Are We Really Such Monsters?
Everything today is "child abuse."
by Lakis Polycarpou
August 18, 2008
The quickness with which some parents and others are willing to pull out all stops and accuse their ideological opponents of child abuse is all the stranger when we reflect on the many cases of real child abuse that we hear about in the media on an almost daily basis. But for some reason, rather than giving us some perspective on, say, sleep-training or breastfeeding, this barrage of terrible images and stories seems to sensitize many people to the point where, at least rhetorically, they are willing to call almost any diversion from their own idealized parenting norms "abusive." To me, the sheer illogic of equating so-called "abuse" with real abuse suggests that something else is going on — something that has more to do with parents and their anxieties than with the actual welfare of children.
This is not to deny the importance or emotional weight of any of the parenting issues under contention. When my wife became pregnant with our first child in 2001, we — like all good parents in our demographic — sought out a book for advice. We settled on one written by Dr. William Sears, the pediatrician who coined the term "attachment parenting" — a philosophy of child rearing that emphasizes breast-feeding on demand, co-sleeping and, perhaps most importantly, never leaving babies to cry themselves to sleep in their cribs. Sears' advice seemed refreshingly sane, humane and compassionate.
Our feelings were validated by the experience of a friend who had "sleep-trained" her baby by putting him in his own crib awake and letting him learn to "self-soothe" until he fell asleep. When, a month later, her doctor told her to stop nursing and switch to formula because her baby was failing to thrive, we all worried that the sleep training may have played a role.
But a year or so later, we had a five-month-old who had never slept for more than two hours at a stretch — usually less — and my wife and I hit a point of bleary-eyed despair. Our pediatrician told us what to do: put him in the crib and let him cry. Our efforts at sleep-training were sporadic, guilt-laden and complicated by other matters (it turned out my son had persistent reflux). To hear many attachment parenting advocates tell it, though, even trying sleep-training was a form of child abuse.
It would be tempting to dismiss this kind of rhetoric as a case of careless hyperbole. Surely these parents don't really believe that anyone who lets an infant cry in his crib is doing something that differs only in degree from beating or shaking a child? If you look at what some experts actually say, though, it's hard not to draw that conclusion. Our pediatrician told us what to do: put him in the crib and let him cry.In a recent episode of Nightline, Harvard researcher Michael Commons put it this way: "There's nothing wrong with having them cry it out, if you want to risk brain damage." He then suggested that crying it out could cause attachment or even borderline personality disorders. "Hitler was a borderline personality. And so was Saddam Hussein," he calmly noted.
Many of Commons' conclusions, however, are based on observations of children in Romanian orphanages, which he then extrapolates to the average, generally loving American home in which frazzled parents let kids cry in their cribs for a controlled period in order for everyone to get some more sleep. By contrast, there are other studies (such as one appearing in last April's Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine) correlating certain typical attachment parenting behaviors (mother present at sleep onset, giving food or drink when child awakens) past age two with later occurrences of bad dreams, less sleep at night and difficulty falling asleep.
©2008 Lakis Polycarpou and Nerve Media
About the Author
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Lakis Polycarpou is a freelance writer, husband, and father of three. He has written for The Washington Post, The Believer and Next American City, among other publications. He also blogs regularly about energy and urban planning at City of the Future. Lakis lives in Washington Heights, New York City. |
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