For kids over 1 year, some sanity saving notes (I have more than 4 kids, was about to go crazy when I got my second and then learned the things below):
- everyone wakes halfway up multiple times each night to see if everything is OK. Make sure they don't fall asleep with anything that can't stay with them during the night: music, tv, light, food, drink or another person (you or others).
- to teach kids to sleep, make them feel safe about it. What I did was walking in at a fixed schedule, starting at exact 3 minutes between the first night (I used a digital kitchen timer back then, a smartphone later) and increasing by two minutes every night. Surprisingly fast, my kids learn that I didn't disappear, and he'll be around even if they don't cry. Once they realized this they started playing with the toy the were allowed to keep in the bed. But, keep in mind: don't stop coming back if they are silent. A major part of the idea is that they realize that they don't have to do anything to make sure we don't forget them. Oh: and keep a very close ear with them in the beginning so they don't wake up and think they are alone.
I never really could get myself to accept the idea that "they need to cry themselves to sleep" and every thing I tried before this didn't work on my oldest.
This worked on my oldest kid, she started sleeping through the night within a week and also became calmer and I got my sleep back. With the rest of them it took 2-3 days only since I started earlier (shortly after they was a year old).
Maybe other methods work too, but this was easy for us and we didn't have to let the kids cry to sleep or anything else I have seen recommended online that I didn't like.
We did the same and there is one big contradiction between this and the research linked: you're not holding them or walking until they sleep, you let the kids fall asleep on their own with the confidence that you'll be back.
In my country you get a monthly check in with experts for the first 6 months and then less frequently. Mostly to weigh and check growth and arrange shots etc. But they also take some time to discuss how things are going and publish a booklet per age group with advice to parents.
Their advice (based on other research) is to strongly avoid holding your child until she sleeps and instead recommend exactly what you did.
The reason is that if you are holding the baby, they fall asleep and then wake a bit or switch to lighter sleep some time later (like every human does periodically every night) they will encounter a different environment and the holding prent is gone. That's going to wake them up fully and get confused. So now you have a crying baby in the middle of the night that you need to hold again to get back to sleep.
While if they fall asleep in their bed, feeling safe that you'll be around, a few hours later if they wake up they'll determine that everything is still OK and as they expect it to be, and continue sleeping.
On a related note, if you sit with them while they're going to sleep, make sure it's "for a while before they go to sleep", not "until they go to sleep", or it becomes a contest where they stay awake as long as possible to keep you there.
Yeah, this is the advice I've always seen with sleep training. It's important to put them down drowsy but awake. I find this extremely challenging. If the lights are on I can tell, but when it's night time and I've got the lights out I have no idea when he's drowsy but not asleep yet, and he's extremely light sensitive so I can't just have a light on. So I often accidently put him down asleep and he actually does just fine.
I agree with not holding the infant until they sleep, that probably makes the greatest difference. I don't understand the check-ins, because they fall asleep so quickly anyway and we don't want to disturb them.
The visiting the room at regular intervals works great. I only have two, and left it late with both. 5yo just fell asleep on his own for the first time a few weeks ago, still hates the idea, but doesn’t scream at least, now he knows I’ve not abandoned him…
With my kids, I used to do visits with increasing intervals. 1st time after 1 min, then 3 min, then 5 min, then 7 min,... I never reached 11 min before they were asleep.
Why have kids (if I read these comments) have such an ingrained idea that you will abandoning them? Is that subconscious, and/or just an emotional response? As in, why would they not presume the inverse (that you will always be there)?
I did much the same thing when the kids were about the same age. I would also put a kitchen timer _in the room_ set to 3:10. So at 3 minutes I got the reminder to stop what I'm doing and go to the room. Then at 3:10 their timer goes off and I came right in the door. The idea was to teach them that the timer brings the parent, not the crying.
We had minimal problems with the two oldest, but the youngest one is impossible. I think I’ve tried all the tricks in every book to make him sleep in his own bed the whole night. I think I can count on one hand the times that have actually happened. Hopefully we/he will figure it soon.
> What I did was walking in at a fixed schedule, starting
Wow I never heard this before, it sounds like a great idea. Did you learn from someone else or figured out yourself? I struggled with getting kids to sleep by themselves.
