A method to promote sleep in crying infants using the transport response [pdf]
cell.com
cell.com
- everyone wakes halfway up multiple times each night to see if everything is OK. Make sure they don't fall asleep with anything that can't stay with them during the night: music, tv, light, food, drink or another person (you or others).
- to teach kids to sleep, make them feel safe about it. What I did was walking in at a fixed schedule, starting at exact 3 minutes between the first night (I used a digital kitchen timer back then, a smartphone later) and increasing by two minutes every night. Surprisingly fast, my kids learn that I didn't disappear, and he'll be around even if they don't cry. Once they realized this they started playing with the toy the were allowed to keep in the bed. But, keep in mind: don't stop coming back if they are silent. A major part of the idea is that they realize that they don't have to do anything to make sure we don't forget them. Oh: and keep a very close ear with them in the beginning so they don't wake up and think they are alone.
I never really could get myself to accept the idea that "they need to cry themselves to sleep" and every thing I tried before this didn't work on my oldest.
This worked on my oldest kid, she started sleeping through the night within a week and also became calmer and I got my sleep back. With the rest of them it took 2-3 days only since I started earlier (shortly after they was a year old).
Maybe other methods work too, but this was easy for us and we didn't have to let the kids cry to sleep or anything else I have seen recommended online that I didn't like.
I remember at age 7 being afraid of tigers and dinosaurs at night, sometimes I watched tall coconut trees. I also asked my mum if she will abandon me for a mistake.
Even if it only happened to, say, 20% of the quiet babies, it's enough to surpass the costs of paranoia.
3500 American babies due suddenly and unexpectedly from SIDS every year. I wonder if there is any research into where these babies were sleeping when they died. Am I an idiot for wondering if they died from the sheer terror of waking up alone in a dark room?
Children just stop breathing. Some newer research suggests this is a genetic issue.
Of course there is misdiagnosis for children that suffocate because of toys/blankets.
It's a particularly interesting finding because we already know that low levels of BChE correspond to an additional challenges waking up from anaesthetic, and the working hypothesis is that this may be linked to the arousal system.
One other potential link is to SUDEP (Sudden Unexpected Death in Epilepsy), which so far we also don't understand the cause of, but it may be similar to SIDS (or in fact, it may even be the exact same condition) - it often presents very similarly (face down in bed, no obvious signs of suffocation, etc.). In fact, in Australia and New Zealand, SIDS is being renamed to SUDI (Sudden Unexpected Death in Infancy), which sort of speaks for itself in terms of similarities.
- don't smoke
- always have infants sleep on their back
Co-sleeping is also somewhat popular, but it greatly increases the chance of SIDS with risks skyrocketing for smoking mothers and those who are bed-sharing but don't usually do bed-sharing.
The product I am talking about is NOT the Owlet Dream Sock. That version is useless for this purpose. You need the now-discontinued Owlet Smart Sock, of which the most recent version was version 3. I believe the app is no longer available in the app store, and you need the app to use it, but I think if you have an Android device you can probably find an APK on one of the APK mirror sites. Personally, I have the iOS app which I still have due to having installed it on my phone before it was discontinued.
I hope someone will make an open-source product like this. It's conceptually quite simple: connect a pulse oximeter to a loud audible alarm. I would also love to be able to get an adult version as well for my grandparents that would call 911 automatically if they stop breathing or their heart stops. Calling 911 automatically would not be allowed in a product I think, but it could be done in an open-source / open-hardware product where the builder of the kit takes on the liability of breaking the 911-related laws (which in my view is a tiny price to pay for saving a loved one's life).
If any hardware hackers are looking for project ideas, an open version of the Owlet Smart Sock would be an incredible thing to build for the world.
P.S. my pet theory for what causes SIDS is that the part of the brain stem that controls breathing needs time to develop, and when the brain is super young that part of the brain is not yet fully developed, and is susceptible to failing to do its job. I think of an analogy to how people can die of failing to breathe during a heroin overdose, wherein that same part of the brain is put into a state where it doesn't maintain a high enough breathing rate. I suspect the failure mechanism in the overdose situation and the SIDS situation might be analogous.
