To get wound up about MN and sleep advice

[LittleMilla]

I love MN and will often come on to get advice...can normally count on it for sensible pointers for everything except for sleep.

AIBU to wonder why noone on MN seems to want their children to sleep through the night? I no of noone in RL who co-sleeps - but everyone on MN seems to? And people seem to think it's entorely normal for a 8 month old baby to wake repeatedly through the night.

I just don't get it. So much valuable advice...yet everyone on here seems to go madly soft when it comes to sleep.

Am I the only one?

One thing I told my ds was, if he does wake up or can't sleep, then that's fine but I expect him to stay in bed as his body will still be resting. It seemed to help him.

Nrft, although I bet its kicked off! I agree to some extent Op, in that the culture on here is almost agressively " its Normal" and you shouldn't even want your baby to sleep.
I had a non sleeper, but I was desperate to get him out of my bed, into his cot, and sleeping thru (he did by one). While it certainly wasn't helpful when family members said " most babies" are sleeping thru at six months, I couldn't have handled more than a year of it.
I never had Mn , so at the time, I stopped feeding in the night at around six months, when I started weaning. I think on mn people tend to expect to be doing night feeds way longer than that. I didn't totally feed on demand, I did have a three hourly routine in the day, and tbh, that was the best thing I could have done, because he got a full belly at his last feed, and I think it helped him go thru. Of course, some would think that not feeding 24/7 once they are over the newborn stage newbie is akin to child abuse, so I won't mention the ( very) controlled crying I did at ten months..

My DC1 slept through from 7 weeks. DC2 was still waking several times a night at 2 1/2 years. We didn't do anything different, they were just different children.

DC3 and DC4 I can't even remember (they are in their 20s). DC5 co-slept from birth and I have no idea how old she was when she slept through. After the first month or so she just helped herself to a BF when she woke, and didn't disturb me at all. She certainly never cried.

IfNot

Yes, that's what I was getting at. I think there are some people who aren't even aware it's possible to try and get a baby into a routine from early on - judging by some of the advice I've read on here.

Also, Lord knows how I'd have coped if the advice in my day had been to keep the baby in the room with you for 6 months (as it is now)

LaGuardia - have been sitting on my first ever but I think you deserve it What a ridiculous post.

Well my eight month old is a shit sleeper. So I feel exhausted and emotional quite regularly. It's really helpful to know it's because I'm lazy, not willing to tackle it, and that I'm not trying hard enough.
There's some really irritating smug posters on this thread. I guess you think a strict routine and "trying harder" would have stopped him having such disrupted sleep when he got six teeth through in the space of two weeks?
I can't think of many other aspects of parenting where if people were struggling they'd be told that they're not trying hard enough.
So you're fortunate enough to have a good sleeper, well congratuwellfuckingdone.

Elle

No, I understand. Mine all went tits up with teething, colds, etc. It's horrible, and it went on and on until I did CC

My son is 17 months old and we still cosleep/breast feed/wake in the night - what a lazy parent I must be!

Too the smug posters. I am even better than you because through good breeding I got the best results, sleeping though by 8 weeks with no interventions at all from us.

then they started waking up when they were older

--then came the non sleeper who we love anyway even though he just does not need sleep, but he is so cute>

But it's not laziness! Whatever you choose to do has to work for you, and, as a lone parent, being totally shattered all the time just didn't work for me. I am an anxious person, and had insomnia when ds was tiny, as in, I found it hard to sleep between feeds, so co sleeping, although I did feed him in bed and fall asleep, could never be a long term solution for me.
If people are genuinely OK with broken nights, and co sleeping for years, then great, I don't care-why would i?!
FWIW, ds is nearly 8, and if he has a bad dream, or is ill, he is in my bed, and that's OK, but for me, the bedtime routine, the bath, the set bedtime and the not feeding in the night (or really interacting when he woke in the night, other than to say "shh-it's sleep time" helped.
I tried cc at six months, and couldnt do it, as I found it too upsetting, but at ten months was totally different; ds knew I was there, and I took the advice of a lovely HV who told me not to go past 10 minutes. He never actually cried as long as that in the end, and I felt like, after a couple of days of doing it, he was relieved to find that he could fall asleep with me not holding him. I was pottering about outside his room saying "shh, go to sleep" a little bit, so not being totally absent, but just "looks, it's night time, and I am not going to pick you up, so go to sleep!"
Sure, some children have real problems with sleeping, and sometimes people can have two that sleep, and one that doesn't, and some of it is luck, but believe me, I had a very wilful and stubborn night owl, and certain methods did help.
He sleeps like a little log now. I could vacuum round him right now, and he wouldn't notice!
My point is, that it's OK to not just accept years of bad sleep, and it's OK to try (and fail sometimes) tried and tested methods to help them learn to sleep.

