Hush, Little Baby
If Dr. Ferber himself isn't certain about Ferberizing a crying baby, what's a parent to do?
It was the equivalent of President Bush announcing that maybe this whole war thing was a bad idea, or Oprah deciding to let the pounds pile on, or Bugs Bunny finally letting Elmer Fudd catch him and cook him.
The news that Boston baby guru Dr. Richard Ferber had softened his long-held belief that parents should let their babies cry in their crib, maybe for as long as 45 minutes, so that they could learn to sleep on their own, in their own bed, was greeted with a great big collective, "Now what?" Because if Dr. Ferber, whose name became an accepted verb as his theory became popular, is not certain that we should Ferberize our kids, no right-minded parents will be able to sit by quietly the next time their infant screams out a lung or, in the case of my 3-month-old, pops a blood vessel in an eye.
Why did Ferber, 61, retreat by telling the Wall Street Journal that the method "wasn't meant to be the way to solve all sleep problems"? Maybe he was babysitting a grandkid who would not shut up after a half hour of Ferberizing and kept interrupting the new episode of Lost. Or maybe he was reading the chapter in his own 1985 best-selling book, Solve Your Child's Sleep Problems (to be revised and re-released this spring), where he wrote: "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." Maybe it then dawned on him that he must have been sleep deprived himself when he conceived this theory.
New parents yearn for the one method that will quiet their baby. But, whatever his reasons, by softening his baby directive, Dr. Ferber - who runs the Center for Pediatric Sleep Disorders at Children's Hospital - is acknowledging what new parents around the world have always suspected but never wanted to believe: That no one, even the smartest baby doctors, knows exactly what to do. That hasn't stopped publishers from besieging us. Besides Ferber's bestseller, there must be 15 billion other books available on how to stop babies from crying - of which 14 billion teeter on my coffee table.
There aren't many things about the old days that appeal to me, but there is one that the only expert in parenting I've known loves to remind me about. "How did we manage to raise two healthy, successful, nice guys" - shucks, Mom - "without all these books on parenting?" she asked me the other day. Mom essentially used two: one by Dr. Arnold Gesell (who started Yale's Clinic of Child Development) and the other by Dr. Benjamin Spock. "Those were the books for when the baby was colicky or had a fever," Mom says. "It wasn't the emotional or psychological help. It was basic stuff. Otherwise, we acted instinctively. We probably did a lot of things wrong, too."
I'll say. But still, I came out OK (ignoring that petty theft incident at 16, the D in biology, and the swan dive off the car into the driveway). So, if my parents handled me and my brother without an entire bookstore in their living room, then why do my wife and I need so many, not to mention the half-dozen websites we peruse daily? We don't, of course. But we hunt and peck for advice until we find the words we like. All of this has provided us a few handy tips, to be sure, but nothing, I am fairly confident, that we, along with our pediatrician, would not have figured out on our own.
Anybody can become a parent. That's the easy part. Being a good parent, not so easy. But the next time your infant cries uncontrollably, and you change his diaper, feed him, bathe him, and check him for any bumps and bruises, and he still won't stop, and you have to crack one of your books for any guidance, remember what Dr. Ferber told Time, 20 years after his revolutionary book first came out:
"The best way for us to learn about sleep is to listen very carefully to what parents describe happening in their own homes and find out what really works and what doesn't."
The experts learn by hearing what we're thinking, what we're doing. Now close that book. 