Why aren't parents more honest about baby days?

[ZombieVampireHedgehog]

I responded to a thread of a Mum struggling, I wondered why there's this, oh best pretend I'm Super Mum. Wouldn't we help more parents if we were honest that at times it's hard work. Some really struggled through baby days and didn't really enjoy it.

I don't think it makes us bad admitting our most trying parenting moments. Or the fact having a baby latched to your boobs 22/24 hours of the day is tiring. BF is hard work, as I guess cloth nappies must be.

We won't be sent to the guillotine. We could actually help.

I know super Mums exist, I thrived more as a parent when they were older. Where these super Mums on SM are mostly about youngest DC, the older ones pretty much do their own thing.

From tummy time to those daft black and white books, meant to turn your DC into Einstein. So many fads. Ooh organic jars and now it's baby led weaning. I admit I did the Annabelle C recipes which DC hated. It's all about textures

Devilish I have some relatives who did the my baby will never cry thing. Result = two year old who still feeds through the night, can't settle herself to sleep for naps/bedtime and massive sleep deprivation for everyone.

Meanwhile, we decided to do the 'pause' thing, where you observe the baby for 10-15 secs when they stir from sleeping - this wasn't difficult as I had PND so wasn't sleeping anyway. Result = at least half the time my baby would simply turn her head the other way and carry on sleeping. She is also good at the theatrical one loud cry just to 'let you know I've turned over'. So, relatives would have been teaching her to wake up (and feed) at all of those moments.

It may have helped that I'd been looking after a friend's baby twins before I had my DD. I quickly learnt that the world didn't come to an end if a twin started crying and I couldn't get to them straight away because I was changing the other twin's nappy etc.

Devilish I respectfully disagree. It's completely possible to comfort your child whenever they need it without having a breakdown. If you choose to do it a different way, wonderful, but suggesting responsive parenting is cue for a breakdown isn't fair or true.

Riding Just because you wouldn't feed through the night doesn;t mean other people are failing because they do. I have a perfectly happy, healthy 20 month old who still feeds to sleep and feeds in the night. He's hitting his milestones, he can cope with upsets as well as any of his peers, where's the issue?

If it possible peapod I’ve never managed it. Sometimes you just need to get out of the door to get to an appointment/take an older child to nursery. Sometimes I need to eat/cook for the toddler. Sometimes I’m changing the toddler’s nappy and the baby starts crying. Occasionally they both start screaming at me at the same time.

My one year old still cries the moment she is put down. I have to cook dinner, look after other dc, go to the loo etc with the constant sound of crying. I was told younger kids just fit in and get on with it. Bollocks do they! She still cries and feeds throughout the night. Last night i got 2 hours unbroken sleep and my nipple feels like it's been sandblasted.

My ninja like reflex response to my babies crying wasn't a guarantee to stop them crying, I was just holding them 100% of the time they were crying and there were times when it drove me batshit crazy. Thank god the baby stage is the shortest.

You know what? You've just got to do what's right for you as a mother. Get through it as best you can. It is the steepest learning curve ever... fuck it's a slog. I adore my kids. We all adore our kids. But it's so hard at times. So brain achingly, heart sinkingly tough.

I turn away when I see mums with newborns in slings. Can't look. Won't look. I've got PTSD.
Just one look at a 4 month old and bone drenching exhaustion sets in.

Everyone's experience is different. I never had an easy baby. All I know is what I experienced with my 3 and it was so incredibly tough at times.

There is no magic bullet. A shit sleeper is a shit sleeper. A fussy eater is a fussy eater. As a parent, you're just going in blind half the time. If we didn't have unconditional love to see us through, we'd be dust.

PeapodBurgundy Tue 28-Nov-17 09:04:02
"Devilish I respectfully disagree. It's completely possible to comfort your child whenever they need it without having a breakdown."

How many children did you have, Peapod? If more than one, did you have a miracle toddler/older child who never threw up, never tried to do something dangerous, never went into complete meltdown, and never needed to get anywhere on time just as your younger child wanted comforting?

I think I'm as cuddly and responsive as any mother can well be, but I can recall plenty of time when I have had to prioritise.

