My Date with Dr. Ferber
An excerpt from "Afterbirth."
by Caroline Bicks
June 24, 2009
L.A. may be the city of dreams. But, for us parents, Boston is the city of sleep. All of the greatest pediatric sleep doctors practice there. You can feel the pulse of their giant brain-veins as you drive down Longwood Ave. and Storrow Drive, past the medical
Walk of Fame: Boston Children’s, Beth Israel, Mass. General, Dana-Farber. Homes to the greatest baby doctors on earth. So great, you know them by one name, like Bono, or Angelina, or God. To us, they are superstars: Sears, Brazelton, and, of course, the great
Ferber. The man who made "cry it out" a household phrase. A man so famous that he has his own verb: Ferberize. As in, "We can’t go out tonight, we’re Ferberizing little Max."
Ferberizing is the Ironman of competitive parenting: You train your baby to sleep on his own by letting him scream his little lungs out all alone wondering where the hell you went. It’s not for the weak or the lazy.
But if you have the stony heart to do it, it’s worth it. Because, as every overachieving parent knows, it’s all about the sleep: how soon your child does it through the night, how long, and how deeply. It’s the single biggest mark of success or failure in
the first three months or parenthood. The faster you reach it, the sooner little Max can get on with tracking a raisin with his eyes and packing his bags for Harvard.
So, naturally, if you live in Boston and you want your child to have an edge, you try to get a piece of the sleep doctors. Anxious and overeducated, we’ll line up, like Oscar day gawkers, to catch a glimpse of the great ones — to hear them speak, or to rub
elbows with them at your husband’s boss’s college roommate who went to med school with one of them’s cocktail party.
Some parents might even have the balls to seek an appointment. Fat chance. Someone has to actually die before a space opens up and, even then, there are parents who’ve been waiting years ahead of you. Get in line, groupie. You can’t sleep your way to the
sleep doctors in this town.
"Is she sleeping through the night?" is a land mine of a question.You need to know all this so you can appreciate what it is I’m about to tell you. I’m not a lucky person. I don’t win preschool raffles, or baby-shower games, or Blues Clues Bingo. But one day— one frigid New England Monday— my luck changed. I got the golden
ticket of competitive parenting.
My daughter hadn’t slept through the night in four and a half years. In other words, never. For a while we were able to make excuses for her: "Oh, she needs to eat every few hours"; or, "We just moved, so she’s in a transition period"; or, "it’s Daylight
Savings. Again." Every few months we’d buy another sleep book, read it, and try the latest method out on her for a week or so, but none of them ever took. Then we’d get too tired, or lose the book, and things would just keep on keeping on.
We never volunteered any of this information. But inevitably we would get asked The Question: "Is she sleeping through the night?" Now, this is a land mine of a question. It seems harmless, but what the person really wants to know is: "Are you a lazy slacker?"
or, if they’re newish parents, "Are you worse at this than I am?" The few times we fell into the trap of telling people the truth, they’d start in about setting limits and consistency. Usually this would be followed by a lecture on their personal sleep guru’s
philosophy and how, with the right commitment, it worked for them.
The point is, no one feels sorry for you when your kid is the "Bad Sleeper." They just look at you like you represent everything that’s wrong with the world: negligence, sloth, incompetence. Like I can’t be bothered with sleep training because I’m too busy
surfing the Internet for cheap deals on recalled car seats. To make things worse, every time we turned around there’d be another study out about how sleep deprivation makes you stupid and fat. Great. Now we weren’t just lame. We were dumb, fat,
and lame.
About the Author
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Caroline Bicks is an English professor at Boston College. Her work has been heard on NPR and seen at ImprovBoston, and she performs regularly
in "Afterbirth: Stories You Won't Read in a Parenting Magazine." If you
think birth is tough now, check out her book Midwiving Subjects in
Shakespeare's England.
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