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Comment by ptsneves | Hacker News Reader

Nobody speaks about the effect of little kids on young parents. It is nightmarish and there is nothing to do about it. I wonder how much damage we get to our minds due to sleep deprivation and shocks. Yes shocks. I once laughed at a report of a mercenary saying he was woken up several times a night with ABBA as a form of torture. I then internally cried thinking of the amount of times I woke up just to hear screams, and put them near my hear in the middle of the night. Or finally falling asleep only for screaming to start, and the rush to stop one child from waking the other, and leading to double screaming. On rough weeks I feel I get ptsd or fear of night time.

I honestly do not understand why evolution gave us this harsh treatment.

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FWIW — and not to criticize you, I’m a parent and know what you’re going through — evolution didn’t do this to us, we did. If we look at our closest relatives, the other primates, infants all sleep snuggled with their mothers. As they get older, they snuggle together or with other relatives. It’s very rare for any of them to sleep alone.

Imagine a baby chimp or gorilla waking up alone in the forest after having fallen asleep snuggled with its mother. Of course it would be terrified, of course it would cry for help.

Many modern cultures choose to make infants sleep alone. That doesn’t do away with the infant’s hard-wired responses, long-set in its genome.

But to be clear, it's very dangerous to sleep with a baby especially if they are preterm / high risk.

If the mother doesn't drink/smoke, has normal sleep, and the baby is healthy, it's not considered dangerous and was practiced by all of humankind for most of its past. Separate rooms and separate beds are a very, very recent invention. For most of humankind's history mothers slept with their babies.

For most of human history, infant mortality rates were much higher than they are now with the application of science.

Yes but due to malnutrition, dysentery, accidents and a general lack of public health and medical care, not because their parents crushed them in their sleep.

I slept with my kid (I'm a father) for almost a year and trust me, you're still deeply aware of them when they're next to you.

Smothering does happen, statistically speaking, but the odds are so tiny and the benefits so great, it's basically a misinformation campaign based on bunk 1950's science.

100%, I think what has happened is smothering/SIDS/co-sleeping deaths got kinda lumped together into a single statistic and I know at least for me as a new parent it really freaked me out.

When I read more into the numbers it seemed that where co-sleeping has a real risk is when it happens outside of the bed, when the caretaker falls asleep in a chair. All of the deaths get lumped together and we are just told that you need to X so you reduce the risk of SIDs. It kinda sucks because it is so hard being a new parent, it would be nice to better understand up front what the real risks are.

Like all things there are risks and some things have greater risk than others but are still low enough that they are not worrisome enough.

There is a lot of misinformation around SIDs and its relationship with co-sleeping. Co-sleeping is riskier than the baby sleeping in its own bed but generally not measurably so. Where a lot of co-sleeping deaths happen is when the caretaker falls sleep in a chair or a couch holding the baby and baby falls or gets into a bad breathing position. The number of deaths from smothering do exist but pale in comparison.

Of course every baby/person is different and you have to find what works for you as a parent.

Co-sleeping with infants often ends with the mother smothering the infant.

Not true. “Often” in this context is a wild overstatement. Humans around the world have co-slept with infants for thousands of years and it’s generally safe.

There are known risk factors for infant smothering during sleep. E.g., parental drinking or smoking, infant low birth weight or respiratory issues (as a sibling comment said). Education and care control for these well.

Plus, with today's technology, it seems it shouldn't be that difficult to have a machine detect if the baby is getting smothered, and wake up the parents with a loud alarm if so. Some googling yields "The 6 Best Baby Breathing Monitors".

This is wrong to the point of absurdity. A simple bed attachment prevents such scenarios 100%.

https://www.pinterest.com/WalkingWomanCO/baby-bed-attachment...

Insisting that human babies cry themselves to sleep night after night, solidifying neuropathways of despair and terror before anything else is insane. Also, somehow culturally acceptable so it’s become the default.

False, co-sleeping while not in a bed has a high risk of injury to the infant. Co-sleeping in a bed is of course riskier than not sharing a bed with a baby but is no where near as high as co-sleeping happening outside of the bed.

I thought that co-sleeping meant sleeping in the same bed with your infant. Does it just mean being in the same room?

Is this only an issue with modern life? Before modernity ruined everything the family and community were closer and there was a support structure. Losing sleep at night is only a problem when you still need to get to work the next day.

i don't think its evolution, its the fact that both the parents work and they need to balance the demands of parenthood with the demands of work (among other things). Not to mention how uptight and anxious some parents are these days about random things related to their child (doing tons of research for everything).

