[lolinder]

This is the kind of "it worked for my kid" bullshit that drives me up the wall.

With my oldest we bought into comments like this and tried to always comfort him when he was crying. He would not stop crying. We stayed up with him an absurd amount of hours trying every idea in the book to soothe him to sleep and nothing worked. He was probably getting 6 hours of sleep a day at a time when he was supposed to be sleeping 18. He lost a lot of weight and we were scared and exhausted.

After a few weeks of that my wife finally put him into his bassinet and stepped away. She sat there next to his crib crying with him for 5 minutes, and then he fell asleep and slept for the longest he had in his life. That moment was the turning point from weight loss to weight gain and from barely sleeping to sleeping normally. In spite of all of our worries that something was terribly wrong, all that was required was to let him be. He's now 3 years old and still hates to sleep, but he's as healthy as any other kid both physically and emotionally.

My only advice to new parents today is to accept what everyone else says as well intentioned and then do what works best for your kid. Every child is different, and people who try to claim that their method is the only humane way to treat a kid need more exposure to the real world.

[detritus]

The only good advice for a new parent, I think, is to ignore everyone else's advice. I appreciate the circularity of this advice.

[orangepurple]

Parents need to have a well defined set of diverse solutions and know how to sample from the search space effectively instead of current epsilon greedy approach

[remote_phone]

100% correct. The baby-rearing book industry is a fraud. They claim “well the average baby does X, Y, Z” but they don’t tell you that the standard deviation is huge. New mothers like my wife were stressed beyond belief because our kid only slept 10 hours and ate twice as much as other kids. She was convinced there was something wrong until I proved to her that he was within the standard deviation of normal.

Do what feels right for your child. No two children are the same, even twins. Infants are very resilient so don’t worry you’re going to scar or damage them. They generally won’t unless you are truly abusive.

[rgbrgb]

How did you prove this?

[alt227]

This is so true. Nothing worked to get my daughter to sleep nights until we finally bit the bullet and stepped away for 20 mins and let her cry out. Every night since then she has slept all night long.

Every child is different which is why parenting is not an exact science. Try everything, something will work!

[conqueso]

You're absolutely right that every baby has different needs and I'm glad to hear that you figured out what's best for yours. It was not my intention to suggest that every baby should co-sleep - I meant to address the very commonplace (IMO misplaced) fear that if they do, then they will never leave their parents' bed and develop independence. There are obviously some babies who are ok or even better off sleeping alone. My frustration is with the mainstream acceptance that this is The Proper Way - to the point where families are leaving infants screaming for nights on end in order to "train" them.

[lolinder]

Your experience of the mainstream is very different than mine. Before having kids, the voices we heard were overwhelmingly saying "immediately respond to every cry or you are a terrible parent", which is exactly how your first comment reads. That's why it took us so long to try letting him cry: we'd listened to voices like yours.

The parents you describe are a tiny minority if they exist at all, and guilt-tripping them in a public forum just hurts the millions of new parents who are at an extremely vulnerable time of life and trying to do the right thing. It's not your place to lecture on how loving parents should be treating a baby you've never laid eyes on.