AT LEWROCKWELL.COM, Heather Carson writes against the “Cry it Out” method of baby care. It’s far better to respond generously to an infant’s demands, she argues, than to let him regularly cry himself to sleep, as the Cry it Out method recommends. I agree, with the caveat that minor, unmet crying is necessary and inevitable. Her argument that persistent neglect of a crying infant causes psychological harm is persuasive.

— Comments —

Kimberly writes:

I used to babysit a baby girl (starting at 9 mos.of age). Her parents read the On Becoming Babywise book. Once, when her mother and I went to wake her from her nap so that she could go home, she shunned her mother’s arms and reached for me. I had never once let her cry to sleep, even though I was also caring for my own baby that was the same age. Her mother was extremely embarrassed and seemed at once angry with the baby.

Later on, during the summer, my baby and I ran into this mother and baby at the farmer’s market a few hours after I had watched her and she had been picked up. I knelt down to say hello to baby Ella. She could not connect with me, although she looked me straight in the eyes. What had been a beautiful, expressive, smiling face just a few hours before had become a pale, heavy, pink-eye-lidded zombie baby that did not even seem to recognize me.

I read an essay written by Gregory Popcak. Here is one quote from it:

“The problem is that children who stop crying as the result of sleep training exhibit the same levels of cortisol as children who are actively crying (Schorr, 2003). The absence of a behavioral indicator of distress (i.e., crying) suggests to parents that the child has “learned to self-soothe” but the physiological data suggests that the child has simply gone into a stress-induced state in which social help-seeking behavior becomes unhooked from the biological processes. This state is the biological manifestation of learned helplessness, a trait that has been implicated in many studies on depression (Seligman, 1990).”

What I got from his very long essay is basically this; the “Cry it Out” method can cause brain damage in your baby’s brain.

John writes:

Obviously, my one example is just a single anecdote, and doesn’t prove anything about the debate over the method. I will just say this: There is a needless hysteria that surrounds this discussion, typified by claims that anyone who uses the Babywise book as a guide is turning his child into a brain-damaged zombie whose interior life amounts to an inexpressible hell on earth.

My own little Baby Boo appears to me to be a very healthy baby, who interacts strongly with us and with her grandmother (who lives with us and provides a lot of her moment-to-moment care during the day), cries when she is hungry or tired, and also–wonder of wonders!–sleeps perfectly through the night. We achieved the current state by implementing a couple of the suggestions in the Babywise book which not only worked, but worked instantly and resulted in, yes, a happier mom and dad, but also a happier baby.

In short, beginning at six weeks and not a day before, we quit trying to use the bottle as an experimental “maybe this will shut her up” tool every time she cried, and we started going through a real daily routine. We tried to keep her distracted and awake for a few hours at a time, and gave her regular feedings before setting her down to nap. At a regular hour each day, we went through her little bedtime routine, where we changed her into her pajamas and gave her a nice big bottle before setting her in her crib to sleep. She actually loves her routine, as nearly as we can tell, if the giggling and flailing of arms are any indication.

Now, I’m not sure what the book actually says–we don’t own it–but we don’t just let her scream for hours, which would be stupid. If it seems she doesn’t want to go to sleep, we go and grab her, but not immediately. It is common for tired kids to keep themselves awake by crying–they cry because they’re tired, but they’re tired because they’re crying, etc. Every parent observes this, I think.

As for what we’ve observed in other parents: The couples we know who give constant grazing and demand feeding to their babies absolutely cannot get them to go to sleep at night. One couple we know basically spends eight hours a day dealing with baby boys who ought to be sleeping through the night, but who can’t even go to sleep without a nipple in their mouths. Even then they only sleep for a couple of hours, and this couple actually “puts them down” twice before going to bed themselves. Come to think of it, I know two couples with this problem. One consequence is that the couple is at each other’s throats most of the time from sheer exhaustion, frustration and sleep deprivation. Frankly, their lives look like a living hell, and I wouldn’t trade places with them for all the whiskey in Ireland.

Then there is my sister, who allowed her oldest girl to scream at the top of her lungs for hours, night after night, for about nine months straight. That girl is now emotionally withdrawn, insecure, unable to connect, pathologically shy, timid, depressed, inward-focused, and basically terrified of the world. She exhibits all the symptoms described by opponents of the “cry it out” method. It would appear to me that my sister, in raising her first baby, had no idea what to do and tried several solutions before just deciding on that. I doubt she handled things in a particularly organized, disciplined, and common-sense way.