Learned it from a book in Danish - God Nat Sov Godt, originally written by a Spanish physician/doctor so if you don't know Danish but can find the author I think there is a fair chance it might exist in more languages.
I think the consensus is that letting them cry is unhealthy when younger than 6 months. But when over 6 months:
What we used to do is to have a simple fixed routine (e.g. drink milk, sing a short song, put them in bed) so she knows what's coming and put her in bed no matter what. Crying or not, just put her in bed softly, ignore the crying, say some nice things and walk out in a friendly way.
Come back after 3 minutes of crying. Stroke/hold/sing until she stops crying (usually immediately when you come back). And then put her in bed again in the same way. Often there will be some crying in protest of being put back in bed, it's really hard, but you have to put them in bed then in the same friendly/soft way as the first time.
Then keep doing this in increasing time intervals. We did 3 min, 5 min, 5 min, 10 min and then keep it at 10. But we rarely got to 10 after the initial week of doing this. I've heard several other parents that did the same thing, some after speaking to a sleep coach. It worked for many, but it takes consistency and a bit of time to start working.
Putting an infant alone in a room of their own seems to be an exclusively western practice and is completely foreign to me.
3500 American babies due suddenly and unexpectedly from SIDS every year. I wonder if there is any research into where these babies were sleeping when they died. Am I an idiot for wondering if they died from the sheer terror of waking up alone in a dark room?
The recommendation in the US is to have infants sleep in the same room in a bassinet. Then moving to a crib, often in a separate room, around 4-6 months.
Co-sleeping is also somewhat popular, but it greatly increases the chance of SIDS with risks skyrocketing for smoking mothers and those who are bed-sharing but don't usually do bed-sharing.
We bought a breath monitor which is a desk/plate (about 20x50cm) with a small device attached via a long cable. You put the desk under the mattress and hang the device somewhere on the crib. When it's on and the kid would stop breathing, the device starts beeping really loud.
It already triggered a few times for us, luckily in all cases it was because we carried the baby from the crib a forgot the turn off the breath detector :-D
To help prevent SIDS, I highly highly recommend a product called the Owlet Smart Sock. It was discontinued due to not being FDA approved but it is still available on eBay and it is a potential lifesaver. What it does is that it's a pulse oximeter that sounds an alarm if your baby stops breathing or their blood oxygen falls below a threshold. This device potentially saved the life of one of our kids and I cannot recommend it enough. Our baby had fallen into a too deep sleep and though he looked peaceful his blood oxygen was very low and we had to aggressively wake him up to get him to start breathing again.
The product I am talking about is NOT the Owlet Dream Sock. That version is useless for this purpose. You need the now-discontinued Owlet Smart Sock, of which the most recent version was version 3. I believe the app is no longer available in the app store, and you need the app to use it, but I think if you have an Android device you can probably find an APK on one of the APK mirror sites. Personally, I have the iOS app which I still have due to having installed it on my phone before it was discontinued.
I hope someone will make an open-source product like this. It's conceptually quite simple: connect a pulse oximeter to a loud audible alarm. I would also love to be able to get an adult version as well for my grandparents that would call 911 automatically if they stop breathing or their heart stops. Calling 911 automatically would not be allowed in a product I think, but it could be done in an open-source / open-hardware product where the builder of the kit takes on the liability of breaking the 911-related laws (which in my view is a tiny price to pay for saving a loved one's life).
If any hardware hackers are looking for project ideas, an open version of the Owlet Smart Sock would be an incredible thing to build for the world.
P.S. my pet theory for what causes SIDS is that the part of the brain stem that controls breathing needs time to develop, and when the brain is super young that part of the brain is not yet fully developed, and is susceptible to failing to do its job. I think of an analogy to how people can die of failing to breathe during a heroin overdose, wherein that same part of the brain is put into a state where it doesn't maintain a high enough breathing rate. I suspect the failure mechanism in the overdose situation and the SIDS situation might be analogous.
My partner is a doctor mainly working in early childhood prevention. When she did some recent training on evidence based early childhood care (which is surprisingly rare, most early childhood care is not really evidence based), she learned a couple of things that she said she really would like to have known when we had our children were born.
One is that you get told a lot about averages. So commonly parents get told that babies (should) sleep around 12h a day. What nobody talks about is the variance. There are babies who sleep only 8h a day and others who sleep close to 20h. So you end up with parents who thing they need to get their child to sleep, even though the child is absolutely not tired.
