New mothers need the whole story about AP.

[wenchystrumpet]

I believe some attachment parents are being disingenous when they say their approach was easier for them (compared to other ways one can be a loving mother).

AP approaches are associated with severe and long term sleep deprivation. So, AP may have other benefits, but is being easier generally one of them?

I acknowledge that AP may well be experienced as easier by some individuals.

My contention is that out of the chorus of voices saying "I'm so lazy" there must be a fair few who have hurt their backs from wearing a sling or got depressed from being housebound and are just not acknowledging this part of their experience.

Why is this a problem? It's a problem because I think new mothers are being told only part of the story about AP. Having had no experience of parenting at all, they hear many (but no doubt not all) AP advocates suggesting that this is an easy way to be a mother, when in fact it is a very intense way to mother.

Mothers with mental health concerns, for example, may not find it easier to scale back their work in favour of spending long hours mothering without the balance that work outside the home can provide.

And yes I know AP is an 'approach' or a 'toolkit' but everyone knows certain ways of doing things are considered preferable.

Ohh italic fail. Definitely sleep deprived then.

You countered my example by telling me why my friends who used cars to get their babies to sleep were failing.

My point is that if your routine isn't working, then it's more likely to be a problem with the routine than with the baby or the parent.

That's equally true if your "routine" is based on all night feeding.

And yet women who haven't slept more than two hours straight for months are regularly told on here that it is just something they have to endure, and that taking steps to change the situation is cruel and unnatural.

Despite the fact that we kniw it is bad for babies and for adults to have so little sleep, it is standard advice on MN that this is entirely normal and just something to be accepted.

And that is harmful, anti-woman bullshit.

I think because of my family, I hear the previous generation hung up on their own prejudice when I read stuff like that.

I never heard about lungs being exercised, but I heard plenty about how babies should be in your bed and you should not expect a decent night's sleep for the first few years

And how men's feelings on what was happenimg in their beds were irrelevant.

I'm reacting against what I consider to have been poor advice from my elders.

Not all of it was poor. But some of it really was.

Oh sorry, when I said that I was supposed to be talking about the people I originally mentioned. I can see how it does not look like that at all. What I meant to say was that my friends felt exactly like that, at the end of their tether, but that in their case, driving around was an 'answer' to a problem that didn't really exist (as baby was happy to be fed to sleep). I type too quickly and then forget to proof read things.

Apologies, I didn't mean to imply that your friends had failed. I don't think anyone should feel like they've failed, and IMO when mothers (because it is mainly mothers) feel they have failed it's because some system or other has failed them, whether that be AP or a GF approach. When women say they feel they failed at BF, there are often other factors that led to that.

"I never heard about lungs being exercised, but I heard plenty about how babies should be in your bed and you should not expect a decent night's sleep for the first few years "

This may be where we are crossing over. In my family, it was all baby in their own room from day 1 and that you have to leave them to cry sometimes because they 'have to learn'. I was asked when I was putting DD on the bottle at 3 days old. As for bed-sharing, I was made to feel like a right idiot and endless comments about a rod for my own back. I felt really uncomfortable with it all until I read about AP and realised I could fuck the so-called rules and do what worked for me and my baby. It wasn't about AP so much as the knowledge that there was more than one way to do things.

Endless ways to judge women.

LOL

Well I was put under quite a lot of pressure not to buy a cot ("because the baby will be in your bed anyway") and felt like my family just saw me as a giant pair of lactating breasts (every noise the baby made was met with advice to latch her on).

The fact was that I wanted a cot and wanted to learn to respond to my baby's cues myself, and that sometimes boob isn't the answer (especially if your nipples are in ribbons and both you and the baby are struggling with latch).

Honestly, the nicest and most well meaning earth mothery hippes can make you feel inadequate too.

And yet women who haven't slept more than two hours straight for months

I agree that sounds shit and if it is happening something needs to change.

I actually found though that when I was BF I got a lot of sleep in while the baby latched on every couple of hours. I found that other people who were completely opposed to the notion automatically presumed that if the baby was feeding I was not sleeping and that was absolutely not the case for me. Even I was really surprised how good quality sleep I got because I had FF my 2 other children and so this has not been an option and feeding them in the nighttime was a royal pain in the arse.

Sometimes here I would suggest co sleeping and BF because I found it worked well for us but that is not to say it will work for anybody else especially when often people are culturally opposed to it. I do think that cultural opposition plays its own part in difficulties associated with co sleeping. People are literally terrified of it because the risks are very much emphasised when in reality that is the practice humans were designed to do before the advent of cots/bottles. If you are nervous co sleeping then obviously that will impact sleep although again that is not the reason everyone is opposed to doing it as we are all different.

Still when someone looks for solutions to their lack of sleep I am inclined to tell them what worked for us but I don't expect them to take the advice if it is not a good fit for them.

Telling people co-sleeping works is helpful if they haven't tried it, definitely.

