AIBU to think a lot of people don't really think of children as people?

[weaningwoes]

So I am a softie and I know it. But so many threads on here have people (who are probably fine people and lovely parents in many ways) advocating such extreme 'briskness' with very young children who are struggling with their feelings that it borders on harshness to me.

Problems with sleeping, giving up bottles/dummies, 'tantrums' (or 'being overwhelmed by emotions' depending on how you feel about that word!), so often the solution seems to be "make them safe and then ignore". There's this fanatical devotion to the idea that "three nights of hell and then that was that" is a good enough outcome to justify what would amount to neglect if it was done to any other group of dependent, vulnerable person, say frail elderly or someone with developmental issues in a care home, and bloody cruel and cold at least if directed to, say, a partner who was crying for some reason.

It feels like a lot of people think their compassion for their children should just stop at 1 minute past bedtime, or the second their feelings or behaviour ceases to be convenient.

I know I sound a judgy bitch, and lots of people will be laughing at me for being so wet. But surely children are real people, even from babies, and there's no reason to imagine they feel what they feel any less truly than we adults do - just that they have far fewer tools to manage and rationalise those feelings!

I don't remember being a toddler but I do remember being a teenager and a small child - how my feelings would take me over and how utterly devastating it was to feel so much and be dismissed, overridden and ignored, even ridiculed for those feelings by adults I loved. Sure, they were right in the scheme of things that I needn't be as upset/passionate about x y z thing, but my feelings were nonetheless genuine. And they hurt!

Surely one doesn't have to agree with someone's assessment of a situation to sympathise with the strength of their emotions about it, especially when it's somebody dependent and helpless, who you love?

Prepared to be told IABVVVU.

Seriously @lifeinthedeep it's not any kind of "consolation" to me that you're having a hard time with sleep. Don't know where in my OP or anywhere else I've given this impression I want mums to suffer. Seriously I don't. Hope your LO learns to love sleep soon. Sleep deprivation is fucking horrible and I sympathize!

Like anything, a middle ground is best but the part I don't agree with from OP is that anyone would be happy to stay awake all night with a person they were caring for, or a partner. Or tolerate tantrums and bad behaviour from them. Would anyone do this? I know my husband wouldn't. He'd leave me to cry while he went to sleep. And why shouldn't he? And if he woke me up to ask me to keep him company in the night as he couldn't sleep... well my reaction wouldn't be pretty.

YANBU -i couldnt agree more&consider myself anything but"wet"moreover question tge sanity of he masses..im very concious of 'adultism'
...mainly in the way it manifests in school,organised sport&childcare centres etc..you know-the places people are meant to know&do better-but more often than not reflect the societal notion of adultism.Check out "happiness is here"blogOP -many others questioning the sanity of prescribed educational/authorative institutes&moving to more holistic child based/led practice.

Some examples of extreme martyrdom from SM

This person is a diehard AP/GP follower. She is against directing your child’s gaze. So you must never say “oh look a blackbird” you must wait for them to notice. Obviously this requires super human effort not to do as it’s something a normal person would do. Most people would fail this one.

Second one - child is dawdling; you need a pee urgently. Now I would hurry child along but AP person says this is wrong and we must be child led and therefore make yourself really uncomfortable so child isn’t hurried along. Sod that!

Another-don’t eat adult food in front of your child as it’s not fair not to share it.

This is where the interpretation of it becomes some sort of weird martyrdom competition. If you complete these sorts of tasks with a grin and are blessed and privileged you get more points. Most people will fail so only the elite few will succeed.

Who is SM and wth is "adult food"? Willy-shaped pasta??

Trust me, the vast majority of us are winging it and hoping we don't fuck our kids up too badly. Even the people who pretend to be perfect and judge other people for parenting in a different way, they may not realise it but they're winging it too.

This. Just this.

YANBU. Too many people who are just sour about children. Maybe they're bitter as they're no longer young but children playing, any form of exuberance from a child seems to annoy them. & the number of people on MN who if OP has issue with child and dares to mention s/he is 18, will say something along the lines of '18 is an adult tell them to move out'. & then act as if OP is too soft for not actually wanting to tell them to leave home at just 18🙄

. I have a friend who recently used a sleep consultant and within 3 days the baby is sleeping better, happier and all the family have gone from being on their knees with exhaustion and stress to enjoying life, bonding better with the baby etc. I think anyone that prefers 10-12 wake ups a night for a prolonged period of time over a bit of sleep training is quite frankly mad.

That aside, parenting is a series of different spectrums of responses to different events. Someone will always find something to judge whether that’s sleep, weaning, response to tantrums, use of screens, employment status etc. No one is perfect at everything.

Of course children are people but they need parenting. I don'tvtreat dd like fellow adults as they have already been brought up and im not responsible for them. Therefore when she plays up i am fairly brisk to correct her . I do listen when she is sad but normally as an adult, i call the shots. ( dd thinks otherwise!).

There is a happy medium between tyeing a child to a cot and letting them rule the roost..

I thinknif you letvyour kids do whatever then itvis doing them a disservice.
I have seen a dress i like...i can't afford it. I am resiliant so i will not tantrum or cry...i will save or forget it and move on.. I am like this as my parents didn't indulge me ( they messed me up in other ways!)

I think some people are like that OP but it’s mostly an older generation. I can’t think of any parents I interact with who are that harsh towards their children.

