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What happens when babies are left to cry it out?

• jbirer 4y ago
  [flagged]
  • leokennis 4y ago
    This is a simplistic potshot. If you go to your baby every time it cries that could mean a lot of work, so much it ruins your own rest/health/sanity and makes you a worse parent at the times the baby isn’t crying.
    • goldenchrome 4y ago
      A defenseless child wants nothing more than to sleep next to their parent. Everyone sleeps better.
      • paulryanrogers 4y ago
        Unless the baby gets caught in the covers or rolled upon during the night. Every approach likely has some pros and cons, so barring randomized and reproduced trials I take all claims as unproven.
        • goldenchrome 4y ago
          Yes if you’re obese or inebriated then you shouldn’t sleep next to a baby, but in those cases you’re better off abstaining from food and drink for your own sake anyway.
          • xyzzy_plugh 4y ago
            Sure, but even if you're not these things still happen. To normal, healthy, reasonable people. They don't happen to people who don't co-sleep.
      • GuardianCaveman 4y ago
        They also want a steady stream of cookies and iPad games and to be able to climb on high dangerous objects but maybe we shouldn’t indulge every want of a child.
        • goldenchrome 4y ago
          Giving an infant a feeling of safety when they’re too small to comprehend their environment is not indulgence.
        • Fire-Dragon-DoL 4y ago
          That's a way older kid than a baby though
      • number6 4y ago
        > Everyone sleeps better. Did you ever sleep next to an infant?
        • goldenchrome 4y ago
          Yes
        • Fire-Dragon-DoL 4y ago
          Yes, got 9 hours of sleep/day (interrupted by diaper change, sure) vs the initial 2/week
      • jjulius 4y ago
        >Everyone sleeps better. This is an absolute that is not true. Many people, even you, may - great! Others may not.
        • goldenchrome 4y ago
          Fair—I was being too extreme.
        • russdill 4y ago
          Seriously, I wonder if it's father's saying stuff like this. You just need to go on YouTube and see the abuse that mother's get from infants and small children while co-sleeping.
  • tiffanyh 4y ago
    Do you have kids yourself? Just curious.
    • agitators1 4y ago
      [flagged]
  • jjulius 4y ago
    >Babies cry for a reason (to get their needs met). Yep. Including, "I woke up and I don't yet know how to put myself back to sleep," which is where "sleep training" helps. I, too, would be curious as someone else asked, if you have children.
    • voisin 4y ago
      But do they cry more or less if they are sleep trained vs co-sleeping? Varies I am sure, but in our case at least our children slept soundly whenever not nursing while co-sleeping but for our ill-fated attempt at sleep training just cried and cried and cried (a mistake we tried only with our eldest). To each their own - I say do whatever works!
    • Fire-Dragon-DoL 4y ago
      Or co-sleeping, where they don't cry before or after
      • themaninthedark 4y ago
        I have two boys 9 and 3. Oldest co-slept with us until his brother was born so until 6yo, even now sometimes he wants to come back to our bed. The youngest we put in the same room as our oldest after about a year, he rarely wants to sleep with us. When they were co-sleeping with us, they would still wake up and cry at night from things other then hunger. Including, I rolled over into my parent and it surprised me so I woke up and now I can't sleep. In the case of my oldest, he started getting to the point where he would only fall asleep if my wife was next to him with her arm under his head like a pillow. It had to be her arm, we once switched so my arm was under his head and he could tell, got upset about it XD. That is when we decided he needed to start sleeping on his own...which took some time. It is also why we choose to have the youngest move out quicker, we didn't want to have the same protracted experience. Now they will sleep together at the oldest insistence, about a third of the time though the youngest will take too long to fall asleep and they end up fighting and the youngest will go off to sleep on his own. I don't think any of us in this conversation have any good data on what is best, and those of us that are parents have way to much bias and way too small sample size to discuss this with any degree of confidence. My personal option is that either way is not going to make much of a difference and you should do what ever works best for you and your family. Edit: Added a paragraph(#4)
  • PeterisP 4y ago
    Sometimes the reason a baby cries is literally the unmet need for sleep - they are very tired, feel awful because of that, and cry. And then they can't fall asleep easily because they're cranky about being too tired.
    • spookthesunset 4y ago
      > And then they can't fall asleep easily because they're cranky about being too tired. ... And worse they are tired and don't know how to fall asleep. Hence why I'm a fan of sleep training. You are giving your little one the gift of being able to put themselves to sleep on their own.
