How do you NEVER leave your child to cry?

[NommyChompers]

I often read on here ‘I have never left my child to cry’ but honestly how does this work in practice? Today I have an awful cold so baby was crying in rocker in the bathroom while I had a hot shower to clear my sinuses. I have IBS so occasionally she is also left to cry for ten minutes while I’m on the loo. How in reality are other parents handling these situations so the baby never cries?

Is is worth never having a long shower/loo break/never sleep training? I feel guilty but then I think why?? Why am I a bad mother for making a cuppa if they are clinging all day after jabs/washing/going to the loo?

DD was not a crier, so I rarely left her crying, simply because she wasn't crying.

This is the to the point that I once called 111 because she was crying (age 4mo) they were incredulous, it's just that she cried so so infrequently I presumed she was ill.

Of course in the freshness of first time parenting I took it for granted she'd always be easy (she's not) and held a secret presumption it was because I was doing something right (I wasn't, it was just pure, idle, luck).

Leaving a child to cry because you can't be arsed to console them... That's not okay.

Leaving a child to cry because you need to do something else for a short time...perfectly okay.

Leaving a child to cry because you're at the end of your tether and need to disengage for a few minutes, also fine. IMHO.

I tried not to as much as possible but I wouldnt not have a quick shower, drive places, make dinner etc

In my mind leaving them to cry literally means walking away from them-
Which I didn't do.

When driving if they were crying, I was still there so to my mind they weren't left- I would try singing and talking to help them soothe whilst driving.
As PP have said I would take DC into the bathroom whilst I went to shower or place them in their cot which is visible from the ensuite if I needed the toilet.

My children cried but they also knew I would be there for them whilst they did.
I think that reduced the crying.

@AllTheUsernamesAreAlreadyTaken

I only showered when she was in a good mood, which was most of the time because her life was awesome.

Thank you. I needed that laugh

You are just the best parent ever

There were times where I had to like in your situation (toilet and shower) but I still took ds with me to have a shower in his car seat and I used to leave the toilet door open and leave him in the hallway where he could see me. I felt that I should have my eyes on him all the time, maybe because I was a first time mum and scared.

Ds was very high needs and intense where he demanded immediate attention and he was bf. The amount of times where I had pull over to feed him and even in the lift as he had no cue, it was literally a scream and he would vomit. He is still a very intense child with sad puppy eyes and miserable.

I think people mean they never do it on purpose. I don’t leave my children to cry. When they were little I brought them into the bathroom with me and talked to them whilst I showered if they weren’t happy left on their own. If they cried when I put them in their cots then I lay next to their cots and stroked their back.
Sometimes they still cried but I was there with them.

I never felt like I couldn't shower or go to the loo with either of my newborns and my first baby cried a lot. They would both be put down to sleep though.

It wasn't until my youngest reached about 10 months old that I understood feeling like you can't go to the loo. He's 22 months now and still very clingy and yes I leave him to cry, frequently or I'd never get anything done.

@runningfromtheoutlaws

Pardon me?

I have a Velcro baby, so I took him to the bathroom in a bouncer when I showered and as I have IBS, when I needed the loo. If I had left him, he would have screamed and cried constantly. It was avoidable, so I avoided it. I assume that’s what people mean.
My SIL has two young children and is heavily guided by her mother. From birth, she gives them a bottle, puts them in their crib or cot and leaves them to go to sleep. According to her husband, it takes about four months of them crying for 15-20 minutes before they fall asleep. If they wake in the night, she leaves them to cry for a similar amount of time (separate bedrooms from an early age) before she gets up to see what’s wrong. Her eldest has stomach issues and they regularly find that she’s thrown up in the night. They have a playroom and if they start crying while she’s busy, she gives them ten minutes to calm down and then sees to them. They’re 1 & 3. They seem to be happy children but I could never, ever do it. It seems unnecessarily cruel to me. My PFB wouldn’t survive a day with them. That said, he only cries when he’s hurt or hungry these days.

[quote AllTheUsernamesAreAlreadyTaken]@runningfromtheoutlaws

Pardon me?[/quote]
???

It's not very helpful to be afraid of/unable to cope with your child's emotions. That can lead to all kinds of problems with boundaries and parental burnout which will damage your relationship long term. If your parental goal is to always make your children happy, maybe look into this discomfort as it does not actually do them any favours.

Oh gosh this rather hit me. I admit I do struggle with this through some generational trauma I guess. I really hope I'm not damaging my long term relationship with me children, its the last thing I want to be doing. I'm finding it very hard to find the right balance though.

