One of the hardest thing about being a parent today is the constant shame and confusion about the “right” way to do it. We don’t live in a hunter gatherer society anymore, we just don’t. There’s lots of wisdom in that way of life, and sure we could learn from it — but there’s enough anxiety as it is, parents don’t need more of it.
We have three kids and we sleep trained them. (Not a pediatrician, standard disclaimer.) This article calls it an ‘extreme’ practice. For us, ‘extreme’ was the sleep deprivation we experienced with baby number one as we tried every ‘no cry’ method in the book. The baby cried and cried and cried. Once we started sleep training, there was a bit of crying and then - a sleeping baby! Through the night! Total amount of crying went from hours to zero. The kid became happier — they weren’t sleep-deprived anymore. And neither were we. I no longer felt like I was going to drop the ball due to extreme exhaustion.
Babies two and three had the benefit of our experience, and they barely cried at all. The third one would lay down eyes-open and fall asleep. “So it actually does happen! — I thought the books must be lying.”
By all objective measures our kids are happy, healthy, and well-adjusted. But that doesn’t mean we still don’t get the stink eye from people who think it’s a cruel practice.
Just raise your kids with love. Be compassionate, and patient. Find a doctor you trust. Don’t let people add to an already stressful endeavor.
I agree, my advice to any new parent would be to listen carefully to advice about how not to drown your child while bathing them, and how to make sure they're not suffocated by their bedding. Both real issues where some simple practices avoid the small risk of an absolutely catastrophic outcome.
Then take all other advice with a pinch of salt. Just follow your best instincts and do what seems right. Your child will be fine, plus you'll be more relaxed, you'll appreciate the time with them more. You'll have more time and emotional energy to understand and respond to how they are doing as well as how you and your partner are feeling, and your instincts will get better and better.
So much of the parenting advice I see dips into micromanaging and min/maxing to an almost paranoid degree. Just learn about what could kill them in the first year and avoid that. Really, six months and under is the true window for SIDS with freak occurrences. Definitely be on the lookout for any poisonous cleaning products While you’re at it and put them high off the ground.
The pro parents who did it all before you are super annoying. I’ve had to politely listen to questionable advice many times. I much prefer people like you who get it. You got to trust your instincts about your own kids. There is broad advice which applies to everyone but everyone’s kid is a little different from the norm as well and as a parent we know our kids better than anyone else.
Generally agree, except I’m not sure there is a bright line between the obviously-worthwhile precautions you mention and the paranoid overprecautions that might themselves carry harm.
Seatbelts... yes. Choking first aid... yes.
Healthy eating, talking to them frequently... probably?
For myself, the risk SIDS didn't even enter my calculus. (I confess I am a little skeptical that it exists at all.)
Regardless, I perceived the emotional bonding with the mother & father to far outweigh anything else and so we shared our bed with our children until they were perhaps 1 year old or so. And even after, they moved into their own small bed just a foot from ours in the same bedroom for another year or so.
I guess that was my "instinct". Although we received a crib as a gift, it just sat in another room, empty.
3 children, we only slept them in their rooms, starting day 10. Naps, day sleep, everything, they slept in their room and in their crib. The room was light controlled, meaning there was no light at all. They quickly associated any sleep with their room and their crib.
We used a baby motion sleep mat for peace of mind for SIDS, the thing was so sensitive it could detect the breathing, but if the baby moved off the mat even a little bit it sounded an alarm.
Unless a baby has colic, and we used baby dophilus for all our children to avoid any stomach or intestine issues, new babies aren't very fussy sleepers. The fussy sleeping usually happens when they get older, but by then they were accustomed to sleeping in their crib.
We never once had a crying fit, we also never forced them to sleep, sometimes, just like adults they aren't ready for sleep, those moments were few and far between and we just surfed through those times.
By 6 months all 3 children were sleeping through the nigh.
Every soon to be new parent we coached on this method had the same success, probably 40+ babies.
Most of the hunter-gatherer parenting practices that get pushed on certain parenting blogs are pseudo-scientific and shouldn't be adopted. And some of claims that a baby crying is dumping enough cortisol into their bodies it will permanently damage their brains is NOT supported by science.
What does have a strong scientific basis: the importance of sleep hygiene.
Children don't need perfection or goofy hunter-gatherer hacks from their parents. They need love, support, and a measure of reasonable consistency[1] from them.
[1] This is why having alcoholic parents can be so disruptive... children get a different experience sober vs intoxicated.
It's not exactly rocket science to figure out that people crying are unhappy about something and need comforting. Later, babies learn to fake crying, but when they're really small it is a really good idea to check on them.
"And some of claims that a baby crying is dumping enough cortisol into their bodies it will permanently damage their brains is NOT supported by science."
This is misleading. You're correct that there is not conclusive scientific evidence either way, but there are decent studies that support the cortisol theory. Not necessarily that it will "damage their brains", but that cortisol levels spike during sleep training and remain elevated even after the baby learns to stop crying at night. We know that, in general, elevated cortisol levels are bad for humans.
The studies that claim to support sleep training are all terrible, unless there are new ones I haven't seen. The most-cited ones use self-reports from the parents themselves to measure "wellbeing" of the infant, which is plainly ridiculous.
I'll probably get downvoted, but I strongly disagree with this mindset. Raising kids is not a fun hobby or a side project that will fit into a neat little drawer in your life. You have an obligation to do the best that you can. Yeah, it's hard. Yeah, it's stressful. Like it or not, that's what you signed up for. So step up.
Like anything else in life, you can do a good job or a bad job at being a parent. If you're prioritizing your own convenience or ego or career over the wellbeing of your child, then you're a bad parent. Don't rationalize it with clichés like "love is all that matters" or search for online echo chambers of fellow shitty parents who will soothe your cognitive dissonance while your kid suffers. Make whatever sacrifices you need to, put the time in, and do better.
> You have an obligation to do the best that you can. Yeah, it's hard. Yeah, it's stressful. Like it or not, that's what you signed up for. So step up.
I'm not downvoting you but I strongly disagree. You have an obligation to do an adequate job of this. I think it's also important not to become a slave to the idea that you must always do more because it's "supposed to be hard." Doing a great job of raising kids doesn't have to be a grueling slog, and I suspect that people who think it does aren't doing as good a job as they think they are.
> Don't rationalize it with clichés like "love is all that matters"
Counter data point. My wife is Argentinian.
I'd say the values you see in her family primarily is "love does come first" and strict boundaries on kids. E.g. the adults are talking, go away.
When I compare that to my own nieces and nephews, they have little boundaries, are quite lethargic and can be quite arrogant. Yet their parents would all describe themselves by your standards.
We also tend to put our elderly in homes, an idea that is abhorrant to my wife.
So I guess what I'm trying to say is ideals are nice. But it's purely theory, mostly to serve your own sensibilities.
> You have an obligation to do the best that you can
This reads like an expectation mindset that with high probability will end up hurting you, your kid and your relationship. Somewhere here belongs the put-oxygen-mask-on-yourself-first metaphor
It's possible you're coming from a very different background than me... I can understand your point of view if your context is being raised under real impoverished conditions; I agree a parent should do anything they can to meet a necessary level of stability for the child.
But this comment makes me think of what is more likely familiar to members of this forum, where parents use their children to serve their own ego, trying to do everything to yield the best "Success" for their child where success is defined by the parent. For so many of us (professionals in the tech industry), the "wellbeing of your child" is not really a question--we know we'll be able to provide food, shelter, etc. People will say they do other things for the "wellbeing" but what they really mean is living out their own failed life goals by putting that baggage on their kid.
So yeah, you got downvoted. It's possible you meant to make a more sympathetic point, but my first impression is that the comment espouses an actively harmful idea about the relation between parent and a child.
> You have an obligation to do the best that you can
The problem I have with this attitude is the pronoun. If you have some standards, great but please try to keep them to yourself. There's a lot of toxic "you should do this, you should be like that" type of talk in parenting circles, a lot of which is frankly condescending and non-actionable and add a lot of unnecessary stress, especially for insecure people.
People like to armchair-coach about what a parent ought to be doing, while completely ignoring that the parent's emotional well-being is a pretty big component in a healthy relationship w/ their kids.
This is exactly why others are saying to ignore unsolicited advice: because a lot of it isn't actually advice.
> Like anything else in life, you can do a good job or a bad job at being a parent. If you're prioritizing your own convenience or ego or career over the wellbeing of your child, then you're a bad parent.
Sounds like you have no clue. Try looking after 3 babies then come back an talk to us.
To me, it’s very simple: I work and my wife works. After some maternity/paternity leave, we both need to get to work again to earn money to provide our kids with food, shelter, a future etc.
To be able to work, we need to sleep. For us to sleep, our kids and the baby needs to sleep.
So we put the baby in his own room on day three. Always had him sleep in his bed in his room. Didn’t let him sleep anywhere else (or when he fell asleep, put him in his bed). When in his room, he was there to sleep, not to play. So in short: sleep = bed = sleep = bed.
He slept on his own through the night after seven weeks, with only two half awake feedings lasting maybe 15 minutes.
Maybe in 1950 the wife was raised to not expect a career and could be up all night taking care of a crying baby, and the man could sleep and then on his own earn a living wage for the family during the day?
Maybe in 10.000 b.C. parents could be up all night taking care of a crying baby and “the village” could then take care of the baby during the day while the parents slept?
Maybe maybe maybe, but in 2021 there is almost no viable alternative apart from making sure your baby sleeps through the night sooner rather than later.