  • themaninthedark 4y ago
    I don't know how much experience you have with babies, yes they cry for a reason. Sometimes that reason is they need/want something, sometimes it is because they are gassy and their stomach hurts. Sometimes it is because they are tired, in which case it may be preferential to help them learn that they should sleep when tired and not cry and keep themselves awake. Also you talk about parental selfishness. Parents have to be selfish and kids have to learn to wait. Parental mental health is important, especially for first time parents. Babies will take everything you give them and still want more, it is up to the parent to set boundaries. One of the first pieces of advice I have seen and heard from many sources to new parents is that if the baby is crying and you can no longer handle the stress, to put the baby in a safe place and go for a walk. The reason we have this messaging being shared so widely is because new parents have a societal expectation that they MUST do everything to take care of the baby and if it is crying then you are not doing a good job, that expectation and view is what leads to shaken babies and infanticide.
    • Fire-Dragon-DoL 4y ago
      Of course, but this is talking about extreme cases. Co-sleeping and sleep training are day-to-day instead.
      • themaninthedark 4y ago
        Par of what I am getting at is that stress builds up over time but sometimes very quickly. Especially for new parents. And you can not predict how the parents will react mentally to this stress. When we label things, such as postpartum depression, we can discuss the issue. But I think that sometimes we forget that we have to make changes to stop having the same outcomes. When a new parent ends up killing their child(ren), it is easy for us to say, "Well they had postpartum depression" but what have we gained as a society except a way to blame or assign the tragedy. Demanding the person who is in the midst of postpartum depression to identify that and then seek help is absolutely insane. We as a society need to look at how and what pressure we put on others as well as be able to have open conversation about the stresses in order to prevent deaths.
    • 4y ago
  • kcplate 4y ago
    My grandson was sleep trained and I was a skeptic at first. But it basically took less than 48 hours before he learned to self soothe and was on a schedule with never more than about 15 mins of fussing in that initial training phase. After he was trained and got on his sleep schedule he was the happiest baby I have ever been around and I raised 3 kids myself and have 3 other grandchildren. He never has issues with overtiredness and basically will only fuss if diaper needs changed or was hungry. Now he just flat out tells you when he is tired (“nigh-nigh”) at 18 months and it’s almost always nearly to the minute of when it is his bed or nap time and within a minute or two of being in bed…he is zonked. Everyone I know who has done it sings it’s praises and in our own observation it’s simply amazing. I am no longer a skeptic. Also I will say this, if the crying is the stressful and damaging situation to babies, then in our experience the net result is less stress for the child with sleep training.
  • scheme271 4y ago
    There have also been studies that show that babies will cry to manipulate their caregivers[1]. They are pretty smart and over time can learn to fake crying to get something that they want. [1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23732624/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23732624/
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• anon291 4y ago
  Part of this is that Americans have an obsession with babies sleeping in another room and in another bed. My family immigrated here and no one ever did that. Children sleep with their parents.
  • jjulius 4y ago
    What does it matter how a family sleeps as long as it works well for the family? Edit: And is it an "obsession" or simply a cultural difference?
    • pessimizer 4y ago
      > as long as it works well for the family? It's easier for the family when the child is in the room with the parents. At least in the same way it is easier to have a master bathroom rather than one on the other side of the house. > is it an "obsession" or simply a cultural difference? It was an imposed cultural difference. American parents were told they would hurt their children if they slept in the same room with them, or attended to them too quickly when they cried. So they changed their behavior in order to conform.
      • lazide 4y ago
        SIDS data shows a (relatively) high occurrence of kids dying by having parents roll over on them, or them getting entrapped/suffocated in bedding. In traditional cultures, this usually gets covered up. Additionally, it’s much harder for the parents or kids to get consistent sleep (often already causing a lot of difficulties during this time), when toddler age kids are in the same area, due to differing schedules. In the US, due to mainly socio-economic issues (need to migrate for work often results in families separated over long distances), it is relatively uncommon to have relatives living in the same household able to help with childcare too, especially late at night. So it puts a lot more load on the parents. If not managed effectively, this can break the parents in ways no one likes to talk about in polite company.
        • anon291 4y ago
• robg 4y ago
  Co-sleeping has much more of a basis in human history. The challenge is transitioning.
  • lazide 4y ago
    And SIDS.
    • voisin 4y ago
      Source? Everything I’ve read has shown this to be more of an urban legend if anything. Most SIDS deaths related to cosleeping involved alcohol or drugs. SIDS was actually found to be reduced due to breathing regulation matching that of the parent.
      • lazide 4y ago
        https://publications.aap.org/pediatrics/article/150/1/e2022057991/188305/Evidence-Base-for-2022-Updated-Recommendations-for https://publications.aap.org/pediatrics/article/150/1/e20220... Not that I saw. The change in sleeping habits due to public health campaigns seems to have cut frequency roughly in half, maybe even as much as 75% depending on how much reach you give the education credit for. Still the #1 cause of death for infants, but a lot less so now.
      • deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
    • derbOac 4y ago
      SIDS research is really difficult to interpret because of issues with medical records and problems with socioeconomic and cultural confounds. So, for example, cosleeping is much more common in immigrant populations and there are a lot of uncontrolled confounds related to access to healthcare, etc. Medical examiners are also hesitant to blame parents often and SIDS is frequently used to avoid assignments of responsibility. My spouse and I were really surprised by the actual research when we looked closely at it. It's much murkier than is commonly believed. My experiences in research and with pediatrics has led me to be deeply skeptical of a lot of common claims about infant and child sleep. I think a healthy dose of caution is warranted but I think a lot of this area is not quite what it seems I initially ( which I think is part of the point of the article).
• impostervt 4y ago
  Did this with both my kids. The first one, probably not until 8 months old. The second we did earlier, at like 6 months. 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.
  • lotsofpulp 4y ago
    Did your kids get sick a lot? Mine went to daycare, and picked up a virus literally every other week. We could not continue sleep training while she was sick and crying from congestions/fever/etc so we just coslept. 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.
    • impostervt 4y ago
      No, they didn't attend day care until later.
• darrmit 4y ago
  I'm more interested in the long-term psychological effects of sleep training and how it affects a child's perception of "secure attachment" [1]. We sleep trained our oldest and did not our youngest and their personalities couldn't be more different. Of course, this may be entirely unrelated, but it's still something my wife and I have wondered about as we've learned more about it. [1] https://www.betterhelp.com/advice/psychologists/what-is-secure-attachment-psychology-definition-and-applications/ https://www.betterhelp.com/advice/psychologists/what-is-secu...
  • lazide 4y ago
    The same happens regularly without sleep training too, so ymmv obviously. 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.
    • ramijames 4y ago
      Haven't slept in ten years, can confirm: am ruined.
      • deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
  • mfer 4y ago
    We sleep trained both our kids and their personalities are so different.
  • jmnicolas 4y ago
    Even cats have wildly different personalities so I don't think sleep training human babies have anything to do with their personalities.
    • rspoerri 4y ago
      Did you sleep train the cats?
• beaned 4y ago
  I wish that when they included this line: "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?
  • mlboss 4y ago
    As mentioned multiple times in the article. Most of the world co-sleeps with their kids. Sleep training is only a norm in US and some other western countries.
  • The_Colonel 4y ago
    TBH it seems kind of shocking to European me as well. Not sleeping in the same bed I understand for sure, but putting the baby in a separate room seems ... unnecessarily cruel?
• oaktrout 4y ago
  I read the primary study and admittedly skimmed the very long article. So far as I can tell the takeaway is: after baby is 6 months old there are no observed downsides to sleep training, is that correct?
  • number6 4y ago
    Yes. Makes no difference if sleep trained or not.
    • oaktrout 4y ago
      To be clear, on my read there were no difference as far as downsides, it seemed to improve the mental health of the parents and it taught the babies to return to sleep without needing intervention from the parents, which I would argue are major upsides.
• MWil 4y ago
  We use an app called Huckleberry for sleep training our first child and I am more than satisfied with the results after 13 months. Our daughter sleeps between 10-11 hours at night, has a daytime routine-ish for naps +- 1hr (until we're down to one), she eats great, and yes selfishly - we, the parents, are very happy about the overall schedule and predictability.
• smallstepforman 4y ago
  From Darwins point of view, klingy children slept besides their parents, were not eaten by sabre tooth tigers, and passed on the klingy gene. Babies that slept alone were eaten by Sabre tooth tigers, and did not pass their “can sleep in isolation” gene across. So why fight nature, accept it as part of life. Sleeping together bonds parents and children.
  • number6 4y ago
    Weak crying baby's get thrown down the pit. Makes tribe stronger. Crush other tribe from cave 19. /s
  • joshribakoff 4y ago
    Because were not at risk of being eaten by saber tooth tigers? By the same logic, we should just give in to our sweet tooth that evolved naturally and ignore our “unnatural” scientific knowledge of diabetes and obesity
  • LoudFrog 4y ago
    And I suppose the cave babies used potties too.
• yosito 4y ago
  My parents let me "cry it out" when I was a kid. I cried so much I got a mild hernia. Mild enough that it has never caused any problems. But it left a bump in my abdomen that I can still feel as a man in my late 30s.
  • voisin 4y ago
    I also know someone who has a hernia from being sleep trained as a baby.
