Sunday January 16, 2005
I am so horrified I can’t even think reasonably. I was reading around my AP blogrings and came across this gem: ***edited out ****
How can somebody who is a part of a Christian AP and an AP blog ring advocate Cry It Out. There was even one horrifying comment about children crying because of their “sinful nature”. I literally saw red and nearly puked when I read this. Our main job as Christain parents to the very young child is to demonstrate God’s love to them, demonstrate how the Ultimate Parent loves and cares for our every need unconditionally. He does not say “I will only love you when you are complient”, he hears our laments, our worries, our concerns and COMFORTS us. He NEVER leaves us alone to “cry it out” because it is inconvient to Him. AAAARRRRGGGG!
It can never be “for the good of the family” if it means one family member will feel unloved and abandoned. I can’t even put what I really think of this woman because it would be so acid-filled and just thinking about the horror of what she is so smuggly doing makes me think some less-than-Christian thoughts about her. And the comments..wuh…how aweful and moronic. That poor, poor child. This really ruined my evening.
eta: I apologize because I should not have gotten so angry. It is none of my business how she choses to raise her child. I strongly believe that CIO is wrong, and there are numerous studies that have born that out, but it is not my business if somebody chooses to parent a different way than I do. I should certainly have been nicer, even in my comments above. I removed the link, but left the other comments unaltered. Again, I should not have lashed out like that and I realize that now.
Hey, I don’t know who you are, and you don’t know who I am. That’s cool. But if you have hated filled things to say about my wife, do it where she can respond. This behind-her-back anti-cry-it-out crap had better stop. I’m very difficult to get upset, but I’m starting to get close.
FYI - I never commented that I would let my child cry it out because of their sinful nature…. someone commented that to me! Just so you know while she’s CIO I am standing there patting her bottom while she lays in her crib… this is after I’ve snuggled her and kissed her and loved on her… and she always wakes up happy! Lay off my back…. really…. I’ve been hurt by enough people today….
I am also a fan of LadyJabez, and I support CIO. Check out my blog to hear more about that. You do realize, don’t you, that your children will cry, right? I think it is MUCH more damaging to bend to your child’s every wish than it is to create an atmosphere where they learn things in a safe and controlled way. CIO is not straight from the pit of hell, and more than that, it is helping this family. LordJabez is right, you are being hateful and I think you should rethink the way you are handling this.
And while I’m at it, God does let us struggle. He does not fulfill our every wish whenever we want it. Why? Because He is a loving parent that allows us to have discomfort for a moment if it will bring about better fruit later.
all crying is a result of sin.
I am not surprised at either lady Jabez’s comments, nor her dh’s comments. I hit a sore spot and I expected them to react. I really think though, that if you choose to use violent methods of child raising that you need to find a blog ring that is more in line with your beliefs…there are probalby some Ezzo or Pearl people out there that would validate your belief that abandonment is discipline, but Attachment Parenting is not going to support that.
And Andy, please, you really don’t know what you are talking about. Of course it is ok for a child to cry, but when they are very young, as their child is, it is simply because it is their only real form of communication. It means a need is not being met, whether it be food, diaper, or that they just need to be held or sat with. You, Andy, really need to stay out of this. When you have a child then I am more willing to listen, but I know that I had much different opinions before children, but after much prayer, the Spirit lead me to follow His example, and parent with love and patience, and where dicipline means what it originally meant, not what some “christian” leaders have manipulated it to be. The only “fuit” that is brought by CIO and spanking is rotten fruit. How can we understand unconditional love if we are not shown it?
And yes, I know the “sinful nature” garbage was not written by the OP, but the fact that somebody with that distorted of a view of children supports your CIO should tell you something. It is people who see children as sinful instead of a gift from God are the ones who support such barbaric practices.
It just makes me sick that people actually beleive like that, and part of the reason I joined the Christian Attachment Parenting blog ring is because I beleive that is how God intends for us to parent and it literally hurts me physically to read about children and babies being harmed, and I do want to waste energy being upset by that. If I want to read about that style of parenting, I would go to a mainstream parenting blog. When I read on non-AP sites, I know that I must steel myself to that kind of practice, but to come upon it in an AP blog ring is shocking and upsetting.