Also a lot of people talk about not giving children too much impressions/stimulation. Which is also generally false, giving them stimulation will actually make them tired and sleep better, they also learn stuff. Obviously you don't do that just before or when going to bed.
More anecdotally there really seems to be a problem with many 'shoulds' involved in childhood care.
I have a good friend who was given contradictory instructions by health care professionals while they were still at the hospital with their child which developed into a situation where 'professionals' were chastising the parents for following instructions correctly.
This is a real bind for parents who don't have easy access to second opinions or are in a position where the health professionals misuse their position of authority to prevent discussion of situations.
My brother gave me some great meta-parenting advice;
"You're going to get a lot of parenting advice, but keep one thing in mind. Those folks aren't telling you how to raise your kid. They're telling you how to raise _their_ kid. But you're not raising their kids, you're raising you're kids. So take all that advice with a grain of salt."
especially if you already can see the results of their parenting (which is maybe 50% of the equation, genes making up the rest at least in early years) and its not that great.
Spoiled, overcompetitve, addicted to phones/tv, eating junk food, no good hobbies, clueless and aimless about life and what they want and so on. I have been at times few of those, and while I love my parents overall, they could have done more in some parts instead of me figuring out everything by myself, took damn too long to realize there are almost no limits to what one can achieve and how to get there
One problem I see with many many parents, usually the smarter ones, is desperate need to have 100% control. To know 100% what to do, how to react, understand everything. Failure rate should be 0%, since then you are a failure as parent, human and so on. Like parenthood is some github project that can always have 100% test coverage and predictable behavior.
The concept of 'science doesnt know yet', 'everybody is unique so this may not be valid for your child' is a sign of incompetence from the doctor, so they just keep searching for one that will sound more confident.
In all this, emotions take the steering wheel. And emotions only are bad advice giver in any topic.
What you describe is something we with my wife have known and heard continuously from every doctor ever involved with our children. Dont stress out if its behind average curve in this or that. Sometimes they behave completely out of boundaries. If they sleep more/less so be it, there is a reason for that and no I can't tell you what it is.
I get the emotion of wanting the best and normal for a child damn too well, but real chaotic life happens and some folks cant grok that. One can see it in this thread so damn well - people having their pet theories, ignoring current science level, being damn sure their opinions are the correct ones. Instead of patiently admitting that we dont know yet, there are some theories and some findings but thats it.
Oh man. We just recently had our first and this is so frustrating. So much parenting advice is old wives tales and just so stories. I found people like Emily Oster really helpful for this, and the APA guidelines are generally pretty helpful. But there are so many things where the available research is just bad.
Ours sleeps quite a bit more than the average and at first it really concerned us until we talked to our pediatrician and they were like no that falls within the normal range. As an analyst I found it really frustrating that the distributions don't get published.
There's so much snark here but I love this. I'd take reading papers like this over mommy blogs every day of the week, even if it's to state the ostensibly obvious.
Does anyone have any other interesting child-rearing resources in this style?
Papers are great, but the fact that this is still a topic of discussion in the 21st century shows that there are no magic bullets, and putting too much stock in a techniques can feel as bad as the problem you are trying to solve if they don't work and you blame yourself.
Among any parenting peer group there will be some whose children fall asleep instantly with no intervention and some who spend hours doing bedtime and get woken up dozens of times a night, despite doing more or less the same thing.
Very much this. I do like that they split the children into "crying-start", "alert-start" and "asleep-start" groups, but ultimately I have had the experience that every kid is different and sleeps differently.
From time to time i go through this cdc[1] website. It is quite comprehensive on child rearing tips.
For a longer form reading i went through [2] and still visit it from time to time. I like it because it discusses multiple approaches and methods and discusses what works and what does not. A bit more scientific, but the gist of it is that most of children's behavior problems are actually parenting problems.
Recently I was trying to figure out why my 1,5 years boy had more liquid poop only when he was in the kindergarten. This made him need to be home quite often. Turned out they were giving him some drink with fruit that made him drink too much water. Given that children do not have perfectly function water absorption in the colon if they drink too much, their stool gets more liquefied. The liquefied poop gets confused for viral diarrhea and he then needs to stay home. I got that insight from [3]. After resumption of diet and removal of sugary fruit from the water, he has been fine for a while now.
