Why Everything Sleep Trainers Tell You Is Rubbish

Do you know the history of what is now called “sleep training” or “Cry it out?”

​Because I do, and I’m going to let you in on a secret that all those “baby sleep experts”, doctors and child health nurses don’t want you to know.

It has absolutely no scientific basis.

There is no need for sleep training, there’s no proof that it is needed and there never was, because it was literally just made up.
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There’s a blog post making the rounds by Grubby Mummy and the Grubby Bubbies - “Why I personally disagree with controlled crying in all its names and forms”. It’s a perfectly good post, and I’m really looking forward to the rest of her series on “The Utter Crap Spun by Baby Whisperers”, but it made me notice something. Almost all the articles or books that i’ve seen that give people’s reasons for being anti-cio contain either a long list of arguments or the author's own failed experience. Some have both.


But when you get right down to it, no one needs a list of reasons why they disagree with sleep training. No one needs to make arguments like “it feels wrong” (even though it does) which only open mum’s up for counter arguments that it’s still what’s best for baby and we just need to get over our “maternal sensibilities” and get dad to do it instead.


We don’t need to try and argue that yes there is actually evidence that shows it can be harmful (or at least that there is no evidence to show that it’s not harmful) which opens us up for attack in the form of being labeled “judgemental sanctimommies” or arguments that the research is mixed.


There is only one argument that we actually need. One that can not be refuted, can not be used to fuel the “mummy wars” and can not make other mum’s feel like you are calling them heartless monsters.


Ready?


It. Is. Completely. Made. Up. Bullshit.


Do you know the history of what is now called “sleep training” or “Cry it out?”


Because I do, and I’m going to let you in on a secret that all those “baby sleep experts”, doctors and child health nurses don’t want you to know.


It has absolutely no scientific basis.


There is no need for sleep training, there’s no proof that it is needed and there never was, because it was literally just made up.


There’s no evidence that babies need to be taught to sleep, no evidence that they need to “self-settle”, no evidence that they need to cry, or that night feeding is bad or that babies can be spoiled or manipulate you or any of their other claims.


There is absolutely no more scientific proof behind the “need” to sleep train (or the methods advised) than there is for the belief that Babies shouldn’t look in a mirror as it could trap them and steal their souls or that an angry or stressed mother will have poisoned milk, or that looking at a monkey too long will cause your baby to resemble a monkey.


So here’s the “Sleep Training” advice actually came about.


At the turn of the last century (1800-1900) two books came out, Luther Emmett Holt’s “The Care and feeding of Children” and John B. Watson’s “Psychological Care of Infant and Child”. These are the first known books to explicitly mention the need for crying setting up the argument for “self-soothing” that we now hear.
They are also the first books to specifically ban overnight feeding, and to pathologize and condemn mother’s who comforted their children.


Victorian and early Edwardian ideals placed great value on “respectable” behaviour. Children were expected to call their father “sir” at all times, corporal punishment rates were high and fathers had absolute rule of all members of the household. Society was authoritarian, patriarchal and just generally an MRA’s wet dream. Children of the wealthy were raised by staff,  presented for inspection to their parents for one hour a day, and “childhood” for all classes was short and harsh, 16 hour days working in factories that produced poisonous off-gasses, climbing chimney stacks, orphanages, etc etc. But Watson would take the “seen but not heard” mantra to the extreme. on pages 81-2 of “Psychological Care of Infant and Child” he states:

Let your behaviour always be objective and kindly firm. Never hug and kiss them, never let them sit in your lap. If you must, kiss them once on the forehead when they say good night. Shake hands with them in the morning. Give them a pat on the head if they have made and extraordinarily good job of a difficult task

Kathryn M. Brigelow and Edward K. Morris, expand on this quote with a summary of Watson’s other beliefs on love and affection.
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Also to insure that children would be independent of any one adult’s love and affection, parents should bring different nurses into their homes on a weekly basis. Comparable positive effects on children’s independence might also be achieved by putting them in a fenced yard for large parts of the day.

