Ah sleep...would love some!

[Cheerfulcherub2014]

Short rant... why is it that when you mention to anyone that you are sleep deprived because your baby has started strange feeding patterns due to returning to work, is teething or for any other reason they feel the need to say "well ours sleeps/slept 7pm-7am and we never have/had any issue". Well aren't you just wonderful. Congratulations to you! Could you try and make me feel any worse? Grrr!

I long for a sleep longer than 2hrs but it looks unlikely!! Breastfed 7 month old baby who refuses to drink while I work, now reverse cycle feeding and teething... zzzzzzzz!

[evertonmint]

The alternative response is "Really? You lucky thing! Mine didn't sleep longer than 30 mins for 6 years"

Any response other than "let me make you a cuppa" just doesn't cut it.

(recently started to fix my nearly 8mo sleep after a very long, sleep-deprived 7 months - I know exactly where you're coming from!)

[FATEdestiny]

Those ones who sleep well are usually not firstborns.

[hawaiibaby]

I have NO idea why people do this? If I broke my leg and said I was struggling to get around, would these same people do a little dance in front of me telling me how lovely it was to get around easily?! What is with them?

Hope it improves soon, we've had many phases... when they are good - I just enjoy and keep my mouth shut! And as a pp said - offer tea / empathy to those whose LO's aren't sleeping.

PS - This made me laugh about middle of the night wakings / inner arguments: bigtroubleinlittlenappies.com/baby/all-day-and-all-of-the-night/

[Heatherbell1978]

I hear you. I go to a lot of baby groups usually looking like death warmed up and when I mention my 6 mths old has never slept through and is waking every hour all I get is 'aw poor you!' Or 'I know how you feel, little Johnny woke up once last night and I only got 6 hours sleep'. No you don't know how I feel....argh......

[hotfuzzra]

As mother to a baby who luckily, fantastically, don't know I'm born etc etc currently sleeps through and has done for a while, what should I say to someone who is moaning about lack of sleep?
I would say something like Aw poor you, but from the PP it sounds as though that is the wrong thing to say?

[Cakeismymaster]

Sympathy for the non sleepers. The pp who said about good sleepers are not usually first borns is right! Dc1 and dc3 here absolute nightmare sleepers. Dc2 did 7-7 from 3 months old! I never did anything different t routine wise.
(Whispers apart from that dc2 was bottle fed but other 2 were bf)

[evertonmint]

Cake - my DC2 was the best sleeper too. DC3 is the worst. Same parents. All 3 breastfed too and actually the best sleeper was the only fully breastfed one (the other 2 both got formula at night to help sleep but it never really worked!)

The upshot of this is, it's not the parents so go right ahead and blame the baby

[evertonmint]

Hot fuzzra - 'poor you, that's rubbish' and 'can I mind the baby while you nap?' are the best things to say, closely followed by the donation of Green & Black's butterscotch. I cried tears of joy when a school mum friend recently gave me a bar in the school playground for no reason other than I looked terribly underslept!

[FATEdestiny]

It's a difficult thing to admit that it might be parenting to 'blame' for poor sleep, but I don't think it is unreasonable.

I made lots and lots of mistakes with my first (that I would not have admitted at the time) that lead to a giant rod for my own back and a terrible sleeper as a result.

DC2 I went completely the opposite way and was quite hands off with sleep time (he never slept on me ever in his life, which I actually came to mourn). He slept better than DC1.

By DC3 I found the happy middle ground and DC4 is just a joy (she is only 4 months). Both by far the best sleepers.

I have met lots of parents who will not accept that their parenting style has any bearing on how well their children sleep. Admitting this carries a lot of guilt.

I actually had some time with DC2 and DC3 where I felt very down and guilty when I realised what a difference DC1's baby years would have been if I'd done things differently with her.

Just because you are the same parents does not mean you will parent each of your children in the same way.

[Heatherbell1978]

I understand what you're saying FATEdestiny but I'm sure some babies are just bad sleepers, just as adults can be bad sleepers despite wanting to sleep!

DS1 is my first but I spent a long time on Mumsnet before he arrived trying to make sure I established good sleeping behaviours by looking at problems other mums were having.

In many ways it worked, from birth I put him down every time he slept, never let him sleep on me, and he will literally sleep anywhere and settles like a dream. I can be at a friends house, put him on a bed with pillows on either side and he'll fall asleep within minutes. But......he still wakes in the night! It's frustratung as a lot of sleep training methods assume baby is hard to settle, mine isn't.

However I agree with you when it comes to babies that won't sleep anywhere but on mum....my NCT group is full of them, the mums have spent the last 6 months letting them all sleep on them and wonder why the babies now won't transition to a cot by myself.

[FATEdestiny]

There was no mumsnet when I had my first, but it will be more or less the equivalent to the fact that I read every parenting book that was in my local library. I expected that there would be some kind of 'instruction manual' with nice bullet pointed list of dos and don't that would give me Perfect Baby and make me Perfect Mum.

As I'm sure you appreciate, all the reading in the world does not come close to all you learn by actually experiencing having a baby.

Oh, and how well a baby sleeps is not just about... well, sleep. It's a holistic thing - how well they feed, how needs are met, how quickly signs from the baby are understood - and knowing what to do when. No one knows all the answers to this - least of all me - but I do believe learning is a lifelong task in all aspects, including parenting. So the longer we parent, the more we learn.