We had one and I think it made one or two false positives where basically it fell off. I can’t say anything about false negatives since none of our children stopped breathing. (It had two alerts, one for losing skin contact and one for low oxygen. The first one we got all the time when forgetting to pause the base station before removing the sock, so that bit certainly worked.)
Is anyone here familiar with the subject across ancient cultures more broadly?
Personally, I sleep better when I’m alone. Haven’t convinced my wife that we should have a separate king and queen suite, though.
There are still a few that live traditionally in what basically is a large, two-floor long house for a multi-generational household. The families live on the second floor in one large room, but often with a small loft area for a quasi-third floodr The bottom floor is open with no walls (just support beams) to keep the animals. So it's constantly noisy.
It already triggered a few times for us, luckily in all cases it was because we carried the baby from the crib a forgot the turn off the breath detector :-D
Obviously, it's one of those things where most people will never actually know if it works or not (thankfully), but based on the fact that it goes off without fail every time I forget to turn the damn thing off after picking the baby up fills me with confidence that it does do what it's supposed to.
In my country you get a monthly check in with experts for the first 6 months and then less frequently. Mostly to weigh and check growth and arrange shots etc. But they also take some time to discuss how things are going and publish a booklet per age group with advice to parents.
Their advice (based on other research) is to strongly avoid holding your child until she sleeps and instead recommend exactly what you did.
The reason is that if you are holding the baby, they fall asleep and then wake a bit or switch to lighter sleep some time later (like every human does periodically every night) they will encounter a different environment and the holding prent is gone. That's going to wake them up fully and get confused. So now you have a crying baby in the middle of the night that you need to hold again to get back to sleep.
While if they fall asleep in their bed, feeling safe that you'll be around, a few hours later if they wake up they'll determine that everything is still OK and as they expect it to be, and continue sleeping.
There is nothing inconsistent about holding an infant and then sleep-training a 1 year old.
Now that she's older and speaking, she sometimes doesn't want to go to bed and will tell you. Then it helps to communicate that you'll be back and they're not on their own. Gives enough comfort that I almost never do more than come back once after 10 minutes or so, and over half the time she's already sleeping. If not I just say good night again, hand back the stuffed animal that by that point has usually been thrown out of the bed and that's it.
I have more than 4 kids
Wow I never heard this before, it sounds like a great idea. Did you learn from someone else or figured out yourself? I struggled with getting kids to sleep by themselves.
What we used to do is to have a simple fixed routine (e.g. drink milk, sing a short song, put them in bed) so she knows what's coming and put her in bed no matter what. Crying or not, just put her in bed softly, ignore the crying, say some nice things and walk out in a friendly way.
Come back after 3 minutes of crying. Stroke/hold/sing until she stops crying (usually immediately when you come back). And then put her in bed again in the same way. Often there will be some crying in protest of being put back in bed, it's really hard, but you have to put them in bed then in the same friendly/soft way as the first time.
Then keep doing this in increasing time intervals. We did 3 min, 5 min, 5 min, 10 min and then keep it at 10. But we rarely got to 10 after the initial week of doing this. I've heard several other parents that did the same thing, some after speaking to a sleep coach. It worked for many, but it takes consistency and a bit of time to start working.
One is that you get told a lot about averages. So commonly parents get told that babies (should) sleep around 12h a day. What nobody talks about is the variance. There are babies who sleep only 8h a day and others who sleep close to 20h. So you end up with parents who thing they need to get their child to sleep, even though the child is absolutely not tired.
Also a lot of people talk about not giving children too much impressions/stimulation. Which is also generally false, giving them stimulation will actually make them tired and sleep better, they also learn stuff. Obviously you don't do that just before or when going to bed.
I have a good friend who was given contradictory instructions by health care professionals while they were still at the hospital with their child which developed into a situation where 'professionals' were chastising the parents for following instructions correctly.
This is a real bind for parents who don't have easy access to second opinions or are in a position where the health professionals misuse their position of authority to prevent discussion of situations.
What does this mean?
"You're going to get a lot of parenting advice, but keep one thing in mind. Those folks aren't telling you how to raise your kid. They're telling you how to raise _their_ kid. But you're not raising their kids, you're raising you're kids. So take all that advice with a grain of salt."
