Why Do Babies Cry? — Conclusion

Is it okay to let babies cry it out?

About 15 to 20 percent of children ages six months and up are still awake enough during the night to worry their parents.

You can try several strategies. If you’ve put your child to bed and she’s crying, you can try waiting two minutes to respond and then gradually increase the wait to six minutes. That’s called graduated extinction. You can also try a technique called bedtime fading with several features, including moving the baby’s bedtime in the desired direction by about 15 minutes every two nights or so. Again, your child may cry.

With either method, you probably don’t have to worry that you’ve damaged your child’s psyche, according to one study. Researchers, following a group of children (ages six months to 16 months) whose parents said that they had a sleep problem, divided them into three groups:

• The controls, who continued as usual
• A group subjected to bedtime fading
• Another group subjected to graduated extinction

After a year, mothers completed assessments of their children’s emotional and behavioral problems, and the researchers put the mother-child pairs through an experiment to judge how attached they were. The children who had been nudged to sleep — which involved some crying it out — had no signs of problems or a less secure attachment style. The children also had better nights, falling asleep faster and awakening less often than the controls.

YOU MIGHT ALSO LIKE: 6 Ways to Keep Your Newborn Safe When She Sleeps