8 ms·

I’m the dad of a 7 month old baby. I think I feel around 100 years older than I actually am.

by edu 3y ago

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
chasd00 3y ago
To you and the others, just hang in there it gets better. You’ll get through and come out the other side better, stronger, and full of more love than you thought existed. /father of a 14 and 12 year old boys
- garrickvanburen 3y ago
  ^ fully agree. I blinked an my youngest was suddenly 10yrs old. The kids all being in double digits is really awesome and far less labor intensive than the early months.
ActionHank 3y ago
Ask your doctor about Modafinil, my GP prescribed it for me when my son was born and it was a life saver.
chasebank 3y ago
For the love of god, sleep train your baby. There are coaches online if you need help.
silveira 3y ago
2 years and 5 months here. He never slept well, wakes up during the night, makes all sorts of sounds while sleeping, and wakes up early (5~6 am). Doctor said some kids are like this and it may get better over the years. The lack of sleep took a lot of my concentration, energy, and memory.
- pdxandi 3y ago
  Same here. 3.5 year old and one year old twins. Poor sleep and just general fatigue most days. It’s hard to convey to those who sleep well how challenging it is to be constantly sleep deprived.
jmacd 3y ago
Posting this here, because it was advice given to me by one of the founders we all look up to on HN when I had my first child (on our 4th now). "If you are going to have kids and run a company, you all need to sleep." and then he introdued me to a sleep trainer/coach. "No way, we are not sleep training" was my thought, but I quickly realized that there is a difference between sleep normalization and what we know as sleep training. The sleep coach gave us a completely customized regime for 2 weeks. Once the baby is 6 months or so, you can start. (up until 6 months, I just slept with the kids in my arms every night. Oh my god I miss those nights now. It makes me cry to think about how wonderful it felt.) We've done it 4 times now and all our children gladly sleep from 7pm to 6:30am every single night. (The older ones now go to sleep more like 9pm). Everyone in the house is rested every day and it makes a big difference. Those two weeks are a lot of work for one of the parents (it is specified that one person should be focused on it) but in our experience it works by the 3rd night or so. The main takeaway from the aproach is to disassociate eating and interaction from the act of sleeping. It created buffers between feeding times and play times and when you finally put them down in their crib to sleep. If they do wake up during the night they don't think "oh, if I cry I will get to eat right away." and they self-soothe and go back to sleep. If they do wake up hungry, it's a failure of the parent to have ensured they've eaten properly. You adjust as they grow. (A hungry cry is totally different from a discomfort or bored cry. You learn them pretty quickly.) When I put my 10 month old in his crib to sleep now he looks back at me briefly and then turns over and gets in his sleeping position and he's asleep before I leave the room. It's such a relief knowing that no matter how badly a day goes, you can sleep that night. I've had a lot of friends think this isn't for them, but 100% of the ones I have convinced to do it (and in some cases have just paid for) have been successful. I'll also add that 2 of our kids were "colicky" and were very unfcomfortable during the day for their first year. Even still we were able to have them sleeping the entire night most nights after 6 months. Again, there is no "cry it out". In fact, the baby almost never cries at all in this process in my experience.
- mreezie 3y ago
  Can you point me in the direction of this trainer/method?
bicepjai 3y ago
