- Pregnancy
- Baby & Toddler
- Parents
- Getting Pregnant
- Baby Names
- Product Reviews
-
Registry
- Community
-
More
Want a personalized experience?
Download the free app
Austin Babies
WDYT: article says CIO method "dangerous"
https://shine.yahoo.com/parenting/crying-dangerous-kids-one-expert-says-222400379.html
I love this line:
"the prevalence of parents who put their own needs in front of their kids', may be to blame for the mental and physical health problems that are plaguing the United States now."
Mental/physical health problems due to CIO? IDK about that. Gets an eye-roll from me.
ETA: mind you, we didn't start the Ferber method until 9 months with Coop and never did it w/ Spence. Just wanted to clarify that before anyone crucifies me or anything. I only have issues w/ CIO if it's before a certain age.
This discussion has been closed.
Re: WDYT: article says CIO method "dangerous"
::whispers::
I agree with it.
I know my opinion is not popular.
I'm okay with that.
But I do agree with that article.
I don't even need to read the article to know its crap. The lack of sleep nearly caused me to have a mental breakdown. I'm positive that would have been far more damaging to my kid that having to CIO for a few days.
ETA: Read it and now I'm totally convinced that they are crap. We waited till 7 months to CIO and we didn't do Layna any favors by that, either. Poor baby was miserable from the lack of sleep. I can't imagine what sort of miserable toddler she could have turned into if we had let that continue. We were starting to hate each other. CIO gave us all sleep and made us all happier, better people.
My mom (being deaf and all...) let me CIO at a certain point and I'm quite healthy, the only issues/surgeries I've had have been fertility-related and I'm sure that has absolutely nothing to do with being allowed to CIO.
As for my mental health? I'm pretty good there too. I like how the article says parents let kids CIO to make the early years "easier". Um, hello? This "early years" shiit is HARD, CIO/Ferber didn't make the tantrums or the whining easier!
ETA: my friend has a baby whom she has tried to Ferber on 3 separate occasions. The baby refuses to nap and is the most miserable child on Earth due to lack of sleep. I detest this child, frankly, because I can see what kind of ordeal she's putting her mother through and it pisses me off. If the kid would just SLEEP, I think everyone would be much happier. /rant about random kid over
There's a debate about this in the Attachment Parenting board right now.
I agree with most of this article (though I certainly wouldn't attribute all the world's problems on insecure attachment...) but the Psychology Today article cited is a bunch of crap. She even cites her own opinion piece as if it was a peer-reviewed study.
I think that there are gentle ways to sleep train some older infants/toddlers that aren't going to break a secure attachment.
But that's exactly my point. CIO didn't break our attachment, the lack of sleep was breaking it. CIO saved and restored our attachment.
I was very against CIO, but at 9 months, DD was still waking 2-3x/night to nurse and since I had received absolutely no help from DH that entire time, I was absolutely exhausted, physically, emotionally, mentally-every way you can be exhausted I was. We decided to try the interval method at 9 months and it didn't really take right away as Ferber says. Took closer to 2 weeks. Part of me still regrets it. And even then she still didn't start STTN until closer to 14-15 months and even now at almost 21 months still doesn't sleep well.
I am, however, one of those children mentioned in the article. My mom was not very nurturing or caring and openly admits to letting my sisters and I CIO at a very young age. Today, at ages 31, 28, and 24, we all have very low self-confidence, do not trust easily and suffer from depression. So, I definitely see there could be a connection there.
Yeah, I'm agreeing with you. CIO was one of my "never evers" with Catie, but I finally did modified (gentler) Ferber when she was 18 months because I was starting to seriously resent her. I was tired all of the time and it made me a worse mother. For us it was absolutely the right thing to do, sounds like it was for you too.
But not all CIO is created equal, and those that try it before their baby is ready or use extinction methods will absolutely damage their relationship and possibly cause long term consequences.
i read another version of that article this week that had me all heated. it actually insinuated that babies that cry have a need you're not meeting. umm... ever met a colicky baby? not true. some babies truly just cry. i have never had a baby with colic, but it would frankly piss me off to insinuate that because my baby cried or was distressed more than another, its brain development was damaged.
as in all things there are extremes of both sides of this discussion that i think can be harmful for the child.
Ahhh okay. I'm not used to hearing Ferber described as a gentler method
In that case...Right on!
ETA: lol, my reading comprehension sucks right now. And I'm supposed to be working. But we totally used the extinction method. Ferber was cruelty to Layna, every time we went back in, it just got her worked up all over again. Extinction (a la Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child) actually worked much better for us.
