“These people have seen this in our cultures back home”: black mothers in the UK and Canada reclaim attachment parenting

ABSTRACT

Attachment parenting (AP), coined by American paediatrician William Sears and his wife Martha, claims inspiration from the practices of “traditional” and “primitive” peoples. These peoples’ “instinctive” parenting behaviour forms the basis for AP’s seven tools, including breastfeeding, babywearing and bedsharing. As the AP phenomenon gathers momentum in the US, UK and Canada, this paper examines the raced, gendered and classed dimensions of its rise to popularity. Who is AP for? And to whom does it belong? Drawing from interviews with nineteen black mothers living in Canada and the UK, this paper captures efforts to “reclaim” attachment parenting, both against the Sears and for black communities.

KEYWORDS:

• Attachment parenting
• black motherhood
• intersectionality
• resistance
• parenting
• intensive mothering

Acknowledgements

Thank you to Ilana van Wyk, esethu monkali, and everyone who attended the Indexing Transformation seminar upon which this paper is based.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This research was funded by an Ontario Trillium Scholarship.