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.

Have you tried oesteopathy?

You just have to be insistent. It wasn't until blood appeared in our dd's stools that anything was done because otherwise she was gaining weight ok which is all the GPs are worried about. The number of times I got fobbed off with 'colic will calm down after 4 months'... it didn't for us.

Try going dairy-free with your diet and see if anything changes in the couple of weeks after that. Unfortunately for me, dd was also intolerant to gluten in a big way so my diet was pretty limited for a while. I couldn't believe that chorizo had dairy in it! I also couldn't believe that explosive vinegary nappies stopped within a day of giving up gluten and she slept through immediately at 5mths.

Ask your GP for an antacid, explaining the arching back symptoms (Sandifer's syndrome - classic reflux). We were given Peptac initially, then ranitidine (by this stage we were seeing a consultant due to the blood, which they think was from her poor raw gullet).

Angle the mattress in your cot/moses basket. Some people even use a Tucker wedge which I would definitely consider next time around if any future dcs are refluxers.

Get a sling so that you can bf whilst actually getting on with other things if the wee one won't sleep.

Good luck! Sorry to hijack the thread.

maria, sympathies. Bad as my dcs were, your ds (and you) sounds quite distressed. I agree to try and eliminate medical reasons, like reflux.

My dd's sleep suddenly got much worse at around 4-5 months. Lots of mothers report that as well. I think at that age, they are more alert, have come out of the sleepy baby phase so ripe for sleep issues. Some babies start to pre-teeth around now as well - is your ds drooling loads? I see you have given calpol. Nothing really helped my dcs' teething pains. They just wanted to comfort nurse when that happened, but still very restless and unsettled.

Oh Maria. You poor thing. Sympathies!

Forgive me if you've tried this already, but do you ever put your DS in a sling or baby wrap? I find I can get my LO off to sleep in our Moby wrap quite easily. While I accept that this may say more about her than it does about the effectiveness of wraps, it might be worth a go for you? I put it on, pop her in, and bob and sway and she drifts off. Then after about 20 mins, when I think she's sunk into a deep sleep, I very quickly extract her and lie her on the bed.

I really do hope you find a solution - perhaps, as the others have said, it's reflux.
Or his ears? My sister cried constantly as a baby, and it was only when she was a little older that she was diagnosed with a unusual susceptibility to ear infections.

Also - meant to say...

I think you are holding it together amazingly well! Respect! To be able to come on here and write such coherent and sensible posts! Says a lot about you, I think.

Maria, I was reluctant to send more sleep advice to you
and now I am glad: I agree with the others, eliminate possible health reasons first.
DON'T let them fob you off!
The son of one of my best friends spent weeks crying
and only the 4th time he was seen in hospital did a nurse spot the problem.

This notion of CC being okay but only if the mother
is really desperately sleep-deprived - nonsense, isn't it?

Under no circumstances would I ever do something harmful to my child
regardless of how sleep-deprived I was.

DaddyJ Would you watch a footie match final instead of helping your DS with his homework that he is struggling with?

There is a difference between actively harming your child and choosing a path that suits you better than it suits your child.

Bloody credit crunch, I missed most of the debate.
Just to add a few last thoughts:

Starlight, blueshoes and all the other CC sceptics have been magnificent on this thread.

No, I still don't agree with them but I do believe them.

It's just their observations and opinions seem utterly alien to me,
like they were actually looking after an infant of a different species.

Maybe our next one will be an 'AP baby'..
this thread has reinforced the need to stay open to all possibilities

A very emotive thread.

Well, I didn't use cc and I'm glad I didn't as it wouldn't suit my ds.But I have friends who's kids haven't slept once through the night at the age of two and I urge them to get proper advice and try cc before they end up in A&E for exhaustion.

Having said that - I've never been able to say to my little one goodnight - turn the light off and that's that. I'm a cosleeper and very happy with that and nothing, but NOTHING, can make me feel I'm doing anything wrong, despite the criticms I get. I think the majority of parents globally cosleep for ages and it doesn't do any harm. I coslept with my mum for YEARS and I had no sleep issues when she put me in my own room.

