Excerpt: The Sleep Trainer
How I gradually came around to the cry-it-out method.
by Sam Apple
June 3, 2009
I knew, of course, that it could be worse. It was worse, in fact, for our upstairs neighbor, Steve, who had to listen to Isaac scream throughout the night but got none of the benefits of parenthood. Almost every night we would hear Steve wake up after Isaac
and then pace around his apartment. This made our stress significantly worse, particularly on the mornings that we saw him coming down the stairs looking as bad as us. After one particularly bad night, Jennifer emailed Steve an apologetic note, to which he
replied kindly, and then asked if it would be possible for us to move Isaac to another room.
The next night we dragged Isaac's crib into the kitchen/dining area of our one-bedroom apartment. We were happy to experiment with the new arrangement for Steve's sake, but Isaac sleeping next to the kitchen created a new set of dilemmas. Specifically, we
could no longer eat after seven p.m. We managed to avoid using the kitchen for the first few nights, but soon Jennifer and I were making night raids to the pantry on our tiptoes, both of us feeling as though Isaac were the parent, and we the mischievous
children.
But the night raids weren't our biggest concern at that moment. Our more serious problem was getting Isaac to fall asleep in his crib. We'd always helped Isaac go to bed for the first time of the night by letting him hold on to one of our hands. It wasn't particularly difficult to reach into the co-sleeper, but giving him a hand in the crib meant standing hunched over the railing for as long as an hour. To escape from Isaac's side, Jennifer and I would try to inch our hands down his body, but even when
Isaac's eyes were closed he remained on high alert for such shenanigans. Sometimes I would manage to slip my hand downward so that I was holding only the loose fabric on his pajama footsies and yet somehow he could sense when I let go. It was as though he
had installed his own high-tech motion-detector security system in his crib.
"I think it's time for Ferber," Jennifer said.Unwilling to cede defeat, one night I tried a new technique to escape Isaac's watch. Rather than standing hunched over the crib, I spread out on the hardwood floor and stuck one finger through the slats of the railing. To my pleasant surprise, Isaac accepted my
meager offering and this trick allowed me to get away in less than half the time. I reported the good news to Jennifer and soon she too was lying on the floor every night with a finger in the crib.
We were delighted with our progress, but the finger trick also came with a problem of its own. Once we managed to work our respective fingers free from Isaac's clammy palm, it was far too risky to stand up and let him see us. It was too risky even to rise
to our hands and knees. And so we did the only thing we could. We army-crawled back into our bedroom on our elbows.
Painful though it could be, a part of me enjoyed the crawling. For a few seconds I could forget that I was a thirty-year-old man on the floor of my own kitchen and pretend that I was a Navy SEAL on an undefined but extremely important mission. But with no
military fantasies to fall back on, Jennifer found little to redeem the act of traversing her own apartment on her stomach. One night after crawling back into our bedroom, she stood before me, brushed the lint off, and said the words babies would dread if they could understand them.
"I think it's time for Ferber," Jennifer said.
Jennifer was referring to Dr. Richard Ferber, the name that has become synonymous with the "cry it out" method of putting babies to sleep. In 1974, while a fellow at the Harvard Medical School, Ferber noticed the scarcity of research on the sleeping habits
of small children and took it upon himself to fill in the gap. A decade later he published Solve Your Child's Sleep Problems, the book that would make him famous.
In his book, Ferber argues that if parents comfort them every time they cry in the night, babies will associate the comforting with falling asleep and become dependent on it. To break their nighttime comforting addiction, parents need to let babies cry themselves
to sleep and should begin to do so as early as at three months, when infants begin responding to the circadian rhythms of day and night.
Ferber's research and Harvard degrees added authority to the idea that letting a baby shriek was the best solution to sleeping problems, but he was far from the first person to suggest the method. Baby experts, including Benjamin Spock, had been encouraging
American parents throughout the century to let their babies cry. In fact, Ferber might be viewed as the final chapter in a much larger story about how Americans thought about babies in the twentieth century.
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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