[conqueso]

The fact that this is so commonplace in my culture (USA) is frustrating and enrages me. As a parent, it is your evolutionary instinct to comfort a crying infant. They are quite literally helpless and look to caretakers for all their needs. There's a deep seated biological reason it feels bad to ignore it. The fact that it is so uncommon in other cultures should make this obvious. What are the odds that the rest of the world and entire history of humankind were mistaken the whole time, until some behaviorists came along and figured it all out in the last century? Talk about infants having "attachment issues" makes my blood boil. They are supposed to be attached to you. It is very much possible to co-sleep and then gradually transition them to their own bed. Yes, it is frustrating and will interfere with your sleep. This is one of the many sacrifices of parenthood.

[lolinder]

This is the kind of "it worked for my kid" bullshit that drives me up the wall.

With my oldest we bought into comments like this and tried to always comfort him when he was crying. He would not stop crying. We stayed up with him an absurd amount of hours trying every idea in the book to soothe him to sleep and nothing worked. He was probably getting 6 hours of sleep a day at a time when he was supposed to be sleeping 18. He lost a lot of weight and we were scared and exhausted.

After a few weeks of that my wife finally put him into his bassinet and stepped away. She sat there next to his crib crying with him for 5 minutes, and then he fell asleep and slept for the longest he had in his life. That moment was the turning point from weight loss to weight gain and from barely sleeping to sleeping normally. In spite of all of our worries that something was terribly wrong, all that was required was to let him be. He's now 3 years old and still hates to sleep, but he's as healthy as any other kid both physically and emotionally.

My only advice to new parents today is to accept what everyone else says as well intentioned and then do what works best for your kid. Every child is different, and people who try to claim that their method is the only humane way to treat a kid need more exposure to the real world.

[detritus]

The only good advice for a new parent, I think, is to ignore everyone else's advice. I appreciate the circularity of this advice.

[remote_phone]

100% correct. The baby-rearing book industry is a fraud. They claim “well the average baby does X, Y, Z” but they don’t tell you that the standard deviation is huge. New mothers like my wife were stressed beyond belief because our kid only slept 10 hours and ate twice as much as other kids. She was convinced there was something wrong until I proved to her that he was within the standard deviation of normal.

Do what feels right for your child. No two children are the same, even twins. Infants are very resilient so don’t worry you’re going to scar or damage them. They generally won’t unless you are truly abusive.

[alt227]

This is so true. Nothing worked to get my daughter to sleep nights until we finally bit the bullet and stepped away for 20 mins and let her cry out. Every night since then she has slept all night long.

Every child is different which is why parenting is not an exact science. Try everything, something will work!

[conqueso]

You're absolutely right that every baby has different needs and I'm glad to hear that you figured out what's best for yours. It was not my intention to suggest that every baby should co-sleep - I meant to address the very commonplace (IMO misplaced) fear that if they do, then they will never leave their parents' bed and develop independence. There are obviously some babies who are ok or even better off sleeping alone. My frustration is with the mainstream acceptance that this is The Proper Way - to the point where families are leaving infants screaming for nights on end in order to "train" them.

[ineptech]

That evolutionary instinct came from a time when humans lived in communal support networks and new parents had help from extended family, and does not translate well to a world where Mom has to work 9-5 in an office a few months after birth. You might as well express shock that suburbanites don't supplement their diets by foraging for fruit and mushrooms.

Besides, it's not like parents 10K years ago had the option to let their babies cry it out in a separate room with a noise machine, and evolution selected against it because co-sleeping babies reproduced more. "Babies cry because they need to co-sleep or they will suffer some serious problem" sounds reasonable to me, but so does "Babies cry because it gets them more nutrition by keeping Mom so sleep-deprived that she delays her next pregnancy." Making just-so stories about behavioral evolution is dubious, the bar needs to be higher than just sounding plausible.

[omnibrain]

> a world where Mom has to work 9-5 in an office a few months after birth

That's a cultural problem itself.

