1. I’m sorry if you thought I considered you extreme.
2. I’ll find any excuse to get the nifty boxes in a post.

You interpret me at the extreme, as usual Graybo, but it’s my fault; I don’t know how to explain myself without sounding totally black and white about it, but the style I’m rejecting is the one advocated by my mother, whereby any crying that isn’t instantly appeased must therefore be the baby trying to manipulate me, and so I must teach it not to cry by ignoring it most of the time. I don’t know much about babies yet, but I feel doubtful that something so unformed and inexperienced can master the art of manipulation to this extent. Unless my mother teaches it, of course…

on the whole I agree with your general sentiment about walking away from a crying baby – the baby is usually crying for a reason and, if you are able to identify the reason, you should try to do something to put it right.

However, there are a couple of instances when I think it is appropriate to walk away:

1. the baby has been crying for ages. You and your partner are at the end of your tether. You’ve tried offering food, changing nappy, playing, rocking, singing, looking for sore bits, Calpol – everything you can think of, all to no avail. At this point, I really recommend that you both put the baby in the cot, shut the door, go downstairs and have a cup of tea and a Digestive. These moments usually occur at 4am when you are delirious with sleep deprivation. We found that we’d start snarling at each other, at Tom, at the cats, at just about anything or anybody. Never under-estimate the restorative power of five minutes peace with a decent cuppa – nothing adverse will happen to the baby if it yells its head off for five minutes on his/her own. You will return to the fray refreshed and better able to cope. This was one of our major coping strategies during the "dark days" (which occur when all your friends have stopped visiting because they’ve met the baby once and they now want to leave you alone; the baby is now growing rapidly and has learnt how to use his lungs and you’ve had three weeks of reduced sleep). If we hadn’t had this strategy, the local police would probably still be mopping up the blood.

2. the baby that won’t switch off. Tom is now at a stage when he is hyper-curious. He doesn’t want to miss anything at all – a passing bird, a swish of the cat’s tail, Dad sneezing. These are all mundane to us, but to him they are new and exciting – and it’s brilliant to watch and see all this development going on. However, because he doesn’t want to miss anything, getting him to go to sleep can be really difficult. So we are now employing a walk-away strategy and it seems to work. Tom gets so tired from his exertions and concentration that he starts crying. You can see in his face how tired he is – enormous bags under the eyes, grumpy demeanour. The problem is, if we stay with him when he is crying, he just wants to yell and see what we are doing in case he misses anything. So we now make him comfortable and then remove the distractions by leaving the room – usually, he falls asleep within five minutes and, once asleep, won’t wake for anything (I dropped something really noisily next to him the other day – not a twitch). If he doesn’t sleep, then we try soothing him for a minute, then leave him again. If that doesn’t work at the second attempt, then we’ve missed something and start going through the checklist (food, hot/cold, sore, nappy, etc.).

I know some of these books advocate a cry-to-sleep method. I don’t think that is right – you have to identify the reason for crying and deal with it. But you also have to preserve your own sanity.