What happens when babies are left to cry it out?
bbc.com
bbc.com
My oldest two could not do sleep training. 10 months of trying for almost every night and they did not just adapt. My middle daughter embraced it after a single night. My adopted middle son didn’t need it at all and was naturally “good” at sleeping. My youngest daughter and son will fall asleep right away if around someone, but otherwise will stay up for hours (but never cried about it).
Again, one family experience but each child has their own needs and responses. I’ve never found a single method that works universally in any aspect of parenting.
Except ice cream. They all seem to love that.
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 nights nothing works. Just take him/her out, watch same television and have the baby on your belly to relax. A kid is not a robot, you can't expect it to go asleep when you say it's time for bed, there's no on/off button. I'm often amazed by parents who expect the kid to be tired at exactly 19.00 each evening.
That's not how it works, the first year is horrible. You as a new parent will be exhausted by the amount of not-sleeping you'll get, and the amount of attention the kid needs. Expect nothing less, things will get better when the kid grows older.
I think it is something of western culture to put a baby in a separate room and leave it alone, and thinking it feels comfortable and save and you can mind your own business.
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).
For our kids, they do sports. Heavy duty sports, since age 2-3.
Now they basically volunteer to sleep on their own.
Bedtime is not a drag. Its a priviledge. And Its glorious.
Every kid is different. But they are all energy machines. Starve the machine of energy, or use it all up, and the machine will go idle. .You have to find what sticks.
It begins with tryptophan, which can be converted either into niacin or serotonin. Taking a niacin supplement with tryptophan will boost the opposing pathway.
Serotonin is itself the source of all melatonin.
Adjusting diet is not as controversial as a hormone supplement.
Do not attempt this while taking an SSRI, which can be deadly.
It taught him to sleep. We stopped it on weekends and then slowly weened him off after 6 months.
Now at 8 he sleeps super well.
My first daughter would wake, have a bottle, fall asleep within a few minutes for 3-4 hours. Wake, bottle, fall asleep for 3-4 hours.
The first year was sooooooo easy. The 2nd year I wake, make bottle, hand it to her, she drinks and falls asleep.
She’s 4 now and can’t stay in a room alone during the day or night. That’s harder because now I can’t go toilet because she will scream at the top of her lungs until someone is in the room. But sleeping is me staying in the room for 5-20 minutes till she’s asleep.
Before that age, I also tried several times, but each time I gave up because he protested too much. It was just easier to let him sleep in the same room.
When he started sleeping in his own room at 3.5 years old he had to adjust psychologically. I had to convince him that monsters don't exist, or if he still believes they exist, at least that they can't get in because they don't have the key. I also got a night lamp for him so he would be less scared.
He would still get up frequently and seek me out because he was scared. The counselor advised us to put him back in bed and be consistent about it. If he gets up 20 times, put him back 20 times, no matter the protests. He accepted this after a few weeks.
I also told him that I won't stay until he falls asleep because I have to sleep too. I said I'll stay with him for max 5m, even if he's not asleep. After a few weeks and many protests he finally accepted.
I think it's the same thing like in other self-help sub-genres: any of such hard and fast rule will work very well for some people in some situations. That's why there are so many of such rules, why they're often mutually conflicting, and why they all have armies of evangelists behind them.
> Certainly one persons life can’t detract from large scale statistics.
Conversely, those statistics talk about what's average, typical. Some things have high enough variance that even most solid RCT only works as a guideline for policy at scale.
I have only two children, but it's clear to me both develop according to completely different trajectories. It kind of makes sense as, even if us parents didn't change in any way, and the environment stayed constant, our younger daughter is still spending a lot of time in the company of her sister. That's a huge additional high-variance input source :).
So I’m always skeptical about articles offering generalized parenting advice.
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 18. He lost a lot of weight and we were scared and exhausted.
After a few weeks of that my wife finally put him into his bassinet and stepped away. She sat there next to his crib crying with him for 5 minutes, and then he fell asleep and slept for the longest he had in his life. That moment was the turning point from weight loss to weight gain and from barely sleeping to sleeping normally. In spite of all of our worries that something was terribly wrong, all that was required was to let him be. He's now 3 years old and still hates to sleep, but he's as healthy as any other kid both physically and emotionally.
My only advice to new parents today is to accept what everyone else says as well intentioned and then do what works best for your kid. Every child is different, and people who try to claim that their method is the only humane way to treat a kid need more exposure to the real world.
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.
Every child is different which is why parenting is not an exact science. Try everything, something will work!
Besides, it's not like parents 10K years ago had the option to let their babies cry it out in a separate room with a noise machine, and evolution selected against it because co-sleeping babies reproduced more. "Babies cry because they need to co-sleep or they will suffer some serious problem" sounds reasonable to me, but so does "Babies cry because it gets them more nutrition by keeping Mom so sleep-deprived that she delays her next pregnancy." Making just-so stories about behavioral evolution is dubious, the bar needs to be higher than just sounding plausible.
That's a cultural problem itself.
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 both. Given the importance of loving, caring, supporting family for a child's overall health, happiness, and future prospects, it's fair to consider some interventions as trade-offs for the sake of the household. The article mentions this near the end, but then mostly dismisses the concern.
And saying it doesn't make it less of a thing.
Babies do delay their mothers' next pregnancy.
But sleep has nothing to do with it. And really, neither do the babies. Nursing mothers inhibit their own pregnancy; that is why the normal interval between births is two years instead of one year.
It’s an interesting theory, but having my second kid appear 12 months after the first — in spite of the breastfeeding — makes me very sceptical of its reliability.
>>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. 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 age. Until that time, a child depends on his parents to help him calm down and learn to regulate his intense feelings.
