New research re-awakens the sleep training debate

There is perhaps no parenting decision that tugs on the heartstrings as strongly as whether to let a baby cry him or herself to sleep.

At one end of the spectrum are parents who use some form of "cry-it-out" method to teach their baby to sleep through the night. The method is characterized by periods of letting a baby cry - from a few minutes to more than an hour - without picking him or her up. At the other end are the "no-cry" types who consider letting a baby cry for any length of time to be cruel and unusual punishment.

Stuck in the middle are a lot of exhausted parents hoping to make the right choice – especially since sleep deprivation in infants has been linked to behavioural and cognitive problems, not to mention its effects on mom and dad.

New research on infant sleep appears to deal a blow to those in the cry-it-out camp. Penn State researcher Douglas Teti examined the role of emotional availability on infant sleep and found that regardless of a family’s night-time routine, infants with parents who were responsive and warm had fewer night wakings and an easier time drifting off. In his study, which involved infrared cameras placed in families’ bedrooms and nurseries, a lapse of more than a minute resulted in a lower emotional availability score.

While more research is under way to further test those findings, Dr. Teti, a professor of human development and psychology, says his work adds to a growing skepticism toward sleep training – not only that it may not work, but that it may, in turn, affect the parent-child relationship itself.

Since his landmark book Solve Your Child’s Sleep Problems was published in 1985, pediatric sleep expert Richard Ferber has became the best known advocate of a “controlled-crying” approach. He advised parents to leave their infants in their cribs for increasingly longer periods of time, starting with a few minutes (the method spawned the verb “to Ferberize”). They were instructed to pat and comfort their baby through the crying, but not pick up or feed the baby.

Other authors and consultants have since added and subtracted behaviors to create their own formulas – staying in the room or not, being visible or not, soothing by voice or not, touching or not – though many caution against sleep training under six months. Parents often pick and choose from the methods, and some, misinterpreting Dr. Ferber’s technique, simply shut the door.

In Dr. Ferber’s second edition, published in 2006, he added a preface clarifying the difference between his method and a shut-the-door approach. “Simply leaving a child in a crib to cry for long periods alone until he falls sleep, no matter how long it takes, is not an approach I approve of,” he wrote.

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