Excerpts from The Sleepeasy Solution No-Cry Versus Crying It Out Most parents wanting to make changes with their child's sleep have heard all the debates about allowing a child to cry. This has led to a lot of confusion. Some of the methods that promise "no-cry" solutions suggest to parents that their child wonÆt ever cry. The idea is that being ôgentler and more responsiveöùcontinuing to soothe your child by patting, picking her up, holding her hand, and the likeùmeans that she is less traumatized. Ironically, though, parents often report that the child still cries even while they continue to attend to her; all children protest change, and the way they let us know they don't like the change is to cry. As important as it is for parents to express love to children through physical touch, and as illogical as it may seem that doing so while helping a child learn to sleep is counterproductive, it is indeed the parent's touch that can exacerbate a child's frustration in this scenario. The result? The child often continues to struggle with sleep, usually for weeks or even months, because she is not being allowed to learn how to soothe herself. With older children, using touch can be especially detrimental, as it tempts them to continue testing limits with you, to keep pressing until you cave in and help them to sleep. WeÆve found that when using these kinds of "hands-on" methods, parents often give up on sleep learning because it takes so long to actually get better sleep that the process itself becomes exhausting. On the other end of the spectrum are the experts who suggest that the fastest way to help a child to sleep is to allow him to "cry it out" in other words, shutting the door and leaving your child completely alone, crying, for as long as it takes him to fall asleep. Also known as full extinction, this method actually does work, and sometimes quite quickly, although we have heard stories of children who have cried for as long as several hours at a stretch on the first night or two, perhaps bewildered and frightened because the usual helpers (namely, you) have disappeared. The idea of a child alone in the dark, crying inconsolably, doesnÆt sit right with most parents, and it doesn't sit right with us, either. It seems unnecessarily hard on both parents and child. We think experts on both ends of the spectrum are well intentioned, but we also believe that the so-called no-cry solutions focus too much on the parent's and child's emotions and not enough on the necessary conditions for learning, and that the extinction methods focus too much on the child's learning and not enough on the emotional side of sleep learning. This is how we arrived at what we call the "least-cry" approach. The "Least-Cry" Approach So if giving your child too much help makes her cry harder and longer, and giving her too little help makes parents (and possibly the child) feel uneasy and overwhelmed, what's left? Finding a balance between allowing your chil Excerpted from The Sleepeasy Solution: The Exhausted Parent's Guide to Getting Your Child to Sleep from Birth to Age 5 by Jennifer Waldburger, Jill Spivack All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