  • kungfufrog 4y ago
    If it's an epigastric hernia (which is most likely, considering it's caused you no issues and hasn't been operated on) then it most likely developed during the very early foetal stage. Epigastric hernias are largely a cosmetic nuisance as it's just fat from the abdominal wall (not intestinal tissue) that's poking through. However, sometimes that fat can get trapped and cause the area to become sore and red, but the body prunes the trapped fat off and reabsorbs it, unlike an abdominal hernia where trapped tissue can quickly become a life-threatening situation due to sepsis.
• trilbyglens 4y ago
  Didn't sleep train and now our 9yo expects to come to our bed every damned night. Big regret.
  • georgeburdell 4y ago
    This is my fear as well. Coworkers have mentioned similar where their wives co-sleep well into elementary school. I’ve met some of those kids, and they just don’t seem well adjusted — as in, during the day they don’t play by themselves unless a parent is nearby. My wife is in the same camp and just cannot bear our kids (1 and 3) crying, so it sabotages any attempt at training them to be independent at night. I finally had to banish her to a remote bedroom while I sleep train them. 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.
    • lotsofpulp 4y ago
      There are billions of children/people around the world that cosleep/coslept simply because having your own bed/sleeping mat/space is a luxury most do not have. 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”.
  • scruple 4y ago
    A former manager remarked to me one day that my one year old twins slept better than his 8 year old son. We've sleep trained all 3 of our children and I can't imagine our lives otherwise. I think we'd just manage to survive if they didn't sleep well and on their own.
  • frereubu 4y ago
    We didn't sleep train our daughter - our organisation was pretty messy to be honest - and although she did sleep in another room from a reasonable age, sleep was incredibly patchy and broken for years. Which broke us too! Something clicked when she was around 7.5 years old, and her sleep has been pretty fine since then. I know you say yours is 9, but I write this to hopefully offer some solace that things do change, even if you don't feel like you didn't do the right things. (And which 12-year-old wants to sleep in their parents' bed?! So although it may feel a long way off, it won't last forever...)
• gwnywg 4y ago
  When my wife was pregnant we purchased very nice bed with eco matress in it and all sort of development toys attached to it. When our child reached a few months we tried to get him sleep over there but after a few days resigned (damn british floors making noises when you walk on them...) Plus I'm a sleep walker (very mild but still) so when we had our first child I opted to sleep in living room while my wife had our child with her at night. Kids have no problems sleeping in their beds now, though it requires discipline in applying daily routine, otherwise sleep time can slip a lot...
• agitators1 4y ago
  Finally, a Hacker News post where men can clutch their pearls tightly and agitate against their sworn enemy, parents.
• pmg102 4y ago
  My daughter was never sleep trained. At 7, she still requires an adult lying in the bed with her or at the very least in a chair beside the bed with an arm to cuddle to get to sleep. Presumably this won't still be the case at age 14 though so it doesn't seem like its a problem.
• pcurve 4y ago
  Summary: There are many studies done, but they all have data quality issues to different degrees. 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.
  • JW_00000 4y ago
    I'd add: > 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.
    • psychphysic 4y ago
      Have they learned not to signal their parents? Or that their parents aren't interested in being there when they need them? 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.
      • VirusNewbie 4y ago
        >Have they learned not to signal their parents? Or that their parents aren't interested in being there when they need them? 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.
    • klyrs 4y ago
      Parents getting more sleep has knock-on benefits for the kid. It's hard not to be grumpy under the influence of a sleep deficit. I wake up several times a night. So does my kid. So if I wake up every time he wakes up, and every time I'd naturally wake up, then I don't get enough sleep. Self-care is crucial for caretakers, and I was a bit disappointed to not find any mention of that in the article.
• Cerium 4y ago
  Cry it out is not the only sleep training technique. My wife and I have been able to implement a gradual reduction of supports in an effort to successfully sleep train our daughter. We started at four months by making situations that she sleeps easily a little harder: for example she would fall asleep while drinking so we started putting her sleeping bag on after she drank. As most people say, it won't fully click until after six months. Around six months she started to demonstrate that she could fall asleep by herself. By eight months she rejected help sleeping. Holding her and doing things that worked in the past would only make her angry, she would demand being placed in the bed when she wanted to sleep.
  • trafnar 4y ago
    Yeah, “sleep train” does not mean “cry it out” My kids slept through the night by four months, with other techniques.
  • mmusc 4y ago
    This. Both my kids were sleep trained but never involved leaving them to cry it out. You let them cry for a min or two but no then you go in and soothe them.
