Gina Ford..a manual how to create a dysfunctional badly attached child!
www.whylovematters.com/
This book will explain why her methods are totally pointless and more importantly very damaging.
You may wish to read this article too. Does crying damage babies' brains?
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Ian Sample
The Guardian, Thursday 11 November 2004 12.21 GMT
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If it does, then there must be a lot of brain-damaged babies around. "If you think of the amount of crying that babies do, you would think biology would ensure it doesn't cause brain damage," says crying expert Dieter Wolke, the scientific director of the Jacobs Foundation at Zurich University. "I can't see how it'd happen."
Warnings of the dangers of leaving babies to cry emerged in reports at the weekend, causing concern to the legions of parents who practise "controlled crying" of the sort recommended by baby experts such as Gina Ford.
Margot Sunderland, who runs a conference and lecture organisation called the Centre for Child Mental Health in London, said that stress levels in babies who aren't comforted when they cry can get high enough, and remain high for so long, that it causes brain cells to die. That in turn can lead to neurosis and emotional disorders later in life, she says.
"About 20 minutes would be enough to cause damage," says Sunderland, who drew her conclusions after studying hundreds of research papers on stress and brain development.
Researchers say that while animals exposed to very high levels of stress for prolonged periods can develop changes in their brain structure, stress from crying has never been shown to cause such damage. "If it were true, it'd be a surprise," says Annette Karmiloff-Smith, professor of neurocognitive development at the Institute of Child Health.
"It's news to me," says Mark Johnson, an expert in developmental neuroscience at Birkbeck College, University of London.
Crying is an immensely useful mechanism for raising the alarm that all is not well, says Wolke. Before the age of six months, crying is almost always a genuine plea for help, rather than simply a way of grabbing attention, he says. On average, a baby cries for two-and-a-half hours a day for the first three months of its life, but for only about an hour once it is one year old.
Wolke says that once an infant is older than six months, it is safe to start leaving the baby to cry for longer periods if they are doing it purely to get attention - so-called controlled crying.
"You should never leave a baby to cry until they are about six months old, because before that age, they don't have the ability to cry just to get attention, they are doing it for a reason," he says.