I really think though, that if you choose to use violent methods of child raising that you need to find a blog ring that is more in line with your beliefs…
Violent menthods of child raising? What the hell? Letting your baby cry for 5 minutes to put themselves to sleep is NOT violent. Get a freakin’ grip.
How can you have such a fluffy one sided view of God? Look at Job, look at Jonah, David, Soloman… God let all these people have trials! He didn’t pacify their every need, Job was the Godliest man on the earth at the time, his family was let to be killed, his house and everything burned, he was sitting on ashes scraping his boils before God came and talked to Him and calmed him down! i’m not using this as any justification for CIO but to invalidate your horrible theology of a Sesame Street God. Bad theology makes ME turn red and nearly puke. If a child needs a different parenting style it is not an act of un-love, it takes MORE love, patience and discipline to let a child cry if it is for their own good and the discernment and wisdom to KNOW THE DIFFERENCE. It would behoove you to spend more time in Proverbs and less time tearing people down. If this were only your opinions i wouldn’t bother commenting but don’t spat your ill-doctrine in the name of my God.
Well, if you read all of her entries on CIO, it was not 5 minutes. Obviously, you did not read it all. Sure, eventually the kid gets the message that you aren’t going to be there for them and gives up in 5 minutes or less, but it doesn’t mean they are content or happy about it. And yes, I consider anything that causes psycological harm to a child to be a form of violence. There is a huge amount of research in child development on the subject and it has been shown repeatedly that the biggest thing a child is learning during the early years is trust and attachment.
And, you know, this is sort of ridiculous. Although I am really in disagreement with CIO, my main point that was left as a comment on her blog entry was that she consider changing her blog rings since she no longer follows that practice of child rearing. I am all for freedom of choice, even though I really am disgusted by her choices, but she has the right to raise her child as she wishes and I certainly realize that there are MUCH worse situations and child rearing practices out there. Her child does have parents that love her, but are simply misguided IMO. They even say that they also believed in AP practices for quite a while, but lost patience with the work involved. I agree that AP can be REALLY hard. God’s biggest lesson for me during my years of parenting is to learn the patience to be gentle and reasonable despite my human frustrations. I have had to really learn to have faith that the way He is leading me, although difficult, is the way He wants me to be so that my ds can be the man God desires him to be.
While I was writing that last entry, Punk posted. Punk, first of all I am rather amused at the “sesame street” comment. I am a fan of Sesame Street and Mr. Rogers, so I find the idea that you are trying to slam me that way pretty funny.
Second, I am Christian, not Jewish, so I am much more interested in what the New Testament has to say about how we are to live our lives. The old testament is of interest and I do read it, but more for the background info to see what world Jesus is coming from than anything else. Jesus sacrifice means that we live in God’s Grace, unlike Job, Jonah, David or Solomon. We are blessed to have His mercy and should also demonstrate that love and mercy to our children so they understand what a blessing that is.
I really do not have time to argue theology right now, but I couldn’t let this pass without any comment.
I think it’s not that you don’t have time to argue theology — but that you don’t know how.
No, you are wrong. I can certainly argue theology if you wish, I just would rather not do it while my child is awake and I have a household to run. It is simply not worth my time to argue theology, especially with a Christian since we have the same source material and our differences are simply interpretations of that, and more to the point, it is silly to argue it when we both have deeply held beliefs and it will denigrade into nothing more than a long winded debate, and in a blog comment section no less. It sounds rather pointless to me.
Something I thought of as I hit submit on my last post….with the gift of Jesus’ sacrifice came the gift of the Holy Spirit. So, unlike the Old Testament people you mentioned, we DO have God with us all the time. Oh, that and Job was an adult, not a baby.
Jennifer_Z, I don’t know who you are, but like you when you read LadyJ’s blog, I was horrified to happen upon yours.
