Why I no longer believe babies should cry themselves to sleep
Named after Dr. Richard Ferber, the pediatric sleep expert quoted in Jan Wong’s article (in this section last week) on parents who share their beds with their children, Ferberization is the process of “training” an infant to sleep by ignoring her crying. As a family physician, I used to advocate the Ferber technique and, as a parent, practised it myself. Since then, I have come to believe that the method is harmful to infant development and to a child’s long-term emotional health.
Ferberization seems simple: “After about one week, your infant will learn that crying earns nothing more than a brief check from you, and isn’t worth the effort. She’ll learn to fall asleepon her own, without your help,” reads Dr. Ferber’s advice. The question is, what else does a baby learn when treated this way and what is the impact of such learning?
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n our stressed society, time is at a premium. Beholden to our worldly schedules, we try to adapt our children to our needs, rather than serving theirs. More “primitive” aboriginal peoples in Africa and North and South America kept their infants with them at all times. They had not yet learned to suppress their parenting instincts.
The baby who cries for the parent is not engaging in “tyranny,” she is expressing her deepest need — emotional and physical contact with the parent. The deceptive convenience of Ferberization is one more way in which our society fails the needs of the developing child.