The Truth About Cry It Out Methods
The cry it out method encourages parents to ignore a crying child, but a crying baby should never be ignored. Crying is the final action in the infant distress response before the baby shuts down to preserve himself.
We do not have children for their convenience. We do not stop being mothers at sun down. Imagine a toddler who was forced to sleep using the cry it out method as a baby not coming to the mother in the night despite being sick. Many mothers have attested to coming into their child’s room in the morning and seeing the toddler lying in a puddle of vomit. All because the child has accepted that his needs do not matter during the night.
Can you put yourself in a child’s position as best as you can? You are having a miserable day. You’re sad, achy, worried about something, you name it. You’re crying, and the person you love most in the world refuses to comfort you, refuses to sit with you and hug you and rock you until you feel better. His rationale is that you’re alive, your bodily needs (namely food) have been tended to, and you don’t need him. He leaves you alone in the dark with your worries and anguish. How would that serve to strengthen a trusting bond?
Everyone, babies, children and adults, wake several times during the night. Adult humans have a sleep cycle that averages 90 minutes and at the end they wake. The difference is that most of the time the adult knows how to put himself back to sleep without remembering the waking whereas the infant has not developed that ability yet.
Cry it out methods seemingly work. But in reality the blessed silence at night is the baby retreating within himself in order to right the horrific wrong of his loneliness. Babies are born into this world with absolutely no concept of time. Their ability to quantify time increases as they age. Infants live only in the moment. They have no ability to understand that they will be cared for later and that they must wait to have their needs met. To an infant, loneliness in a dark room is the worst torture. As long as the baby has a hope that he will be cared for he will cry. It is when the cries end that all hope has been lost. For the baby, his mother may as well be dead, and he is lost in an eternity of solitude during the night.
The fact is that babies are human beings too. Although they are helpless they deserve as much respect of their needs and dignity as any adult does, if not more so, because of their innocence. Their perception of the world is affected by their treatment during this impressionable time. Despite what many people say, tending to your infant when he cries does not create a manipulative child. When a baby is picked up and soothed (ideally by breastfeeding, but also by rocking, singing, etc.) he is taught that he matters as a person, that he holds a very important place in his parents’ hearts, and also learns how to have empathy and compassion for others.
Crying is an incredibly taxing activity for a baby. If one looks at it in a historical and biological fashion, it would not be in an infant’s best interest to cry because it would put the infant in danger of predators. Crying is typically the last resort (with the exception of sudden pain or fright) and is intended to right a situation that is unacceptable and that has been prolonged beyond the tolerance of the baby and to reunite the mother and infant. A baby makes multiple attempts at getting his needs met through other signals before resorting to crying. This is because physiologically crying is harmful to the baby’s body. It raises stress hormone levels and also creates within the infant’s body conditions not dissimilar to those of someone experiencing a stroke.
It is only western culture that expects early independence on its infants in the form of sleeping alone and through the night. It isn’t the norm the world over. In traditional, indigenous societies infants are carried almost constantly in arms or in a sling and spend the night in their mothers’ arms in bed, typically nursing through the night. It really is completely illogical to expect a baby, who has spent almost ten months cradled within the warmth of his mother’s womb, comforted by the rocking motion, and never experiencing cold, hunger, or loneliness, to be comfortable on his own in the expanses of a crib. For human beings gestation does not end at physical birth but continues for a minimum of nine or ten more months, during which time it is up to the parents to create conditions that are similar to the womb to ease the infant’s transition into this world. Thus it is cruel to force these conditions which are in stark contrast to those that the baby has known all his life and expect him to accept them.
Many parents are so eager to push sleeping through the night without considering the fact that infants typically are not physiologically ready to go the entire night without eating. It is expected that breastfed infants receive at least 25% of their nutritional needs during the night for at least the first 12 months. People continue to have things that need to be taken care of during the night for the rest of their lives. It’s just that babies and young children are not capable of handling these things by themselves. Adults need to wake to urinate, or they become thirsty, or even very hungry in the wee hours of the morning, or they have achy legs, or some other concern that is preventing them from having a good night’s sleep. It isn’t reasonable to expect infants and young children to not have these needs during the night. There are also psychological and emotional issues that make it difficult for a baby to sleep. The early years are a time of such incredible brain growth and motor development that the child simply wants to continue to explore his world. This is a natural thing that needs to be accepted by the parent. Fears are also something that arises during the toddler years.
Cry It Out: Manipulation vs. Security
Simply put, the sleep ‘issues’ that almost every parent of a young child has to deal with must actually not be ‘dealt’ with. The best way to survive the night wakings is to just go with the flow and ride them out. This time is so short and is better spent enjoying your child, caring for him and helping him to explore his world. Going to your child and picking him up and loving him when he needs you is most certainly not going to create a manipulative child in the least bit. In fact it will create quite the opposite: a secure baby who knows that his parents love him and who is never afraid to seek help during the night, who feels free to wake his mother because he needs her help. In turn he will most likely treat others with kindness and his own children with compassion rather than ignoring their very real needs in the name of teaching them ‘independence.’
Independence from what? Being a baby? In the grand scheme of things, once baby becomes a teenager, there will be no shortage of drive for independence. Infancy is such a fleeting time.
