I found that building a relationship with my babies was easy. All I needed to do was cuddle, feed, and care for them. Naturally as my children grew, our relationship grew. I saw that what we did together as a family were ways for my husband and I to share our family values and stay connected over time.

INVITE CHILDREN INTO EVERYDAY LIFE

From time immemorial until very recently in history, children have watched, imitated, and helped their parents work from an early age. Today, this is not an economic necessity or, in many cases, even a possibility. 

I think children need to see their parents at work and going about their business. Many parents have commented that the recent trend of working from home has benefited their family despite the struggles of balancing work and home life. One of the benefits is that children get to see their parents at work. When parents work outside the home, their work life is a mystery.

I also remember going with my parents on regular trips to the barber shop, beauty parlor, bank, grocery store, downtown department stores, church meetings, and all the other mundane places that made up the fabric of my parents' lives. They were places of great interest and vitality to me simply because my parents had business there. 

How much more then, I think, that my children need to be part of my home chores! This is a place where parents who work outside of the home can invite children into their life. 

I’ve found that my children are much happier watching me and my husband in our kitchen, helping to stir, setting the table, or playing nearby with real wooden spoons and a metal pan rather than spending a great deal of money on a toy kitchen.

The same can be said for our home office, garden, garage, and the workshop. I find that my young children want to be near me and my husband and, if not watching or directly helping, imitating in some way what we are doing.

CONNECT WITH CHILDREN THROUGH HOBBIES

As my children grow older, I've found that it's important to share with them the hobbies into which I pour my creativity. They don't always connect with a hobby, but I offer it anyway.

I never connected with my mother's knitting or my father's gardening, but my sister found hobbies in both and was enriched by them. Sharing knitting projects with my mother, and maintaining Dad's garden after he passed away, have given her a deep and lasting connection with both of our parents. 

I instead connected with my Mom's cooking, learning to make roast beef and chicken and chocolate cake just the way she does. I also connect with my parents through books and music. I enjoy re-reading books we once read together when I was younger or playing an organ piece my father plays or singing to my children the same songs that my mother sang to me. 

Sharing my books and music has become a meaningful way for me to connect with my children. It has been a delight for me to share  books with my older daughter as she learns to read that I enjoyed as a child and were introduced to me by my own mother. My younger daughter seems to especially enjoy my taste in music.

Common interests are always a way to build bonds with the people in my life. My children constantly enrich me and my husband with their fresh ideas, interests, and hobbies. Offering to share my meaningful hobbies with my children is offering them a bit of myself.

BRING CHILDREN INTO SPECIAL PLACES

My children need to see the special places in my life.

"Right over the next hill," my father would say, "there used to be a beautiful stone-hewn bench. I wonder if it's still there? It's been more than 20 years since I've hiked this way."

The bench was and is still there. Now after his death, I continue to feel a sense of closeness to Dad when I hike that way.  I hope that my children will feel the same way about the way I feel about this bench when they visit my secret play area in the woods.

I feel the same way about the church I watched being built as a child and then helped my parents maintain afterwards.

"Here is the field my parents owned," my mother said recently, "and our farmhouse stood over there."

I am 37 years old and was seeing the old family farm in Minnesota for the first time. Yet, as I looked at the fields that my grandfather I never met once worked, I knew this field nurtured me as surely as it now nurtures its neat rows of corn.

"There is nothing like the feeling of being up above it all, here in the mountains," I remember my father saying once while we hiked together. "Listen! Do you hear that thunder? It's an avalanche on the face of that mountain. Look closely, and you can see the cloud of snow it kicked up."

Bonds are built by sharing time together. When I call my children to come share a sunset with me, or a starry night, our relationships are strengthened in a way only shared reverence and wonder can.

TEACH CHILDREN THROUGH LIVED FAMILY VALUES

My dad loved baseball. I learned so much about his basic life values when we went to ball games together or just talked about the latest baseball game.

"A lot of the players in the city league were really good," my father would say. "They could've had professional careers if they wanted to, but they had families and businesses, so they stayed home and played in the city league. It wasn't about money for them. It was just for fun."

One of Dad's favorite stories: "I remember one year we had a team. Most of them were playing their last year, but many had never really been standouts. For that one year, everyone pulled together and had a great season. That team won the pennant that year!"

I have taken my children to the same city ballpark I went to when I was young with my father, and I tell the same stories that Dad told me to them.