Spoiled, overcompetitve, addicted to phones/tv, eating junk food, no good hobbies, clueless and aimless about life and what they want and so on. I have been at times few of those, and while I love my parents overall, they could have done more in some parts instead of me figuring out everything by myself, took damn too long to realize there are almost no limits to what one can achieve and how to get there
Ours sleeps quite a bit more than the average and at first it really concerned us until we talked to our pediatrician and they were like no that falls within the normal range. As an analyst I found it really frustrating that the distributions don't get published.
The concept of 'science doesnt know yet', 'everybody is unique so this may not be valid for your child' is a sign of incompetence from the doctor, so they just keep searching for one that will sound more confident.
In all this, emotions take the steering wheel. And emotions only are bad advice giver in any topic.
What you describe is something we with my wife have known and heard continuously from every doctor ever involved with our children. Dont stress out if its behind average curve in this or that. Sometimes they behave completely out of boundaries. If they sleep more/less so be it, there is a reason for that and no I can't tell you what it is.
I get the emotion of wanting the best and normal for a child damn too well, but real chaotic life happens and some folks cant grok that. One can see it in this thread so damn well - people having their pet theories, ignoring current science level, being damn sure their opinions are the correct ones. Instead of patiently admitting that we dont know yet, there are some theories and some findings but thats it.
Does anyone have any other interesting child-rearing resources in this style?
For a longer form reading i went through [2] and still visit it from time to time. I like it because it discusses multiple approaches and methods and discusses what works and what does not. A bit more scientific, but the gist of it is that most of children's behavior problems are actually parenting problems.
Recently I was trying to figure out why my 1,5 years boy had more liquid poop only when he was in the kindergarten. This made him need to be home quite often. Turned out they were giving him some drink with fruit that made him drink too much water. Given that children do not have perfectly function water absorption in the colon if they drink too much, their stool gets more liquefied. The liquefied poop gets confused for viral diarrhea and he then needs to stay home. I got that insight from [3]. After resumption of diet and removal of sugary fruit from the water, he has been fine for a while now.
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/parents/essentials/index.html [2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK402020/ [3] https://adc.bmj.com/content/79/1/2
Most published research is bogus. Not everything is physics or chemistry. Most things are actually not.
I'd rather advice based on extensive experience and wisdom than "research shows that ...". Basically everytime I see someone says "research shows" I mentally mark it as bullshit.
It's well established that most published research in Psychology and Sociology does not replicate. So there's that. If you don't want to accept that, maybe you are the one who belongs on a facebook page?
Among any parenting peer group there will be some whose children fall asleep instantly with no intervention and some who spend hours doing bedtime and get woken up dozens of times a night, despite doing more or less the same thing.
If we only prescribed pain medication based on your definition, practically none of them would make it through.
Your body adapts to its environment and as such very few things will work in perpetuity.
I feel a great deal of confusion is stemming from that advice might come to late or to early in the childs life.
What works for us and our previous child is cosleeping. After I saw both my partner and our eldest fall asleep simultaneously after finishing a feed I became a convert.
Also, it's a SIDS risk.
I think it's far better to do it deliberately, knowing where the baby is and deliberately positioning to avoid the possibility of rolling towards them, than to do it via exhaustion at 4am.
And our 3 year old coslept until 6 months and has slept 8pm to 8am in her own bed ever since so if that's counter productive I'll take it.
We noticed the same thing with my first 2 kids. They’d wake up from a dead sleep after putting them down. Once my second child was 3-4 months old we would let him cry for about 1 minute and found he usually went to back to sleep. Worked well. With my first we would run in immediately and I still think she has going to sleep issues.
> Experimental sessions started approximately 1 to 2 hours after the last feeding
> In most cases when mothers laid the infant down, mothers held the infant with one hand behind the neck and shoulders, and the other hand under the buttocks or thighs. The mother laid the infant on its back in 18/19 samples of the 1-month-old and older infants, and 7/7 of the neonate samples, whereas one infant was laid with a sideways landing, later to be turned on its back.
