1. My first child couldn't be calmed easily, although I found a song that somehow worked. [0]
2. Second child could be soothed by slowly rubbing from his temple down past his eye to his cheek.
3. Third child hated that, but loved having her forehead rubbed slowly in a horizontal manner.
4. Fourth child just wanted a firm pressure on the top of his head (e.g., a palm, he'd also burrow up into your armpit for comfort sometimes, which was awkward when I hadn't showered that day)
5. Fifth child didn't need any of the above, just lots of hugs and kisses at bed time. Bless her.
The only generally applicable rules I found are:
* Sleeping on your chest when young where they can hear your heartbeart (I found it works best with Dad when breastfeeding, as the smell of Mom's milk tended to stir them up for a feed, even if they're struggling with wind and not able to feed) can be very calming. Ideally done skin to skin.
* Slow rocking while making a continuous "sssshhh" noise often helped - the fact I'd become a human white noise generator amused me.
* Patiently, calmly, love them. It's most important to do this when it's hardest to love them. Knowing that they can be total assholes and you'll still love them is what grows secure kids.
* Ask for help when you're struggling! A lot of your friends and family are probably desperate to help you, but they don't want to appear condescending, or to intrude. So give them permission, explicitly invite them to help, and your sanity will return, which will make you a much better parent for baby.
That's it. That's all my parenting advice after five babies.
Super chill, knocked all the milestones out of the park, easy to console, cheerful, little peacemaker, apple of big brother’s eye, makes us look like amazing parents.
I don’t give anyone any advice now other than … it can be hard, love your child, and spend a lot of time with them.
That's probably the only generally applicable parenting advice. Glad you got an easy one second time around :)
Our first was difficult as well and advice never really applied. As a baby heavy metal actually worked well, which horrified my mother - but it’s all about finding something that works to calm them. Great closing sentiment, so I’ll paraphrase: it will be hard to love your child sometimes. Love them always, keep them safe, treat them well, and show them the beauty in the world. What seems hard will get easier.
Katherine Heigl: But I had a plan!
Ken Jeong: Baby don't care!
I give one piece of advice, heavily caveated, that running a vacuum cleaner helped calm my newborns when we brought them home from the hospital (advice from nurses line when our oldest was inconsolable at 4 days old). I then follow up that everyone parent is going to have advice that worked for them and their baby, and it can be tiring to hear but typically comes from a place of love. The parent-to-be will figure out what works for them. Reach out for help, they aren't alone, and so on.
Now I'm wondering why 20 years ago I thought the music video for that song featured a cameo of the black panther statue that to me represents that road...
Also lovely words. I can't imagine having five!
The panther statue is at 2:45. I'm glad I didn't imagine this, I started to feel the Mandela effect.
What does not work is advice from "parenting experts" or doctor talking about non medicine etc. And of course advice people trade on forums non parenting forums (like HN) - too much of it is from people who don't interact with kids actually.
My mother was advised by the late great Hugh Jolly, a genuine expert.
I think it's reasonable to survey a dozen parents to get a bunch of different opinions and recommendations of what worked for others, so you have enough things to try if you got a situation, and don't just panic.
Among parenting social media influencers, this is a gamble for building rapport among an audience:
Make some extreme claim that may or may not work for some portion of people who hear it. People who hear it, try it, and find that it works will vividly remember the influencer as being correct. People who try it with no results will quickly forget it about it.
Repeat across several claims and eventually some percentage of them will be correct for the audience.
This was a 100% thing, it felt like magic, but of course I'm not gonna dole it out as even remotely likely to work with another baby.
But, after having more children than you could fit in a regular car, I've realised that each child is an entire bag of quirks that don't apply to others.
Hungry. Wet. Tired. When I learned these she was easy to take care of.
The night terrors tho. That phase is soooo hard. 3 weeks walking up in the middle of the night screaming for no reason. Hours to get her back to sleep. Then just stops…
Only 3 weeks is not so bad. I woke up every three hours for the first 14 months. And then he just started sleeping well. It’s very random.
Daughter would go to bed, fall asleep, all happy, full belly etc. At around 2am, wake up screaming at the top of her lungs. I would pick her up and hold her and pace back and forth for about 2 hours while she sobbed. If my wife tried to touch her the crying would go back up full blast.
After the 4th night on the first time I just threw her over my sholder and hummed to her until she fell asleep, then wife got her blanket and pillow and put it in our bed between us and i would slowly move to the bed, gently put her down trying not to wake her (she woke easy a few times doing this) and then that was usually it for the rest of the night.
