Experts now say letting your baby wail Doesn’t harm them

Four months after having my first child, Alexander, I was an emotional wreck.

As the editor of a parenting magazine, I had access to experts on every conceivable topic and, before his arrival, I’ll admit I thought I knew a fair bit about mothering.

Well, children have been tormenting their parents with lack of sleep for all of history and, as any new parent will attest, the onset of sleep deprivation is a singular form of misery that you simply cannot imagine or prepare for.

Older mothers will nod along smugly with the often quoted idea that you should ‘sleep when the baby sleeps’, but no one can know the torture of day and night melting into one long cycle of wakefulness and crying until it actually happens.

I was depressed, tearful and anxious. I had intended to go back to work around four months postpartum — but the idea of writing at the kitchen table while my child gently slept beside me was laughable.

I became determined to fix the problem. Looking back, my expectations were set by my own perfectionist high standards. If I couldn’t make this work, I thought, no one could.

As exhaustion and work mounted, things began to unravel and my husband, desperate to help, suggested we call in an expert.

A highly regarded sleep trainer — who moved in royal circles, or so she said — arrived at our house. She advocated controlled crying: the controversial practice, in and out of fashion for decades, of leaving babies to cry themselves to sleep in order to establish a sleep routine that — the theory goes — will leave both you and the baby less miserably overtired.

Experts such as Gina Ford, revered author of 1999 parenting bible The Contented Little Baby Book, say getting babies on a schedule is essential. When I was pregnant with Alexander, the idea of letting babies ‘self soothe’ in this way was very much in vogue.

More recently, the Mumsnet commentariat have decried it as a cruel and borderline abusive way to do things, to the extent that Ford once threatened legal action against the website. There are few more emotive topics in the parenting world.

And, this week, the debate was roused again by a Warwick University study claiming it isn’t that bad after all and, anyway, most desperate new parents give in and try it after a few months.

In other words, the cumulative effect of sleep deprivation pushes us to try things that we’d have otherwise rejected at the outset as ‘good mothers’. No kidding.

As for me, I spent most of our session with the sleep consultant in how-has-it-come-to-this tears as she declared that sleep training babies was more to do with training the parents. Immediately, she put Alexander into a timed routine and sat with me as we left him to cry it out for a strictly enforced two-and-a-half hour lunchtime nap.

It was a torturous 40 minutes of listening to him wail before he gave up and went to sleep.

The anxiety I felt during that time is a visceral memory nearly ten years on. Meanwhile, the sleep trainer laughingly suggested that I have a glass of wine and sit on the stairs to wait it out.

That night was the same — my husband and I held our breath and hands in the dark and waited and waited and waited for the crying to stop.

I felt awful.

One hour later, however, Alexander went to sleep and miraculously slept until seven in the morning. Luckily for me, he never cried again like that — every lunchtime and night he simply went to sleep.

I felt fortunate to have a transformed child, who slept when he was tired, ate when he was hungry — and critically slept between the 11pm ‘dream feed’ and 7am.

It felt like all our prayers had been answered — I’d ‘fixed’ the problem — and I threw myself back into work.

Life got back on track to such an extent that, 15 months later, Alexander’s brother Freddie was born. I confidently prepared for his arrival armed with the knowledge I’d gained.

But life is what happens while you’re busy making other plans. When Freddie was eight weeks old, I realised something might be up. I had a new baby who screamed when I put him to the breast. Silent reflux, caused by a cows’ milk allergy — a condition I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy — dominated our lives from then on.

The very same sleep expert who had ‘fixed’ our sleep issues the first time round this time texted me back with the words ‘call me when the reflux is sorted’.

We didn’t speak again. Freddie’s feeding issues meant that he needed to breastfeed little and often around the clock, supplemented by acid reducing medication.

The idea of putting any kind of routine in place was abandoned as I couldn’t be sure he wasn’t hungry. After a gruelling period of cutting out every possible allergen from my diet, including cows’ milk, soya and gluten, eventually we transitioned him on to a hypoallergenic formula.

Perhaps because of all of these difficulties, Freddie’s early days were the polar opposite of his brother’s. He could never lie flat in a stroller or cot, so I would carry him upright everywhere. We often co-slept, out of sheer exhaustion and necessity. Frankly, it was hell with no sort of routine at all until he was 18 months old.

You might think, given these very different experiences, that I’d be a fan of controlled crying, and welcome this new study that suggests the naysayers have got it wrong.

But the truth is rather more complex. My two children are eight and nine today, and yet I still berate myself over the decisions I made for them as babies.

These days, Alexander is definitely the more clingy of my two children at bedtime and often needs cuddling to sleep in order to feel secure. Freddie, by contrast, has a story and a quick cuddle and says: ‘Mummy you can go now.’

And so I guiltily wonder about the effect of nature versus nurture, and how my own desire for sleep and structure may have affected them in the long term.

The ongoing debate just makes me feel worse; recently a therapist whom I was seeing myself — for completely unconnected reasons — remarked out of the blue that I’d almost certainly damaged my eldest child with controlled crying.

She quoted a widely used piece of research (which was, incidentally, based on a very small study of infants) that points to raised levels of the stress hormone cortisol in crying children.

I was shocked and felt — once again — terribly guilty.

Parenting is hard, there are no quick fixes — and nor should we be led to believe that there are.

I now see that subscribing to a narrow system of belief also sets us up to feel as though we’ve failed. Polarising mothers over different ways of coping with a terribly trying phase helps no one. We all do what we believe to be right at the time.

But do I wish I had hung on a little longer and put my son’s sleep ahead of my own? Yes I do. The maxim applies, as with every tricky stage: this too shall pass.