wot dejags said: "well I disagree with your statement that they all become light sleepers at this stage. That's a sweeping generalisation."
wot i said: "may i suggest more reading on how the infant brain develops between say 12 wks and 16 wks?"
how dejags interpreted it: "Kiskidee, your post about me reading more was condescending in the extreme"
I am sorry but i didn't tell you to 'read more' as if i thought you didn't read enough. That sounds like a misinterpretation of my post. i qualitatively implied that you may not be aware of how infant sleep changes and why at a certain stage and reading more about that would help.
if it was too brusque, i apologize as i said, i am spending too much time on the net.
i do not want to take the 'moral high ground' to say one sleep method is better than another as others have suggested.
i take my position on CC based fact that there is no study, never mind a bank of studies to assess the effects (positive or not) of CC. we know its effectivity, that is all. we also know that cc doesn't always work. we also know by looking at how babies sleep in sleep labs in many variations of sleep environments and flag up discrepancies on why solitary infant sleep can cause problems for infants (and parents). which is why the routine advice to CC must be questioned and CC itself studied very carefully. I go back to the saying 'no evidence of harm is not the same thing as evidence of no harm'.
because there are a lot of studies on infant sleep which shows the benefits of co-sleeping - in its many forms (so many people assume co-sleeping means bedsharing only, or only all night bedsharing.) bedsharing is one kind of co-sleeping. Co-sleeping is a continuum of sleeping habits that extends from all night in the same bed to not in the bed at all but only in the same room. I don't get into discussions by backing myself into a corner. as arguementative as i may come across at times, it is due to lack of time that i do not measure my words. i apologize for that.
Another reason i take a strong position on CC is that so many people have been pressured by friends, family, hv and national sleep policy about where and how a baby should sleep and that usually means alone, in a cot, in a different room - the usual objective of CC - and some cheekily suggest with a few walls between parents and baby. It ignores the reality that a lot of people co-sleep some of the time and often with a great amount of guilt but would do so more happily if the gov't or their freinds family etc, was honest with them or even knew that co-sleeping is safe and beneficial in many physical and emotional ways and is even safer than solitary sleep when cosleeping is done following a few simple guidelines.
see research by Ball, Hooker et al in the Sleep lab at Durham University which found that more than of 40% respondents co-slept than they intended to do before their babies were born. Why they co-slept is another minefield of contradictions, social values, and guilt and can take 20 yrs of scientific debate and still not come to a quorum.
A lot of co-sleeping is done as reactive co-sleeping. When adults do it as a last resort to solve the conditioning of a sleep habit that did not 'take'. ie usually solitary sleep for an infant. Reactive co-sleeping comes with a different set of baggage than non-reactive co-sleeping (ie, cosleeping out of choice or tradition.)
I also take a strong position on sleep i strongly advocate breastfeeding and because infant sleep is inextricably tied to feeding method. As more women bf, the more 'sleep issues' they will face because bf babies sleep differently from ff ones. family, friends, and health professionals put pressure on them to have their babies sleep more like ff ones which anadvertently or not encourage mothers to wean their babies from the breast and to practice sleep training which may be going against the grain of their instinct or objectives.
Most of the sleep research on which the national policies of the UK and US are based on reseach which were conducted with ff babies sleeping alone in a cot when this set of circumstances is not how sleep evolved in babies. we are asked to make our babies conform to a set of sleeping conditions that are totally alien to their more normal sleep expectations.
That health professionals (never mind) lay people routinely tell parents to let their baby CIO or CC or whatever when they do not consider the unique family circumstances or even recommend it for babies taht are too young, or don't even give people an understanding of what really to do when they say 'control cry', or 'sleep train' or 'self soothe' etc.
Because i come from a culture where parents routinely sleep with their babies in the same room, same hammock, bed, etc, and we don't view children as having 'sleep problems'. so it made me ask a lot of questions when my midwife told me my (newborn) baby was 'comfort sucking' and that 'i must not hold my baby too much' etc, etc. and i found lots of answers for questions i too ignorant to ask. i also found that it had answers to questions about my own cultural experiences. because i have questioned those too.
Because national policy on infant sleep dictates solitary sleep as the 'best' thing for my baby and many parents find out taht their babies don't conform to national policy and then become unsure of what to do next. Ferber, or SWMNBN, et al don't tell you what to do when sleep training doesn't take either so then, what.
I take a strong position not because i want to take the moral high ground, or because i want to justify what i do (i am so past that in age and experience.) I was stupid enough earlier to give a personal answer (which i point out the poster specifically asked me to do) to a very specific question which led to me being judged in 2 dimensional fashion by it. I know better than to give personalised information on a message board. me all the more stupid.
my only intention when i initially posted on this thread was to raise awareness of the misconception that conditioning and teaching are 2 different things and why it must be clarified that CC is conditioning, not teaching. which no one seems to be disputing anymore so is it safe to assume that i had a point??? I should know better because i continually get past one little point.
i am more interested in keeping the sleep debate alive (notice not the cosleeping or CC debate) and asking people to question what they do and to question what other people tell them to do.
so here are a few articles which can answer some questions you may not even realise are out there. your intrepretation of these articles will, i expect, be different from mine because i am a unique individual in a unique set of circumstance and so are you.
link - Why We Never Asked, Is It Safe For Infants To Sleep Alone.
- very long but worth reading
link - on why we need to distinguish between reactive and non reactive cosleeping.
link - why babies should never sleep alone. a review of the co-sleeping controversy.
link - the article in the New Yorker in which Ferber agrees that CC does not always work and that sleeping with your baby is actually fine.
i put these links up here, not because i want to prove that CC (or solitary sleep) is wrong. no research exists to allow me to make such a claim. i put them there to raise awareness that solitary sleep, one expected end result of cc is not always in the best interests of mother or baby and that other sleep arrangements are advantageous to mother, father and baby so wider public approval of those methods should receive more equal acceptance and recommendations.