CBB Talks to The Office's Melora Hardin, Part 2
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In the second part of our exclusive interview with The Office’s Melora Hardin, Danielle spoke at length with her abouther two homebirths, extended nursing and co-sleeping.
Click ‘More’ to read our exclusive interview! (Click here for part one of our interview.)
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Danielle: I wanted to talk to you about attachment parenting. We’re passionate about it at CBB, and it’s great to hear a celebrity talking about it. Are you very open about it in your regular life?
Melora Hardin: I talk about it all the time with people. It’s the kind of thing that works very, very well with our family. It has to work well for the family — the mother, the father and the children. I think if it works well for the parents, it works for the children. I feel that it’s been the absolute perfect solution for our family. I think it creates children who feel very secure in the world, and we both really love that.
Both my husband and I know there’s going to be a day like, “What? What do you mean? In your bed? Yuck!” They don’t sleep in our bed anymore, they sleep together in their own beds, but they do come into our beds most nights, around five in the morning they end up in there and sleep the last few hours in bed with us. But they did both sleep in bed with us for about two years each.
I breastfeed both of them for two and a half years each. I feel like for me, I was not a sleep-deprived mother, because I got really comfortable with the idea of rolling over, plopping my boob in their mouth and they would go back to sleep and so would I. And that was easier for me than getting up out of bed and sitting in a chair next to the crib.
I never knew about attachment parenting at all, until I had my daughter. There weren’t many mainstream role models a few years ago.
I think it’s a great thing, and something people should feel confident and comfortable with, and not stressed out about. When I was doing it, I had so many people asking me, “When are you going to stop breastfeeding? When she’s 16?” Joking like that. And it’s like, “Well I’ll do it when it’s time to stop!”
In countries where they breastfeed at least a year and over a year, their rate of breast cancer is so much lower than this country. It’s what they’re meant to do. The plumbing needs to be used. It’s good for your boobs! And it’s great for the baby. And there’s still this culture within our culture that is very quiet about all this stuff, but luckily there are more and more people getting open to it. It just worked for me. I don’t judge other people doing that, I think it’d be great for people to have enough relaxation around it to make a decision based on what feels right for them and their baby.
When my kids were two-and-a-half and breastfeeding, that was just for snacks, for comfort. They weren’t breastfeeding in the daytime ever. It was just at night, a little bit, to help them sleep. We weaned down to a normal schedule, but it wasn’t pushed and rushed. I loved breastfeeding, I loved the whole experience. They were eating full meals from me until they were six to nine months old, then food, then as the food came, they just wanted me less and less. It was more about seeing mommy and having comfort, having cuddles. By the time they were 18 months old we stopped breastfeeding in public, by the time they were 2 years old, we cut out the snacks and were only doing night feedings. So I did what I felt was the right thing, based on my discomfort.
I kind of think of animals when it comes to this. Like when a cow doesn’t want their calf to nurse anymore, they kick them! When they’re done nursing them, they’ll walk away, go somewhere else, the calf will come, they’ll walk away again, the calf will come again, and they’ll kick them. And I felt a little bit like that! When I got frustrated with the amount of breastfeeding we were doing, I’d cut it down. I’d talk to them about it — even though they couldn’t understand. “We’re still going to have booby, but we’re not going to have it in public. We’re only going to have it at home.” So if we were out and they said they wanted booby, I’d say we’d have it at home. And they really got that — it wasn’t a hard transition for us. But I wasn’t trying to do it when they were five months old.
So I find it really great and really liberating and empowering, and I think it creates reasonable and confident children. My kids got a lot from it, I think.
They’re the most amazing travelers. I breastfed them on planes, and we never had screaming children, because they were just so content. When they’re feeling fussy or need to go to sleep or suck, you just put them on the boob and they’re happy.
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Did you research this while you were pregnant? Were you breastfed? Did you have people around you practicing attachment parenting?
I started reading some books when I was pregnant with my first daughter, and I had two homebirths, so I was planning my homebirth and reading about different things, and I found the Dr. Sears book and that really helped me a lot.
Reading that book and hearing that they had seven or eight children but didn’t start attachment parenting til their last three was interesting. And he’s a pediatrician and she’s a nurse, and they talk about the difference between practicing attachment parenting with their last three and how that affected their last three as compared to their first five or so. I thought that was fascinating, from people with that kind of experience — really quite mainstream. I thought it was a pretty great testimonial for the method, and I talked to my husband about it, and he thought it sounded good and we thought we’d try it.
I remember when I started breastfeeding [my daughter] in bed I was afraid to move, and I spent a few nights being very uncomfortable — I didn’t want to move because I didn’t want her to be uncomfortable. But I realized that was ridiculous, and started moving her over, and putting her in a position where I could be comfortable. The amazing thing about babies is that they’ll do what you want them to do, if you help them through that without getting angry or frustrated.