Megrim...If you didn't breastfeed then your babies probably did sleep better. Bfed babies tend to sleep more lightly than ff ones. so you can't use your experience of friends babies and extrapolate it to how bf babies sleep...They are just different. Advantages and disadvantages to both but just different things!

*ff babies not friends babies!

Yanbu. The op didn't say an 8 month old should sleeping through, but perhaps not waking repeatedly which I agree with. And why shouldn't an 8 month old that eats well during the day and is in general good health not be expected to sleep through most nights? I don't know any co sleepers and most of my friends babies were mostly sleeping through at this age. Mumsnet advice is sometimes soft. Also the response to early waking is usually that you are lucky if your child wakes at five if they went to bed at seven or eight. How is this lucky?

I have a great eater and a lousy sleeper. I worked and tried and read and struggled with sleep. Eating was easy because SHE was easy about food.

I don't tell all my friends, relatives and strangers on the internet that I know everything about picky eaters because I know NOTHING about picky eaters. I don't have one. I do know a lot about sleep because of DD who didn't sleep until she was 2. The idea that I didn't want her to sleep... I would have done anything, except CIO, to get her to sleep. She just didn't need that much sleep.

Now, at 3, she is the best sleeper of all my 'baby' friends' kids. All the people who told me to FF, put her in a different room at a few weeks old and CIO have worse sleepers than me. I could be smug and say that my way was magical and it was all my hard work and that I know better than them. I could, but why when next week their kids might sleep and mine might not.

Thanks slightly - that is exactly the sentiment I was trying to get across.

I've received helpful advice on faddy eating, tantrums etc. but bugger all on sleep. Whilst I agree that there's a certain amount of nature vs nurture. The latter does play a part and I've rarely got many helpful pointers.

And my expectations (and those of most of my rl friends) of what babies and children ought to do seem to vary wildly when compared to mn.

I would never accuse anyone with a shit sleeper of being lazy. But I too take offence to people saying I'm lucky if my children do sleep through. Every time ds2 gets derailed by teeth and illness we wait until he's better and DH and I work together to get him sleeping through again.

My original post was genuine. I've come on here to look for any pointers during these stages and simply been met with "he should be allowed to be awake at that age" or "co sleep". Neither of which I'm happy with.

But it is PARTLY down to luck that your work works. Others can do the same or more and it won't make a difference. It not hard to see that surely?

My main luck is having a DH who is so strong willed that he is willing to keep on going when I'm ready to crack and feed them!

Reading that back it sounds harsh - it's not. We just agree that until 'x'am he'll go in to settle them.

Of my two children I'd say that ds2 is far more 'textbook' and had he not been so ill he would've slept through without much help much earlier. So I will concede that by nature I've been lucky with him. We've still had plenty of long periods of being awake at stupid o'clock, mind!

Ds1 however is not a natural sleeper.

Yep- sounds harsh.

Why is his own father going to comfort a baby "harsh"?

There's a bit of luck involved as to how much sleep a child needs, but I also think that people who can cope with a bit of crying/grizzling/waiting a few mins before feeding will find their children more likely to sleep eventually. Also those who find the time and energy to teach self settling, and encourage sleep in the child's own cot often find things easier in the end. It is certainly not lazy to not do these things as it is exhausting and hard to do so, but those who don't often find crap sleeping goes on well into toddlerhood. I am not being smug, I am lucky that my children need quite a bit of sleep but so do I, so I helped them learn. My children often wake up with teeth pain, colds etc but when this is over we go back to normal routines. I fear that I will have my throat jumped down but the above techniques work whether people like doing them or not, even with an eight month old!

Which bit was harsh? The OPs husband is comforting the baby, but not with milk as he has slept through without it before right? Right approach IMO.

Haven't read the whole thread but YANBU.

Look, if you have the kind of days where you CAN be knackered from multiple wakings, co-sleeping with an octopus, then knock yourself out.
If you can't function on snatched minutes of sleep here and there and you find your mental health is suffering, then do something about it.

My friends who followed the 'never ever let your baby whimper' mantra have 4 and 5 year olds up and down half the night and they are knackered, their jobs are suffering, their marriages are suffering and their health is suffering.