>To examine the effect of sleep duration on the sleep/wake outcome, the interval between the initiations of infant sleep and laydown was calculated. The timing of the infants’ sleep onset was defined as the initiation of the behavioral sleep state, satisfying both of eye closure and no vocalization.
Definitely helps keep them asleep and non sensitive to sudden noises in town/city.
When we rely on sounds for kids, we stick to sounds that mimic the more random/non-droning sounds you encounter in nature. Birds chirping in a forest, evening crickets and frogs etc.
Citation?
Do you have a source for this? We've always used white noise.
You probably use brown noise or so?
as opposed to a society where traditional authority commands you exactly what to do and you'll obey or else.
I wouldn't put it past evolution to encode useful information wherever possible, but it would be hard to prove that theory.
What I need to find out is what to do in the car. Our kid mostly calms down while walking, but unlike his older brother the car vibrations do not make him sleep at all. And so once he starts crying in the car, we have no way of calming him down, beside stopping the car and carrying him.
It seems like very bouncy driving (a sequence of high acceleration followed by sudden braking) helps, but it’s kind of wreckless, makes my wife sick and my older kid angry.
Help!
Intermediate tactics: white noise in the back seat, maybe some lullabies, singalongs, make sure the seatbelts aren’t too tight, maybe a drink or pacifier, etc - whatever to keep things quiet for a bit.
You can see them, they can see you.
https://usa.streetsblog.org/2013/02/20/the-origins-of-hollan...
Cars produce crazy noise pollution, and car lifestyle requires massive subsidies such as street parking, and a huge share of city real estate being used for parking and roads.
Lately, I’ve been inspired by this channel “Not just bikes” on the subject, and other HN readers may find it interesting as well https://youtu.be/XfQUOHlAocY
1a.) Formula is expensive, takes minutes of effort to prepare, and not always obtainable.
2.) Too much of a good thing is a bad thing. Comfort nursing at certain stages of the child's life will end up sleep training them in a negative way.
3.) Some babies are born with impairments that do not allow them to nurse effectively, or at all.
4.) Moms need a break from nursing too.
Babies cry for very few reasons, and reason number one, two, and three, is hunger.
When teething number one two and three are teeth.
Then for our son, it grew less and by the time he was 3 months old, he was a very happy baby.
What took you so long to start teething?
It's basic common sense, if babies evolved to scream for no reason for long hours in the wild, early humans would have been killed off by nocturnal predators ages ago.
Some humility would serve you well.
Some babies, even toddlers, scream loudly for extended periods with no way to console them. Our neighbor a decade ago had one such child. They were great, loving parents. The kid was obviously happy and content. Yet, every night, for several hours, she was a siren. They saw lots of doctors. They started with co-sleeping, for what it's worth. In the end, a separate bed and a parent reading a book with ear plugs [for several hours] seemed to cause the child the least distress.
When the child was 2, and still screaming, a new neighbor moved in. They spread neighborhood gossip of child abuse. They called the police and child protective services. Luckily, their case was so well documented, it was not an issue. The issue was "resolved" with better soundproofing.
The kid is a teen now. Extremely kind, well adjusted, helpful, smart, and, a sound sleeper. She's obviously loved very much her entire life. I think the parents did a great job.
Shrieking children for hours is very much a modern phenomenon.
yeah it’s a modern phenomenon because overzealous regulatory agencies gatekeep parents’ access to opium lotions
They slowly run out of energy while trying to suck and you only realize in horror when they don’t wake up from their hypoglycaemic “nap” by themselves anymore.
Breastfeeding is a wonderful thing and it’s an important default more mothers should be able to practice for as long as they and their child need and want to.
It’s also a highly complex process that often even a lactation consultant won’t be able to “fix”.
So yeah no shame, just empathy for all involved.
Feeding suddenly gets 1000x harder especially when deciding to go down the commendable road of pumping. All while potentially suffering from additional knock-on effects from lack of often very effective comforting-through-breastfeeding for example.
Even if health, general well-being and circumstances allow getting breast milk into a baby over even just the minimally recommended time can be one of the hardest things you’ll ever witness your partner go through.
For the lucky - majority I’m hoping - it can be both very fulfilling and sensual bonding probably even relaxing to the mother as well.
Be very thankful if that’s so in your case.
