Thoughts on AP and Happiest Baby

There are many things you can't know before you have a child, chief among them, perhaps, being your parenting style. While I was pregnant I would have pegged myself for an Attachment Parenting type - not to the letter, probably, but in essence at least. And I was all about Harvey Karp and his Happiest Babies and the fourth trimester.

Now that there is an infant in my care, I have to take a number of exceptions with AP and I look somewhat askance at old Harvey. I certainly would not judge anyone for being a devotee of either, and I know that AP has many fans and a good friend of mine personally swears by the fourth trimester concept, but for my experience, I can't see a universal truth in either one.

If there is a fourth trimester, Miles outgrew fetushood early. For the first few weeks, certainly, he did want to be held nearly all the time and he did prefer to sleep in my arms. But it really wasn't long before I started reading cues that he sometimes found me overstimulating, that being in arms was occasionally stifling, and sometimes he actually wanted to be left alone, or at least given some space. Of course he doesn't want me to go far, but neither did he want to be worn on my body 24/7. That was abundantly clear as he went from always napping in the baby wrap to sometimes fussing, kicking, and squawking until he was taken out and set down elsewhere.

The five S's, again, were lovely in the first three or four weeks, but seemed to lose relevance quickly. When Miles is fussy, the "Cuddle Cure" (shushing white noise + side position + swinging/jiggling + swaddling + sucking) is not a sure thing. Usually his need(s) for soothing is more specific. He wants to get into the swing, or out of it; he wants to be held, or put down; he wants his paci and that's it.

In the last month he's become a more curious baby who's very interested in the sights and sounds around him. He almost never wants to be carried against my chest anymore unless he's very tired. So I have had to kind of take a break from using baby carriers until he has the neck strength to be worn facing out so he can look around (and he's darn close - he has a lot of head control already). He's not very interested in being worn as a way of being close to us - he would rather directly interact with us for a while by playing and talking together, and then have some time to himself with a toy or a vantage point from which to watch the world go by.

I know that a lot of sensible parents who like AP concepts would say that everything I've described still fits within the bounds of AP because I'm reading my baby's cues. That's fine, although in that case I prefer to think of it as simply intuitive parenting rather than the emotionally loaded phrase "Attachment Parenting." Maybe AP just has a branding issue, I don't know.

It's a cliche but a truism that every child is different, and one should always be wary of a method that claims to work for every baby. That's why I am averse to methods in general, although I'm not afraid to try out some tips and tricks that I hear along the way. (Here's a good one that I use for changing Miles in bed in the middle of the night: put a clean diaper under the dirty one while he's still wearing it. That way if he pees or poops mid-changing the new diaper's already in place. That won't help with airborne pee but it's a little extra insurance.)