<http://www.nytimes.com/>
The New York Times


December 29, 2005


And Baby Makes Three in One Bed

By AMY HARMON

JENNIFER JAKOVICH has spent most of her 5-month-old daughter's life 
dodging questions from friends, family and strangers about how and 
where Chloe sleeps. But since hearing that Dr. Richard Ferber, the 
country's most famous infant sleep expert, has relaxed his admonition 
against parents sleeping with their babies, she has taken a different tack.

"I now mention Ferber's new view while openly admitting to 
co-sleeping," said Ms. Jakovich, an engineer in San Diego. She has 
broken the news to friends that Chloe sleeps in the same bed with her 
and her husband, John, a computer programmer. "I feel I have now been 
given the green light, that it's O.K."

The Jackoviches are part of a growing group of American parents who 
share a bed with their baby, a common practice in the rest of the 
world, which had become nearly taboo in this country. A survey by the 
National Institute of Child Health and Human Development has found 
that about one-fifth of parents with infants up to eight months old 
said the baby usually shared a bed with them, more than triple the 
number of a decade ago.

The trend appears to be driven largely by the increase in 
breastfeeding working mothers, who say it allows them to connect with 
their babies and still get some sleep. But given the prevailing 
cultural distaste, many parents say they have felt compelled to hide 
their shared sleeping arrangements.

It is a testament to Dr. Ferber's influence that even the halfhearted 
nod he has given the practice in interviews has inspired a kind of 
collective coming-out party among co-sleeping parents. Transcripts of 
his network news and talk show appearances last month are being 
circulated on the Internet and recited on the playground.

"Even though I shouldn't have to defend myself, it is nice to have 
that," Ms. Jakovich said. Like many other parents, she never intended 
to sleep with her daughter. "My view was that granola-hippie-type 
people co-sleep," she added.

But Ms. Jakovich, 30, quickly found that she slept better when she 
didn't have to get up in the night to nurse Chloe. To make things 
more comfortable, the Jakoviches took one side off Chloe's deluxe 
crib and pushed it up against their mattress, which they upgraded to 
a king-size.

The old Dr. Ferber would not have approved. In his best-selling 1985 
book, "Solve Your Child's Sleep Problems," he 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."

Still, Dr. Ferber's shift has sparked celebration among some parents, 
who have faced criticism for defying the American dictum that babies 
should learn to sleep alone. And in a child-rearing battle that has 
become as ideological as it is intimate, others say vindication is in 
order, not from Dr. Ferber so much as from fellow parents who 
evangelize his teachings with moral fervor.

"It is at her next doctor's appointment, her 12-month checkup," 
Christina Harrison said of her daughter, Alyssa, "that I relish the 
chance to bring it up the most." Ms. Harrison, 29, let Alyssa cry 
until her voice was hoarse at her pediatrician's urging. "It was horrible."

Ms. Harrison has resolved to sleep with Alyssa until she is happier 
about being in her own bed.

Stephanie Lazure, 31, hopes to show a clip of the ABC News interview 
with Dr. Ferber to her husband's boss, who bought the couple Dr. 
Ferber's book as a baby present. "She comes over and shakes her 
finger in the baby's face and says, 'You have to learn to 
self-soothe,' " Ms. Lazure said. "It's not that I feel criticized. 
It's that I feel my baby is being criticized for not sleeping."

Pressure not to co-sleep isn't coming only from relatives and other 
parents. Many pediatricians discourage the practice because they 
worry about parents rolling over and smothering the baby. But the 
question of how co-sleeping affects the risk of sudden infant death 
syndrome, known as SIDS, is contested. 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.

But many of the new co-sleepers appear to base their sleeping 
arrangements on a blend of pragmatism and pleasure, rather than on a 
particular approach to parenthood. Some push together queen 
mattresses with twin mattresses, others snuggle closer together or 
improvise each night. Cribs, Pack 'N Plays and bassinets become 
useful repositories for toys and laundry.

Rita Hunt Smith, 39, a children's librarian in Hershey, Pa., began 
co-sleeping with her first son, Ezra, after spending an agonizing 
night listening to him cry in the crib down the hall. Then she came 
to treasure the closeness it forged among Ezra, her and her husband, 
Kurt, a graphic artist.

Now 3½, Ezra spends most nights in his own bed, while the Smiths' 
14-month-old son, Fletcher, sleeps with them. Perhaps because her 
husband has an older son from a previous marriage, Ms. Smith said, he 
has been supportive, even though he would like more room for his 
6-foot-3 frame.

"He knows the day is coming when they won't even want to be in the 
same room with us, so let's soak it up now," Ms. Smith said. Upon 
waking, Fletcher, who has just begun to talk, greets his parents with "hiya."

Ms. Smith said she used to be highly secretive about their 
co-sleeping, but has begun talking more about it during baby 
story-time sessions she runs. Her mother, though, "continues to think 
I'm ruining my sons' sleep habits forever," she said.

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."

Some co-sleeping parents say they do not need advice from experts to 
decide where their baby should sleep.

"With no intended disrespect to Dr. Ferber, I do not need his opinion 
to validate my view that co-sleeping is the healthiest, safest and 
most natural sleep situation for my child," Kristi Buxton, 29, a 
microbiology researcher in Portland, Ore., wrote in an e-mail 
message. "The individual who has most influenced (and radically 
changed) my beliefs about co-sleeping is my child."

    * 
<http://www.nytimes.com/ref/membercenter/help/copyright.html>Copyright 
2005<http://www.nytco.com/>The New York Times Company

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