I have plans to take them to see the same traveling circus and hope for them to see the same clown so beloved in my childhood. When they enjoy the antics of J. P. Patches the Clown, I hope that they will perceive the same very basic life values that once touched me: humor, warmth, and friendliness.

SHARE TRADITIONS WITH CHILDREN

I will never forget the first Christmas away from home, which was also the first Christmas after my father's death. My mother came to visit, bringing some of the same holiday decorations, music, and cookie recipes that had always been a part of Christmas for our family.

I have found that rhythms of daily life are as important to our family as holiday traditions in making it easy for my children and myself to draw strength from such tangible connections.

Through the years, I have created many new traditions around holidays and seasons for my children while keeping the best of what my parents created for me. Routines like our daily religious activities, summer walks on the beach, and winter sledding trips in the mountains give my children a sense of sacredness and permanence of our family as well as a connection to me on the occasion when I am not there to share in it.

I also remember going with my parents to ethnic festivals near where I live. The elders of a culture passed down the lore of song and dance and craft to their young, as has been done for generations.

Our modern parenting culture dulls this tradition, I think, of parents passing on to their children expressions of who they are and where they came from.

TELL CHILDREN STORIES FROM 'WHEN YOU WERE YOUNGER'

We were driving along, and I mused to my husband, "You know, I was thinking about something that happened to me in high school once..." From the backseat, my 4-year-old daughter immediately and urgently alerted her 8-year-old sister, "Quiet! Mommy's telling a story!"

Before I became a mother, I never would've dreamed my children would be so hungry to hear stories about me. I'm learning, as my children grow, how much they do want to hear as much about me as I can tell. 

Sharing my life story is the most enduring way of sharing myself with my children. My children often beg me and my husband for yet another story of "when you were younger." They treat stories of my life as treasures to keep always.

It was the same with me and my parents, and my grandparents. No one had any idea that my father would die when I was 26 years old. I have treasured memories of all the stories he told about his life. 

I am working on a memory book of my life's stories for my children. As I write down for them who I am and where I've been and what I've done, I'm giving them myself to keep in their hearts for the rest of their lives. 

Supported by the strength of knowing who I am, they can discover the world for themselves.

What traditions and stories do you honor, share, and create as a family?

I’ve interviewed some big names in my writing life, so I was surprised at how nervous I felt at the prospect of interviewing Nurturings’ co-founders, Barbara Nicholson and Lysa Parker, about our organization’s history and impact on the wider culture.

My anxiety couldn’t have been more displaced. 

Barbara and Lysa, despite their high-profile positions in Nurturings and as co-authors of the book, Attached at the Heart, are a delight to interview and tell an amazing story of how two young mothers—who were also special education teachers—went from having, as Barbara put it, “our own little support group,” to founding a global not-for-profit organization with the vision of helping parents achieve a more compassionate relationship with their children.

Q: How did you two meet?

LYSA: Let’s begin at the beginning. Barbara and I met at a La Leche League (LLL) meeting in Nashville, Tennessee (USA), in 1980. She had just moved from Texas (USA) and was a LLL leader applicant. We started talking and found out we had a lot in common. We were both special education teachers, and our husbands were singers/songwriters. Both our husbands were from Texas, so they knew some of the same people. That’s how our friendship began. 

Because of our friendship, Barbara shared with me what she learned through LLL and was a great support.

In 1985, I moved to Alabama (USA) due to my husband’s new work. I became a LLL leader in 1986, and went back to teaching in 1990. It was a real culture shock for me, because I’d gone from this world of loving, caring mothers surrounded by babies and young children where everybody is nurturing toward their children and each other. 

I found myself stuck in a portable classroom with rambunctious seventh- and eighth-grade students with learning disabilities. Many were emotionally disturbed; they were already initiating for gangs, and one student was a father. I remember looking in their folders and seeing the problems they had in kindergarten and wondering why no one intervened—believing in my heart that parenting could have prevented so many of these problems.

BARBARA: I remember thinking as my children got older, “I can’t imagine going back in the classroom knowing what I know.” I would feel like I wasn’t really serving the students if I didn’t promote parenting. I see prevention as the answer. Maybe 10 to 15 percent of these special education children had a true learning disability, and the rest of them just needed someone to sit and hold them and read to them and give them attention. 

