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Mayim Bialik hates arguing about attachment parenting

By KATE STANTON, UPI.com
UPI/Danny Moloshok
UPI/Danny Moloshok | License Photo

Mayim Bialik, the former "Blossom" star who recently returned to the small screen as a "Big Bang Theory" cast member, has become a public advocate for so-called "attachment parenting." According to the increasingly popular philosophy, parents should develop strong emotional bonds with their children through breastfeeding, holding and "co-sleeping."

But the mom of two, who writes a parenting blog for the Jewish site, Kveller, told omg! on Friday that strangers often call on her to defend her parenting style.

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“If I’m talking to girlfriends, if I’m talking to random people, and we’re talking about parenting, I tell them what works for me and why. But a lot of people want to ask me things so that they can fight with me,” the 37-year-old actress with a PhD in neuroscience said.

And just because I’m a public person, who happened to have breastfed and slept with her kids, that doesn’t mean that I want to fight with you on the street or in the supermarket. So, I think you have to be really careful to understand why people want to know what they want to know.

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As part of her commitment to attachment parenting, Bialik famously breastfed her son, Fred, until he was four years old.

"Well, nay-sayers, prepare to be proven wrong. All of you snarky mamas who glared at me nursing my 3 1/2-year-old on the NYC subway, prepare to be amazed," she said at the time. "I loved nursing Fred. And Fred loved and needed nursing. It was the best nutrition, nurturing, and bonding ever."

Bialik explained that her choice to breastfeed an older child put off plenty of her blog readers.

Obviously the notion of an older child nursing is very strange to some people. In certain cultures it’s not. And I was very careful about when and how I chose to breastfeed my older child. I put a lot of boundaries and limits around it and again took the guidance of women who had sort of walked this path before me. I think the notion of breastfeeding at all is still very controversial in some circles.

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