Did You Know? Babywise is not “Cry It Out”

I can’t tell you how many people stop me in my tracks when I say I recommend this book or tell them I had “Babywise Babies” and say—“oh I could never let my baby cry it out!”

I am intrigued by this because I know it means they have not read the book, but they somehow got the impression that it’s is a guide for how to implement cry it out. I don’t know why that misconception is so widespread, but it really is.

People aren’t typically interested enough for me to let them know I actually did not do much cry it out. But, considering I’m adding a Babywise section to the blog as we journey through it a third time, I thought I’d offer my very long explanation here instead!

Let me first say I’m not really for OR against the cry it out method.

On the one hand, I didn’t get to a point with my babies where we did it (because of Babywise!! I’ll tell you how I did allow fussing at start of naps below). On the other hand, I have heard success stories and parents who felt it was the perfect solution for them.

It can be quite the heated debate and I don’t know enough to get into it on here. This post is about Babywise though and the misconception if often brings.

Babywise is a book all about implementing a daytime schedule of Eat, Wake, Sleep in order to help your baby develop healthy sleep habits and rhythms. It’s about full feedings, learning day vs night, and focusing on rhythms/cycles/schedules.

You can start working on it as soon as the baby comes home, or you can settle in a while and start later. We started around two weeks old with Sam and immediately with Tom.

The big kicker of Eat, Wake, Sleep is that you’ll notice sleeping doesn’t follow eating in the order of events.

Anyone who has fed a baby before knows that eating tends to make for one sleepy baby and they doze right off! Often in the middle of a feeding before they can finish.

Babywise advises against this.

Why?

The idea is that if a baby is always fed to sleep, then they will require being fed to sleep. That means at 3am when baby exits a REM cycle which is natural and wakes up for a few moments (we even do this as adults!), he or she may cry until they are fed simply because they can’t fall back asleep without being fed.

It’s all they’ve ever known…

Additionally, if a baby gets good and sleepy after say only 1.5 ounces of milk, they may doze for a while but then wake up still hungry 25 mins later because they didn’t really get a full feeding. They got a snack and then sacked out on accident!

Now consider instead if you always kept the baby awake while eating and gave a full feeding. This is hard work on a mama and I resorted to stripping baby down to a diaper and even cool wash cloth on the feet while eating. Mean mom!

But if you did that..if you stuck to EAT, WAKE, SLEEP ….if the baby eats, and then stays awake for their wake time (often only 30 mins at first) doing a little activity like tummy time, a bath, a look out the window, shaking a rattle, whatever babies do….

They will actually learn to tire out and then fall asleep on their own due to being tired, not due to being full as a tic. They will still be recently fed so ideally they will be happy and tired and you can lay them down for a nap and walk away.

Amazing right? Why is this even more magical?

Because eventually, the baby develops enough physically to no longer need to eat in the middle of the night and when that time comes, they’ll stop waking up crying. If/when they wake, they’ll probably just roll around like we do as adults on go right back to sleep.

This is a bit of an over-simplification but that’s the idea and I’ve seen it work twice now.

The goal for the baby is 12 hours of straight sleep at night. So first you must pick a wake time. We picked 7am but you pick whatever works best for your family. Now that we know the wake time we just count 12 hours back and we know that we have a 7pm bed time.

Next you set out the feeding times for the day. Depending on the baby, this will most likely be every 3 hours.

Some may need to eat every 2.5 and some may go 3.5 but you as the parent can observe and help structure this for your baby. Babywise is great because it always asks the parent to decide these things and take cues from the baby. You watch both the clock and the child. This teaches you that a screaming baby isn’t always about hunger. If you know in your schedule that you are hours away from a feeding time, you need to look for other reasons the baby is crying. If baby gets upset 20 minutes before you normally eat you can be pretty sure this time it is, in fact, hunger and get that baby fed.

Keep in mind it’s not always great to take longer stretches. You want the baby properly fed all day so he doesn’t try to play catch up at night. Just because he CAN sleep 5 hours one afternoon without food doesn’t mean he should, lest you find yourself paying for it all night long.

7am – wake up! Yes wake them up even if they are sleeping. I know, I know. Now feed, followed by WAKE time and then sleep time from around 8-10am

10am – wake up! Yep. Forget that old “don’t wake a sleeping baby” rule when it comes to day time sleep. Those little bundles have to learn that we sleep all night, not all day 🙂 Immediately feed, then have awake time, then nap from around 11-1pm

1pm – wake up! Implement the Eat, Wake, Sleep cycle yet again with nap falling from roughly 2-4pm

6pm ish – feed again, notice it’s only been 2 hours and not 3. If the baby isn’t having it, that’s okay! Some babies won’t need it. Some will take it every time. Some will have evenings where they want to cluster feed a little and evenings where they don’t want to at all. If they are screaming at 5:30—offer it up then. Within a few month’s time you’ll be replacing with cluster feed (or just adding to it) with some spoon feeding time at dinner anyway.

