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What happens when babies are left to cry it out?

bbc.com

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

#351

Post by sanderjd »

metabagel wrote: post #337
sanderjd wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's abusive to abandon an infant. https://www.attachmentparenting.org/ensure-safe-sleep-physic... "Research shows us that an infant is not neurologically or developmentally capable of calming or soothing himself to sleep in a way that is healthy. The part of the brain that helps with self-soothing isn't well developed until the child is two and a half to three years of age. Until that time, a child depends on his pa…

And yet, sleep training is not abandoning an infant. Mind your own business and stop accusing strangers who you know nothing about of abuse. You're being an a-hole.

Edit to add: attachmentparenting.org is not an objective arbiter of the research on whether or not the dogmas of attachment parenting are correct! They have a dog in this fight...

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

#352

Post by 0xEFF »

lern_too_spel wrote: post #244
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…

Hypothesis: the parent, by forcing themselves to sleep train, conditions themselves to ignore more of the infant's emotions; and the infant, observing no reaction to their emotions, learns the same behavior, leading to higher incidence of autism. Typically (aside from some neurological disorders), there is an underlying reason for the infant to be crying. They could be hungry or wanting to urinate or defecate (many c…

Research shows no long term effects after age 6, positive or negative, of sleep training, so the research doesn't support your hypothesis.

Research shows many positive effects before age 6, both for the child and the family.

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

#353

Post by zajio1am »

sweetheart wrote: post #230
afandian wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not the commenter you replied to, but I am a parent. I see attachment as one of the most important aspects of human experience. Forcibly severing this is, in my opinion, emotional abuse.

Well said. My wife is a therapist who works extensively with children and she would absolutely agree with you. Letting a child cry it out has profound effects of development, in ways that may be invisible or hard to notice for many years. Someone else in this thread mentioned The Boy Who Was Raised As a Dog, which is a great book on the subject.

From the article:

"Hiscock's study, for example, the largest and longest longitudinal study done on sleep training, found sleep-trained children were no more likely to be insecurely attached to their caregiver at six years of age than their peers."

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

#354

Post by [deleted] »

voisin wrote: post #19
lazide wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And SIDS.

Source? Everything I’ve read has shown this to be more of an urban legend if anything. Most SIDS deaths related to cosleeping involved alcohol or drugs. SIDS was actually found to be reduced due to breathing regulation matching that of the parent.

[deleted]

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

#355

Post by metabagel »

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…

Childhood trauma is reflected in behavioral issues at an older age.

"But part of growing up is learning new skills, like eating by themselves and soothing themselves to sleep."

Sure, but wait until they're three before you start sleep training. This idea that we need to toughen up infants is dangerous and frightening. They're completely helpless.

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

#356

Post by lazide »

dragonwriter wrote: post #216
lazide wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Obesity is 'you're going to die an early death because you're overweight'. It is the polar opposite of a healthy weight, but there is a lot of red in the gap. You might not be aware of that? It's one of those uncomfortable truths no one likes talking about. Even Dr's won't usually mention it to patients. 73.6% of American Adults over 20 years old are overweight. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/hestat/obesity-adult-17-1…

> Obesity is 'you're going to die an early death because you're overweight'. No, its not. Even morbidly obese doesn’t mean that, though it statistically correlates with a greater reduction in expected lifespan. > 73.6% of American Adults over 20 years old are overweight. [...] I didn't correlate to eating disorders resulting in people being under weight - I've seen a decent amount of that too. Probably 5 to maybe eve…

Ok? Apologies for overstating. It does definitely impact mortality, with overweight meaning approximately 5 years earlier death, and obesity approx. 10. That is a significant percentage of life expectancy.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/oby.20023

Though I wasn’t claiming its relevance, rather replying to the prior posters apparent assertion that their suggested course of action was widely applicable (when they said it was for folks of healthy weight).

Which if it requires a healthy weight, definitely means it’s not widely applicable right now.

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

#357

Post by Mikeb85 »

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…

> Talk about infants having "attachment issues" makes my blood boil. They are supposed to be attached to you.

Attachment disorder is the opposite of what you seem to think it is, where they had previously been abandoned and thus can't make proper relationships.

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

#358

Post by metabagel »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #320
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…

> Like, what the fuck do we think these babies are actively scheming to find ways to get soothed? That's exactly what they do. Do you believe they're processing sophisticated ideas of love, attachment and comforting? That they're making a choice to ask their parents for soothing? Infants are acting on basic instincts. With very limited but rapidly expanding space of possible actions, they're actively learning what be…

But infants aren't capable of looking after their own needs. You're really mixing up different stages of childhood development.

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

#359

Post by mrjh »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #327
ineptech wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> so does "Babies cry because it gets them more nutrition by keeping Mom so sleep-deprived that she delays her next pregnancy." Babies do delay their mothers' next pregnancy. But sleep has nothing to do with it. And really, neither do the babies. Nursing mothers inhibit their own pregnancy; that is why the normal interval between births is two years instead of one year.

“Nursing mothers inhibit their own pregnancy”

It’s an interesting theory, but having my second kid appear 12 months after the first — in spite of the breastfeeding — makes me very sceptical of its reliability.

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

#360

Post by jpambrun »

omnibrain wrote: post #283
ineptech wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> a world where Mom has to work 9-5 in an office a few months after birth That's a cultural problem itself.

In my culture women want to work and have a carrers as well.
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