I was in the park and there was a lady with a dog and a baby, in a stoller. I was playing with her dog and the baby started to cry so she picked him up and he stopped. Then she put him back and he started to cry. Then she picked him up and he immediately stopped. Then she put him back and he started to cry.
So I says “Oh you can let him cry he don’t bother me.” And she says “Oh no you NEVER let a baby cry.” I said “I thought it was supposed to be good for him” She said that is old fashioned and now-a-days you’re supposed to comfort them.
I don’t have kids and when I babysit other people’s kids I just pick them up, 'cause frankly their cute and no one pays me to look after them so I don’t care if it spoils them.
So my questions is to mothers and fathers, what do YOU think? What is your experience?
When a baby has been fed and doesn’t need changing and it’s not sick, etc, in other words all it’s fine it just wants to be picke up, do you think it’s better to let the little fella/sister cry? Or is it better to pick him up.
Again I don’t mean if you’re in like the library or on a plane and trying to keep him quiet.
I am just talking about a setting where you could let him cry without disturbing people.
Sometimes you have to let a baby cry. You may be going to the bathroom, pulling something out of the oven, or busy with some other chore.
Most parents can tell the difference between cries, such as I’m Cranky/Overstimulated, I’m Hungry/Wet, or Oh Crap My Tummy Hurts like Hell. It’s okay to let a baby whimper themselves to sleep, but if they’re absolutely red-faced hysterical, then pick them up.
I’m not a parent, but even I know that if you give in to a baby’s every whimper you create a dependency that’s going to be harder to break the more you do it. The constant comforting will come back to take a chunk out of her ass when that kid hits the Terrible Twos and beyond, because it’s going to turn out to be a spoiled brat.
Depends a lot on the age of the baby. Small ones don’t know how to manipulate anyone yet, they cry for some reason of their own. And yes, sometimes that reason is that they need to be held or cuddled, just for the security. But you cannot spoil a young baby. They need what they need and taking care of those needs is the best way to teach them that the world is a good place, a safe place. Young babies are supposed to be dependent and letting them be dependent and making sure their needs are met is the best way to help them learn to be independent later when they’re supposed to be.
No it won’t. That’s like arguing that you shouldn’t have sex with your wife every time she asks for it, because that will create an unhealthy dependency.
Under a certain age, which I’m sure is somewhat different for every child, but which is certainly no younger than six months or so, you really can’t spoil a baby by picking it up too much. This is an old wives’ tale, to be filed away with such nonsense as “babies need to exercise their lungs by crying.” When an infant cries, it is telling you that something is wrong. Maybe it’s something you can fix (wet diaper, hungry, tired, bored) and maybe it’s not (unexplainable colic), but responding to it is not going to teach the child that you are going to cater to its every whim, and lead to a whiny spoiled brat of a preschooler. You should certainly at least TRY to figure out the nature of the problem and see if you can fix it before just letting the kid scream its lungs out from some misguided philosophy that “babies need to cry.”
Once babies get older and turn into toddlers, then setting some limits is very appropriate and useful. But no matter how much you ignore its cries and try to train it not to be spoiled, a small infant is not going to learn anything except, possibly, that his parents will not attempt to help him when he needs it.
And to be clear, certainly no harm will ensue if you have to let the baby cry for a little bit while you use the bathroom, or make lunch, or whatever. Just don’t kid yourself that you’re teaching your five-month-old an Important Life Lesson in the process.
What **ivylass **and **thirdwaring **said. If the baby is little, there will be a reason it’s crying. When they get to toddler age, they’re starting to figure out how to manipulate. Toddlers are devious litter effers. They can spot a sucker (usually a grandparent) from a mile away.
Basically, if your child is under six months old, they’re not capable of being manipulative. Picking them up when they cry isn’t going to teach them any sort of bad habit.
(Father of 3 month old twins. They get picked up a lot.)
I’ve talked about this with a lot of parents. I don’t think it’s true. There are two kinds of crying. There’s regular crying, which can mean anything at all from “I’m hungry or wet” to “I just feel like crying” to “That stuffed animal looked at me funny”. Nobody I have talked to has said that they could identify the specific problem from the sound of the crying itself. There may be other clues, but the sound is not one of them.
The other type of crying is the “This baby is in extreme pain” crying. That one is readily identifiable because you (hopefully) don’t hear it very often and it doesn’t sound like normal crying. The problem is that 99% of crying is of the other type and you can only guess at what it means. The myth that parents can tell what’s wrong from the sound of the crying just serves to make parents feel like failures when they don’t have the first clue as to what that baby is crying about.
I once lived for a while with a couple and their 6 mo-1.5 year old. They regularly let it scream itself to sleep. And I mean piercing, hyperventilating, blood-vessel-popping, earplugs-don’t-help (I tried), one-hour-long-without-ceasing screaming. It made me really angry. I had to get out of there. No idea if it was the cause, but the kid is completely emotionally out of control now. Totally manic. It’s sad.
That doesn’t sound normal. We fed/comforted our kids on demand until they were 6 months old. As mentioned above, before that age, they aren’t trying to manuipulate you when they cry. On the advice of our pediatrician, we let them both “cry it out” in bed after their evening feeding once they reached about 6 months. It only took one night each of about 20 minutes of crying and after that they were sleeping through until at least 6 am, with no further actions necessary on our part.
