One of the first questions I get asked by people when discussing my 8 month old son Sam is, "Does he sleep through the night?" This seems to be a benchmark of some kind, somehow tied to my success or failure as a parent. When I respond that Sam feeds a once or twice in the night, I'm bombarded with unsolicited advice on how I should teach him to sleep through the night. It also seems that the topic of sleep training can be very controversial. Some people strongly believe that children should be taught to self-soothe while others believe that children's needs should be met right away.
So I've decided that I'm going to devote the first two blog posts to sleep training. The first post will be about the historical aspects of training a child to sleep and the second post will be about sleep training in the 21st century. There are many different theories of how to train a child to sleep When I was young, my parents let me "cry it out." This meant that they put me down to sleep, closed the door and then checked on me again in the morning. In the Pshycology Today article, "Dangers of Crying it Out," author Darcia F. Narvaez Ph.D writes that the Cry It Out (CIO) method can be traced back to 1880s when people worried about transmitting germs and so parents were told not to hold their babies too much. In the early 20th century, behaviorist John Watson taught parents that too much affection would lead to dependent and whiny human beings. Parents were supposed to teach their young infants how to be independent so that they wouldn't cause too many disruptions in their parents lives. Narvaez writes that during this time, a government phamplet was published that mothers should stop holding their babies immediately if their arms were to get tired because the baby was to never inconvenience the adult. Also, babies older than six months of age should be taught to sit silently in their crib so that they don't have to be constantly watched. The CIO method eventually morphed into the Ferber method. This method was created by Dr. Richard Ferber in 1985 with some modifications in 2006. Babies are left to self-soothe for increasing amounts of time over a period of nights. The goal is that the baby will learn eventually to fall asleep and stay asleep on their own. Fast forward to the 21st century. We've made leaps and bounds with our study of the brain. Narvaez writes that letting babies cry it out causes the following in babies:
Even with all the evidence to show that we need to be more responsive to our babies needs, I am told on an almost daily basis that I need to toughen up and let my baby cry it out. Or that I need to at least let them cry for a little bit before soothing them. In a 2014 Parents magazine, an article titled "Rest Assured" was published which stated that the CIO method worked for those parents who were comfortable with it. In a rebuttal to this article, Narvaez writes that the study quoted in Rest Assured is flawed and that the children in that study weren't actually left to cry it out. The parents in that study used various other methods. Even so, you can find many different articles today in support of this old-fashioned sleep training method. I've decided that I'm not going to let Sam's sleep habits define me as a mother and I don't mind if I need to be a bit inconvenienced at night to get up and settle him back down. In my next post, I'm going to talk about 21st century methods for teaching your child to sleep. References: Narvaez, D (2014 July) Parents Misled by Cry-It-Out Sleep Training Reports. Retrieved from: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/moral-landscapes/201407/parents-misled-cry-it-out-sleep-training-reports Narvaez, D (2011, December) Dangers of Crying it Out. Retrieved from: https://www.psychologytoday.com/ca/blog/moral-landscapes/201112/dangers-crying-it-out Ferber Method- Retreived from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferber_method
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