Which they’ve now decided they don’t like any of the food we make even though it’s exactly the same stuff that would be at daycare.

Are you judging this based on dinner? Ask any pediatric dietician and they will tell you that toddlers and preschoolers are quite likely to skip dinner. It might not be the food but the fact that there is a meal at that hour which is the issue. The recommendation is to serve a full meal afternoon snack and then consider dinner a bonus meal if they even eat it at all.

Which then prolongs the cycle of not eating enough and needing night feeds and then not eating much because there was milk overnight. I feel like we have to cut the night feeds somehow but it feels really cruel to starve them when they’re used to it…

Trust your instincts. It is biologically normal for children to have one or two night feeds up until age 3. Though at some point you can start leaving “the offering” (a bowl of food you are comfortable cleaning up left in their room for them to eat from overnight without waking you, such as a bowl of cheerios).

The sleep is a little better but still not sleeping through the night

Unless you get extremely lucky, plan on your child not sleeping through the night until age 3. Instead, focus on teaching them what is appropriate for them to do by themselves when they wake in their room. You’ll sleep through the night and they will wake, play with some toys, and put themselves back to sleep and everyone will thrive and be happy.

As a long term nanny and now a parent myself, I’ve had exactly ONE charge out of 22 + my own child who can sleep 8 hours with no bottle. He stirs but puts himself back to sleep silently and if you aren’t watching a video monitor, you’d have no idea that he had stirred.

But if you ask The Mister about our own child, he’d swear our own kid sleeps twelve hours with no bottle and no stirring. That’s because THE MISTER sleeps twelve hours and wouldn’t hear a smoke alarm, much less the child stir. So I agree with you to consider the source and that it is very likely fantasy talk.

• most babies do their highest caloric intake at night because it is the lowest stimulation time. While it is possible to have them fast all night long, it isn’t in their best interests because their stomach has a fixed size and simply cannot hold enough calories to get them through the nightly brain growth without a meal. Can vs should. And also, that pediatrician needs to attend some continuing education.

• the fact that children sleep less well in the room with the parents is EXACTLY WHY roomsharing is recommended to prevent SIDS. Cannot die in deep sleep if you never get to deep sleep. Sleep apart at your own risk. And on that note, almost every single SIDS prevention tip is designed to give your child sh-tty sleep in order to prevent sleeping deeply because you cannot die in deep sleep if you never get to deep sleep; it is by design. Ask me sometime how I feel about that.

• sleep training doesn’t teach them that their bed is safe to sleep in. It teaches children that parents don’t want to hear them cry. There have been objective studies that find that children night wake the exact same amount whether sleep trained or not. Absolutely no difference whatsoever. But the sleep trained children wake silently. So this one is one where the benefit is to the child from having a well rested adult caregiver. But the child doesn’t learn anything from it other than to shut up.

It for sure counts as “sorting”. He’s put the two in the same category. Well done for his age and right on target.

I read in another comment that you are trying to avoid a mass shooting episode. Instead of changing schools, let’s change access to ammo and mental health services via laws and voting, restricting one and making the other universal and taxpayer supported. I think that would be more effective. It would keep children safe in schools, in churches, in movie theaters, at birthday parties, etc.

I think that children learn best in the environment that fits their brain the best. If that’s remote - awesome - but if not, I’ll fight a different way for my child’s safety in a physically in person school setting. And my child needs the accountability of the in person setting.

I work in childcare. I take care of the children, both mine and those of other parents. Summer is very busy for me.

My 11 month old drank from a water fountain. We expected him to play in it, but he leaned in like a school child who had been doing it all their life and pursed his lips and took a slurp.

Came to say this. Here, have my upvote.

And now, writing in two days later, he starts it on his own and giggles. So we are past that fear, apparently.

In my education, this was called The Charm Hold and is very useful for a gassy baby. Yet there are holds which are more useful for a gassy baby.