It's just down to this - how do you want to live your life - do you want every evening with your dp (my dp works every evening so it doesn't matter), do you feel your kid is safer if you cosleep - if so do it. Do have a full on job and need a proper night's sleep, then probably doing anything to get your child sleeping through the night is important.

It's partly cultural - I cosleep but have a good routine. My inlaws hate me for it as they live in country where kids go with their parents routine and so have none. Great - if you've got heaps of people around you to entertain the baby in at 3 am or you don't work. But I do, so I want to sleep, my ds does alot better for having a routine and it suits us.

And that's about it really. If my ds didn't sleep though the night I'd definately consider cc.

Incidentally, my ds initally was in a cot in our room, then in a cot in his room and then progressed to cosleeping during a horrendous cold. I've alwasy had to get him to sleep whereever he is. I also work. He's also slept through the night since he was 2 months old regardless of the method I used.
I've got him in a routine - suits me and suits my job. He's happier for it. But many people don't bother and have lots of help around for night wakes. Good on 'em but not for me I'm afraid.

I think cc if used correctly is fine - depending on your child. Wouldn't be good for mine. Might be good for you and yours.

Maria, I have never (with two children), ever had a night like you describe. I don't know how you are still going, I really honestly don't.

All I want to say really is - this isn't normal. It truly isn't like this for most people, I don't think. If I were you, I think I would prioritise seeking outside help, because what you describe sound like a living hell to me.

Can you pay a night nurse for a while to take your DS for say 3 hours between feeds? See your GP? HV? Is there any family anywhere that could come and do a night?

Starlight, tell me why you think that CC was a convenient lifestyle choice for us?
Please. I would like to know why you made that assumption.

In one of your posts you say that babies don't need guidance on how to sleep.
Our daughter did.
Why do you not believe a fellow parent and Mumsnetter?

Yours didn't. So you say. Should I start doubting you?
Maybe they were sleep-deprived and you just didn't notice?
If they had slept through from 6/7 months instead of waking up several times
and needing bfing back to sleep - don't you think all that extra, uninterrupted
sleep would have been wonderful for their brain development and overall health?

You don't believe that infants can learn the skill of settling themselves.
What do you base your belief on?
I have seen my daugther settling herself using her new-learnt skill
at the age of 7 months.

We did CC because it was the right sleep-training method for her personality
and for the situation we were in.
I certainly would have felt guilty if we had failed her in this respect
just because we were afraid of some tears and incapable of recognising protest crying.

What I want to know, Starlight: why do you not believe me?
Why would you believe a bunch of people who can barely use Google?
Who make hair-raisingly crass statements without doing any kind of research first?
People who have lied to you, who have lied to all of us.

Why do you believe them over me?

DaddyJ: "It's just their observations and opinions seem utterly alien to me, like they were actually looking after an infant of a different species."

I will be the first to say my dcs ARE different from yours. They are different from almost all babies I know from their sheer intensity and persistence. I am also different - co-sleeping and broken sleep does not make me sleep deprived. So not-cc-ing works for me and my family.

My goodness DaddyJ That looks like a poem.

I'm not sure I'll be able to respond to all your points in one go as I only MN when bfing (which as you can tell is fairly often though).

CC is done by parents who want/expect their babies to fit in with when they themselves would like to sleep. This isn't when they HAVE to sleep, but how they set up their days/weeks. It is their lifestyle.

On what premise did you decide that your daughter needed guidance to sleep? Or was it rather that you wanted her to be guided to sleep to fit above lifestyle. I certainly believe that her sleeping wasn't what you wanted and you proactively sought to change it.

If I were to want/desire my babies to sleep according to above lifestyle, THEY would need training, so I'm not saying mine don't, rather that I am happy for them to find their own patterns.

I do believe however, that infants do eventually learn to follow the 24 hour pattern that our culture expects, but 'fitting in' with the parents and their sleep cycles. As social animals they learn to do what is necessary to be accepted. Why do I believe this? Sleep training is a modern thing, babies and families survived prior to this 'invention'.