But telling people who already are co-sleeping and feeding through the night, and still getting next to no sleep, that tgis is the only way and that they just need to put up with it, is not cool.

I didn't sleep train my kids, because they have always been good sleepers. My middle kid was sleeping 5 hour stretches from birth! I lucked out.

I like to think if I was on the bones of my arse with sleep deprivation and it was affecting my ability to parent, and if my babies had been constantly grizzly and on a hair trigger due to their own lack of sleep, that I would have had the balls to use sleep training to deal with that issue.

I get infuriated when the very suggestion that it might help is castigated as being cruel.

Sleep deprivation is cruel. Yet people on here advise all the time that babies and adults who are operating on far less than optimal sleep for extended periods just accept their lot.

Even though there are methods we KNOW can work.

Why would you deny a desperate woman and her exhausted baby recourse to those methods in extremis?

Based on ideological objections?

It is bullshit.

And it is common.

I think that there is also an assumption that most parents decide that want to do AP and stick rigidly with it despite the misery.

Most people I met at baby groups started out with a load of different baby books and tried a bit of everything before finding out what worked best. When DC1 was a newborn, I had a copy of a notoriously strict routine-based book, a copy of the Baby Whiperer (I think - the one with the EASY routine) and the Dr Sears baby book.

The first book made me feel miserable and inadequate, and I spent all my time doing sums to work out when the next feed etc was due. I hated it.

I quite like the idea of the EASY routine, and tried it for around a month, but my baby refused to play along. She would fall asleep on the boob, I would spend ages trying to wake her up, her "activity" consisted of crying and trying to get back on my boob, and she never napped for longer than 10 minutes if left to sleep in her cot.

Then I tried just feeding her whenever she liked, and it was bliss in comparison and we were both a lot happier.

Most of the people I know who co-slept did so because although they didn't get a lot of sleep, they gotore sleep than would have done without co-sleeping.

In the case of around the first time co-sleeping parents I know, the bad sleep led to bed sharing rather than the other way round.

I think it's good to hear lots of different opinions. Every mother and every baby is different. Cliche but true! Every mother has to work out her own relationship with each baby. What develops is an accommodation between baby's and mum's needs that works for each individual pair.

Mums, especially first time mums, need to experiment a little to find out what works for them. It's good to know that there is a range of acceptable possible strategies.

I am a big believer in "good enough" parenting.

When I was at my most sleep-deprived, I hated people telling me to sleep train. It's not as though the existence of sleep training is a big secret, known only to a select few. Everyone suggests doing it, and I couldn't do it. My children are fine. I'm fine. It was hard, but in my case, it was better than the available alternatives, including sleep training.

Well I had never heard of sleep training until after I had babies.

It was certainly new to me. If I had needed it, I would have been grateful for someone whonhad done it to explain it to me.

To me it felt like a secret I was only let in on once I was inducted into groups of mothers that weren't my family.

I know, and I know of, families that were transformed from barely coping utter misery into happy, functioning units due to sleep training. It is not shameful to use it.

For some though Doingit the sleep training methods you are alluding to won't work and their situation will still not improve so there are not guaranteed fail safe methods. The amount of mothers of children with ASD that I know that have never slept a full night in their child's life is huge, it is a big issue for parents in this community. We do not typically know which babies have ASD at birth and the instance of ASD is relatively high and similar sleep issues can exist with other disabilities.

Sleep deprivation is awful but I think you are being naive with suggesting that all issues be resolved by just trying everything out there. However I do agree that is is worth trying to find something that works but there are no guarantees.

Of course there are no guarantees.

But there are options.

And when those options are artificially restricted due to a tendency to only approve the "correct" options, that's a bit shit.

It depends so much on the question - you need to read/listen very carefully to know whether a woman is asking

Is it OK to give formula, breastfeeding is making me miserable?

Or

I'm "failing" at breastfeeding and gutted about it, please tell me I can do this and don't need to switch yet

Sometimes women need to hear - "try this, it can really work"

Others they need, "you're doing great, this will not be forever"

What they pretty much never need is either line of advice being shouted down as cruel and unacceptable.

Doingit not all choices are equal no matter how much we want them to be. People are allowed to discuss the negatives of one method versus another. I had an aunt who had 11 children, when I had my first she told me that she never once went to one of hers in the nighttime ever, she needed her sleep, from newborn. Am I meant to see that as a valid sleep training method that worked for her.

Well if your aunt had 11 children presumably that was the best method that worked for her? Meh, can't get judgy on the sleep techniques of a woman with 11 children.

what not that you have too much background to go on but believe me you would judge her if you met her, some people are shit parents and she certainly was. She is a total and utter narcissist and barely any of the 10 surviving speak to her. Her neglect continued for the rest of their childhood too, luckily now I don't have to speak to her either. Surprisingly most of the children turned out well but mostly because the eldest daughter eventually took over parenting.

