Parents Who Keep Their Children Close

There's being close to your children, and then there's being attached to your children.

Deirdre Chadwick carries her 3-year-old son, Noah, in a homemade baby sling that ties around her waist and neck. She avoids using a stroller, still nurses and sleeps next to her child in her queen-size bed -- Noah's on one side with a guardrail and her husband is on the other. It would be easier with a king-size bed, she admits, and "Noah kicks at night," but "we have an open-bed policy. He'll decide when he's ready to stop co-sleeping."

Chadwick, a 33-year-old musician who lives on Capitol Hill, practices "attachment parenting," popularized by the child-care guru William Sears, with techniques including co-sleeping, slow weaning and baby-wearing, all in order to form a deep emotional and physical parent-child bond. There's definitely no spanking, and for gosh sake, no letting the baby "cry it out."

The payoff, say the proponents of what some might call extreme parenting, is providing your child with "a lifelong foundation for healthy, enduring relationships."

Or so says a brochure for Attachment Parenting International, a nonprofit advocacy organization. API also says that parents shouldn't feel pressured to practice all of the group's ideals -- one of which is "maintaining balance in family life" -- but rather should take whatever works for them. They can even work full time and hire a nanny.

As Chadwick puts it, "The most important thing is honoring my child's desires and emotions as a member of humanity."

Society benefits from more attachment parenting, too, API argues, since the method has the potential to ultimately "reduce or prevent child abuse, behavioral disorders, criminal acts and other serious social problems."

Chadwick thinks it just makes sense.

"If babies feel secure and safe, then they're free to learn," she says. "If they're living in fear, then they're really blocked from learning."

She's part of a support group that formed this spring in Washington under the umbrella of API -- an offshoot of a large and growing Northern Virginia group that meets in the McLean area.

One of the new District leaders is Brook Markley, 29, who wears her 2-year-old son, Andrick, in a carrier against her chest. The "support" part of the group is crucial, she says, since attachment parenting is in direct conflict with the values of the nation's mainstream, where "women are so bombarded by things that are designed to take children from their parents. We're taught how to give them a bottle, put them in a crib and a stroller."

Ten mothers and their babies, all under age 3, show up for the most recent meeting of API-D.C., held the third Tuesday of the month at New York Avenue Presbyterian Church (there are no fathers at the gathering, but they have come to previous ones). Issues discussed include finding AP-friendly pediatricians and babysitters, and how to sleep with a restless infant. One woman mentions that her husband's snoring wakes the baby, so the husband has been relegated to another room.

Some AP parents do hire babysitters. Markley, who once in a while will leave Andrick with Chadwick as caretaker, says, "Nobody is able to do this 24 hours for seven days a week."

Chadwick gives a little pep talk. Though this intense care-giving takes work, it's an investment in the future, she says.