There are times when I think that the single purpose of parenting is to destroy preconceived notions.

Yesterday I reached an all-time low in masochistic self-humiliation. I entertained my daughter by jiggling the fat on my belly. My belly has never recovered from pregnancy, and makes a very good “bowl full of jelly” illustration. Apparently this is quite entertaining. For some.

Yesterday I committed another act that, prior to this week, I would have told anyone would never take place in my house.

I let my child cry herself to sleep.

I have always been anti-Ferber. Not to the point of raining judgement down on other people’s parenting choices, I am well aware that I am not in a position to decide what’s best for someone whose circumstances are not my own. But for MY house, for MY CHILD, I knew that Ferber was not the answer.

Button has never been particularly difficult to put to bed. We rock her, give her a bottle, turn on the music and put her down. Usually when supplied with her music and her love monkey, she’ll go to sleep without too much resistance.

She has, however, always been one of those babies who increases tension through crying (as opposed to releasing it). That’s the main reason we knew we could never do the Cry It Out method, because she has never been able to cry it out. She works herself up into hysterics to the point where she’s gasping, panicked, and physically can’t calm down. We have never let her get to the point of throwing up, but have no doubt that if we left her long enough, that would be the next step, followed shortly by permanent emotional damage.

So once we put her down, if she was unable to get to sleep on her own and started crying, I* returned to her and held her, rocked her etc. until she was sleepy enough to put down without realizing that we were putting her down and leaving.

For some reason, everything has changed in the last week. No matter how tired, she refuses to go to sleep. Instead, the minute she senses me moving out of the room, she stands up and starts crying. So I would go back in, calm her down, lay her on her back and stay there until she commenced with the finger-twirling-her-hair-routine that precedes sleep. I’d sneak out of the room and make it half way down the stairs before the screaming began.

After several nights of repeated rounds of this, it became quite clear to me that something wasn’t working. So I put my best 11-Month Old Thinking Cap on to try to figure out what it was, and I saw the following issue: She relaxes, I leave. She cries, I return. And suddenly, it became quite clear that I was unwittingly encouraging the behavior that I find so frustrating.

So I made a new executive decision. At night, I will read her a story, rock her for a few minutes and put her down. I will tell her I love her and kiss her good night. And then I will leave, shut the door, and not return.

I am theorizing that this will help solve the problem because:

• She will have a predictable bedtime routine
• She will know that I’m leaving the room, so she won’t suddenly realize that she’s alone and think she’s been abandoned.
• She will have to un-learn the idea that crying brings Mommy back and delays bedtime
• She will have to learn how to put herself to sleep

At least, that’s what I’m hoping for. I listened to her cry last night for probably 5-10 minutes before she quieted down. I only got through that because by the time I came up with this plan, I had already been back to her room 12 times and was too damn frustrated to get all soft about the crying.

Tonight I tried it again from the start. I put her down, said good night and walked away. She cried for under a minute, and it never reached the level of distress that indicates the point of no return (where she is unable to calm herself down without help/comfort). That gives me hope.

It’s a very strange feeling when you begin to realize that you have to move toward the more structured phase of parenting. Where you have to do more than just love the child…you have to train, discipline, teach. There’s a lot more pressure there. And it seems to be mostly trial and error.

I’m hoping for less error.

* For some reason, the bedtime routine has become MY duty. J says she won’t sleep for him, that she only goes to sleep when I put her down. That might change with the new routine.

This entry was posted on Friday, September 22nd, 2006 at 10:10 pm and is filed under Body Issues, Confessions, Parenting, Sleep Deprivation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.