We do forage for fruits and mushrooms. We just forage inside different locations :)
What person in the suburbs doesn't have a veggie garden?
We sleep trained our son at 7 months. He cried for 90 minutes the first night, then slept soundly until 7 am. The second night he cried for 45 minutes then slept until 7 am. He didn't cry the third night. Every night since he's slept peacefully from 8 PM until 7 AM and asks to go to bed when he gets tired. He's happy during the day unless something obvious is distressing him. Most notably he's happy and peaceful from 5 PM until 8 PM when I see other parents suffering from witching hour and unexplained melt downs.
Isn't a few hours of discomfort in exchange for years of good sleep and happiness a good trade off?
Sleep training (which involved some degree of "cry it out") was a life saver for us.
It (largely) took one freaking day. One day's worth of naps. She didn't even cry, just "cried out" to be held. First a few minutes, then 5, and she didn't reach 10. To our utter amazement, she largely stopped waking us during the night. I was not expecting that at 3 months.
...I did kind of miss our late night "well, might as well turn on the TV and watch Star Trek" times together.
I've had people get judgmental when I've explained that process, but I often hear parents that have their two year olds waking up in the middle of the night for feedings. That's utter insanity.
Difficulty getting themselves to get their kids vaccinated (the screaming or crying is hard!) is a big factor behind the antivax movement, IMO.
> Isn't a few hours of discomfort in exchange for years of good sleep and happiness a good trade off?
It could be - that's a decision for each family to make. I will point out that many families think their baby is sleeping through the night - when what's really happening is they are still waking up repeatedly but have given up on crying (accepting that nobody will come to help them).
Feeding schedules aren’t starving children.
Please focus on what yields the best outcome for your family, and assume other families are doing the same without judgement.
Try replacing your rage with curiosity about all the factors of modern parenting.
The researchers in the article were conducting an actual RCT, they are the only ones who should be speaking to this. Anyone else's anecdotal opinion should be discounted just as much as things like religious fundamentalist views on contraception.
Just let parents be. Stop with the admonitions. If something worked well or poorly for you, you're free to relate that without passing judgment.
Anyway, my charitable reading of GP is not that parents should or shouldn’t do anything in particular, rather that the child’s needs, as expressed over a very long time, should not be forgotten just because we live in different times.
I have spoken extensively on this topic with a variety of practioners, and I've heard plenty of horror stories coming from the cosleeping camp. Learning to sleep by yourself is an important skill, and some parents don't realize they need to teach it. This leads some children to basically never learning, since it gets harder as they get older. There really is a golden window of opportunity (for learning good sleep habits), and while it's not as narrow as some make it out to be, it's not wide open either.
But don't take my word for it. Talk to your doctor and partner and figure out what works for you. And then be consistent about it.
I have one data point to share. An eight year old child decided one day, rather abruptly, that they were "done" with cosleeping and wanted to be in their own room, in their own bed, by themselves. And that was that.
This is wrong. Various methods recommend starting as early as four months (and some recommend a less-strict version that starts earlier but only leaves children to cry for a shorter period of time before coming to get them, as opposed to fully crying it out).
1. https://www.parents.com/baby/sleep/basics/the-ferber-method-...
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 the things we do fall into this category is 100%.
Edit: also, don't be so judgmental. Behaviours are environmental adaptions. In the Western world, mothers typically work 9-5 like men, so of course in cultures where women don't have this constraint they'd be shocked at our behaviours. Humans are adaptable however, and constantly coddling your fearful infant made sense when there were dangers everywhere. In our society's we're pretty safe in historical terms, so it could just be that babies cry because they're instinctively afraid until they learn they're safe when nothing happens to them after a few nights, and then it stops. This actually seems to happen in a lot of cry-it-out cases.
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.
Some stuff is evolutionary. Co-sleeping is seen in all mammal species. And its an important part of the group sentiment, including the social support it brings. The lack of it causes anxiety in mammal species. Even domestic cats prefer to take care of their young in groups of mothers until the kittens grow up.
> This kid cried every time a fart came. At some point you just need to learn...
...that those farts have been causing pain in his abdomen or scrotum. Its amazing how it did not occur to you and instead you let the kid to just 'go through' it.
> 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
Inbreeding, negligent and sociopathic aristocrats are never good examples for anything related to the basic tenets of human civilization. Less, parenting. Sheeesh. If your parenting morning star is murderous 18th century aristocrats who starved their people to be able to live in extravaganza with their powdered wigs...
Not really comparable because we decided it was morally wrong, not that we were wrong about its effects. Its not like humanity used to think slavery was good for the slave.
People said it was the natural order of things - similar to how men owning women or children was divinely approved, and if you read about “the curse of Ham” you can see many variations of the excuses offered that it was just due to ancestral sin - and during the colonial era that exact argument was used to the general effect that slavery provided heathens with a chance to adopt Christianity and be saved.
The reason the Southern Baptists exist as a separate denomination is because they split off from the main Baptist community in support of slavery, only recanting in 1995!, and while that’s generally accepted as being significantly motivated by the massive financial impacts it relied on those rationalizations (it’s biblical, we’re improving people who would otherwise be doomed to a primitive existence without the chance of salvation). These days people know not to say slavery was good but you can still find conservatives saying colonialism was a net win for many countries.
There’s considerably more about this dark part of our history here:
People still argue that slavery (in particularly, chattel slavery of Blacks in North America) was good for the slave, and the argument was even more common when slavery was legal but under active debate.
In fact the word slave originates from Slavic people.. I don't think Asians ever had slaves in the history.
The OP comment said " what are the odds that the rest of the world was wrong for a millenium and Americans figured it out in 100yrs"
Edit: damn. non European had slaves. Didn't know it before. Wasn't definitely part of the history taught in schools though.
