Feb 12 2009
Alternatives to Crying-it-Out or Controlled Crying
The toddler years are so different from infancy. I’m suddenly interacting with an individual who has an opinion about everything, and who very much knows what he does and doesn’t want to do.
His communication becomes more clear by the day as he learns to repeat more words back, and makes up for gaps in expression with gestures (for example, throwing unwanted food on the floor) and body movements. What I love watching is the way the Pibler throws his entire body into every movement and emotion, not holding anything back. Compared to the held-back, restrained way most of us move as adults, he is so in touch with the impulses moving through him, and there is complete congruence between what he feels and experiences, and what his body language tells us.
He hasn’t yet learned to hide his feelings or show a different face to the world. When he doesn’t like someone or is not ready to interact with them, he turns his face away, but his unrestrained joy when he does want to interact is contagious. When he first met my sister on Sunday, he was wary, but within a couple of hours he was ‘asking’ her to pick him up (with upstretched arms) and playing with her. I look at him and feel both awed by this quality and sad at the inevitable fact that he will have to lose some of this free expressiveness in order to fit in in our social world.
The last few nights he’s been up a lot with teething, and this, added to my third attempt to nightwean him since October, has caused a fair bit of crying-in-arms. Over the past 2 weeks of nightweaning (stopping nursing/breastfeeding him between 10 pm and 6 am), I’ve noticed he is starting to sleep longer stretches in the early evening, though not yet the rest of the night, and is able to put himself back to sleep with minimum intervention from us, sometimes only raising his head to see I am there.
Nightweaning is by no means an easy path, but it’s far preferable to me as someone practicing attachment parenting, than any form of crying-it-out or controlled crying. A lot of parents think these are their only options when trying to reduce night wakings, but the crying-in-arms approach is a way to be there for your child and contain his emotions without abandoning him. I don’t want the Pibler to have night terrors and dread bedtime - I want him to have positive associations, and leaving him to cry alone would not accomplish that. I hear a lot of anecdotes about children who were forced to sleep alone early and, as they matured, were more ‘clingy’, wanting to sleep with their parents, whereas children whose need for night-time closeness was honoured, were keen to move on to their own bedrooms out of their own choice. I’m hoping that this will be the case with the Pibler. But right now it’s a transition phase and these are never easy.
