Babies can be exhausting business, especially those babies who are deemed "bad sleepers" or who have a high need for comfort during inconvenient times like 3 a.m. Because of this, generations of parents have been advised to use techniques like "crying it out" (CIO) with their little ones.
All parents have a need for sleep and it's completely natural to look for solutions to sleepless nights for everybody's sake. That said, CIO is not a good answer for a multitude of reasons. Here are ten of them.
1. The argument goes that if you leave an infant long enough to cry for you and don't meet his needs, he'll eventually "learn to self soothe." This is code for "give up expecting you to care." What a tough lesson to learn about your parents at a few months old!
2. Infant distress interferes with brain development. Studies have shown that stress releases extra cortisol in babies and destroys nerve connections in the brain. Some other parts of the brain affected by severe distress are the limbic system, the left hemisphere, and the corpus callosum. Additional areas that may be involved are the hippocampus and the orbitofrontal cortex. Babies who suffer early trauma were also found to have smaller brains than normal babies.
3. Babies cry to express needs and if we fail to respond to them, we don't meet their needs. A baby may cry because she has an ear infection, is hungry, is in pain from teething, is feeling lonely or is scared. When nobody comes to feed her, comfort her, reassure her or otherwise meet her needs she may give up crying but she is still hungry, sad, afraid or in pain. The only thing that is "better" is that parents get to sleep through it.
4. The fundamental message of CIO is that the parent's needs and wants are more important than the baby's.
5. Researchers found that during CIO, young children went through four predictable phases. The first phase, labeled “protest”, consisted of loud crying and extreme restlessness. The second phase, labeled “despair”, consisted of monotonous crying, inactivity, and steady withdrawal. The third phase, labeled “detachment”, consisted of a renewed interest in surroundings, albeit a remote, distant kind of interest. They concluded that while leaving babies to cry it out can lead to the eventual dissipation of those cries, it occurred due to the gradual development of apathy in the child. (J. Bowlby, "The Nature of the Child's Tie to His Mother," International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 39 (1958): 350-373.)
6. Researchers found that babies who had been raised with CIO methods were ten times more likely to have ADHD later in childhood. (Wolke, D, et al, Persistent Infant Crying and Hyperactivity Problems in Middle Childhood, Pediatrics, 2002; 109:1054-1060.)
7. Crying it out desensitizes parents to their babies. Babies' cries are designed to be hard to listen to on purpose, so that parents will come to them and meet their needs. When parents have to listen to screams from the next room repeatedly and do nothing about them, they generally have to turn off their natural empathetic response and try to numb themselves to the sounds of their children in distress. There isn't an easy on/off button to rebuild the natural connection during daytime or more convenient times.
8. One study found that babies who had been left to cry excessively (who did not have colic) later scored an average of 9 points lower on IQ tests and had fine motor delays. (M R Rao, et al; Long Term Cognitive Development in Children with Prolonged Crying, National Institutes of Health, Archives of Disease in Childhood 2004; 89:989-992.)
9. Other researchers found that infants with excessive crying during the early months showed more difficulty controlling their emotions and became even fussier when parents tried to console them at 10 months (Stifter and Spinrad, The Effect of Excessive Crying on the Development of Emotion Regulation, Infancy, 2002; 3(2), 133-152.). Still more research has shown that these babies have a more annoying quality to their cry, are more clingy during the day, and take longer to become independent as children (P. Heron, Non-Reactive Cosleeping and Child Behavior: Getting a Good Night's Sleep All Night, Every Night, Master's thesis, Department of Psychology, University of Bristol, 1994. ).
10. Richard Ferber himself (considered by many to be the father of the CIO movement), admitted in a 1999 New Yorker interview that "some children are untrainable" -- they just won’t stop crying. Many cry until they vomit or pass out, but never reach that promised perfect ending. By the time parents realize that this method will never work for their babies, great harm has been done to them -- physically, neurologically, emotionally and more. And for parents for whom it does "work," at what cost?
For me personally and for many parents, we never needed any of those reasons to know that crying it out was not a path we wanted to take. It quite simply goes against our natural parenting instincts to love, nurture and be there for our babies. If you feel the same but are being pressured to CIO, follow your parenting instincts and turn a deaf ear to the bad advice of others instead of to your baby's cries.
Remember, the choice is not between never getting any sleep and crying it out. There are healthy ways to meet everybody's needs, though they may take a little more time or effort.
Want some ideas on how to meet your little one's needs and still get more sleep for everybody? PhD in Parenting offers these gentle baby and toddler sleep tips.
Comments
Well thought out, Alicia. I know some parents feel the need to try all types of advice when they are at their wit's end and need sleep but my husband and I could never understand the CIO method. I hope you help a few of your readers find different sleep methods with this article.
Good article!
Crying it out doesn't mean allowing your child to fend for herself. It allows children to learn to fall asleep themselves -- after often (as in our case) just three nights of crying for a period of less than an hour. There is nothing wrong with meeting an entire family's need for sleep.
Great article!
I just cant believe parents can even do CIO, it is CRUEL!!!!!
Sadly, it doesn't take long for babes to learn that no one cares.
No apologies here: this article reads like psychological warfare. I can't imagine a more hurtful way to "help" people than the languages and "facts" you used in this article. Mothers and families want the best for their children--and happy families make happy babies, not some holier-than-thou breeder with a blog.
