Hi Dana here. What is cry it out? Let’s talk about that today.

I remember when I had my first son and anytime I expressed frustration with the fact that he wasn’t sleeping well, people here and there would say, “Well, you could always let him cry it out.” And at the time, I had no idea what that meant. I mean, it felt kind of the same as saying, “Well, you could poke him in the eye.” Like it didn’t make really any sense and I think a lot of new parents feel the same. It’s like, “Well, why would I let him cry? I’m trying everything I get over here to make this baby not cry, to stop this baby from crying.”

So I think it’s a hard thing to say to a new parent because there’s just no context around it. So another criticism that I’ll hear sometimes about the cry-it-out approach, or whatever you wanna call it, is that we’re just letting a baby cry all through the night with no intervention, no support, no foundation laying, no timing considerations, no age qualification to that. We’re just letting babies cry all night long. And in the hopes that some, at some point, they will stop. And then, maybe they learn that there’s no point in crying because no one’s coming for them, and so they might as well not bother crying. And this isn’t just the case.

So I wanna put some myths to rest here today is what I’d like to do. And talk about what is really happening when we are teaching a baby to sleep well. It has nothing to do with the crying. The crying is just an unfortunate, unpleasant side effect to learning a new skill. That is what it is. And there’s no, he’ll learn you’re never coming because you are coming. I mean, really in any sleep training method, there is intervention from parents. There is support from parents. And in the Sleep Sense Program, I have a plan where you can be with your baby the entire time. So that one we just blew right outta the water right there because maybe he’s learning not to cry because he has skills for sleeping. So he doesn’t need to cry anymore.

But it’s not the fact that you’re never gonna attend to him or her in the night because, you know, you are and you would. I know that. And so what we’re really doing here is breaking a sleep prop connection. So all the babies that are having trouble sleeping have a prop association, which means they’re using something external to get themselves to sleep. So the most popular ones are bottle feeding or nursing to sleep. And so when they have a naturally occurring wake up in the middle of the night, they’re gonna cry for you to come in and recreate all the things that got them to sleep in the first place, which is, let’s get back on the breast, let’s get that bottle back into my mouth. The food is a nice perk if we’re talking about older babies, but really what I’m after here is getting back to sleep.

And so I’ll use that little external helper to get myself back to sleep. And the next time I wake up, the same thing will happen, and the next time, and the next time. And that’s why you’ve got babies pass the six-month mark, and the first birthday, and even into the second birthday who are still waking up in the middle of the night looking for their sleep prop, looking for help to get back to sleep. So that’s why they’re not sleeping well. How do we teach them to sleep well?

Well, we have to break the connection between the prop and sleep. And the only way we can do that is by removing it. I mean, I don’t know another way to really, to do this, right? We have to take it away. And so what’s that gonna do? That’s gonna cause some upset. That makes sense. It would be the same as if I came into your room tonight, started making a whole bunch of changes to the way that you got yourself to sleep. You would probably not cry ’cause you’re an adult. But you would have, you know, you’d be troubled by it. You would have anxiety around it.

And so the same thing is gonna show up for your child. They’re not gonna be sure what to do. They’re gonna be tired. So that’s gonna add to the grouchiness. And they’re gonna want you to do what you always do every single night because that’s their habit. And when we do a sleep training program like the Sleep Sense Program, we have to allow the child to find some strategies that become independent. So how I get myself to sleep every night is my job, my job and my job only. And that’s what we wanna teach our child, that this is their responsibility now or their job to get themselves to sleep.

And the good news is that this is a skill and it can be learned. And like any skill, it’s gonna take some time. So there’s gonna be a few days where this feels uncomfortable and it’s awkward and it might be a little hard or frustrating for your baby, but they’ll start to put the pieces together and they will start to learn some new ways of getting comfortable and falling asleep without their sleep prop. And the magic is that the crying will stop. There’s no need to cry if I know how to do this myself.

And the Sleep Sense Program allows you 14 days to baby step your way into this so that your child can learn at a reasonable pace, and you can be supportive, and you can be as helpful as possible without intervening or interfering in their strategies. But the goal, we have a goal, it’s not just to let babies cry. The goal is to teach a baby the skills they need to sleep well.

Thanks for watching. Bye for now.