It Is OK To Let Your Baby Cry Himself To Sleep - Research

New research has revealed babies allowed to cry themselves to sleep were not at all stressed nor did they have more behavioral problems than other children.
A new type of sleep training that involves delaying bedtime could be as effective as crying it out.
So new parents who long for a full night of glorious, uninterrupted sleep should not shudder at the thought of letting their baby "cry it out," a little.

Parents can simple try the sleep training method in which they allow their babies to cry themselves to sleep. The new study adds support to the idea that the method is effective and does not cause stress or lasting emotional problems for babies.

Researchers in Australia worked with 43 sets of parents who had babies between 6 and 16 months of age and who had a common complaint: Their child was having problems sleeping. The researchers taught about a third of the parents about graduated extinction, a technical term for crying it out. Parents were asked to leave the room within a minute of putting their child to bed and, if their children cried, to wait longer and longer periods of time before going back to comfort them.

Another third of the parents were asked to try a newer type of sleep training called bedtime fading. In this approach, parents put their infant to bed closer to the time he or she usually fell asleep and could stay in the room until the child dozed off.

The rest of the parents, the control group, did not attempt sleep training and instead received information about infant sleep.

Three months after starting the intervention, the researchers found that babies in the cry-it-out group were falling asleep almost 15 minutes faster than babies in the control group. The babies in the bedtime fading group dozed off about 12 minutes faster compared with the control group.

Source: CNN