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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

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.
      - Tams80 4y ago
        If I recall correctly, it was illegal by the 90s in the UK. That didn't stop the odd occasion of it happening. The cane remained on the wall as a relic, but there was always a handy slipper around.
  - pc86 4y ago
    Abuse in a school setting 40+ years ago is not all that surprising.
    - vmilner 4y ago
      I think early 80s is when it becomes tricky to _legally_ beat kids in schools in the uk. I suspect collective punishment was actually illegal long before that but it wasn’t tested in courts.
  - LAC-Tech 4y ago
    Well has it worked? Have you knifed anyone?
    - dijksterhuis 4y ago
      You cannot say “well you probably haven’t done this one, specific, highly unlikely thing for someone in the UK to do. So yeah caning probably worked, right!” 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.
    - DieAgainAli 4y ago
      You act like ‘back in my day’ there wasn’t any crime. If you look at murder rates in the UK they peaked in the early 2000’s. Maybe those abused boys were taught violence is the answer? 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
      - LAC-Tech 4y ago
        Glad to see the UK is past their murder rate peak - what's the rate now, merely double what it was in 50s or the Edwardian Era?
        talideon 4y ago
        The murder rate in the UK tracked the presence of environmental lead from things like paint, leaded petrol, &. The murder rate in the UK is now trending towards what it was in the Edwardian period, when it was introduced. Beating children doesn't make them obedient and law-abiding adults.
      - wolpoli 4y ago
        > If you look at murder rates in the UK they peaked in the early 2000’s. Maybe those abused boys were taught violence is the answer? 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.
- sanderjd 4y ago
  Comparing a 9-month-old spending 15 minutes calming themselves down before falling asleep to physical abuse is laughably absurd. 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".
  - aaomidi 4y ago
    Yeah…cause they’re human and as the parent you’re their only human interaction. 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.
    - gregoriol 4y ago
      What if it is part of learning?
    - sanderjd 4y ago
      It's not a bad thing, just like it's not bad for a baby to want to be spoon-fed. But part of growing up is learning new skills, like eating by themselves and soothing themselves to sleep. And a big part of parenting is figuring out the right times and ways to encourage this. 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.
- somrand0 4y ago
  well yea, because your parents were essentially slaves, the property of higher elite classes. I'm pointing to the class relationship, nothing specific to your parents. I wonder if such practices were used in schools reserved for royalty and other nobles in the UK
  - dijksterhuis 4y ago
    It’s well known that “elite” schools such as Eton also used physical punishment in a similar manner.
- 0xEFF 4y ago
  Is it emotionally abusive to ignore a child's hours long temper tantrum after they're told they can't have ice cream for dinner?
encoderer 4y ago
For my second kid it worked wonderfully. There was one hard night. After that he had, for the first time in his young life, the ability to put himself back to sleep at night when he woke up. That was a gift for him as well as us. We used the Ferber method.
- Unbeliever69 4y ago
  Back in the 90s my son REALLY struggled getting to sleep on his own. The only way to put him to sleep was to rock him and hope he didn't wake up while you were putting him down. This lasted for almost a year. At wit's end, a friend loaned us a VHS tape about an episode of 60 Minutes that advocated "crying it out." It was a life saver! Within a few nights he was finally sleeping through the night. I'm not going to lie. Those nights were pretty difficult, especially for my wife. Luckily, my daughter didn't have that problem!
amriksohata 4y ago
So very true, I feel this is why adults are becoming more and more hardened and emotionless from childhood rejection issues
paganel 4y ago
> 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. 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-alone-20170324-story.html https://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-reiss-sleep-alon...
- ipaddr 4y ago
  Back in the day travellers men/women/kids/strangers would all sleep in the same bed in the medieval western world. Things have changed.
  - 4y ago
GatorD42 4y ago
The article states no long term negative effects have been found, compared to positive short term findings. There’s been a wide range of child-rearing practices across cultures and history, including infanticide. Probably no culture has gotten it exactly right, but this practice is not that far outside the norm as other practices from other cultures.
- unity1001 4y ago
  > The article states no long term negative effects have been found 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.
agumonkey 4y ago
After suffering extreme trauma, I have a different view on babies crying. Being heard and responded to is one existentially low level mental need. Touched too.
- epolanski 4y ago
  But you can't be heard every single time, the usual example of a parent driving, he can't just stop the car and start soothing the baby ignoring the rest of the world, logistics or obligations. 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.
  - agumonkey 4y ago
    Sure, I can't be absolutist. But whenever I can, I do something. Respond. For the car, you might not be able to reach, but emit something that convey concern and care.
    - epolanski 4y ago
      What if that approach of over protecting brings up a future lazy, spoiled, weak willed adult that will conduct miserable lives because up to 36 months all their brain saw is that crying always got them attentions and everything they wanted? You don't know whether your approach is the best one, I don't, speak with as many professionals you can.
      - metabagel 4y ago
        Children under the age of three aren't capable of self-soothing. If they're quiet when you abandon them, it's because they've given up hope.
        epolanski 4y ago
        You don't know that, you're not inside their brain nor you're a scientist studying the matter. There is no evidence behind your claim.
lern_too_spel 4y ago
Hypothesis: the parent, by forcing themselves to sleep train, conditions themselves to ignore more of the infant's emotions; and the infant, observing no reaction to their emotions, learns the same behavior, leading to higher incidence of autism. 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.
- 0xEFF 4y ago
  Research shows no long term effects after age 6, positive or negative, of sleep training, so the research doesn't support your hypothesis. Research shows many positive effects before age 6, both for the child and the family.
  - metabagel 4y ago
    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34179412 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34179412
  - lern_too_spel 4y ago
    As the article mentions, the research is amateurish. The experimental designs wouldn't pass muster at any tech company.
    - shaklee3 4y ago
      except there's no better research to contradict it
      - 4y ago
remote_phone 4y ago
The fact that you are getting enraged is a huge part of the problem. Keep your own morality to yourself and your own family. If you don’t want to use cry it out, then that’s your decision. The fact you project onto others is the problem and it’s none of your business. Cry it out is effective and works wonders for families and it has no side effects, as mentioned in the article itself.
- metabagel 4y ago
  If you read Dr. Bruce Perry's books, you'll find that some children are able to withstand childhood trauma, while others are deeply affected by it. "Keep your own morality to yourself and your own family." That's not a real solid code of ethics to have.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- unity1001 4y ago
  > The fact that you are getting enraged is a huge part of the problem. Keep your own morality to yourself and your own family. 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.
