Read the article, and many of the comments here. I have a hard time squaring a lot of the hard and fast rules against my own experience. Certainly one persons life can’t detract from large scale statistics. However, I have 6 children. They have all responded to methods of behavioral training in wildly different ways.
My oldest two could not do sleep training. 10 months of trying for almost every night and they did not just adapt. My middle daughter embraced it after a single night. My adopted middle son didn’t need it at all and was naturally “good” at sleeping. My youngest daughter and son will fall asleep right away if around someone, but otherwise will stay up for hours (but never cried about it).
Again, one family experience but each child has their own needs and responses. I’ve never found a single method that works universally in any aspect of parenting.
this... with my first kid I didn't know how to handle, advice was 'to leave it cry to sleep', but it felt like torture to me, inhumane, letting it cry for so long.
A little baby just doesn't want to be alone. I discovered just sitting in the same room, reading something on my tablet was enough to fall a sleep after like 20 minutes, 90% of the time.
And yes, there are those nights nothing works. Just take him/her out, watch same television and have the baby on your belly to relax. A kid is not a robot, you can't expect it to go asleep when you say it's time for bed, there's no on/off button. I'm often amazed by parents who expect the kid to be tired at exactly 19.00 each evening.
That's not how it works, the first year is horrible. You as a new parent will be exhausted by the amount of not-sleeping you'll get, and the amount of attention the kid needs. Expect nothing less, things will get better when the kid grows older.
I think it is something of western culture to put a baby in a separate room and leave it alone, and thinking it feels comfortable and save and you can mind your own business.
> That's not how it works, the first year is horrible. (...) things will get better when the kid grows older.
Except when they won't. Our older daughter started having real sleep issues around when she was 1.5 years old. From that point on, every night was one of "those nights nothing works". Her sleeping schedule became quite consistent: roughly 21:00 - 05:00 if she didn't nap during the day, or 23:30 - 05:00 if she slept even as little as 15 minutes at any point during the day.
We went through pretty much every trick in the book. Less attention. More attention. Earlier supper. Rituals. Toning down lights an hour before bedtime. Music. Singing. White noise. We consulted a psychologist specializing in small children. But nothing helped - in fact, the more we tried, the worse it would get, with our daughter often going to sleep past midnight, only to wake up at 05:00 sharp.
Now I'm going to admit to something that's AFAIK seen as even worse than the "cry it out" method. Something I was very surprised wasn't even mentioned in the entire article. After half a year of unending torture that started to very negatively impact our marriage, in an act of desperation, we gave our daughter melatonin drops.
This solved the problem instantly. We all slept very well that night. And the next one. And the next one. Sleep again became something reliable.
Obligatory YMMV, IANADoctor, consult your pediatrician, etc. But the point is, every kid is different, and sometimes things don't get better (and it's very hurtful when others try to reassure you they will).
For our kids, they do sports. Heavy duty sports, since age 2-3.
Now they basically volunteer to sleep on their own.
Bedtime is not a drag. Its a priviledge. And Its glorious.
Every kid is different. But they are all energy machines. Starve the machine of energy, or use it all up, and the machine will go idle. .You have to find what sticks.
You would be surprised what kids can do with a soccer ball at that age.
You do need a nearby fenced playground that attracts other kids, so you can work for hours without having to be in the middle of it.
Their self-service probably begins at earnest at 3 yrs, though, to be fair.
Before that, its all home playing.
But be creative. If the above situation is not for you, then a properly weatherized, large jaccuzzi is also a great option for an old toddler, particularly if you have a retired grandma or a nanny nearby that can watch them as a hawk.
A toddler, or really any kid below 8 yrs will not run out of things to do in a jacuzzi. Particularly if outdoor temp is above 75F
There will be the occasional crying from someone getting pushed while playing soccer, or scared and swallowing water because another toddler pushes the infant down temporarily.
Activities that push kids to exert themselves do come with periods of difficulty. That's also energy-draining.
> Isn’t bodybuilding bad for kids’ growth in tallness?
Bodybuilding, as such, is generally considered dangerous for kids; whereas age-appropriate strength training is not (though even that is generally recommended for significantly older than 2, most sources I’ve seen suggest not younger than 6-8 to start.)
You might be aware of the pathway that generates melatonin.
It begins with tryptophan, which can be converted either into niacin or serotonin. Taking a niacin supplement with tryptophan will boost the opposing pathway.
Serotonin is itself the source of all melatonin.
Adjusting diet is not as controversial as a hormone supplement.
Do not attempt this while taking an SSRI, which can be deadly.
I think the op is talking about anything that helps create serotonin whilst taking a serotonin reuptake inhibitor is a bad idea and I agree....
I have seen the results of MDMA + SSRI when I was at a party many many years ago... The seizure that person had was full body ... All their muscles were tense... It was lucky we got them to hospital asap as they almost died (30 minutes to live the doctors said) and even at that point needed to be put in a medically induced coma for days... (I took this person to the hospital and heard the rest from the person's family)
I mean melatonin is super safe and fairly effective. Definitely less suffering than crying all night for all parties. It's reasonable to assume a baby would like not to be miserable- so why not!
IANAD, I don't have kids but I'm curious why melatonin properly dosed would be seen as worse than crying to sleep. From what I've learned about melatonin it seems to me you did the right thing
because people don't know what effects that would have on a growing baby. (I'm not saying scientists but just random people)
questions that would worry them would probably be things like what if the baby start depending on them and their bodies reduce/ceases to produce melatonin naturally, and that this permanently affects the baby.
I haven't looked into the findings for theses kind of questions, but even if you look into it you'll also have to be condident of the reliability of the results. maybe it's harmless for adults but not for 2 year olds. Maybe the pediatrician you went to see didn't prescribe them for a reason.
Because it's a chemical! A hormone! Because you're dosing your kid with a drug! You're taking the easy way out! You're using a shortcut to cover for your inability to endure the first few days of ${sleep training method}!
While I reserve any judgement on GP’s use of melatonin to help their child sleep, I think the tone of your comment indicates a confidence in pharmacology that is difficult to justify, or at least betrays significant immaturity about the complexity of these sorts of decisions…
> I think the tone of your comment indicates a confidence in pharmacology that is difficult to justify,
Hey, being condescending about magical thinking and pseudo-reasoning does not automatically imply a special confidence in pharmacology. That said, I do have perhaps above-average confidence in pharmacology, based on some experience and paying attention to details. Much like scientific papers, pharmaceutical products have specific effects and ranges of applicability. If you're aware of those and the trade-offs you'll be making, then pharmaceutical becomes a very effective tool - one that works reliably and consistently, unlike magical / naturalistic thinking.
> betrays significant immaturity about the complexity of these sorts of decisions…
I think it's the other way around. The example responses I provided are, to me, how immaturity looks like in the reasoning department. A lot of complexity in these sorts of decisions is created by people giving such replies, as now parents have to also trade off effective solutions against being judged by others.
I think the argument is more along the lines of a lot of people automatically assuming something like this would be bad without any direct justification.
The same people that will then feed their kids heaps of antibiotics for a viral infection.
Well, no. Melatonin does affect things other than sleep. That said, you do what you need to do as a parent. I would only (silently) judge someone if they jumped right to that and kept at it. Messing with hormones should be a last resort, even if it seems benign.
1) "Last resort" doesn't mean "don't use, ever". A lot of the commentary on baby sleep issues would have you delay trying this until you've tried everything else repeatedly - or, in other words, indefinitely. But sleep deprivation of the entire household is no joke, at some point trying the same methods that didn't work again and again is just torture, and the negative effects far outweigh trying a hormone supplement.
2) Most advice around this topic is based on magical thinking, examples of which I included. Yes, bodies are complex, bodies of developing children even more so. Yes, hormones in general are hugely impactful and messing with them is dangerous. But it's not magic, it's not tainted by evil or something. We do have some idea about what the risks are.
The underlying idea behind the examples I provided (real and widely spread, unfortunately) is a knee-jerk rejection of anything man-made, of any intervention that wasn't available to our great grandparents, or their great grandparents. It's irrational and dangerous and annoying, and usually comes bundled with thinking in absolutes (instead of trade-offs).
I think this is born out of puritan ethics attached to counter-culture “pure” living. Essentially all desired outcomes must be earned through righteous, hard work. Anything short of this effort is cheating.
For me, it’s out of respect for the body’s natural methods of dealing with problems. Obviously there are some cases where it’s useful to interfere with the body’s processes.
But in general humans are extremely complex. We tend to think that we have a better understanding of things than we actually do. The human body does things that we still don’t understand fully, and unless there’s an incredibly clear understanding or benefit of some treatment, I’m hesitant to try to change it. Mostly because of how much I know that we don’t know yet.
If we don't know how the human body works, then surely we don't know that melatonin is better or worse for the body than not taking it. Perhaps it is worse, or perhaps it is better, but either way it has at least one positive effect.
The primary concern is its (potential) effect on natural production. Most human hormone production is governed by the hypothalamus-pituitary-adrenal axis. Internal feedback loops suppress natural production for extended periods of time if exogenous hormones are introduced.
One of the most common examples of this is exogenous testosterone. If you take it long enough, the LH/FSH feedback hormones drop, the leydig cells in your testes atrophy and go dormant, and your natural production could be suppressed forever. Nearly all retired bodybuilders (and other athletes who use gear) are dependent on TRT for life, for this reason.
The open question is whether introducing exogenous melatonin to patients whose natural production is already very high (as it tends to be in children) could lead to lifelong dependency on it. That's the concern.
Thanks for sharing, and I'm happy it worked out for you and yours!
The implication in your response is, unfortunately, what both my wife and myself secretly fear. I've been diagnosed with ADHD as an adult (and after becoming a father); there's another diagnosed case in my immediate family, and at least one highly probable one. Given how highly hereditary ADHD is, we're afraid our daughters may have it too, and we're struggling not to read any unexpected behavior as evidence in favor.
> It is very hard to get a diagnosis pre 6/7 but of course we can see behaviors and project our thoughts.
We're not planning to get an early diagnosis. I feel it's really too early to tell for sure. We are observing carefully though, and carefully listening to feedback we get from daycare/kindergarten and various child development specialists. So far, we haven't heard anything that isn't somewhat common with children this age.
The "projecting our thoughts" bit is tough, however, as it happens automatically. I try to keep an approach of "assume it's normal at this age until proven otherwise" when dealing with her, and the idea that she could be having executive functioning issues actually makes me more empathetic when she keeps ignoring what we say or gets randomly distracted.
I have 2 with ADHD. One with impulsive and dyslexia and the other with inattentive.
The dyslexia plus impulsive is quite a challenge but early identification is key.
If we hadn’t made all the changes and waited till 10 onwards we would be in a totally different situation.
Keep going, try not to over analyze and courage!!!
Occasionally. Her sleeping patterns have regularized now - though off the drops, she's somewhat more prone to wake around 03:00 seemingly recharged, only to fall back to sleep around 06:00 and then be near-impossible to wake up an hour later - but at 3.5 y.o., we have some success in talking her back into sleep, so it's no longer a big issue.
The drops still come in handy in specific situations that we know will disrupt her sleeping pattern, but that too has become less of an issue. For example, it used to be that car travel in the afternoon would have her sleeping through the whole trip, and then refusing to sleep at night, and it would take a couple of days to get her back to the usual sleeping pattern. But in the last ~6 months, she stopped sleeping so much in the car, and learned to fall asleep if the right ritual is followed.
That's a coincidence, my daughter is 3.5 years old too!
The reason I'm interested is my wife is pregnant with our second. First four months our daughter slept all the time. 5 to 11 months was an nightmare. Then it settled down and she sleeps 8 to 6.30 most nights. I think we were lucky, especially after reading what you went through!
> That's not how it works, the first year is horrible. … things will get better when the kid grows older.
My first daughter would wake, have a bottle, fall asleep within a few minutes for 3-4 hours. Wake, bottle, fall asleep for 3-4 hours.
The first year was sooooooo easy. The 2nd year I wake, make bottle, hand it to her, she drinks and falls asleep.
She’s 4 now and can’t stay in a room alone during the day or night. That’s harder because now I can’t go toilet because she will scream at the top of her lungs until someone is in the room. But sleeping is me staying in the room for 5-20 minutes till she’s asleep.
I moved my child to his own room when he was past 3 years old. I had to, because a second child was coming.
Before that age, I also tried several times, but each time I gave up because he protested too much. It was just easier to let him sleep in the same room.
When he started sleeping in his own room at 3.5 years old he had to adjust psychologically. I had to convince him that monsters don't exist, or if he still believes they exist, at least that they can't get in because they don't have the key. I also got a night lamp for him so he would be less scared.
He would still get up frequently and seek me out because he was scared. The counselor advised us to put him back in bed and be consistent about it. If he gets up 20 times, put him back 20 times, no matter the protests. He accepted this after a few weeks.
I also told him that I won't stay until he falls asleep because I have to sleep too. I said I'll stay with him for max 5m, even if he's not asleep. After a few weeks and many protests he finally accepted.
Thanks for the info! Currently I’m in Taiwan staying with family and the plan is to move to New Zealand at the end of next year. Until then we have no space lol so daughter sleeps in her own bed next to ours.
But in NZ she will have her own room so that’s when she will need to adjust. I hope the 2nd one is easier. She’s only 4 weeks and wakes only twice a night to feed.
> I have a hard time squaring a lot of the hard and fast rules against my own experience.
I think it's the same thing like in other self-help sub-genres: any of such hard and fast rule will work very well for some people in some situations. That's why there are so many of such rules, why they're often mutually conflicting, and why they all have armies of evangelists behind them.
> Certainly one persons life can’t detract from large scale statistics.
Conversely, those statistics talk about what's average, typical. Some things have high enough variance that even most solid RCT only works as a guideline for policy at scale.
I have only two children, but it's clear to me both develop according to completely different trajectories. It kind of makes sense as, even if us parents didn't change in any way, and the environment stayed constant, our younger daughter is still spending a lot of time in the company of her sister. That's a huge additional high-variance input source :).
This. As a father of three kids it's sometimes fun to look at people going through this – you are the smartest person about kids if you don't own any yet and most stupid one with the second one if you realize that you can't reuse almost any knowledge you gained with your firstborn. By the time you have a third one, you've already accepted that they are all very different and you have to learn from them, grow with them and adapt.
I have two kids. I already have to parent both of them differently. It’s like being a first time parent all over again when the second one arrived. And strategies that worked at 2 years don’t carry over to 4 years.
So I’m always skeptical about articles offering generalized parenting advice.
The fact that this is so commonplace in my culture (USA) is frustrating and enrages me. As a parent, it is your evolutionary instinct to comfort a crying infant. They are quite literally helpless and look to caretakers for all their needs. There's a deep seated biological reason it feels bad to ignore it. The fact that it is so uncommon in other cultures should make this obvious. What are the odds that the rest of the world and entire history of humankind were mistaken the whole time, until some behaviorists came along and figured it all out in the last century? Talk about infants having "attachment issues" makes my blood boil. They are supposed to be attached to you. It is very much possible to co-sleep and then gradually transition them to their own bed. Yes, it is frustrating and will interfere with your sleep. This is one of the many sacrifices of parenthood.
This is the kind of "it worked for my kid" bullshit that drives me up the wall.
With my oldest we bought into comments like this and tried to always comfort him when he was crying. He would not stop crying. We stayed up with him an absurd amount of hours trying every idea in the book to soothe him to sleep and nothing worked. He was probably getting 6 hours of sleep a day at a time when he was supposed to be sleeping 18. He lost a lot of weight and we were scared and exhausted.
After a few weeks of that my wife finally put him into his bassinet and stepped away. She sat there next to his crib crying with him for 5 minutes, and then he fell asleep and slept for the longest he had in his life. That moment was the turning point from weight loss to weight gain and from barely sleeping to sleeping normally. In spite of all of our worries that something was terribly wrong, all that was required was to let him be. He's now 3 years old and still hates to sleep, but he's as healthy as any other kid both physically and emotionally.
My only advice to new parents today is to accept what everyone else says as well intentioned and then do what works best for your kid. Every child is different, and people who try to claim that their method is the only humane way to treat a kid need more exposure to the real world.
Parents need to have a well defined set of diverse solutions and know how to sample from the search space effectively instead of current epsilon greedy approach
100% correct. The baby-rearing book industry is a fraud. They claim “well the average baby does X, Y, Z” but they don’t tell you that the standard deviation is huge. New mothers like my wife were stressed beyond belief because our kid only slept 10 hours and ate twice as much as other kids. She was convinced there was something wrong until I proved to her that he was within the standard deviation of normal.
Do what feels right for your child. No two children are the same, even twins. Infants are very resilient so don’t worry you’re going to scar or damage them. They generally won’t unless you are truly abusive.
This is so true. Nothing worked to get my daughter to sleep nights until we finally bit the bullet and stepped away for 20 mins and let her cry out. Every night since then she has slept all night long.
Every child is different which is why parenting is not an exact science. Try everything, something will work!
You're absolutely right that every baby has different needs and I'm glad to hear that you figured out what's best for yours. It was not my intention to suggest that every baby should co-sleep - I meant to address the very commonplace (IMO misplaced) fear that if they do, then they will never leave their parents' bed and develop independence. There are obviously some babies who are ok or even better off sleeping alone. My frustration is with the mainstream acceptance that this is The Proper Way - to the point where families are leaving infants screaming for nights on end in order to "train" them.
Your experience of the
mainstream is very different than mine. Before having kids, the voices we heard were overwhelmingly saying "immediately respond to every cry or you are a terrible parent", which is exactly how your first comment reads. That's why it took us so long to try letting him cry: we'd listened to voices like yours.
The parents you describe are a tiny minority if they exist at all, and guilt-tripping them in a public forum just hurts the millions of new parents who are at an extremely vulnerable time of life and trying to do the right thing. It's not your place to lecture on how loving parents should be treating a baby you've never laid eyes on.
That evolutionary instinct came from a time when humans lived in communal support networks and new parents had help from extended family, and does not translate well to a world where Mom has to work 9-5 in an office a few months after birth. You might as well express shock that suburbanites don't supplement their diets by foraging for fruit and mushrooms.
Besides, it's not like parents 10K years ago had the option to let their babies cry it out in a separate room with a noise machine, and evolution selected against it because co-sleeping babies reproduced more. "Babies cry because they need to co-sleep or they will suffer some serious problem" sounds reasonable to me, but so does "Babies cry because it gets them more nutrition by keeping Mom so sleep-deprived that she delays her next pregnancy." Making just-so stories about behavioral evolution is dubious, the bar needs to be higher than just sounding plausible.
Unfortunately, solving a cultural problem is the second most difficult thing to do, after changing laws of physics. Or, as some web article I read the other day put it: society is fixed, biology is mutable.
And it's not just about two-income households. From my personal experience I can say that, even with one parent working, a poorly sleeping child can bring the parents to the brink of divorce, or depression, or both. Given the importance of loving, caring, supporting family for a child's overall health, happiness, and future prospects, it's fair to consider some interventions as trade-offs for the sake of the household. The article mentions this near the end, but then mostly dismisses the concern.
I know many couples that have merged into larger multi-partner families, sometimes as individual couples, sometimes as polycules, regardless, the commune is back lol, and just my own observation it seems an ideal way to raise kids. There's always someone around, couples can take their own time to go on dates quite regularly, the kids grow up with lots of people around and lots of friends, the close community support is just phenomenal looking. If I have kids, I will go this route.
I have one kid and we are going thus route. The nuclear family is dysfunctional by design. Partner and I both have been with them fulltime throughout their life, living off savings instead of working. This opened my eyes to how very little men are taught about caring for people and how much nonsense I was taught. Nurturing a little person from a perspective informed by anarchism reveals a whole lot of backwards thinking. We've just spent 5 days with 3 people who can actually handle facing the childhood trauma that gets stimulated through allowing a little person to actually make choices for themselves and the difference is astounding.
We can spend time together without interruption and without it being after they're asleep. There are people to help cook and clean, do so joyfully, and play and dance and sing and cuddle.
Why you're getting down voted, I have no idea. Community- oriented approaches to families, no matter what society says or does or thinks, are what humans have done for millenia.
It changes, but it's not exactly easy for anyone to predict or control the direction of those changes. Also, this malleability is not what matters in this context - "over the scale of decades" isn't very helpful to the people alive today.
Reading it generously, I think the cultural problem is supposed to be that parents are expected to go back to work too quickly, not specifically that women are. “Mom” has just come through the sequence of quotes, making it unnecessary gendered.
It could also be seen as a cultural problem that both parents are generally expected to work nowadays, and it would be nice to be able to expect that families had some adult at home (but we’d hope that in a more egalitarian society nowadays the gender balance would be more equal — although men can lift larger laundry baskets on average so maybe we should end being the at-home ones more than 50% of the time, I dunno).
Nice, same, I think the "cultural problem" comment is not saying that the problem is that "women are going to work" but rather that "the parents have to be away from the child for the majority of the time, or they will all be homeless and hungry."
I'm not sure which country the OP is discussing, likely one without good maternity/paternity laws and whatnot, which is really sad to hear about, I hope more citizens demand this of their governments and more employees demand this of their companies, it seems crazy to me that you should have to sacrifice formative time with your newborn so you can go do a capitalism every day.
