As someone who also favors long (even very long) sleep, but is planning to have a child, may I ask how old your child is, whether things have already gotten better sleepwise, or whether you think it will?
We're only planning for one, and my impression so far suggests that it's the second child where sleep and free time get lost more permanently, and that with one child the majority of the sacrifices are only temporary (and getting better as the child gets older), but it's always good to hear some experiences.
I'd offer a different perspective than others here: it really doesn't matter how many kids you have, nor how old they are.
If you ignore the initial 6-12 months (once they get into a regular sleep schedule), the impact for the parents for the rest of the time between 1 to 17 yrs-old is pretty much the same. The dynamics will change as they get older, but you'll still be spending considerable time on the various family activities: playing with them, having breakfast/lunch/dinner, going to the park, teaching new things, commuting to/from school, attending their friends' birthdays on weekends, helping with schoolwork, maybe teaching them how to code :), etc.
On top of that, you'll also need to find time for you and your partner, family, friends, hobbies, reading, etc. Add a full time job, a school that starts starting early morning, a fixed annual vacation calendar, and you pretty much don't have many hours left in the day.
Sure, some activities can be shared with your partner, and some can be delegated (family member, nanny), but the conclusion is still the same: time management becomes a lot more critical once you have kids.
Which then leads me to sleep. In order to dedicate enough time to a restful night of sleep, you'll need to prioritize things much more effectively, so you don't end cutting corners, and changing drastically your sleep patterns.
It's not how many kids you have, it's how old they are. The period of time between 0 and 6 months is very challenging from a sleep perspective unless you avoid taking responsibility for the child at night (e.g. by dumping nighttime responsibility on your intimate partner), which I view as generally unacceptable.
Initially children have no circadian rhythm, which is very difficult. Later, they are awake frequently for feeding or otherwise, which is also difficult. Once they settle into a routine, however, it's fine.
I would particularly advise the "cry it out" technique. This seems cruel, which is why I waited with my first-born until he was 14 months old to do it, at which point it took a mere 3 days for him to start going to sleep on his own and sleeping through the night. We did it with our second child at 5 months with the same level of success (at least for going to sleep - very young children still wake up in the night more than older ones).
After around 6 months old, the sacrifices you make for your children are significant but no longer revolve primarily around sleep or the lack thereof.
> I would particularly advise the "cry it out" technique.
If you can't stomach cry it out, you can try the pick up-put down method. Let them cry for 5-10 minutes, then soothe them, then put them back down when they're done crying.
Raw cry it out can be a little hardcore depending upon the kid too, I have one friend who tried it and their kid cried for an hour straight and started vomiting.
“Raw cry it” out isn’t recommended by anyone with any expertise that I’m aware of. Most “cry it out” is closer to your pick up/put down description: Put the kid down, soothe them if they’re still crying after 5 minutes. Repeat after 10 minutes. Repeat after 20 minutes. If it’s night time, continue 20 minute intervals until sleep. If it’s nap time, give up if it hasn’t happened within an hour and try again next time.
Leaving a kid to scream for a solid hour with no soothing is not a good strategy. The goal is for them to learn to self-soothe and to put themselves to sleep, not for them to learn what abandonment feels like.
Just make sure there aren't any reasons for the crying like milk protein allergy. That is very painful while lying still in the bed. Cow milk protein carries over from whatever the mother eats and requires her not to eat anything with cow milk protein for three weeks before it gets better. Not three days as we were told. The list of things you can't eat is very long, milk is used almost everywhere so there are baby formula that is safe to give your baby for extra food if it doesn't work out.
+1 to that. There are also foods that the mom can normally eat no problem, but the kid's either going to have allergies to, or more common just not be able to digest. For example, eat a lot of broccoli, and that is guaranteed farts. Farts by themselves aren't bad, but if it's keeping your baby's belly inflated and makes it hard to sleep, well there goes your sleep!
Little babies are fascinating. Have fun, explore, trust but verify. And lastly, your baby usually knows what's up, and you do too. Don't let the "common wisdom" to tell you otherwise.
Thanks, that helps. Again, if it's "just" for a year or two, then that's just a sacrifice you have to take as a parent. That's different if the lack of sleep would be sustained until the kid reaches, say, puberty, because 15 years is a whole different number in relation to my expected remaining lifetime...
I am laying next to our sleeping baby, who is about 6 months old. (He is our first and will likely be our only) I was terribly concerned about the lack of sleep as a first time father. Besides hearing “congratulations” when we told people we were pregnant, a close second was “sleep now, while you can.” We have had Very few “rough nights,” if you can even call it that, and for the last 5.5 months, my only sleep deprivation is almost exclusively self inflicted. We credit 1) our amazing baby, who seems to know that nighttime is for sleeping or eating only, and 2) that he sleeps with us in our bed.(Queue horrific gasps.)
