Why one child psychologist tried the cry-it-out technique—and never looked back

Before I gave birth to my sweet little boy, I made so many

promises to myself about the kind of mama I would be.

Breastfeed for at least a year.

Only serve homemade,

organic, MSG-free baby foods.

Never touch a disposable diaper.

And the

attachment researcher in me promised never

to sleep train my darling baby.

Confession time?

I was only able to effectively

breastfeed for around 7 months. My kid’s favorite food is cookies. We use

disposable diapers every night for bedtime. And yes, after much soul searching,

I sleep trained my child.

When my son was born, he co-slept in a crib in the master

bedroom until he was six months old. For the first few months, we used the Miracle

Blanket as a swaddle, which remains one of my top five baby

must-haves.

At four months, we ditched

the swaddle because he started rolling over…enter the four-month sleep

regression. After a month of sleepless nights, I moved his crib to his nursery.

(I made the switch during the day while my softie of a husband was at work. I

could only handle one boy in the house being upset with me at a time.)

By seven

months, I was deliriously tired—and so was my little bundle, more importantly.

We had the comforting bedtime routine mastered, but he would wake up constantly

throughout the night even when he wasn’t hungry. I started weighing my options.

As a developmental psychologist, my first inclination was to

conduct my own in-home meta-analysis of every behavioral sleep training study

ever conducted to pragmatically weigh the costs and benefits of sleep training methods

on my child’s development.

After hours of scouring databases, I realized shockingly

few studies had addressed the outcomes of sleep interventions in infants.

One notable study that the American Academy of Pediatrics

cites when recommending sleep training methods found that sleep

training implemented at 7 months led to improvements in baby’s sleep, mama’s

sleep, and mama’s mental health as much as two years later. By age 6, these

children showed no discernible differences in their emotional or behavioral

problems, closeness to parents, or attachment security. Was this study

perfect? By no means. But after a little more research, I was finally ready to

give sleep training a chance.

For a month, we tried controlled comforting, in which we would lay our son down drowsy but not asleep. If he woke up, we would give him a chance to soothe himself. If he couldn’t, we would wait 2-3 minutes and then respond to his cries. We would hug him and offer a few words of comfort (without lifting him out of his crib). Within a minute, we would leave him, and if he continued crying (he usually did), we would wait to respond for increasingly longer intervals. After a while, we admitted that going in and out of his room every 5-10 minutes seemed only to upset and confuse our tot, prolonging his crying for hours each night.

We finally hit a wall where we conceded to try the cry-it-out method for one week and see where it took us. With this method, we would lay him down drowsy but not asleep. If he woke up, we would close our eyes, cross our fingers, and find our happy place. You can imagine there was as much strife going on outside the nursery as inside.

The first night, my tot woke up and cried for 45 minutes.

The second night, 20 minutes.

The third night? He slept like a baby and woke up happier than a mother whose baby slept through the night.

How has our tot fared in his subsequent 15 months?

He sleeps,

well, like a baby most nights, not

including a few anomalies due to travel or illness. And as for this mama? I am

getting the sleep I need to provide my child with the sensitivity and

responsiveness he needs during the day to develop and maintain a secure

attachment.

If you ask me, the key to a happy + healthy child is sleep…for

everyone.

Indeed,

healthy sleep patterns in infancy can help baby’s learning and memory, mood,

and physical growth.

Claims about the adverse

effects of sleep training on infants’ development just aren’t supported by most

current research—or by my experiences. My son shed fewer tears during those

three nights (and every night since) than he did during our weeks of denouncing

this “heartless” method.

But here’s the catch. Every child is unique. What

technique works for one child may be completely ineffective in another.

The

fabulous thing about parenthood is that we get to experiment with techniques

until we find the ones that work for our children…and when we have it all

figured out, we might even think about bringing a second life into this world—a

life just as unique as the first.