Something to Cry About
It’s been almost five months since our daughter was born, and it’s truly been a wonderful experience. One thing I’m quickly learning is that once you’re a parent, you need to come up with answers to a whole bunch of questions that were once easy to dismiss, and the process of finding those answers can be a painful one. We got a very sharp lesson in that reality earlier this week.
Alex is for the most part a very well-behaved child. She’s friendly, smiles a lot, and can attract a flock of grandmothers in a diner from ten feet away. The one slight hitch is her sleep schedule – as is little surprise given her genes, she has none. She tends to fall asleep late, and she absolutely hates her crib. What’s worse, even while asleep, she can sense the moment you put her in the crib, wake up and start telling you, loudly, what a bad idea this was. Her three favorite places to sleep are her baby carrier, in someone’s arms, and in the bed next to Pattie or me. Since only the latter is a safe place while both of us are asleep, this has usually meant that Pattie and Alex sleep in the bedroom at night, while I take a nap on the couch and wait for her to go to work, so I can catch a few hours in bed with the baby. Not exactly what you’d call conducive to ‘putting the baby on a schedule,’ which is the one piece of advice we seem to get from all corners.
When our pediatrician added her voice to the chorus on Tuesday, and said we should put Alex to bed at a set time and let her cry if necessary, we decided to try and bite the bullet. Around ten p.m., Pattie went out grocery shopping and I put Alex in her crib. It didn’t take long for her to start crying, and no amount of soothing or talking on my part would calm her down. So I sat down next to the crib, picked up a book and tried to block it out, getting up every ten or fifteen minutes to check on her. She was persistent, to put it mildly; not only was she crying, she was putting her whole body into it, gradually scooching from the middle of the crib to the corner. The second time she did it – fifty minutes after I had first put her to bed – I finally decided enough was enough, picked her up, and held her for the five or ten minutes it took for her to fall asleep. I gently put her back in the crib and crept out of the bedroom, thinking that a hard night’s work was over. When Pattie walked back in, I rather comically pantomimed various ‘be quiet, she’s sleeping’ gestures and went out to get the groceries.
Fifteen minutes later, Alex was up and howling again.
OK, we said to ourselves. Maybe this is a temporary thing. Maybe she’ll settle herself back down.
No such luck. If anything, the howls were getting louder.
I poured myself a glass of orange juice, sat down in the couch on the living room, and started thinking. 90 minutes had passed since I put Alex to bed and she had spent 75 of them howling. She’d had four vaccinations earlier in the day, and she had shaken them off in fewer than five minutes. By that standard, her crib was approximately 15 times worse than being jabbed with a sharp object four times. I’m not sure I’d agree with that, but I couldn’t help but compare the two. When she cried during the needles, I felt bad for her, but I knew it was necessary for her well-being. But now, I wasn’t sure what benefit there was to be gained in leaving her to cry. It certainly wasn’t necessary for her health. And while I’ve made my share of complaints about sleeping on the couch, it wasn’t really necessary to our well being either. At best, the idea was that we were supposed to be teaching her to be independent and be on a schedule.
Thing is, I’m not sure she’s old enough to really ‘learn’ a lesson like that. As amazing as she is, she’s still very instinct-driven and self-centered. She’s just forming the sort of social bonds that are going to be necessary for her to learn and grow. So she’s there in the crib, looking for a little reassurance and company, and I’m sitting in the living room trying to teach her something that in my heart of hearts I didn’t think she was going to learn. As I realized that, my resolve crumbled, and tears started to well up in my eyes. When I broke down, so did Pattie. We went to Alex’s bedroom, picked her up out of the crib, and took turns holding her. It took five or ten minutes for her to calm down, and she seemed anxious for the rest of the night. When I handed her to Pattie, I collapsed onto the kitchen floor and bawled. I slept on the couch again that night, and couldn’t have been happier.
Now, I’m not saying anyone who takes any variation of the ‘cry-it-out’ stance is wrong, or cruel, or selfish, or what have you. There’s so much we don’t know about kids, and kids are individuals anyway, so what works for one might not work for another. Plenty of the folks who have told us we ‘just had to put her on a schedule’ are caring veteran parents. But in that hour and a half, we had to figure out what works for us, and while it may have taken some time, I think we did.
Good thing, too, because a couple of days later, Alex started teething.
About Dave Thomer
Born and raised in Philadelphia. Studied philosophy at Fordham University in the Bronx, where I made many great friends and met my wonderful wife. We moved back to Philadelphia, where I studied philosophy some more and became a teacher. Online and off, I'm looking for ways that we can be better citizens and build stronger communities.