Controlled Crying - stress levels stay high even when babies have learned to settle themselves.

[Codandchops]

OMG!!!

Even worse is that I could not bear to leave my DS as a baby so used to sit in the room and re-settle him every 5 mins. How shit is that? He could see me for 5 mins at a time not comforting him (even though after every 5 mins I did comfort him).

Have always felt an irrational guilt about DS's autism and wonder if I made things worse .

Need to read the research and look at numbers involved.

*id much rather that, than rant about ..

Sorry iPhone

DD's 14 months, sleep's always been an issue, waking up 4 - 6 time each night for months, I wasn't getting more than a couple of hours sleep at a stretch. I never wanted to do CC but there came a point when I just couldn't take anymore and we tried CC. Unfortunately it didn't work for us, she'd cry for ages and then vomit, we tried a couple of times and stopped, it wasn't worth it for us to put her through it. The Baby Whisperer method worked best for us although only to a point but at least we managed to stop the rocking but even though she can fall asleep on her own now, she still often needs help to go back to sleep. CC (or other sleep methods for that matter) doesn't work for everyone, some babies are just really bad sleepers. I've resigned now to the fact that despite my best efforts to teach DD independent sleep by gentler methods, she's taking it at her own pace, i e very slow!! :) So I'm not a fan of CC but wouldn't judge anyone doing it responsibly (i.e. not leaving baby to cry to a long time) and as long as you can see it working fairly quickly. When you are completely sleep deprived for months on end, you don't do it flippantly because you want a model baby, you need it to save you sanity.

Have no views on the CC thing one way or the other. this is just for Codandchops. I know a reasonable amount about the causes of autism and am married to a man who knows a lot (DH is a developmental neuro) and even if CC does raise cortisol levels in saliva in babies there is no way this either causes autism or makes it worse. It just doesn't.

Although we cannot say precisely for any child what combination of genetic and environmental factors contributed to their autism we do know that autism arises very early in neural development. Your son already had it long before you were debating whether or not to leave him to cry, it was probably inevitable from a few weeks post-conception.

As for making it worse, children with autism show slight differences in their response to stress to other children. So your son might not have exhibited the same hormonal response to controlled crying as these babies. Or it might have been more so. But at most the effect would have been marginal and done him no long-term harm.

if we are going for 'how long since i had a decent nights sleep' 5 kids here aged between 12 yrs and 17mths, eldest born aug 1999 and i had months of no sleep before he was born as i had excruciating spd, was actually hospitalised it was that bad. anyway we muddled through, tbh dp and i just couldnt do cc, it just didnt sit right with us, so we have co-slept, tho the older 4 are now in their own beds in their own rooms, they get their eventually.

i can see WHY people get to the point where they want to do it (esp as i had pnp after ds4 and was hallucinating and ended up in a psych unit) as i said over 12mths and done properly, with lots of reassurance etc. but its not something i could ever bring myself to do.

Funny, I know that CC involves going back in at regular intervals 2,5,7 mins whatever. CIO (which is what they seem to have done in the article) involves simply leaning them to cry - I think this is heartless and cruel and I don't think anyone should EVER do that to a child. I don't like CC and I wouldn't use it myself but it is obviously different with an older child who understands that you are just on the other side of the door/in the other room and are coming back in every few mins. (Someone suggested the 'kiss' game on another thread or using a clock.) I still think that babies are too young for that though so I just don't agree with it for them at all.

"Funny, I know that CC involves going back in at regular intervals 2,5,7 mins whatever. CIO (which is what they seem to have done in the article) involves simply leaning them to cry.

The problem is that a baby doesn't know you're coming back- so leaving them to cry for 2, 5 or 7 minutes is just the same, in a little baby, as CIO. It's possibly different once they are old enough to understand.

penelopepippop re causes of autism. what does your dh think of the recent suggestion of maternal fever having impact in pregnancy. Ds2 just dx HFA tho present more aspergers. In preg I had severe d&v bug with soaring fever.

5mad as i said, some people do do it without sleep training.

the point is it isn't a short amount of time! the only time we are ever alive is now, and as i'm sure you know...any amount of time is too long without sleep.

oh yes sleep deprevation is awful, really awful, but my choice as a parent (and dps choice) was to find ways to work around it so we both got some sleep, whether that was him sleeping on the sofa sometimes or him taking the kids out in the day so i could nap etc, we muddled through it as we couldnt leave ours to cry. but i can see that it doesnt always work, but i do think that under 12mths its not good for a baby and tbh i think they need to be older than 18mths or so to understand cc, that you are coming back and reassuring them etc.

i dont know its not something that i could do and bizarrely dps work at the moment involved caring for a child who was left to cry at night from a young age, he is 14 and still has problems sleeping without adult reassurance/presence. he has been doing a lot of studying on the issue and i have read some of his study books, (i find it interesting) and it has reinforced my belief that for little babies it really isnt a good thing to do tbh. but then a sleep deprived, depressed parent is not good, so itd about getting a balance?

seeker - "The problem is that a baby doesn't know you're coming back- so leaving them to cry for 2, 5 or 7 minutes is just the same, in a little baby, as CIO. It's possibly different once they are old enough to understand."

Except, er, that with CIO you don't actually come back into the room, so there is a massive difference in the experience of the child.

