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6.5 month-old baby is not sleeping well. He wakes up frequently, wants his mother.
For the first few months, almost all his sleep was either co-sleeping (common in Europe, but it never felt safe to me), or in the presence of an awake parent (holding, carrier, stroller, car). For a while, we had some success putting him down after he fell asleep and him staying asleep for a few hours, but it would often take a long time to get him into a deep-enough sleep that he would staying sleeping upon being put down.
I eventually strongly suggested sleep training. I read stuff online, Emily Oster and others, and figured we should give the Ferber method a try.
My wife didn't like it; I found it difficult too, and actually I caved on night 3, even though it was kind of working at other times. But I regret caving and think we should have continued.
But our state-issued parenting advisor recommended a gentler method which I can't see working; it rewards his crying with attention; lo and behold, he cries every time he wakes up alone.
Now my wife and I are at odds; It's been 2 weeks of this with little-to-no improvement. She is getting less sleep than I am.
3 older women in my life whose opinions I respect (mother, aunt, landlady) all say we just need to do sleep training properly and stick to it.
The modern Zeitgeist says that sleep training is cruel, even if the studies don't. My wife's friends and family are on her side too. My wife was worrying that the 3 nights we did of Ferber method have ruined our son completely (on all 3 days after he was in a great mood all day...).
For some, doing "the pause" from birth (when newborn wakes, set a timer and excruciatingly force yourself to wait 4-5 actual minutes before responding; we had to use the timer because when we "felt like" we'd waited 5 minutes it would actually be 1-2) results in babies learning to sleep through the night pretty naturally, often by 2-4 months old. As described in the book Bringing Up Bebe (an interesting discussion of the author's experience of cultural parenting differences between France and the USA).
That's what happened for us--and then came the 4 month sleep regression. First time that happened, we'd just recently stopped sleeping in shifts and it didn't occur to us to go back to sleeping in shifts (we should have). We got to the point of waiting up to 15 minutes before going in--so, basically Ferber--and that was enough.
Reading over your comment, I would suggest you start by putting him down awake. At his age he may be having the "Fell asleep in my bedroom, woke up on the lawn" reaction. (By which I mean "Fell asleep in a parent's arms, woke up in the crib" can cause the same kind of reaction in a baby that the foregoing would cause in an adult--"What happened? Where am I? This has got to be bad!")
! does she know that?
I've kind of mentioned it. But she's very "what do you mean", and I'm struggling to express all the ways that her anxious parenting is stressing us all out.
It's stuff like
Remember though your first child is the most stressful, it's common overreacting to stuff because you've not experienced it before. Second is easier and by the third you'll be almost leaving your kid with strangers (I exaggerate a little, but only a little!). Her overprotectiveness sounds pretty normal at this stage. Though the dog thing sounds pretty ok, dogs and babies is a risk I wouldn't take even now after raising 3 kids to adulthood. People routinely underestimate how unpredictable dogs can be with babies and kids in my direct experience.
But boundaries are not just for kids! It is ok if she wants to do x but that doesn't mean you have to. You have to agree on the big things but your day to day parenting can and maybe even should be different. You don't have to have the same reactions. Ferber is basically what we did and it worked fine, but the chances are whatever method you use won't have any long term impact on your baby. This is more for the parents. The baby will learn to sleep at some point regardless.
Negotiate you taking over the putting to sleep duties perhaps if she is finding it too difficult. Her relationship with your baby and her relationship with your baby are different. You taking different duties is entirely ok.
My top tip is starting to teach your baby sign language from pretty much right now. They can learn very basic signs pretty quickly and just knowing milk, more, done is very useful. For my three kids anecdotally they also seemed to be less stressed when they could communicate even very basic things. They won't be able to make the signs themselves probably for another couple of months but they will start to understand. So when you sign sleep or bed, after a month or two they will know what is happening, and my experience is that made things easier. That is probably the thing I was most skeptical about when one of my wife's friends suggested it, but was blown away by useful it was (and to be fair) how cute it is for your child to be able to make tiny hand signs and actually begin to communicate into the world before they can speak more than a few words.
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We already do this. If it's me doing it, he just screams; if she does it, it's mostly working now, as long as she stays beside him. But when he wakes in the night, he expects someone to be there.
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I could not sleep train. Listening to my baby cry was ... Impossible. She's grown now and fine, for what it's worth. If we were going to sleep train I would have had to leave the house to maintain my sanity. There was just something about my small creature crying that burrowed into my brain demanding immediate attention. I didn't react that way to toddler tantrums or little kid whining or teenager tempers. So, can you send your wife away or put her in a sound proof room? I would have agreed to that because my husband and I were capable of agreeing to a version of sleep training but we didn't have the ability to protect me from the sound. It didn't help that I nursed our daughter and a nursing baby Knows when her mother is around. Babies are cagey.
I wish you sleep, soon. It's crazy making.
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We're a little over 2 months in with our first child, and unfortunately our baby doesn't like sleeping on her back like the literature recommends. I was on baby-duty last night, and about an hour after feeding and burping her, I tried putting her down in her crib to try to build those self-soothing skills. Unfortunately she just ended up crying so hard that she coughed/spat up the milk she drank earlier in the evening. She seems to enjoy sleeping at a 45-degree angle, so she went on a pillow and I ended up sleeping next to her that way. Babies sure are a handful. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
My son didn't like sleeping on his back either, so we let him sleep on his tummy. That let him sleep for far longer stretches. We weren't too worried about him suffocating, because
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I've got a 1, 2, 3, and 6yo. All were sleeping through the night by 6 months. I (father) was responsible for the night shifts, and did basically the Ferber method.
