As you might have guessed from the title, this post is about a topic guaranteed to raise hackles and bring out the profanity and the hurt feelings in every comments section it touches.
Yes, that's right: college football.
Ba-dum-ching.
In all seriousness, I'm going to attempt to keep the tone of this discussion as light as possible, but I simply cannot pass up the chance to talk about it, especially after a conversation I had this past weekend.
Before I get started, I want Maggie to know that this post has been in the works for a while and that its timing has absolutely nothing to do with her. And also, Maggie: it's NOT your fault.
This post also comes with a whopper of a disclaimer.
DISCLAIMER: I am not judging any person or persons who have used the cry-it-out method of sleep training with their children. I have SO been there with the sleep desperation - err, deprivation - and I can completely understand what would drive someone to try anything to get their kid to sleep. I've also read enough of the sleep training books to know that the authors make cry-it-out sound like a very reasonable option, and I can understand how someone could become convinced that the cry-it-out proponents were talking good sense. I don't believe that letting your kid cry-it-out will cause him to grow up to be a serial killer. I do not think you are a bad parent if you've done it.
That bears repeating. If you've done cry-it-out, please do not take this post as a condemnation of you. It is nothing of the sort.
I am not implying in any way that some people are worse parents because they use cry-it-out, or that some other people are better parents because they do not. (In fact, fair warning: any comments to that effect will be deleted.) I am writing this post to discuss what I consider to be some basic philosophical problems with the cry-it-out ideology. I consider parents - sleep-deprived and desperate as they sometimes are - to be the victims, not the perpetrators, of this ideology, which is often thrust upon them on many sides by people who think it is the best and/or only way to get children to sleep well. If a sleep-book-writing pro-cry-it-out "expert" or an interfering pro-cry-it-out grandparent is reading this, he or she is free to take it personally. The rest of you, please don't.
I also want to mention that when I say "cry-it-out," I'm not referring to what I think of as "fuss-it-out," where a child who is not noticeably frightened by his parents' absence appears to benefit from a small amount of wailing to wind himself down to sleep. I'm also not referring to any kind of crying that occurs while the parents are with the child - we've done some of that ourselves, since our baby appears to release tension by crying and often needs to yell a little bit before she crashes in our arms. I'm specifically referring to what I believe is known as "extinction cry-it-out" wherein a child is left to cry by himself for extended periods of time, during which his panic increases and he is clearly scared by the absence of his parents. This is what I'll be referring to when I use the acronym CIO.
All right, let's get started.
Scenario A: Let's say there's a six-year-old who has a crippling fear of spiders. Every time he sees a spider he collapses in hysteria on the floor, screaming for his parents to make the spider go away. Obviously, this is a problem, especially when it happens in the aisle at the grocery store. So his parents develop a tactic to deal with this behavior, and help him learn to act normally when he sees a spider. When he sees one and he goes into hysterics, they put him in a room full of spiders and leave him there until he calms himself. This takes hours the first time, but by the third or fourth time he calms himself pretty quickly in the spider-filled room. From then on he never expresses a fear of spiders, and they don't hear a peep out of him when he sees one. Voila! They've cured his fear, and made life easier for themselves. Parents-of-the-Year Award for them.
Wait. What?
Scenario B: Let's say there's a one-year-old who has a crippling fear of being left alone at night. Every time she's left in a room by herself she becomes hysterical, screaming for her parents to come to her. Obviously, this is a problem, especially when it happens multiple times in the middle of the night. So her parents develop a tactic to deal with this behavior, and help her learn to act normally when left alone. When they put her in her crib and she goes into hysterics, they leave her in the room alone until she calms herself by falling asleep. This takes hours the first time, but by the third or fourth time she calms herself pretty quickly in the room alone. From then on she never expresses a fear of being left alone at night, and they don't hear a peep out of her when they put her in her crib and leave the room. Voila! They've cured her fear, and made life easier for themselves. Parents-of-the-Year Award for them.
Scenario A is clearly psychological abuse. Scenario B is acted out regularly in the homes of well-meaning, non-abusive parents all over the country. Why is this, when they're essentially the same tactic?
I don't think that people who do CIO do it because they believe ruthlessly exposing their child to the thing she fears is the best way to get her to stop fearing it. But the parents don't see what they're doing as exposing the child to fear; they've been convinced that the child is not crying out of fear, but for some other reason, sheer cussedness and/or manipulation of his parents being the most commonly cited.
This is what I consider to be the main problem behind the CIO ideology: it discriminates against the non-verbal. A baby can't explain that she is scared of her parents leaving her, so others get to decide what she's really expressing with all that crying.
