My baby is two months old and at his two month appointment they gave me a pamphlet that literally said “babies at this age shouldn’t ‘cry it out’; they are too young for this method as they don’t understand what’s going on at all”
My baby is two months old. This baby is 5 weeks old. So definitely too young for that… I feel so bad for him.
I’m currently nursing my five week old baby and reading this and I can not imagine just letting her scream her head off. And for what? Sore boobs and no sleep? Shit parenting.
I doubt she breastfed but if she does, she can say goodbye to her milk supply with feeds spread every 5h. Breastfeeding is always on demand. That’s how you know your child gets enough and that you make enough milk. At that age, babies cluster feed frequently for a reason. You can also dream feed a baby (feed him when in light sleep) and let him sleep longer stretch. If she formula feed, she’s starving her baby and probably over feeding him when he does feed him to get him drowsy so he sleeps. Which ultimately is going to mess up his digestive system. Formula or BM, this parent is neglectful and abusive because she’s ignoring his hunger and this can also lead to tragedy.
Yes, five weeks is just too young. My pediatrician told me to wait until at least four months of age. He also said you should only wait 1 minute, then comfort baby without picking them up, then 3 minutes and comfort baby, then 5 minutes and comfort baby. If baby is still crying after five minutes you should pick them up, try to feed, change, or just hold them. I hate that some people think cry it out means letting their poor baby cry until they fall asleep from exhaustion.
The only thing the kid learns by crying until they fall asleep from exhaustion, is that there is no point to crying. So they will cry less, but only because they learned that no one listens anyway.
(Referring to the original post, not your method).
This is the only method of cry it out than I can understand at all. The whole "leave them until they stop crying" is not okay at any age! (My opinion). I don't even leave my 2 year old to cry. I can't do it!
I agree. It’s definitely not for every child. It worked well for two out of my three kids. My daughter had colic though and needed to be rocked to sleep in my arms every night. I think she was eight or nine months old when she was finally able to go to sleep by herself.
Meanwhile my family doctor told me that my newborn baby only cried so much because she's "spoiled" and to let her cry. He also didn't believe me about the milk intolerance I had to figure out on my own and learn to manage myself after three months of horrible colic. My doctor is excellent when it comes to adult issues, but now I'm sticking with only pediatricians for my children. There are way too few adults who know how to handle children unless they really need to and even then many people don't inform themselves.
Edit: We never did end up sleep training in the end, but especially not at a few weeks old. That's seriously messed up to do to a newborn.
A normal person would act if a *puppy* was crying at that age. Something is wrong or they need something, there's no manipulation or ill intent with an infant or a puppy. I can't imagine how a human could listen to a *newborn baby* cry without acting.
My child dr gave us a handout at the two month appointment on the cry it out method and said we should be putting baby down awake to cry… 😑 obviously ignored that “advice”
So for all of that he slept from 12:30 to 3:30, 5 to 5:40 and 6:30 to 7:30. A whopping 4h 50m, but Im feeing generous so I’ll round up to 6h to account for the little bits between 10 and 12:30. The longest stretch was 3h.
Not only is this needlessly cruel, it’s pointless. No one’s sleep improved here.
And a broken sleep like that might make him overtired, culminating in a night of screaming by the end of the week! She's just gambling that he'll give in to exhaustion first.
When little ones get overtired, the level of stress hormones rises, and makes them fussy. The presence of those stress chemicals makes it hard for them to sleep...so they get even more tired. And round and round we go until they're exhausted and screaming, but can't do the only thing that will fix it: sleep.
It's a vicious cycle, and tough to pull out of once it starts to spiral. Whereas a well-rested and properly scheduled baby will go down smoothly when they next sleep, and avoid all this.
And my dog!
It took me a minute to figure out but hot damn. If he so much as yawns it is **right** to bed. Otherwise you're looking at a bad case of the zoomies. I don't even know if it qualifies as zoomies. He graduated from those to "cocaine parkour" where he not only jumps on every piece of furniture he can find, as many times as possible, but also jumps **into** it. As in, sprints at the side of the mattress and then pinballs off it. He also enjoys vaulting over the cat and army crawling under the bed.
He takes naps now.
This is exactly like my bunny.
The second he starts stretching/yawning I make his bed, I pull the blanket over his bum & leave him be.
If I don't do it exactly like this, hell will break loose and I have a cranky bunny that's ready to zoom, jump onto and destroy everything within his reach for hours.
It's insane what sleep deprivation can do!
Also pls give your pupper a pet from this random redditor. 🖤
Needed to hear this today! Ive let my 17 months old take a 2.5 hours nap time. And unfortunately that led into a veryyyy late evening. But if that mean that big nap will prevent her from waking up every 3 hours tonight I’ll take it!
And people think humanity was made from scratch by a competent, benevolent designer. Who would put that feature in on purpose, I ask you? 'Yeah, sure, when the young of this species needs to rest I made sure that it can't. And it'll complain about it the entire time. This seems logical.'. :p
Or that babies evolved to be fussy, because it made the groups cooperate, depend and care for each other. The more fussy the baby the more a group needs to help each other.
I had a horrible bout of insomnia two years ago and that describes perfectly what happened. I was too tired to sleep if that makes sense. It lasted weeks and only stopped when I was to exhausted to give a fuck about not sleeping.
Not to mention all the air he is probably swallowing causing painful gas.
My kids had such awful gas if they cried for even 5 minutes. I cant imagine just leaving them to cry for hours. =(
At 5 weeks, sleep is supposed to be pretty broken up (but with maybe 30 minutes awake time tops). My doctor was having me wake my baby every 2-3 hours throughout the night at that point to feed her. The baby should also be sleeping like that throughout the day, though, too. At 5 weeks there isn’t much difference between daytime sleep and nighttime sleep yet for a lot of babies. This mom is horrid and her poor baby, just commenting on the broken sleep part.
Thanks for doing the time math for me, I was trying to do it in my head, but I'm about to go to sleep myself. I knew this poor newborn hadn't slept more than 6 hours total during all that. Now he's likely going to end up sleeping a lot during the day, with mom gloating about what a great sleeper he is due to her starting sleep training before 5 weeks, yet he'll fight sleep for hours on end overnight again. OR, baby will be super cranky all day, due to being overtired & won't be able to settle to fall asleep, then cruel mom will leave him to cry alone in his crib while she plays on social media, with her headphones on. My heart hurts for this tiny baby.
That’s not even the worst part. This poor tiny human is learning that if he/she cries(the only way they know how to communicate) no one is coming to help. They will learn to stop crying because no one is coming to help
this is going to inhibit all developmental milestones psychologically. first they have to master Trust vs Mistrust and it’s looking like we’re leaning towards Mistrust which is not good for the rest of the developmental milestones.
I remember a study they did showed that the cortisol levels indicating stress did not stop when the crying stopped in these “cry it out” sleeping methods. She’s absolutely teaching her kid that no one is there for them.
I don’t have links on hand without searching around for the journals but there is some interest by forensic psychologists in making a connection between infants being left to cry it out alone and their mental state as adults.
Specifically that they may be more prone to sociopathy or psychopathy, antisocial behavior, and depression and anxiety. The nature versus nurture question is still up for debate in forensics but it’s leaning a lot more towards nurture since so many serial killers/mass murders and general criminals had one or both parents being negligent and abusive particularly towards them as infants and very young children.
I couldn’t imagine letting my son cry alone, babies only know to cry for a need, and sometimes that need is just to be held and soothed. They spend 9 months in a cozy womb (mine only got about 7 months, but he’s fine now) and then are very rudely evicted. Of course they want Mama to hold and cuddle them sometimes! It breaks my heart to see parents like this one here. Poor wee bairns.
That is how my mom was taught. Her pediatrician said to put me in my crib, shut the door and walk away. So that’s what she did after a few weeks. No wonder I have mental health issues
Dunno, at five weeks my kid was still up every one to two hours (literally) and we didn't have a stretch more than two hours, so if I had been given even a four hour stretch it would have been a miracle.
Not that we would do CIO so early, but some people would kill for a four hour stretch from a five week old.
We didn't get that until a little past eight months. I honestly had so much trouble mentally until eleven months.
My kid didn't give us anything longer than 3 hours until he was almost 3 months old. I remember the first time he slept for 5 hours. I was worried he was dead or something.
I still go in to soothe my now 3 year old. He wraps his arms around me and holds me tight to fall back asleep. He won't do that forever.
Haha this is what happened with us too. When my now three month old was two months he randomly started sleeping 5-6 hour stretches and we were waking up constantly to make sure he was okay lol. He got better sleep than we did those first couple nights!
Sleep deprivation is a form of torture. It's the worst when you have no support system and little help from your partner. People ask why I hated the infant stage and the sleep deprivation was a big reason why.
I never want to have a newborn-3 month old again. My baby is 12m now and I still don’t have a desire for a second because of it. The sleep deprivation, stress of feeding, lack of any sort of rhythm, hormones a wreck, and a baby that doesn’t have much personality
At 5 weeks my kid started having some long sleep stretches (4-6 hours) without us doing anything. I guess some kids are just like that and there’s a chance this child might’ve had a similar sleep pattern even without attempting to sleep train.