It's a silly, ridiculous article. If human beings were as pathetically fragile as the author seems to believe, the human race would have collapsed into a puddle of nervous tics about 1000 years ago.
1. Teaching your child to feel comfortable enough to sleep by themselves IS putting their needs first.
2. The cortisol released by the bodies of totally stressed out, over-tired, wired babies is probably more damaging than the cortisol released by a couple of nights of crying.
3. This made me snort: "sets kids up for stress-related problems, trust issues, anxiety disorders, reduced brain function, and a lack of independence, Narvaez writes. And since the problems are on a genetic level,..." A parent who does CIO at a very young age (younger than 6 months) is, in general, probably more likely to be a tougher emotional parent overall. In general, probably not very touchy-feely nurtury. It's being raised by that kind of parent that will greatly influence a child's personality, not so much the CIO part. Likewise, a parent who uses CIO can also be an incredibly attuned, nurturing parent who will raise a confident, attached child. And double snort at the misuse of "genetic" here.
Well then I guess it looks like we can disagree after all!
I think the dividing line for me is that the baby needs to have some understanding that she hasn't been abandoned. If she's only crying because she's frustrated or mad then it's one thing, but if she's scared or panicky I think you need to reassure her that you're still alive out there. For us that meant Ferberizing with 1 minute check-ins after telling her about what was going to happen, she seemed to "get" it.
I totally get that different things work for different babies though, and if you're a loving parent then I'll always give the benefit of the doubt that you did what you really felt was right for your own family.
What I find to be completely ridiculous is blaming CIO for psychological issues later in life in the way this article suggest. My guess would be CIO likely had little to do with it but more likely the "depressed mother, harsh father and unsupportive environment" all played a much larger role into forming the emotional and physical issues of this individual and other individuals like her. Let's balance a few nights of CIO in an otherwise loving and supportive home vs. a home-life as described by the author above and which do you believe will be more damaging to the child over the course of their life? I'm pretty sure it isn't the CIO.
We did Ferber with my oldest. She was waking every 45-60 minutes all night. I was a wreck and averaging 3 hours of sleep. She was a mess. It was unhealthy for me but was also unhealthy for my daughter. She needed help learning to sleep better. It was my job as a parent to help her learn the skill she did not have. I read multiple books and tried several things. My pediatrician was completely on board with us and actually recommended CIO. Ferber worked best for us and I don't have one single regret in doing it. And I have a very happy and healthy 5 year old daughter.
I totally agree with this 200%
I have a very happy and healthy 2 year old son. I TAUGHT him how to sleep through the night and soothe himself without using CIO. CIO is not the only way to teach your child to sleep better. It is not the cure-all for childhood sleep troubles. Those on this board are generally very well educated on how to "properly" do CIO and I agree with Sinafey that using intervals and tailoring the program to your individual child is probably not psychologically damaging.
But a good majority of the people I know off this board do not understand how to do that. They post FB statuses about letting their 4 and 5-WEEK old babies CIO. Or they'll post that their 3 month old is waking several times a night to eat and get 100 comments that they need to start CIO. Or they'll talk about how they heard somewhere that CIO helped someone's kid sleep better, so they started practicing it without knowing how to do it the right way. And yes, in my opinion, that IS damaging to a child.
What I got from the article was not that if you let your kid CIO, you've damaged them for life. But rather that we need to pay attention to our kids and what they (as individuals) need. I love our pedi to death, but when I mentioned that Will was having sleep issues, he said, "Oh, it sounds like it's time to start CIO." He was 4 months old at the time. Not appropriate! I think there needs to be a lot of educating going on so that the sort of thing I mentioned above stops happening.
True. My husband's cousin posted that her kid was waking multiple times at night and she (the cousin) was getting cranky at not sleeping. Every single person who responded told her to start CIO. Her kid was 4 months old and I told her to PLEASE not CIO that early and to read Ferber's book to figure it all out first. It's amazing at how many people were trying to get her to try CIO without her even knowing "how" to go about it appropriately. And amazing that all of these people would do that to a teeny baby.
Ditto Rach.
The human body needs to develop deep sleep cycles (like REM sleep) in order to grow, learn and function properly. You can't do that if you're waking up every 45 minutes - infant or adult.
Both my daughters were happier babies during the day when they started sleeping better at night. CIO is what got us there after many other things had failed.
Really!
And for every article like this, there's 2 more saying the opposite - the problem with our society today is that we are coddling and spoiling our children.
