Have you ever wondered whether or not you are being a neglectful parent if you do not immediately attend to your child’s crying? It’s a fair question after all. I bet there are times when you feel convinced that your little one is manipulating you? The problem is knowing if your little one really needs your love and attention or if you should leave them to “Cry It Out” for a while.
If you identify with this scenario, then I know exactly how you feel. I used to suffer from this exact type of dilemma myself. In fact, my husband and I had many disagreements on the best way to deal with the protests of our first child. When I use the word protest, I am somewhat understating Oliver’s heart rending wailing.
One of things that I used to worry about was whether I was actually creating long lasting insecurities by not going straight to him. Worse still if you are anything like me, you may have wondered whether crying can actually cause physical harm.
Unfortunately, it is very difficult to answer these questions with a degree of surety as there are so many factors that can influence the development of your child. There are however two critical facts that you should consider carefully.
Important Physiological Facts
1) According to studies (Levesque et al, 2000; Luddington-Hoe et al, 2002), crying is physiologically stressful to a baby. Crying increases a baby’s blood pressure, heart rate, and cortisol levels.
2) Current research suggests that it is highly likely that environmental factors can have a direct effect on the biology of the brain. The human cerebral cortex adds a high percentage of its final DNA content after birth and it is quite possible that elevated stress hormones will have a negative effect on this development.
If you take these facts into consideration and combine them with the fact that, across the world, most cultures do not separate infants from their mothers, there are good reasons to not to leave your child to cry for long periods of time.
There is one other critical point that I would like to make and it is this. There are gentle, yet equally effective alternatives to “Cry It Out” type methods. These methods do not assume that the only reason that a child resists sleep is because of an inability to self-soothe.