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What happens when babies are left to cry it out?

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Re: What happens when babies are left to cry it out?

#171

Post by sfpotter »

sanderjd wrote: post #122
Patrol8394 wrote: post #104

My wife and I did not sleep trained our kids. They co-slept with us, they were happy we were able to sleep through the night. Eventually they transitioned into their own bed no problem. Our neighbors will let their baby cry like forever, it was excruciating and imo pointless.

I think parenting is the worst possible space for N=1 anecdotes. I have two sets of friends who did what you did and have never slept alone or through the night for coming up on five years. For our oldest, also coming up on five years, we did like one night of sleep training at 18 months and immediately started sleeping through the night like magic. For our youngest, we never had to do anything, he just always slept…

This is the only good comment in this entire thread.

Re: What happens when babies are left to cry it out?

#172

Post by sfpotter »

andrewclunn wrote: post #127
lars512 wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My brother and his wife did not sleep train their boy and co-slept with him. They had endless issues with sleep that continued past 2y old, were constantly exhausted, and eventually alternated who slept with him. We sleep trained our boy, same age, had very few issues even from very young. Children are so different, from so early, it's not at all obvious what outcome for a particular kid is because of different strat…

The SIDS risk being parents rolling on top of and crushing / asphyxiating the baby. We just gloss over most of this sort of death by calling it SIDS to avoid having to charge the parents with a crime.

Do you have children?

Re: What happens when babies are left to cry it out?

#173

Post by afandian »

conqueso wrote: post #150

The fact that this is so commonplace in my culture (USA) is frustrating and enrages me. As a parent, it is your evolutionary instinct to comfort a crying infant. They are quite literally helpless and look to caretakers for all their needs. There's a deep seated biological reason it feels bad to ignore it. The fact that it is so uncommon in other cultures should make this obvious. What are the odds that the rest of th…

My parents' generation (in the UK) were physically beaten as children. It was a normal part of parenting and part of school.

My hope is that one day we will consider this emotionally abusive behaviour as seriously as we we now look at physical abuse. Though I don't hold out much hope. Especially as there are still some people holding out for the right to hit their children even now.

Re: What happens when babies are left to cry it out?

#174

Post by lazide »

Fire-Dragon-DoL wrote: post #157
lazide wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

'Unexplained' is a large portion of SIDS deaths. Folks trying to protect parents and the family from blame for 'preventable' deaths is also a thing. As SIDS is better understood, and categorization is changing (addressed in the paper I linked elsewhere) the graph showing proportions of accidental suffocation/strangulation during sleep is rising while SIDS is dropping - but both numbers are adding up to about the same…

Is this basically suggesting that all SIDS are essentially suffocation (or close to that?)

Nope, the paper goes into it.

It's saying some proportion is, but it's unknown (and likely unknowable) what the actual proportion really is, for a multitude of reasons. It's unlikely to be most.

There are a lot of similar issues with mortality data in general, but kids are a particularly sensitive topic. For instamce, a large portion of 'gun cleaning accidents' are suicides. How many has changed with the times and the fashions. It's possible to guesstimate approximately of course, but we'll never really know for sure unless we somehow plunked an invisible researcher over the shoulder of every person all day every day.

Re: What happens when babies are left to cry it out?

#175

Post by upsidesinclude »

martythemaniak wrote: post #143
metabagel wrote: post #110

Having read "The Boy Who was Raised as a Dog", which goes into a fair amount of detail regarding attachment and attachment disorders, letting an infant "cry it out" strikes me as child abuse. Infants have no control over their environment, and crying is almost their only way to communicate. I'm not enthusiastic about sleep training either - the gradual, controlled removal of sleep time emotional support by the parent…

> where you don't rock the child to sleep for an hour, but you check in on them, gently touch them, talk to them soothingly for a little bit, and then you leave them for a little while. Come back in a little bit and briefly soothe them, and then leave again for a little while. As long as they know you are there. And you could stretch those periods out to see how the child does You just described the Ferber method, a…

Thank you for saving me from having to look this up.

I thought the same thing, 'isn't that basically describing sleep training...?'

Re: What happens when babies are left to cry it out?

#176

Post by davidmurdoch »

martythemaniak wrote: post #143
metabagel wrote: post #110

Having read "The Boy Who was Raised as a Dog", which goes into a fair amount of detail regarding attachment and attachment disorders, letting an infant "cry it out" strikes me as child abuse. Infants have no control over their environment, and crying is almost their only way to communicate. I'm not enthusiastic about sleep training either - the gradual, controlled removal of sleep time emotional support by the parent…

> where you don't rock the child to sleep for an hour, but you check in on them, gently touch them, talk to them soothingly for a little bit, and then you leave them for a little while. Come back in a little bit and briefly soothe them, and then leave again for a little while. As long as they know you are there. And you could stretch those periods out to see how the child does You just described the Ferber method, a…

TIL: some people think "cry it out" means total abandonment, and that they will ignorantly and confidently tell others that it's child abuse.

