[NovaJehovah]

"And some of claims that a baby crying is dumping enough cortisol into their bodies it will permanently damage their brains is NOT supported by science."

This is misleading. You're correct that there is not conclusive scientific evidence either way, but there are decent studies that support the cortisol theory. Not necessarily that it will "damage their brains", but that cortisol levels spike during sleep training and remain elevated even after the baby learns to stop crying at night. We know that, in general, elevated cortisol levels are bad for humans.

The studies that claim to support sleep training are all terrible, unless there are new ones I haven't seen. The most-cited ones use self-reports from the parents themselves to measure "wellbeing" of the infant, which is plainly ridiculous.

[spamizbad]

I get the impression you're equating sleep training with the old fashioned "cry it out" method. We loosely followed the Karp method and had very little crying and a very happy baby.

[NovaJehovah]

In my experience, "sleep training" is just a more palatable euphemism for "cry it out". My view is that however you slice it, you are conditioning the baby that no one will respond to its distress.

I'm glad you feel it worked out well for you. I honestly hope it doesn't cause problems, because it's very widespread. Based on our reading of the available evidence, we weren't willing to take the risk. Our lives certainly would be easier if we reached the opposite conclusion.

[zamfi]

> In my experience, "sleep training" is just a more palatable euphemism for "cry it out". My view is that however you slice it, you are conditioning the baby that no one will respond to its distress.

You claim to be doing a lot of "research" in other posts but also drawing on your "experience" -- "sleep training" is not "cry it out", and in fact modern sleep training is explicitly about telling your child that you ARE going to respond to distress (and in fact, you do, at time intervals) but that being alone in a room at night time when it's time to sleep need not be cause for distress.

Whether it works that way is a separate question, but it is not a "euphemism".

Even assuming it is the case that cortisol spikes are long-term harmful (though it's unclear that sleep training causes a disproportionate amount of this), the balance of harm from sleep deprived parents to cortisol spikes from sleep training is also not obviously in favor of one over the other.

If we structured our society so that parents had more support when their kids are very young, we would not have to make these tradeoffs in quite the same way, which is the ultimate point of this piece.

> [Quoting another of your posts] > Like anything else in life, you can do a good job or a bad job at being a parent. If you're prioritizing your own convenience or ego or career over the wellbeing of your child, then you're a bad parent.

Sure, some people are like this, but few, and fewer still make a conscious choice here. Your consistent shaming in this thread of straw man parents who are prioritizing work over some critical aspect of their children's wellbeing, without recognizing the hardcore tradeoffs involved in "Western" society child raising, is unlikely to change anyone's mind.

Parenting in American society is damn hard. It's damn hard even without zealots who are so sure that they know the right way to do certain things -- that's why you're being downvoted, not because people disagree that you should "step up" and do what you can for your kids, but because they agree, and you're shaming them for it.

[NovaJehovah]

A 'euphemism', according to Merriam-Webster, is "the substitution of an agreeable or inoffensive expression for one that may offend or suggest something unpleasant."

"Sleep training", in all its forms, means ignoring your crying infant for significant periods of time until they get used to the idea that no one is coming and stop crying. Whether it's done in one night or dragged out over a longer period of time, the result is the same, and the method is more-or-less the same. But we don't call it "ignoring a crying baby training" do we? No, we made a nice and harmless-sounding name for it. There are even consultants you can pay who will tell you it's perfectly fine so you don't have to feel an ounce of guilt.

Fyi, I got plenty of upvotes too.

[zamfi]

I know what a euphemism is, I am telling you that the two are not equivalent -- "sleep training" in the form of, e.g., Karp, is not the same as "cry it out", does not involve what you say, and this is not a euphemism.

That said, given that you merely restated what you previously claimed without addressing anything I said except for the word "euphemism" -- and to be clear, I address the "ignoring" part in my post, which you ignore -- I really don't understand what you think you are contributing to this conversation.

Your opinion on sleep training is clear. Many people agree with you. And...what? Therefore, sleep training is bad and people who try it should be ashamed? Frankly that just doesn't follow.

[NovaJehovah]

> I am telling you that the two are not equivalent

Well, that's where I disagree. I think they are functionally equivalent.

> I address the "ignoring" part in my post

You address it by claiming that sleep training doesn't mean ignoring a crying baby. If there are sleep training methods that don't involve this, I doubt they would work with most kids. Realistically, if you are committed to sleep training, you're going to have to ignore some crying unless you have a really mellow baby.