But you know what is most useful to make babies stop crying? Figure out what it is that they are communicating and act on it.

Sometimes you cannot figure it out because it is something like, “Dad, I need you to poke my left elbow five times while hopping on one foot,” and so they have to cry until something else more pressing comes along that makes their elbow poking irrelevant.

Editing to Add: If you want to stop babies from crying and aren’t going to do the figuring out bit, standing up and holding them vertically against you activates an old, old, old primate danger instinct where they will go silent so as not to attract the attention of the predator while the parent, whose fur their ancient instinct insists they are clinging to, makes the escape. Also, blowing in their face will get them to hold their breath momentarily, which has the side benefit of stopping crying. Cannot cry if you aren’t breathing.

Editing a Second time to Add: Even my own child instantly stopped crying for the pediatrician when he (pediatrician) held my newborn away from me. It has less to do with how the pediatrician held the baby, and more to do with the fact that the pediatrician wasn’t Momma or Dadda and my newborn’s sensory awareness of the world couldn’t locate Momma or Dadda. Danger! Ack! Better be silent to not attract predators while waiting for Momma or Dadda to come find me!

No, we don’t put barrel connectors into our mouths, especially not if they are electrified.

I felt the exact same way. Looking at my first child gave me hope for the future in a way I hadn’t, before. We’re going to be okay.

I finally perfected my cloth diaper poop dunk-n-swish technique to un-brown diapers while out on the go, so as not to have to spray so much in the evening when we get home. It took me an embarrassingly long time to figure out how to be effective at removing the brown solids from a cloth diaper with a dunk-n-swish.

He has figured out that not just dogs can crawl through the dog door, so can he.

Not one a child threw recently, but still by far my most favorite tantrum came when I was chatting with a young boy who I cared for about the very large salad bowl he had found in the kitchen and was playing with.

“It salad bowl,” he proudly said, and then as he attempted to fit inside of it he declared, “I salad.”

His older brother then came up and said, “You are not lettuce.”

The younger boy absolutely completely and totally lost it and melted all the way down, repeating the phrase, “Yes, lettuce. Am a lettuce.”

Of course we all ought to know that nothing about this meltdown was specifically due to the fact that the boy was not in fact a green leafy plant. It was due to the fact that he’d had it up to here with his brother trashing on his play and needed to release some of that irk.

How I handled it: I held space for his big feelings. I let him cry and fuss and kick and yell. So long as he wasn’t hurting himself or others, he needed to process the injustice done to him by his brother and he needed to feel the feelings caused by it. I made sure he was in a safe place and let him become a little adorable ball of emotions and waited for that change in cry, you know the one, where the anger changes to sadness. When we got there, I came over and gave voice to his feelings (“You felt undermined and invalidated. Your brother wasn’t invited into your play but he interrupted in order to destroy it, anyway. That made you mad.”) He came in for a hug, feeling seen and understood. I offered that I could help him come up with some ways to approach his brother about the situation if he wanted. He didn’t want. And so that was that. Within 5 minutes of the start of sad-cry, he was off on another game, this one trying (and failing) to levitate his hotwheels cars.

If you ignore that the intended audience of the book is a parent of an ADHD child, “Why Will No One Play With Me” (book) is a fabulous step-by-step primer that covers all the social and emotional skills one needs to succeed in the world as well as talks the reader (parent) through how to impart those lessons to a child who is good at analytical thinking. I wish there were a book written more broadly that is this good at preparing parents with more than just platitudes and broad goals.

There is something to be said about a small and consistent set of equally intelligent classmates from which to form bonds. I certainly did. It makes one not the weirdo because everyone there is HAG. Then, when out in gen pop and someone treats a HAG kid as The Weirdo, the response isn’t to internalize it with a, “Yeah, I’m the weirdo. No one ever wants to play with me,” but instead with a, “What’s his problem?!” So that’s actually good.

