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Comment by Arwill | Hacker News Reader

The article does not mention it, but mothers with small children have to nurse babies every couple of hours, even at night. So given that in middle ages, families had "copious numbers of children" (quote from the article), it is for sure that mothers would need to get up to feed a baby. And then possibly the whole family would woke up too. And if multiple generations were living in the same house, then even more probably there were babies too. I can imagine such a basic need being the root of the habit.

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Here's a nice graphic showing a baby's sleep pattern during the first 15 weeks:

http://www.eiman.tv/misc/somnrytm.jpg

Since the text is in Swedish, here's roughly what it says: Every row is a day, black is sleep, white is awake.

As a parent of an 8 month old baby who wakes up literally every hour - what is that solid line from 10pm till 6am at around 10 weeks :P Feels like fantasy

there's something wrong with that baby

They're sleeping _way_ too much for 15 weeks. two 3-4 hour naps?? 8 hours overnight is definitely possible but rare

no. it's gonna differ from family to family, but it is not abnormal for a baby to sleep 18 hours a day, overall.

If my kid slept like that when she was a baby, maybe we'd have two children now...

I've heard of sleep patterns like that but always thought it's just marketing.

Oh wow. Babies sleep a lot.

As some parents would attest: some babies sleep a lot. They all wake up a lot :)

They do, however, it's the fact that they wake up during inconvenient hours that's the hard part :)

This chart is just bullshit, there's absolutely no way a 15 week old baby sleeps from 11pm to 7am, then from 8am to 12pm, and then _another_ 4 hour nap from 2-6pm??, that's absolutely insane. Like, a doctor would be extremely worried about this baby

no. your babies may not do that, but it is considered normal.

one of my four children slept 18 hours per day, in three 6-hour sessions, for many months.

The chart is slightly misleading, in the sense that the ranges shown are more like the very strong average sleeping patterns across babies. It doesn't mean that none of them woke up for a quick feed. But even without a feed, sleeping from 11pm-7am, is certainly not abnormal.

16 hours of sleep also falls within normal for a 15 week old baby for most sources I've seen, so I'm not sure why you'd be worried? I had a look, and my daughter was around 15-16 hours. No big naps during the day, but she slept 7pm-6am maybe waking twice for feeding.

They do, but never when you want them to.

Trouble is, they also wake up a lot.

Every time they go to sleep, they eventually wake up !

I'm jealous, lol

Hah as a husband and father whose wife coslept and exclusively breastfed for the first year, this has little merit. My wife one day commented on how it was great how our 6 month old daughter slept through the night and didn’t complain or ask for food. My wife quite literally breast fed in her sleep.

Waking up to feed the baby is a very WEIRD way of looking at the world.

I'm not sure how typical your experience is. My daughter needed to be fed every few hours for the first 11 months. Both my wife and I were freaking zombies. It was rough on us. My wife would basically get a couple of hours every time the baby went down, but no long and peaceful sleep.

In talking with friends, it would seem like our experience was extra crappy and yours is uncharacteristically mild. So the reality may be that many have to wake up at least once in the night to feed, so 2nd sleep kinda makes sense to me here. Not that I'm saying it's where the phrase comes from.

It varies quite a lot. One of my kids was needy all night long for most of a year, the other one started sleeping through the night maybe six weeks after we brought her home.

I've often thought that much of the difference between poor/adequate/great parents is the personality of the kid(s). Have a really easy one and then you think you're some of rockstar parent. Then number two comes along and shatters your delusions.

On top of sleeping, I like to add eating as very important to your own perception of how good a parent you are. :D

To be honest, with my two kids, how much they eat influences their sleep heavily as well. Unfortunately, my first has always eaten too little (he'd happily have his broccoli too, but never enough to be consider him fed), and the second is very picky (she eats a lot of what she likes, none of what she doesn't). When they eat well, they usually sleep well too.

My wife and I thought the same as you, BTW. Then she visited a sleep training centre with our daughter.

Turns out if you stop feeding them or going to them in the middle of the night, they adapt and sleep through in less than a week.

