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1. New research says ‘Cry It Out’ baby sleep method doesn’t harm babies.
Researchers at Flinders University in Adelaide have found that babies allowed to “cry it out” or cry themselves to sleep, in a method called “graduated extinction” by researchers, did not produce any more signs of stress in the infants than a “gentler” method.
The study, published in the journal Pediatrics found that babies allowed to “cry it out” have no difference in terms of stress hormone levels than babies helped back to sleep by their parents through a method called “bedtime fading.”
Graduated extinction is a method of controlled crying that involves gradually delaying parents’ response to their baby’s cry. Bedtime fading involves parents gradually delaying a baby’s bedtime each night in the hope that sleepier babies will fall asleep more easily.
The study was led by Michael Gradisar, an associate professor at Flinders University in Australia and director of the university’s Child and Adolescent Sleep Clinic who monitored 43 infants (between ages 6 months to 16 months) who had issues falling asleep.
He found that babies who cried it out slept roughly 20 mins more than the other group and showed no signs of immediate stress — or had raised levels of cortisol, that could indicate long-term stress.
The researchers found there was no difference among the groups 12 months later in the measures of the children’s emotional and behavioural well-being.