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.

I was with my dc 24/7 they'd never have thrown up if I was out of sight,"terrified of being left alone" sorry I think that sounds slightly insecure.

My kids were so secure ,they knew I was always there and if I was hanging out the washing,on the loo,they knew with certainty I'd be back.They were happy and chilled not so insecure they couldn't cope with being put down for a nap with a full belly,clean nappy after a playtime with mummy.

But no-one that I've seen is saying CC is the only way to sleep train. Different methods work for different children. If you don't want to do CC then don't do it.

In my dd's case I could try and rock and pat her for hours with her screaming to try and get her to sleep. Thats with her pulling her hair and poking her eyes to keep herself awake. Even then she use to wake up after an hour or so so it started all over again. I did CC and it took 15 minutes on the first night and when she woke up in the morning she had no new scratches on her face.

To me, it was more cruel to let her carry on and injure herself then the CC.

This is when I put him down for a nap or at bedtime, he is only 12 weeks so still in same room for night feeds

Panda I used to draw the curtain so they knew it was sleeptime,they had no need for me there.

Twin 1 played with his scratch mits,twin 2 sucked himself to sleep,dd sang to herself,actually they all did. They loved their cots,they were lovely and comfy and they enjoyed naps.I need my sleep,so do they.We've always treated sleep as a good thing not something to be terrified of.

rockpool yes DS1 was terrified of being left alone. I had been in a bad relationship and it affected him quite badly at the time. Totally separate issue.

However getting back to cc, I suppose I do my own version of it as I put my lil one down to sleep, potter around in the room for a minute or two then leave when he has drifted off or just before.

My point is he feels happy and secure and can therefore go to sleep without the need for screaming his head off and being left to do so.

Just read your last post and totally agree, both lads and I love our sleep

Wouldn't have worked for me Panda as they'd have wanted to play.They knew going in their cot was alone time,time to enjoy their cot and sing themselves to sleep.They didn't need me and with 3 it would have been mardi gras in there if I'd have pottered in there too.

I see your point. Obviously different things work for different people but personally I would hate to just leave LO crying. Also in DS1's case it prob would have done more harm because of personal circumstances at the time

I had 2 babies who cried very little, relatively speaking. I can think of so few occasions when they cried incessantly for no apparent reason that I could count them on the fingers of one hand. I didn't rush to meet their needs the minute they utter their first tiny grumble because that is counter productive - they were allowed no time to self settle or to properly register they whether or not they were really awake. This could take more than 5 minutes and I only went to them when they started to cry properly.

The only exception to this was the 3 or 4 days of controlled crying when 5 minutes was plenty of time to work himself up to such a complete rage or state of dispair that he couldn't be settled by just going in and patting him on the back with a there, there.

Please stop kidding yourself that there is very little crying. Maybe there was for your children - that isn't the what the HV told me would happen, nor is it what I read in that book about the subject. They both warned it would be very hard and the HV even said that I should leave DH to do it because if DS smelt me he would want milk. I didn't because DH would have walked away and left him for more than 5 minutes rather than face the upset of trying to settle a baby who wouldn't be left. He isn't as tough as me. If as a technique, you need to worry about how hard it is going to be then you have to wonder if some children are even ready for it, even if they have passed the magic 6 mth lower limit.

Of course there are other methods. And why? Because CC doesn't work for everybody. If it doesn't work nobody can say categorically that for those babies for whom it doesn't work, it isn't damaging to have tried. It is logical, surely?

And doesn't everybody love sleep?!

Panda - that is what we did in the end. Just being there rather than walking away and leaving them. It worked for us too - no tears and a lot kinder to all of us.

I was with my dc 24/7 they'd never have thrown up if I was out of sight,"terrified of being left alone" sorry I think that sounds slightly insecure.

DD wasn't left alone when she threw up, she was in my DH's arms. She just wanted her mummy. Maybe cos she was tiny and desperately needed a feed. Perhaps she woke up starving....who knows.

Big how can 3 days of very little crying damage a child,just how? A few days for a loved baby with 2 or 3 5 mins of crying that spends most of the day in his mother's arms,how exactly can that damage a child?

