While the bedrooms of the neighbor's children just across the way are dark, save for a night light in the toddler's room, my three-year-old is wide awake. She isn't up past her bedtime. She doesn't have one.

She has those important rituals of bedtime, sure. She is bathed by me or my husband almost every night, her delicate skin covered first in lotion and then a set of fleecy pajamas. We'll generally settle in her bed to read stories, but sometimes in ours. She gets at least two books read every night — one per parent. On that, there is no negotiating.

What's fluid is the time.

Our daughter goes to bed when we do. And so in the hours after my husband comes home from the office and I finish up my work-at-home writing, we spend our time together. We eat dinner together — even if it's on the living room couch, with a dog staring hopefully at a butterfly-shaped plate set precariously on the edge of the coffee table.

That's why there's no bedtime in our household, why the seven o'clock hour does not turn our child into a screaming, writhing pumpkin who just wants another ten minutes to play with her toys or sit between Mommy and Daddy on the couch. We tried it a few times — the march upstairs to the bedroom, the tuck in, the request for water, the tuck in, the pleas to go potty again, the tuck in. Each night it would go on for an hour or two, her too keyed up for bed, us more exhausted by the minute.

Pretty quickly, we realized it wasn't just a rule we didn't like enforcing but one we saw no point in enforcing. If she was awake, why argue her into bed? Why spend our few hours together as a family every night manning our battle stations?

Commenting recently in the New York Times on the fact that President Barack and Michelle Obama enforce a strict eight p.m. bedtime for daughters Sasha and Malia, Dr. Judith Owens, who directs the Pediatric Sleep Disorders Clinic at Hasbro Children's Hospital, says parents unfortunately misjudge the appropriate bedtime because they think their kids need less sleep than they do. Owens says just 2.5 percent of the population needs significantly less sleep than average, but 95 percent of the population wrongly thinks it's in that 2.5 percent category.

But Dr. Perri Klass, who wrote the New York Times piece, points out that the sleep experts suggest "testing your routine by checking whether the child wakes spontaneously, alert and cheerful and ready for the day."

Mine does.

In fact, she still rises earlier in the morning than I do — because she generally still falls asleep before either her father or me, him because he stays up to check out the ESPN scores, me because after a bedtime story, I pick up the latest novel off of my bedside table and spend at least an hour decompressing with some escapist trash.

]]>Jeanne Sager http://www.babble.com/Against-Rooming-In-I-loved-my-new-baby-but-after-a-grueling-labor-I-just-wanted-to-sleep/They say that after forty-eight hours without sleep the human brain begins to slow down. Think of a computer burdened by a hundred different open browsers. After seventy-two hours, psychosis can set in. I for one have first-hand knowledge of this process, not because I was subjected to some covert military experiment, but simply because a year and a half ago, I gave birth to my son at a family birthing center that, like many facilities of its sort, adheres to a policy of "rooming in" for new mothers.

I first learned of this policy about a month before my due date, when my husband and I took a tour of the facility. The nurse showed us one of the post-delivery rooms, letting us marvel at just how un-hospital-like it seemed. And then, as we left the room, she gestured briskly at the hospital's nursery: "But you and your babies hopefully won't be seeing much of that. Our expectation is that babies will be sleeping beside their moms. The nursery is only used for babies experiencing medical complications."

At the time, this sounded great. After waiting nine-plus months to meet the baby of my dreams, why would I possibly want to ship him off to a sterile, fluorescent-lit nursery where I wouldn't be able to stare into his eyes or caress his little hands or cuddle him against my chest? Provided the guy was in good health, why would I not want him beside me every moment of those first few days? In other words, our hospital's rooming-in policy seemed like little more than common sense . . . until, that is, I gave birth.

I know that labor isn't easy for anyone, and having talked to plenty of other moms about their experiences, I feel pretty lucky — no serious complications, no c-section, no back-labor, no tearing or vacuum extractions or other horror scenarios. I went into labor a little after midnight and thirty-two hours later: presto.

As a result, most hospitals now offer parents the choice of having their baby room with them or go to the nursery. And such a choice makes sense; many of the moms I know spoke glowingly about their rooming-in experiences — especially moms who had relatively short labors or sleepy babies who gave them the chance to recover from the not insignificant strains of childbirth. But other women — women who had marathon labors like mine, or difficult labors, women who bore fussy or hungry or colicky babies and then attempted to care for them through the night — found the experience torturous, or in many cases, simply impossible, and were grateful to be able to send the baby to the nursery for a night or two before going home.

Often, I find myself recalling with bitter amusement the tour guide's explanation for our hospital's policy: "We believe that new mothers actually sleep better with their babies close by."

