Any child psychologists out there? What do you think (professionally) about controlled crying?

[Neenztwinz]

I have used CC, I think it is a very quick and effective way of dealing with sleep problems, but I was wondering if there was any research done into its long-term effects. My SIL is a child psychologist and she is dead against CC, so I wonder whether it is because of research she may have seen. I don't want to ask her about it because our babies are only 7 weeks different in age and discussions such as these are just not worth the hassle IYKWIM.

mustincreasebust You might be right, but I don't think I do. I haven't in any of my posts owned up to my own parenting style. We do all do our best with what we are given, culture, child, our own experiences and lifeskills and I doubt for a minute that anyone on this thread would ever do anything 'proven' to damage their child.

However, I do think that solutions to all kinds of problems can be sought by looking outside of cultural norms and that as a society we are very VERY bad at this because we fill every spare minute trying to just cope with demands, some real and some perceived, but nevertheless many of us don't have much time to reflect or reassess, we just struggle along without questioning.

Well I question, - a LOT, and then I get back to real life!

Warning - rambling but theres been lots of interesting points raised.

'Perhaps they do it because they are overwhelmed by the demands of a new baby, taken by surprise, have unrealistic expectations and haven't put strategies in place to enable them to cope with a newborn.'

this is all fair enough but we have been brought up in this prevailing culture as well so we would not only have to change this culture but also resocialise ourselves at the same time - this is surely impossible.

People that follow more of the 'AP' tenets - though you know I hate these labels, is it mostly by instinct? and not because they have sat down and thought 'this is what is best for my baby' - it is extremely hard to break out of our own conditioning and so you may be just lucky if you fit in with the 'dominant' or indeed fashionable parenting mores of the day.

I do tend towards a routine as that is what my mother must have done with me - has anyone here managed to break out of this - has anyone successfully parented against their own instinct? (leaving aside my earlier comment about some instincts being more equal than others)

When it comes to instinct and hearing your baby cry - don't different cries provoke different responses in you guys?

When DD cries with tiredness my instinct is to bring her to bed. Even if she continues crying after I've put her down, my instinct is to leave her alone to settle down.

If she wakes in the night, her cry is sometimes sad or (if teething or sick in some way) in pain. My response to this is pretty close to panic - I fumble about for my glasses, stumble around in the dark to get to her. I could not and would not ever ignore that cry.

Other nights she wakes up and does what I call a "moochy" cry, where she just sounds kind of tired and not even really awake. When I hear this I wait for a sign that she's properly woken up. If its interspersed with long contented sighs, then I know for sure that she'll settle back to sleep.

I find it hard to identify with the idea that there is one instinctive response to a crying baby when my own experience, of just one baby, is that the reason I am the best person at caring for her is that I understand her cries and all her other cues better than anyone else seems to, even DH. My responses vary depending on what I am hearing.

DD doesn't sleep that well at her CM's. DH wants to tell the CM to leave her a little while to see will she settle, but I won't do that. To me it seems crazy to tell somebody else to ignore my baby when they are meant to be caring for her. I want the CM to trust her own instincts, even where they are different from mine. I never ignore DD. I pay attention to what she's crying for:

If it's tiredness I will leave her a couple of minutes (if she's in her cot, otherwise I'll put her to bed) to see if she stops.

If it's that she's pissed off because she's been in the car seat too long I will stop at the next safe place and let her out of it for a while.

If it's because I'm putting her back into the car seat after her break and she doesn't want to go back in but we are in the middle of nowhere and it's dark and cold and we need to press on then I just put her in and let her cry. This one I find really hard. It's at those times that I feel like I am going against my instinct and it brings me out in a bit of a cold sweat. If possible I have DH drive at these times.

I always wonder what the people who can't bear to hear their child cry do at these times? Have I got other options than to keep going? Is it just cultural blindness that means that I don't see them?

Maria I thought your first post was fantastic and added a great deal to the discussion. Thanks for your contribution.

Skidoodle, you make a very good point. There are MANY different kinds of cries... and actually sometimes babies even cry a bit in their sleep, at least mine does. (But I'm a big wuss & rush to him even then... ) In any case, the idea that there is somehow an "instinct" that leads us to rush to our babies at their every cry is simply not true, because then why do so many parents- be it because of believing in 'letting them cry a little' or because they're not first time parents- learn to wait a bit when their child cries, and don't rush? Or is it that they are not in touch with their instincts & Attachment parents are closer to their inner self & less brainwashed by society? I simply don't buy that, I think this idea that somehow some parents are 'truer' than others & are more in touch with the true needs of their children is just simply wrong. Not saying there are not better or worse parents. Just that the split doesn't run along the lines of attachment versus non-attachment parents. (Plus almost everyone mixes & matches ideas & practices anyway

Also, I really resent the idea that some parents are somewhat more able to deny their own needs & desires & are ready to sacrifice almost everything for their children- come on, 2 hours with DH is NOT a luxury to be reevaluated, as someone suggested!

agree with skidoodle completely...

my horrible time like that is the school run which has to be done but which dd will do a distressed cry through sometimes - just terrible...

very early on in the thread when everyone was talking about cortisol levels someone did ask a pertinent question about this (paraphrasing)- 'so what happens to my colicky childs cortisol levels when he wont stop crying and be comforted even when I'm holding him'? It wasnt answered.

