CIO and The One Trick Pony

Is it just me or are the cry-it-outers of today surprisingly like the spankers of yesterday in their approach towards parenting: they've only got the ONE trick.

Trouble falling asleep? Sudden bout of night wakings at sixteen months?
Cry it out baby, cry it out.

You try to lay out the story, the nuances, the efforts--how it was one way at six months and then it changed around the time he turned one and then it went back for a bit and then there was this fever that screwed everything up... And what do they say? Get a ticket to the one trick pony show, momma, you'll be impressed.

Now when you talk to the other kinds of parents, the kind who have been to the River, they've got ideas, man, they've TRIED things. They've got a middle of the night dance, a weekend at grandma's strategy, a monkey dressed in momma's bathrobe sneak-away trick. And they want the story, the whole screwed-up thing before they suggest anything. They want to know what food my baby ate that day, what type of pjs he had on, how long it was the way it was before it changed.

All of this one size fits all advice about sleep--which, admittedly, was my just punishment for breaking rule no 4. on the Not To Do List: Survival Tips for the First Year--got me thinking about something I read on Dr. Sear's website recently about spanking:

Parents or other caregivers who repeatedly use spanking to control children enter into a lose-lose situation. Not only does the child lose respect for the parent, but the parents also lose out because they develop a spanking mindset and have fewer alternatives to spanking. The parent has fewer preplanned, experience-tested strategies to divert potential behavior, so the child misbehaves more, which calls for more spanking. (http://www.askdrsears.com/html/6/T062100.asp emphasis added)

I'm not really sure if this quote is as much true for the spankers of today as it was for the spankers of our parent's generation because let's face it, spanking is not a popular choice these days. I think this means that parents today who are choosing to spank have likely put some sophisticated, conscious thought and research into the decision, whereas for our parents discipline WAS spanking. Or pinching. Or yelling. Or maybe that was just my family :)

But back to the point that Sears was making which was that spanking leads to less creative, less varied philosophy of discipline. And isn't this a lot like the CIO parenting model?

Your child is misbehaving? You spank.
Your child is awake when she shouldn't be? You cry it out.

One answer, one method, one plan. There's no reconvening after two weeks and seeing what worked. There's no debate over hidden causes for the problem. There is also most certainly no questioning of what the heck normal is in the first place and whether or not we would even want our children to be such a thing.

(image from Library of Congress, circa 1910)