Out of my very limited anecdotal experience (two small children), it mostly relates to how well fed they are: unfortunately, both of our two kids are bad eaters (the first just wouldn't eat enough, ever, even today at 5yo; the second is just extremely picky but eats plenty of what she likes). The older kid kept waking up in the middle of the night even at 3 yo (not to ask for food, but when we were sure he got stuffed in the evening, never did he wake up). The younger slept through the night at 10 months a few times, but as she gets pickier, those are actually less frequent now at 15 months than back then.

I am sure we could train them with some sort of food scarcity approach (this is the only thing there is to eat; now is the only time you can eat) to teach them to eat enough of the food that's there, but that'd take a psychological toll for a few weeks on us that we aren't able/willing to take on.

They have training centers for this now? I'm genuinely horrified. I'm aware there are different meanings to "sleep training" depending on who talks about it, but the way you imply they use the term ("stop going to them", i.e. let them cry it out) it's just a cutesy way to say "neglect".

There's a reason parents pick up this version (i.e. the "let them cry it out" version, not the "create a safe and comfortable environment to allow them to self-regulate when they wake up" one) of so-called sleep training from books, "experts" and now apparently also training centers, whereas co-sleeping needs to be actively discouraged to stop parents from doing it intuitively.

I'm not saying every parent who doesn't co-sleep with their child is engaging in child abuse, but many mainstream forms of "sleep training" (especially the informal ones) very much boil down to "neglect your infant until they learn not to broadcast their needs because nobody will take care of them".

I'm also not saying that OP's account is representative of all co-sleeping parents. Co-sleeping (with breast-feeding) simply allows for reducing interruptions from nightly feeding in a way that is hardly replicable without it.

Do you actually have kids? Your comment makes it seem like you've got very strong opinions and no actual experience to back it up.

"Let them cry it out" being neglect isn't a strong opinion, it's the literal definition. A lot of neglect and abuse has been socially normalized but that doesn't make it not that: thankfully corporeal punishment has been outlawed in most Western countries although many parents and educators still struggle understanding that punishment itself is ineffective.

That children who are subject to any given for of abuse or neglect don't "seem" harmed by it, doesn't make it harmless either. I think we've all heard people who hit their kids argue that "my dad hit me when I was a kid and it didn't do my any harm either" and don't accept that as a justification anymore.

I'm not saying people who do this (because they are taught to do it) are bad people. I'm saying what they are doing is bad and that there are training centers who sell neglect as "sleep training" (which can refer to other things) are bad.

I don't know why you think "do you even have kids" is a gotcha but yeah, I have kids, I also have nephews and I have friends who have children. Would you insist that someone isn't allowed to speak on whether it's okay to hit your wife if they aren't married, too? That someone telling you off for leaving your dog in the car on a hot day has no right to criticize you because they don't own a dog themselves?

I asked whether or not you have kids because you seem to be completely misunderstanding both what is happening and why we're doing it.

Saying "no" to a request for attention and/or milk at 2AM (for a 1 year-old) is not neglect, it's just setting a healthy boundary.

I'd even be willing to go one step further and say that insisting your partner do this is abusive.

I'm in that place right now. 8 month old son, wakes up every 1-2 hours at night. Not even to feed, just.....wakes up and cries until you settle him. Feeding sometimes helps sometimes doesn't - but it doesn't change the fact that you have to wake up for him.

My wife is a complete zombie, I don't think she had more than continious 3 hours of sleep for at least 6 months now. I would cut my own arm off to make this situation improve at this point.

Really sorry to hear that. We had a nightmare scenario at about 11 months where she howled all through the night and my wife cried pretty hard too as there wasn't anything we could do. We cut a trip short and just drove 5 hours back home (the next day) to get our daughter back to familiar surroundings if it meant sleep for us. She then slept through the night and more or less has done that since. We felt so much better, although I remember checking in on her often to make sure she was ok as she'd never slept that long. I really hope you catch a similar break sometime soon. It might also help when they start to get a more varied diet that isn't just milk, so they aren't always hungry if that makes sense (I'm definitely not any kind of expert though and not giving advice).

Hang in there! It won't be that way forever.

The way my wife and I had it with my first was for me to start taking care of my boy at 6am when he wakes up and let her sleep until 9am every morning, when I'd start work (from home). If you can find a time where the boy does not need her (eg. those times when he's fussy but not hungry), that's the best you can do.

