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.
The parents you describe are a tiny minority if they exist at all, and guilt-tripping them in a public forum just hurts the millions of new parents who are at an extremely vulnerable time of life and trying to do the right thing. It's not your place to lecture on how loving parents should be treating a baby you've never laid eyes on.
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.
I know many couples that have merged into larger multi-partner families, sometimes as individual couples, sometimes as polycules, regardless, the commune is back lol, and just my own observation it seems an ideal way to raise kids. There's always someone around, couples can take their own time to go on dates quite regularly, the kids grow up with lots of people around and lots of friends, the close community support is just phenomenal looking. If I have kids, I will go this route.
We can spend time together without interruption and without it being after they're asleep. There are people to help cook and clean, do so joyfully, and play and dance and sing and cuddle.
Why you're getting down voted, I have no idea. Community- oriented approaches to families, no matter what society says or does or thinks, are what humans have done for millenia.
It could also be seen as a cultural problem that both parents are generally expected to work nowadays, and it would be nice to be able to expect that families had some adult at home (but we’d hope that in a more egalitarian society nowadays the gender balance would be more equal — although men can lift larger laundry baskets on average so maybe we should end being the at-home ones more than 50% of the time, I dunno).
I'm not sure which country the OP is discussing, likely one without good maternity/paternity laws and whatnot, which is really sad to hear about, I hope more citizens demand this of their governments and more employees demand this of their companies, it seems crazy to me that you should have to sacrifice formative time with your newborn so you can go do a capitalism every day.
And sometimes work that doesn’t ever pay off, for reasons well outside of anyone’s control.
There is a reason that spousal and child abuse was so much higher then.
There is no perfect option here.
> so much higher then
When?
I’m disagreeing with what seems to be nostalgia, or a call to a different type of circumstance. I’m just noting, it had major drawbacks then too. Lots of stay at home moms drinking themselves into a stupor being one.
There are definitely issues around gender, wage, and job opportunities in the USA, but right now I'm talking about the total economic downside of out of control detachment of wage against cost of living.
> Lots of stay at home moms drinking themselves into a stupor being one.
Could this have had more to do with an openly misogynistic society and lack of hiring and academic protections for women?
That had mostly faded by the 70’s though.
Openly misogynistic society wise - It’s probably worth calling out the invention of effective birth control here.
Pre birth-control, men and women mixing in all but the most controlled circumstances would result in women getting pregnant, and that had consequences. Emotionally, financially, and biologically. Often life altering, even if the pregnancy was aborted.
That cost often ended up being borne by the women who got pregnant and their support structure, and there are biological reasons why that happens. Society can try to spread the load out, but the Don Juan’s of the world can be adept at trying to work around that.
This leads to that misogynistic society, both directly and indirectly. Looking at global trends, with the only exceptions being out of the way more nomadic societies, the more materially poor a society is, the more rigidly structured the gender divides are, and the more controlling they are of female sexuality in general.
This of course, gets taken advantage by some folks (shitheads) to further gain control in other areas.
On the male side, it’s relatively much easier for men to avoid the biological cost of their natural sexual behavior.
Effective birth control turns this on its head of course. Society is still grappling with what that means, and its implications, and likely will for a very, very long time.
The 50’s and early 60’s were pre (available) decent birth control.
[https://www.ourbodiesourselves.org/health-info/a-brief-histo...]
Mid 60’s to 70’s it started to roll out (and kicked off the ‘free love’ movement).
Women’s liberation became a much more common theme then as well. It was of course a topic before then, but practically was extremely difficult.
Practically, to be independent pre birth control, a woman would need to be either 1) long term celibate/abstinent from normal sex (not easy for most!), or 2) go through a lot of abortion (really not easy for most, medically or emotionally), or 3) be infertile, or 4) independently wealthy.
Otherwise, they would get sucked into the biologically and financially expensive process of having a baby, over and over again, for decades, while having no extra time or bandwidth to earn income. While men don’t have that problem (or at least, biologically, can skip out on it easier).
