Im doing controlled crying and its killing me hearing my baby crying

[ellideb]

Please give me some words of support to carry it through as I would feel cruel to pick him up now after leaving him for 25mins

Bless you ellideb i know its frowned upon but am giving you [hug]

When you next give him a cuddle, enjoy it, and don't beat yourself up. Can also recommend the Elizabeth Pantley book.

Yes popsycal it sounds like a good idea to me.

x-posts, Sheeta - sorry.

hey go cuddle him then! tis ok. or just look at him being all sleepy and lovely, i love watching mine while they sleep.

don't cry, please.

I think the most important advice people have given you here is to trust your instincts.

Alot can be achieved by cuddling him and putting him down, BF him if needed and by keeping things dark and quiet so he knws the difference between night and day.

Don't be taken in by those books which warn about setting up bad sleep habits etc. You are not making a rod for your back. Both mine are in bed at 7pm every night now and they are aged 2 and 4. The first year is just about feeding and cuddling and soothing IMHO.

ellie email me
[email protected]

i have years of horrendous sleep deprivatin with ds2 - just search fronmabout 2006 to, well, noww andyou will see
onwards and upwards

apologiesd for typing
ds3 here again
slept in his cot for ooooh lets see...10 mins beforew waking up....

I know how you feel elli, I left DD once in desperation, even though I am anti any sort of crying methods and I felt so bad about it. I was under pressure to give it a go from people around me. After that I decided to trust my instincts. It really is the best way to go (and I hadn't found MN then

There is loads of support on here if you need advice about sleep. I am glad you have thrown away the book.

this has just reminded me. I never really read baby books but when I was doing my four minute slot cc I would read a page or two of the first mumsnet book.

You will struggle to get support for any form of "sleep training" that is so extreme.
At the risk of sounding patronising, WHY are you doing it? Has someone convinced you that your baby needs training to go to sleep? All children will sleep through the night when they are ready to - some will do it very early, some very late but they will all do it eventually. Your job as his mother especially at this early age, is to respond to his crying with love. He is not a machine to be trained, but a person to be nurtured.

Sorry - took so long to post my reply I missed your throw away the book reply. Hurray for that x

I was actually advised to leave DD to cry herself to sleep by the CRYSIS helpline when she was 6 weeks old! Needless to say I ignored that little gem. It is very difficult and I often feel like tearing my hair out! I have given up reading books and am just going with the flow now. It makes for a much happier DD.

!! at crysis - with DD they told me to ignore her need to be carried all day as a newborn and to leave her in the garden under the washing line! There is a definite need for consistent training for Crysis "counsellors"

Ellideb - your usual routine sounds lovely.

My DS is 5.5 months and recently some of our routines have gone out of the window due to teething/growth spurts/developmental strides/colds (which sent me into a total spin) Forget about tonight and keep with all the cuddling, feeding, singing etc. and it will work again - and make you both feel better. (And then sometimes, again, it will seem like everything has gone out of the window and nothing will work - that's babies!) I am usually a total control freak but I am learning fast that where babies are concerned, there is no control. Embrace the chaos!

ellideb, hope you are feeling ok now, I am sure you won't have damaged him (although doing it repeatedly might).

I just wanted to let you know that I have been following a gradual retreat programme with my 6 month old (he was 5 weeks 3 months when we started) for the last 12 days. From always having been breastfed to sleep and waking pretty much hourly after midnight, he now settles alone with me sitting by the side of the cot (2 hours earlier than he would have), and wakes once or twice before morning. I wouldn't have thought it possible, but actually it's been fine - hard work, but such progress. The longest period of crying we've had at any point is 2 minutes (and even that wasn't the very distressed sort of crying). What I've done is very similar to what is suggested in the No Cry Sleep Solution. If you have support and are VERY consistent, it will work. Please post if you want any more info.

ellie, grab yourself an early night, and tomorrow is another day.

don't be too hard on yourself, how can we learn if not from our mistakes?

Ellie, for what it's worth according to my MIL my DH was left in his pram in the garden to cry many times when he was little, and he managed to get a degree from Oxford. And he's pretty well-adjusted (for a bloke, anyway). Paediatric clinics are NOT full of babies who are neurologically damaged because they were left to cry. He'll be fine. Honest. Pls don't let it get you down, he'll have forgotten about it by the time he next wakes & don't let them put you on a guilt-trip. Hope you sleep well tonight, x

Floozles, my grandad smokes thirty a day and is still alive. It doesn't prove that smoking isn't harmful...
It is not about guilt trips, it is about sharing research.

Find another book.

What about 'The No-Cry Sleep Solution' by Elisabth Pantley. I thought it was great.

clemette please don't equate leaving a baby to cry for 25 minutes with an activity that is well established to cause diseases including lung cancer. Please do share the research that a baby crying for 25 minutes will have any problems as a consequence. And I didn't suggest for a moment that I'd advise anyone to stick their baby in a pram outside. I'm just saying that motherhood is difficult enough without piling on the guilt. Yes, it's important to share information, advice & research, but not opinion-dressed-up-as-fact. To that and, like I said, show me the research.

I think the consensus has been that as a one-off this is not going to have caused lasting damage (just as a one-off try of a cigarette wouldn't). The research that shows the potential lasting damage of leaving a small baby to cry it out regularly has been linked to earlier in the thread.
Of course all research is potentially flawed, but citing reserach is not piling on the guilt, it is passing on collective experience and knowledge. The OP does not appear to have been overwhelmed by guilt, just been supported in her OWN conclusion that this wasn't right for her baby.
Motherhood is difficult but there are also some things that are damaging/dnagerous for children, and on a public forum it is likely that you will get your views challenged. Would you keep quiet, for example, if you knew someone was giving their child salt and didn't seem to know the consequences of doing so??

Definitely look at the no cry sleep solution or gradual withdrawal where to begin with you sit next to the cot stroking, patting, shushing, gently talking or singing etc and gradually over a few weeks/months you move closer to the door until they go to sleep on their own with you outside the bedroom door.

and as vvvqv said earlier on, research into this is ongoing. the articles linked to on this thread aren't just by random internet peeps, they are by fully qualified psychologists, doctors and paediatricians, often working together.

now, you can pooh-pooh that all you want just because they haven't "proven" anything as yet. But I for one thinnk that what all these people are saying makes sense. add to that there are a LOT of them all saying the same thing AND that it has been deemed necessary to further investigatge it and I would say that they could be onto something.

it says to me that there may be a risk leaving a child to cry for proglonged periods. It is not difficult for me to prevent this risk by making sure my baby is not left to cry, and so I will do so.

I find the OP very sad, poor baby.