Parenting

I’m certain folks who say it’s harmful had their kids sleep at least 4hr through by the time they were 4mo and just don’t understand what deep sleep deprivation actually is or can’t empathize with it. I remember hearing Russian political opposition was making world news because the opposition leader was tortured by having the guards wake him up every hour. Here comes my kid waking up every 20 minutes… great why isn’t their world news about it?

There are also different “cry it out” methods. I can see how thinking that leaving your baby alone in the room for hours can be viewed as harmful. I thought so too. So I had my baby scream in my face for 4 hours. Still worked.

I’d like to hear about them. There are also many different sleep training methods. I can see how some might have issues. For example I stayed in baby's room and just pet/shush her instead of holding. She screamed on top of her lungs for 4 hours in my face while I did that. Was that stressful for her? Probably, yeah. But it was either that or killing myself due to months of having less than 1hr of sleep. I’m sure not having parents is worse than whatever issues your wife found. I’m happy your child was chill enough to naturally learn how to sleep. That wasn’t the case with our kid.

I'd be curious of the serious long term issues that she found. I did a bunch of research on this as well and never found any credible source for or against CIO, really. There's a huge spectrum between the different methods too, and I found lots of people conflating "ignoring all the needs of your child" with CIO which isn't really what any of the methods proscribe.

I don't really have a horse in the race, my daughter sleeps wonderfully and has since she was 4 months old or so, but there is a lot of fear mongering on the internet about parenting styles and techniques and the amount of actual evidence is sparser than I'd like. New parents are already neurotic and the internet in general jumps to warning about serious long term issues for almost anything.

My kid would wake up screaming every 17 minutes for months on end until we started sleep training. She slept through the night 2 nights later for the first time. All kids are different.

Agreed. Their linking a single study in the criticism section, at the very end, compared to the overwhelming number of methods they exhaustively cover through the whole article leads readers to think that letting babies cry is not very controversial.

Attachment parenting has a lot of research supporting it, not just a single study.

This article is more like: "an exhaustive list of strategies for sleep training" as it starts at the last step (already having chosen to sleep train your infant.)

There are many ways of doing sleep training. You don’t have to leave the room to sleep train.

Well I did, because as a new parent it really messed me up when your newborn is screaming 24/7 and everyone online says you’re a horrible person for doing what doctors recommend to do in cases like mine. She hasn’t had a day nap since 20 months too. Same story - scream for 2 hours before the nap, destroy things after.