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Nobody speaks about the effect of little kids on young parents. It is nightmarish and there is nothing to do about it. I wonder how much damage we get to our mi

Nobody speaks about the effect of little kids on young parents. It is nightmarish and there is nothing to do about it. I wonder how much damage we get to our minds due to sleep deprivation and shocks. Yes shocks. I once laughed at a report of a mercenary saying he was woken up several times a night with ABBA as a form of torture. I then internally cried thinking of the amount of times I woke up just to hear screams, and put them near my hear in the middle of the night. Or finally falling asleep only for screaming to start, and the rush to stop one child from waking the other, and leading to double screaming. On rough weeks I feel I get ptsd or fear of night time. I honestly do not understand why evolution gave us this harsh treatment.

t0mislav 4y ago
So true. Now that they are 3yr and 6yr old. I'm still not sleeping nowhere as before, but it's getting a little bit better.
- pedalpete 4y ago
  We work in the sleep efficiency space, so I've thought about this quite a bit. My thinking, knowing the research around the area, but not having researched this specific case. 1) we are having children later in life. Evolution designed child rearing age to be 16-25. We have pushed that later and later as we've matured as a species, and in Australia (and Canada) from my experience we are now regularly in the 30+ for first children. I know of many mothers who's first child was born when they were 40 or later. 2) Sleep does not return to normal levels until the youngest child on average reaches 6 years old. 3) Our sleep naturally degrades as we age. Particularly in mid-30s. So if you have a child at 33, and you return to "normal sleep" at 39, you are expecting to return to your restful self, but your sleep has declined during that time.
Aaargh20318 4y ago
[flagged]
- eastbound 4y ago
  [flagged]
- TeMPOraL 4y ago
  Of course, a very effective way of eliminating all negative aspects of a situation is to not enter that situation in the first place. It's also a rather useless truism, since it applies to everything, and if people followed it, nothing whatsoever would ever get done, and humanity would've died out in their caves long ago.
- tsol 4y ago
  Yes there's also a rope tied with a noose, while that technically gets rid of all your problems it also isn't a helpful solution
- klibertp 4y ago
  I'd think that large families, clans, or tribes of the past and present, worked it out pretty well. If it's too much for 2 people, then it might be just right for 5 or 7. That would require those people to live together, and we can't have that right now for some reason. Parents want children out of their hair ASAP, and children want to get as far away as possible as soon as they can, too. Elderly are left alone, and increasingly so once the neighbors start to die off. Visiting once a week is already too much, even for people who live in the same city. I'm very much like that myself and as I'm nearing my 40s, I started to regret it quite a bit. I started to think that the brand of individualism that we imported from you-know-where is somehow broken and dysfunctional when transplanted anywhere else. It's way too late to do anything about it, though, other than praying to Strauss and Howe and hoping the trend will reverse itself in a generation or two. Though, it might not pass, as their theory is also pretty closely tied to the environment and might depend on some factors we don't, or can't, replicate over here. To the TeMPOral sibling comment: yeah, humanity survived in those caves by sticking together. I thinks it's important, and the fact that it took half my life to realize this is, in hindsight, rather strange and sus.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
kentrado 4y ago
>I honestly do not understand why evolution gave us this harsh treatment. I think in the past we didn't use to sleep 8 hours straight. Perhaps it was fine, we just changed and forgot to send babies the memo.
strikelaserclaw 4y ago
i don't think its evolution, its the fact that both the parents work and they need to balance the demands of parenthood with the demands of work (among other things). Not to mention how uptight and anxious some parents are these days about random things related to their child (doing tons of research for everything).
eastbound 4y ago
I’m 35 and I keep waking up throughout the night. I joke that we’re designed to be awake at the age we get kids.
- whatevertrevor 4y ago
  I think having young kids in the mid-30s is a modern trend though, humans generally had their first kids in the mid 20s or even younger which would be an easier age to live with less sleep (at least from my personal experience).
  - eastbound 4y ago
    Actually, in the middle-age at least, lowerclass people would marry and have kids surprisingly late, like in their late 30ies. It was a posh thing to get married early.