@runningfromtheoutlaws

I generally try not to leave him to cry, I'm a first time mom and he is still a newborn so I probably worry more than I should. But sometimes I have little choice, like when we're out walking and he's in the pram and starts crying. I'll stop and stroke his cheek and try to soothe him for a minute but I'm not going to take him out in the street and start rocking him so I just have to let him cry while I get him home as quick as possible.

I used to put mine in the sling to go to the loo and just shower when dp around . Never left her to cry - she's a teenager and turned out alright !

Maybe different with mine as she had an allergy and bad colic so was often in pain when crying . And she cried 90pc of the time in the early days as a result even when I was holding her . So I'd never have been able to leave her crying and not hold her .

I think a lot comes down to your baby. I’ve never left mine to cry but he’s never had reflux etc so has been a pretty chilled baby. He was happy in the bouncer whilst I showered as long as he could see me and loves being in the car (so far). Im under no illusions that this is anything but luck!

I just got up and showered and dressed before dh left for work, much easier than trying to fit it in with a baby or worrying they would wake up/cry/hurt themself while I was in the shower. Our dcs are 7 and 4 now and even now neither dh or I showers unless the other is in the house to deal with fights etc!
I had twins second time round and they most definitely cried while I dealt with the other one or their older sister! I also remember a particularly awful journey stuck in a massive tailback on the M6 with dd1 getting more and more hysterical in the back. There was nothing I could do for her whilst stuck in crawling traffic. Longest journey ever!

Off topic - wasn’t about 16 years ago - M6 loads of football matches etc going on?

9 hours later ….

A battery operated swinging chair saved my sanity. I put the baby in it while bathing the toddler and it would soothe her.

I did forget she was in there once and she was on a ‘brisk’ rock for about five hours—something disrupted the evening routine and I thought I’d taken her out and put her in her cot.

She’s 23 now and fairly sane.

I’ve never left DD to cry in the sense of I’ve always tried to comfort her / gone to her when she’s woken up, but if she’s just cross about something (rather than scared/hungry/ill etc) I let her feel what she feels. So the other day I wouldn’t let her drag everything out of the cupboard which upset her but I just said something like “you’re cross mummy won’t let you play with the cupboard” and offered her a cuddle (although she rarely wants one when she’s pissed off with me 😅)

I’ve taken her to the bathroom plenty of times if I need the toilet but for showers etc usually wait until DH is around. She’s a covid baby and DH has been wfh her whole life so it hasn’t been particularly difficult to do this… I would probably feel differently had she been born pre covid as DH would hardly have been home!

Number 2 is on the way and I’m under no illusion that they’ll cry much more because I’ll have to split my attention between 2 of them and realistically I’ll often be stopping DD doing something dangerous (she’s a climber) so especially whilst non-mobile DC2 will have to wait.

I find it all very weird to be honest...what happens when you have a second or a third. You can't tend to all their needs at once.

I showered every day - sometimes twice a day when DS was teeny. I brought him in the bathroom in his Boppy Lounger or on his tummy time mat and chatted away to him while I showered. If he started to cry I just explained that mummy was deep conditioning/exfoliating/whatever and he had to wait a second.

Ditto with using the loo/making tea or anything else. I had him somewhere safe in the room with me, and if he was fussing I just chatted away to him until I was done.

If that's classed as leaving to cry, then I did it all the time and never felt bad about it . If that makes me a witch with a heart of stone, so be it.

When I say I never left my babies to cry I don’t mean things like leaving them for 2 minutes while I went to the loo or if they were crying in frustration about having to leave the park at closing time. That’s all natural, unavoidable and probably healthy for learning boundaries. I mean I never purposely did things to make them cry like sleep training or ridiculous time out/naughty step type punishments.

Yacarita I don't mean that always trying to make them happy will damage the relationship. It's more the fallout from trying to do this impossible thing IME. So you keep trying to make your child happy all the time, what actually happens is that you end up running yourself ragged for them and then snapping because you're exhausted or have no tools to get them to do something you need them to do. Or they become more and more demanding because you've made "nice things" routine and you get frustrated because they don't seem to appreciate all the nice things that you do. Those are the kind of things that can get in the way of relationship. It's really hard, parenting often throws up our own unresolved issues and we're not always expecting it so it can be hard to deal with them. I was listening to this podcast today which was interesting with the three generations idea.

Listen to How to profoundly connect with your child (in just 15 minutes a day) with Joanna Fortune by The Motherkind Podcast on #SoundCloud
soundcloud.app.goo.gl/7bVCq

@N4ish why ridiculous naughty step/time put punishments? It's what stopped my three year old biting and hitting his brother. Nursery also encouraged this as an appropriate response