OP is right though. Throughout Entire history people had slaves until it was abolished.
At a minimum, Africans and Muslims had slaves. Pretty sure the Incas and Aztecs did. I lack data on Asia.
Isn't co-sleeping (as in bed-sharing) discouraged in the US, at least for newborns, because of the risk of SIDS?
To quote the AAP:
> AAP recommends that parents sleep in the same room – but not in the same bed as a baby, preferably for at least the first six months.
Source: https://www.aap.org/en/news-room/news-releases/aap/2022/amer...
To quote the CDC:
> Sharing a room with your baby is much safer than bed sharing and may decrease the risk of SIDS by as much as 50%.
Source: https://www.cdc.gov/reproductivehealth/features/baby-safe-sl...
From a recent meta-analysis:
> The combined OR for SIDS in all bed sharing versus non-bed sharing infants was 2.89 (95% CI, 1.99-4.18).
[1] https://www.schn.health.nsw.gov.au/news/articles/2022/05/wor...
For what it's worth I agree cosleeping is (in general) quite dangerous, but I do wish all of those recommendations weren't put into place at the same time. It'd be nice to know how much back sleeping helped with SIDS vs cosleeping vs no pillows/blankets/etc.
The generations that have been neglected in this way have not reached their later ages en masse. Of course there would be no negative effects. That aside, repressed psychological damage is still damage.
My hope is that one day we will consider this emotionally abusive behaviour as seriously as we we now look at physical abuse. Though I don't hold out much hope. Especially as there are still some people holding out for the right to hit their children even now.
A big problem with this "debate" is that people conjure images of newborn babies being left to cry for hours, when what is actually predominantly practiced is older infants 6-12 months old being allowed to cry for less than half an hour.
After being fed and given a clean diaper and a safe place to sleep, being rocked to sleep just isn't a "need" for an older infant; they are crying because they want to be soothed to sleep. And it's fine to do that if you want to as a parent (which pretty much all parents do!), but it's also fine for them to learn to soothe themselves instead. It isn't "emotional abuse".
Teaching a child that their call for help will not be answered is unkind and damaging. And I’m not sure a baby has the same perspective on 15 minutes as the average adult.
I’m pretty sure most adults are walking around with unresolved emotional trauma issues that do not serve them, or those around them, well.
Again, on my opinion as a human. Opinions clearly vary wildly.
I wonder if such practices were used in schools reserved for royalty and other nobles in the UK
Different kids parents and circumstances. I've really tried to tone down my judgement of other parenting techniques as I know they can easily judge my choices especially context free.
It's hard.
Cry it out is effective and works wonders for families and it has no side effects, as mentioned in the article itself.
"Keep your own morality to yourself and your own family."
That's not a real solid code of ethics to have.
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 the US. The place where individualism and consumerism hails from and the people load up on prozac to survive.
That's just not feasible nor it can't be 100% an obligation to always respond every single crying.
I think the article does a good job pointing out that after 6 months and definitely after 12 you do need to start let the baby safe soothe itself more frequently.
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 "problem" behavior. You get things like in the OP, corporeal punishment, wilderness therapy, conversion therapy, using aversives[1] to literally hurt and shock autistic kids into complying with the behavior their parents want to see, etc. Some parents even seem to enjoy and take pride in it, and there are some who wish they could send their 11 year olds to go work in the coal mines to build a work ethic or something.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aversives#Use_in_applied_behav...
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.
There isn't any society in the world where such 'leaving kids to cry it out' is advocated. Leave aside anywhere its so mainstream that it can come to a place like HN.
My genes didn’t get the memo. My instinct is to say, “He’ll be fine, but if I don’t sleep, no one will be fine.”
Don't worry. Your gene pool will eventually select itself out via that mindset.
Beyond that - the close presence of parents near the infant until 2 years of age was discovered to be vital for the infant's development, social skills and especially being bold enough to experiment and learn new things. The lack of parents in close proximity in that period causes the infant to feel anxiety and hesitate from wandering around and trying out things and learning.
Babies need to be fed, protected, cared for and loved. Fulfillment of those needs is, for most people on the planet in the last century or so, directly dependent on the parents' ability to hold a job and earn enough income to pay for housing, food and creature comforts.
Even if sleep training is hard for some kids, their parents losing their jobs or breaking up due to sleep deprivation would be much, much worse for those kids.
Suffocation risk is real. Don't do this.
But he did tell us it was safe to do this if we wanted to taking some precautions, and it worked great for us with our two kids.
Yes, sure, our two cases are anecdotic evidence, but I still trust what the doctor said, and I think you shouldn't be making blanket statements against the practice.
The truth is that SIDS is always a possibility and, to be honest, neither my wife nor myself slept well until both our kids were well beyond the age where the statistics show there's a higher chance from this (roughly 1 year old). I guess this helped make co-sleep safe, as we were always very alert (to the detriment of our own wellbeing, something I don't regret since a few years of this is a drop in the water compared with a lifetime, to us anyway).
One thing safe co-sleep requires is commitment and agreement from both parents, and a fair sharing of parental duties too.
Co-sleeping seemed like the cheat code to getting baby boy to sleep through the night.
So it easily follows that our adaptations from a time when we didn't have the luxury of stressing over how to ensure our kids grow into mentally healthy adults are not necessarily valid now regardless of how right we're wired to feel about them.
The idea of infants innocently crying because they need care only works if you assume their instincts are adapted to the modern world, whereas for prehistoric humans it was because it's more conducive to their survival to be somewhat needy yet quick to adjust when that neediness isn't responded to (as constant neediness might've led to abandonment back then).