  - jjulius 4y ago
    How about respecting every parents choices for their own family? How about you step away from HN for a bit and get some fresh air before responding to another comment in this thread? You're obviously very heated and it's not constructive. 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".
scotty79 4y ago
On the other hand if infants were this fragile to be long term affected by something like that humanity would survive 3 generation tops. At some point synaptic prunning comes and the child is rid of nearly all indignities it suffered up to that point.
- giraffe_lady 4y ago
  Plenty of adaptively useful, maybe even optimal behaviors can negatively affect enjoyment of life. The world we live in isn't the one we evolved for, and behaviors and adaptations useful in our evolutionary past can be painful or detrimental to individuals and society now. 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.
  - scotty79 4y ago
    Sure, severe abuse can have lasting impact, but we are talking about babies crying for a bit. Kids have a thousand innane reasons to cry. Having thousand and one doesn't make that much of a difference. For all concerned, I don't have kids and I don't intend to.
    - gsinclair 4y ago
      “prunning” and “innane” — too many ens!
      - scotty79 4y ago
        Thanks. Sorry. I'm not a native speaker and autocorrect is fickle.
- 4y ago
christophilus 4y ago
> As a parent, it is your evolutionary instinct to comfort a crying infant. 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.”
- unity1001 4y ago
  > My genes didn’t get the memo Don't worry. Your gene pool will eventually select itself out via that mindset.
  - jjulius 4y ago
    You need to chill out on your judgemental posts. You're coming into this thread fast and hot and it is not constructive. Your quick reactions are demonstrating your own ignorance on this subject.
    - unity1001 4y ago
      [flagged]
      - shaklee3 4y ago
        your comments are the same tired comments along the lines of "my parents and all the people I grew up with used a natural gas stove, so it's clearly the right way and nothing can be better". except when studies come out showing there are better ways to do things you're so set in your ways that it won't matter. the thing with sleep training is that it works so wonderfully for a lot of people that the same arguments about how people who lived 20 people in a small cottage and had free babysitting all day long are somehow analogous is no longer relevant. times changed, people work more, sleep is more important for everyone (recent studies show), and the old way of doing it is no longer the best/only way.
ineptech 4y ago
That evolutionary instinct came from a time when humans lived in communal support networks and new parents had help from extended family, and does not translate well to a world where Mom has to work 9-5 in an office a few months after birth. You might as well express shock that suburbanites don't supplement their diets by foraging for fruit and mushrooms. 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.
- omnibrain 4y ago
  > a world where Mom has to work 9-5 in an office a few months after birth That's a cultural problem itself.
  - TeMPOraL 4y ago
    Unfortunately, solving a cultural problem is the second most difficult thing to do, after changing laws of physics. Or, as some web article I read the other day put it: society is fixed, biology is mutable. 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.
    - komali2 4y ago
      You can solve cultural problems on a micro level. 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.
naasking 4y ago
> 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? 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.
- bawolff 4y ago
  > There are many cases where all of humanity has been doing something that we only recently decided was wrong. For instance, slavery. 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.
  - neaden 4y ago
    They absolutely claimed it was good for the enslaved person as part of justifying it.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - dragonwriter 4y ago
    > 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.
mike1o1 4y ago
Agreed 100%. I feel like sleep training is for the parents, not necessarily for the babies. Most parents in the USA need to work, so they are the ones that need the sleep.
- TeMPOraL 4y ago
  Obviously. But you're saying it like the parents are being selfish here. 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.
- kaitai 4y ago
  It doesn't sound like you have much experience being the 24-hr care provider for a baby. Phoning it in at work is way more relaxing than being in the house with a baby for the entire day. It's not work that makes parents need to sleep, it's... needing to sleep. Just speaking from experience, having someone with fractured mental concentration cooking, attempting to keep a slightly mobile child from danger, trying not to fall asleep on the couch with the kid in a desperate attempt not to cosleep, trying to keep your cool as the kid screams again and can't be soothed.... much more dangerous and stressful than doodling thru a meeting and saying, "I'm sorry, can you repeat that? I just want to clarify what you're saying."
eslaught 4y ago
In case it's not obvious to everyone reading here, no one recommends using the cry it out method on infants younger than six months. For younger infants, you should always respond as quickly as possible. Our doctor recommended that we have at least one person sleeping in the same room, but in a different bed, for the first six months. Then we gradually transitioned to allowing him to put himself to sleep, and I finally stopped sleeping in the same room around 11 months. For us, this worked wonderfully. My wife hated it, but that was its biggest downside. Almost overnight, it led to better sleep for everyone involved and the kids have never had attachment issues. 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.
- awillen 4y ago
  > In case it's not obvious to everyone reading here, no one recommends using the cry it out method on infants younger than six months. 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-explained/ https://www.parents.com/baby/sleep/basics/the-ferber-method-... 2. https://www.healthline.com/health/baby/cry-it-out-method https://www.healthline.com/health/baby/cry-it-out-method
- clcaev 4y ago
  I think missing a "window of opportunity" with kids "never learning to sleep by themselves" is dubious. Those approaching adolescence develop quite strong need for personal space, eventually. They start rejecting parental company, instead preferring to be alone or be with their peers. 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.
rcpt 4y ago
> co-sleep Suffocation risk is real. Don't do this.
- fipar 4y ago
  Our pediatricians told us risk from suffocation is associated with bad co-sleep practices, not "just with" co-sleep (in our country, not the US, and I'm quoting "just with" because I don't know how to put that better, I'm trying to make the point that if bad practices aren't followed, the risk of SIDS is comparable to babies that sleep alone). This includes co-sleeping when at least one of the parents is a smoker, or is under the influence of alcohol or other drugs (legal or otherwise), having pillows, stuffed animals, or other soft loose things in bed, the bed being too soft, the baby being able to cover their face, etc. 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.
  - gsinclair 4y ago
    You can add my anecdotal experience to yours. Co-sleeping seemed like the cheat code to getting baby boy to sleep through the night.
    - unity1001 4y ago
      > 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.
0xEFF 4y ago
It's curious years of good nights of sleep and a happy child enrages you. 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?
- locusofself 4y ago
  We had the exact same experience. A few nights of crying (we didn't totally abandon her, just a did a peek in and say goodnight again (no picking up the baby) after 5 minutes of crying, then 10, then 15, etc) for a few nights. Daughter has slept through almost every night since then, she just turned 4. Sleep training (which involved some degree of "cry it out") was a life saver for us.
