---
---
* [Ideas](/section/ideas/)
# One Family's Experiment with Attachment Parenting
by
[Kate Pickert](https://time.com/author/kate-pickert/)
May 10, 2012 11:30 AM UTC
"I had one friend who had kids before me. She was not vaccinating. She was doing the attachment parenting things. I hold her in very high esteem. I felt she had kind of blazed the way. She helped guide me through the natural childbirth experience. So I was following her lead initially. That’s the way things are handed down now. We notice how a friend is doing it and I admire the way she does other things." From left to right: Genevieve, age 4, Caroline, age 2, and Amelia, age 6, in her mother, Erica's arms at a Safeway in Walnut Creek, Calif.
"I had one friend who had kids before me. She was not vaccinating. She was doing the attachment parenting things. I hold her in very high esteem. I felt she had kind of blazed the way. She helped guide me through the natural childbirth experience. So I was following her lead initially. That’s the way things are handed down now. We notice how a friend is doing it and I admire the way she does other things." From left to right: Genevieve, age 4, Caroline, age 2, and Amelia, age 6, in her mother, Erica's arms at a Safeway in Walnut Creek, Calif.Timothy Archibald for TIME
by
[Kate Pickert](https://time.com/author/kate-pickert/)
May 10, 2012 11:30 AM UTC
Erica Kain, in many ways, epitomizes the complexities of attachment parenting. She was committed to raising her children by the movement’s principles, even if she didn’t call herself an “attachment parent” or obsess over _The Baby Book_ by Dr. Bill Sears. “With Dr. Sears, you don’t have to have read the book,” says Kain. “It’s ubiquitous. If you Google a question about breastfeeding, up come the articles by Dr. Sears.”
Before she had children of her own, Kain had planned to embrace natural childbirth, breastfeed, sleep in bed with her babies and “wear” them as much as possible. A resident of the Bay Area, she felt great cultural and peer pressure to parent this way. But a difficult first pregnancy, a traumatic birth and realities of parenting multiple kids with their own preferences forced Kain to readjust her expectations. “Motherhood is hard enough without all these ideals hammered into you,” she says.
Photographer Timothy Archibald spent two days with Erica Kain, her husband Richard, and their three children, Amelia, 6; Genevieve, 4; and Caroline, 2\. Kain talked to staff writer Kate Pickert.
One Family’s Experiment with Attachment Parenting
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