I also see an alternative in 2021, even with both parents working. Just as a baby might be trained to sleep through the night, an adult can be trained to not sleep in one big chunk of 6-8 hours, but sleep in several chunks of a few hours. A little nap here and there, and some getting used to using your brain (=working) when tired is a viable alternative for me at least. While sleep is very important for
ones health, having a child got me to realize that I can function with less sleep as well.
This would be more in the spirit of „parents adapt to their new life as a young family“ in contrast to „the baby adapts to the parents pre-family lifestyle“.
I am ready to sacrifice sleep for going out and working late, and so am I to comfort a crying brand-new descendant of mine.
(Maybe I‘ll change my mind once the second baby is here ;) )
That situation is choice, pure and simple. You appear to be some sort of web or database developer, or possibly a system administrator. You can afford to support a family.
You forgo a lot to keep up with the Joneses. Family time gets cut.
If that's the choice you really wish to make, OK. If not, cut costs until you can live a different sort of life. Hints: entertainment, restaurants, high rent, excessive travel, single-use items, services, the expenses due to that extra job, etc.
It sounds like you had an easy time. Good for you. Many, many parents suffer hell with babies not sleeping and being upset. It seems a bit dismissive to just say “oh just do X and it’s all good”.
If you can't both give up time to care for the baby 50% of the time (as opposed to one giving up all the time for 100% of the care, which definitely is backwards) then you have to realistically consider whether or not you should argue online that this is peak parenting. If you don't have time for your children, don't have them.
> We don’t live in a hunter gatherer society anymore, we just don’t.
What you describe isn't a "hunter gatherer society" issue. It's an innate human/pre-human/primate issue. Throughout human existence and our pre-human ancestor's existence, the infant/baby is with the mother 24/7 for the first few months/years of its life. This is something that stretches back millions of years. We really don't know what effects separating the baby from the mother at such an early age does for its emotional, psychological, etc development. Not to mention the mother's emotional, psychological, etc well being and of course the mother-child bonding.
> The baby cried and cried and cried.
It would be shocking if it started to lecture you on the pros and cons of the modern geopolitical world order. That a baby cried is par for the course.
> Just raise your kids with love. Be compassionate, and patient.
Unless you need a good night's sleep? This is comes off as new age nonsense we just love in the US. It's trite and meaningless. Of course you raise it with love, it's your kid. Rather than the obvious, we should
raise kids so that they are well prepared to compete and fend for themselves in the real world.
> Just raise your kids with love. Be compassionate, and patient. Find a doctor you trust. Don’t let people add to an already stressful endeavor.
This, right here is the most important lesson we learned from our experience. There is no right or wrong way and others judging/criticising you for your parenting style have no clue what crazy cocktail of genetics+environment+hidden factors are affecting your family.
>Just raise your kids with love. Be compassionate, and patient.
Right and i would add, give them as many time with you as possible. Some of my greatest memory's was strolling around my dad workplace, when he had work todo. Children's don't need parent's as entertainment, but as adventure preparers.
Quality time with parents is important, of course, but we have become so focused on parental time that children are sacrificing solo time where they learn independence and initiative, and peer time where they learn to create their own identity and cooperate. Also, this places an unsustainable burden on parents who are expected to work full time as well as be parent, teacher, playmate, and cruise director for their kids.
As I've grown older I've found it necessary and desirable to tell my own father about these moments, to assure him that he's done a great job for what he's done even if it was sometimes hard. Thanks for putting this in this perspective. I hope to remember it when I'm a father.
I much prefer a “hot tip” over advice. Here’s my latest for example: Sometimes instead of telling my kid to do something, if I can just give the task a good “dad stare” then give him the same look, he’s less likely to try and argue against me. Just tapping into that part of his brain that already knows what I want from him without vocalizing it gives him less room to wiggle out.
> For us, ‘extreme’ was the sleep deprivation we experienced with baby number one as we tried every ‘no cry’ method in the book.
I was more generous in how I interpreted the article: the need for sleep-training is a consequence of the child having a whole different room to themselves. Parents in other cultures who share the room (or the bed) do not get the same level of extreme sleep deprivation and, as a consequence, will not need to sleep-train.
To me, the article is not questioning how good the parenting in the west is - it's contrasting it with parenting elsewhere (and tracing the roots of the parenting practices)
> Parents in other cultures who share the room (or the bed) do not get the same level of extreme sleep deprivation
That was my direct experience as a kid growing up in a non-Western society (I'm 40 now, am from Eastern Europe). When I first read about the Western tabu of parents not being allowed to sleep in the same bed with their children anymore I was a little surprised at first, and then saddened for those kids: "do you mean 3-year or 5-year old me should have slept all alone in his bed at night with no parent close to me? That is pure madness!"
More than that, one of my most vivid memories as a kid was sleeping with my brother and my two grand-parents in the same 3x4 meter room (give or take), my brother with my grandma and 6-year old me with my grandpa (there were two beds, a stove, a TV set and a small table in that room). I can still remember my grandpa peeling apples or pears and sharing them with my brother and me, just before we all went to sleep while we were watching some TV, very, very nice memories (in fact my nickname is taken from a Soviet TV series we were watching then [1]). Afaik neither me, nor my brother (who is 2 years older than me) were making any unwanted sounds while we were asleep at night.
There's the extinction method which is the most hardcore and there's also the Ferber method which has the parent periodically check in with the baby.
Extinction is extreme, as one is basically abandoning the child to cry. They're scared, they don't know what's happening and they're alone.
Sure, they're (probably?) not gonna suffer long-term damage, but it's just an asshole thing to do. In the book recommending this method all parents had their instincts screaming that they're doing something wrong and they were feeling guilty even if it worked.
It’s not suitable for new babies, that’s for sure. But if you’re closer to the 1yr mark then they’re not crying because they’re scared, they’re crying because they know exactly what’s happening and they want to party and not go through the effort of figuring out how to go to sleep, again.
Some kids are just nuts. Ours both were. We went from an hour-long party of rolling, chanting, screaming, head-butting the wall, pulling the hair of any nearby parent, multiple times a night, to... asleep in 10mins. It felt bad at first until we saw how much his mood improved in the daytime because he wasn’t exhausted.
I've been wondering the same, the BBC article explains:
> the most extreme version of which involves leaving a baby on their own to "cry it out", in an effort to encourage their babies to sleep for longer stretches so their parents can get some much-needed rest.
I'm not a parent but that sounds pretty sensible to me. Odd of the BBC to call it "extreme".
An informal application of #1, the Ferber method. On 4 kids. Worked great. Or seemed to, anyway. You can't know if anything actually works or if the baby just decided to start sleeping on his or her own.
I think this anxiety exists in traditional society as well but instead of getting advice from books and news articles in traditional societies you get an avalanche of advice from relatives
Yeah we waiting a pretty long time to sleep train our first. Just doesn't sound like something that can actually work. And seems really hard to do, psychologically. But we were kind of amazed how well and how quickly it worked. And yep, there are huge benefits to having a better rested baby and better rested parents. We'll probably do it earlier next time.
My wife and I went through the usual western slepo traibit cry out etc, I read an article about sleep cycles before electricity wher people had two sleeps per night, first one after dinner for 4-5 hours then and hour or two away where people had a snack or talked etc then went back to sleep for another few hours, I would liked to have tried that schedule with our kids even as a experiment, the sleep deprivation is horrible, I wonder if we aligned our schedule with our kids would it be better for everyone especially when they are babies
We have three kids and we sleep trained them. (Not a pediatrician, standard disclaimer.) This article calls it an ‘extreme’ practice.
Sleep training appears to be standard for all the parents I know, in the U.S. and otherwise. I think it's more likely that the author of the article has extreme views on parenting that they're tying to impose on others.
Not necessarily standard in Germany. Some literature explicitly calls it out as cruel, parenting books coming from the US recommend it
Mileage varies, know of one couple who did sleep training and had success with it.
Other couples shared a bed with their kid until it was about two and when they moved to a different apartment they took the opportunity to explain: hey you have your own room now.
I’ve sleep trained 3 kids by myself (my wife wants no part in it) in the last 4 years or so. It takes a couple of days and then everyone involved is happier going forward (mother, father, and child).
The constant stream of "you should be doing X" is only shameful or confusing if you think the people imparting it on you have any credibility or their opinions have any validity.
This whole thread is chaos, but I just wanted to share my experience in case its useful for anybody. Once our kids were out of the bassinet and into a larger cot, rolling and crawling around a lot, it was really clear they just wanted to be with us, and in the end we just found it best for everybody if they just slept between us or even lying on my chest.
The struggle we’re having is the baby scratches himself nonstop. No matter how much we trim his nails, if we leave him alone at night he’ll be bleeding everywhere. Other than that he sleeps relatively well.
My wife has joked about writing (yet another) book on parenting but "chill, just go with it and do whatever works" isn't much material for an entire book.
Of all the "weird" things we do as parents in euro/anglo nations, sleeping arrangements seems nowhere near the top.
IMO, the top "offender" is over-scheduling kid's activities. So many kids in my area have their days booked solid with sports, academic tutoring, music lessons. Approaching zero free time to enjoy being a kid.
Edit - and this isn't really a western thing, "Tiger Mom" and similar probably pre-dates this behavior in the US.
Not so sure this is necessarily a western thing. When I was a kid in Germany in the 90ies, school started at 7:30, and ended at 13:00. Once a week you had afternoon school from 14:30 to 16:00, and my parents wanted me to have piano lessons once a week. But after 13:00, and on weekends, I was generally free to do whatever I wanted. I played computer games excessively and watched a lot of movies, of course, but I also explored the nearby forest, build tree houses, taught myself how to build a computer, BASIC, Delphi, HTML, CSS and JS, and drew a comic series with a friend (of course we were the only readers). Except for math, everything that helped my through university and my professional life so far I learned in this free time, just by playing.
