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?!

Lambsie..I am literally feeling your pain.

[shudder] so I am I hadn't looked at it like that before!

I do get when other parents talk about how hard they found the first few months before their kids started sleeping through and wonder how I manageable be so unlucky with 2 out of 3. Funnily enough my adhd and asd Ds1 has always been my best sleeper... Only a year of sleepless nights with him!

insanity I thought I was going to win with the longest number of years disturbed sleep, but I will have to say 'snap' to your 19 years . DD also severely disabled. I have slept next to a baby monitor for 19 years and been in and out of bed seeing to her needs. Even though we get 18 nights respite a year, I still wake up in the night when she is away - my body is now conditioned to it.

Including pregnancies, just past 6 years though the last few months are much improved and mostly good.

I know we could make minor changes which may or may not bring bedtime earlier but I don't have the strength to implement them. So worn out.

I particularly hate when people exclaim " oh, I could never cope". I reply "I'm not".

There's a bit of me that resents the lack of offers of help from grandparents who live very close by and have no reason to not offer help except they don't want to.

Going on for 8 years now. My eldest wakes up twice a night. We don't have to get up, it's just that she wakes me up and then I need a wee. I feel about 20 years older since I had her. I always wash but I rarely looked kempt in the morning.

We had years! I know more people who've had years than those who've had only a few months with a baby. I still get up in the night 1/2 times a week to someone.

Gosh I needed to read this thread tonight. I am a LP and coming into month 17 of not having a full night sleep and no lie ins. I am so glad I'm not alone (misery loves company). Couple that with the stress of becoming a LP to a baby I'm surprised I'm still standing.

it is really starting to affect my ability to function though and today for the first time I forgot to strap dd in after putting her in her carseat !!! I have the brain of a 98 year old.

Wow! I'm shocked by how many people are silently suffering because their DC are poor sleepers!

I have three DC, but only DS1 was a poor sleeper, and it only lasted a few years, but I remember the hell. I see I've been really lucky with my younger 2 DC. Or maybe I just learned to be totally unresponsive to anything at all once I'm asleep

This thread is so soul destroying! I keep trying to convince myself that I just need to change my attitude. Maybe if I repeat often enough - sleep is for wimps, dontcha think I'm hard enough? No? Doesn't work, dammit...

Oh and to the very helpful - just teach them... Oh, why didn't I think of that?

[walks away muttering unreasonably, that's what five years of no kip does]

The worst thing is how grumpy it makes me with my children and husband. And shit at my job.

Into my 10th year....

Definitely contributes to my depression. DS wakes 4.30 to 5.30am most days, especially at half term it seems. I'm trying to go to bed earlier but eldest child doesn't go to bed to 9pmish so I tend to join her. I do have early waking tendencies too but if I wake early and tip toe past DS's room to go downstairs he wakes so instead I lie angrily in my bed and DH telling me to get up as Im disturbing him.

5 years here and counting...

when mine were little my HV told me that you do not catch up on your sleep till your youngest child is 5 years old.
She was right, both for me and for many friends.

BUT
One thing that parents nowadays have to cope with is the surfeit of electronics in bedrooms.

Personally we do not have ANY electronics in bedrooms.
No TVs or consoles or computers
all laptops are in the dining room over night.
if phones are in use too late I confiscate them (kids are teenagers)

it makes bedrooms places to read or sleep

17 years. Disabled dd and two other children with ASDs.

I'm so sleep deprived it is contributing directly to depression and in the early hours of most mornings me considering quitting my phd in the final few months. I simply cannot work because I am so tired. Now into the fourth year of what I would consider true sleep deprivation with a window of about 2months when baby dd was a phenomenal sleeper.

I have two DC, older with a disability which makes her prone to waking at night. DH usually ends up cosleeping with her in our bed and I end up sleeping with baby in her room. I'm so exhausted I usually feel sick by 6pm and cry most days through exhaustion. I'm not a nice mum or a good mum most of the time and rely on caffeine and sugar which in turn are impacting on my health.

Baby dc throws up when she gets upset, hence why she cosleeps.

10 years until ds was medicated. Up until then, he slept really badly as a baby but if he was asleep you could guarantee his twin sister would be awake.

As he got older it could be 1/2am before he would drop off and his sister had night terrors between age 3/6 so that was fun too.

I love my sleep.

