Ernie Park

What if the “Cry It Out” sleep training (aka extinction-based sleep training) has contributed to mental health issues in young people? In some ways, it’s the most insane thing to do to a child (and is based on incredibly poor science). For centuries, families co-slept without issues, but in modern times, it has become increasingly taboo… why? How can repeated emotional non-response to a baby be healthy? What does it do to their stress calibration, attachment expectations, and self-regulation? How does it play out in their long term relationships and social connections? I’ve read the studies and they are poorly designed and weakly supported. Yet, we have an entire generation of parents that blindly follow this insane protocol without reviewing the data themselves. To be fair, the data supporting co-sleeping is weak as well, but it has centuries of precedent so I feel much more comfortable supporting that than a new approach that was largely instituted since the 1920s. For some context, in the 20th century, behaviorist John Watson (1928), interested in making psychology a hard science, took up the crusade against affection as president of the American Psychological Association. He applied the paradigm of behaviorism to childrearing, warning about the dangers of “too much mother love”. The 20th century was the time when “science" was assumed to know better than mothers, grandmothers, and families about how to raise a child. Too much kindness to a baby would result in a whiney, dependent, failed human being. A government pamphlet from the time recommended that "mothering meant holding the baby quietly, in tranquility-inducing positions" and that "the mother should stop immediately if her arms feel tired" because "the baby is never to inconvenience the adult." A baby older than six months "should be taught to sit silently in the crib; otherwise, he might need to be constantly watched and entertained by the mother, a serious waste of time." The truth is the opposite. We now know that ignoring a child raising cortisol levels and hurts trust and attachment. Yet, every young parent I know today has been brainwashed to let their child cry in silence. It’s truly wild.

Looks like people are posting deranged takes on “cry it out” sleep training again FYI “sleeping through the night” is a teachable skill if you break it down into its component parts. All 4 of my kids learned to sleep through the night by ~3 months with minimal tears or drama Most kids won’t sleep through the night much earlier than that because their stomachs aren’t big enough to hold enough calories, so that’s a baseline gating factor. Their tummies need to be big enough to get through the night. But once you’re over that hump, there’s only two skills necessary for sleeping through the night, and they’re both teachable to a 3-month-old: 1) self-settling - the ability to fall asleep on their own. If you rock your baby to sleep in your arms and then put them in bed already asleep, they don’t develop this skill. Put them in bed just as they’re beginning to fade out. Or wake them up a little as you put them down, and let them re-settle to sleep in their own bed 2) connecting sleep cycles - if you pick your baby up every time they stir, they don’t get to build this skill. Instead, pat their back and try to guide them from one sleep cycle into their next one without them fully waking up While “cry it out” does work and I’m extremely skeptical that it creates any lasting trauma, it’s a bit like learning to swim by getting chucked into the deep end. It’s always better to break a goal down into specific skills that can be practiced individually, then gradually blended together for the desired result

All of our docs now have a "copy" option to make them easier to use with LLMs

You really want to solve fertility via encouraging families to have more than 1 or 2 kids again, solve infant sleeping. Solve this and you win the century

Replit status is on iOS is so cool/useful.

Everyone in this chain is a respected poster and friend. But now it is time for some real talk. Baby sleep is a solved problem. THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS A “BABY WHO DOESN’T SLEEP.” All healthy babies can sleep well. Don’t kid yourself that your baby won’t sleep well because he “has a different temperament.” All healthy babies can sleep well. There are a rare few babies who sleep train themselves. But mostly there are parents who sleep train and parents who cannot bring themselves to sleep train. Parents in the former category are well rested and have happy babies. Parents in the latter category are exhausted and have cranky babies. You can choose, it’s your life. Fin.