The Spoiled, Unconsolable Baby Canard

We're headed into the final stretch of the AP FAQ here....

Were you worried they’d get spoiled, and too dependent on external comfort when they were sad?

No. I don’t think you can spoil a baby. I especially don’t think that parents of multiples can spoil their babies: we don’t have the time, the arms, or the energy. But more than that, it has gradually dawned on me that halting a workable solution today just because it might cause problems in the future is, well, insane. Just because I never imagined that the kids would still be wearing night-time diapers at age four, doesn’t mean I should have started potty training at age two. It was age appropriate to respond to every cry from a three-month old baby and to rock her to sleep every night. The babies at 26 months had very different needs and abilities, and now, at age four, I have no hesitation in walking my kids back to their beds, tucking them in, and saying good night again. The crucial factor for me was that my kids trust me to meet their needs. How else do you do that, except through responsiveness?

I also agree with the temperament researchers, who say that what works well for one child may not work at all for another, because of her inborn temperamental needs. Strict schedulers of multiples don’t seem to agree with that idea, at least not in my experience. There tends to be a lot of talk about "teaching the baby she’s not a singleton, and she doesn’t get to do that [particular inconvenient habit]." Gemma has always been a "good sleeper," at night at least, sleeping as much as six hours at a stretch at 2 months and falling asleep in the crib after being laid down awake at five months. Elba had a terrible time relaxing at the end of the day right from the beginning, a fact commented on by every single person who came to stay with us. Elba would actually lie stiffly in my arms as she nodded off, and if pushed too fast at bedtime (whether in crib or swing), she would throw up and become hysterical. Remarkably, by 26 months, she would kick me out of bed at night: she’d gently remind me "night-night, sweet dreams" and get Gemma and Wilder to play along. It was enormously satisfying to watch Elba make that transition, and to believe that I’d helped her along by meeting her need for rocking and parental soothing earlier on. Now, Elba’s the only one of the kids who almost never climbs into bed with me at night, almost always lies in bed awake after the others have dozed off (she still takes longer to unwind) but also sleeps a solid 45 minutes longer in the morning. It was so, so hard to meet Elba’s sleep needs sometimes in the first 18-24 months, hard not to want to just lay her down screaming and run far away, so seeing her so self-sufficient and happy in sleep is a fantastic feeling. Meanwhile, William falls asleep fast, wakes up early, and has virtually nothing in common with his sisters when it comes to sleep. I don’t think that’s at all surprising or unique: my brother and sister and I had fairly different sleep habits, too.

Did they learn to comfort themselves?

Yes. It definitely took longer because it was at their pace, not mine, but in ten years, I doubt I’m going to look back on their baby years and say, gosh, I wish I’d rocked, nursed, and cuddled them less. Right now, today, I miss those times. I needed down time, I absolutely needed Calder to come home and give me my breaks, but I’m not sorry I chose the route I did. I’ll never rock another baby again--I’m incredibly, unspeakably grateful that I did it once.

Plus, I suffered pretty severe post-partum depression. Practicing attachment parenting was incredibly healing for me. I actually didn’t fully embrace it until six or eight weeks after Elba came home; before then I spent a lot of energy and time trying fruitlessly to get the babies onto a schedule, and I was miserable. Were their days I melted down and just wanted the lives of my friends who propped bottles to stay on schedule, introduced cry-it-out at twelve weeks, and laid their babies down awake, thereby getting to see their favorite TV shows in real time? Oh, yes, yes, there were those days. But taken all in all, now that those days are past, I'm so glad I spent my time the way I did. Besides, my kids are enormously self-confident, secure, and happy. Whatever Calder and I managed to cobble together, I think it laid a nice, sturdy foundation.

Well, I know a family who practiced AP and their kid...

"...only slept in the parents’ bed at night, was still night-nursing continually at 15 months, her parents had no sex life, she needed two hours to fall asleep and then only if one or both parents lied down with her, she only napped if the mom slept too, never ate at meals, demanded snacks continually, and was a whiny, clingy, demanding brat by the time she was two"? Yes, I’ve heard of that family! They really get around, don’t they. They seems especially well-known to the baby nurses who post on the Triplet Connection, women who like to say they’ve never met a family for whom AP works, that they’re always being called in to help fix the poor deluded AP parents’ bad choices. I’ve always thought this was about as insightful as the personal trainer who claims he’s never met anyone who eats chocolate without developing a raging weight problem (hello—you’re a problem-solver, people only come to you when they have problems) but whatever.

