Reddit reviews The Attachment Parenting Book : A Commonsense Guide to Understanding and Nurturing Your Baby

I want to encourage you and say your CPTSD won’t affecting your parenting and you providing her with love and security is enough, but I also don’t want to delude you into a false sense of security. To answer your question as to how I do it: Firstly, I put in a massive amount of effort everyday to keep myself grounded and mindful and conscious of how I’m acting/reacting towards my child. On top of that, I never let myself slip into depressive states. On top of that, I have learned to manage and control all of my triggers so that my emotional states never negatively affect my child.


One major element of CPTSD is that it is an attachment disorder. This attachment disorder WILL affect your ability to provide a consistent sense of safety and security to your little one unless you learn how to manage and counteract those insecurities. Another element of CPTSD is that it causes you to develop a distrust/distaste for humans, and a desire to avoid human interaction. This will be absolutely detrimental to your child as he/she ages. All children rely on their parents to provide them with safe, healthy and consistent family and friends. It’s a very tiring and very difficult job, but it creates a ‘safety net’ of security on which your child can lean. How you interact with and value others will turn into how your child interacts with and values others. You will have to spend lots of time around other moms, letting your child play with their child. It’s a strain on you emotionally and mentally, but it’s necessary for healthy child development.


The best advice I can give you as a fellow parent with CPTSD is to start searching for a trauma psychologist and get an appointment scheduled ASAP. Of course anyone can recover from CPTSD without the aid of a psychologist, but when you add a child to the mix, quality and speed of recovery becomes a very important factor. Getting a psychologist to help you process your trauma and learn newer and better ways to do things will save you a lot of time and heartache. A psychologist will also teach you the importance of obtaining and maintaining friendships, and how to better manage all the triggers that parenting will bring up for you.

In the meantime, here is a short list of my all-time favorite parenting books. I’ve read probably hundreds of parenting books at this point: most are bad, a few are great. These are the best, most knowledgeable books I’ve found for ‘people like us’, at least in my opinion:

The Conscious Parent: Transforming Ourselves, Empowering our Children

ParentSpeak: What's Wrong with How We Talk to Our Children--and What to Say Instead

The Whole-Brain Child: 12 Revolutionary Strategies to Nurture Your Child’s Developing Mind

The Parents We Mean To Be: How Well-Intentioned Adults Undermine Children's Moral and Emotional Development

The Attachment Parenting Book : A Commonsense Guide to Understanding and Nurturing Your Baby

No-Drama Discipline: The Whole-Brain Way to Calm the Chaos and Nurture Your Child's Developing Mind


Feel free to PM me anytime :)

You should really check out some of Dr. William Sears' books. He is a pediatrician and author with something like 9 kids. He has written lots of books on parenting and is a huge advocate of attachment parenting, co-sleeping (what he calls "sharing sleep"), breast feeding, and baby wearing.

He certainly has the credentials to back up what he is saying, so if you are interested in co-sleeping and attachment parenting I'd check him out.

The Baby Book.

The Attachment Parenting Book.

This might have some good resources.

Can't vouch for it as I haven't read it, but Dr. Sears' book

I bought [The Baby Book] (http://www.amazon.com/The-Baby-Book-Revised-Edition/dp/0316198269) before I even started trying to conceive with my first, just on a whim, having never heard of Attachement Parenting and everything clicked. It's a great resource on babies in general, but from a gentle, AP perspective. I'd recommend this book for ANY expecting parents, honestly.

[The Attachment Parenting Book] (http://www.amazon.com/The-Attachment-Parenting-Book-Understanding/dp/0316778095/ref=pd_sim_b_9?ie=UTF8&refRID=0WC7WNX0VS1BQNCQTK5F) contains a lot of the same information, but with some additional resources, and if I recall it goes into slightly more detail.

I'd also highly recommend [Attached at the Heart] (http://www.amazon.com/Attached-Heart-Parenting-Principles-Compassionate/dp/0757317456/ref=pd_sim_b_4?ie=UTF8&refRID=0JWRN280KQTRGGP6NH0M) as an excellent resource for new moms who want to practice AP.

As for other resources, I belong to a lot of AP and gentle parenting groups on facebook which, while sometimes overly preachy or cloying, often offer great blog posts or affirmations to mull over. Even when I'm super busy with kids and life, I can usually spend five minutes to read a facebook post and often that's all I need to recenter myself and keep myself focused on my parenting goals.