Sugary drinks for 1.5 year olds, at kindergarten? Capri-Sun and the like should be banned in schools and daycare, people don’t realize it’s not that different from giving their children Coca-Cola every day.
The books by Emily Oster are great, they’re purely based on data and she’s a PhD in Econ at Brown so she knows to not misinterpret. She’s also a mother and blends in just enough personal experience into these books to make pleasant to read while never straying from the aim of scientific accuracy. On many topics the answer is unfortunately still “some studies show X but there are flaws or they aren’t statistically significant so we don’t know for sure what Is the best answer”
Just a random tip: noise canceling headphones, particularly over-the-ear, are great for keeping calm while holding a screaming baby. They can scream quite loudly, and when you hold them they are often right next to your ear!
Most published research is bogus. Not everything is physics or chemistry. Most things are actually not.
I'd rather advice based on extensive experience and wisdom than "research shows that ...". Basically everytime I see someone says "research shows" I mentally mark it as bullshit.
Just tried this on my newborn and it seemed to work! I know there are folks saying this isn’t a new finding but i find the timings really helpful. Previously I was walking the baby too long which was wearing me out but having research based timing advise helps a lot.
I'm pretty sure our 4 day old will react exactly the same way to this as he does when we put him into the next to me cot straight after a feed. Which is to say he'll sleep for 2-5 minutes, realise he's further away from the breast than he wanted to be and wake up.
What works for us and our previous child is cosleeping. After I saw both my partner and our eldest fall asleep simultaneously after finishing a feed I became a convert.
We noticed the same thing with my first 2 kids. They’d wake up from a dead sleep after putting them down. Once my second child was 3-4 months old we would let him cry for about 1 minute and found he usually went to back to sleep. Worked well. With my first we would run in immediately and I still think she has going to sleep issues.
Some more important conditions from the method used:
> Experimental sessions started approximately 1 to 2 hours after the last feeding
> In most cases when mothers laid the infant down, mothers held the infant with one hand behind the neck and shoulders, and the other
hand under the buttocks or thighs. The mother laid the infant on its back in 18/19 samples of the 1-month-old and older infants, and
7/7 of the neonate samples, whereas one infant was laid with a sideways landing, later to be turned on its back.
>To examine the effect of sleep duration on the sleep/wake outcome, the interval between the initiations of infant sleep and laydown
was calculated. The timing of the infants’ sleep onset was defined as the initiation of the behavioral sleep state, satisfying both of eye
closure and no vocalization.
I try to recommend to new parents to get a big room air purifier to clean the air where the baby sleeps but also to add a nice low bass noise (from the motor) that you can’t get from a white noise generator. Our filtrete has been running non-stop for 11 years (kind of crazy).
Definitely helps keep them asleep and non sensitive to sudden noises in town/city.
I think it's more an indication of higher expectations in child-rearing. If you're struggling daily for survival and 7/10 of your children will die before age 6 I don't think can afford to spend hours every day experimenting which method will get your child to fall asleep without crying.
Long term exposure to constant droning sounds could cause issues in language centers of the brain.
When we rely on sounds for kids, we stick to sounds that mimic the more random/non-droning sounds you encounter in nature. Birds chirping in a forest, evening crickets and frogs etc.
Anecdotal but I used a noise machine that played brown noise because I was informed it mimics the sound of the baby’s womb. My daughter is extremely advanced in all areas of learning now at 5 years old. Her first word was hi at 4 months.
As a parent of a 5mo old I had to discover this on my own. Luckily my daughter makes it abundantly clear that she does not like me to sit while I hold her. Our midwife even said that babies like to know you are up and ready to escape predators. Not sure how true that part is.
I think of it as a fitness measure: Are you active enough at moving towards food gathering sites, preparing and surveying the landscape, creating and fine tuning your tools? If it is an approval of sorts on behalf of the child, then it also points to some really basic learning that is beginning to flow between the parent and child
That's a mind-boggling theory actually, that some general survival skills are encoded in the parent-child relationship. Basically you have to become a parent to level-up your survival skills.
I wouldn't put it past evolution to encode useful information wherever possible, but it would be hard to prove that theory.
Not clear whether evolution would select for crying in the possible presence of predators (so fighting adults can be woken) or for silence (to avoid attracting attention as prey).