In short, Watson was obsessed with trying to sever all emotional attachments, in a misconstrued belief that doing so would allow the child to be a blank slate able to be moulded into whatever the adult chose. His ideal world was one in which all babies were immediately removed from their parents and raised by a rotating litany of staff. We now know from the Romanian orphanage discoveries that Watson’s dream actually creates failure to thrive, severe psychological distress and is essentially torture.


Watson’s book was the biggest selling parenting manual until Benjamin Spock. HIs influence on how we have collectively parented for the last century and a bit is huge. He is essentially the reason for all detached parenting methods and all the behaviourist based discipline techniques (time outs, privilege withdrawal, sticker charts) used by both parents and teachers. His granddaughter in her 1990 Memoir wrote "Grandfather's theories infected my mother's life, my life, and the lives of millions. How do you break a legacy? How do you keep from passing a debilitating inheritance down, generation to generation, like a genetic flaw?"- Mary Loretta Hartley, granddaughter to John B. Watson; in memoir of her experiences, "Breaking the Silence".


And guess what - his research was never even complete. After getting caught having an affair with a student he was kicked out of his research position, and simply published his unfinished findings anyway. He then went on to use his own kids as the test subjects for much of his later publications. Unsurprisingly his own kids were pretty screwed up. Both of his son's attempted suicide. One succeeded, the other only recovered thanks to years of psychoanalysis and eventually became a Freudian analyst. (His father hated Freud)


In “The Care and feeding of Children”, the first parenting book written by a man to “go viral”, Emmett Luther Holt outlines strict feeding schedules for babies from birth and bans mothers from sleeping with their babies. This same advice is still given in books written by Paediatricians today.  Holt also maintained that mothers should refrain from kissing their babies, and a baby under 6 months old should not be played with. Ever. If said infant should cry in protest wanting to be “indulged” by it’s mother than “It should simply be allowed to “cry it out.” This often requires an hour, and in extreme cases, two or three hours. A second struggle will seldom last more than ten or fifteen minutes, and a third will rarely be necessary. Such discipline is not to be carried out unless one is sure as to the cause of the habitual crying.”


This is the first known mention of the phrase “Cry-it-out”  which is now commonly associated with curing bad sleep habits, rather than curbing a baby’s  desire to be played with or just generally given human interaction, but you can see the clear allusions to the entire concept of “spoiling” a child with love and affection - if you ”let it get it’s way”.


Once again we are still fighting this completely made up claim, in 1962 Paediatrician Walter W. Sackett Jr wrote  "If we teach our offspring to expect everything to be provided on demand, we must admit the possibility that we are sowing the seeds of socialism," (By which, as an American in the middle of the cold war he meant a damn Ruskie) clearly that’s ridiculous, and yet, people believed it to be scientific fact - because a doctor said it.


Which brings me to the other major difference with Holt and Watson compared to previous authors. They were doctors. People believed them because they were the “experts” the ones with the fancy letters after their name. At the time of their writing infant mortality rates were sky high. Mothers were scared. They didn’t know why babies died, no one ever had. All they had to go on was a collection of old wives tales and superstitions, and here was a doctor who had written a book which he claimed was based in scientific fact saying that babies needed to cry for 2-3 hours a day in order to fully develop their lungs. It sounded true at the time. 100+ years later we know that babies lungs are actually fully developed by 38 weeks and that the process of labour strengthens them ready for breathing in the outside world. But yet, this is still one of the most commonly heard pieces of mothering “advice” - sometimes still given by doctors. The impact of a male, doctor (that’s 4 levels of privilege, gender, class, education and profession) in a Patriarchal and classist society telling thousands of concerned mothers that something was fact can not be underestimated. Even now the number of women who say things like “I don’t need to know that much about childbirth, my doctor will tell me what to do” is astronomical. We have been conditioned to believe that doctors are the font of all knowledge, are always completely up to date, never get things wrong and always put your best interest first.  


