Can I please have your honest opinions on CC? HV is recomending I am not sure.

[eenybeeny]

My HV is recomending CC for my 6 month old.

Our problems with his sleep are these:

1. He only naps in his pram. He screams and screams when I try to get him to nap in his cot during the day.

1. He wakes up to 6 times a night for one thing or another.

1. He wakes anywhere from 3 a.m. to 5 a.m. and is ready for the day.

Please give me any advice you have and let me know... is CC cruel? I really dont know. Normally, the thing is, when he cries I want to rush to him to help him. I dont know if I can leave him to cry. Please help!

I am afraid I am just an ordinary Dad, cruisemum1!
My experience is limited to 10 months of reading books, talking to people and searching the weird wild web. And observing and interacting with one little girl.

I was not going to post on the Mumsnet sleep section but I have been following the 'No cry sleep' thread with my fingers crossed (not that it has helped much..)
since autumn last year and after the CC support thread was attacked I felt like joining the debate and finding out:
what's with the fear and loathing?

This is a very, very interesting and important debate.

I am extremely suspicious of evolutionary arguments for any sort of behaviour or treatment plan in the modern West. We don't live in a Pleistocene environment any more, and that's it. It seems strange to argue as if we still did, when we now no longer live according to the natural light cues of sun and moon, go out hunting and foraging for our own food during daylight, etc.

I find it interesting that while experts offer terrifying predictions about rises in infant cortisol, etc, they do not bother to study the effects of chronic tiredness, anxiety and depression on parents struggling to bring up a child on insufficient sleep, usually without help from extended families or communities (such as the Pleistocene or mythical 'tribal' mother would presumably have been able to call upon automatically?).

An overtired parent will be flooded with cortisol most of the day him/herself because of the struggle of trying to cope and according to various studies, high parental stress will automatically affect the child's levels (this has been proven with regard to parents with depression, for instance).
The 'scientific' attachment parenting argument seems to be a massive red herring.

The careful approach of daddyj and others on this thread to finding a sleep solution which works in real adult's and children's lives, not in some mythical 'ancestral environment', seems far more fruitful. But as others have said, if your overtiredness seems preferable to the guilt and emotional suffering of listening to a child cry for a few nights, cc is not for you.

(when I say 'foraging for own food' I mean actually working physically incredibly hard to get it- before anyone makes a Desmond Morris like analogy to nipping out to Sainsbury's )

here here why why why ....

whywhywhy:
the evolutionary arguement makes sense to me because eventhough we do not live in a Pleistocene environment, our biology does not evolve as quickly as our culture has for it to be quickly adaptable for babies to cope with being left in a different room on their own for 12 or even 5 hrs on the trot.

it is only in the last 200 yrs that this sleep practice for children began.

co-sleeping is only one aspect of attachment parenting. you can co-sleep without doing AP. and even what co-sleeping is, is a range of sleeping arrangements. from having a cot, feet away to sleeping in the same bed or sleeping only a few hrs per night with a child.

Peanutbutterkid: you are right and, FERBER has now revised his latest edition of his book to only recommend sleep training for children over the age of 12 months. He used some of the same scientific research taht have been dismissed lately on this thread in order to revise his book.

"I think Ferber is just covering hmself when he says you shouldn't do cc with a child under 1 y because of all the 'research' that is being aired."

I wonder if you have a direct line to the man, malaleche. Surely Ferber is made of sterner stuff than this. Do you really, truly believe, a man whose techniques you trust would actually be so shallow as to write a book to please researcher he doesn't believe or respect or have an large amount of evidence based conclusions?

I am still hoping that an advocate of CC would back up their beliefs with information that shows evidence that cc is safe.

saying "I did my child no harm" does not cut it for me. my mother also gave me rusks in my feeding bottle and it did me no harm but i would not advocate doing the same to anyone's child because it MAY cause harm.

I don't know how reasearchers in a sleep lab are supposed to provide evidence except by using measurements of hormones like cortisol. science wants measureable indicators of things like stress. It has been provided but the advocates of CC prefer to dismiss these quantifiable indicators.

the unquantifiable indicators are things like grief, fear, hopelessness, confusion, despair. however, i can empathise with a baby because i know what situations can bring me confusion, fear, grief, and hopelessness. i can empathise with a disabled person who is told that no one will attend to his needs for 12 hrs on the trot because it is good for you and besides, it is not convenient to me.

i have seen quite a few despairing mums who attempt cc come back to MN saying thier child was hysterical or vomited and so she picked him up. Is vomiting not a physical indicator taht cc causes extreme stress in some children? What about the children who experience the same amounts of stress but does it does not quite make them vomit? Is taht 'good enough' for you?

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women only have difficulty bf where they do not have a support system to help them through early stages of bf when difficulties most likely occur.

actual physiologic difficulty with bf very, very rare. if you read further down, you will find that another poster already mentioned the same point when you raised that argument initially

emotional, moi? you seem to know more about me than i do about you. and more about your sister's projectile vomiting from an account from your mother who is recalling events that took place years in the past.

it is fascinating that our culture seems to see babies as creatures out to manipulate grownups and are something to be broken and moulded.