That negative could be 'leave me the fuck alone and stop bothering me' though, just in baby language - crying. Yes, even to a parent.
Why wouldnt a baby cry when someone isn’t around?
Why wouldn’t a parent want to comfort a crying child?
I understand the concern around developing bad habits, but those can be dealt with as they arrive.
I strongly believe that forcing kids to sleep in their own bed and in their own room all by themselves as soon as possible is a 5D chess move by the real estate industry to sell as much of their inventory as possible.
No, kids won't be traumatised or become serial killers if they don't have their own bed or their own room as soon as possible, in fact bed-sharing and room-sharing (or even hut-sharing) has been the norm for our species for thousands and thousands of years.
Heck, I shared a bed with my dad until I left for uni, when I was 18, mum was sleeping in the other room our apartment had. In the winters I used to sleep with both of my parents until I was 8 or 9, the three of us had to share to bedroom bed thanks to central heating having stopped working (which was thanks to Ceausescu and then to the shell-shock therapy imposed by the Washington consensus in my country in the 1990s). When I was visiting my grand-parents as a 8-9-year old kid, in the winter, I was sharing a bed with my grandad, and my brother (who was being raised by my grand-parents) was sharing a bed with my grandma, all four of us sharing the same 3x4 meters room. Can't say I developed any long-lasting "attachment" issues.
Again, forcing small kids to have their own rooms and their own beds is a quite recent Western thing.
Later edit: Opinion piece that supports my view (not a difficult view to support, because it's prevalent throughout most of the world):
> This system of sleeping — adults in one room, each child walled off in another — was common practice exactly nowhere before the late 19th century, when it took hold in Europe and North America. (...)
> Indeed, solitary childhood sleep seems cruel in those parts of the world where co-sleeping is still practiced, including developed countries such as Japan.
> But as industrial wealth spread through the Western economies, so did a sense that individual privacy — felt most intently at night — was a hallmark of “civilization.”
[1] https://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-reiss-sleep-alon...
A counter argument (trigger warning): https://www.reddit.com/r/nursing/comments/zls30p/cosleeping/
We co-slept with our second child, but only after taking a lot of precautions.
Attachment disorder is the opposite of what you seem to think it is, where they had previously been abandoned and thus can't make proper relationships.
At some point synaptic prunning comes and the child is rid of nearly all indignities it suffered up to that point.
Selective pressure is no longer meaningfully applied to our species, so we won't further adapt to our situation except intentionally and at our own hands.
Also btw just because people forget their memories before a certain point doesn't mean they are rid of all the effects. Research on this is fraught and delicate, but very young children who suffered trauma are known to carry some consequences of it across that memory boundary. Which at least establishes that it's not a perfect reset and we should still be careful about what experiences we expose very young children to.
The infants that were this fragile eventually selected themselves out of the gene pool by neglectful parents, or by behavioral disorders causing them to not be able to reproduce as much as others. Which is why almost every baby cries.
Typically (aside from some neurological disorders), there is an underlying reason for the infant to be crying. They could be hungry or wanting to urinate or defecate (many cultures begin potty training shortly after birth). This is frequent because their stomachs, intestines, and bladders are small. Figuring out what they want and responding is normal and has a long history of working, not just among humans but among all mammals with dependent young.
It's astonishing that some pop-parenting guide came along and said, "You don't have to figure out what the baby is crying about if they happen to be crying at night or if you are sleepy," and nobody stopped to wonder what night time had to do with it.
Even from a pragmatic point of view, it's hard to imagine otherwise, because all of those underlying reasons are quick to check and (usually) quick to mitigate. You don't even consider sleep training until exhausting every other option, because literally everything is easier than any of the sleep training methods.
Research shows many positive effects before age 6, both for the child and the family.
In general... (my conclusion)
> Leaving your baby to cry it out is helpful for most babies.
> But it's not recommended for babies younger than 6 months.
> Some experts recommend even waiting until 12 months, because month 6-12 is critical for developing emotional regulation that occur with help of parent intervention.
> Benefit of letting baby cry it out isn't permanent. It needs to be repeated.
> By the time they're 6 years old, there was no difference.
> individual personality/temperament play large role in how the baby responds to the training.
> When babies are sleep-trained (with the "cry it out" method), they don't actually sleep (much) longer; they wake up as often but have learned to not signal their parents.
"Researchers tend to focus on sleep training's potential impact on babies – which makes sense, since they're the most vulnerable, helpless members of the family unit. But sleep training obviously affects the rest of the family, too..."
For me I suspect most of this is regression to mean. People mostly try sleep training in a bad patch, meaning things are likely gonna get better anyways.
I assume this is not true, given that most (all?) sleep trained babies will still cry if they are sick, in distress, lose their pacifier or stuffed animal, etc. They just don’t cry out for help to get back to sleep.
To instinctively avoid signaling the predators in the absence of their parents as an evolutionary trait...
My main takeaway is the low fidelity of existing studies and methods.
I found it interesting how small the studies are. Maybe they are challenging to operate at scale? What is the point of even talking about a trial with 43 participants split into 3 groups? That seems little better than the anecdotes presented here.
Also interesting to me that cortisol level and wrist actionography are the only quantitative methods... As mentioned in the article (and intuitively) both seem deeply flawed! Perhaps new methods are the next frontier for this research.
Also the presentation is distracting. Various fonts, styles, mixed with pointless medias, large quotes, a very high noise floor. In the content, too much mixing of reported speech with data. It makes it a hassle to remember who is being quoted, what their role is, why they're relevant, what the data means in the context. Not enough summarized tabular data. Too much verbiage.