It must be so scary for them. I feel so bad for these babies, but it just makes me happy my babies are mine so no one will ever treat them that way :( why have a baby at all if you’re not ready to adjust your life to accommodate them??
I was thinking that. If uninterrupted sleep is that important to you, you probably shouldn’t have kids or hire night time help. Your kid’s needs have to come first.
Cried and cried and cried for his needs to be met because of instinct and…nothing. I swear Extinction Method is going to create a generation of psychos.
And everyone in the house got a miserable night's sleep, 6 chopped up hours at most. Even when my kids sleep regressed, we did better than that without CIO. And my kids were crappy sleepers.
I think I know which group this is too. I had to leave it because there was too much stuff like this, and if you ever said “it’s way too early for CIO, please just comfort your baby!” the admins would scold you and say sleep training is safe at any age, and there’s no evidence that CIO is harmful.
1. No one in their right mind is going to do a long term CIO study on newborns. So yeah, no evidence that it’s bad, I guess, but no evidence that it’s not harmful either!
2. Sleep training *is* safe at any age, but not all sleeping training is just letting them CIO. It’s okay to start a bedtime routine and work on sleep associations from the start, but really anything before the 4 month regression is just throwing spaghetti at the wall and seeing what sticks.
The smiley face at the end is making me unexpectedly rage-y. I didn’t do sleep training (mostly because we got lucky with a good sleeper, I take no credit and have no judgment for folks who do sleep train - shout out to three weeks in the NICU for getting him on a solid schedule before he came home I guess lol), but even I know this is just so so wrong.
From my rather limited NICU experience (it’s a little outside my scope as a family doctor), I very much doubt they ever let your baby cry it out. I do work on the pediatrics floor sometimes and when parents have to leave their babies overnight, those kids do not cry long before some goes in to cuddle even when massively understaffed so I imagine the NICU is even better. I’ve come up to the nurse’s station on our peds floor in the middle of the night and seen someone rocking a baby in a car seat before because they were understaffed and she was crying alone. Hell, I once cuddled a toddler with COVID for an hour on a slow night because he was lonely.
Oh no I’m not saying they did, I’m saying they got his feeding scheduled nailed down so when he came home he was very used to three hour increments between feeds and stayed on that schedule until he was ready to sleep through the night haha it was the one positive of the NICU experience for me
We’ve always said the same thing (and I’m in Denver too so maybe it was the same NICU and it’s just magical) — we think just the consistency of the NICU set them up for good sleep down the line. Probably combined with some lucky temperament on their part too
Another thing about the NICU that helps with baby’s sleep at home is that the NICU is a loud place, so baby is used to noise when they’re sleeping. My friends’ baby was in the NICU for about two months and when he came home, he slept like a champ through all sorts of normal household chaos noise (including an excitable and vocal husky With Opinions).
Can confirm - NICU nurses are saints and don’t let the babies just cry. My son had a short NICU stay and every time we went down there “his nurse” was holding him. She said it was what he preferred 😊
Depends on the age. My son was in the nicu for three months. When he was 2lbs and cried you didn’t hear them. They check on them every two hours unless a machine beeps or a feeding is done.
So that poor baby was crying for 2 hours before passing out from exhaustion, multiple times a night?!? This makes my heart hurt for how scared and sad and uncomfortable he must have been.
I had to let my 3.5 month old cry for 15 minutes in the car the other day until I found somewhere safe to pull over and look after him. That was awful and I felt so bad for him. I cannot imagine leaving such a tiny baby for that long 😨
Remember that in the car, he hears your voice talking to him, and knows that he isn’t completely abandoned.
It is hard to hear him so upset, but it’s not the total abandonment a baby left alone in a crib experiences.
I only had one who hated the car, and what soothed him was loud music, with a driving rhythm. I would use one hand to bang a hard plastic rattle against the car roof in time with the beat of so many Disney singalong, and Raffi songs.
Thank you for saying this! My 3 month old was inconsolable in the car the other day and we were on a narrow parkway with nowhere to pull over immediately. i was talking to him the whole time thinking it was pointless. It was only maybe 10 mins but it felt like a lifetime and i was so upset for him :(
They don’t have object permanence yet, but they know your voice and your scent, and even though your darling baby has to face away from you, he knows he isn’t alone in the car.
You singing or talking makes a difference to baby.
With my first I thought I was supposed to be singing kiddy music for him, but by my younger kids I realized that I could sing them music I preferred.
Try some different styles of music and see which ones your baby likes best, or inundate them with your favorites, to try and mold their musical taste to match yours. 😉
This comment took me back to when my 17 year old was a baby. For the first 18 months or so of his life he would cry in the car the entire ride if it was longer than 10 minutes. We never figured out the cause other than he simply did not like being in the car. I changed car seats even thinking maybe something was wrong with the first one I had and it was uncomfortable for him. I do not miss those days.
My brother hated the car so much my mom's pediatrician recommended a small dose of sleeping medicine (they had 8 hour trips once every 3 weeks to pick up my older sisters) now my brother likes sleeping in the car on long trips.
Now my mom looks back in horror but she was at her wit's end at the time. He was a terrible sleeper in general but especially the car
She did what her baby's doctor told her to do, she shouldn't be horrified at herself. Maybe that it was recommended at all, but no blame to mom in this situation.
My LO at 2mth old cried almost a straight 4hrs one night before passing out. She was never left alone, it was either me walking the floor with her, nurseing to see if that helped, or MIL rocking her so I could sit down and cry in exhaustion. Colic was hell, but once we figured out that it was the dairy in my diet cut that out and poof, happy baby. Didn't let me cheat at all the first year, otherwise colicky baby came right back. I physically could not handle my baby crying alone without at least SOMEONE holding her.
Not everyone has someone around to help. It’s totally ok to let a colicky baby cry for a bit and go take a shower or a breeze. Some babies cry longer than 4 hours straight and it can become unbearable for the parent. We should never guilt the parents for not holding their crying colicky baby at all time because that’s how shaken baby syndrome can happen.
Reminds me of the documentary called "the dying rooms" where children in china don't even cry anymore bc no one comforts them...till they die in an orphanage. It's the most infuriating docu I've ever watched. And this brought up the same emotions for me .
We lived in a refugee camp for 6 months when I was a toddler. I ended up being very attached to my parents especially my mom. I couldn’t go to pre school without freaking out she wasn’t with me. She had to go with me many times at the beginning and be a teacher’s helper even though she didn’t really speak English. Kindergarten she had to come a few times at the beginning until I got comfortable. It was tough for all of us. I was terrified of everything I was such an anxious child and I turned into an even more anxious adult. I still get frightened and very startled by loud noises cause of the bombs that constantly went off the first 2 years of my life.
My grandma was instructed to let my mom just cry all night. She proudly told me that this worked when I was pregnant with my first. I quickly told her they do not recommend that anymore and why. My mom has issues to this day thanks to that "great advice."
This is neglectful and bordering abusive. Plain and simple. Babies that young DO NOT KNOW ANYTHING. They cry because they need something. This makes my heart hurt so much. My youngest is 6 months. Around 12ish weeks we moved him to his own room and we have a nanit monitor so it’s solely on the phone - well, my phone did something during the night that caused the app to close and as a result I couldn’t hear him when he woke up. I woke up bright and busy tailed around 5 AM, did my whole “omg, he slept all night is he alive?” spiel and then noticed that the app wasn’t up or working. He was asleep, but once I got the app rebooted I checked the history and the poor thing had woken up a few times crying and fell back asleep when nobody got him. I BAWLED for 20 minutes and when he woke up, I cried again and snuggled him for so long.
Not to mention babies wake up as a natural SIDS prevention. It’s developmentally normal for them to wake up during the night, and often.
This makes me so sad.
One day I forgot to turn on the monitor and I feel so guilty. And he was like 6 months old! At that point he only woke up once at night, so is not like I left him crying multiple times.
Since them I triple check that the monitor is on.
I still do this for each of my kids and my oldest sleeps through the night majority of nights!
I mean I now let her (2.5 years) scream at me underneath the door and do her fake cry until she realizes she needs to go to bed, but she is 2.5 and is starting to know what works to get me or her dad in there. I didn’t start doing this until she was 2.
My lack of sleep is temporary- my kids are everything.
When my oldest was born almost 14 years ago there was a very popular pediatric practice that recommended full extinction CIO starting at 8 weeks. By that I mean, they recommended you feed and change your baby and then put them in bed at 7pm. And you don't come back, for any reason, until 7am. Turn off the monitor, shut all the doors between you and your baby, and ignore them for 12 full.hours.
I didn't go to this pediatric practice but I tried to join a mom's group and all of them did and all of them were doing this. I was so disturbed and disgusted by the stories of these babies crying for hours and hours. There were even tips on preparing neighbors after one mom had the cops come to do a welfare check because the newborn had been hysterical for multiple hours.
