child’s home, and other adults are also mothers and fathers. We cannot separate our children from the ills that affect everyone, however hard we try. Aspiring to be perfect parents seems like a pathetic attempt to control what we can while ignoring problems that seem beyond our reach.”

Perfectionism is a true problem that dooms us to feelings of shame and inadequacy.  And to the extent that we are under the yoke of some perfect parent paradigm we are well advised to break our chains.  Still, this does not mean failing to attach and nurture—we must direct more resources, not less, in the support of families in the first year or two of child-rearing.  It is precisely because we are not perfect that we need to be that village that it takes to raise kids.

Jong says, “Some parenting gurus suggest that helicopter parenting became the rage as more mothers went to work outside the home. In other words, it was a kind of reaction formation, a way for mothers to compensate for their absence and guilt and also for the many dangerous and uncontrollable things in the modern family’s environment. This seems logical to me. As we give up on ideals of community, we focus more and more on our individual children, perhaps not realizing that the community and the child cannot be separated.”

Here she gets to the place I most agree with her as far as the importance of children in the context of community, however, we did not individually give up on community, we collectively made a lemming leap into untrusting, winner-take-all individuality.  The way back out is by working together, by attaching in healthy and more trusting ways, not by confabulating narcissism with attachment and then savaging the very medicine that can heal us.  (BTW, saying that her own baby did not like nursing is a splendid illustration of a “reaction formation”).

Also, whoever these “gurus” may be, if helicopter parenting is an over-compensation for not being there in the beginning, wouldn’t being there in the beginning (i.e. attachment parenting) be a good solution moving forward?

Ultimately I think I really agree with Erica Jong (with what I imagine she is trying to say), but her message is garbled and aggressive and feels as much a zipless fuck-you to parents as it does a call to love each other’s kids, which I believe it really is meant to be.  It’s just that you don’t heal narcissism with criticism, but with accurate understanding and compassion—be it for each other or for our larger culture.

In the 70’s they said, “If it feels good do it.”  So perhaps for attachment parents it does feel good (or at least right path) to make sacrifices for our kids and give it our all.  Sure we bitch and moan and blow off a little steam, but that doesn’t mean that we are oppressed by caring for our children (we may be oppressed by how little collective support we get, and so here we are, offering collective support to each other).

At no time in history did parents not love their children.  We all do our best, and the experts keep changing the tune.  Meanwhile, moms birth, nurse, soothe, teach, feed, facilitate and love their children; moms know what to do.  My clarion call is to trust your instincts; live your animal; be the village; have a good time.

Jong concludes:  “In the oscillations of feminism, theories of child-rearing have played a major part. As long as women remain the gender most responsible for children, we are the ones who have the most to lose by accepting the “noble savage” view of parenting, with its ideals of attachment and naturalness. We need to be released from guilt about our children, not further bound by it. We need someone to say: Do the best you can. There are no rules.”

In my estimation naturalness and attachment (in a group, community or extended spiritual family context) does release us from guilt.  It allows us to love and care about each other.  Still, I am more than happy to stand beside Erica Jong and say:  Do the best you can.  There are no rules.

Namaste, Bruce