Yes, this must be why enemy interrogators frequently use tape recordings of screaming infants as a form of low-grade torture, because the sound is just so soporific.

]]>Kim Brooks http://www.babble.com/Gimme-Sugar-My-kid-loves-junk-food-and-Im-not-ashamed/Last month, I took my fifteen-month-old son Leo to his friend Elliot?s first birthday party. It was a mostly adult gathering and as we sat around the table the mother of a seven-month old offered him a taste of ice cream from her spoon.

"I?m only giving him a taste," she explained, cheeks flushed. "I almost never give him sugar."

Across the table, the mom of the birthday boy was feeding him the slimmest sliver of carrot cake.

"It is his birthday," she apologized. "This is practically his first sugar. We haven?t even given him meat yet."

Standing in the kitchen doorway where I was letting Leo demolish an entire adult-sized piece of cake, I ? as per usual when then conversation turns to baby diets ? kept my mouth shut.

Because if I opened it, I?d have to admit that the first food Leo ever tasted was ice cream, straight from the plastic spoon at Molly Moon?s ice cream parlor after a trip to the zoo. Then I?d have to admit that on his first birthday he didn?t get some paper-thin slice but a full-sized piece of banana cake with plenty of frosting, and he downed every last crumb. That not only has he eaten meat of pretty much every persuasion, he?s also delved into pizza, fish sticks, and enough homemade cookies and cake to win me the June Cleaver award.

As someone who?s tired of getting the fish-eye from people who seem to think feeding your child a donut is the equivalent to feeding him crack. I?m just going to come clean and say it.

I got my first inkling this wasn?t going to work out when I took Leo to a party when he was about 3 months old.? I watched a father try to steer his two kids away from the chocolate chip cookies and towards a plate of shrimp. Could I pull a lie like that over on my son? That shrimp is a viable choice over a chocolate chip cookie? Surely my kid is going to be smarter than that.

Then there was the friend who told me she never fed her three kids sugar, but that she and her husband pulled the ice cream tub from the freezer every night the second they went to bed. And another friend whose mother raised them on applesauce-sweetened date bars and told them they were cookies. And the mom I met at the park who proudly informed me that she?d baked her daughter a tofu-carob birthday cake for her second birthday and swore up and down this was celebrating. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that building a junk food-free life for Leo would involve a lot of lying? ? and that?s one dynamic I don?t want unfolding between us.

I can?t say I get any support in the popular press with this one. Every time I turn around there?s another parenting magazine or newspaper headline warning me my child?s going to be an obese and angry underachiever if I offer him any snacks besides apple slices and baby carrots.

]]>Nan Mooney http://www.babble.com/The-Sleep-Trainer-How-I-gradually-came-around-to-the-cry-it-out-method/This is an excerpt taken from the sleep chapter of American Parent: My Strange and Surprising Adventures in Modern Babyland, a book part memoir and part history of parenting. It came out June 2, 2009, from Ballantine Books. You can buy it here.

Before Isaac was born, Jennifer and I decided that it would be best to have him sleep next to our bed in a co-sleeper. I was still occasionally having nightmares that left me flailing about on the mattress and I didn't want to risk whacking Isaac in my sleep. But our decision ended up making little difference.

Although we put Isaac down for the night in the co-sleeper, Jennifer would take him out of it for his first nighttime feedings and most of the time — even on the nights Jennifer could have sworn she had put him back — we would wake up to find him lying between us.

When he wasn't crying, it was a pleasure to share a mattress with Isaac. He was warm and mushy and sometimes his heavy breathing made him sound like a purring cat.

His cat sounds notwithstanding, Isaac's presence in our bed wasn't usually a cause for celebration. On a bad night, he would be up almost every hour. I would fall back asleep within minutes, but Jennifer wasn't so lucky. Once he was on our mattress, Isaac ate nonstop and sometimes slept with his hand on Jennifer's breast, as if to ensure that I wouldn't take off with his loot. As he grew older, he began to pinch and claw as well.

"It's like going to sleep every night at an S&M club," Jennifer said.

I thought the plan sounded great until we sat down to discuss the logistics. If Jennifer was no longer going to be feeding Isaac, someone was going to have to comfort him when he woke up in the middle of the night. And since Jennifer had already carried the burden for months, it was now my turn. I accepted my new responsibility without protest, and, as I expected, the transition to milkless nights did not go over so well with our new roommate. The first sign of Isaac waking up was typically the soft thumping of his swaddled feet against his mattress, and the sound alone could strike terror in our hearts. "Oh God, please no," I would say at the sound of those first thumps.

"It can't be," Jennifer would say. "He's been asleep for less than an hour."

