Babies cry. That's a fact of life. How much we let them cry, that's a fact of parenting, and it's easily one of the most confusing, emotional, and even divisive issues new parents face. One parent may insist it's a no-brainer: If baby is crying, you do what you can to comfort and console. Another may argue that if you are always at baby's beck and call, life will never get back to "normal."

For decades, the advice from respected child development specialists and pediatricians such as best-selling authors William Sears ("The Baby Book") and Penelope Leach ("Your Baby and Child"), as well as a host of organizations such as the American Academy of Pediatrics, Zero to Three National Center for Infants, Toddlers and Families, the Brazelton Touchpoint Institute at Children's Hospital, and Brigham and Women's Hospital, is to respond to a crying baby as quickly as possible, especially a baby under 3 months old but including up to 6 months.

Here's what I tell parents," says Sears, a pediatrician in San Clemente, Calif., who is known as the father of attachment parenting, a practice based on a high degree of responsiveness. "When in doubt, put yourself behind the eyes of your baby and ask yourself, `If I were my baby, what would I want my mother or father to do?' "

Most of the time, that means parents will -- and in his mind, should -- pick up a crying baby.

While this is widely accepted pediatric practice, it is not universal. In some places, it's even controversial.

Today in England there's a growing brouhaha over what has come to be known as "controlled crying" -- allowing a baby to cry as a way to manipulate him onto a schedule: If he cries because he's hungry and the clock doesn't say it's time to feed him, let him cry.

Leach, a British developmental child psychologist, is so alarmed at the growing popularity of this practice that she has written a position paper this month in the journal for the World Association of Infant Mental Health urging professionals to take a stand against it. The fuel for the movement, she says, is "The New Contented Little Baby Book," by Gina Ford, a maternity nurse, published in 2001. Ford's book is not unlike "On Becoming Babywise," by Gary Ezzo, executive director of Growing Families International, which drew some attention when it was published in 1998.