• loteck 4y ago
  What we were trying to do was help the parents to teach the kids to self-soothe. So in effect, we weren't saying that they wouldn't wake. We were saying that they would wake, but they wouldn't have to signal their parents. They could go back down into the next sleep cycle. 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.
  • kqr 4y ago
    This is one thing I learned only in my third year as a parent. If I tell an adult "I'm worried you'll break that when you poke it so hard" I expect them to either argue to the contrary or stop poking it so hard. 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.
    • The_Colonel 4y ago
      I think this applies to the adults as well. I've noticed that it takes me some time to change my opinion (on something non-trivial). The first instinct is to maintain your old position.
    • TeMPOraL 4y ago
      Yes! It's something I also realized around when our older daughter turned three. It's as if her higher-level reasoning had 3-4 days of lag.
    • europeanguy 4y ago
      I think there's actually a saying about this. Something like how people don't learn when they're told something, they have to experience it themselves.
• Patrol8394 4y ago
  My wife and I did not sleep trained our kids. They co-slept with us, they were happy we were able to sleep through the night. Eventually they transitioned into their own bed no problem. Our neighbors will let their baby cry like forever, it was excruciating and imo pointless.
  • sublinear 4y ago
    Sometimes a solution is so obvious it's sure to get ignored.
  • pwdisswordfish9 4y ago
    What do you mean? Hard to understand what you're describing.
  • lars512 4y ago
    My brother and his wife did not sleep train their boy and co-slept with him. They had endless issues with sleep that continued past 2y old, were constantly exhausted, and eventually alternated who slept with him. We sleep trained our boy, same age, had very few issues even from very young. 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.
    • andrewclunn 4y ago
      The SIDS risk being parents rolling on top of and crushing / asphyxiating the baby. We just gloss over most of this sort of death by calling it SIDS to avoid having to charge the parents with a crime.
      • sfpotter 4y ago
        Do you have children?
      • 4y ago
• varjag 4y ago
  The silence overwhelmed Mary Carlson when she visited row upon row of swaddled babies in a Romanian orphanage. No babbling, no crying, not even a whimper. ``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. https://apnews.com/article/a6cec231a453aa20429cef7f8694beb6 https://apnews.com/article/a6cec231a453aa20429cef7f8694beb6
  • nicolas_t 4y ago
    The problem with citing the Romanian orphanage is that it's too extreme to be in any way relevant to sleep training. There's a huge difference between gradual extinction (with parents coming back regularly in the room), with a loving relationship during the day and children in the Romanian orphanage who were left with no warm human contact whatsoever.
• warrenmiller 4y ago
  Have a read what Gabor Mate has to say about sleep training “ 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.” https://drgabormate.com/no-longer-believe-babies-cry-sleep/ https://drgabormate.com/no-longer-believe-babies-cry-sleep/
• metabagel 4y ago
  Having read "The Boy Who was Raised as a Dog", which goes into a fair amount of detail regarding attachment and attachment disorders, letting an infant "cry it out" strikes me as child abuse. Infants have no control over their environment, and crying is almost their only way to communicate. 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.
  • lars512 4y ago
    The article mentions this 5y study (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22966034/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22966034/) which included a sleep training intervention at 7m, and found "no evidence of differences between intervention and control families for any outcome". 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.
  • jjtheblunt 4y ago
    Not regarding a human child, but my spouse thought leaving our rescue dog, still a youngster only a few months old, in a cage in another room overnight was somehow proper, which frankly incensed me as cruel and abusive nonsense, because it's not the way of the wild, not what any of us were evolved for. And I'd lived with and worked with rescue animals for decades, so felt strongly about this. (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.)
• greggarious 4y ago
  I had an intense reaction to this story. 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.
• fallingfrog 4y ago
  Human infants are not meant to sleep alone, and human parents are not meant to care for babies all by themselves- especially not one exhausted mother all on her own. Evolutionarily speaking we are supposed to be surrounded by extended family, who can hold the baby and give mom and dad a chance to sleep. It's just the cruelty of modern industrial society that makes people resort to such things as leaving a baby all alone. Future generations are going to see these practices as tragic and the fact that we don't support new parents leads to stressed out, insecure babies, or worse. 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.
  • cycrutchfield 4y ago
    This line of reasoning is absurd. We do a lot of things we aren’t “meant” to do evolutionarily. Babies can and do sleep alone just fine. Sorry it didn’t work out in your case, but don’t try to appeal to Evolution to rationalize it to yourself.