Not least because my 3yo was seriously jealous and needed reassurance that she was still as important. The positive outcome of this is that little brother is still here with all his bones unbroken. It's a result.

I missed a lot of the proper newborn stage. I took terribly ill when DD was 8 weeks old, and spent 3 weeks in high dependency. We moved in with my mum for 12 weeks after I got out so she could help while I recovered, so my mum did most of the proper newborn stuff.

DD started sleeping through the night when I got taken into hospital. A sold 12 or 13 hours every single night, she was like a dream. Always smiley and happy, fed brilliantly, rarely cried.

She's 2.5 now and by god she is hard work! Never stops talking or singing, ever. She's at it from the minute she opens her eyes in the morning. She has an amazing relationship with my mum now, probably due to her start in life and the fact my mum helps out with childcare while DP and I work.

So yeah I found the newborn stage easy, more than likely because I didn't really do much after she turned 8 weeks! I'm finding toddler hood the hardest, so far anyway!

I agree wholeheartedly OP. I struggled with sleep deprivation a LOT with DS and would go to baby group after baby group trying to find mums to talk to about it and I rarely found anyone that admitted they also didn't get much sleep and were struggling. It really affected me especially after best friend had a baby who slept through after 4 weeks.

I have DD now too who is a similarly bad sleeper so I'm going through it again but have given up finding mums in a similar position locally. Even said best friend has also had a second child who will not sleep at all (bad reflux) and she rarely mentions it. If I message her asking how she's getting on she ignores the sleep side of things. I know from our husbands talking that she's struggling with so little sleep. I just don't get it.

Heather irl i don't really mention the non sleeping of my kids because it's tedious to everyone (not that i'm saying you are tedious - just people only really care about nice things and their own shit). I will occasionally say i'm a bit tired as only got 2 hours sleep and get a bit of a sympathetic nod, but other than that no one really cares. Also i feel if i talk about it too much then it becomes my whole life. If i need to moan i come on here and rant a bit.

Why aren't parents more honest about baby days?

Because if I was I would be told I was lying etc ergo I don't talk about it.

It is pretty much socially unacceptable to say you find parenting easy so I don't say anything

Peapod it's fine if you still want to be feeding your 20 month old during the night. I knew before I had DD that sleep deprivation is strongly linked to depression for me and that we needed her to sleep through as soon as possible, else we wouldn't cope as a family. She first slept through six hours every night at six weeks and increased from then on (last dream feed was at five months when she was doing 12 hours a night). Friend who is a maternity nurse said this is normal if you don't encourage them to wake up all the time.

I still found having a baby incredibly difficult - but once I had the confidence to ignore the pressure I was under from relative's family to do attachment parenting things improved dramatically. Their choice to parent their way but they've made life very hard for themselves having a two+ who still feeds at night (the Mum works shifts so the Dad is faffing around with bottles of expressed milk some nights), is incredibly skinny and poor eater as well as being very clingy. I don't talk to them about it because I don't want to look smug, but it was glaringly obvious when I took DD to stay with them.

I have a 3 year old and a 7 month old, both poor sleepers but I love the baby stage. On maternity leave I don’t need to use my brain too much so can cope with being tired.

What is frustrating is I know a couple of people who are like riding who appear to believe that babies sleep well because of superior parenting and babies who sleep badly is because of poor choices. Lots of parents of poor sleepers co sleep and continue to breastfeed because it’s the only way they’ll get some bloody rest.

Whether you’re attachment parenting, Gina fording or somewhere Inbetween i reckon everyone is doing their best but knowing that people reckon you’ve made your own life hard on purpose is shit. I think whether you’ve got a good sleeper or not is mostly down the the baby- not parenting.

Peapod - if someone chooses to not allow their baby to cry (which is a strange choice of words anyway - even babies are allowed to be unhappy or in pain) then that’s up to them. I do however think they are putting a lot of pressure on themselves as if they have a baby who cries a lot (some do - I was lucky enough not to have criers but some of my friends babies cried an awful lot) they are potentially going to feel failures - when actually they just have a baby who cries a lot.