[burnished]

My favorite is “babies cry because the quiet ones got forgotten”

[thaumasiotes]

> so does "Babies cry because it gets them more nutrition by keeping Mom so sleep-deprived that she delays her next pregnancy."

Babies do delay their mothers' next pregnancy.

But sleep has nothing to do with it. And really, neither do the babies. Nursing mothers inhibit their own pregnancy; that is why the normal interval between births is two years instead of one year.

[dinkumthinkum]

I wonder if many people realize mortality rates were much, much higher in antiquity and prehistoric times.

[awillen]

It's astounding to me that so many people on HN, a place where folks generally profess to be driven by science and data, are in this thread just casually throwing around anecdotes and comments about evolutionary instinct while completely ignoring the actual science and data. Doubly so when so many of the comments are pretty vicious towards people who sleep train their babies.

[Aeolun]

> You might as well express shock that suburbanites don't supplement their diets by foraging for fruit and mushrooms.

We do forage for fruits and mushrooms. We just forage inside different locations :)

[anothernewdude]

> You might as well express shock that suburbanites don't supplement their diets by foraging for fruit and mushrooms.

What person in the suburbs doesn't have a veggie garden?

[0xEFF]

It's curious years of good nights of sleep and a happy child enrages you.

We sleep trained our son at 7 months. He cried for 90 minutes the first night, then slept soundly until 7 am. The second night he cried for 45 minutes then slept until 7 am. He didn't cry the third night. Every night since he's slept peacefully from 8 PM until 7 AM and asks to go to bed when he gets tired. He's happy during the day unless something obvious is distressing him. Most notably he's happy and peaceful from 5 PM until 8 PM when I see other parents suffering from witching hour and unexplained melt downs.

Isn't a few hours of discomfort in exchange for years of good sleep and happiness a good trade off?

[locusofself]

We had the exact same experience. A few nights of crying (we didn't totally abandon her, just a did a peek in and say goodnight again (no picking up the baby) after 5 minutes of crying, then 10, then 15, etc) for a few nights. Daughter has slept through almost every night since then, she just turned 4.

Sleep training (which involved some degree of "cry it out") was a life saver for us.

[AuryGlenz]

I did it at 3 months. I did it because my wife couldn't handle it, and she had gone back to work. The only reason I did it was because our baby wouldn't let us put her down a lot of the time. She'd sleep just fine in our arms...and then we'd put her down and she'd instantly cry. It was...stressful.

It (largely) took one freaking day. One day's worth of naps. She didn't even cry, just "cried out" to be held. First a few minutes, then 5, and she didn't reach 10. To our utter amazement, she largely stopped waking us during the night. I was not expecting that at 3 months.

...I did kind of miss our late night "well, might as well turn on the TV and watch Star Trek" times together.

I've had people get judgmental when I've explained that process, but I often hear parents that have their two year olds waking up in the middle of the night for feedings. That's utter insanity.

[lazide]

In my experience, when someone thinks they should be able to do it, but can't do it, and suffers from the consequences of that - you'll get that kind of reaction. Not saying it's what's happening here, but I've seen it a lot.

Difficulty getting themselves to get their kids vaccinated (the screaming or crying is hard!) is a big factor behind the antivax movement, IMO.

[conqueso]

What enrages me is how it's become accepted as 'the right way' for parents in my culture, along with other "techniques" like feeding schedules, where many people end up essentially starving their child without realizing it, and then wonder why they can't sleep through the night. What I know to be true is that infants are completely dependent on their caretaker/s, and they cry to communicate what they need when they need it. Ignoring this feels wrong to me - so I don't do it. I understand that different families have different needs, and that work schedules make things more difficult than they were in the past when children were raised communally. Every family needs trial and error to figure out what works for them, and yes some infants will sleep better alone. What I take issue with is the industry around this that has convinced what seems like most parents that this is The Best Way.

> Isn't a few hours of discomfort in exchange for years of good sleep and happiness a good trade off?

It could be - that's a decision for each family to make. I will point out that many families think their baby is sleeping through the night - when what's really happening is they are still waking up repeatedly but have given up on crying (accepting that nobody will come to help them).