The advice is still not generally applicable.
(About half the parents in the world, fathers, aren't even capable of producing milk.)
The breastfeed strategy worked probably less than half the time for my oldest.
I'm glad this works / worked for you. If only it were this simple for the rest of us!
We are constantly in pain, it’s just that we have calibrated our brains to ignore specific levels of pain or cut off completely sensors.
Typical example of signal we filter out is the sense of our organs moving inside our body.
Hulk is grimacing for a reason ;)
little reality check for you: https://www.cdc.gov/drugoverdose/epidemic/index.html
Anyone have a source for this? It sounds really interesting, but never heard anything like it.
> Typical example of signal we filter out is the sense of our organs moving inside our body.
Interesting, do you have a source for this? Would love to read more.
In my experience, baby carrying is great but some babies just cry. My first child was held constantly, and we spent every evening bouncing hard on a yoga ball with her, but it wasn't enough to fully quell the crying.
You also have to learn to recognize the stages of sleep. Hold the arm of the baby up and down. If the arm remains in the air, this is light sleep. If the arm feels heavier and goes down all the way, this is deep sleep. Only then put the baby into the cot. This is quite important to know.
But there is an issue in our society that if you are looking after a baby by yourselves during the day, so nobody to hand them to, you do need to put them down briefly for practical reasons.
I'm the CTO of a startup working on exactly this (pediatric sleeping):
https://www.restfullysleep.com/
Fun fact there are 3 total methods to naturally promote sleep.
Babies are ridiculous.
If the baby falls asleep in your arms, when he lightly wakes up middle of the night he expects to be in your arms, instead he finds he's alone in bed, and wakes up fully, panics and starts crying.
It is usually recommended to place the baby in his crib while awake, for him to fall asleep there and wake up in the same place he fell asleep in.
This is according to "sleep training", and I can testify it absolutely works (after two difficult nights where baby needs to adjust to falling asleep alone)
I'd expect as much since this is the first thing a parent tries to do. Holding the baby when they wake crying several times a night will calm them, not exactly revelatory, but can come in handy even for more lasting solutions.
I find the lit/consultants have wildly varying degrees of severity for approaches, including for gradual extinction. The mistake I think we made prior to seeking intervention is feeding-to-sleep for too long, i.e. the baby would drink a bottle right before bed and get knocked out (mostly). They were always accustomed to being asleep in arms before being put down. I think if you feed slightly earlier in the routine-chain, with the lights on, you go a long ways to avoiding this issue, since you can rock them while they're awake for a time before putting them down. In some branded variants of graduated extinction, they suggest making sure your baby is super wakeful and basically dropping them in the crib right away after reading a book - this seems needlessly harsh when going from the opposite extreme, which is reflected in the baby's level of crying. We found that it went well to rock them until they were calm and drowsy (but still awake) before putting them down. The protest was mild and short-lived, but of course that's only our experience.
LOL. Definitely did not work on my (now 3 year old) daughter during the infant phase.
Hold and walk until they sleep, then keep walking for 5-10 minutes, or just sit down for 10 minutes before laying them on the bed.
You also have to learn to recognize the stages of sleep. Hold the arm of the baby up and down. If the arm remains in the air, this is light sleep. If the arm feels heavier and goes down all the way, this is deep sleep. Only then put the baby into the cot. This is quite important to know.
I personally favor a bounce->rock->walk->sit pipeline, but ymmv based on the temperament of the child.
This approach does require some patience and letting the child “cry it out”, but this is how they learn to be the master of their own sleep.
Sadly his night feeds went somewhat long because he was a reluctant burper, and that big burp was definitely necessary for him to fall back asleep. I read most of "Quantum Computing Since Democritus" during those night feeds (on a very-low-light-setting kindle, in a dark room, etc). There are probably more conducive environments for reading that book...
I've read about a lot of mental issues having roots in early-childhood abandonment - apparently, when kids are left alone to cry, their body releases hormones which stop the crying, but doesn't stop the anxiety. In a nutshell, the baby still feels like crying, but it just doesn't.