Even in the late 1970s when I was teaching, it was hard to find a parent who was taking the time to give their children special attention. Parents wanted the teachers to take care of that for them, and when the children got home from school, they sat in front of the television. And this was suburban America, not high-risk or inner-city schools; it was a middle class area, not poor.

Dr. Isabelle Fox (former member of Nurturings’ Board of Directors) told us very similar stories. She started her practice in the late 1950s, worked through the 1990s, and the shift in the culture that she has seen during that time is profound. When she was first a young therapist, the mother usually stayed home with the children, so the mother could give the therapist information about the background of the child or what might have led to fears or anxieties. 

In the present day, Dr. Fox said the mothers don’t know what goes on in the child’s life, because they’re in substitute care with many changing caregivers. If it was a nanny, which is what she recommends for substitute care, at least it would be one stable caregiver who would know the child well. But in most situations, it’s not one stable caregiver; it’s a constant rotation, even in the best daycare situations.

Q: When did you realize you wanted to found Nurturings?

BARBARA: We were reading these great books, like High Risk: Children Without a Conscience by Ken Magid. We actually met him later; he was a real catalyst. Then we read For Your Own Good by Alice Miller. All of a sudden, light bulbs were going on about why parents were having such a hard time learning about positive discipline with their own children: because most of us had not been parented that way.

You are so deeply imprinted by the way you were treated as a child. Reactions people think of as instinctual would not be the normal reaction if you’d been raised lovingly. That was a huge “ah ha” moment for us. I subscribed to a journal published by the National Association of Parents and Professionals for Safe Alternatives in Childbirth, and the publishers, Lee and David Stewart, had reviewed Alice Miller’s book. 

So there was this explosion of ideas in the late 1980s. We knew about Dr. William Sears and LLL, but then you have these psychologists giving us the cultural overlay: the punishing culture we live in, that parents only knew what they learned as they were raised.

LYSA: If we had learned about Attachment Theory in college, we didn’t remember, so we’d go to the library and it was like a treasure hunt. 

We found out about Dr. John Bowlby (known as the “father of Attachment Theory") and Dr. James Clark Moloney. We got photocopies of a book of Dr. Moloney’s from Susan Switzer, an LLL leader in Georgia. 

Dr. Moloney was a psychiatrist who had been sent to Okinawa right after World War II as part of a team processing folks who had suffered greatly during the war. He found that, in spite of everything that had happened to them, they had happy dispositions. They weren’t bitter but were resilient, kind, calm, and it piqued his curiosity. He observed them, and what he found was that their parenting created a culture of compassion.

Moloney called it “permissive parenting” at the time, where the child is the sole occupation of the mother for the first two years, then the siblings become part of the care of the child. Okinawan parents were very respectful of the children, contrary to what he had observed in the United States. 

He came back to the United States to work with the Cornelian Corner (a group of progressive pediatricians at Wayne State University) and started teaching American parents how to parent like the Okinawans. Even though the program wasn’t considered a success, it ultimately had its influence through Moloney’s association with LLL International.

So then we started scheming: What can we do? We wanted to start an organization.

BARBARA: So we wrote a letter to Dr. Elliot Barker, who founded the Canadian Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (CSPCC), asking if we could found an American chapter. He had given a talk at a LLL conference that was reprinted in Mothering magazine. 

The day I moved into this house, October 1, 1992, right after we got the phone plugged in, it rang. It was Dr. Barker calling from Canada. I had to go hide in a closet and try to sound professional. I dropped everything to talk to him while people were carrying in boxes downstairs. 

I thought he was going to tell me how to join, but actually he told us if he had it to do over again, he would do so much more than just publishing Empathic Parenting (the CSPCC’s quarterly journal published from 1978-2003). He mentored us from then on and told us to use a grassroots approach. It will start slow, and it will build, he said, but that’s what’s going to change the culture.

LYSA: Dr. Barker emphasized having a strong mission and a strong vision, because he’d seen organizations get watered down over time and ultimately fold because they didn’t stay true to their mission. He wrote letters to important people asking them to send letters of endorsement, which they did, and suggested forming a strong advisory board of well-known experts. 

Thanks to Dr. Barker, we believe we found our spiritual calling: He made us feel that this is what we were meant to do.

Our very first website was created in 1995 by a computer lab teacher at my school. This website became the open door to parents around the world. In 1997, we were contacted by some moms in Seattle, Washington (USA), who wanted to start a local group. We asked them to help us pioneer the support group model for us, which they agreed to take on, and they helped us come up with our very first support group materials.

