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October 22, 2005
Ideology and Relationships
Francis Porretto has a thought-provoking essay on women's desires and constraints, well worth reading. It brought to mind something that I've been thinking about in another context: co-sleeping. Co-sleeping is the practice of having very young children sleep in the bed with their parents. For the advocates of co-sleeping, the benefits are numerous and significant: children generally seem happier and better-adjusted when they sleep with their parents, until (generally around age 4) they desire their own bed; the children obviously know that they want and need this closeness, security and protection, as evidenced by how they cry and cry when they cannot have it, and are contented when they get it; the parents also want and need this closeness, as evidenced by how difficult it is to not go pick up the babies and bring them to bed with you; the babies, especially, wake up in the middle of the night, but both wake up less often and go back to sleep far more easily if they are already with their mother. For the opponents of co-sleeping, the detriments are numerous and significant: it makes it much harder to find time and space for sex; you probably need to buy a bigger bed than you had before, or an accessory bed that attaches to the normal bed and where the baby can sleep; numerous child experts advise against it, and their "advice" usually takes the form of "you will suffocate your baby!!!!!!!!"; toddlers also wake up in the middle of the night, and when they are being potty trained they might wet the bed if they aren't wearing pullups, or the pullups might leak; children sleeping in the same bed as their parents aren't as "independent".
Frankly, I come down on the co-sleeping side, because of one and only one thing: I could not allow my first child to cry himself to sleep merely because he wanted his parents' comfort, because he couldn't deal with the world on his own and sleep soundly. Because, in effect, I didn't want my son to learn that "independence" often means "being alone and without protection, guidance or help". It worked so well, I kept it.
But here's the thing: there are enormous social pressures brought to bear on anyone who parents in a traditional way, if that means the way that humans have parented in all societies for all but the past 150 years or so, before we began to fetishize science over tradition. What is "traditional" now, and this is a big argument against anyone who parents otherwise, is to let children cry themselves to sleep, to feed from a bottle, to make birth and growth into medical events, and to fob your children off on strangers any chance you get and for as long as possible. The pressures — on mothers in particular — are enormous, particularly if the mother doesn't work outside the home. Perhaps this explains, at least in part, the rampant drug use and sex among teenagers, denigration of one's elders, and general rudeness of Americans these days: they've been taught their entire lives to grab what they can, because there's no one there to help out, particularly if you're not already in a massive crisis.
The problem here is the same as that faced by Fran's amalgam woman: too many people don't trust themselves. To live without fear of arbitrary death or dismemberment, to do what you want without the unwarranted interference of others, and to seek your own happiness in whatever way seems most appropriate to you are all that matters; everything else is bunk. Unless you are an absolute idiot, if you do what feels most comfortable to you — in relationships, child rearing, career choices, politics, home computer preference, or whatever — you are almost certainly going to do the right thing. If you are an absolute idiot, no amount of help or advice is going to make a difference in any case.
Ideology will be the death of us.
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Comments
Co-sleeping for us was hugely beneficial and so necessary that I do find it hard to imagine how almost every other child would not prefer it and would find that it felt right. And it needn't severely restrict parents either, given a little ingenuity on the part of parents and a big enough space.
Posted by: Carlotta at October 23, 2005 9:34 PM