When writers fail to come up with reasons to explain the multitude of ways families make sleep work for them, it seems they default to blaming other parents to make sense of children who don't fit into a neat and tidy sleep category. Stay at home parents and working parents are all too well aware of the "mommy wars" manufactured by mainstream media to gain ratings and readership.
These types of parenting wars only fuel the distrust of families toward each other and increase parents' insecurity about their own instinctive parenting skills. Concerned parents find themselves relying on outside "experts" and "coaches" to give the answers that conscious parenting reveals simply through one on one communication.
In recent months, within these same parent writing circles, there appears to be a stronger backlash against attachment parenting families who co-sleep, with some writers scapegoating this choice as the bad seed that starts a spiral of failure for all parents. To validate their own arguments, these writers feel the need to downplay and denigrate other families' choices, going so far as to throw statistics around loosely in desperation.
Chicago Parent magazine recently ran an article on the dangers of adult lack of sleep in this month's issue and discussed establishing a nighttime routine for your baby at about 8 weeks. Wisely, the writer of the article, Christy L. Bonstell, suggested the routine include proven calming strategies such as a warm bath or reading before bedtime. But, unfortunately Bonstell began the same article with yet another co-sleeping "horror story" we see too often in parenting advice articles: one that described parents Jennifer and Dan who allowed their child to co-sleep with them in their bed.
The parents later compromised and realized their daughter would fall asleep if they "stayed with Lily in her own room until she fell asleep and then backed away." Although they say they are planning to prevent the same experience with Lily's new sibling.
More than bashing co-sleeping as a valid parenting method, Babble, the online magazine that bills itself for "a new generation of parents" recently ran an article titled, "The Sleepless Generation", which unfairly targeted co-sleeping as a menace to families' physical and mental health. The article used statistics irresponsibly and thankfully, commenters quickly retaliated as writer Melissa Rayworth indicated co-sleeping as the culprit for everything from parental guilt to why children don't nap regularly. Rayworth cites contradictory and downright misleading information several times in the article to back her argument on repercussions of allowing co-sleeping.
Using another polarizing argument about today's parents being overinvolved, Rayworth begins writing herself into a hole, inadvertently turning the tables on the her own rigid belief that children must be on a sleeping schedule in a certain location by a certain timetable. She quotes Psychology Today editor-at-large Hara Estroff Marano who, in a bizarre twist, appears to believe the problem with children's sleep patterns is the direct fault of working mothers. They are the ones who are wanting to make co-sleeping work at all costs and ruining it for all others.
"So many of these people are really professional women and they're used to being in charge of things. They're results-oriented, goal-oriented," Marano says. "They're professionalizing every aspect of parenthood ... taking the values they have in the office and applying them at home."
So, let's get this straight, by citing Marano, Rayworth is arguing that working women are to blame for children wanting to sleep close to their parents? Sexist, to be sure, not to mention grossly innacurate when the number of co-sleeping families includes both stay at home parents and work at home parents as well. Continuing on, all of Rayworth's cited examples show parents with children who were once co-sleeping and now unable to. In these examples, the children want to continue the practice against the wishes of their parents who are trying to make sleeping separately work at all costs with failed results.
This practice of blaming attachment parenting families isn't just found in parenting blogs and magazines, but too often in major national news media. A recent LA times article highlighting deaths of children who were alleged to have been sleeping next to a parent left out crucial information from the story's lead paragraphs when it placed these facts at the very bottom of the article.
"Patricia Ploehn, director of the county Department of Children and Family Services, recalled a case in 2006 in which a father sitting on a chair fell asleep with his infant child sleeping on his chest; he awoke to find that the infant had slipped in between the armrest and seat cushion and died."
"Some of the co-sleeping deaths were connected with parents who were under the influence of drugs, but others were not, Ploehn said."
Safe co-sleeping, what leading attachment parenting advocate Dr. Bob Sears calls for, does not include sleeping with your baby in a chair or being under the influence of alchohol or drugs at bedtime. Sears is quoted in the article disagreeing with the "blanket statement that the practice (of co-sleeping) is unsafe all the time." His site, "Ask Dr. Sears", also lists safe sleeping guidelines for babies in cribs.
When parents and parent writers blame harmless choices, they clearly undermine their own usefulness and abilities as mothers and fathers. Just as differing learning styles have been recognized in children with alternative educational methods now proven to work for different children, parent writers stand to gain more respect if they show respect for differing sleep styles and parenting methods without feeling threatened to defend why those methods didn't work for their own family.
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