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Read the article, and many of the comments here. I have a hard time squaring a lot of the hard and fast rules against my own experience. Certainly one persons l

Read the article, and many of the comments here. I have a hard time squaring a lot of the hard and fast rules against my own experience. Certainly one persons life can’t detract from large scale statistics. However, I have 6 children. They have all responded to methods of behavioral training in wildly different ways. My oldest two could not do sleep training. 10 months of trying for almost every night and they did not just adapt. My middle daughter embraced it after a single night. My adopted middle son didn’t need it at all and was naturally “good” at sleeping. My youngest daughter and son will fall asleep right away if around someone, but otherwise will stay up for hours (but never cried about it). Again, one family experience but each child has their own needs and responses. I’ve never found a single method that works universally in any aspect of parenting. Except ice cream. They all seem to love that.

TeMPOraL 4y ago
> I have a hard time squaring a lot of the hard and fast rules against my own experience. I think it's the same thing like in other self-help sub-genres: any of such hard and fast rule will work very well for some people in some situations. That's why there are so many of such rules, why they're often mutually conflicting, and why they all have armies of evangelists behind them. > Certainly one persons life can’t detract from large scale statistics. Conversely, those statistics talk about what's average, typical. Some things have high enough variance that even most solid RCT only works as a guideline for policy at scale. I have only two children, but it's clear to me both develop according to completely different trajectories. It kind of makes sense as, even if us parents didn't change in any way, and the environment stayed constant, our younger daughter is still spending a lot of time in the company of her sister. That's a huge additional high-variance input source :).
FrankyHollywood 4y ago
> fall asleep right away if around someone this... with my first kid I didn't know how to handle, advice was 'to leave it cry to sleep', but it felt like torture to me, inhumane, letting it cry for so long. A little baby just doesn't want to be alone. I discovered just sitting in the same room, reading something on my tablet was enough to fall a sleep after like 20 minutes, 90% of the time. And yes, there are those nights nothing works. Just take him/her out, watch same television and have the baby on your belly to relax. A kid is not a robot, you can't expect it to go asleep when you say it's time for bed, there's no on/off button. I'm often amazed by parents who expect the kid to be tired at exactly 19.00 each evening. That's not how it works, the first year is horrible. You as a new parent will be exhausted by the amount of not-sleeping you'll get, and the amount of attention the kid needs. Expect nothing less, things will get better when the kid grows older. I think it is something of western culture to put a baby in a separate room and leave it alone, and thinking it feels comfortable and save and you can mind your own business.
- TeMPOraL 4y ago
  > That's not how it works, the first year is horrible. (...) things will get better when the kid grows older. Except when they won't. Our older daughter started having real sleep issues around when she was 1.5 years old. From that point on, every night was one of "those nights nothing works". Her sleeping schedule became quite consistent: roughly 21:00 - 05:00 if she didn't nap during the day, or 23:30 - 05:00 if she slept even as little as 15 minutes at any point during the day. We went through pretty much every trick in the book. Less attention. More attention. Earlier supper. Rituals. Toning down lights an hour before bedtime. Music. Singing. White noise. We consulted a psychologist specializing in small children. But nothing helped - in fact, the more we tried, the worse it would get, with our daughter often going to sleep past midnight, only to wake up at 05:00 sharp. Now I'm going to admit to something that's AFAIK seen as even worse than the "cry it out" method. Something I was very surprised wasn't even mentioned in the entire article. After half a year of unending torture that started to very negatively impact our marriage, in an act of desperation, we gave our daughter melatonin drops. This solved the problem instantly. We all slept very well that night. And the next one. And the next one. Sleep again became something reliable. Obligatory YMMV, IANADoctor, consult your pediatrician, etc. But the point is, every kid is different, and sometimes things don't get better (and it's very hurtful when others try to reassure you they will).
  - ravi-delia 4y ago
    I mean melatonin is super safe and fairly effective. Definitely less suffering than crying all night for all parties. It's reasonable to assume a baby would like not to be miserable- so why not!
  - jack_pp 4y ago
    IANAD, I don't have kids but I'm curious why melatonin properly dosed would be seen as worse than crying to sleep. From what I've learned about melatonin it seems to me you did the right thing
    - TeMPOraL 4y ago
      Because it's a chemical! A hormone! Because you're dosing your kid with a drug! You're taking the easy way out! You're using a shortcut to cover for your inability to endure the first few days of ${sleep training method}! These and similar kinds of bullshit judgements.
obscurette 4y ago
This. As a father of three kids it's sometimes fun to look at people going through this – you are the smartest person about kids if you don't own any yet and most stupid one with the second one if you realize that you can't reuse almost any knowledge you gained with your firstborn. By the time you have a third one, you've already accepted that they are all very different and you have to learn from them, grow with them and adapt.
jinushaun 4y ago
I have two kids. I already have to parent both of them differently. It’s like being a first time parent all over again when the second one arrived. And strategies that worked at 2 years don’t carry over to 4 years. So I’m always skeptical about articles offering generalized parenting advice.

