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

611–620 of 644 posts

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

#611

Post by lolinder »

conqueso wrote: post #589
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…

You're absolutely right that every baby has different needs and I'm glad to hear that you figured out what's best for yours. It was not my intention to suggest that every baby should co-sleep - I meant to address the very commonplace (IMO misplaced) fear that if they do, then they will never leave their parents' bed and develop independence. There are obviously some babies who are ok or even better off sleeping alone…

Your experience of the mainstream is very different than mine. Before having kids, the voices we heard were overwhelmingly saying "immediately respond to every cry or you are a terrible parent", which is exactly how your first comment reads. That's why it took us so long to try letting him cry: we'd listened to voices like yours.

The parents you describe are a tiny minority if they exist at all, and guilt-tripping them in a public forum just hurts the millions of new parents who are at an extremely vulnerable time of life and trying to do the right thing. It's not your place to lecture on how loving parents should be treating a baby you've never laid eyes on.

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

#612

Post by shaklee3 »

lern_too_spel wrote: post #610
shaklee3 wrote: post #530

Earlier quoted context omitted.

except there's no better research to contradict it

Without valid research in any direction, we should fall back on our prior, which is that ignoring crying infants at night is no less detrimental than ignoring crying during the day.

you're responding with that comment in an article with valid research.

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

#613

Post by lern_too_spel »

shaklee3 wrote: post #612
lern_too_spel wrote: post #610

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Without valid research in any direction, we should fall back on our prior, which is that ignoring crying infants at night is no less detrimental than ignoring crying during the day.

you're responding with that comment in an article with valid research.

As I pointed out earlier in this very thread, the article itself mentions that there is no valid research on the long term effects of sleep training.

The only valid research says that they stop waking up their parents. This is probably due to learned helplessness, which leads us to the hypothesis in my first comment.

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

#614

Post by burnished »

IshKebab wrote: post #601
burnished wrote: post #444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My favorite is “babies cry because the quiet ones got forgotten”

I mean that's literally true. Also why babies are so cute. The ones that weren't got put in the bin.

Quibble: I'm not sure its true, though it is entertaining, reasonable, and appears to fit the facts.

The cuteness one is good too. I wonder if this sort of thing emerged slowly or quickly? Like, is cooperation just generally selected for and animal cuteness has been developing for a long time, or did it appear swiftly somewhere and provide some huge benefit? Or something else entirely?

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

#615

Post by heavyset_go »

dinkumthinkum wrote: post #440
heavyset_go wrote: post #421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The fact that this is so commonplace in my culture (USA) is frustrating and enrages me From the outside, American culture around child-rearing seems like there is an adversarial relationship with tinges of resentment when it comes to how parents see children. A lot of the tough love type of parenting seems to come from a place of pacifying parents, giving them what they want, over their burdensome children with "pr…

There isn’t really an “AmerIvan culture around rearing children”. America large variations in behaviors. If American parenting was completely as you suggest, how do we have a generation of professional victims or constant discussions of “helicopter parenting” or “participation trophies”?

Who said "professional victims" aren't the result of such parenting?

In my experience, people who were raised via such methods either acknowledge that those methods weren't right and make an effort to grow past them as adults, or they double down, take pride in how they were treated and won't acknowledge their own shortcomings. There's a lot of "my parents beat and/or neglected me and I turned out just fine!" sentiments coming from people who aren't, uh, "just fine" and are now grown adults extolling the virtues of child abuse.

Same goes for helicopter parents, I've run across several who also subscribe to the "tough love" ideology, where they might defend their overbearing and verbal abuse as something that will build character in their children and make them stronger or better students or whatever.

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

#616

Post by dang »

unity1001 wrote: post #471
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…

[flagged]

You turned large parts of this thread into nationalistic flamewars and broke the site guidelines in countless egregious ways. That's vandalism and abuse. We ban accounts that wreck threads like this.

I appreciate that child-rearing is an intensely emotional topic and that standards differ between countries, but that doesn't make it ok to pour dozens of flamewar comments into a thread about it. Please see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34194158 also.

I took a quick look at your recent comment history and fortunately didn't see other cases of this, so it should be easy to avoid in the future. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

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

#617

Post by dang »

jjulius wrote: post #522
unity1001 wrote: post #506

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How about respecting every parents choices for their own family? The immense cacophonies that the industries in the US produce, eventually permate to, and induce chaos and problems in other countries. This includes medical industries. > You're obviously very heated and it's not constructive. Im not heated. Im not Angloamerican. This is not 'heated' discussion where I live. Avoid projecting your cultural paradigm to…

>Avoid projecting your cultural paradigm to random people on the Internet. Avoid being an absolute asshole who is impossible to have a level-headed discussion with. Your flying off the handle in this thread with judgement geared towards "random people on the internet" demonstrates that very well. It's clear that there will be no way to have a genuine, level-headed conversation with you. Enjoy your evening, or the res…

Please don't respond to a bad comment by breaking the site guidelines yourself. That only makes everything worse.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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

#618

Post by dang »

unity1001 wrote: post #482

[flagged]

Please don't take HN threads into flamewar, and certainly not nationalistic flamewar, and please follow the site guidelines in the future (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). You broke them horribly and at great length in this thread.

I'm not disagreeing with you about how to handle babies but what you did here was abusive and we need it not to happen again. Please see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34194145 also.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34177180.

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

#619

Post by dang »

jjulius wrote: post #492
unity1001 wrote: post #482

[flagged]

It's French, too. See, "Le Pause". And you're demonstrating a sheer amount of ignorance with your rush to judgement here. The children are not neglected and are checked in on and comforted by the parents during sleep training.

Please don't perpetuate flamewars on HN, regardless of how wrong someone else is or you feel they are, and please don't get into tit-for-tat spats like you did here. It's tedious, and definitely not what this site is for. When the conversation ceases to be curious and playful, the only good thing to do is just stop.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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

#620

Post by dang »

unity1001 wrote: post #496
remote_phone wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that you are getting enraged is a huge part of the problem. Keep your own morality to yourself and your own family. If you don’t want to use cry it out, then that’s your decision. The fact you project onto others is the problem and it’s none of your business. Cry it out is effective and works wonders for families and it has no side effects, as mentioned in the article itself.

> The fact that you are getting enraged is a huge part of the problem. Keep your own morality to yourself and your own family. How about you people keep your destructive practice to yourself and stop advocating it, less, rationalizing it and pushing it to mainstream. And with 'you people', i mean the US, because the only place where this thing seems to be a 'thing' and is even being advocated by 'professionals' is th…

This type of flamewar abuse is a bannable offense on HN. The last thing we need here is nationalistic hell.

Please see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34194158 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34194145, and please don't do this again.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Post reply on HN