And due to all the biological processes involved (and legitimate needs), it’s very difficult for most moms to ignore the kids that result, and those kids are very needy for quite awhile - much longer than it takes to get pregnant again, for sure.
Being anti misogynist or not, or hiring protections or not, barring effective birth control, that is going to put a lot of women in difficult situations where they have no reasonable option but taking care of kids and dealing with biological ‘taxes’ that are very high, regardless of what they want. In any zero sum game, that puts them at a disadvantage to folks who don’t have that weight they are carrying.
Just like men being drafted into a war they didn’t start, or working themselves to death in a coal mine because it’s that or their family starves, that means alcoholism, anger/resentment, violence, etc.
Wealth can help - these issues were much worse pre WW2, for instance. But it’s a theme for most of recorded human history.
Actually taking 3 years off is depending on the job still a bump in the career road, but I'm optimistic that we are getting there.
And saying it doesn't make it less of a thing.
>>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.
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.
Compare https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/3726904/ :
> Data that were collected prospectively from a child health study conducted in Gaza show a strong relationship between breastfeeding and two major components of birth intervals, the postpartum anovulatory period and the waiting time [from resumption of menstruation] to conception.
> The finding of a strong positive association between breastfeeding and the length of postpartum amenorrhea is as expected from numerous other studies.
This myth is a huge cause of depression in new moms
I suspect it's a combination of:
1) Prior/older parents worried about embarrassment or being shamed for going through what they did - a lot of it things that no one likes to talk about.
2) Folks worried (potentially correctly) that many folks would opt to not have kids, which is already a population problem, if they understood what it really meant.
It's the same about War and men returning from it, frankly, though war movies tend to be a lot more glamourous, even the gritty ones.
I also suspect that older generations were less isolated socially and it was much more common to have parents/grandparents/cousins/etc in the same house who could care for the baby for an hour while mom caught up on sleep. It takes a village to raise a child but we have no more villages, so people try to do it on their own and discover it's incredibly difficult.
What person in the suburbs doesn't have a veggie garden?
The cuteness one is good too. I wonder if this sort of thing emerged slowly or quickly? Like, is cooperation just generally selected for and animal cuteness has been developing for a long time, or did it appear swiftly somewhere and provide some huge benefit? Or something else entirely?
But humans have really big heads so they have to give birth really early before the baby is capable of walking, so screaming for help and being super cute is their only option.
We do forage for fruits and mushrooms. We just forage inside different locations :)
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.
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-...
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.
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.
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 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.
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:
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...
https://acamh.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/jcpp....
> 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.
That study criticizes the methods and samples of the study you trust in. Its something fundamental, not 'opinionated'.
> data-driven studies go against their instincts.
What part of a 40 or 200 sample set is 'data driven'. How many of those children are 40 years old. How many of them have passed through the chaos of teenage years and now experiencing their first problems in work life, social relationships or relationship with their spouse.
...
Its amazing how people immediately forget any evolutionary biology or behavioral science lessons they have taken during the course of their lives when it involves self-interest. Simple behaviors that entirety of mammal species rely on as evolutionary behaviors for survival are just 'maladaptive practices' when self-interest is involved.
...
Strong personal interest seem to cause strong bias in this topic. I understand the need for the parents who use such destructive practices to be able to get some sleep while they are raising infants in this modern society that does not leave any time for childrearing. But neither anyone like me empathizing with it nor the circumstances of modern society can negate the evolutionary behaviors and their effects. The parents who are in such a situation must find another way to address the situation than relying on what increasingly seems to be anti-humane advocacy.
Arranged marriages are in no way related to deep behavioral traits of mammal evolution.
> at some point you have to realize that you understand infants less than the parents using this method
Anyone who knows any adult who suffered any measure of neglect in childhood would 'know' otherwise. Especially the adults who have been neglected as infants.
I understand your viewpoint and sentiment. But I do reiterate that those do not negate evolution.
I think we discussed enough in this thread. I'll bail out of this discussion now. Thanks.