[ak217]

Your comment and others in this thread illustrate a different problem. Discourse around this topic (and some other parenting topics like breastfeeding) is out of control and not recognized as such. Regardless of your experience, it's not your place (nor anyone else's aside from maybe their physician), to tell parents what to do - and most of the time these admonitions are misinterpreted anyway because you're trying to boil down a complex set of behaviors and constraints to a rule that you propped up using some moral framework that you religiously believe in. People may well try to apply your rule in a different set of circumstances and get disastrous outcomes. To be clear, there are plenty of irrationally strong opinions on the opposite side of each of these issues too.

The researchers in the article were conducting an actual RCT, they are the only ones who should be speaking to this. Anyone else's anecdotal opinion should be discounted just as much as things like religious fundamentalist views on contraception.

Just let parents be. Stop with the admonitions. If something worked well or poorly for you, you're free to relate that without passing judgment.

[gsinclair]

Your comment is excellent. But I think GP’s comment is fine too. It’s a strongly held opinion, fairly well expressed. I didn’t really read it as an admonition. Sure, some people may not like strong opinions on this topic, but on HN I like to read them, no matter the topic.

Anyway, my charitable reading of GP is not that parents should or shouldn’t do anything in particular, rather that the child’s needs, as expressed over a very long time, should not be forgotten just because we live in different times.

[eslaught]

In case it's not obvious to everyone reading here, no one recommends using the cry it out method on infants younger than six months. For younger infants, you should always respond as quickly as possible. Our doctor recommended that we have at least one person sleeping in the same room, but in a different bed, for the first six months. Then we gradually transitioned to allowing him to put himself to sleep, and I finally stopped sleeping in the same room around 11 months. For us, this worked wonderfully. My wife hated it, but that was its biggest downside. Almost overnight, it led to better sleep for everyone involved and the kids have never had attachment issues.

I have spoken extensively on this topic with a variety of practioners, and I've heard plenty of horror stories coming from the cosleeping camp. Learning to sleep by yourself is an important skill, and some parents don't realize they need to teach it. This leads some children to basically never learning, since it gets harder as they get older. There really is a golden window of opportunity (for learning good sleep habits), and while it's not as narrow as some make it out to be, it's not wide open either.

But don't take my word for it. Talk to your doctor and partner and figure out what works for you. And then be consistent about it.

[clcaev]

I think missing a "window of opportunity" with kids "never learning to sleep by themselves" is dubious. Those approaching adolescence develop quite strong need for personal space, eventually. They start rejecting parental company, instead preferring to be alone or be with their peers.

I have one data point to share. An eight year old child decided one day, rather abruptly, that they were "done" with cosleeping and wanted to be in their own room, in their own bed, by themselves. And that was that.

[awillen]

> In case it's not obvious to everyone reading here, no one recommends using the cry it out method on infants younger than six months.

This is wrong. Various methods recommend starting as early as four months (and some recommend a less-strict version that starts earlier but only leaves children to cry for a shorter period of time before coming to get them, as opposed to fully crying it out).

1. https://www.parents.com/baby/sleep/basics/the-ferber-method-...

2. https://www.healthline.com/health/baby/cry-it-out-method

[rgbrgb]

Our doctor (Kaiser) said 4 months fwiw.

[naasking]

> What are the odds that the rest of the world and entire history of humankind were mistaken the whole time, until some behaviorists came along and figured it all out in the last century?

There are many cases where all of humanity has been doing something that we only recently decided was wrong. For instance, slavery.

Certainly the odds aren't good that this is true of everything humans do, but the odds that some of the things we do fall into this category is 100%.

Edit: also, don't be so judgmental. Behaviours are environmental adaptions. In the Western world, mothers typically work 9-5 like men, so of course in cultures where women don't have this constraint they'd be shocked at our behaviours. Humans are adaptable however, and constantly coddling your fearful infant made sense when there were dangers everywhere. In our society's we're pretty safe in historical terms, so it could just be that babies cry because they're instinctively afraid until they learn they're safe when nothing happens to them after a few nights, and then it stops. This actually seems to happen in a lot of cry-it-out cases.