- Auracle 4y ago
  I did it at 3 months. I did it because my wife couldn't handle it, and she had gone back to work. The only reason I did it was because our baby wouldn't let us put her down a lot of the time. She'd sleep just fine in our arms...and then we'd put her down and she'd instantly cry. It was...stressful. 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.
- lazide 4y ago
  In my experience, when someone thinks they should be able to do it, but can't do it, and suffers from the consequences of that - you'll get that kind of reaction. Not saying it's what's happening here, but I've seen it a lot. Difficulty getting themselves to get their kids vaccinated (the screaming or crying is hard!) is a big factor behind the antivax movement, IMO.
NikolaNovak 4y ago
I have two kids now. We are lucky blessed and privileged with amount of support we have, from family and work and government (Canada:). And yet it's hard. I try to get a little bit less "enraged" and "blood boiling" at other parents' survival strategies. If you have to go to work next morning to pay rent (which,y know, hasn't historically been the case so evolution is no use) and don't have a traditional support network of 500bc Greece and haven't slept for the last 6 weeks... It's very easy to say "it's a sacrifice parents should make" but it feels a bit of a lack of empathy. 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.
ak217 4y ago
Your comment and others in this thread illustrate a different problem. Discourse around this topic (and some other parenting topics like breastfeeding) is out of control and not recognized as such. Regardless of your experience, it's not your place (nor anyone else's aside from maybe their physician), to tell parents what to do - and most of the time these admonitions are misinterpreted anyway because you're trying to boil down a complex set of behaviors and constraints to a rule that you propped up using some moral framework that you religiously believe in. People may well try to apply your rule in a different set of circumstances and get disastrous outcomes. To be clear, there are plenty of irrationally strong opinions on the opposite side of each of these issues too. 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.
- gsinclair 4y ago
  Your comment is excellent. But I think GP’s comment is fine too. It’s a strongly held opinion, fairly well expressed. I didn’t really read it as an admonition. Sure, some people may not like strong opinions on this topic, but on HN I like to read them, no matter the topic. 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.
benshoemaker 4y ago
[dead]
- metabagel 4y ago
  Not in this case. It's actually an appeal to rigorously question changing something which has obvious evolutionary roots and benefits.
jasonhansel 4y ago
> It is very much possible to co-sleep and then gradually transition them to their own bed. 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/american-academy-of-pediatrics-updates-safe-sleep-recommendations-back-is-best/ 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-sleep/index.html 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). Source: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21868032/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21868032/
- ghostpepper 4y ago
  I am not an expert but I think there are ways to safely co-sleep, but chronically sleep-deprived parents tend to not be able to follow the rules consistently
- Auracle 4y ago
  As is sleeping on their stomachs, and most babies really don't like to sleep on their backs. It's no wonder parents have issues...and no wonder many babies have the back of their heads flattened. 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.
- XorNot 4y ago
  SIDS however is probably genetic and little we do has made a difference (for example, when I was a baby the advice was to sleep children on their stomachs - it's literally the opposite now)[1] [1] https://www.schn.health.nsw.gov.au/news/articles/2022/05/world-first-breakthrough-could-prevent-sids https://www.schn.health.nsw.gov.au/news/articles/2022/05/wor...
lolinder 4y ago
This is the kind of "it worked for my kid" bullshit that drives me up the wall. 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.
- detritus 4y ago
  The only good advice for a new parent, I think, is to ignore everyone else's advice. I appreciate the circularity of this advice.
  - orangepurple 4y ago
    Parents need to have a well defined set of diverse solutions and know how to sample from the search space effectively instead of current epsilon greedy approach
- remote_phone 4y ago
  100% correct. The baby-rearing book industry is a fraud. They claim “well the average baby does X, Y, Z” but they don’t tell you that the standard deviation is huge. New mothers like my wife were stressed beyond belief because our kid only slept 10 hours and ate twice as much as other kids. She was convinced there was something wrong until I proved to her that he was within the standard deviation of normal. 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.
Mikeb85 4y ago
> Talk about infants having "attachment issues" makes my blood boil. They are supposed to be attached to you. 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.
lr4444lr 4y ago
The article makes fairly clear that sleep training under 6 months is not advised. Not to say that every baby will be ready at that point, but it becomes clear to most parents somewhere in the first year what cries from their baby express sincere needs - even psychological- and which are just gratuitous attention seeking. Once they have object permanence down, parenting changes.
- unity1001 4y ago
  > The article makes fairly clear that sleep training under 6 months is not advised 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.
Tams80 4y ago
Babies cry because they have little other ways to communicate. And yes, generally it is because of something negative. That negative could be 'leave me the fuck alone and stop bothering me' though, just in baby language - crying. Yes, even to a parent.
heavyset_go 4y ago
> The fact that this is so commonplace in my culture (USA) is frustrating and enrages me 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_behavior_analysis_(ABA) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aversives#Use_in_applied_behav...
- dinkumthinkum 4y ago
  There isn’t really an “AmerIvan culture around rearing children”. America large variations in behaviors. If American parenting was completely as you suggest, how do we have a generation of professional victims or constant discussions of “helicopter parenting” or “participation trophies”?
  - unity1001 4y ago
    > There isn’t really an “AmerIvan culture around rearing children”. America large variations in behaviors. 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.
  - heavyset_go 4y ago
    Who said "professional victims" aren't the result of such parenting? 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.
shepherdjerred 4y ago
> 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? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maladaptation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maladaptation
refurb 4y ago
I had the same perspective. 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.
shaklee3 4y ago
why is something that is uncommon in other cultures obviously bad? there are many, many, many counterexamples to things kind this. just because something is commonplace doesn't mean it's the best way.
dotnet00 4y ago
Another reason to avoid this "deep seated biological reason" based reasoning is that evolution is pretty slow. Our instinct "software" is still setup for 40k+ years ago. It doesn't change particularly quickly and evolutionarily the entirety of human history isn't really a lot. Let alone human history in anything resembling a civilization. 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).
zhdc1 4y ago
> It is very much possible to co-sleep and then gradually transition them to their own bed A counter argument (trigger warning): https://www.reddit.com/r/nursing/comments/zls30p/cosleeping/ https://www.reddit.com/r/nursing/comments/zls30p/cosleeping/ We co-slept with our second child, but only after taking a lot of precautions.

