So if the baby is screaming intermittently, it probably means the caregivers wouldn’t be able to handle taking care of a another one soon.
Comment on :-)
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 1 day agoEven newborn babies are programmed to scream intermittently so that the parents are never well rested
As someone who has taken care of three newborns, that’s not a requirement. If you put the infant on a regular two/three-hour feeding/changing cycle, they don’t reflexively cry unless they’re in some kind of physical distress.
The trick is to execute that schedule, which is itself extremely exhausting, especially if you’re exclusively breast feeding. When you’ve got two or more people handling feedings (with formula) then the baby is chill and parents get more sleep and everyone is much happier.
Also, ffs, this is why both Mom and Dad need maternity leave. The job is 10x when one parent is working solo.
samus12345@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 1 day ago
I never understood how something with a six week old managed to find time to boink. But I guess some folks are just very horny.
samus12345@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
Indeed. Never underestimate humans’ desire to fuck.
pahlimur@lemmy.world 1 day ago
I agree with everything you said and I used to think all kids could be fixed by schedules. But our second child was the antithesis to any of these methods. She screamed for almost 2 years regardless of anything we did. I constantly changed our approach to her to try to find a solution and nothing worked for more than a week. She is only recently getting better now that she can understand us.
We are now the parents that discuss our shopping list while she screams on the floor in the grocery store. Some kids are kinda asseholes. Fortunately she’s extremely cute while being an asshole.
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 1 day ago
I guess maybe we got lucky, then.
I do know some kids have real legit physical issues (colic being a big one). And if you don’t figure out how to mitigate their distress quickly, they simply learn to scream when they want to communicate.
But when I hear “some kids are just assholes”, I tend to see some underlying problem (possibly something you just can’t do anything about at this stage, but it exists) that they’re responding to. It’s not standard baby behavior to make parents miserable.
absGeekNZ@lemmy.nz 1 day ago
You sound like my brother after his first, who was a saint of a child…the second however…great kid but “not a sleeper” as they say.
None of my kids slept through until they were 3…10 years of broken sleep
pahlimur@lemmy.world 1 day ago
This is the one thing my kids did well. First one slept through the night day one. Second took about a year to stay asleep once she was asleep.
And I’m gonna be a hypocrite here. Sleep is a learned behavior which needs to be constantly reinforced. I know parents with super easy kids who never set boundaries around sleep time which caused their kids to be difficult sleepers. Don’t ever allow them to get up after bed time and you’ll suffer a lot less. Our super difficult second kid learned we will only come into the room for short periods to meet her needs during bedtime. We started setting timers of a few minutes to let her learn that we aren’t coming in immediately when she started crying. Saved our sanity and slowly taught her to self sooth. I know it doesn’t work for all kids. But IMO a lot of parents will try to solve issues without the assumption their children can learn to tolerate mild inconvenience. It’s a huge cultural issue in the US.
pahlimur@lemmy.world 1 day ago
I think it’s easy to dismiss the possibility of this kid existing. I am absolutely not a perfect parent but this kid is literally an asshole. Still love her though.
My wife and I think we are mild abuse victims from this kid. We confirmed it’s hereditary with my MIL. My wife as a child was the same monster this kid is. If you listen to her scream she just purposely eggs herself on. She broke our nanny and almost a dozen daycare people. I always say she has like 3 toddlers worth of personality that she is trying to figure out and only recently she is starting to sort it out.
We tried everything related to colic and nothing changed her. Gripe water with fenel seed sort of worked. Omg im just remembering, hiccups 100% of the time after feedings. She almost never ate more than a ounce of formula. My wife had mastitis which killed milk production. Kid was so noise sensitive that I couldn’t close a car door outside the house while she was napping. She needed a pacifier to sleep but would purposely spit it out. She whale tailed for almost a year. Naps were more stressfull than awake time because she needed to sleep 1.5 hours or she would screem constantly during awake time. We think she also had measles at one point, the hospital didn’t do anything about it even after confirming what it likely was.
Kid broke my brain to the point where I understand where PURPLE crying is needed. My memory and anxiety are only recently recovering.
Orcus@lemmy.zip 13 hours ago
I am so sorry you had to go through that! Our toddler is in full velociraptor phase, but atleast the beginning was relatively smooth sailing. Sleep deprivation is crappy, especially when society expects you to still function at full capacity.