to think that parents contribute to the sleep issues?

[ChocolateBiscuitCake]

Disclaimer: I have two DC who have not always been brilliant sleepers and go through patches of wakefullness at night/early in the morning (!) but...

I have been reading some of the sleep threads and am really surprised by the number of people who have older babies or toddlers who sleep SO badly whilst claiming that they don't know how to improve the situation and won't do any form of CC.

From my experiences, babies have to learn how to sleep well and they do this by you setting up routines and helping them along the way. If you feed your 12 month old milk in the middle of the night, they will keep waking for milk in the night. If you bring them into your bed, they will want to be in your bed. If you have to lie down and hold their hand, they will expect you to be there holding their hand if they wake up.

Nothing changes overnight and teaching your baby/child to sleep well takes patience and consistency. But leaving a baby to cry for 5 minutes is not going to hurt it and ignoring a toddler whilst you drag them back to bed and not give into their ridiculous demands is not difficult. We are the adults!

AIBU to think that some parents need to be a bit tougher rather than find some miracle cure for poor sleep habits?

My ds1 was in SCBU for 4 and 1/2 weeks and did not sleep well at all when we got him home We ended up doing CC at 7mo (regret doing this), but it did work.

I co-slept with ds2 for a fair few months and fed on demand. He slept 12 hours a night from 11 (ish) months (in his own cot). No CC or any other method used.

dd is 8mo and co-sleeps for latter part of the night, fed on demand etc and can sleep 9hrs in a go (not every night).

I do agree in part with OP but it can be complicated at times. For e.g. ds2 suffers with severe eczema therefore we can have weeks of getting up to him 5 or so times a night, and we cannot leave him to scratch himself to bleeding (he's 2yo), however when not suffering he will sleep 11/12hrs.

Too many variables to say if you are being unreasonable.

Yes, if your DC shouts for duck pancakes, spare ribs and a side of prawn crackers, and you make them at 3am then you are contributing to sleep issues. (YANBU)

If you find feeding/rocking/comforting your little one to sleep is the fastest most reliable way to get them off, no you are not. (YABU)

I used to frequent the sleep boards a lot when DD was younger, got lots of ideas to problem solve little things we were going through and lots of support when we just had a really bad night and I felt like crap. I go there less and less these days as I have found a zen like state of acceptance about the nights when DD wakes due to teething or nightmares. They will happen, she is a child, I comfort her in the best way I can and know that this too shall pass.

I have plenty of rods for my back, but I find them useful to keep me upright, personally.

Also, I thought Grumpla's post was lovely by the way.

Great post grumpla.

And as for the "being left to cry for 5 mins won't hurt them" comment. Certainly not true for all. Leaving 23 month old ds to cry for
5 mins would almost certainly lead to him getting so wound up he ends having an asthma attack. I think I will be "weak" and go straight to him thanks!

I do think people have very strange expectations about children sleeping. I rarely sleep through the night, often wake up needing a drink or just unable to drop off again. Why do we have this expectation that babies and young children should sleep well all the time when very few adults do?

duellingfanjo

Love this, jointhedots "I have plenty of rods for my back, but I find them useful to keep me upright, personally."

Oh op if only it were that simple.

I have two bad sleepers.
I tired everything - CC, co-sleeping, putting them to bed early, keeping them up late.

Only one thing worked...they got older.

See- ^ this problems transcends all boundaries of society.

erm- how old are we talking wordfactory?

totally agree OP. People let things go too far & then have a hellish situation with a confused, exhausted 2 or 3 yr old. Including myself in that with dd1. Boy did I learn.

I'm with Bertie. Dd would cry till she threw up if left alone when teeny, I don't care if you think us soft but that is cruel. Sometimes she wakes at night, but guess what...so do I and I'm 30.

I love the..."we didnt do cc or routines and it was fine LO was sleeping through by 2 years old".....hmmmm, over 700 nights of broken sleep for parents and LOs cannot be great?

Ah I see. It's a 'rod for your own back' thread.

Good for you for being so wonderfully consistent and firm. Some of us lesser beings don't manage it for a variety of reasons. Probably because we are inadequate . But as long as we aren't bothering you why do you feel the need to comment?

oh if only it was as simple as the op thinks.........
and I am not even talking about my child with sn, but the other one(nt)
I tried EVERYTHING, yet he insisted the only place he could sleep in in the whole world was my bed.
in the end the neighbours(terraced house) sort of complained, so I gave up until he grew out of it, and i can assure anyone going through that stage, they do grow out of it.

But it is really quite normal for children to wake in the night Blackflame, and if it doesn't bother them why should it bother you? I function perfectly well on 5 or 6 hrs sleep a night and always have, even before babies. Not everyone believes in, or needs sleep training.

Hmm. Thing is, I can't help noticing that children with SN don't always come out of the uterus with a label saying "SN". I think a lot of the time, it takes years to obtain a diagnosis, if they do.

So, pronouncements like the OP's probably do end up making SN-children's parents feel utterly crap.

