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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   2664 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for April 20, 2025

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Every baby is different. Try not to compare your baby to your friends’ babies too much, especially when it comes to sleep. Our baby is not a good sleeper and my husband and I are still taking it in shifts every night 4 months out because our little one is up every 1-2 hrs. I’ve had people tell me that he’s probably cold, hungry, sleeping too much during the day etc., and no, he is not, he’s just a crap sleeper.

You have my sympathy.

Our first kid was a crap sleeper for 2 years and it almost killed me.

Someone asked me once what I wanted for Christmas and I just said "... 3 nights in a row where I can sleep 8 hours a night" and I had to leave the room in case I started lolsobbing.

The second kid? No problem.

Thanks. I keep hoping we get lucky with the next one because the chronic sleep deprivation is a killer. Every night I hope is the night he’ll sleep 4 hrs uninterrupted but unfortunately it hasn’t happened yet. But I keep reminding myself it will happen one day…even if it’s in 2 years(!) :/

I'm sorry if this is a stupid question, but why can't you just ignore a crying baby at night? Call it ferberizing, call it self-preservation, whatever.

We are genetically predisposed to be unable to ignore a crying baby. It's the worst, most upsetting sound in the world. If you have a soundproof room it's doable, but if you don't...

We’ve discussed sleep training but have decided against it for now mostly because we don’t think it will work with our current setup (which will be changing in a few months, anyway) or baby’s personality/development level. I also don’t know if I can stomach cry-it-out while he’s this young.

Most of the sleep advice out there now says to wait until 4 months to do any sort of sleep training.

ferberizing

Looking up this term has convinced me that any research related to child rearing is absolutely insane. This should be the easiest thing to test. Instead, every article I saw was either unabashedly pro- or anti-Ferber, and bent over backwards to explain why the lack of clinical evidence supports their position. Then they go back to evo-psych.

(For what it’s worth, it probably works, so the pro-side actually has studies to cite.)

This is like reverse Gell-Mann amnesia. Maybe every field looks like this.

Looking up this term has convinced me that any research related to child rearing is absolutely insane.

Yes. Fucking everyone in the world has opinions on parenting. It's worse than politics.

Re: Ferberizing

I think if I knew we were looking at 2 years of that shit we would have been much more hard about it. Something about being in the midst of it made it unthinkable.

We were all set to do it with the second kid but she barely put up a fuss.

It’s a minefield. Just this weekend I saw a couple of relatives, they have a baby, and they have looked completely exhausted for the better part of two years now. The light has gone out of their eyes. When I suggested the same thing as above, that maybe they should ignore him at night and wean him off, a grandmother rudely told me that as a childless man I had no right to an opinion. Fine, it's not my business, but if I'm right, who is going to tell them? I'm sure that the father too would be told off because it's seen as the mother's domain and her prerogative, and it would be 'selfish' for him to complain when she likely does a bigger share of the (useless) night work. There is no debate, and so they keep suffering.

Mom and I are were too bleeding heart to do that.

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