From Laura Shanley:
Did you see the article in last week's Times about co-sleeping
(12/29/05)? Not too bad! I'm enclosing it below. The last paragraph
says it all! Love, Laura
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/29/fashion/thursdaystyles/29sleep.html?pagewanted=all
And Baby Makes Three in One Bed
By AMY HARMON
Published: December 29, 2005
JENNIFER JAKOVICH has spent most of her 5-month-old daughter's life
dodging questions from friends, family and strangers about how and where
Chloe sleeps. But since hearing that Dr. Richard Ferber, the country's
most famous infant sleep expert, has relaxed his admonition against
parents sleeping with their babies, she has taken a different tack.
Jennifer and John Jakovich (with Chloe) consider themselves vindicated
by the reversal of Dr. Richard Ferber, the infant sleep expert.
"I now mention Ferber's new view while openly admitting to co-sleeping,"
said Ms. Jakovich, an engineer in San Diego. She has broken the news to
friends that Chloe sleeps in the same bed with her and her husband,
John, a computer programmer. "I feel I have now been given the green
light, that it's O.K."
The Jackoviches are part of a growing group of American parents who
share a bed with their baby, a common practice in the rest of the world,
which had become nearly taboo in this country. A survey by the National
Institute of Child Health and Human Development has found that about
one-fifth of parents with infants up to eight months old said the baby
usually shared a bed with them, more than triple the number of a decade
ago.
The trend appears to be driven largely by the increase in breastfeeding
working mothers, who say it allows them to connect with their babies and
still get some sleep. But given the prevailing cultural distaste, many
parents say they have felt compelled to hide their shared sleeping
arrangements.
It is a testament to Dr. Ferber's influence that even the halfhearted
nod he has given the practice in interviews has inspired a kind of
collective coming-out party among co-sleeping parents. Transcripts of
his network news and talk show appearances last month are being
circulated on the Internet and recited on the playground.
"Even though I shouldn't have to defend myself, it is nice to have
that," Ms. Jakovich said. Like many other parents, she never intended to
sleep with her daughter. "My view was that granola-hippie-type people
co-sleep," she added.
But Ms. Jakovich, 30, quickly found that she slept better when she
didn't have to get up in the night to nurse Chloe. To make things more
comfortable, the Jakoviches took one side off Chloe's deluxe crib and
pushed it up against their mattress, which they upgraded to a king-size.
The old Dr. Ferber would not have approved. In his best-selling 1985
book, "Solve Your Child's Sleep Problems," he advised parents to let
babies cry for intervals of up to 45 minutes without responding, to
train them to sleep on their own. Should the child cry so hard that he
throws up, parents are to clean up and leave again. "If you reward him
for throwing up by staying with him, he will only learn that this is a
good way for him to get what he wants," Dr. Ferber wrote.
Parents who take a baby into their bed instead, the book suggested,
damage the child's development as an individual and are probably only
trying to avoid their own intimacy problems. "If you find that you
actually prefer to sleep with your infant," it warned, "you should
consider your own feelings very carefully."
Practiced by millions of parents and widely promoted by pediatricians,
Ferberization and its variations tap into the American desire to imbue
children with independence from an early age. Setting babies apart in
their own cribs also eases a typically American tendency to see sleeping
arrangements as sexual rather than social, some anthropologists say.
Concerns about safety, albeit contested, added to the consensus against
bed sharing, so that a baby's completing a sleep-training regimen has
come to be seen as a developmental milestone comparable to crawling or
cutting a first tooth.
Now, in a flurry of publicity for a revised version of Dr. Ferber's
book, he has allowed that his technique is not suitable for all babies
and that children can develop healthy sleep habits sleeping in their
parents' bed.
A spokeswoman for Dr. Ferber's publisher, Marcia Burch, the vice
president for publicity at Touchstone Fireside, a division of Simon &
Schuster, said he had been taken aback by the interest in his position
on bed sharing and that Dr. Ferber, the director of the Center for
Pediatric Sleep Disorders at Children's Hospital in Boston, would not
comment further until the new edition is published in March.
"He totally underestimated the reaction," Ms. Burch said. "He totally
misunderstood that this was going to be really big news."
Still, Dr. Ferber's shift has sparked celebration among some parents,
who have faced criticism for defying the American dictum that babies
should learn to sleep alone. And in a child-rearing battle that has
become as ideological as it is intimate, others say vindication is in
order, not from Dr. Ferber so much as from fellow parents who evangelize
his teachings with moral fervor.