I volunteer with a U.S. Scout troop. I see boys that don't know whether or not they can go on an activity/campout because they have to ask their parents if they're free that day/weekend. I try to tell them their old enough (most are teenagers) that they should start deciding for themselves what activities they participate in. Most all of them just seem apathetic.
I'm sure their parents are trying to do what is best for their children, but it doesn't seem to be working.
I don’t know what it means for kids to be free nowadays. Free to visit a friend’s home seems like the only thing, because everything else is a home that’s an anonymous unit or a commercial establishment that’s gated by money.
It’s not like you’re releasing your child to be raised by the experiences of the village.
With that in mind, many parents are probably struggling to not have their kids consumed by the web during free time, esp during COVID lockdowns.
Which seems the other side of helicopter parenting; kids don't get much of a say in deciding what they fill their free time with, so they don't develop an opinion in things like that.
Plus (and I'm going to sound old here, give me my cane so I can shake it), there's a lot more casual entertainment lying around the house nowadays to fill the voids in people's time. "doing nothing" is not much of a thing anymore, because people will casually browse their phone or turn on the TV or something. (I'm guilty of that as well).
In the previous generation, there would be a TV but not everything on there would catch the interest of everyone.
My son (now 26) always had summers free at minimum. While he was younger, he did go to a YMCA outdoor "adventure" day camp at a nearby lake park. Once he was in middle school, he stayed home. Sports 2-3 seasons, but he got to pick which one he played and never the crazy travel league stuff. In high school, he was free to do what he wanted (football for 2 years, guitar all 4, and a mix of rec league basketball and volleyball when he felt like it). Always plenty of time to ride his bike, play at the park, run around with friends. Starting in middle school, he'd often disappear across town on bike of skateboard for hours at a time. School was 2.5 miles away and he often opted to ride his skateboard instead of the bus.
I see kids today where every free moment is booked with stuff. All in some sisyphean effort to get into Harvard or something. I mean, sure, I get a desire to go to a top name uni, but the changes of little Johnnie getting in, regardless of extra-curricular, is so small that all the effort seems mostly wasted to me. I "only" went to UVA and turned out fine, IMO, so maybe I'm biased. I dunno.
These days, there aren't many kids who only do Scouting...it's an over-scheduling comorbidity. For kids who resist over-scheduling, scouting seems to be one of the first things to go...because den and pack meetings are by and for adults, they never make it to a troop.
Or to put it another way, teenage apathy prevalence is probably pre-teen survivor bias.
I don't think attitudes to infant care translate in any way to how older kids or teenagers are treated in different cultures. I'm not a parent, but I was a child and teenager at some point, so I can say from personal experience that parents who are extremely present at a young age can actually give you more leeway later in life.
On a more general note, I can recommend Jared Diamond's 'The World Until Yesterday' - it covers similar topics to the bbc article and more.
That seems normal to me? I'm well-past the teenage years, and I wouldn't commit to a weekend activity without double-checking with the rest of my family first.
There is nothing new in that? When I was pre teen and teen, I definitely had to get parents permission for weekend campout. It seems to me normal that parent have a say in whether the non-adult child sleep at home. Plus there were weekend activities woth familly I was expected to participate in - trips, familly visits, grandpa birthsday, etc.
So I would ask. I mean, idea that 16-17 years old goes for campout without asking parents strikes me as wtf.
"IMO, the top "offender" is over-scheduling kid's activities. So many kids in my area have their days booked solid with sports, academic tutoring, music lessons. Approaching zero free time to enjoy being a kid."
It's a weird and tricky balance that one has to strike, in the US, in 2021 ...
On the one hand, I feel strongly that kids should have free time and energy to explore and experiment and I am reinforced daily in my instinct that a "bored" kid is just another 10 minutes away from doing something interesting and magical.
On the other hand, as my oldest children reach pre-teen age, and I pay more attention to their pre-teen peers, I find myself agreeing with the "idle hands are the devils playground" heuristic. I want my teenage children busy doing constructive and healthy things.
But it gets complicated ... you can't just plug your kid onto a age 12 or age 13 baseball or hockey team. Those kids have been playing the sport (and playing the sport together) since they were 4 or 5. Your kid will not make the team or will be conspicuously out of place. So if you've been free-ranging it for their first ten years you're going to need to get more creative as you transition to the teenage years...
I have seen things like mountain biking and BJJ be good options...
Yeah, totally agree on sports. But, that's part of the problem - kids specializing in a single sport before high school? That's bonkers to m.
When I was in school, very few kids specialized, even through high school. The top football players were also the best wrestlers or basketball players, and most also played baseball or track or lacrosse. Few of them did school basketball and then AAU the remainder of the year.
My son stuck to club/rec basketball (instead of the school team) and volleyball (school team, but mens volleyball prior to high school isn't really a thing in DC).
And, like you said, there's always cycling, martial arms, or track/field (typically takes all interested).
I also agree with keeping kids active/engaged. But, to me, that means supporting them as they pick their own activities, not scheduling every second of their non-school time.
Edit - many of the kids specializing before high school are pretty obviously NOT destined for scholarship athletics. There's really no point to it, IMO. I coached football and basketball for much of my son's youth. Of all the kids I coached, 1 went on to NCAA D1 sports (and that was to W&M, where he still had to meet stringent academic standards).
I would suggest approaching this in two structured phases - "breadth" and "depth".
In the breadth phase, you instruct the kid to study the topic of interest at a distance, collect information, attend events casually and give some reports explaining what they like. Make the thing of "pursuing an interest" just a little bit academic and intentional on their part. With a lot of topics they'll have their fill and loosen their grip pretty quickly, and when that happens, allow them to go on to the next thing.
If they can't shut up about it, that's when you go towards the depth phase and push them towards a more intensive effort, to take the class, read the book, join the club. Set modest goals that still take a committment, and indicate that it's very likely that some kids will be ahead or pick up the material faster. They should still report how things go and get your feedback so that you can spot issues, or teach them how to seek out good feedback where you lack competence. But there's a definite thing here of getting them to see the struggle itself as something rewarding, not the outcome like "being the best" or "making a career". Because if they get a feel for that, they will reach adulthood with some sense of balance and intention to what they pursue and why and a sense of their strengths and weaknesses.
Exactly. I tried joining sports for the first time when I was 14 (around 15 years ago). And it was honestly a humiliating experience. I was so far behind the other kids in skill level it was just sad. And I was the ONLY one on the team that couldn't keep up. Everyone else had been practicing for 5-10 years.
You're a good parent to notice and think about these things.
In the west your children's days can be roughly just as busy but you if you're wealthy you can make it easier, basically.
The only thing I'm really jealous of from spending time around people who've grown up with more money is that, assuming your family are basically nice, it's much easier to brush over any cracks or for the children to mentally seperate themselves e.g. The house I grew up is fairly miniscule, the first thing I noticed visiting a large house was not only that they had (say) a music room [so separation] but also that the children could hide within the house outside of earshot of their parents.
Queue the Doctor / Lawyer married couple with 2.5 kids who vacation twice a year, lease German cars, and have positive net worth crying about 'only being middle class'.
My coworker did this with her son. She was spread thin with afterschool programs, sports, projects and so on. Well, the kid got into Caltech. Where he'll probably meet amazing people and receive an excellent education. So maybe it worked? How many YC founders had this overbooked childhood? I'd guess over 70%.
But did the overbooked childhood enable that, or was the kid destined for a top-notch uni regardless?
The students gaining admissions to top unis are largely self-motivated, extremely smart, and would have chosen high-quality activities on their own.
Looking back at my own childhood, I chose my sports, music, and other activities. My parents enabled them, but never forced me into them. Would forcing me to play an additional sport, or forcing me to attend after-school tutoring made the difference between UVA and Harvard? I doubt it. And what did attending UVA instead of Harvard cost me? Hard to say for sure, but I'm inclined to say "not much" as I'm happily upper-middle-class as it is.
And considering my high school peers who did attend Ivies and similar, most of them either smarter or harder working than me.
As someone who went to Caltech I assure you Caltech faculty care very little about the name on the undergrad programs of their grad students. I.E. the value proposition of a Caltech undergrad education barring a few IMO cases (which Harvard tends to grab) is doubtful
I think your guess would be wrong, but I also don't think overbooking is a problem.
As a child who had lots of free time due to living in a place with a lack of structured activities for kids, I really envy kids who can take advantage of such resources enough to have a packed daily schedule.
Best decision my parents made for me when I was kid: no extra activities after school, no summer camps, no music lessons, etc, no soccer teams, etc.
I did have "unofficial summer camps", I did play some music instruments (without teachers), I did play a lot of soccer (without teams, just in the street)... I (and the kids in my neighbourhood) did all of these without adults.
Did you not have any desire to do these things? This strikes me as an odd "rule" to have since a lot of people genuinely enjoy these activities. Playing football in high school was one of my favorite parts of the time period, and going to a summer camp legitimately changed my life path. I think these things can be extremely good if the child wants to participate.
I couldnt imagine not letting my own child not do these things if they wanted to.
Yeah me too! I had the occasional swimming lesson once per week or something but other than that, if the weather was good, you'd find me and all the neighborhood kids running around playing tag or riding our bikes everywhere. I grew up at a co-op so all of the houses were close together and there were a lot of families and other kids my age.
I think the number one thing you can do for your kid is to live in a neighborhood with lots of other kids.
I went to art class once a week because I liked it, but stopped at a young age when I didn't se any classes in the course catalog that I was interested in. The only summer camp I did was one week a summer with Scouts.
