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.

And this is precisely why I don't mention it much in real life! I did it because it worked best/was culturally normal for us - not because I wanted to be a martyr or get gold stars.

But we have to work? Even cavewomen had to work on daily survival.
Baby led is a utopia that cannot be achieved.

You might want to reflect how you are coming across.

TBH the whole gentle/attachment parent thing (beyond a certain point) pisses me off and my kids are now 15 and 13. It does seem to have got worse since I had them. I met a group of Mums through a breast feeding training course when mine were young and tbh I did feel a bit like the odd one out. Why, because I still cared about what my house looked like, what I looked like and sleep. I didn't really voice any of this but there was the definite belief that you have to let go about everything. Yes your baby is hugely important but so are you (the caregiver) and that includes getting enough sleep. I cannot help thinking that 1970s Mothers (thats when I was born) would put up with continuous sleep deprivation (not talking about the newborn days or about when a baby or child is ill). It seems to me that in those days you were allowed to prioritise other things occasionally. I cannot help thinking that in another generation or two, all of this will be turned on its head again.

Meant would not put up with

Also, some of us cannot safely co-sleep (I'm assuming you're taking about the safe sleep seven here). In my case, that was because I had low birth weight babies, but also anyone with a premature or ill baby, anyone exclusively bottle feeding, and people on certain medications just cannot meet the criteria for safe co-sleeping.

Obviously that doesn't mean no one should co-sleep. But it does mean there have to be solutions out there for the fairly sizable number who can't co-sleep safely. Without making those mums feel any worse than they already do (and believe you me, particularly with my first I had some moments of feeling pretty terrible that I'd failed to grow her correctly!)

@Springchicken75 some people can survive on practically no sleep- my wife is one. She can go for a few weeks of broken/very little sleep before she starts to feel the effects. It was brilliant when we had a non sleeping baby.

@FigAndOlive autistic and adhd children often don’t sleep and no amount of ignoring them will make them, it’s in their brain chemistry.

^^This 100%....sigh!

I agree with @Moonicorn there's a large number of people on here saying they're at the end of their tether due to not sleep and it turns out they are still exclusively BF a large 5 month old with no solids & refuse to top up with formula or entertain the idea of some baby porridge. I find it quite upsetting to think of their baby being so hungry they can't sleep. Would people do this to an older child? They also have a mother who is worn out with it all. However we all make our choices and if they don't like the idea of a routine and prefer to walk round exhausted for 2 years then I guess it's up to them.

I agree that new parents definitely need more support, and I wouldn't want anyone to suffer waking every 20 minutes for several years if there was a safe and effective alternative. That's why I try to raise awareness about the medical research surrounding sleep training, so that parents can weigh up their personal risks and benefits and make an informed decision .

I know it can be really difficult to make a decision about what to do and as mothers we often think - well, I will suffer this if it's good for the baby. If you're thinking like that, it might be useful to consider whether the sleep deprivation is causing depression, as maternal depression is linked with poor attachment and adverse effects on babies. So looking after your own mental health has a positive effect on the baby too.

You might also want to consider other risk factors, as PP mentioned falling downstairs from hallucinating. What is the risk to the baby if you crash your car, or lose your job?

The study you've quoted says that mothers report their babies are sleeping longer and that mothers' mental health had improved. I think those are 2 of the main things mothers will be trying to achieve when they begin sleep training, so that study is also evidence that sleep training does work!

We all, adults too, awake multiple times during the night, so you wouldn't expect a sleep trained baby to stop waking in between sleep cycles.

The aim of any sleep training is to withdraw sleep props that the baby relies on to get back to sleep, whether it's a dummy, rocking, shushing whatever. The aim is not for them to stop awakening; the aim is for them to be able to stay calm and drowsy and drift back to sleep naturally, by themselves, without requiring any sleep props - and so without crying and waking up the parent.

I really do recommend the Emily Oster book, Cribsheet, whatever concerns you might have about her conclusions, as she has links to lots and lots of studies on this topic which will give you a lot of Information if you prefer to do your own analysis.

EBF 5 month olds are always hungry and that's why they don't sleep WTF? I think you made this up yourself?? What if you try solids or formula and they still don't sleep, is it still the mother's fault? My baby started solids at 6 months and started sleeping even worse!

It is my experience that hungry babies don’t sleep. If they are eating enough, stimulated during the day, a longer but not unbroken sleep should follow. If not a medical reason should be explored.

The problem with the study is it looks at a whole bunch of other ones, not a specific method or age of the children. Unless anyone able to access the full thing can enlighten me?

It's a tough one. My older two didn't sleep through until they were aged 2. To cope dh did 3 night wake ups and I did 4. We did cosleep. It meant we both got some nights of uninterrupted sleep. I managed to batch cook when I had a better night's rest at the weekend and we'd eat those meals for the week. It meant that on my days when the kids napped so did I. I had 2 under 2 and that was what got me though. Once they went in their own beds there was initially lots of wake ups but then it was putting them back to bed and dh would lie on the floor until they fell asleep. That was crap as he felt he had no evening left so eventually it got to the stage where it was lots of reassurance but back to bed
and within a month dd1 was sleeping all night in her own bed, we then did the same with ds when he was 2.

