Excerpt: The Sleep Trainer
How I gradually came around to the cry-it-out method.
by Sam Apple
June 3, 2009
This is an excerpt taken from the sleep chapter of American Parent: My Strange and Surprising Adventures in Modern Babyland, a book part memoir and part history of parenting. It came out June 2, 2009, from Ballantine Books. You can buy it here.
Before Isaac was born, Jennifer and I decided that it would be best to have him sleep next to our bed in a co-sleeper. I was still occasionally having nightmares that left me flailing about on the mattress and I didn't want to risk whacking Isaac in my sleep. But our decision ended up making little difference.
Although we put Isaac down for the night in the co-sleeper, Jennifer would take him out of it for his first nighttime feedings and most of the time — even on the nights Jennifer could have sworn she had put him back — we would wake up to find him lying between
us.
When he wasn't crying, it was a pleasure to share a mattress with Isaac. He was warm and mushy and sometimes his heavy breathing made him sound like a purring cat.
His cat sounds notwithstanding, Isaac's presence in our bed wasn't usually a cause for celebration. On a bad night, he would be up almost every hour. I would fall back asleep within minutes, but Jennifer wasn't so lucky. Once he was on our mattress, Isaac
ate nonstop and sometimes slept with his hand on Jennifer's breast, as if to ensure that I wouldn't take off with his loot. As he grew older, he began to pinch and claw as well.
"It's like going to sleep every night at an S&M club," Jennifer said.
It was hard for us to imagine Isaac wailing for a few minutes and then deciding to call it a night. If we failed to complain about our lack of sleep at first it was only because we were too overwhelmed by the crying and breast-feeding problems to worry about anything else. But during Isaac's fifth month, with the breastfeeding going smoothly and the worst
of the colic over, Jennifer and I began to talk about sleep training, the practice of letting babies cry until they learn to fall asleep on their own.
Neither Jennifer nor I particularly liked the idea of sleep training. We worked so hard to calm Isaac during the day because we both believed that babies feel real anguish when they cry, even if they can't reflect on their unhappiness in the way that
adults can. And, though we knew that letting babies scream at night worked out well for many parents, it was hard for us to imagine Isaac wailing for a few minutes and then deciding that he should call it a night and catch some z's. If his daytime behavior
was any indicator, Isaac was more than capable of crying all night long.
My resolve to try sleep training might have been stronger had I not remembered my own fear of sleeping alone. I shared a room with my older sister until age five, and when my father broke the news that Jessica was moving into her own room, it felt as though
I were being placed in solitary confinement for life.
"You can't share a room with her forever," my father had said, trying to reason with me. "What would you do when one of you got married?"
"I wouldn't care," I said.
"But what if Jessica's husband cared? Or your wife?"
"I know they wouldn't," I said.
Jennifer could also remember her fear of the night — although, unlike me, she'd had a cadre of Cabbage Patch Dolls to protect her.
And so after looking at a number of different books, we settled on a middle-of-the-road approach to sleep training: We wouldn't let Isaac cry or put him in another room, but we would move him into a crib on the other side of our bedroom and stop feeding him throughout the night.
About the Author
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Sam Apple's work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, ESPN The Magazine, and Slate.com, among many other publications. His first
book, Schlepping Through the Alps, was named a finalist for the PEN America award for a first work of nonfiction. In 2005 he received the
annual Faux Faulkner award. Apple's new book, American Parent, is on sale now. |
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