I'm guessing "summer camp" for most other kids is of a longer duration?
I'd argue that romanticizing children's free time is more weird and more western than anything else. My free time as a kid usually just involved being bored and lonely while watching TV or playing video games.
Speaking as a parent of 5. Parental mental health has a much bigger effect on the child than choice of methodologies. You really need to look after yourself before you can look after them - so if you are suffering from sleep deprivation, doing what you have to do is the right thing to do.
Exactly this. Being able to stay sane, levelheaded, and get necessary things done is probably far more impactful than sleep methodologies, baby wearing, breast versus formula fed, or any of the thousand of analysis paralysis inducing choices that parents have to make.
As a parent myself I have only one piece of child rearing advice.
First: Read a bunch of books (which will contradict each other)
Then: a) do what you think is right and b) when someone tells you to do X (especially, but not only your mother or mother in law), if you disagree just say "Funny you should say that because I just read the exact opposite" and hand them a random baby rearing book.
This sounds like a joke but the biggest problem in child rearing is well meaning busybodies and we figured out this effective way to shut it down. (Busybodies who were strangers we just smiled at and ignored).
Worse: The books that most resonate with you may well be the ones you need to ignore.
Take strict vs permissive parenting, for example. Say you're by nature a more permissive parenting. The books that say you should be permissive will resonate more with you than the books that say that you should be strict. But it's the ones that say to be strict that you need to hear, because they're the ones that are against your natural bent. (Nobody needed to tell you to be permissive, you were going to do that anyway.)
(My position here is that either strict or permissive, taken too far, will be problematic. So you can swap strict and permissive in the previous paragraph, and everything is still true.)
So don't just read parenting books and listen to the ones that strike a chord with you. It's the other ones that you need to carefully consider what they say.
I'm confused... Why would I want to ignore something which resonates with me? Isn't that the whole point of "resonance" and "feelings", to use them to guide our reason?
I would read the books on permissive parenting not to convince myself that it's right, but to find techniques and strategies which work.
Also own parents might have outdated info from 30 years ago which they attempt to use now.
My parents clearly don't like the way I raise my children. I made it clear that what my wife and I do is for us the correct way and while we will listen to reason they should accept it as the right way.
As I reach the age where some of my friends are starting to have kids in a Western country, one thing I've noticed is that they all seem to have different ideas about raising kids, between diets, sleeping habits, baby bjorns, what language(s) to read to them in, how to get them to walk/talk, etc. I wouldn't call any of them weird (although I honestly don't have much of a baseline understanding), but I have a hard time figuring out how exactly you can generalize a Western way of raising kids.
Honestly doctors can spread a lot of disinformation on things not biologically related. For example, our pediatrician recommended we wait until 3 to potty train our son... who at the time was already potty trained.
Potty training is also something that differs widely between developed nations and rest of world.
One thing that I find weird about the Western (perhaps just American) way of raising kids is that the retired population is surprisingly uninvolved in the raising of their grandchildren. It seems like an economic inefficiency when parents are spending so much money on childcare while old people are feeling increasingly lonely.
Good point. I am an Indian, raised in India, came to US at 19.
I notice the same thing here. We have neighbors who are white and have their grandkids over every day. It is very refreshing to see.
However, it is a rare thing to see at the same time. I have never seen other native born Americans talk about their grandkids or heard of them being involved in their upbringing.
I am cautious of the stereotypes such as when they retire, they just want to be left alone, travel and not be bothered. But the stories where they end up in old age homes while their children are fully grown adults and successful, are far too often. This doesn't make sense to me because on one hand they would look forward to their children and grandchildren visiting them in their old age homes, on the other hand they don't want to live together.
Sure, I am fine with the idea "if it works for them, then good for them", but it doesn't seem to work for them.
So to summarize, I think the American culture is still trying to figure itself out. Perhaps things would fall into place in a generation or two after learning from other cultures (and of course, other cultures learning some good things from American culture).
Assuming people have a good relationship with their parents, they would want them to be involved in their children's lives.
The bigger issue, in my social circles at least, is that Americans don't live near the grandparents. The economic opportunities exist in a certain few areas, and either the parents aren't willing to take the economic/quality of life hit to leave near their grandparents, or the grandparents can't afford to come live near the grandkids. Especially in the "good school" district areas.
The best situation I've seen is from Everybody Loves Raymond, grandparents nearby, but still in a separate house. But few grandparents will be located in the same neighborhood as the kids. Typically, similar size/price houses are located near each other, and the more expensive homes in with access to better schools come with higher property taxes/maintenance, which older people might not want to pay.
The American family is notoriously unrooted and migratory. People scatter after college and while looking for work. For those that live near their grandchildren, they are as involved as anywhere else I would imagine.
I am from the U.S. My mother has my kids at least two days a week. It saves me money, gives her an excuse to come over, and the kids love it. After I finish working we will typically make dinner together. I did not have this sort of experience growing up and I'm really glad things have worked out this way for my kids.
If only I could get her to stop cleaning everything while she's at my house and filling my fridge with vegan alternatives.
I think this varies a lot by social/educational group. College educated folks often end up moving to different cities for college and then work so grandparents aren’t in the same place any longer (and with multiple kids in different cities could not be for all of them.)
There are a lot of grand parents involved in the young, then the kids grow up and teens just don't need as much time and so the grand parents are lonely. There are a lot of lonely great-grand parents that someone fit into this. There are a lot of people who don't live close to the grand parents (but may have a sibling who does).
Outside of neglect and abuse, is there really a WRONG way of raising a child?
You see multiple different styles in different cultures. Some cultures where bed-sharing and baby-carrying is common also beat their kids and use other forms of punishment for disobedience. Wouldn't that be much "weirder"? It seems in Europe breastfeeding rates are really low and people use prams, but they might not beat the child as much (or at all). Is that the wrong way?
It seems to me people who are loved and cared for as children are raised and generally become well-adjusted and happy individuals. I fear parents are being constantly judged now for not doing the latest thing that some research found, the latest fad that may or may not have a tiny effect on the child's life itself. It probably gives people a lot of anxiety that they might be doing something terribly wrong for the child for not having the right crib height, or not sleeping in the same bed, or not playing Mozart at the right time or whatever.
I personally know a non-trivial number of women who have gone through absolutely intense (real, diagnosed) anxiety and depression because of having to feed formula to their child instead of breast milk. If you ever get to peek into these "mommy groups" on social media or in person, you can see how much shaming goes on in there. And the breast milk one is one of the biggest issues people get shamed for. Sometimes it's passive aggressive and indirect, and sometimes it's quite direct. They trot out headlines from questionable studies from totally different living environments in the world that indicate some 3 IQ point increase in kids that were breastfed and then they act like it's proof that formula feeding is child abuse.
The guilt and shame people feel over these things is very harmful.
I have some advice I'd like to spread and share. It applies to myself as well and I've been trying very hard to practice it. It is this:
If you are not a scientist who has actually conducted one of these studies; if you are not intimately familiar with the methodologies and the math techniques used in the analysis; if you've only ever read the headline and maybe an abstract of a study- then please don't give advice to anyone on the topic. Please don't spread "information" that X is better than Y.
As someone who has fostered and adopted children with trauma backgrounds (including abuse and neglect), it's doubly frustrating to see parents equating things like sleep training and formula feeding with abuse and neglect.
When you have a kid that was intentionally burned as a toddler by a grandmother as punishment for crying, and another that was left strapped to a car seat with a box of cereal so his mother could go on a meth-binge, it's frustrating to see upper-middle-class mother's calling each other abusive or neglectful for allowing increased screen time during quarantine.
When my wife and I went to pre-baby classes they'd often use the phrase "Fed is best" and I thought it was strange because it sounded like something that could have rhymed and was a missed opportunity. Then I was informed that the phrase used to be "Breast is best" but, like you're saying, women who could not breast feed for whatever reason were subjected to this level of guilt and ridicule so much so that now they've dropped that phrase.
They'd say like "Sure, breast feed if you can but if you can't that is totally a-ok too. Get some formula, get some skin to skin time. Your baby will be fine". I liked how much effort the classes were putting in to not pressure people to breast feed when it wasn't always an option.
There's no need to feel, as a parent, that you've failed your child if you're not breast feeding.
> If you are not a scientist who has actually conducted one of these studies; if you are not intimately familiar with the methodologies and the math techniques used in the analysis; if you've only ever read the headline and maybe an abstract of a study- then please don't give advice to anyone on the topic. Please don't spread "information" that X is better than Y.
I'd say this advice doesn't really go far enough. I'm not a scientist but I have read a number of these studies and the biggest takeaway is that in many cases effect sizes are really low and it's hard to say whether these effects are real or the result of some hidden uncontrolled variable. This applies, at a minimum, to breastfeeding v. formula, and also to alcohol consumption during pregnancy. Back to sleep has real and significant effects. Screen time's harm is severely overhyped given the quality of the evidence we have available, but too much sugar is definitely bad for you.
My advice to new parents is basically that in most cases we don't have good evidence for one thing being much better than another. As far as food, baby should have formula or breast milk, but which one doesn't matter all that much. As far as sleeping, the sleep area should be firm and free of blankets, but as far as I'm concerned the evidence about where baby should sleep is minimal. I'm not aware of any strong evidence that sleep training has an effect other than teaching the baby to sleep.
One other commonality I see in a lot of this stuff is there is zero consideration for the costs that the various treatments impose on parents, and particularly on the mother. If breastfeeding gives junior a 0.5% increase in IQ, is that worth a year of suffering and untold hours spent feeding? That's a value judgment, for sure, but it seems to be left out of the equation entirely when people are giving advice to mothers.
