Is it OK to leave your baby to cry?

There’s nothing quite so vicious as self-styled parenting experts tearing each other apart. This week, the ‘child-centred parenting’ guru Penelope Leach lays into the ‘controlled crying’ technique popularised by the Queen of Routine, Gina Ford. Leach says that leaving babies to cry themselves to sleep damages their brains. Apparently, scientists using saliva swab tests have measured high levels of the stress hormone cortisol in babies who are left to cry; which according to neurobiologists (according to Leach) are ‘toxic’ to the developing brain.

I’m irritated by the way neuroscience always crops up in relation to child-rearing techniques these days – as though our babies are not little people at all, but blobs of grey matter just waiting to be ‘hard-wired’ by the right kind of parental intervention. This pretends that there is no room for questioning the parenting method du jour, because ‘science proves it’ and most of us aren’t scientists who could dispute the findings. Well, I’m rather glad that we’re not all scientists – and our kids aren’t experiments, either.

Aside from the dubious use of scientific claims, what is the problem with ‘controlled crying’? Admittedly, I never used the method myself, being too disorganised, weak-willed and addled by having a baby – and then another – to do more than stumble blindly from one whinge to another. The result? Five years of sleep-deprived chaos. Those of my friends who practised controlled crying report three days of hell (for them, not the child – nobody normal likes to hear their baby scream), followed by a baby who would will sleep through the night, allowing the parents to regain some time, sleep and sanity. These are loving parents, and their kids seem fine to me. I’m not saying that controlled crying is the best method – I don’t think there is one – but I can’t see anything actually wrong with it.

The basis of Leach’s objections seems to be more philosophical than neuroscientific. Controlled crying is a clear example of parents exerting their authority over their child, in a way that directly opposes the ‘child-centred’ approach. But as parents, we assert our authority over our kids every day of their childhoods, for the very good reason that children do not know what is best for them. Babies want to stick their fingers in electric sockets, toddlers don’t like eating their greens, and school-age kids don’t want to do their homework. Whatever techniques parents use to impose their will on their children, the principle that they should do this is surely right – otherwise children would not survive, let alone flourish. That this basic task of parenthood is being thrown into question is far more troubling than the hypothetical consequences of letting a baby wail.

Jennie Bristow is author of Standing Up To Supernanny (Imprint Academic 2009). This article was first published in the Sunday Herald, 25 April 2010.