Husband's down time

[Pondlife87]

We have a 16 month old daughter who is a terrible sleeper.
Both my husband and I work. He does 5 days a week and I do 3.
We did split maternity. When i was off i did all the night wakings. When he was off we shared it as past 3am she will not settle without feeding (she is breastfed).

Now we are both back at work he does the first shift (10.30-2.30) and i do the second shift (2.30-7) of her waking. She tends to end up in bed with us from about 4 as otherwise I'm up every 30 minutes settling her. We've tried having her in bed with us all night, but she just wants to feed constantly if I'm near her and won't accept Dad.

So- i get to my point. Dad has always been a night owl and stays in his workhouse every Friday until 3am doing projects. This means we have to swap the shifts. This means I am up between 10.30-3 resettling her. Then when he comes to bed, because she needs to feed I am awake hourly resetting her and she will only accept me. Then because he has been up until 3am he gets the lie in. I get the lie in the following day.
I have expressed i am unhappy about it as I get next to no sleep all Friday night because i essentially do both shifts. He argues that lots of men/ women go out every weekend.
However i do not think it is ok to go out every weekend until 3am if you have a child, so i don't see why this is different?
I've suggested he can go out but take the baby monitor to do thr first shift and he said no. I suggest he go out and come in earlier at say 12/1 and he said no.
Am i being unreasonable with my requests?
Is there a middle ground? Can you offer any otjer solutions?
Please note this is not a request for advice to help baby sleep better. I've tried everything haha.

OP has long gone

Sorry that was to bluntness. Just no need to keep being a dick when you can tell someone is upset.

@WaterOffADucksCrack

The OP is clearly upset and has decided to leave the thread (I don't understand why it's referred to as 'flouncing') and you're still choosing to be a cunt!

She left the thread because she didn’t like the general consensus of the opinions. No one has used language or called names like you have. You’ve brought a whole new level of insult here.

Not sure why you’re yelling at me @VeniceQueen2004

I gave specific examples of what worked for our family. And set out my belief that in my opinion children need more consolidated sleep. You did whatever worked for you. OPs method is clearly not working for her relationship. And I do think a child only getting 30 min catnaps is not good for them.

I’m a fairly hippie crunchy mum and I definitely do not think there is any one way to parent.

@DalzielandPaxo I think advanced searching people and using it against them is playing the man not the ball. This is an online forum, fact is anyone can say anything at any time which may or may not be true or consistent. So the only way to approach I can be bothered to take with these threads is to take the OP at their word and go from there.

If in this case the OP has been less than truthful then it's pretty annoying but it's none of my business really. She presented a scenario which based on my own experiences I did not find in the least implausible; that's the scenario I addressed, rather than either making things up or running off to cross-reference her previous posts.

@ZaphodBeeblerox oh for goodness sake don't be so precious I was not "yelling at you". I capitalised a single word for emphasis, just as one might say "what on EARTH?" if you hear a cat knock the lid off a bin. I was simply pointing out that your sweeping statement about what children need to thrive could not possibly be correct based on my own child. Maybe it's optimal for development for young children to sleep in larger consolidated blocks, lmaybe it's not. But it's certainly not required, and if I was going to suggest it was I'd want to back that statement up with some evidence. But like arseholes, we all have opinions I suppose and can wave them around if we like.

@VeniceQueen2004 a fair response.

This is mumsnet not an academic paper so I used quite casual language.

But really the research suggests that children whose sleep is fragmented tend to sleep fewer hours, and sleeping longer for consolidated stretches is associated with both better social development and cognitive function.

is one peer reviewed article [[https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/fullarticle/485959]]

And here is a more thorough meta analysis combining results from multiple studies which says
“ Ten studies on infant sleep and cognition were included in this review. Overall, findings indicated a positive association between sleep, memory, language, executive function, and overall cognitive development in typically developing infants and young children. ”
here [[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5440010/ ]]

I really am a very child led parent and have never pushed my child to do something for my benefit (ie sleep so I can go out etc), and am a big believer in attachment parenting. BUT sleeping in long consolidated stretches is good for the child!

Now there are many children who thrive despite having really poor sleep, but it is despite it, not because of it and not unrelatedly.

Thank you for the links, unfortunately neither one works. However I'm aware that there is research on this which indicates that for children as for adults more sleep is better than less. Stands to reason. And I never suggested broken sleep was beneficial for children, merely that it wasn't necessarily harmful.