> They trot out headlines from questionable studies from totally different living environments in the world that indicate some 3 IQ point increase in kids that were breastfed and then they act like it's proof that formula feeding is child abuse.
Breastfeeding, apart from being cheap, convenient and natural, has been shown to have numerous benefits, not just to intelligence but overall health, even for the mother. There is such an abundance of evidence for this that it's just silly to even question, but you can always research it for yourself.
Regarding women feeling anxious. Since refraining from breastfeeding is a significant risk factor, similar to not properly medicating, I think it's reasonable to view it in the same light. I.e. if you refrain from breastfeeding without a very good reason, you are increasing health risks for your child.
Some interesting statistics can be found here for example. Formula-fed children have about twice the risk of vomiting or diarrhea during their first year. Breastfeeding is about as efficient as antibiotics in preventing ear infections. Etc.
Well good advice in general, even though the way you phrase your comment makes it look like you think breast feeding is no better than the formulas.
I am a medical student and we have been told at uni from professors (paediatricians) that breast feeding _is_ better than formulas I think with regards to asthma or some other allergic stuff. There are reasons that mothers should not or cannot breastfeed and it's not the end of the world, but in general I believe they should.
And really the weight of proof rests on the baby formulas to prove that they're OK. Even common sense suggests breast feeding is better, it's been the way people have been growing up for millenia all around the world.
Breast feeding can be difficult for many reasons. In traditional societies people with experience would take the time to coach a new mother. Sometimes a baby is slow to get the hang of it and will actually lose weight for a while before figuring it out. Allowing your newborn child to lose weight goes against mothering instincts, and without a supporting coach is really hard to accept. And if you "cheat" via bottle, the child will get spoiled and only take the bottle. Breast infections and soreness are also common. Coaching helps here also.
A compromise is to purchase human breast milk, perhaps mix it 50/50 with formula if your budget is tight. Still, you are often viewed as a failure for doing such.
Forcing formula is not abuse but neglect, unless done due to medical conditions. Don't fight evolution, formula is harder to digest. Why are you peddling pseudo science over here.
I agree and I really dislike the undercurrent of fear that's present in a lot of parenting advice. The message (implicitly or explicitly) tends to be "do it this way or you'll damage your kids." But the truth is we're never going to be perfect parents, we have no guarantees over how our kids turn out, and there are a wide range of approaches that will lead to good outcomes.
I like to do research to discover options I might not have come up with on my own, but I always try to pay attention to those subtle messages of fear so they don't influence my decisions too much.
There is damage and there is damage. Some can really change kids trajectory. Some become a funny anecdote for the future. I am a newly minted parent and we had a visitation from a parent, who now has a 4 year old. She already introduced him to Starbucks and McDonalds. Now I have to ensure that she stays way way down on the list of people we would consider babysitting.
There may not be wrong way to parent exactly and each parent is entitled to damage their kids ( within reasons prescribed by the society ). My line clearly starts with food and I can already see I people won't like me in school, PTA and like meetings. Joy.
Fully agree. Parenting gets a lot easier as soon as you accept that you don't have any clue what you are doing. The child must be loved, fed, washed, and dressed. Everything else is improvisation.
E: I remember sitting in antenatal class and mindful, well-educated parents asking stuff like the interval they should set their alarm clock to, so they know when to "correctly" feed their child. They read somewhere that a newborn needs milk every 1,5 hours and took that literally.
I love this take and believe in it whole-heartedly. It's very similar to how every shits on each others diets. Some people only eat rice, some potatoes, some meat, and some exclusively ocean. Humans are very versatile and durable and really can make due with most things. The same probably applies to raising children too.
Sometimes cultural differences can be self-reinforcing. Studies on corporal punishment and childhood trauma have shown that trauma increases when it's perceived as unusual. If a kid is beaten for disobedience and none of their peers are, it's more likely to cause lasting trauma. In societies where beatings are commonplace, kids are much more likely to adjust and grow up fine.
> It seems to me people who are loved and cared for as children are raised and generally become well-adjusted and happy individuals.
Is there evidence that people who are tolerated and fed/clothed but not super-loved or super cared-for as children have worse outcomes as adults (adjusting for socio-economic class)?
I suspect that pram vs carrying thing has a lot more to do with practicalities then anything else. Quality of sidewalks, availability of good changing places, how far you need to go and how much stuff you carry.
Definitely something that my wife and I struggle with. She's Vietnamese British, I'm Vietnamese American ; both of us current living in the U.S. Despite what our training classes recommend, we're co-sleeping with our 17 month year old daughter and it feels more intuitive.
"... we're co-sleeping with our 17 month year old daughter and it feels more intuitive."
Good for you. Not only should you do what works and is healthy for your own family but the first two years of your first child is really a magical time. Why not optimize for peace and tranquility ?
I will also add that in addition to the western compulsion to kick kids out of the bed there is also a western compulsion that married partners should be sleeping together every night or something is wrong with their marriage. I strongly advise all parents to at least be open minded to the idea that sleeping in different rooms could dramatically improve their sleeping and parenting logistics.
Our sex life has probably never been better in either frequency or quality.
We typically do it in the living room on the couch in the morning before they get up, or same location during their naps, or in my work-from-home office also during naps. Or where-ever we want when we have a baby sitter, although with the pandemic that's pretty rare.
I'd say about 75%-80% of our sexual activity is essentially scheduled at least 4-6 hours in advance, sometimes more. This works great for all involved. Occasionally if we miss our window because one of them wakes up early, we just reschedule to the next soonest window. We'll occasionally even stay up late after we put the boys down to makeup a missed session.
I also think breaking the habit of only having sex in our bed at a particular time when one or the other kind of vaguely expects it is a big contributor to the improvement in our sex life.
Instead we have explicit communication about when and where we're going to have sex. There's still some room to be spontaneous, but it's very limited with kids.
Not the person you asked but I’ve co-slept three times and have some insights.
My answer would be that you do it while the baby sleeps, and you do it less. Otherwise on the odd occasion you’re away from the baby. It’s a drag. Though in my experience I was always so tired, it was generally a lower priority.
Others might have had a different experience though.
Isn't that sort of an old joke? Before you have kids, put a jelly bean in a jar every time you have sex. After you have kids, take a jelly bean out of the jar every time. At the end of your life you'll still have jelly beans left...
Obviously it varies a lot, and that is just a joke, but man it has been very true for me. My wife had a poor experience growing up, walking in on her mother having sex (they lived in a tiny apartment, so most of the space was shared), and so she has no interest in sex at all if there are children in the house. Anywhere. And it's a 3000sf house, not a tiny apartment.
Doesn't help that the kids (8 & 10) routinely choose to sleep in our room rather than their own (they do not sleep in our bed, however, we nixed that after they were a few years old because it was too disruptive to my sleep).
Secondary sleep space for the baby (we had a crib mattress on the floor in the living room for naps anyway) or secondary sex space for the parents. A futon in another room does double-duty when the kid is old enough to nap there safely.
Middle-of-the-afternoon is a good time. Older kids can be occupied with Legos while the baby naps and the parents sneak off.
Here in Canada it’s sometimes discouraged and criticized to co-sleep, too. I was born here and had never even heard of co-sleeping until I was in my mid twenties. I found it pretty intuitive too, but got some flack from people over it.
After 3 kids I don’t really care about the criticisms anymore. They stop co-sleeping when they’re ready, and it was as simple as that. I mostly enjoyed it. Sometimes you miss having a bed to yourself though, haha.
The advice against co-sleeping is a typical simplification of advice, where nuance is removed and all parents should receive the same, simple advice.
Peter Blair, based at the University of Bristol, has done some great work studying deaths caused by co-sleeping and found some very important factors, mainly the health of the child, any modifiers of the parent's sleep and the sleeping position. For example, drug use by the parents (including alcohol, cigarettes, over the counter & prescription medicine), making them sleep heavier. Also falling asleep on the sofa or a pillow near the child.
So much parenting advice is one-size-fits-none and it takes quite a bit of effort to work out the reality. Luckily, with a baby in arms there's often a lot of time available for reading the many opinions out there. ;)
You definetly learn a lot by having kids. The first kid, you measure water temp, the second kid you just put your finger in. The third one, just the kid. Slightly exagerating, but by the second kid you don't have to relly as much any more on outside advice.
Readit News
We have three kids and we sleep trained them. (Not a pediatrician, standard disclaimer.) This article calls it an ‘extreme’ practice. For us, ‘extreme’ was the sleep deprivation we experienced with baby number one as we tried every ‘no cry’ method in the book. The baby cried and cried and cried. Once we started sleep training, there was a bit of crying and then - a sleeping baby! Through the night! Total amount of crying went from hours to zero. The kid became happier — they weren’t sleep-deprived anymore. And neither were we. I no longer felt like I was going to drop the ball due to extreme exhaustion.
Babies two and three had the benefit of our experience, and they barely cried at all. The third one would lay down eyes-open and fall asleep. “So it actually does happen! — I thought the books must be lying.”
By all objective measures our kids are happy, healthy, and well-adjusted. But that doesn’t mean we still don’t get the stink eye from people who think it’s a cruel practice.
Just raise your kids with love. Be compassionate, and patient. Find a doctor you trust. Don’t let people add to an already stressful endeavor.
Then take all other advice with a pinch of salt. Just follow your best instincts and do what seems right. Your child will be fine, plus you'll be more relaxed, you'll appreciate the time with them more. You'll have more time and emotional energy to understand and respond to how they are doing as well as how you and your partner are feeling, and your instincts will get better and better.
