Monogamy

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monogamy

Monogamy (/məˈnɒɡəmi/ mə-NOG-ə-mee) is a form of dyadic relationship in which an individual has only one partner during their lifetime—alternately, only one partner at any one time (serial monogamy)—as compared to non-monogamy (e.g., polygamy or polyamory). The term is also applied to the social behavior of some animals, referring to the state of having only one mate at any one time.

Terminology

The word monogamy derives from the Greek μονός, monos ("alone"), and γάμος, gamos ("marriage").

The term "monogamy" may be referring to one of various relational types, depending upon context. Generally, there are four overlapping definitions.

• marital monogamy refers to marriages of only two people.
• social monogamy refers to two partners living together, having sex with each other, and cooperating in acquiring basic resources such as shelter, food and money.
• sexual monogamy refers to two partners remaining sexually exclusive with each other and having no outside sex partners.
• genetic monogamy refers to sexually monogamous relationships with genetic evidence of paternity.

For instance, biologists, biological anthropologists, and behavioral ecologists often use monogamy in the sense of sexual, if not genetic (reproductive), exclusivity. When cultural or social anthropologists and other social scientists use the term monogamy, the meaning is social or marital monogamy.

Marital monogamy may be further distinguished between:

1. classical monogamy, "a single relationship between people who marry as virgins, remain sexually exclusive their entire lives, and become celibate upon the death of the partner"
2. serial monogamy, marriage with only one other person at a time, in contrast to bigamy or polygamy;

Frequency in humans

Bronze sculpture of an elderly Kashubian married couple located in Kaszubski square, Gdynia, Poland, which commemorates their monogamous fidelity, through the time of their separation, while he temporarily worked in the United States.

Distribution of social monogamy

According to the Ethnographic Atlas by George P. Murdock, of 1,231 societies from around the world noted, 186 were monogamous; 453 had occasional polygyny; 588 had more frequent polygyny; and 4 had polyandry. (This does not take into account the relative population of each of the societies studied; the actual practice of polygamy in a tolerant society may actually be low, with the majority of aspirant polygamists practicing monogamous marriage.)

Divorce and remarriage can thus result in "serial monogamy", i.e. multiple marriages but only one legal spouse at a time. This can be interpreted as a form of plural mating, as are those societies dominated by female-headed families in the Caribbean, Mauritius and Brazil where there is frequent rotation of unmarried partners. In all, these account for 16 to 24% of the "monogamous" category.

Prevalence of sexual monogamy

The prevalence of sexual monogamy can be roughly estimated as the percentage of married people who do not engage in extramarital sex. The Standard Cross-Cultural Sample describes the amount of extramarital sex by men and women in over 50 pre-industrial cultures. The amount of extramarital sex by men is described as "universal" in 6 cultures, "moderate" in 29 cultures, "occasional" in 6 cultures, and "uncommon" in 10 cultures. The amount of extramarital sex by women is described as "universal" in 6 cultures, "moderate" in 23 cultures, "occasional" in 9 cultures, and "uncommon" in 15 cultures.

Surveys conducted in non-Western nations (2001) also found cultural and gender differences in extramarital sex. A study of sexual behavior in Thailand, Tanzania and Côte d'Ivoire suggests about 16–34% of men engage in extramarital sex while a much smaller (unreported) percentage of women engage in extramarital sex. Studies in Nigeria have found around 47–53% of men and to 18–36% of women engage in extramarital sex. A 1999 survey of married and cohabiting couples in Zimbabwe reports that 38% of men and 13% of women engaged in extra-couple sexual relationships within the last 12 months.

Many surveys asking about extramarital sex in the United States have relied on convenience samples: surveys given to whoever happens to be easily available (e.g., volunteer college students or volunteer magazine readers). Convenience samples may not accurately reflect the population of the United States as a whole, which can cause serious biases in survey results. Sampling bias may, therefore, be why early surveys of extramarital sex in the United States have produced widely differing results: such early studies using convenience samples (1974, 1983, 1993) reported the wide ranges of 12–26% of married women and 15–43% of married men engaged in extramarital sex. Three studies have used nationally representative samples. These studies (1994, 1997) found that about 10–15% of women and 20–25% of men engage in extramarital sex.

Research by Colleen Hoffon of 566 homosexual male couples from the San Francisco Bay Area (2010) found that 45% had monogamous relationships. However, the Human Rights Campaign has stated, based on a Rockway Institute report, that "GLBT young people… want to spend their adult life in a long-term relationship raising children." Specifically, over 80% of the homosexuals surveyed expected to be in a monogamous relationship after age 30.

Prevalence of genetic monogamy

The incidence of genetic monogamy may be estimated from rates of extrapair paternity. Extrapair paternity is when offspring raised by a monogamous pair come from the female mating with another male. Rates of extrapair paternity have not been extensively studied in people. Many reports of extrapair paternity are little more than quotes based on hearsay, anecdotes, and unpublished findings. Simmons, Firman, Rhodes, and Peters reviewed 11 published studies of extra-pair paternity from various locations in the United States, France, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, Mexico, and among the native Yanomami Indians of Amazon forest in South America. The rates of extrapair paternity ranged from 0.03% to 11.8% although most of the locations had low percentages of extrapair paternity. The median rate of extrapair paternity was 1.8%. A separate review of 17 studies by Bellis, Hughes, Hughes, and Ashton found slightly higher rates of extrapair paternity. The rates varied from 0.8% to 30% in these studies, with a median rate of 3.7% extrapair paternity. A range of 1.8% to 3.7% extrapair paternity implies a range of 96% to 98% genetic monogamy. Although the incidence of genetic monogamy may vary from 70% to 99% in different cultures or social environments, a large percentage of couples remain genetically monogamous during their relationships. A review paper, surveying 67 other studies, reported rates of extrapair paternity, in different societies, ranging from 0.4% to over 50%.

Covert illegitimacy is a situation which arises when someone who is presumed to be a child's father (or mother) is in fact not the biological father (or mother). Frequencies as high as 30% are sometimes assumed in the media, but research by sociologist Michael Gilding traced these overestimates back to an informal remark at a 1972 conference.

The detection of unsuspected illegitimacy can occur in the context of medical genetic screening, in genetic family name research, and in immigration testing. Such studies show that covert illegitimacy is in fact less than 10% among the sampled African populations, less than 5% among the sampled Native American and Polynesian populations, less than 2% of the sampled Middle Eastern population, and generally 1%–2% among European samples.

Pedigree errors are a well-known source of error in medical studies. When attempts are made to try to study medical afflictions and their genetic components, it becomes very important to understand non-paternity rates and pedigree errors. There are numerous software packages and procedures that exist for correcting research data for pedigree errors.

Evolutionary and historical development in humans

A pair of New Zealand kaka parrots at Auckland Zoo

Biological arguments

Monogamy exists in many societies around the world, and it is important to understand how these marriage systems might have evolved. In any species, there are three main aspects that combine to promote a monogamous mating system: paternal care, resource access, and mate-choice; however, in humans, the main theoretical sources of monogamy are paternal care and extreme ecological stresses. Paternal care should be particularly important in humans due to the extra nutritional requirement of having larger brains and the lengthier developmental period. Therefore, the evolution of monogamy could be a reflection of this increased need for bi-parental care. Similarly, monogamy should evolve in areas of ecological stress because male reproductive success should be higher if their resources are focused on ensuring offspring survival rather than searching for other mates. However, the evidence does not support these claims. Due to the extreme sociality and increased intelligence of humans, H. sapiens have solved many problems that generally lead to monogamy, such as those mentioned above. For example, monogamy is certainly correlated with paternal care, as shown by Marlowe, but not caused by it because humans diminish the need for bi-parental care through the aid of siblings and other family members in rearing the offspring. Furthermore, human intelligence and material culture allows for better adaptation to different and rougher ecological areas, thus reducing the causation and even correlation of monogamous marriage and extreme climates. However, some scientists argue that monogamy evolved by reducing within-group conflict, thus giving certain groups a competitive advantage against less monogamous groups.

Paleoanthropology and genetic studies offer two perspectives on when monogamy evolved in the human species: paleoanthropologists offer tentative evidence that monogamy may have evolved very early in human history whereas genetic studies suggest that monogamy might have evolved much more recently, less than 10,000 to 20,000 years ago.

Orangutan males are not monogamous and compete for access to females.

