to think very few people have YEARS of sleep-deprivation with kids?

[drivenfromdistraction]

I have 3 kids, aged 6, 4 and 2. The middle one is a fantastic sleeper (since the age of two, was dreadful before that) - shuts his eyes at 6.30pm and opens them again at 6.30 am. If he was my only child, I would be very smug and think I'd done this with my fab routines.

The other two - different story. Youngest still wakes at night 4 or 5 nights a week and needs resettling, which takes an hour or more and leaves me wide awake. Eldest has always been an early waker (5am-ish) and now is struggling to get to sleep, and waking in the night with 'bad dreams' two or three nights a week and then taking hours to get back to sleep.

For seven years, I have almost never had an uninterrupted night. This is unusual, isn't it? Other people don't seem to be sleep-deprived like this. I have just taken the older two to school for the first day after half-term, all the other parents were making comments like 'Oh, it's hard to get up early again after the break, isn't it?' Wtf? I have been up before 6 every day of half-term as usual (either the eldest or the youngest awake and usually both) plus being woken in the night.

Are there other parents like me out there or am I alone?!

fanjo yes it is doubly offensive isn't it. It simultaneously says the poster can't be arsed to consider the full range of issues by including those diagnosed with specific problems and that anyone without a specific diagnosis brought all their problems on themselves....

Oh well, it is a human trait to split things into nice simple boxes to help with dealing with the overwhelming complexity of the world...

Most people can manage slightly more than 2 though....

yes. And please noone be upset by a poster who would actually post "at least I will get a sleep tonight". That should invalidate anything upsetting they have said on this thread.

Some children have contributing factors that make a solid night sleep difficult.

However, for those with none, I think its is mostly habitual. I really think it would help parents if they were made aware that unless a child either naturally sleeps through or is trained to do so at a very young age, then there is a high possibility that you will have years of disrupted sleep.

I think the whole attitude around co sleeping and baby led sleeping has resulted in huge sleep issues that are clearly damaging for mothers (and fathers) in the long term.
Its almost like its seen as normal to be sleep deprived for years when it really shouldn't be.

Just sending understanding to all those going through this now. I had 5 years without a full night's sleep. Ds was fairly straightforward - broken sleep for the first few months, then read up frantically, became expert in healthy sleep patterns, did controlled crying (well actually cry it out, eventually - in desperation! - but it worked really, really well) so at about 10/11 months he started to sleep through ... which was exactly when I fell pregnant again, with associated pg insomnia (which I had also had 1st time round).

When dd arrived, I was a bit smug about sleep to start off with and then - well, it turned out all my expertise in setting up healthy sleep routines a) didn't work so well with her, b) were impossible to implement with a slightly older child who was being woken up and unsettleable by the crying, and c) I didn't have the strength to stick with anyway because I was, by this point, so exhausted.

Eventually she just moved in with me, dp moved into the spare room, and so it stayed until 6 months into primary school when she finally started sleeping through.

I will never take sleep for granted again.

By the way my aunt has 5 kids and when I asked her how she coped, she said 'well, they were all good sleepers - I would have stopped at the first poor one'.

mindosa do you have a reference to a trial that shows that co-sleeping is correlated to poor sleep later on?

we will move onto causality once actually correlation is shown...which I am not aware it has been.

What even makes you think the two things would be connected?

or is it just a personal opinion

Yes I do - look up BMJ online ...... fgs

You might refer to the 'I thinks' in my post.

Come on IceBeing. The thread is about whether its normal not to sleep for years.

Its not normal and as I said some children have contributing factors that make a solid night sleep difficult, but for those who don't I do think that a lack of sleep training at an early age has an impact.

the amount of posters who refer to taking children into their beds, settling them for an hour etc is phenomenal. Yet they don't seem to see how this might make the issue worse.

I'm not remotely offended by anything that Grasshopper has posted. I can smile at the irony and am happy that the posts will stand to let others read and draw their own conclusions.

I find it offensive that parents are expected to adopt a one size fits all approach to their children, SN or not. Surely that's one of the first things a parent learns - that what works for one child doesn't necessarily work for another

DS1 has been a terrible sleeper since birth, and has only moved properly into his own bed very recently at nearly 3.5.

If anyone has a middle-of-the-night waked and is interested, we are having excellent results by giving him a banana 30 mins before bedtime. Like, seriously good results - in the couple of weeks since we started doing it religiously he has gone from waking every night, often for hours at a time, to sleeping 7.30-6.30 without getting up at all.

Hope I've not jinxed it now...

(Baby still wakes up 4-5 times a night though, so I'm not getting any sleep yet)

Now that's the kind of magic tip I like the sound of, Somewhat!

How long before the banana does your DS have his dinner? Mine have it at about 5pm, and bedtime is about 7pm. Maybe I will try DD on a banana at 6.30... Unfortunately, my DS1 loathes them.

Bugger, no bananas in the house. I am going to ring DH and tell him to buy some on the way home. He will think I am bonkers...

I have a night waker who eats 2 bananas before bedtime. Maybe she needs 3...

I do think genetics play apart - DH is terrible sleeper and come from a family of sleep walkers - this is despite good bedtime routines his entire life - I'm not really surprised despite sleep training efforts our DC are similar and we had years of disrupted sleep.

Well - warm milk is supposed to help promote sleep - my parents did that bed time for us as does lettuce - wild related plant is what is used in natural sleeping pills.

Lavender spray in room or on pillows supposed to promote calm, reduce anxiety and help promote sleep - used it with nine no idea if if worked.

Light alarm clocks and black out blinds did help with DD1 as toddler in getting her to sleep in - they broke it and expensive so we didn't replace as didn't help with other two.

Fanjo :o

It's completely unscientific and I didn't read about it in the Daily Mail, oh no

youngasshopper, you may be an unparalleled expert in child sleep problems, and I bow to your 30 years of experience in asthma studies, but you could really work on your 'people skills' - eg - the term 'professionally offended' is, on the whole, used by idiots.

And some people are just crap at empathy and seeing things outside of their itty-bitty-teeny-weeny box.

Actually, grasshopper, my children are generally unproblematic. And although I was very tired when they didn't sleep, I didn't really see it as a problem, just as a fairly typical albeit annoying behaviour that they would grow out of, like not being able to sleep or lack of bladder control. And they did grow out of it.

and some like goading on a thread.

Aha!
Young grasshopper is, in fact, Katie Hopkins!
Now her posts make sense!
not

Mindosa - Your 'I thinks' are then followed by statements that sound like such incontrovertible truths there is no wonder posters are asking for the evidence you have based your shit opinions on.

Fwiw - I think there is nothing else anybody (not even the French, not to mention sleep expert young) could tell me about promoting healthy sleep routines and there is nothing else I could try (apart from sleeping pills and earplugs for me).

I just happen to have spawned three non sleeping night devils in the space of four years.

younggrasshopper has been dealt with by MNHQ. She was a previously banned poster.