But she is an extreme example of what I am saying that not every sleep training method is equal and discussion on negatives are valid, not least because some sleep methods are damaging and most especially to children who won't be trained because they have a neurological condition which affects their sleep.

Well you don't like your aunt, so it is a bit unfair for you to use her as the archetype of sleeptraining mum. With 11 children & 10 non contact, I think that is an extreme that really cannot be more broadly applied.

I think sleep training can be a very good thing in some circumstances as can co sleeping. I don't think one method is intrinsically 'better' than the other, because I respect mother's rights to make their own decisions about what suits them & their child. I am cool about people choosing to formula feed as well. If it works for them, then it is all good.

Oddly desperate to use the example of a highly negligent parent in an attempt to prove a point against sleep training

I think that there is also an assumption that most parents decide that want to do AP and stick rigidly with it despite the misery

Your post berates routines, like EASY, as making you miserable. But you counter this with your opening paragraph above Jasper. No method or patenting ethos needs to be stuck to rigidly causing misery. That doesn't make it bad.

EASY can work if you take it as an idea, an ethos that might work for you, and you tweet it to fit your baby.

AP can work if you take it as an idea, an ethos that might work for you, and you tweet it to fit your baby.

Any other type of sleep training and/or patenting method can work if you take them as an idea, an ethos that might work for you, and you tweet it to fit your baby.

Instincts are amazing things. There is no "I'm right and you are wrong" in anyone's instincts. Aside from the caveat that advice from abusive/negligent parents can safely be ignored - everyone else's instincts are likely to be spot on regardless of the label they are given.

Good post FATE. There are no bad parenting methods just bad parents - and they would be bad, regardless of the method they used. A loving parent will do a good enough job, whatever label they/the world try to put on it.

The book that I was given, that gets endlessly lambasted kn here, but that I found useful was The Contented Baby.

I had literally never even heard of any of those ways of doing things, until my first friend had a baby and used it.

When I leafed through the book pre-baby, I scoffed at its rigidity.

I remember my MN ante-naral group laughing about the idea that we needed to be told to have some toast.

But in my darkest hour after my first was born, when I was barely coping, struggling to feed, totally terrified and overwhelmed, when I kept forgetting to eat - THAT's what I remembered.

That there was a woman who wrote a book about babies who said to make yourself some toast.

I never read the whole book, and as I recall there was plenty in it that was of no earthly use to me.

But just knowing that making myself some toast could be a priority really helped me.

It helped me to start putting my days back together and to energe from utter chaos.

The only other message I was getting was to be led by the baby (and my instincts) in all things.

But I had no real instincts, just fear. I was constantly trying to guess at what to do next and then realising I needed to pump, but all the bottles were dirty and I had to sterlise them and my boobs were bursting and the baby couldn't latch at the best of times.

Ever since I've always been bemused that a suggested schedule is necessarily harmful.

Surely most women adapt whatever soeaks to them, mux in their iwn exoeruence, their griwing kniwledge of their baby

Some babies just sleep less for fewer hours at a time. It's just the way they are and were meant to be. I think if you are unlucky enough to have one of the babies (my first was and she has grown up to be an intelligent, lovely girl!) you just have to find a way that you can survive with it as a parent.

YY DoinItFine - you've made some great points on this thread.

I think it's especially true that sometimes it's hard - often it's impossible - to know whether the answer a mother needs to hear is "It's okay, you've done enough, you can rest now, you can stop" or "You can keep going if you still want to - here's the key you need" or even just "The key is that way but you'll have to find it, hang in there, you're halfway out of the storm". Often impossible online. Easier in person if you're good at reading people. I always try to express both when I'm not sure but it's hard to know if that is the right thing to do. Maybe it just makes things worse :/

YY DoinItFine. There's no "one right way", there's "what's right for me and my child", whatever that is.

I hadn't even heard of this, I had babies before I had the internet (thank Christ).

As a new mother I would have loved to have heard that it's ok. That it's ok to bed share. That I wasn't lazy for not trying to get my newborn into a routine. That I wasn't going to spoil my baby by holding them and loving them. That I could breastfeed as long as we both wanted. I never did anything that could be classed as ap because I felt I should, but I felt a lot of guilt and judgement along the way because I wasn't doing what many other parents and health professionals expected. I am envious that the message has slowly changed from 12 years ago and following your baby's needs no longer seems so isolating.
I carried my baby own my back and they were there, happy and pretty much incidental to me going about my day. I travelled confidently on my own long haul several times, knowing I had everything I needed for the journey to go smoothly. I was strong and never in pain or hurt from carrying my baby/ toddler/ small child.
I would not do a thing differently.
As they've grown, if what I did stopped working, I changed it.
I now have a strapping 12 year old who is growing in confidence and independence, in pretty much the same way as every other 12 year old.
I miss having a baby in a sling , I miss breastfeeding, I miss through the night snuggles, I miss that little hormonal bubble of being with my child. But I did it, it was a lovely part of my life and doing it my way felt very feminist.