Should I give the child a cry?

Young parents often tell us: "I saw on TV a technique that encourages parents to let their child cry every night longer and longer until he learns to fall asleep on their own. This approach seems to me wrong. It works? "This advice has been with us for about a hundred years, and every ten years there are new books for parents offering options for this sad topic. Go to your child in five minutes, then in ten, then in fifteen minutes, weeping may not seem so inhuman or even reasonable, but the result is usually the same: an unbalanced mother and a furious crying child who eventually breaks out offorces and falls asleep - but at what cost? We would like to put this approach to sleep - forever. We have written many articles about the polemics around the method of "let the child cry," we criticized it on national television and for the sake of tired but receptive parents, we conducted a thorough study of what is heading our chart of harmful parents' councils. That's what we found.

This approach does not seem right

To find out what parents feel about this issue, we interviewed three hundred mothers. One of the questions was: "What advice do your friends and relatives give you when you ask what you should do if the child wakes up at night?" The most frequently called advice was "Give the child a cry."We also asked the mothers what they feel about this advice. Ninety-five percent of mothers answered: "This advice seems to me wrong."Our conclusion: 95% of mothers can not be mistaken, and there is a real confusion in which the mother leads the advice she hears and what she feels.

This is for sale

We talked with publishers and TV producers who promote this approach in print and on air. Here's how they protect themselves:

"It's for sale. Parents want quick ways and quick results. "Moms and dads, there are no quick ways to arrange everything, there are no shortcuts to calming the child and making him sleep. Like all good long-term contributions, creating a healthy sleep relationship that will stay with your child for a long time( which is the goal of this article) requires a gradual, step-by-step approach that we propose.

We do not claim that the "let the child cry" approach is always wrong, that it does not work and that you should never resort to it. But we want you to be cautious and not to grab for this method, before you understand well what it is fraught with, and consider other, less stringent alternatives. The material below will help you do this.

Why mothers can not

First let's figure out what exactly is in children's crying. The crying of the baby is designed to ensure the child's survival and development, as well as the development of the parent. Let's go back to the laboratory experiment described in Article 1, during which the mother's biological reaction to the crying of her child was measured. When a child cries, the blood flow to the mother's breast increases, accompanied by an intense desire to take the baby in his arms and feed( that is, to soothe).No other signal causes the mother of

to have such strong emotions as the crying of her child. That's why mothers say: "I just can not calmly listen to my baby crying."

Thus, the first arrow that we will launch into this so-called scientific method is as follows: The "Let the child cry" advice runs counter to the basics of the mother's biology.

Feelings of guilt

One morning I heard a voice from one mother, who often wakes up at night, from the tears in the phone. She saw this "give the baby a cry" approach in a seductive package on TV.She started like this: "I just tried to apply it. Nothing happened, and this morning we are both completely exhausted. Am I a bad mother? I feel so guilty. "

I assured her: "You are not a bad mother. You are a tired mother. This is your all eclipsing desire to get some sleep, forcing you to succumb to the so-called advice of specialists against your own intuition. "I continued the explanation: "As a result, you heard an internal alarm that screams to you:" Wrong! "This sense of wrongness is what you call a sense of guilt. So you are a sensitive person. Your inner sensitivity is your signaling, which protects you from mistakes. Listen to the

her. She will not let you down. "I'm more worried about those mothers who are not worried that their children are crying at night.

You stop not only the child's nightly awakenings

By cutting off the child's nightly awakenings, does the mother dissect other valuable relationships? Suppose, dismissing your guilt and the inner feeling that the method "let the child cry" is not for her, the mother persistently applies it, because she was advised so. Crying continues night after night, but every night the baby cries less and less, and it becomes easier for the mother to bear it. Finally, the child's crying at night stops worrying the mother, and the child begins to sleep longer. Look, it worked. Not Snowball

Mark and Kelly first became parents, and they were lucky enough to have a child with high needs - especially nocturnal ones. They were sensitive and responsive parents, but one day the girlfriend gave them a book preaching the "let the child cry" approach, giving the instruction: "Now you will be tempted to yield, but fasten your heart, and after a few nights he will sleep like a pretty one."While their one-year-old child was crying, these sensitive parents stood, tormented and sweating later, outside the door of his room, afraid to go inside and "break the rule."Every night, revivals have revivals! Would you teach the child to pot, forcing him to sit on the pot until he goes into it?

