The Little One is 16 months; we did graduated crying-it-out (5 min, check, 10 min, check, etc.) with her at about 7 months and she took to it beautifully – the first night was quite painful and horrible (two hours crying – ouch!) and the second night less so, and the third night we were all set, and we’ve all been getting much better sleep since. The next morning, she didn’t display any sort of anxiety over being left to cry and was perfectly happy, not upset or clingy at all – in fact I’d say that after the sleep training she was happier, since she was getting more uninterrupted sleep. But the Little One is a pretty calm baby in general (yes, we are very lucky), and has always been a little less clingy than other kids her age. (She’s in full throes of separation anxiety right now, but so are all her agemates.)
Okay, here’s my question. My friend is hesitant to do cry-it-out (her baby’s 10 months) because she feels she’s noticed that her baby gets very anxious when little traumas happen, e.g., a doctor’s visit, or being left to cry for 5 minutes – after this she’s noticed a period of increased clinginess and anxiety for a couple of weeks.
Have you noticed this in your child, and did it hamper you from doing crying-it-out, or did you try crying-it-out and it didn’t work because of increased anxiety? I’m interested in others’ experiences, because I have the feeling the Little One is on the calm end of the spectrum and thus is not a good sample.
(I’m perfectly aware that many people do not choose to do cry-it-out for whatever reason, and those kids turn out fine. And my friend’s kid may be one of those. I am not interested in the pros and cons of crying it out, or whether I’m a bad or good parent for doing so. I’m interested in specific Doper experiences with anxiety or not.)
My daughter’s less than 3 months old so I don’t have personal experiences to add yet, but it sounds like your friend has been reading Dr. Sears. He advocates “attachment parenting” which thinks that encouraging any kind of independence in small children is Teh Ebbil. His advice is to baby-carry constantly, co-sleep (even for naps), etc etc. He always underlines his points by telling the “true story” of a baby who was started out on his methods, and whose selfish parents then decided to make the baby sleep in a crib/sit in a bouncy chair/drink from a cup. The baby always becomes “sad”, “withdrawn”, “depressed,” “loses trust” and eventually “fails to thrive.”
I hate Dr. Sears. Anyway, see if your friend believes these stories. She may be interpreting her baby according to them.
Mother of 4 kids here. The vast, vast, VAST majority of kids adjust to ‘Ferberizing’ just fine, with no lasting negative effects. They might have a few days of confusion or increased clinginess, but that fades and the child adjusts to the new normal.
With my first I was very hesitant and nervous to let him cry it out, I was afraid of him being traumatized and it affecting our relationship. It was a hard few days, but then we both got over it and I was a MUCH better mommy for getting enough sleep. But the 4th child I felt more confident in my parenting and I knew that our relationship would thrive based on our interaction during the day and how loved he felt.
Every baby is different. I have known/heard of babies who reacted very badly to sleep training methods. My youngest sister was one of them - she was an anxious, clingy baby who was super-attached to my mom, wanted to be held all the time and woke frequently in the night, and my mom gave up trying to train her out of it because her reaction was so extreme (screaming so hard she would sometimes throw up and couldn’t be soothed for a long time after, and it didn’t improve with time). She grew out of it pretty fast, by the time she was 3 or so she was a normal kid for her age with separation anxiety, etc. I on the other hand was born independent and would tantrum if you tried to hold me still in your arms, once I could crawl.
Many babies are in more of a middle ground, thank goodness, and can be ‘trained’ to self-soothe, including my middle sister. My mom sleep-trained her with few problems (moved her from their room into mine at 5-6 months, so I remember it pretty clearly). I think it was over in less than a month, and she would sleep through the night after that. My youngest sister didn’t sleep through the night until she was about 5 years old.
All the sleep-training methods I’ve ever read about start really slow, and I don’t see any reason why your friend can’t try out the beginning steps and see how baby reacts. If it’s bad, no reason to continue, and getting more upset than usual won’t traumatize even the most sensitive baby for very long. And maybe it will work better than she thought, and everyone will get more sleep.
My son had a horrible reaction to sleep training. We tried really hard for two weeks straight letting him cry, but he’d scream for three hours straight sometimes, no matter how much checking and patting we did. Sometimes he’d get so upset he’d vomit. And the one or two times he did manage to scream his little self to sleep, he’d wake up crying every 30-45 minutes afterward and be very clingy in the morning. It was absolutely miserable. We talked to his pediatrician and she was the one who said, “Just take him to bed with you. You tried, it’s not working. It isn’t worth it.” So we did and things improved significantly.
