Word: sleepings
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...known methods of torture is sleep deprivation. It can make a person desperate. That is why parents of small children, as soon as all the common-sense strategies backfire and a woozy reality sets in, start combing bookshelves for a sleep guru. Someone who will please explain, preferably in three easy-to-follow steps, how to get their baby to sleep...
...every given moment. Severe as it sounds, it seems to work. Since the age of three months, our little Beatrice has slept from 7 to 7. When they hear about this, hardened parents choke back a combination of disbelief and envy. "Just wait until the four-month sleep regression," cautioned a friend. (Never came.) "Are you sure something's not wrong with her?" asked another with faux concern...
Perhaps none of the dread offspring archetypes--the thumb sucker, the binky addict, the colicky screamer--is more feared than the bad sleeper, and parents will try any formula that offers the prospect of some rest. Sleep manuals outsell even the baby bible What to Expect When You're Expecting. For years, parents have clung to competing sleep-training camps (Never wake a sleeping baby! No naps in the stroller!) in hopeful desperation. So when Dr. Richard Ferber, author of the best-selling 1985 book Solve Your Child's Sleep Problems, seemingly backpedaled on his signature "cry it out" technique...
Ferberization is one of the most popular, if harrowing, sleep techniques. Recalcitrant sleepers are left shrieking in their cribs for progressively longer periods at night so as to learn to soothe themselves. Deeply conflicted parents are instructed to ignore howls and wails until the allotted moment, at which point they can coo at--but not pick up--their babies before leaving them to suffer themselves to sleep. For parents who successfully Ferberize, the method is a godsend, if by way of purgatory. Even fans shudder at the recollection of those tear-stained nights, when every fiber of their bodies called...
...intensity of debate between the two--online, in Mommy & Me groups, at the playground--is so charged that one wonders if anyone is really getting any sleep at all. Message-board moderators on sites like iVillage have had to restrain posters from attacking one another. My very own Baby Nazi (actually a British baby nurse named Gina Ford, author of The Contented Little Baby) is so reviled by some that one Amazon.com reviewer wrote, "Should be called Have a Convenient Baby"; another, "This book will ruin your life...