TL;DR

This whole cry-it out vs. attachment parenting thing is bullshit. A lot of people turn it in to this huge argument as if you can only do one or the other. I can say with confidence that we do both.

We practice "attachment parenting" with our daughter, as far as I understand it from what I read in Dr. Sears book (Dr. Sears sucks, but if you want to hear from the AP extreme, read it, then throw it out). She has a very strong attachment to my wife and myself and a little bit to the relatives she sees most often. She frequently checks-in with us when she is playing, supposedly a sign of attachment (but honestly, I don't even really care, she is a really happy kid who smiles and laughs a lot and is developing very well).

When she was 1-3 months old we would rock her to sleep every night, then lay her in her crib. Pretty soon this stopped working -- when we layed her in her crib she would wake up. Sleeping in our bed was not an option, it's a SIDS risk factor. Period. Sleeping in our arms all night was also not an option.

We discovered a trick. As we laid her in the crib, she would briefly cry (in a sort of half-asleep state with eyes closed) but if we rubbed her tummy (which caused her body to rythmically rock up and down) she would quickly calm down again and with the room being very dark and quiet she'd be okay and would fall asleep and sleep for hours. Eventually this stopped working as well...

The next trick we noticed was that if we placed her in the crib she would cry briefly but if we made gentle "shhhhhh" sounds, she would calm down and go to sleep and sleep for hours. Eventually this stopped working as well...

The next trick was that we noticed that if put her in the crib and watched her, she would cry for a variable amount of time, anywhere from 1 to 10 minutes, depending on how tired she was, and then fall asleep. The we got a book called the Sleepeasy Solution which was basically letting them "cry it out" with some check-ins at 5, 10, 15 minute intervals.

By this time she was about 4 months old. We basically followed the book, the scheduling of naps and nightime sleep works beautifully.

She's now 11 months old and I've come to realize that what we thought were cries before bed were not really cries for help. I finally realized this when a few nights she woke up screaming and then vomited. The day following those nights, she was sick. When she cried both those times, we responded to her immediately. Those were real cries for help and the bedtime "sounds" were just that, "sounds" rather than cries.

There were a few times when she cried hard when she learned to sit up in her crib. She would sit up and cry really hard. We'd wait to give her a chance to try to lay back down herself, then we'd go in and lay her down and she was usually ok with that.

Now that she is older and can stand up in her crib, there have been a few occasions where she has stood up and cried intensely and we waited 5-10 minutes, then we cave and then my wife went in a breastfed her to calm her.

I can't say that we really practice one technique or another. One thing I can't stand is these people who are dead-set against any "crying-it-out." When our daughter was 1-3 months old she used to cry 2-3 hours a day, mostly in the evenings as we tried to rock her to sleep (and countless other techniques, driving the car, vacuum, white noise, singing), eventually succeeding. It seemed like the right thing to do at the time. Putting her in her crib and letting her cry (if you can even call it that) for 5 minutes got rid of the 2-3 hours of crying and not only that, she slept longer and was less tired during the day. After that we felt extremely guilty for essentially making her cry for 2-3 hours every day while we tried to rock her to sleep. It felt inhumane.

I don't buy the argument that prehistoric humans and those in 3rd world countries sleep with their babies and wear their babies in slings all day. Maybe under 4 months, but not after that. There comes a point where a baby is going to sleep worse if it's near anything that moves or makes noise, and better if it's in a dark quiet crib with nothing to bother him/her.