Hacker News Reader

Comment by RobinL | Hacker News Reader

Here's a decent article summarising the state of th evidence evidence. (I'm not making any claims about what the evidence says, I just found it interesting) https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20220322-how-sleep-traini...

View on HN

> Results One hundred eight intervention and 107 control families provided six-week follow-up information with complete actigraphy data for 96 in each group: 96.9 % of intervention and 97.9 % of control infants had an average of 2 or more nightly wakes, a risk difference of −0.2 % (95 % CI: −1.32, 0.91). 4 % of intervention and 14 % of control infants had parent-assessed severe sleep problems: relative risk 0.3, a risk difference of −10 % (CI: 0.11, 0.84-16.8 to −2.2). Relative to controls, intervention parents reported improved baseline-adjusted parental depression (CI: −3.7 to −0.4), fatigue (CI: −5.74 to −1.68), sleep quality (CI: −1.5 to −0.2), and sleep cognitions: doubts (CI: −2.0 to −0.6), feeding (CI: − 2.1 to - 0.7), anger (CI: − 1.8 to - 0.4) and setting limits (CI: −3.5 to −1.5).

> Conclusions The intervention improved caregivers' assessments of infant sleep problem severity and parental depression, fatigue, sleep, and sleep cognitions compared with controls.

This is largely true for myself - sleep training is for the parents to get some semblance of their lives back.

The first 3 months of my daughter's life - i'd never been more tired in my life.

So it's a selfish choice that doesn't necessarily take into account the child's wellbeing. I don't know your religious/cultural motivations but maybe don't do something that makes you miserable and severely disrupts your life?

See the co-sleeping debate is never ending and highly dependant on family genetics but the statistics referenced above are related to the parents' perception and well-being and not the cognitive development and well-being of the infants themselves.

Parental well-being is important too, especially if increased risk of depression leads to a parent having suicidal thoughts. Having depressed or fewer parents raising the child is not a guaranteed improvement

Ah yes so parents should be more likely to be depressed, become unfit, lose motivation for life because they need to 100% be with their baby at all times. You are aware how that's not a viable long term solution right?

No government forces you to have kids. If you’re up to the task then do it perfectly and enjoy while doing it; if not don’t bring misery upon yourself, your baby and potentially the society by raising a kid without catering to their emotional needs because you’re too busy.

However my views are based on the economic/societal/parental expectations in (progressive) North America and it’s certainly different elsewhere.

Edit: Added specificity

It's okay. I was like you. Once you have kids the position and understanding shifts to be more compassionate towards other parents and their situation.

Yeah I read that last time there was a big thread about this on HN. It’s all pretty inconclusive. My clearest takeaways from that were that doing sleep training too early is not recommended, and that there was no observed long term difference in kids either way. And that we shouldn’t judge folk who need or want to try such things because they’re working parents, depressed, or have other family problems caused by lack of sleep.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com