pedalpete 4y ago
This is what we're working on at https://soundmind.co https://soundmind.co - improving the efficiency of deep sleep by monitoring your brain for slow wave sleep, and using auditory stimulation to increase delta power. We're about to begin testing with our first users in the next few weeks. To answer your question about evolution, I speculate... 1) the evolutionary element was likely only adapted to impact mothers, and still impacts mothers more than fathers. But fathers (I believe) are now more involved. 2) for mothers, less sleep may be linked to less memories of the pain of early child rearing, which may make them more likely to have more children. Lastly, new mothers had a (if I recall correctly) 15% chance of dying during childbirth or shortly thereafter. From an evolutionary standpoint, the mother had mostly done their job, as long as a village was left to raise the young. The priority for evolution was to get the child through the first year or so with the mother intact. Beyond that, mother nature didn't prioritize the mothers health over their offspring.
- DaveExeter 4y ago
  >Lastly, new mothers had a (if I recall correctly) 15% chance of dying during childbirth or shortly thereafter. .85^4 = 52% chance of surviving 4 childbirths. Does that seem right? The figure I've heard is 2%. About half of children died before maturity, so each women had to have 4 children just to keep population stable.
  - pedalpete 4y ago
    You're closer to being correct than my initial estimate. I was taking the average number of children born to a woman at 8. The population wasn't stable, it was growing. Mortality during childbirth either 1 or 2%. So somewhere in the 12-15% range that a woman would die of (one of her) childbirths. So, yeah seems about right. What is .85 in your calculation?
- dtgriscom 4y ago
  There's two of you promoting and posting links to your company; at what point does this become spam?
sonofhans 4y ago
FWIW — and not to criticize you, I’m a parent and know what you’re going through — evolution didn’t do this to us, we did. If we look at our closest relatives, the other primates, infants all sleep snuggled with their mothers. As they get older, they snuggle together or with other relatives. It’s very rare for any of them to sleep alone. Imagine a baby chimp or gorilla waking up alone in the forest after having fallen asleep snuggled with its mother. Of course it would be terrified, of course it would cry for help. Many modern cultures choose to make infants sleep alone. That doesn’t do away with the infant’s hard-wired responses, long-set in its genome.
- jrowley 4y ago
  But to be clear, it's very dangerous to sleep with a baby especially if they are preterm / high risk.
  - EL_Loco 4y ago
    If the mother doesn't drink/smoke, has normal sleep, and the baby is healthy, it's not considered dangerous and was practiced by all of humankind for most of its past. Separate rooms and separate beds are a very, very recent invention. For most of humankind's history mothers slept with their babies.
    - joyeuse6701 4y ago
      For most of human history, infant mortality rates were much higher than they are now with the application of science.
      - nraford 4y ago
        Yes but due to malnutrition, dysentery, accidents and a general lack of public health and medical care, not because their parents crushed them in their sleep. I slept with my kid (I'm a father) for almost a year and trust me, you're still deeply aware of them when they're next to you. Smothering does happen, statistically speaking, but the odds are so tiny and the benefits so great, it's basically a misinformation campaign based on bunk 1950's science.
TeMPOraL 4y ago
> On rough weeks I feel I get ptsd or fear of night time. Been a while since it was very bad, but I do have a low-level anxiety about time after 23:00. There are days when I stay up late to catch up with stuff, while my wife goes to sleep, and I recently realized that I'm no longer able to do much then, because starting 23:00, I keep expecting one of our kids to wake up and start the 30 to 90-minute cycle of trying to get them back to sleep. That waiting is terrible for focus. In fact, I'm writing this comment in the middle of such cycle.
sva_ 4y ago
On the other hand, humans evolved with this so there's probably some mechanisms that protect us from the potential damage. Or so I'd hope.
2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago
Is this only an issue with modern life? Before modernity ruined everything the family and community were closer and there was a support structure. Losing sleep at night is only a problem when you still need to get to work the next day.
treeman79 4y ago
Had two colic children. 3 months of never more than an hour sleep at a time. Completely fell apart. We adopted for our 3rd.
isaacfrond 4y ago
I have a different opinion. My sleep improved a million fold when we put our daughter in her own room. All the small noises, the movement. Being able to close a door once in a while, was much better.

