Starting out parenting with perhaps the spiciest parent topic. Bold! For what it’s worth our kid slept at night fairly easy but we did have to sleep train for naps. She would just scream and scream even if you were holding rocking shushing whatever. We finally gave up at 3 years old, she would just destroy things in her room when we attempted quiet time.
Well I did, because as a new parent it really messed me up when your newborn is screaming 24/7 and everyone online says you’re a horrible person for doing what doctors recommend to do in cases like mine. She hasn’t had a day nap since 20 months too. Same story - scream for 2 hours before the nap, destroy things after.
My wife and I did this. One tough night and three years later she still sleeps through the night reliably. We’ll do it with our other baby once the doctor gives the ok. We also had a friend do it and she said it saved their household because their kids was waking up every twenty minutes. Sleep is so essential not just for the kid’s development but also for the parents’ functionality and temperament.
I don’t understand folks who say it’s harmful, unless they have some evidence to back it up. Because we definitely have evidence that inadequate sleep is pretty harmful.
I’m certain folks who say it’s harmful had their kids sleep at least 4hr through by the time they were 4mo and just don’t understand what deep sleep deprivation actually is or can’t empathize with it. I remember hearing Russian political opposition was making world news because the opposition leader was tortured by having the guards wake him up every hour. Here comes my kid waking up every 20 minutes… great why isn’t their world news about it?
There are also different “cry it out” methods. I can see how thinking that leaving your baby alone in the room for hours can be viewed as harmful. I thought so too. So I had my baby scream in my face for 4 hours. Still worked.
My wife is very anti sleep training. She has done quite a bit of research on it, and there are some serious long term issues that it can create for children.
I’d be curious of the serious long term issues that she found. I did a bunch of research on this as well and never found any credible source for or against CIO, really. There’s a huge spectrum between the different methods too, and I found lots of people conflating “ignoring all the needs of your child” with CIO which isn’t really what any of the methods proscribe.
I don’t really have a horse in the race, my daughter sleeps wonderfully and has since she was 4 months old or so, but there is a lot of fear mongering on the internet about parenting styles and techniques and the amount of actual evidence is sparser than I’d like. New parents are already neurotic and the internet in general jumps to warning about serious long term issues for almost anything.
I am a firm believer that this creates trauma in the child that lasts through their lifetime.
Agreed. Their linking a single study in the criticism section, at the very end, compared to the overwhelming number of methods they exhaustively cover through the whole article leads readers to think that letting babies cry is not very controversial.
Attachment parenting has a lot of research supporting it, not just a single study.
This article is more like: “an exhaustive list of strategies for sleep training” as it starts at the last step (already having chosen to sleep train your infant.)
Yes but sometimes kids actually need it. We had to take shifts sleeping only once every 48 hours because my kid literally would not sleep for more than 17 minutes at a time and this lasted for months. And many other studies point to lack of sleep contributing to poor brain development. My kid slept 6 hours in a row for the first time in her life after I let her fall asleep in the bed rather than on my arms.
Fair! My main point was that the title of this post was misleading; there are lots of reasons not to sleep train. This article didn’t even really cover why to sleep train, either, since I suppose the decision depends on the balance of reasons for and against.
I do think that a lot of Cry It Out methods are cruel and damaging, but that there are a very wide range of practices contained in that one umbrella method.
Well, when a toddler throws a temper tantrum and you still tell them no and there’s no changing your mind… that’s cry it out too.
Yeah, I never did that either.
There are many ways of doing sleep training. You don’t have to leave the room to sleep train.
