The Science of Mother-Infant Sleep: Current Findings on Bedsharing, Breastfeeding, Sleep Training, and Normal Infant Sleep by Kathleen Kendall-Tacett & Wendy Middlemiss

Author:Kathleen Kendall-Tacett & Wendy Middlemiss [Kendall-Tacett, Kathleen]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Praeclarus Press
Published: 2014-03-09T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter 9

Why Not “Crying It Out”

Part 2

Can Certain Infant Care Practices Cause Excessive Stress?

Patrice Marie Miller

Michael Lamport Commons

Understanding the importance of responsiveness is an essential foundation for communicating with parents about early care. Helping parents create healthy, responsive environments may benefit from looking at some common parenting practices and how they may impact infants’ development. The role of stress experiences is an essential consideration when choosing care. What practices may be more risky for infants and which may be more protective is the focus of Part 2.

In Part 1 of “Why Not ‘Crying It Out’,” we reviewed the science forming the foundation for the importance of communicating to mothers about how they provide early care. This science helps to show how early care will impact infants’ developing brains and stress responses, how this aspect of neurological development will impact later behavior.

The next important question to be answered for professionals, and then shared with parents, is whether there are some relatively routine practices used by parents in the United States (and some other countries) that may be stressful enough to affect infants’ development. Based on the science then—the question is whether these practices could produce changes in infants’ brains and behaviors in the ways indicated by the research on stress and its effects.

Explored here are practices often associated with crying it out—practices such as putting infants to bed by themselves, and allowing them to cry instead of picking them up when they do not fall asleep; or allowing infants to cry and not picking them up when they wake up at night.

Other similar practices marked by parents’ non-response would include showing a relative lack of response to crying during the day time (so as not to “spoil” the baby), not holding or touching the baby very much, and so on. We will explore these practices from the framework of parent- and child-centered practices (Miller & Commons, 2010), tying these different practices back to the research reviewed above, and examining the impact of these practices on children’s development.

Parent-Centered Versus Child-Centered Parenting with Infants

Child-Centered Practices and Infant Sleep

Child-centered parenting involves learning to read the cues of the infant, and responding appropriately to those cues. Thus, child-centered parenting practices can encompass a variety of parenting strategies, such as feeding in a manner that is responsive to infant cues, and being highly responsive to crying, or pre-crying, as well as to other cues, co-sleeping or responding to infants during nighttime care, and emphasizing bodily contact more than physical separation. A main result of such practices is a reduction in stressful situations for the infant.

In regard to sleeping patterns, practices in which parents attend to infant signaling can provide a child-centered focus. Additionally, co-sleeping can be viewed as child-centered as this nighttime care practice allows for much faster responsiveness to infant cues. With this practice, infants who co-sleep will not be exposed to the extended crying that can occur when they are left alone to fall asleep on their own, or when their parents do not retrieve them from their crib at night.

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