Should we leave babies to cry?

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It's the most fashionable child-rearing method of our times. It's also unnatural and even harmful, argues Dr Miriam Stoppard
One of the most popular fashions of the moment for training a baby to sleep is "controlled crying", where you leave your baby to cry for long periods with the hope that in the end they will stop crying and eventually learn to put themselves to sleep. Two things bother me about this concept. The first is I loathe the word "training" in the context of babies. Babies shouldn't be trained. Before being developmentally ready, a baby can't be trained. Once a baby is developmentally ready, he or she doesn't need training. The second is that I shrink from leaving a baby to cry for long periods. A mother's natural instincts tell her to go to her crying baby, so why has controlled crying become a strut of 21st-century child-rearing and where did it come from in the first place?
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