effects of CC

[papillon]

i just found this review in amazon.. does anyone agree ... disagree? I have heard of Gina Ford but not Elizabeth Pantley

...Australia the Association of Infant Mental Health have issued a warning against the method of "controlled crying" which she advocates as it can lead to psychological problems!! Gina's job is to train babies, she has no interest in the child's mental or physical (scheduled feeds can lead to dehydration and failure to thrive) well being for the future. She just wants her money for her quick fix methods! She's not even a mother herself, just a baby trainer. Babies aren't meant to be trained, they need to be nurtured and loved and leaving a baby to cry until it believes it has been abandoned and then shuts up to conserve energy is not my idea of caring for a loved one! Dissociation and learned helplessness are not pyschological problems i wish to instill in my baby for the sake of a full nights sleep! This woman makes me so cross! I second the reader (dated the 7th of november) who suggests a far kinder book to look at - "The no-cry sleep solution" by Elizabeth Pantley. At least she has had children so has some idea what she is talking about!

nutcracker _ I understand your comment completely. When I did it I really don't think DD was distressed at all, more whinging than crying. However I felt awful - I was next to tears and definitely more distressed But int he end it has been worth while for us.

has anyone read Elizabeth Pantley or experimented with her brand of baby rearing?
I guess if you go in very regularly it does the trick after a certain age!

Surely there is a difference in the type of crying as well.

Hercules that's great for you, but I have had two close friends who brought themselves to the brink of a nervous breakdown over the whole sleep thing. They refused to try controlled crying because of fears about the damage it would do their children - but both did do it in the end, it worked, they recovered, their children learned how to get themselves to sleep and sleep through the night...

I was never left to cry by my mother, partly because they had lodgers who couldn't be disturbed! So she ended up doing frankly ridiculous things like getting up with me at 3 a.m. and reading to me until 5 or 6 a.m. when I'd go back to sleep and she then had to get up and start her day. It nearly killed her, and it also left me with a legacy of sleep problems - I was a really bad sleeper all through my childhood, and frequently remember it being 11.30 p.m. and not being able to get to sleep and being completely panicstricken about how I would get through school the next day. Not a good outcome for her or me!

I'm a bit confused. We used GF (successfully, I might add - although I completely understand it's not for everyone) and I don't remember CC being advocated at all. Maybe it was mentioned towards the toddler examples towards the back of the book, but it's mostly about getting into good sleep habits (putting down slightly awake in a darkened room etc, not going in at the slightest whimper). I don't remember anywhere she says you can't soothe your baby!

I'll admit it was almost three years ago now that I read it... must dig it out again at some point.

Dinosaur, neither of my children have been "difficult" so yes it is indeed easy for me to say I wouldnt. if it was different then of course I probably would no matter what I thought of it iyswim.

Hercules, I simply meant that just because animals do something doesn't make it good, and because they don't doesn't make it bad.
Animals often: eat their young. Smack - hard - and bite their babies for discipline. Leave some of their offspring to starve if food is short. Throw them out of the family home when the next babies come along, and sometimes fight with them and kill them in territory disputes.
They don't: read to their children, help them find new homes, praise them!!
TBH I think before cc was invented it there wasn't a golden age when babies were invariably attended to night and day. There was certainly lots of 'leaving them to cry' 'letting them exercise their lungs' 'not spoiling them' and just plain ignoring them. The whole point of cc is going in regularly so the child always knows the parent is there. Frankly that upset my ds much more than simply being left to grizzle and grumble for twenty minutes.
As for not leaving a baby to cry for one minute - that's exactly how I felt about my ds - until I discovered that he seemed to need to cry briefly in order to get to sleep - and also he couldn't get to sleep unless he was on his own. That was the real Eureka! discovery of his early babyhood and made a huge difference.

I do think people whose babies sleep have very little idea of the torment involved in babies who wake every 45 minutes or stay awake for three hours between 2am and 5am on a regular basis...

Having been a total failure at cc, because of the distress it caused my baby, I must say, I just don't get the 'going in every XX minutes' thing. Surely babies can't tell the time and one minute must be as long as ten, to them?

I have read the abandonment theory before, I forget where.

absolutely right. Aloha, until yo have had sustained sleep deprivation you have no idea what a torture it is. Like Nutty, I didin't do cc on DS1 til 14 months because he wouldn't sleep through. Mainly because I couldn't bear to think of him believing himself to be abandoned.

With DS2, who at 6 months is still messing around between 2 and 5 am, I know what I have to do to help him learn to settle. It's going to drive me nuts and I will have to be strong but with the second kids and the driving necessity of getting sleep so I can look after both of them properly, a few nights of CC is not much to suffer.

