Searching HN for "mirror cells", I see at least 1 article warning of the dangers from more than 10 years ago. So, this has been a thing for a while. Any biologists here that can chime in on just how big of a risk they do pose? Is there a general consensus throughout the community that this research should end? Is this something that could be developed for bio-terrorism? Should work be started on developing mirror immune system cells, just in case?
no. antibodies will work just fine on a d-protein and one of their mechanisms of killing is to generate ozone, which is an achiral molecule.
there is currently ~no risk because generating mirror life is such a monumental task. we dont have a full biological bootstrap sequence currently. even syn1.0 which was a synthetic genome transplant and rebooting operation, required a living host cell to transplant the DNA into, and the genomic dna does go from a computer file, but only the smallest ~100 bp fragments are made by robots and chemistry; intermediate fragments are assembled and amplified in enzyme reactions, bacteria, and yeast.
in principle you could get these to be entirely in vitro, but the yields would be nearly nil. and the expense of mirror dna monomers is... i can't even imagine. you'd probably bankrupt a midsize nation on that. and theres no motivation to decrease the cost because there's not really any other practical use for mirror dna outside of fucking around scientifically. and thats just the DNA. our ability to synthetically make proteins taps out at around 150-200 residues (maybe 2-4x that if you can get clever with native chemical ligation) and the purification and isolation at that length is truly a nightmare, not to mention refolding longer sequences is also hard.
I don't think anyone is worried about mirror proteins by themselves, they are worried about someone assembling a self-replicating/self-propagating mirror life, no? In which case, the fear is that you can't just run around ozone-ing every little colony of chiral-mirror version of cyanobacteria under every rock in remote Siberia or wherever.
1. > Should work be started on developing mirror immune system cells, just in case?
2. by way of direct response to your question. mirror nutrients (like scavenged AAs, even for autotrophs) are liable to be very scarce so they'll have one hell of a disadvantage makimg it on this world.
Not if you engineer your mirror bacterium to eat normal nutrients to get them started. Or they scavenge enough non-chiral molecules to eat that they get the opportunity to evolve the capability on their own.
building from non chiral molecules is prototrophy, not scavenging. anyways, existing lifeform already scavenge mirror molecules (especially d-ala since thats used in cell walls) so they are already competing in a quite saturated environment with highly adapted organisms.
I'm really curious to know the details here. What is the minimal set of dependencies for the simplest autotroph?
Clearly there was an original self-replicating cell and it was successful, so assuming we constructed the necessary proteins, why do you think it would be difficult the second time?
This is the big question about abiogenesis. If it was easy then life in the universe could be very common. If it is exceedingly difficult, we might be alone.
What is the smallest set of molecules needed to self-replicate, and how common are the ingredients (& nutrients)? I believe all of this is completely unknown, but I havent looked into the research for years now.
I think for the purpose of this topic, we only care about the nutrition (to use your word) question. We can assume humans can intelligently bootstrap past the other abiogenesis problems.
And surely this shouldn't be a difficult question to answer, right? Put an autotroph (the simplest that we know of) in a test tube and give it a ever-stricter diet and observe how far you can go without it dying off.
mimimal prototroph media is glucose, phosphate, ammonium, and trace metals that you just assume are in the water source. this is called m9 media. many known organisms can live on m9, including iirc bakers yeast and e coli.
if its fully autotrophic you dont need to add glucose. i think some forms of nocardia can live on m9 minus glucose.
of course anything that can live on m9 has way more genes in it just to biosynthesize the necessary amino acids and nucleic acids. That's why syn1 is a mycobacterium -- fewer genes because it has almost no metabolism. if you look at the biochemical pathways for mycobacterium its laughable how much is greyed out
A completely "mirrored" organism is not that dangerous.
- It would still have antigenic properties, just not the ones we are familiar with, because antigens are proteins or proteins bound to sugars. Both have "left" vs "right" variants.
- It can't eat any ordinary food, except simple fats. Common proteins and sugars won't fit it's enzymes. That means it can't digest sugars, proteins or any combination that contains them. It also means it can't attack and decompose our tissues, so it would have no way to enter our bodies.
- With only simple lipids as food, it would need to take all Nitrogen from the atmosphere or inorganic compounds, which means it can't really be a pathogen for humans (or any animals) even if it could somehow enter our organisms. However, it could live on the soil and possibly be a plant pathogen.
- It's "mirrored" toxins won't have any effect on us. (But compounds that are normally benign possibly could be toxic if "mirrored" - I can't say for sure if it's possible.)
Mirror life would have no interoperability with normal life, in biochemical terms. Say, if a predator attacked a mirror bacteria, and ate it, it would be just like eating an inedible microplastic particle. A technological analogue would be to change tensions in electric outlets at random, between 115V and 230V standards, with no indication of which outlet has which tension. People would start blowing equipment left and right.
More specifically, it would have no interoperability with the portions of life that target chiral molecules.
Most critically, metabolic pathways.
But that isn't to say there isn't already varied chirality in nature [0]. The primary reason life is generally aligned to one chirality is because its very purpose is to interoperate with the living environment around it.
>> Mirror life would have no interoperability with normal life, in biochemical terms.
That sounds like a good thing but... Our food chain starts at the bottom with bacteria turning nutrients into bio-molecules right? These bacteria are eaten by other things going up the food chain ultimately to us. What if some bacteria got loose at that bottom level and started eating all the nutrients with no natural predators? What if it out-competed those with predators? That might be game over for life as we know it.
I'm NOT saying this would happen, just that it one of thousands of possible scenarios one can come up with that go very badly. No one can say with certainty which things would or would not happen.
The report's scenario is a photosynthetic mirror bacterium eating the bottom out from under the oceanic food web. The existing predators would not be able to eat them, and so they would grow fast, and their predators would then shrink in population and that interaction would ripple upwards sending marine animals extinct.
As soon as it mentioned the line of site antennas I knew it had to be a tree. It often surprises me how much branches can sag from the weight of rainwater
Great story, and LeMessurier is certainly deserving of praise. I'm curious about his initial mistake. The article mentions that he placed the pillars at the middle edges, as opposed to corners, because this is beter for resisting the quarterly winds. So he clearly knew they were a thing. Why then did he not do the calculations for how they would effect the chevon braces until the call from the student? That seems like a pretty huge lack of oversight. Was it pride? The moment of inspiration is described romantically, sprawling designs on the back of a napkin and such, and he was disappointed that the chevrons would be hidden behind the aluminum skin/facade - consoling himself with the thought "It'd be there for God to see".
The article describes the whole situation as a perfect storm of sorts (no violation of building code, industry standard of bolts instead of welding, etc), but I can't get past how he didn't crunch the numbers for something that seems like it should go without saying.
I'm not sure about the initial mistake either. But then again, this was a lesson in one of my structural classes, so you don't forget about that sort of issue.
Basically, I'm surprised that no one did the basic worst case sigma=MY/I for the side and quartering loads. The old grizzled supervising engineer generally will run through a bunch of ballpark estimates to see if the designer has actually checked all the worst case combinations.
I don't really buy the article's factor of safety discussion -- the factor of safety is for uncertainty, not blunders. I _might_ save you from a blunder, but that's not what it's for. It's for variation in material dimension, quality, and loading variation.
As for the bolts vs welding, There's definitely scope for changes at the shop drawing stage. When an engineering firm designs a building, they'll generally design a set of typical connections, but when the shop goes to build them, they have to take this column:floor beam connection and actually turn it into "cut this cope, drill here, ..." and they'll generally do the simplest, cheapest thing they can.
The engineers have to review the shop drawings, and if they don't have a good set of calcs for what the loads are in that particular bit, then they aren't going to necessarily see that this substitution of bolts won't work. (Note -- bolts can be just as good, and potentially better than welds, depending on what you're doing, how you're erecting, and the space you have available. Full Penetration welds are a pain, but they're the easiest way to specify a full strength join. But doing them on site, in the air, when you're putting the thing together is not something that you'd generally want to spec.)
There have been a significant number of historical disasters connected to shop drawing changes that the engineers didn't pick up. (e.g., the Hyatt Regency walkway collapse).
Also remember, this was done in the 70's, so they wouldn't have had Finite element models of the building where it's super easy to just run a couple more loads. Everything there would have been indeterminate elastic analysis, so it's not quick to run an accurate calculation if you're trying to find beam sizes.
I didn't know Bob or know who he was until reading this horrible news. After reading these stories of how he brought people together and had a strict "no-judgement" policy, I'm inspired to try and make a shift toward that mindset. My condolences to his friends and family.
I recently learned about the Belgian Antarctic research station princess Elisabeth, which is not only zero emissions but utilizes passive heating as well - completely heated by incoming sunlight and the human bodies inside.
The fact that this is so commonplace in my culture (USA) is frustrating and enrages me. As a parent, it is your evolutionary instinct to comfort a crying infant. They are quite literally helpless and look to caretakers for all their needs. There's a deep seated biological reason it feels bad to ignore it. The fact that it is so uncommon in other cultures should make this obvious. What are the odds that the rest of the world and entire history of humankind were mistaken the whole time, until some behaviorists came along and figured it all out in the last century? Talk about infants having "attachment issues" makes my blood boil. They are supposed to be attached to you. It is very much possible to co-sleep and then gradually transition them to their own bed. Yes, it is frustrating and will interfere with your sleep. This is one of the many sacrifices of parenthood.
This is the kind of "it worked for my kid" bullshit that drives me up the wall.
With my oldest we bought into comments like this and tried to always comfort him when he was crying. He would not stop crying. We stayed up with him an absurd amount of hours trying every idea in the book to soothe him to sleep and nothing worked. He was probably getting 6 hours of sleep a day at a time when he was supposed to be sleeping 18. He lost a lot of weight and we were scared and exhausted.
After a few weeks of that my wife finally put him into his bassinet and stepped away. She sat there next to his crib crying with him for 5 minutes, and then he fell asleep and slept for the longest he had in his life. That moment was the turning point from weight loss to weight gain and from barely sleeping to sleeping normally. In spite of all of our worries that something was terribly wrong, all that was required was to let him be. He's now 3 years old and still hates to sleep, but he's as healthy as any other kid both physically and emotionally.
My only advice to new parents today is to accept what everyone else says as well intentioned and then do what works best for your kid. Every child is different, and people who try to claim that their method is the only humane way to treat a kid need more exposure to the real world.
Parents need to have a well defined set of diverse solutions and know how to sample from the search space effectively instead of current epsilon greedy approach
100% correct. The baby-rearing book industry is a fraud. They claim “well the average baby does X, Y, Z” but they don’t tell you that the standard deviation is huge. New mothers like my wife were stressed beyond belief because our kid only slept 10 hours and ate twice as much as other kids. She was convinced there was something wrong until I proved to her that he was within the standard deviation of normal.
Do what feels right for your child. No two children are the same, even twins. Infants are very resilient so don’t worry you’re going to scar or damage them. They generally won’t unless you are truly abusive.
This is so true. Nothing worked to get my daughter to sleep nights until we finally bit the bullet and stepped away for 20 mins and let her cry out. Every night since then she has slept all night long.
