I've had a lot of time to ruminate in the last week and a half. I've been surprised and pleased at having the time, but less enthused about when I get it: usually from 2-4 a.m. while I'm holding the baby so my wife can get some sleep. Cyprian won't sleep anywhere there isn't a warm body right next to him. It's adorable and precious yet frustrating, since we both feel, as one book on parenting put it, "slaves to a tiny relentless dictator.
In any case, Parenting has gotten me thinking a lot about independence. Any search, no matter how short, will reveal a wide range of heated opinions on how to best encourage infant independence. A lot of this ranges especially around what to do with a sleeping baby. Articles on Co-Sleeping range from distressingly negative to gushingly positive. Some parents say they don't know how baby will sleep any other way (which is largely our experience); others legitimately wrestle with the tragedy of SIDs and suffocations. One article makes the claim that any SID that happens in the parents bed is automatically classified as caused by strangulation / suffocation, assuming and assigning fault and blame onto the parents for practicing something so "dangerous." Other articles point out that the one-bed-per-family-member practice is both an extremely recent and a distinctly cultural phenomenon. Many sometimes have entire families sleep together, and few can afford to have one bed and one room per individual sleeper. Huffington Post has a great article on kids and milestones and the ways that our culture encourages and praises some milestones while other cultures focus on different ones.
With all this going on, though, the two reasons I hear most often to have baby in a separate bed are the danger of co-sleeping and the need for infant independence. The combination of these two has the interesting effect of relegating any loss of independence do a legitimately dangerous level.
In the background of my ruminations I remember sitting in a circle in a professor's house listening to a PhD student from Romania get quite angry talking about the "american myth of independence." At the time I took her words on a fairly superficial level, merely nodding in agreement. Further study and reflection have increased my appreciation for her wisdom. Reading several articles on the necessity of "social capital" for a class on "Jesus and the Disinherited" began to point out to me the drastic importance that the community from which you come has on your life. Teach for America, the organization that got me into the teaching profession, uses a lot of statistics in its promotional material. One of the most frequently cited is that for many children, the quality of their education is determined by little more than their zip code. Jonathan Kozol's book Savage Inequalities details in distressing form the brutal realities of exactly that claim, looking at failing schools right next to wealthy districts in St. Louis, San Antonio, New York City and Newark.
So now I'm asking the following question(s): Is independence a worthwhile goal? Is it a milestone by which I should gauge my infant's development or health? Is it a category I should use to evaluate what is happening in my home or in my life?
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