Joshua Gans, (author of the forthcoming Parentonomics), has an interesting post on “data-driven Parenting.”
Turns out that there is a cool web service: Trixie Tracker, that allows parents to record and revisit information on sleep, nappy changes, feeding (both breast-milk and solids), medicines, and pumping.
Keeping track of your child’s evolving sleeping patterns (via the internet or even your iPhone) can help you visualize helpful or distressing trends.
The owners of this and similar services have suggested a willingness to share their data with researchers. But the biggest opportunity is to use one of these sites as a platform for running randomized tests.
For example, there is still a bit of a controversy about whether it is useful to “Ferberize” babies. The Ferber Sleep Method is a warm, loving bedtime routine after which you lie your baby in bed awake and leave him (even if he cries) for gradually longer periods of time.
There was a great Mad About You episode (shot as one continuous take) of the Buckmans Ferberizing their infant.
A short term randomized test would not be able to assess whether Ferberization scars the child in the long term. But if Trixie Tracker recruited some parents to participate in a randomized study, you could assess the impact on the children’s sleep patterns and on the parents’ sleep and psychological well-being.
The idea is that Trixie Tracker would ask its registered users if they would be willing, for the sake of science, to be randomly assigned to the Ferber (loving, “leave them crying”) method or the rock them asleep method.
Many parents would refuse outright. But some couples are torn and might welcome contributing to finding out what works. I don’t think a randomized control trial has been run on this basic question that catches the sleep-deprived attention of many new born parents.
and 
. You can also watch it on 
I agree with Tzipporah. Having parents self select into this process would make it near impossible to seperate out the effects of “ferberizing”.
Love Dr. Weisbluth’s Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child!!
What gets me is the attachment/natural parents who will start potty training a child via “elimination communication” at 6 weeks and yet the idea of “training” a kid sleep is complete anathema.
Luckily (since each kid and each parent is different) we can choose whatever parenting method we want, though I have to say that any method is aided most by consistency.
Also have to agree with those who find it highly suspect for a parent to turn over these kinds of decisions to someone else (in order to participate in a study).
John, you might want to ask your wife how capable a baby is of “manipulation” – must be quite advanced babies you have there, if they are aware of the effect that their cries have on your emotions and slyly employ that to their advantage to achieve the goal of getting picked up and thus declare victory over you.
Come on – crying is an instinctive response to discomfort and a child will not become capable of manipulative behavior until years later, regardless of how manipulated a given parent might “feel.” That’s in your mind, not theirs.
Wow, a parent that would willingly subject their baby to a randomization of parenting method? Sounds like a pretty strong selection bias towards indecisive or insecure parents. So all we’ll know is the efficacy of the Ferber method for parents lacking in convictions. What about the rest of us who think we have the ability to make decisions about raising our kids?
Ferberization is a cruel and unusual punishment! A 70′s invention to cater the needs of the working parents. In other cultures, everyone sleeps on one bed or share the same room, babies rarely cry for long periods of time (only when tired, wet, and hungry), etc etc… It’s an industrial thing — and it got Ferber a lot of money and prestige selling his books.
Few people consider that Ferberization is as much about training parents not to worry about their children’s sleep problems as it is teaching the children to sleep by themselves.
I noticed my wife and I were being trained during the process as much as my children were. We weren’t scarred by the process, either.
if a baby is crying it’s heart out and the second you go to pick it up, before you even get it out of the crib it has a smile on it’s face…. seems like maybe that baby is doing some manipulation. this happened to me with my 4 month old daughter. sleep training is hard, listening to them cry sucks bad. but now she sleeps around the recommended 15 hrs a day where as before she was only sleeping 12. Maybe there is something to this training besides neglect.
I agree that this study approach wouldn’t give legitimate results, for the previously-stated reasons with self-selection.
We followed the Babywise methods, which for sleeping is essentially the same as Ferber. After 4 days, our 7-week-old was sleeping through the night, and still does (now almost 20 months old). We put him to bed awake but tired, and he either goes right to sleep or we will hear him talking to himself for a while before falling asleep. If he does cry, it usually only lasts a couple minutes before he’s out.
I don’t buy the argument that “Ferberization” will result in a child who feels less secure in the world. Our child is very independent, and I think a good part of that is learned behavior. He knows we don’t have to be there every second to comfort him, and as a result, he doesn’t need comforting very often.