Every child is different which is why parenting is not an exact science. Try everything, something will work!
You're absolutely right that every baby has different needs and I'm glad to hear that you figured out what's best for yours. It was not my intention to suggest that every baby should co-sleep - I meant to address the very commonplace (IMO misplaced) fear that if they do, then they will never leave their parents' bed and develop independence. There are obviously some babies who are ok or even better off sleeping alone. My frustration is with the mainstream acceptance that this is The Proper Way - to the point where families are leaving infants screaming for nights on end in order to "train" them.
Your experience of the
mainstream is very different than mine. Before having kids, the voices we heard were overwhelmingly saying "immediately respond to every cry or you are a terrible parent", which is exactly how your first comment reads. That's why it took us so long to try letting him cry: we'd listened to voices like yours.
The parents you describe are a tiny minority if they exist at all, and guilt-tripping them in a public forum just hurts the millions of new parents who are at an extremely vulnerable time of life and trying to do the right thing. It's not your place to lecture on how loving parents should be treating a baby you've never laid eyes on.
That evolutionary instinct came from a time when humans lived in communal support networks and new parents had help from extended family, and does not translate well to a world where Mom has to work 9-5 in an office a few months after birth. You might as well express shock that suburbanites don't supplement their diets by foraging for fruit and mushrooms.
Besides, it's not like parents 10K years ago had the option to let their babies cry it out in a separate room with a noise machine, and evolution selected against it because co-sleeping babies reproduced more. "Babies cry because they need to co-sleep or they will suffer some serious problem" sounds reasonable to me, but so does "Babies cry because it gets them more nutrition by keeping Mom so sleep-deprived that she delays her next pregnancy." Making just-so stories about behavioral evolution is dubious, the bar needs to be higher than just sounding plausible.
Unfortunately, solving a cultural problem is the second most difficult thing to do, after changing laws of physics. Or, as some web article I read the other day put it: society is fixed, biology is mutable.
And it's not just about two-income households. From my personal experience I can say that, even with one parent working, a poorly sleeping child can bring the parents to the brink of divorce, or depression, or both. Given the importance of loving, caring, supporting family for a child's overall health, happiness, and future prospects, it's fair to consider some interventions as trade-offs for the sake of the household. The article mentions this near the end, but then mostly dismisses the concern.
I know many couples that have merged into larger multi-partner families, sometimes as individual couples, sometimes as polycules, regardless, the commune is back lol, and just my own observation it seems an ideal way to raise kids. There's always someone around, couples can take their own time to go on dates quite regularly, the kids grow up with lots of people around and lots of friends, the close community support is just phenomenal looking. If I have kids, I will go this route.
I have one kid and we are going thus route. The nuclear family is dysfunctional by design. Partner and I both have been with them fulltime throughout their life, living off savings instead of working. This opened my eyes to how very little men are taught about caring for people and how much nonsense I was taught. Nurturing a little person from a perspective informed by anarchism reveals a whole lot of backwards thinking. We've just spent 5 days with 3 people who can actually handle facing the childhood trauma that gets stimulated through allowing a little person to actually make choices for themselves and the difference is astounding.
We can spend time together without interruption and without it being after they're asleep. There are people to help cook and clean, do so joyfully, and play and dance and sing and cuddle.
Why you're getting down voted, I have no idea. Community- oriented approaches to families, no matter what society says or does or thinks, are what humans have done for millenia.
It changes, but it's not exactly easy for anyone to predict or control the direction of those changes. Also, this malleability is not what matters in this context - "over the scale of decades" isn't very helpful to the people alive today.
Reading it generously, I think the cultural problem is supposed to be that parents are expected to go back to work too quickly, not specifically that women are. “Mom” has just come through the sequence of quotes, making it unnecessary gendered.
It could also be seen as a cultural problem that both parents are generally expected to work nowadays, and it would be nice to be able to expect that families had some adult at home (but we’d hope that in a more egalitarian society nowadays the gender balance would be more equal — although men can lift larger laundry baskets on average so maybe we should end being the at-home ones more than 50% of the time, I dunno).
Nice, same, I think the "cultural problem" comment is not saying that the problem is that "women are going to work" but rather that "the parents have to be away from the child for the majority of the time, or they will all be homeless and hungry."
I'm not sure which country the OP is discussing, likely one without good maternity/paternity laws and whatnot, which is really sad to hear about, I hope more citizens demand this of their governments and more employees demand this of their companies, it seems crazy to me that you should have to sacrifice formative time with your newborn so you can go do a capitalism every day.
I'm posting from a German perspective and have to admit, that we still have major problems with gender imbalances on income (for more complex reasons) and the ability for women having careers, but every parent has the right to parental leave for up to 3 years (take fulltime off, or part time!) and one of those is paid (by the state, so by the taxpayer in the end) with up to 1800€/month.
Actually taking 3 years off is depending on the job still a bump in the career road, but I'm optimistic that we are getting there.
Right, I'm countering the accusations of misogyny with "no, we're talking about the flaws of capitalism." Consider that many families in the USA have two parents, both working multiple jobs, to make ends meet. To me, one of the most important things in my hopefully 80 years is family, and so I get sad when I see people forced to trade that little time we get already, for work.
When it wasn’t two parents working full time to support everyone (aka the post WW2 years until what, about the 90’s).
I’m disagreeing with what seems to be nostalgia, or a call to a different type of circumstance. I’m just noting, it had major drawbacks then too. Lots of stay at home moms drinking themselves into a stupor being one.
Right, back then cost of living were a much lower percentage of average wages. The "Homer Simpson" era when one father could work one job and own a nice a home while feeding a family of 3. Recall that minimum wage used to be a living wage in the USA.
There are definitely issues around gender, wage, and job opportunities in the USA, but right now I'm talking about the total economic downside of out of control detachment of wage against cost of living.
> Lots of stay at home moms drinking themselves into a stupor being one.
Could this have had more to do with an openly misogynistic society and lack of hiring and academic protections for women?
Economically - being the only economy left standing post world war definitely had its advantages! Especially after the major ramp up and mechanization for WW2. The US went from a mostly agrarian economy to the world manufacturing power in short order, and those economic benefits lasted a long time.
That had mostly faded by the 70’s though.
Openly misogynistic society wise - It’s probably worth calling out the invention of effective birth control here.
Pre birth-control, men and women mixing in all but the most controlled circumstances would result in women getting pregnant, and that had consequences. Emotionally, financially, and biologically. Often life altering, even if the pregnancy was aborted.
That cost often ended up being borne by the women who got pregnant and their support structure, and there are biological reasons why that happens. Society can try to spread the load out, but the Don Juan’s of the world can be adept at trying to work around that.
This leads to that misogynistic society, both directly and indirectly. Looking at global trends, with the only exceptions being out of the way more nomadic societies, the more materially poor a society is, the more rigidly structured the gender divides are, and the more controlling they are of female sexuality in general.
This of course, gets taken advantage by some folks (shitheads) to further gain control in other areas.
On the male side, it’s relatively much easier for men to avoid the biological cost of their natural sexual behavior.
Effective birth control turns this on its head of course. Society is still grappling with what that means, and its implications, and likely will for a very, very long time.
The 50’s and early 60’s were pre (available) decent birth control.
Mid 60’s to 70’s it started to roll out (and kicked off the ‘free love’ movement).
Women’s liberation became a much more common theme then as well. It was of course a topic before then, but practically was extremely difficult.
Practically, to be independent pre birth control, a woman would need to be either 1) long term celibate/abstinent from normal sex (not easy for most!), or 2) go through a lot of abortion (really not easy for most, medically or emotionally), or 3) be infertile, or 4) independently wealthy.
Otherwise, they would get sucked into the biologically and financially expensive process of having a baby, over and over again, for decades, while having no extra time or bandwidth to earn income. While men don’t have that problem (or at least, biologically, can skip out on it easier).
And due to all the biological processes involved (and legitimate needs), it’s very difficult for most moms to ignore the kids that result, and those kids are very needy for quite awhile - much longer than it takes to get pregnant again, for sure.
Being anti misogynist or not, or hiring protections or not, barring effective birth control, that is going to put a lot of women in difficult situations where they have no reasonable option but taking care of kids and dealing with biological ‘taxes’ that are very high, regardless of what they want. In any zero sum game, that puts them at a disadvantage to folks who don’t have that weight they are carrying.
Just like men being drafted into a war they didn’t start, or working themselves to death in a coal mine because it’s that or their family starves, that means alcoholism, anger/resentment, violence, etc.
Wealth can help - these issues were much worse pre WW2, for instance. But it’s a theme for most of recorded human history.
Quibble: I'm not sure its true, though it is entertaining, reasonable, and appears to fit the facts.
The cuteness one is good too. I wonder if this sort of thing emerged slowly or quickly? Like, is cooperation just generally selected for and animal cuteness has been developing for a long time, or did it appear swiftly somewhere and provide some huge benefit? Or something else entirely?
I reckon both must have evolved along with the increase in head size. Most animals have babies that have developed enough so that they are reasonably independent. They can at least walk!
But humans have really big heads so they have to give birth really early before the baby is capable of walking, so screaming for help and being super cute is their only option.
> so does "Babies cry because it gets them more nutrition by keeping Mom so sleep-deprived that she delays her next pregnancy."
Babies do delay their mothers' next pregnancy.
But sleep has nothing to do with it. And really, neither do the babies. Nursing mothers inhibit their own pregnancy; that is why the normal interval between births is two years instead of one year.
It’s an interesting theory, but having my second kid appear 12 months after the first — in spite of the breastfeeding — makes me very sceptical of its reliability.
My wife and I were warned about this by nurses. The effect is real, but it's absolutely not reliable as a contraception method, as it can easily break down for various reasons, including the mother not following a strict and consistent regimen of frequent breastfeeding. And, as it turns out, consistent and frequent breastfeeding is much harder to achieve than popular media would had you believe.
There are massive issues with hiding the real challenges with children from potential mothers and fathers.
I suspect it's a combination of:
1) Prior/older parents worried about embarrassment or being shamed for going through what they did - a lot of it things that no one likes to talk about.
2) Folks worried (potentially correctly) that many folks would opt to not have kids, which is already a population problem, if they understood what it really meant.
It's the same about War and men returning from it, frankly, though war movies tend to be a lot more glamourous, even the gritty ones.
I think 1 could also be parents actively forgetting how hard it was. I think I even read a theory that the mother's brain releases chemicals during childbirth that help her remember it as "not so bad"
I also suspect that older generations were less isolated socially and it was much more common to have parents/grandparents/cousins/etc in the same house who could care for the baby for an hour while mom caught up on sleep. It takes a village to raise a child but we have no more villages, so people try to do it on their own and discover it's incredibly difficult.
It’s sad that it’s so little known. I know that not everything can or should be taught at school, but I’d argue in favour of this: breast feeding is often not as easy as it seems it should be, so you should find out more about it when preparing to have a child.
> Data that were collected prospectively from a child health study conducted in Gaza show a strong relationship between breastfeeding and two major components of birth intervals, the postpartum anovulatory period and the waiting time [from resumption of menstruation] to conception.
