My experience has been that once I understood it it became very simple, but learning it was hard since none of the documentation is complete and it often only covers the small child that the author of said document had.
One piece of very practical advice that I picked up from some docs somewhere though:
For some reason adults easily understand that kids needs to learn to eat, learn to walk and learn to speak and later write.
For some reason however many of us think that kids just should know how to sleep.
Most kids however doesn't know how to get a good nights sleep however.
Some general advice in that regard:
- Don't let kids over a year fall asleep with anything they cannot keep during the night (food, parents by their side, music, film etc.) We all wake up about once an hour to see that things are still OK. This is good thing. For small kids this check seems to be mostly that things are exactly as they were when they fell asleep. Not knowing about this mechanism can drive a good hearted parent mad since they'll go to extreme lengths to make sure their kids are happy - including waking up once an hour to help the kid fall asleep again. (Case in point: I did this for months until I realized my kid woke up once an hour because she always fell asleep with a bottle of milk and consequently woke up once an hour the rest of the night to tell us things weren't right until she could have some more milk in her bottle.)
- Some people recommend letting one year olds crying themselves to sleep until they "learn to sleep". I recommend against it. What small kids seems to be afraid of is that parents disappear. Training the kid to realize that parents are there and will check back even if they don't cry seems to help a lot. In other words: if kid cries, pop your head in and say the some very few carefully selected nice words, but more importantly and somewhat counterintuitively if the kid does not cry, have a timer on short intervals and make it boringly predictable to the kid that you will show up even if they don't cry. What I found out was that as soon as my kids realized I would come back with boring precision even if they just played with their toys they stopped shouting or crying: I cannot know what they think but I guess somewhere along the lines of "no need to bother crying if dad shows up in exacly 2 minutes 40 seconds since he was here 20 seconds ago"