On holiday with family members doing CIO full extinction
We were on holiday recently with my brother and SIL and their 14 week old. They were doing CIO for every daytime nap - basically putting little one down in their cot, shutting the door and window, setting a timer for an hour and turning up the music downstairs. No monitor or anything.
Myself and my partner found it pretty disturbing and horribly distressing to be around, but we couldn’t figure out how to approach a constructive conversation around it - except to ask about how they were finding it and how it made them feel, and if anyone else they knew was taking this approach. The screaming and crying did seem to upset them, but they seemed firmly in the “this is for their own good and nothing will help them sleep through if we don’t help them learn this skill” camp. My SIL was pretty clear that they would continue to try this every day even if it didn’t seem to be working, as consistency was key.
My slightly older baby was there too, as well as another family members. Both of these babies had exclusively contact/carrier naps all holiday and we both cosleep too. I think it MAY have been good for them to see other models of baby sleep, but they seemed to actually feel quite sorry for us that our babies weren’t napping “independently” and needed associations like rocking to fall asleep.
How would you have handled this? It’s hard now to even have a conversation with my SIL about baby sleep or how her nights have gone, knowing that this is the continued approach in the day! Equally - I don’t want to alienate her and want to approach the conversations with care and curiosity. I know they love their baby very much, and feel like this is the right approach to support her best - even if to me it feels awful!