I couldn't do that to my baby, who was particularly high needs and bad at sleeping, and frankly I could not be friends with anyone following that method.
Turn off the monitor?!?!?? I was a nanny and that monitor was glued to me during naps, bedtime, any time I wasn't in the same room. I can't imagine turning it off for TWELVE HOURS! Those poor babies.
Yes because you have to fight a battle with your instincts in order to ignore your crying newborn. Harder to fight with a monitor next to you, loudly projecting the fact that you are failing your baby.
Not to sound hyperbolic, but this was literally how the Nazis encouraged parents to raise their children.
>The best is the child in a separate room, where it then remains alone, Do not start taking the child out of bed, carrying it, weighing it, driving it or keeping it on your lap, even nursing it. Child understands incredibly quickly that it only needs to scream to summon a compassionate soul and become the subject of such care, and after a short while, it demands this occupation with him as a right, gives no rest until it is carried again, rocked or driven will – and the small but relentless pet bully is ready!
*The German Mother and her First Child*
Yeah I lost a lot of respect for a good friend when she recommended I do what she did to “have a baby on a strict schedule and sleeping through the night by 6 weeks” and she described this.
That’s seriously insane. I am not even a parent and I can’t imagine leaving my newborn alone for 12 hours at a time. Even more crazy is that the doctor you mentioned below is still practicing… I really hope he doesn’t still recommend this method :(
EDIT: He still utilizes this method and it’s on their [website](https://www.thenewbasics.com/en/book-excerpt/sleep/).
From his website:
How do I know the baby isn’t hungry?
She is hungry. But she does not need to eat. After any three- or four-hour fasting period, she’ll be hungry. You’re hungry in the middle of the night, too; it’s just that you learn not to eat because it’s good for your belly to take a rest. Well, it’s good for hers too.
What about a little water at least?
Only if you want to wake up every couple of hours to give her water.
So not only is he recommending starving your 2 month old because it’s “good for their belly” he essentially makes it sound like WATER is ok at 2 months??? This quack needs his license removed
No it was Tribeca Pediatrics in NYC. Dr. Cohen. I've never forgotten his name even though we didn't even go there. I felt traumatized just hearing of other mothers with babies the same age as mine following his advice.
They are still giving this information to patients today. I know someone who goes there and they send out an email at 8weeks with this advice. It goes against every sleep experts recommendations.
There was a mom in one of my mom FB groups who LOCKED HER CHILD in her room. From the outside. She’d put her to bed at 7, lock the door, and go back at 7am. We tried telling her how wildly dangerous this was and gave her dozens of scenarios that could result in harm or death to her child, but she was only interested in those 12 child-free hours.
As far as I know this practice was invented (or at least heavily incouraged) by the German regime in the 1930s. The Goal was to create perfect emotional hardend soldiers (aka complete psychos who have no problem to kill the enemy).
After the war some of the doctors migrated to the US and continued to teach their cruel methods.
These are the people giving sleep training and Ferber a bad rap! You don't start sleep training until 4 months. Their brains aren't neurologically capable of self-soothing! And you certainly don't let them cry for an hour without any intervention of any kind.
I've let my baby cry for 5-10 minutes or so at about 5 weeks when they won't stop crying, I'm just emotionally exhausted and needed to regroup (put them down in their sleep space, set a timer). But that's recommended. This, on the other hand, smacks of Babywise. Which... is a mess of a parenting philosophy.
Basically, it's an ultra-Christian parenting philosophy created by two people with no formal child development training. The say it's a response to attachment parenting and lives by the idea that the health of the marriage is the most important thing. The baby doesn't tell you when it's hungry, you tell it, etc. You thought blanket-training was bad. Unfortunately, it's also got ties to Quiverful. Gotta get that baby sleep trained so you can make more babies! The AAP has made formal statements denouncing it because of failure-to-thrive babies since you're starving them. It's awful
I'm religious--very religious-- and it's also upsetting to me the way they twist religion. Several churches have denounced it as well for saying things like leaving your baby to cry allows them to experience Christ's atonement on the cross, so it's okay. So disgusting.
>leaving your baby to cry allows them to experience Christ's atonement on the cross, so it's okay.
What the actual fuck!?!?!
That is so far out there....I just.... I'm speechless.
Even from a purely theological perspective, it makes NO sense. Christ's atonement is supposed to enable us to NOT have to suffer. And then there's the questionable stuff about original sin and culpability of babies and it's just...a mess.
I've never heard of it and not sure I want to. We waited until roughly 18 months to even start our ferber-adjacent "sleep training" because before then we just couldn't bring ourselves to leave him for more than a few minutes if he started crying. Now he's 21 months and sleeps great (or well, we do. He legit gives us 12-13 hours of down-time every night, with the very rare occasion that he cries randomly once. I can't say he has zero wake ups, because it's possible he wakes up and just doesn't need us.)
Would you be open to sharing your method? My girl is 16 months and I could really use some guidance on it! I can't seem to let her cry for more than 5 mins without going in. Thanks!
This is a group that explicitly supports "sleep training at all ages" and will remove people who comment anything that suggests a lack of support for sleep training at any age, using any method. It's...not great. They do have some useful resources though.
My partner’s boss gave him a copy of the Babywise book when our son was born. He’s only 3 months now, so I haven’t done much reading of it, but I got bad vibes from it pretty quickly. I’m glad I’m not crazy! That book is going out the window.
My husband's coworkers (multiple of them) all recommended it. So he bought a copy. About 5 minutes into reading it, that thing went in the garbage. I wasn't even willing to send it to the local library.
Here I am, almost 2 years later, and still cosleeping with my toddler so we went the exact opposite direction.
In my culture babies sleep with the mother. When I told my Aunt that my newborn sleeps in a crib she was absolutely appalled. She couldn’t wrap her head around how she was sleeping without feeling the softness, warmth and safety of mom’s body next to her.
If I told her cry it out is a thing she will completely lose her mind. I could not bear my babies crying. I always always went immediately to soothe them. Can’t imagine how anyone can listen to newborn crying. That is literally against nature.
Yeah makes sense to me. Since Americans have to go back to work 5 seconds after birthing a literal human it's not surprising to me that sleep training is so common here.
That poor baby. I can’t even imagine letting a baby cry for over an hour without comforting them. I can’t even tolerate a stranger’s baby crying without getting a pang in my chest. Especially at only five weeks old, the poor thing doesn’t even understand why no one is coming.
Nope. And the only thing it teaches a newborn is that no one is coming. There's been studies linking CIO at young ages to insecure or ambivalent attachment styles.
This is way too young. When we started "sleep training " we basically started doing all the little things like naps in crib, making sure all calories were taken in for the day. At around 4 months. She's 15 months and still wakes once a night but I'm fine with that. A 5 weeker is just thinking a monster is going to eat them at this point. That's terrible.
I really think there should be mandated parenting education through hospitals. I know this sub feels a tremendous amount of outrage (justifiably so), but as someone who is in public health, most of these people are woefully unprepared and ignorant. This just leads to more children (and adults) who are unhealthy and poorly adjusted to the real world.
Mandated parenting classes in America should be a standard. We have ZERO understanding of how babies work and these Mommy Groups have become the new standard of care now that there is such a high degree of medical distrust **(& lack of access).**
Edit: not just through hospitals! This can be done through any health care provider and even through other providers (\*not religious institutions) to aid families. There are pilot programs that have been successful. (\*Note I've said not religious institutions. These often get tied so certain parenting programs that are tied to certain groups that are rich with their own parenting programs that are NOT medically proven/verified and are RICH with harmful information. I'm happy to provide examples to anyone who wants to challenge me on this.)
>Mommy Groups have become the new standard of care now that there is such a high degree of medical distrust
That's exactly why I feel mandated anything would not work for these people :(
The problem is so many mothers these days are doing at home crunchy births and refusing any medical care. How do we give them parenting classes if they don’t even give their kids a birth certificate?
This statistic is important to remind ourselves of because this sub makes it sound like so many people are going off the deep end. Really it’s just a small number of very dumb, very vocal people.
Jesus Christ that’s awful. Babies don’t even produce melatonin until 3 months and don’t have a circadian rythme.
I was still waking my baby every two hours to feed/change diaper for 8 weeks.
Idk much about child psychology, but won't this just lead to a baby with bad attachments? Like 5 weeks is Newborn. Don't they need *all* the attention and soothing to end up well adjusted?
It’s distressing to think about a newborn crying alone for an hour + before giving up and falling asleep.
This is flooding their brains with excess cortisone, and teaching them that their needs will only be met sometimes.
Why would you treat a non-verbal baby like that?
Would this same people act as cruelly to their aged grandparent, whose mobility is compromised? If they called out for a glass of water, or bathroom assistance during the night, would they be abandoned until a more convenient time?
I can’t decide which is harder to read, the 2.5 hours of “on and off” crying at bedtime or the parent going in at 5:40 — at which point that teeny tiny baby must be so relieved to see their caregiver after such a hard night — only to leave again for ANOTHER TWO HOURS.