My short-answer response to these stories is this: you can be a "bad" parent doing a lot of different things. There are "bad" AP parents and "bad" scheduling parents and "bad" whatever-the-hell-else parents. Parenting philosophies are guides, they offer tools, and how you use those tools doesn’t always reflect on the philosophy. Have you met the family who fed their kid formula (yee gads! oh no! how could they! ... Wait, we fed formula ... oh, never mind) on a strict-three hour schedule, left him to scream in his crib for an hour when he was 12 weeks old, and never held him because babies need to learn independence? And now he’s an allergy-ridden thug with an eating disorder and a bed-wetting habit? I think they live right next door to that out-of-control AP family you mentioned. Out on Bad-Mommmy-Myth Lane?

Karen Gromada wrote once on the APMultiples site that she tried to make choices based on a fairly simple formula: what was her child supposed to learn and accomplish during this particular life stage, and what were her goals for how her child would behave, believe, and feel as he entered the stages to come? I wrote at the beginning of this endless little discussion that my primary goal in the first year was to have a really tight mother-baby bond. Everything I did in the early months arose from that. I can easily imagine folks who had the same goal for their baby’s first year, who made completely different choices than mine. I can also imagine people whose goals were very different from mine, but whose choices were the same. It’s a complicated situation, raising a child, and I’ve found that I don’t often agree 100% with Calder about how to handle something, let alone anyone else. But enough with the "everyone I know who did that" stories about attachment parenting, because now you know me, and it’s just not true.

Multiple Attachments: Life Without a Schedule

There is no way you can you practice Attachment Parenting with multiples!

The crucial books for me were Mothering Multiples, rev. ed.; and Keys to Parenting Multiples, both by Karen Kerkhoff Gromada. Gromada is a long-time La Leche League leader, certified lactation consultant, and mom to twin boys who are now in their twenties, plus three other now-grown singletons. She believes that parents, not book authors, are the best experts on their children’s needs; that parents should provide responsive, loving care to their babies and children; and that the parent-child bond is central to all children’s emotional growth, whether the child was a multiple-birth baby or not. Although I read the Sears’ Baby Book, there were and are a great many Sears ideas I wasn’t able to implement fully, babywearing being the most obvious. Too often, I closed the Sears' books feeling guilty more than helped, so I learned to leave them alone. Also, I lost patience with their tendency to call parents who make different choices detached. What a crock.

In practical terms, I learned to spend a lot of time on the floor, cuddling one baby while stroking another’s body if they were fussy, and relied on swings and bouncers when my arms were full. I could nurse/rock one baby while gently bouncing two others in vibrating bouncers with my feet, and I kept my feet clean and bare to increase skin-to-skin contact. I tried using Snuglis and Baby Bjorns, but my back took a beating during the pregnancy and they weren’t very comfortable. When I discovered slings at about 14 months, I started wearing my toddlers more: I wish I’d discovered Kangaroo Korner and the Maya Wrap when the babies were tiny and still in the in-arms stage.

No, seriously, how did you feed three babies without a schedule?

For the first six months, I staggered the babies’ first feed of the day and then let each baby ask to eat after that, with a bit of nudging to keep them staggered as much as possible. On most days, that meant each baby got a half-hour block of time, so I would feed babies at 8am, 8:30am, and 9am, then at 11am, 11:30am, and 12pm. In theory, I mean. In practice, the babies would switch positions all over the place, because like I already wrote, Wilder wanted to eat every 2 to 3 hours while Gemma wanted to eat every 3 to 4 hours. And all of them wanted to eat more frequently as the day went on. And the babies who nursed wanted to eat sooner than the babies who got formula. And regardless of the clock, none of my babies seemed to have been equipped with internal chronometers, and some days were more hectic than others. I still vividly remember one nightmare day when for whatever reason, I was nursing one baby at the top of each hour from 8am until 7pm, when Calder came home and we did our daily group top-off feeding to trigger the nighttime, two-adults routine.