So much of the parenting advice I see dips into micromanaging and min/maxing to an almost paranoid degree. Just learn about what could kill them in the first year and avoid that. Really, six months and under is the true window for SIDS with freak occurrences. Definitely be on the lookout for any poisonous cleaning products While you’re at it and put them high off the ground.
The pro parents who did it all before you are super annoying. I’ve had to politely listen to questionable advice many times. I much prefer people like you who get it. You got to trust your instincts about your own kids. There is broad advice which applies to everyone but everyone’s kid is a little different from the norm as well and as a parent we know our kids better than anyone else.
Seatbelts... yes. Choking first aid... yes.
Healthy eating, talking to them frequently... probably?
Lots of sunlight and fresh air... maybe?
Regardless, I perceived the emotional bonding with the mother & father to far outweigh anything else and so we shared our bed with our children until they were perhaps 1 year old or so. And even after, they moved into their own small bed just a foot from ours in the same bedroom for another year or so.
I guess that was my "instinct". Although we received a crib as a gift, it just sat in another room, empty.
We used a baby motion sleep mat for peace of mind for SIDS, the thing was so sensitive it could detect the breathing, but if the baby moved off the mat even a little bit it sounded an alarm.
Unless a baby has colic, and we used baby dophilus for all our children to avoid any stomach or intestine issues, new babies aren't very fussy sleepers. The fussy sleeping usually happens when they get older, but by then they were accustomed to sleeping in their crib.
We never once had a crying fit, we also never forced them to sleep, sometimes, just like adults they aren't ready for sleep, those moments were few and far between and we just surfed through those times.
By 6 months all 3 children were sleeping through the nigh.
Every soon to be new parent we coached on this method had the same success, probably 40+ babies.
What does have a strong scientific basis: the importance of sleep hygiene.
Children don't need perfection or goofy hunter-gatherer hacks from their parents. They need love, support, and a measure of reasonable consistency[1] from them.
[1] This is why having alcoholic parents can be so disruptive... children get a different experience sober vs intoxicated.
This is misleading. You're correct that there is not conclusive scientific evidence either way, but there are decent studies that support the cortisol theory. Not necessarily that it will "damage their brains", but that cortisol levels spike during sleep training and remain elevated even after the baby learns to stop crying at night. We know that, in general, elevated cortisol levels are bad for humans.
The studies that claim to support sleep training are all terrible, unless there are new ones I haven't seen. The most-cited ones use self-reports from the parents themselves to measure "wellbeing" of the infant, which is plainly ridiculous.
Like anything else in life, you can do a good job or a bad job at being a parent. If you're prioritizing your own convenience or ego or career over the wellbeing of your child, then you're a bad parent. Don't rationalize it with clichés like "love is all that matters" or search for online echo chambers of fellow shitty parents who will soothe your cognitive dissonance while your kid suffers. Make whatever sacrifices you need to, put the time in, and do better.
I'm not downvoting you but I strongly disagree. You have an obligation to do an adequate job of this. I think it's also important not to become a slave to the idea that you must always do more because it's "supposed to be hard." Doing a great job of raising kids doesn't have to be a grueling slog, and I suspect that people who think it does aren't doing as good a job as they think they are.
Counter data point. My wife is Argentinian.
I'd say the values you see in her family primarily is "love does come first" and strict boundaries on kids. E.g. the adults are talking, go away.
When I compare that to my own nieces and nephews, they have little boundaries, are quite lethargic and can be quite arrogant. Yet their parents would all describe themselves by your standards.
We also tend to put our elderly in homes, an idea that is abhorrant to my wife.
So I guess what I'm trying to say is ideals are nice. But it's purely theory, mostly to serve your own sensibilities.
This reads like an expectation mindset that with high probability will end up hurting you, your kid and your relationship. Somewhere here belongs the put-oxygen-mask-on-yourself-first metaphor
But this comment makes me think of what is more likely familiar to members of this forum, where parents use their children to serve their own ego, trying to do everything to yield the best "Success" for their child where success is defined by the parent. For so many of us (professionals in the tech industry), the "wellbeing of your child" is not really a question--we know we'll be able to provide food, shelter, etc. People will say they do other things for the "wellbeing" but what they really mean is living out their own failed life goals by putting that baggage on their kid.
So yeah, you got downvoted. It's possible you meant to make a more sympathetic point, but my first impression is that the comment espouses an actively harmful idea about the relation between parent and a child.
GP is trying to survive in the world in which they find themselves. Will sniping some guilt at them summon up some hidden parenting strength?
The problem I have with this attitude is the pronoun. If you have some standards, great but please try to keep them to yourself. There's a lot of toxic "you should do this, you should be like that" type of talk in parenting circles, a lot of which is frankly condescending and non-actionable and add a lot of unnecessary stress, especially for insecure people.
People like to armchair-coach about what a parent ought to be doing, while completely ignoring that the parent's emotional well-being is a pretty big component in a healthy relationship w/ their kids.
This is exactly why others are saying to ignore unsolicited advice: because a lot of it isn't actually advice.
Sounds like you have no clue. Try looking after 3 babies then come back an talk to us.
To be able to work, we need to sleep. For us to sleep, our kids and the baby needs to sleep.
So we put the baby in his own room on day three. Always had him sleep in his bed in his room. Didn’t let him sleep anywhere else (or when he fell asleep, put him in his bed). When in his room, he was there to sleep, not to play. So in short: sleep = bed = sleep = bed.
He slept on his own through the night after seven weeks, with only two half awake feedings lasting maybe 15 minutes.
Maybe in 1950 the wife was raised to not expect a career and could be up all night taking care of a crying baby, and the man could sleep and then on his own earn a living wage for the family during the day?
Maybe in 10.000 b.C. parents could be up all night taking care of a crying baby and “the village” could then take care of the baby during the day while the parents slept?
Maybe maybe maybe, but in 2021 there is almost no viable alternative apart from making sure your baby sleeps through the night sooner rather than later.
(To avoid possible confusion, I am shaming the society, not you.)
The problem is this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keeping_up_with_the_Joneses
You forgo a lot to keep up with the Joneses. Family time gets cut.
If that's the choice you really wish to make, OK. If not, cut costs until you can live a different sort of life. Hints: entertainment, restaurants, high rent, excessive travel, single-use items, services, the expenses due to that extra job, etc.
What you describe isn't a "hunter gatherer society" issue. It's an innate human/pre-human/primate issue. Throughout human existence and our pre-human ancestor's existence, the infant/baby is with the mother 24/7 for the first few months/years of its life. This is something that stretches back millions of years. We really don't know what effects separating the baby from the mother at such an early age does for its emotional, psychological, etc development. Not to mention the mother's emotional, psychological, etc well being and of course the mother-child bonding.
> The baby cried and cried and cried.
It would be shocking if it started to lecture you on the pros and cons of the modern geopolitical world order. That a baby cried is par for the course.
> Just raise your kids with love. Be compassionate, and patient.
Unless you need a good night's sleep? This is comes off as new age nonsense we just love in the US. It's trite and meaningless. Of course you raise it with love, it's your kid. Rather than the obvious, we should raise kids so that they are well prepared to compete and fend for themselves in the real world.
1. I have no idea what I'm doing
2. Neither does anyone else.
3. billions of parents have gotten through this before you, you will too.
This, right here is the most important lesson we learned from our experience. There is no right or wrong way and others judging/criticising you for your parenting style have no clue what crazy cocktail of genetics+environment+hidden factors are affecting your family.
Right and i would add, give them as many time with you as possible. Some of my greatest memory's was strolling around my dad workplace, when he had work todo. Children's don't need parent's as entertainment, but as adventure preparers.
Children in the West today already spend more time with parents than at any point in the past:
https://news.uci.edu/2016/09/28/todays-parents-spend-more-ti...
Quality time with parents is important, of course, but we have become so focused on parental time that children are sacrificing solo time where they learn independence and initiative, and peer time where they learn to create their own identity and cooperate. Also, this places an unsustainable burden on parents who are expected to work full time as well as be parent, teacher, playmate, and cruise director for their kids.
I was more generous in how I interpreted the article: the need for sleep-training is a consequence of the child having a whole different room to themselves. Parents in other cultures who share the room (or the bed) do not get the same level of extreme sleep deprivation and, as a consequence, will not need to sleep-train.
To me, the article is not questioning how good the parenting in the west is - it's contrasting it with parenting elsewhere (and tracing the roots of the parenting practices)
That was my direct experience as a kid growing up in a non-Western society (I'm 40 now, am from Eastern Europe). When I first read about the Western tabu of parents not being allowed to sleep in the same bed with their children anymore I was a little surprised at first, and then saddened for those kids: "do you mean 3-year or 5-year old me should have slept all alone in his bed at night with no parent close to me? That is pure madness!"
More than that, one of my most vivid memories as a kid was sleeping with my brother and my two grand-parents in the same 3x4 meter room (give or take), my brother with my grandma and 6-year old me with my grandpa (there were two beds, a stove, a TV set and a small table in that room). I can still remember my grandpa peeling apples or pears and sharing them with my brother and me, just before we all went to sleep while we were watching some TV, very, very nice memories (in fact my nickname is taken from a Soviet TV series we were watching then [1]). Afaik neither me, nor my brother (who is 2 years older than me) were making any unwanted sounds while we were asleep at night.
[1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088635/
Extinction is extreme, as one is basically abandoning the child to cry. They're scared, they don't know what's happening and they're alone.
Sure, they're (probably?) not gonna suffer long-term damage, but it's just an asshole thing to do. In the book recommending this method all parents had their instincts screaming that they're doing something wrong and they were feeling guilty even if it worked.
