Letting baby CIO.

Active Poster Joined: Feb 08 2012 Posts: 97

From "To Kindle a Soul" by Rabbi Kelemen based on the teachings of Rav Wolbe

http://www.aish.com/f/p/48916177.html

NIGHTTIME CARE

Although our children always need our sensitive responses, they especially need them at night. The combination of drowsiness and darkness makes children feel especially vulnerable. We have to make special efforts to be attentive to nighttime distress.

The effect of ignoring children's nighttime cries was tragically illustrated during the only modern, cultural experiment in which children were voluntarily secluded from their parents during sleeping hours. Beginning in the 1930s, parents living on Israel's secular kibbutzim elected to sleep their children away from home in communal children's facilities. The small staff size at these facilities made it impossible to attend promptly to every cry, but the early pioneers of the kibbutz movement hoped that their children would adjust to the less attentive arrangement.

A barrage of studies found that the graduates of kibbutz children's facilities suffered disproportionately from a range of psychological disorders, including attachment deprivation traumas, major depression, schizophrenia, low self-esteem, and alcohol and drug problems. By 1994, more than half of all children on Israeli kibbutzim exhibited symptoms and psychopathologies associated with insecure attachment.

Professor Carlo Schuengel, an investigator from Leiden University (The Netherlands), echoed the findings of many earlier researchers when he identified the cause of the psychological disintegration kibbutz children experienced: "Although collective sleeping may allow for sufficient monitoring of children's safety, it leaves children with only a precarious and limited sense of security."

As data poured in revealing the damage that had been done by children's sleeping facilities, kibbutz leaders abandoned the experiment. The last of the kibbutzim's 260 children's facilities was finally closed in 1998.

CRY-IT-OUT?

Frighteningly, some children in the West are being exposed to just such inappropriate child-care arrangements today in their own homes. The "cry-it-out" sleep-training program offers parents an effective alternative to the hassles of nighttime childcare. Behavioral psychologists behind the plan have demonstrated that infants whose nighttime cries are not answered really do stop crying within as little as three days. Although the program has been touted as "a new, revolutionary method for teaching children to sleep through the night," it constitutes no more than a revival of the disastrous kibbutz experiment, and what it really teaches children is despair.

Ignoring a child's nighttime cries might eventually produce quiet, but it does not cultivate security.

People are attracted to the cry-it-out method for the same reason they are attracted to many other destructive childraising techniques: It offers a quick behavioral fix. However, intelligent educators take into account the long-term effects of every childraising strategy. Ignoring a child's nighttime cries might eventually produce quiet, but it does not cultivate security.

Thus, children trained with the cry-it-out method were found to wake more often throughout the night, sleep less efficiently, and walk around with more daytime tiredness than children attended to by their parents. Moreover, children deprived of nighttime comfort are at risk for all the psychopathologies discovered among children who slept in kibbutz children's homes.

Beginner Joined: Sep 27 2008 Posts: 5 Location: Brooklyn

as others before me have written, I think u should try to get the baby to sleep longer at night and that will certainly increase the baby's appetite during the day. I personally would start by skipping one nighttime feeding at a time. for example, no nursing from 8 to at least 1 am. at the same time I feel for u since I do believe that some kids are more difficult to get to sleep and feed. I recommend finding a friend to act as your partner and call when the baby is screaming so you don't give in.