Committed to finding ways out of the coercion/self-sacrifice mire of conventional parenting. We are variously critical rationalists, libertarians, home educators, attachment-parents, but we take our ideas where we find them.
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The Ferber technique recommends leaving your baby to cry itself to sleep. After a night or two, the amount of time it cries for tails off and within a week there might be five minutes of whimpering before the child is asleep for the night.
This is on my mind because a good friend who has had a baby recommended it to me as the "best thing they'd done" and the technique was also being advocated in a whole bunch of National Childbirth Trust literature I was sent.
Someone on a message board reminded me what one is doing when one leaves someone to cry themselves to sleep. Do you remember the last time you cried yourself to sleep and noone came? The gritty eyes next morning, the headache, the horrible feeling that you are all alone in the world, the feeling that your problems have not been solved or ameliorated by the sleep.
Mr (Dr?) Ferber is advocating doing that to someone who cannot even talk yet. He is advocating doing it to someone you love, who is in clear distress, mental or physical. And that person quickly learns that when they are afraid or uncomfortable or lonely, no-one is going to come. Noone.
I do not understand why holding a child, nursing them, singing to them, being with them in whatever way soothes as they learn how to sink into sleep (and yielding to sleep isn't something automatic) isn't the universally promoted plan.
Some ideas:
1. Maybe it is because the flexibility of bedtimes and waking times that would entail is not convenient for former DINKS who are now DIOTKS (double income, one trophy child)
2. Maybe it is because new parents want a degree of predictability in their lives, one which can only be achieved by imposing a routine on their child.
3. Maybe it is because they think it is for the good of the baby.
4. Maybe it is because the obvious way to help one's child when one is exhausted oneself would be to take the child into your bed and sleep together, or scrunch the cot right up next to the bed so your arm can still be hugging the baby while you drop off too. Most people seem to be terrified of any such idea.
Each of these ideas can easily be refuted, I think.
