I’m all for science and research and studies. But sometimes I’m also really for when we just sit back and admit we have reached an impasse on something. Today, that impasse is sleep training a baby. Ain’t nobody knows the right thing to do at this point.
There is currently a debate raging in the Internet’s more hallowed parenting halls about whether it “takes guts” to sleep train an infant or not. The thrust of this begins with Motherlode, the NYT parenting blog, where Aimee Molloy offers “Sleep Training at 8 Weeks: Do You Have the Guts?”
In it, she ponders the hotly contested parenting issue of whether or not to sleep train and if so, how young. Molloy and her husband attended their two-month check up at the bustling Tribeca Pediatrics in New York City, presenting a happy baby who was gaining weight, nursing well, and sleeping 6 to 8 hours a night. Molloy writes:
When we told our pediatrician, she seemed less impressed.
“She could be sleeping 12 hours a night,” she said. “It’s time to think about sleep training.”
Sleep training? An 8-week-old?
Our doctor coached us on the recommended technique. Place all 12 hungry, needy pounds of our daughter in her crib at 7 p.m. Close the door and return at 7 a.m. No checking, no consoling and definitely no feeding. She would cry — for hours, possibly — but in about three nights she’d get the picture that nobody was coming to her rescue and would begin to sleep through the night.
Molloy, like all new parents, was seduced by the idea that this was even possible. Hell, rob anyone of necessary sleep, especially new parents, and they would likely peel off their own skin by hand and fashion it into an organic artisanal baby wrap in exchange for one good, guilt-free night’s sleep, no questions asked.
But Molloy also had another common response to the idea of sleep training, especially for a baby so young: horror at a parenting approach that sounds as about as nurturing as Pol Pot. She did some reporting directly to the source, the man who came up with the idea of getting an 8-week-old to sleep like a teenager:
The man behind this idea is Dr. Michel Cohen, who founded Tribeca Pediatrics in 1994. His practice now sees nearly 32,000 patients at offices in New York, New Jersey and Los Angeles. “It comes down to this,” Dr. Cohen told me when I called to ask about this approach. “Do you have the guts to do what I’m suggesting? If so, you’ll see it works.” And if not? “Then I expect to see you back at six months, exhausted, asking why your kid is still getting up a few times a night.”
Cohen’s bold, gauntlet-throwing suggestion to attempt sleep training at 8 weeks came after a decade of having suggested to start cry it out at 4 months, but noticing that what could be done at 4 months might just as easily work at 3 months. Or 2 months of age. Not 1 month, though:
“I then began to suggest sleep training at one month, but found that to be too early,” he said. “Parents were too emotional. Nobody was quite ready.”
But, as you guessed already, Like Every Single Thing In Parenting, You Will Find Proponents of All Possible Approaches™. Molloy found them, too. Marques Tracy and his wife Roopa, for instance, went all in for sleep training at 8 weeks and it went over like gangbusters:
On the first night, Aidan cried for about three hours on and off. The second night he cried for 45 minutes, and the third, maybe 20 minutes. Aidan has largely slept through the night ever since. “I’d say it worked like a charm,” Marques said.
Others who dared try sleep training say it worked like a charm alright—a charm comprised of rusty spikes pierced directly into their hearts. Says “Manali” of her experience trying to sleep train her now 7-month old son:
On the first night, he cried for two and a half hours. On the second, more than five. “At four in the morning, I gave up and went to get him. I held him and cried my eyes out, wondering if I had traumatized him.”
Molloy notes that sleep researchers say there is no research supporting the notion that letting your kid sleep through the night is damaging in anyway (attachment issues, brain damage) but that “science and logic may not always be enough to reassure parents trying to endure the agony of listening to their baby cry for several hours in the middle of the night.”
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