Im not for on second suggesting children should not wake in the night. Just that often lengthy spells of night waking are linked to the crutches that parents give such as remaining with them til they fall asleep; allowing them to do something just "because its easier" then it becoming habitual.

I know not everyone believes in sleep training, and we are all entitled to our opinion on the matter.

Its hard, though, to offer sympathy to parents who's LO's are bad sleepers purely as a direct result of their actions.

YABU - some children are good sleepers, some aren't. At the end of the day (literally) a parent does what they think best with the information they have to hand to help their child learn to sleep.

We have coslept and fed on demand from birth and have never had any issues or tears at bed time so your post makes no sense at all to me. What worked for us might not work for other parents. It's not about making a rod of any description.

Children learn to sleep in their own time. There are stressful ways of doing this and there are non-stressful ways.

I have two brothers, one learnt to swim by going to classes, the other learnt (very quickly!) when he drove a toy car into the neighbours' swimming pool. So both learnt but in different ways, one stressful, one non-stressful, same result.

I guess. I do think my health visitor was very sensible though when she pointed out that there weren't really problem sleepers in the baby years until books came along to tell us how babies should apparently be sleeping. For me, I wouldn't do any form of sleep training involving crying, and if I did I certainly wouldn't before 2, as at that point dd will be able to u understand more of what we are telling her. Leaving her to cry on her own without understanding why would cause me far more pain than the odd wake up. We're pretty chilled out about it, co slept till 10 months etc and still rock to sleep at 14 months and we're pretty normal I think. Dd is a good sleeper on the whole despite the various sleep regressions, so I think just need to go with the flow as not all babies want to be trained.

Sorry, that was to BlackFlame.

"Its hard, though, to offer sympathy to parents who's LO's are bad sleepers purely as a direct result of their actions"

Well find me one about whom you could say that and I might agree with you. IME there is never a single reason for a child that doesn't sleep.

It is normal for children to wake in the night sometimes, which they can find fearful. I do think that at least sometimes, parents can exacerbate those fears by reinforcing them - a child left to self-settle in a safe, comfortable room WILL work out that nothing bad will happen if you wake in the night. Parents making a fuss about waking sometimes only serves to validate a child's fears, and make self-settling more difficult.

I say this as a rubbish sleeper myself. In the absence of nightmares or illness, waking up is an annoyance rather than a fear.

We are humans so there are no hard and fast rules. I think OP is right about some parents - I know people who complain about disturbed evenings but they faff about and sit with the child until it falls asleep so this is what the child reasonably now expects aged 3 so yes for people like that the sleep problems are largely self inflicted. For others they do everything "right" but just have a non sleeper nothing they have done to exacerbate the problem.

I agree to a certain extent OP. When we changed our behaviour/ the routine ds became the world's best sleep EVER!

Whilst I think you have a point to a degree OP, I think you underestimate other parents a tad here. I'm sure parents of bad sleepers (I had one too) have tried every trick in the book to get their DC to sleep/go to sleep/stay asleep whatever but you cannot assume that because they have bad sleepers that they are somehow doing it wrong. Your post does sound a little smug (I'm doing it right/you're doing it wrong) I'm afraid, I was trying to say that nicely but there isn't really a nice way!

We all do things as parents that others think are totally ridiculous but I reckon you need to do whatever gets you through and sod what everyone else thinks. We also all make decisions as parents how to deal with things e.g controlled crying was an absolute no no for me I just fundamentally don't agree with it, but I understand that it's the way some parents want to go.

OP you are a total paragon of perfect parenting. And this one size fits all style is so productive across the globe. Why on earth are their so many books, websites and professionals centred on sleep issues when you have all the answers?

And CC and dragging toddlers back to bed who then scream works a treat when they share a room with a sibling who WAS sleeping peacefully and has a full day at school the next day.

They are little for such a short, brief time in our lives. Believe me it is not long before you can't drag them out of bed so I am as sure as hell not going to make their little lives a misery by leaving them in confusion and distress at a young age.Nothing will convince me its not cruel and some of the best times I have had and the best bonding times have been in the wee small hours.

And shock horror I lay down every day to give my dd her afternoon nap and I miss those days dearly now. I doubt on my deathbed I will say I wish I had left them to cry it out a bit more.

Have exactly the same as captainnancy- only my ds is 9 and just doesnt sleep!

When he was younger he wandered around but he does on the whole stay in bed now, and is no trouble (apart from when he is singing AC/DC songs at 4am! - I LOATHE "Highway to Hell" with a vengeance!)

But I cant tell him off- I'm exactly the same as him- 4 hours unbroken sleep for me is almost a miracle!

My DD o the other hand has slept like the dead for 12 hours a night since she was 5 weeks old! (Takes after her dad!)

Of course not all parents are responsible for their kids bad sleep habits. But when friends tell you that their 4yo child won't go to bed until midnight and you know that when they make a fuss they bring them down to watch telly you can't say that that hasn't contributed to the problem. Also parents who say their older kids have them up at 4am - just send them back to bed ffs.
I realise you can't make kids sleep but you can make older kids realise that they need to sleep/play quiety/read in their rooms from reasonable o'clock at night til reasonable o'clock in the morning.