If I had a baby in the house right now, I’d probably give up — right after I have a nervous breakdown. And I’d have Penelope Leach to thank for it.
If you missed the hoopla last week, allow me to fill you in: Dr. Penelope Leach, the parenting expert and bestselling author of the 70’s tome Baby and Child claims in her new book The Essential First Year that letting your baby cry it out to sleep raises cortisol levels that may cause brain damage.
Chew on that for a moment. Let’s say you’re an exhausted new mom with a baby who refuses to sleep unless you rock him, hold him or do whatever circus of activities he’s manipulated you into. So you try one of the many “cry it out” techniques that other parenting experts and authors have suggested, like the ones I describe in my own book, Stop Second-Guessing Yourself — Baby’s First Year, which officially publishes the same day as Dr. Leach’s. The ones I didn’t have the guts (nor the complete frustration…yet) to try until my younger son was 16-months-old and could then saunter down the hallway to announce his refusal to sleep.
Now, here’s a renowned expert telling you that if you let your baby cry, you are going to RUIN HIS BRAIN. Because there aren’t enough things for modern moms to worry about already, like claims that baby boys with nannies will become womanizers and babies of moms who work part-time are the healthiest. I am not making this crap up. Other people are, and some of them are basing them on questionable studies or extrapolating out data in questionable ways.
In fact, WebMDseemed to question Leach’s claim that letting your baby cry it out to sleep is “toxic” to your child’s brain. The article quotes Dr. Martin Ward-Platt, author of The Wonder Years, The Essential Guide to Child Development for Ages 0-5 as saying, “I cannot believe that Penelope [Leach] is as scientifically naive as she comes across when she makes her public utterances.” Additionally, Babble says: “To date, however, cortisol levels have only been shown to be damaging in cases of chronic stress due to abuse or exposure to violence — not isolated incidents as would be the case with crying it out.”
That’s small comfort for the mom of a one-year-old baby who e-mailed me last week to, I suspect, get permission to let her baby cry it out. She cited the study and wrote: “Well my almost one year old baby won’t let me rock her to sleep and even though I do my best to comfort her, she won’t sleep unless she cries it out. You seem like a mom who knows what she is talking about. Could you give me your opinion and some advice, because I most certainly don’t want to hinder her brain development. And while it’s hard for me to hear her cry, that is the only way my little girl will go to sleep.”
I told her that I am not a medical doctor, and that she should consult her pediatrician. I hope that she will also trust her gut, because if I were in her shoes, I may well give up at this point and lose it completely, especially having been the mom of not one, but two colicky babies who cried for hours on end for a combined total of seven months, no matter what I did to try to calm them down.
Mothers today are all too often guilted or scared into second-guessing themselves by the media, other parents, studies and more, in a way that no other part of society is experiencing. We are damned if we do and flamed by people who follow Dr. Leach if we don’t. And it’s time it stopped before new moms like the one who e-mailed me the other day lose their minds altogether from the exhaustion, the confusion and the raised cortisol levels from not sleeping much at all for a year or longer.
Moms, please, PLEASE trust your gut. Mothers have been raising children for millennia without the “benefit” of studies and claims like these, and turning out perfectly normal children. Please don’t be frightened. Your instincts and a little common sense will serve you — and your babies — well.
Oh, and the kid I let cry it out? He got straight A’s on his report card today. Chew on that for a moment.
Thanks for the post. Here is a nice checklist of things to consider when your baby is crying…
http://budurl.com/cryingbaby
HOLY CRAP! That is INSANE. Also, I might add that “crying it out” results in one to five nights of fussiness followed by a LIFETIME of quiet whereas coddling fussy babies to sleep creates potentially YEARS of fussiness. So let’s evaluate the cortisol levels of my little scenario. HA!
Retweeted – I typed and deleted a bunch of things here and I’m just going to leave the comment at retweeted because that’s just nuts.
I firmly believe there is a fine line between ‘baby crying’ and ‘baby hysterical’. I let my babies cry. One of my daughters often got tired of being fussed with, and really, honestly, just wanted to cry for a bit by herself before she would sleep. But you can tell when they shift from ‘crying because tired’ to ‘crying hysterically and incapable of calming’. THAT is when cortisol is probably spiking. You wouldn’t expect an adult having a panic attack to “cry it out” and “just go to sleep”. You would never be that callous. So too with babies. Crying? Maybe not so bad. Hysterical? Intervene. There is a difference, and you can hear it when it happens.
I firmly believe that on-going RESENTMENT is POISON in any relationship. If rocking your baby to sleep is working for your baby, you, and your family, great. If you’re regularly feeling resentful about how long it takes to settle your baby and how chronically exhausted you are, it’s time to do something different.
I did sleep training with my four kids when they were around 15 months. One camp of experts would say I should have done it much earlier, so they wouldn’t cry as long. Another camp of experts would say I should never have done it at all. So what. This is what worked for me and my family. At that point in time my babies needed substantially more than a little cuddle to settle, and they seemed sturdy enough to me that *I* was able to tolerate their crying while they learned to fall asleep. (They all became great sleepers.)
You’re absolutely right, Jen: There’s no one-size-fits-all answer when it comes to parenting. Moms do need to trust their instincts, and children CAN tolerate and even benefit from coping with temporary stress.
Wow, I’m sure glad Penelope Leach’s book didn’t say that in 1998! I loved her book and it helped me immensely in the early days of parenting. Common sense will tell most parents that whatever works, works, and we sure don’t need to be told we’re threatening our babies’ brains.
Sheesh!
{SIGH} You’re always right. Just what we need, huh? More pressure? I have done cry it out. And I’ve used other methods (Ferber, sneaking yourself out of the room little by little, etc.). I’m about to try the whole process again (once our baby is FINALLY in her own room, thanks to remodeling). For the most part, I don’t let anyone make me second guess myself. If I ask you (meaning, whoever, not you, Jen, specifically) for your opinion, then I’ll listen. That doesn’t mean I will take your advice, though.
I trust my gut. Our pediatrician tried to convince me that our NEWBORN daughter was manipulating me into holding her because she wouldn’t sleep for the first week OF LIFE without being in my arms. Sorry. I’m going to hold a newborn every time they cry. Period. And she eventually came around. But now? She needs to learn some self-soothing techniques. Done with love, it doesn’t really matter how you do it, as long as it works in the end. Sleep = happy baby AND happy mama!
I really love this blog!
Amen! I’m the mom of a 2 (almost 3) yr old and you nailed it! We can’t win no matter what we do, so we have to use our gut in parenting. I’ve let my son cry it out too and he’s fine. It’s amazing that the human race has continued as what did they do without all these fine studies to tell our earlier generations how to parent? What we really need is a study to find what all contradictory information found in the earlier studies has done to the parents!!! Now, THAT might be useful!!!
this Dr Leach sounds like quite the character… prone to do his buisness by instilling fear into every mother in America..
Amen, Jen. Off to tweet this one.
–KB (A mommy who loves the fact that both of her kids sleep — well and for a long time — because of sleep training.)