True confession: I had panic attacks in the early months. I could not tolerate the thought of two babies getting hungry and screaming to be fed at one time, and at first, I had no confidence that I could do anything to avoid that possibility. Throughout April and May 2001, there were many days when Calder would go on campus at 8:30am, give his lecture, pick up his mail, and be home by noon. I was so lucky that he had that kind of flexibility. Often, on a Friday, he would take one baby to work with him, too. That was marvelous and amazing—going from three babies to two was such a release. Calder also had a sabbatical from the university for the entire 2001-2002 academic year. I’m pretty sure that we couldn’t have been so flexible at home without his consistent presence at home. Even with that, though, he insisted we hire a mother’s helper in late April 2001, and until she had to leave in mid-June 2001 (her son was finished with school for the year), I was able to relax three mornings a week, knowing there was another pair of hands available to comfort crying babies. Also, she did laundry, washed the boxes of hand-me-down toys, and kept me company. If I could do it over again, I would have hired her earlier. I didn’t because I was sick to death of nurses hovering over me at the NICU and wanted to be home alone, must me and my husband and our babies. Competing interests collided.

If I could do it over again, besides making a whole host of different breastfeeding choices, I would have practiced modified demand feeding. Without getting into a convoluted explanation, you start by feeding one or two babies at a time, feed the remaining babies all in a row, then wait for the hungriest baby to demand food again, then rouse the other two and feed them. It takes some of the pressure off, and allows for the possibility that the babies will nap at roughly the same time. Ah well—I’m not going to go out and conceive triplets again just to prove to myself I can do it correctly this time.

For the first four or six months, we didn’t have terribly formal bedtimes. Calder and I would feed the babies downstairs while we watched television, then line them up in bouncers or on our laps and let them fall asleep. The babies would wake again anywhere between 9:30 and 10:30pm, we would do their last downstairs feed, and then take them up to bed. They slept all together in one crib in our bedroom for about two and a half months,* then in separate cribs in the nursery after that. Gemma went through a period in May and June 2001 when she refused to drink from a bottle, and Elba did the same thing in (I think) August and September. Wilder was on special formula and nursed once a day at most for most of the summer of 2001, but as the girls’ nursing tapered off, he increased his time at the breast until, by mid-November 2001, Wilder did nothing but breastfeed. Then, in a stirring testimony to the power of the breast, Wilder went on refusing milk in cups and bottles for another 18 months. He went from being a non-nursing infant to a non-stop nursing toddler.

By around six months, we formalized bedtimes. I would nurse one baby down in the glider in the nursery while Calder cuddled the other two downstairs in the living room, offering a bottle of formula if someone was especially fussy. Then, I would nurse another baby down while, most of the time, the third baby would fall asleep with DH. (Calder has fond memories of rocking Gemma down in his office while "The Dark Side of the Moon" played softly in the background.) As the babies fell asleep, we would lay them in their cribs. By around nine months, Wilder always went first for nursing: besides the fact that he was beginning to refuse all formula around then, he also fell asleep the fastest. It was the rarest of nights when he wasn’t lying limp and unconscious, a tiny dribble of breastmilk at the corner of his mouth, by the time "All the Pretty Little Horses" was playing on the stereo. Then I would nurse either Elba or Gemma, depending on who was fussier. It was, I’m sorry to say, pretty consistently Elba who rated second in my arms by Christmas, and I’m sure that’s why Gemma stopped nursing just before her first birthday. One night, she just didn’t want to be bothered taking the breast. I was heartbroken, and I still worry that it hurt our bond: she’s my child most likely to run hot and cold. And she’s been Calder’s favorite since birth, something that would bother me less if only Elba didn’t so obviously push every button he’s got. Troublesome, that, not just for Elba’s sake, but because she’s so much like me.

This bedtime routine was time- and labor-intensive. What also proved increasingly difficult was the co-sleeping I adopted in desperation as Wilder and Elba showed no signs of sleeping through the night: I kept on laying them down in their cribs at bedtime, but as they woke, I would bring them to bed with Calder and I. When Gemma started waking at night because of molar pain just after her first birthday, it all started to seem too overwhelming. Also, Calder started looking ahead to the end of his sabbatical year and realizing that he didn’t have too many more 60-90 minute bedtimes left in him. Everything converged such that, in May 2001, we removed the cribs from the nursery, laid a king-sized mattress on the floor, and at bedtime I began lying down with the babies until they fell asleep. I would lie on right side, Wilder would nurse my right breast (it was the only one that produced any sort of measurable milk at all by then), Elba would drape herself up my back and across my side and nurse my left breast, and Gemma would lay her head on my outstretched left hand. At first, I stayed in the room until everyone fell asleep. By the time the babies were 22 months, I would nurse for 10 to 15 minutes but leave the room with everyone still awake—although Wilder continued to collapse into sleep while nursing, and even now, he’s often asleep just seconds after saying good night, while the girls will lie in bed and chat for as long as half an hour. When someone woke up, I would return to the nursery, crawl onto the mattress in between them, and fall asleep nursing or cuddling. We switched to toddler beds in November 2003, and the routine has been a little unpredictable since then: sometimes I lie on the nursery floor until everyone’s asleep, sometimes Calder does, sometimes I say goodnight and leave.

