So me and my wife, Suzi, were minding our business raising a talented, clever and happy baby, Kara. Then a well-meaning relative gave me a Father's Day present. Browsing at the bookstore, she had seen a very large book which gave helpful advice about feeding our baby, who was just turning six months old. The book presented reasonable information about how tall and heavy a baby ought to be at a certain age as well as expected developmental milestones.
That poor relative! She had no idea the effect that this book would have on my family. For she did not know the name Dr. Sears, nor his reputation as the man who coined the term "attachment parenting". She could not have known the amount of upheaval and sleepless nights it would cause us. The moment we opened this book, we began to feel horrible about ourselves.
Attachment parenting is a style of raising children that emphasizes intense emotional nurturing. It stands in stark contrast to many of the commandments fostered by physicians of the 19th and 20th Centuries. Attachment parenting features closeness to your baby at all times: co-sleeping, sling transport and skin-to-skin time. It recommends quick responses to crying and obeying intuitive parenting instincts. The first chapter of The Baby Book is about attachment parenting and the rest of the book is infused with it.
I like the idea of attachment parenting. So does the wife. So does the Royal University Hospital maternity department where we had our baby, which recently abolished its nursery so that parents could spend the first days of their child's life in close contact. While we had never previously read anything by Dr. William Sears, attachment parenting has inflitrated the institutions surrounding birth.
We really wanted to be attachment parents. We succeeded at first. Then, two and a half months after our baby was born, the wife had to get a job. The details of this decision I chronicled in this post. Basically, we decided that she could support us monetarily while I couldn't. With that, she spent less time with our baby. Her body couldn't keep up with baby's increasing breastmilk demands, so formula began to creep into Kara's diet. Then, a little past the four-month mark, Kara began to squirm, kick and scratch us in her sleep. We woke each other constantly. I was tired, Kara was cranky and Suzi was hopelessly exhausted with night waking, nursing and working.
Something had to change. Then one day when I was at the end of my rope and Kara was crying for seemingly no reason, I obeyed an intuitive parenting instinct and put her alone in her crib in a dark room. Five minutes of fussing later, she was asleep. I was shocked. Then I tried it again in the afternoon and hallelujiah, she slept again! I researched. I was ashamed because I knew that "cry-it-out" was not "in" and I was certain Suzi would disapprove. I secretly continued to practice Dr. Ferber's method for a week before I broke down and told her. After many apologies, we both decided Dr. Ferber knew his shit. Kara slept, I slept, Suzi slept, we were all sleeping, we were all happy for a month.
As it stood, we tried contemporary parenting and it simply clashed with modern life. We couldn't sustain it and keep ourselves fed and rested at the same time. So food and sleep won and Kara actually seemed more-rested for it.
What followed was several weeks of guilty vigilance on Suzi's part. She would wake with every tiny night-cry and I started having midnight arguments with her about running to the baby's rescue. Exhaustion slipped back into our lives. We both knew what the book had done, knew that we were good parents and had a wonderful and unbroken baby, and yet the book continued to haunt us silently from its place at my bedside table.
This is what The Baby Book did for us and Eris-help-me, we're still recovering. For this disservice alone, I am inclined to follow my emotional and intuitive instinct to tell the Dr. Sears that he can shove copies of his book up the arses of his huge and supposedly-perfect family. But that's not exactly fair. This reaction is based on my own subjective experience and surely it won't be the same for every parent. So for their benefit, I'll try to actually REVIEW this book and be as impartial as possible.
As I mentioned before, the tone of the book is from an intuitive standpoint. It is unsourced. It is scientific only in that a respected pediatrician and his registered-nurse wife authored it. I can't begrudge that, however: it's a parenting book and no parent needs to read a scientific article to learn how to take care of their baby. Scientific writing is boring writing, so not sourcing their claims is just fine. What maybe isn't fine is this: in the opening chapter the authors actually admit that their advice on parenting is not scientific. They say that their parenting style is based only on their subjective experience of dealing with parents of children whom they considered to be "good". Shabby.
Incidentally, William Sears has indeed published articles with actual sources independent of The Baby Book. I haven't read them, nor do I really want to after my experiences with his other writing, but I did find this article slamming his views on cry-it-out to be very interesting.