It felt good to read the stories that we can relate to, we have a a 2.5 year old; literally sleep deprived and these stories woke me up, thank you and good morning. I can see aging process is definitely faster with sleep deprivation. We can physically see it in our photos timeline and feel it in our workouts that we work so hard to keep up. Grey hair and baldness surged in this 2 years. We use to have so much energy in the evening for personal projects after work, not anymore. It’s so hard to deal with this both mentally and physically. Sleep training definitely helped us, but again every experience is unique. Hold on and it will pass.
jrussino 3y ago
A lot of people here will say "it gets better", and it does, but be sure to take your health seriously and not let yourself normalize that feeling for the long-term. Mine are 7 and 4 now and we're well past the sleep-deprived early years, but I realized recently that I had grown accustomed to that feeling and my new baseline is significantly worse, largely due to bad sleep habits. I'm a lot busier now, juggling the needs of 2 kids and my other responsibilities, and for too long I've coasted on ~5-7 hours of sleep thinking it's OK to sacrifice 1-3 hours of sleep in favor of squeezing in extra work or some low-quality leisure time at the end of the day because, "hey, it's still better than it was when they were babies, and I made it through that".
_yb2s 3y ago
People who haven't been through this often underestimate the severity of it... they often think that because they've pulled all-nighters for school or something that they understand but weeks or months of chronic sleep deprivation is a totally different thing. It was living hell for me- my son wouldn't sleep during the night for more than 10-20m at a time, and my partner was having severe postpartum mental health issues (psychosis/rage/depression) so I was parenting solo, and up all night every night by myself with a crying baby. I eventually started hallucinating, and had a short temper and made very poor decisions. I couldn't get advice, help, or sympathy from anyone- usually something along the lines of "parenting is so easy for dads, why are you complaining?" Visiting family would expect me to serve meals to them, and not help either. I almost lost my job also because I couldn't focus or code anymore. Once I started sleeping in a separate room from my son, I could finally think/code/work again. Understanding in the workplace for a struggling new dad was non-existant: everyone assumed the mother was doing all of the work, and I would perform like normal. If anyone is reading this and can relate, don't do what I did- pay for help. Pay for a nanny- take out a loan if you have to. If you or your partner is struggling, get them professional mental health support. Prioritize your sleep, bodily, and mental health needs: you need to "put the mask on yourself first" or you can't help anyone else. Don't be afraid to set a crying baby in a safe crib and go sleep for a while if you need it.
inference-lord 3y ago
100% having the same experience. It's mind bending how tired you can get. We recently all had the flu, 2 nights of the baby having a fever and both of us being sick and also having a fever was one of the most testing things in my life.
- objektif 3y ago
  Try having a kid with febrile seizures. Mine runs 105 fevers casually for 5 to 7 days. We have to check her very often to make sure she is not going into a seizure.
  - 2024throwaway 3y ago
    Sorry. But it’s not a contest.
    - objektif 3y ago
      Oh no did not mean it that way. Not that I want a trophy for sleeping less lol. My point was as a new parent things can get a lot worse in terms of sleep deprivation. I was not prepared for it.
- verisimi 3y ago
  Best advice I heard on this, is for partners to take turns to get sleep if possible. Perhaps it's obvious, but we didn't do that initially. You really only need 3 hours or so (in my experience) and the insanity starts to subside.
  - david422 3y ago
    My wife and I had a spare bedroom - we used to alternate nights down there when our child would scream all night.
forgotmyinfo 3y ago
I've never seen a more zombified human being than when a friend had a fussy baby who simply would not sleep. Two hours a night was her and her husband's norm, sometimes. Godspeed, I hope you can get some rest soon. (Also, congratulations on the new baby! :))