As for that hallowed goal, Sleeping Through the Night: Gemma started sleeping 12 hours uninterrupted at about 10 months; she did six hours’ sleep as early as 2 months. Elba slept 12 hours at around 10 months too, but she would wake at 4am for a quick nursing session (or a bottle—what can I say, I was tired) until she was just about 15 months old. Wilder, alas, had rotten sleep habits—probably due to the reflux, although maybe it’s just Wilder’s personality, he’s still a very wakeful kid—and as late as 26 months, he would sleep only 10 hours at night, with one night-nurse at 1am and another at 5am as well. I thought I was in it for the long haul, but he gave up the 1am session and then the 5am session all in a rush, and started sleeping straight through at 29 months. It’s deeply strange how all-consuming the question of uninterrupted sleep felt at the time, and how long ago those sleepless nights now feel. (The kids are doing their part to remind me, though, by having vivid nightmares and crawling into bed at all hours in search of comfort. It seems as if most daytime stresses—moving, preschool, potty training—invariably show up at night.)

Naptime was a challenge. Until about 9 months, each baby had a separate but overlapping nap schedule because each had his or her own feeding routine. I vividly remember my surprise one afternoon in July 2001, during my friend Diane’s visit, when all three babies napped in their bouncers together for two whole hours. Normally, I never got that much down time. I confess, it wore on me: naptime was when I most wanted just to leave the babies in their cribs and walk away, crying be damned. Starting at around 9 months, after we’d introduced solids and the babies’ schedules overlapped so much more, I started planning and hoping for regular morning and afternoon naps, and I wasn’t shy about using swings to lull any resistors. Typically Wilder would nurse down quickly, as would Gemma if Elba didn’t scream her head off at being forced to wait to nurse (tandem nursing not being an option because I had only one productive breast), but the challenge was to get all three down for a nap with enough time left for me to breathe before the first woke up again. I can’t think of a single babycare book that offers even marginally useful advice about naptimes, and I can’t think of a single issue more likely to drive me around the bend than failing to get the babies to nap. (One good idea that didn’t work for us, but worked for a TC poster I adore, was to lay down with all three babies on the floor, nursing and cuddling until they fell asleep--and then sneak away.) At the babies’ one-year appointments, my pediatrician actually suggested what I’d already started doing: car naps. I would say from 10-14 months, the babies took at least 1 car nap a week -- they would sleep for 2 hours in the car. Meanwhile, starting at around 13 months, after Elba had outgrown the swing -- which had been her nap location of choice -- I switched everyone to cribs for naptime. If someone hadn’t fallen asleep within 10 minutes of nursing, I would lay her down awake in the crib, explaining what I was doing. Amazingly, Elba, who had depended so much on the swing, took to the crib without a peep, and immediately went from being my best napper but in the swing to the best napper in the crib. Wilder just went on being the breast man he was, needing his five or ten minutes to fall into a milk-induced haze, while Gemma mostly took to the crib but fussed for 5 or 10 minutes before settling. Because Gemma wasn’t nursing any more, the fact that she was the baby whose fussing I most often waited out caused me endless anxiety. I still imagine her reading my journals some day and saying, "ah ha, this is why I’ve always thought you loved me least." Arg.

