Absolutely incredible. Emotional state is even more powerful than logic. The baby knows the mother is right there and could still sense something was wrong.
Little children, babies included are pretty clever. Eye contact right after being born, tracking people, recognizing faces of close family at a few days to a few weeks.
I never get enough of observing these little minds at work and how they take in the world around them, fascinating.
Just a helpful tip to those without kids: Most parents prefer that you don't refer to their children as "it", even if you don't know the gender. Remember, you wouldn't refer to someone's partner or cofounder as "it". ;)
Which leads to the question - had this been repeated daily - can training make logic overcome the emotion at such a young age? Can the same situation be turned in to a "game"?
That's a terrible idea. It's not about the baby feeling unsafe, or drawing a bad logical conclusion; it's about the emotional need for love and affection and interaction.
If I had a friend who tried this -- who gave me a cold, non-interactive stare for two minutes on a daily basis -- I'd be profoundly disturbed. And I'm an adult. I can comprehend the rationale behind it; a baby can't. I can find other friends; a baby has one or two immutable social contacts. I have deep emotional reserves, and can maintain control through hours or even days of loneliness and boredom; a lonely baby is reduced to uncontrolled tears in minutes. I can take care of myself; a baby's only hope of happiness is his ability to trust his parents' faithfulness.
What would it be like? What would it be like if the one person in the world who keeps you emotionally healthy, whose faithfulness keeps you feeling loved and happy instead of profoundly lonely, the only person you really know and trust, the person whose interaction is defining for you what human interaction means . . . what would it be like if they regularly did this?
Unlikely. Emotions are hardwired into you, and at least all other mammals. It'd be like hoping to train yourself to not need to eat -- your biology doesn't allow it.
I don't understand parents who let their kids (e.g. <2 years) "cry it out" to learn how to self sooth, especially at night w/r/t to sleep. It's totally counter-instinctual and inhuman. Just look at how freaked out this baby gets, and she can still see her mom. Our son woke up about 8 times a night for 1.5 years, and we were always there for him. Luckily he's gone down to 2-4 wake ups a night, finally.
Stimulus/response. If crying results in a near instant response, crying becomes the mode of communication. I'd love to find the citation but studies we read months ago indicated to us that allowing a baby to experience a certain level of frustration can help it build coping skills - so we gave it a try (but not full on Ferberization, just 10 minutes here and there for the first few months, mostly during the day - at night we did the "pick up, put down" technique). My wife found it very hard but she was all for it, and as a bit of a Vulcan-esque personality, I could control the situation.
All babies have different temperaments, of course, but ours has now slept 7am-7am with only one wake up (for food - she goes back to sleep within 5 minutes) between 2-5 months (with only one nightmare week when we tried weaning too early - causes painful gas!). She is a very happy baby. We have teething due next though, I bet.. :-)
Something interesting has arisen from our technique, too. She's had to build a rich vocabulary of sounds. We can usually tell when cries are "real" or merely to communicate, and can "ignore" most of the superfluous ones. The result has been that she shouts or laughs for attention, and we respond to that immediately (as we want to encourage it). Over time, nearly all non-essential crying has stopped and been replaced by funny sounding "argh!" and "Wooo!" type shouts and calls.
To any (future) parents reading this who want to try similar techniques, I can't personally recommend it. All kids are different and what we've tried is very against the grain with the current common literature on raising a kid. Take what I say with a big pinch of salt - it just worked for us, is all.
This technique worked well for us too. Four kids all sleeping 12 hours/night within the first few months (can't remember how many, but 2-5 sounds about right)
Also worth noting: all kids are different and develop different skills at different ages. The variance on the age at which kids learn things like talking, walking, toilet training etc is huge, years sometimes. If your kids early at something, doesn't mean they're smart, and if they're later developing doesn't mean they're dumb.
"I'd love to find the citation but studies we read months ago indicated to us that allowing a baby to experience a certain level of frustration can help it build coping skills"
I hope that I won't do stuff to my child because I read somewhere that it might be good. Isn't there a chance to simply feel what is right?
The stimulus/response aspect is very interesting, though. Couldn't there other ways to untrain the "cry to get attention" behavior than letting the child cry out? Like responding to other cues than crying?
This just makes me think it might be interesting to program a simulation of such behaviors and look for equilibriums. Because it is not only the child reacting to parents, but also the parents reacting to the child, it's a complex system... Ah, wish the day had 48 hours...
I hope that I won't do stuff to my child because I read somewhere that it might be good. Isn't there a chance to simply feel what is right?
Sure, different strokes for different folks! I don't think anyone who always goes with their gut is wrong, but I also don't think experimenting within safe boundaries is a bad thing. I think everyone should bring their kids up in different ways - diversity of approaches is a good thing.
One thing I painfully recognize, though, is that I'm often wrong and my gut instincts are based on faulty underlying facts, so I'm quick to use other people's knowledge to either reinforce what I know or to change my direction. "Overcoming" certain parenting instincts in this way could be seen by some (and possibly rightly) to be risky - I just see it as an attempt to improve.
