Your comment shocked me, it shocked me so much to make this my first HN comment (maybe not the very first but it shocked me so much I am going against my „don’t get involved in discussions on the internet rule“)
I would like to give you a little background about my situation first. My first born is 2.7years old now. For the first 12 month of his life he cried. I don’t want to say he is a moody baby but he cried. For 5-7 hours a day every single day he cried. And one of us was with him for every single second of that. There was no evidence of any physical reason for his crying.
Me being a „nerd“ was devastated as their was no way to just follow a certain formula to make him stop crying. And we tried everything.
The only thing that finally made him stop crying after 12 months was … growing up.
We have been told to let him cry by countless of people, even experts. I was lucky enough that my wife did some research herself and convinced me that pushing through tough times and staying at his side, or to say it differently „hurt“ ourselves, is in the end far less harmful then possibly hurting our baby by letting him „cry it out“.
Seeing so many comments here advising and lecturing on letting them cry it out hurts when for me it feels like the lazy way out of a problem that will fix itself if there is no physical reasons for the baby crying.
And since people ask for studies and evidence I found a great comment on a study that tried to proof the opposite. It’s linking a lot of studies that show how bad the crying it out method can be: https://acamh.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/jcpp....
Thank you for the input, and for the link to the commentary. It certainly raises some interesting questions.
I'm glad there are people out there that still care more about the well-being of their children than their own convenience. "Crying it out" does feel like a lazy way out from my perspective. The fact that so many parents are willing to do it, and yet become defensive in discussions like this... "Oh, you've never been a parent, you don't know what it's like"... Well, nobody forced them to have children. I don't know what they expected when they decided to have a kid. It's a massive undertake, and requires almost complete dedication. Yet it's so easy to just have a change of heart, feel trapped, blame the child for being a child. I can empathize, but I can't approve. If you have a child, its well being is more important than yours.
there is a lot of culture behind this. friends i visited left their baby in a room crying while they were entertaining guests as if it was the most normal thing in the world. they were otherwise very loving and caring towards their children, so to me this seemed rather out of place. but it looked like that was just how they did it and i guess everyone else from their culture too.
i also think that many parents are being led to believe that letting the kid cry it out is for the well-being of the child. so some will do it even if it goes against their own feelings.
I would like to give you a little background about my situation first. My first born is 2.7years old now. For the first 12 month of his life he cried. I don’t want to say he is a moody baby but he cried. For 5-7 hours a day every single day he cried. And one of us was with him for every single second of that. There was no evidence of any physical reason for his crying. Me being a „nerd“ was devastated as their was no way to just follow a certain formula to make him stop crying. And we tried everything. The only thing that finally made him stop crying after 12 months was … growing up. We have been told to let him cry by countless of people, even experts. I was lucky enough that my wife did some research herself and convinced me that pushing through tough times and staying at his side, or to say it differently „hurt“ ourselves, is in the end far less harmful then possibly hurting our baby by letting him „cry it out“.
Seeing so many comments here advising and lecturing on letting them cry it out hurts when for me it feels like the lazy way out of a problem that will fix itself if there is no physical reasons for the baby crying.
And since people ask for studies and evidence I found a great comment on a study that tried to proof the opposite. It’s linking a lot of studies that show how bad the crying it out method can be: https://acamh.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/jcpp....