He is breastfed, and still wakes up about 3 times during his 12 hours of sleep every night to breastfeed. However, that consists of him making minimal noise, and my wife either picking him up or rolling over and feeding him while they lay next to each other. They literally both sleep through most feedings. For his first few weeks of life, he simply slept on her breast, so it was even easier.
Honestly, after experiencing and witnessing this arrangement, I can’t imagine that nature had moms and babies doing anything differently for the last few thousand years. Our lives would have been more difficult if we had him in a separate room right now. If that was our arrangement, we could count on waking up to loud cries and walking to another room multiple times a night, and either comforting or feeding our baby, and then walking back to bed afterwards. If we were doing that, I think folks’ warnings would have been true.
This was not our plan, but it became our plan after having a very strong instinct to stay close to our newborn when we brought him home.
We don’t fit any of the risk factors associated with SIDS in bedsharing (drug or alcohol use, obesity, smoking, etc), and thus consider it statistically safe enough that the benefits far outweigh the risks. YMMV, but I recommend reading one or two of those articles/papers to balance out the blanket warnings against bed sharing that you will inevitably hear if you live in the US.
Enjoy parenthood. It’s been the best experience of our lives.
Making babies sleep separately is a very western thing. Most women in the rest of the world sleep with babies, and its safe because - obesity, women smoking or drinking are infrequent outside the western world.
All people are different as are the sleep patterns of babies, some give you no rest others are no fuss. As always it's also a question of how well you can handle it yourself and how lucky your in regards to health, e.g. baby blues depression can really make the months with a newborn very stressful.
Thanks for sharing this and congrats on the baby. Our first due October 6th and I feel like every day I read an article about how sleep deprivation will kill me and it's been bumming me out. Hopefully our baby will be a good sleeper fingers crossed. 3x/night sounds like a dream!
As a dad of two (3yr and 1yr), the simple answer is - it depends. One kid might sleep like a rock with little to no sleep training, and the other will not sleep for 2 years, no matter what you do.
After talking to a lot of dads (and I talk to A LOT of them - RadDadShow.com), the general consensus is that first year is going to be hell no matter what.
First they are little creatures who don't understand sleep, and they eat and sleep and poop on a 24h non-stop cycle. Then they become aware of sleep and start fighting it. Then they become even more aware and decide to read books and have lunch at 3am... it goes on.
In our case, couple things helped the most: no screens, no salt and sugar, and early bed time. This way, when your kids aren't hyped up and go to bed before they are fully exhausted, sleep becomes easier to manage.
Happy to answer some questions. Hope the above helps. Good luck, and as my friend Greg Gottesman said, if you consider a long-term horizon, it's completely worth it!
I think the big difference between having one and two, other than the baby/toddler phase being extended, is that with one, it is easier for one parent to look after them while the other does something non-child related.
It's obviously possible for one parent to look after more than one child but it feels like much more work, I'd say, than looking after a single child. On the other hand, if you have two children, they can play with eachother once they get to a certain age. Ours go and wake eachother up in the morning now rather than waking us up which is nice!
You will lose most of your free time the first few years if you have kids though. Not all of it, but life becomes much extremely interrupt-driven and is still that way even now ours are school age.
So this is my first child, about two and a half months old. We are in the peak of the being way behind on sleep. It's significantly harder to debug code I wrote before he was born now. I would say my wife does 80% of the night time stuff, I typically only wake up for one "handle" and she does the rest (1-4 depending on feeding timings). Certainly it is already on the curve of getting better, the problem is we are way behind. It's so, so worth it. But don't expect the same level of debugging ability, it's nice to have some slack in whatever you are doing professionally so you can have a few months of sub-peak output, if you can afford to engineer it.
Not the person you were replying to, but every kid is different. Our oldest (3.5) is a PITA and still wakes us up at least a couple of times most nights. This is an improvement over 6+ times a night for the first ~2 years. Our second has slept through almost from birth and is easy to get to sleep. We didn't do anything different, it's just luck of the draw from everything I've seen.
Good luck. Your biggest problem is that kids should be going to bed by like 7pm. When they got 4-5 you can push that to 8-830, but that's still pretty early. If you ever want to get anything done you're going to sacrifice sleep.
Second that. Super counter-intuitive point, at least in the American society, but little kids need a lot of sleep. Put them to bed early (start your dinner at 5, and bath right after), and they will get lots of rest, while giving you all the time to do something while they are asleep.
Yup. When my daughter was really young we tried keeping her up later, thinking she'd sleep in longer. Nope, just a really crabby child. Turns out if you keep them up too long they get a second wind and it's all downhill from there.
It so hard to say. Our oldest didn't learn how to sleep through the night until she was 7 years old. She typically woke up screaming around 1am every night. Even if we just let her scream, it always woke us up. Other kids slept through the night from early on. Maybe someday there will be some genetic test that will tell you where your kids lie on the spectrum, but it seems to be a crap shoot right now.