    • Fire-Dragon-DoL 4y ago
      Is it absurd? I think your statement is a bit too strong given what the OP has described: that seems a really painful experience for a parent. There is the possibility that it is an evolutionary trait of some subset of the population: some children might not be able to sustain sleep training and others might be. So your statement is extreme too: it's entirely possible that some human beings are not made for that and others are. The only certainty we have is that humans need physical contact when they are babies, we don't know how much is enough from a scientific point though (and I doubt we would be able to do any experiment related to that ever again)
• conqueso 4y ago
  The fact that this is so commonplace in my culture (USA) is frustrating and enrages me. As a parent, it is your evolutionary instinct to comfort a crying infant. They are quite literally helpless and look to caretakers for all their needs. There's a deep seated biological reason it feels bad to ignore it. The fact that it is so uncommon in other cultures should make this obvious. What are the odds that the rest of the world and entire history of humankind were mistaken the whole time, until some behaviorists came along and figured it all out in the last century? Talk about infants having "attachment issues" makes my blood boil. They are supposed to be attached to you. It is very much possible to co-sleep and then gradually transition them to their own bed. Yes, it is frustrating and will interfere with your sleep. This is one of the many sacrifices of parenthood.
  • afandian 4y ago
    My parents' generation (in the UK) were physically beaten as children. It was a normal part of parenting and part of school. 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.
    • vmilner 4y ago
      My Uk school was still doing collective punishment beatings (“Who spoke?” (No-one replies) (30 boys get caned) ) in the early 80s.
      • aaomidi 4y ago
        Physical punishment is still legal in school & home in ton of US states.
        • jasonfarnon 4y ago
          It is legal in every home of the US. It is legal in many states' public schools. We were spanked in Houston public schools through the 90s. And it was a lot milder than what my cousins in Calcutta got. Good stuff.
• johndhi 4y ago
  Having an 11 month old baby I have a few observations: 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.
  • psychphysic 4y ago
    Humans, well life in general, is pretty damn robust. 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.
  • ryanSrich 4y ago
    We have two kids. One is 3, and the other is 1. Our first was an amazing sleeper. After the first few months, she would mostly sleep in a basinet the entire night. She transitioned to a crib easily, and now sleeps in a bed for about 12 hours per night without getting up. 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.
    • The_Colonel 4y ago
      I've heard similar anecdotes (siblings being very different in how they sleep) from many families.
    • zeroonetwothree 4y ago
• justapassenger 4y ago
  To people bringing anecdotes of their neighbors/friends kids crying forever and calling it an abuse, just one very important note. Sleep training is lasting 1-2 weeks. If kid is crying forever, what you hear is not a sleep training.
  • snordgren 4y ago
    The article also quoted one researcher who said that if the baby was crying for more than 5 minutes, then it is probably not yet at a stage of development where it can learn to self-soothe. I think that is a good rule of thumb.
• chinabot 4y ago
  I find this interesting that human infants are the only ones to cry out and make lots of noise, it must have been recent historically as making yourself known to predators is generally not a good idea evolution wise.
  • mlboss 4y ago
    Its mentioned in the article. Human brain at birth is not as mature as compared to other animals. Most of the animals can start walking after birth.
    • standardUser 4y ago
      Chimpanzee and gorilla babies can take 4-8 months to walk. Baby chimpanzees don't cry but gorillas do (though apparently not often like human babies).
  • standardUser 4y ago
    Other primates don't cry like humans, so maybe by the time human crying became common, humans were already established as dominant predators not to be fucked with. Human babies are never left alone so a crying baby probably signaled the presence of 5-10 adult humans or more. Not exactly an easy meal.
  • deniscepko2 4y ago
    Human infants were not left alone to go hunt for food, i believe the modern concept of family is at play here. People used to live with their parents so, much more help - much less crying.
• andrewstuart 4y ago
  I always loved comforting my little boy when he was a crying baby.
• wffurr 4y ago
  What a disaster this thread is. So much projecting, very little actual reading and thinking.
  • zeroonetwothree 4y ago
    So a typical HN thread then
• malfist 4y ago
  So what does happen when babies are left to cry it out? I read over a dozen paragraphs and it never told me. Just told me about a hypothesis and that some people are shocked at other cultures. 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.
• CraigJPerry 4y ago
  I think every baby is probably different and there won’t be a one size solution. 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.
• standardUser 4y ago
  Putting a very young child to sleep in a different bed in a different room seems like one of those modern Western civilization things that makes no sense when scrutinized even a little. Like hiding nipples or cutting off bits of penises. Is it really still the norm to place the baby in another room and then go tend to them when they cry?
• rdtsc 4y ago
  > "Because early experiences of stress may program the HPA (hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal) axis to be more stress reactive, increasing risk of physical and mental health problems in later life, our results suggest that parenting in infant sleep contexts may play an important role in shaping how the child responds to stress across childhood," 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.