I'm sorry; I really don't care what anyone says on this thread - I just refuse to accept that it causes problems for my baby/child that I have left them for 2-5 minutes to cry. Do we REALLY think babies are hardwired to believe that unless their needs are met within seconds of them communicating them, they are being abandoned and therefore damaged cognitively and emotionally? If we take the exact same logic from dem old cavemen days, surely it would be ludicrous if our psyches were so fragile as to be affected by such small travesties?

5mad i think alot of the work of HCPs/ psychs/ youth workers with kids is going to have a certain selection bias as 'normal' kids with reasonably loving backgrounds don't usually get that kind of involvement. they are only going to get the kids with problems...

I agree seeker - one of the reasons I don't like it for babies. ( I don't like it for toddlers either but I do think it's a bit different at that age)

Ladymuck, I don't think coming back to a baby every few minutes to shush/pat/whatever and then go back out leaving them still upset really meets their needs.

If a babynis not old enough to understand that things that aren't there can come back, leaving them to cry for 5 minutes is 5 minutes of wilderness.

And the caveman example is spurious. A cave baby would be with its mother or another person all the time. In the same way that babies outside the developed world are. Or other animal babies are.

Just to be clear seeker - I was launching the 'caveman' theory right back at those earlier in the thread espousing it to support their argument against CC.

One thing decided it for me. - I read that they eventually give up because they don't expect their needs to be met. I wanted my DC to grow up knowing their needs would be met.

Sorry - expecting their needs to be met- not knowing.

We are the only mammals, and, as far as I am aware, the first culture to have decided that being able to sleep alone is an essential development stage for our young.

It's always worth reconsidering anything which appears to distress a pre verbal baby. They are first and foremost instinctual baby animals programmed to survive. Their "monkey brains" know what they need to survive and thrive.

All my mum's generation would have been left to cry it out for hours on end. They seem far more balanced than mine and my brothers mollycoddled lot, many of whom have got mental health problems from taking too many recreational drugs and just don't seem to be able to cope with life.

Having a baby is a nightmare, we do the best we can and what works for us and our families - please don't beat yourself up. I am sick to death of the media printing flimsy research intended to make us constantly feel guilty.

I was round at my mum's the other day and stupidly flicked through the daily fail. There was an article in there saying that babies born by c section are more likely to be obese. So me breastfeeding my dd and doing blw with healthy homecooked meals means nothing, she'll still be fat anyway as she dared to be breech. Oh, and she'll be messed up emotionally too as we did cc.

Fwiw she seems pretty happy and normal sized at 16 months!

I don't know much about autism, but have you discussed it with anyone. I very much doubt there is a link as my hv was not against cc.

Hm, well this may be because I had twins, but mine slept in their own cot (together) since day 1, and in their own room from age about 3 weeks. At no point when they were babies did I sense they were distressed by this.

These are very emotional arguments bandied about, and fabulously large guilt trip phrases being used "well I wanted my children's needs to be met". Oh really? Because of course I so didn't want that.

It is worth remembering that for some of us, there was no sense of us not meeting our children's needs despite not having our babies attached permanently by our sides. I guess most of us are happy with the level of attachment we had to our small babies - mine was to bf my twins for 6 months, albeit - shock horror - with them sleeping in their own room. I am proud of what happy, secure little girls I have and although I'd like to take the credit for that, I have a feeling that largely that's just who they are and I feel blessed to be their parent.

I couldn't do cc. Couldn't relax and get on with anything while hearing my baby crying - so there wouldn't have been any point for me. Felt agitated if I couldn't get to him as soon as he cried. Couldn't help it.

I am laughing somewhat at 'all my mum's generation' as if you can possibly know what they all did! My mother wasn't left to cry it out- nothing is new in looking after babies- people just put labels on it and think it is new- it is all as old as the hills!

Nothing new under the sun- except possibly controlled crying? It's so very against our instincts as parents and our evolutionariy advantage as a species.

Bumbley, she is already cosleeping with two year old, baby sleeps for 20 minutes max when out walking and bringing 2 year old is stressful.

Interestingly no one has really responded to discussion about serious potential longer term consequences of maternal mental illhealth triggered or exacerbated by sleep deprivation. I guarantee you developmentally that significant mental health needs in a mother are not great for infant development. Cc done sensibly working in 2-3 days really isn't likely to have same impact on whole family dynamic.

Evolutionary. Not evolutionarly

Well, perhaps not all my mum's generation, but it was definitely "in vogue" in the 50s and 60s to let babies CIO so it happened frequently. I hated doing cc, but I turned to it in desperation as my dd needed to be settled to sleep by my dp rocking her to sleep for hours at a time, and he works from 5am so was on the brink of a nervous breakdown. We tried everything else first (baby whisperer, no cry etc etc). Cc worked within 2 nights, she's slept through every night since, she's happier as she actually sleeps now and the same with us. I do feel guilty sometimes. I wish bfing her to sleep or cosleeping worked but it didn't. Caving worked for us. Perhaps we should have just stayed up with her whilst she cried and we rocked her (which was what she'd do, she didn't seem "comforted" by our presence) but unfortunately we are not cavemen or monkeys, we both had to go out to work so needed to sleep at night.