We tried half-heartedly with our daughter, but after our experience with our son, we just didn’t have the inclination to force the issue. She’s 18 months and sleeps through the night pretty solidly (unfortunately she wakes at 5:00 - 5:30, but that’s a different issue) and has been doing so since about 12 months or so. Every morning she comes charging into our room, I pick her up and tuck her next to me and she usually dozes with me until my alarm goes off around 6:15. I can live with that.
And with respect to Dr. Sears, I liked many of his suggestions and the overall ideas, but his books were patronizing in the extreme. I read Attachment Parenting on my Kindle. In it he suggested that stressed out women take a break and do something relaxing like go sew, cook or take bubble bath. In other words, very stereotypical suggestions. If I were married to him, I would’ve slapped him. Plus, the examples he used sounded like he was regurgitated the same story with different characters over and over again. Many of his theories worked very well for us, but it was hard to read all at once.
Am I allowed to say “asshole” in the forums? Dr. Sears is a clueless asshole. His “solution” to the problem of a baby that won’t nap without being held is… to hold the baby whenever and for as long as it wants to nap!!!
Apparently his wife Martha never got anything done. For like, twenty years. Plus how the hell do you take a relaxing bath when you have to share your bed with the baby all night and hold it while it naps half the day? Oh wait, you’re supposed to take the baby in the bath with you! Won’t that be relaxing! Silly me!
Actually, if I recall correctly, he does suggest taking the baby in the bath with you. And, if you’re doing things right, you’ve already started relaxing by sewing your baby a new towel from organic cotton anyway.
What I loved most, though, was when he talked about how he and Martha went to a black-tie affair and she wore a gown and a “fashionable sling.” Apparently she was walking around nursing the baby all night and he claimed that the baby was so happy that people were just shocked when she said there was a baby in the sling. They thought she was just wearing a stylin’ wrap! Right.
Having spent a lot of time with my daughter strapped to my chest while she nursed ( though not at a black-tie event), I can tell you that, no matter the cloth you use, a sling still looks like a sling, especially when you strap it on and put a baby in it.
“e.g., a doctor’s visit, or being left to cry for 5 minutes – after this she’s noticed a period of increased clinginess and anxiety for a couple of weeks.”
Hate to fight the OP, but this seems like a very long reaction for a child that age. Id be wondering a bit about how she decided thats what was happening and if anything else is keeping it going that long.
Our child who is supposedly at risk of attachment issues simply due to being adopted had no problems at all with doing it. We can look back and see how blank her face was when first staying with us, so Id say some anxiety was present, but it didnt seem to effect the outcome when we did it. The biggest problem was how stressful we found it.
You don’t have to read Dr. Sears to think that crying it out is not a good idea (or whatever). Kids are kids, and not all babies are alike. I’m in my twenties and I call my mom when I have problems.
When my daughter was 6 months we moved house and she got very unsettled at night. We eventually tried leaving her to cry and she fixed herself in three nights. She never showed any particular anxiety during the day.
I think leaving them to cry is very stressful, and won’t work unless the parents are committed to it. So it may not be a good idea for your friend since it sounds like she has some doubts about it.
I think it’s important to remember it takes 2 to tango. Sleep training needs to take into account the temperament of both baby and mum. I was more of an attachment parenter, generally comfortable with on demand sleeping and feeding. (I lasted 24 hours on Save our Sleep before binning it.) When we sleep trained, I and could only leave her to cry for 5-10 minutes at a time (following the sleep right sleep tight method of returning periodically to pat and soothe). This mum doesn’t sound like she’s even capable of that, and she’s right to listen to how she feels, as it will be her there crying in the hallway at 3am with noone else for support. She needs to find the way that works for her.
I think it’s also worth pointing out that some suggest there are good and bad times to sleep train. We did ours around 5-7 months - perfect timing. 9-11 months is meant to be a bad time to train based on what the kid is developmentally doing at the time (and separation anxiety is a factor at this age). I found the book Bed Timing really helpful - it doesn’t recommend a system of training as such, but does provide some guidance about when to try different tactics:
Some kids seem increase tension (get more and more upset) when they cry, and some release it. And some kids are tension releasers at one stage and increasers at another. If the kid doesn’t calm down and learn to self-soothe within a few night (and becomes visibly more upset) maybe delay it for a few weeks.