And overall I feel like I got the gist: crying it out is probably bad. The article doesn't motivate me to power through it and waste a lot of mental energy getting the finer points.
In defense of Typical HN:
- Usually, the submission itself isn't the topic, but rather it functions like a discussion prompt.
- As you've observed yourself, the primary thing the article tells us is that studies in this space are pretty much worthless, because the problem is incredibly hard to study. There isn't really much to discuss about the article itself.
But yeah, I also found the wrist actionography bit to be interesting, and quite surprising. My own takeaway here is that we might eventually get better studies, as wearable sensors become more and more ubiquitous, making it possible to do proper measurements where to date we have to rely on self-reporting.
1 - parents have strong feelings on this topic and sleep is important.
2 - different kids/families seem to have majorly different sleep experiences in the first year
3 - I am skeptical of the literature in this field. Infant sleep feels measurable so it feels like studying it should be feasible, but we're forgetting these are little humans, not plants or bacteria cultures. People and psychologies are complicated.
4 - our baby ate a lot from a young age and was also able to sleep long lengths from a young age. Why? Probably genetics. We were lucky to not have to do formal sleep training with him; it was more a process of aligning his schedule and letting him learn how to fall asleep with less and less rocking.
Our second on the other hand was a complete nightmare. Crying for almost the entire night for months on end. He eventually settled down a bit, but we finally caved and let him co-sleep. He slept with us for almost the entire first year, and is just now moving to a crib.
So I don't even think it's genetic. It's almost purely random.
That said maybe studies haven't picked this up cause the real negative effect is when you're old and demented they put you in the cheapest home. Where the staff let you cry it out if you fall and break your hip in the night.
Who the hell knows? Or will ever know.
[1] https://www.betterhelp.com/advice/psychologists/what-is-secu...
One thing I will note - if the kid doesn’t sleep and wakes up the adults for years, that impact pretty clearly ruins the adults, and has severe impacts on the kids too.
When you try to expand attachment theory to try to understand healthy kids in non abusive situations the effect size is usually smaller than the experimental noise.
Citation? As far as I know, the roots of Attachment Theory are in the World War II work of John Bowlby, investigating the effects of children separated from their parents when major cities were evacuated during the Blitz.
It is much later that the association of insecure attachment and addiction was scrutinized.
It's something I fully realized only recently, once I spotted my younger daughter sprinting for toys her sister played with, moments after the latter left for kindergarten, and repeating the exact same kind of play she saw her sister do - which was mostly 3 y.o.-level creative reinterpretation and misuse of toys. After that, I started to pay more attention, and noticed that our younger daughter repeats just as many behaviors of her sister as she does of my wife's and mine.
I'm not saying this necessarily should eliminate all worry you have about attachment (personally sleep-training seems like a bad idea to me too; I'm not a parent however), but as far as what research is available, from the OP:
> Of the few studies that have looked at the short- to longer-term outcomes of sleep training, none have found an effect on a baby's attachment or mental health. Hiscock's study, for example, the largest and longest longitudinal study done on sleep training, found sleep-trained children were no more likely to be insecurely attached to their caregiver at six years of age than their peers. (Experts like Hiscock say they aren't aware of any studies that look at potential long-term effects of cold-turkey cry-it-out, just at modified extinction. They also examined healthy babies at least six months old. So these findings aren't necessarily applicable to infants trained at younger ages, or in other ways.)
> Like other longitudinal studies, Hiscock's lost touch with a number of families when it was time for the final follow-up: 101 of the original 326. That means it is theoretically possible that the sleep training did affect some children in either a negative or positive way long-term, but that their experiences weren't captured. It's more likely, though, that any effects of a single intervention simply "washed out" after six years, says Hiscock.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/230830539_Five-Year...
While this article shreds a lot of studies on sleep training, it goes on to cite a lot of others without evidence of equally scrutiny, so who knows.
I'll also add that different people respond very different to things; maybe for some babies sleep training might have long-term effects, and for some it doesn't. Certainly if I look at my own shitty childhood, me and my brother responded quite differently. He was affected much less than I was.
Pretty smart cat, if you ask me, he also managed to teach our dog to play certain kind of games between the two of them.
I think you'll find out you've had much less of an effect than you think.
There don’t appear to be any.
The conversations around sleep training are always rife with folks focusing on their own perceived risks, and the emotional guilt, that come with making trade-off decisions. While we over-focus on the noisy crying, we miss focusing on the skill building part of sleep training: training kids and parents the skill of soothing themselves in the absence of the other. Skill building with kids can sometimes be super hard on both kids and parents; welcome to Parenting.
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 super fascinating.
Exceptions:
• if somebody asks for advice.
• if somebody mentions they're about to try an arsenic-, lead- and powdered asbestos-based nasal spray on their kid.
The capacity of the parents is also a bottleneck: time spent paying attention to your uninformed advice is time spent not paying attention to the child(ren). Unsolicited advice is not relaxing, and doesn't help put food on the table; it probably doesn't help.
Though, I think posting on an internet forum might fall into the "if they're asking for advice"; most people visiting such websites are there because they've looked something up, and they expect to be wading through anecdotes.
-everyone has an opinion about parenting, and many are not afraid to share it
-don't compare yourself to someone with an older child. You will start out a level zero parent, but you get a level zero baby. You'll level up with them. No one starts out a level 20 parent.
You’ve just gotta do what is best for your family, not what is best for some internet stranger’s child.
However, sometimes the parents are doing things that are unintentionally dangerous, or are so sleep deprived and exhausted they're being abusive and can't process that and get themselves to a better place on their own.
It's more common than not, from what I've seen. As is denial and avoidance on the topic.