What the evidence absolutely doesn't suggest is that poor sleep or broken sleep will result or is the result of delayed or incomplete development. Believe me I looked into this in a big way when my baby just would not sleep for longer than exactly 40 mins at a time unless on my chest or in my bed from about 4-12 months, and then spells of about 2 hours for another 8 months. I was concerned, so I read widely. In absolutely no medical research or summary thereof did I find a positive indication or recommendation to sleep train for my baby's benefit. Indeed I saw several papers which indicated that poor sleep in infancy was actually associated with higher intelligence and advanced development (although I fancy the causes are reversed here with busy brains being naturally more alert - total speculation here!)

I'll go away and try to rummage up some links today to support this so as not to be a massive hypocrite. But the fact remains you said babies "need" consolidated sleep to develop properly; you're now saying the opposite (that many children thrive despite poor sleep).

AllTheUsernamesAreAlreadyTaken I didn't realise people would be so precious about swear words on the internet tbh 😂😂😂

@WaterOffADucksCrack

AllTheUsernamesAreAlreadyTaken I didn't realise people would be so precious about swear words on the internet tbh 😂😂😂

It’s just bizarre that you think it’s horrifically offensive for people to tell her what they think the actual problem is and give her advice on night weaning but it’s perfectly reasonable to call someone a cunt 🤷🏻‍♀️

@WaterOffADucksCrack

AllTheUsernamesAreAlreadyTaken I didn't realise people would be so precious about swear words on the internet tbh 😂😂😂

No they are just precious about posters who randomly pop in and lash out and call people a cunt on innocuous threads.

But you do you,

www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5440010/#!po=0.500000

Ok so I've had s look at this now and it's interesting! However not as clear cut as "more sleep = better".

In the studies on memory and post-learning sleep the metric used was children who had no nap vs children who had s nap "of 30 mins or more", with no indication that a longer nap equalled a better performance.

In fact a lot of the studies are based on the benefits of naps (with length unspecified in the systematic review), rather than overall amount of sleep or duration of sleep at night.

The studies looking at night sleep largely consider night sleep as a proportion of total sleep, rather than as a simple value of total amount of sleep or Vs number of night wakings or length of sleep interval.

The study also notes "Despite the fact that all the reviewed cross-sectional studies showed sleep-associated benefits, there were no consistent findings amongst the studies regarding the component of sleep (i.e. sleep duration, sleep efficiency, night awakenings, etc.) that benefitted cognition."

Which indicates that as long as the child is getting enough sleep over all (for them) whether they get that in big chunks or little chunks may not be significant.

The longitudinal studies looking at infant sleep disturbance versus IQ at school age found no significant difference after adjusting for psychosocial adversity, nor did it find any correlation between IQ and sleep patterns recorded at school age.

The conclusions also say "From the reviewed literature, we conclude that sleep plays a key role in those domains with its maturation paralleling, preceding, as well as resulting from interactions with cognitive and physical maturation. Exact mechanisms have not been the focus of this review and still remain to be understood; however, the maturation of central nervous system structures like the hypothalamus or the neurotransmitter system underlies both cognitive development and the regulation of sleep/wake cycles." Which I think is broadly science speak for "we don't know how this works yet" and while sleep may affect development development also affects sleep."

Thanks for this though, I did find it really interesting to read and it did give me some thoughts. My daughter has always been very very smart and physically ahead of her age, but she does also struggle with shyness and high levels of emotional response to things not going how she expects I've always just put that under the heading "sensitive" (or possibly Asperger's, which runs undiagnosed in her father's family). But I am open to the idea that her sleep patterns play a part in her trouble emotionally self-regulating. She does sleep through now at 3.5 and has got about a year, but only for about 10 hours a night (no nap). An earlier bed time does seem to result in a longer night's sleep, and a better mood generally; so might be good for me to read more into the studies reviewed in this SR!

I think there is another element to this, and it’s about the parents

Continual sleep deprevation for adults is hugely detrimental, and has many negative impacts, which then, even with the best of intentions, impacts on the child and the home environment,

However I think it’s moot. The ops other threads indicate this has deteriorated steadily since the child was five months old, and both parents are hugely struggling with the lack of sleep and the disruption. Which is to be expected. Sometimes it’s not just about the child, but about the adults trying to cope for extended periods with heavily disrupted sleep.

I think the op has tried everything to be honest, and they are just really struggling.

@Bluntness100

You're not wrong; I eventually night-weaned because my mother died by suicide the week I went back to work, and while i had been managing with the lack of sleep and the lack of support from my partner I couldn't cope with that plus the grieving and return to work, and it was making me a less good mother. Everyone has a tipping point. But until then it had been working well for us, tired though I was, so people telling me categorically "night weaning will be better for you" (as many people did) were just not correct.

