Cry-it-Out Can Damage a Child’s Psyche and the Family Relationship
Some children made to cry it out to sleep cry so violently that they vomit. Some parents find that the nighttime crying affects their babies' daytime personalities — making them clingy and fussy. Many find that any setback (teething, sickness, missing a nap) sends them back to their night waking problems, and they find they must let their babies cry it out over and over again.
Dr. Paul M. Fleiss and Frederick Hodges in Sweet Dreams: A Pediatrician's Secrets for Baby's Good Night's Sleep have this to say about cry-it-out sleep training programs:
“A child cannot com prehend why you are ignoring his cries for help. Ignoring your baby's cries, even with the best of intentions, may lead him to feel that he has been abandoned. Babies are responding to biological needs that sleep 'experts' either ignore or deny. It is true that a baby whose crying is ignored may eventually fall back asleep, but the problem that caused the night waking in the first place has remain unsolved.
“The most sensible and com passionate approach is to respond immediately to your child's cries. Remind yourself that you are the parent, and that giving your baby reassurance is one of the joyous responsibilities of being a parent. It is a beautiful feeling knowing that you alone have the power to brighten your child's life and banish fear and sorrow.”
Professor Margot Sunderland, a leading expert in the development of children's brains and a British Medical Association award-winning author, says, “If you ignore a crying child, tell them to shut up or put them in a room on their own, you can cause serious damage to their brains on a level that can result in neurosis and emotional disorders later in life,' Based on her four-year study of brain scans and scientific research, Sunderland entreats parents to reject the theories of ‘controlled crying’.
A child’s cries are his way of com municating his needs. If you ignore this attempt at com munication you are sending a message to your child that his feelings are not important to you, and that you are not the one to call to for help. These feelings can be bred into other relationship areas as your child grows older. By ignoring a child’s cries you may be setting up a pattern that will follow for the rest of your life in your relationship with your child.
Sign up for the OV Daily Newsletter
OV Social
I had no choice - it was either let me son cry or commit suicide. I know that sounds extreme and some may not believe it but when you have a child that only sleeps for 45min-1hr at a time; you have been to the help centres available to you and they can't seem to help either; you have severe sleep depreviation which caused manic post natal depression; can't breast feed anymore due to mastitis, thrush infections and now new medication for depression - you seriously contemplate ending it all, and either leaving your child motherless or taking them with you.
The issue of leaving a baby to cry needs to be adressed on individual basis and concern for both persons' health - not just that of the child, needs to taken into consideration. Otherwise the child is going to have even more psychiatric problems if they ever find out that they are the reason their mother committed suicide.
I am going to strongly disagree with you. Let me start by saying I am a mother of 2. My daughter is a 3 year old STTN baby and my son is 6 months and is slowly movng towards STTN b/c he still needs one feeding a night.
With my daughter I co-slpet for 8 months. At 4 months she started to wake up every other hour. I was offended if some one said let her CIO and thought how heartless. I read Dr. Sears, didnt work, I read your book, had a log for 6 weeks, didnt work, infact that log showed me how many times a night she and I were still waking at end of 6 weeks, and how disruptive her naps had gotten over that time. I did everything the way you had written. I followed Sears to the T but at 8 months she was still waking up the same way. It took me literally 60 min to put her down and finally make her sleep only to repeat it in 45 min or tops 1 hour again ALL night long....4 long months. Guess what happened. I went into PPD.
I kept my resolve to not let her cry , i took her to her doc to make sure she was not sick, she was so tired she lost her happy personality, she was whiney cranky all the time and I was sitting home all day crying b/c none of us were sleeping, all because I thought OMG my child will think i abandoned her, i left her alone, she will loose trust in the world and God knows what.
I was made to feel so guilty reading and practicing non cry solutions that I dared not let her cry. All the while I was trying to make her sleeo, i was superimposing all the bad sleep habits she had learned from my lack of willingness to at least read about CIO. Then I read weissbluth and Ferber and Iunderstood what sleep was. With due apologies all books including yours talk about sleep the same way Ferber does and hwo babies sleep but then they go on about pushing methods that reinforce all the causes of sleep disruption and problems. One night i decided to walk out of her room because i realized why parents hurt their children. Inever understood that even when I was going through med school but that night I realzied some might do it out of sheer frustration and lack of sleep. SO i did the wise thing, I walked out. I heard her cry for 40 min and at 8 she was asleep till 7 in the morning. It took me 16 nights never crying more than 40 min and she slept through the night. She never got nap trained and i didnt try more than 2 weeks with naps but I started laying down with her for nap because its only and hour and i could handle that one hour 2 times a day and she slept in her crib to this day and she is a terrific sleeper, a lovely smiling highly intelligent child and our family and me and my husband are so much happier, so i dont know how you can call it damaging the realtionship. We learned our lesson and as a trained physician (I dont work in US) I have read about sleep and sleep problems after my daughter and I have tackled my son totally differently than I did my daughter. Giving him chance to sleep on his own from young age and at 6 months when i put him down yes he cries 10 min or so but then starts playing with his toy and is asleep for 6 golorius hours then eats and goes back to sleep. I refused to let him get attached to my breast (he is breatfed) and then wean him by methods Dr. Sears recommends and I refused to run at the whimper or get to him before he makes a whimper (try to predict when he will whimper) and i give him time to settle down himself even if ti means crying 5-10 min and then settling, trust me he is as happy to see me in the morning and he still smiles ever so beautifully at me because he knows mommy loves him and i am not abondoning him, I am just giving him what he needs sleep and rest. I really think we as parents do not need the feeling of guilt that we are harming our kids and family lives when that is absolutley not true unless the kids are really living with abusive parents. I think this thought needs to be re-visited by non cry it out gurus.