[kaitai]

There is way too much romanticization of a false past here in this larger HN discussion. Yeah, sleep patterns were different, and many people slept with their infants. Infant mortality was also higher, as was maternal mortality, and corporal punishment was common. Sleep-deprived women with piles of children were not spending loving moments staring into their babies' eyes; they were smacking the slightly older children on the back of the head to hurry up and take the chicken feed out and slop the pigs. From my own family histories, I know that babies were often ignored, because at some point having a 1/3 of your babies die means you just don't invest very much emotional energy in them anymore. Very young children were tied to furniture to keep them out of trouble. By age four, some were at work (although the average age to start work in Victorian England was about 10, and the Factory Act came into force to regulate labor conditions for 9-13 year olds). Wet nurses were common, and in parts of England and France in the 1780s for instance it was extraordinarily common to simply ship your baby out to the country so you could work or maintain your aristocratic figure (see references at https://www.geriwalton.com/breastfeeding-or-nursing-with-wet... for instance).

For my own part, we did some version of sleep training (checking every 5 min until crying stopped). This was overall extraordinarily effective. The reassurance that we're not leaving, we're coming back -- quite important. But as important: the discovery that the child in question doesn't like rocking, bouncing, white noise, or any of the other interventions that are billed as crucial. Leave that kid alone for 4-12 minutes? Asleep. Rock/bounce/white noise? Awake for hours. Why torture the child to satisfy someone else's interventionist idea of good parenting?

Every kid is different. And not every cry needs intervention. This kid cried every time a fart came. At some point you just need to learn the world won't end if you fart, and that is simply gained by experience, not mom or dad rushing to reassure and making a big deal of every fart.

[bawolff]

> There are many cases where all of humanity has been doing something that we only recently decided was wrong. For instance, slavery.

Not really comparable because we decided it was morally wrong, not that we were wrong about its effects. Its not like humanity used to think slavery was good for the slave.

[thewhitetulip]

Dude, only Europeans had slaves right? It is not like the entire world had them.

In fact the word slave originates from Slavic people.. I don't think Asians ever had slaves in the history.

The OP comment said " what are the odds that the rest of the world was wrong for a millenium and Americans figured it out in 100yrs"

Edit: damn. non European had slaves. Didn't know it before. Wasn't definitely part of the history taught in schools though.

OP is right though. Throughout Entire history people had slaves until it was abolished.

[jasonhansel]

> It is very much possible to co-sleep and then gradually transition them to their own bed.

Isn't co-sleeping (as in bed-sharing) discouraged in the US, at least for newborns, because of the risk of SIDS?

To quote the AAP:

> AAP recommends that parents sleep in the same room – but not in the same bed as a baby, preferably for at least the first six months.

Source: https://www.aap.org/en/news-room/news-releases/aap/2022/amer...

To quote the CDC:

> Sharing a room with your baby is much safer than bed sharing and may decrease the risk of SIDS by as much as 50%.

Source: https://www.cdc.gov/reproductivehealth/features/baby-safe-sl...

From a recent meta-analysis:

> The combined OR for SIDS in all bed sharing versus non-bed sharing infants was 2.89 (95% CI, 1.99-4.18).

Source: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21868032/

[XorNot]

SIDS however is probably genetic and little we do has made a difference (for example, when I was a baby the advice was to sleep children on their stomachs - it's literally the opposite now)[1]

[1] https://www.schn.health.nsw.gov.au/news/articles/2022/05/wor...

[ghostpepper]

I am not an expert but I think there are ways to safely co-sleep, but chronically sleep-deprived parents tend to not be able to follow the rules consistently

[AuryGlenz]

As is sleeping on their stomachs, and most babies really don't like to sleep on their backs. It's no wonder parents have issues...and no wonder many babies have the back of their heads flattened.

For what it's worth I agree cosleeping is (in general) quite dangerous, but I do wish all of those recommendations weren't put into place at the same time. It'd be nice to know how much back sleeping helped with SIDS vs cosleeping vs no pillows/blankets/etc.

