Go read the Disclaimer again. I am not a doctor. This is not medical advice. Seriously.
Martha is a psychotherapist who unfortunately only had some issues with Freud. She didn't turf all of his ideas, and it shows in the developmental theory which informs this book. William is a child psychiatrist, and the pair have children of their own. The good news is, both worked enough with enough different children that a lot of their specific advice is really good. Neither of them is a behaviorist, and they do not care for a lot of Postive Parenting tactics, which is, imo, all to the good.
Their work is also heavily influenced by attachment and bonding theories. They believe strongly in nurturing the parent/child bond and using the influence that bond gives parents to guide babies and children to be safe, have their needs met, and become stably happy.
They treat breastfeeding and bottle feeding interchangeably, noting only the importance of feeding a hungry baby, not making the baby wait. Given the attachment/bonding basis for this book, not emphasizing the need to breastfeed at the breast is somewhat odd. Then then suggest weaning before a full year, from the breast, or from the bottle to a cup. There are several problems with this. First, for all their emphasis on adults deprecating their own needs and putting babies and children first, they accept the need for mothers of babies to be separated for long hours without comment (at this point; later they emphasize the need to have at least one parent at home until the baby is 3), and without ever contemplating pumping. They ignore the research which clearly shows that even with safe, nutritious foods available, breastfeeding leads to healthier babies at least until age 2 (after that, it has not been studied). In addition to working mothers, their rationale for weaning is because the kid will ask for the breast or bottle by name after they are about a year old, so it will be a lot harder. I find this all pretty suspicious.
Deep gender issues that ignore the impact of child care decisions on the marital relationship -- they emphasize the need to have a parent at home until the child is three (valid) but assume that'll be the woman staying at home at least part time. No mention is made of the four/thirds solution, or stay-at-home or work-from-home fathers. Their advice on child-spacing is interesting, but combined with their mama-has-to-stay-home advice basically impossible for most to follow, and they don't seem to include anything about sibling issues, which is weak.
They oppose cry-it-out, but disregard parental need to sleep. They tell parents to put infants to bed sleepy, but not asleep so they learn to fall asleep on their own, disregarding the many infants this won't work for, and failing to recognize how incompatible all this stuff is with successful breastfeeding. They recognize that cosleeping is normal in other cultures (they do not mention how abnormal our arrangement is); they then produce the usual argument in favor of night time is parent time (whereas evenings can be regained by putting the baby to bed alone for a few hours after falling asleep, and then joined on first awakening by breastfeeding mama who stays thereafter), and infants and children who co-sleep will have trouble sleeping alone. Well, who wants to sleep alone? The parents don't.
There is one page on which the Piepers say they don't mean to be heterocentric (pp 1-2) and another on which they recognize cultural variation in parenting (pp 127-8). These are just words; they are in every way willing to accept recent, cultural constructs (cribs, bottles, early weaning, babies sleeping in a bed and a room alone, a male primary economic provider and a female stay-at-home provider-of-all-things-nurturing). Their changes are largely cosmetic: do not be mean to your children.
The Piepers (presumably through Martha, the psychotherapist) have also made simple cosmetic changes to Freudian ideas such as the oedipus complex, which they have renamed the romantic phase. For girls, they used the idea of the Electra Complex, rather than Freud's notion of homosexual desire for the mother. They have even retained Freud's age range for this conflict of the phallic stage: 3-6 years. Their conception of babies and small children as wanting what they want when they want it is largely id/primary process stuff. They do not use any of Freud's anal ideas; their approach to potty training is largely to ignore it and to encourage parents to ignore it as well. Their advice revolves purely around what not to do; it does not appear to occur to either of them to suggest parents might consult a health care provider to check for possible constipation when a child reverts to diapers. Their failure to address this issue leaves parents prey for the likes of Azrin and Fox; this is irresponsible.
Look, I could do this with the entire book. Is there anything worthwhile here? Yes. They point out some problems with Consequences and with Time-outs. They emphasize the importance of nurturing the bond, and of meeting the child's needs. They note that children take up a lot of time and energy, but not for forever and that it is reasonable to ask parents to sacrifice their nice-to-haves or less-urgents so that children can get what they desperately need during the time frame they need it. Given that they are speaking to an audience which may also be listening to James Dobson and Gary Ezzo, these are all points worth making. But they deprecate parental needs so routinely, I question whether this book can actually be helpful. There is very little here to help a parent work through those personal issues or life circumstances that are interfering with their ability to wholeheartedly parent; there is, instead, an unfortunately large amount of, anger-doesn't-work-so-hold-it-in, and don't-sleep-now-you'll-be-able-to-in-a-year.
By analogy: we all know that pregnant women should not smoke, drink to excess or take unnecessary drugs. But smoking, drinking to excess and unnecessary drugs may be addictive and are generally serving some sort of purpose for the woman who uses them. Telling her to stop without providing her with any tools or insight on how to go about doing so will only help a tiny fraction of users. Exhortations will motivate an even smaller number. Why kill trees for this purpose? To exacerbate the situation, the Piepers deprecate some really useful parenting strategies (co-sleeping, extended breastfeeding), offering some really dumb-ass reasons to justify deprecating those strategies (because it might be hard to get the kid to sleep alone later, because it might be hard to wean the kid later) that, furthermore, are on the surface at least directly at odds with their approach of putting in the effort now to meet the need so it does not persist or become inner unhappiness.
The Piepers assert that if a child's primary happiness derives from a strong, nurturing parent/child bond, and their secondary happiness derives from competence. If parents can maintain the first, and help their children learn to weather the ups and downs along the way to the second, the Piepers assert the following:
children whose fundamental needs are met grow into adults who possess a personal and social autonomy born of an unshakable inner happiness, which no longer depends either on their parents' continued presence or on any other kind of external satisfaction.
I know a lot of people go around saying "needs which are met go away". I've always assumed they meant temporarily. No meal is so filling I never feel hungry again. No amount of sleep prevents me from needing to sleep again. No amount of respect of my peers, no amount of love from my friends is enough that I never need love and respect again. This sentence -- and a lot about this book -- make me wonder about the Piepers. Can any parenting process, can any child hood, live up to this claim? That no matter what my objective life circumstances, a person could have unshakable inner happiness if only their upbringing was of the right sort? Pages 38-9 allow for the possibility that childhood needs might not be met due to external circumcstances such as famine and war. But if a child grows up in abundance with good parenting, would not the resulting adult still find their inner happiness shaken by, say, being posted to or incarcerated in Abu Ghraib?
I don't think the Piepers mean it. They use inner happiness (and inner unhappiness) to illuminate the inner state of a child, without resorting to more obviously reifying constructs such as temperament. A child who has acquired inner unhappiness has a mean, humiliating, punishing superego, er, has parents who treat her in a mean, humiliating or punishing way, and since she knows her parents are providing her with perfect care, she must treat herself in the same way, so she does. (Come on -- you know they mean superego.) Parents need to stop engaging in mean, humiliating or punishing ways, and start engaging in supportive, needs-fulfilling, nurturing ways (that are safe), so the kid's superego, er, whatever, will start reflecting the new, better objective circumstances of her life. It's a simple idea, and a powerful one, and they deploy it to good effect throughout the book. In a sense, this is a nice generalization of Philip Greven's work.
The Piepers are a lot like the Hendrixes. They started out with a horrible interpretive schema, and a whole lot of data helped them come up with a juicy nugget or two. Because of all the problems noted above, it is not entirely obvious this nugget is worth mining. This book may well be gilding on the turd of 20th century middle-class white parenting.
Copyright 2006 by Rebecca Allen.
Created July 11, 2006 Updated July 11, 2006