[afandian]

My parents' generation (in the UK) were physically beaten as children. It was a normal part of parenting and part of school.

My hope is that one day we will consider this emotionally abusive behaviour as seriously as we we now look at physical abuse. Though I don't hold out much hope. Especially as there are still some people holding out for the right to hit their children even now.

[sanderjd]

Comparing a 9-month-old spending 15 minutes calming themselves down before falling asleep to physical abuse is laughably absurd.

A big problem with this "debate" is that people conjure images of newborn babies being left to cry for hours, when what is actually predominantly practiced is older infants 6-12 months old being allowed to cry for less than half an hour.

After being fed and given a clean diaper and a safe place to sleep, being rocked to sleep just isn't a "need" for an older infant; they are crying because they want to be soothed to sleep. And it's fine to do that if you want to as a parent (which pretty much all parents do!), but it's also fine for them to learn to soothe themselves instead. It isn't "emotional abuse".

[afandian]

“A little rap on the knuckles” is less severe than full on beating, but it’s on the gradient of physical violence.

Teaching a child that their call for help will not be answered is unkind and damaging. And I’m not sure a baby has the same perspective on 15 minutes as the average adult.

I’m pretty sure most adults are walking around with unresolved emotional trauma issues that do not serve them, or those around them, well.

Again, on my opinion as a human. Opinions clearly vary wildly.

[jjulius]

>Teaching a child that their call for help will not be answered is unkind and damaging.

I just commented elsewhere and asked you what your understanding of "sleep training" or "crying it out" entails, but I think this answers it for me - you're ignorant to what actually happens.

You do not teach a child that their call for help will be unanswered. You observe them closely as they wake up, listen to how they're crying (each parent knows what their child's cries mean), listen for the highs and the lows of the crying, watch them as they try to learn how to put themselves back to sleep. But you ABSOLUTELY DO NOT abandon them. You go in frequently at first, and slowly extend the amount of time you give them before going in as "sleep training" progresses. You slowly give them more and more space to figure it out, but you still always go in at some point, when they need it. You are giving them the space to learn something while still being there for them.

To suggest otherwise, and judge others as abusive you have been doing repeatedly in this thread, is ignorant and uncalled for. It's not constructive, and it's rude.

[mlboss]

I think the articles talks about this: the child still wakes up in the middle of night but does not cry. Scientists are not sure what is happening, are they able to sooth themselves to sleep or are they still stressed out but are not crying. Because they know nobody will come for help if they cry.

[com2kid]

Everyone wakes up at night.

If my son wakes up at night and needs some water, he'll cry. Diaper change, cry. I have a nursery can and I can see him wake up sometimes, look around, and go back to sleep on his own, because that is perfectly natural.

W/o sleep training he wanted to be patted back to sleep everytime he woke up. That took 15 to 30 minutes, 2 to 4 times a night.

After sleep training, he sleeps better, and gets more sleep, and still has all his needs taken care of.

[Tams80]

And non-cranky parents who aren't bothering him every second he's awake.

[unity1001]

> I think the articles talks about this: the child still wakes up in the middle of night but does not cry

The child is avoiding crying in the absence of its parents because doing so would cause predators to find him before his parents. Evolutionary instinct. The parents will (hopefully) return from hunting & gathering eventually, to pick the child up.

And when the parents regularly fail to return or never return - yeah, one way ticket to a psychological disorder.

[Tams80]

Only with sleep training, the parents do return in the morning, so what's your point?

Of course a neglected child is likely to grow up with a psychological disorder. Neglected as in the parents (or at least some carer) not being there for days on end, or simply abandoning them. That's not sleep training though.

[afandian]

I apologise, I’ve not read literature on it, or the particular methodology you describe. I’m not judging you.

That said, whatever the merits of a structured approach, for every parent that diligently follows them, there are others that are less careful. And I’ve met them.

I’m responding to sentiments like “I just ignore them and they go to sleep eventually”, “don’t go and check, he only wants attention” from other parents, and other reports from someone I know who is a midwife.

The model we followed was “Hand in hand”, which resonated for us. And we were saddened that that philosophy does not seem to be very mainstream amongst parents I have met.

[awillen]

You're throwing around accusations of abuse despite the fact that you admit you haven't read literature on it. Why are you contributing your admittedly uneducated opinion on this? Go read some of the literature instead. Stop judging parents you've never met (and yes, despite you saying you're not judging, you obviously are). Just because something worked for you doesn't mean it works for all babies or families, and it's profoundly arrogant of you to assume otherwise.

[metabagel]

I think this is a dangerous practice. Read the literature on attachment theory.

https://www.attachmentparenting.org/ensure-safe-sleep-physic...

