Higher Highs, Lower Lows

One of the things that destroys my faith in politicians the fastest is their frequent inability to admit they were wrong.  My skin crawls when the evidence is stacked against them but they still refuse to confess the error of their ways. 

These are the thoughts that run through my head on this Thursday morning following a long, painful Wednesday. 

The moment I clicked “PUBLISH” on yesterday’s post, I knew I was making a whopper of a mistake – long before any of the dissenting comments showed up.  But when they inevitably did, they only served to reinforce what I’d already been feeling about my harsh, abrasive words.  So please, dear blogosphere, allow me to apologize.  I was wrong.

The only people I know better than anyone else on the planet are 1) Jake, and 2) Seabass.  Aside from them, there is no one I know well enough to advise on any facet of life.  Especially unsolicited.  Remember when I said I didn’t want unsolicited advice from anyone?  Yeah.  Bit of my own medicine, that.

I have no right to claim that my way is any better than anyone else’s.  No really, I mean it.  Furthermore, I have no “authority” to make broad, generalized claims about anyone’s parenting.  So what if I taught piano lessons for 17 years?  (Though I would like to say that some of my students WERE “horrible, miserable burdens to society,” and I would prefer that Seabass, well…doesn’t turn out like them.  Nuff said.)  I am the mother of a 5 1/2-month-old child, not God.  Big difference.

The purpose of this blog was never to rile parents up or cause division; It was meant to bring us together over the highs and lows of bringing up little human beings.  I don’t know why it changed.  Maybe because we’re all so different and it’s hard not to take note of our diverse styles?  Or because I’ve felt attacked for my style and feel the need to retaliate?  Or because I’m bored and need more drama in my life?  Not sure.

In any case, I hope you’ll find my apology sincere and forgive me for the obnoxious way I’ve thrown my opinions around.  As penance, I’d like to publish this photo that Jake took of me when I first woke up one morning. 

My olive branch.

Yup.  That ought to make up for whatever harm I’ve done.

Does this child look maladjusted to you?

Type the words “cry it out” into Google and you’ll find a dizzying array of opinions.  Applications such as the Ferber Method (aka “ferberizing” – a horrible, kinda dirty-sounding verbization), and Babywise are both lauded and demonized for their approach to babies’ inevitable bouts of crying.

For those of you who haven’t had the pleasure of making such difficult decisions, “crying it out” is letting an infant cry alone until they fall asleep, usually starting some time between four to six months of age.  Some folks appreciate this method as it tends to nip baby’s nightwaking in the bud.  But there is a large and very vocal cross-section of the public for whom crying it out is akin to child abuse. 

Witness this excerpt from an article written for BabyCenter.com, a clearing-house of information and authority on the subject of infant parenting:

Anyone who advises you to let your baby cry until he gives up and falls asleep is focusing on the baby’s behavior (going to sleep all alone) and not on how the baby feels in the process. The problem is that when infants are left to cry themselves to sleep, they are forced to conclude that they are not lovable enough to engage their parents’ desires to comfort them. If they actually stop crying, it is because they have abandoned all hope that help will come.

Then later on:

Once you see that you were right to worry about leaving your baby to cry and that the interruptions to your sleep caused by tending to him are both beneficial to him and time-limited, then, even though you are tired, you will have more reason to make the effort to go to your baby and try to help him to sleep comfortably.

Now, to be fair to BabyCenter.com, I should share that this article is written by guest authors Martha and William Pieper, who are identified as “emotional health and well-being experts” on the site.  That’s a pretty broad title.  So I decided to look further into their creds.  Turns out they’re both psycotherapists with more degrees than Farenheit.  And they’ve written a book called Smart Love: The Compassionate Alternative to Discipline That Will Make You a Better Parent and Your Child a Better Person.

As if you couldn’t already tell from the title, this book argues that “‘tough love’ doesn’t work, and that parents will get more cooperation if they focus on their child’s inner happiness and ‘avoid unnecessary confrontations with children about behavior for which they will eventually assume responsibility.'”

Here comes the part where I opine.  Remember: it’s Controversy Wednesday!

To begin with, let me cover my bases.  It wouldn’t be fair for me to assume that everyone who is against crying it out is in the same camp as the Piepers.  Nor would it be fair for me to state that every child who isn’t left to cry it out will become a little terror.  But the truth is that there are parents in the same camp as the Piepers whose children will become horrible, miserable burdens to society.

How do I know this?  I know because I’ve met them.  Having taught piano lessons to a wide spectrum of little people for over 17 years, I can say with authority that the children of parents who subscribe to the approach outlined in books like Smart Love tend to be reckless, insensitive to everything and everyone else around them, maniacal, loud, self-involved, and wild.  They throw atomic fits wherever – the grocery store, other people’s homes, the doctor’s office, the middle of the street – while their parents speak in soft voices attempting to appease them.  Out of a fear of crushing their spirit or squelching their soul, these parents allow their children to do just about anything they want at just about anyone’s expense. 

And what changes when these kids grow up?  Not much, unfortunately.  A total lack of discipline and negative consequences during childhood leads to an adulthood of entitlement and chronic unrest. I am acquainted with some of these adults.  And I can guarantee that I would have been one of them if it were not for the discipline and structure I was provided as a young, feverishly selfish child.

Now, what does this have to do with crying it out? 

First, I’ll say that crying it out was the method we used for our dear, sweet Seabass.  I say “was” the method because we only had to use it for about three days when he turned four months old.  (Any younger than that is considered too young by many authorities.)  After that?  No more crying.  Only sleeping.  Our baby sleeps like a little champion and wakes up rested, refreshed, and full of smiles – not morose and feeling “unloved” as the Piepers would have me believe.  (I honestly don’t know how he could feel unloved.  I am head-over-heels for that boy.)

