Have babies never slept??

[kentgirl1]

Did parents raising babies in like the 1950s have the same issues with babies not sleeping? Or have our lifestyles changed which has led to a increase in babies not sleeping well??

I doubt it, it's not the most riveting of subjects! . I was just replying to your query on deep sleep in tummy sleepers.

I am so very very jealous @TakeMeToTheFresh

Frozen don't be. He's very miserable, never happy really. He will laugh and in the next breath start moaning

I may be very naive here because obviously sleep deprivation is horrendous but he just isn't a very pleasant character!

Beautiful face though.

Looking for some help. My 2 1/2 week old will not sleep during the day. She is sleeping pretty well at night but she will not nap during the day. Mostly she is a very content happy baby but im worried she isnt getting enough sleep to develop properly. She will sometimes sleep in her sleephead but often its on someone/next to us in bed. She is gassy so we have been trying infacol. Any help gratefully recieved as DH is back to work and my Mum goes back next week so ill be alone

@MrsHealey does she sleep at all in the day? Is she happy?

Hi Kentgirl. Hardly at all. Sometimes we get a few hours but on someone. She is getting very grouchy in the evenings last few days.

@TakeMeToTheFresh only just seen this reply. It's the one thing that keeps me going is that dd is a happy baby when she is awake. (Which is most of the bloody time, arghhhhh)

Hi @MrsHealey do you have a sling? Does she sleep in the pram? Have you tried white noise? Those were things guaranteed to get dd to sleep - I used to play womb noises to her and she would sleep.

Your little one is only tiny so she is still adjusting to it all.

I had my first three babies in the 90s and they were all great sleepers, i fed them during the night and it took a few weeks to get them in to a routine but once they were about 6 to 8 weeks old they only woke at night to be fed. They slept on their backs and went into their own room from about 5 or 6 months. I had a baby monitor though and never left them to cry. They napped well in the day too, except dc3 who never really slept during the day. Number 4 was also a good sleeper but dc5 was born in the noughties and didn't sleep nearly as well, i have no idea why, the only difference in how we cared for her is that she slept in our room for the first year due to lack of space.

I guess that the 'natural' way for a baby to sleep is next to its mother. This is how I slept with Dc2. You do wake a lot in the night, but only for very short periods and you don't really remember it very clearly. (I'm referring to 100 plus years ago).

Stomach sleeping is therefore 'unnatural' in the sense that babies who co sleep with their mothers usually go to sleep while feeding and either end up sleeping on their sides facing their mother, or roll away onto their backs.

What do you think all the vaguely violent historical lullaby songs come from? There's a very old one I'd heard from an Iraqi friend about passing the baby around all the women in the combined household (baby why are you crying, Aminah is rocking you etc...then the next verse another person, then another then another). It's not just all leaving babies to cry, there were also long periods where women would cosleep, but without electricity they also went to sleep close to the same time as the baby, so might have been less tired.

I think understanding sleep and lowering my expectations was a game changer for me. Stress gone!

I don't think our babies have changed.
But my mum (who had her first child- my eldest sibling, obviously- in 1963 and in the States), tells me about the intolerance people had towards their babies. Mum was from a large Irish family, born and raised on a Kilkenny farm, so she found this cold approach towards (not) dealing with babies very bizarre.

DH was born in West London in 1958.
His parents used to put him in the cot and go out to the pub.

There really was a 'put 'em in the cot and leave them there with the door shut' solution to dealing with kids in general. In general, I repeat.
We've changed our approach as parents. There's just a lot more awareness and sharing of information now.

Co-sleeping. It can really be the sensible solution- unless you have a thrasher, then this is really, really difficult. DD is a thrasher. She's 8 and still moves around like an electric fan in the bed all night, so co-sleeping with her didn't really happen. That being said, she was the best sleeper of my three. My other two nearly killed me. But co-sleeping allowed for longer stretches of sleep.
Co-sleeping has been the norm in so many cultures.
My mother found child-rearing in 1960s American totally and utterly barbaric. The mothers, she found, were just walled off. We grew up with a Tibetan refugee family nearby and I remember them showing us the bed that the father built. It filled their entire bedroom, but it fit 8 sleepers! Once the kids were in school, they shared their own bed in their own bedroom.

I think that babies were left to cry a lot more, outside at the end of the garden etc. A 4 hour routine from day one was encouraged. Even in hospital, babies were only bought to Mum for feeds in that routine.

Phernegan (sedative) in the 60's and 70's apparently.

I think the attitude of leave them to cry was only really a small space in time compared to humanity. Sleep is not even a stress for many cultures. It is what it is. When we were in Kathmandu it was such an eye opener that I really had that in mind when I had my children.

Back in the 50’s and 60’s most babies were bottle fed. Formula milk produces more curd in the stomach, which is slower to digest, so the baby didn’t get hungry overnight and wake for a feed. Weaning was also much earlier.
I bottle fed both my DDs in the 80’s/90’s, and they slept right through the night from 8 weeks. I weaned both onto puréed solids at 8 weeks too, and had them sleeping in a cot next to my bed for the first year, so they could hear and smell me nearby. They were very contented, only cried if teething or needing a nappy change. And they’re now grown up and healthy!

My sock is wet again - I think it is the other way round. That boys are much more likely to be left to cry than girls to toughen them up.www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/moral-landscapes/201701/be-worried-about-boys-especially-baby-boys
I understand that recent research in the USA said parents were more likely to carry baby girls around than baby boys.Boys again were more likely to be left to cry it out.

That said I do think going back a few hundred years, babies were carried on their mothers backs , which soothed them.Shutting them away to cry is a modern (20th century) phenomenon.

My granny said that after having a baby you stayed in the nursery wing of the hospital for a week or two to set the routine which helped although her dc3 was a horror re sleep and she would have only had 1 if he'd been dd1!

I had dd1 who had colic, reflux and an aversion to sleep but dtds were in scbu for 8 days and it's true, they had a good routine by the time we went home and despite having 2 babies they did sleep (waking for feeds obviously but then back to sleep). Dtds were not left to cry it out and neither were my mum or her siblings. They were pushed in a massive bouncy pram and left to sleep outside.

The only thing I wonder is if there's more allergies; cmpa and intolerances around, which definitely affect sleep. More cs leads to less stomach bacteria and some think increased risk of various reactions.

I agree that attitudes to sleep in other cultures are very different and it was more like that in the uk in the distant past. And more recent past in lower income families where you'd get 10 sleeping in a room together.

Life is very sterile in modern day baby raising.