What my experience has shown to me is that after about six or eight weeks it isn’t a terrible idea to try getting your baby on some kind of schedule. The human body settles into biological routines very quickly and those routines, with the regular gratification that comes with them, can be a great source of comfort and security. Baby is a ten times happier baby today than she was the day before we tried getting her into a routine, before we stopped trying to silence her crying with food. For a week or so, it seemed that she was hungry at about two hours, but the extra half hour gave us time to be quite sure, and ensured that she would eat enough to be satisfied. By night time, she was usually quite tired, because she had not spent the entire day drifting from one half-hearted feeding to one half-hearted nap, over and over, 24 hours a day. That way lies madness.

This routine became settled very quickly, as I said, and literally within one day, she slept straight through the night without problems. She now sleeps as much as twelve hours at a stretch, waking up exactly once each night for food. Interacting with her every day, I refuse to believe that the resulting improvement in her disposition is really just the descent into a dark and sinister depression and lethargy. She smiles, giggles, and plays more all the time, and every day she becomes more and more expressive and energetic, just like you would expect a baby to do. My point in all of this is that there is a common-sense way of approaching these issues that does not boil down to “a method.” In our age, everyone wants a technique, a technology, a method. So here’s mine: Use your head.

When someone asks us how we handle the baby’s sleep routine, we explain what we did, with the caveat that before six or eight weeks babies just aren’t ready for any routine and have to be given what they want when they want it, 100% of the time. After that, it’s really not an instance of child abuse to withhold food for thirty minutes in order to get them on a 2-1/2 hour feeding routine, and it certainly isn’t torture to keep them entertained for a few hours at a stretch before letting them doze off–it actually requires more investment on your part, for a short while. In our case, the result has been great for everyone involved, and that includes the baby, who now cries her hardest when she wants to get in that crib and go to bed for the night. When she wakes up in the night and cries, she gets her nighttime snack, then she’s out again.

All in all, the image in my head is one of scared young mothers screaming at one another through their computer screens, with older and more experienced women admonishing them that they’re killing their babies with neglect. Maybe that’s an uncharitable characterization, but speaking as a man who watches these wars over “the best way to do X,” it seems like just that, basically a larger-scale version of the same exact battles I see my wife fighting with other women every day over the best way to care for the baby, enabled by the communication revolution.

Laura writes:

I agree it’s wrong to be too doctrinaire or rigid about this issue. I also think it takes serious neglect, with consistent unresponsiveness by parents, to damage a child psychologically by letting him cry. Babies differ enormously and some are just naturally better sleepers. It can be horrific when a couple is not getting sleep. I think, as with toilet training, the important thing to do with a baby who remains up a lot at night or arrhythmic after eight weeks is to focus on trying to figure out a way to get him on schedule (not necessarily to prevent him from waking up at night at all, which is hard to do with a breast-fed baby, though it does happen). It may involve trying to keep him up more during the day.

I have no conclusive answers but I sympathize. Please get back to me in 20 years and let me know what college your daughter is attending. Then I may be able to truly judge the effectiveness of your methods. : – )

Kimberly writes:

There are two factors that make it possible for this father to keep his baby on this perfect little routine. There are no older siblings, and the baby is not breastfed.

When there are older siblings, routines get thrown right out the window about half of the time. Older kids wake baby from naps, interfere for their own needs, etc, etc, etc…

Breastfeeding would make a routine schedule like this totally senseless. It would not be so easy because the father, no matter how enthusiastic, is not who the baby would need, and he could not help out as much as this father is able to. I can tell he helps a lot because he knows all the little details of how each tactic is working. He must be a very good father. But for a woman who is the baby’s sole provider of nourishment, this would be a lot of hassle for no good reason if it even worked at all.

Breast milk digests much more efficiently than formula. Baby is hungrier faster, much faster sometimes. For me, as a breastfeeding mother, one of my main rules is to avoid rigid routines. The babies always pretty much get on their own natural routine anyway. Mine wakes at 7 a.m. every day and naps right around noon, and then depending on the nap’s length he goes to bed between 9 and 10 p.m. Then he pops right up at 7 a.m. again!

Frequent nursing is a big factor in bringing about the natural infertility that can result from breastfeeding (thus the title The Frequency Factor, the book on ecological breastfeeding), so for me, nursing on demand is no trouble; it’s a big help! I have gotten good two-year spaces between all three of my children without the use of any artificial contraception.