Furthermore, if letting babies cry it out were truly as atrocious a practice as you seem to imply, the signal in the data would be so strong it would be impossible to ignore. The fact that we don't see such an indisputable signal should make you question your assumptions.
> ...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.
You seem to be implying that this was somehow wrong. Human newborns need to experience a range of sensations and discomfort to learn how to distinguish what counts as actual pain from mere discomfort. This still happens even into adulthood. Exercise is borderline painful when you're out of shape and then can become pleasurable as your fitness improves. Your brain is constantly adapting and recalibrating.
Yes, but co-sleeping, rearing children, co-habitation, touching, grooming, infants depending on their parents are present in all mammal species. More sophisticated and derived behaviors may not be. But these, are. And the repression of some of these in modern humans causes considerable psychological distress and anxiety.
Literally pure conjecture, as there's no conclusive evidence of this claim, which is the whole point of this article.
Furthermore, the only change we're discussing is eliminating a specific type of co-sleeping. All of the other behaviours common to all mammals remain the same. The odds of this one change being significantly damaging are small, and considering we see no strong signal in the data we do have, I don't see this claim standing the test of time.
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.
"Slavery in Korea formally existed from antiquity up to the 20th century. Slavery was very important in medieval Korea; it was a major institution. [...] The Korean "nobi" system of slavery peaked between the 15th and 17th centuries and then declined in the 18th and 19th centuries." [1]
"The Mongol Empire (1206-1368) had a tremendous impact on slavery across Eurasia. While slaves played a minor role in pre-Imperial Mongolia, the Mongols saw people as a resource, to be distributed among the imperial family and used for imperial needs, like material goods. This view created a whole spectrum of dependency running from free men to full slaves." [2]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_Korea
[2] https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/cambridge-world-his...
I had no idea about Korean slavery that existed till the 20th century. Why aren't these parts included in history curriculum?
In Korea it was officially abolished in 1894 (although it took a few decades to eradicate). In my own country, France, slavery was abolished in 1794 (in Europe) and in 1848 (in all colonies and oversea territories). I think it's the general timeline for western Europe, first half of the 19th century. So not exactly 20th or 21st century either.
Of course, slavery itself (especially related to prostitution) is still ongoing pretty much everywhere, but it's not legal. And then there's war: forced work (Germany and Japan during WWII), and arguably conscription could count as a form of slavery too...
I'm pretty sure I learned about it at school in France, although of course not each country individually. Not sure about your specific country and history curriculum.
The most recent form of slavery was conducted by Europeans and then as the century progressed they gave it up
also Inca and Aztechs were from south america right?
there is also a new form of slavery currently active in the US where immigrants are brought to work and their passports are kept with their "employer" until xyz condition.
so slavery still exists but it is no longer a government policy as it used to be in US
I don't understand how, in the 21st century can we have slaves or bonded labourers. Apalling
The 'new form' of slavery you're describing sounds like indentured servitude. Definitely not new to the US (though now illegal)! Benjamin Franklin was indentured for 2 years when he was a teenager to his older brother, and frankly was not a fan of the practice.
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).
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.
[1] https://www.schn.health.nsw.gov.au/news/articles/2022/05/wor...
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.
I haven’t knived anyone. I was never caned at school.
The absence of someone doing a thing is not proof of a thing doing what you believe it does.
Letting your baby ‘cry it out’ is abuse in my eyes and you can sleep train them without doing this. With my daughter we soothed her in her cot instead of picking her up.
She will now link her sleep cycles and only cry when there is something wrong
Beating children doesn't make them obedient and law-abiding adults.
There were earlier HN posts attributing the decline in the rate of murder rate/violence crime to countries phasing out lead-gasoline. Now we might never know unless we do a properly controlled experiment.
Besides, the effect of lead on the human brain had been well known before leaded petrol was banned.
> We perform the first meta-analysis of the effect of lead on crime by pooling 529 estimates from 24 studies. We find evidence of publication bias across a range of tests.
> When we restrict our analysis to only high-quality studies that address endogeneity the estimated mean effect size is close to zero.