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.
    - Tams80 4y ago
      If I recall correctly, it was illegal by the 90s in the UK. That didn't stop the odd occasion of it happening. The cane remained on the wall as a relic, but there was always a handy slipper around.
- pc86 4y ago
  Abuse in a school setting 40+ years ago is not all that surprising.
  - vmilner 4y ago
    I think early 80s is when it becomes tricky to _legally_ beat kids in schools in the uk. I suspect collective punishment was actually illegal long before that but it wasn’t tested in courts.
- LAC-Tech 4y ago
  Well has it worked? Have you knifed anyone?
  - dijksterhuis 4y ago
    You cannot say “well you probably haven’t done this one, specific, highly unlikely thing for someone in the UK to do. So yeah caning probably worked, right!” 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.
  - DieAgainAli 4y ago
    You act like ‘back in my day’ there wasn’t any crime. If you look at murder rates in the UK they peaked in the early 2000’s. Maybe those abused boys were taught violence is the answer? 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
    - LAC-Tech 4y ago
      Glad to see the UK is past their murder rate peak - what's the rate now, merely double what it was in 50s or the Edwardian Era?
      - talideon 4y ago
        The murder rate in the UK tracked the presence of environmental lead from things like paint, leaded petrol, &. The murder rate in the UK is now trending towards what it was in the Edwardian period, when it was introduced. Beating children doesn't make them obedient and law-abiding adults.
    - wolpoli 4y ago
      > If you look at murder rates in the UK they peaked in the early 2000’s. Maybe those abused boys were taught violence is the answer? 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.
sanderjd 4y ago
Comparing a 9-month-old spending 15 minutes calming themselves down before falling asleep to physical abuse is laughably absurd. 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".
- aaomidi 4y ago
  Yeah…cause they’re human and as the parent you’re their only human interaction. 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.
  - gregoriol 4y ago
    What if it is part of learning?
  - sanderjd 4y ago
    It's not a bad thing, just like it's not bad for a baby to want to be spoon-fed. But part of growing up is learning new skills, like eating by themselves and soothing themselves to sleep. And a big part of parenting is figuring out the right times and ways to encourage this. 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.
somrand0 4y ago
well yea, because your parents were essentially slaves, the property of higher elite classes. I'm pointing to the class relationship, nothing specific to your parents. I wonder if such practices were used in schools reserved for royalty and other nobles in the UK
- dijksterhuis 4y ago
  It’s well known that “elite” schools such as Eton also used physical punishment in a similar manner.
0xEFF 4y ago
Is it emotionally abusive to ignore a child's hours long temper tantrum after they're told they can't have ice cream for dinner?