Watching a documentary about child rearing worldwide, we were surprised at how many different (and, to Western eyes, worrying) ways there are to raise and treat kids. As a planet, we do "ok." The nomads on the Russian steppes wrap their babies tightly all day and put them in a cradle on the back of a donkey for 8 hours a day..
Couldn't there other ways to untrain the "cry to get attention" behavior than letting the child cry out? Like responding to other cues than crying?
My reading suggests so, but that it's a lot harder and time demanding. The reason is that instead of giving zero response to undesirable behavior and a lot of response to positive behavior.. instead you're giving positive behavior to everything and need to give very strong and constant responses to the positive behavior to make it stick, as it were.
Dawkins has a pretty interesting theory in "The Selfish Gene". In it he talks about why little birds peep.
One conclusion could be that they peep because they are hungry. But another more interesting conclusion he makes is that they peep to attack predators thus forcing the mother to silence them by finding food.
The important part is to spot the difference between when they are really sad/afraid and when they are simply trying to get things their way.
On top of that some children like my son don't use pacifiers which makes it quite a bit more challenging to balance things out.
One reason: parents need sleep too. Some parents will be better able to care for a child if they sleep through the night, and after about a year, many kids are ready to sleep through the night themselves.
At around 1.25, we decided to see how our daughter would do if we let her cry a bit - we'd wait through 5 minutes of crying before going in. It was really hard for us all, but it took exactly 2 nights before she was sleeping through the night without crying.
It's totally ... inhuman.
Also, that's a little strong. At a point (e.g. 6 months), this is totally true, but at a point, families need to figure out what works for them.
The _kids_ need sleep as well. One thing we realized was that the constant waking up was not just difficult for us but seemed to put strain on the baby as well. After a usually very short adjustment (3 days or so) our babies would sleep through the night, and so would we, and the babies seemed so much happier and more rested during the day. So anyway I totally agree.
On another point, I would point out that in general adults are very, very attuned to having emotional responses to crying children (the younger the more powerful the response), whether we have our own children or not. That's why a baby crying on a red-eye flight can have such emotional reactions from total strangers (often negative, unfortunately). It's a wonderful human instinct that I think serves us very well in general. But those who aren't experience parents need to remember the following (_please_):
* Every baby has a different temperament and personality.
* Babies sometimes cry to get attention and not because they are actually in any way uncomfortable or scared. The different sounds are easy for the baby's parents to hear and difficult for other people to distinguish. (as mentioned, newborn infants are easier in that they always have a reason when they cry).
* They sometimes cry for a while and there's nothing you can do. Seems to always happen in public. Leg aches, colic, gas, etc.
If you think letting a baby cry feels inhuman, you wont believe what you see yourself doing in a few years' time. Raising a happy, balanced kid requires you to do a lot of counter intuitive stuff. It's worth it though.
I don't agree with that at all. In fact, I think the opposite is true: as parents we should trust our intuition with our kids much more, instead of what "experts" and other people say is best for them.
A great book about parenthood (if you have older children too) is "Hold on to your Kids" by Gordon Neufeld. Highly recommended.
I love it that you say you eschew the experts, then go on to cite a parenting book.
I've never read a book on parenting, nor do I read magazine articles about it, or listen to the so-called 'experts'. I just observe when things I'm doing are having a negative effect, and have to curb my own behaviour sometimes. We're all human beings. Sometimes it's hard to overcome your own faults to raise a better kid.
> I love it that you say you eschew the experts, then go on to cite a parenting book.
I knew someone would say that :)
Hold on to your Kids is not a parenting book though. It is a book about parenthood. It is not a book about what to do with your kids (when they misbehave or otherwise), but about who to be for your kids.
I think "sleep training", as it's now often called, is a better description than "cry it out", since training your child to learn how to put himself/herself to sleep whenever they have those brief waking moments in the night is the goal.
For us, our son would wake every hour in the night and none of us were getting enough rest. He was cranky all day and we were too. We finally started sleep training after about 4 months and quickly got him to start sleeping long stretches through the night. A year later, he's an excellent sleeper and a very happy child.
Overall, it really depends on each family situation and the child. If your family can bear 2-4 wakeups a night for over 1.5 years, then go with it. If the wakeups are making everyone miserable -- including the child -- then that's why many parents turn to sleep training.
In many cultures around the world children waking up during the night is the norm. Those babies are not cranky during the day. I wonder why in western countries people often say that waking up makes the child cranky (I totally understand it can make parents cranky). Did you have to get up early to bring the child to daycare so that they did not get enough sleep? Did you not sleep in the same room as your child, so you had to get up and walk there, so that they were disturbed before you were there? I am totally not judging, just wondering where the differences come from.
Baby's are attention craving machines -- all they want all the time is attention. If doing good things gets them attention, they'll do it. If doing bad things gets them attention, they'll do it. As much as you are training them, they're training you.
Most experts, however, do not recommend just letting babies cry it out. Sleep training involves going in a making your presence aware for increasing lengths of time. Giving a baby too much attention at night, however, will simply train them to wake up and get it. Although the one truth with babies is that everyone is different -- sometimes it does require drastic measures and sometimes you don't have to do anything at all.
