Yes, I know, US doctors have a very different view than German doctors, so the discoveries made here don’t count.
That sounds like co-sleeping on too soft mattresses or impaired adults. The best method I’ve seen are the side-beds mentioned already, with their seperate mattress that latch onto the side of the adult bed. Co-sleeping on a sofa is not the recommended form I was thinking of!
Besides, last I heard about SIDS is that they think it might be a weakness in the blood vessels in the neck. Doctors want to use some new tech gizmo to scan (Infrared, I think) the necks of newborns to spot those babies at higher risk.
Um, excuse me. Taking a fifteen-minute break when crying drives you beserk is not the thing I was talking about. Rather, the advice so far has been to let the baby cry through the whole night!, not because it stresses the parents to breaking point, but because the baby will tire out and get used to it.
I’ve heard this from old-school ideologues before, they argue more or less openly that the baby is crying on purpose to annoy the parents, and letting it cry for hours will cure it from that behaviour. That’s what I was talking about, and where Doctors are against.
In most extreme cases, babies can die from lack of emphatic contact, if only their bodily needs are looked after, but they are not cuddled and held. That’s what the “let them cry, as long as they’re fed” kind of thought leads to.
Why are you posting in such a hostile tone? I never said that German doctors’ discoveries don’t count, only that they are not the only opinions of doctors. You’re the one discounting some doctors’ opinions, I’m saying that there are *many *opinions.
I have only seen one poster, an admitted non-parent posting tongue in cheek, who proposed that. Ferberizing, sleep training, even “Cry it Out” are **not **synonymous with “cry through the whole night.”
I don’t think anyone here is suggesting that crying is good for babies. Sleep, on the other hand, is not only good, but absolutely necessary for babies. And as they get older, it’s more and more likely that when babies wake up in the middle of the night, what they need is not to be held, or fed, or changed, or have their tummy rubbed, but to just go back to sleep. Unfortunately, they don’t know how to just relax into sleep again, so they cry, because they’re awake and they’re unhappy about it. The goal is not to make them cry; the goal is to help them learn to go (and go back) to sleep - in order to get the huge amount of sleep they very much need - even if they have to cry a bit in the process.
Babies need to learn to go to sleep on their own, because sleep is also vital for parents. It’s not good for baby if mommy or daddy gets fired from their job or killed in a car crash because they’re exhausted and unable to function. I’ve *tried *sleeping next to the baby, and while it doesn’t seem to make any difference in how often he wakes up, I wake up far more often and sleep far less soundly. I would never let my baby cry if he actually needed something. And during the day, when he’s awake, I know that if he’s crying, he does need something, and I attend to him immediately. But when I’ve checked on him time after time, night after night, week after week, month after month, and find that time and again, what he needs is sleep, then it may be that the best thing for me to do is just let him sleep.
? My brother and I had our own rooms in the nursery area and slept alone. As far as I know all my cousins of my generation had their own rooms and slept alone. [on my fathers side, there is at least one set of twins on moms side I know grew up sharing a room with each other.] What harm was done to us? We all grew up normal.
I must say, for a sleep deprived mama, you have a really good sense of perspective and ability to both identify and articulate what’s important. Hold to that, and you’ll be fine. Far more than specific techniques and labels (co-sleeping, attachment parenting, ferberizing, blah blah blah) what will affect your child and your relationship with your child are your love, your patience, your flexibility and your senses of perspective and humor. Keep it up and you’ll be fine, whether he sleeps in your arms, in a crib, in a swing or in a dresser drawer.
OP, I’m glad your method made things a bit better. Just stick with it and see if it continues to work. Speaking from personal experience, that’s the nature of the beast - it’s a little bit better the first night and gets better and better over a couple of weeks.
If it’s not going to work, babies tend to let you know early on in pretty spectacular (read: loud and long and screamy) fashion. Sounds like yours just needed a little presence. If we put her to bed before we went to sleep, my daughter used to sleep only if you rubbed her butt - I kept expecting a genie to come out.