> The finding of a strong positive association between breastfeeding and the length of postpartum amenorrhea is as expected from numerous other studies.
It's astounding to me that so many people on HN, a place where folks generally profess to be driven by science and data, are in this thread just casually throwing around anecdotes and comments about evolutionary instinct while completely ignoring the actual science and data. Doubly so when so many of the comments are pretty vicious towards people who sleep train their babies.
>>Parents who are frustrated with frequent waking or who are sleep deprived may be tempted to try sleep training techniques that recommend letting a baby cry in an effort to "teach" him to "self-soothe".
>>Research shows us that an infant is not neurologically or developmentally capable of calming or soothing himself to sleep in a way that is healthy. The part of the brain that helps with self-soothing isn't well developed until the child is two and a half to three years of age. Until that time, a child depends on his parents to help him calm down and learn to regulate his intense feelings.
It's so weird to me that you're throwing around attachmentparenting.org links like they are the final objective word on the subject. It would be like linking to the American Enterprise Institute in a discussion on economics. They are smart and well read on the subject, but they are pushing their own point of view, which is far from being the only one.
Edit: we've had to warn you about this kind of thing before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33501516. Would you please review the rules and fix this? I don't want to ban you, but eventually we don't have a choice if an account keeps breaking the rules.
Name a non-shithole place on the planet where that isn't the case.
This is not a US phenomenon, it's pretty much a global phenomenon by now. It's the flip side of breaking down the traditional family/society model - as more and more households had two incomes, the market quickly compensated for the surplus, and now most households struggle without two incomes.
My country (Poland) has 12 months of maternity leave, and it's nowhere near enough either. In fact, 12 months is about when your child might start exhibiting sleeping issues (as opposed to just being an infant).
In other words, this isn't a problem because of sub-year maternity/paternity leaves. It's a problem because both parents need to work.
It's curious years of good nights of sleep and a happy child enrages you.
We sleep trained our son at 7 months. He cried for 90 minutes the first night, then slept soundly until 7 am. The second night he cried for 45 minutes then slept until 7 am. He didn't cry the third night. Every night since he's slept peacefully from 8 PM until 7 AM and asks to go to bed when he gets tired. He's happy during the day unless something obvious is distressing him. Most notably he's happy and peaceful from 5 PM until 8 PM when I see other parents suffering from witching hour and unexplained melt downs.
Isn't a few hours of discomfort in exchange for years of good sleep and happiness a good trade off?
We had the exact same experience. A few nights of crying (we didn't totally abandon her, just a did a peek in and say goodnight again (no picking up the baby) after 5 minutes of crying, then 10, then 15, etc) for a few nights. Daughter has slept through almost every night since then, she just turned 4.
Sleep training (which involved some degree of "cry it out") was a life saver for us.
I did it at 3 months. I did it because my wife couldn't handle it, and she had gone back to work. The only reason I did it was because our baby wouldn't let us put her down a lot of the time. She'd sleep just fine in our arms...and then we'd put her down and she'd instantly cry. It was...stressful.
It (largely) took one freaking day. One day's worth of naps. She didn't even cry, just "cried out" to be held. First a few minutes, then 5, and she didn't reach 10. To our utter amazement, she largely stopped waking us during the night. I was not expecting that at 3 months.
...I did kind of miss our late night "well, might as well turn on the TV and watch Star Trek" times together.
I've had people get judgmental when I've explained that process, but I often hear parents that have their two year olds waking up in the middle of the night for feedings. That's utter insanity.
In my experience, when someone thinks they should be able to do it, but can't do it, and suffers from the consequences of that - you'll get that kind of reaction. Not saying it's what's happening here, but I've seen it a lot.
Difficulty getting themselves to get their kids vaccinated (the screaming or crying is hard!) is a big factor behind the antivax movement, IMO.
What enrages me is how it's become accepted as 'the right way' for parents in my culture, along with other "techniques" like feeding schedules, where many people end up essentially starving their child without realizing it, and then wonder why they can't sleep through the night. What I know to be true is that infants are completely dependent on their caretaker/s, and they cry to communicate what they need when they need it. Ignoring this feels wrong to me - so I don't do it. I understand that different families have different needs, and that work schedules make things more difficult than they were in the past when children were raised communally. Every family needs trial and error to figure out what works for them, and yes some infants will sleep better alone. What I take issue with is the industry around this that has convinced what seems like most parents that this is The Best Way.
> Isn't a few hours of discomfort in exchange for years of good sleep and happiness a good trade off?
It could be - that's a decision for each family to make. I will point out that many families think their baby is sleeping through the night - when what's really happening is they are still waking up repeatedly but have given up on crying (accepting that nobody will come to help them).
Your comment and others in this thread illustrate a different problem. Discourse around this topic (and some other parenting topics like breastfeeding) is out of control and not recognized as such. Regardless of your experience, it's not your place (nor anyone else's aside from maybe their physician), to tell parents what to do - and most of the time these admonitions are misinterpreted anyway because you're trying to boil down a complex set of behaviors and constraints to a rule that you propped up using some moral framework that you religiously believe in. People may well try to apply your rule in a different set of circumstances and get disastrous outcomes. To be clear, there are plenty of irrationally strong opinions on the opposite side of each of these issues too.
The researchers in the article were conducting an actual RCT, they are the only ones who should be speaking to this. Anyone else's anecdotal opinion should be discounted just as much as things like religious fundamentalist views on contraception.
Just let parents be. Stop with the admonitions. If something worked well or poorly for you, you're free to relate that without passing judgment.
Your comment is excellent. But I think GP’s comment is fine too. It’s a strongly held opinion, fairly well expressed. I didn’t really read it as an admonition. Sure, some people may not like strong opinions on this topic, but on HN I like to read them, no matter the topic.
Anyway, my charitable reading of GP is not that parents should or shouldn’t do anything in particular, rather that the child’s needs, as expressed over a very long time, should not be forgotten just because we live in different times.
In case it's not obvious to everyone reading here, no one recommends using the cry it out method on infants younger than six months. For younger infants, you should always respond as quickly as possible. Our doctor recommended that we have at least one person sleeping in the same room, but in a different bed, for the first six months. Then we gradually transitioned to allowing him to put himself to sleep, and I finally stopped sleeping in the same room around 11 months. For us, this worked wonderfully. My wife hated it, but that was its biggest downside. Almost overnight, it led to better sleep for everyone involved and the kids have never had attachment issues.
I have spoken extensively on this topic with a variety of practioners, and I've heard plenty of horror stories coming from the cosleeping camp. Learning to sleep by yourself is an important skill, and some parents don't realize they need to teach it. This leads some children to basically never learning, since it gets harder as they get older. There really is a golden window of opportunity (for learning good sleep habits), and while it's not as narrow as some make it out to be, it's not wide open either.
But don't take my word for it. Talk to your doctor and partner and figure out what works for you. And then be consistent about it.
I think missing a "window of opportunity" with kids "never learning to sleep by themselves" is dubious. Those approaching adolescence develop quite strong need for personal space, eventually. They start rejecting parental company, instead preferring to be alone or be with their peers.
I have one data point to share. An eight year old child decided one day, rather abruptly, that they were "done" with cosleeping and wanted to be in their own room, in their own bed, by themselves. And that was that.
> In case it's not obvious to everyone reading here, no one recommends using the cry it out method on infants younger than six months.
This is wrong. Various methods recommend starting as early as four months (and some recommend a less-strict version that starts earlier but only leaves children to cry for a shorter period of time before coming to get them, as opposed to fully crying it out).
> What are the odds that the rest of the world and entire history of humankind were mistaken the whole time, until some behaviorists came along and figured it all out in the last century?
There are many cases where all of humanity has been doing something that we only recently decided was wrong. For instance, slavery.
Certainly the odds aren't good that this is true of everything humans do, but the odds that some of the things we do fall into this category is 100%.
Edit: also, don't be so judgmental. Behaviours are environmental adaptions. In the Western world, mothers typically work 9-5 like men, so of course in cultures where women don't have this constraint they'd be shocked at our behaviours. Humans are adaptable however, and constantly coddling your fearful infant made sense when there were dangers everywhere. In our society's we're pretty safe in historical terms, so it could just be that babies cry because they're instinctively afraid until they learn they're safe when nothing happens to them after a few nights, and then it stops. This actually seems to happen in a lot of cry-it-out cases.
There is way too much romanticization of a false past here in this larger HN discussion. Yeah, sleep patterns were different, and many people slept with their infants. Infant mortality was also higher, as was maternal mortality, and corporal punishment was common. Sleep-deprived women with piles of children were not spending loving moments staring into their babies' eyes; they were smacking the slightly older children on the back of the head to hurry up and take the chicken feed out and slop the pigs. From my own family histories, I know that babies were often ignored, because at some point having a 1/3 of your babies die means you just don't invest very much emotional energy in them anymore. Very young children were tied to furniture to keep them out of trouble. By age four, some were at work (although the average age to start work in Victorian England was about 10, and the Factory Act came into force to regulate labor conditions for 9-13 year olds). Wet nurses were common, and in parts of England and France in the 1780s for instance it was extraordinarily common to simply ship your baby out to the country so you could work or maintain your aristocratic figure (see references at https://www.geriwalton.com/breastfeeding-or-nursing-with-wet... for instance).
For my own part, we did some version of sleep training (checking every 5 min until crying stopped). This was overall extraordinarily effective. The reassurance that we're not leaving, we're coming back -- quite important. But as important: the discovery that the child in question doesn't like rocking, bouncing, white noise, or any of the other interventions that are billed as crucial. Leave that kid alone for 4-12 minutes? Asleep. Rock/bounce/white noise? Awake for hours. Why torture the child to satisfy someone else's interventionist idea of good parenting?
Every kid is different. And not every cry needs intervention. This kid cried every time a fart came. At some point you just need to learn the world won't end if you fart, and that is simply gained by experience, not mom or dad rushing to reassure and making a big deal of every fart.
> There is way too much romanticization of a false past here in this larger HN discussion
Some stuff is evolutionary. Co-sleeping is seen in all mammal species. And its an important part of the group sentiment, including the social support it brings. The lack of it causes anxiety in mammal species. Even domestic cats prefer to take care of their young in groups of mothers until the kittens grow up.
> This kid cried every time a fart came. At some point you just need to learn...
...that those farts have been causing pain in his abdomen or scrotum. Its amazing how it did not occur to you and instead you let the kid to just 'go through' it.
> England and France in the 1780s for instance it was extraordinarily common to simply ship your baby out to the country so you could work or maintain your aristocratic figure
Inbreeding, negligent and sociopathic aristocrats are never good examples for anything related to the basic tenets of human civilization. Less, parenting. Sheeesh. If your parenting morning star is murderous 18th century aristocrats who starved their people to be able to live in extravaganza with their powdered wigs...
Invoking evolutionary biology is not the strong point you seem to think it is. Humans have plenty of characteristics and behaviours that are not present in other mammals, even characteristics that seem to be shared among all other mammals. Our shared heritage with cats didn't lead to our sophisticated language or take us to the moon.
