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Strollerderby
Bedtime isn’t just about sleep anymore. Increasingly, how you handle your child’s sleep needs is being seen by researchers (and other parents) as a referendum on your overall parenting skills.
Those of you letting your little ones cry it out won’t be earning any extra credit. The debate about the best way to put a baby to bed still rages, ranging from fierce advocates of cosleeping to devotees of Ferber. But more and more, scientific research sides with the snugglers.
The Globe and Mail sums up several recent research studies about infant sleep and finds the consensus leaning towards a no-cry approach to baby’s bedtime.
Fox news isn’t the most reputable source of information, but a recent report on co-sleeping highlights some interesting data. In Milwaukee county, 100 percent of co-sleeping deaths have involved formula fed babies.
The bedtime battle is as old as parenting. You want to sleep. Your kid wants to stay up all night watching cartoons and eating sugary cereal from the box, which is what he’s sure you do after bedtime.
It’s not just babies vs. parents anymore at bedtime. Moms (and dads) have opened up a new battlefield in the infamous Mommy Wars, and are tearing each other apart over whether – and how – to train their babes to sleep.
A new study just published by Today’s Parent says that sleep training methods work better if the parents using them have the right attitiude.
This is particularly true for the “controlled crying” method advocated by Ferber and a few other sleep experts. What Today’s Parent found was that parents who feel Ok about letting their kids cry get better results with these methods:
On average, those who believed their child would feel abandoned or get even more upset if they didn’t respond quickly reported less success with sleep training. Conversely, those who believed it was OK to let their child cry at night for sleep-training purposes, and who were able to resist their child’s nighttime demands, tended to be more successful.
Most pediatric experts like to discourage parents from co-sleeping with their children. They say it’s unsafe: the bedding is a suffocation risk. The kid could fall off the bed or become trapped between the edge and the wall. A crib, they insist, is the best place for a baby to sleep.
Still, what’s more soothing than nodding off next to your warm and loving Mom or Dad?
Bringing together the best of both worlds are crib co-sleepers.
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I think it’s been years since I’ve read a mainstream news story on cosleeping that didn’t make me want to start cursing at the screen. It has sometimes seemed like every couple weeks there is an over-simplified alarmist story in another regional daily, taken uncritically from a public health agency’s press materials. They usually go like this: “Babies sometimes die in adult beds! It must be the adult beds/adults who did it! Don’t sleep with your baby!” (Imagine if we said the same about cribs. . .)
So I have to say I was pleasantly surprised by the report in the Houston Chronicle titled “‘Cosleeping’ Deaths Scrutinized“—and by the research it was based on.
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