Controlled crying harmful?

[maomao]

Did anyone else see this in yesterday's Observer?

With DD1 naps only extended after time. Sadly. With DD2 I gave her milk to settle her for naps, which oddly never occured to me with DD1. Almost immediately I moved to formula her naps extended in time, and I get 2 naps per day lasting between 2 and 3 hours overall. This was at around 6 months though - so perhaps it was also an age thing.

We found that CC and schedule improved the naps. Schedule included putting DS1 down in his own room, in the dark, in his bed.

Longer better naps may well help your son sleep better in the night, too - the two help each other.

I really like Ferber, because he doesn't just talk about technique, he talks about why those techniques work.

I think 3 or 4 months old is too young to do cc personally, a child can't learn the principle of cc at that age.

My dd had her first real sleep problem at about 15 months at which point we tried pu/pd convinced that cc was cruel. pu/pd was a total bloody torturous nightmare in which poor little dd didn't know whether she was coming or going, in or out of the cot. So we did cc and it took a couple of weeks before she started sleeping ok again but in total there was much less crying than there had been in the weeks of her sleeplessness. So ... I wonder why the cc would damage her more than doing nothing about the fact she would wake up on her own crying every night 2-3 times? I thought having good amounts of sleep was meant to be better for your brain than not?

And finally how the hell did they do a ct scan of a child undergoing cc? I think to ct scan kids they have to mildly sedate them don't they? In which case their brains would be all messed up anyway.

It's clearly another load of old baloney from someone trying to sell her book. I've heard all the things she mentioned in loads of other places. It's all common sense.