John responds:

Kimberly’s comment has confirmed my suspicions about what is driving the tenor of the discussion—charity demands I don’t expand on that point. Leave us say that most of what she writes is either well-known to every reasonably informed person (does anyone think formula is the equal of breast milk anymore?), or is not particularly relevant. Some dynamics obviously will be different when a second baby comes around, and we’ll adjust to them, but that doesn’t change a word of what I wrote.

For what it’s worth, I don’t actually help a lot, and I don’t know much about the baby’s “little” routine (is that a tone I detect?). But in any case it isn’t complicated to know that she’s fed every few hours, and goes to bed sometime between 7:00 and 7:30 PM, and generally wakes up once during the night. Moreover, I’m in graduate school and have barely changed a diaper in over two months, so Super Dad certainly isn’t a factor here either.

But let’s be real. Kimberly’s comment can be summarized to the idea that mom is only having success in this area by getting away with something, by cheating baby somehow, but of course she doesn’t want to come out and say that. But rest assured, baby is neither a budding catatonic nor a victim of neglect, and I’m confident that her sibling won’t be either.

Laura writes:

To be fair, Kimberly didn’t say babies with your kind of routine would be “catatonic.” She said that with regard to a mother who let her baby cry for long periods and was not responsive. And I don’t think she was saying anything about cheating the baby either. She mentioned breastfeeding in the context of fertility not whether it would be best for the baby.

John writes:

 I do not read her comment at all as you do, but I suppose there’s no accounting for that.

Kimberly writes:

It seems that the way John has used the “Cry it Out” method has been not to use the crying part at all, and I’m sure it’s been harmless because of this. My point is only that this perfect little (and my tone here is not to be snotty, but cute; everything that involves baby is little) routine is not ideal and should not be used to promote the ideas in this awful book. Babies should never have to cry for hours without response. I’m sure John agrees and did not intend to do any real siding with that main problematic point; rather, he is a passionate, caring husband and father and feels the need to protect his wife as a mother. He is doing a fine job, and I hope his wife is the type to appreciate it, and I’m sure she is good mother to have a man stand so ready to defend her. I appreciate it and I hope he will come to understand that I am not trying to devalue their baby’s upbringing, but to make the truth about the Babywise book clear. In my opinion, it was written to cater to the selfish, feminist mentality that says, “Baby is here because of my generosity, and will be a “good” baby that leaves me alone when I wish to be free whether she likes it or not. I am the victim because I am a woman; this is just a baby that won’t remember anything.”

Gaia C. writes:

I agree with what has been said that being sensible is definitely the way to go. I followed the advice my mother and my aunts gave me regarding baby matters, which is a version of the cry it out method (even though I have never actually read the book, so I could be wrong). It worked so well for my first child I did almost exactly the same thing for my second and third baby and I will be sure to recommend the same steps to my own daughter when she has children.

What I did was to try and get the newborns into a routine as soon as possible (which took a few weeks for my first and third children and a while longer for my second one because he was very sick and had to be in hospital for a few weeks after he was born). A routine means the kids will be hungry at meal time and sleepy at bedtime, which results in healthier eating habits and less drama when it’s time to sleep. All my children have always slept through the night and woke up the following morning active and ready to play. I had a strict routine whenever they started crying: go in and check everything is allright, wait for fifteen minutes and only then go in and pick them up. The great majority of times they got distracted or fell asleep before the fifteen minutes were up, and comparing notes with friends who had completely different parenting styles it was obvious my kids were crying much less. Today my children are by all accounts perfectly normal children, who do well in school, have lots of friends, play sport etc

If you think about it, it’s only logical. If I snacked all day long, I’d never be able to eat normal meals and I’d be hungry at inconvenient times. If I took a couple of naps in the middle of the day, I would never go to sleep and wake up at sensible times. And if you’ve ever done those things (and who hasn’t in the golden days of college) you know you feel awful afterwards. So why should you teach your baby to get into that type of pattern?

As for siblings disrupting baby routines, what my husband and I did was try and get them involved. When my daughter was four, the highlight of her evening was to rub her baby brother’s belly as I read him his bedtime stories. And when she was eight often she’d be the one reading her baby brother his bedtime stories, which they both loved. It takes time and it is not always easy, but you CAN have more than one small child AND breastfeed and still have a decent routine (of course, we live in a house with three children, two hamsters and a dog, so all tranquillity is relative!).