I'm posting from a German perspective and have to admit, that we still have major problems with gender imbalances on income (for more complex reasons) and the ability for women having careers, but every parent has the right to parental leave for up to 3 years (take fulltime off, or part time!) and one of those is paid (by the state, so by the taxpayer in the end) with up to 1800€/month.
Actually taking 3 years off is depending on the job still a bump in the career road, but I'm optimistic that we are getting there.
Right, I'm countering the accusations of misogyny with "no, we're talking about the flaws of capitalism." Consider that many families in the USA have two parents, both working multiple jobs, to make ends meet. To me, one of the most important things in my hopefully 80 years is family, and so I get sad when I see people forced to trade that little time we get already, for work.
When it wasn’t two parents working full time to support everyone (aka the post WW2 years until what, about the 90’s).
I’m disagreeing with what seems to be nostalgia, or a call to a different type of circumstance. I’m just noting, it had major drawbacks then too. Lots of stay at home moms drinking themselves into a stupor being one.
Right, back then cost of living were a much lower percentage of average wages. The "Homer Simpson" era when one father could work one job and own a nice a home while feeding a family of 3. Recall that minimum wage used to be a living wage in the USA.
There are definitely issues around gender, wage, and job opportunities in the USA, but right now I'm talking about the total economic downside of out of control detachment of wage against cost of living.
> Lots of stay at home moms drinking themselves into a stupor being one.
Could this have had more to do with an openly misogynistic society and lack of hiring and academic protections for women?
Economically - being the only economy left standing post world war definitely had its advantages! Especially after the major ramp up and mechanization for WW2. The US went from a mostly agrarian economy to the world manufacturing power in short order, and those economic benefits lasted a long time.
That had mostly faded by the 70’s though.
Openly misogynistic society wise - It’s probably worth calling out the invention of effective birth control here.
Pre birth-control, men and women mixing in all but the most controlled circumstances would result in women getting pregnant, and that had consequences. Emotionally, financially, and biologically. Often life altering, even if the pregnancy was aborted.
That cost often ended up being borne by the women who got pregnant and their support structure, and there are biological reasons why that happens. Society can try to spread the load out, but the Don Juan’s of the world can be adept at trying to work around that.
This leads to that misogynistic society, both directly and indirectly. Looking at global trends, with the only exceptions being out of the way more nomadic societies, the more materially poor a society is, the more rigidly structured the gender divides are, and the more controlling they are of female sexuality in general.
This of course, gets taken advantage by some folks (shitheads) to further gain control in other areas.
On the male side, it’s relatively much easier for men to avoid the biological cost of their natural sexual behavior.
Effective birth control turns this on its head of course. Society is still grappling with what that means, and its implications, and likely will for a very, very long time.
The 50’s and early 60’s were pre (available) decent birth control.
Mid 60’s to 70’s it started to roll out (and kicked off the ‘free love’ movement).
Women’s liberation became a much more common theme then as well. It was of course a topic before then, but practically was extremely difficult.
Practically, to be independent pre birth control, a woman would need to be either 1) long term celibate/abstinent from normal sex (not easy for most!), or 2) go through a lot of abortion (really not easy for most, medically or emotionally), or 3) be infertile, or 4) independently wealthy.
Otherwise, they would get sucked into the biologically and financially expensive process of having a baby, over and over again, for decades, while having no extra time or bandwidth to earn income. While men don’t have that problem (or at least, biologically, can skip out on it easier).
And due to all the biological processes involved (and legitimate needs), it’s very difficult for most moms to ignore the kids that result, and those kids are very needy for quite awhile - much longer than it takes to get pregnant again, for sure.
Being anti misogynist or not, or hiring protections or not, barring effective birth control, that is going to put a lot of women in difficult situations where they have no reasonable option but taking care of kids and dealing with biological ‘taxes’ that are very high, regardless of what they want. In any zero sum game, that puts them at a disadvantage to folks who don’t have that weight they are carrying.
Just like men being drafted into a war they didn’t start, or working themselves to death in a coal mine because it’s that or their family starves, that means alcoholism, anger/resentment, violence, etc.
Wealth can help - these issues were much worse pre WW2, for instance. But it’s a theme for most of recorded human history.
Quibble: I'm not sure its true, though it is entertaining, reasonable, and appears to fit the facts.
The cuteness one is good too. I wonder if this sort of thing emerged slowly or quickly? Like, is cooperation just generally selected for and animal cuteness has been developing for a long time, or did it appear swiftly somewhere and provide some huge benefit? Or something else entirely?
I reckon both must have evolved along with the increase in head size. Most animals have babies that have developed enough so that they are reasonably independent. They can at least walk!
But humans have really big heads so they have to give birth really early before the baby is capable of walking, so screaming for help and being super cute is their only option.
> so does "Babies cry because it gets them more nutrition by keeping Mom so sleep-deprived that she delays her next pregnancy."
Babies do delay their mothers' next pregnancy.
But sleep has nothing to do with it. And really, neither do the babies. Nursing mothers inhibit their own pregnancy; that is why the normal interval between births is two years instead of one year.
It’s an interesting theory, but having my second kid appear 12 months after the first — in spite of the breastfeeding — makes me very sceptical of its reliability.
My wife and I were warned about this by nurses. The effect is real, but it's absolutely not reliable as a contraception method, as it can easily break down for various reasons, including the mother not following a strict and consistent regimen of frequent breastfeeding. And, as it turns out, consistent and frequent breastfeeding is much harder to achieve than popular media would had you believe.
There are massive issues with hiding the real challenges with children from potential mothers and fathers.
I suspect it's a combination of:
1) Prior/older parents worried about embarrassment or being shamed for going through what they did - a lot of it things that no one likes to talk about.
2) Folks worried (potentially correctly) that many folks would opt to not have kids, which is already a population problem, if they understood what it really meant.
It's the same about War and men returning from it, frankly, though war movies tend to be a lot more glamourous, even the gritty ones.
I think 1 could also be parents actively forgetting how hard it was. I think I even read a theory that the mother's brain releases chemicals during childbirth that help her remember it as "not so bad"
I also suspect that older generations were less isolated socially and it was much more common to have parents/grandparents/cousins/etc in the same house who could care for the baby for an hour while mom caught up on sleep. It takes a village to raise a child but we have no more villages, so people try to do it on their own and discover it's incredibly difficult.
It’s sad that it’s so little known. I know that not everything can or should be taught at school, but I’d argue in favour of this: breast feeding is often not as easy as it seems it should be, so you should find out more about it when preparing to have a child.
> Data that were collected prospectively from a child health study conducted in Gaza show a strong relationship between breastfeeding and two major components of birth intervals, the postpartum anovulatory period and the waiting time [from resumption of menstruation] to conception.
> The finding of a strong positive association between breastfeeding and the length of postpartum amenorrhea is as expected from numerous other studies.
It's astounding to me that so many people on HN, a place where folks generally profess to be driven by science and data, are in this thread just casually throwing around anecdotes and comments about evolutionary instinct while completely ignoring the actual science and data. Doubly so when so many of the comments are pretty vicious towards people who sleep train their babies.
>>Parents who are frustrated with frequent waking or who are sleep deprived may be tempted to try sleep training techniques that recommend letting a baby cry in an effort to "teach" him to "self-soothe".
>>Research shows us that an infant is not neurologically or developmentally capable of calming or soothing himself to sleep in a way that is healthy. The part of the brain that helps with self-soothing isn't well developed until the child is two and a half to three years of age. Until that time, a child depends on his parents to help him calm down and learn to regulate his intense feelings.
It's so weird to me that you're throwing around attachmentparenting.org links like they are the final objective word on the subject. It would be like linking to the American Enterprise Institute in a discussion on economics. They are smart and well read on the subject, but they are pushing their own point of view, which is far from being the only one.
Edit: we've had to warn you about this kind of thing before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33501516. Would you please review the rules and fix this? I don't want to ban you, but eventually we don't have a choice if an account keeps breaking the rules.
Name a non-shithole place on the planet where that isn't the case.
This is not a US phenomenon, it's pretty much a global phenomenon by now. It's the flip side of breaking down the traditional family/society model - as more and more households had two incomes, the market quickly compensated for the surplus, and now most households struggle without two incomes.
My country (Poland) has 12 months of maternity leave, and it's nowhere near enough either. In fact, 12 months is about when your child might start exhibiting sleeping issues (as opposed to just being an infant).
In other words, this isn't a problem because of sub-year maternity/paternity leaves. It's a problem because both parents need to work.
It's curious years of good nights of sleep and a happy child enrages you.
We sleep trained our son at 7 months. He cried for 90 minutes the first night, then slept soundly until 7 am. The second night he cried for 45 minutes then slept until 7 am. He didn't cry the third night. Every night since he's slept peacefully from 8 PM until 7 AM and asks to go to bed when he gets tired. He's happy during the day unless something obvious is distressing him. Most notably he's happy and peaceful from 5 PM until 8 PM when I see other parents suffering from witching hour and unexplained melt downs.
Isn't a few hours of discomfort in exchange for years of good sleep and happiness a good trade off?
We had the exact same experience. A few nights of crying (we didn't totally abandon her, just a did a peek in and say goodnight again (no picking up the baby) after 5 minutes of crying, then 10, then 15, etc) for a few nights. Daughter has slept through almost every night since then, she just turned 4.
Sleep training (which involved some degree of "cry it out") was a life saver for us.
I did it at 3 months. I did it because my wife couldn't handle it, and she had gone back to work. The only reason I did it was because our baby wouldn't let us put her down a lot of the time. She'd sleep just fine in our arms...and then we'd put her down and she'd instantly cry. It was...stressful.
It (largely) took one freaking day. One day's worth of naps. She didn't even cry, just "cried out" to be held. First a few minutes, then 5, and she didn't reach 10. To our utter amazement, she largely stopped waking us during the night. I was not expecting that at 3 months.
...I did kind of miss our late night "well, might as well turn on the TV and watch Star Trek" times together.
I've had people get judgmental when I've explained that process, but I often hear parents that have their two year olds waking up in the middle of the night for feedings. That's utter insanity.
In my experience, when someone thinks they should be able to do it, but can't do it, and suffers from the consequences of that - you'll get that kind of reaction. Not saying it's what's happening here, but I've seen it a lot.
Difficulty getting themselves to get their kids vaccinated (the screaming or crying is hard!) is a big factor behind the antivax movement, IMO.
What enrages me is how it's become accepted as 'the right way' for parents in my culture, along with other "techniques" like feeding schedules, where many people end up essentially starving their child without realizing it, and then wonder why they can't sleep through the night. What I know to be true is that infants are completely dependent on their caretaker/s, and they cry to communicate what they need when they need it. Ignoring this feels wrong to me - so I don't do it. I understand that different families have different needs, and that work schedules make things more difficult than they were in the past when children were raised communally. Every family needs trial and error to figure out what works for them, and yes some infants will sleep better alone. What I take issue with is the industry around this that has convinced what seems like most parents that this is The Best Way.
> Isn't a few hours of discomfort in exchange for years of good sleep and happiness a good trade off?
It could be - that's a decision for each family to make. I will point out that many families think their baby is sleeping through the night - when what's really happening is they are still waking up repeatedly but have given up on crying (accepting that nobody will come to help them).
Your comment and others in this thread illustrate a different problem. Discourse around this topic (and some other parenting topics like breastfeeding) is out of control and not recognized as such. Regardless of your experience, it's not your place (nor anyone else's aside from maybe their physician), to tell parents what to do - and most of the time these admonitions are misinterpreted anyway because you're trying to boil down a complex set of behaviors and constraints to a rule that you propped up using some moral framework that you religiously believe in. People may well try to apply your rule in a different set of circumstances and get disastrous outcomes. To be clear, there are plenty of irrationally strong opinions on the opposite side of each of these issues too.
The researchers in the article were conducting an actual RCT, they are the only ones who should be speaking to this. Anyone else's anecdotal opinion should be discounted just as much as things like religious fundamentalist views on contraception.
Just let parents be. Stop with the admonitions. If something worked well or poorly for you, you're free to relate that without passing judgment.
Your comment is excellent. But I think GP’s comment is fine too. It’s a strongly held opinion, fairly well expressed. I didn’t really read it as an admonition. Sure, some people may not like strong opinions on this topic, but on HN I like to read them, no matter the topic.
Anyway, my charitable reading of GP is not that parents should or shouldn’t do anything in particular, rather that the child’s needs, as expressed over a very long time, should not be forgotten just because we live in different times.
In case it's not obvious to everyone reading here, no one recommends using the cry it out method on infants younger than six months. For younger infants, you should always respond as quickly as possible. Our doctor recommended that we have at least one person sleeping in the same room, but in a different bed, for the first six months. Then we gradually transitioned to allowing him to put himself to sleep, and I finally stopped sleeping in the same room around 11 months. For us, this worked wonderfully. My wife hated it, but that was its biggest downside. Almost overnight, it led to better sleep for everyone involved and the kids have never had attachment issues.
I have spoken extensively on this topic with a variety of practioners, and I've heard plenty of horror stories coming from the cosleeping camp. Learning to sleep by yourself is an important skill, and some parents don't realize they need to teach it. This leads some children to basically never learning, since it gets harder as they get older. There really is a golden window of opportunity (for learning good sleep habits), and while it's not as narrow as some make it out to be, it's not wide open either.
But don't take my word for it. Talk to your doctor and partner and figure out what works for you. And then be consistent about it.
I think missing a "window of opportunity" with kids "never learning to sleep by themselves" is dubious. Those approaching adolescence develop quite strong need for personal space, eventually. They start rejecting parental company, instead preferring to be alone or be with their peers.
I have one data point to share. An eight year old child decided one day, rather abruptly, that they were "done" with cosleeping and wanted to be in their own room, in their own bed, by themselves. And that was that.
> In case it's not obvious to everyone reading here, no one recommends using the cry it out method on infants younger than six months.
This is wrong. Various methods recommend starting as early as four months (and some recommend a less-strict version that starts earlier but only leaves children to cry for a shorter period of time before coming to get them, as opposed to fully crying it out).
> What are the odds that the rest of the world and entire history of humankind were mistaken the whole time, until some behaviorists came along and figured it all out in the last century?
There are many cases where all of humanity has been doing something that we only recently decided was wrong. For instance, slavery.
Certainly the odds aren't good that this is true of everything humans do, but the odds that some of the things we do fall into this category is 100%.
Edit: also, don't be so judgmental. Behaviours are environmental adaptions. In the Western world, mothers typically work 9-5 like men, so of course in cultures where women don't have this constraint they'd be shocked at our behaviours. Humans are adaptable however, and constantly coddling your fearful infant made sense when there were dangers everywhere. In our society's we're pretty safe in historical terms, so it could just be that babies cry because they're instinctively afraid until they learn they're safe when nothing happens to them after a few nights, and then it stops. This actually seems to happen in a lot of cry-it-out cases.
There is way too much romanticization of a false past here in this larger HN discussion. Yeah, sleep patterns were different, and many people slept with their infants. Infant mortality was also higher, as was maternal mortality, and corporal punishment was common. Sleep-deprived women with piles of children were not spending loving moments staring into their babies' eyes; they were smacking the slightly older children on the back of the head to hurry up and take the chicken feed out and slop the pigs. From my own family histories, I know that babies were often ignored, because at some point having a 1/3 of your babies die means you just don't invest very much emotional energy in them anymore. Very young children were tied to furniture to keep them out of trouble. By age four, some were at work (although the average age to start work in Victorian England was about 10, and the Factory Act came into force to regulate labor conditions for 9-13 year olds). Wet nurses were common, and in parts of England and France in the 1780s for instance it was extraordinarily common to simply ship your baby out to the country so you could work or maintain your aristocratic figure (see references at https://www.geriwalton.com/breastfeeding-or-nursing-with-wet... for instance).
For my own part, we did some version of sleep training (checking every 5 min until crying stopped). This was overall extraordinarily effective. The reassurance that we're not leaving, we're coming back -- quite important. But as important: the discovery that the child in question doesn't like rocking, bouncing, white noise, or any of the other interventions that are billed as crucial. Leave that kid alone for 4-12 minutes? Asleep. Rock/bounce/white noise? Awake for hours. Why torture the child to satisfy someone else's interventionist idea of good parenting?
Every kid is different. And not every cry needs intervention. This kid cried every time a fart came. At some point you just need to learn the world won't end if you fart, and that is simply gained by experience, not mom or dad rushing to reassure and making a big deal of every fart.
> There is way too much romanticization of a false past here in this larger HN discussion
Some stuff is evolutionary. Co-sleeping is seen in all mammal species. And its an important part of the group sentiment, including the social support it brings. The lack of it causes anxiety in mammal species. Even domestic cats prefer to take care of their young in groups of mothers until the kittens grow up.
> This kid cried every time a fart came. At some point you just need to learn...
...that those farts have been causing pain in his abdomen or scrotum. Its amazing how it did not occur to you and instead you let the kid to just 'go through' it.
> England and France in the 1780s for instance it was extraordinarily common to simply ship your baby out to the country so you could work or maintain your aristocratic figure
Inbreeding, negligent and sociopathic aristocrats are never good examples for anything related to the basic tenets of human civilization. Less, parenting. Sheeesh. If your parenting morning star is murderous 18th century aristocrats who starved their people to be able to live in extravaganza with their powdered wigs...
Invoking evolutionary biology is not the strong point you seem to think it is. Humans have plenty of characteristics and behaviours that are not present in other mammals, even characteristics that seem to be shared among all other mammals. Our shared heritage with cats didn't lead to our sophisticated language or take us to the moon.
Furthermore, if letting babies cry it out were truly as atrocious a practice as you seem to imply, the signal in the data would be so strong it would be impossible to ignore. The fact that we don't see such an indisputable signal should make you question your assumptions.
> ...that those farts have been causing pain in his abdomen or scrotum. Its amazing how it did not occur to you and instead you let the kid to just 'go through' it.
You seem to be implying that this was somehow wrong. Human newborns need to experience a range of sensations and discomfort to learn how to distinguish what counts as actual pain from mere discomfort. This still happens even into adulthood. Exercise is borderline painful when you're out of shape and then can become pleasurable as your fitness improves. Your brain is constantly adapting and recalibrating.
> Invoking evolutionary biology is not the strong point you seem to think it is. Humans have plenty of characteristics and behaviours that are not present in other mammals
Yes, but co-sleeping, rearing children, co-habitation, touching, grooming, infants depending on their parents are present in all mammal species. More sophisticated and derived behaviors may not be. But these, are. And the repression of some of these in modern humans causes considerable psychological distress and anxiety.
> And the repression of some of these in modern humans causes considerable psychological distress and anxiety.
Literally pure conjecture, as there's no conclusive evidence of this claim, which is the whole point of this article.
Furthermore, the only change we're discussing is eliminating a specific type of co-sleeping. All of the other behaviours common to all mammals remain the same. The odds of this one change being significantly damaging are small, and considering we see no strong signal in the data we do have, I don't see this claim standing the test of time.
> In their recent paper published in JCPP, Bilgin and Wolke (2020a) argue that leaving an infant to ‘cry it out’, rather than responding to the child’s cries, had no adverse effects on mother–infant attachment at 18 months. This finding opposes evidence across a wide range of scientific fields. Here, we outline several concerns with the article and argue against some of the authors’ strong claims, which have already gained media attention, including a report on the NHS website. We suggest that the authors’ conclusions should be considered one piece of a larger scientific whole, where ‘cry it out’ seems, overall, to be of detriment to both attachment and development. Crucially, we are concerned that this study has issues regarding power and other analytical decisions. More generally, we fear that the authors have overstated their findings and we hope that members of the public do not alter their parenting behaviours in line with such claims without further research into this controversial topic.
ah, yes! link to a group of people who didn't like the outcome of a study, so they wrote about it with links to older studies that the more comprehensive one already addressed. of course, said people didn't bother to do their own study, but needed to get it off their chests how mad it makes them that the newer/more data-driven studies go against their instincts.
> ah, yes! link to a group of people who didn't like the outcome of a study, so they wrote about it
That study criticizes the methods and samples of the study you trust in. Its something fundamental, not 'opinionated'.
> data-driven studies go against their instincts.
What part of a 40 or 200 sample set is 'data driven'. How many of those children are 40 years old. How many of them have passed through the chaos of teenage years and now experiencing their first problems in work life, social relationships or relationship with their spouse.
...
Its amazing how people immediately forget any evolutionary biology or behavioral science lessons they have taken during the course of their lives when it involves self-interest. Simple behaviors that entirety of mammal species rely on as evolutionary behaviors for survival are just 'maladaptive practices' when self-interest is involved.
...
Strong personal interest seem to cause strong bias in this topic. I understand the need for the parents who use such destructive practices to be able to get some sleep while they are raising infants in this modern society that does not leave any time for childrearing. But neither anyone like me empathizing with it nor the circumstances of modern society can negate the evolutionary behaviors and their effects. The parents who are in such a situation must find another way to address the situation than relying on what increasingly seems to be anti-humane advocacy.
Those ignoring babies won't hear you, we are the only family in my village that respond to crying calls, and these parents get defensive on this topic, they need to believe...
at some point you have to realize that you understand infants less than the parents using this method, and certainly less than the ones doing the studies. you argument is equivalent to saying we should stick to arranged marriages only because that's how it's always been done and it clearly worked for many cultures.
> you argument is equivalent to saying we should stick to arranged marriages only because that's how it's always been done and it clearly worked for many cultures.
Arranged marriages are in no way related to deep behavioral traits of mammal evolution.
