Bruce Feiler - Where God Was Born, Abraham, Walking The Bible

Is My Daughter a Pharaoh?
Thursday, March 1, 2007

I'm in Dallas this morning, and one of the reasons I like going on the road every now and then is that, as the father of 22-month-old identical twins, I can get a good night sleep. But here I am at 6:15 AM local time, waiting to do a Sirius Radio interview, and reading an article in the NYT about sleep problems and children.

Indeed, this is Topic # 1 among parents I know. Our pediatrician persuaded us very early on that we are raising a generation of sleep-deprived kids -- from baby until teenager -- and that we should be tough from day one. Oh, boy, did our friends and even our parents sometimes disagree. But we have tried, and now we're doing okay.

Yet now I read that the real battles have yet to begin?! The NYT chimes in this morning with a huge piece about toddlers sharing their parents beds, and the parents being shipped off to the kids beds. Aaarggh! This section rung true to me:

Ms. Lange spoke of a generational swing. “When I was growing up,” she said, “my parents’ bed was verboten. It wasn’t even on the table. I remember one night when I was scared as a child, I slept in the hallway, on the floor in front of their closed door. I had a lot of very serious boundaries when I was growing up. Now I think there is a backlash.”

Neil Newman, a clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst in Manhattan, treats parents and children over 5 years old, many of whom are struggling with sleep battles. “If I had to generalize,” he said, “I’d say it usually has something to do with separation or boundaries. It might be a problem of anxiety, but mostly the origin of the problem is the difficulty parents have in setting appropriate limits. It’s commonly believed in the mental health field that it’s important the children learn to sleep on their own. Not doing it often generalizes to other problems, because it’s about a fairly important way that parents say no to their child.”

Sleep specialists deploy a medley of behavioral and cognitive therapies: saying good night and then sitting in a chair that moves farther and farther away from the room each evening; proxy items (stuffed animals to “stand in” for the parent); handmade books that tell the story of the child going to sleep in her own bed. Amy Powers, a Houston mother, painted a “whole nighttime chronology,” she said, in a mural on her 4-year-old daughter Sarah’s wall. Sarah’s bed is a white four-poster, with a pink canopy and zebra-striped netting over the whole affair.

“It’s wonderful and it’s wasted,” Ms. Powers said. “By the time she’s ready to sleep in her own room, she’s going to be over the whole princess thing.”

And I have to say, when I read that section about the "nighttime chronology," it reminded me precisely of the paintings in the tombs of the pharaohs with depictions of what happened to the pharaoh overnight as he waited to be touched by the God of the Sun in the morning. My princess has become a pharaoh!

Labels: Family

Posted by B Feiler at 7:04 AM
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