Furthermore, if letting babies cry it out were truly as atrocious a practice as you seem to imply, the signal in the data would be so strong it would be impossible to ignore. The fact that we don't see such an indisputable signal should make you question your assumptions.
> ...that those farts have been causing pain in his abdomen or scrotum. Its amazing how it did not occur to you and instead you let the kid to just 'go through' it.
You seem to be implying that this was somehow wrong. Human newborns need to experience a range of sensations and discomfort to learn how to distinguish what counts as actual pain from mere discomfort. This still happens even into adulthood. Exercise is borderline painful when you're out of shape and then can become pleasurable as your fitness improves. Your brain is constantly adapting and recalibrating.
> Invoking evolutionary biology is not the strong point you seem to think it is. Humans have plenty of characteristics and behaviours that are not present in other mammals
Yes, but co-sleeping, rearing children, co-habitation, touching, grooming, infants depending on their parents are present in all mammal species. More sophisticated and derived behaviors may not be. But these, are. And the repression of some of these in modern humans causes considerable psychological distress and anxiety.
> And the repression of some of these in modern humans causes considerable psychological distress and anxiety.
Literally pure conjecture, as there's no conclusive evidence of this claim, which is the whole point of this article.
Furthermore, the only change we're discussing is eliminating a specific type of co-sleeping. All of the other behaviours common to all mammals remain the same. The odds of this one change being significantly damaging are small, and considering we see no strong signal in the data we do have, I don't see this claim standing the test of time.
> In their recent paper published in JCPP, Bilgin and Wolke (2020a) argue that leaving an infant to ‘cry it out’, rather than responding to the child’s cries, had no adverse effects on mother–infant attachment at 18 months. This finding opposes evidence across a wide range of scientific fields. Here, we outline several concerns with the article and argue against some of the authors’ strong claims, which have already gained media attention, including a report on the NHS website. We suggest that the authors’ conclusions should be considered one piece of a larger scientific whole, where ‘cry it out’ seems, overall, to be of detriment to both attachment and development. Crucially, we are concerned that this study has issues regarding power and other analytical decisions. More generally, we fear that the authors have overstated their findings and we hope that members of the public do not alter their parenting behaviours in line with such claims without further research into this controversial topic.
ah, yes! link to a group of people who didn't like the outcome of a study, so they wrote about it with links to older studies that the more comprehensive one already addressed. of course, said people didn't bother to do their own study, but needed to get it off their chests how mad it makes them that the newer/more data-driven studies go against their instincts.
> ah, yes! link to a group of people who didn't like the outcome of a study, so they wrote about it
That study criticizes the methods and samples of the study you trust in. Its something fundamental, not 'opinionated'.
> data-driven studies go against their instincts.
What part of a 40 or 200 sample set is 'data driven'. How many of those children are 40 years old. How many of them have passed through the chaos of teenage years and now experiencing their first problems in work life, social relationships or relationship with their spouse.
...
Its amazing how people immediately forget any evolutionary biology or behavioral science lessons they have taken during the course of their lives when it involves self-interest. Simple behaviors that entirety of mammal species rely on as evolutionary behaviors for survival are just 'maladaptive practices' when self-interest is involved.
...
Strong personal interest seem to cause strong bias in this topic. I understand the need for the parents who use such destructive practices to be able to get some sleep while they are raising infants in this modern society that does not leave any time for childrearing. But neither anyone like me empathizing with it nor the circumstances of modern society can negate the evolutionary behaviors and their effects. The parents who are in such a situation must find another way to address the situation than relying on what increasingly seems to be anti-humane advocacy.
Those ignoring babies won't hear you, we are the only family in my village that respond to crying calls, and these parents get defensive on this topic, they need to believe...
at some point you have to realize that you understand infants less than the parents using this method, and certainly less than the ones doing the studies. you argument is equivalent to saying we should stick to arranged marriages only because that's how it's always been done and it clearly worked for many cultures.
> you argument is equivalent to saying we should stick to arranged marriages only because that's how it's always been done and it clearly worked for many cultures.
Arranged marriages are in no way related to deep behavioral traits of mammal evolution.
> at some point you have to realize that you understand infants less than the parents using this method
Anyone who knows any adult who suffered any measure of neglect in childhood would 'know' otherwise. Especially the adults who have been neglected as infants.
I understand your viewpoint and sentiment. But I do reiterate that those do not negate evolution.
I think we discussed enough in this thread. I'll bail out of this discussion now. Thanks.
> There are many cases where all of humanity has been doing something that we only recently decided was wrong. For instance, slavery.
Not really comparable because we decided it was morally wrong, not that we were wrong about its effects. Its not like humanity used to think slavery was good for the slave.
> Its not like humanity used to think slavery was good for the slave.
People said it was the natural order of things - similar to how men owning women or children was divinely approved, and if you read about “the curse of Ham” you can see many variations of the excuses offered that it was just due to ancestral sin - and during the colonial era that exact argument was used to the general effect that slavery provided heathens with a chance to adopt Christianity and be saved.
The reason the Southern Baptists exist as a separate denomination is because they split off from the main Baptist community in support of slavery, only recanting in 1995!, and while that’s generally accepted as being significantly motivated by the massive financial impacts it relied on those rationalizations (it’s biblical, we’re improving people who would otherwise be doomed to a primitive existence without the chance of salvation). These days people know not to say slavery was good but you can still find conservatives saying colonialism was a net win for many countries.
There’s considerably more about this dark part of our history here:
> Not really comparable because we decided it was morally wrong, not that we were wrong about its effects. Its not like humanity used to think slavery was good for the slave.
People still argue that slavery (in particularly, chattel slavery of Blacks in North America) was good for the slave, and the argument was even more common when slavery was legal but under active debate.
There seems to be this narrative that Euopeans went to Africa and stole all the people and forced them into slavery. This is not true at all. Europeans traded with African leaders who sold their slaves to the Europeans. Not saying what they traded was a fair price or was justified, but the africans had the slaves first. The Europeans bought and distributed them round the world.
It's not hard to find sources about slavery in Asia.
"Slavery in Korea formally existed from antiquity up to the 20th century. Slavery was very important in medieval Korea; it was a major institution. [...] The Korean "nobi" system of slavery peaked between the 15th and 17th centuries and then declined in the 18th and 19th centuries." [1]
"The Mongol Empire (1206-1368) had a tremendous impact on slavery across Eurasia. While slaves played a minor role in pre-Imperial Mongolia, the Mongols saw people as a resource, to be distributed among the imperial family and used for imperial needs, like material goods. This view created a whole spectrum of dependency running from free men to full slaves." [2]
I'm not sure what you mean, but I don't think many countries still had legal slavery going into the 20th century, outside of the Arab peninsula.
In Korea it was officially abolished in 1894 (although it took a few decades to eradicate). In my own country, France, slavery was abolished in 1794 (in Europe) and in 1848 (in all colonies and oversea territories). I think it's the general timeline for western Europe, first half of the 19th century. So not exactly 20th or 21st century either.
Of course, slavery itself (especially related to prostitution) is still ongoing pretty much everywhere, but it's not legal. And then there's war: forced work (Germany and Japan during WWII), and arguably conscription could count as a form of slavery too...
I'm pretty sure I learned about it at school in France, although of course not each country individually. Not sure about your specific country and history curriculum.
It sounds like the authorities where you live should have a look at not just the history curriculum but the rest as well. Slavery is very much a contemporary issue and it's been around, globally, since times that predate written history.
also Inca and Aztechs were from south america right?
there is also a new form of slavery currently active in the US where immigrants are brought to work and their passports are kept with their "employer" until xyz condition.
so slavery still exists but it is no longer a government policy as it used to be in US
I don't understand how, in the 21st century can we have slaves or bonded labourers. Apalling
People now are the same as people then, just different fashions and widgets.
The 'new form' of slavery you're describing sounds like indentured servitude. Definitely not new to the US (though now illegal)! Benjamin Franklin was indentured for 2 years when he was a teenager to his older brother, and frankly was not a fan of the practice.
You turned large parts of this thread into nationalistic flamewars and broke the site guidelines in countless egregious ways. That's vandalism and abuse. We ban accounts that wreck threads like this.
I appreciate that child-rearing is an intensely emotional topic and that standards differ between countries, but that doesn't make it ok to pour dozens of flamewar comments into a thread about it. Please see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34194158 also.
I took a quick look at your recent comment history and fortunately didn't see other cases of this, so it should be easy to avoid in the future. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
> You turned large parts of this thread into nationalistic flamewars
As I said, I dont see anything 'nationalistic' about criticism of US-endemic policies and trends. With that logic, we would need to flag anyone who critices the US imperialism of the last 40 years and its overseas wars since it would also evaluate to being nationalistic with the same logic.
Additionally, I didnt name any specific nation to elevate it over the US. I specifically criticized the US, and said that this kind of mainstreamed anti-humane behavior is not present in any other country on the planet. If that makes the rest of the planet a 'nation', Im fine with that.
Ok, you make some fair points and I'm not hung up on the 'nationalistic' part of this, so let's not argue about that. What's much more important is that you broke the site guidelines extremely egregiously in the dozens of comments you posted in this thread. That's unacceptable, and we ban accounts that do it, so please don't do it again.
I have no problem with your views about babies. But there was a huge problem with the aggressive comments you posted. That is a direct contribution to destroying this place, and we can't allow that.
Moreover, it wasn't in your interest to argue this way. I understand how emotional the topic is—and rightly so—but attacking and putting other people down is not only not going to persuade them, it's going to harden them in their wrong (or what you consider to be wrong) position. By doing this you provided lots of fresh justification to dismiss your point of view—after all, look at how the people defending it behave! Assuming your position is true, then what you achieve by doing this is to discredit the truth (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...). Not only is that not in your interest, it hurts everybody.
I know that other people also behaved badly in this thread and I scolded some of them, but I'm sad to say that your posts were the worst by a significant margin. Since you don't have a history of conducting yourself this way on HN (at least not from the old comments I skimmed through), I'm sure you can avoid this in the future. If you'd please do that, and also make sure you're up on the site guidelines at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html, we'd appreciate it.
Thanks for explaining the viewpoint of the HN moderation. I do understand your viewpoint. While I think that people should start raising their voice and expressing their thoughts and sentiments more directly to stop the current decline into hellhole, I do agree that an amicable discussion environment should be maintained. Ill follow the general format that everyone else at HN is using from this point on.
I think a narrow space exists in which one can raise one's voice but do it in a way that connects with the people one is talking to, rather than alienating them. It's not easy to find that narrow space, but that's what HN is trying to be about.
This attitude, like that children shouldn't sleep with parents at all costs, or should be forced to stay crying to fall asleep, is shocking to see from ex-USSR. I used to think it was our militarized culture, where parents and grand parents were obsessed with "discipline" right from birth. "Don't spoil him taking so much care", or "you'll make him a handheld child if you pick him up every time he cries" -- these are real phrases.
I thought it comes from high modernism of early XX century.
