[lamasery]

3 for 3 sleeping through the night by 60 days. All we did was have a feeding schedule that we stuck to pretty closely, and around week 2 started intentionally delaying our response to night-time crying, gradually increasing how far we stretched it (start with maybe a minute, increase over time). They wake up at night and don’t know how to self-soothe back to sleep if you always jump in the second they make a sound, they don’t actually need night time feedings past the first few weeks, responding immediately trains them not to fall back asleep on their own if they stir at night (and everyone does). Down to one feeding at night by a month or so, none past two months.

Can’t say many other things worked equally well for all three kids, but that did.

[johnthedebs]

Love to hear it, thanks for sharing. I only wish there were more parenting "tricks" like this that gave similar quality of life improvements.

[lamasery]

There might be, but we didn't find many of them. Lots of things that work just how the parenting books et c. say they should on one of the three kids, and not at all on the other two.

This is one of the very-rare things that actually worked for all of them, almost exactly the same, all three times.

I'd say the only other things we did that worked 3-for-3 were making the kids walk on their own early and often, as much as feasible, and never having snacks (nor, very relatedly, tablets/phones) for them on-hand when out e.g. running errands—we just never introduced that as even a possibility. We didn't end up with kids still stroller/carrier-dependent past age ~2, and our kids have never had a meltdown[0] or complained about a lack of snacks (or digital toys) when we were out running errands. We reaped benefits by not needing to cart strollers and carriers around nearly as much, and never having to worry about snack-logistics or related mess (God knows we have plenty of other messes to worry about). IDK whether or how much those approaches benefited our kids, but they sure benefitted us.

[0, editing this in] To be clear, each went through period where they'd occasionally have public melt-downs, but never because we ran out of snacks or had the wrong snack or whatever, or because we wouldn't give them our phones to play with. I suspect short-circuiting these exact sorts of meltdowns is how the snacks-in-stores and sitting-in-the-cart-with-a-phone situations come to be (aside from some parents seeming to just think young kids need food available constantly or they might starve? These people baffle me, but do seem to actually exist) but our general rule we followed whenever possible was not to lean on a crutch that we didn't want to end up needing forever. That principle served us well, I think. Tens of embarrassing minutes we might have avoided, but that saved us a ton more hassle later.