Can it really be true that leaving your baby to cry could damage its brain?

When I had my son 22 years ago, something of a skirmish broke out between my mother and me.
She said babies were resilient little things that didn't require their every whim being pandered to. But my instinct was to rush to comfort my child whenever he was crying.
Back then, my views were supported by the favoured baby guru of the time, Penelope Leach, who advised parents never to leave a baby to cry unattended.

Conflicting views: Should a child be cuddled and hugged to stop them crying, or should you leave them to 'cry it out'?

Now, here we are again in 2010 and the same mothering debate has just been reignited.
Leach is back with a new book which contains an intriguing and very modern development, while fighting for my mother's point of view is Gina Ford, best-selling author of The Contented Little Baby Book.
She sternly advocates leaving babies to cry in order to train them into regular feeding, waking and sleeping patterns.

 

This time, in Leach's new book, The Essential First Year - What Babies Need Parents To Know, she claims she has science on her side.
She reveals how, using saliva swab tests, scientists have measured high levels of the stress hormone cortisol in distraught babies whose cries elicit no response from parent or carer.

Controversial: Dr Penelope Leach claims that leaving a baby to cry could affect its development

Neurobiologists say, according to Leach, that high cortisol levels are 'toxic' to the developing brain.
'It is not an opinion but a fact that it's potentially damaging to leave babies to cry. Now we know that, why risk it?' says Leach.
She is not saying it is bad for babies to cry per se, but that withholding a parental response, she argues, can have long-term emotional consequences for the baby (and I would argue for the mother, too).
'We are dealing with the expectations that a baby's brain is building up,' she says. 'The reason babies raised on strict routine regimes go to sleep, usually with less and less crying, is because they are quicker and quicker to give up.
'Their brain has adapted to a world where they are not responded to. That kind of early-induced anxiety may relate to anxiety right through adult life.'
Interestingly, Leach is not the first person to espouse this research. Last year, Dr Margot Sunderland, of the Centre For Child Mental Health in London, gave weight to critics of the 'cry it out' approach.
She said that if babies are left to cry for prolonged periods, they show elevated levels of cortisol, as well as brain activity similar to that of a young child in physical pain.
She also argued - against the tenets of Gina Ford - that if parents take their child into bed with them up to the age of five, they will combat separation anxiety and make an 'emotional investment' in the child.
If Leach has been criticised in the past for being too much of the 'hugger-mother' school - we can't all cleave our babies to our backs like African tribeswomen as we go about our daily business - Ford, in turn, has been both hailed as a demi-god and branded a demon.
So what does Leach have to say to the modern parents who are on the receiving end of so much conflicting advice?

 

When I spoke to her yesterday, she was unapologetic, saying: 'I say what's most important is not to hang on to any book that in any way makes you feel bad. If a book makes you feel guilty, you should give it to Oxfam.'
Leach describes her latest work not so much as a how-to book as a why book. 'In the past five to ten years there has been so much new scientific research. I feel parents have a right to have it presented in an accessible form.'
What she denies is that women have surrendered their maternal instincts to follow the advice of the 'experts'. But she does concede that having a baby seems more fraught than it has ever been.
'If I have a complaint about the routined approach,' she says carefully, as though trying to avoid going to war with Gina Ford, 'it is that parents feel the need to stick with it out of a sense of duty.
'They believe they're teaching the baby something important by letting it cry. But a baby is not capable of learning anything at that early stage. They can pick up habits, but they can't understand cause and effect.'
Under the age of six to eight months, Leach contends, a baby's cry is not always for something diagnosable - like being hungry - but it is a message that the baby is uncomfortable and should be attended to. She says she never comes across research that supports a system of leaving babies to cry.
'In extreme circumstances,' she says, 'babies left in orphanages have been shown to have brains that are not fully developed because the upper brain is built out of the way the baby forms relationships.
'Leaving your baby unanswered occasionally won't do lasting damage, but a policy of not responding, day in day out over a long period, might. Too much cortisol isn't good for a baby's development.
'I know of someone who threw away their baby listening device linked to the child's cot. But surely you owe it to your baby to know what she sounds like.'
This chimes with my views when I was raising my son. I devoured Leach's Your Growing Child as soon as I was home from hospital.
Often he slept between my then husband and I in our big double bed, and it was years before he slept right through.
My mother continued to tut-tut about giving him stricter routines and regular feeding; my sister hinted I was making a rod for my own back. But it never felt right to leave him to cry, and I don't regret it, even though I was run ragged and exhausted much of the time.
It's no coincidence that the shift we have seen in recent years from a society in which children should be seen and not heard to one centred around a child's whims, as well as needs, came alongside the first generation of older mothers - of which I was part.
And there's no doubt that for mothers like me, returning to work when our babies were still tiny, guilt played its part in our attitude towards our children.
If we couldn't be there for them during the day, the least we could do was get up for them at night. When my son was small, I barely had my coat off after work before I was on the floor playing tea parties and reading stories.
What has changed today is that there are many more contradictory parenting books. Take Ford and Leach, in many ways they are as extreme and as persuasive as each other. So who do you believe?
My friend, Sibel Ozmen, is the mother of Ben, 11 months old. She runs a hairdressing salon with her husband Sergio and works four days a week. When she's at work, her mother looks after the baby.
'For the first four months, Ben slept in a cot next to our bed,' says Sibel. 'For the first six months, I didn't leave him to cry once. In the meantime, I read a million books advising you to let babies fall asleep, regardless of crying, but Gina Ford's book seemed far too mechanistic for me. It seemed to suggest that every baby should act the same way, yet every baby is different.
'After about three weeks of writing down every minute of Ben's routine, I just gave up. I started to work things out for myself. For example: what was important was for the baby to see his father, and if that meant keeping him up until he returned from work then so be it. It made sense to me that my baby needs his father more than he needs his routine and vice versa.'
As millions of new parents struggle to work out what's best for their babies, any in-fighting between the experts can only cause further confusion. Whatever the outcome of this spat, and whoever comes out claiming victory, the collateral damage will be neither Leach nor Ford, but mothers and their babies.
In my opinion, science or no science, one thing is clear: instinct not orthodoxy should rule the day.