Paleoanthropological estimates of the time frame for the evolution of monogamy are primarily based on the level of sexual dimorphism seen in the fossil record because, in general, the reduced male-male competition seen in monogamous mating results in reduced sexual dimorphism. According to Reno et al., the sexual dimorphism of Australopithecus afarensis, a human ancestor from approximately 3.9–3.0 million years ago, was within the modern human range, based on dental and postcranial morphology. Although careful not to say that this indicates monogamous mating in early hominids, the authors do say that reduced levels of sexual dimorphism in A. afarensis "do not imply that monogamy is any less probable than polygyny". However, Gordon, Green and Richmond claim that in examining postcranial remains, A. afarensis is more sexually dimorphic than modern humans and chimpanzees with levels closer to those of orangutans and gorillas. Furthermore, Homo habilis, living approximately 2.3 mya, is the most sexually dimorphic early hominid. Plavcan and van Schaik conclude their examination of this controversy by stating that, overall, sexual dimorphism in australopithecines is not indicative of any behavioral implications or mating systems.

Cultural arguments

Plough agriculture. The castle in the background is Lusignan. Detail from the calendar Les très riches heures from the 15th century. This is a detail from the painting for March.

Despite the human ability to avoid sexual and genetic monogamy, social monogamy still forms under many different conditions, but most of those conditions are consequences of cultural processes. These cultural processes may have nothing to do with relative reproductive success. For example, anthropologist Jack Goody's comparative study utilizing the Ethnographic Atlas demonstrated that monogamy is part of a cultural complex found in the broad swath of Eurasian societies from Japan to Ireland that practice social monogamy, sexual monogamy and dowry (i.e. "diverging devolution", that allow property to be inherited by children of both sexes). Goody demonstrates a statistical correlation between this cultural complex and the development of intensive plough agriculture in those areas. Drawing on the work of Ester Boserup, Goody notes that the sexual division of labour varies in intensive plough agriculture and extensive shifting horticulture. In plough agriculture farming is largely men's work and is associated with private property; marriage tends to be monogamous to keep the property within the nuclear family. Close family (endogamy) are the preferred marriage partners to keep property within the group. A molecular genetic study of global human genetic diversity argued that sexual polygyny was typical of human reproductive patterns until the shift to sedentary farming communities approximately 10,000 to 5,000 years ago in Europe and Asia, and more recently in Africa and the Americas. A further study drawing on the Ethnographic Atlas showed a statistical correlation between increasing size of the society, the belief in "high gods" to support human morality, and monogamy. A survey of other cross-cultural samples has confirmed that the absence of the plough was the only predictor of polygamy, although other factors such as high male mortality in warfare (in non-state societies) and pathogen stress (in state societies) had some impact.

Woman farming, using a digging stick in the Nuba Mountains, southern Sudan

Betzig postulated that culture/society can also be a source of social monogamy by enforcing it through rules and laws set by third-party actors, usually in order to protect the wealth or power of the elite. For example, Augustus Caesar encouraged marriage and reproduction to force the aristocracy to divide their wealth and power among multiple heirs, but the aristocrats kept their socially monogamous, legitimate children to a minimum to ensure their legacy while having many extra-pair copulations. Similarly—according to Betzig—the Christian Church enforced monogamy because wealth passed to the closest living, legitimate male relative, often resulting in the wealthy oldest brother being without a male heir. Thus, the wealth and power of the family would pass to the “celibate” younger brother of the church. In both of these instances, the rule-making elite used cultural processes to ensure greater reproductive fitness for themselves and their offspring, leading to a larger genetic influence in future generations. Furthermore, the laws of the Christian Church, in particular, were important in the evolution of social monogamy in humans. They allowed, even encouraged, poor men to marry and produce offspring, which reduced the gap in reproductive success between the rich and poor, thus resulting in the quick spread of monogamous marriage systems in the western world. According to B. S. Low, culture would appear to have a much larger impact on monogamy in humans than the biological forces that are important for non-human animals.

Other theorists use cultural factors influencing reproductive success to explain monogamy. During times of major economic/demographic transitions, investing more in fewer offspring (social monogamy not polygyny) increases reproductive success by ensuring the offspring themselves have enough initial wealth to be successful. This is seen in both England and Sweden during the industrial revolution and is currently being seen in the modernization of rural Ethiopia. Similarly, in modern industrialized societies, fewer yet better-invested offspring, i.e. social monogamy, can provide a reproductive advantage over social polygyny, but this still allows for serial monogamy and extra-pair copulations.

Arguments from outside the scientific community

Karol Wojtyła (later, Pope John Paul II) in his book Love and Responsibility postulated that monogamy, as an institutional union of two people being in love with one another, was an embodiment of an ethical personalistic norm, and thus the only means of making true human love possible. Some writers have suggested that monogamy may solve the problems they view as associated with non-monogamy and hypergamy such as inceldom.

Alexandra Kollontai in Make Way for the Winged Eros argues that monogamy is an artifact of capitalist concepts of property and inheritance and wrote, "The social aims of the working class are not affected one bit by whether love takes the form of a long and official union or is expressed in a temporary relationship. The ideology of the working class does not place any formal limits on love." Later, "Modern love always sins, because it absorbs the thoughts and feelings of 'loving hearts' and isolates the loving pair from the collective. In the future society, such a separation will not only become superfluous but also psychologically inconceivable." One of the tenets of the new proletarian morality is "mutual recognition of the rights of the other, of the fact that one does not own the heart and soul of the other (the sense of property, encouraged by bourgeois culture)."

Ancient societies

The historical record offers contradictory evidence on the development and extent of monogamy as a social practice. Laura Betzig argues that in the six large, highly stratified early states, commoners were generally monogamous but that elites practiced de facto polygyny. Those states included Mesopotamia, Egypt, Aztec Mexico, Inca Peru, India and China.

Tribal societies

Monogamy has appeared in some traditional tribal societies such as the Andamanese, Karen in Burma, Sami and Ket in northern Eurasia, and the Pueblo Indians of the United States, apparently unrelated to the development of the Judeo-Christian monogamous paradigm.

Ancient Mesopotamia and Assyria

Both the Babylonian and Assyrian families were monogamous in principle but not entirely so in practice since polygyny was frequently practiced by the rulers.

In the patriarchal society of Mesopotamia the nuclear family was called a "house". In order "to build a house" a man was supposed to marry one woman and if she did not provide him with offspring, he could take a second wife. The Code of Hammurabi states that he loses his right to do so if the wife herself gives him a slave as concubine. According to Old Assyrian texts, he could be obliged to wait for two or three years before he was allowed to take another wife. The position of the second wife was that of a "slave girl" in respect to the first wife, as many marriage contracts explicitly state.

Ancient Egypt

Although an Egyptian man was free to marry several women at a time, and some wealthy men from Old and Middle Kingdoms did have more than one wife, monogamy was the norm. There may have been some exceptions, e.g. a Nineteenth Dynasty official stated as proof of his love to his deceased wife that he had stayed married to her since their youth, even after he had become very successful (P. Leiden I 371). This may suggest that some men abandoned first wives of a low social status and married women of higher status in order to further their careers although even then they lived with only one wife. Egyptian women had the right to ask for a divorce if their husband took a second wife. Many tomb reliefs testify to the monogamous character of Egyptian marriages; officials are usually accompanied by a supportive wife. "His wife X, his beloved" is the standard phrase identifying wives in tomb inscriptions. The instruction texts belonging to wisdom literature, e.g. Instruction of Ptahhotep or Instruction of Any, support fidelity to monogamous marriage life, calling the wife a Lady of the house. The Instruction of Ankhsheshonq suggests that it is wrong to abandon a wife because of her barrenness.

Ancient Israel

As against Betzig's contention that monogamy evolved as a result of Christian socio-economic influence in the West, monogamy appeared widespread in the ancient Middle East much earlier. In Israel's pre-Christian era, an essentially monogamous ethos underlay the Jewish creation story (Gn 2) and the last chapter of Proverbs. During the Second Temple period (530 BCE to 70 CE), apart from an economic situation which supported monogamy even more than in earlier period, the concept of "mutual fidelity" between husband and wife was a quite common reason for strictly monogamous marriages. Some marriage documents explicitly expressed a desire for the marriage to remain monogamous. Examples of these documents were found in Elephantine. They resemble those found in neighbouring Assyria and Babylonia. Study shows that ancient Middle East societies, though not strictly monogamous, were practically (at least on commoners' level) monogamous. Halakha of the Dead Sea Sect saw prohibition of polygamy as coming from the Pentateuch (Damascus Document 4:20–5:5, one of the Dead Sea Scrolls). Christianity adopted a similar attitude (cf. 1 Tm 3:2,12; Tt 1:6), which conformed with Jesus' approach. Michael Coogan, in contrast, states that "Polygyny continued to be practised well into the biblical period, and it is attested among Jews as late as the second century CE."