1st time was at about 20 months, second time at about 28 months. Bar none the WORST experience we've had so far.
In terms of sleeping through the night, she took ~18 months before not waking for milk in the middle of the night. In the early days I had her crib next to my bed and if she began to stir I would instantly wake, make a bottle. (we did formula for the whole thing, kept a flask of warm water and pre-measured milk powder next to the bed). Change her nappy, feed her, and put her back to sleep. I would be awake for 10 minutes and back to sleep.
I consider myself very lucky in this regard because I've heard horror stories.
Edit: Oh, the other thing with the night terrors, one thing the internet told us to do was get a night light. And don't turn the room light on when they wake. Makes getting back to sleep much harder.
I went through the same thing with my now-13-month-old son. Literally every single month N someone would tell us, "Oh don't worry, this will go away once he turns N+1 months old." AND IT NEVER DID.
Until about a month or so back, that is. Just completely randomly -- I don't think we did anything different to the usual routine, he just started sleeping big 7-9 hours stretches as night with one brief screamy wakeup, and sometimes even 10-11 hours.
Up until then we'd attempted everything -- sleep training, white noise, blackout blinds, rocking, not rocking, singing, calming music, EVERYTHING -- and at some point just decided if he's going to sleep terribly and scream anyway, there wasn't much point beating ourselves up over it and just made our peace with it, and stuck to the same routine that seemed to get the best (VERY RELATIVELY SPEAKING) results.
i feel you -_-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j2C8MkY7Co8
In my experience the baby will often resume crying as soon as you stop doing it, but we used this whenever we needed a couple minutes of relief.
Maybe actually worked 75% of situations, but as you said majority of time they would resume when we stopped.
Helps to try quickly distract them in that moment they pause doing the hold, atleast wth my child
Babies cry because they're new to the world. They have not yet grown the moderating influence of context provided by experience. Every baby is unique, with a different emotional balance.
A big chunk of parenting is figuring your kids out, and balancing that with the set of experiences they need to have in order to grow. Many of those experiences are painful, which means you also need to figure out the balance of "let them cry" and "comfort them", which also changes drastically over time.
That's where having both parents really matters, as the tension between them is essential in finding that balance.
My kids didn’t scream or cry much at all.
Friends whose kids screamed all the time were astonished and tried everything to figure it out.
But we had opposite experiences with kids sleeping through a the night, I’m tired just thinking of it.
So we build kindergardens and other social services to help with that. And underfunded schools somehow gets stuck with actually making functioning adults out of kids. In Sweden, where I live, stay-at-home parents don't get a full share of the pension funds so the system discurages staying at home with kids. So much for the vote-yourself-rich democrazy.
It's a mess. It should be noted though: The small family unit came first, with industrialization. The social network is there to support the industry, not the family.
And there is also a lot of peer pressure. Other women put a funny face when someone discuss not 100% breast feeding.
We had all the pumps, techniques, just wasn't worth the stress.
The important thing is your child is being fed.
There have been multiple cases where infants have starved to death after being born because the mothers were convinced only to give breast milk, and couldn't produce enough.
We switched from 50% formula/breast milk to strictly formula.
If u aren't giving breast, there's additional vitamins you need to give aswell
Do what works best... In many cases it's not breast milk for everyone's health and sanity.
When we switched to ready made Enfamil, that was such a lifesaver for me and my wife
Btw. What the author calls "wicked hour" we used to call "brain pain" - like aching muscles after training, just with the developing brain. One kid wouldn't calm down after being held very tightly for minutes in a dark room and having a screaming tantrum. Once this was over, she was absolutely peaceful again. Other kid didn't need to scream to cope with the day, but had difficulties at the same time of day.
Imagine you had a computer that would crash every time something went wrong. You would develop a checklist for that computer to help with debugging it. That’s the exact same thing with kids.
Became a first-time parent back in 2020, and couldn't agree more. The trend of slowly increasing personal freedom/control suddenly stops, and your freedom is reverted back to near-zero. As in, you will become completely dependent on your spouse and cannot even piss or shit alone when bubs is awake.
The best thing to do is just acknowledge that this is life now (and more than that, the type of life that human beings have evolved to live in), and the past few years of unrestrained personal freedom were a dream that you needed to wake up from.
FTFY. Oh wait…
It's a long story, but we could have saved our family a lot of grief if we knew that from the start - but of course, as first time parents it's not easy to trust your guy.
My general feeling is that you can drive yourself nuts trying to figure out why your baby is crying, and, as the blog author mentioned in his conclusion, you may still be unable to figure it out. IMO this is a great time of one's life to discard the illusion of control.