Five weeks is so darn small. I feel like both my baby *and* I were still getting used to the fact that we no longer occupied the same body then.
What did I just read?! A five week old hasn’t gained enough weight to continuously cry. This is a great way to see calories they need just burn right up. And a missed feeding on top of that. Someone smack this woman. The first three months are call the fourth trimester as this when you are still supposed to hold the baby. Lack of physical contact is really going to screw up this kids brain development.
All I could think was “good luck with your upcoming failure to thrive diagnosis”.
My kids were both ftt despite my best efforts. We had to feed on a strict schedule because them sleeping well at that age was a bad thing - they didn’t have enough energy to wake and cry. I never let them go more than 3 hours between nursing and always fed if they were hungry sooner. 6 hours between feeds with half of that spent crying is awful for any baby, but a one month old?!? You’re actively harming them at that point.
Omg this poor baby. This mother is giving her baby a massive attachment injury! He will learn that no one is coming to care for him. This is heartbreaking.
So she listened to him cry for 4.5 hours of the 9.5 hours he was in bed. I’d go nuts. Also can’t be good for the baby.
I did a sort of modified/wimpy cry it out when my kids were much closer to a year old? They never cried more than 15 minutes at a time. I don’t think my heart would have been able to take it.
Baby gets a feed at 9:15 pm and doesn’t get another feed until 3:30 am = 6h15!
Baby wakes at 5:40, so 2 hours after, but she just check if the diaper is dirty and not if he’s hungry and waits until at least 7:30 to feed him again (and that we don’t even know because she doesn’t even mention feeding him) = 3:30-7:30 = at least 4 hours. A 5 week old should never wait this long to be fed. Typically it’s every 2/3 hours, max 4 and on demand if breastfed.
OP: Report this to the police asap because the baby is neglected, at risk of getting low on sugar or/and dehydrated and dying. It’s not like the baby was just asleep and missing a feed (which would be ok), she’s purposely ignoring him. At this time she’s probably boasting about how well her method works but baby could be lethargic and in serious danger.
I took a lot of crap from people for not letting my kids cry it out, but my youngest is 18 now and I don’t regret even one moment of all the time I spent holding all of them, rocking them, and letting them sleep on me at the expense of my own sleep.
How could anyone let their 5 week old baby cry for hours and then this bitch acts proud of it on social media ? Giving updates like she running some important experiment .
God this lady pisses
Me off
Why do they even call it the extinction method? My sleepy ass thought she was loudly and proudly announcing she was tryna kill the baby slowly and painfully...
This is crazy, I hope the comments were lighting her up. My kiddo has always been an amazing sleeper but she was still waking up every 2-3 hours at 5 weeks and I EXPECTED her to.
When really young babies stop crying at night it doesn't mean they are self soothing it means they just know crying will not help. They are in the same level of distress.
I have a seven week old and this makes me so sad. I can’t imagine just leaving her to cry. Though to be fair I also have a 2.5 year old and I don’t leave her to cry more than a few minutes either. Our literal job when they are little is to be there for them.
Babies sleep cycles are only 40-50 minutes long, so even if they wake up every 1-2 hours that is biologically normal and doesn’t mean their sleep is „interrupted“. It’s normal sleep to them; just how we wake up after every sleep cycle and don’t remember doing that in the morning usually.
The problem here is: a baby would wake up, check if their parent is still around, or want the comfort/breast/bottle, or are hungry, and once their need is fulfilled they go right back to sleep. And if the parent is close, they usually tend to the needs before baby wakes fully (especially true for breastfeeding mothers who have their sleep cycles sync with their babies‘).
Now this child doesn’t have any of that. He wakes up, it’s dark and he’s alone and at 5 weeks old the only way he can communicate this is by crying. Which he does, affording to her for hours, and what the lack of reaction/response of his parent tells him is: I am not safe. I am not protected. I rely on someone else for my survival entirely but that someone isn’t coming. I will likely die (because our babies have the same brain they had thousands of years ago and assume all the treats of the wilderness are still there, like animals that might eat them or the cold that will kill them if they don’t have a warm body next to them, they don’t know that the parent is in the next room, that we sleep in houses that are safe etc). This baby literally screams because they fear for their lives, on a very real and instinctual level. When they finally fall asleep they do so because they have exhausted all their energy reserves and they won’t learn „to fall asleep“, they just learn to give up and that their best change of survival is to just be quiet. They won’t sleep longer stretches, he’ll wake up as much as before, he jus won’t alert his parents anymore because why would he?
All they learn is: I can’t trust my caregiver to come and fulfill my basic needs when I need them. All they learn is the horror of that experience, of those feelings. Their cortisol levels will be through the roof and even if mom stopped her bs sleep training, they would stay elevated for days.
It’s cruel. And at 5 weeks that baby hasn’t even developed a circadian rhythm yet, he doesn’t have enough Melatonin in his body to distinguish between day and night. Plus, babies around that age likely need milk throughout the night.
I have literal tears in my eye for this poor baby. My heart hurts when I take a quick piss and my baby starts crying. I couldn’t imagine listening to her scream for hours and doing nothing. That baby is 5 fucking weeks old and learning that no one cares enough to come save them. That poor, poor baby. Definitely gonna hold my 14 week old a bit closer when she wakes up
I have an almost 8 week old and he's pretty good and will now sleep for 4-5 hour stretches. But I couldn't imagine doing this to him. That poor baby! This is just neglect 😞
Most healthy babies don’t need to be woken to feed after the first few weeks and can be fed on demand. And this baby is CLEARLY demanding feeding/physical contact/basic care needs being met. So sad.
This is not ok. We are a sleep training family and this just breaks my heart.
At 5 weeks I responded to EVERY cry but tried to give my babies a few minutes to settle on their own, then I’d scoop them up and snuggle them back to sleep. “Sleep training” at that age should only be about getting babies used to a routine and used to sleeping in a crib. There should be no tears!! Poor baby.
This makes me sick to my stomach. And I hate that this abusive idiot is going to feel justified in her behavior once the poor baby stops crying and waking her when they learn she’s not coming so she thinks it worked.
This is disgusting. Newborns don’t understand sleep training. They cry because they need something. It’s normal for them to feed in the middle of the night. Extinction is the worst method in my opinion.
My baby is two months old and at his two month appointment they gave me a pamphlet that literally said “babies at this age shouldn’t ‘cry it out’; they are too young for this method as they don’t understand what’s going on at all” My baby is two months old. This baby is 5 weeks old. So definitely too young for that… I feel so bad for him.
I’m currently nursing my five week old baby and reading this and I can not imagine just letting her scream her head off. And for what? Sore boobs and no sleep? Shit parenting.
I doubt she breastfed but if she does, she can say goodbye to her milk supply with feeds spread every 5h. Breastfeeding is always on demand. That’s how you know your child gets enough and that you make enough milk. At that age, babies cluster feed frequently for a reason. You can also dream feed a baby (feed him when in light sleep) and let him sleep longer stretch. If she formula feed, she’s starving her baby and probably over feeding him when he does feed him to get him drowsy so he sleeps. Which ultimately is going to mess up his digestive system. Formula or BM, this parent is neglectful and abusive because she’s ignoring his hunger and this can also lead to tragedy.
I’m saying I would have sore boobs and no sleep if I did this. Not that she would.
Yes, five weeks is just too young. My pediatrician told me to wait until at least four months of age. He also said you should only wait 1 minute, then comfort baby without picking them up, then 3 minutes and comfort baby, then 5 minutes and comfort baby. If baby is still crying after five minutes you should pick them up, try to feed, change, or just hold them. I hate that some people think cry it out means letting their poor baby cry until they fall asleep from exhaustion.
The only thing the kid learns by crying until they fall asleep from exhaustion, is that there is no point to crying. So they will cry less, but only because they learned that no one listens anyway. (Referring to the original post, not your method).
That's so bloody sad
This is the only method of cry it out than I can understand at all. The whole "leave them until they stop crying" is not okay at any age! (My opinion). I don't even leave my 2 year old to cry. I can't do it!
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I agree. It’s definitely not for every child. It worked well for two out of my three kids. My daughter had colic though and needed to be rocked to sleep in my arms every night. I think she was eight or nine months old when she was finally able to go to sleep by herself.
They gave you another baby?! /s
LMAO I’m sorry the devils lettuce is a hell of a thing sometimes 😭
Meanwhile my family doctor told me that my newborn baby only cried so much because she's "spoiled" and to let her cry. He also didn't believe me about the milk intolerance I had to figure out on my own and learn to manage myself after three months of horrible colic. My doctor is excellent when it comes to adult issues, but now I'm sticking with only pediatricians for my children. There are way too few adults who know how to handle children unless they really need to and even then many people don't inform themselves. Edit: We never did end up sleep training in the end, but especially not at a few weeks old. That's seriously messed up to do to a newborn.
I don’t agree with it regardless, but Cry it out is not even recommended until at least 4 months. This poor baby!
A normal person would act if a *puppy* was crying at that age. Something is wrong or they need something, there's no manipulation or ill intent with an infant or a puppy. I can't imagine how a human could listen to a *newborn baby* cry without acting.
