In my country you get a monthly check in with experts for the first 6 months and then less frequently. Mostly to weigh and check growth and arrange shots etc. But they also take some time to discuss how things are going and publish a booklet per age group with advice to parents.
Their advice (based on other research) is to strongly avoid holding your child until she sleeps and instead recommend exactly what you did.
The reason is that if you are holding the baby, they fall asleep and then wake a bit or switch to lighter sleep some time later (like every human does periodically every night) they will encounter a different environment and the holding prent is gone. That's going to wake them up fully and get confused. So now you have a crying baby in the middle of the night that you need to hold again to get back to sleep.
While if they fall asleep in their bed, feeling safe that you'll be around, a few hours later if they wake up they'll determine that everything is still OK and as they expect it to be, and continue sleeping.
There is nothing inconsistent about holding an infant and then sleep-training a 1 year old.
Now that she's older and speaking, she sometimes doesn't want to go to bed and will tell you. Then it helps to communicate that you'll be back and they're not on their own. Gives enough comfort that I almost never do more than come back once after 10 minutes or so, and over half the time she's already sleeping. If not I just say good night again, hand back the stuffed animal that by that point has usually been thrown out of the bed and that's it.
Even if it only happened to, say, 20% of the quiet babies, it's enough to surpass the costs of paranoia.
I remember at age 7 being afraid of tigers and dinosaurs at night, sometimes I watched tall coconut trees. I also asked my mum if she will abandon me for a mistake.
I have more than 4 kids
Wow I never heard this before, it sounds like a great idea. Did you learn from someone else or figured out yourself? I struggled with getting kids to sleep by themselves.
What we used to do is to have a simple fixed routine (e.g. drink milk, sing a short song, put them in bed) so she knows what's coming and put her in bed no matter what. Crying or not, just put her in bed softly, ignore the crying, say some nice things and walk out in a friendly way.
Come back after 3 minutes of crying. Stroke/hold/sing until she stops crying (usually immediately when you come back). And then put her in bed again in the same way. Often there will be some crying in protest of being put back in bed, it's really hard, but you have to put them in bed then in the same friendly/soft way as the first time.
Then keep doing this in increasing time intervals. We did 3 min, 5 min, 5 min, 10 min and then keep it at 10. But we rarely got to 10 after the initial week of doing this. I've heard several other parents that did the same thing, some after speaking to a sleep coach. It worked for many, but it takes consistency and a bit of time to start working.
3500 American babies due suddenly and unexpectedly from SIDS every year. I wonder if there is any research into where these babies were sleeping when they died. Am I an idiot for wondering if they died from the sheer terror of waking up alone in a dark room?
Co-sleeping is also somewhat popular, but it greatly increases the chance of SIDS with risks skyrocketing for smoking mothers and those who are bed-sharing but don't usually do bed-sharing.
It already triggered a few times for us, luckily in all cases it was because we carried the baby from the crib a forgot the turn off the breath detector :-D
Obviously, it's one of those things where most people will never actually know if it works or not (thankfully), but based on the fact that it goes off without fail every time I forget to turn the damn thing off after picking the baby up fills me with confidence that it does do what it's supposed to.
Children just stop breathing. Some newer research suggests this is a genetic issue.
Of course there is misdiagnosis for children that suffocate because of toys/blankets.
It's a particularly interesting finding because we already know that low levels of BChE correspond to an additional challenges waking up from anaesthetic, and the working hypothesis is that this may be linked to the arousal system.
One other potential link is to SUDEP (Sudden Unexpected Death in Epilepsy), which so far we also don't understand the cause of, but it may be similar to SIDS (or in fact, it may even be the exact same condition) - it often presents very similarly (face down in bed, no obvious signs of suffocation, etc.). In fact, in Australia and New Zealand, SIDS is being renamed to SUDI (Sudden Unexpected Death in Infancy), which sort of speaks for itself in terms of similarities.
- don't smoke
- always have infants sleep on their back
Is anyone here familiar with the subject across ancient cultures more broadly?
Personally, I sleep better when I’m alone. Haven’t convinced my wife that we should have a separate king and queen suite, though.
