I’m not sure the ad hominem attack on Dr. Sears is helpful. I do know that his upbringing led him, as a pediatrician, to look at more subtle and nurturing ways of parenting. He and his wife created a system that is actually the opposite of patriarchal. Co-parenting is extremely important for attachment parenting to truly work.

I only mentioned maternity leave in the article as something we should promote. The ins and outs of how I leave to experts, which neither you nor I are. Most industrial countries have subsidized leave for mothers AND fathers. This leave can be taken concurrently or back to back. For some families, this means children are at home with a parent for up to two years. These countries typically have lower infant mortality rates than the United States and also have support systems in place for when parents go back to work.

I am a stay at home dad. I do not believe in, nor did I put in this post, mother-centric childcare. I also am not sure where you get your numbers on low birth rates, ghettos for professional women and crashed economies but this seems to be a false cause fallacy and is a tenuous connection at best. We can look at our own history of mother-centric childcare eras in this country, say the last 100 years, and see that the truly mother-centric period, say from 1912 until the 1990’s, saw the baby boom, the rise in women in the workplace and two crashed economies – both having to do directly with deregulation of the banking industry (the most recent a direct outcome of the 1998 repeal of the Glass Stegall Act of 1933.). There are many more relevant causes of the results you bring up: issues with health care; a for profit insurance industry; the lack of political or judicial protection for women in the workplace; global economic forces; unfunded wars and military escalations.

That said, I would never, and again, did not advocate for such a thing in this blog. I firmly believe that parenting, whether a single parent, heterosexual couple, homosexual couple, is to be approached with understanding, compassion, patience and love by mothers and fathers equally. I also believe, as a society, it behooves us to support parents if for no other reason than that they are raising the next generation of citizens. In that vein, I appreciate your suggestion to not advocate for a year of paid maternity leave, however, I will continue to do so. (Again, the details I leave to people much smarter than I.) A new mother being required to lobby her employer for time off to recuperate and be with her newborn by cobbling together all of her vacation time, paid sick leave days, personal days, and any FMLA time is Dickensian in it’s cruelty. A civil, free society deserves better.

Again, thanks for your thoughts.

1. The author may not realize that Sears has some neuroses and some Christian religious agendas himself. This is why “attachment parenting” gets characterized as patriarchal. Instead of right-wing beating your children to reproduce the trauma you suffered as a child, this is left-wing overcompensation for trauma you suffered as a child.

2. Please do not advocate a year of paid maternity leave (I am a woman and I don’t want this). Instead I think the US needs a policy of 6 mos – 1 year unpaid leave for each parent BUT with savings plan where parents save up for their leaves and which employers can contribute to if they wish. And there should be tax credits and other incentives for parents taking leave equally. I don’t think its a good idea to wholly subsidize people in having children; people need to understand the financial obligation they are taking on in having a child. Also, I do not think it is a good idea to make childcare mother-centric. In some non-Scandanavian European countries this strategy caused (a) a very low birth rate (b) a ghetto for women professionally and (c) a crashed economy overloaded with debt. In the Scandanavian countries that have focused on real gender equality, all three of these problems were avoided.