Strollerderby

Before I had a kid I swore up and down that I would never let her cry it out.  Then I got to point where I realized that it was the only way that was going to lead to everybody getting sleep.  The crying part sucked worse than just about anything but we have drunken rock star sleep now as well.  

For me the "crying it out" method worked.  Of course I am one of those people who can't sleep if anyone is touching me.  I'm also one of those people who if I don't get enough sleep, I'm really, really useless and mean.  So for the good of my family, it was best that my children learn to sleep on their own.  And, I've never struggled with bedtime with my kids.  

I used to attribute my luck with the sleeping issue with good parenting and that "crying it out" method.  But now I've decided that I was simply lucky that all it took for my kids to sleep by themselves was a few rough hours one rough night.  For some of my other theories on parenting have fallen flat on their faces.  

So I've also decided, to each their own.  I may get ridiculed for having such an accepting attitude, but really isn't parenting really a crapshoot depending on many, many factors other than working one simple parenting theory?    

We let our son cry it out and now 11 months later, he sleeps through the night from 6:30pm to 7am.  

You're rationalizing your neglect of your child's needs to make yourself feel better.  

I can not IMAGINE leaving a 5 month old (certainly NOT a "big" girl) to "fend for herself" - with what skills is she supposed to "fend for herself"?  You said yourself that she doesn't even know what her arms are, much less how to use them, at that age.  How lonely and terrirfied she must have been.  And here you are BRAGGING about it?  Acting like you're some kind of parenting martyr?  I am thoroughly disgusted.

How about I tie you up for 12 hours out of every 24, and then ignore your cries for a drink, or for a trip to the bathroom, or for simple human contact?  I think if the government did that to POWs there would be widespread outrage, and yet parents "lovingly" do this to their poor children every damn night, and act smug.  Sick.

I would rather never sleep again than abandon my child that way.  If you want to rationalize it so that you can (snort) sleep at night, be my guest, but how DARE you make it sound like parents who soothe their children are taking the "easy way out"?  There is nothing "easy" about getting up at night with my 18 month old while 8 months pregnant with her little sister.  There is nothing "easy" about spending an hour or more to get her to sleep at night.  But I would rather do that than leave her to deal with the world all on her own.  She's got the rest of her life to be independent, and someday she WILL sleep.  I was the same way when I was a baby, and thank God my mother didn't abandon me for 12 hours a night the way you've abandoned your child.

Tell me, how would you know if something was REALLY wrong?  If you ignore her cries, you wouldn't.  It would serve you right to find your child stuck between the bars of her crib, or bringing in a new tooth, or any number of really bad, painful, frightening things that could very easily happen.

She sleeps like a "drunken rock star" because she gave up on you.  You have taught her that you are not going to meet her needs between 8 pm and 8 am (or whatever her bed and wake times are).  Congratulations.  That's some damn fine parenting.

I'm not exactly sure the "cry-it-out" method advocates completely ignoring your child for 12 hrs...

The reason your heart broke was because you knew it was wrong.  We usually feel guilty for a reason.  

My son sleeps with us and breast feeds all night.  I barely wake up and neither does he.  Most importantly, he has never had to cry himself to sleep, not once in 10 months.  Much easier on my heart then putting him in another room and letting him cry!

Ahh, nothing brings the vehement defenses out like a good parenting co-sleep/CIO battle.  Never the two shall meet.

All I have to say is...let's not attack each other for our choices, m'k?  There are MUCH worse things going on to the world's children than whether or not someone lets their child cry a bit more than another person.

Oh and one other comment...there is a DISTINCT difference between a pain cry and other types of crying/fussing.

Dude, you should know that when you post about parenting choices, that there are other parents (I don't want to say just moms) who have made the other choice who will take this as an attack on their parenting ability.

PingBack from http://mikeadamick.com/blog7/2007/03/01/battle-royale-over-sleep/

 Thanks for putting yourself out there "cryitout".  Every parent does things a little differently, but it doesn't sound like your'e torturing your child.  It's not like you said "Yeah, we put the baby in a dog kennel and then we get really wasted so we can't hear her cry, it's awesome!"  I really hope Amy doesn't sincerely mean that she wants something bad to happen to your baby to prove her point.  

 I personally, when the time is right of course, will probably end up doing the cry it out method.  I have no desire to not get any sleep for the next two years.  Yeah, that'll make me a really wonderful mommy, Sleep deprived, angry, unhealthy, bitchy, testy, unable to drive a car because everyone knows that you should never get behind the wheel with only like an hour of sleep, fat, twitchy, dependent on caffeine, and maybe even resentful of my child for making me feel that way.  