And are they all irreparably emotionally damaged?
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Only 6 weeks in with our first so I have no personal experience but my brother has 3 under 3. All of them (including the 6 month old) sleep independently in their own rooms through the night and I’m pretty sure my brother and sister-in-law did Ferber method. Can’t say I’m a fan of the idea but if I’m still only getting max 3 hr stretch of sleep at night in 6 months I may be singing a different tune.
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Good old topic. Authoritarian VS liberal parenting.
I'm on team strict. It seems to work, get results right away and forms beneficial habits, and while it supposedly traumatizes the child, I think that's either untrue or insignificant compared to the obvious advantages for everyone involved.
My wife and her family, of course, are on team OH GOD DO WHATEVER THE CHILD WANTS OR ELSE SHE WILL BE RUINED FOREVER. I think this mode of thinking is obviously wrong in every way (history, incentives, habit-forming, observable effects, the parenting histories of the people saying so), but what do I know.
Right, so how did you navigate this? Sending her links to fancy-looking blogs doesn't seem to be working for me.
In general, I've been trying to get the message across that parenting has been becoming way more time and money intensive than it used to be, with no better results. I'm the youngest of a very large poor-ish family, that is to say, my level of received parental investment was not super high, and I turned out fine. Meanwhile it appears Gen Z and Alpha have very little resilience.
He doesn't need so many toys. He'll be fine with 2nd-hand clothes. Don't be so worried about leaving him with other people for a few hours.
She wants a 2nd child, but I refuse if it's going to be this circus again.
I navigate it by doing it my way while the wife does it her way. With all the fallout and obvious failure modes. Unclear rules and expectations, constant arguments, and me often straight-up ignoring her instructions (and telling her so). I'm not even giving her any instructions of my own; she wouldn't follow those either. Instead, she just gets a regular supply of "told you so"s.
The consequence of this is that our daughter (3.5yo by now) likes me better for playing, especially during the daytime, because we do more exciting stuff that my wife would never do because there's more than a minimal risk of phyical injury, but prefers her mother for sleeping in bed with because she can get her way with a long list of demands before sleep where I would just say "nope, sleepytime now, good night" and turn off the lights. Obviously when I and our daughter have an argument about something (making a mess and not helping with the cleanup, not wanting the food she requested, refusing to get dressed before we need to go out), I'll take the hard line and the kid will try to outmanoeuver me by running to her mom, who will make up some excuse for her. But shortly after that, her mom will be exhausted by trying to do paranoid helicopter parenting while also indulging in her smartphone addiction, and it's dad time again for actually doing things during the day.
I try to avoid all those stupid dynamics by just grabbing the kid the moment I come back from work (or right after waking up, on weekends) and proclaiming that damn the torpedoes we are now going to the playground/pool (depending on the weather) and we'll picnic outdoors and we're only coming back home after she's thoroughly exhausted herself. After which I get scolded for exhausting her, can't I see it was too much? Too much what - exercise and fresh air? Modern mothers are crazy. But screw spending any time in the pigsty those two create after just one day of me being away at the office. On rainy days I run another hard line of "no playing until we cleaned up this mess". And given some tasks that she can actually accomplish, it seems she even enjoys being helpful. Then it's puzzles and board games and ball.
So yeah, no second child while the mother is under the delusion that children need uninterrupted supervision 100% of the time, or that it's acceptable to give the child unlimited access to sugar and screen time just because the mother herself is addicted to the same, and that the outdoors is a lethally dangerous place because it triggers your social anxiety and so the child is best kept indoors at all times, and that because raising a child like this is so exhausting and all-consuming, you cannot be expected to not make the household explode as soon as the man is out of the house.
Oh hey, hope you enjoyed by blogpost.
I did; I don't like what it says about my future though. My wife was fairly on-board with "strict but chill" before the birth; I hope at some point she'll get there again.
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Oh wow, this sounds exhausting. Did ya'll know about the differing perspectives prior to having a kid or did it come up later?
Nah. My wife thought and thinks herself very wise in the way of children since she grew up with more siblings and WORKED AS A KINDERGARDENER (emphasis hers) FOR LESS THAN HALF A YEAR (emphasis mine). Fair enough, overall more experience than me. I for one just thought "we'll figure it out". My opposition to liberal parenting developed over time as I saw the absolute nonsense it devolves into.
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This is my exact relationship with my kids/wife. I suspect it's overall healthy for the kids to have one "strict" parent and one "soft" parent, but I agree that modern mothers have gone off the deep end. I often find myself having to be harder on the kids than I'd like to be in order to strike a better balance.
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Not to mention it’s extremely stressful and labor-intensive on the parents. And given that the evidence on the kid’s future well-being is inconclusive, that is the main thing.
They’re doing liberalism wrong. Liberalism is rooted in a profound lazyness. ‘laissez faire’, let [things] do, let it be. It’s like old hippies ‘free range’ education, not this micromanaging shit.
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