> at some point you have to realize that you understand infants less than the parents using this method
Anyone who knows any adult who suffered any measure of neglect in childhood would 'know' otherwise. Especially the adults who have been neglected as infants.
I understand your viewpoint and sentiment. But I do reiterate that those do not negate evolution.
I think we discussed enough in this thread. I'll bail out of this discussion now. Thanks.
> There are many cases where all of humanity has been doing something that we only recently decided was wrong. For instance, slavery.
Not really comparable because we decided it was morally wrong, not that we were wrong about its effects. Its not like humanity used to think slavery was good for the slave.
> Its not like humanity used to think slavery was good for the slave.
People said it was the natural order of things - similar to how men owning women or children was divinely approved, and if you read about “the curse of Ham” you can see many variations of the excuses offered that it was just due to ancestral sin - and during the colonial era that exact argument was used to the general effect that slavery provided heathens with a chance to adopt Christianity and be saved.
The reason the Southern Baptists exist as a separate denomination is because they split off from the main Baptist community in support of slavery, only recanting in 1995!, and while that’s generally accepted as being significantly motivated by the massive financial impacts it relied on those rationalizations (it’s biblical, we’re improving people who would otherwise be doomed to a primitive existence without the chance of salvation). These days people know not to say slavery was good but you can still find conservatives saying colonialism was a net win for many countries.
There’s considerably more about this dark part of our history here:
> Not really comparable because we decided it was morally wrong, not that we were wrong about its effects. Its not like humanity used to think slavery was good for the slave.
People still argue that slavery (in particularly, chattel slavery of Blacks in North America) was good for the slave, and the argument was even more common when slavery was legal but under active debate.
There seems to be this narrative that Euopeans went to Africa and stole all the people and forced them into slavery. This is not true at all. Europeans traded with African leaders who sold their slaves to the Europeans. Not saying what they traded was a fair price or was justified, but the africans had the slaves first. The Europeans bought and distributed them round the world.
It's not hard to find sources about slavery in Asia.
"Slavery in Korea formally existed from antiquity up to the 20th century. Slavery was very important in medieval Korea; it was a major institution. [...] The Korean "nobi" system of slavery peaked between the 15th and 17th centuries and then declined in the 18th and 19th centuries." [1]
"The Mongol Empire (1206-1368) had a tremendous impact on slavery across Eurasia. While slaves played a minor role in pre-Imperial Mongolia, the Mongols saw people as a resource, to be distributed among the imperial family and used for imperial needs, like material goods. This view created a whole spectrum of dependency running from free men to full slaves." [2]
I'm not sure what you mean, but I don't think many countries still had legal slavery going into the 20th century, outside of the Arab peninsula.
In Korea it was officially abolished in 1894 (although it took a few decades to eradicate). In my own country, France, slavery was abolished in 1794 (in Europe) and in 1848 (in all colonies and oversea territories). I think it's the general timeline for western Europe, first half of the 19th century. So not exactly 20th or 21st century either.
Of course, slavery itself (especially related to prostitution) is still ongoing pretty much everywhere, but it's not legal. And then there's war: forced work (Germany and Japan during WWII), and arguably conscription could count as a form of slavery too...
I'm pretty sure I learned about it at school in France, although of course not each country individually. Not sure about your specific country and history curriculum.
It sounds like the authorities where you live should have a look at not just the history curriculum but the rest as well. Slavery is very much a contemporary issue and it's been around, globally, since times that predate written history.
also Inca and Aztechs were from south america right?
there is also a new form of slavery currently active in the US where immigrants are brought to work and their passports are kept with their "employer" until xyz condition.
so slavery still exists but it is no longer a government policy as it used to be in US
I don't understand how, in the 21st century can we have slaves or bonded labourers. Apalling
People now are the same as people then, just different fashions and widgets.
The 'new form' of slavery you're describing sounds like indentured servitude. Definitely not new to the US (though now illegal)! Benjamin Franklin was indentured for 2 years when he was a teenager to his older brother, and frankly was not a fan of the practice.
You turned large parts of this thread into nationalistic flamewars and broke the site guidelines in countless egregious ways. That's vandalism and abuse. We ban accounts that wreck threads like this.
I appreciate that child-rearing is an intensely emotional topic and that standards differ between countries, but that doesn't make it ok to pour dozens of flamewar comments into a thread about it. Please see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34194158 also.
I took a quick look at your recent comment history and fortunately didn't see other cases of this, so it should be easy to avoid in the future. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
> You turned large parts of this thread into nationalistic flamewars
As I said, I dont see anything 'nationalistic' about criticism of US-endemic policies and trends. With that logic, we would need to flag anyone who critices the US imperialism of the last 40 years and its overseas wars since it would also evaluate to being nationalistic with the same logic.
Additionally, I didnt name any specific nation to elevate it over the US. I specifically criticized the US, and said that this kind of mainstreamed anti-humane behavior is not present in any other country on the planet. If that makes the rest of the planet a 'nation', Im fine with that.
Ok, you make some fair points and I'm not hung up on the 'nationalistic' part of this, so let's not argue about that. What's much more important is that you broke the site guidelines extremely egregiously in the dozens of comments you posted in this thread. That's unacceptable, and we ban accounts that do it, so please don't do it again.
I have no problem with your views about babies. But there was a huge problem with the aggressive comments you posted. That is a direct contribution to destroying this place, and we can't allow that.
Moreover, it wasn't in your interest to argue this way. I understand how emotional the topic is—and rightly so—but attacking and putting other people down is not only not going to persuade them, it's going to harden them in their wrong (or what you consider to be wrong) position. By doing this you provided lots of fresh justification to dismiss your point of view—after all, look at how the people defending it behave! Assuming your position is true, then what you achieve by doing this is to discredit the truth (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...). Not only is that not in your interest, it hurts everybody.
I know that other people also behaved badly in this thread and I scolded some of them, but I'm sad to say that your posts were the worst by a significant margin. Since you don't have a history of conducting yourself this way on HN (at least not from the old comments I skimmed through), I'm sure you can avoid this in the future. If you'd please do that, and also make sure you're up on the site guidelines at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html, we'd appreciate it.
Thanks for explaining the viewpoint of the HN moderation. I do understand your viewpoint. While I think that people should start raising their voice and expressing their thoughts and sentiments more directly to stop the current decline into hellhole, I do agree that an amicable discussion environment should be maintained. Ill follow the general format that everyone else at HN is using from this point on.
I think a narrow space exists in which one can raise one's voice but do it in a way that connects with the people one is talking to, rather than alienating them. It's not easy to find that narrow space, but that's what HN is trying to be about.
This attitude, like that children shouldn't sleep with parents at all costs, or should be forced to stay crying to fall asleep, is shocking to see from ex-USSR. I used to think it was our militarized culture, where parents and grand parents were obsessed with "discipline" right from birth. "Don't spoil him taking so much care", or "you'll make him a handheld child if you pick him up every time he cries" -- these are real phrases.
I thought it comes from high modernism of early XX century.
Hopping here around the comments, I see some mention that mothers start working again when the child is 3 m.o. This is very very much similar to what the USSR wanted from factory worker families -- to have the worker woman go back to the factory machine ASAP and work, work, work.
except if you read the article and study that has meaningful data shows it's a net positive. so despite your preconceived notions of a baby crying being mentally damaging, there is no evidence to suggest that. on the contrary, everyone is happier and gets more sleep.
> except if you read the article and study that has meaningful data shows it's a net positive
The study was made on ~40 children. That is not a good group for anything. And there are absolutely no long-term studies on this. There are a lot of other comments that discuss that angle in this thread.
> In their recent paper published in JCPP, Bilgin and Wolke (2020a) argue that leaving an infant to ‘cry it out’, rather than responding to the child’s cries, had no adverse effects on mother–infant attachment at 18 months. This finding opposes evidence across a wide range of scientific fields. Here, we outline several concerns with the article and argue against some of the authors’ strong claims, which have already gained media attention, including a report on the NHS website. We suggest that the authors’ conclusions should be considered one piece of a larger scientific whole, where ‘cry it out’ seems, overall, to be of detriment to both attachment and development. Crucially, we are concerned that this study has issues regarding power and other analytical decisions. More generally, we fear that the authors have overstated their findings and we hope that members of the public do not alter their parenting behaviours in line with such claims without further research into this controversial topic.
SIDS however is probably genetic and little we do has made a difference (for example, when I was a baby the advice was to sleep children on their stomachs - it's literally the opposite now)[1]
Like cardiovascular diseases, it's genetic but it's still in your interest to reduce risk factors (like smoking, which is apparently a risk factor both for heart trouble and SIDS.)
I am not an expert but I think there are ways to safely co-sleep, but chronically sleep-deprived parents tend to not be able to follow the rules consistently
As is sleeping on their stomachs, and most babies really don't like to sleep on their backs. It's no wonder parents have issues...and no wonder many babies have the back of their heads flattened.
For what it's worth I agree cosleeping is (in general) quite dangerous, but I do wish all of those recommendations weren't put into place at the same time. It'd be nice to know how much back sleeping helped with SIDS vs cosleeping vs no pillows/blankets/etc.
For my second kid it worked wonderfully. There was one hard night. After that he had, for the first time in his young life, the ability to put himself back to sleep at night when he woke up. That was a gift for him as well as us. We used the Ferber method.
Back in the 90s my son REALLY struggled getting to sleep on his own. The only way to put him to sleep was to rock him and hope he didn't wake up while you were putting him down. This lasted for almost a year. At wit's end, a friend loaned us a VHS tape about an episode of 60 Minutes that advocated "crying it out." It was a life saver! Within a few nights he was finally sleeping through the night. I'm not going to lie. Those nights were pretty difficult, especially for my wife. Luckily, my daughter didn't have that problem!
The article states no long term negative effects have been found, compared to positive short term findings. There’s been a wide range of child-rearing practices across cultures and history, including infanticide. Probably no culture has gotten it exactly right, but this practice is not that far outside the norm as other practices from other cultures.
> The article states no long term negative effects have been found
The generations that have been neglected in this way have not reached their later ages en masse. Of course there would be no negative effects. That aside, repressed psychological damage is still damage.
My parents' generation (in the UK) were physically beaten as children. It was a normal part of parenting and part of school.
My hope is that one day we will consider this emotionally abusive behaviour as seriously as we we now look at physical abuse. Though I don't hold out much hope. Especially as there are still some people holding out for the right to hit their children even now.
Comparing a 9-month-old spending 15 minutes calming themselves down before falling asleep to physical abuse is laughably absurd.
A big problem with this "debate" is that people conjure images of newborn babies being left to cry for hours, when what is actually predominantly practiced is older infants 6-12 months old being allowed to cry for less than half an hour.
After being fed and given a clean diaper and a safe place to sleep, being rocked to sleep just isn't a "need" for an older infant; they are crying because they want to be soothed to sleep. And it's fine to do that if you want to as a parent (which pretty much all parents do!), but it's also fine for them to learn to soothe themselves instead. It isn't "emotional abuse".
“A little rap on the knuckles” is less severe than full on beating, but it’s on the gradient of physical violence.
Teaching a child that their call for help will not be answered is unkind and damaging. And I’m not sure a baby has the same perspective on 15 minutes as the average adult.
I’m pretty sure most adults are walking around with unresolved emotional trauma issues that do not serve them, or those around them, well.
Again, on my opinion as a human. Opinions clearly vary wildly.
>Teaching a child that their call for help will not be answered is unkind and damaging.
I just commented elsewhere and asked you what your understanding of "sleep training" or "crying it out" entails, but I think this answers it for me - you're ignorant to what actually happens.
You do not teach a child that their call for help will be unanswered. You observe them closely as they wake up, listen to how they're crying (each parent knows what their child's cries mean), listen for the highs and the lows of the crying, watch them as they try to learn how to put themselves back to sleep. But you ABSOLUTELY DO NOT abandon them. You go in frequently at first, and slowly extend the amount of time you give them before going in as "sleep training" progresses. You slowly give them more and more space to figure it out, but you still always go in at some point, when they need it. You are giving them the space to learn something while still being there for them.
To suggest otherwise, and judge others as abusive you have been doing repeatedly in this thread, is ignorant and uncalled for. It's not constructive, and it's rude.
I think the articles talks about this: the child still wakes up in the middle of night but does not cry. Scientists are not sure what is happening, are they able to sooth themselves to sleep or are they still stressed out but are not crying. Because they know nobody will come for help if they cry.
If my son wakes up at night and needs some water, he'll cry. Diaper change, cry. I have a nursery can and I can see him wake up sometimes, look around, and go back to sleep on his own, because that is perfectly natural.
W/o sleep training he wanted to be patted back to sleep everytime he woke up. That took 15 to 30 minutes, 2 to 4 times a night.
After sleep training, he sleeps better, and gets more sleep, and still has all his needs taken care of.
> I think the articles talks about this: the child still wakes up in the middle of night but does not cry
The child is avoiding crying in the absence of its parents because doing so would cause predators to find him before his parents. Evolutionary instinct. The parents will (hopefully) return from hunting & gathering eventually, to pick the child up.
And when the parents regularly fail to return or never return - yeah, one way ticket to a psychological disorder.
Only with sleep training, the parents do return in the morning, so what's your point?
Of course a neglected child is likely to grow up with a psychological disorder. Neglected as in the parents (or at least some carer) not being there for days on end, or simply abandoning them. That's not sleep training though.
I apologise, I’ve not read literature on it, or the particular methodology you describe. I’m not judging you.
That said, whatever the merits of a structured approach, for every parent that diligently follows them, there are others that are less careful. And I’ve met them.
I’m responding to sentiments like “I just ignore them and they go to sleep eventually”, “don’t go and check, he only wants attention” from other parents, and other reports from someone I know who is a midwife.
The model we followed was “Hand in hand”, which resonated for us. And we were saddened that that philosophy does not seem to be very mainstream amongst parents I have met.
You're throwing around accusations of abuse despite the fact that you admit you haven't read literature on it. Why are you contributing your admittedly uneducated opinion on this? Go read some of the literature instead. Stop judging parents you've never met (and yes, despite you saying you're not judging, you obviously are). Just because something worked for you doesn't mean it works for all babies or families, and it's profoundly arrogant of you to assume otherwise.
"Research shows us that an infant is not neurologically or developmentally capable of calming or soothing himself to sleep in a way that is healthy. The part of the brain that helps with self-soothing isn't well developed until the child is two and a half to three years of age. Until that time, a child depends on his parents to help him calm down and learn to regulate his intense feelings."
Do you have an unbiased source? Both that website, and the only piece of research linked to at the bottom of the page, are from heavily biased sources (Attachment Parenting International and Journal of Attachment Parenting). None of the primary articles under "Research Related to This Principle" support the quote you highlight (least as far as I can tell, maybe I missed!), and the specific quote doesn't link back to any specific study. Not only that, but...
>Until that time, a child depends on his parents to help him calm down and learn to regulate his intense feelings.
Again, you're ignoring the fact that parents absolutely do tend to their children emotionally during sleep training. I highlighted that in another response to you earlier, as well as this very comment chain. You even edited your comment and acquiesced to support a version of it at six months, and now you're back admonishing the practice as "dangerous" altogether?
Edit: I am not saying you shouldn't hold your own views. Do what you want with your kids as long as you and your family are happy. Just ease up on telling others they are wrong - they are just as right for their family as you are for yours.
You’re getting downvoted because this is just one person’s opinion and yet you’re presenting it as gospel… dogmatically repeating the same post over and over in spite of there clearly being strong support for the opposing POV. More than one opinion can be valid.
I think this is vastly overblowing the upbringing of babies.
Honestly, if it mattered that much, we'd have a global epidemic of behaviour disorders due to poor parenting in the very early years. But that just isn't the case.
> Teaching a child that their call for help will not be answered is unkind and damaging
You don't know that, there is no evidence for it and it definitely depends on the age. Your post is drammatically different when speaking about a newborn, a 6 or a 12 or 18 months old.
Babies absolutely need to learn to self soothe and that crying won't always meet attention too.
The idea that unattending a crying baby here and there will produce long lasting trauma has to be proved first, it may actually be positive.
There's plenty of evidence for it. Read the books by Dr. Bruce Perry. Read about attachment theory.
If you read his books, what you will also find is that children respond differently to trauma. So, some children may not be harmed at all by childhood trauma, while others may be deeply affected. The basic fallacy here is that children under the age of three can self-soothe. They cannot. This is all part of infant development.
Yeah listen, you're not going to convince many people that their two year olds are incapable of soothing themselves! "Infant development" does not describe children between the ages of 1 and 3, who are not infants.
That one sure is an American cultural product that exists nowhere else. "Attachment is a problem" - here is a theory for it.
The entire human evolution is based on attachments created between the group members. From parenting to siblings to relatives to friends to everything else. The destruction of such 'attachments' causes social bonds to be broken and people getting isolated into depression. No wonder people call the US 'prozac nation'...
> For others, it can be hours of crying, even to the point of vomiting (common enough to be a frequent topic of conversation on sleep-training forums and addressed by baby sleep books including Ferber's
The article also includes a reference to 2-3 hours.
Fair enough. I'm not supportive of letting kids cry for 2-3 hours even to the point of vomiting. But even then, I'm sympathetic to it if the parents have tried everything else and they have a kid that just won't sleep. I'm not like an absolutist or anything, I just think parents should have space to try to figure out what works for their own families without random strangers calling them abusive.
"Research shows us that an infant is not neurologically or developmentally capable of calming or soothing himself to sleep in a way that is healthy. The part of the brain that helps with self-soothing isn't well developed until the child is two and a half to three years of age. Until that time, a child depends on his parents to help him calm down and learn to regulate his intense feelings."
And yet, sleep training is not abandoning an infant. Mind your own business and stop accusing strangers who you know nothing about of abuse. You're being an a-hole.
Edit to add: attachmentparenting.org is not an objective arbiter of the research on whether or not the dogmas of attachment parenting are correct! They have a dog in this fight...
> Comparing a 9-month-old spending 15 minutes calming themselves down before falling asleep to physical abuse is laughably absurd.
Psychopathic and delirous. That is how your statement looks to from somewhere else around the world.
...
The child is calling for help. The first instinct of a human baby. No help is coming. The child will instinctively shut up to avoid predators finding it. Its not 'calming itself'. Its avoiding certain death in the absence of the parents. With the in-built expectation that the parents who have been away for some reason will come back and pick him up. Else, he will die - just like all those babies that did not cry or whose parents were killed by predators.
...
What a way to psychologically scar a kid for life...
This is a load of unadulterated bullshit. Kids cry all the time. It doesn't psychologically scar them for life. Take a chill pill!
It's actual insanity how people have come up think that every. little. thing. they do as a parent has these life long ripple effects. I'm sorry to tell you: these little details of parenting just aren't important either way. What matters is food and shelter and a loving home. Focus on those things for your own family and stop driving yourself crazy with these details, and especially stop getting so riled up by what other parents are doing, it's none of your business!
Yeah…cause they’re human and as the parent you’re their only human interaction.
Why is them wanting to be soothed seen as a bad thing? Like, what the fuck do we think these babies are actively scheming to find ways to get soothed?
I swear our brains are looking for adversaries in infants now.
Your infant child can not manipulate you. The brains barely understand action and consequence. Your infant child is trying to communicate its needs, and having it unmet with indifference is honestly hilariously sad.
It's not a bad thing, just like it's not bad for a baby to want to be spoon-fed. But part of growing up is learning new skills, like eating by themselves and soothing themselves to sleep. And a big part of parenting is figuring out the right times and ways to encourage this.
You know what has been a far more traumatic growing experience for every kid I've known than learning to sleep independently? Learning to use a toilet. Way more tears, way more "emotional trauma", but it's all part of growing up.
> I swear our brains are looking for adversaries in infants now.
Also, sleep training is not some new-agey thing that we've just concocted out of a recent adversarial parenting trend; if anything it's exactly the opposite, it is the focus on "attachment" and concern over the impact of things like sleep training that is the newer trend.
Childhood trauma is reflected in behavioral issues at an older age.
"But part of growing up is learning new skills, like eating by themselves and soothing themselves to sleep."
Sure, but wait until they're three before you start sleep training. This idea that we need to toughen up infants is dangerous and frightening. They're completely helpless.
We've repeated ourselves a bunch of times but it irks me to let one of these nonsense comments go unresponded, so again: two year olds and one year olds are not infants and are not helpless. They can fall asleep independently perfectly well.
One thing that has always bothered me is parents trying to justify sleep training as a positive for the child. The reason parents do it is for their own benefit.
So, it's both, for real. Waking up and crying five or six times a night really isn't good for infants and is even worse for toddlers. They need to be well rested for all the learning they do during their days.
But it's also the case that anything that is bad for parents is bad for children. Especially when it comes to sleep deprivation. I'm completely convinced that in my almost-five year old's entire life, the most danger she has ever been in was when we had to drive half an hour to the pediatrician multiple times a week when she was a newborn and we weren't sleeping at all. I may as well have been three or four drinks in every time I drove to the doctor in those early weeks. But driving isn't the only problem. Parents are more irritable, less present, and just generally worse, when they aren't sleeping.
Sleep deprivation isn't just some funny goofy little thing that parents adorably have to deal with; it's a major problem. I didn't even realize this until I started sleeping after a year and a half and had the experience of "waking up" after a few weeks of good sleep. It's an actual problem! It's not just some preference that parents have to be able to sleep.
