I was sort of astonished to read in Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal that Richard Ferber is coming out with a new edition of his book on infant sleep in which he says that “letting children cry ‘was not meant to be the way to treat all sleep problems'”. I found a web-article from 2004 were he also says that parents don’t have enough confidence in their own judgement.
I’m just wondering whether he’s read his own book lately. Maybe now that he’s revised it, I guess. His book isn’t exactly the kind of book that invites a pluralistic, customized, own-judgement-building response to sleep issues. I’d say his book is one of the two pieces of professional advice that I found most undercut my own capacity to think clearly about parenting. The over-the-top authoritarian breast feeding coach that came into our baby class near the end was the other: when we wanted to supplement breast feeding with one 3 a.m. bottle feeding with formula or expressed milk so that my wife could get a rest, we were self-conscious and worried because the coach had been so fanatic about “nipple confusion”. Even though we’d sort of rejected her at the time (among the other things she said that bugged me was that all the parents-to-be in the class should generally distrust their ob/gyns, and this was in a class sponsored by the maternity ward of our hospital…), it was still there in the back of our very exhausted minds.
Anyway, good to see Ferber is revising, but seriously, the problem with almost all of these guys is that they have a single one-size-fits-all solution that they hammer at with varying degrees of dogmatic certainty. I was willing to try Ferberizing; I wish I had been quicker to recognize that it was in our case at least a lousy idea.
So long as people live and busy lifestyle which doesn’t allow them not only to think things through for themselves, but to experiment with what works and what doesn’t they will always fall victim to lousy professional theorizers.
I’m reading this post through heavy lids. My three year old is going through a nightmare stage and tries to sneak into our bed every night at 4. We’re trying various ways to break him of this habit, but having him holler on the top of his lungs for hours upon end isn’t on the list.
But I think a lot of new mothers/fathers like the cut and dry “let ’em cry” message of his original book. I was never good at reading my kids and when you’re are so weary, you just want somebody to tell you what to do.
I read Ferber and thought he was pretty nuanced, humane and helpful — though not as good as the sleep training available through the health service in Australia, where my daughter was born. Almost every single summary of Ferber I’ve read gets him wrong, making it sound like he advocates just letting the kid bawl for a few hours. I thought the book was a hell of a lot better than that.
Kieran: I agree Ferber isn’t quite as simplistic as the worst summaries make him out to be, but neither is he flexible in the way he imagines either his method or the consequences of failing to use it, not in the original edition. He pretty much says, “You have to do this, and it always works if you do it right.”
Emma’s never been a great sleeper, largely I think because she hates being alone. This strikes me as entirely reasonable as a sentiment for a small child *or* an adult, so the issue here in the end may be the importance of teaching a child that they need to master alone-ness; it’s really in a way about alienation as a skill of modern personhood. Ok, I think that is important and necessary, but given the complexity (moral and psychological) of that lesson, I don’t see how anyone could aspire to reducing to a single technique.
I tend to be pro-Ferber. I think the reason that he emphasises sticking to the plan is because alot of people quit well before the full 7 days or whatever. Which is understandable; it is miserable to ferberize a kid.
We were all over the map on the sleep stuff. We co-slept with our first kid because we were in a one bedroom apartment and it was easier. We ferberized the second kid because we were still in the one bedroom apartment and there wasn’t enough room in the bed and we couldn’t have him cry in the middle of the night and wake everybody up. We moved to a house for the third and didn’t ferberize her because we didn’t have the heart, plus the house was big enough that she wouldn’t wake everyone up by crying.
The second kid is still the best sleeper. But, I don’t think any of this stuff makes a difference in the long term.
Tim: I agree that he insists on the method and isn’t too flexible about that. Again, in partial defence, I think this is because the book is called “Solve your child’s sleep problems,” and he knows that if you only partly follow his approach you will almost certainly make those problems worse. That’s different, I think, from believing you have the One True Way of having your child sleep happily and healthily.
Emma’s never been a great sleeper, largely I think because she hates being alone. … so the issue here in the end may be the importance of teaching a child that they need to master alone-ness; it’s really in a way about alienation as a skill of modern personhood.
There’s certainly a lot to this. At the same time, some alternative approaches (e.g. Sears) rely on teaching the mother that they need to master being permanently and forever on call. (OK, OK, so that’s a bit harsh.)
We’d already had two kids by the time we’d first heard of Ferber, and thankfully we’d made more than enough mistakes with Megan to allow ourselves to get suckered by another well-intentioned theory of child-raising. (Melissa has a great story about how, after a terrible trip to visit family with Megan when she was quite young, during which my maternal grandmother told her that we were far too stressed and obsessive about our child and that her temper trantrums were more than anything a reaction to our constant experimenting and arguing, she came home and threw away every single What To Expect…-type baby book she had. She felt immeasurably better afterward.)
