Problem With Parenting Methods
Becoming a parent was a really scary thing for me. I’d been so focused on being pregnant that I just stared at my son like he was an alien or something. I didn’t know what to do with him or what to say. I took a crash course in a matter of days.
When he was 4 weeks old, he decided he was going to spend a good portion of the night crying - and there was seemingly nothing I could do about it. None of the usual bouncing tricks worked so I thought it might be acid reflux, which is very common in infants. I called the pediatrician and voiced my concern about acid reflux and they immediately told me to let him “cry it out.”
As a new parent, it is stressful to listen to your new baby cry for more than a few minutes, and as a breastfeeding mom, well we’ll just say many nursing pads would be needed. I wasn’t only concerned about stress and leaking, crying can cause infants to throw up (not spit up, but vomit) and causes gas. Gas aggravates acid reflux. See the vicious cycle? Not only are there physical problems, but excessive crying can lead to psychological issues as well, such as attachment disorder. When voicing these concerns to the pediatrician, she told me not to be so granola hippy and that if I didn’t do this, I was being cruel to my son by not teaching him to sleep alone. She also said every baby must go through this in order to learn how to sleep.
Aside from her own ignorance on what sleeping through the night is or even how to implement the “Ferber” method, the absurdity that all babies are the same just blows my mind.
The main reason I have so much respect for the well-known authors in the attachment parenting circle, the Sears’, Elizabeth Pantley, etc, is because they allow for differences and changes in children. The Ezzo method, the Ferber method not only don’t allow for differences or changes in children, but put forth the notion that babies are crying to manipulate the parents. This is a dangerous idea and everyone would be better off to read up on early childhood development, especially psychology. There is a difference between crying to get food or attention (which are both physical needs) - that would be called basic communication which is all infants are capable of for the first year - and manipulation for manipulation’s sake - like what a teen does.
It is dangerous for infants and children to be subjected to training methods that promise the same results to any child. There are always exceptions and some methods just don’t work for some kids. Even the best animal trainers will tell you that their methods allow for difference in personality between animals, so why would all human children be the same? If all children were the same, there wouldn’t be so much debate on how to raise kids.
The best parenting advice I have to give anyone is if they read the parenting books, weed through the things that don’t work. It doesn’t matter if something worked for your parents, your siblings, your friends, your pastor, or even people that teach parenting classes - you are the parent and you know your child best. You can try things, but if it doesn’t work it doesn’t work.