"Research shows us that an infant is not neurologically or developmentally capable of calming or soothing himself to sleep in a way that is healthy. The part of the brain that helps with self-soothing isn't well developed until the child is two and a half to three years of age. Until that time, a child depends on his parents to help him calm down and learn to regulate his intense feelings."

[sanderjd]

You shouldn't call people abusive in one breath and then try to say "I'm not judging you" in the next. It isn't credible.

[epolanski]

> Teaching a child that their call for help will not be answered is unkind and damaging

You don't know that, there is no evidence for it and it definitely depends on the age. Your post is drammatically different when speaking about a newborn, a 6 or a 12 or 18 months old.

Babies absolutely need to learn to self soothe and that crying won't always meet attention too.

The idea that unattending a crying baby here and there will produce long lasting trauma has to be proved first, it may actually be positive.

[laserlight]

> You don't know that, there is no evidence for it

Yep, I agree.

> Babies absolutely need to learn to self soothe and that crying won't always meet attention too.

How do you know that? Where’s the evidence for it?

PS: Not the one you’re replying to.

[metabagel]

There's plenty of evidence for it. Read the books by Dr. Bruce Perry. Read about attachment theory.

If you read his books, what you will also find is that children respond differently to trauma. So, some children may not be harmed at all by childhood trauma, while others may be deeply affected. The basic fallacy here is that children under the age of three can self-soothe. They cannot. This is all part of infant development.

[sanderjd]

Yeah listen, you're not going to convince many people that their two year olds are incapable of soothing themselves! "Infant development" does not describe children between the ages of 1 and 3, who are not infants.

[epolanski]

Babies after 12 months are no longer infants.

And yes, babies can self soothe, that's the entire point of the article we're commenting, letting them cry it out so they learn to calm themselves.

[unity1001]

> Dr. Bruce Perry... attachment theory

That one sure is an American cultural product that exists nowhere else. "Attachment is a problem" - here is a theory for it.

The entire human evolution is based on attachments created between the group members. From parenting to siblings to relatives to friends to everything else. The destruction of such 'attachments' causes social bonds to be broken and people getting isolated into depression. No wonder people call the US 'prozac nation'...

[sanderjd]

This is not that at all, and it is a diminishment of actual abuse to compare the two things.

[shaklee3]

unkind and damaging is the opposite of what the latest studies say. did you do your own studies?

[oskarpearson]

From the article:

> For others, it can be hours of crying, even to the point of vomiting (common enough to be a frequent topic of conversation on sleep-training forums and addressed by baby sleep books including Ferber's

The article also includes a reference to 2-3 hours.

[zeroonetwothree]

It’s a spectrum between “spend 24/7 attached to a baby” and “ignore them all night”.

Everyone thinks that the position even 1% different from what they adopted is abhorrent.

[sanderjd]

Fair enough. I'm not supportive of letting kids cry for 2-3 hours even to the point of vomiting. But even then, I'm sympathetic to it if the parents have tried everything else and they have a kid that just won't sleep. I'm not like an absolutist or anything, I just think parents should have space to try to figure out what works for their own families without random strangers calling them abusive.

[metabagel]

It's abusive to abandon an infant.

https://www.attachmentparenting.org/ensure-safe-sleep-physic...

"Research shows us that an infant is not neurologically or developmentally capable of calming or soothing himself to sleep in a way that is healthy. The part of the brain that helps with self-soothing isn't well developed until the child is two and a half to three years of age. Until that time, a child depends on his parents to help him calm down and learn to regulate his intense feelings."

[sanderjd]

And yet, sleep training is not abandoning an infant. Mind your own business and stop accusing strangers who you know nothing about of abuse. You're being an a-hole.

Edit to add: attachmentparenting.org is not an objective arbiter of the research on whether or not the dogmas of attachment parenting are correct! They have a dog in this fight...

[Auracle]

That's funny, my baby has been able to self sooth since 3 months...at least with a pacifier.

[unity1001]

[flagged]

[sanderjd]

This is a load of unadulterated bullshit. Kids cry all the time. It doesn't psychologically scar them for life. Take a chill pill!

It's actual insanity how people have come up think that every. little. thing. they do as a parent has these life long ripple effects. I'm sorry to tell you: these little details of parenting just aren't important either way. What matters is food and shelter and a loving home. Focus on those things for your own family and stop driving yourself crazy with these details, and especially stop getting so riled up by what other parents are doing, it's none of your business!

[aaomidi]

Yeah…cause they’re human and as the parent you’re their only human interaction.

Why is them wanting to be soothed seen as a bad thing? Like, what the fuck do we think these babies are actively scheming to find ways to get soothed?