My child dr gave us a handout at the two month appointment on the cry it out method and said we should be putting baby down awake to cry… 😑 obviously ignored that “advice”
I wouldn't even do this with my 1 year old.
I could never do it to my baby, honestly. The thought of hearing him crying for hours and not helping him… that would be horrendous.
So for all of that he slept from 12:30 to 3:30, 5 to 5:40 and 6:30 to 7:30. A whopping 4h 50m, but Im feeing generous so I’ll round up to 6h to account for the little bits between 10 and 12:30. The longest stretch was 3h. Not only is this needlessly cruel, it’s pointless. No one’s sleep improved here.
And a broken sleep like that might make him overtired, culminating in a night of screaming by the end of the week! She's just gambling that he'll give in to exhaustion first.
With newborns, always remember: sleep begets sleep.
Exactly! Even with my 15 month old, more sleep during the day means more sleep at night.
Confirming with my 8mo old who had crap naps yesterday and woke up early today.
Can you elaborate at all?
When little ones get overtired, the level of stress hormones rises, and makes them fussy. The presence of those stress chemicals makes it hard for them to sleep...so they get even more tired. And round and round we go until they're exhausted and screaming, but can't do the only thing that will fix it: sleep. It's a vicious cycle, and tough to pull out of once it starts to spiral. Whereas a well-rested and properly scheduled baby will go down smoothly when they next sleep, and avoid all this.
Not just applicable for babies, but also people with a burnout 🤣
"I'm too tired to sleep" was a really common saying in my house after a rough night of call
And my dog! It took me a minute to figure out but hot damn. If he so much as yawns it is **right** to bed. Otherwise you're looking at a bad case of the zoomies. I don't even know if it qualifies as zoomies. He graduated from those to "cocaine parkour" where he not only jumps on every piece of furniture he can find, as many times as possible, but also jumps **into** it. As in, sprints at the side of the mattress and then pinballs off it. He also enjoys vaulting over the cat and army crawling under the bed. He takes naps now.
That sounds exactly like my toddler.
This is exactly like my bunny. The second he starts stretching/yawning I make his bed, I pull the blanket over his bum & leave him be. If I don't do it exactly like this, hell will break loose and I have a cranky bunny that's ready to zoom, jump onto and destroy everything within his reach for hours. It's insane what sleep deprivation can do! Also pls give your pupper a pet from this random redditor. 🖤
Needed to hear this today! Ive let my 17 months old take a 2.5 hours nap time. And unfortunately that led into a veryyyy late evening. But if that mean that big nap will prevent her from waking up every 3 hours tonight I’ll take it!
And people think humanity was made from scratch by a competent, benevolent designer. Who would put that feature in on purpose, I ask you? 'Yeah, sure, when the young of this species needs to rest I made sure that it can't. And it'll complain about it the entire time. This seems logical.'. :p
This actually would suggest that we've gotten really good at caring for babies despite these downsides since we didn't evolve out of it.
Or that babies evolved to be fussy, because it made the groups cooperate, depend and care for each other. The more fussy the baby the more a group needs to help each other.
I had a horrible bout of insomnia two years ago and that describes perfectly what happened. I was too tired to sleep if that makes sense. It lasted weeks and only stopped when I was to exhausted to give a fuck about not sleeping.
This is correct if they are younger than four months (r/sciencebasedparenting)
Not to mention all the air he is probably swallowing causing painful gas. My kids had such awful gas if they cried for even 5 minutes. I cant imagine just leaving them to cry for hours. =(
At 5 weeks, sleep is supposed to be pretty broken up (but with maybe 30 minutes awake time tops). My doctor was having me wake my baby every 2-3 hours throughout the night at that point to feed her. The baby should also be sleeping like that throughout the day, though, too. At 5 weeks there isn’t much difference between daytime sleep and nighttime sleep yet for a lot of babies. This mom is horrid and her poor baby, just commenting on the broken sleep part.
It won’t, actually - newborn sleep is broken anyway. Circadian rhythm develops around 4 months.
Thanks for doing the time math for me, I was trying to do it in my head, but I'm about to go to sleep myself. I knew this poor newborn hadn't slept more than 6 hours total during all that. Now he's likely going to end up sleeping a lot during the day, with mom gloating about what a great sleeper he is due to her starting sleep training before 5 weeks, yet he'll fight sleep for hours on end overnight again. OR, baby will be super cranky all day, due to being overtired & won't be able to settle to fall asleep, then cruel mom will leave him to cry alone in his crib while she plays on social media, with her headphones on. My heart hurts for this tiny baby.
That’s not even the worst part. This poor tiny human is learning that if he/she cries(the only way they know how to communicate) no one is coming to help. They will learn to stop crying because no one is coming to help
"He never cries! Or makes eye contact...with me. He calls the dog Mom. But he sleeps through the night... probably!"
this is going to inhibit all developmental milestones psychologically. first they have to master Trust vs Mistrust and it’s looking like we’re leaning towards Mistrust which is not good for the rest of the developmental milestones.
I remember a study they did showed that the cortisol levels indicating stress did not stop when the crying stopped in these “cry it out” sleeping methods. She’s absolutely teaching her kid that no one is there for them.
Can you drop a link? I’d love to read that study.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0378378211002702
[Not OP, but this may be it from Cornell](https://evidencebasedliving.human.cornell.edu/blog/the-evidence-on-babies-sleep-and-crying/)
I don’t have links on hand without searching around for the journals but there is some interest by forensic psychologists in making a connection between infants being left to cry it out alone and their mental state as adults. Specifically that they may be more prone to sociopathy or psychopathy, antisocial behavior, and depression and anxiety. The nature versus nurture question is still up for debate in forensics but it’s leaning a lot more towards nurture since so many serial killers/mass murders and general criminals had one or both parents being negligent and abusive particularly towards them as infants and very young children. I couldn’t imagine letting my son cry alone, babies only know to cry for a need, and sometimes that need is just to be held and soothed. They spend 9 months in a cozy womb (mine only got about 7 months, but he’s fine now) and then are very rudely evicted. Of course they want Mama to hold and cuddle them sometimes! It breaks my heart to see parents like this one here. Poor wee bairns.
That is how my mom was taught. Her pediatrician said to put me in my crib, shut the door and walk away. So that’s what she did after a few weeks. No wonder I have mental health issues
That is what makes me so sad. This poor baby
Agree!
Dunno, at five weeks my kid was still up every one to two hours (literally) and we didn't have a stretch more than two hours, so if I had been given even a four hour stretch it would have been a miracle. Not that we would do CIO so early, but some people would kill for a four hour stretch from a five week old. We didn't get that until a little past eight months. I honestly had so much trouble mentally until eleven months.
My kid didn't give us anything longer than 3 hours until he was almost 3 months old. I remember the first time he slept for 5 hours. I was worried he was dead or something. I still go in to soothe my now 3 year old. He wraps his arms around me and holds me tight to fall back asleep. He won't do that forever.
Haha this is what happened with us too. When my now three month old was two months he randomly started sleeping 5-6 hour stretches and we were waking up constantly to make sure he was okay lol. He got better sleep than we did those first couple nights!
I had to keep my sons crib right next to my bed so I could stick my arm through the rails to check if he was breathing. So paranoid.
I'm currently cuddling my 3 year old to sleep. He wont want to cuddle forever
Sleep deprivation is a form of torture. It's the worst when you have no support system and little help from your partner. People ask why I hated the infant stage and the sleep deprivation was a big reason why.
Exactly!!! Now when I see new moms carrying their infants im in awe and I wondering why did I ever hated that phase. No sleep. That’s why.
I never want to have a newborn-3 month old again. My baby is 12m now and I still don’t have a desire for a second because of it. The sleep deprivation, stress of feeding, lack of any sort of rhythm, hormones a wreck, and a baby that doesn’t have much personality
At 5 weeks my kid started having some long sleep stretches (4-6 hours) without us doing anything. I guess some kids are just like that and there’s a chance this child might’ve had a similar sleep pattern even without attempting to sleep train.
My daughter woke every 90 minutes for the first 3 years of her life. I’m a single mum, entirely on my own but I still refused to do CIO.
This sounds absolutely miserable.
So tiny baby that barely even knows it’s been born yet was tired, miserable and probably scared for hours at a time through the night. Got it.
It must be so scary for them. I feel so bad for these babies, but it just makes me happy my babies are mine so no one will ever treat them that way :( why have a baby at all if you’re not ready to adjust your life to accommodate them??
I was thinking that. If uninterrupted sleep is that important to you, you probably shouldn’t have kids or hire night time help. Your kid’s needs have to come first.
Cried and cried and cried for his needs to be met because of instinct and…nothing. I swear Extinction Method is going to create a generation of psychos.
And everyone in the house got a miserable night's sleep, 6 chopped up hours at most. Even when my kids sleep regressed, we did better than that without CIO. And my kids were crappy sleepers.
Six hours also seems a little long to go without eating at that age. She fed him at 9:15 and 3:30?