  • russdill 4y ago
    Which child suffers more emotionally? The one that undergoes sleep training and has emotional distress for a few nights and afterwards occasionally wakes during the night and goes back to sleep on their own, or the child that for years, whenever they wake during the night undergoes emotional distress until their caregiver wakes, is able to get up, and get to the child?
    • rdtsc 4y ago
      The first one, because in the second case the caregiver actually comes and comforts them. Stress and damage during certain phases of growth and development might not be reversible. That's what the researchers were talking about "experiences of stress may program the HPA (hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal) axis to be more stress reactive,"
• Mikeb85 4y ago
  Our baby will be 5 months in a few days. My partner and I both had kind of harsh upbringings (as in, our parents left us alone to cry among other things). So when we found out we were expecting, we bought a crib and said we'd be tough parents (though maybe less tough than ours). 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.
  • zeroonetwothree 4y ago
    Well the advice is usually to start at 6 months so you are a bit early anyway
    • Mikeb85 4y ago
      Fair enough but the article does cite a study about sleep 'interventions' at 3, 6 and 9 months plus the aforementioned quote about 3 month olds.
• acyou 4y ago
  After baby moved into their own room we just used an audio baby monitor. We never used a time basis for crying, but a severity basis - if baby is getting too worked up and upset, they shouldn't be expected to calm themselves down from that, maybe ever. People rely on heavily other people's emotional support even as adults, that's a good thing. 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.
• unit_circle 4y ago
  I haven't seen a single top level comment that demonstrated a complete reading and understanding. Some even willingly admit an inability to process the information. Funny, because I thought this was actually remarkably good scientific journalism! I guess this demonstrates why this technical reporting is rare. It took my wife and I about an hour to read and discuss the entire article. 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.
  • oaktrout 4y ago
    I enjoyed the article but found it to be a little wordy and difficult to skim to find what I was looking for. Most systematic reviews and meta-analysis convey more information in less text. I personally prefer to get to straight to the facts, say more with less.
  • alach11 4y ago
    Collection and processing of audio/video data has become much cheaper, especially with advances in deep learning. Hopefully we can see some larger sample-size studies taking advantage of newer tech.
  • AYBABTME 4y ago
    I quit midway because I found the article overly rambling and failing to get to the point. 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.
• rayiner 4y ago
  Is American kids abandoning their parents in old age homes revenge for their parents sleep training them and not co-sleeping?
  • tptacek 4y ago
    No, it isn't.
  • aidenn0 4y ago
    American's sense of independence and boot-strap mentality doesn't end just because you get old; we have a second master bedroom in our house and both my and my wife's parents have turned down offers to live there.
• omgomgomgomg 4y ago
  This is a no brainer. 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.
• tcbawo 4y ago
  My number one rule for parents is to not listen to anyone else’s parenting advice. Do what you think is right and don’t second guess yourself.
• firemanx 4y ago
  Read the article, and many of the comments here. I have a hard time squaring a lot of the hard and fast rules against my own experience. Certainly one persons life can’t detract from large scale statistics. However, I have 6 children. They have all responded to methods of behavioral training in wildly different ways. 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.
  • TeMPOraL 4y ago
    > I have a hard time squaring a lot of the hard and fast rules against my own experience. 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 :).
  • FrankyHollywood 4y ago
    > fall asleep right away if around someone 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.
• dccoolgai 4y ago
  My wife and I deliberated over this for a month. In the end, we decided that "cry it out" was really just gaming the infant's evolving worldview with a sense of "learned helplessness" - something both of us struggle with individually. So we knew it would be tougher on us - and it definitely was - but the alternative of teaching a baby that the only thing they could really do was "ineffective" was something we couldn't stomach. 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_.
  • tinco 4y ago
    Same, but hearing stories from other parents makes me believe we are just very lucky that our baby is responsive to this empathic approach. Also white noise app cuts down on the whinyness before sleeping tremendously.
• poopbutt7 4y ago
  I agree- cry it out sleep training is ideal for infants and parents.
  • poopbutt7 4y ago
    I disagree! Cry it out is the worst way!
• rendall 4y ago
  This appears to be an Anglosphere thing. I, being American, tried to introduce this to my baby son's European mother. She was not having it. "If he's crying, he wants to be held. This 'crying it out' will lead to lack of trust." And the baby slept in the same bed with us for about 3 months. And, I am glad she was so adamant. She was right.
  • balfirevic 4y ago
    > This 'crying it out' will lead to lack of trust > She was right. She wasn't, she just made that up.