There are probably studies (and I will appreciate all info given in the replies, be it studies or personal experience), but something about me just can't accept "cry it out" as a healthy method of raising infants. Infants should be in proximity of their mother until they are old enough to detach on their own - that's how it works for the whole animal kingdom, no?
But we're talking about infants here. I seriously doubt that infants are crying because they want to be entertained (as implied by "crying gets me attention") - I think that they cry because they are f-cking scared. Yes, they want attention - the same way that a person stuck in a dark alleyway with a gang of thugs wants the attention of a police officer.
Or am I missing something here?
But getting attention from their parents is one of the areas they are very advanced!
Of course they are good at getting attention, but that's because they need attention. That's why nature gave them the ability to cry surprisingly loud from the moment they're born.
PS. I don’t want to imply your kids where not able to do such things. It would be a rare behavior though. PPS. Father of at least one
Children are smart enough to understand sentences like "This is really not something to get upset about", AFTER they have calmed down, and explained in a loving matter.
They aren't necessity trying to manipulate you but they are constantly experimenting and if certain behaviors get them what they want they will continue to do them.
I am fairly doubtful that infants can want things that they don't need. If infants cry, it's because they feel pain - I don't see any other explanation, and projecting adult traits (such as wanting things they don't need) onto infants doesn't really make sense to me. Of course they "want" their parent's attention. They're infants, they probably feel pain when their parents are not around.
Of course, there is a period around ~2 years old when babies start experimenting with crossing the lines to see what they can and cannot get away with. But at age, they aren't infants anymore.
Thankfully, there's someone selling every possible take on parenting advice to meet every intuition seeking affirmation. (I skip that part and just go straight to my own intuition. I think we need diversity.)
How often does that happen in reality? Are there any studies? What is your personal experience? Honest question, as I really don't know.
> Thankfully, there's someone selling every possible take on parenting advice to meet every intuition seeking affirmation.
There's no need for such a dismissing attitude. I clearly stated I am not an authority on the subject and I'm welcoming all and any information in the replies. I'm just discussing here, and without actual knowledge, intuition is my starting point.
How did you manage to get the 6 years old to finally sleep alone? Did it happen by itself or did you have to do something about it?
6 year old is currently in that state. Again, even daring to admit something like that invites commentary from other parents how we did it wrong. Maybe so, but his mother is also a highly anxious person who could not handle letting a child be upset without comforting him. I also have a 12 year old who sleeps fine on her own now but was similar to about the same age.
So again, I don't see a way to be a parent other than intuition coupled with openmindedness, and that undoubtedly our own limitations or neuroses will end up affecting our children somehow (to the extent we don't or can't work on ourselves). It's somewhat of a tragic or at least deeply humbling experience.
The work here is not to let the child cry in it's early days, but to put it in it's bed, come when it cries, calm it down, go back to bed, come again when it cries etc. Repeat until child sleeps.
It’s a simple technique that helps the parents go through the one or two difficult nights where the child learns how to manage to sleep alone. It uses a stopwatch. First leave the child to cry for 15 seconds before going to comfort them. Always stay by the bed, giving only your presence. If the crying continues when you lay the baby in bed, add 15 seconds so wait for 30 seconds, etc. until reaching a plateau of five minutes. I don’t know anyone who reached the plateau, nor had to do it for more than three days.
My daughter falls asleep almost immediately and is much happier now that she’s properly rested. And as parents we’re happier too!
My wife and I are expecting our first in November and are currently reading - and loving - this book. It’s a great reframe.
based on my experience i'd very much doubt that this sleep problem comes because of attachment parenting. there must have been some other experience that causes the child to have trouble sleeping alone.
the point of attachment parenting is exactly to help the children be more confident, so they need less attachment later. if that doesn't work then there must have been some other influence. elsewhere you mention a highly anxious mother. i don't know, i thought it would have to be something worse like divorce or death of a family member. but it's not surprising that the kids pick up the anxiousness of their mother.
but that doesn't mean attachment parenting is the wrong approach. it only means that it makes it more challenging, and while you could try letting kids cry it out, i believe that would only lead to a worse outcome. because while it works to let the kids sleep by themselves, it influences the relationship between the parents and the children.
(edited for clarification)
Ha 6 is nothing, my 14 year old still asks a few times a week. I gave up a long time ago, its my wife's problem now.
