Should you let your baby Cry It Out?

Many well being friends and family members are telling you to let your baby cry it out. They say if you don’t your child will be spoiled. Your child is manipulating you.

1. Walking away for a few minutes so you can collect your self because your feeling over whelmed is not Cry It Out. 
2. An infant cannot manipulate you. It is not possible.
3. Your toddler screaming because you told them no or because your cooking on the other side of the gate is not “Cry it out”
4. Your child will not be spoiled because you didn’t let them cry it out. 
5.  Babies learn to soothe themselves by being soothed, and some need more help than others. Do not feel bad and nurse, rock, cuddle love those babies until they grow into the sensitive, independent beings they’re meant to be!

What’s the harm you say? I am glad you asked. 

• Crying raises cortisol levels.  Cortisol actually destroys nerve connections in critical portions of an infant’s developing brain.
• Cry it Out has been linked to ADHD, unhealthy social and intellectual skills, suppressed growth and lower immune system, lower IQ, etc.

Response To Cry It Out Studies

• From Sarah Ockwell-Smith:
  For those of you who may have watched BBC Panorama last night (I didn’t, because I knew how angry it would make me!) and the section where parents were told to leave their toddler to cry ‘for her own good’ and were also reassured that ‘it doesn’t have any negative effect on them’, I wanted to spend some time this morning talking about the research that is so commonly referred to.
  This research is used by everybody from sleep trainers, to the NHS website to state that cry based sleep training (specifically controlled crying) is safe – and effective. The thing is, the research really didn’t show that at all. It was in fact utterly comical in its clumsy methodology and grasping conclusions and it is shameful that the NHS and the BBC promote it as being anything but. It is certainly not ‘proof of no harm’.
  The major issues with this research were as follows:
  1. Parents in the experimental group were given advice from a nurse and were able to choose the type of sleep training used – either gradual extinction (what you and I know as controlled crying) or gradual withdrawal (parent starting out sitting with child and moving further away but involving no crying) – though no distinction was made between the type of sleep training used and later impact in the results. Which one are they claiming is ‘safe’?
  2. Parents in the control group (aka the ‘no sleep training group for comparison’) visited the same nurses as those in the experimental group and were free to ask for sleep advice. Nobody knows what advice they gave, OR most importantly what the parents in the control group did – because NOBODY ASKED THEM!!! So the comparison group, who “didn’t do sleep training” may have done controlled crying, heck – they may even have done cry it out! The researchers made a huge mistake in assuming they hadn’t done sleep training.
  3. The researchers declared that the ‘controlled crying’ was safe because they took salivary cortisol samples when the children were TEN MONTHS OLD and SIX YEARS OLD. Hello?!! The concerns over stress to infants from sleep training is during and in the immediate aftermath of the training, a sample taken 2 months up to 5 years later is totally weird. Note, they didn’t take cortisol samples DURING the sleep training (aka ‘crying’) or IMMEDIATELY after the training. So they have no clue how the training affected the babies while it was happening – just a few months and years down the line – OK……………but it gets worse!
  4. Guess how they decided if the training had had any negative emotional effects on the babies? Do you think they were closely observed by psychologists? Maybe some personality assessments when they went in for the cortisol testing at 6yrs old? Oh no, they asked the parents!!! They actually asked the parents if they thought the sleep training had had any negative impact on their child – you know, the psychologically trained and qualified parents who can be totally objective! Definitely not experiencing any cognitive dissonance or experimenter bias.
  5. But that’s not all! They LOST A THIRD of participants to follow up! Over 30% of the families were never followed up, questioned or tested for oddly timed cortisol levels. What the heck happened to this significant chunk of participants? Maybe they didn’t come back because the training didn’t help? Or maybe they found it traumatic? Who knows? Because we never will!
  6. Here’s the most embarrassing thing though – they actually found that sleep training had NO POSITIVE LASTING EFFECTS! ie. those kids who weren’t sleep trained slept ‘no worse’ than those who had been – there’s one in the teeth for the sleep trainers who say that children NEED to be taught to sleep and won’t ever do it on their own/will have bad habits.

What are some alternatives to CIO?

• Good Nights: The Happy Parents’ Guide to the Family Bed (and a Peaceful Night’s Sleep) by Jay Gordon
• The No-Cry Sleep Solution: Gentle Ways to Help Your Baby Sleep Through the Night by Elizabeth Pantley
• The No-Cry Sleep Solution for Toddlers and Preschoolers: Gentle Ways to Stop Bedtime Battles and Improve Your Child’s Sleep by Elizabeth Pantley
• The No-Cry Nap Solution: Guaranteed Gentle Ways to Solve All Your Naptime Problems by Elizabeth Pantley
• Your Self-Confident Baby: How to Encourage Your Child’s Natural Abilities – from the Very Start by Magda Gerber, Allison Johnson
• The Baby Sleep Book: How to help your baby to sleep and have a restful night by William and Martha Sears
• Nighttime Parenting: How to Get Your Baby and Child to Sleep (La Leche League International Book) by William Sears
• Sleeping Like A Baby: Simple Sleep Solutions for Infants and Toddlers by Pinky McKay
• The Gentle Sleep Book by Sarah Ockwell-Smith
• Sweet Sleep: Nighttime and Naptime Strategies for the Breastfeeding Family by Diane Wiessinger, Diana West, Teresa Pitman
• Sudden change in behaviour, and difficulty sleeping often coincides with a developmental leap in both physical abilities, and cognitive development. The Wonder Weeks, book and handy app, give you a heads up. It is not a magical solution to the fussy period, but it helps to put a positive spin on it. http://www.thewonderweeks.com/gb/ab…