to think that having a settled newborn is bugger all to do with anything you have or haven't done?

[IcouldstillbeJoseph]

Obviously disregarding illness or feeding issues etc. I'm talking about the fact that some babies are just better at sleeping and being contented at the very begnning.

So therefore it is really bloody annoying to hear the smug parents come out with gems as to why they think their baby is more settled than others. My personal favourites are:

"i think its because we've been really pro-routine from the very beginning" - as if the parents of unsettled babies wouldn't dearly love to put their DC down at 10pm and have them drift off blissfully until some hours later. Difficult to be pro-fecking-routine when you can't put them down without them howling

"I think its because I was really chilled out during pregnancy" - right, of course that's it, even though your baby wasn't even breathing or aware of the world just yet it was definitely aware that you were really calm and has carried that over into its new little life

"i think it's because i only drink camomile tea"
"I think it's because I always went to bed at the same time every night when I was pregnant"

oh stop being so smug. Its nothing to do with you, its the luck of the draw.

YANBU. It is the key thing I have learned from parenthood. As long as you keep them safe, warm and relatively stimulated they will develop into whatever the heck they want to be, regardless of what you do. I have learned to simply get on and try to enjoy the ride / sleep when possible.

I have only one friend who has had two perfect, chilled babies, and is a Gina Ford devotee. She, perhaps inevitably, infers causality from correlation. I have to confess that I rarely see her

Sorry, I mean I have more than one friend, but only one of my group has had two 'easy' babies ... the rest of us have had a mixture I think!

"someone at work said that with your first baby you're so stressed it gets passed on to the baby, with the 2nd you get better and with the 3rd you're so laidback that the baby will sleep through anything"

bollocks... im on my third baby and i can assure you DS3 does not sleep through anything... i think he cries even more than DS1... DS2 was a little angel, barely cried at all.... DS3 lives in a sling.... at least i could leave DS1 in his moses basket for 40 minutes....

thank you for this thread! what also makes me feel better is to see other parents who are in the playground at 8am in the morning.... live in a flat? got an early riser? borderline hyperactive? check!

stokey - i dont think its down to delivery/labour either...
DS1 - emcs and he's always been demanding
DS2 - vbac , an angel
DS3 - vbac, even more demanding than DS1

also before aving ds3 i did start a thread asking about labour and personality and munsnet concluded there wasno correlation, DS3 just comfirms it.

Smug parents suck, and IMHO are usually the ones who behind closed doors are reaching for the gin. And that's to stick in their kids bottle.

My two were scarily different as all kids are. My daughter (now 5) was a pain in the behind for me, but lovely for her Aunts. She was breastfed, so I was shattered constantly for a year. The only time she would sleep without having a screaming fit so bad I thought the social services would be called about a kid being battered was when a) Night Garden came on CBeebies (the night they changed it to something else was awful), or b) when my partner played- and don't laugh- Pass The Dutchie by Musical Youth.
My son was great by comparison, but he was in SCBU until he was 4 months old and on so many drugs, hence why he'd nod off without issue. Now he's 3, he tells you he's tired by 7pm and wants to go to bed. But then he's a weird child and I've never known any kids like he is about their beds until they reach 13 and then you have to surgically remove them from it.

Obviously, if you're calm round the baby, then I suppose it makes for a relaxed atmosphere. All that chamomile tea/going to bed at the same time when pregnant/ chilled person when pregnant buff is pure hookum.

YANBU! Total fluke. I say this with a very easy baby sleeping next to me. Nothing I did at all and I will happily admit it!

"But then he's a weird child and I've never known any kids like he is about their beds until they reach 13 and then you have to surgically remove them from it. "

I was like that . Loved going to bed early, but was also an early riser, although I was taught very early on not to wake my parents up before 7am!

I even put myself to bed for naps. Once qhen I was a toddler we were on a beach and my parents looked round to see that I'd taken all the towels and built myself a nest in the blow-up boat and gone to sleep

Why oh why oh why can't DS be like that?!!

Bart my children are like you! Both of them have disappeared upstairs when they were 3 ish only to be discovered fast asleep in bed in the middle of the afternoon! Never had a problem with either of them sleeping. Both of them just seemed to be born with a bedtime routine!

I, on the other hand, didn't sleep through the night until I was 5.

Thank God they didn't take after me!

