Download Why I no longer believe babies should cry

Why I no longer believe babies should cry themselves to sleep
GABOR MATÉ , The Globe and Mail
‘Some of our friends see us as weak parents because we haven’t Ferberized our children,”
says my niece Rachel Maté, a 33-year-old Vancouver lawyer and mother of two. ”
‘You’re letting your baby control your lives,’ they argue. But it would break my heart to
let my baby cry without comforting her.”
Named after Dr. Richard Ferber, the pediatric sleep expert quoted in Jan Wong’s article
(in this section last week) on parents who share their beds with their children,
Ferberization is the process of “training” an infant to sleep by ignoring her crying. As a
family physician, I used to advocate the Ferber technique and, as a parent, practised it
myself. Since then, I have come to believe that the method is harmful to infant
development and to a child’s long-term emotional health.
Ferberization seems simple: “After about one week, your infant will learn that crying
earns nothing more than a brief check from you, and isn’t worth the effort. She’ll learn to
fall asleep on her own, without your help,” reads Dr. Ferber’s advice. The question is,
what else does a baby learn when treated this way and what is the impact of such
learning?
People cannot consciously recall what they “learned” in the first year of life, because the
brain structures that store narrative memory are not yet developed. But
neuropsychological research has established that human beings have a far more powerful
memory system imprinted in their nervous systems called intrinsic memory. Intrinsic
memory encodes the emotional aspects of early experience, mostly in the prefrontal lobe
of the brain. These emotional memories may last a lifetime. Without any recall of the
events that originally encoded them, they serve as a template for how we perceive the
world and how we react to later occurrences.
Is the world a friendly and nurturing place, or an indifferent or even hostile one? Can we
trust other human beings to recognize, understand and honour our needs, or do we have
to shut down emotionally to protect ourselves from feeling vulnerable? These are
fundamental questions that we resolve largely with our implicit memory system rather
than with our conscious minds. As psychologist and leading memory researcher Daniel
Schacter has written, intrinsic memory is active “when people are influenced by past
experience without any awareness that they are remembering.”
The implicit message an infant receives from having her cries ignored is that the world —
as represented by her caregivers — is indifferent to her feelings. That is not at all what
loving parents intend.
Unfortunately, it’s not parental intentions that a baby integrates into her world view, but
how parents respond to her. This is why, if I could relive my life, I would do much of my
parenting differently.
When the infant falls asleep after a period of wailing and frustrated cries for help, it is not
that she has learned the “skill” of falling asleep. What has happened is that her brain, to
escape the overwhelming pain of abandonment, shuts down. It’s an automatic
neurological mechanism. In effect, the baby gives up. The short-term goal of the
exhausted parents has been achieved, but at the price of harming the child’s long-term
emotional vulnerability. Encoded in her cortex is an implicit sense of a non-caring
universe.
The concepts behind Ferberization precede the publication of Dr. Ferber’s 1985 bestseller
Solve Your Child’s Sleep Problem. Forty years earlier, Benjamin Spock proposed the
very same approach in his seminal book Baby and Child Care. The cure for what Dr.
Spock called “chronic resistance to sleep in infancy” is straightforward. The way to
ensure that the infant doesn’t “get away with such tyranny,” he wrote, was to “say good
night affectionately but firmly, walk out of the room, and don’t go back.”
Dr. Spock was a great pioneer of humane and loving child rearing and much of his advice
refuted the harsh Victorian practices prevalent in his days. On this sleep issue, however,
he ignored his own admonition that parents should trust their own instincts and gut
feelings and not defer to the opinion of experts.
Monica Moster, an 80-year-old grandmother of seven, recalls what it felt like for her to
follow such advice with her own children. “It was torture for me to do it,” she says. “It
went against all my motherly emotions.”
Rachel Maté reports that even some of her friends who believe in Ferberization have a
hard time of it. “I know women who have to stand in the shower with their hands over
their ears so they can’t hear their baby crying. It’s traumatic not just to baby, but also to
parent.”
In our stressed society, time is at a premium. Beholden to our worldly schedules, we try
to adapt our children to our needs, rather than serving theirs. More “primitive” aboriginal
peoples in Africa and North and South America kept their infants with them at all times.
They had not yet learned to suppress their parenting instincts.
The baby who cries for the parent is not engaging in “tyranny,” she is expressing her
deepest need — emotional and physical contact with the parent. The deceptive
convenience of Ferberization is one more way in which our society fails the needs of the
developing child.
Vancouver physician Gabor Maté is the co-author of Hold On To Your Kids: Why
Parents Need to Matter More Than Peers.