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!

Hi! I Am the OP.

I havent had time to read this. My baby and DH are both seriously ill so I am running around like a headless chicken. Anyway I gather this has kicked off?

I will read it all later on I am sure it will make for interesting reading. But just so you know, we have NOT done CC. We feel Alex is too young and gets too upset to leave him to cry. However he is now napping IN HIS COT (major victory!) and we are still working on the overnights but last night was a lot better even though he is ill. We have accomplished this by some miracle, dont ask me how! Thanks all for your input sorry I havent had time to read your replies but I will catch up soon.

DaddyJ I think I can safely say from what I have read you have a pretty superior attitude and have been rather condescending to some of the other posters. I can see why its kicked off.

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DaddyJ the first two studies say it works. No one disputes that. The third says that "The findings are congruent with those from a previous study".

Babies cry at night in order to reunite themselves with a parent as quickly as possible. That is the main reason for them crying. If they are left to find their own sleep pattern, most seem to sleep longer and longer chunks until they sleep for most of the night, for some this might be at a few weeks, I suspect that for most it is at a few months and for some a few years old.

Why do they sleep through? Surely THAT is because they have found themselves at a stage where they are emotionally and physically ready to go for several hours without parental contact. Why do they cry? I would suggest this is because they are NOT ready to go without parental contact and the crying in the mechanism which unites them with a parent as soon as possible.

Most people argue for CC to improve the parent's mental health, at the risk of the child's mental health. Hmm I think I heart this quoted on a telly programme recently...

Anyway, it sounds like the OP has several issues. I would deal with them one at a time. There is no solution to all of them in one go.

thanks JJ for your other message!

I don't sleep through the night and I am 37. When I wake up I cuddle up to dh and fall asleep again happy. Why should my 2 year old son be any different?

..and..the vast majority of people I have spoken to who have done cc have said how hard it was for them to hear their baby cry. If it's so damned hard doesn't that tell you quite powerfully that it's against your instinct? And since when has mother's instinct been replaceable?

I still don't understand the zealous and aggressive approach todefending cc

it doesn't do much to make it appeal

sigh. 'my manipulative toddler sister'

now i wondered earlier why in western culture we seem to think that our children are manipulative and must broken and then moulded. then got shot down for this assumption. very old testament.

(that by no means is a Judeo-christian statement lots of animist and pre-christian cultures which still survive do not layer adult behaviour on children who have had no experience to manipulate - unless taught by adults of course.

i would hope that more parents respect the inherent needs of babies as they are their own persons. is that convenient for parents, no.

you should read an article about the disembodied voice.

which brings me back to a definition of prolonged crying. prolonged crying is not measured by when we think it is long enough. it is measured by things like blood pressure, body temperature, heart rate, stress hormones and i guess other measureable factors that would accompany crying. whenever these things are beyond a certain point determined not by me or you, but by peer review in the medical community then it is prolonged for the infant.

i will come back to the vomiting thing later. i'm a bit busy.

sorry daddyj, i clicked again and found that the abstract is free. the full pdf text, well i would have to pay for it.

these are the 'key words from the document you posted: Key Words: infant crying ? colic ? infant sleeping ? care giving ? parental care

it didn't say it was investigating cc.

kiskidee there was an interesting article in the Guardian about the assumption of children being evil beings that needed moulding.

Kiskidee, MP and MMJ I just wanted to say how well put and non aggresive your responses have been. I wont add anything else because you have said it all better than I could

My honest opinion - it works (I wouldn't do it at 6 mths though - maybe 8 or 9). I have absolute faith in being able to distinguish both my babys' cries. I know when my toddler is whinging because she's decided downstairs is more exciting. I know when she's had a nightmare, when she's ill etc. I also know why my 7mth old is crying - overtiredness being the biggest culprit at the moment. Maybe the 'against' brigade are not so tuned in. And toddlers DO manipulate

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I don't have a journalistic background, I mend broken computers

'Before intervention, the sleep-disturbed children

"Sleep-disturbed" - Defined by their parents?

were rated as more insecure than a matched comparison group with unknown sleep behaviour.

"Unknown sleep behaviour" - hmm that might just mean that their parents accepted that they woke all the time as being normal. Surely they should have matched them with children who DIDN'T have disturbed sleep patterns?