t0mislav 4y ago

So true. Now that they are 3yr and 6yr old. I'm still not sleeping nowhere as before, but it's getting a little bit better.

pedalpete 4y ago
We work in the sleep efficiency space, so I've thought about this quite a bit. My thinking, knowing the research around the area, but not having researched this specific case. 1) we are having children later in life. Evolution designed child rearing age to be 16-25. We have pushed that later and later as we've matured as a species, and in Australia (and Canada) from my experience we are now regularly in the 30+ for first children. I know of many mothers who's first child was born when they were 40 or later. 2) Sleep does not return to normal levels until the youngest child on average reaches 6 years old. 3) Our sleep naturally degrades as we age. Particularly in mid-30s. So if you have a child at 33, and you return to "normal sleep" at 39, you are expecting to return to your restful self, but your sleep has declined during that time.

Aaargh20318 4y ago

[flagged]

eastbound 4y ago
[flagged]
TeMPOraL 4y ago
Of course, a very effective way of eliminating all negative aspects of a situation is to not enter that situation in the first place. It's also a rather useless truism, since it applies to everything, and if people followed it, nothing whatsoever would ever get done, and humanity would've died out in their caves long ago.
tsol 4y ago
Yes there's also a rope tied with a noose, while that technically gets rid of all your problems it also isn't a helpful solution
klibertp 4y ago
I'd think that large families, clans, or tribes of the past and present, worked it out pretty well. If it's too much for 2 people, then it might be just right for 5 or 7. That would require those people to live together, and we can't have that right now for some reason. Parents want children out of their hair ASAP, and children want to get as far away as possible as soon as they can, too. Elderly are left alone, and increasingly so once the neighbors start to die off. Visiting once a week is already too much, even for people who live in the same city. I'm very much like that myself and as I'm nearing my 40s, I started to regret it quite a bit. I started to think that the brand of individualism that we imported from you-know-where is somehow broken and dysfunctional when transplanted anywhere else. It's way too late to do anything about it, though, other than praying to Strauss and Howe and hoping the trend will reverse itself in a generation or two. Though, it might not pass, as their theory is also pretty closely tied to the environment and might depend on some factors we don't, or can't, replicate over here. To the TeMPOral sibling comment: yeah, humanity survived in those caves by sticking together. I thinks it's important, and the fact that it took half my life to realize this is, in hindsight, rather strange and sus.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

kentrado 4y ago

>I honestly do not understand why evolution gave us this harsh treatment. I think in the past we didn't use to sleep 8 hours straight. Perhaps it was fine, we just changed and forgot to send babies the memo.

strikelaserclaw 4y ago

i don't think its evolution, its the fact that both the parents work and they need to balance the demands of parenthood with the demands of work (among other things). Not to mention how uptight and anxious some parents are these days about random things related to their child (doing tons of research for everything).

eastbound 4y ago

I’m 35 and I keep waking up throughout the night. I joke that we’re designed to be awake at the age we get kids.

whatevertrevor 4y ago
I think having young kids in the mid-30s is a modern trend though, humans generally had their first kids in the mid 20s or even younger which would be an easier age to live with less sleep (at least from my personal experience).
- eastbound 4y ago
  Actually, in the middle-age at least, lowerclass people would marry and have kids surprisingly late, like in their late 30ies. It was a posh thing to get married early.