> > As long as they know you are there.

This line was funny to me... like they think the baby is running on logic and not instinct at 6 months old.

Re: What happens when babies are left to cry it out?

#177

Post by johndhi »

Having an 11 month old baby I have a few observations:

1 - parents have strong feelings on this topic and sleep is important.

2 - different kids/families seem to have majorly different sleep experiences in the first year

3 - I am skeptical of the literature in this field. Infant sleep feels measurable so it feels like studying it should be feasible, but we're forgetting these are little humans, not plants or bacteria cultures. People and psychologies are complicated.

4 - our baby ate a lot from a young age and was also able to sleep long lengths from a young age. Why? Probably genetics. We were lucky to not have to do formal sleep training with him; it was more a process of aligning his schedule and letting him learn how to fall asleep with less and less rocking.

Re: What happens when babies are left to cry it out?

#178

Post by pnutjam »

andrewclunn wrote: post #127
lars512 wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My brother and his wife did not sleep train their boy and co-slept with him. They had endless issues with sleep that continued past 2y old, were constantly exhausted, and eventually alternated who slept with him. We sleep trained our boy, same age, had very few issues even from very young. Children are so different, from so early, it's not at all obvious what outcome for a particular kid is because of different strat…

The SIDS risk being parents rolling on top of and crushing / asphyxiating the baby. We just gloss over most of this sort of death by calling it SIDS to avoid having to charge the parents with a crime.

I'm convinced most of the issues with rolling on babies is people who take medication or drink. Maybe I'm wrong.

SIDS is totally different.

Re: What happens when babies are left to cry it out?

#179

Post by spookthesunset »

cycrutchfield wrote: post #144
coredog64 wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We co-slept with all three kids and caught flak for it from the pediatrician. She was certain that one or both parents were going to roll over onto the kids and squish them. Very pleased we did it, but you may have to stand your ground with well-meaning but ignorant people.

Your pediatrician is ignorant about SIDS risks? They are much more likely to be informed about this matter than you, with your n=3 anecdote.

I'm sure they are very educated about SIDS. But their job is to give you enough information on the pros and cons so you can make a well informed decision yourself.

It isn't the job of any expert to tell you if you should or should not do something. Humans have been cosleeping with their infants since time began. Clearly there are some serious pros to it. An expert who is truly good will never tell you what to do. They will only inform you of the pros and cons and let you arrive at your own conclusion.

It's the same deal with lawyers, dentists, accountants, security folks, UX designers, engineers and everything else. I mean, could you imagine what a product would look like if you only took input from your lawyer?

Re: What happens when babies are left to cry it out?

#180

Post by kgermino »

Insanity wrote: post #154
jjtheblunt wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not regarding a human child, but my spouse thought leaving our rescue dog, still a youngster only a few months old, in a cage in another room overnight was somehow proper, which frankly incensed me as cruel and abusive nonsense, because it's not the way of the wild, not what any of us were evolved for. And I'd lived with and worked with rescue animals for decades, so felt strongly about this. (i put my foot down and…

Crate training is a good thing (imo) but should be done properly. Not just sticking them in a crate overnight in another room and ignoring them. Our dog is crate trained, which makes travelling with him way easier for example. (He is 1 year old now, so at night he just walks into his crate whenever he feels tired. We don’t have to put him in his crate anymore). You have to make sure they associate positive experience…

Adding to this, we didn’t crate train our dog and while I wouldn’t say I regret that, it makes things harder.

She hated the crate when we introduced it. We couldn’t find any way to get her in there without her panicking and trying to dig out after a few minutes. She had a bad history before us and is completely fine outside the crate so we gave up.

Day to day it’s fine. She wanders on her own schedule, has a dog bed she claims as her space, and doesn’t really cause any issues. However, when we travel she’s loose in the car without a comfortable space. When some people visit there’s no obvious place to send her, so she has to be locked in a room where she isn’t used to being confined. When kids visit she has a harder time getting away from the chaos. She doesn’t have a consistently dark place during the day to sleep. The list goes on.

Crate training isn’t just about giving your dog a small room you can lock them in, it’s giving them a private, safe, emotionally and physically comfortable space they can call their own. The crate travels - so their safe space is always with them, they can escape to it, and they are in a comfortable place if you need to lock them up for some reason (as always happens sometimes). Our dog doesn’t have that.

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