Second this. At about 7 months we started putting our son down without making sure he was asleep. He would cry for a while and then fall asleep. The books we read basically said that after a certain age if you went in to comfort them every time they cried after putting them down* you would train them to cry to get more attention.
*This only applies after they reach a certain age (6-9 months) and when putting them to sleep. The book also said it would be counterproductive to let them cry for more than an hour and to insure you could tell the difference from distressed cries and attention seeking/bored/annoyed cries.
Babies don’t understand this world, they just know they are frightened, hurt, lonely, or some other form of discomfort that they don’t understand. They have no power to deal with that on their own, so they do the only thing that they can, cry out. If this has worked in the past they will continue to use this.
If is has not they may not. If crying out caused additional discomfort, or isolation they may learn to just endure their discomfort, not complain when something it wrong.
I believe these characteristics carry over into adulthood.
All babies are different, all parents are different, there are no universal truths. That said, it makes me crazy when people dismiss other peoples’ experience like that. My own personal experience is that you can’t *always *tell what they’re crying about, but lots of times, you can.
I’m always entertained by parenting advice that starts out “I don’t have any kids, but…”
When I interviewed for a nanny job with a husband and wife who are both Dr.'s one of the quesitons was something like this:
If the baby(3 months old) is crying and is dry, fed and seems healthy what would you do?
My answer and the one that seems to have clinched the job for me was that I would go pick him up and rock him, or walk around with him. At that age they aren’t looking to manipulate. The couple admitted to me later that they probably wouldn’t have hired anyone who said they would let him cry.
Now…when the child is two or three, and asking for a drink, or telling you they have to pee for the 5th time just to get out of bed, and then whimpering…you might want to let them CIO(cry it out), a little.
Our son had always been a great sleeper. He slept 10 to 12 hours a night by 4 months of age, and never even tried to get out of his crib or bed until we came to get him. But for some reason right around a 14 months old he had a month or so where he would just stand and cry and want out of his crib. We would go in kiss him, reassure him, put on music, and sometimes even sit in the room for awhile, but we never picked him up. He got through that phase fairly quickly and things were back to normal.
Had he been a few months younger, I would have gotten him out of the crib and rocked him.
In parenting classes and Mums groups and the like people are always talking about “getting to know your baby’s cries” and telling the difference between what they meant. Personally, I recognised three different cries from my babies.
“I’m a little bit unhappy”
“I’m really VERY unhappy”
and
“I’M SO FUCKING UNHAPPY YOU BETTER DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT RIGHT NOW!!!”
Which is not to say I didn’t figure out fairly quickly what to do about most of the cries - when your baby starts crying and you see it’s 3 hours since the last feed or 4 hours since the last sleep it aint rocket science at that point.
On the OP … yeah, pick the kid up if they want it and you’re not doing something that precludes it. Why not? They’re telling you they love you and want to be close to you. That’s a GOOD thing. Even grownups need a cuddle sometimes - babies much more. Sure sometimes they have to wait if you’re doing something else, but that’s just part of the issue of balancing different people’s needs in the family. It also doesn’t preclude “teaching to sleep” methods that involve letting the baby cry for a bit, but it doesn’t sound like the mum in question was trying to get her baby to sleep.
I personally have seen babies get spoiled to being picked up every time that they cry. I have a 2 year old at home and I have worked at a daycare. Yes, the kids that were picked up every single time that they cried, cried way more than the others. They knew that if they cried someone would pick them up and it got progressively worse as they got older. The two year old at home has had to learn that crying and fit throwing isn’t going to get you any attention. I had to make his older sisters understand that. Now, after about 3 months of teaching them the difference between crying for attention and crying because something is wrong, he never cries unless he is really tired, or hurt. Partly because he is older and partly because he doesn’t get attention every time he cries. If he wants attention he simply bring you a toy and says, “Look at this!” Before he would just cry and look around for someone to pick him up.
Kids know, even if they don’t understand, they know what gets them attention. Even a baby can learn. I don’t condone abuse or neglect, but I also don’t condone spoiling children. People that were raised the “old-fashioned way” turned out just fine IMHO.
“Baby” is a pretty broad category, I think. What’s appropriate for a three-month-old is (likely) not what’s appropriate for a one-year-old.
Ours just turned six months, and we specifically asked our pediatrician about this last week at her checkup. His opinion was that even at six months it’s not possible to spoil the kid, and he advised picking her up to comfort her - at this age. That recommendation will change as she grows older.
So far it’s working for us - “cry it out” sure wasn’t when we gave that a shot; the result was three miserable people. We have no intention of spoiling this kid, but we also aren’t interested in inflicting unnecessary anguish for no real reason.
The question is really one of “At what age?”, right? Unless somebody is advocating cry-yerself-to-sleep the day they get home from the hospital. Like most parenting questions, this one reveals a very wide range of strongly-held opinions…
Which old-fashioned way? The one where you squat, drop a kid, and carry it on your back until it can walk? The one where you hand it off to a wet nurse and don’t see it again until it can be properly introduced to company? The one where it dies from some mundane illness before its first birthday? Help me out here.
I really can’t say it enough… there is no foolproof way to raise children. The hard part of parenting is getting to know *your particular kid *well enough to figure out what they want and or need. IMO, if your baby is young enough that you can’t figure out what they’re crying about, they’re probably too young to figure out how to “manipulate” you.
