I let my baby 'cry it out' - now, years later, I wish I hadn't (2024)

Babies don’t come with a manual. If they did, plenty of people would be a lot less wealthy than they are – not least Gina Ford, the globally renowned parenting guru whose tome, The New Contented Little Baby Book, has been translated into seven languages and sold over one million copies worldwide. In the pantheon of captive audiences, no-one is more rapt, gullible or willing to throw money at a problem than a sleep-deprived parent on their very last nerve.

I didn’t even drink coffee until my firstborn, V, was three months old. Walking somnambulantly past Starbucks one afternoon after a particularly difficult night of broken sleep, I bought my very first cup. It acted as a gateway drug to Gina Ford, a woman viewed by her critics as way more toxic than caffeine. I was desperate. Sure, my daily 1pm latte might have made me feel alert for a while, but it was a quick, all too fleeting fix that didn’t solve the crux of the problem.

In 2006, everyone was doing Gina Ford. She pioneered the “controlled crying” method – letting a baby cry for gradually increasing intervals before rushing to comfort them, as a means of teaching them to self-soothe and eventually fall asleep on their own. It was seen by its adherents as a harsh but effective way of getting little Rafi or Lily to sleep through the night. Not that it only governed your nights: it took over your entire life. In order for Ford’s methods to be successful, you had to feed and nap your baby at fixed and specific times, never deviating. Many are the afternoons we spent trying to keep V awake as we wheeled her home in her buggy, knowing that if she dozed off at 5pm, she’d be wide awake at 7pm, scuppering the plan.

V is 18 now, and as nocturnal as she ever was as a baby; a typical teenager whose erratic sleep patterns are more the result of parties and Netflix than lack of cuddles from her mum. But I was reminded of the Gina years courtesy of an interview she gave to another British newspaper over the weekend – her first in 17 years. The notoriously publicity-shy former maternity nurse, now 70, seemed to suggest she’d been misunderstood.

“I’ve never advised parents to let their babies cry it out,” she said.

If I’d been holding a mic, I would have dropped it. Happily, I was holding a coffee (caffeine became a lifelong addiction), and didn’t spill a jot. Excuse me? I will accept that, at the time, my brain may have been too sleep-addled to absorb verbatim every last word of Ford’s tome, but I’m fairly sure I grasped the gist of it, which was – very clearly – an exhortation to let babies cry it out.

“If anyone is following my books correctly, there should not be a lot of crying,” Ford now says. Really? Because I remember that there was, in fact, a lot of crying. There was crying fit to wake any siblings, every neighbour, and possibly even the dead; crying of such forlorn and plaintive cadence that it would have melted the heart of Pol Pot. But not us, for we were Gina Ford parents, and we would not break. We had journeyed too far down Gina Street to make a U-turn.

“This isn’t right,” my husband and I would whisper outside her bedroom door, having got up for the umpteenth time to check whether the crying was “normal baby crying” and not because she was, for example, being savaged by a wildebeest. Despite an overwhelming instinct to bolt into the room, pick her up and comfort her, we resisted. Gina said we shouldn’t, and Gina was god. Gina had helped Matt and Rachel go from strung-out zombies who couldn’t stay in the pub past 8pm to a perky, charismatic couple whose baby now slept so soundly that they could go out raving. Terrified that our poor, crying baby would catch sight of us and cry all the more, we’d peek nervously through the door crack at her tiny form. Entering the bedroom was verboten – damn those creaky wooden floors – and so we’d creep softly back to bed and listen to her cries on the baby monitor.

Possibly, if you are an exceptionally heavy sleeper or a sociopath, Ford’s controlled crying method will work for you. But over the days/weeks/months/years it takes for your baby to settle into its much hoped-for routine, you’ll likely wake up as often as your baby does. Unless your baby is particularly compliant, The New Contented Little Baby book is unlikely to make for New Contented Little Parents. In fact, you’ll be supremely uncontented: not only exhausted but also racked with guilt.

“I’ve always said controlled crying is a last resort and should only be done when you have looked at all other areas,” Ford says now. Most Ford acolytes would attest that they did look at all other areas – room temperature, nappy, the possibility of colic – but that their natural instincts were too easily overridden by their lack of confidence, leaving them vulnerable to anyone who sounded like they had a plan.

“I have always said that one must always assume that the baby cries because of hunger,” Ford now also claims. Older, more experienced me can see the flaw in this theory straight away, but younger, exhausted, first-time parent me nodded mutely, overriding the logic that V could have been crying because she was cold, hot, teething, poorly or scared. I remember with particular guilt a holiday in Suffolk, she in an unfamiliar cot, in an unfamiliar room, with unfamiliar scents, sounds and sensations. Did we go to her when she screamed? No: we carried on watching The Bridge.

Only we did go to her, eventually. “I can’t do this,” one or both of us said, scooping her up and taking her downstairs, whereupon she instantly fell asleep in our lap. It was the last night we ever did controlled crying. As the psychotherapist Phillipa Perry notes, your child is not a project. It’s a sentient human being who, if the famed paediatrician and psychoanalyst Donald Winnicot is to be believed, could be traumatised by having to be made aware too soon of its own helplessness and vulnerability.

Perry is one of many modern gurus who espouse the idea of “gentle parenting” over the imposition of strict rules, but while Ford’s exacting methods might have fallen out of fashion, the baby manual hasn’t. The explosion of podcasts, gadgets and sleep nannies proves that when it comes to getting a good night’s kip, people will still try anything. Mixed as my feelings are about Ford, if she were to write The New Contented Little Menopause Book, I’d probably buy it. But I don’t buy controlled crying, and wish I never had. Babies need love more than they need rules. We all do.