Some kids are just nuts. Ours both were. We went from an hour-long party of rolling, chanting, screaming, head-butting the wall, pulling the hair of any nearby parent, multiple times a night, to... asleep in 10mins. It felt bad at first until we saw how much his mood improved in the daytime because he wasn’t exhausted.
This article lists 6! https://www.todaysparent.com/baby/baby-sleep/most-popular-sl...
> the most extreme version of which involves leaving a baby on their own to "cry it out", in an effort to encourage their babies to sleep for longer stretches so their parents can get some much-needed rest.
I'm not a parent but that sounds pretty sensible to me. Odd of the BBC to call it "extreme".
Sleep training appears to be standard for all the parents I know, in the U.S. and otherwise. I think it's more likely that the author of the article has extreme views on parenting that they're tying to impose on others.
Mileage varies, know of one couple who did sleep training and had success with it.
Other couples shared a bed with their kid until it was about two and when they moved to a different apartment they took the opportunity to explain: hey you have your own room now.
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What did you expect having a child to be like?
IMO, the top "offender" is over-scheduling kid's activities. So many kids in my area have their days booked solid with sports, academic tutoring, music lessons. Approaching zero free time to enjoy being a kid.
Edit - and this isn't really a western thing, "Tiger Mom" and similar probably pre-dates this behavior in the US.
I'm sure their parents are trying to do what is best for their children, but it doesn't seem to be working.
It’s not like you’re releasing your child to be raised by the experiences of the village.
With that in mind, many parents are probably struggling to not have their kids consumed by the web during free time, esp during COVID lockdowns.
“You don’t want to do this anymore? You need this for college, you shouldn’t quit everything you do, I wish I could have done this” etc.
Eventually it’s just easier to passively suffer whatever activity you dislike and just recognize the starting cost to trying new things is extreme.
> “ I try to tell them their old enough (most are teenagers) that they should start deciding for themselves what activities they participate in.”
I’d start with asking them about what their parents are like.
Which seems the other side of helicopter parenting; kids don't get much of a say in deciding what they fill their free time with, so they don't develop an opinion in things like that.
Plus (and I'm going to sound old here, give me my cane so I can shake it), there's a lot more casual entertainment lying around the house nowadays to fill the voids in people's time. "doing nothing" is not much of a thing anymore, because people will casually browse their phone or turn on the TV or something. (I'm guilty of that as well).
In the previous generation, there would be a TV but not everything on there would catch the interest of everyone.
My son (now 26) always had summers free at minimum. While he was younger, he did go to a YMCA outdoor "adventure" day camp at a nearby lake park. Once he was in middle school, he stayed home. Sports 2-3 seasons, but he got to pick which one he played and never the crazy travel league stuff. In high school, he was free to do what he wanted (football for 2 years, guitar all 4, and a mix of rec league basketball and volleyball when he felt like it). Always plenty of time to ride his bike, play at the park, run around with friends. Starting in middle school, he'd often disappear across town on bike of skateboard for hours at a time. School was 2.5 miles away and he often opted to ride his skateboard instead of the bus.
I see kids today where every free moment is booked with stuff. All in some sisyphean effort to get into Harvard or something. I mean, sure, I get a desire to go to a top name uni, but the changes of little Johnnie getting in, regardless of extra-curricular, is so small that all the effort seems mostly wasted to me. I "only" went to UVA and turned out fine, IMO, so maybe I'm biased. I dunno.
Or to put it another way, teenage apathy prevalence is probably pre-teen survivor bias.
On a more general note, I can recommend Jared Diamond's 'The World Until Yesterday' - it covers similar topics to the bbc article and more.
So I would ask. I mean, idea that 16-17 years old goes for campout without asking parents strikes me as wtf.
It's a weird and tricky balance that one has to strike, in the US, in 2021 ...
On the one hand, I feel strongly that kids should have free time and energy to explore and experiment and I am reinforced daily in my instinct that a "bored" kid is just another 10 minutes away from doing something interesting and magical.
On the other hand, as my oldest children reach pre-teen age, and I pay more attention to their pre-teen peers, I find myself agreeing with the "idle hands are the devils playground" heuristic. I want my teenage children busy doing constructive and healthy things.
But it gets complicated ... you can't just plug your kid onto a age 12 or age 13 baseball or hockey team. Those kids have been playing the sport (and playing the sport together) since they were 4 or 5. Your kid will not make the team or will be conspicuously out of place. So if you've been free-ranging it for their first ten years you're going to need to get more creative as you transition to the teenage years...
I have seen things like mountain biking and BJJ be good options...
When I was in school, very few kids specialized, even through high school. The top football players were also the best wrestlers or basketball players, and most also played baseball or track or lacrosse. Few of them did school basketball and then AAU the remainder of the year.
My son stuck to club/rec basketball (instead of the school team) and volleyball (school team, but mens volleyball prior to high school isn't really a thing in DC).
And, like you said, there's always cycling, martial arms, or track/field (typically takes all interested).
I also agree with keeping kids active/engaged. But, to me, that means supporting them as they pick their own activities, not scheduling every second of their non-school time.
Edit - many of the kids specializing before high school are pretty obviously NOT destined for scholarship athletics. There's really no point to it, IMO. I coached football and basketball for much of my son's youth. Of all the kids I coached, 1 went on to NCAA D1 sports (and that was to W&M, where he still had to meet stringent academic standards).
In the breadth phase, you instruct the kid to study the topic of interest at a distance, collect information, attend events casually and give some reports explaining what they like. Make the thing of "pursuing an interest" just a little bit academic and intentional on their part. With a lot of topics they'll have their fill and loosen their grip pretty quickly, and when that happens, allow them to go on to the next thing.
If they can't shut up about it, that's when you go towards the depth phase and push them towards a more intensive effort, to take the class, read the book, join the club. Set modest goals that still take a committment, and indicate that it's very likely that some kids will be ahead or pick up the material faster. They should still report how things go and get your feedback so that you can spot issues, or teach them how to seek out good feedback where you lack competence. But there's a definite thing here of getting them to see the struggle itself as something rewarding, not the outcome like "being the best" or "making a career". Because if they get a feel for that, they will reach adulthood with some sense of balance and intention to what they pursue and why and a sense of their strengths and weaknesses.
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You're a good parent to notice and think about these things.
Sounds like a wealthy thing, not a Western thing.
The only thing I'm really jealous of from spending time around people who've grown up with more money is that, assuming your family are basically nice, it's much easier to brush over any cracks or for the children to mentally seperate themselves e.g. The house I grew up is fairly miniscule, the first thing I noticed visiting a large house was not only that they had (say) a music room [so separation] but also that the children could hide within the house outside of earshot of their parents.
The students gaining admissions to top unis are largely self-motivated, extremely smart, and would have chosen high-quality activities on their own.
Looking back at my own childhood, I chose my sports, music, and other activities. My parents enabled them, but never forced me into them. Would forcing me to play an additional sport, or forcing me to attend after-school tutoring made the difference between UVA and Harvard? I doubt it. And what did attending UVA instead of Harvard cost me? Hard to say for sure, but I'm inclined to say "not much" as I'm happily upper-middle-class as it is.
And considering my high school peers who did attend Ivies and similar, most of them either smarter or harder working than me.
As a child who had lots of free time due to living in a place with a lack of structured activities for kids, I really envy kids who can take advantage of such resources enough to have a packed daily schedule.
For real, I've heard some horror stories about e.g. Chinese parents pulling their kids through the grinder.
I did have "unofficial summer camps", I did play some music instruments (without teachers), I did play a lot of soccer (without teams, just in the street)... I (and the kids in my neighbourhood) did all of these without adults.
I couldnt imagine not letting my own child not do these things if they wanted to.
I think the number one thing you can do for your kid is to live in a neighborhood with lots of other kids.
I'm guessing "summer camp" for most other kids is of a longer duration?
Put your own oxygen mask on first.
First: Read a bunch of books (which will contradict each other)
Then: a) do what you think is right and b) when someone tells you to do X (especially, but not only your mother or mother in law), if you disagree just say "Funny you should say that because I just read the exact opposite" and hand them a random baby rearing book.
This sounds like a joke but the biggest problem in child rearing is well meaning busybodies and we figured out this effective way to shut it down. (Busybodies who were strangers we just smiled at and ignored).
Worse: The books that most resonate with you may well be the ones you need to ignore.
Take strict vs permissive parenting, for example. Say you're by nature a more permissive parenting. The books that say you should be permissive will resonate more with you than the books that say that you should be strict. But it's the ones that say to be strict that you need to hear, because they're the ones that are against your natural bent. (Nobody needed to tell you to be permissive, you were going to do that anyway.)
(My position here is that either strict or permissive, taken too far, will be problematic. So you can swap strict and permissive in the previous paragraph, and everything is still true.)
So don't just read parenting books and listen to the ones that strike a chord with you. It's the other ones that you need to carefully consider what they say.
I would read the books on permissive parenting not to convince myself that it's right, but to find techniques and strategies which work.
My parents clearly don't like the way I raise my children. I made it clear that what my wife and I do is for us the correct way and while we will listen to reason they should accept it as the right way.
Potty training is also something that differs widely between developed nations and rest of world.
I notice the same thing here. We have neighbors who are white and have their grandkids over every day. It is very refreshing to see.
However, it is a rare thing to see at the same time. I have never seen other native born Americans talk about their grandkids or heard of them being involved in their upbringing.
I am cautious of the stereotypes such as when they retire, they just want to be left alone, travel and not be bothered. But the stories where they end up in old age homes while their children are fully grown adults and successful, are far too often. This doesn't make sense to me because on one hand they would look forward to their children and grandchildren visiting them in their old age homes, on the other hand they don't want to live together.
