Why is sleep so often used as the yardstick of "good" parenting?

[cantthinkofagoodname]

As the first time mother of a lovely DD with horrendous sleep issues, I've encountered so many times smug or judgemental attitudes from others. Case in point - yesterday I was driving a neighbour home. She was sitting in the back next to 14wk old DD. DD was having a meltdown through overtiredness.

Neighbour: Oh she's having a right tantrum, isn't she?
Me: she's very tired.
Neighbour: No she can't be otherwise she'd go to sleep. She's doing it for attention.
Me:she won't sleep unless she's in the sling.
Neighbour: She's playing you. She just wants you to pick her up.
5 mins later, arriving home and putting DD into sling. DD immediately stops crying.
Neighbour triumphantly: See! I told you it was for attention!

The same neighbour has also put on a child's voice when I put DD into the sling and said £don't tie me up mum!" She has also told me I should use a pram so DD can look around. Never mind that a) looking around is one of the ways DD fights sleep, and b) she can see perfectly werll in the sling.

Also yesterday I went to a child's birthday party on our street. I was quizzed repeatedly by some of the other mothers about why I was so often walking around with DD in a sling, the implication being that I'm some sort of nutter. Znother mother on our street is convinced its because I'm screwing up with the bfing and not feeding DD enough (she's leaping up the centiles!)

My partner has been quizzed about why she's not attending a late night party of a colleague. She explained that it was because she goes to bed early to compensate for the night wakings. The colleasgue said "Is she STILL not sleeping through?, you want to get her on formula!"

I jusr needed to vent as its bad enough being severely sleep deprived without feeling people (with perfect babies) are judging you too.

Has anyone else had smug / snide comments?

Because small baies only eat and sleep.
People who want to be smug only have those two activities to judge.

I have had no sleep problems with any of my DCS that is not smug it is a just a fact. But I do think if you get a good nights sleep you can deal with anything during the day.

I have never cared what anyone thought of how I care for my baby and you shouldn't either. There are many different styles of parenting and you get to choose yours, not your neighbour.

I totally agree with your annoyance at people who speak as if they are the giving the baby a voice, why do they think it allows them to be as rude as they like?

You sound like a lovely mum don't pay any attention to the opinions of people that just don't matter.

your neighbour sounds like a right dck
i must be crappest parent in world eh? with bf baby 1y who still feeds 6-10x a night who wont take milk any other way and i just dont have energy to sleep train myself (need dh to come back to bedroom and help me)
slings are beautiful and natural! what a fantastic way to carry/sleep a baby
a close friend who is excellent to me (and she bottle fed all 3 of hers) said somwething like - when i said i was gonna sleep train DD - 'you can get rid of all that rubbishy mattress on floor for cosleeping now' (as if only i had done better earlier it neednt have come to that, plus assuming cosleeping is crppy - ok it can be but it can also be great)
i dont think putting a baby on formula just to get a good nights sleep is a good enough reason, unless a mum really is at wits end, then of course yes
14w is so young, i didnt get DD to nap off me till 5m
youre doing fine cantthinkofa!
btw other people dont have perfect babies - you do!

We do mattress on floor too! Well me and DD are on mattress, poor DP is on lilo!

Well, I used to assume that if your baby didn't sleep, that it was down to you and the way you parented them. This was based on the fact that both DS1+2 slept through from 6/8 weeks.

Fast forward 4 years and DS3, who didn;t sleep through until he was 16 months . No different in my parenting, same routine as his brothers, did everything the same, he just didn't sleep through, and didn't nap during the day unless we were out in his pram.

So it really came to bite me on the bum didn't it! I did apologise to both my sister and friend who had bad sleepers about my opinions though.

I would have said the opposite - I got a lot of competitive tiredness. Its a badge of honour how many times you've been up in the night with them.

The sling would be a bit unusual around here so I would probably be curious about it.

I just do my own thing and thank people sweetly for any advice I get. I don't even care if tehy judge. The best mother for your baby is you, because you're its mother. You will do some things right and some things wrong. But so will every other mother. :-)

canthinkofagoodname, I know exactly how you feel. Between 9 and 14 weeks DS would only sleep in the sling. The GP and HVs told me I was letting him manipulate me and (in the words of my GP, put him in his cot and leave him to scream). A neighbour told me he'd still be in it aged 2 if I carried on. Fortunately they were all wrong.

Now (at 6 months) I am bemoaning the fact that he doesn't tend to stay asleep in the sling for long, but prefers his cot.

Babies in slings do get generally more attention than prams,though, I think because they're less common.

We do the mattress on the floor thing too, except DS has one single mattress and I have another, so I can feed lying down but still get my own space. Both sets of parents kep asking where DS is sleeping now - with the sub-text that we must be weird for doing things like that.

Keep going with whatever works for you.

