I agree- cry it out sleep training is ideal for infants and parents.
I disagree! Cry it out is the worst way!
What happens when babies are left to cry it out?
391–400 of 644 posts
Re: What happens when babies are left to cry it out?
#392I'm more interested in the long-term psychological effects of sleep training and how it affects a child's perception of "secure attachment" [1]. We sleep trained our oldest and did not our youngest and their personalities couldn't be more different. Of course, this may be entirely unrelated, but it's still something my wife and I have wondered about as we've learned more about it. [1] https://www.betterhelp.com/advic…
It's hard for children not to be very different from their siblings - after all, your oldest one spent their first N years with just you and your partner; the younger one spends that time with you, your partner, and their older sibling.
It's something I fully realized only recently, once I spotted my younger daughter sprinting for toys her sister played with, moments after the latter left for kindergarten, and repeating the exact same kind of play she saw her sister do - which was mostly 3 y.o.-level creative reinterpretation and misuse of toys. After that, I started to pay more attention, and noticed that our younger daughter repeats just as many behaviors of her sister as she does of my wife's and mine.
Re: What happens when babies are left to cry it out?
#393Earlier quoted context omitted.
“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.
My wife and I were warned about this by nurses. The effect is real, but it's absolutely not reliable as a contraception method, as it can easily break down for various reasons, including the mother not following a strict and consistent regimen of frequent breastfeeding. And, as it turns out, consistent and frequent breastfeeding is much harder to achieve than popular media would had you believe.
> And, as it turns out, consistent and frequent breastfeeding is much harder to achieve than popular media would had you believe.
This myth is a huge cause of depression in new moms
Re: What happens when babies are left to cry it out?
#394Read the article, and many of the comments here. I have a hard time squaring a lot of the hard and fast rules against my own experience. Certainly one persons life can’t detract from large scale statistics. However, I have 6 children. They have all responded to methods of behavioral training in wildly different ways. My oldest two could not do sleep training. 10 months of trying for almost every night and they did no…
> fall asleep right away if around someone
this... with my first kid I didn't know how to handle, advice was 'to leave it cry to sleep', but it felt like torture to me, inhumane, letting it cry for so long.
A little baby just doesn't want to be alone. I discovered just sitting in the same room, reading something on my tablet was enough to fall a sleep after like 20 minutes, 90% of the time.
And yes, there are those nights nothing works. Just take him/her out, watch same television and have the baby on your belly to relax. A kid is not a robot, you can't expect it to go asleep when you say it's time for bed, there's no on/off button. I'm often amazed by parents who expect the kid to be tired at exactly 19.00 each evening.
That's not how it works, the first year is horrible. You as a new parent will be exhausted by the amount of not-sleeping you'll get, and the amount of attention the kid needs. Expect nothing less, things will get better when the kid grows older.
I think it is something of western culture to put a baby in a separate room and leave it alone, and thinking it feels comfortable and save and you can mind your own business.
Re: What happens when babies are left to cry it out?
#395Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
No I'm not. I'm talking about older infants, older than about 6 months. They are capable of falling asleep independently. There isn't a "need" here. The idea is to take care of all their needs before putting them to bed, make sure they are fed, make sure their diaper is dry, don't do it if they're sick or in pain from teething; meet their actual needs. Being rocked to sleep is a want not a need.
Re: What happens when babies are left to cry it out?
#396Earlier quoted context omitted.
Even cats have wildly different personalities so I don't think sleep training human babies have anything to do with their personalities.
Did you sleep train the cats?
Sort of. We initially fed our cat on demand, but at some point switched to feeding it at set times during the day. The cat adjusted to that, and suddenly all his daily activities - including playing and sleeping - started following a consistent schedule.
Re: What happens when babies are left to cry it out?
#397The 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…
> It is very much possible to co-sleep and then gradually transition them to their own bed. Isn't co-sleeping (as in bed-sharing) discouraged in the US, at least for newborns, because of the risk of SIDS? To quote the AAP: > AAP recommends that parents sleep in the same room – but not in the same bed as a baby, preferably for at least the first six months. Source: https://www.aap.org/en/news-room/news-releases/aap/20…
I am not an expert but I think there are ways to safely co-sleep, but chronically sleep-deprived parents tend to not be able to follow the rules consistently
Re: What happens when babies are left to cry it out?
#398The 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…
Babies cry because they have little other ways to communicate. And yes, generally it is because of something negative.
That negative could be 'leave me the fuck alone and stop bothering me' though, just in baby language - crying. Yes, even to a parent.
Re: What happens when babies are left to cry it out?
#399Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Reality: sleep training enters the picture only after all the things you've mentioned have been checked first. Even from a pragmatic point of view, it's hard to imagine otherwise, because all of those underlying reasons are quick to check and (usually) quick to mitigate. You don't even consider sleep training until exhausting every other option, because literally everything is easier than any of the sleep training me…
All of those things have to be checked immediately every time they cry. The Ferber method, mentioned elsewhere in the thread, says to not even check on the baby for longer and longer periods after they start crying.
During the daytime, if they start crying and you haven't solved the issue, you don't just start ignoring them. Why would you do so at night?
Re: What happens when babies are left to cry it out?
#400Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
As the article mentions, the research is amateurish. The experimental designs wouldn't pass muster at any tech company.