Reply to How sleep-deprived were you after your kids were born?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous] I think important to the possibly terrified pregnant person who posted this: in general, if you are a person who NEEDS sleep or is starting to have (mental) health issues, you can sleep train at 3-4 months. I have found it’s mostly friends who are simultaneously able to survive on little sleep and philosophically unwilling to sleep train or put baby in their own room that don’t sleep after the first 5 months or so. Of course there are exceptions, particularly with kids with medical issues etc, but sleep training generally works and does not take especially long if you commit.

My niece was crying until she threw up at age 1 and after 2 nights of going in, cleaning up, and putting her back to bed without also including a bunch of rocking and sleepig on the floor next to her, she was back to sleeping normally for 12 hour stretches, which seems like a healthier situation for both parents and child. [/quote]

It’s also ok to acknowledge to someone that sleep training doesn’t work. Even if you do all the right things, some kids just still wake up and it never works for them. It’s a behavior management technique, and kids are humans and individual and they all respond differently and for some kids and families it just doesn’t work. It’s nice to pretend that if you’re a person with mentall health challenges and who needs sleep that you can count on this working, but sometimes it just doesn’t because your kid didn’t get the memo. And even  if you want to sleep train, not everyone wants to allow their infant or toddler to cry endlessly to the point of hysteria and vomiting, and then go in, change them out of puke clothes, and then allow them to continue to cry to the point of puking, over and over again. It feels awful and it is awful and it’s ok if you’re not ok with doing that.

Also, a lot of parents lie about how well their kids sleep because they think it makes them sound like bad parents or that they did the wrong things. My kids have always been crappy sleepers and it’s been hard on me, my body, and my marriage. But I don’t lie about it with other parents, because I don’t care. And I can’t tell you how often people then confess how bad their kids sleep (who previously bragged how well sleep training went or how Larla goes down at 7 or whatever). It’s just a dirty little secret of parenthood and I for one won’t lie to others. I figured out how to live in less sleep because my kiddos don’t sleep well, and it sucks but we deal. Sometimes, being a parenting just sucks. That’s just a reality. [/quote]

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