Before Emmett was born Will and I were both very attracted to elements of "attachment parenting." Although we both found Dr. Sears moralizing and annoying (I could write a several posts on his orientalist and essentialist tendencies), we rejected the common wisdom that babies need to be "self-soothing" and increasingly independent. We liked the idea of carrying the baby (in part for the convenience on public transportation and to avoid the purchasing of a sleek $1,000 stroller), sleeping with him (maximum cuddle time), and breastfeeding (cheap and good for 'ya). Slowly, Emmett has militated against many of the things we were eager to do as parents. He has intermittently rejected breastfeeding since day 1. Sometimes it is the only thing that makes him happy, but generally it is his least preferred way to eat, and sometimes is experienced as torture. He still loves to be carried sometimes (esp. in the controversial facing-out position), but the stroller is unalloyed bliss and now an indispensable feeding and napping tool. The biggest challenge we face as parents now is frequent night wakings on top of sometimes relentless fussiness in the day time. A good night means that Emmers wakes up 2-3 times. For almost two weeks recently, however, he woke 6-10 times per night. During this period, he also refused to be put down during the day, cried and fussed most of the time, and had the attention span of a coked-up puppy. When he saw strangers, he melted down in tears. So, we got to the point where we had to think hard about sleep. Nights were intolerable and the fussy days were a tremendous problem on almost no sleep. The whole family trinity was crying more.
Sleep philosophies, however, remain a kind of battleground of ideology. Those who promote "self-soothing" and training your infant to put her- or himself to sleep on his or her own cite psychoanalysts as authorities. I know Freudianism enough to know that the moral paradigm remains the independent, rational individual. Thus, "self-soothing" becomes a kind of moral imperative if you believe that parenting is about creating (bourgeois) individuals, beings who see themselves as fundamentally separate from others. I acknowledge that it is important to develop a sense of self-in-relation, which requires a grasp of one's individuation (always in process, of course). I find it is important to see relationships as relationships in order to avoid either a fully narcissistic or self-annihilating subjectivity (okay, I am not totally anti-psychoanlytic). In other words, I don't want Emmett to be blind to his own needs/desires or to those of others. Still, I don't think morality--and therefore parenting--requires becoming a self-policing individual. Still, Emmett won't sleep. What do we do? Do we implement practices advocated by the promoters of "self-soothing"?
We are reading one of the ostensible extremists, Dr. Weissbluth. I say "ostensible" b/c his book is horribly written and sometimes just confused. He is extreme in that he advocates the "extinction" method of sleep training--just ignore the baby's screams until he falls asleep. At times, he argues that parents "deprive their children of the skill of putting themselves to sleep" by comforting them and soothing them to sleep. Yet, when read more closely, his thesis is rather simple: babies (and children and parents) need sleep in order to be happy and healthy. the amount of sleep is also measurable. It is not a mysterious quantity. I am receptive to this. Emmett is clearly much crankier in the day after a night of collective torment. If sleeping with your baby, nursing her or him to sleep, and comforting him when he wakes works--as he claims it does for at least 80% of babies--then great. It is not necessary to train them to sleep through the "extinction" of parental comforting and attention. But some babies, especially "extremely fussy or colicky" ones, develop serious sleeping problems that can only be "cured" through a withdrawal of parent on-call comforting throughout night. Thus, for babies that have a very hard time with sleep, *sometimes* more (forced) self-regulation and less other-regulation is the answer, according to Dr. W.
Well, we read this and cried when reading the description of those rare, "extremely fussy" babies. We are among the unlucky few. We cried b/c our struggle was acknowledged, it seemed like the co-sleeping we (sometimes) love might be contributing to our struggle, and we were really, really tired. At the same time, Emmett got sick and suddenly started sleeping more for the past few days. We are going to start enforcing more sleep. We are encouraging him to take 2-3 naps and trying to institute an earlier bedtime. We would like to do this through soothing him to sleep rather than extinguishing parental attention and leaving him to cry. We will see how it goes... so far has been good. The open question: Can we get sleep and have a parenting style that encourages relational subjectivity?
In the meantime, he is growing and loves to roll over, esp. when naked.
