The Sleepless Generation
The unhappy results of the war on sleep-training.
by Melissa Rayworth
May 12, 2008
It's similar at Stacey Codlin's house, near Seattle. She and her husband Craig let their now two-year-old son, Hunter, begin crying it out around six months. "The first night was really difficult," she says. "We sat there in bed listening to him cry, and at forty-five minutes we turned on all the lights and started flipping through the baby books to find out what we were doing wrong." Weeks later, they tried again. "We did it for three nights. He cried forty-five minutes the first night, then twenty minutes the second night, then barely anything the third night."
It's been pretty calm ever since. Some nights, when they're done reading, he asks for more stories. But most nights "we'll put him down, and he says goodnight. He may stay awake on his own, playing with the animals in his bed, but that's all." Still, trips like their recent cross-country move can disrupt things. That's when the "crying it out" process begins all over again. Hunter, she says, may cry for an hour or two, or even much of the night.
I shudder when I hear that.
3. Crackberrys
We don't exactly lead by example when it comes to winding down after dinner and getting ready for bed. Many of us need our kids asleep on time because we've got a conference call scheduled for 9 p.m., plus a dozen emails that need replies. On weeknights, our work schedules also lead us to crave time with our kids in the hours between dinner and bedtime. We haven't seen them all day, so we pack in an hour of fun. Then we're stuck with energized (and often overtired) kids who've come to expect intervention to help them fall asleep.
4. The Professionalization of Parenthood
We come to parenthood armed with unprecedented amounts of information about the raising of children — much of it grounded in science and research, some of it bogus pop psych, and all of it potentially paranoia-inducing. New parenting-related books hit the market literally daily. We're also more educated and professional than any previous generation of parents. So we micro-manage everything from work-time to playtime to bedtime.
5. Guilt
Sometimes our kids cry when we say goodbye in the morning at daycare, and sometimes they're understandably frustrated when we try to rush them through the dinner-bath-pajamas-book routine. When your child begs you to stay in his room for a just a few more minutes at night, and you didn't get many minutes together all day, it's kind of impossible to say no. Even if part of you thinks he'd be better off if you simply said goodnight.
Letting either of my sons cry for hours isn't something I can do. But I've come to believe that a total intolerance for a child's tears and discomfort can be really destructive.
Psychology Today editor-at-large Hara Estroff Marano says many parents have become convinced that bedtime tears must be eliminated, so they intervene constantly. Whether because of guilt or lack of time with our kids or a backlash against our own experiences being parented by hands-off Boomers, today's parents are obsessively involved in bedtime.
"Anxiety has always gone along with parenting," Marano says. "But this generation is especially anxious. They try to cram everything in, managing everything the kids are exposed to," including that most personal of experiences: sleep. The obsession with sleep management reflects the modern parental view that everything in a child's life must be managed down to the finest detail.
"So many of these people are really professional women and they're used to being in charge of things. They're results-oriented, goal-oriented," she says. "They're professionalizing every aspect of parenthood ... taking the values they have in the office and applying them at home."
In researching her new book, A Nation of Wimps: The High Cost of Invasive Parenting, Marano found parents across the country putting their kids at risk in the name of protecting them from all discomfort. "They sense that this is not good, because they were not raised this way and they turned out okay. But they are terrified to stop, because they have this singular fear that their child will be left behind."
©2008 Melissa Rayworth and Nerve Media
About the Author
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Melissa Rayworth writes about American culture, sexual politics and parenting for The Associated Press and other national news outlets. She lives in Pittsburgh with her husband and two sons, making frequent trips to New York City for work and play. |
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