I was thinking more on the emotional side. Learning how to handle big feelings and small feelings. HAG kids tend to - and here I’m speaking from my former high school teacher career which I’ve long ago left - intellectualize the especially small feelings into nonexistence. It requires explicit instruction to just be taught how to feel. Not as an action item. Just as an experience.

Congratulations!

I’m the Mom, but I - er - the kid got Dad a personalized book to celebrate the fact that it is a first father’s day and then Dad and kid went to the local children’s science museum to explore together and make memories. I’m with kid nearly 24/7 so having dedicated dad-and-kid time is rare and a rare gift indeed. Thanks capitalism for that set of circumstances.

I gave away my entire freezer stash to a new mom whose milk was medically delayed. End of an era. The Chestburster is still nursing, but old enough now that solids and water can hold him should we be apart for any length of time.

(I take him to work with me, so I’m basically around him 24/7 in the normal course of our life.)

Oh yeah, lessons. Um … It is developmentally normal at around 10 months for a nursing kiddo, especially one who is used to straw cups (which they should be, for oralmotor development), to go a bit chompy chompy on the nipple. Especially the left nipple. This constitutes an income stream for IBCLCs. Just have them latch by dragging the nipple down from the kid’s nose to their mouth. This forces them to stick out their tongue to cover the bottom teeth and the top teeth will be at an angle which makes nipple damage challenging - not impossible, but challenging. The problem is “nipple confusion” of a sort. Their world schema only has “I get liquid out of this thing” and they’ve learned straw technique and are applying it to nipple. Within a week or two of forcing a correct latch on them, their world schema changes to “this is a nipple and that is a straw”. And now you don’t have to pay for an IBCLC visit!

When I was a teacher, I had a student make some outlandish and utterly preposterous statement about a gun. He was doing it for the attention as it appears this kid is, as well. I had to report it despite knowing there was nothing to it. The kid got connected with the help he needed for what he was dealing with.

Did you hear these directly or from your daughter? It doesn’t really matter. Either way, go to the school guidance department instead of the teacher. He’s probably dealing with some heavy adjustments from wherever he immigrated from and they ought to be equipped to connect him with a therapist who can help him process those feelings in a more prosocial manner.

Hi from North Carolina. I was a gifted program kid (now and adult) in this glorious state and have had plenty of encounters with children since who are in the program. I even went to the North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics. Go for it with the more rigorous academics BUT the thing you’ll need to enrich in the home environment is those social and emotional lessons. They are getting deprioritized in favor of academics and in order to succeed in the world, the ability to people is actually more valuable than the ability to scholar. But if she isn’t challenged in the classroom, instead of learning how to people, she’ll learn how to be in trouble due to very appropriately suppressing her frustration and boredom as much as her age can possibly do … which isn’t enough.

Also, if she’s any kind of mentally healthy, don’t send her to NCSSM, no matter how much she begs. That’s where people go to have massive mental health issues. The only people who did better at that school, and I am one of them, were people whose home lives were so challenging and unstable that the school was actually an upgrade. Any alumnus - except the ones specifically chosen by the recruiting office, of course - will tell you the same.

Number Blocks is phenomenal. Glad to see it getting representation.

Banned:

• Caillou – whiny child and permissive parents; teaches nothing

• Peppa Pig – same

Approved:

• Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood – I have yet to meet a show that covers social and emotional topics for toddlers better than the Mr. Roger’s franchise and this is its latest iteration. There’s a Daniel Tiger for every situation and one can learn to be a better parent simply by watching how Daddy Tiger or Mommy Tiger respond to situations. The songs still carry important emotional regulation messages that adults can use.

I’m going to give you permission to not swaddle. Swaddles aren’t necessary. At three weeks old there is nothing but a rough night. They don’t have stomachs large enough to tank up on calories to sleep for large periods of time. Small tummy = frequent wake = frequent feed. Moro helps prevent SIDS so don’t hate on it.

