Parenting for lazy people

Since Time Magazine came out with a mother breastfeeding her child on the front cover yesterday , people have been shocked, excited and grossed by this and the debate aboutattachment parenting seems to continue. A lot of people make it seem like attachment parenting is something you can only do when you have endless time on your hands, meaning when you’re a rich, stay-at-home mom.  

“If you are preparing organic baby food, breastfeeding on demand, washing cloth diapers and co-sleeping, there's little time for writing, filing, painting, data entry, making music, nursing, engaging in politics, teaching or appearing on TV to tell other women what to do.”

 I think this is not true; I think attachment parenting is excellent for lazy people. Because if you breastfeed, you don’t need to get up in the middle of the night to make a bottle for your baby. You don’t need to wash an endless number of bottles, and you don’t need to buy formula. When you go somewhere you don’t have to bring bottles, formula and water. When you nurse on demand, you don’t have to watch the clock and remember when you last fed your baby. You don’t have to listen to a crying baby for an hour because only then will it be time for his feeding again.

When you co-sleep, you don’t need to get up in the middle of the night when you hear you baby cry in another room. You will attend to your baby’s needs even before he wakes up, and after a while even before you wake up yourself. To me, co-sleeping was inevitable when I had to go back to work; I just couldn’t make it on even less sleep than I was already getting.

Yup, that's me cooking dinner with BlueEyes on my back

When you carry your baby in a sling, you don’t have to worry about bringing the bulky stroller. You don’t have to worry if you go somewhere with a lot of stairs. Also, you can get a lot done in and around the house with a baby on your back so you don’t have to prevent the baby from burning his hands on the oven while you are cooking.

When you have your baby eat by himself from when he is 6 months old, you don’t have to simultaneously feed a baby and try to eat yourself. You can sit down at night, eat dinner and have a conversation while the baby is playing and eating his food (okay and then the dinner table/floor is going to be a huge mess for a while, so this is the part that is not really for lazy people, but having a quiet dinner is worth it for me). To this day, we have never given BlueEyes baby food from a jar. Not necessarily out of any type of principle, but just because he eats what we eat, and otherwise we have some frozen purees that we’ve made before (which literally takes maybe 10 minutes to make).

So I think we shouldn’t make attachment parenting bigger than it is: parenting for lazy people. And by the way, attachment parenting is NOT deciding not to vaccinate your children.