What is required is constant mindfulness - an awareness that sometimes our children will need us intensely and other times they will need only our background presence. What they will not need is our forcing them into growth, nor will they need our pulling them from it willfully. It is a delicate dance, of careful attention but of resilient flexibility. Attachment parenting has no code, no formula. It is the dedicated and sometimes hard work of listening.
Opinions vary widely about what behaviors constitute the real attachment parenting.
There are important reasons to try these and other less mainstream parenting techniques, but I think there are very few basic, nonnegotiable attachment-fostering practices. I am not saying one must do all of these to create a healthy connection with your child, but I believe that each one contains a natural and powerful effectiveness in allowing deeply loving and healthy parent-child relationships. Gentle childbirth consists of allowing a healthy woman's body to do what it is capable of doing without interference, medical or otherwise. Volumes could be said about each of these issues, the reasoning behind them, and the controversy surrounding them. They are simply decisions to consider, on which to educate one's self, and to make with awareness.