I’m a mom and a long time career nanny. In my career, I once had a kid who sleeps the way you are describing yours sleeps, in a twelve-hour straight run. It is a gift with no negative consequences. Grab that glory and don’t look back.

My own kid has always had a late bedtime. I’m talking 9 pm. Even when the book said it should be earlier, nope, not my kid.

I learned from following Dr. Pam Douglas that my kid has a huge stimulation appetite and just hadn’t built enough sleep pressure due to not actually doing anything or learning much and when I exposed him to a lot, he went to bed for his night sleep earlier and still to this day that’s his pattern. He’s 11 months and Saturday we went to a La Leche League meeting, a baby shower, a sprayground, and then a friend’s house. He went to bed at 5 pm and slept the night through. Sunday, we went to the farmer’s market but otherwise puttered around the house and he struggled to fall asleep by 10 pm. But Saturday’s level of go-go-go is completely unsustainable for us, so I’ve come to terms with a later bed time.

Dr. Douglas’s research shows that contrary to not-evidence-based opinion, children fuss not from overstimulation but from understimulation and that children in their first year are primed to be the biggest learning sponges they could ever possibly be so seek all the data and most parents do the opposite of meeting that need. 🤷‍♀️ I mean, she’s got sources and peer reviewed papers and all. But for me, all I can say is that my kid responds better now and also when he was a newborn to more exposure to the things rather than less exposure to the things. And really, the whole goal is to find what works for the kid you have, right?

Kind of like parenting toddlers: Provide food, sign docs, sling snacks, troubleshoot screens. Except yours can read.

I’m still a parent and I’m a lurker. Weekly discussions sound okay.

My news: We have entered toddler territory.

we’re doing something every week

get them to join us.

Join kid. What does kid like to do? Can you go along to it?

Kid is clearly not part of “we”. Kid needs to be part of “we”. Otherwise, for all the lip service you are doing about how you are reaching out, you’ve othered kid.

I said “I’m on my way”, arrived my teen got in the car said “hey” I responded ‘whats up’ and we drove home in silence. No “thanks for picking me up” nothing at all. And when my partner said “you know you could thank your dad for picking you up” my teen responded “I did”. They did not.

The response is, “I hear you telling me that you did. I believe you. Your brain is telling you that you did. My brain is telling me that you didn’t. So, help me out here, and do it again so that I can shut my brain up?”

Because you do believe them, right? Otherwise you are insisting they lie to your face. “Hey, I know you aren’t thankful whatsoever but I’m going to need you to say the exact opposite to me, k. Give me a full 180 degree lie from your actual feelings on the matter. I’m not interested in you, just in rituals.”

Also, it is super great that your kid is rude to you. I know it doesn’t seem that way, but it means that despite all the rest of your dysfunctions, kiddo feels secure in your unending support. We fawn where we think we stand to be abandoned. Kiddo isn’t fawning. Kiddo knows they won’t be abandoned. That’s a great seed from which a beautiful relationship can grow once some brambles are trimmed back. (Note, this rude-is-good is only for child-to-parent. No other relationship can this rule be applied to.)

and only take their meds when they “remember”.

Those quotes better be because you are direct quoting them and not because you are trying to induce doubt. It is very well known that people with ADHD have trouble remembering (notice, no quotes here) to take their medication. ADHD is an executive function disorder; meaning they have executive dysfunction. Memory is an executive function. What safety net does the family have for the child’s memory failing them? What are your guardrails?

Have you actually planned, strategized, restructured around the needs of one of the inhabitants in your home?

