Parent Thread

chaos_sl said:

6 year old stays up reading. I use that as kind of a "quiet hour" thing for her. She's going into first grade so we're kind of reevaluating everything. It is so weird constantly thinking of your kids as babies and needing to protect them etc and then one day they're all in elementary school. Time flew.

But yeah, but her and the 5 year old stay up, just in their room reading or whatever. They still don't stay up much later, they wake up early for school (relatively) and too much later turns them into assholes the next day. We used to let them have a tablet/device and watch a show or play a little game, but that was a terrible idea, just wires them and causes problems. 3 year old needs her sleep desperately so it is straight to bed for her.

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Oh, that's cool then. Wife grew up with "bedtime" and "lights out time" , usually an hour apart. It's an issue right now with my inlaws and nephews, because both parents go to sleep before the kids, and so they are not going to sleep. I happen to live with them temporarily, and so I'll hear them talking and doing shit on their phones at 11pm, and the parents are like meh, summer vacation. Drives me nuts when parents set a rule, and then don't enforce. Lazy!

But apparently, bed times are getting later and later for kids. Was talking to a friend that has 14 and 17 year old girls, and they are in high school. I told her I had a bedtime of 11:00pm, and that was only my senior year. It went up an hour every year, or something like that, so it was 8-9 my Freshman year of highschool. My friend looked at me like I was crazy!

Sleep regression around 2 years old is also pretty common from what we've read.

chaos_sl said:

I never said they won't learn it on their own or that anyone ever told me that. I said coddling them can lead to developmental and social delays. The sooner they become independent the sooner they start hitting milestones like crazy, if they're being coddled they thrive less.

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I don't know, we were talking about cry-it-out and night time sleeping and self-soothing, which are all pretty direct references to Ferber method and it's bevy of offshoots. Your talking now about not giving in every time a child throws a tantrum which is something that doesn't really apply to a 6 month old.

Yeah, cry it out is part of that. But like I said, it is misleading. It isn't like you just sit the kid down, ignore their shrieks, and go get blazed with your bros. You still have to monitor them. You still have to intervene and you have to put a pretty short timeframe on it. Assuming you are doing it "right". 5-10 years from now maybe the sceintific community will talk about how barbaric the practice is or whatever but I doubt it, and right now the focus from them is promoting independence, which sleep training does.

And you know, parents need sleep, kids need routine, all of this shit is healthy for the entire family. There will be phases where they don't do it, and there will be phases where they keep tot he routine like a robot. Shit happens. But promoting a routine is pretty much a good idea.

chaos, STFU. You're being reasonable and shit.

chaos_sl said:

Yeah, cry it out is part of that. But like I said, it is misleading. It isn't like you just sit the kid down, ignore their shrieks, and go get blazed with your bros. You still have to monitor them. You still have to intervene and you have to put a pretty short timeframe on it. Assuming you are doing it "right". 5-10 years from now maybe the sceintific community will talk about how barbaric the practice is or whatever but I doubt it, and right now the focus from them is promoting independence, which sleep training does.

And you know, parents need sleep, kids need routine, all of this shit is healthy for the entire family. There will be phases where they don't do it, and there will be phases where they keep tot he routine like a robot. Shit happens. But promoting a routine is pretty much a good idea.

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You are talking to me like I don't know what you are talking about. The idea that sleep training is a requirement is bullshit. People that preach that shit like it's a requirement are deluded. I'm not saying don't do it, I'm saying don't let someone tell you you have to do it. This was a response to this post:

opiate82_sl said:

Yeah, babies need to learn to self-soothe and part of doing that is letting them cry it out sometimes. 6 months seems like a great starting point for that, by that time they should have established pretty good bonds with the parents and are beyond the point of needing constant comfort and assurance.

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Sleep training is a fairly recent development necessitated and encouraged by the fact that American families are so largely dual income now and dual income parents need a child that better adheres to their schedule. There has been at least one study that supports the notion that sleep training is better for the child because parents getting sleep promotes a happier household and that's better for the child. Once again though, it's for the parents, it's not about the child's "development".

Yeah, I guess I just disagree, I'll go with my pediatrician on this one.

Trust me, when we started letting our kid "cry it out" it was not for mine our my wife's benefit. My wife would have much rather coddled our daughter and I would have much rather let her, rather than listen to her stress about it.

But you know what, once we started my daughter had a much easier time going to sleep and staying asleep. My wife eventually settled down as well.

I won't deny there are about 35 different ways to deal with a baby and sleeping and what not and the majority of them won't ruin your baby. We can link "baby studies" supporting our "opinions" till our children are all old and educated enough to perform the studies themselves, I'm just stating what my experience has been.