pedalpete 4y ago

This is what we're working on at https://soundmind.co https://soundmind.co - improving the efficiency of deep sleep by monitoring your brain for slow wave sleep, and using auditory stimulation to increase delta power. We're about to begin testing with our first users in the next few weeks. To answer your question about evolution, I speculate... 1) the evolutionary element was likely only adapted to impact mothers, and still impacts mothers more than fathers. But fathers (I believe) are now more involved. 2) for mothers, less sleep may be linked to less memories of the pain of early child rearing, which may make them more likely to have more children. Lastly, new mothers had a (if I recall correctly) 15% chance of dying during childbirth or shortly thereafter. From an evolutionary standpoint, the mother had mostly done their job, as long as a village was left to raise the young. The priority for evolution was to get the child through the first year or so with the mother intact. Beyond that, mother nature didn't prioritize the mothers health over their offspring.

DaveExeter 4y ago
>Lastly, new mothers had a (if I recall correctly) 15% chance of dying during childbirth or shortly thereafter. .85^4 = 52% chance of surviving 4 childbirths. Does that seem right? The figure I've heard is 2%. About half of children died before maturity, so each women had to have 4 children just to keep population stable.
- pedalpete 4y ago
  You're closer to being correct than my initial estimate. I was taking the average number of children born to a woman at 8. The population wasn't stable, it was growing. Mortality during childbirth either 1 or 2%. So somewhere in the 12-15% range that a woman would die of (one of her) childbirths. So, yeah seems about right. What is .85 in your calculation?
dtgriscom 4y ago
There's two of you promoting and posting links to your company; at what point does this become spam?

sonofhans 4y ago

FWIW — and not to criticize you, I’m a parent and know what you’re going through — evolution didn’t do this to us, we did. If we look at our closest relatives, the other primates, infants all sleep snuggled with their mothers. As they get older, they snuggle together or with other relatives. It’s very rare for any of them to sleep alone. Imagine a baby chimp or gorilla waking up alone in the forest after having fallen asleep snuggled with its mother. Of course it would be terrified, of course it would cry for help. Many modern cultures choose to make infants sleep alone. That doesn’t do away with the infant’s hard-wired responses, long-set in its genome.

jrowley 4y ago
But to be clear, it's very dangerous to sleep with a baby especially if they are preterm / high risk.
- EL_Loco 4y ago
  If the mother doesn't drink/smoke, has normal sleep, and the baby is healthy, it's not considered dangerous and was practiced by all of humankind for most of its past. Separate rooms and separate beds are a very, very recent invention. For most of humankind's history mothers slept with their babies.
  - joyeuse6701 4y ago
    For most of human history, infant mortality rates were much higher than they are now with the application of science.
    - nraford 4y ago
      Yes but due to malnutrition, dysentery, accidents and a general lack of public health and medical care, not because their parents crushed them in their sleep. I slept with my kid (I'm a father) for almost a year and trust me, you're still deeply aware of them when they're next to you. Smothering does happen, statistically speaking, but the odds are so tiny and the benefits so great, it's basically a misinformation campaign based on bunk 1950's science.

TeMPOraL 4y ago

> On rough weeks I feel I get ptsd or fear of night time. Been a while since it was very bad, but I do have a low-level anxiety about time after 23:00. There are days when I stay up late to catch up with stuff, while my wife goes to sleep, and I recently realized that I'm no longer able to do much then, because starting 23:00, I keep expecting one of our kids to wake up and start the 30 to 90-minute cycle of trying to get them back to sleep. That waiting is terrible for focus. In fact, I'm writing this comment in the middle of such cycle.

sva_ 4y ago

On the other hand, humans evolved with this so there's probably some mechanisms that protect us from the potential damage. Or so I'd hope.

2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago

Is this only an issue with modern life? Before modernity ruined everything the family and community were closer and there was a support structure. Losing sleep at night is only a problem when you still need to get to work the next day.

treeman79 4y ago

Had two colic children. 3 months of never more than an hour sleep at a time. Completely fell apart. We adopted for our 3rd.

isaacfrond 4y ago

I have a different opinion. My sleep improved a million fold when we put our daughter in her own room. All the small noises, the movement. Being able to close a door once in a while, was much better.