The Sears family also cites a study showing that babies who cry for prolonged periods have lower IQs than kids who don’t, but the study looked at kids who happened to cry a lot more than usual, not those who were left alone to cry. The types of stress that have been shown to cause developmental problems in children include sexual and physical abuse and serious neglect, described as “the absence of sufficient amounts of essential experiences,” which some children raised in state-run institutions in China and Romania suffered, for instance. But several nights of crying during an otherwise happy infancy does not constitute chronic stress. Yes: Chronic, toxic stress is bad for young brains. The first argument made by the journal (and the Sears pediatricians) is that crying-it-out is stressful for babies, flooding their sweet little brains with hormones such as cortisol that interfere with healthy brain development. “By allowing this irresponsible and unethical conclusion, the editors are encouraging parents to do great harm to their children and our fellow citizens,” the author, Darcia Narvaez, a psychologist at the University of Notre Dame, proclaims. A third article compares our society’s poor treatment of babies to racism, noting that the editors of the journal Pediatrics-the official journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics-show “great ignorance and disdain for babies” because in 2012 they published the results of a randomized trial suggesting that sleep training does not cause lasting psychological harm. Crying-it-out is so stressful to babies that it “can rearrange certain systems in the brain,” another piece in the issue argues. Dangerous how? An editorial in the journal suggests that our common use of crying-it-out may be responsible, at least in part, for the fact that Americans “have a longstanding pattern of poorer health” compared to other high-income nations, where crying-it-out isn’t as popular.

A Cry from the Heart by William Sears