[encoderer]

For my second kid it worked wonderfully. There was one hard night. After that he had, for the first time in his young life, the ability to put himself back to sleep at night when he woke up. That was a gift for him as well as us. We used the Ferber method.

[Unbeliever69]

Back in the 90s my son REALLY struggled getting to sleep on his own. The only way to put him to sleep was to rock him and hope he didn't wake up while you were putting him down. This lasted for almost a year. At wit's end, a friend loaned us a VHS tape about an episode of 60 Minutes that advocated "crying it out." It was a life saver! Within a few nights he was finally sleeping through the night. I'm not going to lie. Those nights were pretty difficult, especially for my wife. Luckily, my daughter didn't have that problem!

[GatorD42]

The article states no long term negative effects have been found, compared to positive short term findings. There’s been a wide range of child-rearing practices across cultures and history, including infanticide. Probably no culture has gotten it exactly right, but this practice is not that far outside the norm as other practices from other cultures.

[unity1001]

> The article states no long term negative effects have been found

The generations that have been neglected in this way have not reached their later ages en masse. Of course there would be no negative effects. That aside, repressed psychological damage is still damage.

[afandian]

My parents' generation (in the UK) were physically beaten as children. It was a normal part of parenting and part of school.

My hope is that one day we will consider this emotionally abusive behaviour as seriously as we we now look at physical abuse. Though I don't hold out much hope. Especially as there are still some people holding out for the right to hit their children even now.

[sanderjd]

Comparing a 9-month-old spending 15 minutes calming themselves down before falling asleep to physical abuse is laughably absurd.

A big problem with this "debate" is that people conjure images of newborn babies being left to cry for hours, when what is actually predominantly practiced is older infants 6-12 months old being allowed to cry for less than half an hour.

After being fed and given a clean diaper and a safe place to sleep, being rocked to sleep just isn't a "need" for an older infant; they are crying because they want to be soothed to sleep. And it's fine to do that if you want to as a parent (which pretty much all parents do!), but it's also fine for them to learn to soothe themselves instead. It isn't "emotional abuse".

[0xEFF]

Is it emotionally abusive to ignore a child's hours long temper tantrum after they're told they can't have ice cream for dinner?

[vmilner]

My Uk school was still doing collective punishment beatings (“Who spoke?” (No-one replies) (30 boys get caned) ) in the early 80s.

[somrand0]

well yea, because your parents were essentially slaves, the property of higher elite classes. I'm pointing to the class relationship, nothing specific to your parents.

I wonder if such practices were used in schools reserved for royalty and other nobles in the UK

[NikolaNovak]

I have two kids now. We are lucky blessed and privileged with amount of support we have, from family and work and government (Canada:). And yet it's hard. I try to get a little bit less "enraged" and "blood boiling" at other parents' survival strategies. If you have to go to work next morning to pay rent (which,y know, hasn't historically been the case so evolution is no use) and don't have a traditional support network of 500bc Greece and haven't slept for the last 6 weeks... It's very easy to say "it's a sacrifice parents should make" but it feels a bit of a lack of empathy.

Different kids parents and circumstances. I've really tried to tone down my judgement of other parenting techniques as I know they can easily judge my choices especially context free.

It's hard.

[remote_phone]

The fact that you are getting enraged is a huge part of the problem. Keep your own morality to yourself and your own family. If you don’t want to use cry it out, then that’s your decision. The fact you project onto others is the problem and it’s none of your business.

Cry it out is effective and works wonders for families and it has no side effects, as mentioned in the article itself.

[metabagel]

If you read Dr. Bruce Perry's books, you'll find that some children are able to withstand childhood trauma, while others are deeply affected by it.

"Keep your own morality to yourself and your own family."

That's not a real solid code of ethics to have.

[unity1001]

> The fact that you are getting enraged is a huge part of the problem. Keep your own morality to yourself and your own family.