And then more thumps, now slightly louder — the footsteps of the approaching villain in the scary movie.

"It just can't be."

(Cue the haunting music.)

"No, no, no."

And then the desperate begging. But here the movie analogy breaks down because rather than begging for mercy from the approaching villain, I would be begging for mercy from my fellow victim.

"Please just wake up with him this time," I would say, fully aware that only hours earlier I had confidently assured her that I would be the one to get up and that it really wasn't a big deal.

"But you said — "

"I know. I know. But . . ."

"But what?"

"I'll give you twenty bucks."

"Sam, we share a bank account. You can't bribe—"

"One hundred dollars!"

I knew, of course, that it could be worse. It was worse, in fact, for our upstairs neighbor, Steve, who had to listen to Isaac scream throughout the night but got none of the benefits of parenthood. Almost every night we would hear Steve wake up after Isaac and then pace around his apartment. This made our stress significantly worse, particularly on the mornings that we saw him coming down the stairs looking as bad as us. After one particularly bad night, Jennifer emailed Steve an apologetic note, to which he replied kindly, and then asked if it would be possible for us to move Isaac to another room.

The next night we dragged Isaac's crib into the kitchen/dining area of our one-bedroom apartment. We were happy to experiment with the new arrangement for Steve's sake, but Isaac sleeping next to the kitchen created a new set of dilemmas. Specifically, we could no longer eat after seven p.m. We managed to avoid using the kitchen for the first few nights, but soon Jennifer and I were making night raids to the pantry on our tiptoes, both of us feeling as though Isaac were the parent, and we the mischievous children.

But the night raids weren't our biggest concern at that moment. Our more serious problem was getting Isaac to fall asleep in his crib. We'd always helped Isaac go to bed for the first time of the night by letting him hold on to one of our hands. It wasn't particularly difficult to reach into the co-sleeper, but giving him a hand in the crib meant standing hunched over the railing for as long as an hour. To escape from Isaac's side, Jennifer and I would try to inch our hands down his body, but even when Isaac's eyes were closed he remained on high alert for such shenanigans. Sometimes I would manage to slip my hand downward so that I was holding only the loose fabric on his pajama footsies and yet somehow he could sense when I let go. It was as though he had installed his own high-tech motion-detector security system in his crib.

Ferber argues that sleeping alone in cribs teaches children to see themselves as independent individuals, and that even if babies seem happy sleeping in bed with their parents, it's probably not a good idea to allow it to continue. In drawing this link between sleeping alone and independence, Ferber was perhaps unknowingly regurgitating a uniquely American myth.

In a 1997 attack on Ferber, the science journalist Robert Wright makes a good point that somehow rarely came up in twentieth-century America. "It isn't obvious to me how a baby would develop a robust sense of autonomy while being confined to a small cubicle with bars on the side and rendered powerless to influence its environment," Wright notes. "I'd be willing to look at the evidence behind this claim, but there isn't any." Nor, for that matter, is there any reason to assume, as Ferber does, that the fear of sleeping alone indicates an emotional problem. Wright can barely contain his dismay at Ferber's insistence that "there must be a reason" why babies are afraid of sleeping alone.

Yes, there must. Here's one candidate: Maybe your child's brain was designed by natural selection over millions of years during which mothers slept with their babies. Maybe back then if babies found themselves completely alone at night it often meant something horrific had happened — the mother had been eaten by a beast, say. Maybe the young brain is designed to respond to this situation by screaming frantically so that any relatives within earshot will discover the child. Maybe, in short, the reason that kids left alone sound terrified is that kids left alone naturally get terrified. Just a theory. But then Wright, who writes regularly about morality and evolution, would be the first to say that there is no reason to assume that what's natural is also what's good.

"Quick, turn up the TV," I said. "We can't listen to the screaming."

Jennifer turned the volume almost all the way up, but behind the roar of The Simpsons we could still hear our son wailing. "I can't do this," Jennifer said. "I'm going out on the balcony."

"Okay," I said. I spread out on the floor and tried to watch The Simpsons. Then I got up and opened the door to the balcony.

"I think it's been five minutes," I said.

Jennifer checked the time on her cellphone. "It's been less than two minutes," she said.

"Right," I said. I lay down again, listened to Isaac, and got back up.

"Is it five minutes yet?" I asked.

"It's not even three," Jennifer said.

"All right, well, maybe I should just go. I mean, by the time I get there . . ."

We both appreciated that it took only ten seconds to walk to his crib, but Jennifer could hear Isaac through the open door and she was breaking down along with me.

"Okay, just go," she said.

I returned to Isaac's crib. My plan was to reassure him that he was not alone, put his pacifier back in his mouth, and then walk away.

]]>Sam Apple