To think controlled crying is cruel

[KazMa]

DH would like to try controlled crying/sleep training but I am totally against any sort of crying/leaving DS on his own upset. Any advice?

Here is current scenario:

DS just turned 7 months old and we have been co sleeping since the dreaded 4 month sleep regression, he also breastfeeds to sleep - will go to sleep without it but needs a lot of patting, rocking and walking around so it’s easier just to BF.

For a month now I am able to BF to sleep and then leave him in his cot in his own room for nap times and he will sleep 45mins to an hour per nap (3x per day).

At night however he will wake up and only go back to sleep if he is laying & feeding next to me in my bed. (Eg, bedtime at 8pm but he’ll wake at 8:45 and won’t go back to sleep.

This whole discussion is bonkers to me.

Person A: I couldn't cope with the broken sleep
Person B: I could manage with the broken sleep

People are different, basically.

Did you read the post in question?

It literally says Firstly, yes you can function on broken sleep

It's not ok to let children cry.
It has long lasting effects on the brain.
Sorry.

At the risk of tumbling down a semantics rabbit hole: of course they can. Civilisation and all its societal norms are predicated on it.

“Now, there’s no evidence for this, but it is a scientific fact!” - Brass Eye

You're entitled to your opinion but to call it 'cruel' is ignorant. That implies child abuse, which this absolutely isn't.

We did it. It was life changing. Like you DH wanted to, I didn't. But we had tried everything else and I was ill (I have a chronic illness) and struggling to work (I'm the main earner) as a result of exhaustion.
I wont lie, it was very, very hard, but within a few days DS self settled and slept through the night having previously been waking several times and crying for us. Bear in mind he was over 1 by this stage and I was working full time.

If you've tried everything else then give it a go. Or don't if you don't want to, but don't bad mouth those who do. Do it properly, or it could torture you all and make things worse. Now that would be 'cruel'.

Okay so you made your own choices and you feel it hasn't harmed your child. It's quite a reach then to say that if you don't sleep train that is somehow detrimental to the child, and implying I'm a poor parent because I haven't done it. I would put a meme here of somebody reaching for something, if I knew how to do that.

Letting children cry IS cruel.

You want the neuroscience research?

Well at least you’ve dropped the unevidenced ‘long lasting effects on the brain’ line. Progress.

Sure. Run along to Google and hurriedly do the search. I’m sure others will be along to counter with their own google searches. That’s often how these threads go.

@SleeplessInEngland I didn't think it necessary to repeat it, but yes, long-lasting effects on the brain

The single long sleep is a product of the industrial revolution, as is 3 meals per day.

Evidence? Sleep was invented in the industrial Revolution?

I am definitely forming a hypothesis that lack of sleep does have some impact on critical thinking skills

Parenting choices are incredibly difficult to study. There are studies that relate to sleep training but they're limited because you can't do a blind trial and you also can't assign a group of parents to be the ones who can't respond to their children at night anymore (it would be unethical, and that in itself should tell us something) and you also can't ensure everyone would implement it in the same way. So there are studies that show various things but they can only show a small part of the picture.
Personally I don't need studies to tell me this stuff. I think controlled crying is inherently a horrible thing to do and that it's self-evident. Like, I also don't smack, and I've never read any research to tell me that it's right or wrong to smack, it would be irrelevant because I think it's horrible and that's enough.

Well thanks for making all of us who were totally desperate feel that we were being horrible! I'm going to stop now, but really when an exhausted parent has tried everything and failed, when a method ( which had been explained to me by a GP friend) worked, when the advice given consists of going to bed earlier(!), when the parents have tried waiting for the child to just sleep, just what is the answer? Apart from shut up and get on with it?

It worked very well for me and 2 DS who are now very happy 6 and 3 and sleep incredibly well with no drama, both from the ages of 6 months we used controlled crying. Was effective after about 3 nights, never looked back...But you must do what works for you.

This actually made me lol 🤣

If they are natural wakes and you fall back asleep quickly so you don't remember waking then its not really broken sleep is it? But waking up enough to call for a parent, and need to be sung to sleep (and if not sung to sleep apparently taking ages to fall asleep as I think you said?) is broken sleep and its not optimal.

She's in a habit, that's all, once the habit goes away her body will go back to normal sleep where she might wake up but it'll be so brief she won't wake up fully and won't remember it in the morning, and won't be needing to be sung to in order to fall asleep. I assume she doesn't need to be sung to sleep at bedtime* so you know she is capable of falling asleep.

*If she does then that's another issue which in my experience with my daughter led to bigger sleep problems further down the line.

The suggestion of just go to bed earlier is laughable to me, because with my DD, the terrible sleeper that I didn't sleep train, there was no going to bed earlier because she wouldn't fall asleep until 11 or 12 at night, bedtime took hours, then once she was asleep I'd crawl into bed to get a tiny bit of sleep before she woke up. Then there was the phase when she would wake up around 3am and not fall back asleep again until 6 or so.

1. I don't think it's crying in itself that's inherently harmful, I think it's crying which is consistently not responded to.
2. "You're acting like babies are sentient beings" wtaf
3. It's possible some babies have ongoing trauma from having been in the NICU, sadly, and that's not anybody's fault of course. Older children may have ongoing trauma from having been hospitalised and that's not a controversial thing to say so I don't think babies would be immune from that just because they're babies.
4. I think the initial sleep training period is traumatic and after that you don't know whether they are still distressed every night or not, because there's no way of knowing that, they've just been trained not to vocalise.

If you really believe you did the right thing then I don't think this sort of criticism would bother you because you'd know you were right.
In terms of 'what's the answer' well in your case you were talking about wanting your evenings back and I would have just put up with it for longer tbh rather than listening to my child cry for me and not going to them. That's me. You chose otherwise and if you're happy about it then that's fine you can be happy about it.