Our youngest, Alison, continues to be a wretched sleeper. She’s almost two now, and the current project to somehow finally get her to stop waking up screaming at 4am demanding her milk cup. We’ll just keep trying one thing after another until we get it.
The thing that should alert people about the What To Expect book is that the woman on the front looks like she’s been lobotomized.
My wife and I read several How to Baby books and they were useful but we weren’t compelled to follow all their recommendations. The breast feeding part was the most stressful to my wife because one nipple didn’t function well (I know, I tried) and the other got very sore from overuse (not to say it wouldn’t have become very sore from normal use). We had to break out the formula for the sake of madonna and child.
A second source of stress, with child one, was his cholic. It took time to develope the routine that mitigated each evening’s infinite wails but we eventually came up with a tag team approach. I would carry baby like a football around the family room for at least foorty-five minutes, drool dripping off my elbow, and then give him over to the swaying embrace of his mother. Another ten-fifteen mitnutes and he was in his crib, crisis over. We had tried the let him sream till he stops approach and the only thing wrong with that approach is he never stopped. For those that say that we trained him to expect the nightly comfort session I say go to hell.
I think our worst decision came when we did get him into bed that we laid him on his stomach. I think the current advice on avoiding SIDS is to lay babies on their back. We had heard both recommendations and reasoned that a baby would be less likely to choke on their spitup if on their stomach. I don’t know why we thought that was important. Nor can I remember why sleeping on their backs is better.
“At the same time, some alternative approaches (e.g. Sears) rely on teaching the mother that they need to master being permanently and forever on call.”
Apparently Sears is now relaxing *his* stance as well, acknowledging that parents do need to stay sane and functional and saying things like, “what a baby needs is a rested mother” (that’s not necessarily a direct quote, but I recently saw him quoted along these lines [though too lazy to find it at the moment]). Who knows? another couple of rounds of revisions on both sides, and Sears and Ferber may end up by meeting in the middle…
We did the cosleeping thing and didn’t get our son into his own bed until he was three. And even then, it took months and months to convince him to go to sleep by himself (ie, without having a parent stay with him in his bed for an hour, sometimes almost two hours: of course having a parent there acted as a stimulus which kept him awake that much longer, which became very frustrating for the parents). In desperation, I finally resorted to bribery (or, as I like to call it, an incentives scheme): go to sleep by yourself and you get a sticker, earn 7 stickers and you can go to the toystore and pick out a thomas the tank train. It worked.
I don’t have any regrets about the first year or two of cosleeping, but by year three was really starting to rethink the whole concept.
I like what Tim says about alienation as a skill of modern personhood. The problem, I think, is that we the parents are modern selves who have to exist and function in a world defined by modern concepts of time and and space and boundedness, while at the same time looking after a tiny being who wants to eat and sleep according to pre-industrial rhythms. My main complaint with the Sears/AP crowd is that they put it all on the parents and especially the mother: it takes a village, and you the individual parents/mother should be that village. The problem with the experts at the other end of the spectrum, is that they recommend a fairly quick immersion in the skills of modern personhood, which some (perhaps many babies) aren’t ready for.
We did the cosleeping thing and didn’t get our son into his own bed until he was three. And even then, it took months and months to convince him to go to sleep by himself (ie, without having a parent stay with him in his bed for an hour, sometimes almost two hours: of course having a parent there acted as a stimulus which kept him awake that much longer, which became very frustrating for the parents).
Wow. There’s no way we could have done that.
I finally resorted to bribery (or, as I like to call it, an incentives scheme): go to sleep by yourself and you get a sticker, earn 7 stickers and you can go to the toystore and pick out a thomas the tank train. It worked.
And people say Ferber is all about learning skills of modern personhood! 🙂
Ugh, sorry about that Smiley. You can turn that feature off in your WordPress options, Tim …
I read this book and I agree with your views, there is so much misunderstanding about this issue and i think this is part of our society. In many cultures children do sleep with their parents until they are old enough to leave independently
hmmm. I too read this book and totally agree with the comments made here. Health Professionals should not give strict and rigid advice to all parents because not every baby is the same and somethings work for some parents and not for others.
“letting children cry ‘was not meant to be the way to treat all sleep problems’â€. parents should learn how to make their babys to sleep, from experts . They must receive some experts advice.
Parents need to make their own decisions and draw their own conclusions with regards to baby. Read and listen to as much “useful” advice as you can and then do what YOU feel is right for YOUR child.