I swear our brains are looking for adversaries in infants now.

Your infant child can not manipulate you. The brains barely understand action and consequence. Your infant child is trying to communicate its needs, and having it unmet with indifference is honestly hilariously sad.

[sanderjd]

It's not a bad thing, just like it's not bad for a baby to want to be spoon-fed. But part of growing up is learning new skills, like eating by themselves and soothing themselves to sleep. And a big part of parenting is figuring out the right times and ways to encourage this.

You know what has been a far more traumatic growing experience for every kid I've known than learning to sleep independently? Learning to use a toilet. Way more tears, way more "emotional trauma", but it's all part of growing up.

> I swear our brains are looking for adversaries in infants now.

Also, sleep training is not some new-agey thing that we've just concocted out of a recent adversarial parenting trend; if anything it's exactly the opposite, it is the focus on "attachment" and concern over the impact of things like sleep training that is the newer trend.

[metabagel]

Childhood trauma is reflected in behavioral issues at an older age.

"But part of growing up is learning new skills, like eating by themselves and soothing themselves to sleep."

Sure, but wait until they're three before you start sleep training. This idea that we need to toughen up infants is dangerous and frightening. They're completely helpless.

[sanderjd]

We've repeated ourselves a bunch of times but it irks me to let one of these nonsense comments go unresponded, so again: two year olds and one year olds are not infants and are not helpless. They can fall asleep independently perfectly well.

[mirsadm]

One thing that has always bothered me is parents trying to justify sleep training as a positive for the child. The reason parents do it is for their own benefit.

[sanderjd]

So, it's both, for real. Waking up and crying five or six times a night really isn't good for infants and is even worse for toddlers. They need to be well rested for all the learning they do during their days.

But it's also the case that anything that is bad for parents is bad for children. Especially when it comes to sleep deprivation. I'm completely convinced that in my almost-five year old's entire life, the most danger she has ever been in was when we had to drive half an hour to the pediatrician multiple times a week when she was a newborn and we weren't sleeping at all. I may as well have been three or four drinks in every time I drove to the doctor in those early weeks. But driving isn't the only problem. Parents are more irritable, less present, and just generally worse, when they aren't sleeping.

Sleep deprivation isn't just some funny goofy little thing that parents adorably have to deal with; it's a major problem. I didn't even realize this until I started sleeping after a year and a half and had the experience of "waking up" after a few weeks of good sleep. It's an actual problem! It's not just some preference that parents have to be able to sleep.

[TeMPOraL]

> But driving isn't the only problem. Parents are more irritable, less present, and just generally worse, when they aren't sleeping.

This.

It's hard to not laugh at a remark like "the reason parents do it is for their own benefit". Of course we do it for our own benefit. Because our benefit is the benefit of the child as well.

Temporary attachment or emotional issues, if they happen, can be fixed. Worst case, the parents may need some external guidance from a specialist in children psychology and emotional development. Keeping the parents sleep-deprived for months can cause them to become depressed (or exacerbate mother's postpartum depression - a very important topic that's not being talked about enough), or lose their jobs, or make them hate their own child, or hate each other and ultimately lead to divorce/broken family. All these consequences are orders of magnitude worse for future prospects of a child than anything a botched sleep training can cause.

[singpolyma3]

Just like sending kids to school

[TeMPOraL]

> Like, what the fuck do we think these babies are actively scheming to find ways to get soothed?

That's exactly what they do. Do you believe they're processing sophisticated ideas of love, attachment and comforting? That they're making a choice to ask their parents for soothing?

Infants are acting on basic instincts. With very limited but rapidly expanding space of possible actions, they're actively learning what behavior will lead to their basic needs being satisfied. They can and will overfit on whatever pattern they can spot.

> I swear our brains are looking for adversaries in infants now.

In operational sense, they are - they're fighting for resources for their own survival.

> Your infant child can not manipulate you. The brains barely understand action and consequence. Your infant child is trying to communicate its needs, and having it unmet with indifference is honestly hilariously sad.

Of course they can and will manipulate you. That's, like, parenthood 101. The whole set of biological and psychological changes parents undergo, the whole deal with attachment, is to make the parents vulnerable to the child. The brain of an infant may understand little at first, but it understands enough of "action and consequence" to start doing gradient descent and quickly learn how to get what it needs from its parents. Of course it helps that the parents want to fulfill their child's needs - initially, the kid isn't really learning how to get the parents to respond, but rather training the parents to respond to specific cues.

Eventually, children learn to speak, and that's when it's really clear just how devious and manipulative kids are. It's both amusing and rewarding to watch them push the boundaries of their intelligence to get you to react they way they want. Except in those cases where they succeed, and you only realize it moments later that you've been had :).

