Who is the "Successful" Child?

A bumper sticker announcing a child’s status as an honor roll student. Trophies lining a shelf. Notes about play dates and birthday parties and extracurricular activities cramming the space on a calendar page. A college acceptance letter hanging on the refrigerator.

How do we, as parents, define our children’s success?

Most of us want our kids to taste the success that comes from hard work, but even more than that, we want them to be forces for good in the world. 

Sometimes we can lose track - receiving a good report card or excelling at sports are easier to recognize than whether the child is a loving friend or has a curious mind.

In their book The Successful Child, parents and pediatric experts William and Martha Sears list the qualities they believe define a successful child. Happily, markers like straight-As and an armload of ribbons and trophies aren’t on the list. 

Instead, they are: 

• being able to forge “meaningful relationships with others,” 
• being empathetic, 
• being smart, healthy, and polite, 
• having confidence and joy, 
• making moral and wise choices, 
• being able to communicate well, and 
• having a healthy attitude about sexuality.

The foundation for all of these qualities, according to William and Martha Sears, is being emotionally attached to parents as babies and little children. 

Dr. Sears has co-authored several parenting books with his wife Martha, a pediatric nurse, and is credited with the development of the idea of “attachment parenting.” Attachment parenting is an approach that asserts that a strong emotional bond with parents during a child’s early life is crucial for a person’s emotional health and is a predictor for success in life. 

William and Martha Sears identify a number of “tools” for parents to use. These include breastfeeding on demand, the “family bed” or co-sleeping with children, and “wearing” infants (in a cloth baby sling) instead of keeping them in playpens, car seats, or strollers most of the time.

Early on in The Successful Child, the authors state that of all the stages in a child’s life, the most important one in terms of attachment is the period between birth and one year old. When I read that statement years ago as a new mother, I took it to heart. I wasn’t a convert to all the tenets of attachment parenting, but I incorporated many of the tools into my parenting. 

Like many parents, I picked and chose from various parenting techniques – I followed the smörgåsbord methodology. A bit of this, a bit of that.

I wore my babies in slings. I breastfed. I co-slept with my newborns until they were anywhere from 3 weeks to 3 months, depending on the child but, ultimately, “Ferberized” them all. (Richard Ferber is the author of Solve Your Child's Sleep Problems. He advocates a progressive approach regarding getting babies and children to get to sleep on their own, and stay asleep all night. I picked up the Ferber method when I witnessed close friends and their baby use it and saw them transformed from three insanely exhausted people to three happy, content ones.) Letting a child cry for a few minutes in her crib is a major no-no in attachment parenting, but was a good choice for my family. 

I recently picked up the book, The Successful Child again. This time I read it as the mother of a child adopted as a toddler. I can’t help thinking it was a glaring omission for William and Martha Sears to fail to write a chapter on attaching to a newly adopted child. I tried to imagine what I would have felt like, as a new mother of a child who was adopted, reading the book.

Some adoptive mothers can breastfeed, but many cannot. Some adoptive mothers bring their babies home as newborns, many do not. Some adoptive mothers know what their babies’ early life was like, some do not. I could hear myself and other parents of adopted children demanding of the authors: “Yes, but how can my child be The Successful Child.

There is an answer in the book, though you have to make the connection to adoptive attachment parenting yourself. The authors assert that 

“It’s never too late to practice attachment parenting.” 

They give examples of how to attach to children of all ages and how to help them grow into emotionally, spiritually, intellectually, and physically healthy people.

I feel very grateful that when I adopted my child, I’d already parented three children from birth through the preschool years. I had some awareness of the developmental stages that little kids go through, of the ways I’d fail myself and my children and the means by which I’d extend grace to myself to get past such shortcomings.  All parents, including adoptive ones, can be confident that giving boundaries, providing security, and showering children with love can help to make every child – in his or her own way – “the successful child.”