A 5 year old could barely remember being 3 let alone a baby and in a secure loving family no child will ever be damaged.Sorry it's just ridiculous.

Completely agree. There are so many potential traumas in a baby's life, are we to try and eradicate ALL of them lest they - gasp - be less than perfect human beings?

The only thing which has noticeably affected one of my twins was a 5 day stint in hospital with bronchiolitis. Having hardly slept for two days, and then being woken every hour for 24 hours so the nurses could pin her 9 month old body down and force a Ventolin mask over her face, which must have felt to her like they were trying to kill her, caused a change in her personality which we found devastating at the time.

We can sacrifice ourselves all we want on the altar of motherhood, our children will still no doubt be sat in a shrink's chair at some point in their life berating their parents...

Exactly Lady dd was in SCBU rushed in dehydrated,malnourished and jaundiced.Was under a lamp in an incubator with goggles for a week which certainly hasn't damaged her. Also smelling stress from sleep deprivation and seeing a distressed exhausted mummy 24/7 I'll wager could damage more if we're going down that route.

Hey, this is one of my favourite debates, so I'd love to wade in with my twopenneth please ;)

My conclusions, after 5 years of intense child rearing, are that every woman and every baby are different. Big news. What suits me will not suit suit a woman up the road and her family. Vive la difference.

My personality is such that I like to get things done, I like to get out and about, I like to spend a couple of hours with my man before we conk out at 10pm. Take these things away from me and I become stressed out, resentful and bloody cranky. For our whole family, a couple of days of crying, albeit wearing all round, resulted in a very calm, happy househould. My 3 kids nap well and sleep well. As a result, they have the energy to buzz about with smiling faces. They have a mum who feels like she's doing a good job and who is relaxed and not at the limits of physical exhaustion. I have time to get a breather, eat, cook wholesome food and keep the house just the right side of cesspit. They also have LOADS of cuddles.

I breasted my babes and they napped on me as tinies. When they got a bit bigger I put them down and walked away. My only query about the 'cuddlers' out there is their assertion that putting your child down for a nap is unnatural. We live in a world where we can't all necessarily have a baby strapped to us at all time. I personally do not live In the Masai Mara.

I respect those of you who cuddle your babies to sleep, just as I respect women who have done the same as me.

We,re all doing our best. We all must do what feels right for us and our family situations.

Over and out.

No sacrifice here. I'm not the type to martyr myself which was why I was not prepared to spend another 3 evenings of my life retraining a child who didn't want or need to be trained. It was somebody else's idea not mine and i was too inexperienced to know it was the wrong time and the wrong child.

I am left wondering though, if the HV and the book on CC were wrong, and there wasn't meant to be all the crying we had, why there was any need to do CC in the first place? Surely you could just have put them to bed, turned out the light and walked away? Or was it not as easy as you are trying to make out.

Hm, well - we went from having to rock/shush/pat two 7 month old babies for up to an hour EACH to get to sleep, to being able to leave them to self-settle within about 3-4 days. I did a 'spaced soothing' so left them for a minute, went in and soothed; next time waited two minutes before going in, and then three. We never needed to wait more than three minutes.

Every child is different and maybe we were just lucky. But as my twin girls are chalk and cheese in almost every other aspect, I was fascinated to see that they both responded very well to this. Before, with rocking/etc it felt like they were tired, cranky and desperate to be able to sleep but unable to drop off. Suddenly there just seemed a huge sense of relief for everyone as they had learnt it was okay to just close their eyes and drift off.

Self settling babies are such an alien concept to me! I guess I just never expect a baby to just go to sleep without some intervention. Probably because my MIL always said how her children never self settled till way into toddlerhood and also my own mother saying I was about 3yrs before I would just drift off to sleep. My DS was about 2.5yrs when we could just leave him to fall asleep on his own. And even then, there were/are phases of when he needed us to be with him, just for reassurance, even now, and he is 3.5yrs now. He sleeps through now for the majority of the time.
DD who is 21 months, till recently was just fed to sleep and I was very grateful for that. I'm gutted that it no longer works! Although it does still work if she is very tired...like last night!

