Jean Liedloff

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Biographical Information

Jean Liedloff (died in 2011) "was the author of The Continuum Concept: In Search of Happiness Lost (1975), in which she outlined her belief that babies should be continuously carried by, and never separated from, their mothers, until such time as they are able to crawl away by themselves. She advocated co-sleeping and on-demand breastfeeding and believed that children should be central to their parents' world, but not the centre of it. Many credit her with being the mother of attachment parenting...

"After her fifth trip to Venezuela, she decided to write The Continuum Concept, which was published in 1975 and later translated into more than two dozen languages. The more she learned about the Yequana people, the more she grew disdainful of childcare experts in the west...

"Liedloff was a founding member of the Ecologist magazine. For a while she lived in London, where she lectured on The Continuum Concept. She never married, nor had children. She eventually moved to Sausalito in San Francisco, where she lived on a houseboat with her cat, Tulip, until her death."

• Advisory Board, Alliance for Transforming the Lives of Children