Doctors, family, and baby "experts" like to promote cry-it-out and controlled crying as forms of sleep interventions for infants despite protests that it ignores infant communication and stresses parents out. What if, contrary to what parents are told, it also doesn't really work too well?
The Daily Mail summarized Gina Ford's 8 Golden Rules in one of their pieces. I'd like to discuss them all one by one in hopes of showing how these rules need to be amended.
Click here for Rules #1-4 Source: The Daily Mail Rule #5: Let your baby cry for up to 12 minutes each night before it goes to sleep. Note: Online it says 5-10
I hear people argue all the time that we don't need to be as responsive to our children because there aren't wild animals anymore. We couldn't be looking at the issue any more wrong if we tried.
Dr. Haig suggests infant night waking is an evolutionary trick for babies to increase mom's postpartum amenorrhea and suggests sleep training is therefore okay. But is this the whole story?
This is for those of you who have gone the cry-it-out route and now regret it. The two biggest questions I'm asked on the topic - have I done irreparable harm and can I fix it? - are discussed herein.
Most "expert" bits of advice rely upon the assumption that what works for one baby will work for all... Yeah, right.
Is crying-it-out traumatic for a child? Yes. With this in mind, what does it mean for our promotion of it? Is it short-term pain for long-term gain or should we possibly think a little (okay, a lot) differently?
New research suggests stress can be "caught"; that is, mothers can pass their stress onto infants by touch. Does this provide support for sleep training? I am going to show you here why I think it does not at all...
In pondering the use of CIO and CC further, I start to wonder if those of us who speak out against sleep training may be inadvertently setting families up to fail. Hear me out…
