It was an article in The New Yorker by John Seabrook, in which the author hunted down a man named Ferber, whose research gave birth to a cold-blooded method of training babies to sleep. As I recall, Seabrook and his wife had been made miserable by their newborn’s tendency to holler through the night. Addled by lack of sleep, they set out to “Ferberize” their child. This meant shutting the door and clinging to each other as their baby in the next room shrieked with greater and greater urgency. Ferber extremists believe that parents should leave their infant to learn how to fall asleep on its own, even if the poor creature becomes so upset it vomits. One book even suggests that parents spread a plastic sheet under the baby’s crib to catch the mess. Before Seabrook went this far, he set out to find Ferber. When he found him, he also found that Ferber had recanted. He was no longer quite so sure about his early research. Millions of babies were being tortured without a theory. Even if we had a theory, we couldn’t abide by it.