You know the old adage, “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.”? Looks like no matter how many times your child has their typical struggles, as their outsourced executive function coach and substitute executive function, you haven’t done your part. It’s not shame on your child anymore ;)

I’ll give you a gimme and if it helps, then you can follow up by engaging the services of an ADHD coach – For those who forget to take their medication, put the medication AND WATER next to the bed. Set two alarms. The first one they wake up and take their meds without having to move anything more than their arm. Then they can go back to sleep. The second alarm, a half hour later (because most ADHD meds reach efficacy a half hour after consumption), is their real get up for the day alarm. They should be able to get up more easily due to the efficacy of the medication. It will take 102 practice days, so for 102 days, you need to get up with the first alarm and supervise that the medication has been taken. After that, the routine will be well worn in so that it can be relied on.

Or, if that’s too much effort on your part – Talk to their psychiatrist about moving them to a non-stimulant. Nonstimulants build up in the system and can tolerate several skipped days while still offering benefits. Stimulants cannot seeing as how they lose efficacy within 24 hours.

My teen has always been troubled. They have always been highly sensitive.

Okay, I am REALLY not seeing all this education about ADHD you claim you have.

Of [curse redacted] course they have always been troubled and “highly sensitive” (aka ADHD). It is a LIFELONG CONDITION. In order to be life long it has to be there from their first breath to their dying day. In fact, as a diagnostic criteria for this label it has to be life long, not caused by some later-occurring trauma.

You act as if this is an excuse. No, dude, you are just telling us that your child has ADHD over and over and over and over and over again in ways that I can tell that YOU don’t know you are. This is like ADHD 101. Where the [curse redacted] did you get your education? Almost watching two whole YouTube videos done by clickbait artists bullshirting? (this last bit meant to provide levity; I heard the whole “you didn’t research, you almost watched two whole YouTube videos” somewhere and thought it was funny) I suspect that you have sought information, but that you’ve been ill served by resources you took to be credible that were instead abelist bias-pushing. If Dr. Gabor Mate was at all in your research folder, then just know you’ve absolutely found your way to the wrong information. You are looking for Dr. Ned Hallowell and Dr. Russell Barkley.

You are and continue to be completely unskilled in parenting ADHD. Please own this. Once you do, then you will be open to positive changes. Else, you’ll lose your child. Parenting a child of a neurotype you do not possess is all in the logic brain and cannot come from the intuition brain.

Edited because I read other comments of yours – You seem to have had incredibly poor luck in the ways you reached out for help. Not all therapists, in fact I’d be wiling to say it is a minority of therapists and they are specialists, are able to assist a neurodivergent household. Neurotypical therapy DOES NOT WORK for a neurodivergent home; in fact it harms more than it helps. Your local CHADD or ADDA chapter will be able to point you to therapeutic professionals with neurodivergent qualifications who can provide actionable guidance to make things better. This level of therapeutic professional you need is a very niche specialist who only deals in neurodivergence. So one of the hallmarks of someone who isn’t able to help is someone whose PsychologyToday profile offers therapy for more than just neurodivergent families/households/individuals.

it’s been 13 years lying, deceitful and sneaky behavior, provable fabrication of events, and denials of truths

Okay, but that’s just typical child-with-ADHD. Show me a child with ADHD and I’ll show you a liar who fabricates events and denies truths.

Would you like to know why? Read on!

Because the child with ADHD has been held to standards that are absolutely completely out of whack with who they are biologically (yes ADHD is a biology condition which is why medication is effective). But being children, they aren’t able to articulate. So they lie because it ‘makes the problem go away’. What problem?

The parent asking them if they’ve done their homework. They say yes instead of – No, I haven’t done my homework yet because despite wanting to, I cannot get my body to cooperate with my desires. I absolutely intend to have it done by the time it is due, I’m a good child who enjoys homework and wants to meet those expectations. I’ll do it as soon as my body starts following my brain’s directions and sits down/picks up a pencil. If I tell you I haven’t done it yet, you’ll ask me, “Why?” and I just cannot explain to you because though TheInfamousJ is able to type all this out, that’s because she’s 22 years my senior so has learned a lot of metacognition I don’t have seeing as how my brain isn’t even finished developing yet. I don’t have the words. So yes, Dad [or whatever parent you are], I’ve done my homework because by tomorrow afternoon this statement will be true anyway and it saves me from having to deal with your ish about me, my brain, and how completely unacceptable it and I am to you. … except that time where my body starts following my brain’s directions? It never came before the homework was due. I need help. But you are punishing me rather than assisting me.