Ideally, they would have experienced parents who know them (grandparents) who would be intimately involved and give breaks, intervene in important situations, help them with known working parenting techniques in the situation, etc.
But 1) a lot of folks don't have grandparents who could positively contribute here no matter what anyway, and 2) socioeconomics means it's nearly impossible for this setup to coincide with HN demographics except for certain specific ethnicities, and 3) a lot of boomer parents - the demographics involved - are explicitly not interested in that kind of thing, and a lot of current folks in the child rearing age range have been left adrift with nothing but pop-sci articles to guide them.
It's a shitshow, but I guess that's always been the case.
Children are so different, from so early, it's not at all obvious what outcome for a particular kid is because of different strategies taken and what comes from their individual natures, or other aspects of their environment.
Co-sleeping's known to increase the SIDS risk, so it's another reason people are sometimes reluctant to do it, even if it would make the baby more comfortable.
SIDS is totally different.
SIDS happens also when baby is alone in bed. You relating it to parents rolling on baby tell me you don't know much about the argument.
It is extremely difficult doing so in a high stress environment.
No 'cry it out' plan I've ever seen or heard of would recommend them crying for a very long time. It's really easy to just give up, at the point many parents find themselves doing sleep training, as it's not something folks want to talk about, and the sleep disruption is likely already been going on for a very long time and they're already exhausted.
He’s having eczema problems currently. Having him in the same bed as us means I can notice if he’s scratching and intervene, otherwise he’d keep scratching until he’s bleeding.
Prior to sleep training the first one, I'd have to carry her around and sing to her for almost an hour before she'd go to sleep. It was rough sleep training her. Took less than a week, with the first 2 days being the worst (probably 3+ hours of repeatedly checking in).
Anyway, both kids adapted and turned out fine, and we got a lot of peace of mind and time back.
With the second, we decided beforehand not to bother with sleep training, since he is our last and we liked the feeling of sleeping with them.
They both sleep alone now, although we put them to sleep by cosleeping and then leave.
We tried everything but the cry it out version where you let them cry for 10 mins then go in, reassure them, leave and repeat was definitely the worst strategy by a mile in our case.
What worked for us, and like magic, was stopping planning sleep times and instead planning awake times. E.g. after rising he’ll have 2.5 hours awake, then down for a 1st nap. Then whenever he wakes the clock starts for 3 hours, then down for a nap. 3rd awake pattern… etc.
The length of the wake windows extended by 10 mins or so each week but by that point there was a rhythm going and being able to get that far was 90% of the magic.
My kids slept through the night by four months, with other techniques.
You let them cry for a min or two but no then you go in and soothe them.
First kid slept through the while night immediately after coming home from hospital. When we proudly told pediatrician this at first checkup they became alarmed (even though weight gain was normal) and requested we wake him up every 4h. Very hard to wake him. Next checkup pediatrician says to wake him with wet washcloth. Still hard to wake, so we quit trying to wake him and enjoyed nearly 2 years of sleeping at night until kid #2: wouldn't go to sleep and continued not going to sleep until age 8.
Turns out we caved. Too hard to leave a crying baby especially because, instinctively, we know that it's his only way to communicate and he doesn't really know what's going on. This line is pretty much the same as what we reasoned:
> no one should ever do that to a three-month-old. They don't have object permanence, they don't know that if you're not in the room you haven't disappeared from the planet. It's psychologically damaging
Anyhow we're pretty happy with the decision. Our baby hardly cries, sleeps quite well and no one is stressed out. Not getting out of bed to feed is a massive bonus. There's no rocking him to sleep, we just go to bed and he falls asleep. And hopefully less childhood trauma than we had.
Sleep training is lasting 1-2 weeks. If kid is crying forever, what you hear is not a sleep training.
> > What we found when the children were six was no difference to their sleep and no difference to their behaviour – Harriet Hiscock
It's not about long-term effects. It's about the parents getting to actually sleep.
We did sleep training as per What to Expect the First Year. Others we know spoiled their babies so much that now that their babies are toddlers, the "babies" still sleep with the parents -- I'm talking about people for whom it was not a cultural thing to let their children sleep with them, nor necessary due to lack of space or anything.
I trained both of them at 1 and it only took a few days in a crib. The older one now has his own bed, so that’s been more challenging.
Kids cosleep in my parents’ villages in their home country because most families are living in a single room, but those kids are out playing all day while their parents work the fields or wherever.
I imagine a relatively recent luxury (by itself) available to relatively few people in the world is not a causal factor in people being “well adjusted”.
Thanks to him I finally started combing it regularly.
The narrative behind this was different, more like militarized: teach them to sooth themselves, don't devote too much time, or they'll grow up handheld children, and then be spoiled slackers, etc.
I would recommend co-sleeping to almost anyone.
I'm not enthusiastic about sleep training either - the gradual, controlled removal of sleep time emotional support by the parent. I would suggest to be very conservative and cautious if you want to take that route, and as the article states, definitely not before the age of 6 months.
Edit: I saw another comment which talked about "checking in" on the infant during sleep training. I think there is some middle ground I would be comfortable with after 6 months of age, where you don't rock the child to sleep for an hour, but you check in on them, gently touch them, talk to them soothingly for a little bit, and then you leave them for a little while. Come back in a little bit and briefly soothe them, and then leave again for a little while. As long as they know you are there. And you could stretch those periods out to see how the child does. But, again I would suggest to be very conservative and cautious and don't try this at too early of an age.
It sounds like the main concern would be starting sleep training too early (sub 6 months), or using it in unusual situations where there are already attachment issues.
You just described the Ferber method, a very popular sleep training approach.
(i put my foot down and gave her run of the house so she was soothed to be with her (generalized) family, and she's been fantastic ever since. my spouse is still indignant about her plan being abandoned, but it proved the effective and healthy choice.)
