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.
I thought the plan sounded great until we sat down to discuss the logistics. If Jennifer was no longer going to be feeding Isaac, someone was going to have to comfort him when he woke up in the middle of the night. And since Jennifer had already carried the burden for months, it was now my turn. I accepted my new responsibility without protest, and, as I expected, the transition to milkless nights did not go over so well with our new roommate. The first sign of Isaac waking up was typically the soft thumping of his swaddled feet against his mattress, and the sound alone could strike terror in our hearts. "Oh God, please no," I would say at the sound of those first thumps.
"It can't be," Jennifer would say. "He's been asleep for less than an hour."
And then more thumps, now slightly louder — the footsteps of the approaching villain in the scary movie.
"It just can't be."
(Cue the haunting music.)
"No, no, no."
And then the desperate begging. But here the movie analogy breaks down because rather than begging for mercy from the approaching villain, I would be begging for mercy from my fellow victim.
"Please just wake up with him this time," I would say, fully aware that only hours earlier I had confidently assured her that I would be the one to get up and that it really wasn't a big deal.
"But you said — "
"I know. I know. But . . ."
"But what?"
"I'll give you twenty bucks."
"Sam, we share a bank account. You can't bribe—"
"One hundred dollars!"
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.
Ferber argues that sleeping alone in cribs teaches children to see themselves as independent individuals, and that even if babies seem happy sleeping in bed with their parents, it's probably not a good idea to allow it to continue. In drawing this link between sleeping alone and independence, Ferber was perhaps unknowingly regurgitating a uniquely American myth.
In a 1997 attack on Ferber, the science journalist Robert Wright makes a good point that somehow rarely came up in twentieth-century America. "It isn't obvious to me how a baby would develop a robust sense of autonomy while being confined to a small cubicle with bars on the side and rendered powerless to influence its environment," Wright notes. "I'd be willing to look at the evidence behind this claim, but there isn't any." Nor, for that matter, is there any reason to assume, as Ferber does, that the fear of sleeping alone indicates an emotional problem. Wright can barely contain his dismay at Ferber's insistence that "there must be a reason" why babies are afraid of sleeping alone.
Yes, there must. Here's one candidate: Maybe your child's brain was designed by natural selection over millions of years during which mothers slept with their babies. Maybe back then if babies found themselves completely alone at night it often meant something horrific had happened — the mother had been eaten by a beast, say. Maybe the young brain is designed to respond to this situation by screaming frantically so that any relatives within earshot will discover the child. Maybe, in short, the reason that kids left alone sound terrified is that kids left alone naturally get terrified. Just a theory. But then Wright, who writes regularly about morality and evolution, would be the first to say that there is no reason to assume that what's natural is also what's good.
"Quick, turn up the TV," I said. "We can't listen to the screaming."
Jennifer turned the volume almost all the way up, but behind the roar of The Simpsons we could still hear our son wailing. "I can't do this," Jennifer said. "I'm going out on the balcony."
"Okay," I said. I spread out on the floor and tried to watch The Simpsons. Then I got up and opened the door to the balcony.
"I think it's been five minutes," I said.
Jennifer checked the time on her cellphone. "It's been less than two minutes," she said.
"Right," I said. I lay down again, listened to Isaac, and got back up.
"Is it five minutes yet?" I asked.
"It's not even three," Jennifer said.
"All right, well, maybe I should just go. I mean, by the time I get there . . ."
We both appreciated that it took only ten seconds to walk to his crib, but Jennifer could hear Isaac through the open door and she was breaking down along with me.
"Okay, just go," she said.
I returned to Isaac's crib. My plan was to reassure him that he was not alone, put his pacifier back in his mouth, and then walk away.