TeMPOraL 4y ago

> I have a hard time squaring a lot of the hard and fast rules against my own experience. I think it's the same thing like in other self-help sub-genres: any of such hard and fast rule will work very well for some people in some situations. That's why there are so many of such rules, why they're often mutually conflicting, and why they all have armies of evangelists behind them. > Certainly one persons life can’t detract from large scale statistics. Conversely, those statistics talk about what's average, typical. Some things have high enough variance that even most solid RCT only works as a guideline for policy at scale. I have only two children, but it's clear to me both develop according to completely different trajectories. It kind of makes sense as, even if us parents didn't change in any way, and the environment stayed constant, our younger daughter is still spending a lot of time in the company of her sister. That's a huge additional high-variance input source :).

FrankyHollywood 4y ago

> fall asleep right away if around someone this... with my first kid I didn't know how to handle, advice was 'to leave it cry to sleep', but it felt like torture to me, inhumane, letting it cry for so long. A little baby just doesn't want to be alone. I discovered just sitting in the same room, reading something on my tablet was enough to fall a sleep after like 20 minutes, 90% of the time. And yes, there are those nights nothing works. Just take him/her out, watch same television and have the baby on your belly to relax. A kid is not a robot, you can't expect it to go asleep when you say it's time for bed, there's no on/off button. I'm often amazed by parents who expect the kid to be tired at exactly 19.00 each evening. That's not how it works, the first year is horrible. You as a new parent will be exhausted by the amount of not-sleeping you'll get, and the amount of attention the kid needs. Expect nothing less, things will get better when the kid grows older. I think it is something of western culture to put a baby in a separate room and leave it alone, and thinking it feels comfortable and save and you can mind your own business.

TeMPOraL 4y ago
> That's not how it works, the first year is horrible. (...) things will get better when the kid grows older. Except when they won't. Our older daughter started having real sleep issues around when she was 1.5 years old. From that point on, every night was one of "those nights nothing works". Her sleeping schedule became quite consistent: roughly 21:00 - 05:00 if she didn't nap during the day, or 23:30 - 05:00 if she slept even as little as 15 minutes at any point during the day. We went through pretty much every trick in the book. Less attention. More attention. Earlier supper. Rituals. Toning down lights an hour before bedtime. Music. Singing. White noise. We consulted a psychologist specializing in small children. But nothing helped - in fact, the more we tried, the worse it would get, with our daughter often going to sleep past midnight, only to wake up at 05:00 sharp. Now I'm going to admit to something that's AFAIK seen as even worse than the "cry it out" method. Something I was very surprised wasn't even mentioned in the entire article. After half a year of unending torture that started to very negatively impact our marriage, in an act of desperation, we gave our daughter melatonin drops. This solved the problem instantly. We all slept very well that night. And the next one. And the next one. Sleep again became something reliable. Obligatory YMMV, IANADoctor, consult your pediatrician, etc. But the point is, every kid is different, and sometimes things don't get better (and it's very hurtful when others try to reassure you they will).
- ravi-delia 4y ago
  I mean melatonin is super safe and fairly effective. Definitely less suffering than crying all night for all parties. It's reasonable to assume a baby would like not to be miserable- so why not!
- jack_pp 4y ago
  IANAD, I don't have kids but I'm curious why melatonin properly dosed would be seen as worse than crying to sleep. From what I've learned about melatonin it seems to me you did the right thing
  - TeMPOraL 4y ago
    Because it's a chemical! A hormone! Because you're dosing your kid with a drug! You're taking the easy way out! You're using a shortcut to cover for your inability to endure the first few days of ${sleep training method}! These and similar kinds of bullshit judgements.

obscurette 4y ago

This. As a father of three kids it's sometimes fun to look at people going through this – you are the smartest person about kids if you don't own any yet and most stupid one with the second one if you realize that you can't reuse almost any knowledge you gained with your firstborn. By the time you have a third one, you've already accepted that they are all very different and you have to learn from them, grow with them and adapt.

jinushaun 4y ago

I have two kids. I already have to parent both of them differently. It’s like being a first time parent all over again when the second one arrived. And strategies that worked at 2 years don’t carry over to 4 years. So I’m always skeptical about articles offering generalized parenting advice.