New study says that it’s okay to let babies cry at night

Follow me at @drClaire When my eldest was a baby, I remember feeling so torn when she cried during the night. Our pediatrician and my mother both said that it was okay to let her cry for a while and let her learn to go back to sleep. But as I listened to her cry, I wondered: Will this make her too stressed? Will it damage her emotionally? Will it ruin our relationship? The answer to all of those questions, according to a new study published in the journal Pediatrics, is no. Not only that, if I’d done it (I didn’t, I was too worried), my daughter and I might have gotten a bunch more sleep. Researchers from Australia worked with families who said that their babies (ages 6-16 months) had a sleep problem. They divided the families into three groups. One was told to do “graduated extinction,” during which they let the baby cry first just for a minute before going in and interacting with them, and then gradually increased the amount of time they let them cry. Another group did something called “bedtime fading,” where they told the parents to delay bedtime so that the babies were more tired. The last group was the “control” group and got education on babies and sleep, but nothing else. To measure the effects on the babies, the researchers did something interesting: they measured the level of cortisol, a stress hormone, in the babies’ saliva. They also asked the mothers about their levels of stress. Twelve months later, they looked for any emotional or behavioral pr...
Source: New Harvard Health Information - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Children's Health Parenting Sleep Source Type: news