First of all, I find your comments, both ones you left on LadyJ’s blog and your own, extremely judgemental, even if you try to pose as if they weren’t. Second, I think you have a lot of nerve going onto the website of someone who is obviously a loving mother, and absolutely lambasting her by asserting she was abandoning her child. CIO is HARDLY abandonment.
The biggest problem with the type of parenting you seem to advocate is that it seems to be more about the good of the parent, not the child. Like so many other things in our society, it’s all about “everyone feeling good.” YOU worry that the child will feel abandoned if you let him or her cry for 5 or 10 minutes. It feels painful for the PARENT to let the child cry. AP is a way to make everyone feel better, but what does it teach the child? “If I cry, Mommy and Daddy will come and fix it.” That’s dangerous…soon you have a child who learns his parents will do everything for him, instead of learning to do things himself. The child ends up running the house instead of the parent.
Another point about CIO- which child suffers more? The child that crys for a couple of nights, and soon learns to sooth himself to sleep…or the child that cries for endless months, with a parent that comes and gets him every time?
We let our child cry it out from a very early age. The result? She’s been sleeping through the night since before she was 2 months old. She’s a happy, intelligent, beautiful little 22 month old. She is not, I’m happy to report, a spoiled brat, which I think she would be if we catered to her every whim every time she cries or whines. She gets constant hugs and kisses from her mother and I. She knows she can depend on us, but also knows limits and discipline…it’s all about BALANCE. And, of course we will come to her aid if she suddenly starts crying at night…but not time after time if nothing is wrong, and all she wants is attention.
Not to be mean, but I think your time would be better spent seeking out children who live in bad households, or better yet, children in foster care that don’t even have homes, and championing their causes. I see them often at work…ask me and I’ll get you in touch with an agency or two.
Your comment about her poor, poor child? It’s disgusting that someone would claim to be holding back “less-than-Christian” thoughts and then write something like that.
Paul constantly references OT characters to prove new testament ideas and thoughts, this is POST Acts, post Holy Spirit coming down. The whole OT is to show who God is, it’s example after example of Grace, love, and stearn judgement! Grace has ALWAYS been around, it’s not a jew/christian thing… We as Christians are adopted into the chosen of God (we’re not circumcised of the flesh but of the spirit). The levitical sacrifices didn’t save anyone, God’s grace did from the establishment of a post eden world, it’s true they didn’t understand it until Jesus explained it… God is the same yesterday today and tomorrow, there is no OT and NT God… but you’re right, it’s best not to get into this in a blog, i do pray however that you would be spurred into looking into these basic theological ideas. The Westminster Catechism is a great place to start (not the catholic catechism, this is written by Martin Luther of the reformation). “Slamming you”, calling your God a Sesame Street God was calling your idea of God a very simple one, i wouldn’t have “slammed you” had you not been so dogmatic in your blatant wrong beliefs. I digress, enough is enough, i take my self out of flame wars, i’d rather argue theology to come to a common point, not using it to go no where.
I am really tired of this. I have read Jabez’s blog before, just like I have read any number of blogs on the blog rings I participate in. The reason I read them is to get inspiration and ideas of how to handle situations I come across. The only reason I was so upset was that it hit me unawares, since I beleived I was reading blogs of like-minded individuals (not neccessarily identical, but there is a basic agreement of what AP practices are). I hesitate to make analogies for fear of that being fodder for a further arguement, but I wish that people would understand that in the context of an Attachment Parenting blog ring, a post advocating Cry It Out is totally out of line. Furthermore, I probably wouldn’t have posted anything if not for some of the other comments like babies being of a sinful nature.
I know you don’t know me, but the idea that my child RUNS my household is really silly. The idea that AP parents don’t discipline is a total falsehood created by people who do not understand how we parent. My child, I am happy to report, is not a spoiled brat either. He has limits and knows he can depend on us, and we provide a stable and nurturing environment for him. He is not a “little adult”, he is a child. He deserves respect as a person, he deserves guidance, he deseves security, and mostly, he deserves to be loved. None of those meshes with CIO for me.