> But driving isn't the only problem. Parents are more irritable, less present, and just generally worse, when they aren't sleeping.
This.
It's hard to not laugh at a remark like "the reason parents do it is for their own benefit". Of course we do it for our own benefit. Because our benefit is the benefit of the child as well.
Temporary attachment or emotional issues, if they happen, can be fixed. Worst case, the parents may need some external guidance from a specialist in children psychology and emotional development. Keeping the parents sleep-deprived for months can cause them to become depressed (or exacerbate mother's postpartum depression - a very important topic that's not being talked about enough), or lose their jobs, or make them hate their own child, or hate each other and ultimately lead to divorce/broken family. All these consequences are orders of magnitude worse for future prospects of a child than anything a botched sleep training can cause.
Thanks! We've had a lot of good luck so far. In fact, the child psychologist we went to proactively, to talk about how to help a 1 y.o. child handle moving to a new home in a different city, approved with the way we handled both this and other issues, and with our approach in general. But hey, N=1, it's always possible she is wrong.
> The entire psychology science and discipline was still not able to solve it. But your optimism is encouraging.
The issue isn't with psychology, the issue is with people treating an entire spectrum as one bit "is or isn't" boolean. It's good for writing outrage-inducing stories to maximize revenue. It's good for winning arguments despite being wrong. It's not good if you actually care about the outcome.
The kind of issues we're talking about here are mostly the psychological equivalent of a bruised knee. Meanwhile, the commentariat and the pundits selling books want to round everything up to emotional abuse, as if letting a child cry for 15 minutes was as bad as leaving them to live on the street. Unfortunately, some of the HN comments seem to go this way too.
> Like, what the fuck do we think these babies are actively scheming to find ways to get soothed?
That's exactly what they do. Do you believe they're processing sophisticated ideas of love, attachment and comforting? That they're making a choice to ask their parents for soothing?
Infants are acting on basic instincts. With very limited but rapidly expanding space of possible actions, they're actively learning what behavior will lead to their basic needs being satisfied. They can and will overfit on whatever pattern they can spot.
> I swear our brains are looking for adversaries in infants now.
In operational sense, they are - they're fighting for resources for their own survival.
> Your infant child can not manipulate you. The brains barely understand action and consequence. Your infant child is trying to communicate its needs, and having it unmet with indifference is honestly hilariously sad.
Of course they can and will manipulate you. That's, like, parenthood 101. The whole set of biological and psychological changes parents undergo, the whole deal with attachment, is to make the parents vulnerable to the child. The brain of an infant may understand little at first, but it understands enough of "action and consequence" to start doing gradient descent and quickly learn how to get what it needs from its parents. Of course it helps that the parents want to fulfill their child's needs - initially, the kid isn't really learning how to get the parents to respond, but rather training the parents to respond to specific cues.
Eventually, children learn to speak, and that's when it's really clear just how devious and manipulative kids are. It's both amusing and rewarding to watch them push the boundaries of their intelligence to get you to react they way they want. Except in those cases where they succeed, and you only realize it moments later that you've been had :).
No I'm not. I'm talking about older infants, older than about 6 months. They are capable of falling asleep independently. There isn't a "need" here. The idea is to take care of all their needs before putting them to bed, make sure they are fed, make sure their diaper is dry, don't do it if they're sick or in pain from teething; meet their actual needs. Being rocked to sleep is a want not a need.
> But infants aren't capable of looking after their own needs.
That's my point. They aren't capable of looking after their own needs. They need their parents for that. But what they are capable of is correlating their behavior with their needs being fulfilled, and doing more of the thing that correlates well with those needs being met.
You cannot say “well you probably haven’t done this one, specific, highly unlikely thing for someone in the UK to do. So yeah caning probably worked, right!”
I haven’t knived anyone. I was never caned at school.
The absence of someone doing a thing is not proof of a thing doing what you believe it does.
You act like ‘back in my day’ there wasn’t any crime.
If you look at murder rates in the UK they peaked in the early 2000’s. Maybe those abused boys were taught violence is the answer?
Letting your baby ‘cry it out’ is abuse in my eyes and you can sleep train them without doing this.
With my daughter we soothed her in her cot instead of picking her up.
She will now link her sleep cycles and only cry when there is something wrong
The murder rate in the UK tracked the presence of environmental lead from things like paint, leaded petrol, &. The murder rate in the UK is now trending towards what it was in the Edwardian period, when it was introduced.
Beating children doesn't make them obedient and law-abiding adults.
> If you look at murder rates in the UK they peaked in the early 2000’s. Maybe those abused boys were taught violence is the answer?
There were earlier HN posts attributing the decline in the rate of murder rate/violence crime to countries phasing out lead-gasoline. Now we might never know unless we do a properly controlled experiment.
We've seen exactly the same pattern everywhere in the world when leaded petrol was banned. At this point, we've had our controls, because different countries scrapped lead at different times, and exactly the same trend has been observed. Think of the ones who scrapped it later as acting as the control group for those countries who scrapped it later.
Besides, the effect of lead on the human brain had been well known before leaded petrol was banned.
> We perform the first meta-analysis of the effect of lead on crime by pooling 529 estimates from 24 studies. We find evidence of publication bias across a range of tests.
> When we restrict our analysis to only high-quality studies that address endogeneity the estimated mean effect size is close to zero.
> When we use the full sample, the mean effect size is a partial correlation coefficient of 0.11, over ten times larger than the high-quality sample.
Interestingly, I met someone on HN once who insisted that effect sizes are always smaller in larger trials because that's just the nature of reality. This does not say anything good about scientists' conceptual understanding of what they're doing.
I think early 80s is when it becomes tricky to _legally_ beat kids in schools in the uk. I suspect collective punishment was actually illegal long before that but it wasn’t tested in courts.
It is legal in every home of the US. It is legal in many states' public schools. We were spanked in Houston public schools through the 90s. And it was a lot milder than what my cousins in Calcutta got. Good stuff.
If I recall correctly, it was illegal by the 90s in the UK. That didn't stop the odd occasion of it happening. The cane remained on the wall as a relic, but there was always a handy slipper around.
well yea, because your parents were essentially slaves, the property of higher elite classes. I'm pointing to the class relationship, nothing specific to your parents.
I wonder if such practices were used in schools reserved for royalty and other nobles in the UK
I have two kids now. We are lucky blessed and privileged with amount of support we have, from family and work and government (Canada:). And yet it's hard. I try to get a little bit less "enraged" and "blood boiling" at other parents' survival strategies. If you have to go to work next morning to pay rent (which,y know, hasn't historically been the case so evolution is no use) and don't have a traditional support network of 500bc Greece and haven't slept for the last 6 weeks... It's very easy to say "it's a sacrifice parents should make" but it feels a bit of a lack of empathy.
Different kids parents and circumstances. I've really tried to tone down my judgement of other parenting techniques as I know they can easily judge my choices especially context free.
The fact that you are getting enraged is a huge part of the problem. Keep your own morality to yourself and your own family. If you don’t want to use cry it out, then that’s your decision. The fact you project onto others is the problem and it’s none of your business.
Cry it out is effective and works wonders for families and it has no side effects, as mentioned in the article itself.
> The fact that you are getting enraged is a huge part of the problem. Keep your own morality to yourself and your own family.
How about you people keep your destructive practice to yourself and stop advocating it, less, rationalizing it and pushing it to mainstream. And with 'you people', i mean the US, because the only place where this thing seems to be a 'thing' and is even being advocated by 'professionals' is the US. The place where individualism and consumerism hails from and the people load up on prozac to survive.
There is nothing 'nationalist' about this. The past 40 years have seen an immense amount of trends that were manufactured for profit originating from the US. From privatization of social services to reduction of labor protections. From atomization of social life down to individuals because 'individualism was better' to having those individuals subsist on prozac to keep their resulting depression under control. From sugary food spam then to obesity being bad to now obesity being ok. In the process, a lot of such trends were exported everywhere, including sociopathic scandals like the Avandia drug scandal. (which is one of many). This is without even touching the subject of overseas wars and how they are manufactured with the same trend-making mechanic, starting from how a certain people being 'evil' and their lives not being worth 'that much to ensuing invasion, occupation and destruction being 'a mistake'.
A trend is manufactured by whatever private interest, industry group or segment that catches a moneymaking or career-making opportunity. They push it as hard as they can. If they end up being able to gather popular dynamics behind them for whatsoever reason - like how some people are jumping on this bandwagon - then the trend becomes ever stronger and more easily exportable.
The topic at hand follows on the heels of the mentality that exported all of those to everywhere around the world. If that is a trait of the US as a nation, then there is a problem with that and the rest of the world cannot stop calling it out because 'that would be nationalism'.
By the way, nationalism in its negative sense means people elevating their own nation above others and demeaning others. Not criticising some other nation beause of their actual deeds. At no point I said that 'this particular nation is better than the US and therefore they are superior'. I literally said that the only country on the planet that this is a mainstream trend is the US, which means that the US goes against entire world. Which is obviously not 'a nation'.
I want to stress again that such logic would literally prohibit any criticsm of US foreign policy and prevent anyone from saying that the US has been invading and destroying nations in the past 40 years - due to being 'nationalism' in the subverted definition of 'criticism of a particular nation' that you reduced it to.
You've replied to me three times and responded only about the 'nationalistic' aspect. From this I see that I did a poor job of explaining why your comments were so abusive of HN. Even if we accept your definition of the word 'nationalistic', it ought to be clear that you broke the site guidelines extremely badly.
By nationalistic flamewar I simply mean the kind of flamewar that happens when people put down other countries on internet forums. It's a shallow, simple definition that doesn't have any nuance; nor should it, because internet hellfire doesn't have any nuance.
If you don't like that use of the word, that's fine—it's not the main point. The main point is that you started and perpetuated an aggressive flamewar that wrecked this thread, and moreover would completely wreck this forum if we allowed it to. Please see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34200065 where I've explained this in more detail. You've been a good HN user otherwise, but we can't allow this kind of thing, so please don't do it again.
> The main point is that you started and perpetuated an aggressive flamewar
That makes it clearer, thanks. I do understand the concern about flamewars. I moderated forums myself. However, how will the criticism about things that originate from a specific society, organization or country will even be possible in such an environment then. Any criticism by naming anything would amount to an assault against a group or country under that standard. Or, is it so that if such criticism is raised, but just the origin is not specifically named, that would be compatible with the guidelines?
Thanks for these kind replies—I really appreciate it.
I think it is safer to make one's case on $topic without attributing it to a source that many people are likely to be identified with (e.g. national origin or whatever it is). Any time someone feels pressure against a place of identity, it feels like they're being attacked, and at that point the driver of discussion ceases to be $topic and starts activating survival circuitry. The only responses at that point are defensiveness or counterattack (or both). Curious conversation, which is the raison d'être of this place, becomes impossible.
If, however, the argument makes no sense without that attribution, I would try to do it in a way that includes lots of reassurance that one isn't disrespecting or putting down the identity (e.g. nationality or whatever it is), and make a point of explaining the connection to $topic in a limited and respectful way.
It's necessary to err on the side of doing it this way, even if it feels excessive, because although you may know that you're not attacking someone's identity, they don't have any way of knowing that up front. We all have a lot more context in their heads than we include in our internet comments. Readers don't have any of that information unless we explicitly include it. That's one reason why it's so easy for people to misread others' intent on the internet - I've written about this in various places, e.g. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que....
How about respecting every parents choices for their own family? How about you step away from HN for a bit and get some fresh air before responding to another comment in this thread? You're obviously very heated and it's not constructive.
You are making massive judgements about people while simultaneously demonstrating how little you know about what actually happens when you let someone "cry it out".
You also posted a large number of flamewar comments to this thread and broke the site guidelines very badly and repeatedly yourself.
What's worse, you hounded unity1001 in a variety of different places, which is a whole other form of abuse. That sort of spat is emphatically not what this site is for, so please don't do it again.
If someone else's comments are driving you crazy, the tools to use are downvoting and flagging—not commenting, as the site guidelines say ("Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead.") - and certainly not showing up to flame them in multiple places.
> How about respecting every parents choices for their own family?
The immense cacophonies that the industries in the US produce, eventually permate to, and induce chaos and problems in other countries. This includes medical industries.
> You're obviously very heated and it's not constructive.
Im not heated. Im not Angloamerican. This is not 'heated' discussion where I live. Avoid projecting your cultural paradigm to random people on the Internet.
> You are making massive judgements about people while simultaneously demonstrating how little you know about what actually happens when you let someone "cry it out".
Occasionally checking up on the child while leaving the child to cry itself to sleep is not 'something different' like you propose. So, no.
>Avoid projecting your cultural paradigm to random people on the Internet.
Avoid being an absolute asshole who is impossible to have a level-headed discussion with. Your flying off the handle in this thread with judgement geared towards "random people on the internet" demonstrates that very well.
It's clear that there will be no way to have a genuine, level-headed conversation with you. Enjoy your evening, or the rest of your day, wherever you are.
Im not being an asshole to anybody. Leaving aside the worldwide practice and the contradicting reasearch which people seem to just disregard when their personal experiences and biases weigh in, just like you have your own reasons for your strong bias that made you continue discussing this topic this heatedly (in your words), I have my own reasons too. I know various apparently-successful and 'well-adjusted' adults who were neglected as an infant. Only the people who are close to them can know the problems they face and the difficulties they have to go through. Its no joke. Its not difficult to conclude from a modicum knowledge of psychology and such first-hand cases that leaving alone an infant in its crib would easily do more damage - without even going into evolution, mammal species' behavioral traits or anything else complicated.
But as I said, we discussed enough. I replied out of courtesy one last time. So you too have a nice day.
After suffering extreme trauma, I have a different view on babies crying. Being heard and responded to is one existentially low level mental need. Touched too.
But you can't be heard every single time, the usual example of a parent driving, he can't just stop the car and start soothing the baby ignoring the rest of the world, logistics or obligations.
That's just not feasible nor it can't be 100% an obligation to always respond every single crying.
I think the article does a good job pointing out that after 6 months and definitely after 12 you do need to start let the baby safe soothe itself more frequently.
Sure, I can't be absolutist. But whenever I can, I do something. Respond. For the car, you might not be able to reach, but emit something that convey concern and care.
What if that approach of over protecting brings up a future lazy, spoiled, weak willed adult that will conduct miserable lives because up to 36 months all their brain saw is that crying always got them attentions and everything they wanted?
You don't know whether your approach is the best one, I don't, speak with as many professionals you can.
I approach it the other way. I wouldn't succumb to every tantrum. I try to build a solid emotional bridge so that the kid can stay grounded and relaxed as much as possible.
I'd love to speak with interesting professionals. So far I've met none.
You’ve successfully expressed the “parent in whatever mechanism makes me emotionally fulfilled” style. Many others take a more scientific viewpoint more oriented around child outcomes.
> The fact that this is so commonplace in my culture (USA) is frustrating and enrages me
From the outside, American culture around child-rearing seems like there is an adversarial relationship with tinges of resentment when it comes to how parents see children.
A lot of the tough love type of parenting seems to come from a place of pacifying parents, giving them what they want, over their burdensome children with "problem" behavior. You get things like in the OP, corporeal punishment, wilderness therapy, conversion therapy, using aversives[1] to literally hurt and shock autistic kids into complying with the behavior their parents want to see, etc. Some parents even seem to enjoy and take pride in it, and there are some who wish they could send their 11 year olds to go work in the coal mines to build a work ethic or something.
There isn’t really an “AmerIvan culture around rearing children”. America large variations in behaviors. If American parenting was completely as you suggest, how do we have a generation of professional victims or constant discussions of “helicopter parenting” or “participation trophies”?
Who said "professional victims" aren't the result of such parenting?
In my experience, people who were raised via such methods either acknowledge that those methods weren't right and make an effort to grow past them as adults, or they double down, take pride in how they were treated and won't acknowledge their own shortcomings. There's a lot of "my parents beat and/or neglected me and I turned out just fine!" sentiments coming from people who aren't, uh, "just fine" and are now grown adults extolling the virtues of child abuse.
Same goes for helicopter parents, I've run across several who also subscribe to the "tough love" ideology, where they might defend their overbearing and verbal abuse as something that will build character in their children and make them stronger or better students or whatever.
> There isn’t really an “AmerIvan culture around rearing children”. America large variations in behaviors.
There isn't any society in the world where such 'leaving kids to cry it out' is advocated. Leave aside anywhere its so mainstream that it can come to a place like HN.
You need to chill out on your judgemental posts. You're coming into this thread fast and hot and it is not constructive. Your quick reactions are demonstrating your own ignorance on this subject.
your comments are the same tired comments along the lines of "my parents and all the people I grew up with used a natural gas stove, so it's clearly the right way and nothing can be better". except when studies come out showing there are better ways to do things you're so set in your ways that it won't matter.
the thing with sleep training is that it works so wonderfully for a lot of people that the same arguments about how people who lived 20 people in a small cottage and had free babysitting all day long are somehow analogous is no longer relevant. times changed, people work more, sleep is more important for everyone (recent studies show), and the old way of doing it is no longer the best/only way.
The article makes fairly clear that sleep training under 6 months is not advised. Not to say that every baby will be ready at that point, but it becomes clear to most parents somewhere in the first year what cries from their baby express sincere needs - even psychological- and which are just gratuitous attention seeking. Once they have object permanence down, parenting changes.
> The article makes fairly clear that sleep training under 6 months is not advised
Beyond that - the close presence of parents near the infant until 2 years of age was discovered to be vital for the infant's development, social skills and especially being bold enough to experiment and learn new things. The lack of parents in close proximity in that period causes the infant to feel anxiety and hesitate from wandering around and trying out things and learning.
Agreed 100%. I feel like sleep training is for the parents, not necessarily for the babies. Most parents in the USA need to work, so they are the ones that need the sleep.
It doesn't sound like you have much experience being the 24-hr care provider for a baby. Phoning it in at work is way more relaxing than being in the house with a baby for the entire day. It's not work that makes parents need to sleep, it's... needing to sleep. Just speaking from experience, having someone with fractured mental concentration cooking, attempting to keep a slightly mobile child from danger, trying not to fall asleep on the couch with the kid in a desperate attempt not to cosleep, trying to keep your cool as the kid screams again and can't be soothed.... much more dangerous and stressful than doodling thru a meeting and saying, "I'm sorry, can you repeat that? I just want to clarify what you're saying."
Obviously. But you're saying it like the parents are being selfish here.
Babies need to be fed, protected, cared for and loved. Fulfillment of those needs is, for most people on the planet in the last century or so, directly dependent on the parents' ability to hold a job and earn enough income to pay for housing, food and creature comforts.
Even if sleep training is hard for some kids, their parents losing their jobs or breaking up due to sleep deprivation would be much, much worse for those kids.
Our pediatricians told us risk from suffocation is associated with bad co-sleep practices, not "just with" co-sleep (in our country, not the US, and I'm quoting "just with" because I don't know how to put that better, I'm trying to make the point that if bad practices aren't followed, the risk of SIDS is comparable to babies that sleep alone). This includes co-sleeping when at least one of the parents is a smoker, or is under the influence of alcohol or other drugs (legal or otherwise), having pillows, stuffed animals, or other soft loose things in bed, the bed being too soft, the baby being able to cover their face, etc.
But he did tell us it was safe to do this if we wanted to taking some precautions, and it worked great for us with our two kids.
Yes, sure, our two cases are anecdotic evidence, but I still trust what the doctor said, and I think you shouldn't be making blanket statements against the practice.
The truth is that SIDS is always a possibility and, to be honest, neither my wife nor myself slept well until both our kids were well beyond the age where the statistics show there's a higher chance from this (roughly 1 year old). I guess this helped make co-sleep safe, as we were always very alert (to the detriment of our own wellbeing, something I don't regret since a few years of this is a drop in the water compared with a lifetime, to us anyway).
One thing safe co-sleep requires is commitment and agreement from both parents, and a fair sharing of parental duties too.
> Co-sleeping seemed like the cheat code to getting baby boy to sleep through the night
Naturally since the baby will feel the parents close by instead of being out hunting & gathering, with himself being in danger. Or worse - parents dead, potential predators around. Evolutionary traits.
Everything has risk. What is the risk of having a sleep-deprived parent caring for a baby (holding and walking with them, driving, etc)? For some people, co-sleeping (bed sharing) largely eliminates sleep deprivation. Have you weighed those risks against each other, in particular when something like the safe sleep 7 are followed for co-sleeping?
Another reason to avoid this "deep seated biological reason" based reasoning is that evolution is pretty slow. Our instinct "software" is still setup for 40k+ years ago. It doesn't change particularly quickly and evolutionarily the entirety of human history isn't really a lot. Let alone human history in anything resembling a civilization.
So it easily follows that our adaptations from a time when we didn't have the luxury of stressing over how to ensure our kids grow into mentally healthy adults are not necessarily valid now regardless of how right we're wired to feel about them.
The idea of infants innocently crying because they need care only works if you assume their instincts are adapted to the modern world, whereas for prehistoric humans it was because it's more conducive to their survival to be somewhat needy yet quick to adjust when that neediness isn't responded to (as constant neediness might've led to abandonment back then).
> They are supposed to be attached to you. It is very much possible to co-sleep and then gradually transition them to their own bed.
I strongly believe that forcing kids to sleep in their own bed and in their own room all by themselves as soon as possible is a 5D chess move by the real estate industry to sell as much of their inventory as possible.