> When we use the full sample, the mean effect size is a partial correlation coefficient of 0.11, over ten times larger than the high-quality sample.
Interestingly, I met someone on HN once who insisted that effect sizes are always smaller in larger trials because that's just the nature of reality. This does not say anything good about scientists' conceptual understanding of what they're doing.
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".
Why is them wanting to be soothed seen as a bad thing? Like, what the fuck do we think these babies are actively scheming to find ways to get soothed?
I swear our brains are looking for adversaries in infants now.
Your infant child can not manipulate you. The brains barely understand action and consequence. Your infant child is trying to communicate its needs, and having it unmet with indifference is honestly hilariously sad.
You know what has been a far more traumatic growing experience for every kid I've known than learning to sleep independently? Learning to use a toilet. Way more tears, way more "emotional trauma", but it's all part of growing up.
> I swear our brains are looking for adversaries in infants now.
Also, sleep training is not some new-agey thing that we've just concocted out of a recent adversarial parenting trend; if anything it's exactly the opposite, it is the focus on "attachment" and concern over the impact of things like sleep training that is the newer trend.
But it's also the case that anything that is bad for parents is bad for children. Especially when it comes to sleep deprivation. I'm completely convinced that in my almost-five year old's entire life, the most danger she has ever been in was when we had to drive half an hour to the pediatrician multiple times a week when she was a newborn and we weren't sleeping at all. I may as well have been three or four drinks in every time I drove to the doctor in those early weeks. But driving isn't the only problem. Parents are more irritable, less present, and just generally worse, when they aren't sleeping.
Sleep deprivation isn't just some funny goofy little thing that parents adorably have to deal with; it's a major problem. I didn't even realize this until I started sleeping after a year and a half and had the experience of "waking up" after a few weeks of good sleep. It's an actual problem! It's not just some preference that parents have to be able to sleep.
This.
It's hard to not laugh at a remark like "the reason parents do it is for their own benefit". Of course we do it for our own benefit. Because our benefit is the benefit of the child as well.
Temporary attachment or emotional issues, if they happen, can be fixed. Worst case, the parents may need some external guidance from a specialist in children psychology and emotional development. Keeping the parents sleep-deprived for months can cause them to become depressed (or exacerbate mother's postpartum depression - a very important topic that's not being talked about enough), or lose their jobs, or make them hate their own child, or hate each other and ultimately lead to divorce/broken family. All these consequences are orders of magnitude worse for future prospects of a child than anything a botched sleep training can cause.
Wow. Good luck with that. The entire psychology science and discipline was still not able to solve it. But your optimism is encouraging.
Thanks! We've had a lot of good luck so far. In fact, the child psychologist we went to proactively, to talk about how to help a 1 y.o. child handle moving to a new home in a different city, approved with the way we handled both this and other issues, and with our approach in general. But hey, N=1, it's always possible she is wrong.
> The entire psychology science and discipline was still not able to solve it. But your optimism is encouraging.
The issue isn't with psychology, the issue is with people treating an entire spectrum as one bit "is or isn't" boolean. It's good for writing outrage-inducing stories to maximize revenue. It's good for winning arguments despite being wrong. It's not good if you actually care about the outcome.
The kind of issues we're talking about here are mostly the psychological equivalent of a bruised knee. Meanwhile, the commentariat and the pundits selling books want to round everything up to emotional abuse, as if letting a child cry for 15 minutes was as bad as leaving them to live on the street. Unfortunately, some of the HN comments seem to go this way too.
"But part of growing up is learning new skills, like eating by themselves and soothing themselves to sleep."
Sure, but wait until they're three before you start sleep training. This idea that we need to toughen up infants is dangerous and frightening. They're completely helpless.
That's exactly what they do. Do you believe they're processing sophisticated ideas of love, attachment and comforting? That they're making a choice to ask their parents for soothing?
Infants are acting on basic instincts. With very limited but rapidly expanding space of possible actions, they're actively learning what behavior will lead to their basic needs being satisfied. They can and will overfit on whatever pattern they can spot.