encoderer 4y ago

For my second kid it worked wonderfully. There was one hard night. After that he had, for the first time in his young life, the ability to put himself back to sleep at night when he woke up. That was a gift for him as well as us. We used the Ferber method.

Unbeliever69 4y ago
Back in the 90s my son REALLY struggled getting to sleep on his own. The only way to put him to sleep was to rock him and hope he didn't wake up while you were putting him down. This lasted for almost a year. At wit's end, a friend loaned us a VHS tape about an episode of 60 Minutes that advocated "crying it out." It was a life saver! Within a few nights he was finally sleeping through the night. I'm not going to lie. Those nights were pretty difficult, especially for my wife. Luckily, my daughter didn't have that problem!

amriksohata 4y ago

So very true, I feel this is why adults are becoming more and more hardened and emotionless from childhood rejection issues

paganel 4y ago

> 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. 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-alone-20170324-story.html https://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-reiss-sleep-alon...

ipaddr 4y ago
Back in the day travellers men/women/kids/strangers would all sleep in the same bed in the medieval western world. Things have changed.
- 4y ago

GatorD42 4y ago

The article states no long term negative effects have been found, compared to positive short term findings. There’s been a wide range of child-rearing practices across cultures and history, including infanticide. Probably no culture has gotten it exactly right, but this practice is not that far outside the norm as other practices from other cultures.

unity1001 4y ago
> The article states no long term negative effects have been found 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.

agumonkey 4y ago

After suffering extreme trauma, I have a different view on babies crying. Being heard and responded to is one existentially low level mental need. Touched too.

epolanski 4y ago
But you can't be heard every single time, the usual example of a parent driving, he can't just stop the car and start soothing the baby ignoring the rest of the world, logistics or obligations. 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.
- agumonkey 4y ago
  Sure, I can't be absolutist. But whenever I can, I do something. Respond. For the car, you might not be able to reach, but emit something that convey concern and care.
  - epolanski 4y ago
    What if that approach of over protecting brings up a future lazy, spoiled, weak willed adult that will conduct miserable lives because up to 36 months all their brain saw is that crying always got them attentions and everything they wanted? You don't know whether your approach is the best one, I don't, speak with as many professionals you can.
    - metabagel 4y ago
      Children under the age of three aren't capable of self-soothing. If they're quiet when you abandon them, it's because they've given up hope.
      - epolanski 4y ago
        You don't know that, you're not inside their brain nor you're a scientist studying the matter. There is no evidence behind your claim.

lern_too_spel 4y ago

Hypothesis: the parent, by forcing themselves to sleep train, conditions themselves to ignore more of the infant's emotions; and the infant, observing no reaction to their emotions, learns the same behavior, leading to higher incidence of autism. 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.