Under Judges and the monarchy, old restrictions went into disuse, especially among royalty, though the Books of Samuel and Kings, which cover entire period of monarchy, do not record a single case of bigamy among commoners — except for Samuel's father. The wisdom books e.g. Book of Wisdom, which provides a picture of the society, Sirach, Proverbs, Qohelet portray a woman in a strictly monogamous family (cf. Pr 5:15-19; Qo 9:9; Si 26:1-4 and eulogy of perfect wife, Proverbs 31:10-31). The Book of Tobias speaks solely of monogamous marriages. Also prophets have in front of their eyes monogamous marriage as an image of the relationship of God and Israel. (Cf. Ho 2:4f; Jer 2:2; Is 50:1; 54:6-7; 62:4-5; Ez 16). Roland de Vaux states that "it is clear that the most common form of marriage in Israel was monogamy".

The Mishnah and the baraitot clearly reflect a monogamist viewpoint within Judaism (Yevamot 2:10 etc.). Some sages condemned marriage to two wives even for the purpose of procreation (Ketubot 62b). R. Ammi, an amora states:

Whoever takes a second wife in addition to his first one shall divorce the first and pay her kettubah (Yevamot 65a)

Roman customs, which prohibited polygamy, may have enhanced such an attitude - especially after 212 AD, when all the Jews became Roman citizens. However, some Jews continued to practice bigamy (e.g. up to medieval times in Egypt and Europe). Fourth-century Roman law forbade Jews to contract plural marriages.

A synod convened by Gershom ben Judah around 1000 CE banned polygamy among Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews.

Ancient Greece and ancient Rome

The ancient Greeks and Romans were monogamous in the sense that men were not allowed to have more than one wife or to cohabit with concubines during marriage.

Early Christianity

According to Jesus Christ monogamy was a primordial will of the Creator described in Genesis, darkened by the hardness of hearts of the Israelites. As John Paul II interpreted the dialogue between Jesus and the Pharisees (Gospel of Matthew 19:3–8), Christ emphasized the primordial beauty of monogamic spousal love described in the Book of Genesis 1:26–31, 2:4–25, whereby a man and woman by their nature are each ready to be a beautifying, total and personal gift to one another:

Jesus avoids entangling himself in juridical or casuistic controversies; instead, he appeals twice to the "beginning". By doing so, he clearly refers to the relevant words of Genesis, which his interlocutors also know by heart. (...) it clearly leads the interlocutors to reflect about the way in which, in the mystery of creation, man was formed precisely as "male and female," in order to understand correctly the normative meaning of the words of Genesis.

Contemporary societies

International

Western European societies established monogamy as their marital norm. Monogamous marriage is normative and is legally enforced in most developed countries. Laws prohibiting polygyny were adopted in Japan (1880), China (1953), India (1955) and Nepal (1963). Polyandry is illegal in most countries.

The women's rights movements seek to make monogamy the only legal form of marriage. The United Nations General Assembly in 1979 adopted the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, Article 16 of which requires nations to give women and men equal rights in marriage. Polygamy is viewed as inconsistent with the Article as it gives men the right of multiple wives, but not to women. The United Nations has established the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) to monitor the progress of nations implementing the convention.

People's Republic of China

Main article: Marriage in the People's Republic of China

The founders of Communism determined that monogamous marriage inherently oppressed women and therefore had no place in communist society. Friedrich Engels stated that compulsory monogamy could only lead to increased prostitution and general immorality, with the benefits of restricting capital and solidifying the class structure. As he spelled out in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884),

The first class antagonism which appears in history coincides with the development of the antagonism between man and woman in monogamian marriage, and the first class oppression with that of the female sex by the male. …[T]he wellbeing and development of the one group are attained by the misery and repression of the other.

The monogamous family is distinguished from the pairing family by the far greater durability of wedlock, which can no longer be dissolved at the pleasure of either party. As a rule, it is only the man who can still dissolve it and cast off his wife.

However, the communist revolutionaries in China chose to take the Western viewpoint of monogamy as giving women and men equal rights in marriage. The newly formed Communist government established monogamy as the only legal form of marriage.

"The 1950 Marriage Law called for sweeping changes in many areas of family life. It forbade any 'arbitrary and compulsory' form of marriage that would be based on the superiority of men and would ignore women’s interests. The new democratic marriage system was based on the free choice of couples, monogamy, equal rights for both sexes, and the protection of the lawful interests of women. It abolished the begetting of male offspring as the principal purpose of marriage and weakened kinship ties which reduced the pressure on women to bear many children, especially sons. With arranged marriages prohibited, young women could choose their own marriage partners, share the financial cost of setting up a new household, and have equal status in household and family decision-making. The Government then initiated an extensive campaign of marriage-law education, working jointly with the Communist Party, women’s federations, trade unions, the armed forces, schools and other organizations."

Africa

The African Union has adopted the Protocol on the Rights of Women in Africa (the Maputo Protocol). While the protocol does not suggest making polygamous marriage illegal, Article 6 does state that "monogamy is encouraged as the preferred form of marriage and that the rights of women in marriage and family, including in polygamous marital relationships are promoted and protected." The protocol entered into force on 25 November 2005.

Varieties in biology

Recent discoveries have led biologists to talk about the three varieties of monogamy: social monogamy, sexual monogamy, and genetic monogamy. The distinction between these three are important to the modern understanding of monogamy.

Monogamous pairs of animals are not always sexually exclusive. Many animals that form pairs to mate and raise offspring regularly engage in sexual activities with partners other than their primary mate. This is called extra-pair copulation. Sometimes these extra-pair sexual activities lead to offspring. Genetic tests frequently show that some of the offspring raised by a monogamous pair come from the female mating with an extra-pair male partner. These discoveries have led biologists to adopt new ways of talking about monogamy:

Social monogamy refers to a male and female's social living arrangement (e.g., shared use of a territory, behaviour indicative of a social pair, and/or proximity between a male and female) without inferring any sexual interactions or reproductive patterns. In humans, social monogamy equals monogamous marriage. Sexual monogamy is defined as an exclusive sexual relationship between a female and a male based on observations of sexual interactions. Finally, the term genetic monogamy is used when DNA analyses can confirm that a female-male pair reproduce exclusively with each other. A combination of terms indicates examples where levels of relationships coincide, e.g., sociosexual and sociogenetic monogamy describe corresponding social and sexual, and social and genetic monogamous relationships, respectively.

Reichard, 2003, (p. 4)

Whatever makes a pair of animals socially monogamous does not necessarily make them sexually or genetically monogamous. Social monogamy, sexual monogamy, and genetic monogamy can occur in different combinations.

Social monogamy does not always involve marriage in humans. A married couple is almost always a socially monogamous couple. But couples who choose to cohabit without getting married can also be socially monogamous. The popular science author Matt Ridley in his book The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature, described the human mating system as "monogamy plagued by adultery".

Serial monogamy

Serial monogamy is a mating practice in which individuals may engage in sequential monogamous pairings, or in terms of humans, when men or women can marry another partner but only after ceasing to be married to the previous partner.

Serial monogamy may effectively resemble polygyny in its reproductive consequences because some men are able to utilize more than one woman's reproductive lifespan through repeated marriages.

Serial monogamy may also refer to sequential sexual relationships, irrespective of marital status. A pair of humans may remain sexually exclusive, or monogamous, until the relationship has ended and then each may go on to form a new exclusive pairing with a different partner. This pattern of serial monogamy is common among people in Western cultures.

Reproductive success

Evolutionary theory predicts that males would be apt to seek more mating partners than females because they obtain higher reproductive benefits from such a strategy. Men with more serial marriages are likely to have more children than men with only one spouse, whereas the same is not true of women with consecutive spouses. A study done in 1994 found that remarried men often had a larger age difference from their spouses than men who were married for the first time, suggesting that serial monogamy helps some men extract a longer reproductive window from their spouses.

Breakup

Serial monogamy has always been closely linked to divorce practices. Whenever procedures for obtaining divorce have been simple and easy, serial monogamy has been found. As divorce has continued to become more accessible, more individuals have availed themselves of it, and many go on to remarry. Barry Schwartz, author of The Paradox of Choice: Why less is more, further suggests that Western culture's inundation of choice has devalued relationships based on lifetime commitments and singularity of choice. It has been suggested, however, that high mortality rates in centuries past accomplished much the same result as divorce, enabling remarriage (of one spouse) and thus serial monogamy.

Mating system

Main article: Monogamous pairing in animals

Monogamy is one of several mating systems observed in animals. However, a pair of animals may be socially monogamous but that does not necessarily make them sexually or genetically monogamous. Social monogamy, sexual monogamy, and genetic monogamy can occur in different combinations.

Social monogamy refers to the overtly observed living arrangement whereby a male and female share territory and engage in behaviour indicative of a social pair, but does not imply any particular sexual fidelity or reproductive pattern. The extent to which social monogamy is observed in animals varies across taxa, with over 90 percent of avian species being socially monogamous, compared to only 3 percent of mammalian species and up to 15 percent of primate species. Social monogamy has also been observed in reptiles, fish, and insects.