> I swear our brains are looking for adversaries in infants now.
In operational sense, they are - they're fighting for resources for their own survival.
> Your infant child can not manipulate you. The brains barely understand action and consequence. Your infant child is trying to communicate its needs, and having it unmet with indifference is honestly hilariously sad.
Of course they can and will manipulate you. That's, like, parenthood 101. The whole set of biological and psychological changes parents undergo, the whole deal with attachment, is to make the parents vulnerable to the child. The brain of an infant may understand little at first, but it understands enough of "action and consequence" to start doing gradient descent and quickly learn how to get what it needs from its parents. Of course it helps that the parents want to fulfill their child's needs - initially, the kid isn't really learning how to get the parents to respond, but rather training the parents to respond to specific cues.
Eventually, children learn to speak, and that's when it's really clear just how devious and manipulative kids are. It's both amusing and rewarding to watch them push the boundaries of their intelligence to get you to react they way they want. Except in those cases where they succeed, and you only realize it moments later that you've been had :).
That's my point. They aren't capable of looking after their own needs. They need their parents for that. But what they are capable of is correlating their behavior with their needs being fulfilled, and doing more of the thing that correlates well with those needs being met.
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 just commented elsewhere and asked you what your understanding of "sleep training" or "crying it out" entails, but I think this answers it for me - you're ignorant to what actually happens.
You do not teach a child that their call for help will be unanswered. You observe them closely as they wake up, listen to how they're crying (each parent knows what their child's cries mean), listen for the highs and the lows of the crying, watch them as they try to learn how to put themselves back to sleep. But you ABSOLUTELY DO NOT abandon them. You go in frequently at first, and slowly extend the amount of time you give them before going in as "sleep training" progresses. You slowly give them more and more space to figure it out, but you still always go in at some point, when they need it. You are giving them the space to learn something while still being there for them.
To suggest otherwise, and judge others as abusive you have been doing repeatedly in this thread, is ignorant and uncalled for. It's not constructive, and it's rude.
That said, whatever the merits of a structured approach, for every parent that diligently follows them, there are others that are less careful. And I’ve met them.
I’m responding to sentiments like “I just ignore them and they go to sleep eventually”, “don’t go and check, he only wants attention” from other parents, and other reports from someone I know who is a midwife.
The model we followed was “Hand in hand”, which resonated for us. And we were saddened that that philosophy does not seem to be very mainstream amongst parents I have met.
https://www.attachmentparenting.org/ensure-safe-sleep-physic...
"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."
>Until that time, a child depends on his parents to help him calm down and learn to regulate his intense feelings.
Again, you're ignoring the fact that parents absolutely do tend to their children emotionally during sleep training. I highlighted that in another response to you earlier, as well as this very comment chain. You even edited your comment and acquiesced to support a version of it at six months, and now you're back admonishing the practice as "dangerous" altogether?
Edit: I am not saying you shouldn't hold your own views. Do what you want with your kids as long as you and your family are happy. Just ease up on telling others they are wrong - they are just as right for their family as you are for yours.
Honestly, if it mattered that much, we'd have a global epidemic of behaviour disorders due to poor parenting in the very early years. But that just isn't the case.
If my son wakes up at night and needs some water, he'll cry. Diaper change, cry. I have a nursery can and I can see him wake up sometimes, look around, and go back to sleep on his own, because that is perfectly natural.
W/o sleep training he wanted to be patted back to sleep everytime he woke up. That took 15 to 30 minutes, 2 to 4 times a night.
After sleep training, he sleeps better, and gets more sleep, and still has all his needs taken care of.
The child is avoiding crying in the absence of its parents because doing so would cause predators to find him before his parents. Evolutionary instinct. The parents will (hopefully) return from hunting & gathering eventually, to pick the child up.
And when the parents regularly fail to return or never return - yeah, one way ticket to a psychological disorder.
Of course a neglected child is likely to grow up with a psychological disorder. Neglected as in the parents (or at least some carer) not being there for days on end, or simply abandoning them. That's not sleep training though.