6:30pm – start the bedtime routine. Low lights, bath time, sound machine, oils, story time. There is no right or wrong answer here but be consistent so these routine steps give your baby cues about it being bedtime every night. You are letting them know this sleep is different.

7pm – feed (for us its during a bedtime story) and then lay down awake (or as awake as you can, often times mine dozed here and I didn’t want to go full on cold rag since it was bed time after all).

For the rest of the night you are going to feed the baby any time they wake up crying.

You are not going to ignore or let them cry it out. You have set the routine for the day and are well on your way to teaching the baby about night time verses day and how they can and will be able to fall asleep without a bottle or boob in their mouth!

However, for those early months they are going to wake up simply because they need food. (Use your judgment, sometimes they are waking up for a blow out or another reason.)

Both of my kids quickly settled into a routine where they woke up around 1am and 4am. At some point that 1am got later and later until they sort of dropped it and only woke once in the night around 3/4am.

And then one day they just stopped waking up for feedings. For both of them this was around 10 weeks old although Sam did give me some seriously impressive 8 hour stretches off and on starting at 6 weeks
old. At 12 weeks we dropped the dream feed and it had no change on them waking more at night.

Neither baby missed a beat…and I really thought Tom would because he was sucking down 9oz most feedings and I’m not even kidding. MORE than our biggest bottle would hold.

Interestingly enough Babywise doesn’t give you a guide for how to get your baby to achieve this ability to fall asleep on their own, so the parents actually need to determine that for themselves.

We strongly heeded the Babywise advice of avoiding sleep crutches.

What’s a sleep crutch?

Something your baby NEEDS in order to fall asleep. Do they have to be rocked for 2 hours while you sing one song on repeat, swaddled in their miraculous swaddling device with a certain brand of pacifier, clutching 3 extra pacis, with a sound machine set to only RAIN level 7, a night light, lavender essential oil diffusing, and then placed into a swing set on speed 3 before you crawl out of the room on your hands and knees?

Then you are going to be facing some habit-breaking in the future….it doesn’t take a sleep expert to recognize that. But I get it. We do anything for sleep! It made sense to me to avoid all these things that weren’t going to work forever. The above routine doesn’t exactly jive with a 2 year old especially if another baby has come along by then.

In theory, Babywise theory, if you start with full feedings and Eat Wake Sleep and always laying the baby down awake….there should be no crying out needed at all!

But, we are all human and like quick fixes.

We swaddled our first for several weeks and he had a paci AND he slept with an incline for the first month. The flat crib took a little bit of adjusting. Our second was not swaddled and was in his crib sooner so he didn’t get hooked on inclined sleep thank goodness. He was a thumb-sucking sound machine addict, though!

Just do your very best here.

We were pretty diligent with laying the baby down awake and happy in their crib for so long that we didn’t have many habits to break! I sometimes wonder if that’s what cry it out is use for most…for when parents find themselves wanting or having to break the baby of a habit they can no longer sustain.

Babywise tells us—start as you mean to go.

Try to avoid those crutches now and you’ll never need to worry about breaking any temporary habits!

I would lay baby down for their nap and leave the room. If they fussed I’d go back in a lay a hand on their chest and make a “shushing” sound until they were quiet and then I’d leave.

Do this over and over until the baby falls asleep. During this process I got comfortable with letting the fussing in-between my “shushing” go on for several minutes. Starting with around 30 seconds, I worked up to maybe 3-5 minutes where I’d stand outside the door and allow the baby to fuss.

I say fuss because if the baby ever screamed at this point I went in and settled him. This was only for naps during our scheduled days because, again, if our babies were crying at night I just went in and fed them.

Babywise doesn’t say which sleep training method to use. The book just wants that baby to know how to doze off independently. If that means you want to try cry it out, you can. If you’d rather not, then don’t.

Anyway, you all can tell I love my Babywise. I truly think if you start as you mean to go, work on full feedings, work on routines, lay baby down awake, and work on differentiating day and night, you’d never be in a place to have to consider Cry It Out.

I like the idea of the parent deciding how to get there. Babywise tells you WHY it’s important and you as a parent create the plan for HOW to achieve it.

I hope someone out there found this rather long post helpful and it cleared up any misconceptions of what I mean when I say my kids were” Babywise babies.” Good luck to all the new parents out there just trying to get some shut eye!