To Let Her Cry, or Not

“Wake up happy, and sleep peacefully,” is a thought my mom strongly believes in, and it’s how she brought up both my brother and me. And over the years, I’ve stuck to this thought and followed the same. So, when I first heard the term “cry it out” – a method to sleep train your baby – a few months after I had my first child, it wasn’t actually my baby but me who wasn’t ready to take on this method. I decided not to cry it out but to wait it out. Here’s how it worked for both my girls.

A little reading on the Internet, and speaking with many other parents, made it clear that this really was a tried and tested method to help babies sleep through the night. To cry it out basically means letting the baby weep to sleep for at least three nights in a row. Most babies understand by the fourth night or at the most in a week that it is their bedtime and they will have to sleep on their own.

As first-time parents, both my husband and I had different views. Simply, he agreed and I did not. But we decided to give it a go when she was around four months old. We put her in her crib, hugged her and kissed her, said goodnight, and waited outside her room. The house was all quiet for the first five minutes. I was trying to guess what she was doing. Then the crying started. I got up to enter her room and my husband stopped me and said “you need to let her learn.” I sat back down. But 15 minutes later, I couldn’t take it any longer and she was back in my arms.

My logic was that neither of our parents had put us through this method and we grew up well, so why not stick to the Indian way of bringing up our child? His point was that parenting methods change with time and there was no harm in trying out a new technique. When we were babies, most Indian parents never used a crib like what we have these days. Most babies were rocked to sleep on their mother’s lap, which meant that the mother had to keep sitting almost the entire night as the baby found it comfortable to sleep on her lap. Or parents used a traditional cloth-made cradle hung from the ceiling. The mother, father or the grandparent would gently rock the baby to sleep. Or the mother would just put the baby next to her and pat the baby to sleep. There is also the concept of joint families in India, where the doting grandparents are always there to care for their grandkids’ every need. Space constraint also adds up to this. For instance, if the child is growing up in metros like Mumbai, which is full of high-rise apartments, a separate room for the baby to sleep in at an early age is out of the question. Even if there is enough room, many Indian parents just do not believe in the concept of letting their kid sleep alone so young. So the child might sleep in a crib or a small bed in the same room with its parents.

I remember sleeping in my parents’ room even as a teenager, especially after I watched horror movies like “The Exorcist” or “The Omen.” For over a week I would sleep hugging my mom till both my mom and dad were tired of explaining to me, in all possible ways they could, that it was just a movie. “You don’t need to feel so involved. Don’t watch it if you can’t take it,” they would say.

Though I saw many other New Age Indian parents over the last few years – both living in India and abroad – successfully trying out this method, I was satisfied that I could never let our baby cry it out. But my husband decided to try a little harder to convince me. “Our parents never thought of setting up a baby room to welcome the baby, or of buying feeding chairs. If you can agree to other new methods of parenting, then why not this?” he asked.

Then another friend took his side and said that crying it out worked very well for her baby and made it easier for her to get back to work after maternity leave. Still not convinced, I discussed with my lactation consultant how this would affect the feeding pattern and schedule for my baby, as I wanted to continue breastfeeding her. I had read that formula-fed babies feed fewer times than breastfed babies. She tried to explain to me that it was okay even for breastfed babies to sleep through the night. But when that didn’t help, she suggested, “It’s all right. Let the baby sleep next to you and you can sleep train her when you are ready. Your baby will be ready when you are ready.”

So I decided to put away all methods of sleep training and just go with my baby’s rhythm. Her crib was now used more like a playpen. She was ready to play in it but not sleep in it. I waited till she turned one. She could walk, say “No,” and respond with a nod to say, “Yes.” She could express what she wanted by pointing to things and understand what we said. I thought that now was the time. I moved her crib close enough to my bed so that if she put out her hand she could hold mine. When it was time for her afternoon nap, I put her in her crib, and then I lay down. She seemed a little confused. I looked at her and said, “That’s where you need to sleep. And I am sleeping here in my bed, right beside you.” She did not cry but kept standing for a good 15 minutes. I then tried to lay her down in the crib, and lying down, I said, “You can hold my hand if you like.” She held it, immediately feeling comforted. And she dozed off soon. From then on, I stuck to putting her in the crib and holding her hand for both her afternoon nap and at night. And after a week, she did not need to hold my hand anymore. Now this became a routine. After her storytime, when it was time to sleep, she was ready to sleep in her crib happily. And to make sure she was comfortable and not scared if she awoke in the night, my husband came up with a good night kiss rhyme for her. It goes, “Amma (South Indian word for Mom) loves you. Appa (Dad) loves you. Thatha (Grandpa) loves you and Paati (Grandma) also loves you. Everybody loves you. Sleep well.”

When we had our second baby, “cry it out” never even came up. We decided to wait till she was ready, too. Our second is a little over 18 months. She too gets her share of the good night rhyme from Daddy dear. She sleeps happily, talking, laughing and making funny sounds with her sister, who sleeps across from her crib in their room. I was ready to try out new parenting methods, but I guess I just needed more time.

By Keerthana Nagarajan

Keerthana Nagarajan lives with her husband and two little girls in Zurich. She is currently freelancing with swissinfo, covering Indian-Swiss stories. Keerthana worked previously in the Netherlands at Radio Netherlands Worldwide, covering South Asia news, and CNN’s sister concern in India CNN-IBN, a 24-hour news channel. Here’s the link to all her published content: http://keerthananagarajan.blogspot.in

Illustration by Susana Gutierrez

Susana is the mother of two little girls and a freelance illustrator. She can be reached at s.escapa@gmail.com