I think babies cry when they get tired to warn parents they are going to fall asleep soon, so that parents know they have to take them somewhere safe to sleep.
What I need to find out is what to do in the car. Our kid mostly calms down while walking, but unlike his older brother the car vibrations do not make him sleep at all. And so once he starts crying in the car, we have no way of calming him down, beside stopping the car and carrying him.
It seems like very bouncy driving (a sequence of high acceleration followed by sudden braking) helps, but it’s kind of wreckless, makes my wife sick and my older kid angry.
Probably just need to gut it out for a couple road trips and try not to show the kid how stressed out you are while it’s happening - kinda like a thunderstorm. It gets better. Good luck.
Intermediate tactics: white noise in the back seat, maybe some lullabies, singalongs, make sure the seatbelts aren’t too tight, maybe a drink or pacifier, etc - whatever to keep things quiet for a bit.
I got nothing. For us, we discovered that if we time car trips around their bedtime or naptime, she cries a while and then conks out. Then when we reach our destination, we take her out and put her in an adjustable lay-flat stroller (if outside) or to bed (if home). The process of getting her to conk out while we drive? Just pure grit, endurance, and lots of singing lullabies, which may simply be correlated, rather than causative. Sometimes it takes a while. :(
Child safety and cars sure is related - and history buffs will be glad to know the “kindermoord” of automobiles was what got the Netherlands to change from car-centric cities with many lanes wide traffic jams, to the best city infrastructure in the world
Cars produce crazy noise pollution, and car lifestyle requires massive subsidies such as street parking, and a huge share of city real estate being used for parking and roads.
Lately, I’ve been inspired by this channel “Not just bikes” on the subject, and other HN readers may find it interesting as well https://youtu.be/XfQUOHlAocY
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- everyone wakes halfway up multiple times each night to see if everything is OK. Make sure they don't fall asleep with anything that can't stay with them during the night: music, tv, light, food, drink or another person (you or others).
- to teach kids to sleep, make them feel safe about it. What I did was walking in at a fixed schedule, starting at exact 3 minutes between the first night (I used a digital kitchen timer back then, a smartphone later) and increasing by two minutes every night. Surprisingly fast, my kids learn that I didn't disappear, and he'll be around even if they don't cry. Once they realized this they started playing with the toy the were allowed to keep in the bed. But, keep in mind: don't stop coming back if they are silent. A major part of the idea is that they realize that they don't have to do anything to make sure we don't forget them. Oh: and keep a very close ear with them in the beginning so they don't wake up and think they are alone.
I never really could get myself to accept the idea that "they need to cry themselves to sleep" and every thing I tried before this didn't work on my oldest.
This worked on my oldest kid, she started sleeping through the night within a week and also became calmer and I got my sleep back. With the rest of them it took 2-3 days only since I started earlier (shortly after they was a year old).
Maybe other methods work too, but this was easy for us and we didn't have to let the kids cry to sleep or anything else I have seen recommended online that I didn't like.
In my country you get a monthly check in with experts for the first 6 months and then less frequently. Mostly to weigh and check growth and arrange shots etc. But they also take some time to discuss how things are going and publish a booklet per age group with advice to parents.
Their advice (based on other research) is to strongly avoid holding your child until she sleeps and instead recommend exactly what you did.
The reason is that if you are holding the baby, they fall asleep and then wake a bit or switch to lighter sleep some time later (like every human does periodically every night) they will encounter a different environment and the holding prent is gone. That's going to wake them up fully and get confused. So now you have a crying baby in the middle of the night that you need to hold again to get back to sleep.
While if they fall asleep in their bed, feeling safe that you'll be around, a few hours later if they wake up they'll determine that everything is still OK and as they expect it to be, and continue sleeping.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8ccGjar4Es
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Wow I never heard this before, it sounds like a great idea. Did you learn from someone else or figured out yourself? I struggled with getting kids to sleep by themselves.
What we used to do is to have a simple fixed routine (e.g. drink milk, sing a short song, put them in bed) so she knows what's coming and put her in bed no matter what. Crying or not, just put her in bed softly, ignore the crying, say some nice things and walk out in a friendly way.
Come back after 3 minutes of crying. Stroke/hold/sing until she stops crying (usually immediately when you come back). And then put her in bed again in the same way. Often there will be some crying in protest of being put back in bed, it's really hard, but you have to put them in bed then in the same friendly/soft way as the first time.