[metabagel]

But infants aren't capable of looking after their own needs. You're really mixing up different stages of childhood development.

[sanderjd]

No I'm not. I'm talking about older infants, older than about 6 months. They are capable of falling asleep independently. There isn't a "need" here. The idea is to take care of all their needs before putting them to bed, make sure they are fed, make sure their diaper is dry, don't do it if they're sick or in pain from teething; meet their actual needs. Being rocked to sleep is a want not a need.

[TeMPOraL]

> But infants aren't capable of looking after their own needs.

That's my point. They aren't capable of looking after their own needs. They need their parents for that. But what they are capable of is correlating their behavior with their needs being fulfilled, and doing more of the thing that correlates well with those needs being met.

[gregoriol]

What if it is part of learning?

[0xEFF]

Is it emotionally abusive to ignore a child's hours long temper tantrum after they're told they can't have ice cream for dinner?

[vmilner]

My Uk school was still doing collective punishment beatings (“Who spoke?” (No-one replies) (30 boys get caned) ) in the early 80s.

[LAC-Tech]

Well has it worked? Have you knifed anyone?

[dijksterhuis]

You cannot say “well you probably haven’t done this one, specific, highly unlikely thing for someone in the UK to do. So yeah caning probably worked, right!”

I haven’t knived anyone. I was never caned at school.

The absence of someone doing a thing is not proof of a thing doing what you believe it does.

[DieAgainAli]

You act like ‘back in my day’ there wasn’t any crime. If you look at murder rates in the UK they peaked in the early 2000’s. Maybe those abused boys were taught violence is the answer?

Letting your baby ‘cry it out’ is abuse in my eyes and you can sleep train them without doing this. With my daughter we soothed her in her cot instead of picking her up.

She will now link her sleep cycles and only cry when there is something wrong

[LAC-Tech]

Glad to see the UK is past their murder rate peak - what's the rate now, merely double what it was in 50s or the Edwardian Era?

[talideon]

The murder rate in the UK tracked the presence of environmental lead from things like paint, leaded petrol, &. The murder rate in the UK is now trending towards what it was in the Edwardian period, when it was introduced.

Beating children doesn't make them obedient and law-abiding adults.

[wolpoli]

> If you look at murder rates in the UK they peaked in the early 2000’s. Maybe those abused boys were taught violence is the answer?

There were earlier HN posts attributing the decline in the rate of murder rate/violence crime to countries phasing out lead-gasoline. Now we might never know unless we do a properly controlled experiment.

[talideon]

We've seen exactly the same pattern everywhere in the world when leaded petrol was banned. At this point, we've had our controls, because different countries scrapped lead at different times, and exactly the same trend has been observed. Think of the ones who scrapped it later as acting as the control group for those countries who scrapped it later.

Besides, the effect of lead on the human brain had been well known before leaded petrol was banned.

[thaumasiotes]

https://www.gla.ac.uk/media/Media_774797_smxx.pdf

> We perform the first meta-analysis of the effect of lead on crime by pooling 529 estimates from 24 studies. We find evidence of publication bias across a range of tests.

> When we restrict our analysis to only high-quality studies that address endogeneity the estimated mean effect size is close to zero.

> When we use the full sample, the mean effect size is a partial correlation coefficient of 0.11, over ten times larger than the high-quality sample.

Interestingly, I met someone on HN once who insisted that effect sizes are always smaller in larger trials because that's just the nature of reality. This does not say anything good about scientists' conceptual understanding of what they're doing.

[pc86]

Abuse in a school setting 40+ years ago is not all that surprising.

[vmilner]

I think early 80s is when it becomes tricky to _legally_ beat kids in schools in the uk. I suspect collective punishment was actually illegal long before that but it wasn’t tested in courts.

[aaomidi]

Physical punishment is still legal in school & home in ton of US states.

[jasonfarnon]

It is legal in every home of the US. It is legal in many states' public schools. We were spanked in Houston public schools through the 90s. And it was a lot milder than what my cousins in Calcutta got. Good stuff.

[Tams80]

If I recall correctly, it was illegal by the 90s in the UK. That didn't stop the odd occasion of it happening. The cane remained on the wall as a relic, but there was always a handy slipper around.

[somrand0]

well yea, because your parents were essentially slaves, the property of higher elite classes. I'm pointing to the class relationship, nothing specific to your parents.

I wonder if such practices were used in schools reserved for royalty and other nobles in the UK

[dijksterhuis]

It’s well known that “elite” schools such as Eton also used physical punishment in a similar manner.