Hi Angeldog. How did you wean your DS off the sling? I keep trying to encourage her to go for a nap with me in the middle of the day, (Heaven knows, I need it!) but instead of feeding to sleep (as at night) she just lies there and screams.

Hi canthinkofa - check out the Challenging 3 month-olds thread for AD's various nap-encouragement strategies!! Some good advice there you might want to try.

We get loads of attention because of the sling, but get away with it because we're English (we live in Spain) - once they satisfy themselves we're not Romanian (!), the Spanish tend to be intrigued by the sling and usually agree that it's very convenient to have two hands free and that the baby loves being so close to Mummy (their usual concerns are ergonomic - "Isn't it heavy?" - and temperature-based "Don't you get hot?")

Do whatever you have to do and sod everyone else!!

OP, when I see attention seeking kids where I work, I sometimes wonder if their parents ignored them as babies because their parents were 'careful' not to give them too much attention.

You know you are doing nothing wrong. Your story just reminded me of when I wonder how come some kids turn out. cos I am not cruising for a flaming here.

dd is now 21 mos and i can't believe how quickly it seems they no longer need the sling. it seems like such a long time ago.

at around 14 weeks I put her in a high back carry and she'd go to sleep in there while I did the ironing.

Why are so many things used as yardsticks of good parenting? Honestly, using just one measure I can make each of DC seem terrific or awful -- News Flash: a lot of how they turn out isn't actually parental doing. It's hard-wired. I don't take credit for all their good points so please don't blame me for all their failings or difficult moments, ta.

I get so tired of people commenting on my dd's sleeping habits too, why is it any of their business?

Mine is 2.6 now and still co-sleeping, it works for us and the likelihood is that she will go into her own bed when she is ready and be quite happy to do so.

Other people I have spoken to whose dc go to sleep in their own beds have admitted that they generally end up back in bed with them at some point during the night, but its as if its something to be ashamed of which I think is terribly sad, they are so small still and I am damn sure my dd will soon be asserting her independance from me in many ways so I intend to enjoy this while I can.

AS Immaculada said sod everyone else

The next yardstick of good parenting is how good a walker your child is (e.g. Oh we never use the buggy, DD walks for 5 miles a day) so you might want to give up the sling now to get a head start on that one

If OP has a 14 week old who is "playing" her for attention, she should be very impressed at how advanced she is

Bumper - I'll bear that in mind!

Cantthink - sounds very much like my 21 week old DD. Except she doesn't always sleep in the sling either! She really fights sleep and leaving her in the cot to scream just wouldn't work. I walk miles every day - no baby weight left though I could do with some sleep.

I hate the way people blame breast feeding - my supply is fine I've got a freezer full of the stuff! I'm getting grief now that I should be giving up breast feeding as "you shouldn't do it longer than 6 months".

can'tthinkofagoodname, your situation does sound similar to my DS, but I can't guarantee that what worked for him would work for you. This is a bit of an essay, but I hope it's useful.

DS was (in hindsight) pretty colicky ie he needed soothing for more than 3 hours a day on average to prevent crying. Nights weren't so bad, but in the day he'd shriek his head off before dropping off to sleep. Discovering the sling at 9 weeks was one of the biggest reliefs of my life, as it (usually) worked and without so many tears.

As the colickyness gradually improved, he started to feed to sleep at bedtime (but not in the middle of the night, and never during the day) - somewhere between 10 and 12 weeks, IIRC. Then it improved some more - he no longer shrieked in the sling for the early evening nap he needed before bedtime. (He still needed the nap, but didn't really yell any more.)

Then we were advised by a paediatrician friend that if we were having to fight him to sleep, we were probably mis-reading his tired signals during the day which was why only the sling worked. It turned out that we had been trying to get him off to sleep before he was really tired, which was why other methods failed to work. Only the sling would induce drowsiness in a baby who wasn't really sleepy.

We had been trying to get him to sleep when he started yawning and grizzling about 45 mins after he woke up (which we assumed meant he was tired). However, when we tried keeping him awake for longer (about an hour and a half) it turned out that it was the second lot of yawns / grizzling that meant he was tired. If we put him in the sling then, he would drop off instantly rather than it taking a while.

Once we'd got a better idea of when he was tired, I tried getting him off without the sling. Various methods then worked:

• car plus dummy (someone had to hold it in his mouth as he couldn't do that himself) with a muslin over the front of the car seat;
• pram on very bumpy ground plus dummy and a muslin over it.
• rocking - I'd swaddle him, lie him on his side across my lap as if to bf him, with his face into my elbow, put in dummy (and hold it in with my elbow), put a muslin over my shoulder/his head to block out visual stimulation, play white noise, rock madly and pat him.

