Feast your eyes on Bob Sutherland. He is a massage therapist, waiter and wine guy and attached papa of 6-month-old Leo. He is an anti-circing, cloth diapering, co-sleeping, baby wearing, breast-feeding supporter who cooks and cleans and gives mom and baby great massages. He is a rock star dad.

 

Why is talking about fatherhood important?

We started this series as a joke – a fun competition between real dads and AP Ryan Gosling. However, it had undertones of doing good things — we could normalize attachment parenting and also lift up great dads. There are so many definitions of attachment parenting. We tend to stick to these principles, but different parents practice even those principles to somewhat different degrees. Also, because a lot of attachment parenting families eat organic food, and a lot of attachment parenting families use cloth diapers and a lot of attachment parenting families use crystal deodorant,  those things are often included as attachment parenting principles. Unfortunately, these things became reasons for moms to criticize some of our dads. So, we felt like we were at a point where we needed to choose our battle — did we want to talk about attachment parenting, what defines attachment parenting, and help to normalize it for parents who don’t realize that the instinctual choices they make actually qualify as attachment parenting or did we want to unconditionally lift up dads who are doing their best — which happens to be a pretty great job?

We’ve decided to choose dads. We don’t care what type of parenting choices dads make – we want moms AND dads to feel empowered to make the right choices for their families. Most of our dads will come from families who practice some level of attachment parenting, and lots of our dads will come from 2-parent households, but not all of them will. It has been so wonderful and heartwarming to receive nearly 1,000 emails from moms lifting their partners up as great examples of dads. We’re going to continue with this series, and hope to find another outlet to record these stories, so keep them coming! Submit your kid’s dad to info@iamnotthebabysitter.com.