And the effects on parents of having to fight their own instincts should not be underestimated either; When I night-weaned it was gradual. I began to day wean too at 2yo and eventually weaned altogether at 2.5 due to pressure from my partner (essentially our relationship wouldn't have survived me feeding for any longer, so another tipping point where what was best for us biologically was no longer 'best' overall because of external factors).

When I fully weaned I had an absolutely massive hormone crash which plunged me into a quite severe depression that I think had been staved off since my mother's death by sustained oxytocin levels from breastfeeding (not that I realised at the time, I thought I was just coping well). I eventually needed medication to level me out again.

I think this is probably one of the issues that is un-PC and so little understood - although lack of sleep does suck for mothers and fathers alike, breastfeeding mothers when feeding responsively have a huge hormonal boost to balance it out somewhat - fathers do not have this, so I think the impact on them if committed to participating equally in the lack of sleep is more severe. This is why by and large in a bf family I'm in favour of bed-sharing for mum and baby and Dad picks up the slack in other ways. However, this doesn't work for everyone (this caveat should be stamped in red at the top of every MN advice post!). Some mums hate bedsharing, bf or not. Some dads can endure sleep deprivation better than their partners for whatever reason. Some couples find not sharing a bed impacts badly on their relationship.

I guess this is my issue with how this thread went. OK, so you went a-sleuthing and found out the OP hadn't represented her true situation in the post. But what she said was not actually implausible. Families come to a huge range of agreements about how to best meet all the needs involved; and it is completely fine for families to rule out certain things (a completel random example set being sleep training, corporal punishment, private/boarding school, nursery, the naughty step) as not suitable for them, and still ask for advice on specific issues they are having. There really is no 'right way' to do parenting. And I think to have a whole thread of people come on and hammer on the one point you explicitly ruled out from the start is just really rude and dismissive.

The details of what is best re sleep is irrelevant 🙄. It would be optimal if we went back to living in a forest and spending all day doing creative play with the little darlings but we don’t obviously. This kid will be absolutely fine if the parents take a few simple steps to ensure everyone gets a better nights sleep.

Sorry but to me this current situation is madness because the “upside” of a child having a perfect childhood without a moments distress are not worth the “downside” of the parents health happiness and marriage! And I went down the attachment route abit and read similar stuff so not unsympathetic with that view but this isn’t sustainable for them.

To be honest I didn’t go sleuthing, a pp mentioned a previous thread so I had a look out of curiosity.

I do feel for the op. It appears she’s tried everything apart from cry it out, and the baby settles for her husband and the grandmother. When near the op she wants constant feeding, I can see why she doesn’t wish to entertain the discussion again if she’s tried to night wean and had to revert back just to settle her baby. And why she desperately needs her husband to take his shift. It would probably have been better to present it like that though, but when you’re knackered sometimes you don’t think straight.

The op is right, this convo isn’t about night weaning as such, it’s a tired mother struggling who is desperate for her husband to always take his shift so she can have a little sleep. Even his one night off Is enough to tip her over the edge. And understandably so.

The thing I don't get about the criticism of attachment parenting is that it is simultaneously criticised for being 'martyred' and at the same time 'for the parent'.

I mean either you are arguing that parents should do what feels right for them (be that sleep training or night feeding) for the benefit of their wellbeing and the knock-on effect on their child's wellbeing; or you think they should go against their instincts (be that to get more sleep or be responsive to night wakings) for the good of their child?

I mean which is it: am I foisting my selfish desire for attachment on my child at their expense, or am I martyring myself against my own interests when I should be prioritising my own mental health and my relationship with my partner? Or am I somehow managing to be crap on both counts?

That was at MsTSwift btw not Bluntness.

The thing I don't get about the criticism of attachment parenting is that it is simultaneously criticised for being 'martyred' and at the same time 'for the parent'

Why do you keep returning to the criticism of AP?
Loads of us did it, we didnt BF every 30 minutes until we felt absolutely desperate.
I would suggest AP results in DC that are more settled, not less.
The situation here is very difficult for the OP, its not about criticism of you or AP.

@Pondlife87

Also, I'm not complaining about the lack of sleep overall. I'm complaining about the lack of potential fairness.

I get your reasoning about fairness. But think that in your scenario you've chosen your stance re extended bfing etc and not cc/cio, something I don't disagree with. So I think that tbh as you're actually talking about 1 evening really, I'd say, it's 2 months before you intend to end the bfing and given you work pt, I'd say its not that unreasonable for 1 night a week. If you get to a point when you have weaned and it's still at this level, then I don't think a review of how to manage the Friday for the interim is unreasonable.