The subjective tone of the authors prevails everywhere in the book. Allow me to paraphrase a sidebar which appears in their section on baby's sleep habits:
There once were two parents who were offered a cry-it-out book to help their baby sleep. They tried it and their baby screamed all night. They were heartbroken and sad and as a result of this method they lost their sympathetic connection to their baby's cries. His crying didn't affect them anymore and they stopped caring for him and took increasingly long vacations away from him. The End.
Please allow me this uncharacteristic slip into leet: lolololololololstfu!!!!1!!11!
That's a very accurate paraphrase of their story and I challenge anybody to find it in The Baby Book and tell me I haven't captured the spirit of it. It's absolutely ridiculous. If these parents, who I doubt actually exist, stopped caring about their baby because of cry-it-out, what the fuck kind of parents were they in the first place? The world is filled with parents, such as myself, who continue to love their children and yet have let them cry-it-out. This bullshit story about two sociopaths who abandon their baby insults my intelligence.
The tone of the book continues to drag it down. The average section begins with inflammitory language wherein the Sears' state their opinion, then they repeat themselves over and over again. Then they say, "but if you can't manage to do this, that's okay too!" Then follows a section whereby they answer the critics of attachment parenting by stating the concerns and then unscientifically stating, "No, actually they're wrong and the opposite thing happens." Here's a parody:
Playpens: The Black Den of Evil
Often we find parents asking us about playpens. Are they good? In our experience, no. To a child, a playpen is a prison and you are an abusive guard. She wails and cries and the parent doesn't respond and she learns that nobody loves her. She needs to crawl everywhere and if you don't let her, her muscles will atrophy and she'll get ADD. You shouldn't own one or think about owning one and you should avert your eyes if you see one.
But it's okay to put her in the playpen if you need to answer the phone. Also, if you can't not put her in a playpen, feel free to do so! You need to feel your own way through parenting, so even if you have to keep her in a cardboard box for six hours, that's fine! We're not judgmental!
Some of you are dumb and won't take us at our word, so here are some of your concerns:
I can't watch my child all the time and playpens keep my baby from falling down the stairs or eating electrical cords. Should I use one?
Absolutely not! If you're watching your baby all the time like you should be, then you can keep her out of electronics. And because we don't believe in using harsh language or physical punishment, your baby will learn "no" but not care about it until she's six, she won't learn anything and you'll get to spend even more time watching her!
My baby always has fun in her playpen and seems to enjoy being in there because it's safe. Is that possible?
In our experience, babies only pretend like they're having fun in their playpen. Inside they are screaming for emotional attachment to their parents, but are too frightened to express themselves because they are afraid that if they cry they will have to spend more time in the playpen as punishment. Babies who find themselves in this predicament grow up to be like Hitler.
I heard a baby was put in a playpen and he died. Is that true?
Yes.
Joking aside, The Baby Book would actually be very helpful if its tone didn't make it unreadable. As that relative observed when she bought it, it is full of great information. I opened it many times for the charts. Personally, I think it could be rewritten. Half could be chopped, namely the paragraphs where they write the same thing over and over again, then some judgmental bullshit and of course one or two stories that probably didn't happen.
As it stands, this book is a giant mess of repeated unobservable and unscientific commandments with some useful charts hidden within it. I'm sure your money could be spent better elsewhere. As for my copy, it eventually left my bedside table and, for a week, it received its greatest use as a block to prop up Kara's carseat so it was level. Then it got returned.
1/2 a value judgment out of 5
And finally, I have some more personal comments to share. I've already railed against the tone of The Baby Book. However, the book does contain a passage that I'll take with me. The Sears ask us to simply not rely heavily on any baby book to raise our children. They say that no book has all the answers and as your child's parent, you know better than anybody else. It's commendable advice and after all the crap I read in this book, I was not expecting to read this passage.
In the end, the Sears are right about intuitive parenting. The truth of how to raise each kid lies somewhere between attachment parenting and Prussian child-rearing. Different kids will respond better to different things. Furthermore, no scientist on earth can accurately tell you how much nurture effects children versus nature. Some kids are born caring and some dispassionate, some artsy and some mechanical, some gregarious and some asocial and nobody knows how or why. Parenting just isn't a science. Those who pretend that parenting is a science are trying to make money.
So take a page out of the book of the man who coined "attachment parenting" and don't take his book that seriously.
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