Ferberizing Your Young Adult
Monday, July 20th, 2009Emma slept through the night at seven-and-a-half weeks, and was a marathon napper through toddlerhood. I never had to contend with letting non-sleeping babies cry. I never needed to know about “Ferberizing.”
Ferberizing, named after its inventor, Dr. Richard Ferber, is a method of encouraging independent sleep by allowing a baby to cry for progressively longer intervals without excessive soothing. The real trick is to increase the parents’ ability to wait out their infants’ crying without rushing in to pick them up. Staunch adherents of the attachment parenting style promoted by renowned pediatrician Dr. William Sears view Ferberizing as verging on child abuse. Many exhausted parents swear by it, but warn that it is not for the faint-hearted: You have to be able to tolerate your baby crying, sometimes for long periods.
If Emma had been a poor sleeper, I would have been a faint-hearted mother who failed miserably at Ferberizing, unable to bear the torture of my baby’s distress.
Now I can’t sleep because my 21-year-old baby is distressed. Emma was not a colicky infant, but she has been a dyspeptic college student, on an erratic trajectory of fits and starts for three years now. Just as she is starting to straighten out her course, we puncture her dreams by telling her we will not pay for yet another super-expensive school that would mean tens of thousands of dollars in debt. I do not know if this is a limit we need to set, or if we are knocking her off the ladder she is using to climb out of the hole she’s been in. Now she’s calling in a state of collapse, raging, paralyzed, sobbing, unable to imagine a future or even get out of bed. Is this a tantrum to be ignored, or a tailspin requiring intervention? Everyone says I must resist the urge to pick her up, she must learn to make it through this crisis, this is what she must do in order to grow up.
But I can hardly bear it. My blouse is no longer milk-soaked in response to her cries, but the instinct to board the next plane so I can rock her in my arms is powerfully activated.
My head is with the Ferberizers, but my heart is with Dr. Sears.
The good doctor maintains that “crying it out” methods encourage parents to become desensitized to an infant’s needs. Babies need responsive parents more than they need to learn self-soothing.
How do I know what Emma needs now? Is it better to let her figure out how to soothe herself, or to swoop in and hold her? What is the difference between helpful support and disastrous enabling of regression? Should I be a desensitized parent, or a responsive one? Perhaps what looks like responsiveness is actually the last thing she needs. Then again, perhaps what looks like desensitivity is just that—insensitive and harmful. What’s a mother to do?
I remind myself that the original Ferberizing debate is about what infants need to be able to sleep securely through the night. My baby is no longer an infant, but an emerging adult. She sleeps fine, but needs help in learning she can make it on her own. Even the attachment zealots would try to dissuade me from rushing to pick her up.
Everyone I know—from my husband to my therapist to my best friends to my mother-in-law—employs a full body block to keep me from boarding that plane to go rescue Emma. Since they have impeccable attachment credentials themselves, I go against my better judgment and decide to listen. So I stay away from airports, phones, and e-mail. Emma stays away from us—an Iron Curtain of silence descends. I imagine her frozen exactly as she was during our last call–sobbing, paralyzed, and even more incapacitated because her mother has abandoned her.
Somehow, I white-knuckle it through her distress—and mine.
A month later, Emma ends the silent treatment. She’s fine—making new plans, recovering from disappointment, figuring things out on her own. Not only is she sleeping through the night, she is growing up.
Now I, too, can sleep through the night—a happily Ferberized mother.
ABOUT THIS AUTHOR
Lorrie Goldin is a psychotherapist who practices in San Rafael and Berkeley (www.lorriegoldin.com). Her essays have appeared on NPR and in various publications. She is married and the mother of two teenagers, and is beginning to see the light through the disintegrating twigs of the empty nest.
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Oh, Lorrie…Good writing, and good decision. I am struggling with Faberizing my 10 year old (love this concept applied to non-babies, thanks!), and sometimes I wonder if it gets easier once he gets older. Your blog made me wonder if my struggles now are nothing but resilency training for more things to come in the future… Thank you for writing this.
Too bad even Dr. Ferber renounced this method after having a child of his own. I find my oldest, now 15, who I used the “Ferber Method” on before I knew better is actually the least confident and the least independent of my four children. I used attachment parenting with the other three.
In addition, Ferber had some definite thoughts about parents sleeping with their newborns, or what he termed as bed sharing. In 1985 he wrote, “Sleeping alone is an important part of [your child’s] learning to be able to separate from you without anxiety and to see himself [or herself] as an independent individual.”
In a recent Newsweek interview Ferber said, “That’s the one sentence I wish I never wrote. It was describing the general thinking of the time, but it was not describing my own experience or philosophy”.
http://www.healthplans.com/articledetails.php?articleid=6042
Dr. Ferber, 61, says that he has been largely misunderstood. When he first published his book in 1985, “there weren’t any others,” he says. The book, which has been reprinted 45 times, contains advice on a range of sleep issues, from bed-wetting to teens who can’t get up for school on time. But he is most known for his signature controlled-crying method, which involves leaving a baby alone in the crib to cry for progressively longer intervals until he or she falls asleep. Parents are instructed to go into the room at the end of each interval to console — but not touch or pick up — the child.
Dr. Ferber, who is also director of the Center for Pediatric Sleep Disorders at Children’s Hospital in Boston, says that now, “we’ve had a lot more experience. There really are a lot of different ways” for children to learn good sleep habits.
Dr. Ferber says that he will be revising his book because some parts need to be updated. For instance, he says new research suggests that babies don’t need as much sleep as he originally advised. And he wants to clarify that his crying technique was targeted at a specific problem: the child who can fall asleep only while being rocked or held. While he still presents this approach in his new edition, he says he tells parents they can use gradual steps to wean a child off of rocking and soothing behaviors. And he clarifies that some children such as those suffering from anxiety will not be helped by the crying method.
Anji, did you ever think that your Ferberized child might be the least confident and the least independent of your 4, BECAUSE you treated the other three different? Just sayin……Also, Ferber didn’t renounce his method….he updated it. It’s still basically the same, just less conservative, probably for more book sales.
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Dr. Ferber says that he will be revising his book because some parts need to be updated. For instance, he says new research suggests that babies don’t need as much sleep as he originally advised. And he wants to clarify that his crying technique was targeted at a specific problem: the child who can fall asleep only while being rocked or held. While he still presents this approach in his new edition, he says he tells parents they can use gradual steps to wean a child off of rocking and soothing behaviors. And he clarifies that some children such as those suffering from anxiety will not be helped by the crying method.