Worried about the long-term effects of the CIO method? Perhaps you needn't be.
Whenever a mum hears her baby cry, her immediate instinct is to comfort and soothe. However, a new study has found that babies who are allowed to CIO, or “cry it out” – crying themselves to sleep – do not experience any more stress than those who are comforted.
In fact the method, called “graduated extinction” by the researchers, was found to have been more effective in reducing the amount of times babies woke through the night, and the amount of time they stayed awake for.
The experiment, published in the journal Pediatrics by scientists at Flinders University in Adelaide, studied 43 infants and parents, keeping track of when the babies were sleeping with an ankle monitor, and measuring stress hormone cortisol each morning to check if this “graduated extinction” caused upset.
Apparently there was no effect on the cortisol levels, while babies in the “cry it out” group actually went to sleep faster and slept longer on average.
According to Michael Gradisar, associate professor and clinical psychologist at Flinders University, babies who are comforted when they cry at bedtime fall into a “a coercive behavior trap”, where they are more rewarded by their parents’ responses to their crying than they are by going to sleep.
“This is especially true if the parent responds quickly after the child cried,” Gradisar told Today. “The result being the child is more likely to cry more often thus disrupting the sleep of both themselves and their parents.”
What do you think of the study mums? Is the “cry it out” method something you advocate? We would love to hear from you!