My BIL and his wife are expecting their first and I've made it quite clear to them that I am on constant standby in case they have a spritely little monkey who'd rather play/cry all night and they need a brea/sleep.

No smugness from me! It's flippin' exhausting with ones that do sleep.

I wish I had seen this thread when my ds was a baby - oldest dc's had been dream babies (but you don't realise that at the time) until you have the difficult baby - it's a complete cure for smug parenting.

Ds is now lovely but grief he was a nightmare, he didn't seem to enjoy being a baby, he didn't want to sleep and he wanted to be up and active. Since he turned 3'ish he has been easier and loves his independence.If anyone is struggling with a baby who is such hard work you have my sympathy but do hold on it will get better.

I found it difficult to get support when I struggled with ds as I did get smug comments. One friend said she fed her baby "only organic food and that obviously helped her placid baby". Ha...she then had a lively non sleeping boy and no amount of organic food settled him!!!

Payback is a biatch, karma wise. I had a fab baby, gr8 sleeper, one tantrum her whole toddler-hood, a tantrum that lasted 10 hellish minutes and was concluded by a tearful nap.

Early school years? Unbelievable. DD was keen to please, compliant and just adorable on the whole. Went to bed whenever she was told, loved everything we did together, we got on like a house on fire. I was clearly an exceptional parent with an abundance of skills. Of course, I ceded, an element of luck must have been involved, but of course it was down to my fabulous parenting too!

Enter the 10th and 11th year of life and something went wrong. Clearly my parenting style changed overnight and I stopped being fab-born-to-it, look what an adorable child I am responsible for, to OMG, Satan's spawn, she devil, spinning headed youngster with no respect, no boundaries and no appreciation of anything we do or anything we buy her.

Where did it all go wrong?

Er, you dumb woman....IT WAS NEVER DOWN TO YOU DOING ANYTHING RIGHT IN THE FIRST PLACE....IT WAS LUCK!!! DUMB LUCK!! And luck always runs out at some point.

If there was an anti smug face, that's what I'd be posting right now :) YANBU, but there are definitely parents out there who really don't help themselves when they think the problem with their kids is ALWAYS down to someone else. Now I know that sometimes it will be someone else's fault, but always? Really?? All parents need to do a reality check every now and again. Sadly, some of them are too busy blaming school for not being challenging enough or other kids for being so bullish, blah, blah, blah.....

I think calm parenting makes a difference, but not in the first few weeks and its got zilch to do with chamomile tea!

It makes sense that a baby/ young child will be more fretful if they don't trust that they'll be cooled down/ warmed up, fed, watered, comforted etc as and when they need it.

In common with many posters, I also had two different kinds of babies but as soon as I trusted my instincts (which were the opposite of Gina Ford's views) then my babies became calm and placid, which was a good base from which to deal with sleeping/ eating issues.

I don't know really. We have 5 DC and all of them were good sleepers and good eaters and still are. I don't know if were lucky 5 times, whether genes play a part in this (though our family is blended so perhaps to a lesser degree with some) or whether we have influenced them by choosing routines and thinks that are suited to our children's personalities. I'm not smug in any way and don't for moment think that babies who aren't so settled are that way due to bad parenting, but I sometimes feel judged because mine sleep and eat well.

Friends have said to me "oh, you must think my kids are so terrible leaving half their food..." or whatever and I think no such thing. It's like a catch 22 because when people rant about their lack of sleep (which is normal and natural as everyone needs to vent) if I nod along with them I feel dishonest but if I don't share their experiences I feel that they will think I am smug.

I don't know enough about other parenting styles to say what influences kids and what works, I only know what woked for me and I know it doesn't mean it would work for all babies and parents.

I think we can all agree that the one difference that calm parenting makes is happier parents. :)

Thing is, if you have a naturally settled child, it will appear that you're using just the right approach because after you e done whatever you're doing, they're calm and settled. Be that gina ford, co sleeping and baby wearing or living in a yurt. I was convinced for a while that ds only liked sleeping one way round in his Moses basket-based on when I accidentally put him the other way round he was more settled. Then dh kindly disproved that theory by putting him back the other way round! If you have a less settled baby you're more likely to try different approaches and be more of the opinion that your baby will be however they'll be. I was convinced that my dedicated approach to weaning a la annabel Karmel was what made dd1 a great eater until I saw the same approach fail dismally with dc2 and 3.