YOu think you are giving your children what they need but to me it sounds you are giving yourself what you need. You don't allow your son to get attached to your breasts? What does that mean? YOu don't allow him to get comfort at your breast? I am sorry that you don't see that breastfeeding is so much more than just giving nourishment.
Where do you get that children (or adults) are meant to sleep 8 or more hours straight? It's safe to assume that our forefathers did not sleep that much in one stretch; there were many dangers about and it pays to sleep in a why that one wakes up for strange noises in the night.
Bottom line is that any prolongued crying is jacking up a baby's heart rate and that is NOT healthy. It's stressful. Crying for up to 40 minutes is just not a good choice. Besides, I cannot wrap my head around how you could possibly stand hearing her sob for so long.
Children are not mini adults; they need their parents close by to take care of them all the time. It's a shame that we don't live in extended families anymore because taking care of children is too much for just two parents. And our kids are paying the price for it.
Ima and Najma, This is touching upon the very essence of what I hate about the very extreme points of view on both sides of this debate on whether to allow a child to cry to fall asleep or not. Najma touched upon an important thing and that's we should not judge other people's parenting because we have not walked in each other's shoes. Babies respond to sleep deprivation in different ways and parents, too.
Ima, you are right that we don't have the extended family that we once did, but you also can't assume that what's wrong with society is that some parents have to *let* (not make) their child cry some to help them learn how to fall asleep without as much parent involvement. Again, a newborn who gets used to breast feeding or bottle feeding to fall asleep is very different than an 8 month old who needs it every hour or two all night, every night. You can not assume that just because a parent allows a child to cry at bedtime to fall asleep is a parent who does not parent in the most loving way possible. Relationships are very complex to insinuate that ONE thing damages a child forever. It is all the love and attention you give a child each and every day, all day that makes a difference.
As I said before, it is impossible for those with "easy" sleepers to understand how another parent may have to resort to cry-it-out, but please don't pass judgment and make it personal. We all must find the right way to parent our children. The same way one parent would think it's awful to let a 2 year old have McDonald's for dinner another has it once a week. We can not parent each other's children and I'm sure there are things you might do that others wouldn't understand, too.
I see and understand how and why other people fail. It come to very fundamental perspectives. It is about caring. These parents 'caring' is a different level of 'caring'. it's hardly even comparable terms. They talk at their kis, or babies rather than too them. Those children are really left to their own devices. I do believe it effects society . People are different, some people are honest, compassionate, giving, caring, creative people, where as others are selfish, dishonest, callous, irrational, and just counter creative. I would think one method over the other would produce results towards one type. These things are not really mysteries, but it seems people wish they were. They want to justify the existance of evil people. In short, that is what they're doing. Knowingly.
you understand well. i suspect the death of the little girl in wisconsin may be related to this very common misunderstanding about love. why live where there is not love? and what IS love if not attention? i remember going to the kitchen to find a knife to cut out my heart when i was only a tiny tot. my mother never knew my despair. she never listened. when i was sad, her response was, "if you don't stop crying, i'll give you something to cry about." she was taught that crying was to be ignored or punished... children were to be 'seen but not heard'... not listened to. fortunately we healed our very adversarial relationship three years before she died. if parents want close relationships with their children and want happy lives for their children, they will give them the love and attention they themselves crave... and the parents will find they too are fed by the love their children will return to them. voila! a win-win. :)
It is a fact that a baby's heart rate is jacked up and that is not healthy. Repeated and prolongued CIO may also have an effect on brain development in the sense that children may be less able to deal with stress well later on (this from a neuroscientist whose lecture I heard a while ago).
