Comment by xcom86 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by xcom86 | Hacker News Reader

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First off, congratulations! I love hearing about new people coming into the world. I'm currently doing some debugging while one of my little ones is slowly falling asleep (mine are 2 1/2 and 4 1/2).

There's a PaulG tweet about this that I'll have to dig up sometime about how parenthood changes you and yes it will change you.

The first six-months to a year you won't have decent sleep. You'll learn how to function.

Really I think the difference is that you don't have much time anymore for distraction, you don't tolerate it. You can't tolerate it. Sure, you'll still be able to browse HackerNews and play games (sometimes). But those long periods of drifting off, spacing out, taking hours to finish something...you'll learn to stop that.

You'll become more efficient. You'll have to: the baby is hungry or needs to be picked up from daycare. Dishes need washing, diapers need changing. Some young dev is dawdling on about something in their day? No. Where's the MR, here's what you need to fix. Get it done. Push it out. We don't have time for this sh*t.

It gets real. In a good sense. In the best sense.

I think you'll wish you did this years ago.

I'd also add that "you'll have no time" thing doesn't really feel like that. Unlike a job or some other big but necessary commitment, the feedback loop on where that time is going is pretty quick: it's going to your child.

You feed a baby they're happy, you change a baby, they're happy, you get them to sleep and they'll be happier. It's a very different experience IMO to anything else: it takes as long as it takes, and it's all necessary, but the feedback loop is close to instant.

Source: am the father of an almost 7 month old so far (and was extremely skeptical I'd enjoy it as much as I actually am).

>I think you'll wish you did this years ago.

We just had our first this past weekend and so far your post reads entirely true, especially this.

The only things that helped our kids learn to sleep (which took us several years to figure out):

- hot shower (not bath) before bed

- immersion school in another language

- sleep training

HTH, congratulations, and good luck!

First: congratulations!

Second, two tips more tips from a dad of 5 children:

1. From somewhere after around 1 year: Put effort into teaching sleep skills: I did it by leaving the room after singing and prayer and coming back every 1 + 2n minutes where n is days. (Of course, use your parental judgment.) This was surprisingly effective in teaching them that Dad leaving the room doesn't mean Dad had disappeared, only that Dad is elsewhere and will be back soon. Important: do come back. Use a timer and follow it exactly. Come back even if the kid doesn't cry. It is important that they realize they don't have to cry for us not to disappear.

2. Also, when teaching them to sleep, don't let the fall asleep with anything (persons, toys, food, music, tv, absolute silence) that won't keep all night. We all wake halfway up many times during the night to check if everything is OK. For a small child a missing milk bottle is enough to signal "not ok".

That seems like a lot for something humans do naturally.

if you've got woods and a camp fire, that little sucker is probably out before the embers die down, unfortunately that's not what the typical night looks like for most people on here, so we improvise

Just feed the darn creature well before bedtime. If it isn't diaper, babies wake up or can't sleep due to hunger.

Thanks, I’m going to need these:)

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