Classic. A blogger sets up an extreme position on a hot-button issue, allowing an existing article to do the dirty work and "highlighting" it in a fair-minded tone. The comments are abuzz. The opposing view is on the defensive, gets really angry, and the side that started it acts like they're just "discussing" it. Someone appeals for parents not to judge each other. The comments quiet down for a week or so until the blogger drops another bomb.

The article highlighted in the post is drivel, and since the poster added little to the argument, it's a waste of our mental energy. To quote that article's author, John Rosemond, from his own website:

"Indecisive parents are afraid of making mistakes. They think bad decisions scar children for life, so they end up making no decisions at all; and that's the biggest mistake a parent can ever make."

When we decided not to make our daughter cry it out, like so many of our decisions, we worried that we were making the "wrong" decision. Guess what? We'll get through it our way, just like you will your way. Heads up, folks: Hundreds of millions of dollars of our nation's GDP are tied up in parents fearing their solid parenting instincts.

"Indecisive parents are afraid of making mistakes."

Indecisive parents get their parenting advice from shoot-from-the-hip bloggers who try to breathe ultimate authority into their personal experiences.

I think parenting is a constant dance of trying to figure out the right match- if something works for you and your kid-- great, you have a winning match. if one side is uneccessarily suffering...not a good match. EVERY CHILD AND EVERY PARENT IS DIFFERENT. If you believe crying it out is best for child in the long run- great. If you think it causes permanant damage- guess what, not the right choice for you. It isn't complicated.

What bugs me about this whole issue is the implication that good sleep comes from good parenting, and poor sleep comes from poor parenting.  The reality is that there are tremendous individual differences in sleep patterns that have very little (if anything) to do with our parenting practices.  Not to mention all the neurological, hormonal, and circadian developments that influence sleep.

I have a friend whose daughter has slept 12+ uninterrupted hours every night since she was 3 months old.  The girl can sleep any time, any place (I've even seen her sleep soundly right through an incredibly loud and boisterous party).  Is that due to parenting?  Of course not - her baby is just an easy sleeper.  

The other implication is that cry-it-out and other sleep training strategies always work, and it's just a matter of whether you're willing to try it, or stick it out, to get the results.  But that's not true, either.  We've tried just about every method of sleep training out there to improve my 8 month-old's sleeping habits.  You know what has made the difference?  Maturation.  There's nothing I did that lengthened his naps from 35 to 75 minutes.  I expect his night-time sleep will follow a similar course, largely independent of my actions.

We'd all do well to avoid the judgment that "if your baby is sleeping poorly, you're either responsible for causing the problem, or you've chosen to do nothing about it."  I for one get enough of that from my mother-in-law.

I don't really think letting them cry it out works any better than any other tactic. Most babies start sleeping through the night as they get older -- so it's simple biology, not whatever you're doing. Example: my son never slept more than 2 hours at a time until he was about 8 weeks. As a toddler, he always went down promptly and slept through the night. In fact, we ended up having the opposite problem, he slept through everything, including flooding his bed. I do have to say that he started sleeping a LOT better when I moved him into his own room. I think we were keeping each other up.

It's hard to tell how many posters have older kids.  I just wanted to weigh in as a parent of an infant (10 months) but also of school-aged children who survived the family bed and no longer sleep with us!  

My infant sleeps with us and breastfeeds in snatches throughout the night.  We all sleep well together.  It is the sweetest thing in the world when she wakes, looks to her left to smile at Dad and looks to her right to smile at me.

My older children (oldest is nearing nine) did the same exact thing - weaned from nursing at about 15 months, but stayed in our bed until about 2 years.  

I followed my intuition and my kids' cues.  Anyone currently sharing the family bed with their first baby, please don't fear detractors' claims of timid, clingy kids.  My school-aged kids are JUST FINE.  They happened to be ready to sleep independently at two.  The second one still flew into our room and jumped between us periodically until he hit three, but now they are perfectly content to sleep solo.  

Follow your kids' cues - I could not bear to hear my babies cry for long, nor could I tolerate lumbering back and forth to breastfeed many times a night so family bed worked/works in our house.  

I disagree that "easy sleep now only means pain later" because nothing could be further from the truth in our case.  And I have to roll my eyes at Dr. Rosemond's example.  If one finds oneself "reacting angrily" to nighttime visits by toddlers then there's something else wrong!

