AIBU that I never expected my baby to sleep through the night and can't understand why others do?

[PrincessBoo]

When I had my son I never ever expected him to sleep through the night. I knew that he would wake up for feeding and that my breasts produced the best quality milk at night so he'd more likely be wanting to feed then. We co-slept from birth which made it all so much easier, and apart from teething and illnesses it was all as expected.

Some people on here though, and other sites, and amongst some of the people I met back then at baby groups, it seems like there is this quest to get them to sleep through as early as possible.

My son will be 3 in a couple of months and he still doesn't sleep all the way through the night. He usually wakes up at about 4am and climbs in our bed. I'm so used to being disturbed for ten minutes each night that it isn't even an issue - however I am blessed with being on of those people who can get back to sleep pretty easily after being woken up.

I'm just wondering what other people's expectations were / are?

lol!@ 'attacked by wolves'

I think people do! I think it depends on how confident you are at interpreting the meaning of the cry. I certainly have done it and realised, when I've picked him up, that I probably should have delayed going in after the event. I think I probably responded too much from months 7 through to 10, really, because previously he had been a screamer as though he was being attacked by wolves.

The first time I left him for two minutes (two, mind, not five or ten or anything like that) when he wasn't even really crying, I sat downstairs in a total state of nerves about it.

One of my friends from postnatal group said that she had never let her son cry for even two minutes until the weekend of his first birthday when she had no choice because she had set a pan on the stove on fire. The fact that by the time she had put out the fire he was asleep was a total revelation to her (he is her fourth child!). The rest of her kids were always tended to immediately and didn't sleep through as toddlers. Her fourth baby, because of this accident of fate, really, is sleeping through since 13 months as she braved him crying a bit longer.

And here, I must underline, I am not talking about controlled crying.. just doing that "go to sleep, c'mon" playing-chicken-with-dh thing of waiting a few minutes. I found it really hard to do and if dh hadn't pushed it, I guarantee I would have been rushing in there at every peep.

i BF DD for 6 months & due to my exhaustion she also co-slept. Found it easier for me to latch her on while I was still barely awake. The fact she woke up every 1.5 hrs to feed didn't help.

She still woke up for bottle feeds about two times during the night after that. Was easier for me to keep her near me instead of getting out of bed to feed her

Only now have I managed to put her to sleep in her own cot, with just a little bit of fuss from her part.

I'm still hoping & dreaming about the night where she sleeps 9-7 without waking up once.

I'm not sure that expected is the right word, but I wasn't surprised that my baby slept through from a young age because that is usual in my family. My siblings and i slept through quite soon, as did my nieces and nephews. Sleep is something we're very good at in my family! Too good really, I'd love to be able to survive on less.

I remember someone saying that most adults don't sleep through without waking so why should we expect babies to. Well that was news to me, I go to sleep and next thing I know it's 7am.

I don't think it's unreasonable for parents to want an uninterrupted sleep after the early days. I do think it's unreasonable to insinuate that babies only sleep through because of controlled crying or similar methods. Some babies sleep well, some don't.

ah yes, there we go badfairy I now have competitive sleep bingo

people expect broken nights but I guess they would like them to be over as quickly as possible as sleepless nights are a killer

dd1 obliged by sleeping through at 3 months, thus setting up the expectation in me that dd2 would do the same ...needless to say she took alot longer...at which point i realised dd1 had not been the norm

I expect ds to wake up at night, but I certainly want him to sleep through! Who wouldn't want a good night's sleep?

I certainly expect him to be sleeping through the night by the time he's a toddler, because I know I function better (and can be a better parent) when I sleep well, and I think it's important for children to sleep well and get an undisturbed night's rest.

habbibbom, I think alot of people will respond to a whimper...my mum is an example...she responded to every little noise I made when I was a baby/child. I was a terrible sleeper and don't think that she helped one bit.

When she is in my house and we hear my DD on the monitor she asks if I am going to check on her when she makes the smallest of noises! I know that if I wasnt there she would probably go in and pick her up

Haven't read all of it

OP I know what you mean. I was lucky in that I had the idea in my head that babies were awake all night every night for a year No idea where it came from but I think it was helpful that I had pretty low expectations and expected it to be dreadful, so in fact when it was awful it was what I thought was going to happen, and when it was better I thought I was really lucky!

I remember we had a talk about BF at an antenatal class and they were saying that babies feed every two hours. One of the fathers put his hand up and said "what, even during the night?"

So I do think that different people have different expectations, yes, and I do think that in a way the lower the better!

YABU. Everybody knows that babies wake at night, and everybody expects this to happen. Please show me the book/ magazine/leaflet that says babies don't need fed at night???

But as many others have said, most parents desperately hope that the night waking will settle down asap and that the baby will sleep through sooner rather then later.

In my ante natal group it's the main topic of convo, for the simple reason as everybody else pointed out that adults have slept through for many years and mostly cannot function on repeated broken sleep.

If you can manage ok with your current set up then great, but many people literally cannot function adequately on broken sleep, and will focus on it relentlessly as it is the defining characteristic of their lives with a young baby.