There are still a few that live traditionally in what basically is a large, two-floor long house for a multi-generational household. The families live on the second floor in one large room, but often with a small loft area for a quasi-third floodr The bottom floor is open with no walls (just support beams) to keep the animals. So it's constantly noisy.
The product I am talking about is NOT the Owlet Dream Sock. That version is useless for this purpose. You need the now-discontinued Owlet Smart Sock, of which the most recent version was version 3. I believe the app is no longer available in the app store, and you need the app to use it, but I think if you have an Android device you can probably find an APK on one of the APK mirror sites. Personally, I have the iOS app which I still have due to having installed it on my phone before it was discontinued.
I hope someone will make an open-source product like this. It's conceptually quite simple: connect a pulse oximeter to a loud audible alarm. I would also love to be able to get an adult version as well for my grandparents that would call 911 automatically if they stop breathing or their heart stops. Calling 911 automatically would not be allowed in a product I think, but it could be done in an open-source / open-hardware product where the builder of the kit takes on the liability of breaking the 911-related laws (which in my view is a tiny price to pay for saving a loved one's life).
If any hardware hackers are looking for project ideas, an open version of the Owlet Smart Sock would be an incredible thing to build for the world.
P.S. my pet theory for what causes SIDS is that the part of the brain stem that controls breathing needs time to develop, and when the brain is super young that part of the brain is not yet fully developed, and is susceptible to failing to do its job. I think of an analogy to how people can die of failing to breathe during a heroin overdose, wherein that same part of the brain is put into a state where it doesn't maintain a high enough breathing rate. I suspect the failure mechanism in the overdose situation and the SIDS situation might be analogous.
We had one and I think it made one or two false positives where basically it fell off. I can’t say anything about false negatives since none of our children stopped breathing. (It had two alerts, one for losing skin contact and one for low oxygen. The first one we got all the time when forgetting to pause the base station before removing the sock, so that bit certainly worked.)
A lot of research went into solving SIDS and once the recommendations changed to always make infants sleep on their backs, SIDS plummeted.
Except that there is exactly zero evidence to support this.
Those sort of injuries would be as readily apparent as if you'd run the child over with a lorry, and they are absent.
2) Does a detailed CSI-level investigation take place when an infant dies of an apparent SIDS death? I'm sure the parents are delicately asked about what happened for somebody to fill out the paperwork, but if there's no obvious bruising or broken bones or anything, how intense is an actual investigation?
2) Occam’s razor. I will give you that sleeping with newborns in bed and accidentally smothering them happens all too often, but anything more malicious can in my opinion be safely discarded, because parent’s killing their child require way more presupposition and proof would be on your side.
It's obvious instantly.
This is how internet rumors begin.
I wont repeat what others stated, just point out that reactions to your post reflect well just how ridiculous things you wrote.
- everyone wakes halfway up multiple times each night to see if everything is OK. Make sure they don't fall asleep with anything that can't stay with them during the night: music, tv, light, food, drink or another person (you or others).
- to teach kids to sleep, make them feel safe about it. What I did was walking in at a fixed schedule, starting at exact 3 minutes between the first night (I used a digital kitchen timer back then, a smartphone later) and increasing by two minutes every night. Surprisingly fast, my kids learn that I didn't disappear, and he'll be around even if they don't cry. Once they realized this they started playing with the toy the were allowed to keep in the bed. But, keep in mind: don't stop coming back if they are silent. A major part of the idea is that they realize that they don't have to do anything to make sure we don't forget them. Oh: and keep a very close ear with them in the beginning so they don't wake up and think they are alone.
I never really could get myself to accept the idea that "they need to cry themselves to sleep" and every thing I tried before this didn't work on my oldest.
This worked on my oldest kid, she started sleeping through the night within a week and also became calmer and I got my sleep back. With the rest of them it took 2-3 days only since I started earlier (shortly after they was a year old).
Maybe other methods work too, but this was easy for us and we didn't have to let the kids cry to sleep or anything else I have seen recommended online that I didn't like.