One of the many interesting aspects of my job is the chance to listen to mothers in groups at a nearby children's centre.
Over the past couple of years a recurring topic has been how upset many mothers have become when they have tried to follow advice that babies should be left to cry until they stop. (This is different from the controlled crying, based on regular but boring contact, which health visitors suggest for night waking.) Many have been in tears when they spoke of this, leading always to a discussion of the wisdom of the technique, generally known as 'crying it out', which assumes that unwanted crying will be suppressed if it is not rewarded by parental attention.
The idea is that the baby must be forced to adapt to the parents' zone of comfort - the opposite of the sensitive responsiveness that builds security. One problem is that hardly any of the studies cited to justify this approach have actually included infants in their sample, and none have examined the effect this has on babies.
Let's start with the obvious - you cannot spoil a baby (although you can spoil a toddler), and until eight or nine months of age they do not have the neurological capacity to couple feelings with events. So when 'crying it out' works it is because the baby has given up hope and has moved into the dissociative, or freeze, stress response. If this upsets you, then well and good - imagine what a baby must feel like.
Crying to extinction is physiologically stressful and causes a rise in heart rate, blood pressure and the release of cortisol (which in excess is toxic to neurons in the hippocampus, and so destroys any chance of remembering), and a decrease in blood oxygen.
Animal studies show that while the signals of distress can be extinguished, the physiological markers remain high. There is no research to back up any assertion that crying it out is not harmful to the baby, but there is a lot of research on the deleterious effects of cortisol.
Not responding to a baby cuts both ways. If this behaviour generalises out and becomes an overall attitude, then parents veer towards the brutal and babies get trained rather than nurtured.
Robin Balbernie is a consultant child psychotherapist based in Gloucestershire
