...to not understand why so many parents post constantly wondering why their child wakes through the night?

[sleepingtroub]

Post after post.
"My child is 5mo and wakes during the night to feed"
"How can I implement a routine on my 5week old?"
"How can I get my 6mo to sleep in their own room without waking up"

When did it get to this?

These are all normal things.

Before I was even old enough to have a child I was fully aware of the concept: baby = no sleep
Obviously it's not as bad as that 24/7 but why are so many parents expecting their old sleep routines to continue when they have a baby?

@karencantobe That's really interesting. I've struggled with insomnia as a teen, but in my 30s I don't have an issue getting back to sleep if I wake up.

I had no idea that was the case. I've asked a few other mums I know and most of them have said they may wake once or maybe even twice. Maybe it's habitual after having DCs. I'll have a good read about that on Google later.

@msflibble I totally agree with your post about community and how we live now. But it isn’t hard to see on here and in real life how much mothers seem to push away help. No one seems to accept advice or help from their own families. And often live hundreds of miles from them, isolated but that’s the way they like it. I understand some people have genuinely abusive upbringings, but I see posts where a MIL offers to take baby for an afternoon so mum can sleep and it’s ‘my MIL is controlling and obsessed with my baby! Help!’

Even nannies are not good enough now, always doing things wrong or Being let go for not giving Benjamin the correct type of yoghurt or whatever.

I knew babies don't sleep well. But there are some things you don't truly understand until you're in the thick if it.

• it goes on for months and months, with no end date
• they wake up, it may take an hour to get them to go back to sleep again. Those wake ups feel very lonely and helpless
• life still goes on, no matter how sleep deprived you are. You feel like your doing a shit job as you are judged from every which way for what you do and how you cope, and sympathy wanes after the first few weeks.
• it's relentless. The jokes everyone makes about sleep deprivation being a tool for torture aren't actually jokes.
• if baby doesn't get enough sleep, you are in for an extra difficult day on top of your already sleep deprived self.

It's lucky these babies are cute :)

Because even though you know the little buggers don’t sleep all night you’re still hoping someone has a magic wand/potion/cream/anything really.. cause you’d really like to not see anything but the back of your eyelids for 8hours.

And it’s worse once they’ve proved they can sleep all night n a bloody blocked nose throws the game for months again

Actually the more I think about the OP the more annoying it is. To post as you have suggests that although you are tired from night wakings, you’re coping with it. There have been times when I haven’t been coping at all. When I was so tired that I was suicidal, because if you’re dead at least you’re not awake. When I phoned my dad sobbing in the middle of the night to come and take my baby away as he’d woken up at 10 just as I’d gone to bed and it was now 4am and he still wasn’t asleep, and I had to be up with my other two DC in 2 hours. When I was thinking the best thing to do was divorce DH so I at least got every other weekend off.
I dreamed of a baby who woke 2-3 times a night, had a feed and went back to sleep. That would have been absolute bliss. Or one that napped in the day without being driven round in a car for hours (when I was too tired to safely drive).

@Chillicheese123
Yes it's true, we've made a rod for our own backs, but it's hard to get out of it! We live abroad so we never had help from relatives with the kids. Was hard sometimes. But I couldn't go back to the UK just for that. This is my home.
Idk - we've been raised to shun community in northern Europe and it's not easy to unlearn. In southern Europe things are pretty different, but you have to be used to it to feel comfortable with it IYSWIM

Because they need advice I guess, which is what forums are for. All babies are completely different anyway so there isn't a one size fits all answer.

Oh and not all older Mums 'forget' how their babies slept. I have two dcs, dc1 never slept more than two hours at a time and didn't need much slept - still doesn't at 24 and gets up easily in the morning. dc2 slept 6 plus hours in the hospital (they made me wake him for feeds - which I stopped doing immediately after getting home!) then continued sleeping 6-8 hours and going back down after a bottle. However he is almost impossible to get up in the mornings, even now as an adult - sleeps through alarms constantly.

I wish more people were honest about the fact that children don't sleep. My son is nearly 3 and still doesn't sleep through every night. I was actually told by a pregnant friend a few weeks ago that I should stop telling her that my son doesn't sleep because she is sick of hearing horror stories! I felt like screaming my son is not a horror story it is perfectly normal for a child to still not sleep at 3 years old!!

Chillicheese123 you know some of us don’t actually have help? I’d kill for a MIL to take mine for an afternoon while I slept, but as she’s a 6 hour plane ride away (they moved away when I was pregnant) that is not possible. My parents do their best but work full time. I’m not turning help away, I just don’t have any.

“ I dreamed of a baby who woke 2-3 times a night, had a feed and went back to sleep. ”

Me too. It wasn’t me being unrealistic about expectations of babies, it was me being normal and wanting a few longer chunks of sleep myself

God I hate these smug "MY baby didn't sleep and I coped" posts. Bully for you. When my baby wasn't sleeping it triggered such bad PND that I attempted suicide. I knew babies didn't sleep. I knew I'd be sleep-deprived. But I had no idea - how COULD I know? - how that would impact my mental health.