All of those methods had previously failed repeatedly, which I assume was because he was still at the colicky stage and horribly overtired. However once he got the hang of going to sleep fairly easily (in the sling) it was relatively easy to help him get to sleep by other methods. There was some crying involved but it was protest crying rather than hysterics, IYSWIM, and it worked. As he got used to it, the crying got less.

I then tried feeding him at the point at which he was evidently tired, and he happily fed himself to sleep on my lap. He had always refused before - because he wasn't actually that tired, and it wasn't actually that long since his previous nap. (Both then and now, if he's overtired, he just refuses to feed, or feeds for a short while and then yells - he won't feed to sleep.)

I had a stage of feeding him to sleep for every nap and progressed to being able to put him down before he was fast asleep. Then I managed to rock him to sleep swaddled & with a dummy, but without the muslin / white noise / patting. As he got more used to it I was able to ditch the dummy. Gradually I was able to put him down sooner and sooner, so recently I was able to rock him until a bit drowsy (when his eyes start to roll) and then put him down and he'd do the rest on his own (with a bit of shush patting if necessary).

If your DD likes the sling, she may well like being swaddled, as I think the sensation of being wrapped up tight is similar - certainly my DS loves both.

I don't know if any of that will help, but there's more on the daytime sleeping habits of colicky babies here. It takes some babies 4 months or so to get over the unsettled colicky stage.

I would have a go at trying for a nap after around 1.5 hours awake (maybe only 1 hour after waking in the morning). Babies find it easiest to get to sleep when they are well-rested, so they ought to find the first nap of the day easiest.

HTH!

Wow thanks AngelDog this is much appreciated. We have found that it takes much longer to get her aleep in the sling if we put her in there at the first yawn, but if we leave it longer I only have to walk to the end of my street and back to get her into a good deep sleep.

I'm just desperate to get her to nap other than in the sling as:

a) it's impossible to "sleep when the baby sleeps" if the baby's in a sling so I'm knackered all the time

and b) I can get very few jobs done with a baby in a sling so the house is going to rack and ruin!

I believe that sleep is often used as a yardstick of 'good parenting' due to the fact we live in a society (ie contemporary Western) that has a strongly held belief that young infants need to be taught how to sleep without parental assistance, alone & for long periods (ideally through the night). If the OP lived in say, Japan or Guatemala where infant sleep culture/expectation is very different, I suspect she would not feel the same level of pressure and interest in her DC's sleep behaviour. Sometimes I wish I could live in one of these countries given the amount of time I spend justifying my parenting choices re sleep to various friends/relatives!

I don't think it should be considered a yardstick at all, it entirely depends on the baby, it really gets on my nerves when people stick their big noses in and makes you feel like a failure because your baby doesn't sleep when he/she is supposed to.

cant tell your neighbour to sod off and mind her own!!!!

I thank my lucky stars every single day DS sleeps through and certainly don't take it as a given he will continue to do so.

Good luck with getting some sleep

forgot to add, I think it's great when I see a baby in a sling, it's a naturel place for a baby, I couldn't put DS in a sling cause I had a nasty accident a few years ago and broke my neck, so I don't have the strenght to carry him and the pain would be unbelievable!!!

Another thread I don't really understand...

I never had people comment about my DCs sleeping even though DS2 had horrendous problems.
I suspect I either have a fuck off face or my strategy of mumbling in a totally disinterested way when asked about my parenting choices paid off

FWIW I don't know anyone in RL who feels sleep patterns are a yardstick of parental competence so I can't really accept the premis of the Op.
I also suspect that people engage with parents of babies about sleeping and feeding because babies don't do much else so once you have talked about how gorgeous they are and family likenesses there is fuck all left to talk about

at 'fuck off face', I think I have one of those too!

I did have a few people ask me in the early days if DD was sleeping, I just used to laugh and say no, but it was OK but she was in our bed so I didn't have to get up to feed her. That either seemed to shock people into silence or prompt people to offer ever so helpful advice about formula top-ups, controlled crying and other methods that just made me grin and say 'nah, not my style'.

I think some people just want to prove or show what a good parent they are by offering advice to other people, whether they want it or not. Maybe they are a bit insecure.

OP- I intend to sling my next DC, I wasn't confident enough to do it with DD when she was tiny but this time around I think I can crack it!

Welcome to the world of motherhood, where you will be judged and sniped at whatever you do (or don't do).

Breastfeed beyond 6 months? Nutty lentil weaver
Formula feed? Selfish cow
Sling and co-sleep? Loony hippy
Buggy and cot? Cold-hearted lover of Gina Ford
Stay at home? Loafing dependent leech
Go back to work? Ruthless career beeyatch

...and on it goes.

IGNORE. Smile sweetly. Do your own thing. Occasionally throw the odd 'What on earth are you talking about?'-type withering look when someone says something really stupid.

In five years time people will be unable to fathom the immensity of the fuck you do not give about any of this. Seriously.