Are we doing the right thing for our baby's sleep?

[ExhaustedButAlive]

Hey all,

I want to preface this vent/plea for help and validation by saying that I love and respect my partner to no end, and while at times I do get frustrated or feel invalid/forgotten/unimportant, I'm a grown ass man and can go go get over myself quite easily. If anything I have written below seems like I am passive aggressive or assigning/relegating blame, I want you to tell me so I know how to be better.

In early 2024 me and my partner had a baby. A couple of key things to note:

1. The baby is one of the happiest, most social and content babies I have ever met, and her social progress has been applauded multiple times by the health visitor and local mums support groups. 99% of the time, even when she's ill, she's all smiles and laughter.
2. My partner and I don't live together (various reasons that we are trying to overcome but we make the best of what we have).
3. I am a fixer. If there is an issue, problem or challenge, I will fixate on it until it is fixed, even if I haven't been asked to get involved.
4. We both work. My partner travels to her workplace and is on a lower shift pattern (typically 20 hours per week) while I work from "home" (a flat I rent and use to work from for focus and quiet for client calls) and tend to do 40 - 60 hours. Both careers are high-intensity in different ways.
5. As a result of my working hours, my partner tends to handle the nighttime routine (she is breastfeeding so this makes sense) while I work/sleep at my flat/office to avoid waking them up with a super late night/early morning bedtime routine. NOTE: I tend not to start work until the afternoon, so from 7/8AM I am with the baby and handle most of the day to day things (naps, meals, changing, stimulation etc.)

Now for the issue:

Since baby was born, I've been able to get her to sleep in literal minutes. Her typical sleep pattern during the day is:

• Nap #1: 10:30AM to 11:00AM
• Nap #2: 13:10PM to 14:15PM
• Bedtime prep: 18:45PM to 20:00PM (stimulation and mum/daughter time)
• Bedtime settling: 20:00PM onwards

And I very rarely have issues with this pattern. However, when it comes time for bedtime sleep, it is the complete opposite unless I am the one handling it. If mum is putting her down to sleep, she will scream and push and fight as hard as she can to stay awake, but as soon as I take over she settles and drops off. I've lost count of the amount of times I've had a phonecall between 2 and 4am to come and take over.

This is having a horrible effect on mum for a couple reasons:

1. The most important: Mum is starting to feel like she isn't enough. I cannot convince her she is, and while I keep trying to I know that until she believes it herself there is no chance I can change her mind. There is a level of her that feels like she is detaching from being a mum, to the point where even when she is in the room with the baby she isn't paying attention, and spends most of her time on her phone (no judgement, normally she is shopping for baby things and tinted is a marvellous platform).
2. Almost equally important: Mum is struggling to get a solid nights sleep. Even when I turn up to take over, her sleep has already been so broken that the extra few hours me being there affords her doesn't have anywhere near the replenishing effect it needs to - this often leads to days where mum is in bed through the day and up most nights when she isn't at work, which only makes the situation worse in the long run.
3. Less important but still difficult: Our relationship is fairly strained. I'm not specifically talking about sex but for all instances of intimacy or affection (cuddles, kisses, even just sitting in the same room and having dinner or a conversation), I instigate and get shot down (I completely understand why, and she did prewarn me that this may happen prior to baby birth as it happened with her previous child from a different relationship). All conversations are one sided and are met with one word answers or complete silence. I've also noticed that I pay for everything, plan everything, and handle all of the mundane day to day alongside childcare related issues. I'm also starting to take the lead in supporting the first child (preteen with her own set of dependencies) with all of her needs and issues to be resolved, and when I ask for my partners opinion there is a lethargy to her responses of "I don't know, figure it out".

One of the challenges that I feel we face is that the baby is now almost 13 months old, and still sleeps in mums bed. She has her own cot in mums bedroom, AND her own bedroom in the house, but trying to convince mum to start transitioning to self-sleep/independent sleeping has been met with a flat refusal and no remote desire for a conversation about the benefits/needs in terms of the baby's development.

I will admit, I have given up on that fight because I was tired of being reminded that I'm too busy at work to have an opinion.

My question is, are we doing the right thing? Is the codependency and co-sleeping actually hindering my partners efforts and causing the baby to disassociate?

Or, as I am terrified of, am I the issue? Either because:

1. I am the routine nap-maker/bedtime soother and baby doesn't associate mum with that level of comfort or safety as a result.
2. My child has developed separation anxiety because I go away each day for work and that is usually the last she sees me until the next day.

Any and all advice, opinions or feedback will be appreciated, because I'm at the end of my rope trying to find a fix for this.

Baby sleep, lack of sleep, broken sleep and disagreements about how to solve it are all really common and also drive parents insane in the early years.

A few thoughts. It doesn’t matter if you are the one that make the baby go to sleep at a the drop of hat, if you’re not there over night and are happily getting unbroken sleep every night then you don’t get to dictate whether your partner co sleeps or not.

It’s all very well that you are able to manage naps etc easily, you’re not there! So it’s up to mum to make it work.

Does mum want you help? Does she want it to change? It’s not clear what she wants, as this post is mostly about what you want.

Babies can have a preference for a parent, that can fade away, stay the same or change parent. The other parent has to suck it up, and in this case she has to manage it since you’re the one always leaving.

The truth is baby sleep can be awful and turns us all into obsessive nutcases. It won’t be like this forever, baby will grow out of it and it will be a distant memory.

The most important thing is that mum gets some sleep as she sounds at breaking point. So she needs to figure out what would work for her to do that. And then you need to help make it happen. She doesn’t want to do what you’re suggesting, so you need to come up with something else. Or start doing nights instead, which frankly sounds like the best option given how amazingly easy it is for you.

Oh and finally, co sleeping does not make your baby more dependant, it is a perfectly reasonable coping method when you don’t want to get up five times a night and go to another room.

I couldn’t read all that, but I think understand your issue. It’s completely normal for baby to prefer the parent who always does the soothing and settling to always do the soothing and settling.

It’s not because mum is doing anything wrong or not wanted. It’s just you’ve created a routine that works really well. Usually the parent doing all the nighttime parenting is mum, and it’s the opposite issue. Have a search for all the threads on here from mums asking how they can get their partners to be able to do bedtime because they just want to go out one night to their best friends birthday dinner. No really, search for them, because they will have good advice.

The problem is though that your baby doesn’t live with you, so you’ve created a bit of a problem where the primary parent who lives with baby full time isn’t the one who can do bedtime. To change that, you just need to create a new routine. Mum needs to persist with doing bedtime solo and you need to not intervene. In fact, best if you aren’t even there. Until things settle and baby is used to mum doing bedtime.

Co-sleeping is perfectly normal and natural and won’t be causing these issues. Both my dc co-slept with me regularly til about 3. We didn’t have any sleep issues really and no challenges with bedtime/settling for sleep. If you want to change up the bedtime routine, best thing you can do is to keep the nighttime sleep routine the same.