About 8 months into pregnancy, I read this book Our Babies Ourselves based on the recommendation of a woman I met at a random dinner gathering where half of the assembled guests turned out to have been PA's on Entourage. (I live, I am continually surprised to remember, in Los Angeles).
Anyway, it's about culture and parenting and how everybody raises their babies in the molds of their cultural expectation. I threw it across the room a couple times because its (NOT VERY DISGUISED) agenda was that Western parenting is weird and if we just wore our babies and slept with our babies like the !Kung San bushwomen, everyone would be happier. I would readily accept that my baby would be happier being attached to me every second of the day. I am far less sure that I would be happier. And I am also pretty convinced that the !Kung San bushwomen don't have a lot of excess time in their day for things like reading Middlemarch (or even reading about reading Middlemarch) which makes me glad I am not one.
But even though it made me mad, I'm glad I read it because it's helped me understand part of what's going on with the sleep training obsession. People (in the clock-bound, capitalist West) want their babies to fall asleep and stay that way. The demonstrable ways of achieving this (aka Ferberizing) are built on teaching your babies to self-soothe (aka thumb suck). I, typical as I am, am also obsessed with self-soothing. I may have even bragged about it on this very blog. Sleep training sounds very reasonable. It may even turn out to be (we're a few months from trying it) true.
It's also an example of a pretty damn American attitude toward life. Hey, kid, you're 4 months old. What's it most important that you learn in your crib?
Self Reliance!
(I'm also now referring to my baby as the hobbliest goblin of little minds)
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