My first needed to cry to learn to sleep. I tried it with my second around six months and he would scream for hours, like overly’s son. So I shrugged and kept co-sleeping for another month, tried again, and it worked. We still haven’t night-weaned the second, but he’s generally only nursing once a night, and I kind of like it.
This didn’t happen to work for us at all. My son would freak out and scream the instant he noticed you were heading for the door, then scream however long it took you to go back. The answer we came up with was to just sit with him for a half hour to an hour or more until he was deeply asleep, then tiptoe out. That sucked, especially when he wasn’t quite asleep enough. Our pediatrician suggested just putting him to bed and walking out, not going back at all.
Day 1 20 min crying
Day 2 2 min
Day 3 10 sec
Day 4 stopped crying before we shut the door
He’s been very good about sleeping ever since, now 3 years old.
Going back in to check at 5min 10min etc. just got him all hopped up for another round of tears.
At about 9 months our oldest would get up every night at 2 am and take forever to get back to bed, crying, etc. We were going nuts, and suspected colic and all sorts of horrible things. Our pediatrician told us to let her cry it out. Like the others, it was a horrible 3 days or so, and then blessed sleep all through the night. She’s 29 now, so I can testify it didn’t hurt her.
I don’t know if the youngest had this problem or not - by that time we wouldn’t have let the problem get worse. She’s fine also.
I’m not going to get into a fight about attachment parenting in this thread, but I have to say that this is a vast, vast misrepresentation of what attachment parenting is about. I find Dr. Sears’ writing style to be somewhat patronizing, but characterizing his advice specifically and attachment parenting in general as “encouraging independence is Teh Ebbil” is simply wrong. Pardon the expression, but you are throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
Here’s my advice to the OP’s friend: If she has concerns about the baby showing anxiety after she does cry-it-out style stuff, and that is making her not want to do cry-it-out, then she probably shouldn’t do cry-it-out. She knows her kid. Some of the worst parenting decisions I’ve made are when I’ve gone against my instincts and listened to someone else’s well-meant advice that was based on what worked for their child.
I’m totally on board with the ideas that a) my friend may not be comfortable doing crying it out regardless of what her baby thinks, and that’s fine (I told her that) and b) all babies are different, so what worked for my baby isn’t necessarily going to work for her baby (the reason why I asked the OP in the first place!) – it was good to get the variety of responses from you guys; sounds like it does work for most babies but by no means all, and sometimes other factors can come into play, which… I should have expected, it being the theme of everything else I’ve learned in the past 16 months.
I haven’t read any Dr. Sears (don’t know if my friend has), but it sounds like I am very much not the attachment parenting sort, and it sounds like the Little One is very much not the attachment child sort. (rhubarbin, your description of your babyhood sounds very much like our Little One.)
Otara, two weeks does seem like a long time for a baby to remember something – I can’t remember anything more than two days myself at this point, and I’m pretty sure my kid can’t either – but I don’t know her baby (unfortunately we live far away) and she does, I reckon. But yes, I don’t think she is 100% sure of the correlation.
Girl from Mars, thanks for the reminder about ages mattering – I’d forgotten about that, and that may be part of the issue too.
Lissla, oh yeah, I forgot about that. We tried training too early and it didn’t take at all – she was definitely not ready. We tried again a month or two later and it worked beautifully.
Cheesesteak, heh – yet another example of “All babies are different!” Whenever I tried your method it would turn out that the Little One had a poopy diaper or was hungry… Good to know it worked for you, though, if we ever have another one who doesn’t respond to the 5-10-min thing.
Amen - this pretty much sums up most of my parenting experience. We had well-meaning friends tell us that we “hadn’t tried hard enough” letting our son cry it out because crying it out had worked for both their kids. It must therefore work for everyone’s, right? Yeesh.
a 10-month-old cannot hold a grudge for weeks. the one who’s anxious is the mother. ask yourself this: if the parent had 3 or 4 kids, or more, would they be so interested in every little nuance? usually the later kids in large families are better adjusted because they’ve been left alone to work it out for themselves
