Today is Blog Action day and the topic is Human Rights. It seems the perfect day to announce on EP that I have taken up a new role: I am now a member of the Advisory Board for the Children’s Health and Human Rights Partnership.
Often when I write about crying-it-out or controlled crying, I get comments from people who have done it asking what else they should have done in their sleep deprived state. The question concerns me because it highlights not only how mainstream the idea of leaving a child to cry has become, but also about how ignorant society is as a whole about the alternatives to sleep training.
Do you think the world would be a better place without the "mommy wars"? That we need to just support one another and accept that every choice is valid and equal? I call bullshit on the whole thing.
The recent piece on sleep training sparked what I believe to be misguided outrage in many people. I want to address some of the issues that were brought up and speak generally about the importance of what we promote to families.
If you have a child under five, if you watch children under five, if you have grandchildren under five, or if you just care about children under five… GET YOUR HANDS ON THIS BOOK.
You know how everyone keeps saying it's up to us to prove the risk of harm from sleep training? Well, we have the beginnings of this with a new review piece looking at outcomes for sleep training of infants under six months of age.
The argument is that if you have a warmer relationship at other times, the failure to be responsiveness or to even be hurtful is not a problem. The problem is that science doesn't back that up at all...
Do you believe that children are our equals? What does this theory look like in practice and are we doing our children any favours by acting as though they are?
Shouldn’t we all support each other? Hmmm… well, no. Not that I don’t think we don’t offer support to any parent who asks for advice moving forward, but do we give carte blanche to all actions? Absolutely not. Or at least absolutely not for me.
Yes, I am one of those people who used to argue that routine infant circumcision was a "personal" (i.e., parental) decision. And then I learned...
