HAHAHAHAHAHAHA! Mr. Ferber changes his stance on cosleeping
Now, if Ezzo and Weisbluth would join the bandwagon, AP’s domination of the world would be complete! HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!
An excerpt for your reading pleasure:
In his best-selling 1985 book, “Solve Your Child’s Sleep Problems,” Ferber 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.”
Hmm…did he change his position due to outside pressure, or from the fact that 70% of Americans sleep with their babies?
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.
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.”
Ahh….sweet vindication!!!
