Have you ever heard “Babies need to learn to self-sooth”. That’s the premise behind “cry it out”. Well, I am here to tell you that allowing your kid to cry it out may have terrible long term effects. And I am not sharing this to shame anybody. I am sharing this because we can only do better when we know better.

The Science of Emotions and Brain Development

The mother and child are highly interconnected. Each makes the other healthier and happier based on their mutual connectiveness. For the baby, this results in important structural development in the brain. Research shows that there are critical stages of brain development so that genes can be triggered to regulate emotions, such as anxiety. When nurturing is limited, the brain can fail to develop in a way that turns on these genes.

That has important implications when we look at the practice of crying it out. The baby grows by being held. When there is a loss of that essential connection, the baby becomes emotionally dysregulated, meaning they fall out of the accepted range for typical emotional reactions. Thus, the baby can become highly distressed.

The brain of the baby is developing rapidly. When the baby is highly distressed, that creates the conditions for damage to occur to the synapses by the release of cortisol. This impacts the overall construction of the network that is occurring exponentially in the infant brain. Even a full term baby is born with only 25% of its brain developed. She is undergoing rapid brain growth. It is hard to quantify the damage that can occur during times of such stress.

The impacts can also extend well beyond brain development. Acute stress can also have a negative impact in the body, including by way of damage to the vagus nerve. The vagus nerve affects functioning in multiple systems, including digestion. This can have life long implications. (source)

Most importantly, cry it out does not lead to the baby’s ability to self soothe. The baby is dependent on her caregivers to learn how to self-regulate. The caregiver tunes the baby’s body and brain to be calm. This happens by meeting the baby’s need before she gets distressed.

When a baby gets scared and a parent holds and comforts her, the baby builds up an expectation to be soothed, and thus to have a goal of an emotional state of being calm. This expectation of being soothed and calm gets integrated into the ability to self-comfort. Babies don’t self-comfort in isolation. If they are left to cry alone, they learn to shut down in face of extensive distress—stop growing, stop feeling, stop trusting. (source) (source)

A Healthy Alternative to Cry It Out

As a mother to two young children, I understand how physically taxing it must be to have a baby who will not sleep through the night. But, there are healthy alternatives to crying it out. Some of us have kids that have slept through the night since really young (both my kids started sleeping through the night at four months) and have never let them cry themselves to sleep. Here’s what we did (you will notice that I only mention Lennox for a while, because I am rescuing this article I wrote when he was a baby. I will add a few notes at the end to include Mara).

The most important thing to learn from this post is that sleep training is NOT “crying it out”. . I was under that same wrong impression. Then, I found the book that made our life incredibly better.

During the 1st three months of my son’s life, I barely got any sleep. I knew this came with the territory but at 3.5 months I started to be unable to function. Let me explain. Lennox used to wake up at 2 am and then at 5 am. He was in a very solid 3 hours rotation, but I was not. I would go to bed at around midnight. When I would wake up at 2 am to feed him, I was unable to fall asleep again up until around 4.30 am. I would sleep for about half an hour, would feed him and then I was basically up for the day. Let’s do the math. This mama was sleeping a maximum of three hours a night and already working full-time.

I realized that I was not going to be able to be a good caregiver while being so sleep deprived. After some research on sleep training, I found great reviews about “On Becoming Baby Wise“. I was SO encouraged by what people were saying about it. I bought the book and had it delivered overnight. After it arrived, I read it from beginning to end in two days. I took notes and was determined to make this work.

Let me write this in capitals because I am amazed about how many people have no clue that you can sleep train your child without using crying it out. ON BECOMING BABY WISE TEACHES YOU HOW TO PUT YOUR BABY ON A SCHEDULE.  It teaches them to differentiate between day and night. As a result, they learn to sleep through the night. The book never encourages you to let your kid cry himself to sleep. I would never have it in my heart to do so.

If you are willing to try, it is an intense short-term commitment. The 1st week, the training basically runs your life but it is SO worth it. Lennox slept through the night after that 1st week and the book turned into my new Bible!

I do not believe that we all parent the same way or that every family has the same needs but, whether or not you choose to implement the method, here are my reasons why I think that you should read it as a new mom:

1. You need to sleep. I know this sounds obvious. But I learned that the quality of your life and, as a result, your family’s declines significantly when you are perpetually exhausted. I do not even like to sleep and motherhood made me realize how necessary a good night’s rest is for your physical and mental well-being. The earlier you do something about getting more sleep, the better your chances will be to actually get some rest. I believe that kids are easier to sleep train when they are younger.
2. You want your child to be happy. This was such an eye opener for me. The author of the book states that no child is born cranky. According to him (and he is a pediatrician), there are not cranky kids. A cranky kid is a kid who is not well rested. While Lennox has never really been cranky, I definitely knew that he’s struggling if he missed a nap. What I saw once he was sleep trained was that his overall attitude improved tremendously. He is the happiest boy and I believe that it is in great part due to getting 11-12 straight hours a night since he was 3 and half months.
3. You want to have a social life. And I do not mean going out to parties. I mean getting out of the house, period. If your child rules what happens during the entire day, it is very hard to plan any kind of outing (including errands). Additionally, the challenge of new motherhood is tough enough to add to it ignoring the fact that you actually had a life prior. Going out to dinner with your husband or grabbing a drink with a friend will keep you sane, and you need your kid on a schedule to be able to plan those things.

Reading an implementing the Baby Wise method was probably the best decision I have made for Lennox to date. Lennox thrives on having a schedule. I really am baffled when a friend tells me about her 9-month-old still waking up to eat in the middle of the night. For Lennox, that would be terrible because he is so high energy that sleeping through the night is absolutely necessary for him.

When Mara was born, I was super ready to put the same plan into practice and it was way easier the second time around. I already knew what to do and she was a big sleeper to begin with.

There are a few things that I would like to mention to wrap up the post:

1. We truly think that LUCK has been a factor with our kids. We implemented the method, and it worked. I know methods are not perfect and do not work for everybody.
2. We were very serious about following the method in the beginning. Once it was solid, we would be flexible in regards to days when we wanted to go out to dinner with the kids, etc. But I believe that a strong routine has been a huge factor in getting our kids to be good sleepers.
3. Lastly, our kids have never gone straight to the crib as babies. And by that I mean Lennox started going straight to bed at around 2.5 and Mara seems to be following that same path. We rock our babies to sleep. We believe that that gives them the level of comfort they need to fall asleep peacefully and that peace they feel when they fall asleep is carried through the night.

I believe in informing myself as a mom as much as possible when it comes to making decisions for my kids’ well-being. That is why I highly recommend to any new mama to read “On Becoming Baby Wise“. Perhaps you will read it and will decide that it is not for you, but I can assure you that you will learn something from this great read.