No, kids won't be traumatised or become serial killers if they don't have their own bed or their own room as soon as possible, in fact bed-sharing and room-sharing (or even hut-sharing) has been the norm for our species for thousands and thousands of years.
Heck, I shared a bed with my dad until I left for uni, when I was 18, mum was sleeping in the other room our apartment had. In the winters I used to sleep with both of my parents until I was 8 or 9, the three of us had to share to bedroom bed thanks to central heating having stopped working (which was thanks to Ceausescu and then to the shell-shock therapy imposed by the Washington consensus in my country in the 1990s). When I was visiting my grand-parents as a 8-9-year old kid, in the winter, I was sharing a bed with my grandad, and my brother (who was being raised by my grand-parents) was sharing a bed with my grandma, all four of us sharing the same 3x4 meters room. Can't say I developed any long-lasting "attachment" issues.
Again, forcing small kids to have their own rooms and their own beds is a quite recent Western thing.
Later edit: Opinion piece that supports my view (not a difficult view to support, because it's prevalent throughout most of the world):
> This system of sleeping — adults in one room, each child walled off in another — was common practice exactly nowhere before the late 19th century, when it took hold in Europe and North America. (...)
> Indeed, solitary childhood sleep seems cruel in those parts of the world where co-sleeping is still practiced, including developed countries such as Japan.
> But as industrial wealth spread through the Western economies, so did a sense that individual privacy — felt most intently at night — was a hallmark of “civilization.”
I've slept in the same bed with a work-colleague of mine a few years ago during a team-building trip, we're both males. We were quite on good terms but I wouldn't say we were sharing our deepest emotional thingies, things were ok (other then his snoring).
My dad often tells me how he used to do the same thing some years ago during company trips. Sure as hell the company wouldn't have paid for two separate hotel rooms when sending a team of 2 guys out to some remote town/city, and if it so happened that that room had one matrimonial bed instead of two separate beds then bed-sharing was the norm.
On a more general note, strangers share beds and rooms while sleeping without thinking about the sex stuff, they just want to have a good night's sleep.
> What are the odds that the rest of the world and entire history of humankind were mistaken the whole time, until some behaviorists came along and figured it all out in the last century?
why is something that is uncommon in other cultures obviously bad? there are many, many, many counterexamples to things kind this. just because something is commonplace doesn't mean it's the best way.
> Talk about infants having "attachment issues" makes my blood boil. They are supposed to be attached to you.
Attachment disorder is the opposite of what you seem to think it is, where they had previously been abandoned and thus can't make proper relationships.
Plenty of adaptively useful, maybe even optimal behaviors can negatively affect enjoyment of life. The world we live in isn't the one we evolved for, and behaviors and adaptations useful in our evolutionary past can be painful or detrimental to individuals and society now.
Selective pressure is no longer meaningfully applied to our species, so we won't further adapt to our situation except intentionally and at our own hands.
Also btw just because people forget their memories before a certain point doesn't mean they are rid of all the effects. Research on this is fraught and delicate, but very young children who suffered trauma are known to carry some consequences of it across that memory boundary. Which at least establishes that it's not a perfect reset and we should still be careful about what experiences we expose very young children to.
Sure, severe abuse can have lasting impact, but we are talking about babies crying for a bit. Kids have a thousand innane reasons to cry. Having thousand and one doesn't make that much of a difference.
For all concerned, I don't have kids and I don't intend to.
> On the other hand if infants were this fragile to be long term affected by something like that humanity would survive 3 generation tops.
The infants that were this fragile eventually selected themselves out of the gene pool by neglectful parents, or by behavioral disorders causing them to not be able to reproduce as much as others. Which is why almost every baby cries.
Hypothesis: the parent, by forcing themselves to sleep train, conditions themselves to ignore more of the infant's emotions; and the infant, observing no reaction to their emotions, learns the same behavior, leading to higher incidence of autism.
Typically (aside from some neurological disorders), there is an underlying reason for the infant to be crying. They could be hungry or wanting to urinate or defecate (many cultures begin potty training shortly after birth). This is frequent because their stomachs, intestines, and bladders are small. Figuring out what they want and responding is normal and has a long history of working, not just among humans but among all mammals with dependent young.
It's astonishing that some pop-parenting guide came along and said, "You don't have to figure out what the baby is crying about if they happen to be crying at night or if you are sleepy," and nobody stopped to wonder what night time had to do with it.
Reality: sleep training enters the picture only after all the things you've mentioned have been checked first.
Even from a pragmatic point of view, it's hard to imagine otherwise, because all of those underlying reasons are quick to check and (usually) quick to mitigate. You don't even consider sleep training until exhausting every other option, because literally everything is easier than any of the sleep training methods.
All of those things have to be checked immediately every time they cry. The Ferber method, mentioned elsewhere in the thread, says to not even check on the baby for longer and longer periods after they start crying.
During the daytime, if they start crying and you haven't solved the issue, you don't just start ignoring them. Why would you do so at night?
Without valid research in any direction, we should fall back on our prior, which is that ignoring crying infants at night is no less detrimental than ignoring crying during the day.
As I pointed out earlier in this very thread, the article itself mentions that there is no valid research on the long term effects of sleep training.
The only valid research says that they stop waking up their parents. This is probably due to learned helplessness, which leads us to the hypothesis in my first comment.
Summary: There are many studies done, but they all have data quality issues to different degrees.
In general... (my conclusion)
> Leaving your baby to cry it out is helpful for most babies.
> But it's not recommended for babies younger than 6 months.
> Some experts recommend even waiting until 12 months, because month 6-12 is critical for developing emotional regulation that occur with help of parent intervention.
> Benefit of letting baby cry it out isn't permanent. It needs to be repeated.
> By the time they're 6 years old, there was no difference.
> individual personality/temperament play large role in how the baby responds to the training.
> When babies are sleep-trained (with the "cry it out" method), they don't actually sleep (much) longer; they wake up as often but have learned to not signal their parents.
Parents getting more sleep has knock-on benefits for the kid. It's hard not to be grumpy under the influence of a sleep deficit. I wake up several times a night. So does my kid. So if I wake up every time he wakes up, and every time I'd naturally wake up, then I don't get enough sleep. Self-care is crucial for caretakers, and I was a bit disappointed to not find any mention of that in the article.
There is a mention of it in the article. Starts about 3/4 of the way through with the heading of "Family Fatigue":
"Researchers tend to focus on sleep training's potential impact on babies – which makes sense, since they're the most vulnerable, helpless members of the family unit. But sleep training obviously affects the rest of the family, too..."
What's worse, it's mostly dismissed. This is surprising, because it's arguably the most important factor - even the speculated negative effects of sleep training on child development pale in comparison to the negative effects of persistently sleep-deprived parents have on child short and long-term development.
Have they learned not to signal their parents? Or that their parents aren't interested in being there when they need them?
For me I suspect most of this is regression to mean. People mostly try sleep training in a bad patch, meaning things are likely gonna get better anyways.
>Have they learned not to signal their parents? Or that their parents aren't interested in being there when they need them?
I assume this is not true, given that most (all?) sleep trained babies will still cry if they are sick, in distress, lose their pacifier or stuffed animal, etc. They just don’t cry out for help to get back to sleep.
I haven't seen a single top level comment that demonstrated a complete reading and understanding. Some even willingly admit an inability to process the information. Funny, because I thought this was actually remarkably good scientific journalism! I guess this demonstrates why this technical reporting is rare. It took my wife and I about an hour to read and discuss the entire article.
My main takeaway is the low fidelity of existing studies and methods.
I found it interesting how small the studies are. Maybe they are challenging to operate at scale? What is the point of even talking about a trial with 43 participants split into 3 groups? That seems little better than the anecdotes presented here.
Also interesting to me that cortisol level and wrist actionography are the only quantitative methods... As mentioned in the article (and intuitively) both seem deeply flawed! Perhaps new methods are the next frontier for this research.
I quit midway because I found the article overly rambling and failing to get to the point.
Also the presentation is distracting. Various fonts, styles, mixed with pointless medias, large quotes, a very high noise floor. In the content, too much mixing of reported speech with data. It makes it a hassle to remember who is being quoted, what their role is, why they're relevant, what the data means in the context. Not enough summarized tabular data. Too much verbiage.
And overall I feel like I got the gist: crying it out is probably bad. The article doesn't motivate me to power through it and waste a lot of mental energy getting the finer points.
> I haven't seen a single top level comment that demonstrated a complete reading and understanding. Some even willingly admit an inability to process the information. Funny, because I thought this was actually remarkably good scientific journalism!
In defense of Typical HN:
- Usually, the submission itself isn't the topic, but rather it functions like a discussion prompt.
- As you've observed yourself, the primary thing the article tells us is that studies in this space are pretty much worthless, because the problem is incredibly hard to study. There isn't really much to discuss about the article itself.
But yeah, I also found the wrist actionography bit to be interesting, and quite surprising. My own takeaway here is that we might eventually get better studies, as wearable sensors become more and more ubiquitous, making it possible to do proper measurements where to date we have to rely on self-reporting.
I enjoyed the article but found it to be a little wordy and difficult to skim to find what I was looking for. Most systematic reviews and meta-analysis convey more information in less text. I personally prefer to get to straight to the facts, say more with less.
Collection and processing of audio/video data has become much cheaper, especially with advances in deep learning. Hopefully we can see some larger sample-size studies taking advantage of newer tech.
Having an 11 month old baby I have a few observations:
1 - parents have strong feelings on this topic and sleep is important.
2 - different kids/families seem to have majorly different sleep experiences in the first year
3 - I am skeptical of the literature in this field. Infant sleep feels measurable so it feels like studying it should be feasible, but we're forgetting these are little humans, not plants or bacteria cultures. People and psychologies are complicated.
4 - our baby ate a lot from a young age and was also able to sleep long lengths from a young age. Why? Probably genetics. We were lucky to not have to do formal sleep training with him; it was more a process of aligning his schedule and letting him learn how to fall asleep with less and less rocking.
We have two kids. One is 3, and the other is 1. Our first was an amazing sleeper. After the first few months, she would mostly sleep in a basinet the entire night. She transitioned to a crib easily, and now sleeps in a bed for about 12 hours per night without getting up.
Our second on the other hand was a complete nightmare. Crying for almost the entire night for months on end. He eventually settled down a bit, but we finally caved and let him co-sleep. He slept with us for almost the entire first year, and is just now moving to a crib.
So I don't even think it's genetic. It's almost purely random.
Humans, well life in general, is pretty damn robust.
That said maybe studies haven't picked this up cause the real negative effect is when you're old and demented they put you in the cheapest home. Where the staff let you cry it out if you fall and break your hip in the night.
I'm more interested in the long-term psychological effects of sleep training and how it affects a child's perception of "secure attachment" [1]. We sleep trained our oldest and did not our youngest and their personalities couldn't be more different. Of course, this may be entirely unrelated, but it's still something my wife and I have wondered about as we've learned more about it.
The same happens regularly without sleep training too, so ymmv obviously.
One thing I will note - if the kid doesn’t sleep and wakes up
the adults for years, that impact pretty clearly ruins the adults, and has severe impacts on the kids too.
It's important to understand that the attachment theory was developed to explain why children of drug addicts are so messed up. It was then expanded to children who suffered other kinds of abuse.
When you try to expand attachment theory to try to understand healthy kids in non abusive situations the effect size is usually smaller than the experimental noise.
>attachment theory was developed to explain why children of drug addicts are so messed up
Citation? As far as I know, the roots of Attachment Theory are in the World War II work of John Bowlby, investigating the effects of children separated from their parents when major cities were evacuated during the Blitz.
It is much later that the association of insecure attachment and addiction was scrutinized.
It's hard for children not to be very different from their siblings - after all, your oldest one spent their first N years with just you and your partner; the younger one spends that time with you, your partner, and their older sibling.
It's something I fully realized only recently, once I spotted my younger daughter sprinting for toys her sister played with, moments after the latter left for kindergarten, and repeating the exact same kind of play she saw her sister do - which was mostly 3 y.o.-level creative reinterpretation and misuse of toys. After that, I started to pay more attention, and noticed that our younger daughter repeats just as many behaviors of her sister as she does of my wife's and mine.
The OP overview did mention some studies. (The OP overview is a really good model for a popularly-accessible summary of research on a complex topic! it lists so much stuff!)
I'm not saying this necessarily should eliminate all worry you have about attachment (personally sleep-training seems like a bad idea to me too; I'm not a parent however), but as far as what research is available, from the OP:
> Of the few studies that have looked at the short- to longer-term outcomes of sleep training, none have found an effect on a baby's attachment or mental health. Hiscock's study, for example, the largest and longest longitudinal study done on sleep training, found sleep-trained children were no more likely to be insecurely attached to their caregiver at six years of age than their peers. (Experts like Hiscock say they aren't aware of any studies that look at potential long-term effects of cold-turkey cry-it-out, just at modified extinction. They also examined healthy babies at least six months old. So these findings aren't necessarily applicable to infants trained at younger ages, or in other ways.)
> Like other longitudinal studies, Hiscock's lost touch with a number of families when it was time for the final follow-up: 101 of the original 326. That means it is theoretically possible that the sleep training did affect some children in either a negative or positive way long-term, but that their experiences weren't captured. It's more likely, though, that any effects of a single intervention simply "washed out" after six years, says Hiscock.
I am also interested. Buried in the article is a note that by age 6 there was no appreciable difference in children with sleep interventions and without.
While this article shreds a lot of studies on sleep training, it goes on to cite a lot of others without evidence of equally scrutiny, so who knows.
I think the point the previous poster was trying to make is that people have wildly different personalities, and that any observation with a sample size of 2 is basically useless to draw any conclusions from.
I'll also add that different people respond very different to things; maybe for some babies sleep training might have long-term effects, and for some it doesn't. Certainly if I look at my own shitty childhood, me and my brother responded quite differently. He was affected much less than I was.
Sort of. We initially fed our cat on demand, but at some point switched to feeding it at set times during the day. The cat adjusted to that, and suddenly all his daily activities - including playing and sleeping - started following a consistent schedule.
Not the OP and not sleep training, no need for that, but I did manage to poopy-train our cat, meaning he only takes a poo when we are awake. The same goes for when we are eating, he's not taking any poo during those times, either.
Pretty smart cat, if you ask me, he also managed to teach our dog to play certain kind of games between the two of them.
We didn't sleep train our oldest, but we did our other three. All of them are very different people (ages 5-13). Every kid is different, and I don't think you can attribute it exclusively (or even primarily) to any one thing most of the time.
Oh come, there's like a billion variables in kids' personalities. My kids couldn't be more different from one another and we pretty much did all the same stuff with them.
What we were trying to do was help the parents to teach the kids to self-soothe. So in effect, we weren't saying that they wouldn't wake. We were saying that they would wake, but they wouldn't have to signal their parents. They could go back down into the next sleep cycle.
The conversations around sleep training are always rife with folks focusing on their own perceived risks, and the emotional guilt, that come with making trade-off decisions. While we over-focus on the noisy crying, we miss focusing on the skill building part of sleep training: training kids and parents the skill of soothing themselves in the absence of the other. Skill building with kids can sometimes be super hard on both kids and parents; welcome to Parenting.
This is one thing I learned only in my third year as a parent. If I tell an adult "I'm worried you'll break that when you poke it so hard" I expect them to either argue to the contrary or stop poking it so hard.
For my children, they don't register what I've said until a few days (and attempts) later. It's virtually impossible to teach them something in the moment, it all falls into place later. Super frustrating and super fascinating.
I think there's actually a saying about this. Something like how people don't learn when they're told something, they have to experience it themselves.
I think this applies to the adults as well. I've noticed that it takes me some time to change my opinion (on something non-trivial). The first instinct is to maintain your old position.
My wife and I did not sleep trained our kids. They co-slept with us, they were happy we were able to sleep through the night. Eventually they transitioned into their own bed no problem. Our neighbors will let their baby cry like forever, it was excruciating and imo pointless.
I think parenting is the worst possible space for N=1 anecdotes. I have two sets of friends who did what you did and have never slept alone or through the night for coming up on five years. For our oldest, also coming up on five years, we did like one night of sleep training at 18 months and immediately started sleeping through the night like magic. For our youngest, we never had to do anything, he just always slept through the night no problem. All of these anecdotes mean nothing, just like yours. Parents need to experiment and figure out what works best for them and their kids, and everyone who isn't them needs to butt. out.
Yep, the thing I always tell new parents when asked about kids is that every single kid is different. Your kid might be a good eater and a bad sleeper. Maybe the reverse. They might be extremely needy or be completely chill and independent. This is especially obvious when you have multiple kids of your own. Some knowledge generalizes, but a lot of the personalized experience is different (e.g. what they respond to in terms of incentives or "training"). I was always about 10/90 in my opinions of nature vs nurture (90% nurture, 10% nature) but after having kids its so obvious nature is much higher than I thought. Not sure what the end ratio is, but I'd say at least 50% nature.
You make a good point, each child is different. It's almost as though children are people. Maybe there's some kind of a lesson in that, but I can't see it.
• if somebody mentions they're about to try an arsenic-, lead- and powdered asbestos-based nasal spray on their kid.
The capacity of the parents is also a bottleneck: time spent paying attention to your uninformed advice is time spent not paying attention to the child(ren). Unsolicited advice is not relaxing, and doesn't help put food on the table; it probably doesn't help.
Though, I think posting on an internet forum might fall into the "if they're asking for advice"; most people visiting such websites are there because they've looked something up, and they expect to be wading through anecdotes.
This resonated with me. The only two bits of advice I ever give to any new parent are:
-everyone has an opinion about parenting, and many are not afraid to share it
-don't compare yourself to someone with an older child. You will start out a level zero parent, but you get a level zero baby. You'll level up with them. No one starts out a level 20 parent.
Sometimes? Yeah. And random advice spamming doesn't help, and just makes it worse. MDs tend to be the worst at this, but there are exceptions.
However, sometimes the parents are doing things that are unintentionally dangerous, or are so sleep deprived and exhausted they're being abusive and can't process that and get themselves to a better place on their own.
It's more common than not, from what I've seen. As is denial and avoidance on the topic.
Ideally, they would have experienced parents who know them (grandparents) who would be intimately involved and give breaks, intervene in important situations, help them with known working parenting techniques in the situation, etc.
But 1) a lot of folks don't have grandparents who could positively contribute here no matter what anyway, and 2) socioeconomics means it's nearly impossible for this setup to coincide with HN demographics except for certain specific ethnicities, and 3) a lot of boomer parents - the demographics involved - are explicitly not interested in that kind of thing, and a lot of current folks in the child rearing age range have been left adrift with nothing but pop-sci articles to guide them.
It's a shitshow, but I guess that's always been the case.
I'm all for that! But what I'm talking about is people (like the person I replied to) that present their N=1 anecdote as the gospel of how to parent right.
My brother and his wife did not sleep train their boy and co-slept with him. They had endless issues with sleep that continued past 2y old, were constantly exhausted, and eventually alternated who slept with him. We sleep trained our boy, same age, had very few issues even from very young.
Children are so different, from so early, it's not at all obvious what outcome for a particular kid is because of different strategies taken and what comes from their individual natures, or other aspects of their environment.
Co-sleeping's known to increase the SIDS risk, so it's another reason people are sometimes reluctant to do it, even if it would make the baby more comfortable.
The SIDS risk being parents rolling on top of and crushing / asphyxiating the baby. We just gloss over most of this sort of death by calling it SIDS to avoid having to charge the parents with a crime.
I believe those cases are included in SIDS statistics. I can’t find it but NPR had a long informative show with a doctor talking about SIDS, she mentioned that if you take out overweight/drunk parents the risk of SIDS from co sleeping is actually very low
EDIT: Another important factor is where the sleeping occurs. A bed is very safe, a couch is not. She pointed out that an exhausted parent lying down with the child for an intentional nap is much better than them falling asleep sitting up on the couch.
I've had to roll my wife off of our dog before, and she doesn't take sleep medication or drink. The dog would have been able to protest enough to get her to stir on her own, and probably has - I was just coming to bed at the time.
A baby would not have been able to. Some people are hard sleepers, and even if you're usually not you probably still have days where you are.
You would be wrong. I suppose it's anecdata but a member of my family who works in pedatrics sees this regularly unfortunately. Usually it's these new-age parents that think co-sleeping is somehow beneficial. You fall into a deep enough sleep, it takes almost no time at all to seriously injure or kill your child.
Frankly, co-sleeping with a baby is irresponsibility of the highest form. It may have worked for the GP but for every one that it works, another 100 show up to my family member's office or to the morgue. There's no conspiracy in why part of the "how to handle a baby" guidelines they give new parents is "never, ever, EVER co-sleep". Its far safer to assume that the new parent is not in the less-risky population and will in fact eventually cause their child's death.
Nearly the entire world except America and Western Europe "cosleeps" with their babies. And this has been happening for thousands of years. Unless you are morbidly obese(which again quite a lot of Americans are), you won't accidently kill your child while sleeping.
And you'd maybe need to do it with 700 more to kill one, but it's still a pretty substantial risk. They have bedside basinets where you can still drape an arm over - it seems like a good tradeoff to me.
LOL, every parent has a different set of anecdotes! We had sleeptime issues as well as a number of our friends. We did a gradual approach where we sat in a chair nearby the bed, then gradually moved the chair away, over about a week. Everything was fine after that.