Now, I realize that it is logically possible that the baby is manipulating her parents rather than expressing fear when she cries. But based on my own personal experience, I've never been able to believe this.
I can remember being scared at night. I was prone to becoming obsessed with various scary thoughts - wolves and lions when I was younger, and when I was older a fear of being kidnapped - and on numerous occasions I would call down the stairs to my parents and they would help me deal with the fear so that I could finally go to sleep. Also, until I was eight or nine years old, I would routinely wake up in the middle of the night and feel alone and scared so that I'd go get in bed with my parents. My parents were great about it: they would escort me back to my own bed after five or ten minutes, but they always made sure that I knew they loved me and that there was nothing to be afraid of.
I was in elementary school at the time, not even close to being a baby. I could understand that my parents were in the house and that they loved me even when they were not in the room, and yet I still occasionally needed their presence to help me go to sleep in the evening and to go back to sleep in the middle of the night. I was not manipulating them in any way. I was not refusing to go to sleep on my own because I wanted to give them a hard time. I was simply scared, and young enough that I was not equipped to deal with it on my own.
This is why I do not buy the idea that a one-year-old who is crying in the night is manipulating her parents. This is why my gut tells me that when she is crying alone in a room, she is scared. This is why I have such a big problem with the idea that the proper solution to a baby or toddler's continuous requests for the presence of her parents is to remove that presence so that she learns it is fruitless to ask for it. Because I think about my own five- or seven-year-old self, and how badly it would have affected me if my parents had refused to give me the comfort I needed, and I can only imagine that it would hurt a little one much, much more.
I do understand that all babies are different. My baby becomes almost immediately hysterical with fear when we leave her sight, but not all babies do the same thing. I believe that the parents are the ones who are equipped to know whether their baby is crying out of fear or is just ticked off, and that they are the ones who should decide how to deal with that crying. What I have a problem with is the imperative implicit in the CIO ideology: the idea that in order to achieve the goal of getting the baby to sleep, a parent should ignore his or her own instincts about what the child is expressing, as well as his or her own instinctive desire to comfort the child. I can't count the number of times I've heard or read, "We did CIO, and it felt so wrong and I hated it, but it worked."
Yes, parenthood often involves doing things you don't want to do. I've held my daughter through four sets of immunizations, and hated every minute of that. But the payoff of the health benefits far outweighs the pain she underwent, which was fleeting and merely physical. Does the payoff of a child who sleeps the way the experts say he or she "should" outweigh the prolonged emotional trauma the child may undergo in the process? Especially when that trauma may conceivably have effects that last a lifetime?
Recently I had a very illuminating conversation with a guy I know. The person wanted me to know how impressed he was that despite Camilla being so high-needs, Bryan and I had committed to never letting her be scared in any way by our absence. I have to admit I was a little surprised that this particular person had even noticed, but after a few minutes of talking I realized why he felt so strongly about it. He himself was left to cry it out as a baby, and while not blaming he parents - "there were circumstances," he says - it's clear that he carries the effects of that experience to this day, with a strong fear of abandonment, among other things.
My parents never left me to cry it out so I can only vaguely imagine, but this person described it succinctly. As a baby, you need your parents. When they don't come when you cry, it's "like the bottom falls out of your world." I could tell as he was saying it that he could remember it. Not consciously, of course, but still. He remembers.
I know that the CIO people say that studies show that CIO has no ill-effects on children. I can't speak to the studies, but it seems to me that if there are people out there who still carry the scars of being left to cry alone decades earlier, then "no ill-effects" cannot be absolutely true.
There are so many other issues in play that would be worth discussing here. Whether expecting children to soothe themselves to sleep and sleep through the night at x age is reasonable. Why children sleeping in rooms apart from their parents is the norm in our society, even though it hasn't been in most times and places throughout human history. Mitigating factors such as parental depression/psychosis exacerbated by sleep deprivation. Signals that babies do give in re: whether they're crying because they're scared. The overall trend of "expert"-driven parenting. I could go on and on.
But I've already written 2000+ words here on this topic and I feel like I've just scratched the surface, so if I don't want to be writing for a week this seems as good a place as any to stop.
*steps back, opens giant can of worms*
I would be very interested in a civil discussion in the comments section, if anyone has thoughts to share. Remember my earlier warning about not judging any particular parent. We are just talking about ideas here. If I feel a comment is borderline, I will delete it, so be very thoughtful and cautious in your comments.
*takes deep breath*
*hits "publish"*
In honor of the day of the be-wishboned bird, here's something that tickled my funny bone this week:
. You have to save room for pie, you know.