As for "not walking in someone's shoes with a "bad" sleeper", my son woke every two hours for most of his first two years. My youngest, who is 2 now still wakes at least twice a night. All three of my kids have gone through phases where they woke every hour or two, because of teething or before meeting milestones. I have not slept more than 4 hours in one stretch since 2001 and it has affected me badly at times. Luckily my husband has shared with the night time tending to our kids. I also catch up with sleep on the weekends, when my husband takes care of the children in the mornings by himself.
I am not implying by any way that CIO makes for a bad parent, it makes for a bad parenting choice in this respect IMO and I making my case here for the reasons why.
That is the same thing bad choice = bad parent at least bad judgement in my opnion and that is not the case. My choice was based on my own experience no one pushed me to do it but i tried plenty to ignore what the real issue was, me reinforcing bad habits just to avoid crying. It is not the most pleasant thing to do but who said parenting is a bed of roses devoid of making the tough choices. I can say easily a 2-year old waking up so many times is a bad choice as well but I wont b/c its what you think is best for you. I can say not enocouraging to sleep continuosly once they go on solids and eat in addition to just milk is bad choice b/c it makes them want to eat when they dont really need to especially if they have doubled the body weight be it bottle or breast. I hope the neurlogist you listened to didnt intentionally leave out the effects of disruptive sleep on brain development and concentration, but i have a feeling he did. My daughter had similar teething pains and milestones but she never ever woke up because of those ever unless she was really sick and then i did attend to her forgetting the STTN, once she was over the sickness she promptly would go back to STTN so really sickness or milestones dont interfere that much with sleep, it is the learned behavior of waking up that is the culprit. Even with a spouse's help a baby who wants just breast and no one else leaves very little room for mom to be creative. Cas ein point jacking up heart rate for a few minutes is much better than having a tired baby who wakes up every so many hours and never gets to sleep like he should. While as a family you are happy to catch up on sleep when he is home, i as a family prefer routine and family time when he is home since he already works 70 hours a week and I want to give our children quality time with mom and dad rather than sleeping when he is home with us, so routine and restful nights suit all of us better. Try to do your own search and see what literature says about how much sleep babies need, at least 16 hrs before they are one 12 of those at night, for optimal brain and body health, that is my reason to help my baby get the sleep she needs rather than trying to avoid the inpleasantness of few nights.
As far as the fact that they cant handle stress...I think having a sibling after 2.5 year of undivided attention is a lot of stress, at the same time changing rooms in school and going through potty training, you would agree that is a lot within a period of 3 months for a 2.5 year old right??? After all in her small world these are big changes but My baby girl handled it so well that I was amazed and proud at the same time,She proved all my fears about her anxiety wrong. To this day she has to show any huge huge issues with her brother and loves him to pieces expecpt well may be on days she has missed a nap at school as she is phasing out her nap and that does make her over tired and more clingy. She has been a marvelous toddler through it all and has handled the change and stress plenty well so i have no doubt about her ability to carry the trait once she grows up too. I will again say a child doesnt get a myriad of behavioral issues and problems just b/c a parent let him or her cry for bedtime, it has to be several other issues of parenting that lead to emotional void and problems people associate with babies. CIO is not the culprit here. I cannot imagine a baby or toddler who is well loved, adored and showered with attention to go the wrong way and develop all the bad problems in the world if that child has to cry at bed time. Even with my 6 month old really when he cries at bed time is almost always when he is over tired, even 20 min make him over tired, so his crying is actually a sign of over tiredness more than anything else. Nicole said it all when she talked about relationships being way more complex than assuming that only one facet can make or break them for life of a child.
I appreciate your position and your response. I am in awe at the sleep deprivation you have gone through! I don't really know how you function and hopefully you find time for napping, somehow. I can imagine there are a lot of parents who would not be able to function, go to work, run the household, or even drive, on that level of sleep deprivation. I know of parents who simply felt it was unsafe to drive with their kids while that sleep deprived after driving through stop signs and that sort of thing and those parents felt it was their duty to get their kids sleeping better for their family's safety and others on the road.
Other parents may simply lack the energy to do much else with their kids than watch TV a lot of the day if they don't get sleep and feel they are doing their kids a disservice to continue not sleeping enough. Some parents see their child's behavior deteriorate and be unhappy most of the day when he or she is not getting enough sleep. No parent wants to do cry-it-out or plans to, but at some point, some parents do sometimes decide that the present situation is not "good enough" or does not allow them to be the parent they truly want to be that they may turn to this route.
One last point is that many kids do not outgrow their sleep problems. Look at all the commercials for sleep aids for adults. Sometimes, by not addressing it can make for an adult who doesn't sleep well, either, and some parents feel that it would be a better parenting choice to let their kids cry a few nights rather than let bad habits linger for years. It is all so situational, depending on the child and parent.
