IN WADING THROUGH the parenthood literature, I have read exactly one piece of writing that comes close to capturing the potential misery of it. It was an article in The New Yorker by John Seabrook, in which the author hunted down a man named Ferber, whose research gave birth to a cold-blooded method of training babies to sleep. As I recall, Seabrook and his wife had been made miserable by their newborn’s tendency to holler through the night. Addled by lack of sleep, they set out to “Ferberize” their child. This meant shutting the door and clinging to each other as their baby in the next room
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