Be a parent, not a lollipop
IN THE U.S. military's Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape program, or SERE, troops are trained to prepare for possible capture by an enemy. To help them endure, trainees are sometimes subjected to one of the most severe stressors human ingenuity can devise: extreme sleep deprivation combined with an endless audio loop of a crying baby.
When used against detainees, such techniques violate international law, and even for volunteers they can be agonizingly difficult to endure. "After 36 hours, I was a total mess -- I was hallucinating," one SERE veteran told me.
Most parents of young infants know the feeling.
Because babies cry a lot -- generally at unpredictable hours -- many new parents get even less sleep than soldiers in the SERE program.
Despite this, there's remarkably little sympathy out there for parents who take a tough-minded approach to teaching their babies to sleep through the night.
In any parenting forum, try suggesting that it won't hurt a tired baby to cry for half an hour in her crib every now and then. The backlash will be prompt. You'll be called selfish, cruel and worse. You'd get more sympathy if you were a soldier who broke under enemy interrogation and gave away the position of your platoon.
Even pediatrician Richard Ferber -- author of the 1985 classic "Solve Your Child's Sleep Problems" -- recently beat a strategic retreat in the face of those who consider it barbaric to let a tired baby cry in her crib.
In 1985, Ferber argued that many well-meaning parents inadvertently teach their babies to be poor sleepers. Babies like company, so if you run to them every time they emit a tiny squawk, they quickly learn that squawking pays. Next thing you know, you've got a tyke who wakes up wailing every hour, all night, every night, and won't return to sleep unless you rock him in your arms for 45 minutes while pacing the room and humming Brahm's "Lullaby."
Instead, Ferber urged, you should put the baby gently into his crib, kiss him and leave, returning, if he cries, only briefly and at progressively longer intervals. Your baby (who is smarter than you think) quickly figures out that he can't keep you around by squawking, so he decides not to bother, and goes to sleep.
But in the revised edition of his book, published last week, Ferber seems to have gone on the defensive. He takes pains to emphasize that "the approaches I recommend are designed specifically to avoid unnecessary crying."