Note I am not criticising any style of parenting I am saying that the parents are putting enormous pressure on themselves and their baby if a baby crying is seen as a failure. Sometimes a baby cries whatever you do. If the baby isn’t ‘allowed’ to cry then you really are putting your own mental health in the lap of the gods.

That doesn’t mean I think you should leave a baby to cry (the length of time I left mine was different for each as they had different ways to settle themselves) I’m just saying start with realistic expectations. Sometimes a baby will cry even when attached all day to you. Doesn’t mean you have done anything wrong.

It's a mixture of the baby and the parenting. Some babies (especially with SN) will be very poor sleepers - I have a friend whose daughter didn't sleep through until five, who turned out to be autistic.

I did everything I'd read about to encourage DD to sleep through - didn't expect it to work until four-six months though, I was lucky it happened earlier. (I have never read Gina Ford - thought she was frowned upon in parenting circles?!) The HV on Woman's Hour a few weeks back said the majority of babies were capable of sleeping through by four-six months but many parents didn't facilitate that. This chimes with my maternity nurse friend who had 20 years of encouraging babies to start sleeping for longer periods, then had twins of her own and guess what, did the same thing!

And gah - not only the expectations that having a newborn is all cooing bliss rather than the honesty about what it's really like. Bumped into Old Lady Neighbour who asked, very sympathetically, how things were going with being back at work (I've been back a year) and it must be really hard being away from DD. I replied honestly that I was loving being back at work, DD is thriving at nursery and I was far happier this year than on maternity leave. OLN looks horrified and disappears into her house without another word.

I’m not particularly enjoying the new born phase, and didn’t enjoy the majority of my pregnancy. I don’t find it difficult, but so boring. I get sick of lounging around all day. I find it demoralising tidying up after my DH when he’s gone off to work, like I’m only a housewife and mum now-a-days and not ‘me’.

When most people ask how I am I put on a smile and say I’m fine. I’ve found that a lot of people give me ‘the look’ when I’m honest. I know some people find the newborn stage easy but I think most people don’t like to admit their struggles and some like us to think their super mums. I now know the friends that I can be honest with, who I can text when I’m having a bad day and they help me feel like I’m not the worst mum in the world!

It is pretty much socially unacceptable to say you find parenting easy so I don't say anything

I found this with the baby stage - both my babies were monumentally easy.
DS1 slept through from 11pm-6am from 10 days old. He was swaddled from birth, easy to nurse, happy as larry.
DS2 fed through the night so I co-slept with him, rarely cried, watched the world around him, easy to nurse. So far so easy.

It was the 2+ years that I struggled with, when I was dealing with sleep regressions and teething, and tantrums and eldest sibling rivalry, all whilst back at work full time and trying to juggle career and young family.

I certainly wasn't under the mistaken assumption that my babies were easy because of the way we parented, they were easy because they just were. We both knew it could, and would turn on a dime and it did.

My friend who had difficult, screaming, colicky babies had absolute dreams when they reached 9 months + and who have been delights ever since.
Mine morphed from angels to little squealing, sleep refusing, foot stamping dictators which spanned, collectively, about 3 years.

Now, at 6 and 3 years, they're both awesome - finally there is sleep to be had, and socially acceptable behavior is followed (except for the 3 year old who is about 60% of the time, a total dickhead...)

It is pretty much socially unacceptable to say you find parenting easy so I don't say anything

This ^^. Which is a bloody shame as I really, really needed some positive parenting stories when I was pregnant with DD1. All I heard was people telling me how hard my life was about to become.

There seems to be a slummy-mummy-I'm-having-a-contrived-hard-time-pass-me-a-gin social media trend which actually undermines women who genuinely are.
I didn't struggle at all postnatally, they were and are (third baby is quite young) the best times of my life and I find it very easy, with no support.
There have been horrific times in my life though so I can empathise with anyone having a hard time.

Well my DD is 8 weeks old. She will sleep from around midnight until 8 waking once in the night but it wasn't always that way. She used to wake every few hours. She cries a lot and for seemingly no reason.
I feel like I shouldn't moan because we were trying for years for a child but sometimes I just need to