The most controversial method of trying to get children to sleep all night comes to the screens of mobile devices. "Go to sleep!" Is the application for iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch Estivill method.
It was not surprising that this phenomenon that aims to "teach" children to sleep will be passed to new technologies, and now this application is available in the iTunes App Store for 1.59 euros. Just reading the product description, and not mentioning what the background of the famous "method" means, several questions squeak:
Get your child to sleep in just five nights! TO SLEEP! It explains how to apply step by step the recognized method of Dr. Eduard Estivill for the treatment of childhood insomnia.
- Get the child to sleep in just five nights? First: the children sleep. No one spends five nights without sleep. Pretending that a baby or child sleep through the night is another matter. Just as there are babies who sleep through the night, it is absolutely normal (and healthy) for others to wake up several times, even for years.
- The method". When you talk about "method" in this parenting it sounds really bad to me and it generates a rejection, be based on the principles that are based. There are no methods for children, every child is a world and we cannot pretend to typecast it in a predetermined system to circulate through it and obtain a fixed result. And more when what we want to change is normal and natural.
- And here we come to another surprising point in the text: the one that told us about "childhood insomnia." Associating this term referring to a serious sleep disorder to children who usually wake up at night is misleading. Parents, often out of despair at losing their own sleep, come to think that their children have a medical problem, which is not the case.
We can know a little more about this application in the video presentation of the application of the Estivill method, which speaks of "scientific standards" to teach children to sleep (as we see, words very biensonantes to which anyone who thinks they need a medical solution would grab).
Content of the Estivill method for iPhone and iPod
The application has a theoretical part (accompanied by illustrations and audio files) in which the Estivill method is explained, what is the meaning of crying, how children communicate with adults, what is childhood insomnia, the importance of I dream ... and addresses the behavior of parents in certain situations.
More surreal and absurd it seems to me the stopwatch theme, which allows to measure the times between “visits to the baby” or cries, according to the day of the method in which it is, or the voice of the doctor who, which guru hypnotizing his followers, encourages parents to follow and ensures that he will be by your side helping them. I was surprised to see that you can time up to seven minutes waiting outside the room.
I understand if the baby is calm, but can anyone hold that time if your baby cries without doing anything? Moreover, can anyone recommend that the baby not be cared for at that time?
Even the phrases to be told to the child appear in quotation marks (at least they are not "Fall asleep once!"), Not once, but several times if the child does not stop crying, as if we were a scratched disk without resources or anything to say (why not put a recording to repeat while lying down, to see if something is recorded in the subconscious?).
Messages of support and perseverance such as “Remember, nothing happens to the child. The success of the method depends on you ”sign this unusual and unnatural way to face a night with a baby and transport us to a playing field in which the coach pulls us to achieve a victory with epic slogans.
Of course, from the mobile device we can access the data about the author of the famous method (which by the way, is not his invention) and his works, as well as buy them.
I do not know if the Estivill method application for iPhone and iPod Touch It will be very successful, but I sincerely hope that not many parents believe that a preconceived system, either on the screen, or on paper, and because the neighbor tells you, will help their children to sleep. And more if it is something as unnatural as not attending to them when they need us.
Official Site | iTunes Apple
In Babies and more | When do babies sleep all night? Dr. Estivill avoided following his method with his grandson (and himself), not only does the Estivill method sleep the child, what Dr. Estivill should explain (if he were sincere), Tracy Hogg's method of sleeping: an alternative to Estivill
