Infant sleep training news: 'Cry it out' does no harm
Infant sleep training study suggests a gentle approach to the 'cry it out' scheduling method does no harm. But it's not likely to end the emotional debates among bleary parents.
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Meanwhile, everybody points to research showing that their way is the best, and that other techniques lead to deep emotional, psychological, and potentially even physical problems in children. (Or parents.)
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Correspondent
Stephanie Hanes is the lead writer for Modern Parenthood and a longtime Monitor correspondent. She lives in Andover, Mass. with her husband, Christopher, her daughter, Madeline Thuli, a South Africa Labrador retriever, Karoo, and an imperialist cat named Kipling.
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Oh, and if you do this wrong your kid will hate you.
But today, a group of Australian researchers are helping us tired parents out. They published their findings from a longitudinal study of 326 children who were reported by their parents to have sleep problems at 7 months.
The good news: gentle sleep training, at least, does not have a negative impact on children. And, in the short term, sleep training can work to ease difficult bedtimes and night times.
In this study, half of the children were assigned a group where their parents were taught about soothing bedtime routines and two moderate “sleep training” techniques: controlled comforting, where you let babies cry for short amounts of time and respond at increasingly longer intervals, and that “camping out” method. Parents in this group could pick which sleep technique they wanted to use.
The other children were in a control group that did not use sleep training.
Now, 30 percent of the families dropped out of the study by the end of the five year research period. (I’m interested to know more about those folks.) But researchers found that among the children who remained, by the time they were six years old there was no significant difference between the control group and the sleep trained group in terms of emotional health or behavior, and no differences in the mothers’ levels of depression or anxiety. There was no difference in parent-child bonds.
Keep in mind: this study did not evaluate what have been called the “harsher” sleep training methods – in particular, the cry-it-out “extinction” method, in which the parent simply leaves a child to cry until he or she is asleep. Some sleep experts have called this method kinder than the graduated approach; others have warned that it causes stress and emotional trauma in kids, essentially teaching them that mom and dad won’t come to help.
That debate can continue.
RELATED: 5 top childcare options - value and cost, from nanny to day care.
Meanwhile, another tidbit from the research: sleep training, the scholars found, does work in the short term to help babies fall asleep more quickly and sleep longer at night. But in the long term? There’s no difference in the level of sleep problems among children who have had sleep training and those who haven’t.
A potential lesson in this for the sleepy parents: It will all be OK. Really.
Just try to keep that in mind at 3 a.m.
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