The role of a lifetime
Pediatrics, which says it raises the risk of sudden infant death syndrome.
The fact is safe co-sleeping is not difficult. The notion of babies being smothered is simply not true. And the benefits of sleeping together are profound. How do you make it safe and what are the benefits?
The benefits are it facilitates breast-feeding, and it encourages more rest. It allows for constant refreshing of the hormones that govern bonding with your baby. We have a mattress on the floor so no one has a risk of falling off. I thought breast-feeding was widely accepted as the better alternative if you can do it. I thought perhaps where attachment parenting diverges is on how long you do it.
Right, so childhood weaning is the term for listening to your child’s signals and not enforcing a concept of weaning and when a child is quote, done breast-feeding. Again, there’s a tremendous amount of variation, but in general, attachment parenting does support what we call extended breast-feeding. So to say that it is recommended that babies breast-feed exclusively for six months is the general global recommendation for baby and mother’s health, but there’s still a strong emphasis on starting solids at 4 or 6 months. Both of my kids did not have solids until after their first birthday. So how old were they when you weaned them?
I did not wean them. My first son weaned at 2; my second son is 3½ and still breast-feeds. He doesn’t breast-feed a lot, but I have not actively weaned him. We set a lot of boundaries around breast-feeding, so for example I wouldn’t breast-feed my 3½-year-old in the middle of the supermarket, where if a newborn needed to breast-feed, I would breast-feed them wherever they needed to. We tend not to breast-feed out of the house at this stage. Are you familiar with Erica Jong’s critique of attachment parenting in the Wall Street Journal? She wrote that it victimizes women and said, “It’s a prison for mothers and it represents as much of a backlash against women’s freedom as the right to life movement.”
I think we’re seeing a new wave of, I guess, what’s being termed feminist mothers — women who feel empowered by being a parent and by making active choices and choosing to follow this aspect of biology. I understand academic and traditional feminism and do believe that for some women not having children is the answer. I also meet a lot of women and selfproclaimed feminists who don’t want to parent their child and would rather someone else do it. Obviously, everybody gets to choose what works for them, but I think we live in a culture that is simply not supportive of mothering this way as empowering, as significant or as worthwhile. And when you look to countries like Sweden and Denmark and Norway, places that place a federal and local emphasis on appreciating parents, those are countries where you see the lowest rates of infant and maternal mortality. I’m sure there aren’t too many neuroscientist-slash-actors out there. How were you cast as a neuroscientist on “Big Bang Theory”?
When I first appeared on the show, it was a guest spot, the finale of Season 3, and my character had no job. She was just a girl Sheldon was being set up with. The way Bill Prady tells it, our creator and executive producer, they figured, why not make her what I am so I can fix things if they’re wrong? The TLC show “What Not to Wear” recruited you because they thought you were “a schlumpy mommy mess,” and that was the first time they’d ever done that.
Iwas the first celebrity that they made over. Fred, my younger son, was 9months old and was on the set off camera, nursing on demand. It was a week of craziness, but it ended up being positive publicity-wise, and it got me to understand some of the politics of appearance in this new Hollywood that I’d really been out of for about 12 years. I learned that it’s important for everyone to see how skinny I am at all times. I learned what colors are good for me and what parts of my body are the best features to emphasize. I learned never to trust myself getting dressed again.
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