The articles says “And 4-year-old Sean Paddock suffocated after his mother wrapped him in a blanket too tightly in an effort to keep him from getting out of bed.”
The Pearls don’t teach that. They teach blanket training, where you train your baby to play on a blanket with toys while the mother is nearby.
The wrapping tightly in blankets thing is some sort of wacky teaching that originated in the adoption movement as some way of simulating a “re-birth” into the new family (for kids who would not bond with their adoptive families) and several others deaths have been reported. But that is not a Pearl teaching at all.
All that having been said, I think some of the things in the book are good. It’s mostly just a bunch of common sense. But I would say that I disagree with them that you can train your child to some kind of completely obedient and always perfect kid.
Kids are still kids, and just like adults, they are going to make mistakes.
But the mistake being made here is blaming a well meaning husband and wife who wrote the book for the crimes of 3 unbalanced adoptive parents who never should have been approved for adoption anyway.
Why would anyone want to try to combine an old line Amish book with a new-ageish “re-birth” pop psychology and think they could come up with anything that is realistic.