Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

What happens when babies are left to cry it out?

bbc.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

381–390 of 644 posts

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

#381

Post by lr4444lr »

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…

The article makes fairly clear that sleep training under 6 months is not advised. Not to say that every baby will be ready at that point, but it becomes clear to most parents somewhere in the first year what cries from their baby express sincere needs - even psychological- and which are just gratuitous attention seeking. Once they have object permanence down, parenting changes.

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

#382

Post by detritus »

lolinder wrote: post #341
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…

This is the kind of "it worked for my kid" bullshit that drives me up the wall. With my oldest we bought into comments like this and tried to always comfort him when he was crying. He would not stop crying. We stayed up with him an absurd amount of hours trying every idea in the book to soothe him to sleep and nothing worked. He was probably getting 6 hours of sleep a day at a time when he was supposed to be sleeping…

The only good advice for a new parent, I think, is to ignore everyone else's advice. I appreciate the circularity of this advice.

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

#383

Post by TeMPOraL »

Gordonjcp wrote: post #377
TeMPOraL wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Name a non-shithole place on the planet where that isn't the case. This is not a US phenomenon, it's pretty much a global phenomenon by now. It's the flip side of breaking down the traditional family/society model - as more and more households had two incomes, the market quickly compensated for the surplus, and now most households struggle without two incomes.

In the UK you get six month's paid maternity leave, and that is in a country being run into the ground by right-wing idiots. In most European countries it's 12 months.

Six months is "few months" in my book.

My country (Poland) has 12 months of maternity leave, and it's nowhere near enough either. In fact, 12 months is about when your child might start exhibiting sleeping issues (as opposed to just being an infant).

In other words, this isn't a problem because of sub-year maternity/paternity leaves. It's a problem because both parents need to work.

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

#384

Post by VirusNewbie »

psychphysic wrote: post #263
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.

Have they learned not to signal their parents? Or that their parents aren't interested in being there when they need them? For me I suspect most of this is regression to mean. People mostly try sleep training in a bad patch, meaning things are likely gonna get better anyways.

>Have they learned not to signal their parents? Or that their parents aren't interested in being there when they need them?

I assume this is not true, given that most (all?) sleep trained babies will still cry if they are sick, in distress, lose their pacifier or stuffed animal, etc. They just don’t cry out for help to get back to sleep.

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

#385

Post by jasonfarnon »

aaomidi wrote: post #207
vmilner wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My Uk school was still doing collective punishment beatings (“Who spoke?” (No-one replies) (30 boys get caned) ) in the early 80s.

Physical punishment is still legal in school & home in ton of US states.

It is legal in every home of the US. It is legal in many states' public schools. We were spanked in Houston public schools through the 90s. And it was a lot milder than what my cousins in Calcutta got. Good stuff.

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

#386

Post by TeMPOraL »

unit_circle wrote: post #301

I haven't seen a single top level comment that demonstrated a complete reading and understanding. Some even willingly admit an inability to process the information. Funny, because I thought this was actually remarkably good scientific journalism! I guess this demonstrates why this technical reporting is rare. It took my wife and I about an hour to read and discuss the entire article. My main takeaway is the low fidel…

> I haven't seen a single top level comment that demonstrated a complete reading and understanding. Some even willingly admit an inability to process the information. Funny, because I thought this was actually remarkably good scientific journalism!

In defense of Typical HN:

- Usually, the submission itself isn't the topic, but rather it functions like a discussion prompt.

- As you've observed yourself, the primary thing the article tells us is that studies in this space are pretty much worthless, because the problem is incredibly hard to study. There isn't really much to discuss about the article itself.

But yeah, I also found the wrist actionography bit to be interesting, and quite surprising. My own takeaway here is that we might eventually get better studies, as wearable sensors become more and more ubiquitous, making it possible to do proper measurements where to date we have to rely on self-reporting.

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

#387

Post by anothernewdude »

ineptech wrote: post #272
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…

> You might as well express shock that suburbanites don't supplement their diets by foraging for fruit and mushrooms.

What person in the suburbs doesn't have a veggie garden?

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

#388

Post by TeMPOraL »

klyrs wrote: post #282
dr_orpheus wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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..."

ah, good, I guess I missed that.

What's worse, it's mostly dismissed. This is surprising, because it's arguably the most important factor - even the speculated negative effects of sleep training on child development pale in comparison to the negative effects of persistently sleep-deprived parents have on child short and long-term development.

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

#389

Post by neaden »

bawolff wrote: post #376
naasking wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> There are many cases where all of humanity has been doing something that we only recently decided was wrong. For instance, slavery. Not really comparable because we decided it was morally wrong, not that we were wrong about its effects. Its not like humanity used to think slavery was good for the slave.

They absolutely claimed it was good for the enslaved person as part of justifying it.
Post reply on HN