Jean Liedloff

Jean Liedloff, who has died aged 84, 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 center of it. Many credits her with being the mother of attachment parenting.

Liedloff was born in New York and grew up in Manhattan. As a child, she was attracted to Tarzan and the jungles. "It seemed to me," she said, "that there was something primal, something right about [the jungle]. Tarzan represented a pure being." She attended Drew Seminary for Young Women in Carmel, New York, and then went on to Cornell University but never graduated. She modeled for a while and wrote.

On her first trip abroad, to France and then Italy, she was introduced to a "blond, blue-eyed count called Eurico," a man whom Liedloff recalled was "so successful with women, he had become extremely conceited, and I would have nothing to do with him." However, when he announced he was going to the South American jungle to search for diamonds and asked her to go with him, with just 20 minutes' warning before the train left, she went, "jumping on the train as it was pulling out of the station."

Jean Liedloff’s fascination with wild nature led to her adventures in the Amazon rainforest, her discovery of the continuum concept, and her book’s profound influence on parenting in modern societies. She passed away in 2011, and her dramatic life story has been documented in a biography entitled Jungle Jean, written in vivid detail by Jean’s friend and confidante, Geralyn Gendreau. Geralyn also wrote Jean’s obituary, shown below, as it appeared in Jean’s local newspaper.