Sexual monogamy is defined as an exclusive sexual relationship between a female and a male based on observations of sexual interactions. However, scientific analyses can test for paternity, for example by DNA paternity testing or by fluorescent pigment powder tracing of females to track physical contact. This type of analysis can uncover reproductively successful sexual pairings or physical contact. Genetic monogamy refers to DNA analyses confirming that a female-male pair reproduce exclusively with each other.

The incidence of sexual monogamy appears quite rare in other parts of the animal kingdom. It is becoming clear that even animals that are overtly socially monogamous engage in extra-pair copulations. For example, while over 90% of birds are socially monogamous, "on average, 30 percent or more of the baby birds in any nest [are] sired by someone other than the resident male." Patricia Adair Gowaty has estimated that, out of 180 different species of socially monogamous songbirds, only 10% are sexually monogamous. Offspring are far more successful when both the male and the female members of the social pair contribute food resources.

An example of this was seen when scientists studied red winged blackbirds. These birds are known for remaining in monogamous relationships during the course of mating season. During the course of the study, the researchers gave a few select males vasectomies just before mating season. The male birds behaved like they do every season, establishing territory, finding a mate, and attempting to make baby birds. Despite apparent social monogamy, the female birds whose partners were surgically altered still became pregnant, indicating that overt social monogamy did not predict for sexual fidelity. These babies were cared for by their sterile adoptive fathers.

The highest known frequency of reproductively successful extra-pair copulations are found among fairywrens Malurus splendens and Malurus cyaneus where more than 65 percent of chicks are fathered by males outside the supposed breeding pair. This discordantly low level of genetic monogamy has been a surprise to biologists and zoologists, as social monogamy can no longer be assumed to determine how genes are distributed in a species.

Elacatinus, also widely known as neon gobies, also exhibit social monogamy. Hetereosexual pairs of fish belonging to the genus Elacatinus remain closely associated during both reproductive and non-reproductive periods, and often reside in same cleaning station to serve client fish. Fish of this genus frequently mate with a new partner after they are widowed.

Evolution in animals

See also: Social monogamy in mammalian species

Socially monogamous species are scattered throughout the animal kingdom: A few insects, a few fish, about nine-tenths of birds, and a few mammals are socially monogamous. There is even a parasitic worm, Schistosoma mansoni, that in its female-male pairings in the human body is monogamous. The diversity of species with social monogamy suggests that it is not inherited from a common ancestor but instead evolved independently in many different species.

The low occurrence of social monogamy in placental mammals has been claimed to be related to the presence or absence of estrus—or oestrus—the duration of sexual receptivity of a female. This, however, doesn't explain why estrus females generally mate with any proximate male nor any correlation between sexual and social monogamy. Birds, which are notable for a high incidence of social monogamy, do not have estrus.

Researchers have observed a mixed mating system of monogamy and polygyny in the European pied flycatcher.

Genetic and neuroendocrine bases

The prairie vole is an animal example for its monogamous social behaviour, since the male is usually socially faithful to the female, and shares in the raising of pups. The woodland vole is also usually monogamous. Another species from the same genus, the meadow vole, has promiscuously mating males, and scientists have changed adult male meadow voles' behaviour to resemble that of prairie voles in experiments in which a single gene was introduced into the brain by a virus.

The behaviour is influenced by the number of repetitions of a particular string of microsatellite DNA. Male prairie voles with the longest DNA strings spend more time with their mates and pups than male prairie voles with shorter strings. However, other scientists have disputed the gene's relationship to monogamy, and cast doubt on whether the human version plays an analogous role. Physiologically, pair-bonding behavior has been shown to be connected to vasopressin, dopamine, and oxytocin levels, with the genetic influence apparently arising via the number of receptors for these substances in the brain; the pair-bonding behavior has also been shown in experiments to be strongly modifiable by administering some of these substances directly.

The North American microtine rodent's (vole) complex social structure and social behavior has provided unique opportunities to study the underlying neural bases for monogamy and social attachment. Data from studies using the Microtus ochrogaster or prairie vole indicate that the neuroendocrine hormones, oxytocin (in female prairie voles) and vasopressin (in male prairie voles) play a central role in the development of affiliative connections during mating. The effects of intracerebroventricular administration of oxytocin and vasopressin have been shown to promote affiliative behavior in the prairie vole but not in similar, but non-monogamous montane voles.^{[citation needed]} This difference in neuropeptide effect is attributed to the location, density, and distribution of OT and AVP receptors. Only in the prairie voles are OT and AVP receptors located along the mesolimbic dopamine reward pathway, presumably conditioning the voles to their mates odor while consolidating the social memory of the mating episode. This finding highlights the role of genetic evolution in altering the neuroanatomical distribution of receptors, resulting in certain neural circuits becoming sensitive to changes in neuropeptides.

Attachment parenting

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attachment_parenting 

 

William Sears advises mothers to carry their baby on the body as often as possible.

Attachment parenting (AP) is a parenting philosophy that proposes methods aiming to promote the attachment of parent and infant not only by maximal parental empathy and responsiveness but also by continuous bodily closeness and touch. The term attachment parenting was coined by the American pediatrician William Sears. There is no conclusive body of research that shows Sears’ approach to be superior to "mainstream parenting".

History

Context

Attachment parenting is just one of many responsiveness and love-oriented parenting philosophies that entered the pedagogical mainstream after World War II, and it owes many of its ideas to older teachings, such as Benjamin Spock's influential handbook Baby and Child Care (1946). Spock had mothers advised to raise their infants according to their own common sense and with plenty of physical contact – a guideline that radically broke with the preceding doctrines of L. Emmett Holt and John B. Watson; the book became a bestseller, and Spock's new child rearing concept greatly influenced the upbringing of the post-war generations.

Thirty years later, Jean Liedloff caused a stir by a "continuum concept" that she presented to the public in a book of the same title (1975). In Venezuela, Liedhoff had studied Ye'kuana people, and later she recommended to Western mothers to nurse and to wear their infants and to share their bed with them. She argued that infants, speaking in terms of evolution, have not arrived in the modernity yet, so that today's way of child care – with bottle feeding, use of cribs and baby carriages, etc. – does not meet their needs. Later, authors such as Sharon Heller and Meredith Small contributed further ethnopediatric insights.

In 1984, developmental psychologist Aletha Solter published her book The Aware Baby about a parenting philosophy that advocates attachment, extended breastfeeding and abstinence from punishment, similarly to what William Sears later wrote; however, the point that Solter stressed most was an encouragement of the child's emotional expression in order to heal stress and trauma.

In the 1990s, T. Berry Brazelton invigorated the discussion. He contributed new research about the capacity of newborn infants to express themselves and their emotions, sensitized parents for these signals, and encouraged them – just like Spock – to follow their own judgment.

Origin

William Sears came upon the term "attachment parenting" in 1982 by reading Liedloff. Initially, he referred to his new philosophy as "the new continuum concept" and "immersion mothering". When he published his book Creative Parenting in 1982, the concept was largely elaborate already. The "7 Baby-Bs" were not explicitly presented as a canon yet, but as basic elements of a new parenting philosophy, they were distinctly clear even at that early point. In 1985, William Sears and his wife Martha Sears began to link the concept – ex post – with attachment theory which they had begun to recognize at that time. From then on, they used the term "attachment parenting".

[...] I realized we needed to change the term to something more positive, so we came up with AP, since the Attachment Theory literature was so well researched and documented, by John Bowlby and others.

— Martha Sears

In 1993, William Sears and Martha Sears published The Baby Book which became the first comprehensive manual for AP-parents and which was occasionally dubbed "the attachment parenting bible". The first attachment parenting organization, Attachment Parenting International, formed in 1994 in Alpharetta, Georgia and was founded by Lysa Parker and Barbara Nicholson. The first book that carried the term attachment parenting in the title was written by Tammy Frissell-Deppe, a mother who gave an account of her personal experiences and of those of her friends and acquaintances. In 1999, blogger Katie Allison Granju followed with another book, to which William Sears contributed a foreword, before he, together with Martha Sears, published his own work, The Attachment Parenting Book in 2001. All three books stood – with their opposition against a crude behavioristic infant anthropology – in the tradition of Spock, but radicalized the concept of a contingency-oriented parenting on the one hand, and incorporated Liedloff's idea of an instinct-guided resp. "natural" childrearing on the other hand.

In the same year as Sears and Sears' Attachment Parenting Book, Jan Hunt published her essay collection The Natural Child. Parenting from the Heart. Hunt who sees herself as a child advocate, campaigned in this book not only for attachment parenting, but also for unschooling. A more recent AP proponent is parenting advisor Naomi Aldort, who published her book Raising Our Children, Raising Ourselves in 2006.