How about you people keep your destructive practice to yourself and stop advocating it, less, rationalizing it and pushing it to mainstream. And with 'you people', i mean the US, because the only place where this thing seems to be a 'thing' and is even being advocated by 'professionals' is the US. The place where individualism and consumerism hails from and the people load up on prozac to survive.

[agumonkey]

After suffering extreme trauma, I have a different view on babies crying. Being heard and responded to is one existentially low level mental need. Touched too.

[epolanski]

But you can't be heard every single time, the usual example of a parent driving, he can't just stop the car and start soothing the baby ignoring the rest of the world, logistics or obligations.

That's just not feasible nor it can't be 100% an obligation to always respond every single crying.

I think the article does a good job pointing out that after 6 months and definitely after 12 you do need to start let the baby safe soothe itself more frequently.

[heavyset_go]

> The fact that this is so commonplace in my culture (USA) is frustrating and enrages me

From the outside, American culture around child-rearing seems like there is an adversarial relationship with tinges of resentment when it comes to how parents see children.

A lot of the tough love type of parenting seems to come from a place of pacifying parents, giving them what they want, over their burdensome children with "problem" behavior. You get things like in the OP, corporeal punishment, wilderness therapy, conversion therapy, using aversives[1] to literally hurt and shock autistic kids into complying with the behavior their parents want to see, etc. Some parents even seem to enjoy and take pride in it, and there are some who wish they could send their 11 year olds to go work in the coal mines to build a work ethic or something.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aversives#Use_in_applied_behav...

[dinkumthinkum]

There isn’t really an “AmerIvan culture around rearing children”. America large variations in behaviors. If American parenting was completely as you suggest, how do we have a generation of professional victims or constant discussions of “helicopter parenting” or “participation trophies”?

[christophilus]

> As a parent, it is your evolutionary instinct to comfort a crying infant.

My genes didn’t get the memo. My instinct is to say, “He’ll be fine, but if I don’t sleep, no one will be fine.”

[unity1001]

> My genes didn’t get the memo

Don't worry. Your gene pool will eventually select itself out via that mindset.

[lr4444lr]

The article makes fairly clear that sleep training under 6 months is not advised. Not to say that every baby will be ready at that point, but it becomes clear to most parents somewhere in the first year what cries from their baby express sincere needs - even psychological- and which are just gratuitous attention seeking. Once they have object permanence down, parenting changes.

[unity1001]

> The article makes fairly clear that sleep training under 6 months is not advised

Beyond that - the close presence of parents near the infant until 2 years of age was discovered to be vital for the infant's development, social skills and especially being bold enough to experiment and learn new things. The lack of parents in close proximity in that period causes the infant to feel anxiety and hesitate from wandering around and trying out things and learning.

[mike1o1]

Agreed 100%. I feel like sleep training is for the parents, not necessarily for the babies. Most parents in the USA need to work, so they are the ones that need the sleep.

[kaitai]

It doesn't sound like you have much experience being the 24-hr care provider for a baby. Phoning it in at work is way more relaxing than being in the house with a baby for the entire day. It's not work that makes parents need to sleep, it's... needing to sleep. Just speaking from experience, having someone with fractured mental concentration cooking, attempting to keep a slightly mobile child from danger, trying not to fall asleep on the couch with the kid in a desperate attempt not to cosleep, trying to keep your cool as the kid screams again and can't be soothed.... much more dangerous and stressful than doodling thru a meeting and saying, "I'm sorry, can you repeat that? I just want to clarify what you're saying."

[TeMPOraL]

Obviously. But you're saying it like the parents are being selfish here.

Babies need to be fed, protected, cared for and loved. Fulfillment of those needs is, for most people on the planet in the last century or so, directly dependent on the parents' ability to hold a job and earn enough income to pay for housing, food and creature comforts.

Even if sleep training is hard for some kids, their parents losing their jobs or breaking up due to sleep deprivation would be much, much worse for those kids.

[rcpt]

> co-sleep

Suffocation risk is real. Don't do this.

