“…I read The Baby Book. And in my sleep-deprived brain, I came to the conviction that Dr. Sears was right about everything–even though I would have preferred it if he weren’t–and that if I really loved my child as much as I was certain I did, I would quit my job and sell my husband’s camera equipment so I could invest in more nursing bras, since I’d be needing them for some years to come. Through Dr. Sears’s eyes, I could see that my frequent desire to escape from my screaming infant meant that I was insufficiently bonded with her. That was a horrible thought. But I also knew the cure prescribed by Dr. Sears: ask those around me to lift some of the burdens of cooking and laundry from my sagging shoulders, so I could spend more time breastfeeding and sleeping with the baby. Then undoubtedly I would begin to love her the way nature intended me to: sublimely, unfailingly, with all my other interests in life falling away like dandruff to leave only the single pure desire to give my daughter everything she needed, everything she wanted, everything that every baby should have.

Oh, I wasn’t completely taken in. I figured out within the first couple of chapters that Dr. Sears’s whole family-bed-sleeping-exclusive-breastfeeding-non-working-mother thing was a little extreme, and that his occasional nods to diversity (“do what works for your family”) were probably inserted at the insistence of his editor. I never took him to be any counterpart to beloved Dr. Benjamin Spock, who assured a generation of mothers that they were doing just fine, that babies were resilient.” Brain.Child