With our first child we were not sure what not sure what our sleeping arrangements were going to be but was wife going to breastfeed for the first year. We tried many different arrangements and finally settled on co-sleeping then around 5 months we moved him to the crib (still in our room) because he was rolling all over the place in his sleep. One year later he was still waking up 2 to 4 times a night for a cuddle and a sip of milk, but i cant blame the guy who doesn't like a midnight snack and warm cozy breast to fall back asleep on.

Right after his first birthday we went back to visit family and he stayed in the grandparents room were he was sleeping 8 plus hours every night. First night back home and in our room he woke up 3 times. The next day while my wife was at work I moved all his stuff into his own room and that first night he slept 10 hours without so much as a peep. Wife was really upset at first but when she got a full nights sleep she quickly got over it. Now I tell her our daughter who is 3 months will be getting kicked out at 8 months.

chaos_sl said:

6 year old stays up reading. I use that as kind of a "quiet hour" thing for her. She's going into first grade so we're kind of reevaluating everything. It is so weird constantly thinking of your kids as babies and needing to protect them etc and then one day they're all in elementary school. Time flew.

But yeah, but her and the 5 year old stay up, just in their room reading or whatever. They still don't stay up much later, they wake up early for school (relatively) and too much later turns them into assholes the next day. We used to let them have a tablet/device and watch a show or play a little game, but that was a terrible idea, just wires them and causes problems. 3 year old needs her sleep desperately so it is straight to bed for her.

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We have done the same thing with out daughter. For the longest time, her bedtime was 8pm during the week and 8:30pm on weekends (although weekends weren't as strict). We started that when she was a baby, she would cry about it but eventually got into to routine of it. She is 8 now, her bedtime is 8:30pm during the week and I can probably count on one hand how many times she has given any sort of issue when it was bedtime. She's just so used to going to bed at certain times that if she actually stays up real late for some reason (due to use being out for example), she doesn't last a lot past 9-9:30pm. A lot of it has to do with the fact that she wakes up early during the week (6am) which is why she gets tired once it gets real late.

We are also pretty strict about sleeping in bed with us. Basically if she ever came in the room (scared, bad dreams, etc), we would let her sleep with us for about an hour at most and then I get up and walk her right back to her room. But that was when she was younger, I can't remember the last time she woke up in the middle of the night (she sleeps though anything for the most part).

What's with The Ancient being aggressive as fuck? God damnit. I'm with Chaos on this one. I don't tolerate crying and whining. I have a 2 year old, so I have to. But I threaten to tickle my daughter every time she whines. She'll start whining for a snack or a toy or whatever and I just have to say "are you whining?" and she usually stops with a few giggles.

Different issue than crying it out for sleep, but it's in the same vein.

My son still needs to eat at around midnight every night and we're about to hit 5 months. Ugh. But he's getting better at sleeping from 7ish to midnight and midnight to 7am. We're finally starting to get him into a nap ritual now. Hopefully we'll transition to morning nap and afternoon nap and sleep soon. Probably a month or two away.

Draegan_sl said:

What's with The Ancient being aggressive as fuck? God damnit. I'm with Chaos on this one. I don't tolerate crying and whining. I have a 2 year old, so I have to. But I threaten to tickle my daughter every time she whines. She'll start whining for a snack or a toy or whatever and I just have to say "are you whining?" and she usually stops with a few giggles.

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Totally stealing this tactic when Nolan turns into a sentient being.

It's kind of trippy to watch a blob with a head and 4 appendages turn into a semi-sentient human being over the course of a few days.

Your son brushes his own teeth? My daughter is 3 1/2 and still doesn't. Granted, she lets us brush them, but she doesn't do it herself.

Our girls will be 3 in October and while they get to brush their teeth at bedtime, we follow up with our own brushing after they are done. Then they get to floss with floss picks and we follow up again with that. We let them brush totally on their own before they take a nap, so that is good practice time to see how well they can handle the entire process. They both still struggle with uncapping the toothpaste and squeezing it onto their toothbrushes.

Bipolar is more of a cycle thing. Some people cycle pretty fast, but lots of mood swings in a single day typically aren't a bipolar thing. ADHD is something that should have been diagnosed when she was younger, but sometimes it does escape diagnosis until a child is older. Could be ADHD, could be an anxiety disorder (you did say she had a fascination with death or something like that at one point didn't you?), could be both, could be something else entirely.

Kid had his brain scan this morning. Everything is normal and the hemangioma is just superficial. Great relief.