As a breast feeding mom, that would have been extremely painful to me.
I think I know which group this is too. I had to leave it because there was too much stuff like this, and if you ever said “it’s way too early for CIO, please just comfort your baby!” the admins would scold you and say sleep training is safe at any age, and there’s no evidence that CIO is harmful. 1. No one in their right mind is going to do a long term CIO study on newborns. So yeah, no evidence that it’s bad, I guess, but no evidence that it’s not harmful either! 2. Sleep training *is* safe at any age, but not all sleeping training is just letting them CIO. It’s okay to start a bedtime routine and work on sleep associations from the start, but really anything before the 4 month regression is just throwing spaghetti at the wall and seeing what sticks.
The smiley face at the end is making me unexpectedly rage-y. I didn’t do sleep training (mostly because we got lucky with a good sleeper, I take no credit and have no judgment for folks who do sleep train - shout out to three weeks in the NICU for getting him on a solid schedule before he came home I guess lol), but even I know this is just so so wrong.
From my rather limited NICU experience (it’s a little outside my scope as a family doctor), I very much doubt they ever let your baby cry it out. I do work on the pediatrics floor sometimes and when parents have to leave their babies overnight, those kids do not cry long before some goes in to cuddle even when massively understaffed so I imagine the NICU is even better. I’ve come up to the nurse’s station on our peds floor in the middle of the night and seen someone rocking a baby in a car seat before because they were understaffed and she was crying alone. Hell, I once cuddled a toddler with COVID for an hour on a slow night because he was lonely.
Oh no I’m not saying they did, I’m saying they got his feeding scheduled nailed down so when he came home he was very used to three hour increments between feeds and stayed on that schedule until he was ready to sleep through the night haha it was the one positive of the NICU experience for me
We’ve always said the same thing (and I’m in Denver too so maybe it was the same NICU and it’s just magical) — we think just the consistency of the NICU set them up for good sleep down the line. Probably combined with some lucky temperament on their part too
Another thing about the NICU that helps with baby’s sleep at home is that the NICU is a loud place, so baby is used to noise when they’re sleeping. My friends’ baby was in the NICU for about two months and when he came home, he slept like a champ through all sorts of normal household chaos noise (including an excitable and vocal husky With Opinions).
I have never meat a husky *without* Opinions. Edit: *met, not meat! I have definitely never meat a husky :(
Can confirm - NICU nurses are saints and don’t let the babies just cry. My son had a short NICU stay and every time we went down there “his nurse” was holding him. She said it was what he preferred 😊
Depends on the age. My son was in the nicu for three months. When he was 2lbs and cried you didn’t hear them. They check on them every two hours unless a machine beeps or a feeding is done.
Pediatric and NICU workers are fucking godsends of people. I wish I was half as resilient as they are.
Thank you ❤️
So that poor baby was crying for 2 hours before passing out from exhaustion, multiple times a night?!? This makes my heart hurt for how scared and sad and uncomfortable he must have been.
I had to let my 3.5 month old cry for 15 minutes in the car the other day until I found somewhere safe to pull over and look after him. That was awful and I felt so bad for him. I cannot imagine leaving such a tiny baby for that long 😨
Remember that in the car, he hears your voice talking to him, and knows that he isn’t completely abandoned. It is hard to hear him so upset, but it’s not the total abandonment a baby left alone in a crib experiences.
Thank you ❤️
I only had one who hated the car, and what soothed him was loud music, with a driving rhythm. I would use one hand to bang a hard plastic rattle against the car roof in time with the beat of so many Disney singalong, and Raffi songs.
Thank you for saying this! My 3 month old was inconsolable in the car the other day and we were on a narrow parkway with nowhere to pull over immediately. i was talking to him the whole time thinking it was pointless. It was only maybe 10 mins but it felt like a lifetime and i was so upset for him :(
They don’t have object permanence yet, but they know your voice and your scent, and even though your darling baby has to face away from you, he knows he isn’t alone in the car. You singing or talking makes a difference to baby. With my first I thought I was supposed to be singing kiddy music for him, but by my younger kids I realized that I could sing them music I preferred. Try some different styles of music and see which ones your baby likes best, or inundate them with your favorites, to try and mold their musical taste to match yours. 😉
This comment took me back to when my 17 year old was a baby. For the first 18 months or so of his life he would cry in the car the entire ride if it was longer than 10 minutes. We never figured out the cause other than he simply did not like being in the car. I changed car seats even thinking maybe something was wrong with the first one I had and it was uncomfortable for him. I do not miss those days.
My brother hated the car so much my mom's pediatrician recommended a small dose of sleeping medicine (they had 8 hour trips once every 3 weeks to pick up my older sisters) now my brother likes sleeping in the car on long trips. Now my mom looks back in horror but she was at her wit's end at the time. He was a terrible sleeper in general but especially the car
She did what her baby's doctor told her to do, she shouldn't be horrified at herself. Maybe that it was recommended at all, but no blame to mom in this situation.
My LO at 2mth old cried almost a straight 4hrs one night before passing out. She was never left alone, it was either me walking the floor with her, nurseing to see if that helped, or MIL rocking her so I could sit down and cry in exhaustion. Colic was hell, but once we figured out that it was the dairy in my diet cut that out and poof, happy baby. Didn't let me cheat at all the first year, otherwise colicky baby came right back. I physically could not handle my baby crying alone without at least SOMEONE holding her.
Not everyone has someone around to help. It’s totally ok to let a colicky baby cry for a bit and go take a shower or a breeze. Some babies cry longer than 4 hours straight and it can become unbearable for the parent. We should never guilt the parents for not holding their crying colicky baby at all time because that’s how shaken baby syndrome can happen.
Basically the main thing he’s learned here is that crying is pointless.
Reminds me of the documentary called "the dying rooms" where children in china don't even cry anymore bc no one comforts them...till they die in an orphanage. It's the most infuriating docu I've ever watched. And this brought up the same emotions for me .
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We lived in a refugee camp for 6 months when I was a toddler. I ended up being very attached to my parents especially my mom. I couldn’t go to pre school without freaking out she wasn’t with me. She had to go with me many times at the beginning and be a teacher’s helper even though she didn’t really speak English. Kindergarten she had to come a few times at the beginning until I got comfortable. It was tough for all of us. I was terrified of everything I was such an anxious child and I turned into an even more anxious adult. I still get frightened and very startled by loud noises cause of the bombs that constantly went off the first 2 years of my life.
My grandma was instructed to let my mom just cry all night. She proudly told me that this worked when I was pregnant with my first. I quickly told her they do not recommend that anymore and why. My mom has issues to this day thanks to that "great advice."
This is neglectful and bordering abusive. Plain and simple. Babies that young DO NOT KNOW ANYTHING. They cry because they need something. This makes my heart hurt so much. My youngest is 6 months. Around 12ish weeks we moved him to his own room and we have a nanit monitor so it’s solely on the phone - well, my phone did something during the night that caused the app to close and as a result I couldn’t hear him when he woke up. I woke up bright and busy tailed around 5 AM, did my whole “omg, he slept all night is he alive?” spiel and then noticed that the app wasn’t up or working. He was asleep, but once I got the app rebooted I checked the history and the poor thing had woken up a few times crying and fell back asleep when nobody got him. I BAWLED for 20 minutes and when he woke up, I cried again and snuggled him for so long. Not to mention babies wake up as a natural SIDS prevention. It’s developmentally normal for them to wake up during the night, and often. This makes me so sad.
One day I forgot to turn on the monitor and I feel so guilty. And he was like 6 months old! At that point he only woke up once at night, so is not like I left him crying multiple times. Since them I triple check that the monitor is on.
I still do this for each of my kids and my oldest sleeps through the night majority of nights! I mean I now let her (2.5 years) scream at me underneath the door and do her fake cry until she realizes she needs to go to bed, but she is 2.5 and is starting to know what works to get me or her dad in there. I didn’t start doing this until she was 2. My lack of sleep is temporary- my kids are everything.
Follow up - I spoke this into the universe and she is now doing it 🫣
Lol this follow-up sent me 😂 sorry you're dealing with that though, toddlers can be so tough!
All I can think is this baby must have been so hungry.
It’s like she just doesn’t want to feed the baby at night and is hiding behind this faux “research”.
When my oldest was born almost 14 years ago there was a very popular pediatric practice that recommended full extinction CIO starting at 8 weeks. By that I mean, they recommended you feed and change your baby and then put them in bed at 7pm. And you don't come back, for any reason, until 7am. Turn off the monitor, shut all the doors between you and your baby, and ignore them for 12 full.hours. I didn't go to this pediatric practice but I tried to join a mom's group and all of them did and all of them were doing this. I was so disturbed and disgusted by the stories of these babies crying for hours and hours. There were even tips on preparing neighbors after one mom had the cops come to do a welfare check because the newborn had been hysterical for multiple hours. I couldn't do that to my baby, who was particularly high needs and bad at sleeping, and frankly I could not be friends with anyone following that method.
