crying it out

[metaphortunate]

Spend time around the hippie parenting areas of the internet, and you will run into the attachment parenting idea that leaving your baby alone to cry at all is a form of child abuse.

At first I thought this was wild-ass exaggeration. Now I think it's - these are all people with only one child, right? I mean, to even come up with this idea? Because let me tell you, when the toddler shits himself and starts to run around the house like a maniac giggling, I will be putting the baby down. And if that baby chooses to cry the entire time I am collaring his brother and wrestling him into the tub, then that is just what he will have to do, because I can't help him while I am dispensing justice and hygiene. I cannot have him strapped to my chest, not unless I want him being sharply kicked and having his poor little head shoved around by the large and active toddler making his very best effort to escape. Which incidentally wouldn't do much for the cause of not crying.

Comments

[princessofgeeks]

…I got nuthin.

Parent of two here.

[wild_irises]

I was once on a parenting mailing list--okay, I'm a voyeur, I know that--where there were some parents who seriously believed that you should give an 8-10-year-old a choice about whether to have a broken arm set (!), telling them it would hurt a lot now but be better later. I couldn't even stay on the list...

[boxofdelights]

The Taking Children Seriously people? I was on that mailing list when my kids were very young. Rage-quit after the second time I asked a question.

[wild_irises]

Yep. Taking children seriously sounded good...

[metaphortunate]

I really hope that was all thought experiments.

[dr_memory]

these are all people with only one child, right?

Not all of them, but there is a very very very high correlation, IME.

[lovepeaceohana]

Yeeeeeeaaaaaaah, I find it really difficult to keep hanging out in those kinds of spaces. I mean, I do consider myself aligned with attachment parenting, in that I did a lot of the stereotypical AP stuff - elimination communication, babywearing, bedsharing, (willingness to do) extended breastfeeding and baby-led weaning, etc. - but like, no, sometimes it's just not physically or temporally possible to attend to two children at the same time. And that sucks! But suckage is not child abuse, and it's - I can't deal with that, I can't deal with people who think like that.

You did the best you could with a crap situation, literally. Your toddler will be fine. Your baby will be fine. You're still a great parent.

[metaphortunate]

They both seem fine. :)

[khedron]

Oh, yeah.

While all babies are different, our observation that crying didn't kill #1 has helped us with #2. Maybe sounds callous, but it's true. And #2 goes to sleep vastly better than #1 -- whether that's nature or nuture is anyone's guess, of course, but it's definitely the case we literally couldn't devote the resources to getting him to sleep that we could with his big sister.

[metaphortunate]

And I feel bad about that! But that is the way it is. And I am comforted by seeing evidence of ways in which he benefits from having parents who from day one already knew how to feed, wash, rock, swaddle, etc. a baby.

[xiphias]

I state what I always state about these things. I know people who've raised kids, and been raised, bottle-feeding, extended breastfeeding, being fed on schedules, being fed on demand, cry it out, respond quickly, disciple by carefully explaining why not to do the thing discussed, discipline which includes SOME OF THE MILDER forms of spanking (we're not talking belts or anything here), and all sorts of things -- and they mostly all turned out okay.

Being unable to trust your parents, that screws people up -- and that seems to correlate with stronger forms of corporal punishment. But, I dunno. There aren't THAT many other things I can think of that really consistently screw people over. I'm sure there are some, but they're not coming to mind.

[wordweaverlynn]

This rings true for me. The perfect parent is not as good as the good-enough parent.

[metaphortunate]

I try to remember that kids have been raised in thousands and thousands of different ways and it's all seemed normal at the time.

[thistleingrey]

Yeah, even with one child, there are times when the child has to wait for good reason. That's how it is. I've made some effort to say so, even when my daughter was too young to respond, but e.g. she was left to cry during part of the 45 minutes it took me to clean up the translucent glass bowl she shattered by accident when she was nine months old. She cried for the first part, then was fascinated by the weird ritual mama did with the fuzzy thing and the wet cloth and the fuzzy thing (broom) again; it didn't even occur to me to try wearing her while seeking invisible slivers of death on my knees.

[jedusaur]

I thought the "cry it out" school of thought referred to intentionally leaving the kid screaming. I'm fine with letting a kid cry if there's a reason I can't be there right then (including "brief sanity break," although that one applies to me very rarely because I get to go home at the end of the day). But I don't think I've ever left a kid crying alone when I had the option not to, which is what I think most (sane) attachment parenting folks are against.

[lovepeaceohana]

I've mostly heard it referred to as a sleep-training strategy, i.e. that when your baby/toddler wakes up crying in the middle of the night you should just let them "cry it out" instead of going in to see what the matter is. Still, there are definitely some folk out there from whom it is relatively easy to infer that any sort of child crying that is not immediately tended to is abusive, which I think is what metaphortunate is referring to.

[metaphortunate]

Well, we sleep trained the Junebug, but that's another story. My point is, I totally support not choosing or wanting to let a kid cry if you have another option. But if you leave a baby to cry for twenty minutes because you think it's necessary for it learning to sleep, vs. if you leave it to cry for twenty minutes because it's safe and your other kids need your attention more urgently...makes no difference to the baby. I mean, either it's abusive or it's not.

[cereta]

Oh, God. I had one of those types accuse me of putting my baby in a cage because we had her sleeping in a crib.

There are serious class issues to tease out in the way that middle/upper-middle-class families have adopted practices born largely out of necessity and poverty and glorified them as "natural" while looking down on women who have fewer options* (women in poorer areas generally don't wear their babies for bonding and nurturing; they wear them because they have shit to get done and don't have playpens, much less daycare). I'm sure someone has already written about it.

*Note: I'm not talking about all AP parents, just the extreme ones who get self-righteous about it.