page_title: Attachment parenting
section_title: Stress
hierarchical_section_title: Attachment parenting / In theory / Fundamental terms and criticism / Stress
caption_attribution_description: Waaah!.
context_page_description: Attachment parenting 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".
context_section_description: 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".
caption: Should parents give comfort or teach composure?
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