By Sherri Delozier Carter
When I was pregnant with our son, Eli, I knew attachment parenting was going to be the right choice for us. But how we parent goes beyond just this basic philosophy. Just as we attend to our son’s physical needs, we also knew his emotional needs were just as important to nurture. One day, I came across the phrase ’peaceful parenting’ on Facebook, a social media platform. Here is what Danelle Frisbie writes about this style of parenting:
Peaceful Parenting
Peaceful parenting is essentially the effort to mother and father our babies and children in a manner that leads to their optimal health, hap- piness, and well-being. Peaceful parenting is as old as humanity itself, and is coherent with listening to our own mothering and fathering instincts, as well as tuning into the cues our little ones provide for us. As parent- ing that is normal, natural, primal and innate, it is not exactly the same as
the pop-culture definition of ‘attach- ment parenting,’ and it is not a set of hard, fast methods or laws to follow. Peaceful parenting does no intentional harm. It is parenting based not only in natural human and mammalian experi- ence, but also in hard science and evidence-based research.
She summed up exactly our ideas of how we were raising our son! So what does that mean? For us, it is a foundational principle for raising our son, Eli, who is almost three. In nature, other mammal mothers and fathers model desired behavior. We, as humans, do this as well - whether we are aware of it or not. As parents we make the conscious effort to model the behavior we desire, and even the emotional traits we wish for our son to learn. The traits/behaviors which guide us are empathy, intrin- sic value of self, and respect.
Because we want Eli to learn empa- thy towards others, we model empa- thy for him. His cries have always had value to us. We have always attend- ed to his needs, both physical and
66 Aug/Sept 2011
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