Peaches and the farce of parenting creeds

IT WAS not the best week for the promotion of ‘attachment parenting’, the method of child rearing that says women should keep their babies close to them 24/7. In much the same way as Gwyneth Paltrow introduced the idea of conscious uncoupling to the masses, Peaches Geldof used her celebrity to promote the intense child-rearing techniques known as AP.

At every opportunity the devoted mother talked about the 7Bs of AP – bonding, breastfeeding, baby-wearing and so forth – most famously in a television clash with outspoken Apprentice contestant Katie Hopkins, who dismissed it all as ‘New Age nonsense’.

But Peaches’s thousands of Instagram and Twitter followers – mostly young mothers like her – disagreed. They were treated to daily updates of the adorable Geldof boys cheerfully meeting all their developmental milestones and becoming the confident little products of the perfect parenting creed.

Peaches co-slept, or rather slept with them, in a nine-foot bed, picked them up as soon as they cried and carried them around with her in a sling. She became an inspiration to her fans, although occasionally as she swapped tips about children’s clothes and equipment on Instagram, she might be asked an awkward question – like why she had stopped breast-feeding, which is, unsurprisingly, quite high up in the list of the 7Bs. PEACHES’S response was that she had a thyroid problem and, in retrospect, that perhaps should have flagged up the possibility of there being a yawning chasm between her public image and private life. Because, as her inquest heard, for all her dedication to AP, Peaches had adopted a more hands-off style of mothering in her last days. Her little boys spent the weekend with their grandparents which, the court heard, was a regular occurrence. Her husband Thomas Coen had dropped her younger son Phaedra home the day before her fatal overdose and when Peaches died on her spareroom bed in a fog of heroin, the 11-month-old was all alone in the house. Sadly, for all the extra pains Peaches had taken to give her sons the best start in life, none of them could paper over the cracks created by her deep unhappiness or stop the timebomb that was detonated once she relapsed into drug use.

The internet rows over whether she was taking a risk sleeping with her babies, rather than leaving them in a cot, or whether she was feeding them solids too early, faded into insignificance compared to her personal demons.

That’s the thing about parenting philosophies – they may be great for stimulating debate but whether they are right or wrong matters not a damn compared to the parents’ level of happiness.

Being a mother or a parent is about who or how the mother is – whether she is prepared to let her baby holler for one minute or for ten is purely a mechanical issue. A child who has a mother full of anxiety will pick up on it and often become just like their mother, regardless of whether they are breastfed until their milk teeth fall out or swaddled until they start walking.

History has a habit of repeating itself and Peaches’s life followed the same wretched trajectory as her mother’s. The child who watched her mother spiral into drug addiction, slid into a similar abyss herself.

Peaches Geldof had high hopes for her sons. She often said that she hoped they would have two parents to care for them and a longer and more enjoyable childhood than she ever had.

The 7Bs of attachment parenting were not much help in that regard. The key to that was Peaches coming to terms with the pain of her childhood, her psychological struggles and her addictions.