In practice

Babyreading

Like before him the founders of attachment theory, Mary Ainsworth in particular, William Sears teaches that a strong mother-child-attachment emerges from contingency, that is of emotional attunement of mother and child, which again is based on the mother's sensitivity. Since the mother "reads" the signals of her infant, Sears speaks in this context of "babyreading". Another metaphor that he uses is "to be in the groove".

The 7 Baby Bs

William Sears strongly believes in the existence of child rearing practices that support "babyreading" and that augment maternal sensitivity. The methods of attachment parenting include seven practices/principles that according to Sears form a "synergetic" ensemble and that are based on the child's "biological needs". Sears refers to those principles as "7 Baby Bs":

• Birth bonding
• Breastfeeding
• Baby wearing
• Bedding close to baby
• Belief in the language value of your baby's cry
• Beware of baby trainers
• Balance

Until 1999, Sears named only five Baby Bs. The last two were only added in 2001 with the publication of the Attachment Parenting Book.

Birth bonding

Mother with newborn

William Sears postulates the existence of a brief time slot immediately after birth during which the newborn is in a "quiet alert state" and particularly accessible for bonding. He refers to this birth bonding as "imprinting" and bases himself on a study by Drs. Marshall Klaus and John Kennell from 1967; however, Klaus and Kennell later modified their original assumptions, including the one cited by Sears. Sears advises women to abstain from analgesics during childbirth, since those drug the child, too, and according to Sears interfere with the birth bonding.

Breastfeeding

William Sears argues that breastfeeding greatly accommodates mother-child-attachment because it triggers the release of oxytocin in the mother which supports her emotional bonding with the child, notably in the first ten days after childbirth. In opposition to bottle feeding which tends to being done in three to four hour intervals, breastfeeding enables the mother, too, to perceive the child's moods and needs exactly. Since the half-life period of the hormones prolactin and oxytocin (which promote bonding) are very short, Sears recommends to breastfeed very frequently, newborns in particular (8 to 12 times a day). He claims that the hours between 1 am and 6 am are the most beneficial for breastfeeding. In general, Sears argues that breastfeeding is beneficial for the health of both child and mother. He claims that infants up to six months should be exclusively fed with breast milk, since he believes that, at that age, children are allergic to all other foods.

William and Martha Sears advise mothers to breastfeed every child for 1–4 years:

While breastfeeding for only a few months is the cultural norm for Western Society, what we know about breastfeeding in primitive cultures and weaning times for other mammals that human infants were designed to breastfeed for several years.

— Bill Sears, Martha Sears

William Sears advocates extended breastfeeding, since he is convinced that breastfeeding supports attachment even of older children and that it is a valid instrument to comfort older children or to bring mother and child together on turbulent days. Neither does he object nighttime breastfeeding of toddlers. As early as in 1992, Norma Jane Bumgarner had campaigned for extended breastfeeding.

Sears’ recommendations are in accordance with the WHO guidelines on breastfeeding, which recommend exclusive breastfeeding in the first six months and complementary breastfeeding in the first two years for all countries.

Since breastfeeding studies are, for ethical reasons, never conducted as randomized controlled trials, critics have repeatedly suspected that studies may have produced the superiority of breastfeeding as an artifact. Both the physical, emotional and mental development of children and the preferences of women for a feeding method are strongly determined by socioeconomical factors such as the mother's ethnicity, social class, and education. If researchers go without randomization and turn a blind eye to those possible alternative factors, they fundamentally run a risk to falsely credit the feeding method for effects of socioeconomical factors. A loophole from this problem was first presented by Cynthia G. Colen (Ohio State University), who successfully factored out socioeconomical determinants by comparing siblings only; her study demonstrated that formula fed children showed only minimal differences to their breastfed siblings, insofar as their physical, emotional and mental thriving was concerned.

William Sears' assumptions about the benefit of breastfeeding for the attachment have been studied. In 2006, John R. Britton and a research team (Kaiser Permanente) found that highly sensitive mothers are more likely than less sensitive mothers to breastfeed and to breastfeed over a long time period. However, the study showed no effect of the feeding method on the attachment quality.

Babywearing

A child in a sling

Sears advises mothers to wear infants on the body as many hours during the day as possible, for example in a sling. He argues that this practice makes the child happy and allows the mother to involve the child into everything she does and never to lose sight of the child. He advises working mothers to wear the child at least 4–5 hours every night in order to make good for her absence during the day.

In 1990, a research team from New York revealed in a randomized study that children of lower class mothers who to the age of 13 months spent a lot of time in a child carrier on their mother's body showed significantly more frequently a secure attachment as defined by Ainsworth than the control group children, who spend more time in an infant seat. For middle-class families, an equivalent study doesn't exist yet.

Sears argues furthermore that babywearing exercises the child's sense of balance; since a child who is worn on the mother's experiences more of her conversations, he believes that babywearing is also beneficial for the child's language acquisition. However, there are not studies that confirm such effects.

It is undisputed that babywearing can calm children down. Infants cry the most at the age of six weeks; in 1986, a research team at McGill University showed in a randomized study that infants of that age cried significantly less if their parents wore them a lot on the body during the day. Sears recommends babywearing for the purpose of settling a baby to sleep, too. He approves on the use of a sling up to the age of three, since childwearing can also be used to calm a misbehaving toddler down. Other pediatricians find it disputable to wear children beyond the age of nine months permanently on the body, arguing that this is against the child's natural desire for autonomy.

Co-sleeping

Christian Krohg: Mother and Child, 1883

William Sears states that any sleeping arrangement that a family practices is acceptable as long as it works; but he advises mother to sleep close to the child. He thinks of co-sleeping as the ideal arrangement and refers to it as the nighttime equivalent of babywearing: co-sleeping supports, in his opinion, the mother-child-attachment, makes breastfeeding more convenient, and prevents not only separation anxiety, but SIDS, too. Sears is convinced that mother and child, in spite of frequent nighttime breastfeeding, have the best sleep when they sleep close together. He is also convinced that due to the extra nighttime feedings, a child that sleeps close to the mother thrives better than a child "crying, alone, behind bars". Moreover, Katie Allison Granju argued that co-sleeping is beneficial for children, too, because it gives children a vivid notion of the concept of bedtime.

The idea of co-sleeping was not new in modern Western societies; as early as in 1976, Tine Thevenin had campaigned for the "family bed". Sears doesn't see a problem when a three-year-old still shares their mother's bed every night. He doesn't even object if a child is in the habit of spending the whole night with her mother's nipple in her mouth, except when the mother really feels uncomfortable. Sears advises working mothers to co-sleep on all accounts in order to compensate the child for her daytime absence.

Sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) occurs with an incidence of roughly 33 per 100,000 live births.  James J. McKenna studied five pairs of co-sleeping mothers and infants and found them to synchronize nighttime arousals. With the study, he raised the questions of 1) whether there's a relationship between these synchronized nighttime waking and breathing stability and 2) whether this could be related to some forms of SIDS.  Studies that investigate SIDS directly have shown that co-sleeping raises the SIDS risk instead of lowering it. Things that increase the risk of SIDS include: 1) when the infant is younger than four months, 2) the parents were especially tired, 3) the parents consumed alcohol, 4) parents were smokers, 5) slept on a sofa, or 6) the baby was in a duvet.  Even in the absence of these risk factors, studies have still shown there to be an increased risk of SIDS when bed sharing.  The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission also warns against co-sleeping. Attachment Parenting International issued a response which stated that the data referenced in the Consumer Product Safety Commission statement were unreliable, and that co-sponsors of the campaign had created a conflict of interest. The American Academy of Pediatrics' policy on SIDS prevention opposes bed-sharing with infants, although room-sharing is encouraged.

In general, research doesn't confirm an advantage of co-sleeping over separate beds. A meta study from Israel has pointed out in 2000 that sleeping aids such as pacifiers and teddy bears significantly improve the child's sleep, while co-sleeping and frequent nighttime breastfeeding if anything hinder the formation of wholesome sleeping patterns. Co-sleeping mothers breastfeed three times as frequently during the night as mothers who have their bed for themselves. The most important factor for a child to get a good sleep proved to be the mother's emotional accessibility, not her permanent physical closeness.

"Crying is an attachment tool"

Crying newborn

William Sears determines crying as the child's pivotal mean of self-expression. Parents are challenged to "read" the crying – which is initially generalized – and to provide the child with empathic feedback in order to help them to differentiate and elaborate the repertoire of their signals gradually. Furthermore, he recommends prevention of crying: parents are advised not only to practice breastfeeding, babywearing and co-sleeping as much as possible, but also to get into the habit of properly responding to the early warning signals so that crying doesn't happen in the first place. Likewise, parents must teach their child that some trivial occasions are no cause for alarm at all.