BARBARA: About that time, we hired our first employee, fellow LLL Leader Zan Buckner, who started out just doing filing and then helped us so much with our early materials. We had a wonderful group of LLL friends who wanted to expand their horizons. They were excellent parenting resources. At the conferences, you could really expand on the philosophy of LLL and move into parenting, and that’s where we heard so many fantastic speakers. 

So many LLL leaders were ready to do more, so they joined us.

Our first LLL conference as co-founders of Nurturings (originally called Attachment Parenting International) was in Indianapolis, Indiana (USA), with our exhibit that looked like a science fair project—a cardboard, three-sided exhibit with magazine cutouts. We’ll always be school teachers at heart! 

One of the founders of LLL and their new executive director was there. They were so supportive of what we were doing. Since then, we have met every founder, and they all said they wish they could have done what we were doing—expand their mission into parenting. 

There wouldn’t be Nurturings without the experience of breastfeeding our babies—learning to trust our bodies and ourselves as parents. Some of us were the first generation in several generations to breastfeed.

Q: Can you talk a little bit about the struggles of founding a not-for-profit?

LYSA: Every time we’ve gotten to the point where we were about to give up, because we didn’t have enough money or resources or we were burned out, someone or something has come along and helped us out. I don’t want to sound preachy, but we’ve turned it over to God: If it’s meant to be, it will survive.

It’s a constant miracle in our lives to see how Nurturings keeps hanging in there. We will always be indebted to Pam Stone and Christy Farr (former executive directors of Nurturings) for their dedication. 

To us, it’s so important and nourishing to hear from parents and professionals. We’ve talked to people who knew John Bowlby, and they’ve said he would be proud of what we’re doing. His quote that I love is: “If a community cares for its children, it must cherish its parents.” He held support groups for parents when he was practicing medicine at the Tavistock Clinic in London, UK. What an inspiration!

Q: How has Nurturings gone about changing culture?

LYSA: You can’t change generations of behaviors in one generation, but you can begin the change.

So often, parenting is blamed for troubles in a relationship or with children. But really, it has to do with the individual and collective experiences we bring to a relationship. That’s why Giving the Love that Heals by Harville Hendrix and Helen Hunt is such an important book. You’ve got to raise your consciousness about yourself so that you’re more conscious with your children. 

Our children are grown now, but we’re still working on this with them and will be with our grandchildren.

BARBARA: Sometimes we hear of parents who say their own parents stayed together for the children but did not work on the issues in their marriage. The children absorbed the dysfunction in their family. They had not been given a model for a healthy relationship. 

We’re proud that our book, Attached at the Heart, and our organization, Nurturings, emphasize how important it is for couples to model positive, loving interactions and ideally to work on their issues as a couple before they become parents.

LYSA: We can say without a doubt that we have seen the cultural shift begin. It’s reflected in the media. Like-minded businesses have popped up all over the Internet. People from all over the world contact Nurturings for advice and resources. With our professional training, we have seen even more change in cultural attitudes and beliefs toward children and parenting.

BARBARA: We hope the parents who are out there setting such a good example in their communities will continue to nurture their children and each other, family by family creating a more compassionate world.

I remember when the first edition of the book, Attached at the Heart, was released in 2009 – Nurturings’ 15th anniversary since its founding by the book’s coauthors, Barbara Nicholson and Lysa Parker.

Attached at the Heart was an absolute labor of love, and all of Nurturings’ volunteer staff, Board members, and local parent group leaders around the world were ecstatic to share in Barbara and Lysa’s celebration of their book. Here’s what the coauthors had to say about their book at the time:

LYSA: The book, Attached at the Heart, is a culmination of the last 20 or more years since we had our first conversations about wanting to help children and parents. In our book, we paint the big picture and give the reader the reasons why parenting is important, as well as the Eight Principles of Parenting and the research to support those reasons. We want to give parents the researched information and empower them to make their own informed decisions.

BARBARA: The other important message of the book is the title: Attached at the Heart. We wanted to have something about nurturing or connection in the title to capture all of these philosophical concepts we've been talking about.

