In the spring of 2014, I paid a woman $200 for permission to let my eight-month-old son cry himself to sleep. Technically, what she did was (1) spend an hour drawing up a “sleep evaluation” based on a “walk-through audit” of my apartment and (2) have a brief chat with my husband and me. Those were nice touches, and they reassured us that she was giving us sound and thoughtful advice based on our particular flavor of dysfunctional exhaustion. But a few days later, as we began sleep training our son, and as the cloud of exhaustion began lifting from my eyes, I realized what had really happened. Her advice had been elaborate and carefully worded, but it boiled down to this: Leave the room. Go get some sleep. Let him cry. It will be fine. I wasn’t mad at her about this, but grateful. I respected her hustle. It was one of the better two hundreds I’ve ever spent.
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