I do have so much guilt over the CIO that we did. Ferber did not work for us. Anytime anyone would go in there, it would start the crying cycle over again. So we said good night, would go back in 2 minutes later and tell her it was okay and go back out for good. Granted, the longest she ever cried was 30 minutes and it was only half-assed crying. But it was a pretty horrible 30 minutes. Our sleep issues started when she was sick and I was going in and holding her ever hour. She got used to me rocking her to sleep, and her sleep got worse and worse until we were both about to have a breakdown. I tried everything I could to avoid CIO, but that just kept making the situation worse. It only took about a week, and now the whole fam-damily is sooo much happier and better rested. Do I feel guilty? Yes. Did I cry? Yes. Did it work, though? Hell yah!
This is exactly what I thought! So, does this mean that all colicky babies have damaged brains?
I have read studies that babies whose needs are not responded to do suffer - but those were referring to babies in orphanages where their physical needs were met but they were never held, cuddled, loved, etc at all. Likewise, I'm sure a family with a lot of fighting would be bad for a baby (or any child). A couple of nights of crying? I don't buy it. This quote especially stuck-out to me:
"Babies don't self-comfort in isolation. If they are left to cry alone, they learn to shut down in face of extensive distress--stop growing, stop feeling, stop trusting (Henry & Wang, 1998)."
I know A LOT of people who have done CIO and their babies still ate, grew, and loved their parents.
This whole thing gets me riled-up because I was led to believe that if I didn't immediately respond to my babies cries, that she would suffer permanent psychological damage. And then she had colic and reflux and gross motor problems and she cried all.the.time for most of her first year. I drove myself freaking crazy trying to respond to her. I was really depressed and seriously thought I was going to lose my mind. We ended up doing CIO and it was probably the only thing that stopped me from going to my OB and begging her to drug me.
But I still felt a ton of guilt about it and ended up talking to a social worker at ECI about it. She said there is a lot of truth to Attachment Theory, but that it is often taken too far when it comes to CIO. IMO, if a parent can raise their child not doing CIO, that's great for them and I am jealous. But I also don't think I harmed my kid by letting her cry so that we could all get some sleep.
ETA: I would also like to ask this researcher about when babies are screaming because they are stuck in carseats in the back of cars, and you can't tend to them because you are driving. Are we damaging their brains at that time too?
This is absolutely true. I have friends who adopted girls from a Haitian orphanage and they are having a hard time with attachment disorder. But it's because they were allowed to cry and cry and cry and no one ever met their needs in any way besides feeding them and changing their diapers.
But those are extreme circumstances and I don't think anyone on this board is doing anywhere close to the same thing if they use CIO as their method of sleep training.
That being said, we did non-CIO (HSH, HC) sleep training because we thought that was best for V. Now she is an awesome sleeper and if she does cry during the night, we know that something is really wrong.
I can't even read this article because I know it will upset me.
Kate was a very high needs baby. Likely, she had colic. By the time she was 9 months old, she was waking every hour to be nursed back to sleep, would nap approximately 30 minutes to 1 hour total a day (and only if she was latched on the whole time) and screamed every night for 3 hours while we rocked her. She had never slept more than 3 hours in a row in her entire life.
When her sleep issues were only causing me issues, I let it go and got up with her every hour, but I was barely able to function. I gave in on the sleep training when a. my husband told me he was scheduling a vasectomy and B. Kate started suffering from lack of sleep. She was always cranky and had bags under her eyes etc. DH finally convinced me by pointing out that Kate was screaming for 3 hours every night anyway, how could it get any worse?
We did Ferber at 9 1/2 months because nothing else worked. We tried The Sleep Book, The Baby Whisperer... Basically if there was a non-CIO sleep book we tried it. Listening to her CIO was hands down the hardest thing I have ever done as a parent and I still feel a lot of guilt over it. For a long time I said I would have no more children because I would never put another child through that.
I will say that there was some detachment initially on my part. I was desensitized to Kate's cries and much less responsive to her. Kate responding by being desperately clingy. It was heartbreaking. I think our CIO issues were exacerbated by the fact that it took a full 3 weeks for the whole process.
I know that CIO was the best thing for me. It was the best thing for my husband. It was the best thing for our marriage. Was it the best thing for Kate? I think so. Once she started sleeping at night and napping she was a *much* happier baby.
Now at 2 1/2 she still doesn't really sleep through the night and DH and I go in to calm her down or rock her probably once a week. Sometimes 3 or 4 times a night. I have no problem with this. I think that if Kate had been waking only 2 or 3 times a night, we never would have done any kind of sleep training. Ditto for the evening sleep. If she had been willing to sleep from 7-10, I don't think we would have done CIO. That wasn't the case for us though.