and so it goes

My thoughts are that puberty is a hard time. And a sleepy time. And a time that basically the brain is taken over by a chemical soup not far divorced from pregnancy-brain or postpartum-brain. If pubescent children were on the whole tidy, there wouldn’t be tropes about horrifically tossed teenager rooms, so not cleaning up after themselves seems developmentally apt.

If the child doesn’t meet your standards for cohabiting or vacationing, don’t take them. Your own child can relate to their friend in a different scenario.

Sleeping in a closet isn’t typical behavior, no, but it is also harmless. Perhaps the closet was a dark or quiet space which they needed in order to sleep and while they, too, think closet sleeping is weird, the alternative was no sleep at all because too bright or loud. It is tempting to fill in an unknown with a narrative, but your narrative is no more valid than my counterproposed narrative in this paragraph.

I wouldn’t tell her parent anything unless asked directly. I wouldn’t assume that the parent lacks the ability to see the same things you’ve seen as I doubt the behavior you saw is any different except in the better direction than how she behaves at home.

The only thing I can offer you is that motivation isn’t the currency of the ADHD brain. Importance isn’t the currency of the ADHD brain. The only currency of the ADHD brain is INTEREST. As in, “Oh, this is interesting to me.”

It sounds as if school isn’t capturing their interests. Can changes be made so that school is interesting? Harder classes? Different electives? Anything?

And trust me, you don’t want unmanaged ADHD behind the wheel of a car. There’s a reason we of the ADHD brain have a shorter life expectancy on average, and that’s because the deaths that bring down the average are almost all vehicularly related. I’d back off that expectation until the ADHD is under control.

Is there a psychiatrist in play? Medication ought to be lowering the activation energy/removing or easing the barrier-to-action between your child and the things they are interested in and actually want to do, and it sounds as if that isn’t happening.

As a parent with ADHD and a parenting coach with lots of experience parenting ADHD children (though none my bio kids; my own bio kid is too young for their ADHD to be any of the known struggles) – You have to back down, not ride harder. Sure, one of the ways to overcome the barrier-to-action is unholy terror which puts in place fight-or-flight and can get one over the barrier BUT existing in that state endlessly is super duper bad and leads to serious hard burnout and trauma from constantly being The Problem. I know that riding them has been effective thus far, but under the hood, the way it has been effective has done long term harms. As a family, you all need to learn new management and coping skills. You need to stop overfunctioning. Family therapy (which is different in nature than couples therapy or individual therapy) is the direction to go here. ADHD isn’t a person’s problem, it’s a family problem. Especially when it involves a child who need parents to teach and guide them in to how to exist as prosocially as possible with the brain they never asked for but nonetheless were given. You aren’t teaching them how to exist with their brain, you are teaching them how to exist with your brain; they don’t have your brain. ADHD isn’t a malfunctioning neurotypical brain any more than neurotypicality is a malfunctioning ADHD brain. Both are okay and both are different. Think horses and zebras - both okay, both different, both rideable, both with manes and tails, both with hooves, both about the same size, but a zebra is not a malfunctioning horse nor a horse a malfunctioning zebra. A horse cannot teach the zebra how to horse, it would be bad for the zebra.

My own Mother called my ADHD Father some names (deadbeat is the one you chose to call) and when I realized I related to my Father due to same neurotype, I realized two things: (a) my mother would call me a deadbeat too simply because she doesn’t know how to coexist with a neurodivergent person and so her response is disgust and shaming and (b) living in the house with her was going to be supremely traumatic to me because she’s going to take out her discomfort and ignorance on me in the worst ways. I got out of the house. Your child has not.

