Attachment Parents Really Think They Are Doing It Better Than Everyone Else

Last night, Bravo’s Extreme Guide to Parenting continued it’s theme of showcasing parents who have gone off the rails with their parenting decisions because they feel they were wronged by one or both of their own parents. This week’s couple is practicing “Conscious Attachment Parenting,” mainly because mom was abandoned by her father as a child and now she refuses to put her baby down. I’m not making fun of abandonment issues, I have them, too. I just don’t take them out on my kid by forcing her to be attached to my boob 24/7, sleep in my bed, and live in a wrap attached to my bosom.

The show opens with the Axness family bed-sharing, of course, breastfeeding, of course, and talking about their daughter’s need to pee outside a diaper, of course. “I’m sure we’ll be able to catch one this morning,” Nate, the father, says. They mosey into the kitchen for breakfast, and their 16-month-old daughter, Eleanor, is sitting bare-bottomed in her highchair because her parents are waiting for elimination communication cues. Elimination communication is a potty-training style in which you teach your infant to use the bathroom way before all of her friends. It basically translates to staring at your kid all day, trying to run her to the bathroom before she has an accident. Seeing this couple in action did not change my opinion that it is a giant waste of time. They honestly think their daughter is giving them “cues” – she’s honestly being a 16-month-old who is going to pee where ever and whenever she feels like it.

“I was very proud of you for going in the potty yesterday!” Christian Axness, AP-mom extraordinaire, exclaims. Eleanor looks at her mom with a blank stare. A few minutes later, she pees in her high chair at the breakfast table. The parents are nonplussed. Dad explains that he bought medical gloves when they first started allowing her to defecate all over the house, but now he’s used to it — no big.

“Shit. I should have been watching!” Christian screams. They truly think their daughter is communicating. I truly think she’s just peeing whenever she wants. They are also signing with her — she’s not signing back. At all. Not even close to making a hand motion.

Scene two commences: enter placenta. Christian handles other women’s placentas as a side gig, it seems. She plops a giant one on her kitchen counter and brags about how big hers probably was. Nate mopes about not being able to actually take Christian’s home because someone else apparently encapsulated hers for her. Bummer. She’s really excited to be handling this other woman’s placenta. Their house is basically covered in bodily fluids.

Christian has a friend, Bethany, who is also a mom of a son about the same age as Eleanor. She works full time, formula feeds, and vaccinates her kids — so her lifestyle is basically Christian’s kryptonite. Christian basically spends the entire show non-stop judging her friend and making it really clear she thinks her AP parenting style is superior. She also makes it really clear that she actually thinks she loves her child more (as evidenced by her parenting style), but we’ll return to that later. She somehow convinces Bethany to come to her AP parenting group, where a whole mess of crazy is unleashed. Here are a few select quotes from a variety of the smug AP moms:

“No child wants to pee and sit in a diaper.”

“I’m very much against vaccinations. I would much rather expose my daughter to Chicken Pox in the most natural way than take the risk of the vaccination with all of the ingredients that are in them.”

“I’m more comfortable with pumping up my child’s immune system, than injecting a bunch of chemicals in her body.” YES EVERYONE! BREAST MILK CURES POLIO NOW. OH, WAIT. NO IT DOESN’T.

Poor Bethany says she doesn’t breastfeed, so since her child is not getting her natural immunities she asks what her options for preventing vaccine-preventable diseases? The answer is obviously “vaccines,” but one of the moms chimes in something about boiling a chicken carcass, and everyone nods in agreement. So I guess these women think chicken soup prevents measles? Of course. Duh. Why didn’t I think of that.

Now all the AP moms start to wax poetic about chicken pox and how much fun it was, at which point I down my glass of wine.

Cut to baby yoga class, where Christian goes on a diatribe about moms and iPhones and how they need to put their phones down and stare at their child. Then she takes her kid’s diaper off in the middle of class and sets her naked butt on a towel on her arm. The woman next to her gives her a weird look, because taking your diaper off your child in the middle of baby yoga is totally weird. Now she’s breastfeeding her naked baby while doing yoga, because why not?

In the next scene, her aunt, an ER nurse, tries to talk some sense into her anti-vaxx nonsense head, by assuring her that once you’ve seen a child who needs to be intubated because they had chicken pox in their throat and couldn’t breathe – you might change your idea about how “harmless” the disease is. Christian just keeps insisting that it’s how it went down in the good old days, so why progress? Fuck science, am I right? Why skip a potentially debilitating disease by receiving a harmless immunization when you can have a chicken pox party and infect the whole neighborhood? Fun!

What about polio and whooping cough? She has no answer for why she’s avoiding those vaccines. It’s a “no brainer” for her husband. They’re “trying to avoid the carcinogens” in vaccines. They don’t think they’re safe.

The episode continues with Christian leading a breastfeeding awareness fair and judging her friend Bethany more. “I’m not going to say that I love my daughter more than anyone else loves their child BUT… this little human being has changed everything about me and I’m living an awesome life. I wish Bethany could experience that, you know?” Bethany is experiencing that, you idiot. She doesn’t love her child any less because she puts a diaper on her and vaccinates. Christian manages to guilt her now crying friend Bethany again, by implying she’s less than for not breastfeeding her child. Ew. Christian basically claims she opened her own business so that she could constantly be near her child and breastfeed on demand and implies that Bethany could have done the same thing. Ugh.

There is a moment of hope that her aunt’s speech in the nail salon got into her thick head, but when she discusses vaccinating and the possibility of taking her 16-month-old to a chicken pox party, her husband acts like that’s the best idea, ever. Then her husband says they’re going to do things in an “educated” way. I guess a degree from Dr. Google is “educated” in his world. He has no problem exposing his child to chicken pox. The couple then does a Skype chat with two women who are not doctors and takes their singular anecdotes to confirm that chicken pox is safe.

The episode ends with a positive pregnancy test and another huge glass of wine poured for me. These people are the worst.