While breastpumps are a necessary part of life for working mothers who must be separated from their babies, and while for some mothers, full time breastpumping is the only way they can provide breastmilk at all (I am in awe of those women. God bless you, because I don’t know if I could do it.), I agree with this blogger, who says we are headed down a slippery slope with our growing cultural dependence on the breastpump:

…a pumping friendly workplace, while a step in the right direction, is not necessarily a breastfeeding mom-friendly workplace. Giving lower wage women the ability to pump at work is a short-term fix to a much bigger problem. On a meta level, institutionalizing pumping for all women in America is a dangerous, ill-conceived solution to the problem of maternity leave and childcare…

Bigger, better breastpumps, and more luxurious workplace pumping rooms (not that too many companies have those, anyway) are a poor substitute for what American families really need, which is meaningful family leave so that one parent can stay home for at least the first six months without risking poverty (or worse poverty).

Via my old pal, the brilliant Kathy Dettwyler, I found this really excellent review of the past 20 years of academic research related to attachment parenting, which ran as a piece in the journal Evolutionary Psychology.

I just finished reading an essay about why one mother never uses a baby monitor, in which she writes:

I developed a habit of lolling around bed in the morning, not responding to my daughter’s cries down the hall until they progressed from gentle mewling to outright fury. And in that spirit, I refused to buy a baby monitor.

These days, it seems, there’s no such thing as an off-duty parent. These days, there’s no such thing as an off-duty parent. Even when your children are sleeping, you must remain tethered to them by an electronic gadget, one of those modern-parenting must-haves that our own parents somehow survived without.

Well, I’m gonna agree with her on one point – when it comes to infants and very young children, there isn’t such thing as an off-duty parent, unless that parent takes a break by leaving her baby with another aware, alert and responsible adult. Babies are a huge lot of trouble for the first few years, including at night. Their health and safety requires pretty much 24 hour attention.

And as for our forebears not needing electronic gadgets to tether themselves to their babies, well, that’s because until not that long ago, most women breastfed their infants, including at night, meaning they stayed close anyway, without the need for any sort of electronic gadgetry.

Obviously, each parent knows her own baby best, and I am not suggesting that you should always jump to attention at every little whimper and sigh your baby makes during the night, but I cannot imagine “lolling in bed” while my infant screamed in the next room. Would you do that to any other relatively helpless and dependent group of people? Put them in a bed with bars in another room and then refuse to respond to them until you felt like it? Disabled people? Elderly people?

And frankly, even if I had no intellectual problem with allowing my babe to cry and sob in another room, every fiber of my maternal instinct would be screaming for me to respond to my baby. I wouldn’t be physically able to do any “lolling” when my baby was crying out for me from another room.

I sleep with my baby. We start the night with her lying down with me on our bed until she drifts off. Then her daddy moves her to her own crib, which is set up right next to my side of the bed. At some point during the night, she asks to get into bed with us, and I pick her up, and snuggle her in between us. She sighs contentedly. I sigh contentedly. We all sleep happily. At some point soon, we will have her own room finished, separated from ours by a bathroom, and we will begin the process of moving her to her own sleep space – probably starting with naps after she’s about two years old.

This is what works for me. Your mileage may vary. Lots of people I know say they cannot sleep well with a child in their bed. That’s okay too, of course. I think the best sleep strategy for a family is the one in which the most people get the most sleep, and everyone feels comfortable and satisfied. For Jon and me, that’s keeping our baby close. I would not sleep well at all with her in another room. Plus, since I am separated from her all day while at my job, co-sleeping recharges our attachment batteries, so to speak. We need the touch time.

But whether you have the baby in your bed, in your room, or in another room, it’s imperative that you be able to hear her, and hear her well. In my opinion, putting the baby in another room with no baby monitor is just plain mean. It’s also risky.

 What do I mean by risky? Well, there is increasing research that maternal awareness and response to infant noises and behaviors during sleep reduces the risk of SIDS.  As a mother who has co-slept with three babies now, I know first-hand how symbiotic mother-baby interaction is during the overnight hours in a shared sleep space. A lot of mothering happens while we are in bed together, and I believe that it’s mothering that helps to keep my baby safe.

Leaving SIDS aside, however, what if your baby were choking? Or vomiting? What if part of the crib collapsed? What if one of these things happened while you had her in another room with the door closed, and no baby monitor on? You wouldn’t hear her. She could die.  This is just plain irresponsible, in my opinion.

I understand the desire not to “overparent” children. I get that. But babies need babying. It’s bigger kids who need to be treated like, well, bigger kids. Sometimes parents get the two confused.

For sure, don’t micromanage your five-year-old’s relationships with other kindergarteners. Don’t attach a GPS tracking chip to your 10 year old. Don’t refuse to allow your 12 year old to walk to a friend’s house. Don’t call your 19 year old every single day at college.

But for God’s sake, DO make sure you can clearly hear your infant or young toddler when she is alone in another room at night. That’s not overparenting. That’s good parenting.

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2009 will mark 10 years since the publication of “Attachment Parenting.”