Mayim Bialik's Parenting Style

By Paulette Cohn for JustMommies

Mayim Bialik is best remembered for her starring role on the NBC comedy, "Blossom," which aired on NBC in the early '90s. Following the series, she enrolled in UCLA, and now holds a doctorate in Neuroscience. That said, as the mother of two boys -- Miles, 4, and Fred 1 -- Bialik made the decision to be a stay-at-home mom. To help with that, she has returned to acting, which she says has a more flexible schedule than being a professor or researcher, and this fall she has a recurring role as a high school guidance counselor on ABC Family's "The Secret Life of the American Teenager" and will appear on two episodes of Fox's comedy, "'Til Death." When Mayim is working, her husband Michael Stone, a grad student, parents their two boys.

Bialik's style of parenting includes breastfeeding on demand, Elimination Communication, and having her children sleep with her. In addition, she plans to home school, she enjoys vegan cooking and baking and lives a green and eco-friendly lifestyle, which includes cloth diapers.
JustMommies: You practice Attachment Parenting, which is a little unusual in today's society. Can you explain what that means.
Mayim Bialik: It is only unusual in the sense that for the last 200 years it has been done differently, but for most of human history, people slept with their kids, kept them close to them, nursed on demand and were the primary caregivers for their children. I guess that is what our style of parenting looks like. It has been called Attachment Parenting. There are a lot of things that some people do that are not Attachment Parenting. It is a general umbrella term. Also, there are other things we do that don't necessarily fall into Attachment Parenting, like we do the Elimination Communication thing, which is teaching your baby or yourself, your baby's elimination cues from birth. We do things that are considered out of the ordinary, but we consider them evolutionarily beneficial.
JustMommies: Did you know before you gave birth that you wanted to parent this way?
Mayim Bialik: I didn't really know. My mom was pretty hip. She used soy milk for us, she worked at a health-food store, and she had a lot of holistic instincts, but it wasn't really encouraged in the community where she was raising kids. So I was raised with some consciousness of holistic living, but never pictured I would do a home birth and all this stuff. We had friends a little older than us -- a couple of different friends who had kids before us -- and they lived in Northern California, where this kind of parenting and these options are circulating more. We started learning about it through them and seeing their kids and started doing research before we even got pregnant. Once we had our son, we were enmeshed in this style of parenting.
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2 comments

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By Twinkle on 10/09/09 at 2:40 pm

I agree, its a great article!

By Katie Ever on 10/02/09 at 8:14 pm

Great article, thank you.

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