by Jeanne Deaux

Created on: January 27, 2008

When it comes to parenting a young baby it's important to realize that infants do not think like adults do, or even as older children do. Their nervous systems simply are not developed to the same extent. Therefore, there are certain things they need that they won't need when they get older, and there are certain things they will understand later that they are incapable of understanding now. Unfortunately, many parents do not realize this, which is why the debate still rages over whether to let an infant "cry it out" to go to sleep.

The first and best argument against leaving your infant alone when he is in distress is an evolutionary one: Adults who leave their babies alone wind up with no baby. Lone infants in the wild are easy prey for predators. It's easy to respond to this idea with the argument that we don't live in the wild and our babies are protected by houses, locked doors, and cribs. We know that, but houses are a relatively new experience in human evolution and cribs are even newer, and baby instincts have not caught up yet. Since crying is an excellent homing signal to tell a predator the exact location of a helpless infant, if your young baby is crying for you, he's doing it for a very good reason: his distress has overridden his instinct to keep quiet.

If that seems silly, consider this: Babies begin their emotional development very early, and they start by assessing some very basic signals from their parents. It might be said that a baby's cry over hunger or a wet diaper or simply being tired is an early qualification test for what kind of relationship she'll have with Mommy and Daddy later. Remember that your baby is brand-new to the world and has no idea whatsoever about how anything works or how anyone is supposed to behave. Amazingly, many parents behave as if they expect baby to automatically know that they'll go to her aid if she needs them, even when they ignore her cries. And this is not something a baby learns after one or two experiences of Mom or Dad picking her up; it's a lesson that needs repeating over and over again. (You might as well keep this in mind, incidentally, for when baby becomes a toddler; the need for repetition doesn't go away in the first six months!) If you ignore your child's cries when she's too young to understand that you're nearby to care for her, she will come to believe you won't be there for her if she has any other problems, either. What basis does she have to believe otherwise? This is why "crying it out"

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