I would like to see a cite from you that what I’ve written about the dangers of Babywise is wrong and what you’ve written is right. Not your opinion or your anecdotal evidence but actual factual information that the feeding schedule advocated by the Ezzos does not pose serious dangers to an infant’s life.
This is not funny at all. My own brother was dehydrated when he was two months old because my idiot grandmother did a lousy job babysitting. He spent ten days in the hospital seriously ill and still suffers the aftereffects of her poor care three decades later.
Babywise should be pulled from the shelves because the authors are morons with an agenda that is all about religiously motivated punishment and poorly thought out ideas about child rearing rather than meeting the needs of an infant.
I’m not sure the issue is that the baby knows or not - they certainly won’t remember - but rather of stress hormones and their effect on brain development: Article by Dr. Sears. Another article.
The challenge is that you can find pretty much any study to prove what you want to prove - for example, the article by Dr. Sears underscored the stress response; the other article (by a group of scientists for mass consumption) underscores that, yes, there is a stress response, but it isn’t sustained for weeks on end, so the response should have little impact on the baby.
Ultimately it boils down to what the parent is comfortable with.
That said, several parts of the edition of Babywise published in 1995 were called into question because of lack of scientific basis: cite. I’m guessing the book was probably updated because there is a) a lot of medical evidence that counteracts the unsubstantiated claims in the book and b) a lot of public uproar (or at least in mothering circles) about the quality of the information in the book. I’m sure the book worked for some people. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that the book is a great resource for parenting a newborn. I’ve read Rich Dad, Poor Dad. Lots of people swear by it, but it was the single poorest piece of writing I’ve ever seen in my life and many of the principles behind it were pure bullshit. I see Babywise as the same sort of thing. Everyone’s mileage varies, though.
Failure to Thrive is an actual medical diagnosis that can lead to death, and can be caused by extreme neglect. Not abuse, not withholding of food, but simply not touching a baby or child for an extended period of time is enough to do it. However, again, that’s not what anyone in this thread is talking about. No one is seriously recommending leaving the child unattended to cry for even a single whole night, much less the weeks it takes for neglect to cause Failure to Thrive.
I’m guessing his M.D. trumps your medical degree, from where did you say?
Other than the opinions of some doctors that have written articles claiming that the methods described in the Babywise book could lead to failure to thrive and the other conditions you listed, can you cite any actual cases of children that suffered from parents using the book?
Secondly, using the publisher’s website as a cite for the quality of a book is…lame.
Thirdly, it’s the American Society of Paediatrics that suggests that the book is unhelpful and possibly dangerous. Not ‘internet gibberish’.
If the method worked for you, that’s fantastic. I don’t think you can argue that it’s a well regarded method by experts though. And the notion that the book has gained ‘world prominence’ is a joke. I had never heard about it before this thread and I’ve been obsessively reading since I got pregnant.
No. Unfortunately my grandmother was just an idiot who didn’t think she should feed my brother when he was two months old and hungry. She illustrates what happens when you follow strict feeding schedules that do not take into account the actual needs of the baby.
Yes, I read the stupid book after picking it up at a garage sale for a quarter. The book sucks and so do the Ezzos. Quoting from it does not change the problems with the book.
Your post still doesn’t negate what the cites I pulled up state about the dangers of the book’s feeding schedule. If there’s even a possibility of a problem why take the slightest chance with your baby’s health?
Omar Little, I remember seeing the cite you provided earlier. Isn’t the author of that Web site one of the authors for the Babywise book? It seems like he’d have a personal stake in promoting his own theories. Also, the Web site seems to indicate that the other creator of the Web site has a masters in theology - do you know what his background is in child development? I’m not asking to be douchey.
For what it’s worth (and it’s not worth much, if anything), my husband’s family and much of the rest of the world are mystified about how much time we spend worrying about getting babies to sleep. I was once talking to my father-in-law’s girlfriend about it when my son was a baby and we were visiting India. It had never even occurred to her as a concern, and she has two kids.
The blank look on her face was priceless, then she said, “This is actually something you spend a lot of time thinking about? Why? You won’t even have to worry about it in a few years. No wonder parenting is so complicated for you in America!”