5 years to have both "back to normal" since that is how long it takes for kids to become school age. Unless you plan to hire a nanny, invest significantly in daycare, or you or your partner stops working, in which case one of you can probably be back to work after 3 months.
I was still totally inexperienced and I now had two kids waking me up.
Two things that helped me a lot:
- don't let a child fall asleep with anything they cannot have the whole night (speaking of >6-12 months). No music, no falling asleep in front of a screen, make sure they don't fall asleep while drinking their last meal for the day. By all means: tell stories, sing, and make sure they get milk before they fall asleep though. The reason is, as far as I know that we subconsciously verify that everything is ok multiple times a night. For small kids that means everything is like it was: if there was music or if dad or mom was in the room - that's what they'll expect during the night.
- small children have to learn to fall asleep. We understand that kids needs help to learn eating real food, walking, talking etc, but it seems at least in my culture we somehow expect kids to understand how to fall asleep. They usually don't, and so the parents get worried: is there anything wrong? Maybe the kid is still hungry? Or afraid?
Instead I've learned to be very clear with myself and my wife when we start teaching the kids to sleep:
- I make sure the child is ok: not hungry, happy etc
- when I put them to bed I make sure they only have things they can keep all night, generally one (safe) toy and a pacifier (don't want to defend pacifier much but what made me decide for it was a slightly lowered risk of SIDS according to one doctor)
- the I sing a small song, say a few words and leave the room. The words I say before leaving are the same, every time.
- I then walk outside and start a timer for 60 seconds, walk in (even if they are silent, verify they are ok, say the same words, walk out, start a timer for 180 seconds and wait. I do this until I'm sure they are asleep. In particular I keep visiting the room every three minutes even if they are happy. This reinforces the idea that you'll look after them. If they aren't happy I give them the pacifier and toy, say the same words, leave.
- next day: first 3 minutes (180 seconds), then 5 minutes intervals until they are asleep.
- increase by two minutes every day (but usually my kids get it by the second or third day: Dad has not left, he'll be back soon enough even if I don't cry so I can just relax and play with this toy.)
- for my first kid it took more like a week because I waited for too long before I started sleep training.
Edit:
- Do use a timer!
- Do walk in even if the kid is just falling asleep!
- Do use the timer once to verify that the kids are actually asleep after you think they fell asleep!
Read it in a book by a Spanish doctor. I read it in Danish, but I think the original is called "Duérmete, Niño". It is written by
Eduard Estivill and Sylvia De Béjar from what I can find using Google.
(I think people often misunderstand it so you'll find some people saying he argues that kids should cry it out or something, while the idea is rather to make them feel safe and enjoy bedtime.)
> my impression so far suggests that it's the second child where sleep and free time get lost more permanently
The most difficult time is right after the second child is born: you have two children who are incompatible in their needs, abilities, sleep schedules...
But think long-term: if you have only one child, then anytime it needs human interaction, it will turn to you. Two children, they can play together for a while... while you are doing something else (within hearing distance).
Here is a trick we used for a 6 months old child:
Make the child room accident-proof. Trivial things, such as the child stupidly crawling against the wall and hitting it by head, that's not a problem. Just make sure that the child cannot reach anything dangerous (sharp, breakable, poisonous, small enough to swallow), that there are no plastic bags, that the power outlets are filled with small plastic pieces, and that there is nowhere to fall from. To achieve the last one, instead of bed we simply have a mattress on the floor, surrounded by soft carpets, so the child can crawl from/to the "bed" anytime. Have a box full of safe toys in the room.
Now, when the child wakes up, as long as it is not crying, feel free to sleep. If the child is crying, breastfeed, change the diapers, then return to the room and continue to sleep. Choose five or seven random toys from the box, and put them on random places on the floor, about one step far from each other (the time your child spends crawling between the toys is also the time you spend sleeping). During the day, as long as your child is okay playing in the room, feel free to take a nap there; just remember to close the door.
You will not get long uninterrupted sleep this way, but you can get a long interrupted sleep and a few naps. Anyway, with breastfeeding, long uninterrupted sleep is impossible for a mother with little baby; but it gradually gets longer: a newborn will wake up several times during the night, but the 2 years old child can sleep the whole night.
And here is a trick we used for a 3 years old child:
She can play with tablet: there is Tux Paint and Scratch (where she only edits scenes) installed. In the morning she gets an apple and the tablet, and we get an extra hour of sleep. (Yeah, yeah, some people disapprove of little kids using computers, but I can't hear their opinions while I am sleeping.)
If you insist on long uninterrupted sleep, I imagine the following strategy could work: one partner goes to sleep N hours before the child, and the other handles the evening routine alone; then the second partner wakes N hours after the child, and the first one handles the morning routine alone (adjust N depending on how long the child sleeps and how long you want to sleep).
We're only planning for one, and my impression so far suggests that it's the second child where sleep and free time get lost more permanently, and that with one child the majority of the sacrifices are only temporary (and getting better as the child gets older), but it's always good to hear some experiences.