Might I suggest that your education come from ADDitude Magazine’s webinar series? It is free as a podcast. And I would like to extend an invitation to you to join the How to ADHD Discord as there is a whole parenting section for advice on parenting ADHD children as well as another section called “Hearts asking Brains”. You, not having ADHD, would be a heart. And the adult ADHD brains can offer insights you might not otherwise have been exposed to.

If you feel comfortable with a book in English, check out the book “Why Will No One Play With Me”. It sounds as if there may be some neurodivergence going on and from only what you have mentioned here, this limited information fits almost exactly the pattern for ADHD. But there’s obviously more information you aren’t disclosing.

ADHD is highly heritable which makes sense that like parent like child.

Child psychiatrist is who you take her to for a diagnosis. Once you know where to look for strategies, which is what that diagnosis tells you, then you can start supporting her in all the best ways she’d benefit from.

Thanks for being a concerned parent.

Having to do the work to learn healthy techniques to healthily regulate one’s own emotions so that one can coregulate small humans who are just learning how to do the alive thing and then actually putting into place what one has learned is a challenge vs not doing any of this? You don’t say. /s

These preliminary findings, which will be submitted soon for publication, should be interpreted with caution since the diversity of our sample was limited.

The authors polled 100ish parents across the country; just 100ish parents. Are any of you all family studies scholars? Is this really something which would be published with this kind of study design simply due to the inclusion of the “should be interpreted with caution” caveat? Like, in a reputable peer-reviewed journal, published? My background has me completely flabbergasted that something of this nature would come to be and I need reassurance that it is okay in its field.

a 36-year-old mother of two children under 5 reflected that she often feels like she “has nothing to give” and gets “easily overstimulated and overwhelmed all day every day.” She ended her reflections with the simple confession: “I often feel out of control.”

Oh lovely woman, you’ve skipped a few grades in Gentle Parenting. The first steps are to learn effective and healthy techniques to regulate one’s own emotions. You, my darling lovely woman with two under five, have not. You are burned out, overstimulated, and overwhelmed because you haven’t. One cannot pour from an empty teacup and no teacher was ever deemed effective who taught from the textbook without having a deep understanding of the material.

I fear that situations like the above will lead to mass impressions on the youth that respectful, emotionally intelligent parenting is useless simply because children are not unaware of burned out, tapped out, stressed out, touched out, and overstimulated parents. They are more attuned than we know.

It took me twenty years, a lot of therapy, several post graduate degrees, and twenty one children raised from bottles to backpacks as the AIC (adult in charge) during weekday daytime hours as a nanny to dial in my ability to healthily regulate my own emotions and sensory needs without disadvantaging any children who came into my area of effect. Save the Duggars, I don’t think any actual parents (note, gentle reader, I am also an actual parent of a darling son) will have the opportunity to go through 20+ children as part of their learning curve. I think that Gentle Parenting is a fabulous and delightful ideal to aim for, but perhaps more realistic is Good Enough Parenting where you sometimes let them be angry without having to tell them that they are angry (footnote), while you go sip your tea in another room while it is still hot.

(footnote) Telling someone the name of their emotion in the moment without, you know, helping them with what to do with it, is unhelpful but it makes for great Instagram reels. Imagine yourself, very, very, very, very thirsty and unable to get a drink. Along comes someone who can provide you with a drink. Instead, they turn to you and say, “You are thirsty.” And then they sit with you in your thirst. Rather than, you know, getting you a drink or anything. You’d gain a vocabulary word, but no skills. Same here with naming emotions. Magda Gerber was on the right track but she didn’t get to the station, if you follow my analogy. And “Good Inside” can be summarized on a fortune cookie as: “They aren’t giving you a hard time, they are having a hard time. Your experience is accidental.” This, too, isn’t the station.