@Lacey What is the point in commenting on this article other than you insulting the author? I have two children and I used CIO with my son, and CoSleeping with my daughter. I find that this examiner typically writes about gentle parenting. It is pretty obvious from her other articles and her preferred links which you can see on the sidebar. The article references actual studies and medical journal articles. The point of the article is to educate those that read it to give them more tools to file in their mind's filing cabinet to use with their babies. I guess really all I want to say to you @Lacey, is go be a troll somewhere else. There are other more appropriate places on the web where you can join in with other people who follow the same type of parenting practices. This doesn't seem to be meeting your needs.
Lacey - your ignorance is showing. The psychological warfare here is CIO. Mothers and families DO want what's best for their families and children - unfortunately, the ignorance YOU are propagating tends to keep them from realizing what's bad and what's not. CIO is psychologically damaging to babies and there's solid science behind it. How sad for you that your mother obviously used it when you were a baby.
@Lacey - apparently your attitude has annoyed some commenters here, but I do like the content of what you're saying. This article could indeed be construed as psychological warfare designed to hurt people who have had to resort to sleep training. I live in a very progressive, attachment parenty community and sleep training really is a last resort for the people who do it. Beating them over the head about their decision is what's cruel. Letting a one-year-old cry in bed for 20 minutes, three nights in a row, til she learns that you won't come running when she's trying to avoid sleep...? I still haven't worked up the courage to do it, but I don't think it's necessarily "cruel."
I love this article. I love that it relies on scientific evidence to make its point, and I love your point that it doesn't have to be either/or. Babies can be soothed and never ever left to cry it out and the rest of the family can still be happy and healthy. @Lacey, it's a shame that babies are sometimes born to folks who are too self-centered to at least make a precious, helpless little newborn the center of their families at least for a few short months when they most need attention!
Thank you for this article! I never used CIO with my 5 yr old and I have not used it with my 3 mo and they both are able to fall asleep on their own. Everyone is entitled to their own opinion but think about this...Have you (as an adult) ever cried so hard that you were emotionally exhausted and finally fell asleep. Did you feel better about "soothing" yourself afterwards? I bet it would have been nice to have someone rub your back and let you know that you were not alone. Even a hug probably would have been nice. Now project that feeling onto an infant who knows only that their parent is there for them. Now imagine that infant being left alone to cry endlessly until they are emotionally exhausted and finally fall asleep. Is that really self-soothing? Just chew on that for a bit before you insult someone for expressing opinion backed up by fact... A "normal " baby should want to be held...research shows this!
So, I should write a gentle thoughtful comment, but I think I'll just throw one out there that echoes the spirit of some of the snippy ones up there...
Not to be insensitive to people who think they should have a child then ignore it so they can continue uninterrupted in their own very important little life, but why have a child if one is too selfish to care for him? and by "care for him" I mean treating him with respect, compassion, and love. Of course, I'm sure putting him in a crib alone, and then listening to him cry for an hour or more is hard for people, so, I guess the solution to that is turn up the volume on one's iPod. Way to go; you rock, mom, and it's all about you.
For those who want to attack this Examiner - consider this: There is SOLID SCIENCE AND RESEARCH showing that CIO is BAD FOR BABIES. That's not opinion; that's hard facts. Even Ferber, who developed the theory and practice of CIO, has repositioned himself with regard to his own concept. THAT BY ITSELF should speak volumes.
And really, at the end of the day, if you're reading these kinds of articles that espouse parenting practices of which you will never partake, for the sole purpose of being snarky and showing your ass in public, um, WHAT DOES THAT SAY ABOUT YOU? #somepeoplehaveentirelytoomuchfreetimeontheirhands
[LIKE]
CIO was NEVER an option for us. It never entered our realm of thinking. After all we had this precious little bundle in our arms. Luckily it was never suggested to us either. It just seemed to go against everything we believed. We didn't have the solid scientific facts that were so nicely laid out for us (THANKS Alicia!). Now it's nice to have science back up what seemed natural to us. To this day Clarissa is a very good sleeper and still enjoys laying on my tummy and listening to me sing to her. These are the days I will treasure and I won't look back and have any regrets.
So, I think what we all have to understand is that everybody deals differently. Iused CIO with my child. I went in to check on him every ten minutes, so he was not completely ignored, he still knew I was there.
And I read about this in books about how to help a child to get to a good sleep pattern. Now a lot of you have to understand, that those studies referred may be newer. So I'm sorry, but the method I used worked for me and my child. And it has nothing to do with neglecting my baby, or with wanting to "turn up the volume on ones iPod". Honestly you people saying that I might be a bad parent because I used the CIO method, what do you care, you don't have to raise my child, deal with maybe ADHD or other this that happen through it...
Utter nonsense. When you have established that all of your baby's other needs have been met, i.e., hunger, diaper, no pain, no illness, then what is left is the need for attention. There's nothing wrong with that, but at some point if you respond to your baby's every cry and all times of the day or night, then you are educating them that they are in control of you and that their needs supersede everyone else's. No one is advocating letting your baby cry for hours, but you do your baby no service by not allowing them to discover that they can have immediate comfort whenever they want.
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