Yup tolerance for crying is such a personal thing ... as a result we are all going to have a varied point of when to terminate for sure!

After 20 years in the field and working many of them in infant programs where you would have up to 10 infants transition in every Fall I have a fairly high tolerance of infants transitioning into care and experiencing anxiety but not sure I could do months of STRAIGHT UNCONSOLED SCREAMING ALL DAY

Here I have been complaining about my newbie and his 'short cord' but little dude was happy for the most part initially as long as I was holding him or close by and than after couple days as long as he could SEE me and finally after two months I am now able to PEE again without taking him with me! ... but he still has periods where I miss his cues and we have a screaming fit until I can get him fed or down for a nap!

I like Momof4 I also firmly believe that the parents have to be on the same page with beliefs and working with you and I am willing to try a little longer when I know they are trying to be consistent .... IMO when a child takes MONTHS to transition into care it is because there is an inconsistency between expectations between home and care and that is creating the anxiety in the child that causes the screaming and so forth .... so for example if at home they are rocked to sleep with a bottle so have no self soothing skills because they always are 'helped' to sleep and than they come into program and they are being expected to 'figure out' how to self soothe to sleep on their own without the bottle only at night to than be rocked to sleep - they are 'confused / frustratted / anxious' about the different expectations and they express this by crying for the provider who has 'higher' expectations than the skills they have ... if the expectations were the same at both locations the child would be much quicker to master 'self soothing' because they have consistent experiences through which to practice and master the expected task .... hence if the parents are working WITH I am willing to try but if they outright say 'no we want to rock her to sleep' than I would have to say 'ok well that is not going to work here so I will give her 'x' weeks to master self soothing for nap time without screaming and disrupting the children and if she cannot due to the inconsistency between home and program than I will have to terminate ... that way I TRIED and made it clear to the client that the success of their child in the program is being compromised by THEIR choice cause I cannot rock a child to sleep with a bottle daily while getting 4 other children to sleep at the same time!

Plus crying is the only way young infants really know how to 'communicate' so it is normal during those first few months of care to have a lot of crying through out the day as we learn about each others routines and needs and learn how to read their 'cues' but once they have been in care and you can read cues to meet needs before they need to 'cry' to draw attention to them and they are developing 'words' than the crying is replaced with better forms of communication!

For example my first few weeks of care my new babe would come in happy and than after 30 minutes the crying would start and he had been fed and just woke up just had his diaper changed because I change every kid upon arrival to check for 'rash / marks on body' so he should be 'happy' and so initially I was just trying to redirect him back to playing and so forth but than after a couple of days I noticed that after about 10 minutes of not being able to redirect him I would go through the not hungry, not tired - check the diaper sure enough POOPY but dude did not smell so he could be sitting on your lap poopy and no clue and he had likely pooped and been crying because of that