Based on my personal experience with two kids, it’s completely random what type of kid you’ll get. My first would wake every hour at night and require a lot of effort to get back to sleep, this lasted until he was at least a year. My second was far better, but still created sleep deprived parents for the first four months.

Having at least 3-4 months of an infant after birth (the forth trimester) be difficult to sleep and calm down is quite normal. And based on the anecdotal data from my friends in similar points of their lives, even average.

The outliers are the ones who sleep through the night immediately (which can be dangerous) and those who wake up every sleep cycle.

I was sure that SOME things you can control, but now I believe you just have some variable amount of influence - in the end, luck matters a lot. E.g. we managed to "train" our first two kids to eat well, but the third broke us. At some point, we were begging her, "eat this cupcake, it has chocolate!". Taught me to refrain from judging other parents.

Yes. I remember scoffing when my grandmother, who raised 11 children, tried to warn me that I wouldn't have as much control as I envisioned early on. Most of us seriously overestimate the amount of influence that parents have.

By the time you get to 3, it's pretty evident that each child comes pre-built with their own unique tour-de-force of personality, and parents are just as beholden to it as anyone else.

Yeah, every kid is different, and every parent is different.

Our first actually taught us this lesson. We have friends with really, really easy kids. Our oldest - 4 years old now - is... tough. She has always been very hard headed. She has always stood up for herself and what she wants. She is persistent. My friends joke about how someday she is going to conquer the world.

Our twins are much easier. And much "better" behaved at similar ages. Sometimes you get what you get.

> She was breastfed, so feeding her at night was a minimum hassle at night...

Appreciate you may not have meant to imply this, but breastfeeding does not mean minimum hassle at night. We lived on about 3-5 hours a night for about 18 months. You got lucky.

A small percentage of kids are probably hard to deal with when it comes to sleep no matter what you do, but most of the parents I've seen with kids who still often wake them up past the 4-6mo range are training their kids to do it. They can't possibly realize they are or they'd surely stop, but they are. This is usually combined with waiting way too late to start trying to sleep-train.

I hate being that guy who asks where you infer it's a "small percentage", but my anecdata are that disrupted sleep is the norm. Yes, it got better after the first 3 months. Then there were multiple - very natural, I hear - sleep regressions: expansive brain growth which led to night talking/nightmares, teething, illnesses, fluctuations in natural body temperature regulation... kids are rapidly evolving creatures, and habits/pattern/training are great to instill, but there are a lot disruptors both natural and environmental.

I have 4 kids and all were breastfed. My wife would get up or feed them laying down. She never asked me to get up as her thinking was that at least one of us should not be sleep deprived. I have friends where the husband would get up and change the diaper and then hand the baby to the wife which meant both got less sleep and they always complained about lack of sleep.