To think that responsive/attachment parenting doesn't give a flying fuck about maternal wellbeing?

[Santaslittlehelper83]

....or the family unit. I recently joined the fb group 'Beyond Sleep Training' as was interested in some different ideas for managing our babies frequent night awakenings. CIO/CC is not for me but I'm not adverse to more gentler methods of ST. I was really disturbed by some posts by quite clearly desperate mums, and the advice in a nutshell seemed to boil down to....'that's normal baby behaviour, deal with it!' There was to be fair some advice re tweaking routines etc, and messages of solidarity but nothing else. A lot of posters were referencing their toddlers/preschoolers who hadn't slept more than 2 hours consecutively since birth...on what planet is that helpful to a sleep deprived mum at the end of her rope!? I think it was almost competetive, like a token of honour with generally a lot of sneering towards families who chose a different approach. I also didn't see the logic of lumping all sleep training methods together....someone sensibly suggested removing nipple gently when baby finished night feed to avoid this becoming a sleep association....this was shot down by a very heavy handed post by the admin.

Of course babies needs are paramount, but Mums (and Dads) matter too.

Long term effects of sleep training can be achieved by looking, broadly, at today’s 40 and 50 something when sleep training was very popular. I can’t see any clear and unique negative effects they’ve suffered.

’Gentle parenting’ has never been so popular and yet kids have never been so ‘anxious’ and have so many mental health issues. That’s not to say one causes the other, but it obviously isn’t cushioning a lot of children in the way it’s supposed to is it?

I think this is a fantastic point.

The difference between how people talk about first and second babies and the "science" around them on here is astounding.

When it's a first, supposedly all reputable parenting advice is that you must be constantly responsive or you are being cruel to them.

With a second, supposedly all reputable parenting advice is that if both children need you, you must ALWAYS tend to the older one first so they don't get their nose out of joint. Baby will be fine.

So which is it??

@aSofaNearYou im willing to bet there are quite a few ‘attachment parents’ who, in a flustered moment, have had to leave a crying baby to run after a toddler who has fallen over or similar, and the baby has dropped off before they’ve been able to get back to them. So they have ‘left baby to cry themselves to sleep’ but would probably never mention it!

I was in a gentle parenting group and there were so many mums (it was all mums) asking desperately if something they needed to do would "ruin" their child.

Where does this idea of "ruined" come from? It seems so unhealthily perfectionist and counter-productive to think that if you do one thing wrong/imperfectly/differently that somehow everything about your baby is broken for ever.

I think a lot of these parenting fads encourage mums to see things in a very black and white way. I wonder if it is a way of trying to tolerate the uncertainty of not knowing if you are doing the right thing / feeling worried about all the things that could potentially happen to your vulnerable little baby who you are responsible totally for.

Like a talisman to ward off evil: if I have done this and this I am a good mum and my baby will be ok.

@FrizzledFrazzle I think you've hit the nail on the head there.

I heartily agree about the second children thing. Many of us are a ball of nerves and anxiety with our first, religiously following the latest guru.

Come the second you just do not have time! Lying in bed for hours feeding a baby on demand with a toddler rampaging around - as if! And trying to operate for months and months with hardly any sleep - yep - good idea

I agree 100%, to repeat my previous post I think it’s like a form of OCD - if I do X Y and Z, my child will be more okay than the others and the sacrifices will mean I can’t be a bad mother.

There are very few women still heavily involved in ‘attachment parenting’ past the age of 6 or 7ish, I think they probably look around and see their children are pretty much the same as any other at that point and it doesn’t really make any difference.

I remember my mother telling me that when I was a baby she followed Dr Spock's advice. Which was to, on principle, not respond to a baby's demands. So if I was in the pram in the garden and started crying / screaming, she would force herself to follow Dr Spock's advice by ignoring me. So, again because she was told to do so by a parenting guru, she did the exact opposite of what these modern day mothers are being told to do.

I agree. I think, like many things, it is borne out of fear - fear that they will do it wrong and somehow their child will feel abandoned/not cared for/ have anxiety or separation issues.