Sometimes that's not an option, but this worked great with our first (we couldn't do it with our second, so my wife is more of a zombie this time even though the daughter is a better sleeper on average).

I do exactly that - she leaves him with me 6-7am and then I look after him until I have to start working around 9pm. And while yes, it provides her with some much needed sleep, it's still nothing in the grand scheme of things. I think as a human you really need that uninterrupted 6h+ of sleep at least every now and then, and not having it for months at the time just absolutely wrecks you as a person.

I think you misunderstood him. Parent poster said that their child was breast fed during the night, his wife just did not wake up for it, but slept through the suckling.

Kids vary.

Daughter slept they the night from day one.

Son was up hungry every night at 2am.

Given that, power point of this thread, people pretty much went to bed at sunset, at European latitude that would mean a long night much of the year with kids wanting food and adults being sufficiently rested late at night. Once satiated amid a quiet daze of food/sex/meditation, they’d likely doze back off until daybreak. Two sleeps seems quite sensible without electricity’s prolonged days.

It’s funny that you mention that. When I was reading the article, it occurred to me how biphasic (or multiphasic) sleep resembles the schedule of a newborn’s parents. To me the lack of artificial lighting is a more compelling explanation, but who knows there could be many factors that contributed to the habit.

The parent not caring for the baby learns to sleep through. My wife and I swap roles when we wean babies, we need just a couple nights to get used to the changed role.

Sleep through baby crying? I found my own babies cries to be a complete NMI.

When we had infants I'd go back to sleep pretty well instantly (co-sleeping, with baby on a side-cot at bed level; baby breastfed, not by me) but in general one would wake to the little snuffles that precede the crying (I guess that helps to calm them before they get in a tizzy [in a state, brought on by their own actions, crying in this case]).

I sleep through thunderstorms without stirring.

I'm a few years out from dealing with crying babies and still if there's crying in the background, that sounds like one of my kids, I'll pop-up like a meerkat. The sound even gets though (non noise-cancelling) headphones when I'm gaming, though I won't know what I've heard until I take them off.

The parent on duty learning to recognize the baby is stirring before she cries is a part of it.

It helps if the father is a night owl who works from home. Back when we had a baby (20 now) I preemptively bottle fed her at 2 am. She didn't wake up other than sucking from the bottle. Neither did her mother who was sleeping next to her.

Multiple generations also slept on the same bed, I'm surprised the theory is two sleeps and not multiple sleeps. Not that humans haven't habituated to group sleeps in tight quarters, but one bed feels qualitatively different than a bunch of tired submariners cramped in individual bunks or some similar arrangement.

If that were the origin of it, then wouldn't there be three or four sleeps, not two?

Babies, on average, only need multiple feedings a night through the first few months. Even if there was a new baby for one mother every year, that would be multiple feedings only for 3 months out of every 12 months.

Just like parents today, people would power through that, and not make that a habitual sleeping pattern.

I am not saying this makes the hypothesis of the origin being in parenthood true, just that it does not make it false either :)

The mother would either sleep with the baby or have it easily retrievable without significantly stirring. Dozing while nursing would provide some compromise between rest for her and the household, and enjoying/enduring some thinking time.

This argument amounts to "cosleeping babies are not noisy" which is only partially true. They are less noisy, but they still do cry enough.

> Dozing while nursing .... and enjoying/enduring some thinking time.

Nah, it is just brain fog from slee deprivation. It is not free thinking time, it is "Jeeez I want to sleep" time.

I have had some great insights when I can't fall a sleep, in that brain fog you mention, sometimes where the feeling of my own self somehow disappears, seeing everything less through the lens of the self-protective consciousness, then I could suddenly understand and solve some nagging issues.

But the toll is high, not sleeping properly ruins your life. And most of the time it's definitely not insights, but the opposite. For me, it's not something to seek out.

They are less noisy, often enough to stay below the threshold that wakes others nearby. Sleep quality is a probabilistic game, as it sounds like we both know. :)

The comment about contemplative dozing comes from my wife. I’ll pass on your feedback.

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