Sure, I am fine with the idea "if it works for them, then good for them", but it doesn't seem to work for them.
So to summarize, I think the American culture is still trying to figure itself out. Perhaps things would fall into place in a generation or two after learning from other cultures (and of course, other cultures learning some good things from American culture).
The bigger issue, in my social circles at least, is that Americans don't live near the grandparents. The economic opportunities exist in a certain few areas, and either the parents aren't willing to take the economic/quality of life hit to leave near their grandparents, or the grandparents can't afford to come live near the grandkids. Especially in the "good school" district areas.
The best situation I've seen is from Everybody Loves Raymond, grandparents nearby, but still in a separate house. But few grandparents will be located in the same neighborhood as the kids. Typically, similar size/price houses are located near each other, and the more expensive homes in with access to better schools come with higher property taxes/maintenance, which older people might not want to pay.
If only I could get her to stop cleaning everything while she's at my house and filling my fridge with vegan alternatives.
I'm asking because in my culture parents living separately from their adult kids is rare.
You see multiple different styles in different cultures. Some cultures where bed-sharing and baby-carrying is common also beat their kids and use other forms of punishment for disobedience. Wouldn't that be much "weirder"? It seems in Europe breastfeeding rates are really low and people use prams, but they might not beat the child as much (or at all). Is that the wrong way?
It seems to me people who are loved and cared for as children are raised and generally become well-adjusted and happy individuals. I fear parents are being constantly judged now for not doing the latest thing that some research found, the latest fad that may or may not have a tiny effect on the child's life itself. It probably gives people a lot of anxiety that they might be doing something terribly wrong for the child for not having the right crib height, or not sleeping in the same bed, or not playing Mozart at the right time or whatever.
I personally know a non-trivial number of women who have gone through absolutely intense (real, diagnosed) anxiety and depression because of having to feed formula to their child instead of breast milk. If you ever get to peek into these "mommy groups" on social media or in person, you can see how much shaming goes on in there. And the breast milk one is one of the biggest issues people get shamed for. Sometimes it's passive aggressive and indirect, and sometimes it's quite direct. They trot out headlines from questionable studies from totally different living environments in the world that indicate some 3 IQ point increase in kids that were breastfed and then they act like it's proof that formula feeding is child abuse.
The guilt and shame people feel over these things is very harmful.
I have some advice I'd like to spread and share. It applies to myself as well and I've been trying very hard to practice it. It is this:
If you are not a scientist who has actually conducted one of these studies; if you are not intimately familiar with the methodologies and the math techniques used in the analysis; if you've only ever read the headline and maybe an abstract of a study- then please don't give advice to anyone on the topic. Please don't spread "information" that X is better than Y.
When you have a kid that was intentionally burned as a toddler by a grandmother as punishment for crying, and another that was left strapped to a car seat with a box of cereal so his mother could go on a meth-binge, it's frustrating to see upper-middle-class mother's calling each other abusive or neglectful for allowing increased screen time during quarantine.
They'd say like "Sure, breast feed if you can but if you can't that is totally a-ok too. Get some formula, get some skin to skin time. Your baby will be fine". I liked how much effort the classes were putting in to not pressure people to breast feed when it wasn't always an option.
There's no need to feel, as a parent, that you've failed your child if you're not breast feeding.
I'd say this advice doesn't really go far enough. I'm not a scientist but I have read a number of these studies and the biggest takeaway is that in many cases effect sizes are really low and it's hard to say whether these effects are real or the result of some hidden uncontrolled variable. This applies, at a minimum, to breastfeeding v. formula, and also to alcohol consumption during pregnancy. Back to sleep has real and significant effects. Screen time's harm is severely overhyped given the quality of the evidence we have available, but too much sugar is definitely bad for you.
My advice to new parents is basically that in most cases we don't have good evidence for one thing being much better than another. As far as food, baby should have formula or breast milk, but which one doesn't matter all that much. As far as sleeping, the sleep area should be firm and free of blankets, but as far as I'm concerned the evidence about where baby should sleep is minimal. I'm not aware of any strong evidence that sleep training has an effect other than teaching the baby to sleep.
One other commonality I see in a lot of this stuff is there is zero consideration for the costs that the various treatments impose on parents, and particularly on the mother. If breastfeeding gives junior a 0.5% increase in IQ, is that worth a year of suffering and untold hours spent feeding? That's a value judgment, for sure, but it seems to be left out of the equation entirely when people are giving advice to mothers.
Breastfeeding, apart from being cheap, convenient and natural, has been shown to have numerous benefits, not just to intelligence but overall health, even for the mother. There is such an abundance of evidence for this that it's just silly to even question, but you can always research it for yourself.
Regarding women feeling anxious. Since refraining from breastfeeding is a significant risk factor, similar to not properly medicating, I think it's reasonable to view it in the same light. I.e. if you refrain from breastfeeding without a very good reason, you are increasing health risks for your child.
Some interesting statistics can be found here for example. Formula-fed children have about twice the risk of vomiting or diarrhea during their first year. Breastfeeding is about as efficient as antibiotics in preventing ear infections. Etc.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2998971/
General references:
https://www.who.int/health-topics/breastfeeding#tab=tab_1
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
I am a medical student and we have been told at uni from professors (paediatricians) that breast feeding _is_ better than formulas I think with regards to asthma or some other allergic stuff. There are reasons that mothers should not or cannot breastfeed and it's not the end of the world, but in general I believe they should.
And really the weight of proof rests on the baby formulas to prove that they're OK. Even common sense suggests breast feeding is better, it's been the way people have been growing up for millenia all around the world.
A compromise is to purchase human breast milk, perhaps mix it 50/50 with formula if your budget is tight. Still, you are often viewed as a failure for doing such.
I like to do research to discover options I might not have come up with on my own, but I always try to pay attention to those subtle messages of fear so they don't influence my decisions too much.
There may not be wrong way to parent exactly and each parent is entitled to damage their kids ( within reasons prescribed by the society ). My line clearly starts with food and I can already see I people won't like me in school, PTA and like meetings. Joy.
E: I remember sitting in antenatal class and mindful, well-educated parents asking stuff like the interval they should set their alarm clock to, so they know when to "correctly" feed their child. They read somewhere that a newborn needs milk every 1,5 hours and took that literally.
You can probably even leave this one out!
There's a lot of hidden complexity and subjectivity in those two words.
Is there evidence that people who are tolerated and fed/clothed but not super-loved or super cared-for as children have worse outcomes as adults (adjusting for socio-economic class)?
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Good for you. Not only should you do what works and is healthy for your own family but the first two years of your first child is really a magical time. Why not optimize for peace and tranquility ?
I will also add that in addition to the western compulsion to kick kids out of the bed there is also a western compulsion that married partners should be sleeping together every night or something is wrong with their marriage. I strongly advise all parents to at least be open minded to the idea that sleeping in different rooms could dramatically improve their sleeping and parenting logistics.
YMMV.
Our sex life has probably never been better in either frequency or quality.
We typically do it in the living room on the couch in the morning before they get up, or same location during their naps, or in my work-from-home office also during naps. Or where-ever we want when we have a baby sitter, although with the pandemic that's pretty rare.
I'd say about 75%-80% of our sexual activity is essentially scheduled at least 4-6 hours in advance, sometimes more. This works great for all involved. Occasionally if we miss our window because one of them wakes up early, we just reschedule to the next soonest window. We'll occasionally even stay up late after we put the boys down to makeup a missed session.
I also think breaking the habit of only having sex in our bed at a particular time when one or the other kind of vaguely expects it is a big contributor to the improvement in our sex life.
Instead we have explicit communication about when and where we're going to have sex. There's still some room to be spontaneous, but it's very limited with kids.
My answer would be that you do it while the baby sleeps, and you do it less. Otherwise on the odd occasion you’re away from the baby. It’s a drag. Though in my experience I was always so tired, it was generally a lower priority.
Others might have had a different experience though.
Obviously it varies a lot, and that is just a joke, but man it has been very true for me. My wife had a poor experience growing up, walking in on her mother having sex (they lived in a tiny apartment, so most of the space was shared), and so she has no interest in sex at all if there are children in the house. Anywhere. And it's a 3000sf house, not a tiny apartment.
Doesn't help that the kids (8 & 10) routinely choose to sleep in our room rather than their own (they do not sleep in our bed, however, we nixed that after they were a few years old because it was too disruptive to my sleep).
Middle-of-the-afternoon is a good time. Older kids can be occupied with Legos while the baby naps and the parents sneak off.
The theory goes that children are programmed by nature to prevent more offspring. A sort of incentive here.
Looking online there are mixed reviews of whether co sleeping hurt the adult relationship.
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After 3 kids I don’t really care about the criticisms anymore. They stop co-sleeping when they’re ready, and it was as simple as that. I mostly enjoyed it. Sometimes you miss having a bed to yourself though, haha.
Peter Blair, based at the University of Bristol, has done some great work studying deaths caused by co-sleeping and found some very important factors, mainly the health of the child, any modifiers of the parent's sleep and the sleeping position. For example, drug use by the parents (including alcohol, cigarettes, over the counter & prescription medicine), making them sleep heavier. Also falling asleep on the sofa or a pillow near the child.
So much parenting advice is one-size-fits-none and it takes quite a bit of effort to work out the reality. Luckily, with a baby in arms there's often a lot of time available for reading the many opinions out there. ;)
Even after having one kid, I too no longer care about the criticisms. We're all just trying to survive.
How do they even know you're co-sleeping in the first place?