Treating Bedtime Crying in Loving, but firm manner

Behavior & Habits

It’s easy for a baby of age 6 to 7 months to fall into a certain pattern, like for example you kiss the baby good night and leave the room. She or he wails. You reappear, cuddle and kiss her or him, say good night, and leave the room. She wails. And so on. Both you and the baby are trapped in a vicious cycle that in the end leaves everyone frustrated and overtired.

The standard advice is to “let your child cry it out”. Once children learn that crying doesn’t make their parents appear, they stop crying. A more positive way to think about this process is that you are allowing your child to learn the skills she or he needs to fall asleep on her or his own.

Most babies who are healthy certainly can calm themselves down and drift off to sleep. But if parents always do the soothing for them, they never have a chance to develop these important abilities themselves.

Letting a baby cry at bedtime usually works, and it is almost certainly the fastest solution. But it is not for everybody. Many parents simply cannot bear the thought of walking out of the room while their baby is wailing. Some worry that it is physically or psychologically harmful to let a baby go on crying, especially if the crying lasts for 30 minutes or longer.

The reality is, it is not true. There is just no reason to believe that crying at bedtime is dangerous or harmful if a baby is not hungry or wet and is well loved and responded to at other times.

Still, if you feel terribly uncomfortable letting your baby cry, then you should listen to your heart. There are also other gentle ways that you can adopt to self calm a baby at bedtime, which we will discuss in some upcoming posts.

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