Suedonim, I don't think that's true. They can't tell the time, of course, but they certainly are capable of objecting to being on their own more the longer you leave them, so they do differentiate by time periods. Surely with four children you must have ignored a child's cries for a few minutes in your life? I am extremely sceptical about the abandonment theory myself. It's really not what cc is about.

Well cc certainly didn't work for us - we just ended up with vomit everywhere, a totally hysterical ds who was still not asleep even after 7 hours of screaming (and I do mean screaming, not whimpering or ordingry "crying". We gave after 6 nights when if anything he was worse than he had been at the beginning.

And then for weeks afterwards ds would instantly vomit as soon as he was put into his cot he was so frightened of being left alone in it. Although that eventually calmed down, as soon as he was able to climb out of his cot he simply wouldn't stay in it at all. Even now (he's been in a bed from 14 months) he doesn't like having his door closed and the light has to be left on.

I regret ever trying cc - am now much more of the opinion that if you took away "civilisation" and considered "the human animal" then a baby - and even a toddler - would naturally want the comfort of sleeping with it's parents. So we settled for partial co-sleeping (starting the night in his own bed - with one of us with him until he falls asleep) until he was ready to spend the whole night on his own. Now, at 2.6 he does not only (usually) go to sleep on his own, but (usually) stays in his own room all night so I doubt that this approach has really done him any harm, whereas persisting with the controlled crying might well have done.

This will no doubt now spark another debate on the pros/cons of co-sleeping - oh well!

Your points make a lot of sense as always aloha!

I will also repeat that I dont know what it's like to have a baby up in the night but then we've always coslept so i dont know if this has helped.

I would like to add the practicalities of having other kids to look after in to the mix.
With DS1 I was the most vehemently pro co sleeper a la Deborah Jackson, and anti CC and put all aspects of my life on hold so he i could be available to him for his comfort all thorugh the night. Then one day I realised I couldn't carry on being a zombie, did 5 nights of CC and then hey presto he was in his own cot, still waking once in the night, and didn't appear to be any worse for the CC, in fact he was happier to have a mummy who wasn't permanently dazed. This is just what happened to work for our family.
This time round, with 2 to look after, I still partially co-sleep but have to let DS2 cry more at various times and am gearing up to do some CC, and I really wish I had done it sooner with DS1. I just cannot make myself available for DS2 24/7 and I believe the skill of settling himself will benefit him in the long run.

look what i found

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I would certainly have co-slept without question if it had led to more sleep - without a shadow of a doubt. We kept trying and trying to settle him in with us just so we could lie down in a warm bed ourselves - we were utterly desperate. But it just want't he magical panacea it obviously is for others. He'd stay awake for hours excited by our proximity, pulling our noses and poking our eyes. But even now ds can only really happily go to sleep on his own. He sleeps brilliantly now though. Asleep now!

I haven't read all the responses to this but I will say this:

I started a GF routine when DS was 8 weeks old. He was NEVER left to cry himself to sleep and was the bonniest baby out of all the babies in our post-natal group (developed above the 100% centile for weight). I followed it pretty religiously from 8 weeks until DS was about a year old and to this day (he is nearly 3) he is a contented, easy child who is comfortable going to sleep anywhere and rarely wakes in the night for any length of time, even when sick.

Gina Ford advocates scheduled feeding and naptimes to encourage a healthy diet and good sleeping habits through to toddlerdom. Admittedly CC is not for everybody but to say that it could lead to psychological problems - what a load of bollocks! If done properly and if your childs individual personality is taken into account they should never feel abandoned. It's about setting boundaries - that is after a parents job.

I don't normally get involved in these discussions because I feel its a very personal choice and neither way is the right way. I just get angry when it is suggested that the way I have done things would psychologically damage my son when nothing could be farther from the truth...

I'll leave now

I totally agree with Bloss's post.

We were co-sleepers too for most of the time. DD slept with us from birth and then started t o sleep in her bedside cot from about 6 weeks to 14 weeks quite well, but arms stretched out to hold my hand. The at 14 weeks she started waking much more often in the night and she wanted to be cuddled right up, so from then on she spent the first part of the night in her cot (own room when we moved and she was 14 months) and then from about 2-3am in our bd. But last Christmas things were just getting silly and she suddenly couldn't settle herself on going to bed either, and was waking up more frequently. That's when we resorted to CC. Luckily for us it works.

Just a shame we have never managed to nap time as well.

So what age would be the minimum?

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Hercules, that was a good link!

Bloss, does the Bible have anything to say about the morality of cc ?

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