Hopping here around the comments, I see some mention that mothers start working again when the child is 3 m.o. This is very very much similar to what the USSR wanted from factory worker families -- to have the worker woman go back to the factory machine ASAP and work, work, work.
except if you read the article and study that has meaningful data shows it's a net positive. so despite your preconceived notions of a baby crying being mentally damaging, there is no evidence to suggest that. on the contrary, everyone is happier and gets more sleep.
> except if you read the article and study that has meaningful data shows it's a net positive
The study was made on ~40 children. That is not a good group for anything. And there are absolutely no long-term studies on this. There are a lot of other comments that discuss that angle in this thread.
> In their recent paper published in JCPP, Bilgin and Wolke (2020a) argue that leaving an infant to ‘cry it out’, rather than responding to the child’s cries, had no adverse effects on mother–infant attachment at 18 months. This finding opposes evidence across a wide range of scientific fields. Here, we outline several concerns with the article and argue against some of the authors’ strong claims, which have already gained media attention, including a report on the NHS website. We suggest that the authors’ conclusions should be considered one piece of a larger scientific whole, where ‘cry it out’ seems, overall, to be of detriment to both attachment and development. Crucially, we are concerned that this study has issues regarding power and other analytical decisions. More generally, we fear that the authors have overstated their findings and we hope that members of the public do not alter their parenting behaviours in line with such claims without further research into this controversial topic.
SIDS however is probably genetic and little we do has made a difference (for example, when I was a baby the advice was to sleep children on their stomachs - it's literally the opposite now)[1]
Like cardiovascular diseases, it's genetic but it's still in your interest to reduce risk factors (like smoking, which is apparently a risk factor both for heart trouble and SIDS.)
I am not an expert but I think there are ways to safely co-sleep, but chronically sleep-deprived parents tend to not be able to follow the rules consistently
As is sleeping on their stomachs, and most babies really don't like to sleep on their backs. It's no wonder parents have issues...and no wonder many babies have the back of their heads flattened.
For what it's worth I agree cosleeping is (in general) quite dangerous, but I do wish all of those recommendations weren't put into place at the same time. It'd be nice to know how much back sleeping helped with SIDS vs cosleeping vs no pillows/blankets/etc.
For my second kid it worked wonderfully. There was one hard night. After that he had, for the first time in his young life, the ability to put himself back to sleep at night when he woke up. That was a gift for him as well as us. We used the Ferber method.
Back in the 90s my son REALLY struggled getting to sleep on his own. The only way to put him to sleep was to rock him and hope he didn't wake up while you were putting him down. This lasted for almost a year. At wit's end, a friend loaned us a VHS tape about an episode of 60 Minutes that advocated "crying it out." It was a life saver! Within a few nights he was finally sleeping through the night. I'm not going to lie. Those nights were pretty difficult, especially for my wife. Luckily, my daughter didn't have that problem!
The article states no long term negative effects have been found, compared to positive short term findings. There’s been a wide range of child-rearing practices across cultures and history, including infanticide. Probably no culture has gotten it exactly right, but this practice is not that far outside the norm as other practices from other cultures.
> The article states no long term negative effects have been found
The generations that have been neglected in this way have not reached their later ages en masse. Of course there would be no negative effects. That aside, repressed psychological damage is still damage.
My parents' generation (in the UK) were physically beaten as children. It was a normal part of parenting and part of school.
My hope is that one day we will consider this emotionally abusive behaviour as seriously as we we now look at physical abuse. Though I don't hold out much hope. Especially as there are still some people holding out for the right to hit their children even now.
Comparing a 9-month-old spending 15 minutes calming themselves down before falling asleep to physical abuse is laughably absurd.
A big problem with this "debate" is that people conjure images of newborn babies being left to cry for hours, when what is actually predominantly practiced is older infants 6-12 months old being allowed to cry for less than half an hour.
After being fed and given a clean diaper and a safe place to sleep, being rocked to sleep just isn't a "need" for an older infant; they are crying because they want to be soothed to sleep. And it's fine to do that if you want to as a parent (which pretty much all parents do!), but it's also fine for them to learn to soothe themselves instead. It isn't "emotional abuse".
“A little rap on the knuckles” is less severe than full on beating, but it’s on the gradient of physical violence.
Teaching a child that their call for help will not be answered is unkind and damaging. And I’m not sure a baby has the same perspective on 15 minutes as the average adult.
I’m pretty sure most adults are walking around with unresolved emotional trauma issues that do not serve them, or those around them, well.
Again, on my opinion as a human. Opinions clearly vary wildly.
>Teaching a child that their call for help will not be answered is unkind and damaging.
I just commented elsewhere and asked you what your understanding of "sleep training" or "crying it out" entails, but I think this answers it for me - you're ignorant to what actually happens.
You do not teach a child that their call for help will be unanswered. You observe them closely as they wake up, listen to how they're crying (each parent knows what their child's cries mean), listen for the highs and the lows of the crying, watch them as they try to learn how to put themselves back to sleep. But you ABSOLUTELY DO NOT abandon them. You go in frequently at first, and slowly extend the amount of time you give them before going in as "sleep training" progresses. You slowly give them more and more space to figure it out, but you still always go in at some point, when they need it. You are giving them the space to learn something while still being there for them.
To suggest otherwise, and judge others as abusive you have been doing repeatedly in this thread, is ignorant and uncalled for. It's not constructive, and it's rude.
I think the articles talks about this: the child still wakes up in the middle of night but does not cry. Scientists are not sure what is happening, are they able to sooth themselves to sleep or are they still stressed out but are not crying. Because they know nobody will come for help if they cry.
If my son wakes up at night and needs some water, he'll cry. Diaper change, cry. I have a nursery can and I can see him wake up sometimes, look around, and go back to sleep on his own, because that is perfectly natural.
W/o sleep training he wanted to be patted back to sleep everytime he woke up. That took 15 to 30 minutes, 2 to 4 times a night.
After sleep training, he sleeps better, and gets more sleep, and still has all his needs taken care of.
> I think the articles talks about this: the child still wakes up in the middle of night but does not cry
The child is avoiding crying in the absence of its parents because doing so would cause predators to find him before his parents. Evolutionary instinct. The parents will (hopefully) return from hunting & gathering eventually, to pick the child up.
And when the parents regularly fail to return or never return - yeah, one way ticket to a psychological disorder.
Only with sleep training, the parents do return in the morning, so what's your point?
Of course a neglected child is likely to grow up with a psychological disorder. Neglected as in the parents (or at least some carer) not being there for days on end, or simply abandoning them. That's not sleep training though.
I apologise, I’ve not read literature on it, or the particular methodology you describe. I’m not judging you.
That said, whatever the merits of a structured approach, for every parent that diligently follows them, there are others that are less careful. And I’ve met them.
I’m responding to sentiments like “I just ignore them and they go to sleep eventually”, “don’t go and check, he only wants attention” from other parents, and other reports from someone I know who is a midwife.
The model we followed was “Hand in hand”, which resonated for us. And we were saddened that that philosophy does not seem to be very mainstream amongst parents I have met.
You're throwing around accusations of abuse despite the fact that you admit you haven't read literature on it. Why are you contributing your admittedly uneducated opinion on this? Go read some of the literature instead. Stop judging parents you've never met (and yes, despite you saying you're not judging, you obviously are). Just because something worked for you doesn't mean it works for all babies or families, and it's profoundly arrogant of you to assume otherwise.
"Research shows us that an infant is not neurologically or developmentally capable of calming or soothing himself to sleep in a way that is healthy. The part of the brain that helps with self-soothing isn't well developed until the child is two and a half to three years of age. Until that time, a child depends on his parents to help him calm down and learn to regulate his intense feelings."
Do you have an unbiased source? Both that website, and the only piece of research linked to at the bottom of the page, are from heavily biased sources (Attachment Parenting International and Journal of Attachment Parenting). None of the primary articles under "Research Related to This Principle" support the quote you highlight (least as far as I can tell, maybe I missed!), and the specific quote doesn't link back to any specific study. Not only that, but...
>Until that time, a child depends on his parents to help him calm down and learn to regulate his intense feelings.
Again, you're ignoring the fact that parents absolutely do tend to their children emotionally during sleep training. I highlighted that in another response to you earlier, as well as this very comment chain. You even edited your comment and acquiesced to support a version of it at six months, and now you're back admonishing the practice as "dangerous" altogether?
Edit: I am not saying you shouldn't hold your own views. Do what you want with your kids as long as you and your family are happy. Just ease up on telling others they are wrong - they are just as right for their family as you are for yours.
You’re getting downvoted because this is just one person’s opinion and yet you’re presenting it as gospel… dogmatically repeating the same post over and over in spite of there clearly being strong support for the opposing POV. More than one opinion can be valid.
I think this is vastly overblowing the upbringing of babies.
Honestly, if it mattered that much, we'd have a global epidemic of behaviour disorders due to poor parenting in the very early years. But that just isn't the case.
> Teaching a child that their call for help will not be answered is unkind and damaging
You don't know that, there is no evidence for it and it definitely depends on the age. Your post is drammatically different when speaking about a newborn, a 6 or a 12 or 18 months old.
Babies absolutely need to learn to self soothe and that crying won't always meet attention too.
The idea that unattending a crying baby here and there will produce long lasting trauma has to be proved first, it may actually be positive.
There's plenty of evidence for it. Read the books by Dr. Bruce Perry. Read about attachment theory.
If you read his books, what you will also find is that children respond differently to trauma. So, some children may not be harmed at all by childhood trauma, while others may be deeply affected. The basic fallacy here is that children under the age of three can self-soothe. They cannot. This is all part of infant development.
Yeah listen, you're not going to convince many people that their two year olds are incapable of soothing themselves! "Infant development" does not describe children between the ages of 1 and 3, who are not infants.
That one sure is an American cultural product that exists nowhere else. "Attachment is a problem" - here is a theory for it.
The entire human evolution is based on attachments created between the group members. From parenting to siblings to relatives to friends to everything else. The destruction of such 'attachments' causes social bonds to be broken and people getting isolated into depression. No wonder people call the US 'prozac nation'...
> For others, it can be hours of crying, even to the point of vomiting (common enough to be a frequent topic of conversation on sleep-training forums and addressed by baby sleep books including Ferber's
The article also includes a reference to 2-3 hours.
Fair enough. I'm not supportive of letting kids cry for 2-3 hours even to the point of vomiting. But even then, I'm sympathetic to it if the parents have tried everything else and they have a kid that just won't sleep. I'm not like an absolutist or anything, I just think parents should have space to try to figure out what works for their own families without random strangers calling them abusive.
"Research shows us that an infant is not neurologically or developmentally capable of calming or soothing himself to sleep in a way that is healthy. The part of the brain that helps with self-soothing isn't well developed until the child is two and a half to three years of age. Until that time, a child depends on his parents to help him calm down and learn to regulate his intense feelings."
And yet, sleep training is not abandoning an infant. Mind your own business and stop accusing strangers who you know nothing about of abuse. You're being an a-hole.
Edit to add: attachmentparenting.org is not an objective arbiter of the research on whether or not the dogmas of attachment parenting are correct! They have a dog in this fight...