I believe your daughter settled herself at 7months, but it is not possible to say with certainty that cc was responsible for this or that it would not have happened anyway. You refer to 'the situation you were in'. Could this have led to bedtime anxiety on her part? Not saying it did. I have no idea of your circumstances.

I don't understand the last verse of your poem.

I do know that being a parent in the first year in particular is very very hard, and that we are no longer set up in a way for babies who take longer to sleep well to do so in their own time.

I do think it is only a matter of time and that being tired creates the biological need to sleep, as being hungry makes us eat. It is only as our consciousness develops that we are able to over-ride these needs i.e in anorexia.

BTW I completely made up the last paragraph.

Parental poetry, one of my favourite things!

Ok, let me address your points, could be interesting:

No, CC is done by parents whose child needs some prop in order to fall sleep.
That's it.
None of the cultural stuff that you talk about is relevant to the CC debate.
You are saying there was no sleep training in the past -
well, women were regularly beaten by their husbands in the past.
Are you sure you want to return to the good old days?

DD slept from 7-6 before CC, and after CC. No change to her sleep routine.
The difference was that she could settle herself
and was not reliant on someone else doing something to her (i.e. bf)
so that she could sleep.

It is possible to say with absolute certainty that she would have not
learnt this skill without CC. Certainly not at 7 months.
No, neither she nor us suffered from any anxieties at bedtime.

'The situation' I am referring to is her utter dependency on a crutch.

No, the first year does not have to be 'very very hard'.
People who persistently follow the wrong approach for their child
and for themselves, they are the ones who tend to suffer badly.

Did you find the first year very very hard?
Do you believe the mother's suffering reflects the quality of her parenting?

Maria, I haven't read through all your posts completely but I also think you haven't read through mine properly too. My number one main point has been that for sleep deprived women sleep training is a helpful option. WHat is not acceptable for me is the idea that it should be a first resort.

I do know how it is to be sleep deprived. I do know what its like to have a cranky baby. My daughter was a ridiculously terrible sleeper. She woke every hour in the night for weeks. Then 5-6 times in the night until she was 1. She needed to be jostled and bounced all the time. It was awful. But as I said I didn't do CC but NOT because I believe I am a "better" mother than people who do give in to sleep training, but because I felt keenly in my bones that I was abandoning her if I left her to cry. It just felt wrong. It was the worst of all the options. If that sounds sanctimonious and holier-than-thou, then so be it, I am guilty! But I can not, never will agree that leaving a baby to cry is okay as a method in itself, unless you are at the end of your tether (see my previous post).
I know that this opinion gets a lot of stick on mumsnet. Its seen as "baby-centred" or "martyrdom". FIne. But I still have very strong beliefs that its unnatural to wilfully let a baby cry when you have the power to put him out of his misery by simply picking the poor thing up.

DaddyJ,
comparing those two past situation: 1] lack of CC and B] wife-beating, is utterly ridiculous.
Don't you get it? Wife beating is a bad thing. Picking up a baby when it cries is a good thing.
Leaving a baby to cry is a fairly recent, man-made practice. I doubt many mothers with the right support (village environment as mentioned previously) would decide "Hmm, I don't think I'll respond to my baby's signals and cues today. I think I'll let her cry instead."

This thread is pushing all the wrong buttons for me. TIme for me to step out, I think.

its amazing how many historians we have on this thread. how can you really know what was the popular practice in the past? people probably did what they thought was best for everyone, as they do know.

sakura - i respect that it felt wrong for you to let your baby cry in your situation. but that doesn't mean that its "unnatural" for everyone else.

and again i think that being tuned in to your baby means being able to read when they "protest" cry or when they need to be picked up, fed or changed. letting them protest while you hold their hand/stroke their face or repeatedly return to the room to reassure them is not abandoning a baby.

