with their parents.
How did these parenting “experts” come up with these numbers? One begins to wonder. Wishful thinking? There were no actual studies to back them up. By the time the study of infant behaviour developed into a science in the sixties and seventies and researchers began disproving the spoiling theory, the low-touch, high-control style of parenting was so entrenched that even today compelling research has not been able to unseat it.
The cry-it-out advice is based on the principle of reinforcement, which is simply this: if a behaviour is not reinforced (not responded to), it is extinguished, it goes away. If the behaviour is reinforced (responded to), it will be repeated. This does make a certain amount of sense, but there are several fallacies in the way this principle has been applied to infant crying. First of all, the reinforcement principle assumes that the cry is a bad behaviour to be eliminated rather than a signal to be listened to. Second, research does not support the idea that ignored cries are simply extinguished. Rather than learning to be quiet, some infants learn more disturbing means of communication. In other babies, those with whom the cry-it-out advice “works”, it is the drive to communicate that is extinguished. And along with learning that his cries have no signal value, the baby also learns that he has less value. This lays the foundation for a sense of distrust rather than trust. This is no way to begin life.
“But it works”, defenders of cry-stopping advice claim. This depends upon your point of view. Consider how you would feel if you had a desperate message to convey, and your previously trusted significant other stopped listening. You’re delivering what you feel is a very important message, at least to you. You need some help, yet the one to whom you are talking ignores you. How would you feel? You might conclude that what you are saying has little or no value to the listener. You might further conclude that your listener doesn’t care about your message, or about you. How would you react? You could yell more loudly and make yourself so obnoxious that your listener would be forced to come to your rescue. By this time you’d be a very angry person and would carry that anger with you, perhaps turning it inward. You could just quit delivering your message, sniffle to yourself a few times, and decide that you can’t depend on anyone but yourself or that maybe you don’t deserve to be heard. A baby who makes this shift might even be rewarded with the tag of “good baby”, one who doesn’t bother anyone. A third alternative is to go on delivering your message, sincerely hoping your listeners will stretch themselves to really hear what you have to say, and will respond appropriately.
cry-it-out advice: 1897-style
The following is a quote from one of the most influential baby-care books of the nineteenth century, Diseases of Infancy and Childhood, by paediatrician Dr Emmett Holt, published in 1897. This excerpt will help you appreciate the misguided, controlling origins of the cry-it-out advice. After Dr Holt advises mothers to respond to their baby’s cries if they believe the cry is due to illness, he goes on to admonish them: “The cry of habit is one of the most difficult to recognize. These habits are formed by indulging infants in various ways. Some children cry to be held, some to be carried, some to be rocked, some for a light in the nursery, some for a rubber nipple or some other thing to suck. The extent to which even very young infants may indulge in this kind of crying, is surprising, and it explains much of the crying of early childhood. The fact that the cry ceases immediately when the child gets what it wants is diagnostic of the cry from habit. The only successful treatment of such cases is to allow the child to ‘cry it out’ once or twice and then the habit is broken … On admission to Babies’ Hospital very young infants almost invariably cry a great deal for the first two days. It being against the rules to take such children from their cots and hold them to quiet their crying, they soon cease the habit, and give no further trouble … The mothers were forbidden to quiet the infants by taking them up, and after two or three days’ discipline the crying ceased and peace and order were again restored.”
Such is the frightening advice that was to infect parenting throughout the next century.
For some infants, the cry-it-out advice does seem to “work”, in that they stop crying as much. These infants seem to be the compliant type, the “easy” babies. And many seem none the worse for wear when trained to become “good babies”. The older “easy” baby may wind himself down from a cry, realizing that he can do this without outside help and that he is really all right afterward. This does not happen with high-need babies, as mothers we have interviewed testify. Most of these mothers revealed that if they tried the cry-it-out advice, their babies just kept crying persistently, and afterward both the mothers and their babies were emotional wrecks. In fact, many mothers who have, in desperation, left their babies to cry it out, have later confided, “I’ll never do that again.”
What cry research tells us. Researchers Sylvia Bell and Mary Ainsworth performed studies in the 1970s that should have put the spoiling theory on the shelf to spoil forever. These researchers studied two groups of mother-infant pairs. Group 1 mothers gave a prompt and nurturant response to their infant’s cries. Group 2 mothers were more restrained in their response. They found that children in Group 1 were less likely to use crying as a means of communication at one year of age. These children seemed more securely attached to their mothers and had developed better communicative skills, becoming less whiny and manipulative.
Up until that time parents had been led to believe that if they picked up their baby every time she cried, she would never learn to settle herself and would become more demanding. Bell’s and Ainsworth’s research showed the opposite. Babies who developed a secure attachment and whose cues were responded to in a prompt and nurturant way became less clingy and demanding. More studies were done to shoot down the spoiling theory, showing that babies whose cries were not promptly responded to began to cry more, longer, and in a more disturbing way. In one study comparing two groups of crying babies, one group of infants received an immediate, nurturant response to their cries, while the other group was left to cry it out. The babies whose cries were sensitively attended to cried 70 per cent less. The babies in the cry-it-out group, on the other hand, did not decrease their crying. In essence, crying research has shown that babies whose cries are listened to and responded to learn to cry “better”; infants who are the product of a more restrained style of parenting learn to cry “harder”. It is interesting that the studies revealed differences not only in how the babies communicated with the parents based on the response they got to their cries, but there were also differences in the mothers. Studies showed that mothers who gave a more restrained and less nurturant response gradually became more insensitive to their baby’s cries, and this insensitivity carried over to other aspects of their parent-child relationship. Research showed that leaving baby to cry it out spoils the whole family.
Discipline confused with control. Another reason the cry-it-out advice has survived so long is that it was marketed as one of the essential points of discipline. Parents were led to feel that if they didn’t let their baby cry they were wimpy parents and that their children would always have the upper hand. This approach to child rearing confused discipline with control, a confusion that persists in some parenting-advice circles. With the parent-in-control philosophy, the infant’s temperament and personality play no part in determining the style of care he receives. The infant is given no voice in his own management. This undermines the whole foundation of parental discipline: knowing your infant and creating a trusting relationship between parent and child. Babies, even newborns, can learn the basic principle of trust: distress is followed by comfort, and thus the world of the family is a nurturing and responsive place to be. In contrast, the cry-it-out advice creates a distance between infants and parents, a distance that makes disciplining the growing child more difficult.
Crying isn’t “good for baby’s lungs”. One of the most ridiculous pieces of medical folklore is the dictum “Let baby cry – it’s good for his lungs.” In the late 1970s, research showed that babies who were left to cry had heart rates that reached worrisome levels and lowered oxygen levels in their blood. When these infants’ cries were soothed, their cardiovascular system rapidly returned to normal, showing how quickly babies recognize the status of well-being