> Comparing a 9-month-old spending 15 minutes calming themselves down before falling asleep to physical abuse is laughably absurd.
Psychopathic and delirous. That is how your statement looks to from somewhere else around the world.
...
The child is calling for help. The first instinct of a human baby. No help is coming. The child will instinctively shut up to avoid predators finding it. Its not 'calming itself'. Its avoiding certain death in the absence of the parents. With the in-built expectation that the parents who have been away for some reason will come back and pick him up. Else, he will die - just like all those babies that did not cry or whose parents were killed by predators.
...
What a way to psychologically scar a kid for life...
This is a load of unadulterated bullshit. Kids cry all the time. It doesn't psychologically scar them for life. Take a chill pill!
It's actual insanity how people have come up think that every. little. thing. they do as a parent has these life long ripple effects. I'm sorry to tell you: these little details of parenting just aren't important either way. What matters is food and shelter and a loving home. Focus on those things for your own family and stop driving yourself crazy with these details, and especially stop getting so riled up by what other parents are doing, it's none of your business!
Yeah…cause they’re human and as the parent you’re their only human interaction.
Why is them wanting to be soothed seen as a bad thing? Like, what the fuck do we think these babies are actively scheming to find ways to get soothed?
I swear our brains are looking for adversaries in infants now.
Your infant child can not manipulate you. The brains barely understand action and consequence. Your infant child is trying to communicate its needs, and having it unmet with indifference is honestly hilariously sad.
It's not a bad thing, just like it's not bad for a baby to want to be spoon-fed. But part of growing up is learning new skills, like eating by themselves and soothing themselves to sleep. And a big part of parenting is figuring out the right times and ways to encourage this.
You know what has been a far more traumatic growing experience for every kid I've known than learning to sleep independently? Learning to use a toilet. Way more tears, way more "emotional trauma", but it's all part of growing up.
> I swear our brains are looking for adversaries in infants now.
Also, sleep training is not some new-agey thing that we've just concocted out of a recent adversarial parenting trend; if anything it's exactly the opposite, it is the focus on "attachment" and concern over the impact of things like sleep training that is the newer trend.
Childhood trauma is reflected in behavioral issues at an older age.
"But part of growing up is learning new skills, like eating by themselves and soothing themselves to sleep."
Sure, but wait until they're three before you start sleep training. This idea that we need to toughen up infants is dangerous and frightening. They're completely helpless.
We've repeated ourselves a bunch of times but it irks me to let one of these nonsense comments go unresponded, so again: two year olds and one year olds are not infants and are not helpless. They can fall asleep independently perfectly well.
One thing that has always bothered me is parents trying to justify sleep training as a positive for the child. The reason parents do it is for their own benefit.
So, it's both, for real. Waking up and crying five or six times a night really isn't good for infants and is even worse for toddlers. They need to be well rested for all the learning they do during their days.
But it's also the case that anything that is bad for parents is bad for children. Especially when it comes to sleep deprivation. I'm completely convinced that in my almost-five year old's entire life, the most danger she has ever been in was when we had to drive half an hour to the pediatrician multiple times a week when she was a newborn and we weren't sleeping at all. I may as well have been three or four drinks in every time I drove to the doctor in those early weeks. But driving isn't the only problem. Parents are more irritable, less present, and just generally worse, when they aren't sleeping.
Sleep deprivation isn't just some funny goofy little thing that parents adorably have to deal with; it's a major problem. I didn't even realize this until I started sleeping after a year and a half and had the experience of "waking up" after a few weeks of good sleep. It's an actual problem! It's not just some preference that parents have to be able to sleep.
> But driving isn't the only problem. Parents are more irritable, less present, and just generally worse, when they aren't sleeping.
This.
It's hard to not laugh at a remark like "the reason parents do it is for their own benefit". Of course we do it for our own benefit. Because our benefit is the benefit of the child as well.
Temporary attachment or emotional issues, if they happen, can be fixed. Worst case, the parents may need some external guidance from a specialist in children psychology and emotional development. Keeping the parents sleep-deprived for months can cause them to become depressed (or exacerbate mother's postpartum depression - a very important topic that's not being talked about enough), or lose their jobs, or make them hate their own child, or hate each other and ultimately lead to divorce/broken family. All these consequences are orders of magnitude worse for future prospects of a child than anything a botched sleep training can cause.
Thanks! We've had a lot of good luck so far. In fact, the child psychologist we went to proactively, to talk about how to help a 1 y.o. child handle moving to a new home in a different city, approved with the way we handled both this and other issues, and with our approach in general. But hey, N=1, it's always possible she is wrong.
> The entire psychology science and discipline was still not able to solve it. But your optimism is encouraging.
The issue isn't with psychology, the issue is with people treating an entire spectrum as one bit "is or isn't" boolean. It's good for writing outrage-inducing stories to maximize revenue. It's good for winning arguments despite being wrong. It's not good if you actually care about the outcome.
The kind of issues we're talking about here are mostly the psychological equivalent of a bruised knee. Meanwhile, the commentariat and the pundits selling books want to round everything up to emotional abuse, as if letting a child cry for 15 minutes was as bad as leaving them to live on the street. Unfortunately, some of the HN comments seem to go this way too.
> Like, what the fuck do we think these babies are actively scheming to find ways to get soothed?
That's exactly what they do. Do you believe they're processing sophisticated ideas of love, attachment and comforting? That they're making a choice to ask their parents for soothing?
Infants are acting on basic instincts. With very limited but rapidly expanding space of possible actions, they're actively learning what behavior will lead to their basic needs being satisfied. They can and will overfit on whatever pattern they can spot.
> I swear our brains are looking for adversaries in infants now.
In operational sense, they are - they're fighting for resources for their own survival.
> Your infant child can not manipulate you. The brains barely understand action and consequence. Your infant child is trying to communicate its needs, and having it unmet with indifference is honestly hilariously sad.
Of course they can and will manipulate you. That's, like, parenthood 101. The whole set of biological and psychological changes parents undergo, the whole deal with attachment, is to make the parents vulnerable to the child. The brain of an infant may understand little at first, but it understands enough of "action and consequence" to start doing gradient descent and quickly learn how to get what it needs from its parents. Of course it helps that the parents want to fulfill their child's needs - initially, the kid isn't really learning how to get the parents to respond, but rather training the parents to respond to specific cues.
Eventually, children learn to speak, and that's when it's really clear just how devious and manipulative kids are. It's both amusing and rewarding to watch them push the boundaries of their intelligence to get you to react they way they want. Except in those cases where they succeed, and you only realize it moments later that you've been had :).
No I'm not. I'm talking about older infants, older than about 6 months. They are capable of falling asleep independently. There isn't a "need" here. The idea is to take care of all their needs before putting them to bed, make sure they are fed, make sure their diaper is dry, don't do it if they're sick or in pain from teething; meet their actual needs. Being rocked to sleep is a want not a need.
> But infants aren't capable of looking after their own needs.
That's my point. They aren't capable of looking after their own needs. They need their parents for that. But what they are capable of is correlating their behavior with their needs being fulfilled, and doing more of the thing that correlates well with those needs being met.
You cannot say “well you probably haven’t done this one, specific, highly unlikely thing for someone in the UK to do. So yeah caning probably worked, right!”
I haven’t knived anyone. I was never caned at school.
The absence of someone doing a thing is not proof of a thing doing what you believe it does.
You act like ‘back in my day’ there wasn’t any crime.
If you look at murder rates in the UK they peaked in the early 2000’s. Maybe those abused boys were taught violence is the answer?
Letting your baby ‘cry it out’ is abuse in my eyes and you can sleep train them without doing this.
With my daughter we soothed her in her cot instead of picking her up.
She will now link her sleep cycles and only cry when there is something wrong
The murder rate in the UK tracked the presence of environmental lead from things like paint, leaded petrol, &. The murder rate in the UK is now trending towards what it was in the Edwardian period, when it was introduced.
Beating children doesn't make them obedient and law-abiding adults.
> If you look at murder rates in the UK they peaked in the early 2000’s. Maybe those abused boys were taught violence is the answer?
There were earlier HN posts attributing the decline in the rate of murder rate/violence crime to countries phasing out lead-gasoline. Now we might never know unless we do a properly controlled experiment.
We've seen exactly the same pattern everywhere in the world when leaded petrol was banned. At this point, we've had our controls, because different countries scrapped lead at different times, and exactly the same trend has been observed. Think of the ones who scrapped it later as acting as the control group for those countries who scrapped it later.
Besides, the effect of lead on the human brain had been well known before leaded petrol was banned.
> We perform the first meta-analysis of the effect of lead on crime by pooling 529 estimates from 24 studies. We find evidence of publication bias across a range of tests.
> When we restrict our analysis to only high-quality studies that address endogeneity the estimated mean effect size is close to zero.
> When we use the full sample, the mean effect size is a partial correlation coefficient of 0.11, over ten times larger than the high-quality sample.
Interestingly, I met someone on HN once who insisted that effect sizes are always smaller in larger trials because that's just the nature of reality. This does not say anything good about scientists' conceptual understanding of what they're doing.
I think early 80s is when it becomes tricky to _legally_ beat kids in schools in the uk. I suspect collective punishment was actually illegal long before that but it wasn’t tested in courts.
It is legal in every home of the US. It is legal in many states' public schools. We were spanked in Houston public schools through the 90s. And it was a lot milder than what my cousins in Calcutta got. Good stuff.
If I recall correctly, it was illegal by the 90s in the UK. That didn't stop the odd occasion of it happening. The cane remained on the wall as a relic, but there was always a handy slipper around.
well yea, because your parents were essentially slaves, the property of higher elite classes. I'm pointing to the class relationship, nothing specific to your parents.
I wonder if such practices were used in schools reserved for royalty and other nobles in the UK
I have two kids now. We are lucky blessed and privileged with amount of support we have, from family and work and government (Canada:). And yet it's hard. I try to get a little bit less "enraged" and "blood boiling" at other parents' survival strategies. If you have to go to work next morning to pay rent (which,y know, hasn't historically been the case so evolution is no use) and don't have a traditional support network of 500bc Greece and haven't slept for the last 6 weeks... It's very easy to say "it's a sacrifice parents should make" but it feels a bit of a lack of empathy.
Different kids parents and circumstances. I've really tried to tone down my judgement of other parenting techniques as I know they can easily judge my choices especially context free.
The fact that you are getting enraged is a huge part of the problem. Keep your own morality to yourself and your own family. If you don’t want to use cry it out, then that’s your decision. The fact you project onto others is the problem and it’s none of your business.
Cry it out is effective and works wonders for families and it has no side effects, as mentioned in the article itself.
> The fact that you are getting enraged is a huge part of the problem. Keep your own morality to yourself and your own family.
How about you people keep your destructive practice to yourself and stop advocating it, less, rationalizing it and pushing it to mainstream. And with 'you people', i mean the US, because the only place where this thing seems to be a 'thing' and is even being advocated by 'professionals' is the US. The place where individualism and consumerism hails from and the people load up on prozac to survive.