You can go overboard with this. It depends on the age of the baby, too. A brand new baby obviously needs attention quickly after he starts crying, both to establish a trust and bond with his caretakers and because they usually don't cry for things like attention, they just don't get that concept for a few months at least, generally.
But someone close to our family has an almost two-year-old and has never tried to teach him appropriate communication methods or appropriate distance and separation, for that matter. It is painful to be around him. If the mom is more than ten feet away from him and they are in the same room he freaks out. He cries over such silly and needless things and he cries a lot because at home crying always results in instant attention and fulfillment. He cannot take discipline because he has never been disciplined.
In my opinion the teaching and disciplining needs to begin well before 1 year in normal cases. A 1 or 1.5 year old is more than capable of understanding the responses he receives to the behaviors he enacts.
Contrary to some of the comments here, here is a article with citations, that supports the view that crying babies need to be held.
http://www.awareparenting.com/comfort.htm
Just to add another opinion on this book, I found it very badly written. The points he makes are helpful, but it takes a lot of work to find them amidst all the contradictions and convoluted paragraphs.
Also, there are only a few pages on infants and sleeping, and the rest is for older children.
As someone a few days away from having his first child, this is pretty stunning. I don't want to say it's unsurprising, because it makes total logical sense. However, the speed at which the baby went from being in a happy mood to trying to get her mother's attention again was the most interesting point.
It must've been difficult for the mother to not respond, and I can't imagine the parent who doesn't love their child like that. It just makes child abuse that much worse knowing how much children need attention like that.
Father of a 2 year old here. It is really about still-face. Daughter won't allow me to change her nappy still-faced (notice this often when I have something else on my mind and try to do a quick nappy change expressionless). I have to acknowledge her and talk to her otherwise she'll cry.
One of the points the video was making is that the facial response is a very powerful form of interaction, and that very young infants respond to this.
What I'm saying is the video did not show conclusively that it is exactly because of the still face. There were 2 elements in play in the experiment: the still face and the mother not moving at all.
If the mom was moving instead but with a still face and the baby reacted the same way, then it is because of the still face.
gsk, however, attested that it is the still face (see his reply to my comment above).
I doubt doing it once matters, but isn't there something kind of bad about having a baby escalate signals until it cries, and then responding with attention as soon as it does? I guess there's no other way to do the experiment and then calm the kid down but it seems a little weird to watch.
I doubt doing it once matters, but isn't there something kind of bad about having a baby escalate signals until it cries, and then responding with attention as soon as it does?
Potentially, but not as bad as you'd think. Especially if it's inconsistent.
Most babies have no problem adapting to new routines or stimulus/response patterns within several days if you do it properly. This is what the so called "baby whisperers" and child psychologists do/suggest in situations where the parents have failed to encourage good behavior in babies and older children.
Consistently "bad" behaviors - such as overuse of a pacifier or other prop - are not hard to train out with the right behavior consistently given from the care giver(s). The problem, though, is that most parents cave in too often for habits to be resolved adequately (while allowing the original habit to maintain its hold).
Calming down a distressed baby isn't as unpleasant as it seems, by the way (sorry if you're a parent and know this, I'm just assuming you're not). My wife gets a lot of satisfaction from doing it successfully. The unpleasant times are when you have an inconsolable baby on your hands (that is, over 5-10 minutes of agonizing wailing) - but this is nearly always down to an underlying problem (in our case, reflux and gas).
It would be bad to do it a lot maybe. But a few times is not going to have any harm.
At worst it will teach the baby to cry right away when the mother does that.
Babies cry a lot, and people don't play with them constantly. A little more isn't going to harm them.
The times where there is a positive reactions far outweigh the negative ones here. Not sure if that was clear. I mean that when there is a positive reaction the baby learns from it. A negative one is mostly ignored as far as long term learning goes.
Babies cry a lot, and people don't play with them constantly. A little more isn't going to harm them.
I wish I could find the citation but my wife and I did a lot of reading of studies in the early weeks we had our baby. There were more than a few references to actually allowing your baby to be frustrated and upset from time to time in order to ensure they developed the skills to deal with a little frustration, rather than growing up to freak out at every tiny thing.
We're no child psychologists, but it's worked for us. Perhaps a few times a week when the baby was inconsolable, we'd let her "cry it out" (but not full on Ferberizing) for 5-10 minutes and then console her when she went into a quieter phase. Now, at five months, she's well adjusted (for her age), sleeps through the night, and deals with frustration pretty well. It could all be BS, of course, but letting her freak out from time to time didn't do any obvious harm, at least.
Experimentally confirming things you think are true is still science, especially if you can quantify the results precisely. And as he says 1 minute in, this experiment was first done 30-odd years ago, when scientists (perhaps obtusely) did not think babies interacted in a socially meaningful way.
I understand that. I can see how this piece of experimentation would fit into a greater project. But to produce this video and tell the world about it? Seems crazy to me.
