Connected at the Hip?

Attachment parenting is a hot topic among psychologists, and parents alike. 

What is attachment parenting? 

Attachment parenting is typically an extremely close relationship of child and mother. The mother will breastfeed her child, on demand, sometimes until they are toddlers at age 3, 4 or even 5. The mother will perform 'baby wearing' which is always carrying the baby either in a sling, a carrier in the front, a backpack for behind, or in a hip attachment as seen above. In attachment parenting, co-sleeping is also a popular method used to ensure bonding.

The next question after this explanation would probably be: 

Who created this idea of parenting? 

TIME magazine writer Kate Pickert, wrote an article in May that made the cover staring attachment parenting and the doctor that created it, Dr. William "Bill" Sears.

Dr. Bill Sears (right) and wife Martha (left)

Dr. Sears is known as the father of attachment parenting. He is the author of over 40 books on child-rearing and pregnancy. Sears' is best known for his 'tome', as Pickert describes it, a 750+ paged parenting manual known as The Baby Book that his wife Martha also helped with writing. This book, however, wasn't written based on Sears' own experience but more of a 'reaction' to his childhood. Sears and his wife did not have their theories of attachment parenting come to life as children themselves. Sears's father abandoned him as an infant; Martha's father died when she was a child and her mother was mentally ill.

As the couple that founded the theory of having a close relationship to your children had anything but that. It has been concluded that it is because they did not have the loving family they wanted that they would create one for their children in their upbringing, and thus, attachment parenting was born.

Attachment parenting is very controversial as it is very anti-feminist. 

This practice expects women to carry their baby, feed their baby, and sleep with their baby in order to have the set connection possible with their baby. This practice can also leave dad out of the picture a lot since methods such as breastfeeding, even after teeth have developed, should be done straight from the breast and shouldn't be pumped to ensure the best mother-child connection.

Nutritional benefits of breast milk vs. formula

I think that breastfeeding is something that everyone should do, but I don't see a problem with pumping the milk for later use. Pumping the breast milk encourages a stronger father-child connection when the child can see the father's face when feeding them as well as the mother's. Breast milk is much better for children than formula because the baby can get vitamins, minerals, and other nutrients that can't alway be dehydrated and crushed up to make a powdered substance for consumption as that is basally what formula is. I think that breastfeeding should be done for at least the first year and a half, maybe two due to the nutrients that babies will receive from the mother's milk. Breastfeeding and pumping are also all around more beneficial economically.

Cost benefits of breast milk vs formula

If it is done for longer that that, then, I think more pumping should be involved and it should be used as a vitamin supplement if say the child just doesn't like vegetables yet, who knows. A personal benefit of the mother continuing breastfeeding is that the 'baby weight' gained during pregnancy will slide right off as breastfeeding can burn a few hundred calories a day since the baby is using it for their energy. Continuing breast feeding or pumping can also prevent monthly menstruation as well as a pretty decent form of birth control, though as all others out there, not 100% effective.

Another big part in attachment parenting is baby wearing or carrying that has critics about it, including myself. I think that babies do need that bonding with their parents that is received when they are being rocked and carried as it shows the child that they are wanted and loved which is the goal of attachment parenting, to ensure this bond is formed and sealed as stated in the Attachment Parenting International website where it talks about caring for the child in the first paragraph. I don't see how this can be necessarily healthy though, once the child is able to walk, for the mother to constantly be holding their child. 

When thinking anatomically about carrying a child on your hip, many mothers have to shift their weight to the child's side and 'throw their hip out' to support the child. This weight shifting is putting more pressure on one side of the body and also leaving the hips at an unnatural angle under this pressure for long periods of time as well as the back being slights curves in a left or right position, and the knee locked in place, which is also unnatural for long periods of time. I myself have carried babies this way and I know that my back becomes sore along with my hips and sometimes my knees from carrying children this way for a long time. 

The typical carrying method for infants on a mothers hip.

After my experiences, I think that children should be carried and coddled when they are infants, but as the child ages and grows bigger, I think they should start to be carried less. I realize that there are many devices to carry babies on some part of a mother, but if attachment parenting is about a natural connection and natural upbringings, then shouldn't there not be a use for those artificial devices? I think not. Strollers, I think, are the best way to go when a child is to heavy to carry but still too small to walk for a long time on their own.

Strollers are good for infants and toddlers alike.

The bonding continues with attachment parenting, from the breast, to the hip, now into the bed the babies will go with their parents in a practice called 'co-sleeping'. Co-sleeping is when the mother, father, and their children sleep in the same bed, every night until they are ready for a "big kid bed" which can be as late as age 8 or 9 in some cases. A blog post in The Mommy Files talks about this interesting phenomenon that has been increasing in popularity since the 70s and 80s when it became more widely accepted to sleep in the same bed as your child. Blogger of The Mommy Files, Amy Graff considers the question of whether or not sex is acceptable in the family bed in her post.

