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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?

#411

Post by kaitai »

mike1o1 wrote: post #284
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…

Agreed 100%. I feel like sleep training is for the parents, not necessarily for the babies. Most parents in the USA need to work, so they are the ones that need the sleep.

It doesn't sound like you have much experience being the 24-hr care provider for a baby. Phoning it in at work is way more relaxing than being in the house with a baby for the entire day. It's not work that makes parents need to sleep, it's... needing to sleep. Just speaking from experience, having someone with fractured mental concentration cooking, attempting to keep a slightly mobile child from danger, trying not to fall asleep on the couch with the kid in a desperate attempt not to cosleep, trying to keep your cool as the kid screams again and can't be soothed.... much more dangerous and stressful than doodling thru a meeting and saying, "I'm sorry, can you repeat that? I just want to clarify what you're saying."

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

#412

Post by ravi-delia »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #405
FrankyHollywood wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I mean melatonin is super safe and fairly effective. Definitely less suffering than crying all night for all parties. It's reasonable to assume a baby would like not to be miserable- so why not!

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

#413

Post by remote_phone »

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…

100% correct. The baby-rearing book industry is a fraud. They claim “well the average baby does X, Y, Z” but they don’t tell you that the standard deviation is huge. New mothers like my wife were stressed beyond belief because our kid only slept 10 hours and ate twice as much as other kids. She was convinced there was something wrong until I proved to her that he was within the standard deviation of normal.

Do what feels right for your child. No two children are the same, even twins. Infants are very resilient so don’t worry you’re going to scar or damage them. They generally won’t unless you are truly abusive.

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

#414

Post by komali2 »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #298
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.

Unfortunately, solving a cultural problem is the second most difficult thing to do, after changing laws of physics. Or, as some web article I read the other day put it: society is fixed, biology is mutable. And it's not just about two-income households. From my personal experience I can say that, even with one parent working, a poorly sleeping child can bring the parents to the brink of divorce, or depression, or bot…

You can solve cultural problems on a micro level.

I know many couples that have merged into larger multi-partner families, sometimes as individual couples, sometimes as polycules, regardless, the commune is back lol, and just my own observation it seems an ideal way to raise kids. There's always someone around, couples can take their own time to go on dates quite regularly, the kids grow up with lots of people around and lots of friends, the close community support is just phenomenal looking. If I have kids, I will go this route.

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

#415

Post by komali2 »

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.

Nice, same, I think the "cultural problem" comment is not saying that the problem is that "women are going to work" but rather that "the parents have to be away from the child for the majority of the time, or they will all be homeless and hungry."

I'm not sure which country the OP is discussing, likely one without good maternity/paternity laws and whatnot, which is really sad to hear about, I hope more citizens demand this of their governments and more employees demand this of their companies, it seems crazy to me that you should have to sacrifice formative time with your newborn so you can go do a capitalism every day.

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

#416

Post by jack_pp »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #405
FrankyHollywood wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

IANAD, I don't have kids but I'm curious why melatonin properly dosed would be seen as worse than crying to sleep. From what I've learned about melatonin it seems to me you did the right thing

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

#417

Post by remote_phone »

metabagel wrote: post #328
awillen wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's astounding to me that so many people on HN, a place where folks generally profess to be driven by science and data, are in this thread just casually throwing around anecdotes and comments about evolutionary instinct while completely ignoring the actual science and data. Doubly so when so many of the comments are pretty vicious towards people who sleep train their babies.

https://www.attachmentparenting.org/ensure-safe-sleep-physic... >>Parents who are frustrated with frequent waking or who are sleep deprived may be tempted to try sleep training techniques that recommend letting a baby cry in an effort to "teach" him to "self-soothe". >>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. Th…

Not even a single study was cited in that page. It’s garbage.

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

#418

Post by gsinclair »

ghostpepper wrote: post #393
TeMPOraL wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It’s sad that it’s so little known. I know that not everything can or should be taught at school, but I’d argue in favour of this: breast feeding is often not as easy as it seems it should be, so you should find out more about it when preparing to have a child.

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

#419

Post by TeMPOraL »

jack_pp wrote: post #416
TeMPOraL wrote: post #405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

IANAD, I don't have kids but I'm curious why melatonin properly dosed would be seen as worse than crying to sleep. From what I've learned about melatonin it seems to me you did the right thing

Because it's a chemical! A hormone! Because you're dosing your kid with a drug! You're taking the easy way out! You're using a shortcut to cover for your inability to endure the first few days of ${sleep training method}!

These and similar kinds of bullshit judgements.

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

#420

Post by kaitai »

naasking wrote: post #275
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…

There is way too much romanticization of a false past here in this larger HN discussion. Yeah, sleep patterns were different, and many people slept with their infants. Infant mortality was also higher, as was maternal mortality, and corporal punishment was common. Sleep-deprived women with piles of children were not spending loving moments staring into their babies' eyes; they were smacking the slightly older children on the back of the head to hurry up and take the chicken feed out and slop the pigs. From my own family histories, I know that babies were often ignored, because at some point having a 1/3 of your babies die means you just don't invest very much emotional energy in them anymore. Very young children were tied to furniture to keep them out of trouble. By age four, some were at work (although the average age to start work in Victorian England was about 10, and the Factory Act came into force to regulate labor conditions for 9-13 year olds). Wet nurses were common, and in parts of England and France in the 1780s for instance it was extraordinarily common to simply ship your baby out to the country so you could work or maintain your aristocratic figure (see references at https://www.geriwalton.com/breastfeeding-or-nursing-with-wet... for instance).

For my own part, we did some version of sleep training (checking every 5 min until crying stopped). This was overall extraordinarily effective. The reassurance that we're not leaving, we're coming back -- quite important. But as important: the discovery that the child in question doesn't like rocking, bouncing, white noise, or any of the other interventions that are billed as crucial. Leave that kid alone for 4-12 minutes? Asleep. Rock/bounce/white noise? Awake for hours. Why torture the child to satisfy someone else's interventionist idea of good parenting?

Every kid is different. And not every cry needs intervention. This kid cried every time a fart came. At some point you just need to learn the world won't end if you fart, and that is simply gained by experience, not mom or dad rushing to reassure and making a big deal of every fart.

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