Today I’m trekking once more into the Heart of Darkness to attend the annual National Council for Adoption conference, this year appropriately titled Surviving and Thriving in Volatile Times.
Indeed!
Topics include lots of industry survival stuff: private-public collaboration, mergers, ethics (or lack thereof), international updates, and my favorite: Validating Your Agency’s Purpose: What Research Really Tells Us About the Impact of Adoption on Birthparents, Children and Families. (Care to bet a week’s wages–if you’re fortunate enough to have a job–there’s no mention of records snatching and identity theft?) I’m especially looking forward to the return of The Story Lady–Dr. Karyn Purvis–who equates wheeling your kid around the store in a grocery cart with child abandonment. (Do you really want to know?) Purvis will keynote lunch on Thursday followed by a break-out with an “infant massage representative.” Guess what I won’t be sitting through. I’m undecided about the unPierceian 6:30 am pilates.
On the upside, I won’t have to listen to a lecture on Primal Wound Theory or pass a Kleenex box around the room.
“Do you really want to know?”
I do. Do tell.
Get two copies of all the handouts! I want some!!
Party on, Marley!:-)Ask the LDS reps about their magic underwear. Wear ALL your amulets to protect against evil and cooties, and please do return and report!
Yeah.
I want to know.
Please do tell.
Well, it seems that baybees need to be with mama all the time and need to feel her love and warmth blah blah, and when they’re put in a shopping cart, even when said mama wheels them around, they feel abandoned amd unbonded. Otherwise they’ll turn into ax-wielding porch pissing adoptees. I hoe all you ladies hold your heads in shame for being the rotten abandoner you are.
Maryanne, aren’t you getting a little personal. You expect me to check out NCFAnoid underwear? You truly are a shameless hussy!
I’m very interested in finding out what they try to say about “What Research Really Tells Us About the Impact of Adoption on Birthparents, Children and Families.”
Can you forward me this info if you attend, Marley?
I know that what the agencies post right now on their websites is total crap.
I was also there for the Karyn Purvis (Director of Texas Christian University’s Institute of Child Development) comments at the NCFA conference a few years back.
As Marley is currently ‘in the heart of darkness’, I’ll just add my .02.
Purvis is a ‘bonding and attachment’ guru who advocates essentially supergluing children to their mothers- bodily, for those oh so important formative years, thereby precluding pesky (and oh so feminist!) little ideas of womyn having lives. You know, things like jobs, privacy, their own beds, etc.
The womyn is to be ‘attuned’ to the child’s every (usually unstated, thereby projected) whim 24-7 for as long as possible. Doing otherwise is of course, evidence of being a ‘bad parent’ which naturally will have repercussions societally (depression, alcoholism, crime, etc).
Wheeling a child around in a grocery cart (as opposed to bound to the womyn’s body,) was equated to child abandonment.
The word “no” as coming from a Bastard is viewed as “resistance” or a negative behaviour, something to be overcome. Similarly, individual autonomy and independence are viewed as potential warning signs.
Purvis also equates the application of her ‘attachment’ quackery as critical to creating positive ‘neuropathways’ and ‘nureotransmitters’ in the child’s developing mind. (Junk pseudoscience at its finest.) Essentially, she is trying to claim a chemical/scientific basis.
She seeks broader acceptance of, and embrace of her quack ‘research’ from individuals to governments, as a means to a ‘better society’ …”one child at a time.”
But her ‘attachment crap’ is not reserved for children alone, she’ll gladly find ‘attachment disorders’ in adults too, and has decided it can be passed along inter-generationally as well. There seems to no limit to her potential client base/market.
She, and the rest of the ‘attachment industry’ find a special place in their therapeutic pantheon, and marketing niche for adopters. As the child is not biologically related, it is then posited that it becomes all the more vital to get out the ‘attachment’ staple gun.
‘Attachment’ quacks such as Purvis take aim at adopters, playing on their insecurities, desires to be ‘good parents’, and feelings of inadequacy.
The fact that NCFA embraces such quack therapy ideas of womynhood, and uses for adopted children goes to the heart of how NCFA far from being a stand alone is part of a broader movement with preset concepts attached to words like ‘womyn’, ‘motherhood’, or ‘child’.
Which is not to say fathers and grandfathers can’t be blamed as well. But men aren’t be asked to stay home with the kid 24-7, now are they?
The unstated assumption in Purvis’ work is that womyn upon having a child, must be with that child, and responsive to it 24-7 for years. The ‘natural’ outgrowth of which is womyn confined to the home, precluded from the workplace from birth forward, (and all the economic assumptions inherent to such.)
Womyn who so much as put their kids in grocery carts, much less daycare are equated to abandoners, abusers, and failures as parents.
When the State embraces such a view of womyn and children, can removing said children from those now lablled “abandoners”, abusers etc, be far behind?
Should we really be all that surprised that such a view of womyn comes not only from Texas Christian, but also from a womyn who, Phyllis Schafly-esque, has a career of her own and travels?
Thanks for all this info, Baby Love Child. I find it interesting that the attachment/bonding stuff is favored both by NCFA and by the touchie-feelie members of adoption reform. Here are some examples that have been sent to me:
Janel Miranda
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wVf4rzam0Xo
Marcy Axness
http://www.QuantumParenting.com
So this stuff is on both side of the adoption world, amazing!
As to shopping carts, my kids loved them….they can see Mommy and all the stuff in the store. And I did all that stuff with the kids I raised, was a stay at home mom, breastfed for several years, kept them with me all the time as infants….and as adults I don’t see they are much different from the son I surrendered, raised by a not very nice mom he now has nothing to do with. I did what I wanted and was happy with it because it was easy for me, but all my kids turned out ok and with the personalities they were born with.
