Here is some information on supported crying – which involves listening to empathising with your baby and most importantly HOLDING your baby when they cry.

There’s an MD in NY now telling mothers to put their babies (at 4 months) to bed at 7pm and not go into the room until 7am- no matter what. When my friend asked what to do if her daughter threw up, he said, “go in there, clean her up, don’t talk to her, and put her back in her bed, shut the door and don’t go back in till 7am!” That’s abuse! And this is an MD. If you hear a baby screaming in NY, I’m sure it’s a patient of this absurd famous rich MD that thinks he’s just the bomb. My friend walked out.
My personal take from my observations in life- your baby shuts down when you let them CIO. They learn very fast (in 5 days or less) that you will not come. But that baby still needs you to feed them, love them, play with them, and provide, so they connect to you in the morning. And they will love you unconditionally, until more experiences build on the foundation you created. And you have no idea how they store those memories. You have no idea what perceptions they will develop about they decisions you’ve made. Is that a risk you’re willing to take?
EVERY parent I’ve asked about CIO that has done it says the same thing- IT WAS HARD. VERY HARD. Personally I think that’s the parent intuition being ignored.
If a parent can let a child scream that loud for that long, what else are you able to ignore in your child’s communication?
I believe it damages the limbic brain. I believe sleep is so personal, and it’s years before any person realizes they like to sleep alone because they rest better. In most cases, no one likes to sleep alone, thus the double, queen and king size beds. We all need comfort, security, and love while we sleep. It starts at birth and goes for years!
Is this hard? Yes. Will I survive? Yes. Will my daughter have a foundation where she knows her needs are met and her emotional building blocks are all in tack? Yes.

One serious misunderstanding I’ve noticed is that many people seem to be under the impression that the scientific studies linked to actually deal with with controlled crying or other “crying it out” methods, which simply isn’t the case. The studies looked at children who had experienced of severe trauma & neglect, not children from normal families who used controlled crying. The kind of stresses they are talking about these children’s brains being subjected to are of a different order of magnitude, continued over extended periods of time, and would have been combined with generally poor parenting. We are talking chronic exposure to stress hormones over long periods. This just can’t be compared to leaving an otherwise well-cared-for and unconditionally loved child to cry for a while at night for a few weeks at most (controlled crying, done properly, usually only takes a couple of weeks after which the child only cries at night when there is a serious problem, or only wakes to have a brief winge before settling themselves back down).

People also seem to fail to distinguish between different “cry it out” methods, as though all parents who do this are leaving their children to cry for hours every night. The controlled crying method I and many other parents have used is more gentle, involving a much more gradual process of slowly letting the child get used to you not instantly coming to pick them up every time they cry. I frequently went in to my son to reassure him that I was there but left again after a short time and left him to cry a little longer each time – he wasn’t lying there screaming for hours without being attended to! I also paid attention to how his cries sounded – if it sounded like he was in serious distress I would go to him regardless of how long it was since I last went in.

The other issue that seems to cause confusion is related to the age of the baby – many of the experts who argue against using “cry it out” methods are specifically talking about very young babies, yet their opinions are then taken up by others to be applied to all children, even much older preschoolers who are at an age where crying is a less primal response and more about being a way to get what they want and express the fact that they feel hard-done-by. I absolutely agree that very young babies should feel able to totally rely on their caregivers, and that their crying should not be seen as “manipulative” in any negative sense. For young babies “crying it out” is completely inappropriate and unhelpful. But I think there is a point where the child starts to become more “knowing” about what they are doing, as well as being more able to communicate their needs in other ways, which usually corresponds approximately with the point at which long term sleep deprivation on the part of the parent starts to have very serious consequences (a parent on the verge of a breakdown due to 2 years of getting only a few hours of broken sleep each night is much more of a danger to the child than allowing that child to cry themselves to sleep for a couple of weeks). Controlled crying is definitely something that should be seen as a technique to be applied to toddlers, not babies of only a few months old.

The trouble is with all of these mixed messages based on misinterpretation of the arguments is that already stressed out & bewildered parents make things even worse for themselves by thinking that if they leave their child to cry for even a few minutes they are causing brain damage. The parents’ mental health is of critical importance to the child, yet parents are made to feel guilty if they want to try to get a decent night’s sleep because to ignore their child’s cries is a form of “child abuse”! I would never want to go back to the way things were only a few generations back, when “cry it out” didn’t even mean “controlled crying”, it just meant leaving your child to cry for hours if necessary, feeding only on schedule, and avoiding anything that could “spoil” the baby (like excessive cuddles!), but very few people advocating modern forms of controlled crying are talking about anything like that. And anyway – playing devil’s advocate here – where are all the brain damaged people of our parents’ & grandparents’ eras, who were subject to the old-school “cry it out” methods? If leaving babies to cry really did cause all the problems attributed to it surely we’d see more signs of it amongst the older adults alive today! As I said, I wouldn’t advocate that style of parenting at all, but I just think it’s important to remember that babies over the generations have been subject to all kinds of different types of parenting, some of which we would consider quite cruel today, yet very few of these seem to have had any significant lasting impact on those who experienced them.

There are several things I think I would do differently if I have another child, but even after reading and taking in all of the arguments about controlled crying I think I would still consider using the technique if I have a child who is unable to settle at night by the time they are a toddler. However, as I did with my son, I would combine it with showing him that he was unconditionally loved and that whenever he really needed me I would be there. I do, however, believe that there is something to be said for helping children to learn to be self-reliant once they are old enough to be capable of it (which excludes young babies who are, by definition, dependent on you), and that this doesn’t have to come with a hard, old-fashioned attitude to children where to show them any love or attend to their needs is to “spoil” them.