Definitely agree there are different types of cry - and different types of looks. Sometimes when DS cries in his cot it is a wail and his eyes say to me 'mummy I need you, you have to pick me up' so I do. Whereas my DD cries sometimes and I know she is just fighting sleep, so I leave her (going in to resettle if necessary of course).

And for the record I am a SAHM, I think me looking after my kids is the best thing for them but am lucky cos DH earns enough for me to do that.

I used CC - I wouldn't say I was desperate, I used it cos I wanted my kids to go to bed at 7pm and they weren't doing that. It may well be cultural norms but haven't cultural norms developed for a reason? When I was a kid I went to bed at 7/8pm and got up at 7/8am. Because that was what was best for me, made sure I got a good night's sleep and was refreshed for school.

Can I ask a serious question about AP - do the kids grow up thinking the world revolves around them? And that they can always do whatever they want (choose their own bedtime etc)?

And I disagree that most mums don't think their baby waking in the night is a problem - check out my June 08 postnatal thread and you'll see lots of mums desperate for a good night's sleep (I think the new thread title even says it!)

Er - don;t know what happened with my username there!

I was just thinking wow who is this man city fan on this thread! Er, it's me

Neenz- you are mancity??!! LOL!!!

There are different cries (and looks) and there are different babies.

For both of my babies, I could not distinguish between their cries, whether for cuddles, hungry, bored, tired etc because they went from small grizzle to full blown screaming their guts out within a minute, usually shorter. As a result, the smallest peep from them (particularly with dd), I would rush to them to head off any discomfort. They were almost invariably inconsolable once they got into that state. My day was like walking on eggshells. I co-slept with them just so I could get to them faster when they woke at night. I had what Sears would have described as 'high needs' babies. My dh, accordingly to MIL, was the same as a baby.

Whilst before I had babies, I was so sure I would put them in a routine and use CC if necessary, once I saw what I had been landed with, I had to find alternatives ie AP. The force of their personalities were just too strong for me to want to break them.

I don't know whether it was instinct which changed my entire philosophy to childrearing. But some babies cry louder, demand more, insist on their needs being met NOW and are less amenable to parental redirection. So to that extent, they influenced me, rather than or as much as the other way round.

"Can I ask a serious question about AP - do the kids grow up thinking the world revolves around them?"

No.

The point about attachment parenting is not that you do exactly what the baby wants all the time but that you and your baby/child make decisions based on a negotiation between the two of you, taking both your needs (and the needs of the rest of the family) into account. If you do this, your baby should, theoretically, grow up used to negotiating a peaceful win-win solution with others; (extreme) authoritarian parenting is based on life being a power struggle, with the weak (in this case the child) dominated by the strong (the parent). You would theoretically (and in my observation, it really does happen in practice) get adults who expect the world to revolve around them because it is "their turn" to be powerful, after a childhood in which they were powerless.

"But some babies cry louder, demand more, insist on their needs being met NOW and are less amenable to parental redirection."

That is so true.
You missed out that some have incredible staying power,too. They NEVER give up.

Sorry, I had to leave the thread last night so you might all have gone away now!!

However, I did want to respond following Starlight's post (which was responding to mine...)

Forgive me - the following will be an essay (to read or not as people see fit!) but I need to put it down once and for all.

"I don't think many CCers do it because of extreme circumstances, or at least if that is the reason they have given they have usually an extremely narrowminded view of 'extreme'!"

I have tried not to personalise in this debate as I think the issues are clearly much wider but I do think there is too much generalising that goes on when it comes to CC so I wanted to present a specific case - me. An extremely narrow minded view of extreme?

We did do CC with DS. DS had hardly slept from the moment he was born and he screamed. A lot. When he was awake he either fed (yes, he was breastfed - on demand) or screamed. As it turned out he had GERD (reflux). Mostly silent but with daily bouts of projectile vomiting thrown in for good meaure. Lying him flat was pretty much the trigger for the acid to wash up and therefore wake him to start screaming all over again. This was a scream that could shatter glass and it certainly shattered me.

