Posts by: Rita Brhel
“He’s using you as a pacifier!” I thought I was the only one who regularly heard this when someone noticed that I breastfed my babies to sleep, until I read it in a list among the annoying things breastfeeding women commonly hear in La Leche League’s The Womanly Art of Breastfeeding. When did a pacifier—a [...]
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We really have to be careful with what terms we use, when we refer to our children. Even if not spoken aloud, the labels that we put on our children in our own minds can influence the way we interact with them and consequently how they grow up thinking of themselves. Recently, a woman told [...]
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Last weekend, I picked up the fourth edition of A Child Is Born by Lennart Nilsson and Lars Hamberger, an absolutely brilliant, breath-taking photographic journey of a baby’s development from conception to birth. I am using it as a way of introducing sex to my children, the oldest of whom is six years old. Some [...]
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When I work with mothers who are breastfeeding or who intend to breastfeed, I cannot overemphasize the importance of nursing on demand. This means not scheduling feedings and not substituting pacifiers or bottles for the real thing. The breasts produce as much milk as is needed, no more and no less. And a baby nurses [...]
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Everyone loves babies. We’re programmed to. It’s biological: A 2008 research study at Baylor showed that the happiness centers in our brains light up when we see a baby smiling at us. Conversely, a 2012 study at Aarhus University showed that a baby’s cry elicits a unique, lightning-fast response in his parents to soothe the [...]
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There is a pervasive myth that Attachment Parenting is done once the child has left the baby stage, when breastfeeding and babywearing are no longer appropriate or even possible to do. This is related to the same myth that prescribes only certain parenting techniques – namely breastfeeding, babywearing, bedsharing, and others – to parenting with [...]
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When I was a new mother, I heard all the usual reasons why I shouldn’t practice Attachment Parenting with my baby – namely, the need to teach her early independence. Now that I’ve had a few babies, people are wising up that I think that argument for early independence is bogus. Children naturally learn independence [...]
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There is still a lot of discussion centering on attachment parenting, even though the controversial TIME coverage was almost three weeks ago, which is equal to eons away in our instantaneous, cluttered, sensationalism-saturated mass media. You know that something – some issue, some news story – has made it big when it’s still being talked [...]
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I have to admit, I was a little shocked when I first saw the cover of TIME magazine last week. My first thought was not that there is anything wrong with breastfeeding a three or four year old, because there isn’t, but given the climate in mainstream America, that brazen of a photo would turn [...]
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It’s one of those moments that parents never think will happen to them, and then suddenly they find themselves in that moment wondering how they got there and what it will take to get them out. Last weekend, I sat beside my oldest daughter as she lay in a hospital bed, waiting for a doctor [...]
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A monumental event happened in our home last night: My almost six-year-old daughter, my oldest, came to me sometime in the middle of the night after a scary dream to ask if she could sleep in my bed for the night. Half asleep, I pulled a pillow next to me and spread my blanket over [...]
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I have spanked a child. Wow, that was hard to admit. It was before I fully embraced Attachment Parenting, way back when. I was a new parent, I was intrigued by AP and positive discipline, but I was struggling against the punishing mindset I grew up with. SpankOut Day is Monday, April 30. What will [...]
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