My son would cry until he threw up even when I was with him consoling him. He had horrible colic until 4 months. But wouldn't a baby without the colic issue still throw up if they got worked up enough? This is what scares me. Do they really recommend leaving them in there to cry no matter what?
I can't imagine doing that. For one thing, my son has had his crazy stubbornness since day 1 and trust me, I think he would have cried the whole 12 hours for 3 days straight.
I really blame our culture of "get back to work, mom and dad (also you're on your own)" for this sleep training phenomenon and the idea that infants should be sleeping through the night almost immediately because that's what's most convenient for mom and dad.
We have this idea that babies are just objects to be molded and fit to our schedules and convenience, and that they need to fit into the 'right' schedule ASAP. We seem to think that childbirth and having a baby are mere inconveniences that can be easily handled alone in a matter of days, then mom needs to be back to work, back to a regular schedule, back to taking care of her house, back to exercising, back in shape, back and ready for sex by the next week or so. And baby can be easily slotted off to daycare during the day so mom and dad can work, then trained to sleep all night so mom and dad can be productive at work the next day.
It's not natural, it's not normal, and it's not healthy. Our attitude needs to change.
I think it has been this way for a while though. My mom told me that when I was a baby she got a lot of pressure from my grandmother on my dad's side to not pick me up when I cried and to let me cry it out at night. Her best friend even helped her with me one day to see if they could get me to cry it out. (Apparently my son gets his stubbornness from me though because I didn't give up.)
Maybe that just happened to be in my mom's circle, but she said there was very much this idea that if you saw to your baby's crying too much that it would spoil the child.
eta - I also completely agree with you. Just wondering how long it's been that way.
I really blame our culture of "get back to work, mom and dad (also you're on your own)" for this sleep training phenomenon and the idea that infants should be sleeping through the night almost immediately because that's what's most convenient for mom and dad.
We have this idea that babies are just objects to be molded and fit to our schedules and convenience, and that they need to fit into the 'right' schedule ASAP. We seem to think that childbirth and having a baby are mere inconveniences that can be easily handled alone in a matter of days, then mom needs to be back to work, back to a regular schedule, back to taking care of her house, back to exercising, back in shape, back and ready for sex by the next week or so. And baby can be easily slotted off to daycare during the day so mom and dad can work, then trained to sleep all night so mom and dad can be productive at work the next day.
It's not natural, it's not normal, and it's not healthy. Our attitude needs to change.
I think it has been this way for a while though. My mom told me that when I was a baby she got a lot of pressure from my grandmother on my dad's side to not pick me up when I cried and to let me cry it out at night. Her best friend even helped her with me one day to see if they could get me to cry it out. (Apparently my son gets his stubbornness from me though because I didn't give up.)
Maybe that just happened to be in my mom's circle, but she said there was very much this idea that if you saw to your baby's crying too much that it would spoil the child.
eta - I also completely agree with you. Just wondering how long it's been that way.
Sounds like you can blame the Puritans and pioneers:
From the day of birth, schedules and strict discipline were of deep importance. This baby was to interfere as little as possible with your life. Affection was to be restricted, with care instructions more fitting a ficus than a child. From 1916's The Mother and her Child by Drs. Lena and William Sadler: "Handle the baby as little as possible. Turn it occasionally from side to side, feed it, change it, keep it warm, and let it alone; crying is absolutely essential to the development of good strong lungs. A baby should cry vigorously several times each day."
As the child grew, regulated contact could be tolerated. "At the age of two weeks, the child may be systematically carried about in the arms 2 to 3 times a day, as a means of furnishing additional change in position," is the precise advice of Dr. JP Crozer Griffith in 1900.
Even bowel movements were regimented. "Children under one year of age should have two movements of the bowels in the twenty-four hours, and those from one to three years at least one stool a day," wrote Napheys. Should the baby not conform to these healthy perimeters, the same books prescribed any number of enemas, draughts, and oils to make things more shipshape.
As for "crying it out," the advice of the early manuals was unanimous. A spoiled baby will be miserable its entire life, prone to hysterics and weakness, unable to cope with the life's hard turns. And the first and worst way to spoil a baby is to hold it when it cries. Per the Sadlers:
We run into many snags when we undertake to discipline the nervous baby. The first is that it will sometimes cry so hard that it will get black in the face and may even have a convulsion; occasionally a small blood vessel may be ruptured on some part of the body, usually the face. When you see the little one approaching this point, turn it over and administer a sound spanking and it will instantly catch its breath.
....
According to the CDC, in the year 1900, 10 to 30 percent of all American babies born died before their first birthday. They died from things we don't think about. They died because their drinking water was too close to their sewers. Because the cow's milk they drank was unpasteurized. They died of measles and whooping cough and all the diseases that now cause four minutes of hard crying in a nurse's office and a Batman Band-Aid, instead of death. That was the time these writers, and the mothers they wrote for, lived in.
They were frightened.
They didn't know why their babies died, or screamed, or sickened; and they clung desperately to anyone who claimed to have the knowledge to prevent it.
"We're not smarter now," said Dr. Apple. "We simply have more information. More knowledge is only more detail, but it does not give us the complete answer."
"Why do you think mothers were told not to pick up their babies when they cried?" she asked me. As a mother myself, I have always been astounded by my ability to stop another human's suffering with only my arms, and could not fathom any mother feeling differently.
Yet my mind provided a wordless answer, a picture, almost immediately. A kitchen at the turn of the century, a heap of soiled clothes by a washboard, a dead chicken waiting to be scalded and plucked, countless other children bringing their chaos and noise to their mother, a husband plowing far out in the back forty and a grandmother who stayed back east.
....
The second reason was what Dr. Apple calls "mobility." You no longer lived your whole life in the same town that your forefathers had founded and died in. You moved for better work, you emigrated west; you set up homesteads in places where your nearest neighbor was 640 acres away. Your mother and aunties weren't around to advise you. At the same time, your family was smaller than it had ever been, meaning you were less likely to have seen others care for babies.
Post by janetplanet20 on Mar 27, 2015 18:52:22 GMT -5
I don't like this at all and we did use CIO around 10 months. Our first pedi (left the practice shortly after my son was born) told us we needed to wake our son up to eat every 3-4 hours until he was 4 months old (which OMG was so rough since I went back to work at 8 weeks), so this really skews my opinion of CIO at 8 weeks!
Post by hokiegirl82 on Mar 27, 2015 20:52:34 GMT -5
The thought of letting an 8 week old CIO for hours absolutely breaks my heart. I am not anti-CIO, we used a modified CIO with DS to teach him how to fall asleep on his own, but even now at almost 10 months old he's usually up 1, sometimes 2 times a night. I am always ecstatic when he sleeps at least 5 hours, I can't imagine expecting 12 out of an 8 week old.