I'm not sure if you're arguing for or against it, but for those who don't know, this is at its core sleep training. It doesn't require a parent to just throw their child into a crib, slam the door, and put in ear plugs. Anyone who ignores the needs of their child is cruel. That said, sometimes a child's needs are met and they just need to learn to go to sleep without someone patting their back.
As with all things, if it is applicable or not requires a comprehensive understanding of the actual situation, the people involved, and fair and balanced judgment and reasonable plan of action that adjusts to circumstances.
It is extremely difficult doing so in a high stress environment.
No 'cry it out' plan I've ever seen or heard of would recommend them crying for a very long time. It's really easy to just give up, at the point many parents find themselves doing sleep training, as it's not something folks want to talk about, and the sleep disruption is likely already been going on for a very long time and they're already exhausted.
Not our experience with co-sleeping at all: our sleep quality was terrible and the transition was extremely tough and prolonged. Congrats on getting lucky! :)
We co-slept with both of ours as well. We still do with my youngest who’s just shy of two.
He’s having eczema problems currently. Having him in the same bed as us means I can notice if he’s scratching and intervene, otherwise he’d keep scratching until he’s bleeding.
Did this with both my kids. The first one, probably not until 8 months old. The second we did earlier, at like 6 months.
Prior to sleep training the first one, I'd have to carry her around and sing to her for almost an hour before she'd go to sleep. It was rough sleep training her. Took less than a week, with the first 2 days being the worst (probably 3+ hours of repeatedly checking in).
Anyway, both kids adapted and turned out fine, and we got a lot of peace of mind and time back.
Did your kids get sick a lot? Mine went to daycare, and picked up a virus literally every other week. We could not continue sleep training while she was sick and crying from congestions/fever/etc so we just coslept.
With the second, we decided beforehand not to bother with sleep training, since he is our last and we liked the feeling of sleeping with them.
They both sleep alone now, although we put them to sleep by cosleeping and then leave.
I think every baby is probably different and there won’t be a one size solution.
We tried everything but the cry it out version where you let them cry for 10 mins then go in, reassure them, leave and repeat was definitely the worst strategy by a mile in our case.
What worked for us, and like magic, was stopping planning sleep times and instead planning awake times. E.g. after rising he’ll have 2.5 hours awake, then down for a 1st nap. Then whenever he wakes the clock starts for 3 hours, then down for a nap. 3rd awake pattern… etc.
The length of the wake windows extended by 10 mins or so each week but by that point there was a rhythm going and being able to get that far was 90% of the magic.
Cry it out is not the only sleep training technique. My wife and I have been able to implement a gradual reduction of supports in an effort to successfully sleep train our daughter. We started at four months by making situations that she sleeps easily a little harder: for example she would fall asleep while drinking so we started putting her sleeping bag on after she drank. As most people say, it won't fully click until after six months. Around six months she started to demonstrate that she could fall asleep by herself. By eight months she rejected help sleeping. Holding her and doing things that worked in the past would only make her angry, she would demand being placed in the bed when she wanted to sleep.
I read the primary study and admittedly skimmed the very long article. So far as I can tell the takeaway is: after baby is 6 months old there are no observed downsides to sleep training, is that correct?
To be clear, on my read there were no difference as far as downsides, it seemed to improve the mental health of the parents and it taught the babies to return to sleep without needing intervention from the parents, which I would argue are major upsides.
First kid slept through the while night immediately after coming home from hospital. When we proudly told pediatrician this at first checkup they became alarmed (even though weight gain was normal) and requested we wake him up every 4h. Very hard to wake him. Next checkup pediatrician says to wake him with wet washcloth. Still hard to wake, so we quit trying to wake him and enjoyed nearly 2 years of sleeping at night until kid #2: wouldn't go to sleep and continued not going to sleep until age 8.
Our baby will be 5 months in a few days. My partner and I both had kind of harsh upbringings (as in, our parents left us alone to cry among other things). So when we found out we were expecting, we bought a crib and said we'd be tough parents (though maybe less tough than ours).
Turns out we caved. Too hard to leave a crying baby especially because, instinctively, we know that it's his only way to communicate and he doesn't really know what's going on. This line is pretty much the same as what we reasoned:
> no one should ever do that to a three-month-old. They don't have object permanence, they don't know that if you're not in the room you haven't disappeared from the planet. It's psychologically damaging
Anyhow we're pretty happy with the decision. Our baby hardly cries, sleeps quite well and no one is stressed out. Not getting out of bed to feed is a massive bonus. There's no rocking him to sleep, we just go to bed and he falls asleep. And hopefully less childhood trauma than we had.
The article also quoted one researcher who said that if the baby was crying for more than 5 minutes, then it is probably not yet at a stage of development where it can learn to self-soothe. I think that is a good rule of thumb.
> Longer-term, the Australian study found that any parent-reported improvements in sleep from sleep training disappeared by age two.
> > What we found when the children were six was no difference to their sleep and no difference to their behaviour – Harriet Hiscock
It's not about long-term effects. It's about the parents getting to actually sleep.
We did sleep training as per What to Expect the First Year. Others we know spoiled their babies so much that now that their babies are toddlers, the "babies" still sleep with the parents -- I'm talking about people for whom it was not a cultural thing to let their children sleep with them, nor necessary due to lack of space or anything.
A former manager remarked to me one day that my one year old twins slept better than his 8 year old son. We've sleep trained all 3 of our children and I can't imagine our lives otherwise. I think we'd just manage to survive if they didn't sleep well and on their own.
This is my fear as well. Coworkers have mentioned similar where their wives co-sleep well into elementary school. I’ve met some of those kids, and they just don’t seem well adjusted — as in, during the day they don’t play by themselves unless a parent is nearby. My wife is in the same camp and just cannot bear our kids (1 and 3) crying, so it sabotages any attempt at training them to be independent at night. I finally had to banish her to a remote bedroom while I sleep train them.
I trained both of them at 1 and it only took a few days in a crib. The older one now has his own bed, so that’s been more challenging.
There are billions of children/people around the world that cosleep/coslept simply because having your own bed/sleeping mat/space is a luxury most do not have.
Kids cosleep in my parents’ villages in their home country because most families are living in a single room, but those kids are out playing all day while their parents work the fields or wherever.
I imagine a relatively recent luxury (by itself) available to relatively few people in the world is not a causal factor in people being “well adjusted”.
I do sometimes wonder on the effects of "positive" bullying in social circles. Not physical violence, but teasing etc. One boy in our childhood friendship group was constantly teased for his weight and bad eating habits. Eventually, he had had enough and one summer, hit the gym and got in shape. I suppose it easily could have gone the other way and this is all anecdotal but there must be other instances of such social effects
We didn't sleep train our daughter - our organisation was pretty messy to be honest - and although she did sleep in another room from a reasonable age, sleep was incredibly patchy and broken for years. Which broke us too! Something clicked when she was around 7.5 years old, and her sleep has been pretty fine since then. I know you say yours is 9, but I write this to hopefully offer some solace that things do change, even if you don't feel like you didn't do the right things. (And which 12-year-old wants to sleep in their parents' bed?! So although it may feel a long way off, it won't last forever...)
Cry it out is unnatural in my very humble opinion. It's a solution designed to get mothers back to work in a nuclear family. Children are a lot of work when little. It is extremely hard on the mother. There is also the big breast feeding mania - which while good will really not help the mother get back to work faster. I think we as a society need to make up our minds. Do we want more happy children and happy parents in a nuclear family or do we want mothers and fathers back to work as fast as possible with no regard to the children? It seems we're settling for the latter and making some bullshit pseudo-analysis that its the former.
USSR in early decades wanted people back to work ASAP (and social security in 1920-30-s was almost non-existent in the country), so the attitude towards bearing a child and towards children was the same: force everyone to follow strict schedule, no matter what.
The narrative behind this was different, more like militarized: teach them to sooth themselves, don't devote too much time, or they'll grow up handheld children, and then be spoiled slackers, etc.
My parents let me "cry it out" when I was a kid. I cried so much I got a mild hernia. Mild enough that it has never caused any problems. But it left a bump in my abdomen that I can still feel as a man in my late 30s.
If it's an epigastric hernia (which is most likely, considering it's caused you no issues and hasn't been operated on) then it most likely developed during the very early foetal stage. Epigastric hernias are largely a cosmetic nuisance as it's just fat from the abdominal wall (not intestinal tissue) that's poking through. However, sometimes that fat can get trapped and cause the area to become sore and red, but the body prunes the trapped fat off and reabsorbs it, unlike an abdominal hernia where trapped tissue can quickly become a life-threatening situation due to sepsis.
My wife and I co-sleep with our kids (2 & 4). I get just about a full sleep every night. If the kids wake up I imagine it's much less work to roll over and cuddle with them as opposed to getting out of bed, going to a separate room and then comforting them. Co-sleeping gets bonus points for giving me just a little extra sweet time with my kids, because before I know it they will be older and wanting their own space. They are only little once.
Forgive me here; I'm approaching this from a place of ignorance and curiosity, and I hope I don't overstep any personal boundaries - both for you and myself!
My wife and I had many reasons for why we ultimately chose not to co-sleep. One of those reasons was our sex life. I don't pretend to know what the "norm"/average is, but it's frequent for us, 3-4 times per week, and at the risk of TMI, it can be fairly... involved. We know a few couples who co-sleep and I've always been curious how, or hell, even if, it has impacted their sexual relationships. Clearly it works for them (and you) and that's great! I would just be interested, if you're comfortable sharing, to hear what your experience has been here.
From personal experience: after we had kids, sex became a lot more about opportunity than any particular place (our bed) and time (at night). It was that way for a while. Now, they're a little more grown up, and things are the way they were before. Everything is a phase.
Ha! Perfectly reasonable question. Well, we just about never have sex in our room, but luckily for us our house is large enough with plenty of other venues for intercourse. The hardest thing for both me and my wife is the fact that we can't just roll over and fall asleep afterwards. I do miss those days!
I'm not the person you are replying to, but my kids often find their way into our room before we get there. We usually just move them back to their own beds. If they come back on their own, it's usually not until much later after we've had time to ourselves. My kids go in phases, for a few weeks they will come in every night, then for seemly no reason, they won't come again for a month or so. However with 3 kids, they can't sync that schedule so we more often than not have a kid in our bed.
We co-slept with all three kids and caught flak for it from the pediatrician. She was certain that one or both parents were going to roll over onto the kids and squish them. Very pleased we did it, but you may have to stand your ground with well-meaning but ignorant people.
My wife looked into this and I think the safety issue is mostly a myth. I think the rare cases of child deaths while co-sleeping were when the parent was drunk or smoking in the bed and caused a fire.
I'm sure they are very educated about SIDS. But their job is to give you enough information on the pros and cons so you can make a well informed decision yourself.
It isn't the job of any expert to tell you if you should or should not do something. Humans have been cosleeping with their infants since time began. Clearly there are some serious pros to it. An expert who is truly good will never tell you what to do. They will only inform you of the pros and cons and let you arrive at your own conclusion.
It's the same deal with lawyers, dentists, accountants, security folks, UX designers, engineers and everything else. I mean, could you imagine what a product would look like if you only took input from your lawyer?
>Humans have been cosleeping with their infants since time began.
Take a look at a graph of infant mortality rates since time began, chief. Appealing to "this is how things have always been" does not really work in this case.
> Take a look at a graph of infant mortality rates since time began, chief
Thats cool. I have. But we co-slept anyway because for us the benefits outweighed the risks. Especially while breastfeeding... Raw facts and data alone are not the only things required to make an informed decision on any subject. They only serve as inputs.
There are a range of reasons why the paediatrician may not be giving the full story. Most particularly, they’re toeing the party (AAP) line, which is known to be more conservative than is needed.
Also, population-level data should not be the only input into an individual decision.
We started co-sleeping with our son at first wake at around 8 months, and have been doing that continuously for the past 7 months or so (basically he sleeps with us in bed between 2 and 6ish AM). I've enjoyed the arrangement but my wife is tired of it, due to getting kicked and punched all night long. On top of that, she's 32 weeks pregnant and really needs the sleep.
Does your wife share your enthusiasm for co-sleeping?
That sounds rough! From what my wife has let on, third trimester sleep is tough any way you slice it. My kids kick me sometimes, but usually I can just move them over and resume my slumber. It helps that we took two mattresses (a king and a twin) and pushed them together, so there is plenty of room for the four of us.
And to answer your question, my wife is even more gung-ho than I about co-sleeping. She actually had to convince me to start doing it in the first place, because I shared the concern of lot of commenters here with regards to SIDS.
> my wife is tired of it, due to getting kicked and punched all night
I hope this isn't patronizing. If you want it to work you could put the little one on your side of the bed instead of in the middle. A mattress on the floor next to you can make rolling out of bed a non-event.
Or sleep on a futon / remove the bed stand. There are many variations that work.
SIDS research is really difficult to interpret because of issues with medical records and problems with socioeconomic and cultural confounds. So, for example, cosleeping is much more common in immigrant populations and there are a lot of uncontrolled confounds related to access to healthcare, etc. Medical examiners are also hesitant to blame parents often and SIDS is frequently used to avoid assignments of responsibility.
My spouse and I were really surprised by the actual research when we looked closely at it. It's much murkier than is commonly believed.
My experiences in research and with pediatrics has led me to be deeply skeptical of a lot of common claims about infant and child sleep.
I think a healthy dose of caution is warranted but I think a lot of this area is not quite what it seems I initially ( which I think is part of the point of the article).
Covers most of this. And with education campaigns and shifts in habits, overall mortality not just ‘SIDS’ rates have dropped a lot.
As to risk/reward, long term implications of things, etc. - I don’t know, and I don’t know anyone who reasonably can claim to know, but I also haven’t seen any reason to be concerned overall.
Plenty of bigger, more concerning issues - like lack of healthy socialization among kids, etc. in many environments, reduction in exercise, anxiety issues, social media, etc.
Source? Everything I’ve read has shown this to be more of an urban legend if anything. Most SIDS deaths related to cosleeping involved alcohol or drugs. SIDS was actually found to be reduced due to breathing regulation matching that of the parent.
The change in sleeping habits due to public health campaigns seems to have cut frequency roughly in half, maybe even as much as 75% depending on how much reach you give the education credit for. Still the #1 cause of death for infants, but a lot less so now.
I will not trust medicine on this. It's just too vague and enough babies have been killed because "sleeping face down is better".
If one of the strongest parental instinct is sleeping with your baby, I'll trust mother nature this time.
Sorry, I'm particularly bitter about this. We have been pushed away from Co-sleeping due to poor education and when we did, we got from 2 hours of sleep per week to 8 hours per day, and a lot more cuddles.
It's mangled because humans are complex. A lot of the risks are from activities or issues that cause sleep problems -- alcohol, drugs, sleep apnea. What is the likelihood that a baby gets smothered? These all factor in. The risk decreases with age.
Co-sleeping, generally, is much more dangerous than sleeping on their own in a proper crib. If it works for you, great. Some people take extraordinary steps to ensure it's safe, like removing pillows or fluffy comforters. It should not be generally recommended though.
I don't think hypotheticals are very useful. A sleep deprived parent is a risk in any scenario. It's a moot point.
The only point I was making is that it is generally agreed upon that a crib is safe for babies to sleep in. They can't fall out, get smothered, etc.
Medicine treats co-sleeping horrifically because, by any measure, it's less safe. Few medical professionals will recommend, generally, anything associated with such risk.
If you choose to co-sleep, I believe you should simply accept the risks. We can't pretend there are none. We can't reasonably ask the medical community to stop being harsh.
Perhaps co-sleeping hasn't had it's "fed is best" moment that we've seen with bottle v breast, but I'm not sure it ever will. It's simply more risky.
That's what I'm disagreeing with: there is less risk of the baby dying IN THE CRIB, but there isn't less risk of the baby dying overall, that's not assessed (and it would be very hard to prove), but the reality is just that.
Then again, the risk factors of Co-sleeping are known and can be eliminated: put the bed on the floor, remove extra pillows, use light covers or no blankets, set the room temperature to something you can sleep well while naked, no drugs/alcohol.
There is also a whole thing about the skin-to-skin sleep providing to the baby regulation for breathing and circulation (no idea about the scientific base of it, but it was told by doctors, so I assume there is some), which seems to help for other issues too, as well as being a known way to prevent SIDS.
Sorry, but you’re wrong. Not only wrong, but confidently and smugly wrong. You think you know best but haven’t bothered to actually do any real research on this topic.
Hey, sorry for my tone previously, I'm particularly irrational when it comes to co-sleeping due to being treated poorly due to my choice.
I did research based on 5 books and talking to professionals (extensively), my research stopped when I assessed that it's not as high risk as depicted by the verbiage used by some professionals at the hospital.
This is not my field of expertise, so of course my knowledge is limited.
I won't give recommendations from the medical perspective, but I will strongly suggest to reconsider the stance toward co-sleeping.
What does it mean to be "wrong" in this context? Maybe they've looked at the information and decided that the pros outweigh the risks? Who gets to decide that when such a decision is well outside the scope of science or facts? Such decisions fall into a persons values and risk assessments. No expert can, nor should, make such a decision for an individual.
Yes that's what I meant, but I don't think my statement reflected that correctly, it came as "this should be what you should do" and in a certain way, I'm arguing exactly against that behavior.
I apologized in a separate comment.
Yes, we did a risk assessment (we were literally terrified of having the baby sleep with us), I read ~5 books about the topic before the baby was born and talked to various professionals.
It was a weighted risk: me and my wife don't roll while asleep (I sleep tummy down and she sleeps tummy up), and I wake up when I have to roll.
We also adopted various strategies to check on any babies movement: for example, I had an arm in physical contact with baby's body.
Later on the baby just slept on mom's breasts, in which case she had full control (any movement would wake her up) at that point.
> P. S. Again sorry for my tone, I'm super angry for how the entire medicine treats Co-sleeping like a horrific thing
This is a theme across all kinds of expertise. In my opinion a good expert will understand that the world isn't black and white. They'll understand that there are many, many more variables that go into a decision than their particular line of expertise. They'll understand their job is to clearly convey the risks and benefits that fall into their scope and more important they'll clearly state that they alone cannot make a decision for you.
Bad medical professionals think their expertise is all that should go into a decision. Good medical professionals will understand that there are countless other factors that go into a person's decision that fall well outside of the scope of their expertise.
Based on what I've observed over the last 3 years, there are plenty of "experts" out there who seem to think that only their line of expertise should go into any decision.
The other challenge is the one of ‘how do you actually get different behavior’.
Knowing all the shades of grey, what do you tell folks in the 15 seconds of attention (at most) that you’ll be able to get that may produce a better outcome.
The issue is that even doing basic summaries of what is (actually) happening would require full time attention from a researcher 24/7 (so really 3 researchers, minimum).
Parents are sleep deprived, under incredible stress, and trying to avoid judgement from any number of other parties. Asking for survey responses ain't going to help, and even if they are trying to be fully transparent, they won't be able remember half of what is going on anyway.
Having read "The Boy Who was Raised as a Dog", which goes into a fair amount of detail regarding attachment and attachment disorders, letting an infant "cry it out" strikes me as child abuse. Infants have no control over their environment, and crying is almost their only way to communicate.
I'm not enthusiastic about sleep training either - the gradual, controlled removal of sleep time emotional support by the parent. I would suggest to be very conservative and cautious if you want to take that route, and as the article states, definitely not before the age of 6 months.
Edit: I saw another comment which talked about "checking in" on the infant during sleep training. I think there is some middle ground I would be comfortable with after 6 months of age, where you don't rock the child to sleep for an hour, but you check in on them, gently touch them, talk to them soothingly for a little bit, and then you leave them for a little while. Come back in a little bit and briefly soothe them, and then leave again for a little while. As long as they know you are there. And you could stretch those periods out to see how the child does. But, again I would suggest to be very conservative and cautious and don't try this at too early of an age.
The article mentions this 5y study (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22966034/) which included a sleep training intervention at 7m, and found "no evidence of differences between intervention and control families for any outcome".
It sounds like the main concern would be starting sleep training too early (sub 6 months), or using it in unusual situations where there are already attachment issues.
> where you don't rock the child to sleep for an hour, but you check in on them, gently touch them, talk to them soothingly for a little bit, and then you leave them for a little while. Come back in a little bit and briefly soothe them, and then leave again for a little while. As long as they know you are there. And you could stretch those periods out to see how the child does
You just described the Ferber method, a very popular sleep training approach.
Theres different levels of crying, and its easy to tell the difference as a parent. Theres regular, all-purpose crying which I'm in favor of allowing to run its course. Then theres actual panicked, full-on crying which is when I would say its time to intervene.
Not regarding a human child, but my spouse thought leaving our rescue dog, still a youngster only a few months old, in a cage in another room overnight was somehow proper, which frankly incensed me as cruel and abusive nonsense, because it's not the way of the wild, not what any of us were evolved for. And I'd lived with and worked with rescue animals for decades, so felt strongly about this.
(i put my foot down and gave her run of the house so she was soothed to be with her (generalized) family, and she's been fantastic ever since. my spouse is still indignant about her plan being abandoned, but it proved the effective and healthy choice.)
Crate training is a good thing (imo) but should be done properly. Not just sticking them in a crate overnight in another room and ignoring them.
Our dog is crate trained, which makes travelling with him way easier for example. (He is 1 year old now, so at night he just walks into his crate whenever he feels tired. We don’t have to put him in his crate anymore).