'I do believe however, that infants do eventually learn to follow the 24 hour pattern that our culture expects, but 'fitting in' with the parents and their sleep cycles.'

starlight - I dont agree that its 'cultural' for us to sleep at night rather in the day time (although yes granted the research on a long nap during the day so 2 sleeps) - I think we are probably programmed as mammals to sleep at night and not during the day. After all it wasnt the culture that invented the lunar cycle was it.

Absolutely, there is nothing cultural about the mature human's 24-hours sleep-wake cycle and sleeping at night/being awake in the light. It is biological.

Of course, artificial light/moving across time zones etc can interfere temporarily with biorythms.

I have a friend who had three sons. The first was a good sleeper. The second son was a happy, wellfed bonny confident baby but woke several times a night to breastfeed and was still doing so at 10 months. She decided he was just waking out of habit so endured a week of hell sleeptraining him. He was completely cured of his waking habit, and continued to be a happy, confident, adventurous very tall and strong little boy. She felt completely vindicated in her actions and always said she had made a serious mistake letting things get to 10 months without acting. HOWEVER, now he is 11 years, she had told me he is (despite being very tall strong, clever amiable) insecure, very emotional, wanting to stay close to the family group etc and wanting her attention. (She has always given him lots of attention and adores him btw). It is interesting to know whether his experience of being sleeptrained in this draconian manner was the cause of his insecurity. It has only surfaced in the last three years as a particular issue (he was never a clingy little boy). Similarily, I did controlled crying on a 15 week old twin, who was obviously desperate to go to sleep but unable somehow to tune out. I think it took three episodes (15-20 mins each) of leaving her to cry herself to sleep before she changed her sleep association. She has been a brilliant sleeper from then on (she's now six) and needs her sleep desperately. However, I think the neediness has not gone away, and it has resurfaced in other forms. I now find there is a lot of cuddling to sleep now that she's six, and falling asleep with me in the bed next to her. So the need for reassurance has only really been suppressed, not removed in both cases. Maybe the answer is that the sort of children that 'need' controlled crying are children that need lots of reassurance in all parts of their life. I never used controlled crying on my other two children (who were good to erratic sleepers) nor did my friend. I suppose I just assumed I had to go to them when they needed me. But their sleeping was never BAD.
Surely the problem is parents not exercising a bit of commonsense at the beginning, providing sleep cues, quiet times, winddown periods. Then they wouldn't need to sleep train later. I think when you've made an effort to give all the right cues, and the baby still wakes up in the night, it needs something. YOU

Maria, I would second the suggestion of osteopathy.

My DS used to keep my up all night as a newborn, be just would not settle after feeds, needed to be on my chest for 30 mins asleep before I could put him down. Took him for 2 sessions of osteopathy (at 6 and 7 weeks old) and he was like a different baby. He'd been a little out of line due to his forceps birth (had a gunky eye too which cleared within days of the 'blockage' being cleared) and once he had been 'fixed' he slept wonderfully.

Try www.fpo.org.uk/

swanriver, your post struck a cord with me.

I did not do CC with my dcs, because I did not think (rightly or wrongly) that 3 nights would be all it would take. I had the feeling that their need went a lot deeper than just being unable to settle on their own without a short cry.

They are both very extroverted and cuddly with me and dh. It is a lovely part of their personality. No amount of sleep training will change that aspect of their personality. I just feel in my bones that their need to co-sleep goes to the heart of their relationship with me. When I went to dd's 5 drop-in afternoon at school, she practically leapt into my lap for utter joy and hugged me for 5 minutes and would not let me go. I don't know what I did to deserve that but she is consistently affectionate and expressive about it.

To this day, co-sleeping is one of the most precious things I will remember of their early childhood.

DaddyJ I'm afraid I'm gonna have to let you have the last word (unless this is still going in 2.5 weeks). I'm going abroad in 36 hours with a 24m old and a 14week old (not THEIR best interests I shouldn't imagine) and my house resembles a typical APer who believes that the packing won't feel insecure if not attended to.

Unfortunately reality is making itself known so I really have to back out for now.

Thanks all for an interesting thread.