How much will my baby cry?

The most famous question in sleep training

When it comes to cry-it-out (CIO) variations of sleep training, the desperate parent who chooses one of these methods is usually at the end of their rope, trudging through the days in a zombie-like stupor with ashen skin hanging loose beneath their sunken eyes. They are trying to balance two seemingly opposing forces: the need for everyone (their little one, especially) to get better sleep, and the paralysing fear of subjecting their little one to any unnecessary distress.

After making the difficult last-resort decision to proceed with a CIO variation of sleep training, the poor, guilt-stricken, zombified parent wants - no, needs - to know…

“How much will my baby cry?”

Learning from those who have gone before

In my own sleep training journey as a first time mother, I was astounded to find that there are no professional and publicly available detailed guidelines as to what is considered a realistic (and safe!) duration of crying as a little one learns how to fall asleep independently. Given the prevalence of sleep training, and the immense guilt and distress a parent feels when hearing their little cherub cry, you would think such an emotionally charged exercise would be extensively documented! But unless you have access to a personal sleep consultant who can give you these guidelines based on their own experience working with other families, you’re basically flying blind with what feels like the weight of the world on your shoulders. After all, the psychological wellbeing of your most precious little baby is a profound responsibility, indeed. 

And so, most poor parents are left to fumble their own way in the dark and come up with their own hard limits for how much crying they (and their little one) can tolerate. 

When faced with this challenge myself, I scoured the internet to find other accounts of parents who had successfully sleep trained their baby. My thinking was that I could then start to come up with my own limits based on the experiences of parents who had gone before me. And I vowed that once I had made it out the other side, I would document what I had found. 

Before we get stuck into the results, a quick semantic note… I’m sure that those who are reading this are probably familiar with all the different sleep training terms, but for the sake of clarity, I’ll use “extinction” for describing the method where babies are given the space to figure out how to fall asleep on their own, without any parental interference. (This method also goes by other names such as Weissbluth or cry-it-out.) And I’ll use the term “checkin” when referring to the strategy where babies are given the space to fall asleep on their own, but with a parent returning to check on them at increasing intervals of time. (This method is also known as Ferber, graduated extinction or controlled crying.)

And without further ado, let’s dive into the results.

Total cry time per night of sleep training

The graph below shows the total time 51 different babies spent crying per night over the course of ten nights. These results are based on the accounts of parents who successfully sleep trained their baby. Their babies ranged in age from 4 to 18 months, with the majority of them in the 4-5 month age bracket. (Note that “total crying time” includes crying that occurred at bedtime and all subsequent wakings during the night. It can be a difficult thing to estimate when your baby is doing those “waves” of outbursts (something I’ve witnessed first hand), so take all numbers with a tiny grain of salt.) 

While completely and utterly arbitrary, I highlighted the blue area myself as a kind of “safe zone” in terms of expected crying time. If you’re about to embark on a 10 day sleep training journey with your own little one, and their total crying time on any of those nights falls within this area, I would say you’re on the right track.

Some interesting observations:

• Overall, the total crying time between extinction and checkin methods is pretty similar, with both methods seeing a drastic reduction in crying by day 4. 

• In about 20% of cases (whether extinction or checkin), an “extinction burst" occurred. Here, crying time drastically and uncharacteristically increased for one night only towards the end of sleep training (usually between days 7 and 9), before resuming its trend to zero.

• 60% of babies learned to fall asleep independently after only 3 days when using the checkin method, compared with 30% for the extinction method. But the extinction burst seems to occur more for the checkin method so perhaps all the crying kind of comes out in the wash. (I would definitely like to see a lot more data sets before I had any confidence in this observation, though.)

From this data, I also calculated the average total cry time per night for each method as shown below, which will hopefully also serve as a helpful guideline.

As suggested above, it looks like the checkin method results in a slightly faster reduction in total crying time (yet slightly larger extinction burst) on average, but this difference is marginal and I would need a lot more data to confirm (or refute!). Frankly, I think it’s actually quite surprising how similar the results are between methods. Speaking from my own experience (which is supported by the many different testimonials I read), the choice of whether to do checkins is highly dependent upon the temperament of the baby. In our case, we found that my frequent checkins were actually having an overall calming effect on our daughter. But in many of the stories I read, checkins had the opposite effect. In those situations, the extinction method is literally the path of least resistance and the completely understandable choice. 

The first night is the worst

Now, it’s pretty well understood that the first night of sleep training is the worst, and the data certainly supports that. But I thought it would be interesting to check whether the total crying time on that first night is in any way related to the age of the baby. The graph below looks at just that. 

Before you take a quick look at it and incredulously say, “What? It looks like the older the baby, the less crying they do?” please remember that all data used in this little exercise is based on successful cases. I sadly came across many accounts of tortured parents who had tried one of these methods on their older baby, only to pull the plug three harrowing hours later when their precious-and-increasingly-hoarse little one showed no signs of calming down. In the couple of successful cases beyond 12 months that you see on the graph, perhaps the child was able to understand what was going to happen and was ready for independent sleep themselves. I would certainly need many more data points to confirm. 