My current baby has slept through from 3 months. She was drowsy and I was putting her to sleep when I had to go help my son off the toilet. I placed her in her crib as I went to him and when I got back to her she was asleep. I thought it was a fluke and then it happened again. At that point I started putting her in her crib when she was drowsy and remained upstairs so I could pick her up if she cried, she would just go to sleep. Now she is 18 months and goes in her cot for her nap and overnight. She goes down drowsy, if she cries I pick her straight up comfort her and try again after 10 or 15 minutes.

Being a parent does require some sacrifice and many parents will be sleep deprived for a while but you don't get a medal for being a martyr.

My advice is that every kid is different, sometimes you just might have a shit sleeper and in that case you need to share the load with your oh and do whatever you can to reduce the other pressures. So for example, get a cleaner, batch cook, sleep when baby does, the other parent tidies up before you go to bed do laundry on set days so you don't have piles of clothes building up. It can and does get easier but when you are in the thick of it it is hard.

On the group front, you are an adult and should be able to recognise whether a group is good or bad for you. If it makes you feel worse then it isn't the group for you, withdraw from it.

It's a meta-analysis. This is the kind've thing that feeds into health policy, eg Nice guidelines, NHS website advice etc

It's not a problem

100% agree. It's appalling. In those pro bedsharing/attachment parenting groups everything boils down to 'this is normal, deal with it'.

Even if someone is desperate, at their wit's end, can't take another night of waking every ten minutes. 'Biologically normal. Put baby in your bed [risking their life]. Parenting doesn't stop overnight'

It's criminal tbh. Never before in human history have mothers been expected to cease to have needs once they have a child. I'd love to send some of these people back in time!

Great comment.

"hungry babies don't sleep" yep
Are EBF babies hungry because they're EBF?

I've noticed that a lot of FB parenting groups focused on a single issue tend to go this way (to the point even the name annoys me!) completely polarised because they set themselves up as OUR WAY is the one right perfect way which works for everyone and can never be criticised and THAT OTHER WAY is terrible, awful, bad parenting and people only do it because they don't know any better 🙄

It's got to a point I avoid groups with that kind of ethos entirely because it leads to a load of nonsense! There is never any space for nuance. While there is often some good advice/specialised info, it's difficult to sift out from the politics - you get the over-competitive poster who pops up on every thread to explain why she is just sooooooooooo much better at RightThing than everyone else and have people fawn over her. You get the snark against a well-meaning relative's suggestion or a new member who dares to ask the wrong question or offer the wrong answer. You get lots of competitive, sometimes deranged virtue signalling moves like "I went into a book shop and turned all the sleep training books around LOL" "I bought the sleep training books from my local charity shop and burned them hahahaha". You get total random made up turds of "advice" floating around that people take as gospel because everyone repeats them so often but nobody knows where they came from and if you dig they are usually just someone's pet theory or even competitiveness points. Selective reading of "studies" presented as the absolute truth. I could go on.

Basically they are toxic and completely unhelpful to anybody.

A friend of mine said her mother told her 'when you were a baby we had to put you in the garage some nights as you just wouldn't stop crying!'

my friend was aghast 'how could you do that?'

her mum: 'we had to! You wouldn't stop waking and crying in the night. It was the only way we got some sleep!'

didn't see anything 'wrong' with it at all. They saw parents getting sleep as a priority, as long as baby was old enough to not need night feeds anymore it was seen as perfectly acceptable to leave them to cry.

Emily Oyster is just as bad as the facebook group mentioned. She basically wrote a book to justify her parenting methods and then cherry picked studies to suit her narrative.

I've noticed that a lot of FB parenting groups focused on a single issue tend to go this way (to the point even the name annoys me!) completely polarised because they set themselves up as OUR WAY is the one right perfect way which works for everyone and can never be criticised and THAT OTHER WAY is terrible, awful, bad parenting and people only do it because they don't know any better

I agree with this. I joined a baby led weaning group once, when DD1 was about 6 months. If you mentioned that you'd so much as glanced at a baby spoon you got a firm telling off. The mere mention of the word purée was basically banned. One woman was told off and had her post deleted for asking "my friend has given me some baby purées and I don't want to waste them, is there a way I can incorporate these into a meal that my baby can eat in a BLW way?"

@3WildOnes

Spot on!

I bought her book, read it. Then went looking for responses from medics. Not good.

She had fundamentally misunderstood what "risk" actually means in the medical sphere. It's very different to the economic understanding of it.

Doesn’t really answer my question Qwerty. You can’t say ‘sleep training doesn’t result in more sleep’ if that ‘training’ is allowing an 18 month old to cry and bang on the door until they collapse exhausted.

What question? This is how medical data works.

If you want to know more about meta-analysis and it's implications for medical policy and advice, there's loads on Google