Just skimmed. Also agree that sleep deprivation is awful, the desire for babies/children to sleep as long as poss is perfectly reasonable.

Just because you expect your nights to be broken doesn't mean that you are happy about it IYSWIM.

DD is nearly 3 months and so far a pretty good sleeper for a baby. Wakes once or twice a night for a feed...fine by me. I always thought she would wake at night, she's a baby! Of course I hope, at some point she will sleep through, which if course she will! Her sleep is getting a little worse as she gets older, I think she is having a growth spurt or getting ready to teeth or something at the mo so wakes once more than normal.

She is EBF, sleeps in a Moses basket by the bed. Co-sleeps for half the night, normally comes in after 3 or 4am feed.

yabu. people need sleep! and some babies do sleep well.

I get what you are saying PrincessBoo - does my head in on the AIBU thread when people willfully misinterpret posts to rant about whatever they want to rant about (ducks for cover too!). I am expecting first baby soon and obviously I hope to get as much sleep as possible but I also expect it to wake up in night quite a lot - I mean that's what babies do isn't it. I am hoping to concentrate more on ways to see to its needs at night without waking myself up fully (eg low lighting, not playing with it but just feeding and soothing it) than on getting it to sleep through, and anything more will be a bonus.

I expected my children to be able to sleep through the night as babies, and on the whole, they did.

I think DS1 could have probably slept through the night earlier than he did (12 weeks- ish) but I undermined that by getting up to him when he made the slightest peep.

It did all go to pot when teething happened, but once that was past, I again had an expectation that they would need to be helped to get back into the self-settling ability I knew they had. Which they did.

I would not have another baby, in large part because the sleep deprivation I did have drove me nearly bonkers.

Disclaimer - both DSs were FF, so I can't really comment on breast-fed babies

I don't expect my child (When it's born) to sleep through the night. Though I quite fancy the idea that after a certain age it will sleep in its own room.

YABU and namey what is smug about saying you havent slept properly in 3 years, I think thats just awful.
Sleep is important to most people and a 3 year old waking in the middle of the night is to my mind, just unacceptable. Some sleep earlier than others but, for me, 6 months is the limit.
As for all the - babies arent meant to sleep, mothers are meant to be martyers, the more tired, bad you look, the better the mother you are et - this shall pass and mothers will go back to having a bit of balance.

oh i have a friend Habbiboom who whips out her boob for her dc4 (!!!!) at event the slightest whimper! and he's nearly a year old!!then he falls asleep on her boob but she never puts him down in case he wakes back up and if her whimpers again she just swaps boobs!

i only know this cause she tells everyone how she is awake so often in the night doing this! she could have written the OP!

but i am in the other camp - i excpected to have a few months after my dc were born of not sleeping but i EXPECTED them to sleep through the night after this except when poorly etc.

thankfully i wasnt disappointed!

Somehow from my mother and others in the 1970s I picked up the expectation that babies should only feed every 4 hours, that they should sleep thru by 6 weeks, that they should sleep thru the whole night by 6 months, that I should do controlled crying to achieve all that if necessary.

Then I met some GF fans who kind of messed my head up even more. I think my problem is that I'm too open-minded. :)

Don't worry, I didn't feed baby only every 4 hours, but I used to feel guilty and rather because I wasn't following those traditional expectations. I think that OP is lucky if she started out confidently with realistic expectations.

Actually, I think I agree. Going without sleep is terrible, and people's ability to cope varies, but all other things being equal, it's easier to cope with anticipated broken sleep.

And in my own experience, it was much harder to cope with my babies' wakings after my family had spent ages convincing me that I would be able to take the feeds down to every four hours very, very soon. Thanks, you selfish, arrogant sods...

I didn't expect DS to sleep through the night but it's always one of the first conversations that you have at baby group, etc, when you meet new people and when you start to hear about how everyone else's kids are apparently sleeping through (which I know they aren't but it feels like it at the time), then you start to wonder what you are doing wrong.

DS never slept through until literally about a month ago when things started to fall into place for him, right after his 2nd birthday: started nursery, started eating better, slept less during the day and slept through at night.

I didn't expect much from my first one, but she started sleeping a reasonable length of time by 6 weeks, and reliably slept all night from 6 months. after that i expected all other babies to do so. so far, so good.

personally i think it is because like me, they are very lazy.

although it annoys me a bit when people consider it 'natural' for a baby to wake all the time - I'm pretty sure that hunter-gatherer mothers don't do any more than cuddle and feed their kids to sleep (no switching on lights, using rockers, going for walks in the night etc)...i think modern life makes it possible for us to give babies no definite sense of night and day.

What I found interesting was that at DD's 12 month check, the HV told me that in the 'Behaviour' section of the check, they had to ask how I got her to sleep at night and whether she slept through.

That was it.

When I said I fed her to sleep the HV winced. When I said she still woke 3 or 4 times overnight she told me to leave her to cry. When I protested that if I left her to scream she'd be sick she told me that was an important developmental stage and that I just had to clear up without fuss and carry on!

I didn't.

DD still wakes sometimes at 18mo, but sleeps through from 7-7 probably half the nights now.