In general, Sears argues that infants should never be left crying because this would harm them. But as early as in 1962, T. Berry Brazelton had shown in a study that a certain amount of crying in young infants does not indicate emotional or physical problems, but is to be considered normal and harmless.

No sleep training

William Sears names two reasons why infants should not undergo sleep training: he believes that infant training hardens the mother emotionally and that children who underwent such training don't sleep better but merely resign and become apathic, a state that he refers to as "shutdown syndrome", although a condition of this name doesn't exist in DSM or ICD. Frissell-Deppe and Granju believe that sleep training is traumatic for children.

Sears argues that advocates of sleep training are professionally incompetent and merely business oriented, and that there is no scientific proof that sleep training is beneficial for children.

Balance

For parents and particularly for mothers, attachment parenting is more strenuous and demanding than most other present-day ways of parenting, placing high responsibility on them without allowing for a support network of helpful friends or family. William Sears is fully aware of the arduousness of the methods. He suggests a whole package of measures that aim to prevent an emotional burnout of the mother, like the prioritization and delegation of duties and responsibilities, streamlining of daily routines, and collaboration between both parents. Sears advises mothers to turn to a psychotherapist if necessary, but to stick to attachment parenting at all costs.

Sears finds the burden of attachment parenting just and reasonable, and describes the opponents of this philosophy as "authoritarian males ... caught up in their role of advice giver". Granju, too, takes a swipe at "the male dominated 'scientific' childcare guidance". She argues that the low reputation that breastfeeding, namely extended breastfeeding in the Western world has, arises from a sexualization of the female breast: from the perspective of a sexistic society, the breast "belongs" to men, not to children. Mayim Bialik, too, considers attachment a feminist option, since it constitutes an alternative to the – male dominated – superiority of physicians who traditionally shaped the spheres of pregnancy, childbirth, and motherhood.

Since attachment parenting poses a considerable challenge to the reconcilability of motherhood and female career, the philosophy has been greatly criticized, most notably in the context of the attachment parenting controversy from 2012.

Parental authority

Sears states that in attachment families, parents and children practice a highly developed and sophisticated type of communication that makes it unnecessary for parents to use practices such as scolding; often, all it takes is a mere frown. He is convinced that children who trust their parents are cooperative and don't resist parental guidance. He therefore recommends positive discipline. But in contrast to many AP parents, he isn't fundamentally opposed to confrontative methods (firm, corrective response), and he gives high significance to child obedience and conscience. Sears is a decided advocate for authoritative parenting.

As studies have shown, it is indeed possible to use discipline strategies that are sensitive and, therefore, one should not equate discipline and insensitive caregiving.

In theory

Claim

Like Benjamin Spock before them, William and Martha Sears consider their parenting philosophy as a common sense and instinct-guided ad hoc way of parenting. In contrast to Spock who derived his ideas in a straight line from Freud’s psychoanalysis, the Searses in fact didn’t start out from a theory; even the tie to attachment theory was only engineered ex post, when the philosophy was already largely complete. Apart from Liedloff’s rather eclectic thoughts, they came to their ideas mainly from their own personal impressions:

Our ideas about attachment parenting are based on thirty-plus years of parenting our own eight children and observing moms and dads whose parenting choices seemed to make sense and whose children we liked. We have witnessed the effects this approach to parenting has on children.

— Bill Sears, Martha Sears

Despite the lack of a consistent theory, William and Martha Sears consider attachment parenting scientifically proven:

AP is not only common sense, it’s supported by science.

— Bill Sears, Martha Sears

Their belief in such scientific proof doesn’t hinder the Searses to advise AP parents not to engage in discussions with AP critics. They also favor some science while they refuse other:

Science says: Good Science Backs AP.

— Bill Sears, Martha Sears

Fundamental terms and criticism

Critics consider a lack of a consistent theoretical foundation – notably the lack of precise definitions of the fundamental terms – a shortcoming of the attachment parenting concept.

Sensitivity

Contingency: Mother and child in emotional harmony

The concept of mutual emotional fine-tuning has been known in psychology since Franz Mesmer, who introduced it under the term "rapport", before Freud adopted it for psychoanalysis. In relation to the mother-child-tie, behaviorists and developmental psychologists rather speak of "contingency" today; Daniel Stern coined the term "attunement", too.

For Williams Sears, attachment parenting is a kind of parenting that is radically characterized by maternal responsivity. For that, he adopted Mary Ainsworth's term of "maternal sensitivity": The woman directs her attention completely on the child ("babyreading") and responds continuously to every signal that the child sends; the result is a state of harmony between mother and child that leads to mutual attachment. Sears believes that the maternal "tuning-in" begins during pregnancy already.

Attachment

Within the framework of infant cognitive development studies, the child's attachment to the parents has been well researched. As early as in the late 1940s, Donald Winnicott gave a detailed account of the development of the child's attachment; at the latest after the sixth month, healthy children begin to disengage from the mother-child symbiosis quite normally. However, it was Margaret Mahler who gave the most accurate description of the attachment development during the first three years. William Sears’ publications reveal no knowledge of this relevant literature.

Sears’ use of the term "attachment" is merely colloquial. He applies it synonymously with terms like trust, harmony, closeness, bonding, love bonds, and connection: "Attachment describes the whole caregiving relationship between mother or father and baby." He mentions that attachment emerges from contingency, but in his further accounts, he never differentiates between attachment and contingency. The readers must therefore assume that attachment is a deeply vulnerable state that never stabilizes and that requires constant reestablishment through incessant sensitivity.

Later in the book, in contradiction to his own preceding statements, Sears reassures adoptive parents: "Don't worry about the attachment your child may have ’missed’ in foster care. Infants are extremely resilient."

Insecure attachment

The establishment of a secure mother-child attachment is the declared and pivotal goal of attachment parenting.

In numerous scientific studies, the normal development of attachment has been well documented. The same applies for deviant or pathological developments. Problematic or disturbed attachment has been described in three contexts:

• In extreme and rare conditions, the child may not form an attachment at all and may suffer from reactive attachment disorder. Children who suffer from reactive attachment disorder have often experienced extremely traumatic childhoods with a lot of neglect and abuse. An example of such a case is for children in orphanages in Romania where babies have been known to be left for 18–20 hours by themselves in their cribs. As adults, people with reactive attachment disorder show severe emotional abnormalities and a severely impaired social behavior.
• Mary Ainsworth described a type of disorganized attachment that appears, too, mostly in children who suffered child abuse; boys are more frequently affected than girls. Those children show distress, and their mothers reveal an obvious lack of empathy. Disorganized attachment is no mental disturbance in terms of ICD, but a type of behavior that can be observed in the strange situation test only. In "normal" middle-class families, about 15% of all children show a disorganized attachment. In social problem groups, the percentage can be significantly higher.

Secure, insecure-avoidant, and insecure-ambivalent attachment in toddlers in the U.S., in Germany, and Japan

• A third group of problematic attachment is constituted by the types of insecure-avoidant and insecure-ambivalent attachment, both described by Mary Ainsworth, too. Children who are insecurely attached behave in the strange situation test either aloof towards their mothers, or they fluctuate between clinginess and rejection. As Beatrice Beebe (Columbia University) has substantiated in a study in 2010, these children experience from their mothers constantly behavior like under- or overstimulation, intrusiveness or volatility. Nonetheless, their mothers displayed empathy and were fully able to respond to their children's emotional expressions appropriately; the children showed no signs of emotional distress. Insecure attachment as defined by Ainsworth is very common and applies for example in the U. S. to about one out of three children.

William Sears uses the terms "lesser quality of attachment", "insecure attachment", and "non-attachment" synonymously. His formulations don't reveal which kind of problematic attachment is meant: reactive attachment disorder (ICD), disorganized attachment (Ainsworth) or the two forms of insecure attachment (Ainsworth). Still in 1982, he mentioned "diseases of non-attachment" not referring to the attachment theorists Bowlby and Ainsworth, but to Selma Fraiberg, a psychoanalyst who studied blindly born children in the 1970s. Due to the vague description of problematic attachment, Sears and AP organisations who use his criteria have been reproached to produce a high rate of false positives. The same applies to definitions of attachment therapy, a concept that frequently appears to be partially overlapping with attachment parenting. Attachment parenting supporters have distanced themselves from attachment therapy, notably from its methods, but not from its diagnostic criteria.

Sears offers a discrimination between (good) attachment and (bad) enmeshment, but again without explaining to his readers how exactly they can identify the difference.

There is no conclusive body of research that shows Sears’ approach to be superior to "mainstream parenting". In field studies in Uganda, Ainsworth has observed that sometimes even children who spend plenty of time with their mothers and who were breastfed on cue, developed signs of insecure attachment; she concluded that it is not the quantity of mother-child interaction that determines the attachment type, but the quality. It is, therefore, not practices like co-sleeping, babywearing or feeding on cue that Ainsworth identifies as the crucial determinant for a secure attachment, but the maternal sensitivity.