You don't know that, there is no evidence for it and it definitely depends on the age. Your post is drammatically different when speaking about a newborn, a 6 or a 12 or 18 months old.
Babies absolutely need to learn to self soothe and that crying won't always meet attention too.
The idea that unattending a crying baby here and there will produce long lasting trauma has to be proved first, it may actually be positive.
Yep, I agree.
> Babies absolutely need to learn to self soothe and that crying won't always meet attention too.
How do you know that? Where’s the evidence for it?
PS: Not the one you’re replying to.
If you read his books, what you will also find is that children respond differently to trauma. So, some children may not be harmed at all by childhood trauma, while others may be deeply affected. The basic fallacy here is that children under the age of three can self-soothe. They cannot. This is all part of infant development.
That one sure is an American cultural product that exists nowhere else. "Attachment is a problem" - here is a theory for it.
The entire human evolution is based on attachments created between the group members. From parenting to siblings to relatives to friends to everything else. The destruction of such 'attachments' causes social bonds to be broken and people getting isolated into depression. No wonder people call the US 'prozac nation'...
And yes, babies can self soothe, that's the entire point of the article we're commenting, letting them cry it out so they learn to calm themselves.
> For others, it can be hours of crying, even to the point of vomiting (common enough to be a frequent topic of conversation on sleep-training forums and addressed by baby sleep books including Ferber's
The article also includes a reference to 2-3 hours.
Everyone thinks that the position even 1% different from what they adopted is abhorrent.
https://www.attachmentparenting.org/ensure-safe-sleep-physic...
"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."
Edit to add: attachmentparenting.org is not an objective arbiter of the research on whether or not the dogmas of attachment parenting are correct! They have a dog in this fight...
Psychopathic and delirous. That is how your statement looks to from somewhere else around the world.
...
The child is calling for help. The first instinct of a human baby. No help is coming. The child will instinctively shut up to avoid predators finding it. Its not 'calming itself'. Its avoiding certain death in the absence of the parents. With the in-built expectation that the parents who have been away for some reason will come back and pick him up. Else, he will die - just like all those babies that did not cry or whose parents were killed by predators.
...
What a way to psychologically scar a kid for life...
It's actual insanity how people have come up think that every. little. thing. they do as a parent has these life long ripple effects. I'm sorry to tell you: these little details of parenting just aren't important either way. What matters is food and shelter and a loving home. Focus on those things for your own family and stop driving yourself crazy with these details, and especially stop getting so riled up by what other parents are doing, it's none of your business!
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.
You are making massive judgements about people while simultaneously demonstrating how little you know about what actually happens when you let someone "cry it out".
The immense cacophonies that the industries in the US produce, eventually permate to, and induce chaos and problems in other countries. This includes medical industries.
> You're obviously very heated and it's not constructive.
Im not heated. Im not Angloamerican. This is not 'heated' discussion where I live. Avoid projecting your cultural paradigm to random people on the Internet.
> You are making massive judgements about people while simultaneously demonstrating how little you know about what actually happens when you let someone "cry it out".
Occasionally checking up on the child while leaving the child to cry itself to sleep is not 'something different' like you propose. So, no.
Avoid being an absolute asshole who is impossible to have a level-headed discussion with. Your flying off the handle in this thread with judgement geared towards "random people on the internet" demonstrates that very well.
It's clear that there will be no way to have a genuine, level-headed conversation with you. Enjoy your evening, or the rest of your day, wherever you are.
But as I said, we discussed enough. I replied out of courtesy one last time. So you too have a nice day.
What's worse, you hounded unity1001 in a variety of different places, which is a whole other form of abuse. That sort of spat is emphatically not what this site is for, so please don't do it again.
If someone else's comments are driving you crazy, the tools to use are downvoting and flagging—not commenting, as the site guidelines say ("Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead.") - and certainly not showing up to flame them in multiple places.
If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
Please see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34194158 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34194145, and please don't do this again.
