What is Attachment Parenting and Its Benefits

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The education and raising of children is one of the most complex tasks and on which more books have been written throughout history. In fact, from Freud to the present day, different psychological currents have emerged that advocate different ways of facing parenthood and childcare, some of them completely opposite to others, which helps us, to get an idea, of how complex this issue can be. One of the trends that has been gaining strength in recent decades is attachment parenting, which, despite being frontally different from Freudian approaches, offers a series of advantages over them. If you want to go a little deeper into the subject and discover what is attachment parenting and its benefits in the care and development of children, keep reading Green Ecology and we will tell you about it.

What is attachment parenting

Attachment parenting is a parenting system based on the ideas of psychiatrist and psychoanalyst John Bowlby. In fact, it is a stream that drinks directly from the approaches to developmental psychology, which studies changes in people's behavior from conception to death.

Attachment parenting holds that since babies are naturally sociable beings, it is natural for them to seek the presence and shelter of their parents. In this way, attachment parenting states that spending a lot of time with babies is good, as well as allowing them the physical contact with parents (especially with the mother after childbirth), and that babies and children believe emotional ties with their parents without this being an inconvenience when it comes to doubting whether they will be independent adults in the future.

Difference between attachment and traditional parenting

Attachment parenting is opposed to traditional approaches, specifically to the more traditional view of Freud, which argues that both babies and children love their parents because they are the means to satisfy their desires. In this way, children become dependent individuals on their parents, since they are the means they naturally find to satisfy all their wants and needs. Following this approach, it is necessary to force the independence of children with respect to their parents, since it will be the only way in which they will become self-sufficient and independent adults.

However, this theory has received much criticism, since, affirming that babies or children only want their parents to satisfy their desires, collides head-on with the fact that human beings are sociable beings, that is, that they can enjoy the simple fact of being in contact with other human beings just because they are, without the need for a hidden interest to mediate beyond simple contact with their peers. In reality, today very few psychologists claim that the Freudian view is the only way to deal with such a complex issue and, in fact, more and more experts are emphasizing the importance of emotions and emotional intelligence in developing healthy and satisfied adults.

Attachment Parenting: Benefits

In fact, although it is evident that parents fully meet the needs of children, it is also important to keep in mind that they are an example for them. That is, it is not only about solving the needs of minors, but, by solving them, they also constantly provide information to the lives of children, who they take in their parents models and examples behaviors to imitate that allow them to solve their own needs when the time is right.

In addition, beyond the merely practical part related to the solution and satisfaction of children's wishes, another of the most important aspects that parenting with attachment takes into account is that allows children to develop greater empathy towards other human beings. This entails a better understanding of the reality of the other, which, likewise, makes them much more emotionally intelligent adults, since they are able to better understand everyday situations of the day to day and establish much more solid and real social ties.

In fact, one of the most beneficial effects of attachment parenting is found in the way adults approach problems. Those minors who have been motivated to be self-sufficient from a very young age are usually very skilled at finding solutions to problems individual or that only affect them in a reduced part of their life sphere. In contrast, those children who have grown up in an environment in which attachment parenting has been practiced become much more cooperative adults. That is, it may be true that they are not as self-sufficient as the first. However, they have a greater capacity for cooperation with others, which allows them to develop much stronger and more efficient social groups when solving problems, whether they affect a single individual or the community as a whole. In this way, although there is greater dependence on the group, the results are better, since, indeed, belonging to a group allows individual needs to also be satisfied, and, in fact, more effectively than in the case of those adults who have more to the competition than to the collaboration.

If you want to read more articles similar to What is Attachment Parenting and Its Benefits, we recommend that you enter our category of Parenting with Attachment.

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