As a mum of teens now, if only I could explain to them that the real opportunity to fuck your child up comes after the age of 13 😂

@converseandjeans you must be very out of touch as the current guidance is that babies should exclusively breastfed for the first 6 months, research shows that giving them other food before this can cause lifelong digestive problems.

The correct/ ideal food for most
babies under 6 months is breast milk. And most need to be fed around every 3 hours though it varies. This isn’t a parenting style it is the basic needs of a baby.

@whatadayforadaydream I
felt the same as you, I wanted to exclusively breastfed (as it’s best for the baby), sleep near my baby and be responsive to them whenever they ask for me. That’s what was natural to me and I had to ignore ‘leave him to cry’ ‘teach them to sleep by themselves’ which went against my instinct.

@Babooshka1990 so? We’re not talking about small babies, we’re talking about much older babies and toddlers, and exhausted mums unable to cope.

’Gentle parenting’ has never been so popular and yet kids have never been so ‘anxious’ and have so many mental health issues. That’s not to say one causes the other, but it obviously isn’t cushioning a lot of children in the way it’s supposed to is it?
Mental health issues are on the rise across the board though, not just with children.

Society seems increasingly designed to keep people in a permanent state of feeling inadequate, concerns, worried about the latest boogieman, not being good enough, not keeping up with the Jones, not being a good enough spouse, not being a good enough parent, not being pretty enough, not being stylish enough, not be the right amount of sexy, not having the right house, not being like the people you see on social media etc.

It's not a surprise that children are also picking up on it. How many children have to be styled a certain way, have to pose endlessly for their parents' social media, feel the pressure of being the right kind of child, to put the right show on in public, to do all the sports teams/music ensembles/drama performances, look a certain way, have the right tech, have access to the latest platform etc.

I'd say my parenting falls into the gentle camp, but as in respectful and authoritative parenting. We hold boundaries with respect, don't engage in humiliation, isolation as a punishment, shouting, accept the rupture and repair cycle is part of children learning boundaries. It's a far cry away from what I've seen described as gentle parenting on some boards, which is frankly permissive parenting and it's no wonder their children are unsettled and acting out because the adults have left the room and the children are left anxiously trying to guess the rules of the game.

@Babooshka1990 “current guidance” -that’s the whole point of the thread! You are following the idea that babies must be fed every three hours for six months, but do you honestly think that those people who were not fed like this “have lifelong digestive problems”? Frankly that’s ridiculous.

Every generation follows different “guidance” and swears their predecessors were uninformed or endangering their babies. Funny how the human race keeps going, really….

Yep my DM and MIL were amazed I was told to put my baby to sleep on her back as in the 80s when I was small
they were advised against it. Goodness knows what the guidance will be when/if my DD has a baby.

Waking up 3 times no...but that is not the experience of a lot of mothers. Only sleeping being held upright for the first 6 weeks, then 5 more months of waking every 1-2 hours will definitely make you sleep deprived with great risk to mental and physical health and your ability to function. This seems to be shrugged away but the attachment/responsive parenting advocates..having a lie in or a candlelit bath is just not going to cut it!

@Santaslittlehelper83 some babies are more demanding though and they can’t just be ignored so parents can get 8 hours sleep. Or overfed so they sleep longer. Sleep deprivation is part of having a baby isn’t it and if people aren’t willing to lose out on sleep they shouldn’t have a child.

For me actually, the hardest thing I found about baby sleep was with the first one and just expecting it to get better and it not - he’ll be waking up less by 6 months / 9 months etc. It was when people finally told me to stop clock watching, stop counting how many times we woke up at night, just co-sleep and go with it that everything got a lot easier.
So maybe I’m the unusual one but I did find it helpful to know what plenty of 2/3/4 year old still wake up lots at night and it’s just about adjusting your expectations and finding a way of making it work. For me that was things like - co-sleeping, going to bed early (and feeling NO guilt), napping in the day when I could (and again, NO guilt), sharing lie-ins on the weekend etc etc.

That’s funny because I thought Dr Spock said the opposite? He was the anti - Gina Ford of his day I thought and advocated for more affection towards children?