You have to make sure they associate positive experiences with it.
Adding to this, we didn’t crate train our dog and while I wouldn’t say I regret that, it makes things harder.
She hated the crate when we introduced it. We couldn’t find any way to get her in there without her panicking and trying to dig out after a few minutes. She had a bad history before us and is completely fine outside the crate so we gave up.
Day to day it’s fine. She wanders on her own schedule, has a dog bed she claims as her space, and doesn’t really cause any issues. However, when we travel she’s loose in the car without a comfortable space. When some people visit there’s no obvious place to send her, so she has to be locked in a room where she isn’t used to being confined. When kids visit she has a harder time getting away from the chaos. She doesn’t have a consistently dark place during the day to sleep. The list goes on.
Crate training isn’t just about giving your dog a small room you can lock them in, it’s giving them a private, safe, emotionally and physically comfortable space they can call their own. The crate travels - so their safe space is always with them, they can escape to it, and they are in a comfortable place if you need to lock them up for some reason (as always happens sometimes). Our dog doesn’t have that.
We picked up a young stray. Too rambunctious to be left out overnight. Well-behaved generally but around 3 am he jumps on top of us and wants to play. Not working. A crate though? Seems barbaric. But we did it gently, in slowly increasing increments. If he became distressed, we let him out. I think that's probably key. Oh, sleepy time? Let's try to get him to do it in the crate for an hour. Then a few hours.
Now, around bed time, he goes in on his own, lies down and waits for his treat. He usually prefers to sleep in the crate, and he goes there during thunderstorms too; it's a good safe place. We don't usually have to lock the crate door anymore, but when he's rowdy it's "no! bed!" and he goes and lies down in the crate, and we can cinch him in, for a few more hours of rest. Even that's increasingly rare.
I think a major mistake is to use it to separate the dog from people. It's very important that he can hear us nearby, even just sleeping. If he can't hear us, it becomes separation anxiety and he needs to get out because he's trapped in an isolated place. About five minutes out of the bedroom and the whining will start. I'd guess that it's probably also important that it be predictable and associated with daily routines. And it should never be used as punishment.
that last paragraph is exactly what was wrong in our first few nights and which we changed by moving the crate into the main bedroom with us, and then there was no need for the crate door to be closed. everything seemed harmonious (hence my assertion the original distant part of house nonsense was unnatural isolation).
good point. we left her crate set up with door open, which she could use as a "fort", and she did like that for napping. i guessed partly in the sense she doesn't have to stay partially awake worrying about being stepped on.
Not to defend crate training, but potty training, walking your dog on a schedule, feeding it processed dog food and generally keeping a pet indoors is also not the way of the wild.
These are actually somewhat similar to wild dog behaviours. They usually have specific areas to poo, and they often have routines – albeit, not externally-enforced ones.
Don't worry, crate training is indeed illegal in many western European nations.
Americans who do this are deluded into thinking it's okay. I had the misfortune of living with a person who did this with their two dogs and I saw the impacts it had on the dog first hand.
No, 10000 years ago, when the dog fell asleep in the den with its "owners", the den door was NOT closed. It is abusive as fuck to crate train.
I'm also very happy to have seen states like California take a stand against usage of small crates within factory farming techniques with chicken and veal. There's still far more to be done on this front, but there will be an end to this practice eventually.
I don't get it either. Our shelter dogs were always crated overnight since they weren't allowed in the bedrooms and they would go there when it was bed time with no problem. Occasionally they'd go to their crate to take naps or seek refuge there during storms. I guess if a dog willingly going into a crate to sleep while everyone else slept is cruel and abusive I don't know what they'd think about actual abuse. Our dogs lived long happy lives. Most dogs I know have a spot that's tight and cozy, maybe even covered, that they go to; crate or not. If you crate train with positive reinforcement it's a benefit for everyone IMO even if you don't make them sleep in there.
You're talking about the dog not minding being in the crate since you've taught them its nice and cozy. In that case why does it have to be a crate, why not say, an indoor doghouse?
As far as that goes, there's nothing wrong with that and that's not the part that people actually have problems with (but it's a nice strawman to argue against).
The part that is cruel and abusive is locking them up when nobody is at home so they can't damage your possessions. If there is some emergency like a fire, intruder, something falling down, etc, they can't do anything about it.
I think what we did is much more similar to what you describe, with the crate door left open, so she didn't feel isolated when the other pets and humans were in other rooms. we moved the crate upstairs and left the door to it open, and she took a liking to it as her own space, and would choose to go sleep in it like it was her bedroom (or whatever), but having it at the distant end of the house clearly alone for the sake of isolating her is what I found counterproductive.
Docking tails and ears is normal too. Male circumcision is normal. Locking people in cages for possessing certain plants, extracts, chemicals is normal. War and all of the murder that goes on in it is normal. Burning coal is normal. Limiting rights of women is some countries is normal.
>Edit: I saw another comment which talked about "checking in" on the infant during sleep training. I think there is some middle ground I would be comfortable with after 6 months of age, where you don't rock the child to sleep for an hour, but you check in on them, gently touch them, talk to them soothingly for a little bit, and then you leave them for a little while. Come back in a little bit and briefly soothe them, and then leave again for a little while. As long as they know you are there. And you could stretch those periods out to see how the child does. But, again I would suggest to be very conservative and cautious and don't try this at too early of an age.
I have two children under the age of three, so this has been a topic I'm innately familiar with. What you are describing is the commonly taught method of "crying it out" or "sleep training", and yes, it's commonly suggested to wait until at least six months of age.
It's incredibly frustrating how many people in this thread seem to think that we are just abandoning our children for the evening and calling it abusive, even earlier in your own post.
Well said. My wife is a therapist who works extensively with children and she would absolutely agree with you. Letting a child cry it out has profound effects of development, in ways that may be invisible or hard to notice for many years. Someone else in this thread mentioned The Boy Who Was Raised As a Dog, which is a great book on the subject.
"Hiscock's study, for example, the largest and longest longitudinal study done on sleep training, found sleep-trained children were no more likely to be insecurely attached to their caregiver at six years of age than their peers."
> Having read "The Boy Who was Raised as a Dog", which goes into a fair amount of detail regarding attachment and attachment disorders, letting an infant "cry it out" strikes me as child abuse.
You sound exactly like someone who doesn’t have kids, advising parents and speaking with authority that you don’t have.
> and speaking with authority that you don’t have.
All of us have (had) parents, the majority of us have been raised by parents, and that includes the childless people. And even the people who weren't fortunate enough to be raised by one or two parents are entitled to talk about parenting, I'd say that they're even more entitled to talk about it.
The discussion is in no way comparable. If anything, you could say that we've all been actors, i.e we've al been kids, but even that seems a little stretched.
Anyway, this talk of "it's so hard to be a parent!" mostly comes from middle-class well-to-do people for whom it shouldn't be actually hard to be parents, or at least not as hard as it objectively is to much poorer people.
I suspect they're mostly doing it (the complaining, that is) as a social signifier, the same way that part of the same well-to-do middle class people used to complain until not that long ago that they're over-worked because of all of the emails.
You have no authority to say they are not comparable, nor do you have any authority to say that being a child gives you any insight on how to be a parent.
Just an anecdote from friends: Their baby was crying a lot and having a lot of trouble with sleeping. Desperate after some months they tried out one last thing the doctor suggested: The mother switched to a vegan diet. And the baby suddenly is calm and sleeps well. Later it turned out their child had several food sensitivities, which caused a lot of discomfort. It seems the vegan diet of the mother made her milk less irritating for the baby. The lesson: Sometimes babies cry for a reason. It is worth changing your routines to figure out the cause of discomfort.
I find this interesting that human infants are the only ones to cry out and make lots of noise, it must have been recent historically as making yourself known to predators is generally not a good idea evolution wise.
Other primates don't cry like humans, so maybe by the time human crying became common, humans were already established as dominant predators not to be fucked with. Human babies are never left alone so a crying baby probably signaled the presence of 5-10 adult humans or more. Not exactly an easy meal.
Human infants were not left alone to go hunt for food, i believe the modern concept of family is at play here. People used to live with their parents so, much more help - much less crying.
> In their recent paper published in JCPP, Bilgin and Wolke (2020a) argue that leaving an infant to ‘cry it out’, rather than responding to the child’s cries, had no adverse effects on mother–infant attachment at 18 months. This finding opposes evidence across a wide range of scientific fields. Here, we outline several concerns with the article and argue against some of the authors’ strong claims, which have already gained media attention, including a report on the NHS website. We suggest that the authors’ conclusions should be considered one piece of a larger scientific whole, where ‘cry it out’ seems, overall, to be of detriment to both attachment and development. Crucially, we are concerned that this study has issues regarding power and other analytical decisions. More generally, we fear that the authors have overstated their findings and we hope that members of the public do not alter their parenting behaviours in line with such claims without further research into this controversial topic.
Human infants are not meant to sleep alone, and human parents are not meant to care for babies all by themselves- especially not one exhausted mother all on her own. Evolutionarily speaking we are supposed to be surrounded by extended family, who can hold the baby and give mom and dad a chance to sleep. It's just the cruelty of modern industrial society that makes people resort to such things as leaving a baby all alone. Future generations are going to see these practices as tragic and the fact that we don't support new parents leads to stressed out, insecure babies, or worse.
Here's the truth: nothing works. They just eventually grow out of it. When they are a year or two old, you can start transitioning to having them sleep by themselves.
I really did try to sleep train my youngest.. I would set a timer and not let her go too long. I really tried. Once I went and picked her up after 15 minutes, and her little voice had grown hoarse. She was covered in sweat and shaking and she just collapsed against me when I picked her up. Her tiny body, just limp against me. She had nothing left. And she whimpered softly. Babies aren't meant to sleep alone. I wish I had someone I could call. One hour of sleep would have meant everything.
This line of reasoning is absurd. We do a lot of things we aren’t “meant” to do evolutionarily. Babies can and do sleep alone just fine. Sorry it didn’t work out in your case, but don’t try to appeal to Evolution to rationalize it to yourself.
Is it absurd? I think your statement is a bit too strong given what the OP has described: that seems a really painful experience for a parent.
There is the possibility that it is an evolutionary trait of some subset of the population: some children might not be able to sustain sleep training and others might be.
So your statement is extreme too: it's entirely possible that some human beings are not made for that and others are.
The only certainty we have is that humans need physical contact when they are babies, we don't know how much is enough from a scientific point though (and I doubt we would be able to do any experiment related to that ever again)
No affiliation at all, just a gentler alternative that worked for us.
I understand there may be no one-size-fits-all and each family and child are unique, but from my anecdotal experience, with my wife implementing the above program with our third child, it had a major positive impact on her (my wife's) psyche and anxiety surrounding infant sleep (especially when compared to our first two children). It also helped my sister with her child.
I'm far from an expert on the program as my wife did all the heavy lifting, but at it's core, it revolves around building up sleep pressure during the day so that the child is ready and able to sleep at night. I see some overlap with the stuff Andrew Huberman talks about in his podcast.
"Modern Mayan mothers, for example, expressed shock when they heard that in the US, babies were put to sleep in a separate room."
That they followed it up with why Mayan mothers prefer to sleep with the baby. Is it just a default cultural expectation or do they have their own reason for it?
TBH it seems kind of shocking to European me as well. Not sleeping in the same bed I understand for sure, but putting the baby in a separate room seems ... unnecessarily cruel?
As mentioned multiple times in the article. Most of the world co-sleeps with their kids. Sleep training is only a norm in US and some other western countries.
The issue I've had with studies of children and parenting techniques is this:
There's rarely any accounting for family culture. How people in the family treat each other day-to-day matters. Do the parents fight when the kid sleeps? This will for sure impact the kid and their sleep if they hear it. Is there a sibling who torments the kid? Sleep issues practically guaranteed.
We've found it's much more effective to talk to our friends who've been doing trauma work. Finding out how they were handled and the impact they report tends to lead to more insight we can use.
Studies that don't account for family culture and are done in countries where there's lots of shame and fear of judgment around what's going on in a family are already flawed.
Most threads cover anecdotal experiences and the summary is that many different strategies work.
I’m gonna go ahead and mention what I haven’t seen almost any thread say. Which is that any singular child’s early infant and toddler stages pale in comparison to the other 15 or 16 years+ that also determine your child’s habits, disposition and development.
Ignore the noise, partial studies and fads. Do what is best for you.
Dare I say if parents were less fixated on early sleep methods and actually being present and supportive (which also strongly correlates to having a healthy relationship with your partner and how your child sees you love them) throughout we would probably have better equipped and developed young adults.
We over index on sleep training when we lose sleep because it’s hard. But it’s a season.
> "Because early experiences of stress may program the HPA (hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal) axis to be more stress reactive, increasing risk of physical and mental health problems in later life, our results suggest that parenting in infant sleep contexts may play an important role in shaping how the child responds to stress across childhood,"
I never liked the "cry it out". suspecting something like that. It was hard waking up at night but we did it anyway. It felt it was the right thing to do. I understand some might say it's evolutionary and just a way for kids to tug at our heart strings, and they may be fine otherwise. However, I sure wasn't going to experiment with that on my children.
Which child suffers more emotionally? The one that undergoes sleep training and has emotional distress for a few nights and afterwards occasionally wakes during the night and goes back to sleep on their own, or the child that for years, whenever they wake during the night undergoes emotional distress until their caregiver wakes, is able to get up, and get to the child?
The first one, because in the second case the caregiver actually comes and comforts them.
Stress and damage during certain phases of growth and development might not be reversible. That's what the researchers were talking about "experiences of stress may program the HPA (hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal) axis to be more stress reactive,"
My wife and I deliberated over this for a month. In the end, we decided that "cry it out" was really just gaming the infant's evolving worldview with a sense of "learned helplessness" - something both of us struggle with individually. So we knew it would be tougher on us - and it definitely was - but the alternative of teaching a baby that the only thing they could really do was "ineffective" was something we couldn't stomach.
At some point we all learn that we're helpless and we can't do shit to change the world... But we didn't want the baby to learn that from _us_.
The silence overwhelmed Mary Carlson when she visited row upon row of swaddled babies in a Romanian orphanage. No babbling, no crying, not even a whimper.
``The children are just lying there. You don’t hear crying, even in a room full of infants,″ Carlson said.
The orphanages are terribly overcrowded and understaffed, leaving little chance for the attention babies need. Not even mealtime offers a chance to cuddle: bottles are propped in the cribs.
The problem with citing the Romanian orphanage is that it's too extreme to be in any way relevant to sleep training. There's a huge difference between gradual extinction (with parents coming back regularly in the room), with a loving relationship during the day and children in the Romanian orphanage who were left with no warm human contact whatsoever.
When my wife was pregnant we purchased very nice bed with eco matress in it and all sort of development toys attached to it. When our child reached a few months we tried to get him sleep over there but after a few days resigned (damn british floors making noises when you walk on them...) Plus I'm a sleep walker (very mild but still) so when we had our first child I opted to sleep in living room while my wife had our child with her at night. Kids have no problems sleeping in their beds now, though it requires discipline in applying daily routine, otherwise sleep time can slip a lot...
My sample size is low, but I did cry it out with my son at 4 months old and he has slept amazing ever since. He is 16 months old now and he gets excited when I put him in his crib to sleep. He will often go to the crib unprompted around 7:30pm (his normal bedtime), as he is ready to sleep. I've had sleeping problems my whole life, so seeing him sleep so well is very satisfying to me. I will be doing the same with my second child.
We did sleep training with ours, it took two days and a solid sleeper ever since. I don’t think cry it out always works. But the side hustle is that you have a schedule and stick to it.
Have a read what Gabor Mate has to say about sleep training
“ The implicit message an infant receives from having her cries ignored is that the world — as represented by her caregivers — is indifferent to her feelings. That is not at all what loving parents intend.”
So what does happen when babies are left to cry it out? I read over a dozen paragraphs and it never told me. Just told me about a hypothesis and that some people are shocked at other cultures.
It spent most of that time talking about outrage by online communities instead of just giving me information. Terrible journalism.
It told me that there were two studies and how many babies were involved, but not the findings of the study. Garbage.
We use an app called Huckleberry for sleep training our first child and I am more than satisfied with the results after 13 months. Our daughter sleeps between 10-11 hours at night, has a daytime routine-ish for naps +- 1hr (until we're down to one), she eats great, and yes selfishly - we, the parents, are very happy about the overall schedule and predictability.
This appears to be an Anglosphere thing. I, being American, tried to introduce this to my baby son's European mother. She was not having it. "If he's crying, he wants to be held. This 'crying it out' will lead to lack of trust." And the baby slept in the same bed with us for about 3 months.
American's sense of independence and boot-strap mentality doesn't end just because you get old; we have a second master bedroom in our house and both my and my wife's parents have turned down offers to live there.
My daughter was never sleep trained. At 7, she still requires an adult lying in the bed with her or at the very least in a chair beside the bed with an arm to cuddle to get to sleep.
Presumably this won't still be the case at age 14 though so it doesn't seem like its a problem.
It doesn’t surprise me this has 433 comments (so far). Other than what you feed your child there is no topic that is more contentious among new, exhausted parents.
It's easier for the family when the child is in the room with the parents. At least in the same way it is easier to have a master bathroom rather than one on the other side of the house.
> is it an "obsession" or simply a cultural difference?
It was an imposed cultural difference. American parents were told they would hurt their children if they slept in the same room with them, or attended to them too quickly when they cried. So they changed their behavior in order to conform.
>It's easier for the family when the child is in the room with the parents. At least in the same way it is easier to have a master bathroom rather than one on the other side of the house.
Up to a point, sure. One common scenario is for newborns to sleep in their own crib/basinet/whathaveyou in the parent's room for a short time, before moving into their own room. Many people don't sleep train until their children are at least six months, if not much older. Other parents will keep them in their beds.
I have two children under the age of three and, anecdotally, where and how parents decide to have their children sleep is really all over the board because it boils down to what works best for the family.
And I think it's really stupid, unfair and short-sighted to judge other parents for their decisions in this area.
Also, children are wildly different! My elder slept terribly for about 3 months, until we gave up on trying to cosleep, and slept for almost 6 hours straight when we put him down by himself for the first time. The younger liked co-sleeping and transitioning to a separate room was much harder.
Completely agreed. If the children and parents are happy and healthy, whatever is happening in their home is working for them and it's absolutely not my place to question it. Everybody is different.
SIDS data shows a (relatively) high occurrence of kids dying by having parents roll over on them, or them getting entrapped/suffocated in bedding. In traditional cultures, this usually gets covered up.
Additionally, it’s much harder for the parents or kids to get consistent sleep (often already causing a lot of difficulties during this time), when toddler age kids are in the same area, due to differing schedules.
In the US, due to mainly socio-economic issues (need to migrate for work often results in families separated over long distances), it is relatively uncommon to have relatives living in the same household able to help with childcare too, especially late at night. So it puts a lot more load on the parents.
If not managed effectively, this can break the parents in ways no one likes to talk about in polite company.
As far as I'm aware, rolling over and suffocating is NOT SIDS. With SIDS, the cause is undetermined.
This is also a weird presumption: go to bed when the kids go to sleep and wake up early. You get the same amount of sleep and a free morning.
> SIDS: A disorder marked by the sudden and unexpected death of a healthy child who is younger than one year old, usually during sleep. The cause of sudden infant death syndrome is not known. Also called crib death and SIDS
'Unexplained' is a large portion of SIDS deaths. Folks trying to protect parents and the family from blame for 'preventable' deaths is also a thing.
As SIDS is better understood, and categorization is changing (addressed in the paper I linked elsewhere) the graph showing proportions of accidental suffocation/strangulation during sleep is rising while SIDS is dropping - but both numbers are adding up to about the same. (see total SUID death rate, Figure 1)
It's saying some proportion is, but it's unknown (and likely unknowable) what the actual proportion really is, for a multitude of reasons. It's unlikely to be most.
There are a lot of similar issues with mortality data in general, but kids are a particularly sensitive topic. For instamce, a large portion of 'gun cleaning accidents' are suicides. How many has changed with the times and the fashions. It's possible to guesstimate approximately of course, but we'll never really know for sure unless we somehow plunked an invisible researcher over the shoulder of every person all day every day.
If you and your spouse are of healthy weight and the mother breastfeeds all night and the bed is stripped of heavy bedding and pillows this is unlikely.
I wish doctors would give parents this advice because what happens now is that many American parents will cosleep without admitting it and don't know what to do when they engage in it.
In many traditional cultures, the baby is breastfed all night and the bed is stripped and beds are on the floor. If you do these , sids risk is greatly diminished. Some of the cosleep studies on sids are flawed. They conflate taking a baby onto a couch to sleep with an exhausted mother the same as a breastfeeding mother falling asleep with her child on a flat surface. But Americans are obsessed with cribs so doctors don't give any advice and conflate two unlike things.
In British Columbia, Canada, new mothers are given material that talks about how to co-sleep in a safe manner, just as you say. Ensuring the mother has not had alcohol or drugs, covers and pillows are kept away and that the mother isn’t falling asleep exhausted (easier said than done, but going to bed early and not being up all night are key).
We are in BC but it was still treated poorly: kinda not talked about, poorly represented on news (kid died because family was Co-sleeping!), in the hospital they strictly avoided it. We were lucky with a great prenatal course though.
