A culture of controlled crying - Our Addiction to Professional Advice
Despite evidence suggesting sleep training practices can be damaging to infant mental health, we as a culture continue to embrace controlled crying as a panacea for all our family sleep issues.
What is the appeal of controlled crying? ;Why is it the first recommendation of our doctors and child health nurses who supposedly play an important role in our children's health and wellbeing? ;Why do we parents, in desperate sleep deprivation, accept their advice as gospel? ;And why do we feel like failures when we follow the formula, but still don't succeed?
We are, most of us, the cultural product of modern times. ;Raised alongside the television and its limited images of modern family life; suckered by media depicting easy, convenient parenthood and babies that eat, sleep and eliminate without fuss or bother; bombarded with advertising designed to appeal to the stereotype within us all.
We are children of the drive-thru fast food era; accustomed to convenience, instant gratification and a quick-fix. ;We are consumers; we know what we want and when we want it and we're willing to pay for it. ;We are disappointed when our expectations are not met. ;We have learned inflexibility and instead of adapting to our changing environment, we insist our environment adapt to us. ;To our environmental detriment, this trend creeps over the globe.
We have been conditioned to assume certain comforts, a hot meal, recreation time, a good night's sleep, are our basic human rights. ;Few of us have experienced life with babies and small children before greeting our own offspring and life has ill equipped us for the hardship, the physical and emotional wear-and-tear, of parenting – night time parenting in particular. ;Nothing in our lives before baby ever challenged our comfort zones and our ability to cope under sleep-deprived stress. ;Our 'rights' violated, we imagine we are being manipulated by our offspring for their own gain! ;
Isolated from good role models, extended family support and detached from our communities, our pain is real! ;We have no support and no realistic information to inform our actions. ;Our baby is abnormal! ;We can't cope any more! ;Lacking in creativity, we turn to the professionals.
Each year ;tens of thousands of overweight people turn to weigh loss centres for a diet and weight loss regime when the formula for sustained weight loss is universally known and evident with just a bit of research and, more challenging than that, some lifestyle change. ;But only a minority of people choose to lose weight independent of organisational support. ;We look for menu plans, recipes, energy tables – ANYTHING that can standardise our experience and give us expectations of measurable success. ;
Sleep training for babies is no different. ;We seek a one-size-fits-all formula for success; something that can guarantee that we will achieve our goal of the optimally sleeping baby. ;Teachable techniques and an easy-to-follow formula only contribute to the appeal of controlled crying techniques. ;Courses and do-it-yourself books abound in the belief that we can train our babies to sleep longer and harder than evolution has equipped them to. ;The expectation of a soundly sleeping baby is developmentally unrealistic. ;Yet, it is a powerfully idealistic expectation and so long as it seems attainable the sleep experts continue to create their own target market of desperate and vulnerable new parents.
It takes more than a formula applied to find a 'solution' to our family sleep issues. ;Often, our ancestors and other, less western cultures can teach us a lot about humane baby-raising, valuing breastfeeding, accepting the time investment and emotional commitment that babies and small children demand of their parents and developing an extended support network to help us find our way through the child raising maze. ;
We have lost our connection, our community, our common sense and our creative parenting instinct, but we can recreate these in our lives by rejecting a culture of controlled crying and seeking out others who desire a more flexible, gentle and respectful path to family harmony.
Jodie Miller - Author
Jodie is the mother of four and lives with her husband, Paul in the Samford Valley. Jodie has been active in the birth reform movement in Queensland since the birth of her first child.
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