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 can add something new.

for me it is never over till the fat lady sings.

I don't think you are a veteran of mumsnet are you daddyj?

I would be surprised if anyone would be willing to let their babies cry if it were not the last resort, kiskidee.

I feel there is a certain lack of empathy towards those parents who practise any form of cc because they are at the end of the line and desperate.

As far as co-sleeping...I would willingly continue it if it helped ds sleep thru - it doesn't!

Interestingly, I am from a culture where co-sleeping was the norm. When my family found out I was bringing him into bed, it was "oh, no, you don't want to ruin him!" Why? because they all have lots of kids and can't do it to all of them.

Sometimes I think the western world is more sentimental about doing things "other cultures" do when those cultures are no longer doing it. Very guardian reader-ish! [diving for cover]

Sorry to go on about it, but I'm intrigued by this idea of changing one's attitude/way of dealing with night awakenings as some sort of solution.

Certainly in my case this doesn't actually address the problem. The problem was my BABY'S distress and tiredness.

I spent months having the sort of attitude to night wakenings that you are taking about. I was knackered but taking it in my stride and being quite cheerful about the whole thing. I'm sure women's hormones help you to adjust to this time (seems sometimes the dads don't cope as well as the mums).
However once my baby started to suffer, show signs of distress and have her daytime behaviour affected by her bad sleep I felt it was my job as a parent to do something. Having tried everything I could think of, feeding/cosleeping/rocking/walking/singing/ for A LONG TIME I decided to see if my baby could in fact do the job better herself if I just butted out and let her.

I actually think that whilst I was bravely soldiering on with my positive 'hey you shouldn't have babies if you want to sleep at night' attitude, I was really only prolonging things for my child.

Are you sure you don't want to leave it with the happy conclusion, kiskidee?
Don't be cross , I just thought we were done.

But if everyone wants to carry on this thread, then course I'll stick around.

Amijee I rather agree with your comment about western sentimentality towards other cultures, I suspect a lot of the time we are also quite ignorant of the details of how the people in these societies really live.

cross? nope. just waiting for your rebuttal of my analyses of your articles you posted.

I'm not quite sure what co sleeping is tbh

as to it being helpful to assess your own attitude to being woken throughout the night and losing sleep..it is a possible string to your bow not compulsory

cc doesn't always "work" so it is helpful to have a holistic approach

Can I ask a question first though:
Can you explain what you mean by 'subjectivity of parents'?

i grew up in the third world. i am half Maya and half,well, bastardised european because i have ancestry in at least Spain and the Levant. one of my third world friends a full blooded Mayan from a little village with one community telephone and part time electricity who also left the village and did a master's in mental health in the US, was surprised to hear that i co-slept. she said she thought that i would think only people left that in 'the bush' did 'that kind of thing'. (Tongue in cheek i think as i suspect she also co-sleeps.) Romantic view of other cultures? nope. i have seen grinding poverty and its effects too.

some people think froot shoots are the spawn of satan and some think it is harmless.

any research which relies on self reporting is subjective aka not necessarily a good witness to events or scientifically valid

this is the problem with a lot of issues

eg hyperactivity and food

Is that what you meant, kiskidee?

Can you also explain the sleep lab comment?
What would a sleep lab study look like?

CC isn't recommended before 6 months. Cortisol levels in the brain of infants left to cry for prolonged periods has been observed to have consequences on their overall emotional development. The last stuff I read on this was Sue Gerhart about three years ago - much of the research based on studies of Romanian orphans who had minimal physical contact with carers in the first 6 months of life and beyond - extreme and tragic cases but enlightening.

babies need reassurance. I waited until DS was before doing CC, and never left him for more than 5 minutes, I just couldn't do it. It worked for a time but we had to start from scratch every time he was ill or teething and it was too stressful for me never mind him so I didn't go back - just tried to ride the wave and remind myself that one day he would find his own comfort zone and sleep through, which he did quite soon after.

Neglecting babies - leaving them to cry before they are able to self soothe can be very harmful. Stressed babies who don't learn how to self soothe grow up into adults who can't either. CC done sensitively and after an infant is mature enough to 'learn' - learn you go an importantly, learn you come back, shouldn't be traumatising. But cortisol and other stress hormones are present - it's the chronic over exposure to these that may cause the damage.

long term damage, I mean

Kiskidee what do mums in Maya do when they cosleep with their babies yet the babies wake up every hour and are not soothed by breastfeeding or the presence of their parents?

some babies do cry a lot...it's not always clear why and they don't always respond to soothing..I fully empathise with that

how to cope depends on all sorts of things

And when babies who cry a lot and don't respond to soothing by the parents are allowed to soothe themselves (by crying) is that such a bad thing?

And when these babies cry less and are well rested is this because their 'spirit has been broken' or is it possibly that the baby knew best all along and just needed to be allowed the space to sort things out?

Ds has colic for the first 3 months and cried a lot. But I think there must be a difference between crying when abandoned and crying because of discomfort and still being comforted.

Message withdrawn

Add to the 'broken spirit' comment, the 'grief, fear..' comment and this article by J Hunt on an anti-CC blog
and you get the impression it is possible to read baby's mind and that all babies' minds work the same.

On the other hand, we are told categorically that no one can tell what baby's
cries mean and hence all cries at all times necessitate immediate parental attention.

My personal experience has been that it's the other way around:
Understanding dd's cries was like learning a foreign language at first but
we learnt it quicker than we thought. Reading dd's mind has so far proved impossible.

Can somebody just recap the evolutionary argument for me please?