The naming / branding of sleep training methods in parenting is abysmal. “Cry it out” is also called “extinction.”
Like who came up with this? It’s terrible, and totally reasonable to reject the notion based on the naming alone.
That said the right way works. Even if you know all of the technique and carry it forward faithfully it can take a lot of bravery to go ahead with it.
Anyone on the fence with this I get it. There’s a subreddit, /r/sleeptrain where you will find others in your spot.
The connotations of using that term are rather unfortunate but there's a reason why that name is used.
Any baby younger than that you basically should always attend to their needs and never let them cry without trying to soothe them [there can be a grey area from 3-5 months but still the general idea is the same].
That's the most worst message you can send out to a person of any age.
I often hear people say: but they learn, they manipulate you as if a baby’s personality was naturally hostile and their main reason in life was betraying their parents. :)
This is an open question, I'm not taking any side because I don't know. But any answer should be supported by some kind of rational argument, not the argument of convenience, i.e. my child stopped crying, therefore they're okay, because I feel better when they are not crying.
I'd expect that going from one extreme to the other (i.e. extinction) can lead to long panic crying and is unnecessarily harsh. By contrast if you rock your baby until they are comfortable and drowsy (but awake), then set them down, they'll be annoyed at the adjustment at first and protest but won't freak out. Then you can decide on whichever interval you want to check in (5-10 min), usually touching but not picking up. By the first night our kid fell asleep in 15 min, then 5 min the next. Then in no time he's sleeping through his nights.
Everyone gets better sleep and it was fairly painless. It doesn't have to depend on an infant feeling helpless - at bedtime they have high sleep pressure, they want to sleep. We told ourselves we'd abort the process if it things went awry. In the daytime they're as happy as ever.
I would like to give you a little background about my situation first. My first born is 2.7years old now. For the first 12 month of his life he cried. I don’t want to say he is a moody baby but he cried. For 5-7 hours a day every single day he cried. And one of us was with him for every single second of that. There was no evidence of any physical reason for his crying. Me being a „nerd“ was devastated as their was no way to just follow a certain formula to make him stop crying. And we tried everything. The only thing that finally made him stop crying after 12 months was … growing up. We have been told to let him cry by countless of people, even experts. I was lucky enough that my wife did some research herself and convinced me that pushing through tough times and staying at his side, or to say it differently „hurt“ ourselves, is in the end far less harmful then possibly hurting our baby by letting him „cry it out“.
Seeing so many comments here advising and lecturing on letting them cry it out hurts when for me it feels like the lazy way out of a problem that will fix itself if there is no physical reasons for the baby crying.
And since people ask for studies and evidence I found a great comment on a study that tried to proof the opposite. It’s linking a lot of studies that show how bad the crying it out method can be: https://acamh.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/jcpp....
I'm glad there are people out there that still care more about the well-being of their children than their own convenience. "Crying it out" does feel like a lazy way out from my perspective. The fact that so many parents are willing to do it, and yet become defensive in discussions like this... "Oh, you've never been a parent, you don't know what it's like"... Well, nobody forced them to have children. I don't know what they expected when they decided to have a kid. It's a massive undertake, and requires almost complete dedication. Yet it's so easy to just have a change of heart, feel trapped, blame the child for being a child. I can empathize, but I can't approve. If you have a child, its well being is more important than yours.
i also think that many parents are being led to believe that letting the kid cry it out is for the well-being of the child. so some will do it even if it goes against their own feelings.
Nature gives us a tiny creature, who (during the first stages of childhood) operates entirely or almost entirely on pure instinct, and it surprisingly gives it the ability to cry at a volume that puts Whitney Houston to shame, and makes you feel like a fire alarm has gone off. Why are they able to cry like that when they are still so small? To me, it's common sense that it's so that we feel compelled to answer their call and do something to stop the crying ASAP. That's the natural thing to do, the thing our species seems to be designed to do. Any other reaction would require very solid evidence to convince me it's a good idea. And no, "with this method the baby sleeps alone without crying in two weeks" is not valid evidence, because that's an argument based on convenience for parents in contemporary society, not on what's best for the baby.