I'd be really interested in what you thought of my previous argument:

1. Babies cry at night in order to reunite themselves with a parent as quickly as possible. That is the main reason for them crying.
2. If they are left to find their own sleep pattern, most seem to sleep longer and longer chunks until they sleep for most of the night, for some this might be at a few weeks, I suspect that for most it is at a few months and for some a few years old.
3. Why do they sleep through? Surely THAT is because they have found themselves at a stage where they are emotionally and physically ready to go for several hours without parental contact.
4. Why do they cry? I would suggest this is because they are NOT ready to go without parental contact and the crying in the mechanism which unites them with a parent as soon as possible.

Do you agree or disagree with this reasoning?

Thanks for pointing that out Bloss, actually yes I am aware that cc is not designed to teach babies to sleep through the night, and instead it trains them to settle themselves back down with no help from their parents. Perhaps I didn't make the point well, but I was rather referring to the point that when I wake up I would much rather have the help of a cuddle from dh as I am settling myself back to sleep, it's my own personal basic human instinct and my son clearly feels the same. I would not feel happy denying him that.
Just me.
Just my point of view.
I am interested to know how cc makes babies secure and comfortable in their beds given that the whole point is that they are not receiving any reassuring attention... really am not trying to be inflammatory, just really interested to know how that can be so.

Could we have a thread on the detrimental effects on babies of having mothers who ignore their cries while they spend too much time on Mumsnet discussing CC?

I have read DaddyJ's links (well, couldn't finish the longest one) and I wish we knew whether the babies in the London/Copenhagen/proximity study were PFB's or if they had parents with other demands on their time i.e. brothers or sisters. I thought it telling that the proximity group had the largest proportion of mothers who had not previously worked - sorry i'm assuming that since they were middle class and educated that they didnt need to. It would be interesting to have a study that involved the stress levels and resulting drop in the quality of childcare by mothers who were trying to keep their businesses functioning by phone from home, to avoid going bankrupt and having the house repossessed, and are paying someone else to do their job for them so they can stay home with the baby, for the good of the baby, instead of putting it in a nursery at 4 months of age.

I would also like to see a study which measures the detrimental effects on fussing/nonfussing babies who are left unattended by mothers who spend all day running up and down to kitchens at the opposite end of the house to living rooms down a 20 metre long corridor and who are unable to carry them in a sling due to back problems (I have tried different slings but they all make it worse).

To the people who think some of the posters on this thread are being a bit heavy on the non-ccer's - this argument has being going on for some time and over several threads and patience in both camps is wearing a little thin...I would say this thread is the eye of the cc storm.

I think it is the small voices here and there like mmk's (below) who are speaking the greatest truths: "...we had to try to get our son to sleep on his own. He simply couldn't sleep with us. Every little sound woke him, and I was constantly checking on him. Possibly, for each parent, and each child, there is a right way. If parents can't find this way, it helps to hear of possible solutions, and create one around advice. For me, it was done with love and tenderness and caring, I'm sure it would be the same for most people. If he had become severeley distressed (which I would have defined as being more distressed than I had seen him before), I would have adapted it to suit us. I would imagine most parents, like us, do it but adapt the advice."
Exactly.

malaleche, you are right to gently chide me, I allowed my simmering anger at
kiskidee's attack on the CC support thread to spill over into my posts on this thread.
Not good

bloss, it looks like the scientific debate is over.
The evidence that CC does no harm, on the contrary, was provided.

The rest is beliefs and debating beliefs becomes personal and could turn vicious..

Sure, I'll have a look.
Is there a particular section you have in mind?

please don't ever use this cruel method on a baby....don't break the bond of trust that you have built, don't let them feel abandoned.

How would you like it if you felt ill/scared/alone and your DP decided that he/she didn't feel you needed reassurance or support anymore and left you when you called out for help???

If that happened to you, at least you would be able to understand what has happened. Your baby will just be left feeling alone and confused and will eventually fall asleep through sheer exhaustion.

Not my intention to upset or offend anyone but feel so strongly about this just had t post my view for the OP.

Trust your instincts...even people that have used CC will tell you it went against everything their heart was telling them...