I have two children under the age of three, so this has been a topic I'm innately familiar with. What you are describing is the commonly taught method of "crying it out" or "sleep training", and yes, it's commonly suggested to wait until at least six months of age.
It's incredibly frustrating how many people in this thread seem to think that we are just abandoning our children for the evening and calling it abusive, even earlier in your own post.
You sound exactly like someone who doesn’t have kids, advising parents and speaking with authority that you don’t have.
> In their recent paper published in JCPP, Bilgin and Wolke (2020a) argue that leaving an infant to ‘cry it out’, rather than responding to the child’s cries, had no adverse effects on mother–infant attachment at 18 months. This finding opposes evidence across a wide range of scientific fields. Here, we outline several concerns with the article and argue against some of the authors’ strong claims, which have already gained media attention, including a report on the NHS website. We suggest that the authors’ conclusions should be considered one piece of a larger scientific whole, where ‘cry it out’ seems, overall, to be of detriment to both attachment and development. Crucially, we are concerned that this study has issues regarding power and other analytical decisions. More generally, we fear that the authors have overstated their findings and we hope that members of the public do not alter their parenting behaviours in line with such claims without further research into this controversial topic.
Here's the truth: nothing works. They just eventually grow out of it. When they are a year or two old, you can start transitioning to having them sleep by themselves.
I really did try to sleep train my youngest.. I would set a timer and not let her go too long. I really tried. Once I went and picked her up after 15 minutes, and her little voice had grown hoarse. She was covered in sweat and shaking and she just collapsed against me when I picked her up. Her tiny body, just limp against me. She had nothing left. And she whimpered softly. Babies aren't meant to sleep alone. I wish I had someone I could call. One hour of sleep would have meant everything.
No affiliation at all, just a gentler alternative that worked for us.
I understand there may be no one-size-fits-all and each family and child are unique, but from my anecdotal experience, with my wife implementing the above program with our third child, it had a major positive impact on her (my wife's) psyche and anxiety surrounding infant sleep (especially when compared to our first two children). It also helped my sister with her child.
I'm far from an expert on the program as my wife did all the heavy lifting, but at it's core, it revolves around building up sleep pressure during the day so that the child is ready and able to sleep at night. I see some overlap with the stuff Andrew Huberman talks about in his podcast.
"Modern Mayan mothers, for example, expressed shock when they heard that in the US, babies were put to sleep in a separate room."
That they followed it up with why Mayan mothers prefer to sleep with the baby. Is it just a default cultural expectation or do they have their own reason for it?
There's rarely any accounting for family culture. How people in the family treat each other day-to-day matters. Do the parents fight when the kid sleeps? This will for sure impact the kid and their sleep if they hear it. Is there a sibling who torments the kid? Sleep issues practically guaranteed.
We've found it's much more effective to talk to our friends who've been doing trauma work. Finding out how they were handled and the impact they report tends to lead to more insight we can use.
Studies that don't account for family culture and are done in countries where there's lots of shame and fear of judgment around what's going on in a family are already flawed.
I’m gonna go ahead and mention what I haven’t seen almost any thread say. Which is that any singular child’s early infant and toddler stages pale in comparison to the other 15 or 16 years+ that also determine your child’s habits, disposition and development.
Ignore the noise, partial studies and fads. Do what is best for you.
Dare I say if parents were less fixated on early sleep methods and actually being present and supportive (which also strongly correlates to having a healthy relationship with your partner and how your child sees you love them) throughout we would probably have better equipped and developed young adults.
We over index on sleep training when we lose sleep because it’s hard. But it’s a season.
I never liked the "cry it out". suspecting something like that. It was hard waking up at night but we did it anyway. It felt it was the right thing to do. I understand some might say it's evolutionary and just a way for kids to tug at our heart strings, and they may be fine otherwise. However, I sure wasn't going to experiment with that on my children.
At some point we all learn that we're helpless and we can't do shit to change the world... But we didn't want the baby to learn that from _us_.
Also white noise app cuts down on the whinyness before sleeping tremendously.
``The children are just lying there. You don’t hear crying, even in a room full of infants,″ Carlson said.
The orphanages are terribly overcrowded and understaffed, leaving little chance for the attention babies need. Not even mealtime offers a chance to cuddle: bottles are propped in the cribs.
We did sleep training with ours, it took two days and a solid sleeper ever since. I don’t think cry it out always works. But the side hustle is that you have a schedule and stick to it.
“ The implicit message an infant receives from having her cries ignored is that the world — as represented by her caregivers — is indifferent to her feelings. That is not at all what loving parents intend.”
It spent most of that time talking about outrage by online communities instead of just giving me information. Terrible journalism.
It told me that there were two studies and how many babies were involved, but not the findings of the study. Garbage.
And, I am glad she was so adamant. She was right.
> She was right.
She wasn't, she just made that up.
Presumably this won't still be the case at age 14 though so it doesn't seem like its a problem.
This is worse than tabs versus spaces.
Blessings to you all!
My family immigrated here and no one ever did that. Children sleep with their parents.
Edit: And is it an "obsession" or simply a cultural difference?
I got a solid 3-4 hours a night. The babies got fed, cleaned, cuddled etc. Win-win.
I'm so tired of the condescending tone that is usually taken for granted when talking about traditional American culture. Can we please stop this? It's just a cultural difference.
“America” is a big country, with many world cultures in it.
anyway, the non Western world is obsessed with full time childcare being compulsory for women. Why are you even talking about this?
Crying comes from emotional triggers like anger, fear,pain, hunger, loneliness etc.
When we cry as adults, it kinda helps to have a trusted person around to stand by us.