gambiting 3y ago
I feel you - our son had about 6 months(from ~4 months old until 10 months old) where he just wouldn't sleep for more than an hour at the time, then would wake up screaming and it took at least 30-40 minutes to put him back to sleep. I think in that period me and my wife were actual zombies, just didn't get any sleep at all, there was a point where I thought to myself I haven't had more than 2 hours of continious unbroken sleep for few months, and that there is no way this can be healthy lol. Also, I know saying this now doesn't help, because at the moment you are in one of the most "intense" periods of their development where they need all of your attention but give relatively little back - but that will improve. They will eventually sleep better and they will start telling you how much they love you and kiss you goodnight - and then all of those early months are forgotten :-)
- tutfbhuf 3y ago
  I can relate, sleep deprivation can have serious health effects. We did night shifts on cycles every other day, where one parent slept through the night on the couch with hearing protection, while the other stayed with the baby in the bedroom. This method worked out quite well. The advantage is that the parent who slept on the couch has more energy during the day for the child and can enjoy the time more, which is also beneficial for the child.
  - fullstackchris 3y ago
    so... what are you supposed to do if you have a full time job?
    - n4r9 3y ago
      I have an 8 month old and am full time while mum's on maternity leave. When the baby was ill recently, at times he wouldn't sleep unless he was being held by a standing person. I'm not kidding - there were nights where sitting or lying down as gently as possible would wake him up. We ended up doing half-night shifts where I'd have him from 8pm to 2am and then mum would take him from 2am-8am. I'd wake up at 8am, put him in the carrier for a nap while mum napped as well (30-60 mins) and then start work. How parents in the US do it when maternity is only 12 weeks unpaid... I have no idea!
meindnoch 3y ago
I'm in the same shoes, and I often wonder why evution haven't solved this yet... Like, babies' chance of survival should drop if their parents are sleep deprived. There should be a selection pressure for well-sleeping babies. Or is it about ensuring that mom and dad don't make a sibling that takes away the baby's resources?
- HumblyTossed 3y ago
  > I'm in the same shoes, and I often wonder why evution haven't solved this yet It did! But we, in our infinite wisdom, got selfish and we now live alone. Fight nature and she fights back!
- PaulHoule 3y ago
  It is our own damn fault. Back in the day people slept with their kids and being close to their parents meant they felt secure and would (1) sleep through the night, and (2) if they needed any attention it would be easy to give it to them. Somebody invented the crib, got rich at our expense, and now people can't imagine life any other way.
  - alex_duf 3y ago
    Isn't co-sleeping a significant cause of death though? So maybe our society traded sleep to get a higher survival rate
    - PaulHoule 3y ago
      There are two versions of this story. "It's very safe to sleep with your baby unless you sleep with your baby drunk or on a small couch", and "It's very dangerous to sleep with your baby especially if you sleep with your baby drunk or on a small couch" That last bit is right and a study found "The risk associated with being found in the parental bed was not significant for older infants (>14 weeks) or for infants of parents who did not smoke and became non-significant after adjustment for recent maternal alcohol consumption..." See https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC28288/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC28288/ Anyone who has shared a bed with a cat or small dog would note that you never roll over and crush it.
caporaltito 3y ago
Keep in mind: this period does end at some point. All the best!

