Hold The Line

(Title’s from Toto)

On Tuesday morning last, my son Freddie turned 29 weeks old. I have a ritual I started when he turned 7 weeks: I prop him up on the bed and take a picture with my Droid then tag it and send it to Evernote. I think he’ll appreciate it one day to see how he grew through his first year, don’t you?

Anyway, as I held him this morning after a somewhat difficult night (he’s got the sniffles and a cough), I got to thinking about the prevailing literature on sleep in particular and baby care in general and not surprisingly, I’ve come to certain conclusions.

The modern thinking on baby’s sleep and a somewhat nefarious concept known as ‘sleep training’ is to help the baby learn to self-soothe: for example, put the baby down for sleep when they’re about 80% asleep so they learn how to go to sleep by themselves. Apparently, this is supposed to also help the baby go back to sleep when they wake up in the middle of the night. It seems we all wake up several times in the course of a night’s sleep, but we fall right back to sleep with such efficiency, if you will, that we don’t notice it. This is what, with such training, the baby’s supposed to learn to do.

In addition, to reinforce this capacity, the training involves allowing the baby “cry it out” without parental intervention in order to cement the idea firmly in place: no one’s coming to help soothe you back to sleep so you may as well go back to sleep. Self-soothe. Variations on the theme exist: some require no response to baby’s cries; some require a gradual tapering of response, from first response at 5 minutes then another at 10 minutes and so on.

I have a problem with this notion. We must consider on first principles the common sense objection that we’re dealing with babies. You may as well be trying to teach your baby to read Calculus. They exist to be soothed and attempting to teach baby self-soothing is, among other things, a selfish idea ultimately. “Take care of yourself,” daddy seems to be saying, “and let me be.”

And so it continues in today’s America: from self-soothed babies to self-caring teenagers, dropped off at the mall because mom and dad want to do their own thing. What an inconvenience to have children. Can’t wait until I don’t have to be bothered, what a pain.

Well, parenting is not nor should it be easy, at least for the first year. Humans throughout history naturally practiced attachment parenting, moms carried babies wherever they went and the family bed was the only bed in the house! We came out OK. Burn some calories, to quote Adam Carolla and keep involved even if it means you have to hold the baby for 15 minutes until they fell asleep several times through the night. If you didn’t want children, you shouldn’t have had them. Don’t jump into the pool then expect to stay dry.

I’m not advocating a strict adherence to attachment parenting, not with both parents working and the pressures of everyday living. But that’s the ideal, isn’t it, and we should attempt to reach and hold that line, should we not?