Can leaving a child to cry seriously damage its future mental health? JO HAYWOOD reports.

IT'S one of the few noises that can reduce grown men to tears and induce homicidal tendencies in normally sane women.

A constantly crying baby can drive you mad. But is leaving it to cry itself out a healthier option?

Not according to Professor Margot Sunderland, a psychologist and director of training at the Centre for Child Mental Health in London.

In her new book on raising children, she claims that leaving a child to cry can lead to high rates of depression and emotional problems when they reach their teens.

"The blunt truth is that uncomforted distress may cause damage to the child's developing brain," she told the Daily Mail. "If you ignore them or put them in a room on their own, you can cause serious damage to their brains on a level that can result in severe neurosis and emotional disorders later in life."

Other child rearing experts, like Dr Penelope Leach and Gina Ford, are split on this subject. And Marion Moore, parenting specialist at Family Matters York, can understand why.

"There are no blanket answers; what works for some parents won't work for others," she said. "You get to know your baby after a while and learn to distinguish between a distressed cry, a hungry cry and a tired cry.

"With that knowledge you can then decide whether they need picking up immediately or can be left for a while.

"With my own children, I set myself a maximum of five minutes. If they were crying for longer than that, even if I knew they had been fed, changed and were sleepy, I would check on them.

"This is a decision individual parents must make for themselves."

Lucy Hjort, press officer for the National Childbirth Trust in York and mother of two girls, was less even-handed about Prof Sunderland's findings, dismissing them as "another stick to beat parents with".

"There are far more serious things for us to worry about," she said. "This is about over-analysing a situation and then trying to apportion blame.

"There are so many ways we can mess up our children, to pinpoint one just isn't logical."

Few parents can honestly say, hand on heart, that they have never left their baby to cry, especially if it is 4am and they have had less than an hour's sleep because of their little one's insistent wailing.

At this point, it can be a case of leaving them to cry or throwing them - cradle and all - out of the window.

"It's much more important to learn how to interact with your child, to spend time getting to know them and equipping them for life," said Lucy.

"It seems to me that most teenagers are emotional and depressed at times. Giving them the skills to cope is much more important than worrying about how much they cried when they were a baby."

Updated: 12:11 Tuesday, December 07, 2004