I’m the dad of a 7 month old baby. I think I feel around 100 years older than I actually am.

by edu 3y ago

I’m the dad of a 7 month old baby. I think I feel around 100 years older than I actually am.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

chasd00 3y ago

To you and the others, just hang in there it gets better. You’ll get through and come out the other side better, stronger, and full of more love than you thought existed. /father of a 14 and 12 year old boys

garrickvanburen 3y ago
^ fully agree. I blinked an my youngest was suddenly 10yrs old. The kids all being in double digits is really awesome and far less labor intensive than the early months.

ActionHank 3y ago

Ask your doctor about Modafinil, my GP prescribed it for me when my son was born and it was a life saver.

chasebank 3y ago

For the love of god, sleep train your baby. There are coaches online if you need help.

silveira 3y ago

2 years and 5 months here. He never slept well, wakes up during the night, makes all sorts of sounds while sleeping, and wakes up early (5~6 am). Doctor said some kids are like this and it may get better over the years. The lack of sleep took a lot of my concentration, energy, and memory.

pdxandi 3y ago
Same here. 3.5 year old and one year old twins. Poor sleep and just general fatigue most days. It’s hard to convey to those who sleep well how challenging it is to be constantly sleep deprived.

jmacd 3y ago

Posting this here, because it was advice given to me by one of the founders we all look up to on HN when I had my first child (on our 4th now). "If you are going to have kids and run a company, you all need to sleep." and then he introdued me to a sleep trainer/coach. "No way, we are not sleep training" was my thought, but I quickly realized that there is a difference between sleep normalization and what we know as sleep training. The sleep coach gave us a completely customized regime for 2 weeks. Once the baby is 6 months or so, you can start. (up until 6 months, I just slept with the kids in my arms every night. Oh my god I miss those nights now. It makes me cry to think about how wonderful it felt.) We've done it 4 times now and all our children gladly sleep from 7pm to 6:30am every single night. (The older ones now go to sleep more like 9pm). Everyone in the house is rested every day and it makes a big difference. Those two weeks are a lot of work for one of the parents (it is specified that one person should be focused on it) but in our experience it works by the 3rd night or so. The main takeaway from the aproach is to disassociate eating and interaction from the act of sleeping. It created buffers between feeding times and play times and when you finally put them down in their crib to sleep. If they do wake up during the night they don't think "oh, if I cry I will get to eat right away." and they self-soothe and go back to sleep. If they do wake up hungry, it's a failure of the parent to have ensured they've eaten properly. You adjust as they grow. (A hungry cry is totally different from a discomfort or bored cry. You learn them pretty quickly.) When I put my 10 month old in his crib to sleep now he looks back at me briefly and then turns over and gets in his sleeping position and he's asleep before I leave the room. It's such a relief knowing that no matter how badly a day goes, you can sleep that night. I've had a lot of friends think this isn't for them, but 100% of the ones I have convinced to do it (and in some cases have just paid for) have been successful. I'll also add that 2 of our kids were "colicky" and were very unfcomfortable during the day for their first year. Even still we were able to have them sleeping the entire night most nights after 6 months. Again, there is no "cry it out". In fact, the baby almost never cries at all in this process in my experience.

mreezie 3y ago
Can you point me in the direction of this trainer/method?

bicepjai 3y ago

It felt good to read the stories that we can relate to, we have a a 2.5 year old; literally sleep deprived and these stories woke me up, thank you and good morning. I can see aging process is definitely faster with sleep deprivation. We can physically see it in our photos timeline and feel it in our workouts that we work so hard to keep up. Grey hair and baldness surged in this 2 years. We use to have so much energy in the evening for personal projects after work, not anymore. It’s so hard to deal with this both mentally and physically. Sleep training definitely helped us, but again every experience is unique. Hold on and it will pass.

jrussino 3y ago

A lot of people here will say "it gets better", and it does, but be sure to take your health seriously and not let yourself normalize that feeling for the long-term. Mine are 7 and 4 now and we're well past the sleep-deprived early years, but I realized recently that I had grown accustomed to that feeling and my new baseline is significantly worse, largely due to bad sleep habits. I'm a lot busier now, juggling the needs of 2 kids and my other responsibilities, and for too long I've coasted on ~5-7 hours of sleep thinking it's OK to sacrifice 1-3 hours of sleep in favor of squeezing in extra work or some low-quality leisure time at the end of the day because, "hey, it's still better than it was when they were babies, and I made it through that".

_yb2s 3y ago

People who haven't been through this often underestimate the severity of it... they often think that because they've pulled all-nighters for school or something that they understand but weeks or months of chronic sleep deprivation is a totally different thing. It was living hell for me- my son wouldn't sleep during the night for more than 10-20m at a time, and my partner was having severe postpartum mental health issues (psychosis/rage/depression) so I was parenting solo, and up all night every night by myself with a crying baby. I eventually started hallucinating, and had a short temper and made very poor decisions. I couldn't get advice, help, or sympathy from anyone- usually something along the lines of "parenting is so easy for dads, why are you complaining?" Visiting family would expect me to serve meals to them, and not help either. I almost lost my job also because I couldn't focus or code anymore. Once I started sleeping in a separate room from my son, I could finally think/code/work again. Understanding in the workplace for a struggling new dad was non-existant: everyone assumed the mother was doing all of the work, and I would perform like normal. If anyone is reading this and can relate, don't do what I did- pay for help. Pay for a nanny- take out a loan if you have to. If you or your partner is struggling, get them professional mental health support. Prioritize your sleep, bodily, and mental health needs: you need to "put the mask on yourself first" or you can't help anyone else. Don't be afraid to set a crying baby in a safe crib and go sleep for a while if you need it.

inference-lord 3y ago

100% having the same experience. It's mind bending how tired you can get. We recently all had the flu, 2 nights of the baby having a fever and both of us being sick and also having a fever was one of the most testing things in my life.

