How I Stopped Worrying And Forced My Son To Cry It Out

When you get your baby from the baby outlet the one thing they tell you is that if he or she is crying, it's telling you something — specifically that he or she is wet, hungry, gassy or some other stuff that I can't remember right now (oh, right, tired, which I certainly am).

Then all of the sudden you realize that he realizes stuff and that he is perhaps being a little bitch about things. And that's when you start to think about "changing behaviors."

The way the baby-industrial complex works is that there is a dichotomy that those in charge set up where you either do one severe thing or another. It's distasteful to thoughtful, independent-minded people to choose a "method" and "stick to it," but that's where our polarized society is these days: You're an adherent one style or another, specifically whether you get a kid to "cry it out" or not.

One method or another is kind of a bullshit proposition — akin to the ridiculousness we see in the artificially dichotomous political world we live in — and part of me thinks that it only really serves those who are selling books or getting on television or whatnot. But you know I don't know shit from shit and, well, anyway . . .

To be clear, for quite some time we resisted what is termed on various message boards as "CIO." The acronyms on baby parenting message boards are like the acronyms on all manner of message boards: totally incomprehensible until you finally ask your partner what stuff stands for (if you or your partner ever spent much time on a wedding message board you'll see it's the same thing). So in this way, "LO" is "little one," "DH" is "dear husband" and "MOTY" is (sarcastically) "mother of the year." There's a whole list here; I think my favorite one is "BM," which in baby message board land stands for either "bowel movement" or "breast milk."

Anyway, CIO — which is not "chief information officer" but rather "cry it out" — we resisted doing anything resembling "crying it out" for some time. For one, it seemed cruel; you think an infants are capable of controlling when or when they don't cry?

As it turns out, maybe they do. Or at least eventually the parents get so burned out that they no longer give a fuck. I would say in our case it was more the latter.

So anyway, Monkey has been teething lately — a little late, I gather, but the thing with teeth is that they're eventually going to come in — so we had been a little forgiving of his wakefulness. I'm sure, without knowing how exactly, that it's probably very disorienting and painful to have this stuff going on in your mouth. So, for example, I let him sleep next to me while I sat in the bed. And then within a couple of days we had a pattern going. Some would call it a "habit." Others would call it a "bad habit." So whatever you want to call it, it happened.

So the other night when Jen was out and I was trying to get Monkey to sleep and I was sitting with him in bed while he slept and it was past 9:30 and past 10 p.m. and I still hadn't eaten, and when I tried to put him in his crib he started crying, it finally occurred to me — this was bullshit.

And when Jen got home and she was hungry and we needed to eat and we were held hostage by a baby that may or may not wake up at any given moment, it occurred to her, too: Maybe we should let the little shit cry it the fuck out.

Now we actually made it through "dinner" that night without being called away by a screaming child, which was good for him, but it did get us around the corner on this particular issue.

There's a thing that happens when you have someone over and they see you running up and down the stairs to answer a baby monitor and they're like, "He needs you to get him back to sleep?" and that's when you feel it: It's not so much "Are You Mom Enough?" as it is "You Don't Know Shit From Shit, Do You?" and you always tell yourself that you're not going to get sucked into the fucked up world of competitive parenting but then there you are, sheepishly explaining that your child is teething. A friend told us that his experience was that the first night of crying it out led to two straight hours of crying followed by approximately 30 minutes the next night and then only a few more minutes the night after. That seemed not so bad, to be honest.

So the next night as I was trying to get Monkey to sleep, I had fallen asleep in the bed with him just before 9:30 and I decided that I wanted to go back downstairs to do adult things, so I picked him up to take him to his crib and of course he started crying. And so I got him back to sleep and put him down and no sooner had I put him down then he started crying again and it was then that I decided that it the time was now to change some behaviors.

Now I had been thumbing through a book Jen got called The No-Cry Sleep Solution: Gentle Ways to Help Your Baby Sleep Through the Night . . . OK, let me backtrack: Jen told me to look at this book and I was figuring out what applied to our situation. Not to get all "dad," but the book — like many books, actually — seems to be talking to a mother and not a father (or caregiver), so I had to filter out anything related to nursing. The funny thing about the No-Cry aspect is that it doesn't really mean that no crying will take place, just that it's not as harsh as strictly "crying it out" (and thus deserving of a back-cover blurb by Dr. Sears). I thought I remembered what whatever section I had read said, but in reality, I had no idea. So with the two hour baseline in mind, I set out to making Monkey sleep without me.

The first problem was that I had to go back to the No-Cry book to remember what it said. And while I sat there trying to read it, I realized that I didn't fully understand what it was saying in the first place. So I guess I sort of used the No-Cry method, except that I think eventually Monkey just cried it out.

And at about 10:30, wouldn't you know it, Monkey stopped crying. This was of course precipitated by a great deal of crying, standing straight up in the crib and shrill uvular screams, but he did eventually stop. And when he woke an hour later, and I returned to his crib to get him back to sleep, I put my hand on him and he immediately fell back asleep.

I was feeling pretty smart by this point, all "Who's Your Daddy?" and whatnot. So I went back to drinking beer and doing whatever it was I was doing and then went to bed after 2, only to have to get up at 3:51 to get him back to sleep. Just after 5 a.m. I went back to bed (this part was not very fun). Then in the morning, around 6:45 or so, I took him back into our room for nursing, like Jen and I discussed in advance.

We were scared that we'd create a psychopath by doing this, but when he woke up, he was the same as ever before, just as smiley and ridiculous. So I guess they don't really know what's going on. Which is good to know.

I, on the other hand, was tired as all get-out. My beers-to-hours-slept ratio would have paid out little, if any, in Vegas, but that didn't matter when we tortured our son and he awoke to remember nothing of it.

I don't know that we mastered anything in particular, but as I sit here at just after 1 a.m. the next night, I can say that it only took me 17 minutes to get him to sleep — without holding him and without returning several times to pick him up again. The two times since then I've had to soothe him back to sleep — again, without picking him up — were relatively short and painless. It's possible that we now have our lives back — at least until the next developmental hurdle.

Posted: October 19th, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: The Cult Of Domesticity | Tags: , , ,
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