The Moms are Anxiously Attached

For some moms who worry about their kids’ attachment, the call is coming from inside the house.

The other day on Facebook Reels (because of course) I saw a reel from an attachment parenting influencer that started out fairly predictable (“it’s not natural to send our babies to daycare!”) and then went a bit off the rails when it also asserted that parents should be wary of K-12 schooling, after-school sports, and *checks notes* play dates.

As a mom who is probably on the more gentle, neurotic, coddling (and at times, permissive) side of things, the attachment parenting media has a very intense grip on my brain. On the one hand, I kind of agree with it, because it effectively makes me feel extremely guilty for everything from working from home during my my first child’s toddler years, to taking a shower while my kids are awake. If I thought it was bullshit, it wouldn’t have the capacity to make me feel bad. But I always assumed the whole point of attachment parenting was to be responsive to infants’ and toddlers’ needs so that they feel they have a safe “home base” in the form of at least one primary caregiver—and that this degree of safety makes them feel comfortable exploring the world once socialization/group play comes into the picture (around age 2 or 3.) I did not take this philosophy to mean that parents should be wary of their 9-year-old having friends.

I’ve seen similar content loosely quoting attachment parenting experts Erica Komisar and Gabor Mate, by scaring parents with the fact that at some point, we will not be the “most important people” in our kids’ lives. The focus is on us, and our emotional needs, in a way that doesn’t even seem subtle. I see videos of babies and children juxtaposed with the terrifying text that one day they will have friends or spouses who they enjoy more than Mommy—that we only have thirteen summers with them before they abandon us forever. To avoid losing them to the siren song of socialization, we must keep them home and close to us—or better yet, start living in the forest so we never have to worry about them accidentally stumbling upon friendships.

I gotta be honest—this feels creepy. It doesn’t feel like it has anything to do with children’s attachment at all. While there’s a compelling argument to be made against over-scheduling kids or shipping them off to sleepaway camp for a full summer, or an argument to be made for prioritizing lots of quality family time, surely there isn’t a single reputable child psychologist who believes a school-age child’s social needs should be 100% filled by their parents, or that we should be wary of kids having friends or hobbies outside the home. If you went to any child psychologist and touted the fact that you and your eleven-year-old were each other’s only friends, they would not consider this a success story.

Increasingly, it seems this type of content aims to validate the attachment needs of clingy, anxious parents, as opposed to the actual children. The emphasis is on the terror of our own irrelevance, and on “losing” our children, not to drugs or self-harm, but to other more insidious demons: tee-ball and Aiden. And I’ll be honest: to some extent, I am one of those parents, but I have some self-awareness about my narcissism, which is why I can identify exactly what they’re doing.