Thank you for the feedback and the suggestions. I'll try and post on the topic of dreams in the next week or two.
One reader writes:
"I have tried sleep training in the past, when my daughter was an infant, but was not able to stick with it because of my fear that I was causing my child some psychological harm by not responding to her cries. I had a lot of questions nagging on me as I listened to her cries. Am I sending my child the message that mother is no longer responsive to her needs? Am I just teaching her learned helplessness? Will she be angry or confused? Is all of the intense crying going raise her stress hormones or damage her amygdala? These are the sorts of questions/fears that sabotage my efforts to adhere to sleep training. I would find it very helpful if you could discuss studies that have looked at the long-term consequences of sleep training. Are there studies comparing children who were sleep-trained to children who were not? I guess I just want some reassurance that letting my child cry it out until she learns to sleep won't cause her psychological harm".
I am not aware of comparative studies that have looked at the long term effects of sleep behavior modification on child development, and think it would be difficult to conduct such studies, as there would be very many confounding variables, and it would also be impossible to blind the subjects, their parents, and/or the observers to whether or not the intervention had been made for a specific child.
My feeling, though, is that as sleep behavior modification is a process which can generally be implemented within (and often in less than) a week, any deleterious effects on the child's well being and development are negligible and fleeting. There really is no difference between teaching a two year old that she needs to fall asleep on her own and insisting that she have lunch before hitting the cookie jar. In both cases, she knows what she wants, but the parent has the broader perspective, and the authority, to enforce the behavioral standards acceptable in the family, even if they run contrary to what she wants.
As for developing learned helplessness, or the belief that her mother is no longer responsive to her needs, I don't think that these should be points for concern. We are, after all, discussing changing the ground rules of one, very specific component of a multifaceted relationship. The rest of the relationship, including its very foundations, remains stable. There should be no reason for the child to question her mother's love, or responsiveness to her needs, just because she is being asked to fall asleep on her own. This is, after all, the same mother who continues to feed, clothe, hug, kiss, sing to, tell stories to, and bathe her.