What is it with Yahoo? I try not to read anything on there. Seems like their news links I'm pointed to are so sensational and poorly written.
Ditto Libby. Personally I agree that its psycologically damaging to let a child cry it out. And I 100% agree that a crying baby is not having its needs met. But at the same time I don't think mom and/or dad should have a mental breakdown because of lack of sleep. A breakdown seems worse than a little bit of well thought out CIO where the childs needs are kept in mind. I think my threshold for meeting that standard is pretty high though and like Libby and others said I think our society (not this board though) just makes this assumption that CIO is the only way to get your child to sleep. The assumption that you have to / need to CIO is what really gets me riled up (and again just to clarify I don't think that's how our board thinks, more our society on average).
I do think that a baby whose crying isn't having his or her needs met. Even a baby with colic. Ryan had colic, granted he didn't cry all day and night, just from late afternoon through 11 each night. But something was bothering him and I was not able to help him, but that doesn't mean he didn't have a need. My motto during those times was if someone was holding him and reflecting his emotions / listening to him, that was enough. I wanted him to know we heard him, we knew he needed something and we were trying to help it. Sure sometimes I had to go to tbe bathroom or just needed a break so I didn't lose it and I set him in the swing. But overall I wanted his impression to be that he wasn't abandonned when he had a need. So yes I do think those times I left him were "damaging" but I also think that can be somewhat undone (or overpowered?) by responding to his crying most of the time and by the love and attachment that is most of his life.
Pretty much exactly this. To me, crying baby = unmet need. Sadly, we don't always know what those needs are (screw a cure for the common cold, find a cure for colic!) and sometimes we do know but we can't do anything about it. If you do know what they need and CAN meet it, I think you should. I don't agree with CIO, I do think it can be damaging, and it was a tool we chose never to utilize in spite of having a truly sh!tty sleeper (swaddling got us up to 45mins of straight sleep, at best, from months 5-13). But you know, not everybody's situation is the same. I wasn't working during that time so I could lay down with DD during the day, we could stay home if I was too tired to drive, nobody was going to die if I was too exhausted to do my job properly. DH did the best he could, but at night it was all me all the time and it sucked. I had/have the attitude that it was such a short time in our lives that this would be necessary so I could just buck up and deal with it. Because really, what is 2-3 years out of 80?? We also didn't have the problems like kiarox was describing with DD being sleep deprived and cranky; I was the one suffering, not DD. DH and I had our share of marital stress during that time, but I don't recall it being any worse than any other stressful times we have had. In fact, I can think of several other times that we WEREN'T sleep deprived that were far worse, lol.
BabyZee is a fairly unhappy baby, and due to necessity she has had to cry far more than I would like. I can't rock her for 20-30 minutes in a dark room while the older two are left to their own devices, and trying to put her to sleep when there is any stimulation just makes it worse. She cries for up to 3 minutes sometimes, and sadly I've become pretty desensitized because it's normal for her. She also tends to be crying/screaming more often than not when she is awake and has done this for about 5 months. I know there is something she needs, and I have some ideas I would try if she were mine but there really isn't anything I can do besides love her. I meet her needs as best I can, as do her parents, so while I hate the idea of her having to cry to go to sleep I don't feel like it's ruining her for life. Heck, she slept in the swing until she hit 14mos to minimize the crying! It's actually one reason we don't plan on more children, even though if we did H would be old enough to be alone for a bit and of course I could nurse that baby to sleep whereas that wasn't an option with BabyZee.
Like Michelle, I also feel like so many parents think CIO is something you "have" to do, like a rite of passage. They count down until their baby is 4mos old, even if they have totally normal sleep patterns for their age. Or they do it at a very young age due to outside pressure or whatever. There are other ways to teach them to sleep, but they aren't as widely talked about so I think a lot of parents end up thinking they have two choices- CIO or be sleep deprived.
"I was raised in a middle-class family with a depressed mother, harsh father and overall emotionally unsupportive environment -- not unlike others raised in the USA," she writes. "I have only recently realized from extensive reading about the effects of early parenting on body and brain development that I show the signs of undercare -- poor memory (cortisol released during distress harms hippocampus development), irritable bowel and other poor vagal tone issues, and high social anxiety."
Ummm, I'm pretty sure that's what might have caused that.... not that they let you cry for 10 minutes.
I'm still looking for the scientific support of the one person they are basing this article on, who might have said something about perhaps maybe a connection of something to what?