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COPYRIGHT 2002 Mothering Magazine
When our baby was a week old, his grandfather voiced concern that my partner and I were holding him too much. Since then, Grandpa has worried about cosleeping and extended nursing, and we have continued to talk together about the differences in our parenting philosophies. At one point Grandpa attempted to harmonize our obviously different approaches: "Surely we all want the same thing," he said. "We want our children to grow up to become independent."
We do want our son to develop the resources to care for himself and to meet his needs effectively. We also want him to be deeply connected to himself and to others, to become interdependent as well as independent. The conviction that by practicing attachment parenting my partner and I were creating the foundation for a lifetime of trust and connection has been deeply sustaining.
Attachment parenting means nurturing independence and interdependence by prioritizing babies' needs. We hold them, nourish them, wrap them onto our bodies, welcome them into our beds. Yet before our children are out of diapers our relationships with them become infinitely more complicated. As they grow, we encounter increasingly autonomous human beings whose desires often collide with ours. Faced with this greater range and complexity of needs, we are often less clear about our options for responding in ways that nurture trust, respect, and autonomy.
How do we deal with a two year old when he grabs every toy his friend plays with? What do we say to a four year old who screams in rage when her baby brother cries? How do we talk with a ten year old about the chores he has left undone, again? What strategies will keep our teenager open with us--and safe?
Nonviolent Communications[SM] (NVC), sometimes referred to as Compassionate Communication, offers us a powerful approach for extending the values of attachment parenting beyond infancy. A process for connecting deeply with ourselves and others, and for creating social change, NVC has been used worldwide in intimate family settings as well as in organizations, schools, prisons, and war-torn countries.
NVC shares two key premises with attachment parenting: Human actions are motivated by attempts to meet needs, and trusting relationships are built through attentiveness to those needs. Both premises contrast with prevailing childrearing practices and with the assumptions about human beings that underlie these practices. Instead of focusing on authority and discipline, attachment parenting and NVC provide theoretical and practical grounds for nurturing compassionate, powerful, and creative children who will have resources to contribute to a peaceful society.
Human Needs and Human Actions
Unlike conventional views of babies as manipulative and in danger of being spoiled,...
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