By eighteen months or so, we didn’t need car naps anymore. The girls would nap in a crib and a pack-n-play in the master bedroom, while Wilder nursed down in the nursery. Between reliable 2.5-hour naps and the babies' increased mobility, the "two's" were an amazing, wonderful year for me. The kids gave up their naps entirely just after our move this past June, but no one had really been sleeping very well since their third birthday. Often, the girls would chat for an hour or more, then fall asleep and nap until 5pm, throwing bedtime into chaos, while Wilder (who stopped nursing at naps ... hmm, I don’t even remember when) would often have just laid in bed staring at the ceiling or reading a book, and of course would have a meltdown if we didn’t get him to bed at night as soon as possible. It was easier, finally, just to give up my dreams of a daytime break in return for earlier, easier bedtimes.

How were you able to hold them all enough?

For the first year, because of the staggered feeding schedule over the first nine months and then the stair-stepped naps (especially in the morning), I had a lot of one-on-one time with each baby. This was frankly one of the things that kept me going with attachment parenting when I had playdates with moms who propped bottles, laid everyone in cribs and shut the door. I didn’t have as much time for myself, Calder, or the house, but I had a lot more time with each baby alone. After the NICU, and in the context of multiples, that one-on-one time was precious to me.

*The whole beginning was such a blur, it wasn't until I wrote to Tertia about sleep habits that I remembered Calder and his mom putting the babies to sleep one night in their cribs in the nursery, and realized that we must have moved them there by mid-April. I was always making those mistakes back then, overestimating just how long a particular stage or phase had lasted. I just didn't realize those misimpressions would have such a long shelf life.

Coming Next: Answering the Critics

Defining My Terms

What do you mean, "Attachment Parenting"?

I believe the attachment, or bond, between baby and parent takes precedence over other concerns, particularly in the first nine to twelve months. (For the record: I do not believe Bill and Martha Sears when they write that working during your baby’s infancy makes you detached. What a load of crap.) I believe that parents need to respond to their babies’ cues, so that babies learn to trust their parents. I believe that establishing trustworthiness and a sense of safety is the first job of parenting. I believe that what a baby wants and what a baby needs are the same things in the first year. I believe that holding your baby as much as possible is a worthy ideal.

I believe that parenthood gets harder as your child gets older, because the child’s needs and wants start to diverge, and because parents are supposed to start gently pushing their child to expand his limits and his horizons and to take a chance. I believe that your toddler will let you know when he’s ready to fall asleep on his own, stop wearing diapers, and spend more time apart from you. I believe that parents should respect separation anxiety and stranger anxiety and not force their toddlers to stand apart too soon. I believe that children should be cooperative, not obedient. I believe that children raised to be cooperative are not, in school or on the playground, significantly distinguishable from children raised to be obedient.

For me, leaving a baby to cry for any length of time had too great a potential to damage the mother-baby bond. Having multiples exacerbated that fear, because I found that I had a very slow learning-curve of "cry recognition." It took me a very long time to learn three different sets of cries: for hunger, wet bottoms, loneliness, anger, or "leave me alone, I just need to fuss about the world." I didn’t trust myself to know which cries could be left alone: I wanted to respond to all of them.

In general, the people I know who practice cry-it-out and parent-directed scheduling tended to say and post things like "my baby was twelve weeks old, he weighed twelve pounds, all this waking to eat at night was habit, not need." I tended to believe my babies knew their appetites for food better than I did. The parent-directed scheduling folks would write that their multiple-birth babies who fussed so much didn’t really need to be held, they were just wanting extra attention. I was always thinking, if this little tiny baby could speak, what would she be saying? Do I think she's saying, "Mommy, Mommy, I need you to hold me," and if so, do I want to respond, "no, no, Mommy’s too busy, it’s time for bed, you’re really just fine," give her a pat, and leave her to cry? At six months, the answer was "not in a million years." At four years, the answer is, a lot more often than I would have predicted. But hey, my kids are four now. They are, for all intents and purposes, entirely different people than the ones I mothered in 2001.

It drives me crazy when Calder loses patience and walks away when I start crying, and I’m an adult. I would never walk away from a crying baby.

Coming Next: You can't do that with multiples!

