Written by Editorial Team
Getting your baby to sleep through the night is a big task for the parents. During the newborn days, you have no choice but to feed the baby whenever he wakes up. This gives you many sleepless nights. However, once the infant grows a little say when about six months old or more, you can consider training your baby to sleep without your help. Here, the ‘Cry-it-Out’ method might be helpful.
In fact, hearing your baby crying is not that easy and the ‘motherly instinct’ is to calm the crying baby. But a lot of mothers would do anything to get a good night’s sleep, and this is where the cry-it-out method will come into the picture!
In This Article
Cry-It-Out Method (CIO), as the name implies, does not mean that you let your baby cry forever. It is a way of training your baby to sleep on their own. In this technique, for a certain time, you let your baby cry and then you go and calm them.
With the help of this method, eventually, the baby will learn to self-soothe and fall asleep rather than waiting for the mother to rock them to sleep. This is actually another milestone in the baby’s development.
This method works on simple logic. When the baby is used to falling asleep while you feed or rock them, they will not be able to sleep on their own. Like adults, babies also tend to get up in the middle of the night.
When the baby is awake in the middle of the night, he will not be able to soothe themselves back to sleep and will cry until he gets comfort from his mother. This method works on the theory that if the baby is given an opportunity, he will be able to achieve the milestone of falling asleep on his own
First of all, you should start to try this method only when the baby is set to sleep. The baby should be a little drowsy when you are putting them to sleep. Also,
The following are just a few suggestions. However, the time you let your baby CIO before you go and soothe him totally depends on how comfortable you are.
Here are some tips with which the cry-it-out method can be implemented more effectively.
Once the baby starts to sleep on their own following the Cry-it-out method, they are less likely to be grumpy during bedtime. Also,
Here are some of the disadvantages of this method:
But remember these drawbacks has no scientific reasoning so it leaves a lot of room for debate.
Maybe you don’t agree with the logic of the cry-it-out method or you have tried it out and it did not work for you. Every child is different and what is successful in one’s case may not hold good for another. So you can try different ways that suit you for training your baby to sleep.
Please do share with us some of your experiences of sleep training your baby. Have you tried the cry-it-out method? What is your opinion about it?
Critics of this approach say it’s too harsh and harmful for the infant, as crying may be a symptom of stress. However, research shows that there are no negative impacts on child development associated with letting a baby “cry it out.”
The CIO method’s purpose is to let baby fret and scream on their own until they tired themselves out and falls asleep on their own. Initially, you may have to let the baby scream it out for 45 minutes to an hour before she falls asleep, but this varies from baby to baby. It may eventually decline to 15 to 20 minutes.
The few studies that have looked at the short- to long-term impacts of sleep training have not found any evidence that it has any impact on a baby’s bonding or mental health.
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