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Comment by jbirer | Hacker News Reader

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I don't know how much experience you have with babies, yes they cry for a reason. Sometimes that reason is they need/want something, sometimes it is because they are gassy and their stomach hurts. Sometimes it is because they are tired, in which case it may be preferential to help them learn that they should sleep when tired and not cry and keep themselves awake.

Also you talk about parental selfishness.

Parents have to be selfish and kids have to learn to wait. Parental mental health is important, especially for first time parents. Babies will take everything you give them and still want more, it is up to the parent to set boundaries.

One of the first pieces of advice I have seen and heard from many sources to new parents is that if the baby is crying and you can no longer handle the stress, to put the baby in a safe place and go for a walk. The reason we have this messaging being shared so widely is because new parents have a societal expectation that they MUST do everything to take care of the baby and if it is crying then you are not doing a good job, that expectation and view is what leads to shaken babies and infanticide.

Of course, but this is talking about extreme cases. Co-sleeping and sleep training are day-to-day instead.

Par of what I am getting at is that stress builds up over time but sometimes very quickly. Especially for new parents. And you can not predict how the parents will react mentally to this stress.

When we label things, such as postpartum depression, we can discuss the issue. But I think that sometimes we forget that we have to make changes to stop having the same outcomes. When a new parent ends up killing their child(ren), it is easy for us to say, "Well they had postpartum depression" but what have we gained as a society except a way to blame or assign the tragedy. Demanding the person who is in the midst of postpartum depression to identify that and then seek help is absolutely insane. We as a society need to look at how and what pressure we put on others as well as be able to have open conversation about the stresses in order to prevent deaths.

>Babies cry for a reason (to get their needs met).

Yep. Including, "I woke up and I don't yet know how to put myself back to sleep," which is where "sleep training" helps. I, too, would be curious as someone else asked, if you have children.

When we sleep trained our kids, this was exactly our interpretation as well. You are literally training them how to sleep on their own. Yes they will be uncomfortable for a little while and yes they will cry because it is a new situation but it's truly for their own good. You are giving your kid the gift of being able to know how to sleep and fall back asleep.

You can do such training without being a cruel hard ass about it either. You know your kid best and know their limits and when you should go into their room to comfort them... but you have to know why you are doing it--you are teaching them how to sleep. The only way they can learn that is by themselves (at least at an early age).

Sleep training our daughter was one of the best decisions we made early on. But every kid and every parent is different. There is no one single way to raise a kid...

Incidentally, potty training can also involve a lot of crying, tantrums, etc. I would say I don't see the uproar of parents claiming it's child abuse, but the numbers of children past 36 mo that are not potty trained is pretty shocking.

Or co-sleeping, where they don't cry before or after

I have two boys 9 and 3. Oldest co-slept with us until his brother was born so until 6yo, even now sometimes he wants to come back to our bed.

The youngest we put in the same room as our oldest after about a year, he rarely wants to sleep with us.

When they were co-sleeping with us, they would still wake up and cry at night from things other then hunger. Including, I rolled over into my parent and it surprised me so I woke up and now I can't sleep.

In the case of my oldest, he started getting to the point where he would only fall asleep if my wife was next to him with her arm under his head like a pillow. It had to be her arm, we once switched so my arm was under his head and he could tell, got upset about it XD. That is when we decided he needed to start sleeping on his own...which took some time. It is also why we choose to have the youngest move out quicker, we didn't want to have the same protracted experience.

Now they will sleep together at the oldest insistence, about a third of the time though the youngest will take too long to fall asleep and they end up fighting and the youngest will go off to sleep on his own.

I don't think any of us in this conversation have any good data on what is best, and those of us that are parents have way to much bias and way too small sample size to discuss this with any degree of confidence.

My personal option is that either way is not going to make much of a difference and you should do what ever works best for you and your family.

Edit: Added a paragraph(#4)

I think you are right and I'm just angry at the behavior toward co-sleeping.

In the end, every family should do what fits them.

