All babies have different temperaments, of course, but ours has now slept 7am-7am with only one wake up (for food - she goes back to sleep within 5 minutes) between 2-5 months (with only one nightmare week when we tried weaning too early - causes painful gas!). She is a very happy baby. We have teething due next though, I bet.. :-)
Something interesting has arisen from our technique, too. She's had to build a rich vocabulary of sounds. We can usually tell when cries are "real" or merely to communicate, and can "ignore" most of the superfluous ones. The result has been that she shouts or laughs for attention, and we respond to that immediately (as we want to encourage it). Over time, nearly all non-essential crying has stopped and been replaced by funny sounding "argh!" and "Wooo!" type shouts and calls.
To any (future) parents reading this who want to try similar techniques, I can't personally recommend it. All kids are different and what we've tried is very against the grain with the current common literature on raising a kid. Take what I say with a big pinch of salt - it just worked for us, is all.
To ad to the stimulus/response.
Dawkins has a pretty interesting theory in "The Selfish Gene". In it he talks about why little birds peep.
One conclusion could be that they peep because they are hungry. But another more interesting conclusion he makes is that they peep to attack predators thus forcing the mother to silence them by finding food.
The important part is to spot the difference between when they are really sad/afraid and when they are simply trying to get things their way.
On top of that some children like my son don't use pacifiers which makes it quite a bit more challenging to balance things out.
I hope that I won't do stuff to my child because I read somewhere that it might be good. Isn't there a chance to simply feel what is right?
The stimulus/response aspect is very interesting, though. Couldn't there other ways to untrain the "cry to get attention" behavior than letting the child cry out? Like responding to other cues than crying?
This just makes me think it might be interesting to program a simulation of such behaviors and look for equilibriums. Because it is not only the child reacting to parents, but also the parents reacting to the child, it's a complex system... Ah, wish the day had 48 hours...
Sure, different strokes for different folks! I don't think anyone who always goes with their gut is wrong, but I also don't think experimenting within safe boundaries is a bad thing. I think everyone should bring their kids up in different ways - diversity of approaches is a good thing.
One thing I painfully recognize, though, is that I'm often wrong and my gut instincts are based on faulty underlying facts, so I'm quick to use other people's knowledge to either reinforce what I know or to change my direction. "Overcoming" certain parenting instincts in this way could be seen by some (and possibly rightly) to be risky - I just see it as an attempt to improve.
Watching a documentary about child rearing worldwide, we were surprised at how many different (and, to Western eyes, worrying) ways there are to raise and treat kids. As a planet, we do "ok." The nomads on the Russian steppes wrap their babies tightly all day and put them in a cradle on the back of a donkey for 8 hours a day..
Couldn't there other ways to untrain the "cry to get attention" behavior than letting the child cry out? Like responding to other cues than crying?
My reading suggests so, but that it's a lot harder and time demanding. The reason is that instead of giving zero response to undesirable behavior and a lot of response to positive behavior.. instead you're giving positive behavior to everything and need to give very strong and constant responses to the positive behavior to make it stick, as it were.
Also worth noting: all kids are different and develop different skills at different ages. The variance on the age at which kids learn things like talking, walking, toilet training etc is huge, years sometimes. If your kids early at something, doesn't mean they're smart, and if they're later developing doesn't mean they're dumb.
At around 1.25, we decided to see how our daughter would do if we let her cry a bit - we'd wait through 5 minutes of crying before going in. It was really hard for us all, but it took exactly 2 nights before she was sleeping through the night without crying.
It's totally ... inhuman.
Also, that's a little strong. At a point (e.g. 6 months), this is totally true, but at a point, families need to figure out what works for them.
On another point, I would point out that in general adults are very, very attuned to having emotional responses to crying children (the younger the more powerful the response), whether we have our own children or not. That's why a baby crying on a red-eye flight can have such emotional reactions from total strangers (often negative, unfortunately). It's a wonderful human instinct that I think serves us very well in general. But those who aren't experience parents need to remember the following (_please_):
* Every baby has a different temperament and personality.
* Babies sometimes cry to get attention and not because they are actually in any way uncomfortable or scared. The different sounds are easy for the baby's parents to hear and difficult for other people to distinguish. (as mentioned, newborn infants are easier in that they always have a reason when they cry).
* They sometimes cry for a while and there's nothing you can do. Seems to always happen in public. Leg aches, colic, gas, etc.
A great book about parenthood (if you have older children too) is "Hold on to your Kids" by Gordon Neufeld. Highly recommended.
I've never read a book on parenting, nor do I read magazine articles about it, or listen to the so-called 'experts'. I just observe when things I'm doing are having a negative effect, and have to curb my own behaviour sometimes. We're all human beings. Sometimes it's hard to overcome your own faults to raise a better kid.
I knew someone would say that :) Hold on to your Kids is not a parenting book though. It is a book about parenthood. It is not a book about what to do with your kids (when they misbehave or otherwise), but about who to be for your kids.
For us, our son would wake every hour in the night and none of us were getting enough rest. He was cranky all day and we were too. We finally started sleep training after about 4 months and quickly got him to start sleeping long stretches through the night. A year later, he's an excellent sleeper and a very happy child.
Overall, it really depends on each family situation and the child. If your family can bear 2-4 wakeups a night for over 1.5 years, then go with it. If the wakeups are making everyone miserable -- including the child -- then that's why many parents turn to sleep training.
Most experts, however, do not recommend just letting babies cry it out. Sleep training involves going in a making your presence aware for increasing lengths of time. Giving a baby too much attention at night, however, will simply train them to wake up and get it. Although the one truth with babies is that everyone is different -- sometimes it does require drastic measures and sometimes you don't have to do anything at all.
But someone close to our family has an almost two-year-old and has never tried to teach him appropriate communication methods or appropriate distance and separation, for that matter. It is painful to be around him. If the mom is more than ten feet away from him and they are in the same room he freaks out. He cries over such silly and needless things and he cries a lot because at home crying always results in instant attention and fulfillment. He cannot take discipline because he has never been disciplined.
In my opinion the teaching and disciplining needs to begin well before 1 year in normal cases. A 1 or 1.5 year old is more than capable of understanding the responses he receives to the behaviors he enacts.
It was a fantastic book and written by a doctor who specializes in sleep habits. It's the gift I give to all my friends who are expecting.
Also, there are only a few pages on infants and sleeping, and the rest is for older children.