Survey extracted from my « Parents’ Survival Manual. Keys to coping with every situation. De 0 à 6 ans » (InterEditions, 2019)

I know how hard it can be to take care of young children on a daily basis. Especially when our nights are always interrupted by his repeated cries (hello, tiredness). However, leaving him to cry alone in his bed doesn’t seem to be the solution… Short of teaching him how to sleep, the « let him cry » method teaches him not to rely on adults when he needs them, and to deactivate his warning signals (such as screaming and crying).

The same applies to children who are sometimes left to cry in crèches (due to a lack of available adults) and who, after a while, stop crying. They’ve finally adapted! » we say, reassured. Unfortunately, not necessarily. Chances are, their need for closeness and reassurance remains the same, but the child no longer expresses it, because the adult has repeatedly failed to respond…

I’d like to take you back to the origins of this once-popular method of education. How did we get here?

Ignoring inappropriate behaviour is the basis of behavioural methods.

It all began in the ^20th century, when behaviorism emerged. What is behaviorism? It’s a branch of psychology whose aim is to suppress maladaptive behavior in individuals (such as beating up your grandbrother, or escaping endless department meetings!) The principle is as follows: we punish (or ignore) a maladaptive behavior to make it disappear (punishment = negative stimulus)[1] and encourage an adapted behavior to make it reappear and become anchored in the individual’s behavioral repertoire (encouragement = positive stimulus). For example: if you’d like your colleague to give you more compliments and a little less criticism, encourage him when he compliments you (positive stimulus), and don’t react when he criticizes you (withdrawal of attention aimed at extinguishing the behavior). This is the basis of education for children and animals (and adults, too!).

We figured that ignoring the child’s cries would eventually make him stop crying…

But what does this have to do with children’s sleep? Quite simply. Based on these behaviorist postulates, a simple idea has emerged: to get a child to stop waking us up at night, all we have to do is ignore his or her crying. And here, two strategies coexist.

For some people, letting them cry simply means ignoring their inappropriate behavior. Which, on the face of it, is not mistreatment! But many practitioners will tell you that letting a baby cry is not punishment. It’s just a matter of not paying attention to him when he doesn’t behave as he should. So you can feel good about yourself…

Others will tell you that this ignorance is a real punishment because when the child cries, we abandon him (and abandonment is a strong negative stimulus for many of us).

However, whatever the underlying strategy, the behaviour remains the same: the child cries alone in bed, and that’s that. And, let’s face it, it works pretty well (but not for the right reasons, as we’ll see a little later). After a few nights, the child no longer wakes up his parents at night. And parental dark circles fade. Eureka!

We forget that crying is an alarm, not an intentional behavior.

Unfortunately, we’ve overlooked a major detail in this story. It’s surprising to treat inappropriate behavior such as « a colleague’s criticism » in the same way as… a baby’s crying. Why do you ask? Because your colleague’s criticism is a reasoned, intentional behavior. Whereas your baby’s crying is an alert, unintentional behavior. Your child isn’t crying on purpose and giving you a bad night! So it’s not logical to give them the same response: ignorance…

The famous « 5-10-15 » method

Let’s get back to our subject: the « let the child cry » method (described by some as sleep training). Over the years, various doctors have adopted it, adding their own variations (and their own names, too, to inflate their egos – which is only logical). The Ferber or « 5-10-15 » method is one of the most famous. It’s probably the one your pediatrician or great aunt told you about. At the time, it was as popular as Bordeaux wine is today (or almost). The principle is simple (and quite cruel): the parent must let the child cry for 5 minutes before going to find him/her, then 10 minutes, then 15 minutes, then 20 minutes, then 25 minutes, and so on. Let’s see how it works in practice…

On the pediatrician’s advice, you decide to let your child cry…

That’s it, you’ve decided to let your child cry tonight, thanks to the advice you received from your pediatrician this morning. You tell him again how much you love him (your child, not the pediatrician!). You put him down in his crib, leave the room (not quite reassured, though, because you sense that something is not quite right with this method) and turn off the light. And then, BIM, your child starts crying[3]. Your heart rate and breathing quicken, your throat tightens. Naturally, as a parent legitimately concerned about your child’s well-being, you start to stress. How could it be otherwise? To combat this discomfort, parents do what they can: some take refuge at the other end of the apartment so as not to hear their child’s cries, others opt for earplugs (and advise their neighbors to do the same), still others – the most reckless – stay behind the door hoping that the crying will eventually stop. But these minutes are interminable…

What’s going on in his little brain at that moment?