This year, Nurturings celebrates its 30th anniversary with the release of Attached at the Heart’s third edition. I’ve spent much time reflecting on the past 15 years since this book was first published. I am excited to share with you what Barbara and Lysa have to say about this third edition:

Q: What has changed in Attached at the Heart since the last edition of the book?

BARBARA: Our Eight Principles of Parenting have remained the same, but new and exciting research comes out every year! We strive to gather the most pertinent information and synthesize it in a user-friendly format that is helpful not only to parents but to parent educators, such as childbirth educators, doulas, lactation specialists, and mental health professionals. Here's just a taste of some of the new and exciting information in this third edition:

• Positive Childhood Experiences (PCEs) buffer and reduce the harms from inevitable Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs). Recent research has shown that positive childhood experiences and relational buffers can mitigate the impact on physical and psychological health of adverse childhood experiences.
  Parents are modeling and guiding their child’s emotional responses. Babies cannot regulate intense emotions on their own. Parents deserve effective coping tools to help them help their babies learn to recover from stress. This book offers strategies to help parents effectively manage stresses and tensions.
• Resilience arises from children receiving nurturing care. Resilience isn’t about tough love but rather guiding and teaching children strategies to navigate life’s stressors with a safety net of connection.
• Gentle alternatives to sleep training are now more mainstream. Our book offers gentle strategies to help babies sleep without resorting to cry-it-out approaches. These tried-and-true methods have helped many exhausted parents get more sleep while still meeting their babies’ needs.

Q: What has changed in the parenting world since your 1st and 2nd editions of Attached the Heart?

BARBARA: For one thing, Nurturings has truly gone "International!" Because of professionals around the world finding us online, our book is now translated into Greek, Turkish, and soon to be Spanish. It has been adapted to a parenting curriculum, and parents can attend parenting classes on Zoom.

It seems there's always two sides to every story, and it's no different in the parenting world. On the positive side, we have so much more information on infant brain development, research in healthy relationships between parent and child, and optimum infant nutrition and care. Parents can more easily find information and support online at the touch of their fingertips, 24 hours a day. Things like Zoom meetings and webinars were not available to parents when we first published the book in 2009, yet now it's a part of our everyday lives.

The downside could be seen in all these aspects, too, because it's hard for parents to investigate everything they read or see online...how accurate is the information? Is it backed by sound child development research and practices? What if my pediatrician is saying something different than what I've read or heard? We know that mental health issues are being diagnosed at younger and younger ages, with medications being prescribed even for toddlers.

Our hope is that as we normalize nurturing, and focus on Positive Childhood Experiences, we all play a role in providing the resources that parents, families, and children require for flourishing. It’s important that we continue to prioritize resources for each new generation of healthy parenting, providing support and strategies for giving parents and their children the precious time they need in the early years and as their children grow.

Q: What has been the impact of Attached the Heart since it was first published?

LYSA: The impact of Attached the Heart since it was first published is difficult to measure, but anecdotally parents have told us over the years how much our book meant to them. We know that healthy parenting has become mainstream due to the efforts of many other people, such as Dr. Bill and Martha Sears (who have written many like-minded parenting books), and our book has been a part of that evolution.

In Attached the Heart, we dive deeper into the Eight Principles of Parenting that provide a framework to give parents daily practical strategies and tools that support their nurturing capabilities. We recognized that parents value the information and the research that supports the principles, so they can share it with their family, friends and even their pediatricians.

In 2010, we began working on a curriculum based on our book, and from that, we have offered numerous training sessions for professionals with the intent of preparing them to teach parenting classes in their own communities. This effort has led to several international trainings, and there is continued interest.

We find it interesting and telling about our culture that this information is more readily accepted in some other cultures than in the United States. We know that modern times bring modern stresses. We know that today there is a mental health crisis and that parents are burnt out from the COVID pandemic. Through Nurturings, our goal has always been to make research-based information and support available to more parents. Our trained professionals and volunteer staff are also parents. We have lived experience, and we know how hard it is to find trusted information.

Q: What's the one thing that parents today must know about raising children that you address in this 3rd edition of Attached the Heart?

LYSA: The one thing that parents today must know about raising children is that becoming more informed and active participants in pregnancy, birth, and parenting is more important than it’s ever been. We encourage parents to question deeply, to probe beyond anything that doesn’t feel like the right fit for their family. What we want to do as an organization is help parents learn how to identify what is truly effective and helpful to them for their family. When we are willing to do that, we change ourselves and change the world.