WEANING
My daughter is now officially one year old, and has celebrated this milestone by becoming bipedal. Most mornings I wake up to her stumbling down the hallway in a manner that is not entirely unlike the drunks who stumble by our apartment on Saturday nights. In fact, both my daughter and the drunks are similarly inclined to loud, and largely unintelligible random shouts best described as vowel movements.
But I digress.
With age comes responsibility, and my wife and I have decided that it is time to start weaning our daughter from the boob. This is a scary prospect, as my daughter loves the boob more than just about anything. "WAAaaoooooaannnhhhh!" she shouts, roughly translated as "I love boob!" or "Give me the boob!" Come to think of it, this may also be what the drunks are yelling about.
I have digressed again.
What I am trying to get at it is this: we are now embarking on a plan to slowly wean our daughter from the boob. It will start with what is called "night weaning," or not breastfeeding her when she wakes up during the middle of the night. Logically, this should also help her sleeping, because if there's no boob waiting for her when she wakes up, what's the point of waking up at all?
The authority on night weaning for many parents is Dr.Marc Weissbluth's book Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child. Normally, I go out of my way to avoid all such manuals dealing with child-rearing, preferring instead to let my child's development unfold like a great mystery novel full of unexpected twists and shocking discoveries.
But in this case I agreed to read what the good doctor had to say, and as near as I can tell, he advocates that during the night weaning process parents should turn into reptiles. Specifically, he describes a sequence of actions that seems to approximate the parenting style of an alligator, whereby the parent alligator is at first attentive, then becomes steadily indifferent, and finally is perfectly willing to eat the child.
He calls this process "fading," and it involves the following steps:
-Respond promptly, spend as much time as needed
-Father gives bottle or mother doesn't nurse.
-No bottle
-No singing or talking
-No physical contact
-No eye contact
-Delay response
-No response
-Eat child
Believe it or not, the good doctor then goes on to say that this gradual method is basically for parental wusses and has no chance whatsoever of working. Instead, he prefers a method called (and I'm not making this up) "extinction" where you skip the above steps and instead eat your child immediately. It reads like a torture manual: "This procedure strikes many people as too harsh, too abrupt, or cruel. Those are personal value judgments, but bear in mind that this procedure is effective. It works."
This is why I don't read parenting books.
But I digress.
With age comes responsibility, and my wife and I have decided that it is time to start weaning our daughter from the boob. This is a scary prospect, as my daughter loves the boob more than just about anything. "WAAaaoooooaannnhhhh!" she shouts, roughly translated as "I love boob!" or "Give me the boob!" Come to think of it, this may also be what the drunks are yelling about.
I have digressed again.
What I am trying to get at it is this: we are now embarking on a plan to slowly wean our daughter from the boob. It will start with what is called "night weaning," or not breastfeeding her when she wakes up during the middle of the night. Logically, this should also help her sleeping, because if there's no boob waiting for her when she wakes up, what's the point of waking up at all?
The authority on night weaning for many parents is Dr.Marc Weissbluth's book Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child. Normally, I go out of my way to avoid all such manuals dealing with child-rearing, preferring instead to let my child's development unfold like a great mystery novel full of unexpected twists and shocking discoveries.
But in this case I agreed to read what the good doctor had to say, and as near as I can tell, he advocates that during the night weaning process parents should turn into reptiles. Specifically, he describes a sequence of actions that seems to approximate the parenting style of an alligator, whereby the parent alligator is at first attentive, then becomes steadily indifferent, and finally is perfectly willing to eat the child.
He calls this process "fading," and it involves the following steps:
-Respond promptly, spend as much time as needed
-Father gives bottle or mother doesn't nurse.
-No bottle
-No singing or talking
-No physical contact
-No eye contact
-Delay response
-No response
-Eat child
Believe it or not, the good doctor then goes on to say that this gradual method is basically for parental wusses and has no chance whatsoever of working. Instead, he prefers a method called (and I'm not making this up) "extinction" where you skip the above steps and instead eat your child immediately. It reads like a torture manual: "This procedure strikes many people as too harsh, too abrupt, or cruel. Those are personal value judgments, but bear in mind that this procedure is effective. It works."
This is why I don't read parenting books.