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!

Beachcomber, that word 'utopian' is central in this context.

Anti-CC is part of a vision to create a better world through shielding your
child from any perceived negativity: change the world, nurture a child.

This might come as a surprise but I do sympathise with the idea.
I was a bit of a left-wing radical in my yoof, fiercely defending
anything that promised to alleviate the problems of humanity.
I am not disillusioned now - life is too much fun for that - but I did soon realise that
utopian promises are usually just that. Promises. It matters little whether these promises
are made by the Taliban, Yehovas' Witnesses or by absolutely delightful yoghurt weavers.

I too wish the world was a perfect place with no crying babies, no wars, no poverty and no Victoria Beckham.
(I fully retract that last example, don't want to get Mumsnet into even more trouble).

That's why I enjoyed this debate and maybe part of me hoped that the anti-CC camp would come up with real evidence
that they are on to something. I don't even mind the personal comments, I know this lot, used to be one of them.
They mean well, really. After all they are trying to banish negativity for ever.

itsmemummy, the book you recommended alluded to advances in neuroscience that could
or may prove that this is more than utopian. If you find the time to post, I would be
happy to listen.

kiskidee, a good way of closing a terrific debate (for the time being..I am sure!).
I would not dream of ignoring your posts and your links have made fascinating reading.
It's a shame that a few of the scientific papers I linked to are not readily available
but then again only comment is for free.

And given how much I appreciate your views, any notion of me bullying you is surely as
far-fetched as you bullying mothers on the CC support thread

you used to be one of what lot daddyj?

"I only want parents to stop thinking that cc is a convenient, fix it all option when a lot of studies point to it being more of a last resort one."

Well said kiskidee. Also worth noting that studies aside, many parents also refer to it as a last resort. How many posts have you read in which the poster says "Help please, don't want to go down the cc route unless I absolutely have to" ?

Message withdrawn

ok, itsmemummy. thanks again.

who says i am done daddyj?

yes malaleche, that is what i meant. if you lurk on some of the sleep, parenting and behaviour threads, you will get a better picture of what i am referring to.

i would like posters who don't agree with me to interpreting my writing as if i speak in exclusives. If i have, i will be happy to point out where i did so. then maybe i can explain or apologize. i don't make all or nothing statements. likewise, i don't mean for anyone to imply i talk about supermoms, martyrs, earth mothers, etc, etc. we are parents.

i will appreciate too if my post strikes a chord with you to go away, reflect on what i said and why it struck a chord with you. then decide how to respond. easier said than done because it is easier to type away and press post.

it is not that i am taking anything personal. i cannot because none of you know me. i say these things as a 7 yr veteran of message boards and i find it a good rule to follow.

'i would like posters who don't agree with me to interpreting my writing as if i speak in exclusives'

shooot.

i meant: i would like posters who don't agree with me to read my posts carefully as i try hard not to speak or write in exclusives. all, no, must, never, always, will, have to, etc, etc.

jetjets: by 3 or 4 yrs old most children are happy to go to bed on their own and sleep through. so i think that is how they are genetically programmed i would think.

i don't really take notice kitbit. and i don't think you can say since it may not come into people's mind to put that detail in an op. in fact, i don't normally visit sleep threads you may be surprised to hear. i see it from time to time like the OP seems to be recommended by a hv to do cc with a 6 mo old and it sounds like nothing else has been tried.

"Anti-CC is part of a vision to create a better world through shielding your
child from any perceived negativity"
no I'm sorry but that is so sweeping as to be nonsense. I don't think cc is a good idea because I don't think it's a good idea to leave a baby to cry. Not because I am shielding a baby from "perceived negativity" but because a crying child is a child in distress and to leave a child in distress goes against instinct and basic humanity.
as kiskidee says, cc is too frequently mentioned as a first resort i.e. she wasn't sleeping through the night at six months so my hv said we should do cc. One very mainstream and million selling baby care book talks about leaving a baby to cry for three hours, two nights running, without comforting. It is always worth pointing out that there are lots of alternatives to leaving your baby to cry himself to sleep like that, given that it seems to the mainstream and accepted view that that kind of thing is acceptable.
who knows whether a few nights of crying himself to sleep is psychological damaging for your child? I don't know but I do care and I would certainly not be prepared to take the risk.

Message withdrawn

I am not sure if you are being flipppant but ....evolution really doesn't work that quickly.... physiologically, we are effectively the same as we have been for a very long time indeed. changes in our physical state (e.g. that we are taller) are to do with nutrition rather than evolution.

I agree with zippi btw about the mental attitude to lack of sleep. I think she is talking a lot of sense.

no we are not genetically programmed to go to our own beds. we are programmed to have a certain brain development by a certain age which by then we are able to understand that our parents will still be there even if they are not next to us at night and lots of other things i can't / won't go into in this post.

in most places children don't have their own beds nevermind their own room so these questions never occur.

we also have the ability to sleep for 8 - 12 hrs without fully waking up around the same age though it is proven that normal sleep patterns mean that we wake up every hr or so at night. we just don't remember these wakings.

daddyj, the swedish study you pointed to in one of your more, shall we say, emotional posts also relied heavily on the subjectivity of parents.

ie, filling in a diary and filling in questionnaires. not very emperical as there is no way to measure the subjectivity of parents on many fronts, as you can appreciate.

empirical, as i remember from doing a bit of chemistry and biology means measuring responses using factors, in this case like blood pressure, heart rate, body temp, neurological activity in certain areas of the brain, hormone levels like cortisol and melatonin, levels of crying intensity (decibels) over an extended period of time, say every hour in the next 12 hrs after say waking?

none of these things are easily measured by the average parent or in an average home which is why a sleep lab is a better place to have cc studied.

Bloss: what then, is the scientific definition of prolonged crying? Please enlighten me. not a cheeky request. an honest one.

"if you don't think that a 3 year old can be manipulative"

no, i dont' think a 3 yr old is being manipulative.

i think a 3 yr old is ego-centric. a part of the definition of what is a toddler. a toddler does not yet have the life experience to know that everything he wants is not a good idea. it is a grown-up interpretation to class the behaviour as manipulative or say, innovative.

manipulative is a word with a lot of negative connotations.
but innovative has positive ones.

they both have a more neutral meaning of using intelligence in the context of past experience to achieve a goal.

jpepsy.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/17/4/467

that one has nothing to say in the abstract to be of any use. can't even tell if it was lab or home based.

I do think infant children do learn to be manipulative...however you call it

they learn that certain behaviour achieves results

it doesn't really matter whether you refer to it as manipulative or innovative (though the pedant in me would say as it is common behaviour amongst small children it's not innovative)

eg a child can feel very negative about a new sibling getting attention eg during feeding and said child will naturally do everything possible to divert attention from sibling to herself

This thread is now longer than any of the support threads but we
are not adding anything new.

After nearly 200 posts we came to the conclusion that Controlled Crying is an
acceptable option but that parents should research CC and the alternatives thoroughly first.

That's all we wanted to establish.

kiskidee, your posts re the scientific papers underline that you are a veteran of the forum world
I look forward to reading more of your 'occasional' posts.

If someone wants to open a new thread and extend this discussion beyond CC, I am game.

'kiskidee, your posts re the scientific papers underline that you are a veteran of the forum world'

i would rather you said what you really mean rather than patronise me.

and i would rather you take a position regarding my last posts about the papers you came back and trumpeted with some pomp.