Made a huge difference, since our baby didn't sleep for more than 1 hour without a human body until she was age 2. Now if she's tired, she naturally fall asleep.
Considering nearly zero Americans are of healthy weight right now (obesity rate over 42%), even if you don’t consider stress eating that often happens with a new baby - just limiting by healthy weight or not is going to bias any results towards a pretty small group of people.
Obesity is 'you're going to die an early death because you're overweight'. It is the polar opposite of a healthy weight, but there is a lot of red in the gap. You might not be aware of that? It's one of those uncomfortable truths no one likes talking about. Even Dr's won't usually mention it to patients.
26.4% of the American population is not overweight. I didn't correlate to eating disorders resulting in people being under weight - I've seen a decent amount of that too. Probably 5 to maybe even 10%.
I'm struggling to see how that isn't a pretty select cohort that is a healthy weight, no?
Anecdotally, most Americans consider me lean and athletic - I'm a good 20 lbs overweight by reasonable historic standards, but not obese. The overton window has shifted a lot, but our bodies and what is healthy for us are no different.
> Obesity is 'you're going to die an early death because you're overweight'.
No, its not. Even morbidly obese doesn’t mean that, though it statistically correlates with a greater reduction in expected lifespan.
> 73.6% of American Adults over 20 years old are overweight. [...] I didn't correlate to eating disorders resulting in people being under weight - I've seen a decent amount of that too. Probably 5 to maybe even 10%.
1.6% of adults over 20, actually, using 2018 numbers. [0]
At any rate, even if it was your 5-10%, not enough to make the “at a healthy weight” number close to 0 (even if underweight was relevant in context of being more likely to suffocate an infant, which I would hazard a guess it is not.)
Ok? Apologies for overstating. It does definitely impact mortality, with overweight meaning approximately 5 years earlier death, and obesity approx. 10. That is a significant percentage of life expectancy.
Though I wasn’t claiming its relevance, rather replying to the prior posters apparent assertion that their suggested course of action was widely applicable (when they said it was for folks of healthy weight).
Which if it requires a healthy weight, definitely means it’s not widely applicable right now.
I understand the argument to be that it doesn't work well for the baby. That they experience a form of abandonment because their brains are wired to equate abandonment with the absence of close contact. They're very dependent on the proximity of a caregiver.
It's an obsession because pediatricians insist upon it while offering no advice on co sleeping despite that being the most common arrangement worldwide. It's also extremely common in the United States despite parents not admitting to it.
Unfortunately, being given no information, the American parents who cosleep go on blind and don't know what precautions to take.
But yeah, it's an obsession because it's pushed despite the fact the arrangement is incredibly uncommon worldwide.
As for the last question.... I don't care. In fact I ask the same thing when people act as if co sleeping is some great evil
I slept with both my babies for maybe two nights. Nights where I slept an hour or less because I would wake with every little sound they made. Then I put them in their own rooms, with a baby monitor set to a reasonable threshold.
I got a solid 3-4 hours a night. The babies got fed, cleaned, cuddled etc. Win-win.
> Nights where I slept an hour or less because I would wake with every little sound they made.
This is a feature, not a bug. That attunement is what allows caregivers to avoid suffocating their child. It works when the caregiver is not under the influence or so exhausted they don’t wake up (which it sounds like in your case you were on the verge of that by only sleeping an hour or less, but I promise you after a week or so you adjust and sleep fine if not more a bit less deeply so you will react if anything is happening to the baby.
This goes away after a few days, it's explained in the Co-sleeping section of the course they should give you: your body is attuning to the baby.
That's also how you don't roll over them and how they wake up if it's too hot
I'm so tired of the condescending tone that is usually taken for granted when talking about traditional American culture. Can we please stop this? It's just a cultural difference.
It's something I find very commendable of americans actually. Americans generally take unsolicited criticism and brash antagonizing language from foreigners quite well. Every american traveling abroad can attest (remember the post 9/11 years?!), and generally have dealt with civilly and with head raised.
> I'm so tired of the condescending tone that is usually taken for granted when talking about traditional American culture. Can we please stop this? It's just a cultural difference.
This is not a traditional American cultural value. Traditionally, Americans sleep with their kids. In fact, large portions still do. Putting children in a crib was turned into an American cultural value by various associations, not by some cultural development.
This is what you get when you treat everybody else in the same way, by telling them cosleeping is evil. I'm very bitter of the opposite, we have been taught it's wrong to co-sleep the entire time.
Lucky, mother nature gave us some help.
After we co-slept for 3 years with our baby, on the second one they wanted to take the baby off my wife the night in the hospital (baby sleeps on mom's chest).
I understand the concern, but this is the second baby, we know the drill.
> This is what you get when you treat everybody else in the same way, by telling them cosleeping is evil.
An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.
I am an American, and my family's pediatrician gave cosleeping advice when asked, despite discouraging it. I'll reiterate GP's point: labeling a cultural difference as a national "obsession" is unwarranted.
I knew someone who was born in a Romanian orphanage who was "left to cry it out"... she was forever traumatized in ways just as damaging as one terrible moment, but not discussed since no one ever made a hit lifetime television series about those who abuse via inaction.
There are people who made it through the fall of both the Nazis and the Berlin Wall who should not have access to so much as a houseplant who continue to influence young minds to this day, and it will forever keep me up at night that I can't just turn off my phone and correct that error like I'd like to.
After baby moved into their own room we just used an audio baby monitor. We never used a time basis for crying, but a severity basis - if baby is getting too worked up and upset, they shouldn't be expected to calm themselves down from that, maybe ever. People rely on heavily other people's emotional support even as adults, that's a good thing.
I know a few parents that are struggling due to co-sleeping arrangements. Not sure if it's because the sleep training they did backfired, or if they never did anything besides co-sleeping. I can sympathize with those parents, as I could easily end up in that situation or worse. Therefore, I am not judging them (and I would appreciate if others, who think they are so smart, would stop judging me).
Young child(ren) want to know that we are either A) actively taking care of them, or B) Doing something that is needed in order to take care of them. They also want to have predictable and consistent treatment and responses to what they do, probably regardless of age.
They are perfectly fine with being left alone for extended periods of time, as long as we can convince them that it's for their own good and that they haven't been abandoned.
This is one of thousands of topics related to having children that could be discussed and read about in a similar form: "Studies have shown", "21% of parents" etc. ad nauseum.
What's missing is a discussion of the deeper issues at the heart of this and many other conversations relating to parenting:
A) Intergenerational knowledge transfer
B) Mother or father as a core part of human identity
C) Confidence and common sense
Anyone reading this looking for answers, I'll give you my 2 cents as well: What you need above all else is the confidence that you have the ability to figure out and decide what is best for you and your family. Anyone else's advice is just ideas that you can consider, but you need to believe that you will be able to decide (with your partner if you have one) what will be best, and your belief and confidence will go an immensely long way towards making it work.
We never read any books or worked using a predetermined schedule, but got our information from baby, grandparents and our own good common sense. The following worked for us well but would have gone very differently depending on any circumstance:
0-1 months sleep on mom in bed, 100% spotting during co-sleeping to avoid smothering - work on laptop in bed. This motivated us to stop co-sleeping ASAP.
1-3 months get sleepy or go to sleep on mom, transfer to bassinet next to bed, cry immediately or eventually wake up crying, pick up and feed if hungry, sing, read, etc, repeat over and over again. Mom is motivated to help baby sleep, she gets to sleep if baby gets to sleep. Baby sleeps better and better on their own, feel bad for baby alone in the bassinet but life's tough, need to get used to it eventually.
3-6 months same as above, sleeping well in bassinet, progressively longer stretches until only waking up once in the night for diaper change and food
6 months: stopped sleeping soundly in the bassinet, move into other room in crib, cried for 20 minutes then went to sleep. The first day, listening to that was for some reason harder than any other day. We wanted to go to baby but knew that it would be better for them in the long run if they could handle us not being there.
6 months + 1 day: cried for 10 minutes then went to sleep, slept way better than when in the bassinet same room, probably due to lack of snoring noise
6 months onwards: sleep in crib/bassinet 100% of time, no real crying when going down to sleep unless sick, hot, cold, overtired, or hungry. Falling asleep on mom or dad is nice but nowhere near as comfortable as in the crib due to being held vertically.
Things could have gone very differently, maybe baby wouldn't have wanted to go to sleep by themselves as readily and co-sleeping would have lasted much longer, and we would have made a whole different set of decisions and that would have been OK.
I would be highly motivated to stop co-sleeping ASAP for a variety of reasons, none of which are new. How do naps even work with co-sleeping??
Not sure how you get an older child to stop wanting to co-sleep or have someone there with them when they fall asleep after being used to having someone there. Seems like it would be difficult, but we would either accept the situation or figure it out if that were the case for us (and it may very well be in the future). I am not sure how I would deal with it until I was in that situation.
I suspect I would just start getting progressively farther and farther away while they were falling asleep, going in the other room to do stuff etc, maybe while singing with the door open and responding, making some noise, then I would close the door and stay nearby (and tiptoe away very quietly). Then if they call out at any point I guess I would need to go back, and repeat daily until they get used to having me outside the room with the door closed making some noise in the other room while they go to sleep.
I have not read any books or articles on these subjects (including the link), but I have the confidence that I can figure it out with my own good common sense. If I couldn't figure it out, I'd probably start talking to people that I trust for ideas.
I want to be left alone in order to do this! Not a fan of anyone reading some peer-reviewed journal articles and statistics and doing some backseat parenting or throwing around terms like child abuse when discussing how parenting should be done (I can see that a lot of people are wading in without any idea of what they are talking about). Before having kids, I may even have been one of those people (but I doubt it). A lot of ideas sound great on paper. Lots of people with great ideas that worked for them. Good for them. I would appreciate if they would share, but stop short of dogma and the incredible self-centricness in thinking that their way is the only good way.
If the backseat parents really care so much, they should demonstrate their fitness to judge by attracting a mate (this is probably the main hurdle for them), gather the resources and space to procreate, test their theories, and feel free to share afterwards once they have proven out their ideas! They will quickly find that their dogma and lack of basis in grounded reality makes them horrible parents, maybe they won't even have the self-consciousness to realize this. But that's opening a whole different discussion.
When you do something yourself, that's when you get to decide and test out your theories, and not before.
I don't know how much experience you have with babies, yes they cry for a reason. Sometimes that reason is they need/want something, sometimes it is because they are gassy and their stomach hurts. Sometimes it is because they are tired, in which case it may be preferential to help them learn that they should sleep when tired and not cry and keep themselves awake.
Also you talk about parental selfishness.
Parents have to be selfish and kids have to learn to wait. Parental mental health is important, especially for first time parents. Babies will take everything you give them and still want more, it is up to the parent to set boundaries.
One of the first pieces of advice I have seen and heard from many sources to new parents is that if the baby is crying and you can no longer handle the stress, to put the baby in a safe place and go for a walk. The reason we have this messaging being shared so widely is because new parents have a societal expectation that they MUST do everything to take care of the baby and if it is crying then you are not doing a good job, that expectation and view is what leads to shaken babies and infanticide.
Par of what I am getting at is that stress builds up over time but sometimes very quickly. Especially for new parents. And you can not predict how the parents will react mentally to this stress.
When we label things, such as postpartum depression, we can discuss the issue. But I think that sometimes we forget that we have to make changes to stop having the same outcomes. When a new parent ends up killing their child(ren), it is easy for us to say, "Well they had postpartum depression" but what have we gained as a society except a way to blame or assign the tragedy. Demanding the person who is in the midst of postpartum depression to identify that and then seek help is absolutely insane. We as a society need to look at how and what pressure we put on others as well as be able to have open conversation about the stresses in order to prevent deaths.
>Babies cry for a reason (to get their needs met).
Yep. Including, "I woke up and I don't yet know how to put myself back to sleep," which is where "sleep training" helps. I, too, would be curious as someone else asked, if you have children.
When we sleep trained our kids, this was exactly our interpretation as well. You are literally training them how to sleep on their own. Yes they will be uncomfortable for a little while and yes they will cry because it is a new situation but it's truly for their own good. You are giving your kid the gift of being able to know how to sleep and fall back asleep.
You can do such training without being a cruel hard ass about it either. You know your kid best and know their limits and when you should go into their room to comfort them... but you have to know why you are doing it--you are teaching them how to sleep. The only way they can learn that is by themselves (at least at an early age).
Sleep training our daughter was one of the best decisions we made early on. But every kid and every parent is different. There is no one single way to raise a kid...
Incidentally, potty training can also involve a lot of crying, tantrums, etc. I would say I don't see the uproar of parents claiming it's child abuse, but the numbers of children past 36 mo that are not potty trained is pretty shocking.
I have two boys 9 and 3. Oldest co-slept with us until his brother was born so until 6yo, even now sometimes he wants to come back to our bed.
The youngest we put in the same room as our oldest after about a year, he rarely wants to sleep with us.
When they were co-sleeping with us, they would still wake up and cry at night from things other then hunger. Including, I rolled over into my parent and it surprised me so I woke up and now I can't sleep.
In the case of my oldest, he started getting to the point where he would only fall asleep if my wife was next to him with her arm under his head like a pillow. It had to be her arm, we once switched so my arm was under his head and he could tell, got upset about it XD. That is when we decided he needed to start sleeping on his own...which took some time. It is also why we choose to have the youngest move out quicker, we didn't want to have the same protracted experience.
Now they will sleep together at the oldest insistence, about a third of the time though the youngest will take too long to fall asleep and they end up fighting and the youngest will go off to sleep on his own.
I don't think any of us in this conversation have any good data on what is best, and those of us that are parents have way to much bias and way too small sample size to discuss this with any degree of confidence.
My personal option is that either way is not going to make much of a difference and you should do what ever works best for you and your family.
I understand, it is frustrating seeing people blame and reject things are useful just because they are not used tho them or are foreign to their culture.
Part of the reason we co-slept is because my wife was breastfeeding and it would have been unfair for her to have to get up, leave the room to take care of the baby. Also, I am good at adapting and quickly learnt to sleep through hunger cries...so probably for the best we were not doing the swap schedule.
Makes sense. I forgot about the problem with breastfeeding, since initially we were all in the same room and there was zero sleep, so it didn't matter much. By the time breastfeeding would have been annoying (for waking up), we were already co-sleeping.
Our first 2 weeks were really, really bad, with the first week being at 2 hours in total (that is 2 hours of sleep for 168 hours), after a month and a half she started sleeping with us.
The second one just slept with us from the beginning since knew all the tricks of it and worked really well the first time
But do they cry more or less if they are sleep trained vs co-sleeping? Varies I am sure, but in our case at least our children slept soundly whenever not nursing while co-sleeping but for our ill-fated attempt at sleep training just cried and cried and cried (a mistake we tried only with our eldest). To each their own - I say do whatever works!
If you go to your baby every time it cries that could mean a lot of work, so much it ruins your own rest/health/sanity and makes you a worse parent at the times the baby isn’t crying.
They also want a steady stream of cookies and iPad games and to be able to climb on high dangerous objects but maybe we shouldn’t indulge every want of a child.
Seriously, I wonder if it's father's saying stuff like this. You just need to go on YouTube and see the abuse that mother's get from infants and small children while co-sleeping.
Unless the baby gets caught in the covers or rolled upon during the night. Every approach likely has some pros and cons, so barring randomized and reproduced trials I take all claims as unproven.
Yes if you’re obese or inebriated then you shouldn’t sleep next to a baby, but in those cases you’re better off abstaining from food and drink for your own sake anyway.
There have also been studies that show that babies will cry to manipulate their caregivers[1]. They are pretty smart and over time can learn to fake crying to get something that they want.
My grandson was sleep trained and I was a skeptic at first. But it basically took less than 48 hours before he learned to self soothe and was on a schedule with never more than about 15 mins of fussing in that initial training phase.
After he was trained and got on his sleep schedule he was the happiest baby I have ever been around and I raised 3 kids myself and have 3 other grandchildren. He never has issues with overtiredness and basically will only fuss if diaper needs changed or was hungry. Now he just flat out tells you when he is tired (“nigh-nigh”) at 18 months and it’s almost always nearly to the minute of when it is his bed or nap time and within a minute or two of being in bed…he is zonked.
Everyone I know who has done it sings it’s praises and in our own observation it’s simply amazing. I am no longer a skeptic. Also I will say this, if the crying is the stressful and damaging situation to babies, then in our experience the net result is less stress for the child with sleep training.
Sometimes the reason a baby cries is literally the unmet need for sleep - they are very tired, feel awful because of that, and cry. And then they can't fall asleep easily because they're cranky about being too tired.
> And then they can't fall asleep easily because they're cranky about being too tired.
... And worse they are tired and don't know how to fall asleep. Hence why I'm a fan of sleep training. You are giving your little one the gift of being able to put themselves to sleep on their own.
Please don't take HN threads into flamewar, and certainly not nationalistic flamewar, and please follow the site guidelines in the future (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). You broke them horribly and at great length in this thread.
I'm not disagreeing with you about how to handle babies but what you did here was abusive and we need it not to happen again. Please see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34194145 also.
> Please don't take HN threads into flamewar, and certainly not nationalistic flamewar,
I don't see anything 'nationalistic' about calling out trends that are manufactured solely in the US. If calling out the US warmongering of last 40 years is not 'nationalistic', this neither is.
And you're demonstrating a sheer amount of ignorance with your rush to judgement here. The children are not neglected and are checked in on and comforted by the parents during sleep training.
Please don't perpetuate flamewars on HN, regardless of how wrong someone else is or you feel they are, and please don't get into tit-for-tat spats like you did here. It's tedious, and definitely not what this site is for. When the conversation ceases to be curious and playful, the only good thing to do is just stop.
There are great behavioral and cultural differences in between the south of France and the North.
> And you're demonstrating a sheer amount of ignorance with your rush to judgement here.
Im not. Co-sleeping, close proximity, touching are evolutionary traits of all mammals including humans. The majority of the mammal infants also cry to their parents and their parents attend them. If the cries are not answered, the infant shuts up to avoid signaling the predators in the absence of the parents. The parents not responding to the infant's signal is not a good thing in any mammal species. Even more so for humans.
> The children are not neglected and are checked in on and comforted by the parents during sleep training.
That's not what the child will instinctively interpret. As far as he is concerned, he is either abandoned and his life is at risk, or the parents are prioritizing their other children for survival.
>There are great behavioral and cultural differences in between the south of France and the North.
So you agree it's not just the US doing it, despite your lambasting only that country multiple times.
>That's not what the child will instinctively interpret. As far as he is concerned, he is either abandoned and his life is at risk, or the parents are prioritizing their other children for survival.
No, I don't. A lot of things that were manufactured in the US were exported into countries that were under its influence. Rich, Anglophile segments in a country adopting a behavior from the US because it suits their preferences does not make it a national paradigm.
> Cite your source.
There are various comments from others in this thread which explain that problem in detail. In contrast, your perspective of 'nothing happening' resides on a single study made with 43 children.
(edit - posting the counterpoint here just in case - it was a google search away)
> In their recent paper published in JCPP, Bilgin and Wolke (2020a) argue that leaving an infant to ‘cry it out’, rather than responding to the child’s cries, had no adverse effects on mother–infant attachment at 18 months. This finding opposes evidence across a wide range of scientific fields. Here, we outline several concerns with the article and argue against some of the authors’ strong claims, which have already gained media attention, including a report on the NHS website. We suggest that the authors’ conclusions should be considered one piece of a larger scientific whole, where ‘cry it out’ seems, overall, to be of detriment to both attachment and development. Crucially, we are concerned that this study has issues regarding power and other analytical decisions. More generally, we fear that the authors have overstated their findings and we hope that members of the public do not alter their parenting behaviours in line with such claims without further research into this controversial topic.
>No, I don't. A lot of things that were manufactured in the US were exported into countries that were under its influence.
Again, demonstrating your ignorance. Sleep training is based on "Le Pause". It's imported.
>There are various comments from others in this thread which explain that problem in detail.
And there have been countless comments in this thread, all citing evidence that there is no difference in a child who co-slept or was sleep-trained beyond the age of 6. There simply is not.
>In contrast, your perspective of 'nothing happening' resides on a single study made with 43 children.
I have never cited that study, but thank you for putting words into my mouth.
Putting a very young child to sleep in a different bed in a different room seems like one of those modern Western civilization things that makes no sense when scrutinized even a little. Like hiding nipples or cutting off bits of penises.
Is it really still the norm to place the baby in another room and then go tend to them when they cry?
From Darwins point of view, klingy children slept besides their parents, were not eaten by sabre tooth tigers, and passed on the klingy gene. Babies that slept alone were eaten by Sabre tooth tigers, and did not pass their “can sleep in isolation” gene across.
So why fight nature, accept it as part of life. Sleeping together bonds parents and children.
Because were not at risk of being eaten by saber tooth tigers? By the same logic, we should just give in to our sweet tooth that evolved naturally and ignore our “unnatural” scientific knowledge of diabetes and obesity
My oldest two could not do sleep training. 10 months of trying for almost every night and they did not just adapt. My middle daughter embraced it after a single night. My adopted middle son didn’t need it at all and was naturally “good” at sleeping. My youngest daughter and son will fall asleep right away if around someone, but otherwise will stay up for hours (but never cried about it).
Again, one family experience but each child has their own needs and responses. I’ve never found a single method that works universally in any aspect of parenting.
Except ice cream. They all seem to love that.