concludes that he himself is not worthwhile either. The baby loses the motivation to communicate with his parents, and the parents miss out on opportunities to get to know their baby. Everyone loses. A baby with a more persistent personality does not give up so easily. Instead, he cries more loudly and keeps escalating his signal, making it more and more disturbing. You could ignore this persistent signal in several ways. You could wait until the baby stops crying and then pick him up, so that he won’t think it was his crying that got your attention. This is actually a type of power struggle; you teach the baby that you’re in control, but you also teach him that he has no power to communicate. This shuts down parent-child communication, and in the long run everybody loses.
You could desensitize yourself completely so that you won’t be “bothered” at all by the cry; this way you can teach baby he gets responded to only when it’s “time”. Also, according to this scenario, baby gets used to being in a constant state of want. Not feeling right becomes the norm to be re-created throughout his life. This is another lose-lose situation; baby doesn’t get what he needs, and parents remain stuck in a mind-set that doesn’t allow them to enjoy the baby’s unique personality. Or you could pick baby up to calm him but then put him right back down because “it’s not time to feed him yet”. He has to learn, after all, to be happy “on his own”. Lose-lose again; he will start to cry again and you will feel angry. He will learn that his desires make you angry. And he will learn his communication, though heard, has not been understood, which can lead him to learn to distrust his own perceptions (“Maybe they’re right. Maybe I’m not hungry”).
Your other option is to give a prompt and nurturant response. This is the win-win way for baby and mother to work out a communication system that helps them both. The mother responds promptly and sensitively so that baby will feel less frantic the next time he needs something. The baby learns to cry “better”, in a less disturbing way, since he knows mother will come. Mother structures baby’s environment so that there is less need for him to cry; she keeps him close to her if she knows he’s tired and ready to sleep. Mother also heightens her sensitivity to the cry so that she can give just the right response: a quick response when the baby is young and prone to fall apart easily or when the cry makes it clear there is real danger, a slower response when the baby is older and can begin to learn to settle the disturbance on his own.
Responding appropriately to your baby’s cry is the first and one of the most difficult of many communication challenges you will face as a mother. You will master the system only after rehearsing thousands of cue-response cycles in the early months. If you initially regard your baby’s cry as a signal to be responded to and evaluated rather than as an unfortunate habit to be broken, you will open yourself up to becoming an expert in your baby’s signals, which will carry over into becoming an expert on everything about your baby. Each mother-baby signal system is unique. That’s why it is so short-sighted for “sleep trainers” to prescribe canned cry-response formulas, such as “leave her to cry for five minutes the first night, ten minutes the second”, and so on.
“But is there a time when I should leave my baby to cry?” you may wonder. As a new mother you are vulnerable to all kinds of well-meaning advisers, each of whom bears his own bag of tricks to dump on you whether you want them or not. The most damaging of all this free advice is “leave your baby to cry it out”. This often given, yet seldom helpful, advice shows a lack of understanding of the signal value of the infant cry and of the receptive qualities of the listening mother. This advice serves no useful purpose; if followed, it usually desensitizes a mother to her baby and creates a distance between the members of the communicating pair.
As a teacher, my training in child development kept haunting me. I remember learning that the social and emotional growth of a child begins with the stage of trust versus mistrust. Jason would either learn trust in his environment or learn various degrees of mistrust. Even if we could not alleviate his discomfort, we could at least hold him and rock him and let him know we cared. Abandoning him to suffer alone in a cot down the hall seemed cruel and inhumane. If we could not comfort him, at least we could teach him to learn to trust.
No one should ever advise a mother to let her baby cry it out, but neither should a mother feel that it is her responsibility always to stop her baby from crying. In the following discussion we want to help you work out the cry-response communication network that works best for you. If, when, and how long to let your baby complain is a cry-by-cry judgment. These following considerations can help you make the right judgement.
How the cry-it-out advice got started. In light of what we now know about infant development, the cry-it-out advice should be put in its proper place – filed away in the archives of bad baby advice; yet this dreadful advice is still around. Why? Understanding the historical setting that bred this philosophy makes it easier to appreciate why this advice is still so common. This sad story began in the late 1890s, when drastic changes occurred in parenting, ones that, like a contagious disease, are still around infecting parenting practices a hundred years later. This was the era when, due to a variety of social and economic situations, experts entered the business of advising women on childbearing and child rearing. Traditional motherly wisdom fell out of favour and new “scientific” theories took over. Pregnancy and birth became a medical “disease” from which a woman needed to be delivered. Man-made formula replaced mother-made milk. Rigid schedules replaced flexible feeding routines. The infant cry became an annoyance to be squelched, not a signal to be listened and responded to. “What should I do when my baby cries?” was a question that mothers should never have had to ask in the first place, and advisers should not even have attempted to answer.
Once “scientific” notions of baby tending did away with mother’s intuition, demand rose in the baby-advice market, and a multitude of advisers rushed in to supply what was needed. The most prevalent parenting theory of the time was that parents must be strict and in control, that babies and children should follow rigid, prescribed routines, and that parents who didn’t follow this advice to the letter were likely to raise spoiled and wildly uncontrollable children. If parents listened to their baby rather than to the books, they were not in control and their babies were manipulating them. To rescue parents from the fearful prospect of losing control, baby-care advisers handed out quick and easy rules to help parents control their children. The chief vaccine against the disease of manipulation was “let baby cry it out.” This was not just a suggestion, it became a mandate. This advice even came with a schedule of the predicted results: baby will probably cry one hour the first night, forty-five minutes the second night, and so on. Every new cry adviser had his own timetable: “Leave baby to cry five minutes before the first time you go in to reassure him, ten minutes the second time …”
survival mode
Even as newborns, most babies who are separated from their mothers click into survival mode: their breathing increases, they clench their fists, they arch their backs and tense their muscles. Their whole body language shouts, “I have to be held to survive.” The sooner parents pick up on these cues, the sooner baby will thrive. Some babies are particularly separation-sensitive, even during sleep. We decided to study the physiological effects of nighttime separation on our eighth baby, Lauren, when she was two months old. A local company loaned us £50,000 worth of equipment and their technical assistance. Using the latest in noninvasive technology, we wired Lauren to a computer that recorded her electrocardiogram, breathing movements, air flow from her nose, and her blood oxygen saturation. The instrumentation was painless and didn’t appear to disturb her sleep. The computer recorded Lauren’s physiological changes during one full night of sleeping side-by-side with Martha and the next full night of sleeping alone in the same bed. Our study revealed that Lauren’s overall physiology – her heart rate, breathing, and blood oxygen saturation – was more stable when sleeping next to Martha than when sleeping alone.
New studies are beginning to prove what savvy mothers