I couldn't imagine doing it any other way. too exhausting for everybody. Being able to goto sleep on your own is a skill! And it's a self taught thing.
Brings a tear to the eye.
I think (because I have no experience) twins must have a deeper human connection than non-twins, and if so, I wonder if can / is applied to other relationships. I wonder if there's any vestigial evolutionary benefit.
Semi-related funny story: When our second was old enough to go into a cot, rather than a bassinette, we tried putting both the kids into the same room when they slept. It was fine... for the few minutes it took for the youngest to realise that there was "someone else" in her room, and started scream-crying, which woke up and set-off the eldest into scream-crying.
We thought the fucking room must have been on fire or something, never moved so fast in unison with my wife before or since. It was existential dread at the time. It's hilarious now.
(It really was just that the youngest wasn't used to having the eldest also in the room, it worked fine together for a few years after that until they eventually wanted their own rooms - between times, however, they were actually comforted by having each other in the same room - also brings a tear to my eye.)
For all its worth, I know at least 2 pairs of twins who cannot stand each other.
My dad is an identical twin, and I get along with my cousins from his twin brother better than my other cousins. There's a gender / age difference with the other cousins though, so may not count for much.
Further question to the ether: Do identical twins get along better than non-identical twins?
Actually, you could say the same about all manners of recording history; Story telling, art, education, music.
Why bother with any of it if people can figure it out for themselves? Because we progress further when we work as a team and share knowledge.
In general, I recommend taking all advice with a grain of salt: not because it is bad advice, but because no kids are the same, and what works with one will not necessarily work with another. Just take it easy and try to not worry too much. The unbroken chain of your ancestors have all figured it out, and so can you. And congratulations!
If you go from walking to putting the baby down horizontally, the baby will often be awakened by the sensation of falling backwards, and wake up.
Do you have children of your own?
That step is apparently not super obvious because this grabbed over 300 upvotes on HN, no small feat.
Even if it was obvious to some, parents of newborns are often (always?) sleep-deprived, so it might be hard for them to remember how well it worked to hold the baby still for 2, 4, or 6 minutes. I didn't have especially difficult sleepers, but it would have been nice to have seen this data back when we had tiny ones.
Tongue tie was quite obvious for my first daughter (it even runs in my family), but hospital staff still refused to do a proper diagnosis and said it was fine. It was not, and impacted the breastfeeding.
Or are you just anecdoting?
However, the placebo effect here is really strong. Firstly because tongue tie revisions are to fix issues that very often are the kind of thing that resolves on it's own. Secondly because parents are told they will see some sort of fix and they are putting their child through a procedure than can be painful so they will really want to see an improvement.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5804819/
"A desire to increase rates of breast feeding initiation and absence of standardized criteria for the diagnosis of ankyloglossia have resulted in runaway rates of frenotomy for newborn infants in some parts of Canada."
https://internationalbreastfeedingjournal.biomedcentral.com/...
You'll see a really unfortunate statement like this in almost every article discussing the issue "Randomized controlled trials of optimized lactation support vs. frenotomy and of scissors vs laser in performance of frenotomy are needed."
This is my third kid, and we definitely discovered this the hard way during our first baby. There are a few windows that you can soothe and successfully put a baby down to sleep. Despite all our kids being otherwise different, putting them down as babies worked exactly how this method describes.
We had figured out that once she falls asleep, we wait 8-10 minutes for her to get really deeply asleep before putting her down. But the transport to calm crying, that is really going to come in handy.
We did soften it somewhat by setting the maximum interval at 7 minutes (we couldn't stand longer than that). It might have slightly reduced how quickly the method works (although we started to really see great progress 4 days in which is in line with the book).v
I do remember that quite sharp 'parental pain' (it's hard to describe, it's like an intrinsic 'hunger to help') of knowing that we have to get through the next X minutes of baby crying without going in there. It's good to have a supportive partner so you can both keep each other in check (or to put it how I'd prefer: "well, we're both bad parents if this doesn't work, it's not just me").
Moreover, this is more about feeding the baby than moving it. Feed the baby and walk it around a little and they sleep. Try this on a hungry baby and see fall apart! Useless research!