There is nothing 'nationalist' about this. The past 40 years have seen an immense amount of trends that were manufactured for profit originating from the US. From privatization of social services to reduction of labor protections. From atomization of social life down to individuals because 'individualism was better' to having those individuals subsist on prozac to keep their resulting depression under control. From sugary food spam then to obesity being bad to now obesity being ok. In the process, a lot of such trends were exported everywhere, including sociopathic scandals like the Avandia drug scandal. (which is one of many). This is without even touching the subject of overseas wars and how they are manufactured with the same trend-making mechanic, starting from how a certain people being 'evil' and their lives not being worth 'that much to ensuing invasion, occupation and destruction being 'a mistake'.
A trend is manufactured by whatever private interest, industry group or segment that catches a moneymaking or career-making opportunity. They push it as hard as they can. If they end up being able to gather popular dynamics behind them for whatsoever reason - like how some people are jumping on this bandwagon - then the trend becomes ever stronger and more easily exportable.
The topic at hand follows on the heels of the mentality that exported all of those to everywhere around the world. If that is a trait of the US as a nation, then there is a problem with that and the rest of the world cannot stop calling it out because 'that would be nationalism'.
By the way, nationalism in its negative sense means people elevating their own nation above others and demeaning others. Not criticising some other nation beause of their actual deeds. At no point I said that 'this particular nation is better than the US and therefore they are superior'. I literally said that the only country on the planet that this is a mainstream trend is the US, which means that the US goes against entire world. Which is obviously not 'a nation'.
I want to stress again that such logic would literally prohibit any criticsm of US foreign policy and prevent anyone from saying that the US has been invading and destroying nations in the past 40 years - due to being 'nationalism' in the subverted definition of 'criticism of a particular nation' that you reduced it to.
You've replied to me three times and responded only about the 'nationalistic' aspect. From this I see that I did a poor job of explaining why your comments were so abusive of HN. Even if we accept your definition of the word 'nationalistic', it ought to be clear that you broke the site guidelines extremely badly.
By nationalistic flamewar I simply mean the kind of flamewar that happens when people put down other countries on internet forums. It's a shallow, simple definition that doesn't have any nuance; nor should it, because internet hellfire doesn't have any nuance.
If you don't like that use of the word, that's fine—it's not the main point. The main point is that you started and perpetuated an aggressive flamewar that wrecked this thread, and moreover would completely wreck this forum if we allowed it to. Please see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34200065 where I've explained this in more detail. You've been a good HN user otherwise, but we can't allow this kind of thing, so please don't do it again.
> The main point is that you started and perpetuated an aggressive flamewar
That makes it clearer, thanks. I do understand the concern about flamewars. I moderated forums myself. However, how will the criticism about things that originate from a specific society, organization or country will even be possible in such an environment then. Any criticism by naming anything would amount to an assault against a group or country under that standard. Or, is it so that if such criticism is raised, but just the origin is not specifically named, that would be compatible with the guidelines?
Thanks for these kind replies—I really appreciate it.
I think it is safer to make one's case on $topic without attributing it to a source that many people are likely to be identified with (e.g. national origin or whatever it is). Any time someone feels pressure against a place of identity, it feels like they're being attacked, and at that point the driver of discussion ceases to be $topic and starts activating survival circuitry. The only responses at that point are defensiveness or counterattack (or both). Curious conversation, which is the raison d'être of this place, becomes impossible.
If, however, the argument makes no sense without that attribution, I would try to do it in a way that includes lots of reassurance that one isn't disrespecting or putting down the identity (e.g. nationality or whatever it is), and make a point of explaining the connection to $topic in a limited and respectful way.
It's necessary to err on the side of doing it this way, even if it feels excessive, because although you may know that you're not attacking someone's identity, they don't have any way of knowing that up front. We all have a lot more context in their heads than we include in our internet comments. Readers don't have any of that information unless we explicitly include it. That's one reason why it's so easy for people to misread others' intent on the internet - I've written about this in various places, e.g. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que....
How about respecting every parents choices for their own family? How about you step away from HN for a bit and get some fresh air before responding to another comment in this thread? You're obviously very heated and it's not constructive.
You are making massive judgements about people while simultaneously demonstrating how little you know about what actually happens when you let someone "cry it out".
You also posted a large number of flamewar comments to this thread and broke the site guidelines very badly and repeatedly yourself.
What's worse, you hounded unity1001 in a variety of different places, which is a whole other form of abuse. That sort of spat is emphatically not what this site is for, so please don't do it again.
If someone else's comments are driving you crazy, the tools to use are downvoting and flagging—not commenting, as the site guidelines say ("Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead.") - and certainly not showing up to flame them in multiple places.
> How about respecting every parents choices for their own family?
The immense cacophonies that the industries in the US produce, eventually permate to, and induce chaos and problems in other countries. This includes medical industries.
> You're obviously very heated and it's not constructive.
Im not heated. Im not Angloamerican. This is not 'heated' discussion where I live. Avoid projecting your cultural paradigm to random people on the Internet.
> You are making massive judgements about people while simultaneously demonstrating how little you know about what actually happens when you let someone "cry it out".
Occasionally checking up on the child while leaving the child to cry itself to sleep is not 'something different' like you propose. So, no.
>Avoid projecting your cultural paradigm to random people on the Internet.
Avoid being an absolute asshole who is impossible to have a level-headed discussion with. Your flying off the handle in this thread with judgement geared towards "random people on the internet" demonstrates that very well.
It's clear that there will be no way to have a genuine, level-headed conversation with you. Enjoy your evening, or the rest of your day, wherever you are.
Im not being an asshole to anybody. Leaving aside the worldwide practice and the contradicting reasearch which people seem to just disregard when their personal experiences and biases weigh in, just like you have your own reasons for your strong bias that made you continue discussing this topic this heatedly (in your words), I have my own reasons too. I know various apparently-successful and 'well-adjusted' adults who were neglected as an infant. Only the people who are close to them can know the problems they face and the difficulties they have to go through. Its no joke. Its not difficult to conclude from a modicum knowledge of psychology and such first-hand cases that leaving alone an infant in its crib would easily do more damage - without even going into evolution, mammal species' behavioral traits or anything else complicated.
But as I said, we discussed enough. I replied out of courtesy one last time. So you too have a nice day.
After suffering extreme trauma, I have a different view on babies crying. Being heard and responded to is one existentially low level mental need. Touched too.
But you can't be heard every single time, the usual example of a parent driving, he can't just stop the car and start soothing the baby ignoring the rest of the world, logistics or obligations.
That's just not feasible nor it can't be 100% an obligation to always respond every single crying.
I think the article does a good job pointing out that after 6 months and definitely after 12 you do need to start let the baby safe soothe itself more frequently.
Sure, I can't be absolutist. But whenever I can, I do something. Respond. For the car, you might not be able to reach, but emit something that convey concern and care.
What if that approach of over protecting brings up a future lazy, spoiled, weak willed adult that will conduct miserable lives because up to 36 months all their brain saw is that crying always got them attentions and everything they wanted?
You don't know whether your approach is the best one, I don't, speak with as many professionals you can.
I approach it the other way. I wouldn't succumb to every tantrum. I try to build a solid emotional bridge so that the kid can stay grounded and relaxed as much as possible.
I'd love to speak with interesting professionals. So far I've met none.
You’ve successfully expressed the “parent in whatever mechanism makes me emotionally fulfilled” style. Many others take a more scientific viewpoint more oriented around child outcomes.
> The fact that this is so commonplace in my culture (USA) is frustrating and enrages me
From the outside, American culture around child-rearing seems like there is an adversarial relationship with tinges of resentment when it comes to how parents see children.
A lot of the tough love type of parenting seems to come from a place of pacifying parents, giving them what they want, over their burdensome children with "problem" behavior. You get things like in the OP, corporeal punishment, wilderness therapy, conversion therapy, using aversives[1] to literally hurt and shock autistic kids into complying with the behavior their parents want to see, etc. Some parents even seem to enjoy and take pride in it, and there are some who wish they could send their 11 year olds to go work in the coal mines to build a work ethic or something.
There isn’t really an “AmerIvan culture around rearing children”. America large variations in behaviors. If American parenting was completely as you suggest, how do we have a generation of professional victims or constant discussions of “helicopter parenting” or “participation trophies”?
Who said "professional victims" aren't the result of such parenting?
In my experience, people who were raised via such methods either acknowledge that those methods weren't right and make an effort to grow past them as adults, or they double down, take pride in how they were treated and won't acknowledge their own shortcomings. There's a lot of "my parents beat and/or neglected me and I turned out just fine!" sentiments coming from people who aren't, uh, "just fine" and are now grown adults extolling the virtues of child abuse.
Same goes for helicopter parents, I've run across several who also subscribe to the "tough love" ideology, where they might defend their overbearing and verbal abuse as something that will build character in their children and make them stronger or better students or whatever.
> There isn’t really an “AmerIvan culture around rearing children”. America large variations in behaviors.
There isn't any society in the world where such 'leaving kids to cry it out' is advocated. Leave aside anywhere its so mainstream that it can come to a place like HN.
You need to chill out on your judgemental posts. You're coming into this thread fast and hot and it is not constructive. Your quick reactions are demonstrating your own ignorance on this subject.
your comments are the same tired comments along the lines of "my parents and all the people I grew up with used a natural gas stove, so it's clearly the right way and nothing can be better". except when studies come out showing there are better ways to do things you're so set in your ways that it won't matter.
the thing with sleep training is that it works so wonderfully for a lot of people that the same arguments about how people who lived 20 people in a small cottage and had free babysitting all day long are somehow analogous is no longer relevant. times changed, people work more, sleep is more important for everyone (recent studies show), and the old way of doing it is no longer the best/only way.
The article makes fairly clear that sleep training under 6 months is not advised. Not to say that every baby will be ready at that point, but it becomes clear to most parents somewhere in the first year what cries from their baby express sincere needs - even psychological- and which are just gratuitous attention seeking. Once they have object permanence down, parenting changes.
> The article makes fairly clear that sleep training under 6 months is not advised
Beyond that - the close presence of parents near the infant until 2 years of age was discovered to be vital for the infant's development, social skills and especially being bold enough to experiment and learn new things. The lack of parents in close proximity in that period causes the infant to feel anxiety and hesitate from wandering around and trying out things and learning.
Agreed 100%. I feel like sleep training is for the parents, not necessarily for the babies. Most parents in the USA need to work, so they are the ones that need the sleep.
It doesn't sound like you have much experience being the 24-hr care provider for a baby. Phoning it in at work is way more relaxing than being in the house with a baby for the entire day. It's not work that makes parents need to sleep, it's... needing to sleep. Just speaking from experience, having someone with fractured mental concentration cooking, attempting to keep a slightly mobile child from danger, trying not to fall asleep on the couch with the kid in a desperate attempt not to cosleep, trying to keep your cool as the kid screams again and can't be soothed.... much more dangerous and stressful than doodling thru a meeting and saying, "I'm sorry, can you repeat that? I just want to clarify what you're saying."
Obviously. But you're saying it like the parents are being selfish here.