I do advocate for much more serious issues, btw, but I happen to believe that many of those issues are rooted in things like CIO and the like.
I guess it what it boils down to is this…if you don’t beleive in AP, fine, but don’t participate in an AP blog ring. I don’t seek out Pearl or Ezzo blog rings and speaking out against their practices on their blog rings would be inappropriate of me. I guess I should not have said anything, but that ’sinful nature’ comment just really got under my skin.
Dang, my first flame fest. I would never have guessed it would be because I am anti-CIO on an AP blog ring. Hmmph.
I am truly interested in the scientific research that proves that the CIO is emotionally detremental to infants. I would also like to see the research that shows a connection between CIO and children with bad behavior. I know plenty of examples of children who “suffered” through the CIO method and turned out to be productive Christians, however, maybe I am misinformed. I’ve read the new testament as well and I am having trouble recalling the book, chapter, verse that might be linked to the sin that is CIO. Isn’t allowing your child the opportunity to train him/herself to fall asleep for a reasonable amount of time to ensure health and well being demonstrating God’s mercy for us.
Here are some links to get you started bplank. Both of these are basically pages of links on the subject of CIO.
http://www.gentlemothering.com/topics/
http://mothering.com/discussions/showthread.php?t=179657
I know that this is not the defining issue of how a person ‘turns out’. There are people that have suffered the worst kind of abuse and become productive people, and there are people who have had all the advantages who are not productive. There are so many variables in what things shape us and how they shape us.
I know I am not a perfect parent. I am just striving to be the best parent I can and how I interact with my child is one thing that I can control (with God’s help of course…I was not born with a lot of patience).
That first link will have a lot more info on the biblical basis for AP parenting practices since it is a Christian site, the second site is a non-religious site, so it is not going to approach it from that angle. I will look for some more biblical links and will post them too. It depends on how often I get interupted as to how fast they go up.
Don’t let a flame-fest keep you from blogging! Heated discussions are good for all.
What I left out of my last post is that I give you credit for being educated in what you believe…at least you can back your arguments up! I respect that.
I never realized it, but people are probably as protective of their parenting style as they are their political views…
actually, Jennifer Z I did read all of LJ’s blog. And yes, at times it was more than 5 minutes. But it’s to be expected since she isn’t used to it. But this is stupid to attack another’s parenting style just because you don’t agree with it. Everyone has a different style and I think the only wrong way is if you’re abusing your child… and I think you’d be hard pressed to find any judge that would convict you of child abuse for letting your child CIO for 20 minutes (and in most cases less) while you’re standing their patting her bottom and whatever else it was LJ said she was doing during that time.
I totally agree with you, Jennifer! I stumbled upon her blog hitting random on the AP blogring. Yes, everyone can treat their children however they want, but I certainly would not expect to find a CIO parent in an AP blogring! I definitely wouldn’t belong to a blogring for Ferber/Ezzo followers – why would I want to?
Ilaria
Ya know what? Just because I have not given birth to the children I have taken care of doesn’t make me completely unable to understand them. I work with children full time and have for years. You have absolutely no right to tell me that I don’t know what I’m talking about. Half of the doctors that write these books don’t have kids either… I know pediatricians that don’t have kids of their own, and I doubt you’d talk to them that way. I’d go as far as to say that I might actually have a *better* view than some, because I have seen more kids than you have, I’ve personally worked, day in and day out, with a number of personality types. You know what works for *your* child, whereas I have seen basic principles that work well across the board for many, many kids. I too am so sick of this whole discussion, but had to comment on your close minded attitude toward me. The people that employ me pay a very high premium and are very thankful to have me in their lives because they know that their children are in amazing and loving hands all day long. The local “gymboree” owner gives out my name as a trusted reference, as does a local pediatrician. You may not like what I have to say, but don’t tell me that I have no place in this discussion.
I apologize for coming off to strong. I will simply remove myself from this discussion at this point. I offer my blessings for you and your family, and wish you nothing but the best.