Need

William Sears assumes that even toddlers can have a need for breastfeeding.

The theoretical starting point of attachment parenting – the idea of contingency – would suggest a concept of the infant as a creature who is essentially defined by their feelings and communication. William Sears, though, defines infants even more essentially by their needs. Need is therefore another basic term; attachment parenting means quintessentially to attend to the child's needs.

As early as in the 1940s, psychologists such as Abraham Maslow shaped detailed models of the human needs; ever since, scientists have made a clear distinction between needs on the one hand and desires on the other hand. In 2000, T. Berry Brazelton, a pioneer in the field of newborn psychology, and child psychiatrist Stanley Greenspan published their book The Irreducible Needs of Children, in which they re-assessed the term for pediatrics. When the Searses published their Attachment Parenting Book one year later, they responded neither to Maslow nor to Brazelton and Greenspan, but used the word need merely in a colloquial sense. Although they stressed that parents must distinguish between needs and desires of children, in particular of older children, they denied their readers a guideline of how to tell needs and desires apart. With a view to infants, they believe that needs and desires are plainly identical. In general, they use both terms synonymously. With a view to toddlers, they often phrase it: a child is not ready yet (to do without breastfeeding, without co-sleeping, etc.); but even in contexts like these, they speak of needs, too.

Opponents of attachment parenting have questioned that the behavior of a 3½ year old who still demands to nurse can actually be classified as a need. Most likely the child is seeking consolation. To give a child comfort is an important parental responsibility; but parents are just as well liable to teach their child to take heart by their own power.

Stress

Should parents give comfort or teach composure?

Stress has been surveyed and documented in many studies. The theoretical foundation was created in the 1960s by Richard Lazarus. In 1974, Hans Selye introduced the differentiation between distress and eustress, and in 1984, psychoanalyst Heinz Kohut proposed the concept of optimal frustration; Kohut postulated that the harmony between parents and child needs some well allotted disruption in order to empower the child to develop a healthy personality. In resilience psychology, too, there is broad agreement today that it harms children if their parents keep any stress away from them indiscriminately; by doing so, they suggest to the child that everyday problems are painful and overall to be avoided.

Even though stress is one of the fundamental terms of attachment parenting, William Sears’ publications don't reveal acquaintance with pertinent literature about this topic. Sears links stress and distress with the release of cortisol, but uses both terms synonymously and in a purely colloquial sense. He refers the term to any uncomfortable or frustrating state which makes the child cry – a signal which AP mothers are supposed to carefully attend to since stress sickens the child. On the other hand, Sears advises mothers not to overreact and to teach the child imperturbation ("Caribbean approach"). He leaves it up to the parents to decide which type of response individual situations ask for.

For parenting, any fuzziness of the term stress as well as of the term need have far-reaching consequences. If it is assumed that any crying of the child indicates harmful stress and that any of his demands indicate a true need, parents are bound to confuse rapport, sensitivity, responsivity, emotional availability, and wise protection with behaviors that, from an educational standpoint, are highly dysfunctional and that William Sears mostly wouldn't agree with himself:

• with anxious continuous monitoring of the child
• with over-parenting, that is the continuous removal of such problems which the child could actually cope with herself
• with continuous micromanagement of the child's moods, aimed to keep the child happy around the clock; indeed, William Sears considers happiness "the end result and the bottom line of child-rearing".

Instinct and nature

Mother with child in Mali (2006)

Instinct is another basic term of attachment parenting. The Searses describe attachment parenting as the natural, biological, intuitive and spontaneous behavior of mothers who rely on their instincts, sixth sense, inner wisdom or common sense. They attribute even motherliness itself to instincts, whereas they attest men a reduced instinct for children's needs.

Instinct theory developed in the 1930s within the framework of ethology. It owes its basic ideas to William McDougall among others, and its elaboration mainly to Konrad Lorenz and Nikolaas Tinbergen. Lorenz believed that instincts are physiological processes, and assumed they could be described as neuronal circuitry in the brain. But already Arnold Gehlen had disputed that humans still have much instinct at their disposal; for him, plasticity and learning aptitude outranked instinct. In today's research, the term instinct is regarded as obsolete. Recent studies have demonstrated that motherly behavior is not inbred but biologically and socially determined. It is partly triggered by oxytocin, partly learned.

William Sears' writings show no knowledge of this current state of research. The Searses use the word instinct in a purely colloquial sense and synonymous with terms like hormonal and natural; as an antipole of instinct and nature, they identify the things that "childcare advisors" say.

If you were on an island, and you had no mothers-in-law, no psychologists, no doctors around, no experts, this is what you would naturally and instinctively do to give your baby the best investment you'll ever give.

— William Sears, Martha Sears

William Sears, who owes his formative impressions to Jean Liefloff, points to mammals, primates, "other", "primitive", and "traditional cultures", namely on Bali and in Zambia. Developmental psychologist Heidi Keller who comparatively researched the mother-child relationship in a large bandwidth of cultures, disputes that attachment parenting can be described as a return to a "natural motherliness", like many supporters advertise it. Keller doesn't rank attachment parenting as a counteragent to the high-tech world, but asserts that it "paradoxically fits optimally into a society of individualists and lone warriors how we experience it in the Western world". Many of the methods that the representatives of attachment parenting attribute to the evolutionary history of life don't actually play the major role in non-western cultures that is attributed to them. In Cameroon for example, children are actually carried in a sling initially, but then have to learn to sit and to walk much earlier than European and North American children; rather than to cultivate affectionate eye contact, mothers blow into their children's face in order to get them out of the habit of making eye contact.

Navajo baby on a cradleboard (1936)

Even in the United States, there are minority groups which can be classified as highly "traditional", none of them practicing attachment parenting. Amish mothers for example co-sleep with their infants, but only for the first several months; they never let their infants and toddlers out of view, but they don't wear them while they are working. From very early on, Amish children are raised to serve God, family, and community rather than to express their own needs. The infants of orthodox Jews traditionally sleep in cradles. In communities where there is no eruv, Jewish parents are not allowed to carry their children about on Shabbat. Native Americans traditionally used cradleboards which could be worn, but which involved minimal physical touch of mother and child.

Optimal development of the child

As Suzanne M. Cox (Northwestern University) has pointed out, neither attachment theory nor attachment parenting offer a general outline of the optimal development of the child, which could be used to empirically measure the efficacy of attachment parenting. The Searses promise parenting results such as increased independence, confidence, health, physical growth, improved development of the motor and language skills, good manners, conscientiousness, social competence, sense of justice, altruism, sensitivity, empathy, concentration, self-control, and intelligence. However, there is no conclusive evidence from empirical research that supports such claims.

The ultimate target of child rearing is, according to Sears, happiness. Similar to the German catholic Albert Wunsch, Sears therefore ranks among those parenting advisors whose philosophies reflect stray aspects of their religious beliefs, but result in a purely worldly target. In the year of the publication of the Attachment Parenting Book, Wendy Mogel, by contrast, suggested her own very influential concept of character education that was straightforwardly based on her Jewish faith (The Blessings of a Skinned Knee, 2001).

Distribution and acceptance

In 2014, German Federal Minister of Family Affairs, Manuela Schwesig, was patron of the first Attachment Parenting Congress in Germany.

Attachment parenting is particularly popular among educated urban women in Western countries, who are interested in ecological and social issues.

In the United States, parenting tips of well-known people like the actresses Mayim Bialik and Alicia Silverstone contributed to the popularity of the philosophy. Many North American Women are organized in support groups of Attachment Parenting International (API), the movement's umbrella organization, in which Martha Sears serves as a board member. In Canada, there are further AP organizations such as the Attachment Parenting Canada Association (Calgary); even some public health organizations promote attachment parenting. William Sears has close ties to the international La Leche League (LLL) which feature him as a conference speaker and published several of his books. In LLL groups, many mothers get in touch with attachment parenting for the first time. There are also attachment parenting organizations in Australia and in New Zealand.

In Europe, Attachment Parenting Europe (APEU, in Lelystad, Netherlands) campaigns for attachment parenting; in the Dutch language the philosophy is referred to as natuurlijk ouderschap (natural parenthood). This organization keeps liaisons to representatives in Belgium, Denmark, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Norway, the United Kingdom, and Switzerland. In 2012, there were 30 AP groups in England and Wales.

In Germany, there are independent AP institutions in several cities. Hamburg, the movement's central point in Germany, hosted a first Attachment Parenting Congress in 2014, under the patronage of Federal Minister of Family Affairs, Manuela Schwesig. A second one has been announced for 2016.