> sleep training is bad and people who try it should be ashamed

Well, yeah. I get why people do it, but I think it's very likely to be damaging to our kids and our society. So I'd rather that people stop doing it. I know that plenty of folks have already drunk the kool-aid and are unlikely to be convinced (doing so would likely mean confronting some uncomfortable feelings). But there are sure to be brand new parents or soon-to-be parents reading this thread, and I'm hoping to convince some of them that there's a better way.

[plutonorm]

You have kids. You step up. Yes it's hard, but it's your absolute unshakeable duty to do your best by them. Putting them down to sleep away from you and then expecting them to suck it up and deal with it when they get distressed is one of the most idiotic things that I hear otherwise intelligent people say. To a child, separation from their parents is the most stressful experience possible because in the wild separation means death. What is the most dangerous time of day? The night time. So you compounding the most stressful thing you can do to your child by doing it at the most dangerous time. The idiocy of people beggars belief.

[zamfi]

> Putting them down to sleep away from you and then expecting them to suck it up and deal with it when they get distressed is one of the most idiotic things that I hear otherwise intelligent people say

This is exactly the kind of "common sense reasoning" put-down that makes parenting so challenging.

Do you actually know -- I mean, have actual evidence of harm? Obviously it "sounds idiotic". But bloodletting to reduce headaches also makes "common sense" -- or at least did pre-modern medicine.

The critical part here is that sleep training does not happen in the absence of other effects. If the alternative is heavily sleep-deprived parents, is a few nights of distressed sleeping worse than 3 extra months of extremely exhausted parents? To me this is much less obvious.

[plutonorm]

Fine, don't use common sense. My parents and my parents in law were against breast feeding. I mean literally against breast feeding. Why? Because psychologically it was impossible for them to even think that they might not have done the very best for their kids. You are probably caught in the same trap. And as the evidence comes in for sleep training or separating from your child at night, as it did for artificial milk, you will probably adopt the same psychological defence. But at the end of the day, these things are not going to hurt the average child. But we should have guidelines that improve the average outcome for the average child. And anything that deviates from what we have adapted to over millions of years is likely to be a bad idea.

[krageon]

> I mean, have actual evidence

If you go to a psychologist with a pretty broad spectrum of issues it turns out a lot of the problems are created when you are very little. An unsafe bond is hard to quantify and by stubbornly demanding that it is quantified I think it is more clear that you don't want to entertain the idea than that you are actually skeptical.

You already know you value the parents more than the child, and you more or less know what cannot be provided by the other party. So that's what you demand, and then when things turn out as you know they will you point at it and say "See? You're being unreasonable". That's bad-faith arguing.

[hombre_fatal]

You can't be serious.

People use your exact, extreme language to justify every other superstition they have about raising their kids.

[anomaloustho]

This sort of implies that all crying is the same. The data you can get as a parent is a lot richer than that. There is a difference between “stirring”, “moaning”, “calling”, and “crying”. There is also a question of whether you know in advance that your child has a high temperature, runny nose, ear pulling, diaper rash, etc.

Combining those factors allows for a much more nuanced approach than a simple, “crying == trauma” boolean.

[sanderjd]

Everything is trade-offs. Less consistent sleep (for both the baby and the parents) is also clearly problematic.

[NovaJehovah]

In my experience, babies will get enough sleep one way or another, with or without "sleep training", though it may not be on a consistent or convenient schedule.

Parents can easily get enough sleep as well. It's called "sleeping when the baby sleeps". Infants sleep like 15 hours per day, so it isn't hard. You just can't conform to any kind of a schedule--that's the tradeoff, not getting enough sleep.

[sanderjd]

I think you're wrong about the first part. It's probably right for newborns but not even older infants and it is definitely possible (even extremely common) for toddlers to get too little sleep if left to their own devices.

"Sleep when the baby sleeps" sounds good but is not really how sleep works; sleep quality is very sensitive to cycles and time of day (it's also a very personal thing, with big differences between individuals). It also doesn't work at all for working parents. And even in households where one parent doesn't work, the other one does, and it is important for both parents to be rested.

Of course you can pull this off, I'm not saying anybody is going to die or anything, I'm saying there are very real advantages to more predictable and consistent sleep. For us, we were very hesitant (or maybe just lazy) about sleep training, but our ~15 month old was noticeably happier after being able to sleep through the night.

[krageon]

> Parents can easily get enough sleep as well. It's called "sleeping when the baby sleeps".

I did this with a puppy (when they're little they'll wake you every 90m at night) instead of putting her into a cage and once you figure it out it's really not that much worse than sleeping through the night. Perhaps doing that for a few months is measurably different from doing it for a year or so, but I seriously doubt it as chronic sleep deprivation (which I would have had if I had not adapted to the schedule) starts being very harmful very obviously quite a bit before "a few months".