<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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