For his first few months he pretty much lived upright on me as it was the only way he could sleep. Needless to say this meant I did not sleep.

I had PND that kicked in the first night he was here and never let up. It was bad. It was exacerbated by sleep deprivation to the point that I sometimes hallucinated. I cried a lot. I had dark thoughts that haunt me to this day.

I tried very hard to hide the PND from DS. I cuddled him a lot, stroked him, sang to him, read to him, nursed him through the screaming.

The rest of life stopped. I expected that. Of course I did.

Finally we did get his symptoms under control with medications after a battle with the medical profession. This left him with entrenched and very poor sleep habits. So he still did not sleep. So on top of all the other guilt I felt for my PND I now had the guilt that carrying him around upright, feeding to sleep etc. etc. had left him not knowing how to fall asleep by himself. So that was my fault too.

The PND and exhaustion raged on. My life was feeding him, winding him and, in between feeding him expressing like a cow hooked up to a milking machine because he would only take one of his medications mixed in with expressed milk. (On the positive side I was a milk-producing expert - I could express a full bottle in 15 minutes flat in my heyday!)

DS was exhausted. He was suffering and he looked terrible. He so badly wanted to sleep but how many more days and nights could I keep upright?

Believe me, I tried a lot of things. Then, yes, I was advised to try CC. I was adamantly against. But I tried. I failed after about five minutes.

In the end I called in a professional to help me (actually I wanted a night nanny first so I could sleep a little to give me the strength to cope - but I was referred t0 a lady who bacme a godsend). The first night she was with me (swaddling and a short period of crying) he slept from midnight to 6.30. He woke up and started chatting and singing to himself. It was the first time I thought that there was an alternative to killing myself or living in hell. It was a bit of a one-off but he was so desperate to
sleep that it worked!)

It was then a gradual process of decreasing my interventions. It had set backs because ocassionally his pain would flare up

• or I would suspect it of flaring up so I would be back in in a nanosecond. Or I would give in because my nerves and emotions were being flayed. I felt wretched beyond belief and my instincts to go to him tore me apart.

It became controlled crying. Over a very short period of time but it felt like an eternity to me.

We got through it. He was so much happier.

I got through my PND.

Now? If cries in the night I either go to him straight away or leave him for a maximum of five minutes to see if he will fall back to sleep (depends on the cry, whether he is ill etc.) We are close. He is happy and secure and knows he is loved. He is a good sleeper!

I do not beleive he was in any way damaged emtionally by a fleeting interval in his life when we did CC.

So yes, I was "overwhelmed by the demands of a new baby". I was sure as hell "taken by surprise". Did I have unrealistic expectations? I don't think so. I was not expecting a rose garden but this was, to me, infiinitely worse than what I had imagined.

Did I have "strategies in place to enable [me]to cope with a newborn"? Clearly not. Not sure what I could have done. Sent him back?!

CC for me was NOT about "needing to present an external image of 'coping'". It was about my sanity and the welfare of both my baby and me.

I completely understand why people are against CC. I was too. But I do feel hurt and frustrated when people who employ it are written off automatically as automatons who are either too wussy/selfish to cope with a newborn or unfeeling enough to shove them at the bottom of the garden and leave them until school age. There may be some like that. It was not me and I suspect my story is not isolated.

Was there an alternative? Maybe. Probably. But I did what I felt I had to at the time. It worked. He was happier and healthier. He goes to bed happliy, he wakes up and chats or sings to himself. If he needs me in the night he knows I will be there. Which I am.

I believe I owed it to him to help him.

I do have strong notions of what I believe are the needs and best interests of a baby. His welfare and happiness are pretty high on the list and if I felt that a few nights worth of having to cry on his own for a short time were what was needed as part of that, then so be it.

Would I do it again? Not if I could avoid it. But put it this way, I would not have another child again and go through that first year again if my life depended on it.

I did not expect my life to snap back to how it was before. I am not stupid. Life will never be the same again - I never expected it to be.

I am not a stereotype. I am a devoted mother. I make mistakes. But I love DS and he loves me.

End of.

Neenz/mancity: "And I disagree that most mums don't think their baby waking in the night is a problem - check out my June 08 postnatal thread and you'll see lots of mums desperate for a good night's sleep (I think the new thread title even says it!)"

If your above sentence was directed at me, I did not say that I think most mums find non-sleeping a problem. My point is simply that there are mothers would don't necessarily find sleepless nights a problem yet are pressured into CC-ing their young babies (eg By MIL) because of the cultural expectation that a baby is expected to sleep through or in its own cot. I am a case in point.

Yeah I am mancity! I was playing around with my nickname last night to try to find a christmassy one and I must have filled in some boxes wrong when I was trying to get back to normal.