As a parent, it is obvious that you do not let your babies let it cry out.
Listen to yourself, not to youtube advice.No need to study evolution.
There are some moments where it appears they want to be left alone, but try your best to calm them down and cheer them up.
From baby to autarky, it takes 2 decades in the best case.
I knew someone who was born in a Romanian orphanage who was "left to cry it out"... she was forever traumatized in ways just as damaging as one terrible moment, but not discussed since no one ever made a hit lifetime television series about those who abuse via inaction.
There are people who made it through the fall of both the Nazis and the Berlin Wall who should not have access to so much as a houseplant who continue to influence young minds to this day, and it will forever keep me up at night that I can't just turn off my phone and correct that error like I'd like to.
I know a few parents that are struggling due to co-sleeping arrangements. Not sure if it's because the sleep training they did backfired, or if they never did anything besides co-sleeping. I can sympathize with those parents, as I could easily end up in that situation or worse. Therefore, I am not judging them (and I would appreciate if others, who think they are so smart, would stop judging me).
Young child(ren) want to know that we are either A) actively taking care of them, or B) Doing something that is needed in order to take care of them. They also want to have predictable and consistent treatment and responses to what they do, probably regardless of age.
They are perfectly fine with being left alone for extended periods of time, as long as we can convince them that it's for their own good and that they haven't been abandoned.
This is one of thousands of topics related to having children that could be discussed and read about in a similar form: "Studies have shown", "21% of parents" etc. ad nauseum.
What's missing is a discussion of the deeper issues at the heart of this and many other conversations relating to parenting: A) Intergenerational knowledge transfer B) Mother or father as a core part of human identity C) Confidence and common sense
Anyone reading this looking for answers, I'll give you my 2 cents as well: What you need above all else is the confidence that you have the ability to figure out and decide what is best for you and your family. Anyone else's advice is just ideas that you can consider, but you need to believe that you will be able to decide (with your partner if you have one) what will be best, and your belief and confidence will go an immensely long way towards making it work.
We never read any books or worked using a predetermined schedule, but got our information from baby, grandparents and our own good common sense. The following worked for us well but would have gone very differently depending on any circumstance:
0-1 months sleep on mom in bed, 100% spotting during co-sleeping to avoid smothering - work on laptop in bed. This motivated us to stop co-sleeping ASAP.
1-3 months get sleepy or go to sleep on mom, transfer to bassinet next to bed, cry immediately or eventually wake up crying, pick up and feed if hungry, sing, read, etc, repeat over and over again. Mom is motivated to help baby sleep, she gets to sleep if baby gets to sleep. Baby sleeps better and better on their own, feel bad for baby alone in the bassinet but life's tough, need to get used to it eventually.
3-6 months same as above, sleeping well in bassinet, progressively longer stretches until only waking up once in the night for diaper change and food
6 months: stopped sleeping soundly in the bassinet, move into other room in crib, cried for 20 minutes then went to sleep. The first day, listening to that was for some reason harder than any other day. We wanted to go to baby but knew that it would be better for them in the long run if they could handle us not being there. 6 months + 1 day: cried for 10 minutes then went to sleep, slept way better than when in the bassinet same room, probably due to lack of snoring noise
6 months onwards: sleep in crib/bassinet 100% of time, no real crying when going down to sleep unless sick, hot, cold, overtired, or hungry. Falling asleep on mom or dad is nice but nowhere near as comfortable as in the crib due to being held vertically.
Things could have gone very differently, maybe baby wouldn't have wanted to go to sleep by themselves as readily and co-sleeping would have lasted much longer, and we would have made a whole different set of decisions and that would have been OK.
I would be highly motivated to stop co-sleeping ASAP for a variety of reasons, none of which are new. How do naps even work with co-sleeping??
Not sure how you get an older child to stop wanting to co-sleep or have someone there with them when they fall asleep after being used to having someone there. Seems like it would be difficult, but we would either accept the situation or figure it out if that were the case for us (and it may very well be in the future). I am not sure how I would deal with it until I was in that situation.
I suspect I would just start getting progressively farther and farther away while they were falling asleep, going in the other room to do stuff etc, maybe while singing with the door open and responding, making some noise, then I would close the door and stay nearby (and tiptoe away very quietly). Then if they call out at any point I guess I would need to go back, and repeat daily until they get used to having me outside the room with the door closed making some noise in the other room while they go to sleep.
I have not read any books or articles on these subjects (including the link), but I have the confidence that I can figure it out with my own good common sense. If I couldn't figure it out, I'd probably start talking to people that I trust for ideas.
I want to be left alone in order to do this! Not a fan of anyone reading some peer-reviewed journal articles and statistics and doing some backseat parenting or throwing around terms like child abuse when discussing how parenting should be done (I can see that a lot of people are wading in without any idea of what they are talking about). Before having kids, I may even have been one of those people (but I doubt it). A lot of ideas sound great on paper. Lots of people with great ideas that worked for them. Good for them. I would appreciate if they would share, but stop short of dogma and the incredible self-centricness in thinking that their way is the only good way.
If the backseat parents really care so much, they should demonstrate their fitness to judge by attracting a mate (this is probably the main hurdle for them), gather the resources and space to procreate, test their theories, and feel free to share afterwards once they have proven out their ideas! They will quickly find that their dogma and lack of basis in grounded reality makes them horrible parents, maybe they won't even have the self-consciousness to realize this. But that's opening a whole different discussion.
When you do something yourself, that's when you get to decide and test out your theories, and not before.
Is it really still the norm to place the baby in another room and then go tend to them when they cry?
So why fight nature, accept it as part of life. Sleeping together bonds parents and children.