A few co-sleeping positions with some humorous names.

Starting with the co-sleeping itself, I think that it is acceptable for a child to sleep with parents when they are infants. When I read that there are little 'side carts' for beds for infants I became more than certain in my opinion that infants should be close to the mother, especially if she is breastfeeding, then it would make it easier to do so in the middle of the night. If a parent feels uncomfortable with the baby so close with possibilities such as blanket suffocation then they should place the baby in a crib, but still keeping them in the same room for better monitoring of the child. I think that at around the age of two, maybe three, that the child should 'graduate' from being with mommy and daddy in the bed and sleep alone in their own room and go on from there to be moved from a crib to a 'big kid bed'.

I think co-sleeping is a good idea. I also think that sex is a healthy behavior, especially for married couples that want children. I do not support both happening simultaneously in the same room at all what-so-ever. 

I am sure that some of you can think back to when you were children and to hear some strange noises coming from the other room or peeked into mommy and daddy's room when they thought you were asleep and saw them doing a very strange act to you. That was possibly a pretty scarring event, wasn't it? Now, think about how it might effect a child's mentality to wake up to it happening right next to them. The sight, the sound, maybe even the smells could really effect the child's relationship, not only with the parents, but maybe even other adults. It doesn't matter if the baby is sleeping, they can still hear it, their brains are still functioning while unconscious. Having sex with your child in the room is comparable to a college roommate bringing someone home to get busy with while you're sleeping on the other side of the room!

It's embarrassing, rude, and totally unacceptable in my opinion.

Overall, I think that there are many variations and different levels to attachment parenting for any situation in a parent-child relationship. As anything, it is best to do what you think is right for you.

A Word Speaks a Thousand Thoughts

A word,
Eine wort,
Una palabra,
Un mot.

Words, are spoken all over the world, everyday, and at every moment of a day, but do these words actually mean more than what is said?
There are over 7,000 spoken languages from all parts of the Earth and many of them have not interacted with each other which leads to the languages themselves to be different (i.e. Swedish and Swahili are two totally different languages and even have different character sets for their written versions).

I will use my first set of phrases at the top as my first example of how language is not only the way we speak, but how we speak and think about things. The four phrases you see above all mean the same thing 'a word'.The first two, English and German are in a category of languages called the Germanic languages and the latter two, Spanish and French, the Romantic languages.

These categories are denoting branches of languages that have spread over time, but still have some of the same characteristics of each other such as similar words and syntax. The English and German phrases have a similarly spelled noun "word; wort" however, the indefinite article "a" is very different. The reason why there is this difference is because in German there is a feminine, a masculine, and a neuter version of the word "a"; this phrase happens to be feminine.

Why is "word" feminine in German you may ask? It is simply because that is how the language was constructed in order to help better define and categorize things in the German language. Spanish and French also have masculine and feminine articles in their Romance languages, as do Portuguese and Italian in the same Romantic category. Spanish and French have very similar looking indefinite articles for the same word, however what may become confusing is to know that, although it is the same word in both languages, in Spanish "word" is feminine and, in French, masculine. Now why would two languages from the same branch of origin have different genders you may ask? It is the same answer as with German, over time it was how the language was constructed. Although Spain and France are side by side geographically, they will have their differences in language as they do in their cultures because as they developed on their own, that is how they became independent and individualized as countries.

Language fascinates me. What I have already described above is primarily information I have gathered while personally studying and learning languages, but since language is such an interesting topic, I read further into it on a wider scale than Western European language to find out even more incredible concepts, thoughts, and ideas in other languages.

Time is a concept that has been around for thousands of years. We use time to determine when the morning and the afternoon are, shifts at work, when a meal should be ready, bed times for young children, when young children reach a milestone in their life such as young adulthood. Time is used in many ways to bring order into our lives, so we would assume that everyone, no matter what language they speak, would have words in their language for time, right? Wrong. In the 1940s, a linguist named Benjamin Lee Whorf wrote about an idea he had that language influences thought. Whorf believed that groups of people thought differently due to the language they speak. He went as far to say at cultures such as the Hopi Native American tribe were unable to understand the concept of time because the word "time" wasn't able to be directly translated. This idea was thought to be true until the 1960s where it was rejected due to two factors; the idea itself seemed racist and, how could humans have created a word such as "time" if it didn't always exist in the first place? The idea that language influenced thought was still a very interesting idea to many and was further looked upon to seek the validity in it.