My request is to stop blaming co-sleeping and accept it as a valuable option, same value as sleep training.

I understand, it is frustrating seeing people blame and reject things are useful just because they are not used tho them or are foreign to their culture.

Part of the reason we co-slept is because my wife was breastfeeding and it would have been unfair for her to have to get up, leave the room to take care of the baby. Also, I am good at adapting and quickly learnt to sleep through hunger cries...so probably for the best we were not doing the swap schedule.

Makes sense. I forgot about the problem with breastfeeding, since initially we were all in the same room and there was zero sleep, so it didn't matter much. By the time breastfeeding would have been annoying (for waking up), we were already co-sleeping.

Our first 2 weeks were really, really bad, with the first week being at 2 hours in total (that is 2 hours of sleep for 168 hours), after a month and a half she started sleeping with us.

The second one just slept with us from the beginning since knew all the tricks of it and worked really well the first time

But do they cry more or less if they are sleep trained vs co-sleeping? Varies I am sure, but in our case at least our children slept soundly whenever not nursing while co-sleeping but for our ill-fated attempt at sleep training just cried and cried and cried (a mistake we tried only with our eldest). To each their own - I say do whatever works!

This is a simplistic potshot.

If you go to your baby every time it cries that could mean a lot of work, so much it ruins your own rest/health/sanity and makes you a worse parent at the times the baby isn’t crying.

A defenseless child wants nothing more than to sleep next to their parent. Everyone sleeps better.

They also want a steady stream of cookies and iPad games and to be able to climb on high dangerous objects but maybe we shouldn’t indulge every want of a child.

Giving an infant a feeling of safety when they’re too small to comprehend their environment is not indulgence.

That's a way older kid than a baby though

>Everyone sleeps better.

This is an absolute that is not true. Many people, even you, may - great! Others may not.

Seriously, I wonder if it's father's saying stuff like this. You just need to go on YouTube and see the abuse that mother's get from infants and small children while co-sleeping.

Fair—I was being too extreme.

Unless the baby gets caught in the covers or rolled upon during the night. Every approach likely has some pros and cons, so barring randomized and reproduced trials I take all claims as unproven.

Yes if you’re obese or inebriated then you shouldn’t sleep next to a baby, but in those cases you’re better off abstaining from food and drink for your own sake anyway.

Sure, but even if you're not these things still happen. To normal, healthy, reasonable people.

They don't happen to people who don't co-sleep.

> Everyone sleeps better.

Did you ever sleep next to an infant?

Yes, got 9 hours of sleep/day (interrupted by diaper change, sure) vs the initial 2/week

Yes

There have also been studies that show that babies will cry to manipulate their caregivers[1]. They are pretty smart and over time can learn to fake crying to get something that they want.

[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23732624/

My grandson was sleep trained and I was a skeptic at first. But it basically took less than 48 hours before he learned to self soothe and was on a schedule with never more than about 15 mins of fussing in that initial training phase.

After he was trained and got on his sleep schedule he was the happiest baby I have ever been around and I raised 3 kids myself and have 3 other grandchildren. He never has issues with overtiredness and basically will only fuss if diaper needs changed or was hungry. Now he just flat out tells you when he is tired (“nigh-nigh”) at 18 months and it’s almost always nearly to the minute of when it is his bed or nap time and within a minute or two of being in bed…he is zonked.

Everyone I know who has done it sings it’s praises and in our own observation it’s simply amazing. I am no longer a skeptic. Also I will say this, if the crying is the stressful and damaging situation to babies, then in our experience the net result is less stress for the child with sleep training.

Sometimes the reason a baby cries is literally the unmet need for sleep - they are very tired, feel awful because of that, and cry. And then they can't fall asleep easily because they're cranky about being too tired.

> And then they can't fall asleep easily because they're cranky about being too tired.

... And worse they are tired and don't know how to fall asleep. Hence why I'm a fan of sleep training. You are giving your little one the gift of being able to put themselves to sleep on their own.

Do you have kids yourself?

Just curious.

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