Just over 11 years ago, I began parenting my first child. I was the first of my siblings and my friend group to have a baby. This was Missouri in 2011. Attachment parenting, gentle parenting and bedsharing all existed, but they hadn?t made it to the Midwest, or at least not into my baby-free world. So I did everything the way my mom had done it, with a few tricks I learned from second-hand parenting books thrown in for good measure. I bought a playpen. I breastfed because I was poor, not because I had strong feelings about breast being ?best.? And as soon as my baby was six months old, we started sleep training. We did it with common sense?by setting timers, checking in with soothing reassurances and starting her on solid foods?but by ?sleep training,? I mean we let her cry it out. Like the books promised us, the process lasted less than four nights. And after that, my daughter became a sleeping pro. By the time I had my second child two years later, ?crunchy? parenting had arrived in the Midwest, or, at least, the controversy had arrived. Sleep training, along with bottle vs. breast and whether to vaccinate, had become a question of identity. But while parents everywhere channelled their latent aggression into the ?mommy wars,? I ignored the evidence being slung by both sides and quietly sleep-trained my six-month-old in the same way I had my first.
Two years later, when we had our third and final baby, the mommy wars were over. Cosleeping attachment parents who responded ...