I am not an expert on this.  I only know what I’ve seen, and I’ve seen that crying it out has made Seabass’ life, my life, Jake’s life – heck, even the dog’s life – so much better.  I like how Dr. Weissbluth, author of Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child, describes a child’s need for sleep as equally important to a child’s need for any other sort of care.  Seabass can’t feed himself – I have to help him.  He also couldn’t fall asleep himself (remember the swing post?) – so I helped him.  I didn’t refrain from going into him as he cried because I wanted to sleep.  (How could I have slept through that?!?)  I refrained because I believed that allowing Seabass this temporary discomfort would provide him with a lifetime of good rest.  In other words, I decided that crying it out would yield a better return on my investment than constantly giving Seabass what he wanted.

And that’s what parenting is, isn’t it? Making loving (and often self-sacrificial) decisions that protect a child from harm despite their short-sighted desires for instant gratification.  Those children I described at the top of the page?  The ones who never see negative consequences to their actions?  Yeah, they were given everything they wanted, and then some.  Pretty soon, they’ll be the same people cutting you off on the freeway, teaching your grandkids and running for office. 

But enough outta me.  What do you think?

The family bed of our fears

You’ll notice a lot of my posts begin with the words “Before we had Seabass, we thought….”  Why not add another to the pile?

No offense, but BEFORE WE HAD SEABASS, WE THOUGHT people who did “the family bed” were hippie Phish-listening weirdos.  (Really, no offense.)  There is that amazing scene in “Away We Go” where Maggie Gyllenhaal’s character describes the importance of a “continuum” from inside the womb to outside the womb which includes a bed for the whole family.  So…we basically didn’t want to be like that.  Just the crib for this here Seabass.  Yup, yup.

“Ha ha ha!” said God. “This will be the first in a series of many preconceived ideas which I will dash to the ground.”

The first night home from the hospital with our boy was rough.  I would do my best to soothe him to sleep for about 30 to 45 minutes before laying him down ever so gently.   But from his reaction to being placed in the crib, you’d think his sheets were burning hot baby-melting lava.  He just wouldn’t have it.  I’d try this for hours to no avail.

It was undeniable at this point that C preferred falling asleep close to my body.  Since he fell asleep almost immediately while nursing, I finally became so loony that I decided it was perfectly reasonable to sit in the rocking chair with him at the breast all night long.  Parenting’s all about sacrifice, right? I thought.  So for several nights, I sacrificed.  Until I woke up one morning with C drooping halfway out of my arms and saw that my ankles had swelled to the size of tree trunks.  Perhaps this is the wrong kind of sacrifice? I wondered.

Now, if I was reasonably anti-family bed before having C, Jake was violently anti-bed.  So it took a lot of courage to come to him with my little request.  When I asked if Seabass could share the bed with us, his mind raced forward to imagine our baby as a fifteen year-old who still cuddles up between us every night.  “For how long?” was his first question.

“I don’t know, until we see if it helps.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Hey man, I’m the one with the elephant ankles.  Can we just try it?”

Since my husband is a loving, caring man, he said yes with the caveat that we re-assess at the one-month mark.

There was still one major issue to resolve: our bed.  We have slept in the full-sized bed I grew up with for the majority of our marriage because 1) it was free, 2) it’s pretty and I care about that sort of thing, and 3) we own sheets that fit it.  I’m aware that many people who try family bed are afraid of rolling over their newborns while sleeping, but frankly, I was more afraid that one of us adults would roll off the bed than onto the baby.  We tried family bed on the full-sized mattress for two nights, but neither Jake nor I slept much more than a wink.

It must have worked somewhat like sleep deprivation torture because on that third morning Jake woke up and announced that we were going to buy a brand new big bed.  I can’t emphasize enough how out of character this was for Jake.  No offense to my wonderful husband, but he is very cheap.  For him to buy a new bed so that the baby could sleep in it with us made me wonder if he was feeling alright.  But I jumped on the opportunity nonetheless.  Yay for new furniture!  Yay!  Yay!

The new queen-sized bed, mattress and box springs arrived just a few short hours later from a discount furniture place in town, and Jake scrambled to get the old bed out and the new bed in quickly thereafter.  To our surprise, the first night in the new bed was almost equally difficult as in the full-sized, though, as C grunted in that half-awake, half-asleep gassy state from sundown to sunrise.

“At least we have more space,” I reasoned.

“Yeah, but I don’t even feel like we’re allowed to enjoy our new bed,” lamented Jake.

The next night I assumed would be like the handful of nights before.  I nursed C in bed and then laid him as deftly and quietly as possible between Jake and I so that he could hopefully fall asleep.  But no.  With my first move, he writhed and cried.  Here we go again, I thought.  Jake had been seeming a bit zombie-ish from a lack of sleep lately, so I decided to bring C with me into the nursery to put a few walls between his crying and Jake’s ears.

I soothed and rocked and swung and bounced Seabass until I feared my arms might collapse.  But when he finally conked, I had this silly notion that maybe, just maybe, he’d sleep in the crib.  Call it my first case of mother’s intuition.

And wouldn’t you know it?  That cheeky little bugger slept five hours in the crib that night.  He hasn’t enjoyed our brand new family bed since.  But I’ll take it.  I’ve got a kid who loves to sleep in his own room and a new swingin’ piece of furniture.

ADDENDUM: Not two minutes after I wrote this, a friend posted this article on Facebook.  What timing!