This is what we're working on at https://soundmind.co - improving the efficiency of deep sleep by monitoring your brain for slow wave sleep, and using auditory stimulation to increase delta power.

We're about to begin testing with our first users in the next few weeks.

To answer your question about evolution, I speculate...

1) the evolutionary element was likely only adapted to impact mothers, and still impacts mothers more than fathers. But fathers (I believe) are now more involved.

2) for mothers, less sleep may be linked to less memories of the pain of early child rearing, which may make them more likely to have more children.

Lastly, new mothers had a (if I recall correctly) 15% chance of dying during childbirth or shortly thereafter. From an evolutionary standpoint, the mother had mostly done their job, as long as a village was left to raise the young.

The priority for evolution was to get the child through the first year or so with the mother intact. Beyond that, mother nature didn't prioritize the mothers health over their offspring.

>Lastly, new mothers had a (if I recall correctly) 15% chance of dying during childbirth or shortly thereafter.

.85^4 = 52% chance of surviving 4 childbirths. Does that seem right?

The figure I've heard is 2%.

About half of children died before maturity, so each women had to have 4 children just to keep population stable.

You're closer to being correct than my initial estimate. I was taking the average number of children born to a woman at 8. The population wasn't stable, it was growing.

Mortality during childbirth either 1 or 2%.

So somewhere in the 12-15% range that a woman would die of (one of her) childbirths.

So, yeah seems about right. What is .85 in your calculation?

There's two of you promoting and posting links to your company; at what point does this become spam?

I'm the only person in my company that uses HN, so I don't know who the other person is. Or was it me responding to a different comment?

> improving the efficiency of deep sleep by monitoring your brain for slow wave sleep, and using auditory stimulation to increase delta power

> We're about to begin testing with our first users in the next few weeks

Ooh, would it be possible for me to become a tester? I don't have a typical sleep schedule though.

All our units are spoken for, and we have a LONG list. If "not a typical sleep schedule" means working shifts or something, research has shown that day time sleep is not as impacted by slow wave enhancement (what we do) as night-time, so it appears the stimulation is not ideally suited to shift workers.

Having said that, I haven't looked closely at the protocols of those studies, but one of the researchers we collaborate with is strongly convinced that daytime sleepers is not a good target for us.

I have a different opinion. My sleep improved a million fold when we put our daughter in her own room. All the small noises, the movement. Being able to close a door once in a while, was much better.

> On rough weeks I feel I get ptsd or fear of night time.

Been a while since it was very bad, but I do have a low-level anxiety about time after 23:00. There are days when I stay up late to catch up with stuff, while my wife goes to sleep, and I recently realized that I'm no longer able to do much then, because starting 23:00, I keep expecting one of our kids to wake up and start the 30 to 90-minute cycle of trying to get them back to sleep. That waiting is terrible for focus.

In fact, I'm writing this comment in the middle of such cycle.

Had two colic children. 3 months of never more than an hour sleep at a time. Completely fell apart.

We adopted for our 3rd.

On the other hand, humans evolved with this so there's probably some mechanisms that protect us from the potential damage. Or so I'd hope.

So true. Now that they are 3yr and 6yr old. I'm still not sleeping nowhere as before, but it's getting a little bit better.

We work in the sleep efficiency space, so I've thought about this quite a bit.

My thinking, knowing the research around the area, but not having researched this specific case.

1) we are having children later in life. Evolution designed child rearing age to be 16-25. We have pushed that later and later as we've matured as a species, and in Australia (and Canada) from my experience we are now regularly in the 30+ for first children. I know of many mothers who's first child was born when they were 40 or later.

2) Sleep does not return to normal levels until the youngest child on average reaches 6 years old.

3) Our sleep naturally degrades as we age. Particularly in mid-30s. So if you have a child at 33, and you return to "normal sleep" at 39, you are expecting to return to your restful self, but your sleep has declined during that time.

>I honestly do not understand why evolution gave us this harsh treatment.

I think in the past we didn't use to sleep 8 hours straight. Perhaps it was fine, we just changed and forgot to send babies the memo.

I’m 35 and I keep waking up throughout the night. I joke that we’re designed to be awake at the age we get kids.

I think having young kids in the mid-30s is a modern trend though, humans generally had their first kids in the mid 20s or even younger which would be an easier age to live with less sleep (at least from my personal experience).

Actually, in the middle-age at least, lowerclass people would marry and have kids surprisingly late, like in their late 30ies. It was a posh thing to get married early.

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