A trend is manufactured by whatever private interest, industry group or segment that catches a moneymaking or career-making opportunity. They push it as hard as they can. If they end up being able to gather popular dynamics behind them for whatsoever reason - like how some people are jumping on this bandwagon - then the trend becomes ever stronger and more easily exportable.
The topic at hand follows on the heels of the mentality that exported all of those to everywhere around the world. If that is a trait of the US as a nation, then there is a problem with that and the rest of the world cannot stop calling it out because 'that would be nationalism'.
By the way, nationalism in its negative sense means people elevating their own nation above others and demeaning others. Not criticising some other nation beause of their actual deeds. At no point I said that 'this particular nation is better than the US and therefore they are superior'. I literally said that the only country on the planet that this is a mainstream trend is the US, which means that the US goes against entire world. Which is obviously not 'a nation'.
I want to stress again that such logic would literally prohibit any criticsm of US foreign policy and prevent anyone from saying that the US has been invading and destroying nations in the past 40 years - due to being 'nationalism' in the subverted definition of 'criticism of a particular nation' that you reduced it to.
By nationalistic flamewar I simply mean the kind of flamewar that happens when people put down other countries on internet forums. It's a shallow, simple definition that doesn't have any nuance; nor should it, because internet hellfire doesn't have any nuance.
If you don't like that use of the word, that's fine—it's not the main point. The main point is that you started and perpetuated an aggressive flamewar that wrecked this thread, and moreover would completely wreck this forum if we allowed it to. Please see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34200065 where I've explained this in more detail. You've been a good HN user otherwise, but we can't allow this kind of thing, so please don't do it again.
That makes it clearer, thanks. I do understand the concern about flamewars. I moderated forums myself. However, how will the criticism about things that originate from a specific society, organization or country will even be possible in such an environment then. Any criticism by naming anything would amount to an assault against a group or country under that standard. Or, is it so that if such criticism is raised, but just the origin is not specifically named, that would be compatible with the guidelines?
I think it is safer to make one's case on $topic without attributing it to a source that many people are likely to be identified with (e.g. national origin or whatever it is). Any time someone feels pressure against a place of identity, it feels like they're being attacked, and at that point the driver of discussion ceases to be $topic and starts activating survival circuitry. The only responses at that point are defensiveness or counterattack (or both). Curious conversation, which is the raison d'être of this place, becomes impossible.
If, however, the argument makes no sense without that attribution, I would try to do it in a way that includes lots of reassurance that one isn't disrespecting or putting down the identity (e.g. nationality or whatever it is), and make a point of explaining the connection to $topic in a limited and respectful way.
It's necessary to err on the side of doing it this way, even if it feels excessive, because although you may know that you're not attacking someone's identity, they don't have any way of knowing that up front. We all have a lot more context in their heads than we include in our internet comments. Readers don't have any of that information unless we explicitly include it. That's one reason why it's so easy for people to misread others' intent on the internet - I've written about this in various places, e.g. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que....
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.
You don't know whether your approach is the best one, I don't, speak with as many professionals you can.
There is no evidence behind your claim.
I'd love to speak with interesting professionals. So far I've met none.
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...
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.
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.
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.
Naturally since the baby will feel the parents close by instead of being out hunting & gathering, with himself being in danger. Or worse - parents dead, potential predators around. Evolutionary traits.
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...
My dad often tells me how he used to do the same thing some years ago during company trips. Sure as hell the company wouldn't have paid for two separate hotel rooms when sending a team of 2 guys out to some remote town/city, and if it so happened that that room had one matrimonial bed instead of two separate beds then bed-sharing was the norm.
On a more general note, strangers share beds and rooms while sleeping without thinking about the sex stuff, they just want to have a good night's sleep.
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.
For all concerned, I don't have kids and I don't intend 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.
Research shows many positive effects before age 6, both for the child and the family.
The only valid research says that they stop waking up their parents. This is probably due to learned helplessness, which leads us to the hypothesis in my first comment.
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.
During the daytime, if they start crying and you haven't solved the issue, you don't just start ignoring them. Why would you do so at night?