In Austria and Switzerland there exist a small number of AP institutions, too. In Sweden, fantasy and science fiction writer Jorun Modén solicits attachment parenting, which she refers to as nära föräldraskap (proximal parenthood). In France where the philosophy is dubbed as maternage intensif or maternage proximal, the movement has virtually no followers; due to the success of the Napoleonic education reforms, the French traditionally have a deeply rooted belief that educated child care specialists educate children at least as well as mothers do.

Controversy

Since 2012, there has been a controversy about Sears' positions which has been mostly carried out in the English-speaking world.

It began in 2012 with a cover picture on Time magazine that showed a Californian mother breastfeeding her almost 4-year-old. In the accompanying article The Man Who Remade Motherhood, journalist Kate Pickert argued that even if William Sears' positions are much less radical than those of his followers, they are misogynic and give mothers a chronically guilty conscience, and that they frequently disagree with relevant research results. The cover picture and article became the starting point of agitated disputes in many media.

At the same time, attachment parenting attracted attention of sociologists like Ellie Lee, Charlotte Faircloth, Jan Macvarish, and Frank Furedi who described the phenomenon an example of 21st century Parental Determinism. As early as in 1996, sociologist Sharon Hays had described the sociocultural phenomenon of an Intensive Mothering; with attachment parenting, this phenomenon finally became tangible and recognizable. In 2004, media critic Susan J. Douglas and philosopher Meredith W. Michaels followed with their account of a New Momism.

Time cover picture and article

The Time magazine cover picture and article were published May 21, 2012. Pickert described how parents who follow Sears tend to take opinions that are much more radical than Sears himself. Nevertheless, many parents catch from Sears' books an outlook that Pickert jestingly describes as a "post-traumatic Sears disorder": a severe sense of insufficiency that seems to appear in particular in such mothers who want to follow Sears' advice, for the sake of their children's mental health, but cannot, e.g. because they can't afford to be stay-at-home-moms.

"Parental tribalism"

Katha Pollitt referred to attachment parenting as a fad. Parents who follow the philosophy have been reproached as acting according to their own helplessness and unsatisfied emotional neediness which may be the true reasons for their decision to incessantly pacify their child by breastfeeding and babywearing even into toddlerhood, as the belief that the child actually needs all that permanent intimacy for their healthy development is only a subterfuge. Emma Jenner argued that parents who are in the habit of stereotypically attending to each of the child's signals with physical proximity will not learn to perceive the child's needs in the full extent of their bandwidth and complexity.

Katie Allison Granju, who advocates attachment parenting and who published comprehensive guidelines for AP parents, offers a different perspective. She characterizes attachment parenting as not just a parenting style, but "a completely fulfilling way of life".

Sociologist Jan Macvarish (University of Kent), a pioneer in the recent field of parenting culture study, described how AP parents utilize their parenting philosophy as a strategy of individualization, as a way to find personal identity and to join a group of congenial adults. Macvarish even speaks of parental tribalism. According to Macvarish, it is characteristic for such choices that they are much more angled towards the parents' self-perception than towards the child's needs. Sociologist Charlotte Faircloth, too, considers attachment parenting a strategy that women pursue in order to gain and to express personal identity.

Child-rearing and lifestyle preferences of AP parents

Multiple authors have stated that many parents choose attachment parenting as part of an individualization strategy and as a statement of personal identity and of social affiliation. This assumption is supported by the observation that most AP parents show further distinctive parenting and life style preferences that are based on a particular set of attitudes (notably: a striving for naturalness), which, however, are mostly not directly tied to the declared goal of attachment parenting:

• "gentle" childbirth, "natural" childbirth, home birth;
• use of homemade toddler food from organic ingredients, veganism, paleolithic diet;
• use of washable cloth diapers, elimination communication;
• "gentle discipline", "positive discipline", non-confrontative parenting;
• naturopathy, holistic health, homeopathy, and decline of vaccination. William Sears' son Robert Sears published a Vaccine Book in 2007 which fueled the vaccine skepticism among parents, and in some AP groups, parents are explicitly asked not to have their children vaccinated. Vaccine skepticism is not universal among AP groups, however.

Some practices and preferences of AP parents are prevalent only in North America:

• decline of infant circumcision (in Europe, infant circumcision is relatively rare).
• naturism.
• homeschooling or unschooling (in Europe, homeschooling is less popular).

The Sears encourage some of these practices explicitly, for example non-smoking, healthy and home-prepared food, no circumcision, but don't comment on how they are supposed to be linked to the core ideas of attachment parenting. Only in the case of positive discipline, the link is quite obvious.

Feminist perspective

In his Complete Book of Christian Parenting and Child Care (1997), William Sears opposes maternal occupation, because he is convinced that it harms the child:

[Some] mothers choose to go back to their jobs quickly simply because they don't understand how disruptive that is to the well-being of their babies. So many babies in our culture are not being cared for in the way God designed, and we as a nation are paying the price.

— William Sears, The Complete Book of Christian Parenting and Child Care (1997)

Baby books (including my own) and child care experts extol the virtues of motherhood as the supreme career.

— William Sears

Any form of intensive, obsessive mothering has, as Katha Pollitt stated, devastating consequences for the equality of treatment of women in the society. In France, Élisabeth Badinter argued that over-parenting, obsession with washable diapers and organic, home made infant food, and parenting practices as the ones recommended by Sears, with breastfeeding into toddlerhood, bring women inevitably back into outdated patterns of gender role. In the United States, Badinter's book The Conflict: How Modern Motherhood Undermines the Status of Women (2010) had a partially critical reception, because there is no publicly paid childcare leave in this country, and many women consider it a luxury to be able to be a stay-at-home-mom during the child's first years. Still, gynecologist Amy Tuteur (formerly Harvard Medical School) stated that attachment parenting amounts to a new subjection of the woman's body under social control – a trend that is more than questionable in the face to the hard-fought achievements of women's movement.

As Erica Jong observed, the rise of attachment parenting followed a surge of glamourized motherhood of popular stars (Angelina Jolie, Madonna, Gisele Bündchen) in the mass media. She stated that the effort to model exceptional children under sacrifice of the parent's own well-being transformed motherhood into a "highly competitive race"; all attempts of women to radically monopolize their parental responsibilities very much accommodate right-wing politics.

A "culture of total motherhood"

In her 2005 book Perfect Madness. Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety, Judith Warner, too, described how attachment parenting has taken a strong influence on mainstream parenting and how it has established a "culture of total motherhood"; due to these cultural changes, mothers are convinced today that they have to instantly attend to every need of their children in order to protect them from the risk of lifelong abandonment issues. As early as in 1996, sociologist Sharon Hays wrote about a newly formed "ideology of intensive mothering". Characteristic of this ideology is the tendency to impose parenting responsibility primarily on mothers and to favor a kind of parenting that is child-centered, expert-guided, emotionally absorbing, labour- and financially intensive. Hays saw the motives for the overloading of motherhood in the idealistic endeavor to cure an overly egoistical and competitive society through a counterbalancing principle of altruistic motherliness. But according to Hays, any kind of "intensive motherhood" that systematically privileges children's needs over mothers' needs happens without fail to the economical and personal disadvantage of mothers.

In 2014, a team of researchers at the University of Mary Washington showed in a study that mothers endorsing the belief that parenting is challenging (e.g. "It is harder to be a good mother than to be a corporate executive"), which is associated with intensive motherhood, have statistically more signs of depression

Fathers in attachment parenting

Dr. Sears has taken an adamant stance against fathers being primary caregivers in attachment parenting. On his website, he claims that fathers should "help" by supporting mothers and creating an environment which allows the mother to devote herself to the baby. Sears has claimed infants have a natural preference for a mother in the early years; although, little scientific literature actually supports this conjecture since these studies are typically done in situations were the mother is the primary caregiver and not the father. It is biased to say that infants have a "natural" preference for the mother when their mother is the one who is their primary caregiver; a more correct statement would be that infants have a attachment preference for the parent who is their primary caregiver. Studies have found that between 5 and 20% of children actually have a primary attachment with their father.

One specific caregiving activity in which Sears claims fathers should be supportive rather than primary is feeding. Breastfeeding includes nutritional benefits which are undeniable, but the main reason breastfeeding is promoted in attachment parenting is for the mother-child bonding through skin to skin contact and intimacy; however, the benefits of skin to skin contact and intimacy are still present for fathers. Dr. Sigmund Freud theorized that infants tend to prefer mothers since it is the mother who fulfill's the infant's oral needs; however, if the father is fulfilling this need, it would be reasonable to assume that attachment would form with the father. Through what is called "bottle nursing", fathers and other caregivers who cannot breastfeed hold the infant touching their bare torso and feed gently and intimately, focusing their attention on the baby.

Other common mother-child AP practices, such as bonding after birth and co-sleeping, may also be equally beneficial for fathers.