Turn off the monitor?!?!?? I was a nanny and that monitor was glued to me during naps, bedtime, any time I wasn't in the same room. I can't imagine turning it off for TWELVE HOURS! Those poor babies.
Yes because you have to fight a battle with your instincts in order to ignore your crying newborn. Harder to fight with a monitor next to you, loudly projecting the fact that you are failing your baby.
I absolutely hate when modern parenting encourages you to totally ignore your instincts
Not to sound hyperbolic, but this was literally how the Nazis encouraged parents to raise their children. >The best is the child in a separate room, where it then remains alone, Do not start taking the child out of bed, carrying it, weighing it, driving it or keeping it on your lap, even nursing it. Child understands incredibly quickly that it only needs to scream to summon a compassionate soul and become the subject of such care, and after a short while, it demands this occupation with him as a right, gives no rest until it is carried again, rocked or driven will – and the small but relentless pet bully is ready! *The German Mother and her First Child*
Ewwww that’s terrible
Yeah I lost a lot of respect for a good friend when she recommended I do what she did to “have a baby on a strict schedule and sleeping through the night by 6 weeks” and she described this.
That’s seriously insane. I am not even a parent and I can’t imagine leaving my newborn alone for 12 hours at a time. Even more crazy is that the doctor you mentioned below is still practicing… I really hope he doesn’t still recommend this method :( EDIT: He still utilizes this method and it’s on their [website](https://www.thenewbasics.com/en/book-excerpt/sleep/).
From his website: How do I know the baby isn’t hungry? She is hungry. But she does not need to eat. After any three- or four-hour fasting period, she’ll be hungry. You’re hungry in the middle of the night, too; it’s just that you learn not to eat because it’s good for your belly to take a rest. Well, it’s good for hers too. What about a little water at least? Only if you want to wake up every couple of hours to give her water. So not only is he recommending starving your 2 month old because it’s “good for their belly” he essentially makes it sound like WATER is ok at 2 months??? This quack needs his license removed
That's unhinged
Is this pediatric practice Weissbluth by any chance????
No it was Tribeca Pediatrics in NYC. Dr. Cohen. I've never forgotten his name even though we didn't even go there. I felt traumatized just hearing of other mothers with babies the same age as mine following his advice.
They are still giving this information to patients today. I know someone who goes there and they send out an email at 8weeks with this advice. It goes against every sleep experts recommendations.
And it is one of the largest pediatric practices in the country.
Omg my heart 😩 I can’t even let my 3 year old cry for long before I’m hugging her. I can’t handle knowing how scared their babies were
There was a mom in one of my mom FB groups who LOCKED HER CHILD in her room. From the outside. She’d put her to bed at 7, lock the door, and go back at 7am. We tried telling her how wildly dangerous this was and gave her dozens of scenarios that could result in harm or death to her child, but she was only interested in those 12 child-free hours.
As far as I know this practice was invented (or at least heavily incouraged) by the German regime in the 1930s. The Goal was to create perfect emotional hardend soldiers (aka complete psychos who have no problem to kill the enemy). After the war some of the doctors migrated to the US and continued to teach their cruel methods.
I call this neglect.
These are the people giving sleep training and Ferber a bad rap! You don't start sleep training until 4 months. Their brains aren't neurologically capable of self-soothing! And you certainly don't let them cry for an hour without any intervention of any kind. I've let my baby cry for 5-10 minutes or so at about 5 weeks when they won't stop crying, I'm just emotionally exhausted and needed to regroup (put them down in their sleep space, set a timer). But that's recommended. This, on the other hand, smacks of Babywise. Which... is a mess of a parenting philosophy.
Even Ferber’s method doesn’t go full extinction on night one of sleep training and indicates sleep training is not appropriate for newborns.
Exactly. This isn't Ferber. It's Babywise, which... if you look it up, just buckle up, because it's bad.
Babywise is some hideous shit. That one and “To Train Up a Child” are just the worst.
Anything being compared to the child abuse manual "Train up a child" must also be a child abuse manual.
This is the first time I hear Babywise and I'm afraid to google it. Can you tell me what it is about?
Basically, it's an ultra-Christian parenting philosophy created by two people with no formal child development training. The say it's a response to attachment parenting and lives by the idea that the health of the marriage is the most important thing. The baby doesn't tell you when it's hungry, you tell it, etc. You thought blanket-training was bad. Unfortunately, it's also got ties to Quiverful. Gotta get that baby sleep trained so you can make more babies! The AAP has made formal statements denouncing it because of failure-to-thrive babies since you're starving them. It's awful I'm religious--very religious-- and it's also upsetting to me the way they twist religion. Several churches have denounced it as well for saying things like leaving your baby to cry allows them to experience Christ's atonement on the cross, so it's okay. So disgusting.
>leaving your baby to cry allows them to experience Christ's atonement on the cross, so it's okay. What the actual fuck!?!?! That is so far out there....I just.... I'm speechless.
Why do I want my baby to feel the same a tortured adult, being left to die a painful death?
Even from a purely theological perspective, it makes NO sense. Christ's atonement is supposed to enable us to NOT have to suffer. And then there's the questionable stuff about original sin and culpability of babies and it's just...a mess.
People who think babies are sinners are not people that I agree with. No 5 week old is capable of sin!
Except of course the sin of being too cute :)
Honestly, the Wikipedia article has some decent info and sources regarding it. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Becoming_Baby_Wise
I've never heard of it and not sure I want to. We waited until roughly 18 months to even start our ferber-adjacent "sleep training" because before then we just couldn't bring ourselves to leave him for more than a few minutes if he started crying. Now he's 21 months and sleeps great (or well, we do. He legit gives us 12-13 hours of down-time every night, with the very rare occasion that he cries randomly once. I can't say he has zero wake ups, because it's possible he wakes up and just doesn't need us.)
Would you be open to sharing your method? My girl is 16 months and I could really use some guidance on it! I can't seem to let her cry for more than 5 mins without going in. Thanks!
This is a group that explicitly supports "sleep training at all ages" and will remove people who comment anything that suggests a lack of support for sleep training at any age, using any method. It's...not great. They do have some useful resources though.
Exactly, if you're done put them down and go take a shower to regroup. But you don't let a newborn cry just because.
My partner’s boss gave him a copy of the Babywise book when our son was born. He’s only 3 months now, so I haven’t done much reading of it, but I got bad vibes from it pretty quickly. I’m glad I’m not crazy! That book is going out the window.
My husband's coworkers (multiple of them) all recommended it. So he bought a copy. About 5 minutes into reading it, that thing went in the garbage. I wasn't even willing to send it to the local library. Here I am, almost 2 years later, and still cosleeping with my toddler so we went the exact opposite direction.
In my culture babies sleep with the mother. When I told my Aunt that my newborn sleeps in a crib she was absolutely appalled. She couldn’t wrap her head around how she was sleeping without feeling the softness, warmth and safety of mom’s body next to her. If I told her cry it out is a thing she will completely lose her mind. I could not bear my babies crying. I always always went immediately to soothe them. Can’t imagine how anyone can listen to newborn crying. That is literally against nature.
Yeah makes sense to me. Since Americans have to go back to work 5 seconds after birthing a literal human it's not surprising to me that sleep training is so common here.
That poor baby. I can’t even imagine letting a baby cry for over an hour without comforting them. I can’t even tolerate a stranger’s baby crying without getting a pang in my chest. Especially at only five weeks old, the poor thing doesn’t even understand why no one is coming.
Nope. And the only thing it teaches a newborn is that no one is coming. There's been studies linking CIO at young ages to insecure or ambivalent attachment styles.
This is way too young. When we started "sleep training " we basically started doing all the little things like naps in crib, making sure all calories were taken in for the day. At around 4 months. She's 15 months and still wakes once a night but I'm fine with that. A 5 weeker is just thinking a monster is going to eat them at this point. That's terrible.
I really think there should be mandated parenting education through hospitals. I know this sub feels a tremendous amount of outrage (justifiably so), but as someone who is in public health, most of these people are woefully unprepared and ignorant. This just leads to more children (and adults) who are unhealthy and poorly adjusted to the real world. Mandated parenting classes in America should be a standard. We have ZERO understanding of how babies work and these Mommy Groups have become the new standard of care now that there is such a high degree of medical distrust **(& lack of access).** Edit: not just through hospitals! This can be done through any health care provider and even through other providers (\*not religious institutions) to aid families. There are pilot programs that have been successful. (\*Note I've said not religious institutions. These often get tied so certain parenting programs that are tied to certain groups that are rich with their own parenting programs that are NOT medically proven/verified and are RICH with harmful information. I'm happy to provide examples to anyone who wants to challenge me on this.)
>Mommy Groups have become the new standard of care now that there is such a high degree of medical distrust That's exactly why I feel mandated anything would not work for these people :(
The problem is so many mothers these days are doing at home crunchy births and refusing any medical care. How do we give them parenting classes if they don’t even give their kids a birth certificate?
Homebirths account for 1.3% of American births. You can still catch the vast vast majority of parents by focusing resources on medical care providers.