Then keep doing this in increasing time intervals. We did 3 min, 5 min, 5 min, 10 min and then keep it at 10. But we rarely got to 10 after the initial week of doing this. I've heard several other parents that did the same thing, some after speaking to a sleep coach. It worked for many, but it takes consistency and a bit of time to start working.
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3500 American babies due suddenly and unexpectedly from SIDS every year. I wonder if there is any research into where these babies were sleeping when they died. Am I an idiot for wondering if they died from the sheer terror of waking up alone in a dark room?
Co-sleeping is also somewhat popular, but it greatly increases the chance of SIDS with risks skyrocketing for smoking mothers and those who are bed-sharing but don't usually do bed-sharing.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2065975/
It already triggered a few times for us, luckily in all cases it was because we carried the baby from the crib a forgot the turn off the breath detector :-D
Children just stop breathing. Some newer research suggests this is a genetic issue.
Of course there is misdiagnosis for children that suffocate because of toys/blankets.
The product I am talking about is NOT the Owlet Dream Sock. That version is useless for this purpose. You need the now-discontinued Owlet Smart Sock, of which the most recent version was version 3. I believe the app is no longer available in the app store, and you need the app to use it, but I think if you have an Android device you can probably find an APK on one of the APK mirror sites. Personally, I have the iOS app which I still have due to having installed it on my phone before it was discontinued.
I hope someone will make an open-source product like this. It's conceptually quite simple: connect a pulse oximeter to a loud audible alarm. I would also love to be able to get an adult version as well for my grandparents that would call 911 automatically if they stop breathing or their heart stops. Calling 911 automatically would not be allowed in a product I think, but it could be done in an open-source / open-hardware product where the builder of the kit takes on the liability of breaking the 911-related laws (which in my view is a tiny price to pay for saving a loved one's life).
If any hardware hackers are looking for project ideas, an open version of the Owlet Smart Sock would be an incredible thing to build for the world.
P.S. my pet theory for what causes SIDS is that the part of the brain stem that controls breathing needs time to develop, and when the brain is super young that part of the brain is not yet fully developed, and is susceptible to failing to do its job. I think of an analogy to how people can die of failing to breathe during a heroin overdose, wherein that same part of the brain is put into a state where it doesn't maintain a high enough breathing rate. I suspect the failure mechanism in the overdose situation and the SIDS situation might be analogous.
Dead Comment
One is that you get told a lot about averages. So commonly parents get told that babies (should) sleep around 12h a day. What nobody talks about is the variance. There are babies who sleep only 8h a day and others who sleep close to 20h. So you end up with parents who thing they need to get their child to sleep, even though the child is absolutely not tired.
Also a lot of people talk about not giving children too much impressions/stimulation. Which is also generally false, giving them stimulation will actually make them tired and sleep better, they also learn stuff. Obviously you don't do that just before or when going to bed.
I have a good friend who was given contradictory instructions by health care professionals while they were still at the hospital with their child which developed into a situation where 'professionals' were chastising the parents for following instructions correctly.
This is a real bind for parents who don't have easy access to second opinions or are in a position where the health professionals misuse their position of authority to prevent discussion of situations.
"You're going to get a lot of parenting advice, but keep one thing in mind. Those folks aren't telling you how to raise your kid. They're telling you how to raise _their_ kid. But you're not raising their kids, you're raising you're kids. So take all that advice with a grain of salt."
Spoiled, overcompetitve, addicted to phones/tv, eating junk food, no good hobbies, clueless and aimless about life and what they want and so on. I have been at times few of those, and while I love my parents overall, they could have done more in some parts instead of me figuring out everything by myself, took damn too long to realize there are almost no limits to what one can achieve and how to get there
The concept of 'science doesnt know yet', 'everybody is unique so this may not be valid for your child' is a sign of incompetence from the doctor, so they just keep searching for one that will sound more confident.
In all this, emotions take the steering wheel. And emotions only are bad advice giver in any topic.
What you describe is something we with my wife have known and heard continuously from every doctor ever involved with our children. Dont stress out if its behind average curve in this or that. Sometimes they behave completely out of boundaries. If they sleep more/less so be it, there is a reason for that and no I can't tell you what it is.
