gaaah

[flea]

To soften you up before the rant: I painted my toenails red today, and then I painted Casper's red too, because she wanted me to. They are So. Cute.

The Rant: We seem to have the options of half-hour nursing sessions 1-2 times a night, or 30-60 minute crying sessions, with multiple brief visits every 10-15 minutes to say "it's time to sleep," and the phrase, "I. Want. Mom. Mee." whined, cried, shrieked, etc. approximately 147,000 times. I am so ANGRY about this right now. I spend an hour awake listening to her cry, then an hour awake surfing to cool down my anger so I can actually sleep, then I get up in the morning and resent her all day Like a cat who goes straight to the one person in the room who hates or is allergic to cats, Casper chooses these days to be particularly clingy wth me.

I'm thinking we need to try something completely new, but I'm not sure what it is. Have her sleep on a pillow on the floor in our bedroom? Give her to the wolverines?

Comments

Re: Tough Approach

[loligo.livejournal.com]

It may take a week or 2 of hell

The thing is, for some kids it's more like 6-8 weeks of hell with this approach, plus they are absolutely panicked and miserable during the day and cling to Mom (or Dad) like a leech. It all depends on their personality.

That's why, even though I *did* recommend a sleep book earlier in the thread, I've never found a parenting book that I really, whole-heartedly love -- none of them seem to fully recognize that KIDS ARE DIFFERENT FROM EACH OTHER. The hard-ass books are all "Your kids'll get over it right away," -- well, some kids don't. And the soft-touch books are all "Your children will be traumatized forever if you do this!" and guess what -- some kids won't be! For some kids the hard-ass shortcut works great! It's really too bad that child-rearing gets turned into this big ideological *thing*, and that more "experts" don't approach it with more creativity. Everyone in the family has needs, and sometimes it takes some tinkering and some thinking outside the box to find ways to meet everyone's needs with as little pain as possible.

Re: Tough Approach

[cindywrites.livejournal.com]

This is also why I offered a soft approach in a separate response. These are suggestions, not prescriptions. They're not from a book, they're from parenting 3 children (ages 9, 6, and 5) and from being an aunt to 20 children, and they're not guaranteed. They're also worth exactly the paper they're written on.

Kids are different, which is why I didn't say "DO this for X minutes." Only flea and Mr. flea know how long is too long for Casper to be crying, and only they (and she) know the difference between her panic, and her anger at not getting her own way.

Kids are also the same, too. They learn what to expect, because we teach them what to expect, with our actions. If some nights, you let them cry, and don't nurse, and sometimes you nurse, they don't have any reason to expect any set behavior.

Re: Tough Approach

[casperflea.livejournal.com]

Just to set our particular situation a little more clearly, with Casper some of the Pantley (we read her first sleep book) stuff was really helpful when we started trying to get her to sleep more, at about 7 months. We have a good bedtime routine and have had it consistently since then, although as she has gotten older, and partly because of summer late sunsets, her bedtime has crept later. (How I long for the 7:30 bedtime of last March!) Going to bed is not usually a big struggle.

Our problem has always been night waking. However, 2-3 months ago we had successfully night-weaned her and at the same time got her sleeping 8:30pm-5 or 6am maybe 4 nights out of 7. She'd be up early morning, nurse, and then sleep until 7:30ish. Nights she woke in the night mr. flea would stick his head in her door and quiet her, and she'd settle. We originally did this with some modified Ferber - we've never found anything more gentle to have any effect on her at all, and believe me, we tried all of the relevant tricks Pantley suggested. It took about 3 (very hard) nights. I don't remember what threw us off this glorious schedule, maybe just one or two zonked and thus thoughtless accidental 1 am nursings, but I know it was already gone by the time we went on vacation (sure-fire schedule-freller). So we've been trying to re-establish it, and we have successfully night-weaned, but she's not willing to settle herself in the night right now. She's angry with us, and trying to get her way, and I have a philosophical problem about it all because I do want to find a middle way. I can't be a parent who says, "She's got to do it the way we say because we're the parents," and I simultaneously believe that children need limits set and consistency - but I can't always live up to my own ideals in the latter area. It's also tied in to a new phase in Casper's development generally, of typical increasing independence and wilfulness, that we're still only beginning to feel our way to understanding how to deal with.

Cindy, I appreciate your advice above, but it did read sort of like you were talking to someone who had never thought about sleep issues, and I know you know I have. If there's one thing I've found I believe about parenting it's that what is most effective for me is to hear, "This is what my kid is/was like, and here is what worked for me." I don't believe that parenting data exists, and so what I really want to hear is (preferably sympathetic) anecdote. But I've found Pantley to be a creative, inclusive strategizer, so I think I'll have a look at her toddler book - thanks, loligo, I didn't realize she had one specifically for toddlers.

Re: Tough Approach

[loligo.livejournal.com]

Kids are different, which is why I didn't say "DO this for X minutes."

Yeah, I wasn't meaning for that to come across so much as a critque of your advice as a general rant of frustration with the whole topic. My 3 year-old, "Chuckles", is the first baby in either side of our extended family for like, decades, and she's got the high-strung temperment of some of my siblings with the insomnia of my husband's family. So all we've got to work with are two grandmas who say, "Well, *you* never did that..." and a bunch of books that say "All kids do X" -- and ours invariably doesn't!

So for casperflea, here's our latest bizarre sleep anecdote: the brand new magic bullet of sleep for Chuckles is... a magnetic erase board. You know, those things like an Etchasketch, but you draw on them with a stylus? Someone got her a little travel one for her birthday, and it has knocked her out at least eight times in the past two weeks. I seriously doubt this will ever be useful advice for anyone else, but for her, her biggest problem has *always* been winding down enough to fall asleep, and for whatever reason, drawing circles on that darn board is more soporific than anything since the baby swing.