[fipar]

Our pediatricians told us risk from suffocation is associated with bad co-sleep practices, not "just with" co-sleep (in our country, not the US, and I'm quoting "just with" because I don't know how to put that better, I'm trying to make the point that if bad practices aren't followed, the risk of SIDS is comparable to babies that sleep alone). This includes co-sleeping when at least one of the parents is a smoker, or is under the influence of alcohol or other drugs (legal or otherwise), having pillows, stuffed animals, or other soft loose things in bed, the bed being too soft, the baby being able to cover their face, etc.

But he did tell us it was safe to do this if we wanted to taking some precautions, and it worked great for us with our two kids.

Yes, sure, our two cases are anecdotic evidence, but I still trust what the doctor said, and I think you shouldn't be making blanket statements against the practice.

The truth is that SIDS is always a possibility and, to be honest, neither my wife nor myself slept well until both our kids were well beyond the age where the statistics show there's a higher chance from this (roughly 1 year old). I guess this helped make co-sleep safe, as we were always very alert (to the detriment of our own wellbeing, something I don't regret since a few years of this is a drop in the water compared with a lifetime, to us anyway).

One thing safe co-sleep requires is commitment and agreement from both parents, and a fair sharing of parental duties too.

[mahogany]

Everything has risk. What is the risk of having a sleep-deprived parent caring for a baby (holding and walking with them, driving, etc)? For some people, co-sleeping (bed sharing) largely eliminates sleep deprivation. Have you weighed those risks against each other, in particular when something like the safe sleep 7 are followed for co-sleeping?

[dotnet00]

Another reason to avoid this "deep seated biological reason" based reasoning is that evolution is pretty slow. Our instinct "software" is still setup for 40k+ years ago. It doesn't change particularly quickly and evolutionarily the entirety of human history isn't really a lot. Let alone human history in anything resembling a civilization.

So it easily follows that our adaptations from a time when we didn't have the luxury of stressing over how to ensure our kids grow into mentally healthy adults are not necessarily valid now regardless of how right we're wired to feel about them.

The idea of infants innocently crying because they need care only works if you assume their instincts are adapted to the modern world, whereas for prehistoric humans it was because it's more conducive to their survival to be somewhat needy yet quick to adjust when that neediness isn't responded to (as constant neediness might've led to abandonment back then).

[Tams80]

Babies cry because they have little other ways to communicate. And yes, generally it is because of something negative.

That negative could be 'leave me the fuck alone and stop bothering me' though, just in baby language - crying. Yes, even to a parent.

[refurb]

I had the same perspective.

Why wouldnt a baby cry when someone isn’t around?

Why wouldn’t a parent want to comfort a crying child?

I understand the concern around developing bad habits, but those can be dealt with as they arrive.

[paganel]

> They are supposed to be attached to you. It is very much possible to co-sleep and then gradually transition them to their own bed.

I strongly believe that forcing kids to sleep in their own bed and in their own room all by themselves as soon as possible is a 5D chess move by the real estate industry to sell as much of their inventory as possible.

No, kids won't be traumatised or become serial killers if they don't have their own bed or their own room as soon as possible, in fact bed-sharing and room-sharing (or even hut-sharing) has been the norm for our species for thousands and thousands of years.

Heck, I shared a bed with my dad until I left for uni, when I was 18, mum was sleeping in the other room our apartment had. In the winters I used to sleep with both of my parents until I was 8 or 9, the three of us had to share to bedroom bed thanks to central heating having stopped working (which was thanks to Ceausescu and then to the shell-shock therapy imposed by the Washington consensus in my country in the 1990s). When I was visiting my grand-parents as a 8-9-year old kid, in the winter, I was sharing a bed with my grandad, and my brother (who was being raised by my grand-parents) was sharing a bed with my grandma, all four of us sharing the same 3x4 meters room. Can't say I developed any long-lasting "attachment" issues.

Again, forcing small kids to have their own rooms and their own beds is a quite recent Western thing.

Later edit: Opinion piece that supports my view (not a difficult view to support, because it's prevalent throughout most of the world):

> This system of sleeping — adults in one room, each child walled off in another — was common practice exactly nowhere before the late 19th century, when it took hold in Europe and North America. (...)

