by Katie Allison Granju
We dropped our nearly-12-year-old son, Henry off for a month at summer camp this weekend. He stayed two weeks last year but wanted to try a month this time. I know I'll miss him but it was fun to see him happily waving goodbye, surrounded by a gaggle of other boys as we drove away.
In the past few weeks, as I've mentioned to friends and acquaintances that Henry would be gone at camp for four weeks, I've encountered quite a bit of wonderment that we would allow him to stay away that long, or that he would want to. Interestingly, some of the folks who seemed most startled at the idea that a sixth grader would spend a month away from his parents at summer camp are the same people who have amazed me in the past with their willingness to leave their infants and very young children for days or even longer at a time.
In thinking about that riddle, I was reminded yet again of how upside-down I find much of millennial, Western child rearing to be. I think we have it backwards in our culture: we don't allow babies much of a babyhood, but we treat our older children and teenagers like babies for far too long.
As with other higher-order mammals, human infants are hardwired to require certain responses from their adult caregivers in order to thrive. Human babies need to be held a great deal—almost constantly, actually—and experience a great deal of touch-time with other humans. They need to eat very frequently and in small amounts, including during the night. They have a strong need to suck for comfort, not only for food. They need to discover that they are able to elicit responses from the people around them when they cry. And optimally, human infants need to wean and reach other important developmental milestones, such as readiness for separation from parents—at their own unique pace.
Notice that I said that they need these things to thrive, rather than survive. I'm well aware of the anecdotal "my mother fed me on a strict schedule and I'm just fine" argument (I myself rode around without a car seat in a haze of second hand smoke as a tyke), but a growing body of respected anthropological and medical research now supports the view that high-touch, fed-on-cue, attachment-style child care yields optimal neurological and emotional development in babies and young children.
Sure, babies can turn out OK under a variety of conditions, just as plants can take root in rocky soil, but we know with increasing assuredness what the gold standard is.
Yet we modern American parents lead the world in our gadgetry and lifestyles designed to maximize babies' separation from their parents. Although there has been some movement toward more attachment-style parenting in recent years, American babies still spend more time in playpens, swings, cribs, and battery powered bouncy seats than they do in the arms of their parents, siblings, and other relatives. We stay at arm's length, and it's almost as if we are afraid to hold our babies too much for fear they will never let us put them down.
But by age six or seven, we begin to obsess over every detail of our kids' lives and micro-manage every moment of their days. Because we worry about stranger danger and exposure to the wrong movies, advertising, or foods, we no longer allow kids to wander freely through our neighborhoods or even our own front yards, where they should be learning important lessons in autonomy and problem solving. I meet many 10- and 11-year-old children who, while never having spent a night sleeping in the same bed as their parents as infants, still have never spent a night at a friend's house as third and fourth graders.
Our parenting style is like asking trapeze artists to learn to work without a net first, and only after they have mastered this, insisting that they perform in full safety gear of nets, wires, and pulleys. I believe that the result of this backwards approach to raising kids is that we are turning out children who may feel an unexpressed longing for something very primal that they can't even identify, yet without basic life skills or self confidence.
Babies need babying. Big kids need the chance to try out their wings.
And when they experience the inevitable bumps and bruises along the way, that's when we get to hold them close and give them a little "booster shot" of smother love. I fully anticipate that we will receive at least one "I'm so homesick I could die" letter from Henry. When I do, I'll pack and send off an extra special care package for him and continue to count the days until we get to retrieve him. And I'll be both surprised and a little disappointed if in a year or two, he doesn't feel ready for a five week stay.
Katie Allison Granju lives in Knoxville and is the author of Attachment Parenting (Simon and Schuster/1999). Her website is www.locoparentis.blogspot.com
July 10, 2003 * Vol. 13, No. 28
© 2003 Metro Pulse
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