And for the record, mine DID start sleeping through around 6mo, so it's perfectly possible for many babies.

I think we are fed a sort of "Ideal" by the media ,family and so on ,that we have to get baby into a good sleep routine ,keep the house tidy and so on ,when mostly babe has different ideas! As a PP said ,most people dont really know how it feels to have broken sleep for months /years until they experience it! They feel better when they can speak to others about the horrors of being sleep deprived .It impacts on your energy levels so you feel constantly drained through the next day .Also many people seem to imagine once past baby stage ,children never wake up .Many do and it is normal in other countries to co sleep .Often children will want Mum and Dad for comfort even at PS age ,this is rarely if ever discussed .

Well, excruciating pain when breastfeeding is not normal either, and yet you seem to think it is...

@livingformypinkgin same here! DS will be 3 in a month and only just starting to actually sleep properly. I thought he'd be like his sister and start to sleep through at 2 but noooo.
Hope your situation improves soon.

Maybe because babies can be exhausting. My first was what you'd call a dream baby so I stupidly thought my second world be too. How wrong I was. Then you begin to think is it me? Something I did or didn't do? So they post looking for advice and support. What is wrong with that?

@Elbeagle of course I do. I have a v elderly MIL who couldnt manage half an hour with baby. But there are undeniably posts all the time on here and I hear in real life, mums have offers of help but seem to think it’s some sort of conspiracy or some sort of criticism.

I read a blog that helped me relax on this, Jay something. I wanted to stop bfding at night and was late to do it. Reading it made me feel ok about it all.

Suppose they are clinging on to the hope that someone has a magic solution as they are fucked with tiredness

I always thought (before having babies) that it was normal for most babies to usually sleep through the night from six months or so.

I'm one of those lucky mums whose baby did just that. I now know that's not the case for many babies. Inevitably, if the next baby doesn't sleep through until aged two, I'll wonder what I could do differently.

It is sad when you see people posting “my baby sleeps badly what am I doing wrong??” Sleep deprivation is so so awful as it is without blaming yourself on top of it.

DC1 was a horrendous sleeper and I gave up on asking for advice at all in the end because none of it proved helpful and some of it made me want to hurl things through windows. There are a lot of people with good sleepers who think it’s all 100% down to their parenting and will smugly tell you so, so I can see how some people with bad sleepers end up thinking it’s their fault and there must be some easy fix out there.

I’ve found the opposite to be true, actually. If someone tentatively posts that they are struggling with sleep deprivstjon, 500 people will immediately descend to tell them ‘but it’s biologically normal! In non-western countries they all sleep in the same bed!! Have you tried co sleeping? Don’t leave your baby to cry or they will grow up damaged!!’

Yep! Heaven forbid a parent want to prioritise their own sleep.

And OP, yabu. The posts from parents with really young babies are usually made out of desperation, which should be obvious. And when they get past the first couple of months or so, yes it's within normal range of behaviour to wake through the night but it's also within normal range of behaviour to sleep for long stretches, even all night.

Given that the latter is much, much easier on most parents, it's perfectly reasonable for people whose babies are at the more wakey end of normal to want to see if there's anything they can do to move them to a different part of the normal baby behaviour spectrum.

As another bit of 'you don't know how it'll be until you're doing it' anecdata - I thought I'd cope well with it because I've always needed less sleep than average (and was a bit smug about it, tbh). I thought that the people who really struggled were the 'can't cope without my 8 hours, me' people, whereas I regularly used to go to work on 4 hours sleep at busy times, was always last to bed on a night out, etc so thought I'd find it easier. I had previously had long periods of insomnia and, again, thought that would prepare me. What I didn't know is how mad broken sleep drove me (my insomnia was always great trouble falling to sleep, not staying asleep). I really thought I was losing my mind. Now that DS sleeps through I rarely get more than 6 hours and feel on top of the world with that, but when he was about 8 months I was going to bed at 8pm and so probably getting more sleep overall than now (at the expense of having any time at all for me, btw, as I was back at work then, which I found really depressing in itself) but was very much not coping. I cried every day on the way to work, as I drove down a motorway - I look back shuddering at how unsafe it was.

After ds, who had sleep apnoea, and woke every 30 minutes or so and had to bf to clear the tiredness from dd felt ok. I slept in the day and lasted that way.

If there’s an extra thing which means they wake often it is v v hard. A while ago now but I was on my knees with tiredness.

@LisaSimpsonsbff I feel like I've won the lottery if I get a stretch of 4 hours atm. The broken sleep is a total killer. I'm still going through that now, going to bed at 9, up every 2 hours for up to an hour at a time. I'm going back to work soon and, tbh, frightened how I'm going to cope

Lisa I think also before children it is so much easier for many people to “catch up” a bit eventually - even if not with sleeping but with spending the day watching a boxset or generally pleasing yourself. Not for everyone without children obviously, but for most of us pre-children. The opportunities for recuperation are few and far between with babies and toddlers