objektif 3y ago
Try having a kid with febrile seizures. Mine runs 105 fevers casually for 5 to 7 days. We have to check her very often to make sure she is not going into a seizure.
- 2024throwaway 3y ago
  Sorry. But it’s not a contest.
  - objektif 3y ago
    Oh no did not mean it that way. Not that I want a trophy for sleeping less lol. My point was as a new parent things can get a lot worse in terms of sleep deprivation. I was not prepared for it.
verisimi 3y ago
Best advice I heard on this, is for partners to take turns to get sleep if possible. Perhaps it's obvious, but we didn't do that initially. You really only need 3 hours or so (in my experience) and the insanity starts to subside.
- david422 3y ago
  My wife and I had a spare bedroom - we used to alternate nights down there when our child would scream all night.

forgotmyinfo 3y ago

I've never seen a more zombified human being than when a friend had a fussy baby who simply would not sleep. Two hours a night was her and her husband's norm, sometimes. Godspeed, I hope you can get some rest soon. (Also, congratulations on the new baby! :))

gambiting 3y ago

I feel you - our son had about 6 months(from ~4 months old until 10 months old) where he just wouldn't sleep for more than an hour at the time, then would wake up screaming and it took at least 30-40 minutes to put him back to sleep. I think in that period me and my wife were actual zombies, just didn't get any sleep at all, there was a point where I thought to myself I haven't had more than 2 hours of continious unbroken sleep for few months, and that there is no way this can be healthy lol. Also, I know saying this now doesn't help, because at the moment you are in one of the most "intense" periods of their development where they need all of your attention but give relatively little back - but that will improve. They will eventually sleep better and they will start telling you how much they love you and kiss you goodnight - and then all of those early months are forgotten :-)

tutfbhuf 3y ago
I can relate, sleep deprivation can have serious health effects. We did night shifts on cycles every other day, where one parent slept through the night on the couch with hearing protection, while the other stayed with the baby in the bedroom. This method worked out quite well. The advantage is that the parent who slept on the couch has more energy during the day for the child and can enjoy the time more, which is also beneficial for the child.
- fullstackchris 3y ago
  so... what are you supposed to do if you have a full time job?
  - n4r9 3y ago
    I have an 8 month old and am full time while mum's on maternity leave. When the baby was ill recently, at times he wouldn't sleep unless he was being held by a standing person. I'm not kidding - there were nights where sitting or lying down as gently as possible would wake him up. We ended up doing half-night shifts where I'd have him from 8pm to 2am and then mum would take him from 2am-8am. I'd wake up at 8am, put him in the carrier for a nap while mum napped as well (30-60 mins) and then start work. How parents in the US do it when maternity is only 12 weeks unpaid... I have no idea!

meindnoch 3y ago

I'm in the same shoes, and I often wonder why evution haven't solved this yet... Like, babies' chance of survival should drop if their parents are sleep deprived. There should be a selection pressure for well-sleeping babies. Or is it about ensuring that mom and dad don't make a sibling that takes away the baby's resources?

HumblyTossed 3y ago
> I'm in the same shoes, and I often wonder why evution haven't solved this yet It did! But we, in our infinite wisdom, got selfish and we now live alone. Fight nature and she fights back!
PaulHoule 3y ago
It is our own damn fault. Back in the day people slept with their kids and being close to their parents meant they felt secure and would (1) sleep through the night, and (2) if they needed any attention it would be easy to give it to them. Somebody invented the crib, got rich at our expense, and now people can't imagine life any other way.
- alex_duf 3y ago
  Isn't co-sleeping a significant cause of death though? So maybe our society traded sleep to get a higher survival rate
  - PaulHoule 3y ago
    There are two versions of this story. "It's very safe to sleep with your baby unless you sleep with your baby drunk or on a small couch", and "It's very dangerous to sleep with your baby especially if you sleep with your baby drunk or on a small couch" That last bit is right and a study found "The risk associated with being found in the parental bed was not significant for older infants (>14 weeks) or for infants of parents who did not smoke and became non-significant after adjustment for recent maternal alcohol consumption..." See https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC28288/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC28288/ Anyone who has shared a bed with a cat or small dog would note that you never roll over and crush it.

caporaltito 3y ago

Keep in mind: this period does end at some point. All the best!