Deprived of your proximity, your child is suddenly overwhelmed by a feeling of insecurity. The younger the child, the less able he is to reason, the more insecure he feels. Vulnerable as it is, nature has equipped it with cries and screams so that it can always be sure of the proximity of the adult in case of trouble. Which, in this case, it is. His amygdala, a small part of our brain whose role is to decode danger, is activated. The alarm is triggered: « PIN PON PIN PON! Alerted, your child’s hypothalamus orders the secretion of stress hormones. Instead of relaxing, his body will be hyper-vigilant. His body prepares for the worst to ensure his survival: fight or flight (remember, by the way, that his brain – several thousand years old – can’t quite tell the difference between a 40-ton mammoth coming ashore and the insecurity he feels when he’s alone in bed).

His brain is flooded with an abundant flow of chemicals and hormones. And so, to protect the child from this overload of stress and attenuate the activity of its alarm system, nature has provided everything. His brain bathes itself in opiate-like substances, such as endorphins and serotonin. It’s like a self-drug. Eventually, the child falls asleep, exhausted.

Subjected to too much stress, its brain needs oxytocin to calm down

But the best antidote to this cortisol overload is… oxytocin. And there’s no need to run to the chemist’s in the middle of the night to get this hormone – just hold your child! It’s magical! It’s the hormone our brains secrete when we show affection for someone, when we smile at them, when we think about someone we love (when we have sex too, but that’s another story). That’s why, when a child cries, we generally advise parents to cuddle him or her without asking too many questions. In fact, this is the type of mothering that has prevailed for 99% of humanity! By letting a child cry, we’re teaching him that the rules have changed over the millennia, and that he’s not going to get that oxytocin.

And if your child cries in spite of everything, even if he’s curled up in your arms, don’t panic: re-read my article « Crying babies: a great misunderstanding » and invite him to cry, to unburden himself in your arms. Crying to your heart’s content in the arms of someone you trust is a very positive thing!

No, he’s not throwing up to get your attention. He’s simply throwing up.

In a high-stress situation, when cortisol and serotonin levels are particularly high, the icing on the cake is that the child may start vomiting involuntarily. It’s a scene often seen in cinema: faced with a high-stress situation (the sight of a corpse, for example), one of the characters runs off to vomit on the sidewalk. So no, contrary to what you may have been led to believe, your child isn’t making himself vomit at that moment to get you back into the room, he’s not doing it on purpose.

Children learn to rely solely on themselves

Confronted with these repeated experiences, the child’s crying, ignored by those around him, will eventually stop. The child will no longer wake you up at night. It’s about time. But be careful, it’ s not that the child no longer has needs, it’s just that he no longer expresses them.

Leaving a child to cry alone in bed isnot teaching him to sleep. Instead, we’re subjecting him to unbridled stress. What we risk teaching him is that he can’t count on adults in times of need, and that he must get used to relying only on himself. These situations, if repeated, can influence his attachment style and his trust in the adults who take care of him.

In high doses, repeated stress becomes toxic to the brain

In high doses, stress (the excessive and/or repeated activation of the alarm system) can become toxic. High levels of cortisol can act like poison on a child’s brain, particularly in the hippocampus region, causing neuronal loss. Rosa Jové, a child psychiatrist specializing in children’s sleep, points out that « these successive waves of chemicals that flood the brain reduce the normal secretion of serotonin and numb the amygdala (…). Let’s not forget that a low serotonin level is the most important marker of violence in animals and humans, and is linked to a high index of homicide, suicide, arson, antisocial disorders, self-mutilation and other aggressive behaviours »[5].

