What happens when babies are left to cry it out?

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... 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.

So I’m always skeptical about articles offering generalized parenting advice.

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.

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.”

[1] https://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-reiss-sleep-alon...

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.

Cry it out is effective and works wonders for families and it has no side effects, as mentioned in the article itself.

At some point synaptic prunning comes and the child is rid of nearly all indignities it suffered up to that point.

My genes didn’t get the memo. My instinct is to say, “He’ll be fine, but if I don’t sleep, no one will be fine.”

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.

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.

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.

Suffocation risk is real. Don't do this.

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?

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.

It's hard.

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.

Isn't co-sleeping (as in bed-sharing) discouraged in the US, at least for newborns, because of the risk of SIDS?

To quote the AAP:

> AAP recommends that parents sleep in the same room – but not in the same bed as a baby, preferably for at least the first six months.

Source: https://www.aap.org/en/news-room/news-releases/aap/2022/amer...

To quote the CDC:

> Sharing a room with your baby is much safer than bed sharing and may decrease the risk of SIDS by as much as 50%.

Source: https://www.cdc.gov/reproductivehealth/features/baby-safe-sl...

From a recent meta-analysis:

> The combined OR for SIDS in all bed sharing versus non-bed sharing infants was 2.89 (95% CI, 1.99-4.18).

Source: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21868032/

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.

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.

That negative could be 'leave me the fuck alone and stop bothering me' though, just in baby language - crying. Yes, even to a parent.

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.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aversives#Use_in_applied_behav...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maladaptation

Why wouldnt a baby cry when someone isn’t around?

Why wouldn’t a parent want to comfort a crying child?

I understand the concern around developing bad habits, but those can be dealt with as they arrive.

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).

A counter argument (trigger warning): https://www.reddit.com/r/nursing/comments/zls30p/cosleeping/

We co-slept with our second child, but only after taking a lot of precautions.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

Who the hell knows? Or will ever know.

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.

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.

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.

There don’t appear to be any.

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.

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.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/230830539_Five-Year...

I think you'll find out you've had much less of an effect than you think.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

My kids slept through the night by four months, with other techniques.

You let them cry for a min or two but no then you go in and soothe 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.

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.

I would recommend co-sleeping to almost anyone.

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.

(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.)

You just described the Ferber method, a very popular sleep training approach.

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.

You sound exactly like someone who doesn’t have kids, advising parents and speaking with authority that you don’t have.

Also white noise app cuts down on the whinyness before sleeping tremendously.

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.

> She was right.

She wasn't, she just made that up.

Edit: And is it an "obsession" or simply a cultural difference?

I got a solid 3-4 hours a night. The babies got fed, cleaned, cuddled etc. Win-win.

“America” is a big country, with many world cultures in it.

anyway, the non Western world is obsessed with full time childcare being compulsory for women. Why are you even talking about this?

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.