CIO on the Fence

I am on the fence about whether to use the cry it out method now that I am trying to transition my one son (6 months) out of being swaddled. I have no idea how reliable the information I found is, but I was just wondering what other people think about it. I am sure there is information to support both sides, but does anyone have an experience doing it with one of their children as a opposed to an other or any other informatin they have found.

http://drbenkim.com/articles-attachment-parenting.html
http://www.news.harvard.edu/gazette/1998/0...renNeedTou.html

 

I did not read the articles but I did CIO with our twins for naptime and it worked well for us. After a couple of days, they did not need to be rocked to sleep for naps and would go to sleep quickly for them.

 

others may disagree with me, but i personally feel like transitioning out of the swaddle is hard enough without also throwing CIO into the mix. we did a slow transition out of the swaddle for our guys because it's teaching them how to sleep without that snug security around them. i would just be afraid that removing that snug security and then not responding to his cries would be a little too much at once. if it were me, i would transition him out of the swaddle gradually by freeing one arm at a time and doing it across a week or two. after he was sleeping comfortably unswaddled i would then try CIO.

again, that's just me.

we did CIO successfully with jacob probably a month and a half ago. we tried with owen but he was going through a bout of separation anxiety while teething and he just got too hysterical and couldn't calm himself down. as a result we're in a situation with one who is able to CIO and one who is not. we're actually going to try CIO with owen again this weekend since it's been about a month and he seems more ready.

i think you have to see how your children can handle it. not every baby is ready just because the calendar says he is. we did CIO with jacob because we tried other methods and he just wouldn't let us leave the room. it really came down to a last resort with him, and luckily he was able to handle it.

 

i agree with piccologirl, learning to sleep without the swaddle can be difficult for some babies and i would not want to compound that with CIO at this point. i have done CIO with DD and it does work, DS never really needed it.

good luck with whatever you decide, just remember that consistency is the key when doing CIO, and it can be heartwrenching at times. i found that the extinction method worked best for DD, whenever i would go in to check her it just increased the hysterics..

 

When we transitioned out of the swaddle we started by just leaving one arm out and then both arms out and then finally we just put them in a Grobag which is what they still sleep in now. I agree that CIO and removing the swaddle at the same time might be tough.

 

WE also did a slow transition out of swaddles, One arm out- then both arms out- and started really introducing a "lovey". We never did CIO and we have all night sleepers
To me yes kids need to be taught healthy sleep habits, but CIO is not the only way to get there. Like everything else, I believe STTN is a developmental milestone.

 

i found those articles really interesting - they seemed to imply that if a parent does CIO they never respond to their child when he/she cries & that certainly isn't the case. i'm also curious about these long term studies that indicate that CIO leads to more stress in life - how do they know it was the CIO specifically that caused that? how can they eliminate all the other variables that would cause trauma, stress, etc? it seems like a big jump to me. :unknw:

for us, CIO was a tool we used because we were ALL miserable with the routine at the time & it needed to change. i wasn't trying to make my babies more independent, per se, i was trying to create a healthy situation for all of us. i do not regret it at all & i think that it was the right choice for us.

as for dropping the swaddle & doing CIO at the same time, i personally think that that would be fine. i'm of the philosophy that it's better to rip the band aid off quickly than to do it slowly.

 

We are currently doing CIO with our girls because they got to the stage where they wanted to play with us more than they wanted sleep. They also started to "fight" the soothing. We couldn't hold our girls all night and so something had to give. I have slept with the girls in our bed before, but don't feel totally comfortable with that (those first couple months I did whatever worked!).

I'm with Miss Bossy, the articles imply that if CIO is being used that a mom/caregiver is not going to be responsive to the baby at all, which is not the case. While I do lean more toward attachment parenting, we are using CIO for the sake of our sanity. At all other times of the day, I respond to my babies crying immediately. I'm in the thick of it, so I can't say whether CIO is going to work, but I hope so! Our issue was not with night wakings, but with the initial putting to sleep--they pretty much STTN, and have since well before we started CIO. When our babies wake during the night, we go check on them and console them, hold then/rock them if needed, making sure they are okay. If at some point it becomes them waking us and then wanting to play, we may resort to CIO overnight.

 

QUOTE(ohjojo @ Jun 17 2009, 11:17 PM) [snapback]1358913[/snapback]
just remember that consistency is the key when doing CIO, and it can be heartwrenching at times. i found that the extinction method worked best for DD, whenever i would go in to check her it just increased the hysterics..

Same for us.

QUOTE(miss_bossy18 @ Jun 18 2009, 12:05 AM) [snapback]1358968[/snapback]
i found those articles really interesting - they seemed to imply that if a parent does CIO they never respond to their child when he/she cries & that certainly isn't the case. i'm also curious about these long term studies that indicate that CIO leads to more stress in life - how do they know it was the CIO specifically that caused that? how can they eliminate all the other variables that would cause trauma, stress, etc? it seems like a big jump to me. :unknw:

A huge jump. I'm confident that my boys aren't traumatized from CIO.


GL with your decision.

 

I did CIO with my DS for his naps as he was refusing to sleep and it was casuing a lot of problems. He was around 10 months old. It worked out fine for us and him as he now knows that nap time is for sleeping. I can´t see that he was/is traumatised by the experience. Its true that consistency is key. Going in repeatedly only made it worse.

GL!

 

I agree that the articles don't really give enough study-based evidence, and I'm sure CIO done in the right way, with love and consistency, is fine if you are comfortable with it. For my family, it wasn't an option.

This is a hard topic to address without offending people, so I'll try to stick to my own opinions for my babies. I try to follow the lead of the babies. When they wanted to nurse, I nursed. When they looked sleepy, I put them down for naps. I watched them, tried to make some sense out of their behaviors, and it worked really well for us. They developed a nap/nursing/sleep schedule all on their own. I'm not saying I didn't have times when they didn't sleep well. I think even parents who do CIO have that - teething, growth spurts, developmental milestones all disrupt things for a night here and there. I swaddled DS for a few months because he had a hard time sleeping if he didn't feel secure. DD didn't need it. I just went with what they seemed to find comforting, and I've had great sleepers. DD needs to "fuss it out" most nights before she'll settle down, but if she starts crying, I comfort her. I decided not to do CIO initially because that's just what felt right to me (I do believe in a lot of the methods of attachment parenting, though), but then my beliefs were confirmed when I read about the physical effects of crying on the babies at the time (I'm not talking long term effects, just in the moment bodily changes). I can't remember where I read it, but it said that hysterical crying like you get sometimes with CIO can cause blood pressure to rise, heart rate to soar, and some babies even throw up from it. That's enough for me to know. My job is to keep them safe and help them feel secure, so I find other ways to get them to sleep.

If you're interested in another method, I'm a big fan of Pantley's No Cry Sleep Solution. Totally common sense stuff, no real "techniques," but it worked well for us. When we dropped the swaddle for DS, I put in a white noise machine (ocean waves) and did it one arm at a time. It took about a week for him to get used to it...maybe 4-5 nights with one arm swaddled and then we just put him in a sleep sac. The first couple of nights unswaddled we had to go in and pat his back a few times to keep him asleep (we went in as we heard him starting to wake himself up), and then after that he was fine. GL!