13/05/2022
“Last week, my physiotherapist asked me what I do for a living.
We talked about my day job and then I told her about Raised Good, mentioning that lately I’ve been writing a lot about sleep.
She’s a strong, independent, confident mother of adult children.
I knew that if we disagreed on our approaches to infant sleep, it would still be a healthy conversation so I was honest.
But, it took a turn I didn’t expect.
Her demeanor changed. Her posture shifted. And her voice softened as she recounted her experience with sleep training.
Twenty-five years ago with her first born baby, she was pressured into sleep training by her (well-meaning) mother-in-law.
She went through with it, leaving her baby to cry for a few nights until she heard an eerie silence.
She’d been trying to do the “right” thing.
But, she was heartbroken.
She felt as though her and her son had lost something special.
And all these years later her emotional wounds are still fresh; the scars haven’t formed, let alone healed.
She said if she had one wish in this life, it would be to go back and find the courage to decline unsolicited advice, while bringing her baby into her bed, holding him close, making him feel safe, and never leaving him alone to cry it out.
Because when we give babies no choice but to cry it out, we need to ask ourselves what is the “it”?
The it” is safety. The “it” is connection. The “it” is tenderness.
The “it” is us - their parents.
They are crying for us.
For us to come, for us to not leave, for us to pick them up, for us to soothe them, to hold them close.
As harsh a truth as that may seem in black and white, there’s no escaping it.
Yet, what’s harsher is expecting babies to do what we can’t even do as adults - to ‘self soothe’.
The reality is that self soothing is a buzzword, a marketing tactic, a fugazi that is used to sell non-responsive sleep training as a solution to parental exhaustion while papering over lack of support - nothing more.”
An excerpt from my blog post, When we give babies no choice but to cry it out, we need to ask what is the “it”? Link in BIO. 📷: 💕