[...] Penelope Leach may have some good advice but her new book does not have solid advice.  In her new book The Essential First Year Leach claims “cry-it-out sleep training” can cause brain damage. Oh Penelope! She made this claim with no backing. Take it away Strollerderby getting the truth straight! http://blogs.babble.com/strollerderby/2010/04/26/dont-believe-the-hype-the-cry-it-out-sleep-method-d... [...]

OK, so now Babble readers can feel good about ignoring their crying infants. Rock on!

Out of the two articles/philosophies, this is the one that seems like common sense to me.

I can’t imagine crying it out before it’s obviously a temper tantrum. As my pediatrician (and a few other people) have told me – babies under 9months (give or take depending on the child) are just not capable faking hunger, fear, discomfort, etc. So a child cries for those reasons.

Is it physically harmful? No. But leaving a BABY to cry for hours (as I have known people to do) is only teaching that baby that no one is going to come help. Which breaks my heart.

Now, ask me again when my two year old doesn’t want to nap…but that’s vastly different than an infant.

And I would like to add that there are a good number of babies (estimated at about 10-15% last time I checked) who do learn to sleep through the night themselves (represented by the number of people who post how confused they are that people ever have to resort to sleep training). CIO and other sleep training methods DO NOT APPLY to these babies.

If you would like to learn more about the importance of sleep for children and its impact on health, ability to learn and its relationship to the surge in childhood obesity, I strongly urge you to read ‘Nurture Shock’ by Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman. It’s a genuine wake-up call (pun intended).

So if it is harmful to babies to cry for extended periods of time, then what about those babies with COLIC? For that matter, what happens when you have to take your infant on a car trip 400 miles away to see your parents? My firstborn couldn’t stand the carseat, and didn’t give a rip if I was there next to her, she still screamed and screamed. I guess I could have had my husband stop the car and taken her out of her carseat every 15 minutes, but then it would have taken us 2 weeks to get to my in-laws’. Come to think of it… :P

Oh for Pete’s sake, GP. Is this for real? Is it April Fool’s Day? Are you actually a junior high school student trolling this site?

Yes, GP, nobody else ever touched their baby, or co-slept, or used a midwife, or had natural childbirth, or massaged their baby, or provided loving comfort, or made their own baby food, or sang to their distressed child, or breastfed exclusively… oh, hang on a second, I did all these things.

We are talking about people whose babies are suffering the effects of not getting enough sleep, which CAN and sometimes DOES become a serious problem, both for the babies themselves and for their families (including other children).

This is something that you obviously never suffered through so, in fact, you have no experience in the matter and are therefore ill-equipped to criticize others, to say the least.

For a short time, I thought I might know it all too (although not nearly to the extent that you do) when I had one child and it all went smoothly and he was an easy, lovely baby. I stupidly and ignorantly assumed that this was because we had done everything ‘right’ and was delighted with myself and my husband. DUH. It didn’t take too long to realize that there is not one solution to every problem my babies might have. Thankfully, I finally clued into the fact that there is an infinite number of solutions to problems that babies might be experiencing… because babies (much like their parents) are unique individuals with unique learning styles, unique personalities, etc.

I, at least, have always had the grace to shut the hell up and refrain from criticizing /condemning people who are suffering with a heartbreaking problem of which I have no experience. If you can’t have some sympathy, and if you can’t offer advice without abandoning the most basic of good manners, then I am finally going to concede defeat and join the legions of others who have asked you to stop posting this nonsense.

I’m not criticizing or condemning anyone…I’ve said before in other threads to do what you need to do. The tone I get from many of the pro CIO posters is “no baby is gonna pull that shit on me” and you know it. It seems more like the posts focus on the MOMS not getting enough sleep, now you’re trying to say its all about the babies. Go ahead and bullshit yourself. It doesn’t matter one way or another to me. And, jenny, why is a baby crying for hours but will suddenly go to sleep after just 10-30 minutes when put down in a crib? You guys just go around and around in circles with this stuff coming up with more and more little comments to make yourself feel OK about this. So that’s fine.

But…if there is no verifiable harm from sleep training, it’s not rationalizing. It’s looking at one thing that does have clear health effects (long term sleep deprivation) and one thing that does not (sleep training) and determining for each family how much the risk of the harmful thing justifies the need for the unpleasant, but not harmful thing. Rationalizing, in the negative way, is when someone knows something is harmful but using emotion finds excuses to do it anyway.

How could you know who is in touch with their insticts? Many of us feel that our insticts help us tell a “hungry” cry or a “scared” cry from a cry of a baby who just needs a few minutes to get used to the situation.

Step 1: Berate with outrageous hyperbolic statement: “You all LOVE making babies cry!”
Step 2: Offer examples of superior motherhood: “If you would just do what I did, everything would be okay!”
Step 3: Say you aren’t being judgmental: “I’m not criticizing…”
Step 4: Follow up with criticism: “… but you all suck.”
Step 5: Say you don’t care: “I don’t care what you do!”
Step 6: Declare your rights: “I have a right to an opinion…”
Step 7: Follow with a criticism: “… and it is my opinion you suck!”
Rinse/repeat on another thread.