0xEFF 4y ago
Research shows no long term effects after age 6, positive or negative, of sleep training, so the research doesn't support your hypothesis. Research shows many positive effects before age 6, both for the child and the family.
- metabagel 4y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34179412 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34179412
- lern_too_spel 4y ago
  As the article mentions, the research is amateurish. The experimental designs wouldn't pass muster at any tech company.
  - shaklee3 4y ago
    except there's no better research to contradict it
    - 4y ago

remote_phone 4y ago

The fact that you are getting enraged is a huge part of the problem. Keep your own morality to yourself and your own family. If you don’t want to use cry it out, then that’s your decision. The fact you project onto others is the problem and it’s none of your business. Cry it out is effective and works wonders for families and it has no side effects, as mentioned in the article itself.

metabagel 4y ago
If you read Dr. Bruce Perry's books, you'll find that some children are able to withstand childhood trauma, while others are deeply affected by it. "Keep your own morality to yourself and your own family." That's not a real solid code of ethics to have.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
unity1001 4y ago
> The fact that you are getting enraged is a huge part of the problem. Keep your own morality to yourself and your own family. 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.
- jjulius 4y ago
  How about respecting every parents choices for their own family? How about you step away from HN for a bit and get some fresh air before responding to another comment in this thread? You're obviously very heated and it's not constructive. 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".

scotty79 4y ago

On the other hand if infants were this fragile to be long term affected by something like that humanity would survive 3 generation tops. At some point synaptic prunning comes and the child is rid of nearly all indignities it suffered up to that point.

giraffe_lady 4y ago
Plenty of adaptively useful, maybe even optimal behaviors can negatively affect enjoyment of life. The world we live in isn't the one we evolved for, and behaviors and adaptations useful in our evolutionary past can be painful or detrimental to individuals and society now. 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.
- scotty79 4y ago
  Sure, severe abuse can have lasting impact, but we are talking about babies crying for a bit. Kids have a thousand innane reasons to cry. Having thousand and one doesn't make that much of a difference. For all concerned, I don't have kids and I don't intend to.
  - gsinclair 4y ago
    “prunning” and “innane” — too many ens!
    - scotty79 4y ago
      Thanks. Sorry. I'm not a native speaker and autocorrect is fickle.
4y ago

christophilus 4y ago

> As a parent, it is your evolutionary instinct to comfort a crying infant. 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.”

unity1001 4y ago
> My genes didn’t get the memo Don't worry. Your gene pool will eventually select itself out via that mindset.
- jjulius 4y ago
  You need to chill out on your judgemental posts. You're coming into this thread fast and hot and it is not constructive. Your quick reactions are demonstrating your own ignorance on this subject.
  - unity1001 4y ago
    [flagged]
    - shaklee3 4y ago
      your comments are the same tired comments along the lines of "my parents and all the people I grew up with used a natural gas stove, so it's clearly the right way and nothing can be better". except when studies come out showing there are better ways to do things you're so set in your ways that it won't matter. the thing with sleep training is that it works so wonderfully for a lot of people that the same arguments about how people who lived 20 people in a small cottage and had free babysitting all day long are somehow analogous is no longer relevant. times changed, people work more, sleep is more important for everyone (recent studies show), and the old way of doing it is no longer the best/only way.

ineptech 4y ago

That evolutionary instinct came from a time when humans lived in communal support networks and new parents had help from extended family, and does not translate well to a world where Mom has to work 9-5 in an office a few months after birth. You might as well express shock that suburbanites don't supplement their diets by foraging for fruit and mushrooms. 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.

omnibrain 4y ago
> a world where Mom has to work 9-5 in an office a few months after birth That's a cultural problem itself.
- TeMPOraL 4y ago
  Unfortunately, solving a cultural problem is the second most difficult thing to do, after changing laws of physics. Or, as some web article I read the other day put it: society is fixed, biology is mutable. 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.
  - komali2 4y ago
    You can solve cultural problems on a micro level. 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.

naasking 4y ago

> 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? 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.

bawolff 4y ago
> There are many cases where all of humanity has been doing something that we only recently decided was wrong. For instance, slavery. 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.
- neaden 4y ago
  They absolutely claimed it was good for the enslaved person as part of justifying it.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- dragonwriter 4y ago
  > 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.

mike1o1 4y ago

Agreed 100%. I feel like sleep training is for the parents, not necessarily for the babies. Most parents in the USA need to work, so they are the ones that need the sleep.

