wow……..crazy

Wait

there’s some assholes out there just letting their baby “cry it out”?

what the absolute fuck?

It’s a baby. It can’t fix its own problems. And it does, indeed, have problems they don’t just cry for no reason. Best case scenario you’re leaving a kid terrified and alone during its most formative years, more likely you’re risking serious health problems or even death by letting it sit in its own filth or starve or whatever because you can’t be bothered to take care of your fucking kid.

If you’re not willing to respond to a plea for help from somebody who is absolutely defenseless, you should not be anywhere near an infant. Put it up for adoption, hire a nanny, whatever, just don’t force them to rely on you for anything.

Oh yeah, that comes from this mentality people that have no idea of how to be oarents fall.

The “I’m not their slave and I won’t let them order me around” kind of mentality.

It’s really really dumb

Worse- these types of parents believe that their children requesting any kind of support, or expressing emotional responses, is a sign of manipulation. They’re a fucking infant. They can’t manipulate the colorful blocks yet, nevermind a whole human person.

Letting babies “cry it out” used to be common parenting advice, specifically meant to help babies sleep through the night better. My mum was advised to do it, but I remember her saying that she really struggled with it (I’m not sure if she ever wound up following it).

It’s not just bad parents who have terrible practices. First-time parents in particular can be prone to following bad advice through fear, particularly if the advice comes from authority figures.

Oh yeah, totally. I was pointing out the logical flaw of assuming that kids crying was for anything that wasn’t immediately necessary (even if that immediate necessity is “attention”) and kids crying is “bad” and “manipulative” and should be “trained out.” A lot of abusive parenting in general is obscured by ignorance, especially of power structures. For example: telling young boys not to cry, not helping them do things and letting them get hurt needlessly.

I was a baby with a lot of health problems (surprise!) who cried a lot, and the health provider that used to come to our house (a midwife I think) to see how my mother was doing, once told her to put me in the garage to let me cry myself out to “show the baby you won’t be dictated to”.

My mother never followed through with that particular suggestion, but the one time she let me “cry myself out” alone through the night on the advice of the midwife, she opened the nursery door to find me floppy and unresponsive. I was rushed to the hospital where I stayed for some weeks due to a viral infection that ravaged my immune system. After that my mother never let one of us “cry it out” ever again, despite the fact that doctors, nurses and midwives told her to do it again with my much sicker and disabled younger brother.

So yea, it’s ingrained in the system, particularly with older people who were raised by people who were also raised by people who believed that too much affection would “spoil moral character”. And it is some bullshit.

Also just to add, if you are feeding formula to your baby? Thank you for taking care of your child and making sure they get food. Breastfeeding while beneficial for some reasons, is not the only correct way to take care of baby, and people need to stop shaming parents for not breastfeeding. That shit is hard for some people, it can hurt and cause infections and the pressure they get put under to persevere with it to the point of drawing blood is horrible.

Y’all should just know that these recommendations are not a thing of the past. Parents are being told by their health care providers that they need to teach their kids to “self soothe” by leaving them to cry it out. RIGHT NOW. TODAY.

Also some mental health professionals are saying the same, but NOT because there is any research to back it up. They say it because it’s what they did or what was done to them.

The research is overwhelmingly in favor of responding to a child’s needs at night- EVEN WHEN THEY ARE NO LONGER BABIES. Nighttime is scary for small people. They NEED their caregiver. Emotional comfort is a NEED. A requirement for healthy brain development. There is a reason your instincts are screaming at you to respond to your baby. Don’t let fools who can’t be bothered to read a peer-reviewed article tell you to ignore your baby or your instinct to care for them.