What I think about the cry it out method

I think that there is good reason for it to be quite a common method for many families.

I haven’t used it and that has been intentional. Having been on a journey of my own, learning to understand myself and who I really am, I found myself standing in another room from my daughter. She was standing in her cot, is was 3am and I was exhausted. I was pacing up and down, trying to find something else to focus on other than her crying and I realised. I was in the middle of teaching her a lesson that someone else thinks is a good enough lesson to make a baby cry and be alone for so long.

Someone else’s decision.

It was not my decision. It was what I thought I had to do to be a good mum. It was what the book said.

But fuck the book!

That’s my baby! MY baby.

I stormed into the room. Swept her up into my arms and cuddled her standing until my back could take it no more. Then we fell back into my bed. The dim blue light of humidifier projecting a calming representation of the moment. If the room hadn’t been full of crying and shushing, whimpering and wishing I’d never had let it get so far, the silence would have shown you a beautiful moment between mother and child.

As it should be. At 3 am.

I so almost let a book, someone life experience and upbringing, joys and traumas, define my mother hood.

Fuck the book.

Fuck letting other people decide for me!

Anyway back to the good enough reason….

Yes, you can train a child to behave how you want them too. You can let them cry and understand that you are not coming so they might as well give up on their efforts to seek help, love, acceptance as they are.

You train them that way and you will sleep peacefully. Something tells me, if you are completely informed and still make that decision you really need your sleep.

Some people can function fine on long stretches of no sleep. As for others? It’s really affects with them; hormonally, mentally, spiritually, physically, emotionally, socially, financially…

In every way possible.

And that is such a reasonable reason. No one else knows how life affected you when you weren’t getting sleep, so never let anyone else’s opinions, methods, Instagram posts make you feel like less than.

We learn things when we are trained and from the point of us learning and accepting something, when change as a person. And every decision from that moment onwards, will be built up from that foundation.

If a child is sleep trained and learns that they are not going to be attended to when they call for their career on the middle of the night, there may be other times in life when the child feels like they cannot call for your help. They will have an underlying belief that they are not going to be rescued every time, and those children become apathetic. Which is a … not the best … energy to be operating in; for many reasons.

If a mother does not sleep train and feels she is obliged to meet her child’s need over her own every single time, the mother is likely to feel apathetic. This can also hinder the relationship with the child.

So to cry it out or not to cry it out.

It is your decision. No one else’s.

Someone else’s decision. It is none of your business.