My kids all have had different sleep patterns.  I didn't have to do the cry it out method with the last two.  Both have slept through the night since they were a little over a month old.  Matt, our oldest, gave me hell for almost 2 friggin years.  I don't know how I would have handled the "problem" of having a non-sleeping baby vs. needing sleep to function.  Our last two shared a room with us (not a bed). I was a mere 5 feet away from them at night.  There is a definite difference between a "dirty diaper" scream and a "just need to make sure someone is here cry".  I don't see a big deal with letting them learn how to soothe themselves back to sleep.  On the rare occasion one of my last two woke up in the middle of the night, I always waited a minute or two just to make sure he didn't just wake up for waking up's sake.  I'm sure the other parents who let their children cry it out did the same thing and would be the first in their child's room if they had sensed or thought something was really "wrong".  

Hey, Amy, is it possible that your sleep deprivation is making you a little, um, irritable?  It amazes me what strong feelings this brings out in people.  

Amy--Dr. Sears is not God.  The original research on attachment was done with war orphans and other children who had undergone trauma.  I don't think you can generalize from that to ordinary kids with two mostly happy parents who turn up every morning to greet the day with baby.  Also most people don't seem to know that Dr. Sears is the author of a book called

The Complete Book of Christian Parenting & Child Care: A Medical & Moral Guide to Raising Happy, Healthy Children

Maybe he's just trying to expand his market share, but I find this suspicious.  I think he's an old school sexist bastard, who's trying to cover up the fact that he'd prefer a society where women never worked outside the home and breastfed each of their nine children till they went to kindergarten.  

Mike,

You've clearly hit a nerve here.  Personally, I think Dr. Sears is responsible for making a whole generation of parents feel inferior.

And I do get frustrated when my kids wake me up.  Because they are 5 and I need sleep.  So we bribe them.  And it usually works.

it's really not just dr. sears that encourages co-sleeping and comfort and attatchment... it's biology, and evolution, and instinct. we are all born with certain evolutionary expectations specific to our species, and when those needs aren't met, there CAN be issues later. not always, because the human is a fairly resilientbut for certain people this type of negelct can lead to serious (and subtle) emotional/psychological distrubances. I know this for a fact, I have a step-sister with Attatchment Disorder, and the father of my daughter is also recovering from attatchment disorder.

Letting children cry it out is contrary to both instinct of the parents, and to the needs of the baby human.

Children are not hobbies, or pets that need to be trained, they are living vessels with hundreds of thousands of dna memory, expecting to have their needs met. 100% of the time.   I do think it is a cruel action that takes place when parent's let their children cry it out, and it breeds resentment and/or clinginess.  I don't think it means that parents love their children any less or more for doing this, it is just an ignorant thing to do.  A very western thing to do. A very American thing to do...and go figure, we are one of the most depressed countries out there.  So-called "experts" who promote crying it out, and other detatchment efforts, are contributing to a world where people are lonely, isolated and confused.  

I really encourage all of you to check out the link embedded in 'continuum concept' or to browse some of these articles: http://www.continuum-concept.org/reading.html

Even if you are opposed to the whole AP lifestyle, it is good to know where we a lot of us are coming from, and why we are so passionate on our stance... because I really do believe that how we treat our children is the best and easiest way to make the world a better place.

If Dr. Sears isn't your cup of tea, (he's a bit old-fashioned for my taste) then check ot Dr. McKenna, who did more official study-based researched on the matter of co-sleeping,

http://www.nd.edu/~jmckenn1/lab/faq.html

The great thing about co-sleeping is that you don't have to do the cry it out thing or, the get up every couple of hours to nurture/put paci back in thing. If my daughter starts to fuss in the middle of the night, I just breastfeed her lying  down for a little bit (not even fully awake) and we both fall back asleep. No harm done, and everyone sleeps well.

Yikes, I am commenting in Strollerderby. Dast I?

Anyway, we didn't have to do any work with our own Emmeline. She went to sleep on her own at two months when we moved her from the bassinet in our room to her own crib.

BUT - she had sleep issues when we moved to a new state and that was tough. I did let her cry it out then and it was way harder on me. As a 18-month-old she had very large lungs and could cry my name pitifully.

I just think you have to decide what works for you and what you and your child can handle. I hate all this judging crap.

Hey, I let my kid watch TV and eat M&Ms. Anyone wanna hit me?