I won’t go into the details of DC1’s sleep troubles but after having gotten two DCs though infancy I can confidently say I am a better and more caring understanding mum when I get at least 6 hours of unbroken sleep a night.

OP you are trying to normalise your DC behaviour while telling the rest of us we are wrong .
Up every 40 mins -2 hours is not normal .
Yes I BF on demand and agree that babies are designed to wake at intervals to feed.
I have realised I was a bit AP
BF ,sling,cuddles, co sleeping when babies.
But they happily went to sleep in their own cots, bit of grizzling but comforting set bed time routine which we researched and put in place.
All slept through by 1 and I BF until 2 .
Stopped as they fed less and less , no suffering.
It sounds like you havent made the leap into self settling at all or even tried.
I bet a sleep consultant would have sorted in a few days.
Lack of sleep is terrible and poor sleep is indicated in accidents and poor health.
So stop congratulating yourself on your marvellous parenting while telling the rest of us we are crap.
All the examples (tying to a cot) are ridiculously extreme .

@Halloumimuffin and @BingPot99 my thoughts exactly!

The nhs wouldn't advise you to leave your elderly parent crying for 3 nights so that you could get more sleep, so why leave a child?

Actually they would if said parent was fed, watered, clean and nothing else wrong. A grizzle while they go to sleep is fine. Happens in plenty of nursing homes.

Your ideas about sleep training are incorrect.

You have hit a nerve, sleep training prevented a full on mental health breakdown in me. That's why I advocate it. If I has had a breakdown and needed to be sectioned, the impact on my child would have been far worse. Don't pretend it won't have been. 3 nights of grizzling has not bred an unhappy or emotionally stunned child.

As. For the work martyr comment, full time teaching requires 50 hour weeks. Now I'm enjoying 6 weeks of no work and spending time with my child. Someone has to pay the bills.

Teachermaths* of course you have to do something if your mental health is struggling and you have no support, that must be really hard.
I don't think people are talking about 'Grizzles', I think it's more like they can't understand leaving a child crying upset.

I think of my daughter (2) as a person. I respect her emotions and try and empathise if she is overwhelmed etc. I don’t ‘punish’ her in any way and try and use a positive parenting type approach.

But do you know what I find most respectful? Helping her to get enough sleep! I’ve always been very strict with sleep (even with myself, pre-DD) as I did shift work for years and now in a job where a mistake due to tiredness could kill someone. I’ve always been keen to ensure DD has decent sleep too.

Last week we were on holiday, and our routine completely went out the window - later nights, sporadic naps etc. Towards the end of the week poor DD was a wreck. Lots of tantrums, screaming, whinging - completely unlike her. A few days of decent sleep and she is her happy, sunny self again.

I’ve never had to do controlled crying, probably as from a couple of weeks old I was strict with routine, not cuddling to sleep etc, and she slept well from about 2 months old. No crying to sleep needed. However, I wouldn’t have hesitated to do CC if needed and completely support those who do.

The economist Emily Oster appraised all the available research on sleep training - there is no evidence that it is in any way harmful, and there is clear evidence that it improves sleep. This doesn’t mean you have to do it or feel comfortable with it, but it does mean you are no better a parent than anyone else for waking up a million times a night.

I think the sleep thing is challenging as it's a real problem for a lot of people and I don't think anyone does controlled crying for fun (although personally we didn't do it), but I do agree with you generally OP. So often I see people basically ignoring their kids (and mine) or only interacting with them to tell them how to behave or tell them off and it makes me really sad. DD is so much fun and such good company (she's 5) that I think people are missing out, let alone how it feels for the child to be alternately ignored and told off!

But surely children are real people, even from babies, and there's no reason to imagine they feel what they feel any less truly than we adults do - just that they have far fewer tools to manage and rationalise those feelings!

To give you another very commonplace example OP, outside of the very polarising sleep debate - yesterday DD (23 month) had a friend round. She'd had a particular toy, put it down, he picked it up, she decided she wanted it.

I don''t doubt the strength of her feeling when she wailed and stamped her feet and threw things just after, but I saw my job as being to distract her, console her, but when that didn't work to say " You just had a go, now Jack is having a go, and you can have a go after. Now let's find something else to do." Because actually me reacting to the incident in proportion seems the correct response - I want her to learn that actually it's not a tragedy that someone else has her toy, even if it may feel like that, and that the correct response is to occupy herself elsewhere.

Would you have handled this differently?

@EssentialHummus according to Phillipa Perry book mentioned in this thread, it's manipulative to distract your crying child. You are teaching them to hide their feelings.

So yeah we're screwed.

Essential I would have done exactly the same as you.

We have to equip our children with the tools to cope, not just let them have their own way.

You wouldn't let them run into a road and explain why they shouldn't afterwards. You'd grab them before the car hit.

There's a time and a place for explaining and gentle parenting. It's also sometimes necessary to physically stop a child.

To refer back to Philippa Perry’s book (which I read and enjoyed), what stood out for me was that whilst I generally agreed with most of what she said and thought it myself, she has one child and parenting one child in a gently way is very different to two or more. If I’m doing the school run and child number two doesn’t want to leave so we can get child number one to school I don’t really have the time to discuss at length how they feel about it especially if I’m wrangling the baby in to the pushchair. Of course I do ‘we’re leaving in 5 mins etc’, but sometimes they want to go but we’ve got to!