    • rendall 4y ago
      Nope. She, being an intuitively good mom, understood that crying is literally a cry for help.
• deleted 4y ago
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• gautamdivgi 4y ago
  Cry it out is unnatural in my very humble opinion. It's a solution designed to get mothers back to work in a nuclear family. Children are a lot of work when little. It is extremely hard on the mother. There is also the big breast feeding mania - which while good will really not help the mother get back to work faster. I think we as a society need to make up our minds. Do we want more happy children and happy parents in a nuclear family or do we want mothers and fathers back to work as fast as possible with no regard to the children? It seems we're settling for the latter and making some bullshit pseudo-analysis that its the former.
  • culebron21 4y ago
    USSR in early decades wanted people back to work ASAP (and social security in 1920-30-s was almost non-existent in the country), so the attitude towards bearing a child and towards children was the same: force everyone to follow strict schedule, no matter what. 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.
• LoudFrog 4y ago
  My sample size is low, but I did cry it out with my son at 4 months old and he has slept amazing ever since. He is 16 months old now and he gets excited when I put him in his crib to sleep. He will often go to the crib unprompted around 7:30pm (his normal bedtime), as he is ready to sleep. I've had sleeping problems my whole life, so seeing him sleep so well is very satisfying to me. I will be doing the same with my second child.
  • SV_BubbleTime 4y ago
    Wait until he gets an iPhone. /s 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.
• flamebreath447 4y ago
  Most threads cover anecdotal experiences and the summary is that many different strategies work. 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.
• unity1001 4y ago
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• unity1001 4y ago
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  • jjulius 4y ago
    It's French, too. See, "Le Pause". And you're demonstrating a sheer amount of ignorance with your rush to judgement here. The children are not neglected and are checked in on and comforted by the parents during sleep training.
    • unity1001 4y ago
      > It's French, too There are great behavioral and cultural differences in between the south of France and the North. > And you're demonstrating a sheer amount of ignorance with your rush to judgement here. Im not. Co-sleeping, close proximity, touching are evolutionary traits of all mammals including humans. The majority of the mammal infants also cry to their parents and their parents attend them. If the cries are not answered, the infant shuts up to avoid signaling the predators in the absence of the parents. The parents not responding to the infant's signal is not a good thing in any mammal species. Even more so for humans. > The children are not neglected and are checked in on and comforted by the parents during sleep training. That's not what the child will instinctively interpret. As far as he is concerned, he is either abandoned and his life is at risk, or the parents are prioritizing their other children for survival.
      • jjulius 4y ago
        >There are great behavioral and cultural differences in between the south of France and the North. So you agree it's not just the US doing it, despite your lambasting only that country multiple times. >That's not what the child will instinctively interpret. As far as he is concerned, he is either abandoned and his life is at risk, or the parents are prioritizing their other children for survival. Cite your source.
        • unity1001 4y ago
          > So you agree it's not just the US doing it No, I don't. A lot of things that were manufactured in the US were exported into countries that were under its influence. Rich, Anglophile segments in a country adopting a behavior from the US because it suits their preferences does not make it a national paradigm. > Cite your source. There are various comments from others in this thread which explain that problem in detail. In contrast, your perspective of 'nothing happening' resides on a single study made with 43 children. (edit - posting the counterpoint here just in case - it was a google search away) https://acamh.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/jcpp.13390 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.
• dboreham 4y ago
  I have a sample size of 2: 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.
• unity1001 4y ago
  https://acamh.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/jcpp.13390 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.
• deleted 4y ago
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• chrisbrandow 4y ago
  It doesn’t surprise me this has 433 comments (so far). Other than what you feed your child there is no topic that is more contentious among new, exhausted parents. This is worse than tabs versus spaces. Blessings to you all!
• nraf 4y ago
  For those not sure about sleep training, I would like to suggest this program as an alternative: https://www.georginamaysleep.com/ https://www.georginamaysleep.com/ 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.
• amai 4y ago
  Just an anecdote from friends: Their baby was crying a lot and having a lot of trouble with sleeping. Desperate after some months they tried out one last thing the doctor suggested: The mother switched to a vegan diet. And the baby suddenly is calm and sleeps well. Later it turned out their child had several food sensitivities, which caused a lot of discomfort. It seems the vegan diet of the mother made her milk less irritating for the baby. The lesson: Sometimes babies cry for a reason. It is worth changing your routines to figure out the cause of discomfort.
• crawfordcomeaux 4y ago
  The issue I've had with studies of children and parenting techniques is this: 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.
• cryptonector 4y ago
  > Longer-term, the Australian study found that any parent-reported improvements in sleep from sleep training disappeared by age two. > > 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.