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To Cry it Out, or To Not Cry it Out: That is the Question!

I was utterly dismayed the other day when a friend who enjoys getting my goat up (wink wink) sent me an article he had seen in the New York Times which seemed to condone or encourage “cry it out” sleep training because “babies matter, and so do parents”. Of course this is true: both parents and children do matter;however, when we decide to become parents, we do so with the knowledge that we probably aren’t going to sleep well for quite a while. We decide to bear children and so we decide to commit to sleepless nights.

sleeping baby

Think about it: crying is the only way infants have of communicating their needs to us. So, if we ignore their cries, what message are we sending them? Many caregivers use the “cry it out” method believing that the infant stops crying because they learn “oh, it’s time to sleep now!” This belief is faulty: what the infant learns is “I cry and no one comes anyway so I might as well not bother” – a very different lesson than what the caregiver intends. And actually, at six months old (the lower end age of the subjects studied by the researchers in the NYT article) an infant does not even have the cognitive abilities to make such a connection between sleep and being left to cry.

I’m not opposed to sleep training. In fact, after 13 exhausting months of my son waking every single night (not to mention the nights his twin sister also graced us with her 2a.m. presence), I was desperate for him to sleep through the night.  I found myself in a quandary – I urgently wanted him to sleep, but I knew that letting him “cry it out” was not a method I should use if I wanted him to develop a healthy attachment style. I found a method that helped solve this problem; one in which he came to learn that once he was in his crib  it was time to sleep, but also one in which I comforted him when he cried so that he would not feel abandoned. He now sleeps wonderfully – most of the time. If anyone is interested in the sleep-training method I used, here is a link to the book:

 

What troubled me about the article was that it seemed to imply that infants are a nuisance or inconvenience when they wake during the night. The thing is, even if they are, we chose to bring that nuisance into our lives and so we are obligated to do whatever we have to do to give that nuisance the best start in life, no matter how it inconveniences us. When we ignore infants several troubling things happen, all of which can lead to unhealthy attachment styles, which (as I keep banging on about) can persist throughout the lifespan.

  1. Crying is how they get their needs met and getting their needs met is how they survive. Therefore, being ignored is incredibly stressful for an infant. Repeated stress can lead to cortisol flooding – where their cortisol levels spike. If this happens often enough, those cortisol levels can get “stuck” which can lead to disordered stress regulations for life. In short: you may be setting your infant up for a life of being unable to handle stress well.
  2. Erik Erikson’s developmental theory describes the first two years of life as the trust vs. mistrust stage where infants learn whether or not they can trust others. They first learn to trust via their earliest caregivers; they learn whether or not the caregiver can be trusted to meet their needs. If their needs are met consistently and appropriately they learn “yes, others will treat me well and I can rely on them”. If they are ignored and their needs are not met then they become wary of the world and guarded against people.
  3. Being ignored when they cry can lead to anxious-ambivalent or avoidant attachment styles and the associated behaviors. The anxious-ambivalent child may resort to histrionic behaviors (protest behaviors) in a bid to get the attention he/she needs and the avoidant child may just stop asking for help altogether.

Finally, infants aren’t just being annoying when they wake during the night (that will come later! Ha ha!) – there are crucial biological reasons for night-time waking. This article explains it brilliantly:

https://www.buzzfeed.com/patricksmith/its-evolution-baby?utm_term=.qlvjYANQV#.iseE7Pebj

Sleep is important, and so are parents, but we need to keep in mind that loss of sleep comes with the territory of having a new baby and that the sleep sacrifices we make in the earliest years of a child’s life will lead to life-long benefits for that child, and surely that’s worth it?

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