> Indeed, solitary childhood sleep seems cruel in those parts of the world where co-sleeping is still practiced, including developed countries such as Japan.

> But as industrial wealth spread through the Western economies, so did a sense that individual privacy — felt most intently at night — was a hallmark of “civilization.”

[1] https://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-reiss-sleep-alon...

[ipaddr]

Back in the day travellers men/women/kids/strangers would all sleep in the same bed in the medieval western world. Things have changed.

[zhdc1]

> It is very much possible to co-sleep and then gradually transition them to their own bed

A counter argument (trigger warning): https://www.reddit.com/r/nursing/comments/zls30p/cosleeping/

We co-slept with our second child, but only after taking a lot of precautions.

[shepherdjerred]

> What are the odds that the rest of the world and entire history of humankind were mistaken the whole time, until some behaviorists came along and figured it all out in the last century?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maladaptation

[amriksohata]

So very true, I feel this is why adults are becoming more and more hardened and emotionless from childhood rejection issues

[shaklee3]

why is something that is uncommon in other cultures obviously bad? there are many, many, many counterexamples to things kind this. just because something is commonplace doesn't mean it's the best way.

[Mikeb85]

> Talk about infants having "attachment issues" makes my blood boil. They are supposed to be attached to you.

Attachment disorder is the opposite of what you seem to think it is, where they had previously been abandoned and thus can't make proper relationships.

[metabagel]

Not in this case. It's actually an appeal to rigorously question changing something which has obvious evolutionary roots and benefits.

[scotty79]

On the other hand if infants were this fragile to be long term affected by something like that humanity would survive 3 generation tops.

At some point synaptic prunning comes and the child is rid of nearly all indignities it suffered up to that point.

[giraffe_lady]

Plenty of adaptively useful, maybe even optimal behaviors can negatively affect enjoyment of life. The world we live in isn't the one we evolved for, and behaviors and adaptations useful in our evolutionary past can be painful or detrimental to individuals and society now.

Selective pressure is no longer meaningfully applied to our species, so we won't further adapt to our situation except intentionally and at our own hands.

Also btw just because people forget their memories before a certain point doesn't mean they are rid of all the effects. Research on this is fraught and delicate, but very young children who suffered trauma are known to carry some consequences of it across that memory boundary. Which at least establishes that it's not a perfect reset and we should still be careful about what experiences we expose very young children to.

[unity1001]

> On the other hand if infants were this fragile to be long term affected by something like that humanity would survive 3 generation tops.

The infants that were this fragile eventually selected themselves out of the gene pool by neglectful parents, or by behavioral disorders causing them to not be able to reproduce as much as others. Which is why almost every baby cries.

[feet]

There's a lot more than synaptic pruning going on during the neurological development of infants such as migration of cells

[lern_too_spel]

Hypothesis: the parent, by forcing themselves to sleep train, conditions themselves to ignore more of the infant's emotions; and the infant, observing no reaction to their emotions, learns the same behavior, leading to higher incidence of autism.

Typically (aside from some neurological disorders), there is an underlying reason for the infant to be crying. They could be hungry or wanting to urinate or defecate (many cultures begin potty training shortly after birth). This is frequent because their stomachs, intestines, and bladders are small. Figuring out what they want and responding is normal and has a long history of working, not just among humans but among all mammals with dependent young.

It's astonishing that some pop-parenting guide came along and said, "You don't have to figure out what the baby is crying about if they happen to be crying at night or if you are sleepy," and nobody stopped to wonder what night time had to do with it.

[TeMPOraL]

Reality: sleep training enters the picture only after all the things you've mentioned have been checked first.

Even from a pragmatic point of view, it's hard to imagine otherwise, because all of those underlying reasons are quick to check and (usually) quick to mitigate. You don't even consider sleep training until exhausting every other option, because literally everything is easier than any of the sleep training methods.

[0xEFF]

Research shows no long term effects after age 6, positive or negative, of sleep training, so the research doesn't support your hypothesis.

Research shows many positive effects before age 6, both for the child and the family.