Photo: iStock
New parents are faced with an impossible dilemma: respond to your baby?s cries throughout the night and endure the torture of prolonged sleep deprivation; or, sleep train your baby with some form of cry-it-out, and feel like a heartless monster?albeit one who doesn?t weep at the thought of how much effort it will take to get dressed.
Now new research is showing that both options, as well as a method that?s a combo of the two, are just fine. According to a study published in Pediatrics, the outcomes were similar among babies whose parents used gradual extinction, letting baby cry for increasingly longer intervals before going in, and those who used bedtime fading, where a child is put to sleep at the time he usually dozes off, while the parent stays in the room. (A control group simply received information on infant sleep; total extinction, where parents shut the door and don?t go in again until morning, was not studied.) Among the 43 healthy six- to 16-month-old Australian babies in the study, the CIO cohort fell asleep faster than the control group, as did the fading group. The infants in the CIO group slept longer overall after a week and woke less overnight than babies in the other two groups. The attachment between parent and child didn’t seem to be affected either way. And here?s the surprising kicker: measurements of cortisol, the stress hormone, were found to be lower in sleep trained babies than in the babies who weren’t sleep trained. Prev...