Controlled Crying & Crying It Out

These are both sleep training exercises that can be used when trying to get a baby into a sleep routine. Many people agree with them, one or the other and many more don’t believe in either of them.

Crying it out (CIO) is basically leaving a child to cry without going back into them and leaving them until the fall asleep.

Controlled crying (CC) is a sleep training technique where parents allow a baby to cry for increasing lengths of time until he or she eventually falls asleep. The parent will go in and check on a baby at increased intervals until he or she finally learns to self soothe and fall asleep without the help of a sleep prop or parental intervention.

I couldn’t bear the thought of using either of these techniques when Joshua was younger and I could never understand and still don’t, parent’s who use either technique on small babies. Both techniques are not recommended until a baby is at least 6 months old – even then I wouldn’t use either. As far as I was concerned I didn’t want my baby to become scared of sleep times, and over time we went from rocking him to sleep, to staying with him till he drifted off to being able to put him down sleepy and leave the room. It took longer than either CIO or CC probably would but caused both me and Joshua much less stress.

However after months of going to sleep brilliant something changed and Joshua would no longer fall to sleep, at ten months I made the decision that I couldn’t get into the habit of staying with him until he fell asleep – especially with a new baby on the way. So I decide to try out my own version of CC. I chose ten minutes and left Joshua to cry, and then went back in, lay him down and popped dummy in. I repeated this every ten minutes until he finally fell asleep. The first night took an hour and half and I sat outside his room crying, it was killing me. Listening to my baby crying is so hard, it just doesn’t seem natural. I came so close to giving in but was so glad when I never. My night four he only cried for ten minutes, and generally that’s as long as he cries for most nights now – usually just having a fuss and settling himself.

As hard as it was at the time, and as much as I felt like the WORST mummy in the world. I know it was the right decision and since doing it 90% of nights he sleeps all the way through – something he has never done before!
I would never chose CIO as an option as how would you know if your baby had a dirty nappy, or had been sick or anything if you just left them up there to cry until they fell asleep. It reminds me of that NSPCC advert ‘Miles has learnt that nobody comes whether he cries or not!” Breaks my heart!

So that’s my view on things...what does everyone else think?