Anne, thank you for posting about your experience with your triplets -- it
must have taken some good nerve for you to do it, and it's important for us
all to read.

I think there are a lot of people, who basically hate scheduling feedings,
who might still agree that for mothers of higher-order multiples it can be
the lesser of two evils. Even twins who are theoretically are fully demand
fed are sometimes both fed when either one is hungry -- which can
occasionally amount to Twin A "scheduling" Twin B.   Parenting is full of
surprises, and I can only imagine how true that is of triplets! and
ultimately parents need to do what works for them and their families.

It sounds as if for your family the theoretically more flexible plan of
straight demand feeding had paradoxically become more rigid -- it was playing
out in a way that made you feel trapped.   And, contrariwise, setting up some
degree of scheduling gave you enough breathing room that you could be capable
of flexible thinking at all!

In The New Yorker this week John Seabrook wrote about the process of slowly
becoming committed to co-sleeping with his baby, and part of what makes it a
great article is that while he comes down ultimately strongly in favor of
co-sleeping -- and says outright of the CPSC announcement that "it's based on
shoddy science" -- he acknowledges the true, horrible, not-at-all-imaginary
debilitating effects of gross sleep deprivation, and acknowledges frankly why
parents might be absolutely right to try a lot of different things to escape
from it.

I think a lot of our discussion about BabyWise and GKGW has been really
inappropriate in taking the tone that only bad, alienated, narrowminded or at
the best clueless parents are going to find value in this book.   It is just
obviously not the case.  People are various, and which particular lesson they
happen to need to hear at a particular juncture of their lives is various.

That said, I think that the big problem that remains with the Ezzo's
parenting recommendations is that -- even if they helped you think outside
the box, and sometimes help others do that too -- they are not about
flexibility or figuring out what is best for your baby and you.   They are
really about one, set, way to raise your family, and most families who read
it are not managing multiples.  They need to impose a schedule not to save
their sanity, but because they believe schedules and some greater control of
baby processes are better for human character.

Of course this is true of any fixed "movement" with fixed "steps" you need to
implement -- I hope there is nobody here who imagines that attachment
parenting has never been a straitjacket for some families.    But if
attachment parenting is carried beyond good-sense into dogma, or begins to
express parental anxiety instead of parental confidence, the worst case is
going to be parental headaches and spoiled kids.   Whereas if BabyWise is
implemented unwisely it can ultimately result in starvation of infants and
abuse of toddlers.    And tragically these results really have happened in
some families.  Nor are as many bf relationships saved by it as sabotaged --
not every mom is getting 3x stimulation, so fewer feeds can be insufficient
for some mothers to keep up their supply even if theoretically they might be
enough for the baby.

Get what you can from it, definately.   I give people Ferber's book, too, to
learn from, even though I have a three year old who happily hops in and out
of my bed all night.   "Who is wise?  One who learns from every person."
(_Pirkei Avot_).  But if you are recommending it to parents of multiples to
help them escape from one kind of slavery, please remind them not to use it
in a way that will consign them and their children to another form.

-- And please, when you mention the book to others, add some mention of
stooling to those "getting enough" recommendations!    A baby that is peeing
enough will not die of dehydration, but she can still starve to death, and
pretty quick, too.

Warmly,

Elisheva Urbas
NYC

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