Warning: Preachy, judgmental post below.
One of my favorite mommybloggers recently wrote about her six-month old son still waking in the middle of the night (from what I can tell, he’s only waking once- at 3am). She wants him to stop waking up so that she can get a good night’s sleep. She’s a working mom and also has a two year old, so her situation is much different than mine- I’m a stay at home mom who works from home doing odd things like sewing slings. The thought of dealing with a toddler and a baby at the same time literally makes me not want to have another one because of how tired I’d feel all the time. Seriously.
Anyway, so she asks for advice. And 50% of the advice she gets is to let her baby CIO (Cry It Out). I am so anti-CIO it scares me. I laid awake last night thinking of all of those poor babies who are left alone to cry while their parents put pillows over their ears or put them in a different room in their cribs and turn off the baby monitors so they don’t have to hear the wails.
Crying is the only verbal form of communication that babies have and they are being ignored.
One person even commented that she let her baby cry so long that the child ended up throwing up. The “concerned parent” she is, she asked her doctor’s advice and the doctor said that IT WAS OKAY!!!!!!!!!!!! What the hell kind of a medical system offers doctors with that kind of belief??
THROWING UP DUE TO EXCESSIVE CRYING IS NOT OKAY AND IS NOT NORMAL.
So, I wrote a quick reply and voiced my opinion that CIO is child abuse and that the person should seriously consider switching doctors and my comment was deleted. I was not very tactful nor political in my comment because I feel so strongly about CIO/Ferber methods that it’s hard for me to contain myself. It’s hard for me not to write line after line after line of curse words and insults towards parents who try to sleep train their infants.
Listen. Parenting is hard. Harder than you imagine it will be while your belly is growing or you’re even considering having a child. There’s one thing that you must understand: babies are not trying to inconvenience you. When they wake up in the middle of the night it’s probably because they’re lonely, wet or hungry. It’s not because they’re these evil little creatures with the goal of interuppting your REM sleep. They have basic needs that do not go away once the lights go off for the night, or when they reach 12lbs, like one mother in the same comment section wrote (on the advice of yet another doctor, go figure).
Sure, it can be frustrating to be woken up in the middle of the night- I’ve been there. Ash still doesn’t sleep a whole night through; he goes down at 7, wakes briefly once between 7-11, wakes for a nurse and pee on the potty at 11, and then another nurse at 3am, but he’s right beside me in bed and I just roll over and he latches on and five minutes later we’re both asleep again. And I’m proud to say that Ash has never, not ONCE, cried at night. Not when he was brand new, not at six months old, never, ever ever. We also do not allow him to cry during the day- there’s no need for it. If he starts to cry, I figure out what he’s attempting to communicate, fix it, and we go about our day. Why would I possibly let him cry? It goes against everything I am as a person and everything I am as an instinctual animal.
Letting babies CIO is BAD FOR THEM, physically and psychologically.
Research suggests that allowing a baby to “cry it out” can cause brain damage.
Some experts warn that allowing a baby to “cry it out” causes extreme distress to the baby. And such extreme distress in a newborn has been found to block the full development of certain areas of the brain and causes the brain to produce extra amounts of cortisol which can be harmful.
and
The pair examined childrearing practices here and in other cultures and say the widespread American practice of putting babies in separate beds — even separate rooms — and not responding quickly to their cries may lead to incidents of post-traumatic stress and panic disorders when these children reach adulthood.
The early stress resulting from separation causes changes in infant brains that makes future adults more susceptible to stress in their lives, say Commons and Miller.
“Parents should recognize that having their babies cry unnecessarily harms the baby permanently,” Commons said. “It changes the nervous system so they’re overly sensitive to future trauma.”
Please stop abandoning your children. Please attend to their basic needs. Please be patient with them and love them and stop ignoring them. CIO may “work” because the children give up on you. What are you teaching them? Love and nuture them, please stop treating them like inconveniences.
Then again, I co-sleep and that always gets wide eyed looks from the uneducated.
It’s sort of like calling formula “satanic”. 
Sometimes, parents have to make the choice to try certain things to solve problems that are incredibly individual, or to even discount possible solutions. I bet that Mom would try CIO for one night and realize how wrong it feels and that would be more effective than anything you could ever say. 