TeMPOraL 4y ago
Obviously. But you're saying it like the parents are being selfish here. 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.
kaitai 4y ago
It doesn't sound like you have much experience being the 24-hr care provider for a baby. Phoning it in at work is way more relaxing than being in the house with a baby for the entire day. It's not work that makes parents need to sleep, it's... needing to sleep. Just speaking from experience, having someone with fractured mental concentration cooking, attempting to keep a slightly mobile child from danger, trying not to fall asleep on the couch with the kid in a desperate attempt not to cosleep, trying to keep your cool as the kid screams again and can't be soothed.... much more dangerous and stressful than doodling thru a meeting and saying, "I'm sorry, can you repeat that? I just want to clarify what you're saying."

eslaught 4y ago

In case it's not obvious to everyone reading here, no one recommends using the cry it out method on infants younger than six months. For younger infants, you should always respond as quickly as possible. Our doctor recommended that we have at least one person sleeping in the same room, but in a different bed, for the first six months. Then we gradually transitioned to allowing him to put himself to sleep, and I finally stopped sleeping in the same room around 11 months. For us, this worked wonderfully. My wife hated it, but that was its biggest downside. Almost overnight, it led to better sleep for everyone involved and the kids have never had attachment issues. 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.

awillen 4y ago
> In case it's not obvious to everyone reading here, no one recommends using the cry it out method on infants younger than six months. 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-explained/ https://www.parents.com/baby/sleep/basics/the-ferber-method-... 2. https://www.healthline.com/health/baby/cry-it-out-method https://www.healthline.com/health/baby/cry-it-out-method
clcaev 4y ago
I think missing a "window of opportunity" with kids "never learning to sleep by themselves" is dubious. Those approaching adolescence develop quite strong need for personal space, eventually. They start rejecting parental company, instead preferring to be alone or be with their peers. 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.

rcpt 4y ago

> co-sleep Suffocation risk is real. Don't do this.

fipar 4y ago
Our pediatricians told us risk from suffocation is associated with bad co-sleep practices, not "just with" co-sleep (in our country, not the US, and I'm quoting "just with" because I don't know how to put that better, I'm trying to make the point that if bad practices aren't followed, the risk of SIDS is comparable to babies that sleep alone). This includes co-sleeping when at least one of the parents is a smoker, or is under the influence of alcohol or other drugs (legal or otherwise), having pillows, stuffed animals, or other soft loose things in bed, the bed being too soft, the baby being able to cover their face, etc. 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.
- gsinclair 4y ago
  You can add my anecdotal experience to yours. Co-sleeping seemed like the cheat code to getting baby boy to sleep through the night.
  - unity1001 4y ago
    > 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.

0xEFF 4y ago

It's curious years of good nights of sleep and a happy child enrages you. 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?

locusofself 4y ago
We had the exact same experience. A few nights of crying (we didn't totally abandon her, just a did a peek in and say goodnight again (no picking up the baby) after 5 minutes of crying, then 10, then 15, etc) for a few nights. Daughter has slept through almost every night since then, she just turned 4. Sleep training (which involved some degree of "cry it out") was a life saver for us.
Auracle 4y ago
I did it at 3 months. I did it because my wife couldn't handle it, and she had gone back to work. The only reason I did it was because our baby wouldn't let us put her down a lot of the time. She'd sleep just fine in our arms...and then we'd put her down and she'd instantly cry. It was...stressful. 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.
lazide 4y ago
In my experience, when someone thinks they should be able to do it, but can't do it, and suffers from the consequences of that - you'll get that kind of reaction. Not saying it's what's happening here, but I've seen it a lot. Difficulty getting themselves to get their kids vaccinated (the screaming or crying is hard!) is a big factor behind the antivax movement, IMO.

NikolaNovak 4y ago

I have two kids now. We are lucky blessed and privileged with amount of support we have, from family and work and government (Canada:). And yet it's hard. I try to get a little bit less "enraged" and "blood boiling" at other parents' survival strategies. If you have to go to work next morning to pay rent (which,y know, hasn't historically been the case so evolution is no use) and don't have a traditional support network of 500bc Greece and haven't slept for the last 6 weeks... It's very easy to say "it's a sacrifice parents should make" but it feels a bit of a lack of empathy. 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.

