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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?

#271

Post by sanderjd »

oskarpearson wrote: post #218
sanderjd wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Comparing a 9-month-old spending 15 minutes calming themselves down before falling asleep to physical abuse is laughably absurd. A big problem with this "debate" is that people conjure images of newborn babies being left to cry for hours, when what is actually predominantly practiced is older infants 6-12 months old being allowed to cry for less than half an hour. After being fed and given a clean diaper and a safe p…

From the article: > For others, it can be hours of crying, even to the point of vomiting (common enough to be a frequent topic of conversation on sleep-training forums and addressed by baby sleep books including Ferber's The article also includes a reference to 2-3 hours.

Fair enough. I'm not supportive of letting kids cry for 2-3 hours even to the point of vomiting. But even then, I'm sympathetic to it if the parents have tried everything else and they have a kid that just won't sleep. I'm not like an absolutist or anything, I just think parents should have space to try to figure out what works for their own families without random strangers calling them abusive.

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

#272

Post by ineptech »

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…

That evolutionary instinct came from a time when humans lived in communal support networks and new parents had help from extended family, and does not translate well to a world where Mom has to work 9-5 in an office a few months after birth. You might as well express shock that suburbanites don't supplement their diets by foraging for fruit and mushrooms.

Besides, it's not like parents 10K years ago had the option to let their babies cry it out in a separate room with a noise machine, and evolution selected against it because co-sleeping babies reproduced more. "Babies cry because they need to co-sleep or they will suffer some serious problem" sounds reasonable to me, but so does "Babies cry because it gets them more nutrition by keeping Mom so sleep-deprived that she delays her next pregnancy." Making just-so stories about behavioral evolution is dubious, the bar needs to be higher than just sounding plausible.

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

#273

Post by scotty79 »

giraffe_lady wrote: post #258
scotty79 wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other hand if infants were this fragile to be long term affected by something like that humanity would survive 3 generation tops. At some point synaptic prunning comes and the child is rid of nearly all indignities it suffered up to that point.

Plenty of adaptively useful, maybe even optimal behaviors can negatively affect enjoyment of life . The world we live in isn't the one we evolved for, and behaviors and adaptations useful in our evolutionary past can be painful or detrimental to individuals and society now . Selective pressure is no longer meaningfully applied to our species, so we won't further adapt to our situation except intentionally and at our…

Sure, severe abuse can have lasting impact, but we are talking about babies crying for a bit. Kids have a thousand innane reasons to cry. Having thousand and one doesn't make that much of a difference.

For all concerned, I don't have kids and I don't intend to.

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

#274

Post by Mikeb85 »

Our baby will be 5 months in a few days. My partner and I both had kind of harsh upbringings (as in, our parents left us alone to cry among other things). So when we found out we were expecting, we bought a crib and said we'd be tough parents (though maybe less tough than ours).

Turns out we caved. Too hard to leave a crying baby especially because, instinctively, we know that it's his only way to communicate and he doesn't really know what's going on. This line is pretty much the same as what we reasoned:

> no one should ever do that to a three-month-old. They don't have object permanence, they don't know that if you're not in the room you haven't disappeared from the planet. It's psychologically damaging

Anyhow we're pretty happy with the decision. Our baby hardly cries, sleeps quite well and no one is stressed out. Not getting out of bed to feed is a massive bonus. There's no rocking him to sleep, we just go to bed and he falls asleep. And hopefully less childhood trauma than we had.

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

#275

Post by naasking »

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…

> What are the odds that the rest of the world and entire history of humankind were mistaken the whole time, until some behaviorists came along and figured it all out in the last century?

There are many cases where all of humanity has been doing something that we only recently decided was wrong. For instance, slavery.

Certainly the odds aren't good that this is true of everything humans do, but the odds that some of the things we do fall into this category is 100%.