"about you" gah, i meant, 'about myself' this isn't personal. it is interesting. i actually enjoy a good debate rather than witter on chat threads - though i pop in there occationally for a larf.

My what a huge thread already...I'm sorry I have only skimmed through...

But for me personally, I have never done CC. I have had 3 babies and BF them all. All 3 have slept with me in our bed until they were about 2 years old. (well dd2 is now 19months and is still in our room, she has been the exception as she has been quite happy to sleep on her own in a cot) We have never forced them to sleep on their own in their own room or cot untill they felt comfortable to do so.
I have had no problem transfering them to big beds in their own rooms as they have been old enough to understand the change, and we have always had a good bedtime routine.

I personally cannot let my children cry themselves to sleep. Our cot has been a permanent extention of our bed for about 5, nearly 6 years now, we have always had room, and reletively quiet and restful nights.

I am currently using cc - with my puppy.

It works brilliantly on dogs and I have no maternal distress whatsoever.

But human emotions and learning are so much more complex than dog's.

I would only try cc with a baby if I was totally at the end of my tether and absolutely convinced it was worth a go.

hello eeny and sorry to hear your lo is waking up so much at night

btw, it does annoy me when poeple say not to get emotional - just to have a scientific debate - as if scientists do not have emotions !

subjecively speaking, i tried cc with my first dd when she was about 1 year old. i will never know whether it did her any harm or not, but i know the memory of hearing her screaming for hours is imprinted on my memory and i wish i had never done it.

i would suggest that cc would be useful for someone who feels they cannot cope any longer any other way, otherwise i think it's dreadful

We did cc with our ds. At first, it was pure Agony- it really hurt me and Dh. So, we went in every two minutes for half an hour (we felt better about it that way) then we went in every 5 mins, for half an hour, by then he was asleep.
Next night the same, but it only took 20 minst, next night the same, but it only took 5 mins.

We went with our instincts a bit, we needed to do it,but we all needed to feel happy too.

I think we cheated and used a dummy too.

Hope this helps

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I really do thing controlled crying's cruel - and particularly so with a baby too young to realize that if it's left alone it's not been left alone for ever. I lost my temper with my 6 year old this morning, and to my eternal shame said to him "OK, if you won't come, I'm going to leave you at home alone all day" and walked away. He was absolutely distraught at the thought - and he's 6 YEARS old, not 6 months.

Babies cry - it's what they do. Parents gettired and hag-ridden - it's part of the job description. I do wonder sometimes if people are expecting babies to fit into their lives, rather than fitting their lives around the baby. And some people seem to want their babies to rush through the "stages" as fast as possible - sleeping through the night, potty training, learning to read....... They grow up - before you know it they're leaving home and maybe, just maybe you might wish you'd spent a bit more time going with the flow and less trying to make square babies fit into round holes.

i cannot relate any evidence that directly CC harms or is safe specifically because NO parent, ever, anywhere, has volunteered to conduct CC in a lab.

now why would you think that may be? Plenty of advocates out there.

what there is, however is a lot of evidence that prolonged crying induces stress in babies and young children.

which is, coincidentally, the same reasons why no advocate of CC can prove that it is safe.

sorry you are losing interest in all this. i will say though that babies and mothers all over the world do not have to learn to sleep. that is isn't a skill. mothers and babies go to bed together since the dawn of humanity and continue to do so now and funnily enough, they all learn to sleep the night through.

not until all the teeth are through is my rule

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not read all or even much of the thread but

even with a support system women can and do have intransigent difficulty breast feeding..not sure how it relates to cc as I haven't read the thread

only read the OP.

to me sounds like your little one needs attachment - would suggest a babysling in the day & co-sleep at night. If you're bf then co-sleeping will be restful for you as you can bf in bed.

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here is an article bloss, which if you read it carefully, dismisses the opinion you seem to express earlier that attachment parenting is about giving in to every squeak of a child. that is just misled parenting imho.
continuum concept

"My mother often tells how my projectile vomiting sister got to the point where she could manipulate it beautifully - look you in the eye and doing a massive projectile vomit, just to make a point."

the above quote, bloss, is the only instance of manipulative - or supposed manipulative behaviour - i was alluding to.

eenybeeny, for your op - would recommend Baby Whisperer. Not cc too harsh imo. Visit BW website post your problems - plenty of moderators there will guide you through and get little one sleeping as much as possible. Sounds like probably overtired hence v early wake-ups, but give it a shot! www.babywhisperer.com

As I said, the evolutionary argument would suggest that mothers and babies in our society should have no difficulty bfing. They do. Why not sleeping which is just as basic a need?

a lot of sleep problems we have in Western Culture do not exist in other societies around the world because parents do not recognise them as problems. they recognise them as babies behaving as babies do. by 3 or 4 their brains have developed enough and are wired more like an adult's brain that they can sleep through the night like adults. most societies certainly don't see it as something to be fixed.

it is treating the normal sleep behaviours like problems that actually create the problems.

you may want to google 'reactive co-sleeping' and 'non reactive co-sleeping' to read what I mean by the above statement.