With the "let her cry" method, the mother destroys her faith in herself and her confidence that she understands the child's signals. It excites sensitivity in oneself, and insensitivity is exactly what brings the mother to trouble. The child loses the belief that the mother is near, and in her ability to give him consolation, and also loses faith in her own ability to influence her behavior so that she meets his needs. Perhaps he feels that now he has become a less important person for her. Sensitive to their children, parents who spent the night with friends who had trained their children so that they slept alone, reported that these children on alienated the

benche became less and less, like the affection of their parents. The child as a result did not cry out - he paid off all his confidence in the parents, and all of their sensitivity was erased from the parents. Mark and Kelly used to take Matthew with them wherever they went, because they wanted it, and they felt that it was wrong to leave him. Well, now it's easier for them to leave. Weekends away from the child outgrew weeks away from him. Between the parents and the child a distance was formed. Together with the crying of children, the family left not only nightly awakenings.

, in fact, at night cry and call for help. They are horrified, realizing that parents simply do not hear how their children cry.

The subtle relationship that existed between the mother and the child when the cry of the child troubled the mother is now broken. Since both the child and the mother now have less confidence in each other and toward themselves, the parent-child relationship has depreciated, and the atmosphere of trust has been replaced by a distrust that will penetrate into other aspects of their relationship. This will lead to an even more alienation, and such a mother will be drawn into an approach that was alien to her a few weeks ago.

The true reason for nocturnal awakenings remains unclear

This night-time approach "hands off the child, let it calm itself" holds other pitfalls: it prevents parents from finding out the true cause of nocturnal awakenings and considering more humane, future-oriented solutions to the problem. This approach implies that the only reason a child wakes up is because it is "spoiled";that he did not learn to fall asleep himself, because you always help him;that if you did not help him fall asleep again, he would have had to learn the techniques of complacency. What comes out of

?Themselves are to blame that the child wakes up. But this is not true.

Cindy, sensitive and very attached to her child's mother, turned to me about the fact that her one-year-old kid, always sound asleep, suddenly became restless at night and constantly wakes up. She began this way: "I know my child, he wakes up for good reason. Something is wrong, and I'm not going to let him cry, as my friends advise me. "I gave Cindy a list of possible causes of nocturnal awakenings. In the process of elimination, she found that the night irritant is polyester clothing in which her child sleeps. That night, when she changed her child into pure cotton, her child slept again perfectly.

That's why you can not separate the daily care of the child from the night. A mother who begins with loving care and affection becomes so sensitive to her child that the "let him cry" approach in itself seems alien to her, and she intuitively searches for the reasons for her child's nightly awakenings and not such soulless solutions to the problem. But the mother, who has chosen a more, strict approach to the child, is easier to yield to the temptation of the approach "let him cry."He is not so alien to her installation, and she can more easily succumb to him.

Tony or

When teaching a child to swim, you do not throw him into the water, allowing him to drown or swim. Similarly, you do not just need to put the baby in the crib and wait for him to fall asleep. First, you help the child to gain confidence in the fact that there is no need to fear water, then let him feel that it is nice to be in the water. Then you teach him to swim. To learn to fall asleep, you must first learn not to be afraid of sleep;then the child discovers that sleep is a pleasant and not a lonely state;and finally, you teach the child how to stay in a dream.

Stories of two mothers

For some easily managed children, the "let it cry" approach may work, at least so it may appear on the surface. For children with high needs( which you will meet in the next article), it rarely works. Without answering the cry of the child, you do not actually teach the child to sleep: you teach your child that his crying has no communicative value. Do not "succumb" to your child, you teach him to give up. It is very difficult for us to believe in the wisdom of such a campaign. This is a night training, not a nightly parental care. We train animals - and we nurse children. Read these mother stories.

Laurie, an exhausted but affectionate mother of a constantly awakening child at night, desperately succumbed to the advice of being stricter.

"I plugged my ears and let him cry. Soon my husband had to hold me, because I was irresistibly anxious to go and take the baby in my arms. My child's cry grew louder and louder, and in the end I could no longer bear it and ran to him. God, he was so distraught! I'll never do that again. "

We learned about one more defeat of this approach from one mother who was recommended to give the child to cry at night: doctor

"I could no longer endure his crying and finally came to him and gave her breast to put him to bed again. We were both sitting in a rocking chair and crying together, and I had to lull him twice as long to fall asleep again, than if I came to him right away. The next day he clung to me till the evening.

When I read the "crying book", I had to remember when to calm the child, when to take it in my arms, how to behave next to him, when to lay him to sleep, how many seconds I can afford to soothe him, and so on. Of course, to be a parent you need to learn - but not the same! Parental care should not be reduced to science. It must be natural, it must be guided by instinct. I'm sure the advice "let it cry" does not suit me - does not suit us. "