Babies rarely magically start sleeping for 10-12 hours without some kind of parental nudge.

I tried the whole cosleeping, BFing to sleep gig for as long as I could before I had a breakdown and ended up in hospital with PND. It had got to the point where I was so fucking exhausted and wired that I couldn't sleep.

i have three children one is a great sleeper one who was almost as good and one who does not flipping sleep (who is the youngest 13 months) he has slept in my bed occasionally but not all night usually just for an hour or two after four am ive dozed next to him for a bit he sleeps on top of the duvet with his own blanket on top (or just my dressing gown) we have only ever done it when we are desperate or freezing he always falls asleep with me on the sofa then gets transferred to bed he has not gone to his cot awake since he was ill and ended up in hospital my other son was like this right till he had a bed he has many many bad sleeping habits but he will sleep sometimes and thats all i can expect really

I'm not sure the "three types of babies" thing really works. There are lots of types of babies. I think TulipOHare has it right about being long periods of sleep being a developmental stage, like walking or talking - and likewise probably related to all sorts of individual things, physiological and cognitive and developmental, like the baby's muscle tone, temperament and digestive motility (yes, there is a huge normal range in the time it takes for the gut to empty, whether in babies or adults - hence why the frequency of baby (or adult!) pooing is so wide!) Despite generalised HV-style folk wisdom, some babies do need a feed during the night longe than others do - perhaps their gut simply empties quicker. It's well known that bf babies' guts empty quicker compared to ff babies, so they tend to wake more often.

OP are you sure most of the difference isn't just in knowing people who mostly ff rather than bf? The whole way you practice so-called "sleep hygiene" is different if you are EBF or extended BFing. Nearly everyone I know breastfeeds and cosleeps, so clearly it depends on your circle. Most mothers and fathers I know are mid-late thirties or early forties, work (normally flexibly), do attachment parenting, don't wean until 6mo, share childcare equally between mum and dad, and talk endlessly about how their baby doesn't sleep through the night. It's definitely not thought of as normal for an 8mo to "sleep through".

My DD wasn't a "bad sleeper". She slept great: she just didn't sleep for a long period without waking up for a quick feed and resettling, which is a very different thing an totally normal, physiologically, for a breastfed 8mo. FWIW she had/has an excellent "routine", and will sleep for a 12hr block overnight 8-8 like clockwork - but until 12m she also woke up every 3hrs for a feed, from birth and also like clockwork. She wasn't crying or distressed, just a bit hungry, and would feed back to sleep happily. I'm not sure what I could have done to make her not need those feeds! On turning 1 she has just suddenly started sleeping for periods of 8hrs+ without waking. I think I would have caused myself a lot of fuss and heartache trying to force her to change something that she was going to outgrow naturally anyway. (Leaving DD to cry even for a short period produced meltdown - she is not one of those babies who will grizzle then stop. She works herself up into hysterics. CC or CIO would not have worked.) DD was also a baby who did not sleep much in the day - from about 2months you could get at most two 30-min naps out of her. Nothing kept her asleep longer. But she is probably not temperamentally a sleepy baby - she has always been very lively: strong muscle tone from birth (trying to lift head right from birth), loads of energy, sat and walked early, beady eyes following everything - she was just a bit hyper during the day and not keen on sleeping. That's just how she is. I couldn't have made her nap more, or stop waking every 3hrs in the night to eat, any more than it was somehow some achievement of mine that she had unusually strong neck muscles at birth. That's how she came!

Anyway, why is there this ingrained cultural assumption that not "sleeping through" without waking is "poor" or "bad" sleeping? As others on the thread have pointed out, tiny babies are designed to wake up every few hours to feed and to wake you up. This is so they don't die. Routines, sleep training and "sleep hygiene" are ways of managing and overriding this to make it fit our desires and lives. Not many people on the thread have mentioned SIDS, but it's worth saying again: the main risk period for SIDS is up until 6 months (but it's not risk-free after), hence the recommendation for babies not to sleep alone until then (and 8mo is not that much older than 6mo). And waking frequently in the night is a physiological protection for the baby; it's known to be a risk factor for SIDS for a baby to sleep too long without arousal out of a deep sleep state. In that context, "good" sleeping looks very different: it isn't a flaw in the baby that it wakes in the night; it's what it is meant to do, and different babies grow out of that physiological stage at different times and rates. Ultimately yes I was tired, but I was actually quite reassured that my DD woke regularly: it meant that she was doing what healthy babies routinely do.

My good sleeper went to pot when we introduced solid food.