At the same time, a child who cries alone is better than a parent who risks losing his temper…

After that, as I often tell parents, it’ s better to have a child crying alone in bed than exhausted parents who risk acting out, shaking the child and causing irreversible damage… Caring for a young child is hard work. Every day, we all do the best we can with our resources. The idea is to strike a delicate balance between satisfying our child’s need for closeness and reassurance, and satisfying our own need for calm and rest. May the strength be with you!

By the way… Since when do kids need to be taught how to sleep?

There’s one point in this story that we’ve completely forgotten to mention: learning to sleep. There’s no need to teach a child to sleep, because he can sleep just fine on his own. He was already sleeping very well when he was comfortably lodged in our womb. It’s just that today, he doesn’t sleep the way we’d like him to, according to our adult constraints (how he must miss his old life, at times…). Teaching a child to sleep would be like teaching him to breathe or to eliminate – it makes no sense!

So kids are sleeping through the night at 4 months?

Oh yes, and one last point: the age at which your child should sleep through the night (the number 1 topic of conversation among exhausted young parents). « He’s 4 months old? Your child should be sleeping through the night! It’s enough to make parents feel guilty and put them under unnecessary pressure[6]. Don’t be fooled by preconceived ideas: only 10 to 15% of 7-month-olds are able to sleep 10 to 12 hours a night in one go[7]. Other research points out that 15-35% of children have more or less disturbed sleep during the first five years of life[8]. In their book « Le sommeil, le rêve et l’enfant » (Albin Michel, 2011), Drs. Thirion and Challamel explain that 40% to 60% of 18-month-olds still wake up at night. In 1970, Ajuriaguerra[9] noted that between the ages of 3 and 5, even though sleep is better organized on the whole, slow falling asleep and waking up at night are still common. All this to say that, bad luck, children don’t sleep as well as we’d like to think. « These false hopes encourage parents to imagine that their child has a big problem (…). But this is not true. Sleep is an evolutionary process, and every healthy child will end up sleeping perfectly one day or another, » stresses Dr Rosa Jové in her excellent book « Dormir sans larmes. Les découvertes de la science du sommeil de 0 à 6 ans » (Les Arènes, 2017). No pressure, then.

What if the problem wasn’t our children’s sleep, but our own expectations of their sleep?

It’s interesting to note that in societies where the upbringing of children is more respectful of their needs, and where children’s sleep is not idealized,there are very few sleep problems among young children! Quite the opposite of Western societies, which are less respectful of children. An idea worth pondering…

[1] In child and dog training, for example, this negative stimulus has long been corporal punishment. We tended to hit a child for dropping a glass of water, or a dog for peeing in the living room. Even today, for many parents, punishment remains THE negative stimulus par excellence (even though it induces feelings of anger and shame in children rather than helping them to understand the significance of their actions). Since then, water has flowed under the bridge, and our knowledge of children has encouraged us to deploy strategies that are more respectful of them as individuals. Today, this negative stimulus, which aims to make behavior disappear, consists more in ignoring the behavior, remaining indifferent. For example: we’ll ignore the little dog who chews the toy and encourage him if he manages to let go of the toy and chew his bone! This principle, more respectful of individuals – human and non-human – is the basis of positive education.

[3] Remember that your young child is literally programmed to be in fusion with a reassuring adult during his first months of life, due to his immaturity. Even when he’s a little older, he still feels this fundamental need for closeness with the adult. He doesn’t WANT to be against you, he NEEDS to be against you!

[5] Quoted from the book « Dormir sans larmes. Discoveries in the science of sleep from 0 to 6 years ».

[6] Have you noticed how quickly the subject of sleeping comes up in conversations with those around you when it comes to your child? « How old is he? » (first question) and « Does he sleep through the night? » (second and fateful question).

[7] Estivill and Béjar (1995). Duérmete, Nino. Published by Circulo de Lectores.

[8]Lozoff et al (1985). Sleep problems seen in pediatric practice. Pediatrics. 75(3):477-83.

[9] Ajuriaguerra, J. (1970). Manuel de psychiatrie de l’enfant. Paris, Masson (2nd edition).