modern form to measure time - the wrist watch

ancient form to measure time - the sundial

A more in-depth academic article How Language Shapes Thought begins to unravel the mysteries of the relationship between thought and language based on simple concepts such as time, numbers, gender, family, and direction. A great example of this is written in this article:

"For example, suppose I want to tell you that I saw Uncle Vanya on 42nd Street. In Mian, a language spoken in Papua New Guinea, the verb I used would reveal whether the event happened just now, yesterday or in the distant past, whereas in Indonesian, the verb wouldn’t even give away whether it had already happened or was still coming up. In Russian, the verb would reveal my gender. In Mandarin, I would have to specify whether the titular uncle is maternal or paternal and whether he is related by blood or marriage, because there are different words for all these different types of uncles and then some (he happens to be a mother’s brother, as the Chinese translation clearly states). And in Pirahã, a language spoken in the Amazon, I couldn’t say “42nd,” because there are no words for exact numbers, just words for “few” and “many.” 

These are all variations of a single sentence in only a handful of different languages. 

With the verb in the sentence ("saw" or "to see" in the infinitive) it is in the past for us, but in other countries it may not even have a tense or past, present, future as English does. Languages without a future tense are known as "futureless languages". There is an idea that is argued that there is a difference in the economic standing for "future languages" and "futureless languages". In a TED talk video, Keith Chen, a behavioral economist, examines the pattern that a country with a "futureless language" may actually have a higher savings rate than a country with a "future language". He believes this to be true since those without a future tense tend to think of the future similarly as they do of the present. This may make "futureless speakers", such as those in Luxembourg that have the highest % of GDP,  more conservative with spending as compared to "future speakers" such as Greeks that have the lowest % of GDP savings in the graph that Chen displayed during his presentation.

Graph shown in Keith Chen's TED talk

Language is a complex concept to grasp and even more so with the increase in studies of what it effects, and how it effects a country, a person, and a single thought.

Thanks for reading!

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Babies: My thoughts on their thoughts

With the articles that we read this week the main question was if babies could think or not. In the past fifty years, there has been an increase in the amount of research that has gone in to figure out this difficult question.

Since one can't normally go up to an eighteen month old and ask them what they are thinking about or have them answer a question verbally, the best way to go about it is to test it with body language, more specifically, eye movement and pupil dilation.

A Time article focused on eye movement and pupil dilation where infants were tested for their ability to notice a difference in something such as the color of a train being the same going in a circular track through a tunnel until, of course, it changed color in the tunnel. The infants' pupil dilations were recorded to show that the infants' eyes dilated when a change occurred, or something unusual happened.

This shows that babies are thinking, as they notice something with their eye dilation to support this. The question is-what babies are thinking when they see this strange occurrence, whether it is something as complex as understanding it to be an impossibility that the train could change colors in the tunnel, or simply that they thought this was a novel event with a color change.

Due to a lack of object permanence, which is when one can recognize that something that is still in existence even when it is not visible, the infant thinks that there is a blue train and then when it changes color that there is a green train. They cannot yet understand that the blue train changed into a green train but, can understand the event of a blue train and the event of a green train which does show that they are thinking.

Angela Saini introduced a point that there was an increase in women in this field of study. In class we spoke about why it could that there has been this increased interest in discovering how babies think. With the increase in the research there was also an increase in women researchers in this field. I think that this is not a coincidence as many mothers could feel more at ease with their baby being tested on if they were being tested by a researcher that was also a mother. With the typically natural nurturing instincts of a women, the babies would natural feel more calm as the researcher would better know how to keep the baby happy, especially if she were to have a child of her own.

 A TED talk video with Child Development psychologist, Alison Gopnik described another interesting point in child development compared to other baby animals; that humans have a longer period of childhood where they are nurtured more so than any other species. Gopnik claims that this is the reason why babies are so bright and how they can develop a higher level of thinking sooner. It makes sense since infancy is where the brain develops the most so if we have more time to finish, it can increase in its complexity.

Languages are a great example of a child's learning capabilities. Children are like sponges that absorb information quickly and effectively when taught a second language. Their brain growth increases exponentially until as old as the age of five, from then the brain develops at a steadier pace of learning, but they are still actively thinking.

Gopnik also claims that during this time that with their increased active thinking, that there is increased creativity. With children being so open to new experiences before the effects of stress and judgement set in, children can openly think about what ever they want to think, how ever they wish to think it. This openness in thought could lead to great ideas that adults, with their experience and more complex knowledge could use to benefit others.

Children are actively thinking about thousands of things at all ages, I think its just more of a question of how deep of thinkers are they and at what point do their thoughts become more complex.

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