Attachment Parenting and Me

It’s amusing, and a little sad, to think back to the day when the question of schedules and of letting the baby cry were the be-all, end-all issues of our parenting life. (I know that the question of mothers working operates very early too, but I’ve always thought that particular "debate" was insulting to everyone involved, so I’m going to give it a wide berth here.) Parents of preschoolers know from debatable issues: Disney Princess: adorable or nauseating? Television: harmless diversion or agent of Satan? If yes to TV, kid-friendly only, or "Fear Factor" and "WWE"? (Don’t scoff, the question of kids’ favorite TV programs arose not long ago on the Triplet Connection and several mothers said their 4-year old sons’ favorite programs were wrestling. Fear Factor is the #2 or #3 prime-time show for children ages 2-11.) Preschool: Waldorf, Montessori, or unschooling? Discipline: how do we keep these little balls of energy in line? The level of diversity in parenting simply explodes as kids get older, and puts all the sound and fury about baby bedtimes to shame. I’m convinced the only reason why the scheduling/crying issue gets so much press is because new parents are the only parents naïve enough to believe they might find definitive answers. Also, because they still have a little money and time left to buy and read parenting books. All I have the energy to do these days is ... well, watch mindless TV. But not Fear Factor or the WWE: my mindless television of choice tended to run toward all things Whedon, until his shows went off the air.

Maybe because I miss the days of easy answers, I thought I would throw out there that Calder and I practiced attachment parenting with the babies. We’re not rabid freaks about it, I couldn’t carry even one baby in a sling because of back problems and we’re not one of those families with three futon mattresses spread across our bedroom floor. But on the spectrum of approaches to parenthood, we were at the AP end of the line. I think this merits some explanation, not least because everyone always assumes that no one with multiples could possibly survive without a schedule. Schedules just don’t work for everyone, so hearing that one family managed just fine without them might be encouraging to someone, some day. Besides, I love a good debate.

So, here’s a little FAQ for you, adapted from a post I made to the Triplet Connection that’s now been deleted. I’ll post it in parts, because it’s mighty long. Please, please, keep in mind this important fact: Nothing I write here should in any way be construed as a criticism, veiled or otherwise, of your choices. It was just what worked, and made sense, for us.

Why Attachment Parenting?

Because what Bill and Martha Sears write about fussy babies made the most sense to Calder and me, and we weren’t on board with the idea of leaving babies to cry it out. Because I wanted to do everything possible to nourish my babies’ individualism, and I didn’t know how else they expressed themselves in the early months except through their particular, individual needs for sleep and food. Because I had a rough, rough relationship with my mom and wanted to lay a firm foundation of loving kindness and an aura of warm embraces between my babies and me, and lots of rocking, cuddling, and responsiveness seemed like the way do to that. Because I knew they’d been left to cry in the NICU and I couldn’t bear the thought that they’d be left alone at home, too. Because I so desperately desired one-on-one time with each baby that staggered schedules and completely independent naptimes worked well for me, taken all-in-all.

Oh yeah, also because I was really, exceedingly lazy. I read this fantastic book by T. Berry Brazelton called Touchpoints, and in every single new chapter, Brazelton would explain how to teach and re-teach your baby to sleep independently. Apparently, babies have immature sleep cycles—they "surface" more at the peak of each three-to-four hour cycle, it’s linked to the development of REM sleep—and every little thing can set them off. Babies who’ve learned to sleep through the night wake again when they start teething, when they learn to roll and crawl and stand and walk, when separation anxiety sets in, when dreams start, when they get more teeth….The list was endless, and at every "touchpoint," Brazelton explained that parents had to go into the nursery, give their child his lovey, pat him on the back, and re-teach him how to soothe himself. I’m sorry, but I didn’t have the time or the patience for that. It was far easier just to crawl into bed with the wakeful child and fall back asleep, okay?

There’s also a certain cult-like atmosphere around scheduling and high-order multiples. I never drank the Kool-aid, and I never quite understood the idea. Would anyone think it was natural for three babies born on the same day to different parents to eat, sleep, and be actively alert all at the same time, just because they share a birthday? Does anyone out there have two children born in different years whose infant habits were identical? Why should multiple-birth children somehow be more capable of synchronization than newborn neighbors or different-aged siblings? Why should three siblings behave identically in their eating and sleeping habits, just because they shared a uterus and a birthday?

Now, I’ll grant you, looking back, I can see that most babies are pretty malleable. I suspect most babies are just as happy to eat, sleep, and play in rhythm with their siblings as otherwise. In our particular case, it simply wasn’t workable: Wilder had reflux and needed small, frequent meals right up until the day he started solids. Gemma was two or three pounds heavier than him very early on, and could go four hours between feeds. These were babies whose needs simply were never going to be tweaked into conformity.

Coming Next: What is Attachment Parenting?