Chronicles of a Babywise Mom: Using Babywise Without Doing CIO

Friday, December 5, 2008

Using Babywise Without Doing CIO

I have had various questions over time about how to implement Babywise without doing CIO with baby. I thought this warranted a post for easy reference.

You can certainly use Babywise without having your baby cry it out (CIO). Parents have various reasons for wanting to do this. Many have a baby with reflux and crying really aggravates it. Their child cries and ends up throwing up. For some babies it also causes the acid to move up the esophagus, causing more pain. Some parents live in a place where neighbors can hear baby easily and they don't want to disrupt neighbors. Other parents simply do not want to do CIO.

Whatever the reason, you are not without options. There are plenty of parents out there to take what they want from Babywise and leave the rest. If this is what you choose to do, that is fine, but let me just caution against having expectations of achieving the results of Babywise without implementing all of Babywise. Just keep that in mind. See this post for more on that idea: Other Parenting Books : http://babywisemom.blogspot.com/2008/04/other-parenting-books.html

Here are a couple of ideas for you if you want to follow Babywise but don't want to/can't do CIO:

Work to teach your child how to self-soothe. The purpose of CIO is for your child to learn to self-soothe. That is the why behind the action. If you can't implement the how, think of a different how (see this post for more on why vs. how: Why vs. How ). One idea is to read and implement the Baby Whisperer's method for teaching to self-soothe. (see this article for a bit on it, my confusion, and be sure to see the readers comments for clarification Baby Whisperer: Sensible Sleep ). If at all possible, I would work to get your baby to self-soothe. With that ability, you can implement Babywise with no problem.
Do the eat/wake/sleep cycle. If you are willing to CIO but not yet, or for whatever reason don't want your child to self-soothe, you can at least do the routine. One word of caution is that you probably won't get long naps and sleeping through the night will probably take longer and/or be hard to attain. The cycle is a good start though. I started Brayden on this cycle a few weeks before we started CIO, and that alone made a difference for him. As your baby gets older, there are a lot more theories and practices that can help you in your parenting, such as independent playtime.

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