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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?

#401

Post by Tams80 »

com2kid wrote: post #316
mlboss wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the articles talks about this: the child still wakes up in the middle of night but does not cry. Scientists are not sure what is happening, are they able to sooth themselves to sleep or are they still stressed out but are not crying. Because they know nobody will come for help if they cry.

Everyone wakes up at night. If my son wakes up at night and needs some water, he'll cry. Diaper change, cry. I have a nursery can and I can see him wake up sometimes, look around, and go back to sleep on his own, because that is perfectly natural. W/o sleep training he wanted to be patted back to sleep everytime he woke up. That took 15 to 30 minutes, 2 to 4 times a night. After sleep training, he sleeps better, and…

And non-cranky parents who aren't bothering him every second he's awake.

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

#402

Post by Tams80 »

metabagel wrote: post #345
awillen wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're throwing around accusations of abuse despite the fact that you admit you haven't read literature on it. Why are you contributing your admittedly uneducated opinion on this? Go read some of the literature instead. Stop judging parents you've never met (and yes, despite you saying you're not judging, you obviously are). Just because something worked for you doesn't mean it works for all babies or families, and i…

I think this is a dangerous practice. Read the literature on attachment theory. 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 ag…

I think this is vastly overblowing the upbringing of babies.

Honestly, if it mattered that much, we'd have a global epidemic of behaviour disorders due to poor parenting in the very early years. But that just isn't the case.

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

#403

Post by orangepurple »

detritus wrote: post #382
lolinder wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Parents need to have a well defined set of diverse solutions and know how to sample from the search space effectively instead of current epsilon greedy approach

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

#404

Post by Tams80 »

jasonfarnon wrote: post #385
aaomidi wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If I recall correctly, it was illegal by the 90s in the UK. That didn't stop the odd occasion of it happening. The cane remained on the wall as a relic, but there was always a handy slipper around.

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

#405

Post by TeMPOraL »

FrankyHollywood wrote: post #394
firemanx wrote: post #336

Read 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 n…

> That's not how it works, the first year is horrible. (...) things will get better when the kid grows older.

Except when they won't. Our older daughter started having real sleep issues around when she was 1.5 years old. From that point on, every night was one of "those nights nothing works". Her sleeping schedule became quite consistent: roughly 21:00 - 05:00 if she didn't nap during the day, or 23:30 - 05:00 if she slept even as little as 15 minutes at any point during the day.

We went through pretty much every trick in the book. Less attention. More attention. Earlier supper. Rituals. Toning down lights an hour before bedtime. Music. Singing. White noise. We consulted a psychologist specializing in small children. But nothing helped - in fact, the more we tried, the worse it would get, with our daughter often going to sleep past midnight, only to wake up at 05:00 sharp.

Now I'm going to admit to something that's AFAIK seen as even worse than the "cry it out" method. Something I was very surprised wasn't even mentioned in the entire article. After half a year of unending torture that started to very negatively impact our marriage, in an act of desperation, we gave our daughter melatonin drops.

This solved the problem instantly. We all slept very well that night. And the next one. And the next one. Sleep again became something reliable.

Obligatory YMMV, IANADoctor, consult your pediatrician, etc. But the point is, every kid is different, and sometimes things don't get better (and it's very hurtful when others try to reassure you they will).

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

#406

Post by rdtsc »

russdill wrote: post #340
rdtsc wrote: post #267

> "Because early experiences of stress may program the HPA (hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal) axis to be more stress reactive, increasing risk of physical and mental health problems in later life, our results suggest that parenting in infant sleep contexts may play an important role in shaping how the child responds to stress across childhood," I never liked the "cry it out". suspecting something like that. It was hard…

Which child suffers more emotionally? The one that undergoes sleep training and has emotional distress for a few nights and afterwards occasionally wakes during the night and goes back to sleep on their own, or the child that for years, whenever they wake during the night undergoes emotional distress until their caregiver wakes, is able to get up, and get to the child?

The first one, because in the second case the caregiver actually comes and comforts them.

Stress and damage during certain phases of growth and development might not be reversible. That's what the researchers were talking about "experiences of stress may program the HPA (hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal) axis to be more stress reactive,"

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

#407

Post by bee_rider »

jpambrun wrote: post #360
omnibrain wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Reading it generously, I think the cultural problem is supposed to be that parents are expected to go back to work too quickly, not specifically that women are. “Mom” has just come through the sequence of quotes, making it unnecessary gendered.

It could also be seen as a cultural problem that both parents are generally expected to work nowadays, and it would be nice to be able to expect that families had some adult at home (but we’d hope that in a more egalitarian society nowadays the gender balance would be more equal — although men can lift larger laundry baskets on average so maybe we should end being the at-home ones more than 50% of the time, I dunno).

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

#408

Post by NateEag »

marliechiller wrote: post #233
partiallypro wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is going to sound harsh but I think some bad habits like this are gotten rid of when their friend group finds out and makes fun of them for it.

I do sometimes wonder on the effects of "positive" bullying in social circles. Not physical violence, but teasing etc. One boy in our childhood friendship group was constantly teased for his weight and bad eating habits. Eventually, he had had enough and one summer, hit the gym and got in shape. I suppose it easily could have gone the other way and this is all anecdotal but there must be other instances of such socia…

In my early teens a friend harassed me constantly (but gently) about my constantly disheveled hair.

Thanks to him I finally started combing it regularly.

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

#409

Post by rendall »

This appears to be an Anglosphere thing. I, being American, tried to introduce this to my baby son's European mother. She was not having it. "If he's crying, he wants to be held. This 'crying it out' will lead to lack of trust." And the baby slept in the same bed with us for about 3 months.

And, I am glad she was so adamant. She was right.

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

#410

Post by TeMPOraL »

kqr wrote: post #162
loteck wrote: post #58

What we were trying to do was help the parents to teach the kids to self-soothe. So in effect, we weren't saying that they wouldn't wake. We were saying that they would wake, but they wouldn't have to signal their parents. They could go back down into the next sleep cycle. The conversations around sleep training are always rife with folks focusing on their own perceived risks, and the emotional guilt, that come with…

This is one thing I learned only in my third year as a parent. If I tell an adult "I'm worried you'll break that when you poke it so hard" I expect them to either argue to the contrary or stop poking it so hard. For my children, they don't register what I've said until a few days (and attempts) later. It's virtually impossible to teach them something in the moment, it all falls into place later. Super frustrating and…

Yes! It's something I also realized around when our older daughter turned three. It's as if her higher-level reasoning had 3-4 days of lag.
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