Edit: also, don't be so judgmental. Behaviours are environmental adaptions. In the Western world, mothers typically work 9-5 like men, so of course in cultures where women don't have this constraint they'd be shocked at our behaviours. Humans are adaptable however, and constantly coddling your fearful infant made sense when there were dangers everywhere. In our society's we're pretty safe in historical terms, so it could just be that babies cry because they're instinctively afraid until they learn they're safe when nothing happens to them after a few nights, and then it stops. This actually seems to happen in a lot of cry-it-out cases.

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

#276

Post by ryanSrich »

johndhi wrote: post #177

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…

We have two kids. One is 3, and the other is 1. Our first was an amazing sleeper. After the first few months, she would mostly sleep in a basinet the entire night. She transitioned to a crib easily, and now sleeps in a bed for about 12 hours per night without getting up.

Our second on the other hand was a complete nightmare. Crying for almost the entire night for months on end. He eventually settled down a bit, but we finally caved and let him co-sleep. He slept with us for almost the entire first year, and is just now moving to a crib.

So I don't even think it's genetic. It's almost purely random.

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

#277

Post by mirsadm »

sanderjd wrote: post #255
aaomidi wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah…cause they’re human and as the parent you’re their only human interaction. Why is them wanting to be soothed seen as a bad thing? Like, what the fuck do we think these babies are actively scheming to find ways to get soothed? I swear our brains are looking for adversaries in infants now. Your infant child can not manipulate you. The brains barely understand action and consequence. Your infant child is trying to…

It's not a bad thing, just like it's not bad for a baby to want to be spoon-fed. But part of growing up is learning new skills, like eating by themselves and soothing themselves to sleep. And a big part of parenting is figuring out the right times and ways to encourage this. You know what has been a far more traumatic growing experience for every kid I've known than learning to sleep independently? Learning to use a…

One thing that has always bothered me is parents trying to justify sleep training as a positive for the child. The reason parents do it is for their own benefit.

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

#278

Post by wolpoli »

DieAgainAli wrote: post #256
LAC-Tech wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well has it worked? Have you knifed anyone?

You act like ‘back in my day’ there wasn’t any crime. If you look at murder rates in the UK they peaked in the early 2000’s. Maybe those abused boys were taught violence is the answer? Letting your baby ‘cry it out’ is abuse in my eyes and you can sleep train them without doing this. With my daughter we soothed her in her cot instead of picking her up. She will now link her sleep cycles and only cry when there is som…

> If you look at murder rates in the UK they peaked in the early 2000’s. Maybe those abused boys were taught violence is the answer?

There were earlier HN posts attributing the decline in the rate of murder rate/violence crime to countries phasing out lead-gasoline. Now we might never know unless we do a properly controlled experiment.

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

#279

Post by tmtvl »

JamesSwift wrote: post #146
sanderjd wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yep, the thing I always tell new parents when asked about kids is that every single kid is different. Your kid might be a good eater and a bad sleeper. Maybe the reverse. They might be extremely needy or be completely chill and independent. This is especially obvious when you have multiple kids of your own. Some knowledge generalizes, but a lot of the personalized experience is different (e.g. what they respond to in…

You make a good point, each child is different. It's almost as though children are people. Maybe there's some kind of a lesson in that, but I can't see it.

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

#280

Post by dr_orpheus »

klyrs wrote: post #265
JW_00000 wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd add: > When babies are sleep-trained (with the "cry it out" method), they don't actually sleep (much) longer; they wake up as often but have learned to not signal their parents.

Parents getting more sleep has knock-on benefits for the kid. It's hard not to be grumpy under the influence of a sleep deficit. I wake up several times a night. So does my kid. So if I wake up every time he wakes up, and every time I'd naturally wake up, then I don't get enough sleep. Self-care is crucial for caretakers, and I was a bit disappointed to not find any mention of that in the article.

There is a mention of it in the article. Starts about 3/4 of the way through with the heading of "Family Fatigue":

"Researchers tend to focus on sleep training's potential impact on babies – which makes sense, since they're the most vulnerable, helpless members of the family unit. But sleep training obviously affects the rest of the family, too..."

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