Declaration of Mutual Dependence

The baby has to learn to sleep independently, to sleep through the night by herself.. It’s developmental.

Yup, that’s what most parenting advice would have you believe. The baby has to learn to sleep by herself in order to develop her independence as a human being.

Some advice even tells you to let the baby cry and cry by herself for long stretches of time until she learns that you won’t come to her in the night. At night, she has to be independent.

Of all the parenting advice I’ve read in the past few years, that’s the biggest bunch of crap I encountered. The baby doesn’t need to learn to be independent. The baby needs to learn that she is secure, that her parents (i.e. mothers with milk and breasts) will come to her during the night to bring her food and comfort if that’s what she needs.

And this is the parenting advice that taught me just how ideologically loaded most formal parenting advice is. There isn’t just an agenda in most parenting books, there is an ideology. Back when I was up with my babies multiple times during the night (last week?) I often wondered what the parenting advice in the Soviet Union or Red China said about a baby’s sleep and independence. Perhaps that they need to sleep through the night for the good of the collective?

But it also strikes me this morning that urging a person to grow up to be independent is dysfunctional in another way. When I became a mother, I lost so much of the independence that being an American has conditioned me to treasure. I can’t set my schedule, do the work my soul burns for at the moment I need to do it, take a shower, get dressed, or even sleep unless all my other ducks are in a row. Is my husband available to watch the children? How many minutes are left on that DVD? Is the school open? Will they please, please, please settle down and go to sleep so I too can get the rest I desperately need?

And I also desperately need those children, the ones who are carrying around my heart.

Raising children to be independent does not prepare them to be parents themselves. It trains them to resent the ways in which parenting (or at least mothering?) curtails their independence.

Maybe this week we should celebrate our mutual dependence, rather than our individual and national independence.