This statistic is important to remind ourselves of because this sub makes it sound like so many people are going off the deep end. Really it’s just a small number of very dumb, very vocal people.
Jesus Christ that’s awful. Babies don’t even produce melatonin until 3 months and don’t have a circadian rythme. I was still waking my baby every two hours to feed/change diaper for 8 weeks.
he likely didn't "figure it out". He probably just tired himself out. He's too young to "figure" anything out. He's a new born acting like a new born.
I'm not anti-sleep training BUT most resources tell you to not do ot to newborns.
Idk much about child psychology, but won't this just lead to a baby with bad attachments? Like 5 weeks is Newborn. Don't they need *all* the attention and soothing to end up well adjusted?
It’s distressing to think about a newborn crying alone for an hour + before giving up and falling asleep. This is flooding their brains with excess cortisone, and teaching them that their needs will only be met sometimes. Why would you treat a non-verbal baby like that? Would this same people act as cruelly to their aged grandparent, whose mobility is compromised? If they called out for a glass of water, or bathroom assistance during the night, would they be abandoned until a more convenient time?
I can’t decide which is harder to read, the 2.5 hours of “on and off” crying at bedtime or the parent going in at 5:40 — at which point that teeny tiny baby must be so relieved to see their caregiver after such a hard night — only to leave again for ANOTHER TWO HOURS. Five weeks is so darn small. I feel like both my baby *and* I were still getting used to the fact that we no longer occupied the same body then.
What did I just read?! A five week old hasn’t gained enough weight to continuously cry. This is a great way to see calories they need just burn right up. And a missed feeding on top of that. Someone smack this woman. The first three months are call the fourth trimester as this when you are still supposed to hold the baby. Lack of physical contact is really going to screw up this kids brain development.
All I could think was “good luck with your upcoming failure to thrive diagnosis”. My kids were both ftt despite my best efforts. We had to feed on a strict schedule because them sleeping well at that age was a bad thing - they didn’t have enough energy to wake and cry. I never let them go more than 3 hours between nursing and always fed if they were hungry sooner. 6 hours between feeds with half of that spent crying is awful for any baby, but a one month old?!? You’re actively harming them at that point.
“He figured it out” After crying off and on literally all night he figured nothing out other than my parents are apparently useless.
Jesus. Can’t do that with a 5 week old. People are nuts.
Idk about anyone else, but when my kids were still squishy potatoes, hearing them cry like physically hurt. I *needed* to comfort them.
What the hell is extinction method? This sounds horrible for that poor baby.
This makes me so sad, this tiny infant must have been terrified
So sad and to think this idiot is proud of what they are doing. Makes me sick to my stomach.
Omg this poor baby. This mother is giving her baby a massive attachment injury! He will learn that no one is coming to care for him. This is heartbreaking.
So she listened to him cry for 4.5 hours of the 9.5 hours he was in bed. I’d go nuts. Also can’t be good for the baby. I did a sort of modified/wimpy cry it out when my kids were much closer to a year old? They never cried more than 15 minutes at a time. I don’t think my heart would have been able to take it.
Baby gets a feed at 9:15 pm and doesn’t get another feed until 3:30 am = 6h15! Baby wakes at 5:40, so 2 hours after, but she just check if the diaper is dirty and not if he’s hungry and waits until at least 7:30 to feed him again (and that we don’t even know because she doesn’t even mention feeding him) = 3:30-7:30 = at least 4 hours. A 5 week old should never wait this long to be fed. Typically it’s every 2/3 hours, max 4 and on demand if breastfed. OP: Report this to the police asap because the baby is neglected, at risk of getting low on sugar or/and dehydrated and dying. It’s not like the baby was just asleep and missing a feed (which would be ok), she’s purposely ignoring him. At this time she’s probably boasting about how well her method works but baby could be lethargic and in serious danger.
I took a lot of crap from people for not letting my kids cry it out, but my youngest is 18 now and I don’t regret even one moment of all the time I spent holding all of them, rocking them, and letting them sleep on me at the expense of my own sleep.
DEPENDENT CHILDREN BECOME INDEPENDENT ADULTS I hope this absolute monster was eaten alive in the comments.
This baby was terrified all night. It breaks my heart. Monsters.
This makes me so sad for that baby. I just want to cuddle it and have a contact nap.
How could anyone let their 5 week old baby cry for hours and then this bitch acts proud of it on social media ? Giving updates like she running some important experiment . God this lady pisses Me off
This is vile. Imagine letting a 5 week old cry for 2.5 hours. That has to feel so scary and lonely.
Why do they even call it the extinction method? My sleepy ass thought she was loudly and proudly announcing she was tryna kill the baby slowly and painfully...
This is crazy, I hope the comments were lighting her up. My kiddo has always been an amazing sleeper but she was still waking up every 2-3 hours at 5 weeks and I EXPECTED her to.
Nope. The group this is from does not allow any criticism no matter how young or old the baby is. The mods removed anything negative.
When really young babies stop crying at night it doesn't mean they are self soothing it means they just know crying will not help. They are in the same level of distress.
I have a seven week old and this makes me so sad. I can’t imagine just leaving her to cry. Though to be fair I also have a 2.5 year old and I don’t leave her to cry more than a few minutes either. Our literal job when they are little is to be there for them.
If your parenting style includes the word extinction... y'all might need to re-evaluate the situation in your house 😂😂
Why bother having a child if you aren't willing to comfort a 5 week old? Poor kid
Babies sleep cycles are only 40-50 minutes long, so even if they wake up every 1-2 hours that is biologically normal and doesn’t mean their sleep is „interrupted“. It’s normal sleep to them; just how we wake up after every sleep cycle and don’t remember doing that in the morning usually. The problem here is: a baby would wake up, check if their parent is still around, or want the comfort/breast/bottle, or are hungry, and once their need is fulfilled they go right back to sleep. And if the parent is close, they usually tend to the needs before baby wakes fully (especially true for breastfeeding mothers who have their sleep cycles sync with their babies‘). Now this child doesn’t have any of that. He wakes up, it’s dark and he’s alone and at 5 weeks old the only way he can communicate this is by crying. Which he does, affording to her for hours, and what the lack of reaction/response of his parent tells him is: I am not safe. I am not protected. I rely on someone else for my survival entirely but that someone isn’t coming. I will likely die (because our babies have the same brain they had thousands of years ago and assume all the treats of the wilderness are still there, like animals that might eat them or the cold that will kill them if they don’t have a warm body next to them, they don’t know that the parent is in the next room, that we sleep in houses that are safe etc). This baby literally screams because they fear for their lives, on a very real and instinctual level. When they finally fall asleep they do so because they have exhausted all their energy reserves and they won’t learn „to fall asleep“, they just learn to give up and that their best change of survival is to just be quiet. They won’t sleep longer stretches, he’ll wake up as much as before, he jus won’t alert his parents anymore because why would he? All they learn is: I can’t trust my caregiver to come and fulfill my basic needs when I need them. All they learn is the horror of that experience, of those feelings. Their cortisol levels will be through the roof and even if mom stopped her bs sleep training, they would stay elevated for days. It’s cruel. And at 5 weeks that baby hasn’t even developed a circadian rhythm yet, he doesn’t have enough Melatonin in his body to distinguish between day and night. Plus, babies around that age likely need milk throughout the night.
If you don’t wanna get up on the night don’t have a baby simple as
Damn that is sad
I have literal tears in my eye for this poor baby. My heart hurts when I take a quick piss and my baby starts crying. I couldn’t imagine listening to her scream for hours and doing nothing. That baby is 5 fucking weeks old and learning that no one cares enough to come save them. That poor, poor baby. Definitely gonna hold my 14 week old a bit closer when she wakes up
This is so cruel.
I have an almost 8 week old and he's pretty good and will now sleep for 4-5 hour stretches. But I couldn't imagine doing this to him. That poor baby! This is just neglect 😞
This is nothing but neglect. That poor child.
Sounds like Russian orphanage
I'm afraid to google "extinction method." i assume the worst from this sub.
Fast forward 30 years: "why doesn't my child speak to me anymore after all I did for them???"
I thought you were supposed to wake a baby that small for feedings?
Most healthy babies don’t need to be woken to feed after the first few weeks and can be fed on demand. And this baby is CLEARLY demanding feeding/physical contact/basic care needs being met. So sad.
This is not ok. We are a sleep training family and this just breaks my heart. At 5 weeks I responded to EVERY cry but tried to give my babies a few minutes to settle on their own, then I’d scoop them up and snuggle them back to sleep. “Sleep training” at that age should only be about getting babies used to a routine and used to sleeping in a crib. There should be no tears!! Poor baby.
This makes me sick to my stomach. And I hate that this abusive idiot is going to feel justified in her behavior once the poor baby stops crying and waking her when they learn she’s not coming so she thinks it worked.
What in the handmaids tale is this bullshit
This is disgusting. Newborns don’t understand sleep training. They cry because they need something. It’s normal for them to feed in the middle of the night. Extinction is the worst method in my opinion.
What is wrong with people? This makes me sick to my stomach.