I am bfing cosleeping and carrying in slibg up to 12 hors a day she will sleep anywhere goes through the night and sometimes I forget I have got her shes so quiet in the sling.Shes ten weeks

That's brilliant Molly, enjoy it

YABU
Plenty of evidence to say that if a mother feels stressed in pregnancy that cortisol goes straight through to the baby
Of course your style of parenting makes a difference to your child - no brainer there.

EssentialFattyAcid apart from where is this evidence why on earth would prenatal exposure to maternal cortisol have harmful effects on developing babies?

We die if we don't produce enough cortisol to enable our bodies to respond to stress, it is vital to life. Maturing foetuses start to produce it for themselves very early on in pregnancy. Even if the babies of stressed mothers do get exposed to slightly higher levels of cortisol than the babies of relaxed mothers their own kidneys are no doubt well able to cope with this.

The evidence that the effects of prenatal maternal cortisol exposure lead to changes in the developing brain is minute. But the bigger issue is that even if we observed differences in brain development that would not necessarily lead to differences in behaviour in the babies affected. Population studies don't help us much because inevitably stressed out mothers are likely to parent differently than chilled out mothers and it is very hard to control for this. Even where children are removed from parental care early we cannot know that it is not this early damaged attachment which results in behavioural change, rather than the mother's stress level in pregnancy.

Obviously keeping stress levels low where possible is an end in itself. But the idea that stress in pregnancy will harm the baby is unsupported and frankly implausible nonsense.

PenelopePipPop Yes we all produce cortisol including developing babies and this is normal. Too much cortisol though has negative effects on the hippocampus, causes irritability, insomnia, anxiety, depression, impaired memory, fears, phobias and social withdrawal plus a raft of other long term health problems.

It would seem naiive in the extreme to think that the developing foetus is immune to these effects.

I think my DS2 was more settled because he was ignored more ;)
Well I did have a 2 year old to look after at the same time

Too much cortisol may have the effect of making person more irritable, cause insomnia, etc when it is actually present but that is not the same as creating changes in the baby's brain structure which cause these traits in the long term.

Is there any evidence that raised cortisol in pregnancy definitely causes babies to be unsettled weeks later? If there isn't we shouldn't give mothers of unsettled babies more reasons to feel guilty.

It's not a question of "blaming" mothers if they have been stressed during pregnancy, where did that cOme from?

'Too much cortisol may have the effect of making person more irritable, cause insomnia, etc when it is actually present but that is not the same as creating changes in the baby's brain structure which cause these traits in the long term.'

Those are not really traits. The long term temperamental effect of prenatal cortisol exposure in utero is fearfulness.

UCLA study on effects of prenatal cortisol exposure:
'Results: Elevated maternal cortisol at 30-32 weeks of gestation, but not
earlier in pregnancy, was significantly associated with greater maternal report of infant negative reactivity. Prenatal maternal anxiety and depression additionally predicted infant temperament. The associations between maternal cortisol and maternal depression remained after controlling for postnatal maternal psychological state. Conclusions: These data suggest that prenatal exposure to maternal stress has consequences for the development of infant temperament'

This study suggests that excessive cortisol exposure may in fact alter the structure of the developing brain, particularly in limbic regions such as the amygdala and hippocampus that play a role in the development of affective disorders and are also very susceptible to the effects of cortisol, and that the effects are different among girls and boys. Cortisol easily passes the blood-brain barrier.

These studies are not concerned with average maternal cortisol levels but those associated with conditions such as severe anxiety or depression, (which also affect a developing baby's brain post natally).

I fucking hate it when people say you are smug when you mention your baby sleeps through.

Dd has slept through from 8 weeks (7.30 - 7) and I said I was very happy about it as I had a good sleep (having still not slept well for worry/anxiety for people who don't know)

I was told I was smug and it was a 'long time to go without food.'

?!

All my friends could talk about their babies sleeping habits but I couldn't without being made to feel smug, or that I couldn't possibly know what it was really like, as of I didn't even count.

I do think parenting has a lot to do with it as they get older. My cousin wakes her 18 month old for ANY visitors, actually wakes her. She also doesn't have a bedtime. She wonders why she is still awake at 11pm and screaming. My other cousin ha her for 2 nights and did a 8pm bedtime routine and she slept. You have to adapt for each individual baby

Note that does not apply to newborns obv but older