I Don’t Care If You Sleep Train Your Kid, But This Is Where I Draw The Line
I was a pretty crunchy mama when my kids were little. You know, breastfed them forever, baby wore them till they were preschoolers, let them sleep in my bed (also forever!), cloth diapered them, practiced positive discipline, yadda, yadda, yadda.
Now that they are older, I have learned that the parenting choices you make when your kids are young don’t matter as much as you think when you are in the thick of it. Bottlefed or breastfed, co-slept or crib-slept, your tween is still going to roll their eyes at you if you so much as breathe within ten feet of them.
All that being said, there is a parenting choice that I really can’t abide with – couldn’t when my kids were young, and still can’t put up with for one second today.
It’s the idea that during the course of sleep training, you should leave your child to cry so hard that they vomit. And that if it gets to that point, you shouldn’t so much as pick your child up to console them. Nope, just clean up the puke, and let your child cry some more until they finally drift off into dreamy slumber.
No, this is not a joke. Yes, people do it. And it’s based on actual advice from a published book written co-written by a freaking pediatrician (apparently one who lives in medieval times).
The book in question is called Your Baby Week by Week: The Ultimate Guide to Caring for Your New Baby, and was written by Dr. Caroline Fertleman, a pediatrician at the Whittington Hospital in London, and Simone Cave, a former health editor at the Daily Mirror.