Babies need to be fed, protected, cared for and loved. Fulfillment of those needs is, for most people on the planet in the last century or so, directly dependent on the parents' ability to hold a job and earn enough income to pay for housing, food and creature comforts.
Even if sleep training is hard for some kids, their parents losing their jobs or breaking up due to sleep deprivation would be much, much worse for those kids.
Our pediatricians told us risk from suffocation is associated with bad co-sleep practices, not "just with" co-sleep (in our country, not the US, and I'm quoting "just with" because I don't know how to put that better, I'm trying to make the point that if bad practices aren't followed, the risk of SIDS is comparable to babies that sleep alone). This includes co-sleeping when at least one of the parents is a smoker, or is under the influence of alcohol or other drugs (legal or otherwise), having pillows, stuffed animals, or other soft loose things in bed, the bed being too soft, the baby being able to cover their face, etc.
But he did tell us it was safe to do this if we wanted to taking some precautions, and it worked great for us with our two kids.
Yes, sure, our two cases are anecdotic evidence, but I still trust what the doctor said, and I think you shouldn't be making blanket statements against the practice.
The truth is that SIDS is always a possibility and, to be honest, neither my wife nor myself slept well until both our kids were well beyond the age where the statistics show there's a higher chance from this (roughly 1 year old). I guess this helped make co-sleep safe, as we were always very alert (to the detriment of our own wellbeing, something I don't regret since a few years of this is a drop in the water compared with a lifetime, to us anyway).
One thing safe co-sleep requires is commitment and agreement from both parents, and a fair sharing of parental duties too.
> Co-sleeping seemed like the cheat code to getting baby boy to sleep through the night
Naturally since the baby will feel the parents close by instead of being out hunting & gathering, with himself being in danger. Or worse - parents dead, potential predators around. Evolutionary traits.
Everything has risk. What is the risk of having a sleep-deprived parent caring for a baby (holding and walking with them, driving, etc)? For some people, co-sleeping (bed sharing) largely eliminates sleep deprivation. Have you weighed those risks against each other, in particular when something like the safe sleep 7 are followed for co-sleeping?
Another reason to avoid this "deep seated biological reason" based reasoning is that evolution is pretty slow. Our instinct "software" is still setup for 40k+ years ago. It doesn't change particularly quickly and evolutionarily the entirety of human history isn't really a lot. Let alone human history in anything resembling a civilization.
So it easily follows that our adaptations from a time when we didn't have the luxury of stressing over how to ensure our kids grow into mentally healthy adults are not necessarily valid now regardless of how right we're wired to feel about them.
The idea of infants innocently crying because they need care only works if you assume their instincts are adapted to the modern world, whereas for prehistoric humans it was because it's more conducive to their survival to be somewhat needy yet quick to adjust when that neediness isn't responded to (as constant neediness might've led to abandonment back then).
> They are supposed to be attached to you. It is very much possible to co-sleep and then gradually transition them to their own bed.
I strongly believe that forcing kids to sleep in their own bed and in their own room all by themselves as soon as possible is a 5D chess move by the real estate industry to sell as much of their inventory as possible.
No, kids won't be traumatised or become serial killers if they don't have their own bed or their own room as soon as possible, in fact bed-sharing and room-sharing (or even hut-sharing) has been the norm for our species for thousands and thousands of years.
Heck, I shared a bed with my dad until I left for uni, when I was 18, mum was sleeping in the other room our apartment had. In the winters I used to sleep with both of my parents until I was 8 or 9, the three of us had to share to bedroom bed thanks to central heating having stopped working (which was thanks to Ceausescu and then to the shell-shock therapy imposed by the Washington consensus in my country in the 1990s). When I was visiting my grand-parents as a 8-9-year old kid, in the winter, I was sharing a bed with my grandad, and my brother (who was being raised by my grand-parents) was sharing a bed with my grandma, all four of us sharing the same 3x4 meters room. Can't say I developed any long-lasting "attachment" issues.
Again, forcing small kids to have their own rooms and their own beds is a quite recent Western thing.
Later edit: Opinion piece that supports my view (not a difficult view to support, because it's prevalent throughout most of the world):
> This system of sleeping — adults in one room, each child walled off in another — was common practice exactly nowhere before the late 19th century, when it took hold in Europe and North America. (...)
> Indeed, solitary childhood sleep seems cruel in those parts of the world where co-sleeping is still practiced, including developed countries such as Japan.
> But as industrial wealth spread through the Western economies, so did a sense that individual privacy — felt most intently at night — was a hallmark of “civilization.”
I've slept in the same bed with a work-colleague of mine a few years ago during a team-building trip, we're both males. We were quite on good terms but I wouldn't say we were sharing our deepest emotional thingies, things were ok (other then his snoring).
My dad often tells me how he used to do the same thing some years ago during company trips. Sure as hell the company wouldn't have paid for two separate hotel rooms when sending a team of 2 guys out to some remote town/city, and if it so happened that that room had one matrimonial bed instead of two separate beds then bed-sharing was the norm.
On a more general note, strangers share beds and rooms while sleeping without thinking about the sex stuff, they just want to have a good night's sleep.
> What are the odds that the rest of the world and entire history of humankind were mistaken the whole time, until some behaviorists came along and figured it all out in the last century?
why is something that is uncommon in other cultures obviously bad? there are many, many, many counterexamples to things kind this. just because something is commonplace doesn't mean it's the best way.
> Talk about infants having "attachment issues" makes my blood boil. They are supposed to be attached to you.
Attachment disorder is the opposite of what you seem to think it is, where they had previously been abandoned and thus can't make proper relationships.
Plenty of adaptively useful, maybe even optimal behaviors can negatively affect enjoyment of life. The world we live in isn't the one we evolved for, and behaviors and adaptations useful in our evolutionary past can be painful or detrimental to individuals and society now.
Selective pressure is no longer meaningfully applied to our species, so we won't further adapt to our situation except intentionally and at our own hands.
Also btw just because people forget their memories before a certain point doesn't mean they are rid of all the effects. Research on this is fraught and delicate, but very young children who suffered trauma are known to carry some consequences of it across that memory boundary. Which at least establishes that it's not a perfect reset and we should still be careful about what experiences we expose very young children to.
Sure, severe abuse can have lasting impact, but we are talking about babies crying for a bit. Kids have a thousand innane reasons to cry. Having thousand and one doesn't make that much of a difference.
For all concerned, I don't have kids and I don't intend to.
> On the other hand if infants were this fragile to be long term affected by something like that humanity would survive 3 generation tops.
The infants that were this fragile eventually selected themselves out of the gene pool by neglectful parents, or by behavioral disorders causing them to not be able to reproduce as much as others. Which is why almost every baby cries.
Hypothesis: the parent, by forcing themselves to sleep train, conditions themselves to ignore more of the infant's emotions; and the infant, observing no reaction to their emotions, learns the same behavior, leading to higher incidence of autism.
Typically (aside from some neurological disorders), there is an underlying reason for the infant to be crying. They could be hungry or wanting to urinate or defecate (many cultures begin potty training shortly after birth). This is frequent because their stomachs, intestines, and bladders are small. Figuring out what they want and responding is normal and has a long history of working, not just among humans but among all mammals with dependent young.
It's astonishing that some pop-parenting guide came along and said, "You don't have to figure out what the baby is crying about if they happen to be crying at night or if you are sleepy," and nobody stopped to wonder what night time had to do with it.
Reality: sleep training enters the picture only after all the things you've mentioned have been checked first.
Even from a pragmatic point of view, it's hard to imagine otherwise, because all of those underlying reasons are quick to check and (usually) quick to mitigate. You don't even consider sleep training until exhausting every other option, because literally everything is easier than any of the sleep training methods.
All of those things have to be checked immediately every time they cry. The Ferber method, mentioned elsewhere in the thread, says to not even check on the baby for longer and longer periods after they start crying.
During the daytime, if they start crying and you haven't solved the issue, you don't just start ignoring them. Why would you do so at night?
Without valid research in any direction, we should fall back on our prior, which is that ignoring crying infants at night is no less detrimental than ignoring crying during the day.
As I pointed out earlier in this very thread, the article itself mentions that there is no valid research on the long term effects of sleep training.
The only valid research says that they stop waking up their parents. This is probably due to learned helplessness, which leads us to the hypothesis in my first comment.
I enjoyed the piece and this is one part that I disagree with. As I understand it, being in a flow state simply means being totally absorbed by what you are doing during that time frame - it doesn't necessitate taking any more time away from other activities/priorities that you otherwise would if not in a flow state. I also enjoy working like this, and can relate to the feeling of frustration when being interrupted when the going's good. The most effective way I've found to avoid it is communicating that I'm "head down" and turn off all (non-emergency) notifications. Being able to shift away from work when you're not on the clock is a certain kind of discipline that is necessary to living a healthy and (IMO) worthwhile life - working in a flow state does not have to impede this.
GP is most likely mocking what they see as circular logic in the crypto-sphere. Re: Uniswap - a study posted here few days ago found that 97.7% of tokens launched there are either scams or rug pulls: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33572361
1. I received useful emails each day, and spams are always around 10%. Maybe I am just conservative about wher I put my email? Not being in crypto may help as well, but it's definitely not 1%-99% for me, more like 90%-10%.
2. More importantly, an email provider that doesn't make an effort to distinguish between 99% of spam emails and 1% of legit ones is definitely useless and worthless.
Uniswap the protocol is like SMTP - it's open and permissionless. Uniswap the website is more like Gmail, it has a whitelisted set of tokens to swap.
Because it's a protocol anyone can build a frontend on top of it to filter out any information they like, just like Email. Zapper, DeFi Saver and Zerion are examples of this. Element Finance runs using Balancer under the hood but you wouldn't know and aren't exposed to any tokens or pools they don't manage.
Without the capacity for powerful spam blocking email is a bad technology, or at least an unusable one. DeFi seems to pride itself on _not_ blocking its equivalent of spam.
The more interesting part of that article was the ML techniques described, and the actual conclusion that using said techniques, scam versus not-scam projects can be identified very early on. But that was lost is the typical ‘I told you so’ from the ‘crypto is bad’ crowd.
It doesn't sound like mocking scams, it sounds like mocking people not putting money where their mouth is. A lot of people already promoting "defi" are keeping their funds on centralized exchanges. Why? They still provide a performance edge and more features, but if all you need is basic trading, they should be being utilized even more.
DeFi has no fiat gateway though, that's the biggest bottleneck. The gateway is the centralized exchanges, and I think people tend to park their money on them once they deposit/convert their dollars.
This is really cool. Listening to themes from different places and eras, I can place myself there in my mind. It's like a nostalgia for something I never actually experienced. Is there a word for that?
It's apparently a very new word but "Anemoia" means "nostalgia" for something you haven't experienced. Nostalgia in quotes because by definition you can't be nostalgic for something you never experienced.
I actually looked it up a while back and there are several words... some seemingly invented recently (there is probably one true german one [1]) but couldn't find a definitive answer. I get the same feeling from the "vaporwave" [2] genre of music or any popular song but paired with the words "slowed and reverb" [3] on youtube.
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