Yeh TalkinPeace my DS is five this month he will sleep beyond 5am, but my experience with HV makes me think she is talking rubbish

My dc have never had electronics in bedrooms. We Used black out blinds. Nightlights etc.
Nothing worked.
Should say ds1 (10) is now fine but ds2(5) took up where he left off!
I am amazed I made it though ds1s babyhood tbh.
He woke - on average - at least 5 times a night. When ill or teething he could wake every 40 mins throughout the night and take 20 mins to settle again.
no more babies for me

There are threads I wrote when DD was much younger. I used to sob trying to get her to sleep, she was a nightmare. She was six when she started sleeping properly.

When she was six, my second child arrived. I thought... lets make this easier than last time.

My son is nearly three. He has slept through the night nine times. Not in a row. Just nine here-and-there nights in nearly three years. He regularly wakes at 12:00. some nights at he's awake at three, and then he is up. Sometimes, if I am lucky, its four/five in the morning.

He's better if he comes into our bed. We regularly wake up and just find him sitting in the middle of us in bed, wide awake. DH and I have forgotten what sleep is!

Nearly 8 years here and still ongoing.

Worst was DC1 - intractable. Up 8 times a night every night for years and years, and didn't sleep through until reception age. HVs, doctors, sleep clinic the works. Still highly strung, nervous, a huge worrier.

DC2 was not nearly as bad but still didn't sleep through the night for several years.

By the time DC3 arrived, we'd stopped thinking things should be any other way.

I am a shadow of the person I used to be. I have no idea how I hold down a job.

In terms of "child induced lack of sleep" the worst time I had was with no2 son, he was 2 years old before he slept for longer than two hours, and the first time he did, I woke up, realised it was actually 6am, and ran across the room to grab him from the cot, convinced something terrible had happened to him in the night [convinced]
That said, the last time I went to bed when I was tired, fell quietly to sleep, slept til I was done, undisturbed, and woke refreshed was sometime round about the summer of 1986, so really, children or not, various "stuff" has interfered with my sleep.
I think that I have just come to accept being either tired, very tired, or totally and utterly knackered as normal, and can actually go three days without sleep now - came in handy when I worked 17 hour double shifts including an overnight though!
If someone told you beforehand just how much sleep you would lose through your job/children/physical or mental health in your life, you would swear that a person just Could Not Cope, but when it does happen, you just get on with it and get through, and it's only afterwards, looking back, that you realise quite what it was you went through.
It will pass btw, 6, 4 and 2 are still pretty young. My three youngest have the same spacing, and now they are 11, 9, and 7, they are much more self sufficient and better behaved mostly so that they don't need me right there all the time and I can have a lie down, or a rest, or even a nap, if I must, without Armageddon breaking out. There is hope there, honestly, it might just seem a long, long way off right now Hang in there driven "This too shall pass" as they say.

DS is a fantastic sleeper. DD still gets up and gets into my bed EVERY SINGLE NIGHT at about 2am. EVERY EFFING NIGHT she wakes me up. She can get herself off to sleep in seconds when she goes to bed in the evening, but stay there? Not a chance!

She's nearly 8 for god's sake, and there is no end in sight. So years of sleep deprivation is very much a reality for me (I make up for it at my desk after lunch when I can scarcely keep my eyes open, let alone my brain ticking round).

8.5 years here. And the thing that drives me mad, more mad than loss of sleep, is people who say "oh I couldn't cope with that, I love my sleep, need my 8 hours". Whereas me, hey I love having no sleep, wouldn't want it any other way! And what do they mean by saying they couldn't cope? Would they actually have their child taken into care? Or would they simply not have the problem in the first place because they're a better parent than me?

Dd slept 10pm to 7am from about twelve weeks. The large doses of phenobarbitone we were shovelling into her at 10pm probably helped.

DS was fucking hard work for the first year - I'd been nervous about a newborn I wasn't allowed to drug and I was right - but co sleeping and him being a pro at breastfeeding lying down helped.

He hit one, started sleeping through, and barring illness, he still does - he'll be 4 in April. He's recently gone from waking at 7 to 6.30 but we just let him come in with us and we doze for half an hour whilst he tells me which are his favourite engines that week.

I know we are really really lucky. It's why we daren't have any more children frankly. I need sleep and I would be crazed if I was regularly woken in the night.

Ah, sorry Jolly, that was badly timed!

To clarify - I was quite ill last year and am still really tired pretty much constantly. It would wipe me out even more if I wasn't getting a solid block of sleep. Naturally if that was the wont of my small people, I would just get on and cope with it, and DH would step up too, he's great when they're ill and wake up. I'm just lucky, that I don't have to deal with it. And no, not a better parent, just how it's worked out. I didn't 'do' anything to make them sleepers, they just are.