Od, not a matyr here either! It is SOOOOO much easier just to feed/cuddle them to sleep. They you can go of an be with "your man" or whatever else you want to do- you don't have to sit in your living room, fighting against every instinct you possess as your baby screams itself in to the knowledge that human babies, unlike every single other mammalian baby, are meant to sleep alone.

Haha. Well, we've obviously had very different experiences! My experience was that, once a baby was a bit older, they got wise to you putting them down once asleep and woke up screaming. So, no, I didn't get any time to do much else. At this point, with other tinies to care for, something had to give. Believe me, we were all the better for it. Not least, the baby, who suddenly was getting the block of sleep needed to be happy and contented.

Horses for courses.

That said, there is a certain smugness in some responses which is starting to get my goat. Just do what you've got to do, don't judge others and question their 'instincts'. Who's to say there won't be a study released soon finding that babies who have never learnt to go to sleep without intervention are more likely to grow up needy and lacking independence. It could happen....

Blimey Seeker I never experienced that scenario with cc once and I've done it all X3. They sleep,they don't scream for hours.We're humans not animals,we differ.

Mine rarely fed or cuddled to sleep,they also used to wake up if moved asleep. Mine needed a routine then to be placed in their cot and left to go to sleep by themselves,that was natural for us.

Old there are already studies showing that kids who don't get enough sleep and have sleeping issues are less healthy and do less well at school.

i kept them with me in the evenings for the first few months, made sense with cluster feeding then as they got older i would take them up to our bed, lay them down and then feed them, then l could get up and come back downstairs for a couple of hours etc.

i am sure cc does work for them, i am still not sure that it is good for a baby under the age of 12mths. and people keep saying about a few mins of crying even the hv and the books about it say it oftne takes longer than that a LOT longer, i know people who have followed it to the letter going in every 2 mins etc and stil had screaming babies 45-60mins later before they finally fell asleep only for them to wake a few hours later and the whole process begin again, and even if it does work, it often needs to be done again after a bout of teething or illness etc. so its not just 3-4nights of 5-10mins of crying is is often much much more than that.

and mine all learnt to go to sleep on their own, they just did so gradually and without crying and sobbing to sleep on their own, all 5 of mine aged from almost 13yrs down to 17mths go to sleep on their own just fine, some started doing it earlier than others, but they all got their wihtout crying, some needed a feed, others needed a cuddle or shushh and a pat, ds4 alway just sucked his thumb and had his blanket. they have all been different, but they werent left to cry and dp and i still made time for each other, but a crying baby would take priority over that, they are only little for a such a short period of time, i didnt martyr myself to my children, some people think i am strict and they all pitch in and help out around the house and are independent when necessary, and certainly not needy.

Absobloodylutely. I give up on this thread, it's beyond pointless.

seeker - well done for describing the three minutes of my children's crying I chose to listen to as 'screaming'; going for maximum emotive impact eh? Actually it was more like fussy grizzling, since you didn't bother to check asked.

Lady fussy grizzling was how I'd describe it too.

I fail to see how or why any baby that had a full belly, clean nappy,hadn't slept for a good while,had been stimulated and had fresh air would have the energy or inclination to scream for hours or even scream itself in.

and its great that your babies didnt really cry, they just grizzled and went to sleep but many babies do not.

www.supernanny.co.uk/Advice/-/Health-and-Development/-/0-to-4-years/Sleep-problems-~-when-controlled-crying-doesn't-work.aspx this is from the millipond sleep help clinic and how they recomend doing cc, ie going in every 2 mins, then every 5, etc building up to 15mins, some babies DO cry and cry and not just go to sleep with 3 mins grizzling like yours, you may find it hard to comprehend but it does happen and if you google cc you wil find many stories of babies that cry like this and i have friends who have used the technique nad their babies cried and cried, some persisted with it, others decided it wasnt worht the stress.

a baby that grizzles for a few mins and goes to sleep is great, ds2 would sometimes do that if i was busy, but more oftne than not he just worked himself into a state. all babies are different, if it worked painlessly for yours fine but it isnt that simple for many others.

"If you apply the technique properly, your child should not cry for much more than an hour. " this is in the link i posted, so yes babies do cry for long periods of time and imo even with going in and comforting every few mins, an hour is too long for a baby to cry for, they recomend this technique from ages 6mths and up!!