On October 21st at 5.21 AM I became the happiest person I have ever been. My daughter Nina was born and I am now responsible for the life of another human being. Parenting has so far been full of stillness. A lot of people have warned me, “Oh, you will never sleep again; prepare to be busy 24/7, etc.“. I now wonder how much of that is because parents feel there are a lot of shoulds, and they really shouldn’t.

A simple example is bedsharing. This has seemed obvious to me for a long time. Why would parents spend their days together with their baby; being close, nursing, and cuddling, and then when night starts suddenly separate themselves? How must this feel for someone who came into the world just a few days ago? Current recommendations are that babies sleep safest in their own beds. Here is a passage from the book “The Science of Mom” by Alice Callahan

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Cee was 3 weeks old when I felt like I was being swallowed into a fog of cumulative sleep deprivation . My mother had returned to her own life several thousand miles away , and my husband was flying around the country for job interviews . I was facing newborn night duty alone , and between diaper changes and breastfeeding and soothing Cee back to sleep , I found myself piecing together my sleep in 30 - minute increments . During one endless night , after I’d nursed Cee in my bed in the wee hours , we fell asleep together . I woke to find sunlight streaming across the bed and my baby still sleeping sweetly next to me , her eyelids newborn translucent . “ Crap ! ” I thought . “ We’re cosleeping . I don’t want to cosleep ! ” But it happened again the next night and the night after that . When my husband returned home , he was relegated to sleeping on the couch , while Cee and I shared our bed . With Cee in my bed , I felt more rested , and I no longer resented her frequent night awakenings . Sleeping next to her made it easier to breastfeed during the night , and she often went back to sleep without a fuss when she could feel my body close to hers .

Alice goes on to explain how she felt conflicted about continuing to co-sleep because after all the baby is not safe in the bed with her mother. Her mother could roll over her, cover her with a blanket or similar thus increasing the chance of the terrible case of SIDS, sudden infant death syndrome.

I understand this, when I first had my daughter resting on my chest I was in a state of complete bliss, yet also scared. Newborns’ breathing mechanisms are not fully developed and they tend to breathe unevenly, sometimes more frequently to the point of sounding like hyperventilation. Whenever there was a change in her breathing, I would immediately worry and think, 'Is she still breathing? I understand how it can be scary with a newborn, and SIDS is no joke. It must be unimaginably terrible to experience.

So what goes wrong here with the recommendation of bedsharing? The problem is scientism. That terrible disease of modern times when “The Science” is treated like an authority that can be used to answer pretty much any question in the world. The problem is that science can only provide explanations about the physical world; it cannot tell you what to do. Whether or not you should sleep next to your child is a question that scientific explanations can partly inform or criticize, but these explanations are only part of the answer. For instance, science cannot say anything about how it feels to be left alone by your parents at night. How a mother feels having to leave her baby alone, hearing her cry, and sometimes even using the CIO method, which entails leaving your baby to Cry It Out, essentially torturing the child to sleep.

This is not the place to answer all questions about how to do bedsharing safely, there are books written about that such as James Mckenna’s Safe Infant Sleep. The main point here is about the problem with ‘shoulds’. Should is fundamentally a question of morality, and morality is the problem of what to do next. The answer to that question cannot be derived from rules, that would be a “touchstone of truth”. Morality is objective, there are rights and wrongs. That means that our only way of learning what to do in morality is the same as in all realms of objective knowledge; conjecture and refutations. Just as we cannot use a rule to derive a new scientific theory we cannot use a rule to derive answers to individual questions about what to do next. We need to identify what the problem is and try to guess a solution that improves the problem-situation.

In the context of parenting, I find that shoulds are all over the place. You should let your child do this, forbid that, make them try this, don’t let them do that. If you search YouTube for “ideas for how to play with your newborn” on youtube, the videos that have the highest rankings are videos with the titles “Do this for optimal brain development” or “Play for healthy development”. Contrast this with “ideas for how to play with your friends”. The answers there are all about “must try fun games” etc. They are geared towards having fun. When it comes to children there are games that we should do because they lead to “better brains” (don’t get me started on the “science” behind that”, I am sure it is complete rubbish). When it comes to our friends it is all about having fun. Who cares about what you should do in the sense of improving yourself according to some external criteria?

This creates a weird and ultimately destructive dynamic between the parent and the child. The parent is trying to manufacture something that works, similar to building a car. What is forgotten is that the child is a human being; creative and open-ended. They are not supposed to become anything predetermined, that would be a way to create static and doomed cultures.

Parenting is rife with shoulds that are often scientistic and authoritarian. We can opt out though. Ease out of the shoulds, relax, and experience the calm of helping each other out and having fun instead.

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