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TO COMFORT OR NOT TO COMFORT?

By: Thomas Rutter   |   August 12, 2021

Mothers abhor the idea of letting their babies cry and want to pick them up. Dads don’t always feel the same way.
 
When our daughter attended preschool, my wife was pressured at work and therefore I was very involved in the day-to-day care of our daughter.
 
I fit the Marin dad profile pretty well – a university administrator with a busy lawyer wife, a home on Mount Tam, a dog. My job offered me far more flexibility with childcare than my wife’s, so I often found myself the lone dad in a sea of moms at compulsory parent meetings at the daycare center.
 
The mothers paid no attention to my presence. Nor did they curtail their comments. My invisibility gifted me insight into these moms’ thoughts.
 
One afternoon, I arrived at a parents' meeting to find the moms mad. Talk of divorce fluttered sharply once or twice over spirited chatter. The conflict being discussed was the way their husbands wanted to handle crying children. It was a serious friction in these marriages.
 
To my male brain it seemed reasonable to think (as their husbands did) that picking up a crying child rewards that behavior and results in more crying. To make matters worse, they felt their husbands did not want to comfort their babies. This was impossible for these mothers to comprehend or accept.
 
It appears that parenting psychology inevitably ends up in one of two directions with the mother and the father on opposite sides; a conflict that can get heated.
 
In the first camp is the “don’t comfort” approach. In the 1950s, an influential psychologist, BF Skinner, discovered that in the absence of a reward or reinforcement for a particular behavior, that behavior will eventually disappear. His work paved the way for the “extinction” or “cry-it-out” method. 

In the “comfort” camp, modern pediatrician William Sears coined the term attachment parenting, a parenting philosophy that advocates maximal parental empathy with lots of closeness and touch with children.
 
Attachment parenting is one of many love-oriented parenting philosophies that has become hugely popular in post-war generations. 

Attachment parenting owes many of its ideas to older teachings, such as Benjamin Spock's influential The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care (1946). Spock also advised mothers to raise their infants with plenty of physical contact.

Most dads I know partially subscribe to a BF Skinner approach. But this attitude can conflict seriously with a woman’s primal programming to cuddle her baby. It is the emotional umbilical cord that cannot be severed.
 
My wife explained this to me. She said that when our child was a baby, she almost physically felt our baby’s cries in her breasts, so powerful and primal was the need to provide a loving response. For many women, how they naturally respond to a crying baby is instinctive and they want to pick them up and hold them.

What appears rational to men is not always true for women and vice versa. This difference is obvious when a child cries. Acknowledging this difference may reduce the conflict between moms and dads the next time their baby cries. 
 
In the end, I have learned what is most important is to understand that a different approach does not mean the parent loves the child less. It just means we are who we are because of how we were brought up and what lessons we think we have learned.

Published author Thomas Rutter has called Mill Valley home for over two decades. He shares his humor, tips and rich experiences raising two daughters and a son. When he’s not writing and working on his yard, he loves traveling to Paris and Italy, dinner parties and meeting friends in the town square. 

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