Ergh…I’m saying that if a sleep-training baby is brain-damaged from 10-30 minutes of crying, then a colicky or car-seated baby is going to be brain-damaged from hours of crying. No study has shown that either sleep-training or colic causes brain damage, but the studies that people use to rail against cio show CRYING for long periods to be the cause of the stress hormone flood, so, those studies would have to conceded that colicky or car-seated babies are suffering brain damage, too. Not saying that a colicky baby is ready to be sleep-trained or anything of the sort.

Oh, for fuck’s sake, GP. Why do you even post anymore if you’ve already decided that the rest of us are stupid, lazy breeders who are all just jealous of you?

I would *hate* for new moms…correction

Ok…I’m done. Really.

1. You’re right. There are different kinds of crying. The cry that babies have when they’re a little unused to their cribs or carseats and would prefer to be held is different from the constant cry of a dirty, hungry, neglected baby left alone for hours. The neglected cry is damaging, the I-would-like-to-be-held-now cry isn’t. If it goes on very long, then the parent has it wrong, and it’s not just a hold-me cry.

2. Do you think rational people will be swayed from doing “what everyone does” (which is usually not the motivation to take on a parenting practice, from what I’ve seen, anyway) because a stranger on the internet (who sounds a wee bit sleep-deprived) proclaims that people who don’t do it her way are stupid and lazy and “weak-asses”?

*sigh* I did put my babies to bed gently, with a consistent, calming routine at 7 pm. Of course that doesn’t disrupt sleep. It’s the stuff that can happen (doesn’t always) when you signal to your child that if they don’t want to sleep in their bed, they don’t have to, that disrupts sleep. With cio crying at bedtime and in the middle of the night was over with (for the most part, until night terrors showed up) within a week. You trade one difficult week for a year or more of disrupted sleep.

I think a lot of APers’ shock and disgust of sleep training methods stems from the fact that they have absolutely no idea how sleep training is accomplished. They seem to think that parents throw the baby in her crib and lock the nursery door from 8pm until 8am and then go party and sleep to their heart’s content. The truth is that there are many different forms of sleep training, and, for each of these forms, the methods vary depending on a child’s age. For a very young infant that still needs to eat during the night, sleep training consists of trying to feed around the same time, using a consistent patern (feed, burp, change, feed other side, burp, back in the crib), not prolonging these night-time interludes, and listening to baby’s cries to determine their cause. Babies, even pretty young babies, will cry because they are bored or tired, and if parents can distinguish these cries from the hungry-, dirty-, gassy-cries and only respond to the latter, then I can’t see how sleep-training harms baby in the slightest.
We started sleep-training DS at a very young age (maybe six weeks), once his night-time feeding patterns were relatively consistent, and he never cried more than a half hour.
It is just a ridiculous leap in logic to say that one or two nights of less than an hour of crying causes chronic stress in the same way that abuse, neglect or exposure to violence would. In fact, it seems utterly irresponsible and patronizing for a doctor to make these statements and not back it up legitimate studies (focused on sleep-training, not on abuse).

yeah…I am supposed to listen to someone who tries to sleep train a 6-week-old? that’s insanity…that baby needs to be held/cuddled pretty much all the time

I don’t know ANY doctor or other expert, or even many parents who would agree with allowing a six week old baby cry for 30 minutes. That is just wrong.

Is it really the same GtothemfckinP who is “not exhibiting any bad manners” and “is not criticizing anyone” who then goes on to call *other people’s babies* “stupid, lazy progeny”?

Such charm! Such class! I’d hate to see what she has to say when she’s being rude.

Seriously, where the hell are these people raised?

*your

Thank you for this article. As a former neuropsychologist, I cringed when the media started reporting that cry-it-out would damage babies brains, because I had actually looked at the research when trying to decide whether to sleep train my baby. Even though cry-it-out was ultimately not the right choice for our family, I hate the idea that the parents who made a different choice are feeling guilty because some authority figure is spewing baloney talk with no scientific basis.

Wow. I’m completely new here. I don’t know why I read the comment section, even. I don’t usually post on these things. But I have to say that this:

“Step 1: Complain about how hard being a parent is.
Step 2: Whine more and find solace in the fact that others are wimpy losers, too, who take the easy way out.
Step 3: Complain about other people who find ways to do things successfully, maybe just by working a little bit harder and not being whiny sacks of shit.
Step 4: Be jealous of them and garner more support from other weak-asses with funny jokes at the expense of your children.
Step 5: Pretend you are accepting of everyone and so very cool and open minded.
Step 6: Continue breeding more stupid, lazy progeny and make sure you have more than one, since you’re so good at raising them.”

…has to be one of the most arrogant, nasty, rude, and downright hateful comments I have ever read on the internet. Bravo!