<aside> 💡 A meta-analysis on medical parenting advice regarding infant crying, from the 1800s to today. A data-driven historical lens on parenting trends to give readers perspective.

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Narrative Outline:

• Introduction - the parenting dilemma: to cry or not to cry? Personal anecdote on how difficult infant parenting decisions have become and the social pressures from trend phenomenons.
• How recent is the no-cry movement, and how much of the current discourse is it taking up?
  • meta-analysis filtered to show the emergence and increase of books, articles and videos on no-cry sleep training in recent years (and the historical prevalence of cry-it-out training). This gives parents perspective beyond present trends.
• That's all well and good, but what do the medical studies have to say about whether or not crying is harmful to babies?
  • meta-analysis filtered to show medical literature over the last 100 or so years. This gives parents perspective on the lack of medical consensus.
• Conclusion: it varies for every child but studies have confirmed there are benefits to sleep training, there is no consensus on whether crying harms babies or causes long-term issues after childhood.
• Personal opinion: whether cry or no-cry most babies end up in the same place, what we ended up doing and why.

Matt Feedback

• Notes
  • I did bring this up with a few parents on NYE. It did seem that everyone made the decision based on a few variables: asking around, reading, doctors, family history/culture. They were also pretty clear that the decision depends on your baby’s age and whether they are ready for sleep training. That is, to cry or not depends on what month you’re in with your baby.
    • I need to challenge this slightly because it's central to the story pitch - all experts agree that sleep training should start at 3-4 months when your baby is ready but the debate centres around how and whether to sleep train at all (using the cry-it-out method or the no-cry method) → which is the focus of the article: "to cry, or not to cry?"
    • The Tiktok videos you shared are the perfect example of how opposed the two camps are today, the no-cry parents being very vocal about their opinion that letting babies cry is cruel.
  • This question did connect a lot with parents, and it’s very much part of a larger discourse, as you mention, that there’s seemingly infinite decisions to make with no clear medical consensus, including things like nursing/formula, some vaccines, screen-time, swaddling, etc.
• Overall
  • The main point I’m getting from this is that there’s no medical consensus on whether to let your baby cry or not—no right or wrong way.
    • This is correct, but most people aren't aware of it. As new parents we're inundated with opinion videos and articles about the dangers and cruelty of letting your baby cry. But when you've read the right books you discover there is no medical consensus - it took me 3-4 weeks to get the right book, read it and understand this.
  • My one concern here is whether this is interesting enough to pull the reader through this project—I’ll bring this up with the team on Monday.
    • Hoping those Tiktok videos you shared are a good example of how engaged and active parents are around the subject! It's a critical point all couples need to make a decision on that will affect the next few months of their lives.
  • The other context you’ve set about this topic: the guilt parents feel, the fad-like TikTok crowd willing to sacrifice (a clear 2020s cultural narrative), tiny decisions matter, be sure you’re right, letting babies cry feels cruel…this feels like the real story you’re trying to tell. Part of me thinks the story is actually here and not on the medical consensus point (i.e., here are the “facts”)
    • Confirming this is the story I am trying to tell, apologies if it wasn't clear before! We start with the context: the difficulty of parenting given the endless buffet of diverging opinions from articles and social media.
  • Also consider this is a lot of context-setting to get your main point about the medical research. You might lose the reader in this setup, so make sure it’s short!
    • In the “Story” section below, it looks like most of this would fall in the “intro.” I would just think on that a bit and whether it should all fit into the setup or whether it comes in different places during the sequence of the story.

1.1 Why?

Early parenting is exhausting, and it doesn’t help that every choice and decision seems like it might make or break our kid in the future, including seemingly tiny things like how to change diapers without damaging his lower back, which position his heads should be in and most importantly - whether or not to sleep train him.

Like everyone else, I started reading books and browsing the internet for advice. There is so much advice on the internet, thousands of rampant opinions of which less than half offer trustworthy advice.

Then I asked my parents, grandparents and doctors to consult the previous generations. They all confirmed taking a simpler approach with less parenting anxiety - to let babies cry. You can clearly see an evolution pre and post -2010, after which the norms on sleep training changed and the tolerance for baby crying dropped dramatically.

Today whether I ask around or search online there’s a tremendous amount of debate when it comes to letting infants cry, some of our friends would openly disapprove. Many parents signalling their willingness to put their baby’s needs above their own - sacrificing their sleep and health in the process - to a large public on Instagram or blogs, this shifts cultural standards and influences the parenting opinions of our friends.

All of this makes it much harder for us to make informed and unemotional decisions on what is best for our kid, and for us. Social pressure and judgement weighs heavily.

So I decided to look at the literature and make my own data-driven research.