I’m reading this from my laptop in my bed with my baby tucked up in his bassinet within arm’s reach (which, amusingly enough, is the product name of the bassinet as well). My goal is to co-sleep in the roomsharing sense for the first year since I am breastfeeding.

Have I fallen asleep with him in the same bed as me? Absolutely. Did it the first night after he was born, in the hospital, even. I was in labor for over 24 hours and was knackered. The nurse came in and gently took him from me and put him back in the plastic box by my side. Hospital was big on “rooming in”.

So, because I knew I absolutely could involuntarily head off to slumberland while breastfeeding, I took care to set my bed to be as safe as possible should this occur. It’s like wearing a seatbelt in a car – no plans for an accident, but just in case.

And let me tell you, my mental health is great! I know enough about me to know that my mental health would be far worse if I had to trudge down the hall in order to breastfeed at night or chastised myself for sharing a bed at such times as my body desperately needed sleep so took it. And with me sane in the membrane, I’m the kind of parent kiddo deserves in terms of personal quality. He doesn’t deserve me loopy from sleep deprivation; so I’m not, mostly.

I’m a nanny. I provide childcare in the child’s home. I’m hired by the parents. And those essential oil, antivax, homeschooling parents? They PROUDLY tell the world that they bedshare. In fact, during interviews they quiz me to find it out if I’ll cuddle their child for the child’s naps because that’s the only way kid knows how to sleep.

I’m pretty sure the ones who lie to their pediatricians are those who are much more mainstream, based on how many times I’ve gone searching for a child’s sleep sack only to find it in the parent bed, the parent bed unmade, and a clear impression of a sleeping child still in the pillowtop. But they won’t even admit it to me, who doesn’t care and just wants to know where the sleep sack is.

When did this become a contentious topic.

When people decided to make the perfect the enemy of the good. I don’t know what concise term it is that is happening here, but it is the same as Time Out. So before Time Out was a thing, parents would assault their children simply because they, the parents, felt upset or frustrated with their children existing as new people who were still learning. In order to keep children from being hit so hard they’d welt or bruise, the public health authorities convinced parents that Time Out was by far more effective – go sit in a corner by yourself! The only thing it was more effective at was getting that child out of the walloping range of an emotional parent; the goal. But if the public health authorities told those parents that, they’d keep hitting their kids. Time Out is not actually an effective teaching tool and for parents who aren’t inclined to beat children, it’s actually a poor choice to make vs taking the teachable moment to teach. So it isn’t really A Good Thing as it has been branded. But if it saves even one child from harm, let’s spread the good word.

Same with this one. Some children were overlaid by inebriated parents. Saying that children in the bed is A Bad Thing will save the lives of children whose parents are prone to inebriation and would otherwise have bedshared with them. And since it saves even one child from harm, we spread the good word. However, much like the parent who isn’t going to beat their child above, there is also the parent who avoids intoxicants.

Yet people like hard and fast rules and like sanctimony. So they’ll stan No Kids in the Bed under all circumstances without noting the nuance.

Personally, we follow the Safe Sleep 7, though baby spends more sleeping hours in his own bassinet than in our bed. Yet sometimes, only proximity to parents will do at night and so we make it as safe as possible so we can all get some much needed sleep.

Weird how they lump cosleeping as both the same surface and same room. Very different situation for the safety of the child, especially when they are under 2.

They do that because in both cases, the child can hear the breathing of the parents so is unlikely to succumb to the part of SIDS where they stop randomly breathing during the night (happens to all children as brains learn to brain) without restarting (this part doesn’t happen to all children). Apparently hearing breathing is good for reminding a new brain to do the breathing thing.

That said, bedsharing and roomsharing have been studied separately under their own titles.

Dinner means night. Surely the child won’t be awake for 6 hours. You will likely do toddler dinner then bed time routine and then they will be asleep. Ask to go over a day early to shadow the bedtime routine.