"It is at her next doctor's appointment, her 12-month checkup,"
Christina Harrison said of her daughter, Alyssa, "that I relish the
chance to bring it up the most." Ms. Harrison, 29, let Alyssa cry until
her voice was hoarse at her pediatrician's urging. "It was horrible."
Ms. Harrison has resolved to sleep with Alyssa until she is happier
about being in her own bed.
Stephanie Lazure, 31, hopes to show a clip of the ABC News interview
with Dr. Ferber to her husband's boss, who bought the couple Dr.
Ferber's book as a baby present. "She comes over and shakes her finger
in the baby's face and says, 'You have to learn to self-soothe,' " Ms.
Lazure said. "It's not that I feel criticized. It's that I feel my baby
is being criticized for not sleeping."
Pressure not to co-sleep isn't coming only from relatives and other
parents. Many pediatricians discourage the practice because they worry
about parents rolling over and smothering the baby. But the question of
how co-sleeping affects the risk of sudden infant death syndrome, known
as SIDS, is contested. Last month the American Academy of Pediatrics
SIDS task force released a statement discouraging parents from sharing
beds with their babies.
But the academy's own section on breastfeeding argues that bed sharing
is safe in many circumstances and can benefit babies by facilitating
breastfeeding. And an epidemiological study published in the fall in the
journal Pediatrics found no higher sudden infant death risk for infants
older than 11 weeks unless the mother smokes.
"Some of the opponents of bed sharing persist in their beliefs in spite
of the scientific evidence," said Dr. Martin Lahr, who is an author of
the paper on bed sharing.
Co-sleeping has long been embraced by devotees of Dr. William Sears and
his philosophy of "attachment parenting," who dismiss Dr. Ferber's
earlier methods as cruel. Ferber fans have in turn derided co-sleepers
as sacrificing themselves and their romantic relationships in the name
of spoiling a baby who needs parents to set limits.
But many of the new co-sleepers appear to base their sleeping
arrangements on a blend of pragmatism and pleasure, rather than on a
particular approach to parenthood. Some push together queen mattresses
with twin mattresses, others snuggle closer together or improvise each
night. Cribs, Pack 'N Plays and bassinets become useful repositories for
toys and laundry.
Rita Hunt Smith, 39, a children's librarian in Hershey, Pa., began
co-sleeping with her first son, Ezra, after spending an agonizing night
listening to him cry in the crib down the hall. Then she came to
treasure the closeness it forged among Ezra, her and her husband, Kurt,
a graphic artist.
Now 3½, Ezra spends most nights in his own bed, while the Smiths'
14-month-old son, Fletcher, sleeps with them. Perhaps because her
husband has an older son from a previous marriage, Ms. Smith said, he
has been supportive, even though he would like more room for his
6-foot-3 frame.
"He knows the day is coming when they won't even want to be in the same
room with us, so let's soak it up now," Ms. Smith said. Upon waking,
Fletcher, who has just begun to talk, greets his parents with "hiya."
Ms. Smith said she used to be highly secretive about their co-sleeping,
but has begun talking more about it during baby story-time sessions she
runs. Her mother, though, "continues to think I'm ruining my sons' sleep
habits forever," she said.
Child development experts have said that Dr. Ferber was likely to be
reacting to accumulated research since his earlier edition that supports
the notion that babies have different temperaments and that their
development is best served when parents are able to adapt to their
individual needs.
"It is clear that children of differing temperaments need different
things at night, just as they do during the day," said Sara Harkness,
the director of the Center for the Study of Culture, Health and Human
Development at the University of Connecticut.
Dr. Harkness, who has conducted cross-cultural research on infant sleep
habits in several countries, said no studies have borne out the
connection originally drawn by Dr. Ferber and others between teaching
babies to sleep alone and their ability to develop autonomy.
"It's an American myth," Dr. Harkness said. "It's fine to think about
training children to be independent, but there has been this misguided
effort to extend it to an area where it's really not developmentally
appropriate."
Some co-sleeping parents say they do not need advice from experts to
decide where their baby should sleep.
"With no intended disrespect to Dr. Ferber, I do not need his opinion to
validate my view that co-sleeping is the healthiest, safest and most
natural sleep situation for my child," Kristi Buxton, 29, a microbiology
researcher in Portland, Ore., wrote in an e-mail message. "The
individual who has most influenced (and radically changed) my beliefs
about co-sleeping is my child."
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