Blueshoes, I remember when DS was a newborn, he would only sleep after night feeds if I held him for 30mins before putting him down. If I tried to put him down before that he would scream and scream. It was odd cos he would sleep so well during the day. Obviously I held him for the required time till he went to sleep. But to me that is not normal, a baby shouldn't need that, so I took him to a cranial osteopath and after one session he was like a different baby. He'd been forceps delivery and was a bit out of line. He also had a gunky eye which cleared up after the osteo (there was a blockage down the side of his face caused by the forceps). After the treatment he started going down in his cot with no trouble at all.

The point I am trying to make is I didn't accept that he was 'just a clingy baby' etc, and I am glad I didn;t because I would still be holding him to sleep now when that was not what he needed - what he needed was to have the osteo treatment.

Just wondered whether those with 'demanding' babies had considered whether it is something more than just personality.

juuule, I am amazed, do you KNOW my babies? Yes, persistence is their middle name. I frequently use the term 'take-no-prisoners' or think 'scorched earth' with them!

Blueshoes- very very good point. I think my 4 month old boy is exactly the way you describe. Which is why we don't take away his dummy (even though it means disturbed nights for all of us). Which is also why we've ended up co-sleeping. I feel he is a very 'insistent' baby, if you see what I mean... I think he's been like that from the start. When he wants something, he wants it NOW & he really really shows it! Not at all like some of the much more easy-going children of some of my friends. So yes, even though I don't subscribe to a particular type of parenting (as I said, I think all that is just labels that simplify things) in practice I've been following whatever feels right for my boy. I do feel that in the case of my boy letting him to cry- at least at the moment and for the foreseeable future- would just not be right for him, I think he wouldn't accept any change easily at all. And you know, there ARE babies who respond to CC by actually INCREASING their cries for quite a few days, & it takes ages for it to work. So it really depends on the baby, and it's not as if all babies stop crying & start sleeping within 3 days of CC. If/when I have another baby, who knows, maybe he/she will be the best sleeper in the world

god Elffriend - that sounds awful, well done for coming through it. Your next baby will probably be completely different though so bear that in mind

Blueshoes - not wanting to be annoying but could we not use the phrase 'break them' when referring to personalities and cc? It doesnt help posters like Elffriend and I think its too emotive.

neenz, a baby who needs only 30 minutes holding before going down is easy easy easy to me. Sorry, but I will say that babies are different. With mine, I am certain it is a function of their personality, which I am very proud of BTW. Inconvenient as it is when they are babies, persistence and drive is a fantastic thing for an adult to have IMO. I won't be extinguishing that too soon.

Elfriend: that's an amazing post. You've been through such a lot. I have a huge amount of respect for you for coming through the other side of all that.

Elffriend. Thanks so much for your message. I found it really moving, & very honestly written. I'm really really sorry you had to go through such a difficult time. I think early motherhoood (parenthood) is so often romanticized, when so many of us have loads of difficulties. I found that in the first 6 weeks of my boy's life I would just cry all the time for no reason. Now that he's 17 weeks- and not sleeping- I find that I'm much more often 'down' than I expected to be at this stage. You know, people say 'it gets better' & they even give you timeframes for that e.g. 6 weeks, 3 months etc. Well not every case is the same, as your story describes very well. I think you've given us a very good, valuable example of a situation where CC not only worked but was probably necessary to save your sanity & to create a happier life for you & your boy. Thank you for writing it.

blueshoes- except that I don't think CC necessarily 'extinguishes' their personality! I agree that babies are different (as I wrote). But in my opinion it would take far more than 3 days of crying to extinguish a baby's personality...it would take a far more persistent attempt to control the child and make him/her compliant. Elffriend's story is a good example. Having said that, as I said I do think some babies don't respond as well to CC,and maybe other alternatives need to be explored first? But as many have written on this thread, in some cases there ARE no other alternatives...

Can I also reiterate the point that I think Neenz made earlier about the definitions of what we are talking about here - cc is used most often and in the way i think about it for babies to go down at their bedtime - not for waking up in the night.

When we had the two hour waking at 4 months - CC would not have been appropriate at all - what we did was gradually get rid of the dummy - my dd was waking up and looking for it when it had fallen out and gradually space out the feeds by comforting etc over the space of a week until we were back to one/two feeds again.

I know people will take issue with that and that if we were co-sleeping then I wouldnt have noticed and she would have fed and gone back to sleep but she would never sleep properly in the bed with us.

But if it takes more than 3days of crying what then? Do you continue until it works?
How long would that take? How long is too long to continue?

Message withdrawn

juule - wouldnt it depend on if there was any improvement at all in those 3 days?