Light at the end of the tunnel

The good news, for all the currently zombified parents out there, is that 80% of babies cry for less than an hour on that first night! (Only 4% cried for longer than 2 hours, and not by much.) And 53% of babies cried for less than 45 minutes. Total. Given that the first night is the worst, it may be of some comfort to know that all that stands between you and sleep (for everyone!) is 45 minutes. (And if this little exercise gives even one tired mother (or father) some comfort, I’ll consider it effort well spent.)

I do want to lastly reiterate that all of these observations are based on only 51 data sets, which is technically not enough to draw any statistically significant conclusions. However, the overall trend does appear to align with the broad numbers outlined here (taken from a survey of over 100 mothers). 

And on that note, if anyone reading this already has a successful sleep training experience under their belt, please feel free to shoot the data my way. (Something like “age: night 1 crying time, night 2 crying time, night 3 crying time etc.” will do!). I’ll happily add it to the existing data set to see if we can beef up our confidence in these results and spare some future parents the agony of setting their own limits. 

Sleep training is (ironically) a lot like insomnia; lonely and isolating. You feel like nobody outside your own family’s sleep-deprived bubble can possibly understand. My hope is that these graphs make you feel a little less alone, as if each blue and purple dot is a hug of solidarity and a shoulder-squeeze of reassurance while you do what feels like one of the hardest things in your life. 

Wishing you all the best of luck!

Source data

• https://www.reddit.com/r/sleeptrain/comments/j5u9e5/our_detailed_experience_with_cio_cry_it_out/

• https://www.reddit.com/r/sleeptrain/comments/mue925/experience_so_far_with_ciofull_extinction_method/

• https://www.reddit.com/r/sleeptrain/comments/obj9mx/our_cio_experience/ https://www.reddit.com/r/sleeptrain/comments/504q7r/cio_success_with_our_5_mo_after_complete_failure/

• https://www.reddit.com/r/sleeptrain/comments/h7au04/extinction_with_16_week_old_summary/

• https://www.reddit.com/r/sleeptrain/comments/phzqif/sleep_training_5_month_old/ https://community.whattoexpect.com/forums/march-2018-babies/topic/extinctioncio-success-stories-with-high-needs-babies-70010488.html https://community.whattoexpect.com/forums/march-2015-babies/topic/how-long-sleep-training-took.html

• https://community.whattoexpect.com/forums/march-2015-babies/topic/how-long-sleep-training-took.html

• https://www.reddit.com/r/sleeptrain/comments/d1hkwi/my_experience_extinction_sleep_training_with/

• https://www.reddit.com/r/sleeptrain/comments/g9uhai/extinction_method_vs_ferber_what_was_your/

• https://www.reddit.com/r/sleeptrain/comments/nmo5c2/how_long_did_your_baby_cry_during_the_first_night/

• https://community.whattoexpect.com/forums/sleep-training-1/topic/how-long-did-it-take-8431.html

• https://www.reddit.com/r/sleeptrain/comments/da9drf/cio_sleep_training_the_best_sleep_i_have_had/

• https://www.reddit.com/r/sleeptrain/comments/504q7r/cio_success_with_our_5_mo_after_complete_failure/

• https://www.reddit.com/r/sleeptrain/comments/py0lb1/my_experiences_with_cry_it_out/

• https://www.reddit.com/r/sleeptrain/comments/8iff18/extinction_positive_sleep_training_story/ https://community.whattoexpect.com/forums/sleep-training-1/topic/can-someone-share-their-story-of-cio-extinction-2.html

• https://community.whattoexpect.com/forums/sleep-training-1/topic/weissbluth-extinction-method-how-long-1.html

• https://community.babycenter.com/post/a39356548/new_to_sleep_training_forum https://community.whattoexpect.com/forums/sleep-training-1/topic/extinction-method-how-many-days-did-it-take-67327502.html

• https://www.reddit.com/r/beyondthebump/comments/oj8ot2/my_experience_with_cio_as_a_parent_who_didnt_want/

• https://www.reddit.com/r/sleeptrain/comments/glpe7t/experiences_in_trying_ferber_at_4_or_5_months_of/

• https://www.reddit.com/r/beyondthebump/comments/4oji9t/my_ferber_experience_over_the_past_week_long/

• https://www.dcurbanmom.com/jforum/posts/list/463420.page

• https://www.dcurbanmom.com/jforum/posts/list/15/463420.page

• https://community.whattoexpect.com/forums/sleep-training-1/topic/first-night-of-ferber-does-it-get-better-nbsp.html

• https://www.reddit.com/r/sleeptrain/comments/ll82zv/ferber_method_experience/