Penelope Leach writes: My latest book, The Essential First Year, aims to empower parents to make decisions about their babies based on information rather than on hearsay, tradition or fashion. Within it, the topic that has attracted more attention than any other is 'controlled crying'.

It's not surprising. For many parents, lack of sleep is the worst part of having a baby, and 'controlled crying' is a way of 'teaching' babies to go to sleep at bedtime and sleep through the night. 'Controlled crying' means settling your baby into her cot at the time you've decided and then leaving her, crying or not, checking she's OK at regular and increasingly widely-spaced intervals (such as every five, then ten, then 15 minutes), but not picking her up again.

Some babies don't cry, or only for a minute; they are happy to settle and don't need controlling. But some cry a lot, night after night. Left crying for long enough, they all eventually stop, not because they have learned to go to sleep happily alone (young babies brains aren't up for that kind of learning) but because they're exhausted and have given up hope of help.

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