Wall Street Journal - Sleep Training, why so important!

Today, in the Wall Street Journal, May 3rd, 2016, there is a great article about Sleep Training. In the article it says "infants can more easily sleep through the night at 2 months old" some pediatricians say. It also goes on to say that "research shows cry-it-out sleep training, doesn't negatively affect children's long-term mental and physical health". At Tribeca Pediatrics (located in NYC & LA), Dr. Cohen says that sleep training "actually works better at 2 months than at 4 months". Judith Owens, director of sleep medicine at Boston Children's Hospital sites frequently a 2012 Journal of Pediatrics in Australia, that the group of 326 infants that were slept train were tested from 7 mos to 5 years of age had "no long-term harm to their emotional development, stress regulation, mental health or relationship with their parents." Sleep training "also helps infants develop self-regulation skills", Judith Owens says.

"How long a baby can be left to cry depends a lot on the parent's threshold, sleep experts say. Allowing a baby to cry for more then an hour isn't harmful for several days while sleep training, though most babies won't cry that long". This is hard for any parent to listen to, but for some parents, it may be too hard to hear and that is ok. "Many children will cry for 30-40 min, sleep for a couple of hours, then wake up and cry again" during sleep training. Dr Lyons in the WSJ article concludes by saying, "it works best if the parents don't give in, otherwise the next time they try to do sleep training, it's that much harder." Many babies right before they are going to go to sleep after crying for some time, the cries escalate, and right at that moment when the cries seem to be getting worse, many parents run in to rescue. But in actuality, if the baby was left to be in that escalating crying moment, that baby was actually on its way to a deep sleep. In the WSJ, research that was done in the Journal of Sleep research in February of 2016, it says "that parents who are quicker to respond to a crying infant are more likely to have children who can't sleep through the night". By responding to the cries, we are creating a habit if the baby cries, we respond. And after a few months of no sleep, we wonder as parents why won't my child sleep?! If only we stopped going in circles of fear, and the "what if I don't respond to the cries, what would happen?" Little do we know, the baby would fall asleep on its own, if we taught them this through healthy ways of sleep training.