Do you know the history of what is now called “sleep training” or “Cry It Out” (CIO)?
There’s a blog post making the rounds by Grubby Mummy and the Grubby Bubbies – “Why I personally disagree with controlled crying in all its names and forms”. It’s a perfectly good post, and I’m really looking forward to the rest of her series on “The Utter Crap Spun by Baby Whisperers”, but it made me notice something. Almost all the articles or books that I’ve seen that give people’s reasons for being anti-CIO contain either a long list of arguments or the author’s own failed experience. Some have both.
But when you get right down to it, no one needs a list of reasons why they disagree with sleep training. No one needs to make arguments like “it feels wrong” (even though it does) which only opens mums up for counter arguments that it’s still what’s best for baby and we just need to get over our “maternal sensibilities” and get Dad to do it instead.
There’s no evidence that babies need to be taught to sleep, no evidence that they need to “self settle”, no evidence that they need to cry, or that night feeding is bad or that babies can be spoiled or manipulate you or any of their other claims.
So here’s how the “sleep training” advice actually came about.
At the turn of the last century (1800-1900) two books came out, Luther Emmett Holt’s The Care and feeding of Children and John B. Watson’s Psychological Care of Infant and Child. These are the first known books to explicitly mention the need for crying setting up the argument for “self soothing” that we now hear.
They are also the first books to specifically ban overnight feeding, and to pathologize and condemn mothers who comforted their children.
Watson’s book was the biggest selling parenting manual until Benjamin Spock. His influence on how we have collectively parented for the last century and a bit is huge. He is essentially the reason for all detached parenting methods and all the behaviourist based discipline techniques (time outs, privilege withdrawal, sticker charts) used by both parents and teachers. His granddaughter in her 1990 memoir wrote, “Grandfather’s theories infected my mother’s life, my life, and the lives of millions. How do you break a legacy? How do you keep from passing a debilitating inheritance down, generation to generation, like a genetic flaw?”- Mary Loretta Hartley, granddaughter to John B. Watson; in memoir of her experiences, Breaking the Silence.
This is the first known mention of the phrase “Cry It Out” which is now commonly associated with curing bad sleep habits, rather than curbing a baby’s desire to be played with or just generally given human interaction, but you can see the clear allusions to the entire concept of “spoiling” a child with love and affection – if you “let it get it’s way”.