Now, we’ve looked at where the supposed need to “cry it out” came from, but what about the belief that babies need to be trained to sleep in the first place?


Karin Bergstermann has written a paper summarising the history of infant sleep in Germany. Specifically she focuses on how the cultural climate shifted to one where parents believe that their children need to be taught to sleep, and where mothers feel pressure to sleep train their children as well as house them in a separate room. Annie at PHD in Parenting has thankfully sumarised Bergstermann’s article in English, and I highly advise you all to read it.


So what did Bergstermann find? Politics played an interesting role in shifting the climate of parenting advice. Do read the whole article, but I will quote Annie's conclusions here:
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Overall, as I read Bergstermann's review of the literature, I noticed two major shifts. The first was when the advice turned from information of a medical nature (developmental information on normal sleep from doctors and medical professors) to "housewife" advice (tips and tricks that would benefit the mother, but that don't necessarily consider the best interests of the child). The second shift was when the advice became politicized, turning it from something mothers may want to consider to something they were expected to do, creating the "good mother" and pitting her against the "bad mother" who spoils and coddles her child.

​Now the whole myth of the “bad mother” had actually existed in the housewife magazines and books as well as in “old wives tales” for a long time before 1930’s Germany. Mothers were blamed for anything and everything that went wrong with a child. Dwarfism? in 9 out of 10 cases it is the mother’s fault. Dumb child - mother’s fault. Screaming child - mother’s fault. Stillbirth - Mothers fault. As I said earlier, they had no way of knowing what actually caused these things, so they just guessed. And in a world where women were inferior they often got the blame. Conversely if your son was bright and healthy it was clearly the father’s influence and in the 1740’s doctors tried to claim that men should raise children because women were too weak minded and couldn’t be trusted to do a decent job of it.


The change in 30’s Germany was that you were now a “bad mother” if you did not sleep train your child. This was new. Before that plenty of “experts” had recommended and even strongly pushed for sleep schedules and warned against night feeding, but their arguments for it had been “scientific”. (as in they claimed there was a health related benifit) Now however it was not just recommended, if you didn’t do it you were damaging your baby.


This is still the core argument used by sleep trainers today. It comes in a few variations. There’s the standard “if you don’t teach your baby to sleep/sleep on a schedule/self soothe they will never learn to do it/will always need your help/you’ll create a rod for your own back. But we now also have the supposedly scientific evidence that babies will suffer growth retardation and brain damage if they don’t get x number of hours sleep at y age.


This taps into two sets of maternal fears. The first being the irrational yet extremely common fear that a child’s behaviour at x age will be their behaviour forever. This is quite clearly illogical, but given that we live in a culture where almost no one has lived experience with babies and children before they have one, it’s easy to see why so many first time mum’s fall into this trap. We have no knowledge of normal child development to allay our fears. The second set of fears it taps into is the fear of causing damage to their child’s health. This is a logical fear, but one that is in this case being exploited to undermine mother’s self-belief, make them trust in “experts” and convince them that sleep training is a “necessary evil”. Which is clearly bull. It’s not necessary at all. It never was. Babies all over the world, for all of time have eventually taught themselves to sleep through the night, have eventually taught themselves to sleep independently, have eventually weaned themselves and have napped on their mothers or in the arms of another loving caregiver for every nap with no schedule or clock watching for as long or as little as that particular baby needs at that particular stage of their individual development with no adverse effects.


That is what the science tells us is “normal” human development, and in everywhere except for the west this is how babies and toddlers still live. This is how we westerners raised our children before the industrial revolution came along with it’s need to force mothers into factories and a need for compliant workers. It’s how we raised our children until some doctor with a publishing connection decided to tell us that it was wrong.


And it’s how I parent because I don’t rely on Victorian myths to inform my parenting choices.