Ferberizing Finny

When Finny was sick for an endless seven days from his nasty reaction to the MMR shot, we spent a lot of time trying to make him comfortable enough to sleep. He woke up every couple hours hot and inconsolable, and as every responsible parent knows, this is not the time to make him cry it out. So we did everything from rocking to co-sleeping to pacing the halls to Thomas the Train watching to cheese-eating to Tylenoling to pajama changing to curling up on the hardwood floor beside his crib in order to help him get back to sleep. When he finally was back to his old laughy, Tupperware-re-organizing self again, we were so relieved to see our chipper little boy and looking forward to getting back to life as we knew it.

What we soon discovered was that although Finny was up for playing and eating again, he was not up for sleeping alone again. He still needed to be rocked to sleep and continued to wake up crying multiple times throughout the night. Initially, we complied. After all, this poor kid had just been through a lot, and if he needed a little comfort at night to get back to normal, well, we were there for him.

But after a few days of rocking and snuggling and tiptoeing out of his room only for him to hear the tiniest creak in the door, wake up, need rocking and snuggling and tiptoeing again, and after a few nights of sleeping with my glasses on and a pretty rockin’ crick in my left shoulder from our early morning co-sleeping position, I realized that I was being, well, manipulated, and it might be time to bring in the big guns. That’s when I decided to call on Richard Ferber, M.D.

It just so happened that that week on our new favorite show, Modern Family, Cam and Mitchell were Ferberizing their baby girl, Lily. The show humorized the conflict involved in the Ferber method of “crying it out.” Mitchell, on the one hand, was stoic and believed they were doing what was right by their daughter: making her suffer in the short run in order to give her the gift of self-soothing for the long run. The sensitive Cam, on the other hand, couldn’t resist picking up the poor, suffering Lily and soothing her himself. I saw myself relating a lot to Cam but admiring Mitchell. While I would do almost anything to keep Finny healthy and protect him from suffering, including but not limited to giving him a kidney, throwing myself in front of a train, or taking a bite of pureed baby sweet potatoes and pretending they’re delicious, I could not see how giving up my uninterrupted sleep for a perfectly healthy toddler was really going to benefit either of us.

So I did it. For four to five nights, I listened anxiously as he cried it out. The first night it took a seemingly endless thirty-five minutes. If he woke in the middle of the night, I went in to check that he hadn’t wet through his diaper or that the fever had not returned, but when I knew he was all right, I laid him down, told him gently to go back to sleep and I walked out and shut the door behind me. Sometimes it would take twenty to thirty minutes, but each day it got better, until Thursday of last week, he actually slept in until eight a.m.! So far this week, he is going to bed at eight and not waking up until close to seven. Yesterday, he even napped for an hour in the morning and four hours in the afternoon, a nap time so gloriously long, I was nearly twiddling my thumbs by the end of it.

When it comes down to it, most mothers I know are extremely self-sacrificing. It comes with the job, and there’s great joy that comes from that kind of sacrificial love. But sometimes, when it’s not quite right and your sleeping with your glasses on, and it’s not joy you’re feeling but resentment, it’s time to re-evaluate. Sometimes we need someone to give us permission to try the tough love. We need someone to tell us that if we let the baby cry himself to sleep, it doesn’t mean we love him less. In a way, it’s a very selfless thing to do. Because as tempting as it is to want our children to need us and never want to leave us, it is not our job to raise dependants. One of the greatest gifts of love we can give them is a skill set that allows them to get along in this world without us. So I guess I’ll start with one of my personal favorites: the glorious gift of uninterrupted sleep. He may think I’m punishing him now, but I’m pretty confident he’ll thank me for it when he lives with twelve other dudes in college. While they’re up all night drinking and partying because their mothers didn’t have the courage to Ferberize them, my little Finny will be sleeping soundly to the soothing sounds of his Beatles Lullaby CD. I can almost guarantee it.