ak217 4y ago

Your comment and others in this thread illustrate a different problem. Discourse around this topic (and some other parenting topics like breastfeeding) is out of control and not recognized as such. Regardless of your experience, it's not your place (nor anyone else's aside from maybe their physician), to tell parents what to do - and most of the time these admonitions are misinterpreted anyway because you're trying to boil down a complex set of behaviors and constraints to a rule that you propped up using some moral framework that you religiously believe in. People may well try to apply your rule in a different set of circumstances and get disastrous outcomes. To be clear, there are plenty of irrationally strong opinions on the opposite side of each of these issues too. 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.

gsinclair 4y ago
Your comment is excellent. But I think GP’s comment is fine too. It’s a strongly held opinion, fairly well expressed. I didn’t really read it as an admonition. Sure, some people may not like strong opinions on this topic, but on HN I like to read them, no matter the topic. 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.

benshoemaker 4y ago

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metabagel 4y ago
Not in this case. It's actually an appeal to rigorously question changing something which has obvious evolutionary roots and benefits.

jasonhansel 4y ago

> It is very much possible to co-sleep and then gradually transition them to their own bed. 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/american-academy-of-pediatrics-updates-safe-sleep-recommendations-back-is-best/ 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-sleep/index.html 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). Source: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21868032/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21868032/

ghostpepper 4y ago
I am not an expert but I think there are ways to safely co-sleep, but chronically sleep-deprived parents tend to not be able to follow the rules consistently
Auracle 4y ago
As is sleeping on their stomachs, and most babies really don't like to sleep on their backs. It's no wonder parents have issues...and no wonder many babies have the back of their heads flattened. 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.
XorNot 4y ago
SIDS however is probably genetic and little we do has made a difference (for example, when I was a baby the advice was to sleep children on their stomachs - it's literally the opposite now)[1] [1] https://www.schn.health.nsw.gov.au/news/articles/2022/05/world-first-breakthrough-could-prevent-sids https://www.schn.health.nsw.gov.au/news/articles/2022/05/wor...

lolinder 4y ago

This is the kind of "it worked for my kid" bullshit that drives me up the wall. 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.

detritus 4y ago
The only good advice for a new parent, I think, is to ignore everyone else's advice. I appreciate the circularity of this advice.
- orangepurple 4y ago
  Parents need to have a well defined set of diverse solutions and know how to sample from the search space effectively instead of current epsilon greedy approach
remote_phone 4y ago
100% correct. The baby-rearing book industry is a fraud. They claim “well the average baby does X, Y, Z” but they don’t tell you that the standard deviation is huge. New mothers like my wife were stressed beyond belief because our kid only slept 10 hours and ate twice as much as other kids. She was convinced there was something wrong until I proved to her that he was within the standard deviation of normal. 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.

Mikeb85 4y ago

> Talk about infants having "attachment issues" makes my blood boil. They are supposed to be attached to you. 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.

lr4444lr 4y ago

The article makes fairly clear that sleep training under 6 months is not advised. Not to say that every baby will be ready at that point, but it becomes clear to most parents somewhere in the first year what cries from their baby express sincere needs - even psychological- and which are just gratuitous attention seeking. Once they have object permanence down, parenting changes.

unity1001 4y ago
> The article makes fairly clear that sleep training under 6 months is not advised 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.

Tams80 4y ago

Babies cry because they have little other ways to communicate. And yes, generally it is because of something negative. That negative could be 'leave me the fuck alone and stop bothering me' though, just in baby language - crying. Yes, even to a parent.

heavyset_go 4y ago

> The fact that this is so commonplace in my culture (USA) is frustrating and enrages me 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_behavior_analysis_(ABA) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aversives#Use_in_applied_behav...

dinkumthinkum 4y ago
There isn’t really an “AmerIvan culture around rearing children”. America large variations in behaviors. If American parenting was completely as you suggest, how do we have a generation of professional victims or constant discussions of “helicopter parenting” or “participation trophies”?
- unity1001 4y ago
  > There isn’t really an “AmerIvan culture around rearing children”. America large variations in behaviors. 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.
- heavyset_go 4y ago
  Who said "professional victims" aren't the result of such parenting? 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.

shepherdjerred 4y ago

refurb 4y ago

I had the same perspective. 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.

shaklee3 4y ago

why is something that is uncommon in other cultures obviously bad? there are many, many, many counterexamples to things kind this. just because something is commonplace doesn't mean it's the best way.

dotnet00 4y ago

Another reason to avoid this "deep seated biological reason" based reasoning is that evolution is pretty slow. Our instinct "software" is still setup for 40k+ years ago. It doesn't change particularly quickly and evolutionarily the entirety of human history isn't really a lot. Let alone human history in anything resembling a civilization. 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).

zhdc1 4y ago

> It is very much possible to co-sleep and then gradually transition them to their own bed A counter argument (trigger warning): https://www.reddit.com/r/nursing/comments/zls30p/cosleeping/ https://www.reddit.com/r/nursing/comments/zls30p/cosleeping/ We co-slept with our second child, but only after taking a lot of precautions.