Question

Write a letter to your little sister in a response of her letter about guide to her she want to know about society their relationship our behavior lot of sensitive issues

Answer 1

n a family home in picture-pretty Oxfordshire, four women and seven toddlers are, respectively, drinking tea and causing chaos. The children, aged between 13 months and four years, are doing what children of those ages do: quarrelling over toys and bellowing for their mothers. The women are discussing the kinds of things modern mothers discuss: the evils of sleep training, the joys of hypnobirthing. Rebecca, whose house we are in, sets cake down for her friends just as her 19-month-old son toddles up to demand some milk.

“You’re hungry again? OK,” she says, shifting in a large armchair as she lifts her boy across her body and unbuttons her top. “You don’t wake up and think, I’m going to breastfeed a toddler,” she tells me. “You just keep feeding your newborn. Sometimes I’ll go somewhere and other people will look at me strangely. They’ll make comments about him always hanging off me, but then they say what a happy boy he is,” she adds, as her son drinks contentedly, pausing only to switch sides. Fifteen minutes later, he is back for more.

These women, who meet every week, refer to themselves as a tea-and-cake group, but they are also an attachment parents’ group. An offshoot of “natural parenting”, also known as gentle or off-grid parenting, or intensive mothering, this is the approach of the moment, just as Gina Ford’s more scheduled method (strict bedtimes, an unbreakable routine) was a decade ago; to a certain degree, it is the reaction of a new generation of parents against Ford and her ilk.

Attachment parenting harks back to the baby-focused 1970s, only with a more 21st-century, anti-authority bent. Mothers are urged to trust their instincts over the advice of professionals, and to shun developments such as sleep training (in which babies are left to cry to encourage them to sleep for longer) and, occasionally, vaccinations. Whereas parents were once encouraged to fit the baby into their schedule, an attached mother is led by her baby, responding to their demands immediately, or “respectfully”. The approach combines an attitude of enlightenment (“We don’t do things the old way”) with veneration of the distant past (vague anthropological references to the practices of ancient tribespeople, never mind the improved mother and infant mortality rates). If you are a woman aged between 25 and 45, you will almost certainly have seen people lauding this approach on social media; Facebook will soon have as many groups devoted to attachment parenting as it has gifs of cats.

Like the trend for “wellness” and clean eating, attachment parenting posits that the modern world has corrupted what was once pure, through scientific intervention. Rejecting modernity has become the ultimate aspirational signifier, from fetishising cycling over driving to praising farmers’ markets over supermarkets; after all, in order to reject something, you not only need access to it, you have to have so many options, you don’t even need it. It also has about it a touch of anti-intellectualism, an increasingly popular stance in everything from politics to nutrition.