In our house, even when an infant would wake up in the middle of the night for whatever reason, we never turned the lights on or made it time to wake up. Even if we knew we were going to be awake for an hour or two, it was all about going back to sleep. We’re sitting in the rocking chair, the lights are out, we’re laying on the bed, we’re under the covers, we’re rocking, we’re singing. Even if we had to turn music on or dance around, we kept the lights off. I feel like that helps let them know what’s expected of them, and you do it in the most loving way with the most patience that you can.
Were you and your husband breastfed?
My mom tried to breastfeed me. She told the doctor she was going to breastfeed me, and he said, “What are you, bovine?” She was incredibly embarrassed, needless to say. She had no support. She fed me for about six weeks, but says her milk dried up. I’m sure she had plenty of milk and could have been successful, but she didn’t know how to do it. She tried. With my older brother, she also tried, but when my brother was born, he was born in New York, in a progressive hospital where they allowed my father in the room, where that’s not traditionally done. I was born in Texas, where they didn’t let men in the room. My mom had to go through this labor all by herself, and she tells the story of a nurse coming in the room saying, “Can I get you anything?” And my mom said, “Yes, your hand!” And she says she remembers trying not to squeeze her hand too hard. It’s just so horrific to think that this is how it was done!
As that as a comparison to attachment parenting, there’s going to be a day where people go, “Can you believe there was a day when people didn’t do this?” If people can look beyond their own backyards, there are tons of cultures that have practiced “attachment parenting” since the beginning of time. They don’t have the luxury to be in five bedrooms and four-bathroom homes. They don’t have that. So they all sleep on the same mat, the same tent, the same dirt floor.
What was your husband’s experience like, growing up in England?
He wasn’t breastfed, and he was a C-section baby. He was a scheduled C-section — who knows whether his mom needed it or not — but pretty traditional, Victorian birth. Certainly not any of this attachment parenting!
It must’ve been dramatic for his family to hear about this then.
My mother-in-law, who is very English, when we had our first daughter and she heard she was sleeping in the bed with us, she said, “Well I told my friends there’s no sex in that house!” I couldn’t believe she said the word “sex” to me! And I said, “Oh don’t worry about that, we’re doing just fine.”
That’s another thing about attachment parenting that people worry about — they think if the kid is in the bed with you that you’re not having sex with your husband. And there are a lot of other places to have sex besides in the bed!
I have friends whose young daughter shared their bed for a few years and her friends said, “How can you have sex?” and she always said, “On the couch, on the floor, in the kitchen…”
Anyway, there are definitely a lot of misconceptions about sex, bonding time for the husband, not being able to go out when breastfeeding. I always wonder why they think it’s any of their business.
It should be everyone’s business — people should realize ignorance breeds prejudice. If you’re ignorant about it, you should get informed about it, by talking to people who are practicing it. Or practice it yourself and see how it feels to you. Read some books with real-life testimonials, like the Dr. Sears books.
All of us who are parents realize that there is no perfect way. It’s just as random as a love relationship with your partner — you’re just finding your way as you go. Our culture says, “No sex this way! No sex that way!” And then billboards are flashed everywhere about sex, too. So you have to remember we are a country built on Puritanical guidelines, and I think that’s something that never goes away. Yet we’re probably one of the most promiscuous cultures, all under the surface, with all these kinky things people do that they don’t want to reveal. I think the best thing is to talk about attachment parenting and what it’s really like.
People get really offended when we talk on the site about attachment parenting. We see that with a lot of parenting issues like vaccinations, circumcision. Do you see that?
I think people get threatened. They think you’re saying that they’re bad because they’re doing it differently than you’re doing it. I ran into that a lot with the homebirth situation. People love to tell their birth horror stories, and I didn’t have any horror stories. I had two beautiful births at home that I feel really great about, and I would always choose to do that at home unless I had to go to a hospital. I think hospitals are fantastic for emergency or high-risk situations. But luckily I didn’t have that. I think people take it personally, they feel threatened that you did something outside of their understanding, which isn’t different when it comes to a lot in our culture — why our races don’t understand each other and why in 2008 we still have racial issues. It’s why people of one religion think another is wrong.
We value right and wrong, black and white — we value extremes. We don’t value trying to sort of discover and experience and appreciate the other side of things … I don’t think you can preach to the choir, I think it’s dangerous to do that, and I don’t have interest in doing that. I don’t have interest in making people feel bad about what they’ve done because of what I’ve done. I feel really good about what I’m doing for my family. It’s working for us — we’re a happy little group. If someone wants to look at me and get inspiration from that, then great. But if they don’t, and they want to judge it and say they think my methods are crap, then that’s fine!
glad to see so much exposure for it here, danielle & co.!