I think the only place that bonding stuff makes a difference is in cases of extreme abuse and real abandonment/neglect. For most parents, adoptive or natural, just use common sense and do what works for you.
Well, it seems that baybees need to be with mama all the time and need to feel her love and warmth blah blah, and when they’re put in a shopping cart, even when said mama wheels them around, they feel abandoned amd unbonded.
Ms. Purvis has it wrong, and in getting it so completely ass-backwards gives caregivers who use carriers a really crap reputation.
I’m a carrier parent. I have a bunch of different ones, for different situations. Wolfgang has been carried a lot for the seven months he’s been alive, mostly because strollers are a pain on the bus and because it’s WAY easier to nurse at any old time when you’re using a carrier.
as a result, when I do put him down, or wheel him around the grocery store, he’s pretty mellow about it. he’s a non-screamer, most of the time. I think it does have to do with the fact that he’s pretty much a carrier baby.
I do think newborns get all lonely and confused when their go-to grownup isn’t around. and this feeling of disequilibrium produces he desire to cry, which everyone in earshot just can’t tolerate. so, to keep the crying to a minimum, I use a carrier much of the time. I feel more independent and capable because I have almost full use of my hands while still being able to keep a close eye on The Littlest Patriarch.
but here’s the crazy thing – if I suddenly switched to some sort of day-care arrangement, stopped nursing, traded my carriers in for a stroller, all that jazz — Wolfie would be FINE. he probably wouldn’t notice (or, if he did, would regain his equilibrium after a short period of adjustment). but I’d be a mess. I myself would be lonely and feel crazy separation anxiety, while he’d grow up to be perfectly okay, probably get elected president (and break his mama’s heart) or some crap.
I’m not as important to him as he is to me, basically. I’m really replaceable, in the grand scheme of things.
Purvis is a ‘bonding and attachment’ guru who advocates essentially supergluing children to their mothers- bodily, for those oh so important formative years,
I prefer duct tape. 😉
thereby precluding pesky (and oh so feminist!) little ideas of womyn having lives. You know, things like jobs, privacy, their own beds, etc.
just speaking for myself here – if I had some sort of job or life that I just just just LOVED or made me mad cash or was dangerous in some way or could not be made “baby” “friendly” – I could see where I would yearn for wolfgang-free time so I could go back to doing what I was doing before he came along.
and, thanks to people like Purvis, the guilt would kill me.
but I had NOTHING else going on. (and with my pretty marginal job skills, any job I could get for which we’d have to use day care wouldn’t be worth it, financially speaking.)
so, I haul the kid around – don’t know how feminist it is, but we get by.
It’s not like I miss the hustle-bustle of the coffee-achiever jet-set corporate lifestyle…
but it does beg the question – what is the feminist way to raise kids? and is the coffee-achiever jet-set corporate lifestyle so feminist to begin with?
The womyn is to be ‘attuned’ to the child’s every (usually unstated, thereby projected) whim 24-7 for as long as possible. Doing otherwise is of course, evidence of being a ‘bad parent’ which naturally will have repercussions societally (depression, alcoholism, crime, etc).
yeah, that’s total bullshit.
but it’s fucked up – failure to carry your kid 24/7 is evidence of being a bad parent, but carrying your kid a lot is evidence of being a stupid, easily-intimidated, non-feminist parent. can’t win, really.
Antiprincess, I like what you have to say, and be sure to treasure this time with little Wolfgang because they grow up way too fast.
Yes, children are very flexible; they have had to be or the human race would not have gotten this far, and there are many different ways of being a good parent.You hit the nail on the head that it is the mother who would suffers
anxiety etc if she is into carrying the baby everywhere, nursing etc.and this has to stop, not so much the baby long term.
I surrendered my first child and I know this produced a lot of anxiety about the kids I got to raise, especially when they were babies but continuing to this day. Somewhere deep in my psyche I still believe I deserve to lose my kids, and panic when anything is wrong, even though they are grown men. I had to have my doctor reassure me that a health issue my 40 year old had mentioned was not really serious:-)
I realize like you did that the attachment stuff when they were babies was about me, not them. I was doing what made me feel more comfortable and secure, but I do not see it as the only way to raise a healthy person. And as I said before my surrendered son who was not raised this way is also fine.
Don’t worry about being feminist or not, just enjoy your little guy.
Don’t worry about being feminist or not, just enjoy your little guy.
well, sure, but where’s the fun in that? 😉
right now, Wolfie is in a portacrib and I’m at “the office”. (sposta be working.)
so, feminist? who knows? what’s the best way to be employed and a mom at the same time?
but this is all maybe totally academic – I mean, I had the privilege of wanting a baby, and waiting ’til forty to have a baby, with someone I actually dig, and I didn’t need to surrender him, and the baby himself is healthy and “easy”.
so, Wolfgang is basically just made of privilege. I’m pretty sure the attachment crap deal would sound a lot different to me if my circumstances were different.
As the child is not biologically related, it is then posited that it becomes all the more vital to get out the ‘attachment’ staple gun.
well – one final idea:
a lot of the attachment mumbo-jumbo, I think, is in reaction to the idea that became popular a couple generations ago, that caregivers should keep as much distance as possible between themselves and the children in question, in order to more easily habituate the children into a routine that coincided with an industrialized life.
Breaking attachments early on and encouraging early independence was seen as positive. and so some of the missionary zeal of the attachment loonies may be a sort of backlash to that idea.
maybe we’re all at the whim of child-guidance-book publishers?
” . . . when they’re put in a shopping cart, even when said mama wheels them around, they feel abandoned amd unbonded.”
Disappointing, but as I feared.
I was vainly hoping for descriptions of crazed wild-eyed trolley-pushing mamas doing the ton down the supermarket aisles just for hell of it.
Then leaving the baby to be safe-havened at checkout.
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