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Wellness Wednesday for September 11, 2024

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

  • Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.

  • Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.

  • Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).

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If your infant is extremely fussy, there typically really is something wrong. Get to know your kid and trust them by default. You'll get to learn what a real cry at night is vs a "bad dream". Go through the checklist: diaper, hungry, comfort, boredom, and only then give it more time to see if they'll cry it out. (But then, when you move them into a crib, definitely let them cry it out. Please.).

If I can add a tip, teaching your baby some very basic signs is really, really helpful. At 4-6 months you can begin to teach simple signs for Hungry, Drink, Done, Play, Sleep etc, for my youngest two it helped in finding out what is wrong, and anecdotally they seemed to be more content once they were able to communicate even very basic information. Very useful in the time before verbal communication is possible. And the babies I have seen (my own kids and others) seem to pick it up reasonably quickly.

When teething, my youngest was able to sign "Tooth Medicine" when teething which was a godsend when he woke up screaming.