Last but not least, I’d like to adress the way some people who commented referred to women wanting “good” children, as in “children who don’t make much noise and don’t cause too much trouble”. Well I refuse to admit there is anything wrong with that. Of course, it is wrong to repress your child into “good” behaviour, but that goes without saying. Teaching your children to behave themselves and to seek attention in constructive ways as opposed to crying and screaming is, I believe, jolly good parenting. There is something about this day and age that sees demanding a certain standard of behaviour from children (and sometimes people in general) as the most vicious of cruelties. We are ashamed to ask a one year old child things we’d all expect from a well trained dog. I frankly think this is a spineless attitude and women should, just for once, make a stand where it really matters and start really educating children again.

Kimberly writes:

 Gaia C. seems to be a bit annoyed with attachment parenting. So am I, to an extent. I agree that many parents use these methods as an excuse to do away with discipline. Permissive types do seem drawn to attachment parenting. At the same time, I feel that it is absolutely ridiculous to start in on discipline when a baby is too young to comprehend the word “no,” and that comprehension comes very smoothly with breastfeeding. The first time they bite down, and you say, “NO” and take your breast away for a second, baby is ready to slowly start on the long road of learning discipline. This doesn’t happen until baby is about six months old, and even at this point, there is no good reason to let baby spend hours in tears. Gaia says fifteen minutes was her policy. That sounds somewhat reasonable. I would guess that I have let my babies whine and cry for about that long when I sensed there was a chance of them finding some way to cheer up on their own. But never have I timed it. I feel that mothering by heartfelt instinct is something that breastfeeding teaches in a profound way. I believe it is the best way. There is a reason you feel your breasts fill up with milk when you hear your baby cry. There is a reason that you feel discomfort when your breasts are too full and need to be emptied. God gives a mother many physical “instincts” to follow.

Babies are innocent. There is no reason, ever, to believe a baby is “bad,” which is the implication if baby is not “good.”It does not teach a baby to throw temper tantrums if you answer their cries for you. This is their only form of communication. Once they start to communicate in other ways, you can expect more mature behavior from them, and you can get it with consistent discipline. Since parents are placed in the role of God for their little ones, it’s important that we start teaching our babies the most important truths first. Mercy is God’s greatest attribute, and the first and most valuable lesson we can learn in faith is that we can and should TRUST Him because He is so full of Mercy; He is Mercy Itself, indeed. So teaching baby that you are always there, that you can be trusted, that there is nothing to fear if they put their trust in you, this is a great service to their faith in the future. This is the foundation of sanctity. Mother knows best; God knows best. When you are older, you will learn all that this implies.

It is a certain laziness, as far as I know from my experience, that puts a mother in a “mechanical” frame of mind (I’ve been there). Routine trumps heart and instinct when mother doesn’t care to take the time to think about what the baby really needs. I am not saying that routine is bad. Again, Ecological Breastfeeding will put a baby into a natural routine anyway, that changes as baby grows. It is never a rigid or strict routine, however, as applied to baby. It does create some strictness in the routines of older siblings, and this seems extremely healthy and needed for them. But the baby is always an exception, whether we like it or not, if we respond to their cries, whether we wait 15 minutes or answer instantly. It would be impractical in most instances for a mother using Eco-bf. to wait even one minute when the baby wakes up crying. Why? Because in following the Seven Standards, a mother sleeps with her baby for one good nap during the day and all through the night, or at least in very close proximity. These are the times when baby is most likely to wake up crying. It is very easy for mother to roll over, latch baby to the breast, and fall back to sleep within, oh, 15 seconds. So why wouldn’t she? Baby isn’t waking anyone up and Mother is getting extended infertility (an average of 14.5 months amenorrhea, which would mean at least 24 months spacing between babies). This is an indication to me that God planned motherhood out in this way. He created the female body to function in a way that rewards her for meeting the needs of the baby.

I believe all of this used to be common mothering, maybe four generations back. Until feminists taught us to reject our feminine instincts, to reject and despise the most fulfilling parts of womanhood and view them as degrading and a waste of time, we listened to our instincts. We saw the importance in the care we gave to our little babies and there was no question as to how to much time and thought we were willing to put into doing it well. We just did it. And you know what? It is extremely fulfilling. I would say that this is the number one indication that it is a good thing to do.

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