| HN Mirror

It's not a bad thing, just like it's not bad for a baby to want to be spoon-fed. But part of growing up is learning new skills, like eating by themselves and soothing themselves to sleep. And a big part of parenting is figuring out the right times and ways to encourage this.

You know what has been a far more traumatic growing experience for every kid I've known than learning to sleep independently? Learning to use a toilet. Way more tears, way more "emotional trauma", but it's all part of growing up.

> I swear our brains are looking for adversaries in infants now.

Also, sleep training is not some new-agey thing that we've just concocted out of a recent adversarial parenting trend; if anything it's exactly the opposite, it is the focus on "attachment" and concern over the impact of things like sleep training that is the newer trend.

metabagel 1268 days ago

Childhood trauma is reflected in behavioral issues at an older age.

"But part of growing up is learning new skills, like eating by themselves and soothing themselves to sleep."

Sure, but wait until they're three before you start sleep training. This idea that we need to toughen up infants is dangerous and frightening. They're completely helpless.

We've repeated ourselves a bunch of times but it irks me to let one of these nonsense comments go unresponded, so again: two year olds and one year olds are not infants and are not helpless. They can fall asleep independently perfectly well.

mirsadm 1268 days ago

One thing that has always bothered me is parents trying to justify sleep training as a positive for the child. The reason parents do it is for their own benefit.

So, it's both, for real. Waking up and crying five or six times a night really isn't good for infants and is even worse for toddlers. They need to be well rested for all the learning they do during their days.

But it's also the case that anything that is bad for parents is bad for children. Especially when it comes to sleep deprivation. I'm completely convinced that in my almost-five year old's entire life, the most danger she has ever been in was when we had to drive half an hour to the pediatrician multiple times a week when she was a newborn and we weren't sleeping at all. I may as well have been three or four drinks in every time I drove to the doctor in those early weeks. But driving isn't the only problem. Parents are more irritable, less present, and just generally worse, when they aren't sleeping.

Sleep deprivation isn't just some funny goofy little thing that parents adorably have to deal with; it's a major problem. I didn't even realize this until I started sleeping after a year and a half and had the experience of "waking up" after a few weeks of good sleep. It's an actual problem! It's not just some preference that parents have to be able to sleep.

> But driving isn't the only problem. Parents are more irritable, less present, and just generally worse, when they aren't sleeping.

This.

It's hard to not laugh at a remark like "the reason parents do it is for their own benefit". Of course we do it for our own benefit. Because our benefit is the benefit of the child as well.

Temporary attachment or emotional issues, if they happen, can be fixed. Worst case, the parents may need some external guidance from a specialist in children psychology and emotional development. Keeping the parents sleep-deprived for months can cause them to become depressed (or exacerbate mother's postpartum depression - a very important topic that's not being talked about enough), or lose their jobs, or make them hate their own child, or hate each other and ultimately lead to divorce/broken family. All these consequences are orders of magnitude worse for future prospects of a child than anything a botched sleep training can cause.

unity1001 1268 days ago

> Temporary attachment or emotional issues, if they happen, can be fixed

Wow. Good luck with that. The entire psychology science and discipline was still not able to solve it. But your optimism is encouraging.

> Wow. Good luck with that.

Thanks! We've had a lot of good luck so far. In fact, the child psychologist we went to proactively, to talk about how to help a 1 y.o. child handle moving to a new home in a different city, approved with the way we handled both this and other issues, and with our approach in general. But hey, N=1, it's always possible she is wrong.

> The entire psychology science and discipline was still not able to solve it. But your optimism is encouraging.

The issue isn't with psychology, the issue is with people treating an entire spectrum as one bit "is or isn't" boolean. It's good for writing outrage-inducing stories to maximize revenue. It's good for winning arguments despite being wrong. It's not good if you actually care about the outcome.

The kind of issues we're talking about here are mostly the psychological equivalent of a bruised knee. Meanwhile, the commentariat and the pundits selling books want to round everything up to emotional abuse, as if letting a child cry for 15 minutes was as bad as leaving them to live on the street. Unfortunately, some of the HN comments seem to go this way too.

singpolyma3 1268 days ago

Just like sending kids to school

> Like, what the fuck do we think these babies are actively scheming to find ways to get soothed?

That's exactly what they do. Do you believe they're processing sophisticated ideas of love, attachment and comforting? That they're making a choice to ask their parents for soothing?

Infants are acting on basic instincts. With very limited but rapidly expanding space of possible actions, they're actively learning what behavior will lead to their basic needs being satisfied. They can and will overfit on whatever pattern they can spot.

> I swear our brains are looking for adversaries in infants now.

In operational sense, they are - they're fighting for resources for their own survival.

> Your infant child can not manipulate you. The brains barely understand action and consequence. Your infant child is trying to communicate its needs, and having it unmet with indifference is honestly hilariously sad.

Of course they can and will manipulate you. That's, like, parenthood 101. The whole set of biological and psychological changes parents undergo, the whole deal with attachment, is to make the parents vulnerable to the child. The brain of an infant may understand little at first, but it understands enough of "action and consequence" to start doing gradient descent and quickly learn how to get what it needs from its parents. Of course it helps that the parents want to fulfill their child's needs - initially, the kid isn't really learning how to get the parents to respond, but rather training the parents to respond to specific cues.

Eventually, children learn to speak, and that's when it's really clear just how devious and manipulative kids are. It's both amusing and rewarding to watch them push the boundaries of their intelligence to get you to react they way they want. Except in those cases where they succeed, and you only realize it moments later that you've been had :).

metabagel 1268 days ago

But infants aren't capable of looking after their own needs. You're really mixing up different stages of childhood development.

No I'm not. I'm talking about older infants, older than about 6 months. They are capable of falling asleep independently. There isn't a "need" here. The idea is to take care of all their needs before putting them to bed, make sure they are fed, make sure their diaper is dry, don't do it if they're sick or in pain from teething; meet their actual needs. Being rocked to sleep is a want not a need.

> But infants aren't capable of looking after their own needs.

That's my point. They aren't capable of looking after their own needs. They need their parents for that. But what they are capable of is correlating their behavior with their needs being fulfilled, and doing more of the thing that correlates well with those needs being met.

gregoriol 1268 days ago

What if it is part of learning?