Just when her physician was finally satisfied that breastfeeding would
not harm her 2.5 year old (the mother felt obligated to provide a
rationale, and although I don`t think he deserved to get one, it was an
easy job) a mother I am helping has now been told by a child
psychologist that attending to her child`s needs was ``controversial in
the psychological literature`` and that ``she owed it to herself to
explore other approaches to parenting``. Why is this on-topic? Because,
far from being an ap radical, this mother is just following her
intuition, and breastfeeding on cue is how she has learned to do that. I
reinforced her approach and made a rather rash statement that nothing I
had read in anti-ap literature was based on scientific evidence,
although plenty on cue-feeding, co-sleeping and the sort of things this
psychologist was questioning had good science (biological and human)
behind it. Do you think she would get anywhere if she asked the
psychologist to provide evidence? This looks to me like an unfortunate
combination of a mother who really needs approval and lacks confidence
(and has good reason to have grown up that way) and a psychologist who
is making unfounded statements. BTW, he asked who the ``guru`` of
``what did you call it, attachment parenting?`` was and hadn`t heard of
Wm. Sears.
Perhaps the psychologist owes it to him or herself to explore other
approaches to parenting.
Jo-Anne, who was distressed to discover that *three* people who have
made negative comments about extended bf are now marketing their
services: counselling on parenting issues, including *attachment*
issues. Egads.

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