Healthy Attachment vs. Helicopter Parenting

It’s a funny thing, attachment.  I’ve been dealing with this concept from two very different angles lately, and they are pulling me into different directions.

From a philosophical perspective, attachment is bad and ought to be avoided.  We’re talking here of attachment to labels, to the past, to the future, to desires.  These are the common robbers of true joy and peace in the present moment.  But this blog isn’t about my spiritual journey or philosophical musings.

From a parenting perspective, attachment is good and desirable.  My goal as a mother is to form a healthy attachment with my daughter.  Doing so will enable her to learn to trust and give her the confidence to develop true independence in a developmentally appropriate timeframe. 

When a child is a baby, she needs her parents (and mother in particular) the most.  In most cases, the child depends on her mother’s womb and later breastmilk for mere survival.  That’s pretty dependent, and it’s the way nature intended it.  Even if a baby is not breastfed, or was adopted at birth, she still depends on her parents for all of her nutrition, her safety, her comfort, opportunities to learn about the world around her.  So no matter how you look at it, a baby is needy, and that’s normal and healthy and good.

As a baby enters toddlerhood, although still very much dependent on her parents, she now begins to want to explore the world on her own, learning that what she does has an effect on her surroundings.  Slowly, the mother begins the long and difficult journey towards her child’s independence.

Even though Natalia is only starting solid foods and we still have at the very least another 6 months of breastfeeding ahead of us, it has already tugged at my heartstrings that at some point in the future, she will wean off the breast, and I will miss the closeness that her dependence on me has had.  On one hand, it’s a sign of healthy attachment between us.  On the other hand, it’s a reminder that the most difficult thing about being a mother will be to let my little girl grow up.

I know it’s too soon to worry about an empty nest, but in reality, once baby starts to wean, mother really should try to remember that her child’s best interest will necessitate letting go, little by little, over the years to come.

There’s a buzzword in parenting circles that deals with a certain parenting style – helicopter parenting.  This refers to the mother (let’s be honest, it’s generally the mother) who cannot accept her child’s growing independence, and sees herself as unequivocally essential to her child’s well-being.  The helicopter parent sees her role as trying to prevent all negative experiences from crossing paths with her child, in the process handicapping the child’s ability to deal with the inevitable struggles of life.  The helicopter mother encourages the child’s dependence on herself for far too long, doing for the child what the child ought to be learning to do for oneself.  Taken to an extreme, a helicopter parent never allows the child to grow up, continuing to do laundry and pay bills (for instance) for their college-aged son or daughter.

Most people agree that this extreme is unhealthy, yet few realize that the road to this scenario is slippery and begins early on.  There is nothing magical that happens on a person’s 18^th birthday that suddenly changes a child into an adult, a dependent creature into an independent grown-up.  It is extremely unfair to the child to coddle her, protect her from all perceived worldly negativity, do for her what she should do for herself, and then ta-da!  “Happy birthday!  Move out, you’re on your own”.  I suspect this happens more than we would think.

And so I have to keep my ultimate goal as a mother in mind.  Right now, Natalia is a little baby who authentically needs me to introduce her to the world.  I will not push her into independence before she is developmentally ready.  This means I don’t let her “cry it out” in a misguided effort for her to figure things out on her own.  She’s too little for that.  It means I recognize her need for physical closeness with me, and I accommodate this need to the best of my ability.

At any rate, I know that my job is to raise a competent, healthy, kind, happy adult.  My job is not to build padded walls around my daughter’s experiences as if I can protect her from the difficulties of life forever; I cannot.  Therefore, I must prepare her instead.  In a word, my job is to make my job obsolete.  If as an adult, Natalia doesn’t need me to do things for her, then I have done my job.

But I do take comfort in knowing that my job as a mother to an adult daughter will not disappear altogether; it will simply metamorph into a role of mentor.  I hope that the years I am putting in now to establish myself as a trustworthy confidant will allow me to be an ideal sounding board for her whenever she needs to run an idea by me, whenever she needs a second opinion without judgment.  No, I don’t want to be her best friend.  That is a role best reserved for a peer.  But I do want our relationship as mother-daughter to flourish with time, and not to stagnate because I become too attached to the idea of being needed by her.

In a way, the parenting attachment brings us full-circle to the philosophical attachment.  If done mindfully, raising a child inevitably makes a parent aware that nothing stays the same, and that the only moment worth living for is the one we’re in right now.  My daughter will never be 6 months old again.  Once she weans off breastmilk, we will never breastfeed again. Though hopefully she will never outgrow cuddles, even if they will need to be done in private and away from her peers.   

So for now, I hold her, nurse her, carry her, shower her with affection, give her my time and attention.  Soon enough, she won’t need it, and I don’t want to look back and say that I didn’t get everything I could have possibly gotten out of these precious early months because I was too busy trying to “teach her independence”.  Alas, her independence will come, but her needing her mommy won’t stay forever.  I will embrace it while I have it.