Last week was a rough week for Luke. He cut two teeth and had an appointment with the pediatrician involving another round of vaccinations. While waiting for the doctor, I filled out the idiot form. Oh, you’re not familiar with the idiot form? Allow me to explain. When you take your infant into Kaiser for a checkup, you get an idiot form to fill out with yes-or-no questions like, “Do you shake your baby?” or “Do you leave your baby alone in the bath tub?” All the correct checkboxes fall in the right-hand column and all the incorrect ones on the left so the doctor can quickly ascertain what breed of idiot you are and set about curing your erroneous parenting techniques.
I filled out the form quickly (parents of infants fill out all forms quickly) and three-quarters of the way down the page I noticed that two of my answers fell in the wrong column. “Do you put your baby to bed when (s)he is drowsy but not asleep?” “Does your baby sleep through the night?” No and no. Uh-oh. There’s a lecture coming.
Now my pediatrician is pretty cool. She listens well and is generally not into unnecessary medication or procedures, which I appreciate. But she’s a good Kaiser doctor nonetheless and she’ll read the form and address the idiot questions.
“Hmm,” she says, holding the form. “Not sleeping through the night?”
“A couple of times,” I say, trying not to wince.
“And what do you do when he wakes up?”
Trick question. “Pick him up?” I offer with rapidly disappearing confidence. “Then I feed him and rock him back to sleep?”
My doctor then begins to tell me, gently, that Luke is entering the age where he will begin to realize that his actions can effect my actions and that we could be creating some bad habits.
Ah, the cry-it-out debate. It goes something like this: if you don’t teach him to put himself back to sleep, he’ll never learn. I’ve heard it from friends and medical professionals alike. When my child cries in the middle of the night, I’m supposed to let him cry it out (presuming nothing is legitimately wrong, and how I’m supposed to establish that without picking him up and going through the list is a mystery to me). Twenty minutes, they say. Let him cry for twenty minutes and he’ll tucker himself out.
I’ve resisted this advice thus far. It’s hard for me to imagine that my four-month old infant is deliberately and maliciously manipulating me.
Luke generally wakes up twice in the night: once around 2 a.m. and again around 5:30 a.m. I take the first shift, changing his diaper and feeding him until he drops back off to sleep. Shawn takes the next shift, when he changes him again, if necessary, and then delivers him to me in bed for a snack. He finishes off the morning cuddling with us in bed. It’s do-able. I like our mornings together. He wakes up smiling and cooing, snug and secure. Sure, it’d be nice to sleep for 8 hours straight, but at what cost? Is it worth nights of lying in bed in a puddle of milk and guilt while I listen to my child scream for me?
A friend and fellow parent told me, “It won’t hurt him. The only person you’ll be hurting is yourself.”
I’m not so sure.
He could be cold. He could be hungry. He could be wet. He could just be lonely and scared. Is this how you teach an infant self-reliance? Forgive me for being sensitive, but it seems like all I’ll be teaching my son is that he can’t depend on me to be there when he needs me.
I’m the mommy. I’m supposed to make it all better. That’s my job.
I remember what it was like to be alone and scared in the middle of the night as a child. (Shoot -- sometimes I still feel that way.) My parents’ door was always open to me. And I still turn to them for help in moments of doubt. So when I finished with the pediatrician, of course I called my mom.
“Maybe with some kids, at some point, you have to go down that road,” she tells me. “I never did it with you or your sister. I just couldn’t. Follow your instincts, honey.”
Fast-forward to the wee hours of the next morning. I return to bed with Luke in my arms at 5:45 a.m. Shawn rolls over bleary-eyed and looks at the clock.
“I’m sorry,” he says. “It’s my shift.”
“Shift, nothing,” I reply. “This is the first time he’s woken up tonight.”
Shawn blinks. “He slept 7 hours?”
“Seven hours and forty-five minutes.”
“Wow.”
“Uh huh.”
Luke settles into his snack and Shawn and I smile in the dark over the top of his head. “Good boy.”
Thank you very much for your advice, Doctor, but I think we’re doing okay.