I get the emotion of wanting the best and normal for a child damn too well, but real chaotic life happens and some folks cant grok that. One can see it in this thread so damn well - people having their pet theories, ignoring current science level, being damn sure their opinions are the correct ones. Instead of patiently admitting that we dont know yet, there are some theories and some findings but thats it.
Ours sleeps quite a bit more than the average and at first it really concerned us until we talked to our pediatrician and they were like no that falls within the normal range. As an analyst I found it really frustrating that the distributions don't get published.
What does this mean?
Does anyone have any other interesting child-rearing resources in this style?
Among any parenting peer group there will be some whose children fall asleep instantly with no intervention and some who spend hours doing bedtime and get woken up dozens of times a night, despite doing more or less the same thing.
For a longer form reading i went through [2] and still visit it from time to time. I like it because it discusses multiple approaches and methods and discusses what works and what does not. A bit more scientific, but the gist of it is that most of children's behavior problems are actually parenting problems.
Recently I was trying to figure out why my 1,5 years boy had more liquid poop only when he was in the kindergarten. This made him need to be home quite often. Turned out they were giving him some drink with fruit that made him drink too much water. Given that children do not have perfectly function water absorption in the colon if they drink too much, their stool gets more liquefied. The liquefied poop gets confused for viral diarrhea and he then needs to stay home. I got that insight from [3]. After resumption of diet and removal of sugary fruit from the water, he has been fine for a while now.
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/parents/essentials/index.html [2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK402020/ [3] https://adc.bmj.com/content/79/1/2
Most published research is bogus. Not everything is physics or chemistry. Most things are actually not.
I'd rather advice based on extensive experience and wisdom than "research shows that ...". Basically everytime I see someone says "research shows" I mentally mark it as bullshit.
What works for us and our previous child is cosleeping. After I saw both my partner and our eldest fall asleep simultaneously after finishing a feed I became a convert.
Also, it's a SIDS risk.
We noticed the same thing with my first 2 kids. They’d wake up from a dead sleep after putting them down. Once my second child was 3-4 months old we would let him cry for about 1 minute and found he usually went to back to sleep. Worked well. With my first we would run in immediately and I still think she has going to sleep issues.
If we only prescribed pain medication based on your definition, practically none of them would make it through.
Your body adapts to its environment and as such very few things will work in perpetuity.
> Experimental sessions started approximately 1 to 2 hours after the last feeding
> In most cases when mothers laid the infant down, mothers held the infant with one hand behind the neck and shoulders, and the other hand under the buttocks or thighs. The mother laid the infant on its back in 18/19 samples of the 1-month-old and older infants, and 7/7 of the neonate samples, whereas one infant was laid with a sideways landing, later to be turned on its back.
>To examine the effect of sleep duration on the sleep/wake outcome, the interval between the initiations of infant sleep and laydown was calculated. The timing of the infants’ sleep onset was defined as the initiation of the behavioral sleep state, satisfying both of eye closure and no vocalization.
Definitely helps keep them asleep and non sensitive to sudden noises in town/city.
When we rely on sounds for kids, we stick to sounds that mimic the more random/non-droning sounds you encounter in nature. Birds chirping in a forest, evening crickets and frogs etc.
Do you have a source for this? We've always used white noise.
Citation?
I wouldn't put it past evolution to encode useful information wherever possible, but it would be hard to prove that theory.
What I need to find out is what to do in the car. Our kid mostly calms down while walking, but unlike his older brother the car vibrations do not make him sleep at all. And so once he starts crying in the car, we have no way of calming him down, beside stopping the car and carrying him.
It seems like very bouncy driving (a sequence of high acceleration followed by sudden braking) helps, but it’s kind of wreckless, makes my wife sick and my older kid angry.
Help!
Intermediate tactics: white noise in the back seat, maybe some lullabies, singalongs, make sure the seatbelts aren’t too tight, maybe a drink or pacifier, etc - whatever to keep things quiet for a bit.
You can see them, they can see you.
https://usa.streetsblog.org/2013/02/20/the-origins-of-hollan...
Cars produce crazy noise pollution, and car lifestyle requires massive subsidies such as street parking, and a huge share of city real estate being used for parking and roads.
Lately, I’ve been inspired by this channel “Not just bikes” on the subject, and other HN readers may find it interesting as well https://youtu.be/XfQUOHlAocY
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