Of course, only parents who have done cry-it-out versus those who haven't will know if they have a 2, 6, 8, 12 year old who is still unable to sleep all night and whether they felt they made the best decision for their family.
Good luck to you and I hope you get some sleep, soon! I always say that one day they will be teenagers we'll have to drag them out of bed, right? :)
Isn’t this the perfect example of what I have a problem with, a non-CIO mom telling me how horrible I am for MAKING her cry.Well you know what you got one thing right, I did it absolutely for myself because that is what I had to do as a mother who was pushed into PPD by sleep deprivation and by the constant guilt trips after reading and practicing all non cry out books and methods.Nothing can be far from truth than whats in those books and methods and the guilt trip they provide for parents.So yes you are right I did it for myself b/c I have responsibility to keep myself alive for my kids and family and treat the cause of my depression.I guess your solution would be SUCK IT UP and suffer because you are a mother and mothers are suppose to suffer. What would you rather propose, keep on doing what I was all the while knowing it was not working and not educate myself about why she was not sleeping and being so tired all the time?You cant wrap your head around it ???? Of course you cant because you were not me back then, and I hope you never are because it was not fun.May be you will never listen to your child cry or sob ever (I don’t think that is possible though as a parent) I did what I needed to do because as a parent I am responsible to make sure among other things that they are well rested as well.Our forefathers did what they did was because there were dangers we don’t have today, b/c they did it so it must be right is not a good or intelligent enough argument at least for me. They ate raw meat too, and wore loin clothes so may be I should do that too right???
What will it do to them as adults?It is well proven that unhealthy sleep leads to loss of concentration, short attention span, hyper activity and lack of energy for adults and children.Children need waaaaay more sleep than we do, so yes they are not mini adults.They highest peak of GH is one hour after sleep and then in 3rd and 4th stage of REM sleep so if a baby is not even sleeping 45 min before waking up and doesn’t even do a full sleep cycle how is that better than sleeping long periods of night and developing.For these little ones the majority of building brain and body is when they sleep long stretches of night. So the claim of high heart rate and high steroid is really very weak when we know the nocturnal hormones in a resting sleeping healthy sleep baby are so important for them.BTW keep in mind that I am a trained physician so I am not ignorant to how hormones work in the body since you brought up the tachycardia and cortisol.Over tiredness due to lack of sleep can stimulate the same stress effect you have mentioned.Children need their parents for care and making sure they sleep like they are suppose to for optimal rest is also a part of being a parent.You haven’t seen my kids so you cant judge my parenting. My 3 old can do a 24 piece floor puzzle(they do a 6 piece at this age), she can name and make a US state puzzle in flat 4 minutes.She talks fluently in 2 languages and you can have a conversation with her like no ones business,she is smart,loving,the joy of my life and she knows that.The only difference I had seen in her after she STTN was that she was happier and she wanted to do more fun activities rather than crying and whining all day.For you to propose that I am a horrible mom for my choices is as self-rightous as it gets and my main problem with non-CIO parents. Do not judge our parenting…you don’t love my child more than me and you are not a better parent than many of us.I am sure you love you child more than the world and that is exactly what I do,justbecause I don’t do it your way doesn’t mean my child is deprived or any less better than yours.
i understand doing something that is not the best because there is no other way. cio because you are on the verge of collapsing; but it's quite another to toute it as something that is ok to do. it's like a mom feeding her child a crappy diet because of monetary constraints and telling everybody that the diet is just fine.
http://www.askdrsears.com/html/10/handout2.asp has all there is to know about coritsol and other stress hormones being released into a baby's system and the effects of that.
As for my 6 month old he is still breast fed and will be till he wants and I know the huge bonding tool that it is but what is wrong with him learning to sleep himself, we still co-sleep for the night feeding part but once he is done he loves to snuggle and I refuse to be human paci to the extent where I cant even change position like I had to with my daughter. Once he is in his crib after the feed does he cry??? not really, in beginning he did for may b 8 min and that too was mainly whining but when he wakes up in the AM he is as happy to see me as he was last night so trust me he knows he is loved, you don’t need to worry about that.
Guess what I did different this time, I re read Ferber, I re-educated myself, I re-read weissbluth and made sure I do not instill bad sleep habits in my child so I don’t push him to the edge of tiredness his sister had suffered and there was less crying and more sleeping this time around.
I had made a promise to myself after the day I realized I Had PPD exclusively due to sleep deprivation, and had the image of me hurting my baby, that I will never listen to parents and sleep gurus who are out to make me feel bad, about getting facts and tools for the right, logical management of my children’s sleep problems and I am glad I did. I have the best 6 month old sleeper just because I did what I was suppose to do.
Never tell a mother that she is crummy and incompetent because that is exactly the kind of support a mother doesn’t need.