@Babooshka1990 that last sentence is exactly what I'm talking about in my OP. At best unhelpful and dismissive. At worse a statement that could sent someone struggling into a very dark place mentally.

Of course most people expect to be sleep deprived....I did as this is not my first child and I'm not an idiot. Did I expect to be waking every 1-2 hours for almost 6 months- no. And I don't think that's an unrealistic expectation. And even if it is unrealistic and I have been naive, I think it's cruel and dangerous to pull out the 'well, you shouldn't have had a child' card.

Did I expect to be waking every 1-2 hours for almost 6 months- no. And I don't think that's an unrealistic expectation. I think some people do find it helpful to reassess their expectations though - I did. Both my DC woke up every hour for years as did over half of the DC of my friends. It was my previous expectation that babies woke up every 3 hours (!) that was perhaps naive.. or I don’t know… Maybe plenty of people do have babies like this? The 3 hour thing has to come from somewhere I suppose. But personally I found that the first step to me feeling better about it was just acceptance and to stop obsessing about whether the baby had woken up 8 or 9 times last night and just go with it (and co-sleep).

I understand you are saying you don’t find it helpful but I found the assertions that babies sleep better the older they get and they’ll probably be sleeping through by a year to be unhelpful. The reason I found that so unhelpful and often upsetting is that with my first child at least I was just counting down the weeks / months until he was sleeping better and felt so confused, let down, etc when he was waking up just as much at say, 11 months as at 1 month. It felt like was I doing something wrong? - was my baby broken? Why had I listened to people that said babies slept through by a year? Etc etc.

I found people sharing stories of frequent wakers helpful. It meant I didn’t feel alone and also I was interested in other people’s ways of coping.

If people aren't willing to lose out on sleep they shouldn't have a child is a simply absurd thing to say. No one can know what sleep deprivation will look like for them.
DD2 would not sleep unless she was on either DH or me for the first 6 months of her life. I co slept with DD1 but DD2 wouldn't sleep like that, even lying right next to me latched on to my breast she wouldn't sleep. She had to be lying on someone. This was unsustainable for two reasons - one, we would occasionally fall asleep with her on us, which is obviously incredibly dangerous. And two, I had severe PND. My PND wasn't caused by sleep deprivation, nor was it cured when we did sleep training, but I made a massive difference. When I was sleeping more, I stopped actively planning ways to kill myself.
Sleep training for us was fuck all to do with "not be willing" to lose out on sleep. It was because we decided (and I am not being flippant, I'm being serious) that any ill effects from sleep training would in no way be anywhere near as bad as the impact of growing up without a mother.

I think people’s expectations are incredibly low here.

Unless there are health issues, there is no reason at all why a baby that has been fed well during the day and had structured naps wouldn’t sleep for 3 hours at a time at night. None of my newborns ever woke more than 3 times a night - in fact, with a feed at 10pm it was usually twice (2am and 5am). This quickly became a single waking. I’m not counting when they were ill/teething etc, but in the normal order of things.

I suspect what’s happening with a lot of ‘baby-led’ mums (and I saw several of my friends do this) is that the poor baby is stirring after 1.5 hours (natural sleep cycle) but instead of letting it resettle mum is picking it straight up and sticking a boob in its mouth before it has chance to go back to sleep. This creates a very over tired baby who develops an association with being fed to sleep.

Let the poor baby sleep and you’ll probably find that it’s quite capable!

@Tiddler39 that makes sense

I suspect what’s happening with a lot of ‘baby-led’ mums (and I saw several of my friends do this) is that the poor baby is stirring after 1.5 hours (natural sleep cycle) but instead of letting it resettle mum is picking it straight up and sticking a boob in its mouth before it has chance to go back to sleep. This creates a very over tired baby who develops an association with being fed to sleep.

I think I might have done this with DD1 at one point. I'd wake and hear her starting (as I thought) to wake up and think I might as well cut out the wait for her to wake fully and feed her straight away. Fortunately I had the sense to listen to DH when he said, "I think you're waking her when she would go back to sleep, try leaving her a minute." She slept a lot better!