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Comment by spicyusername | Hacker News Reader

People are struggling to get by. Overworked, underpaid, lonely.

Parenting is an extremely draining and time-consuming job. Many households can not afford to have a parent stay home to do the full-time job of running the house and overseeing that the children's needs are fulfilled.

I'm not surprised to see shortcuts like this rise in popularity, however reprehensible.

If we want to turn these kinds of trends around in the Western world, we need to start by focusing on fixing our broken culture, and allowing the average parent the time, financial security, and social connections to cultivate a meaningful, fulfilling life. You'll get an increase in children's well-being as a downstream effect for free.

Less focus on work, less financial distress, more social services, more volunteering, more community building, etc.

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My wife is a SAHM and I work from home. We are not overworked nor do I have a time-consuming job. My son struggles from anxiety and sleep loss. We tried in-person therapy, to which he did NOT take and instead had to go the medication route, which to its credit, has changed our son back into the happy-go-lucky kid he once was.

That said, after extensive consultation w/our trusted pediatrician, he still struggled with sleep and thus in addition to the anxiety meds, he's also on sleep inducing medication and takes 10mg of melatonin every night. It's not a shortcut for...reasons; it appears to help him get the rest he needs. We strongly preferred a more traditional route that did not include medication, but when those other avenues failed, we had to do something and trusted our pediatrician to help--which she did.

Sleep deprivation, anxiety, and depression are REAL issues for kids today and there have been numerous studies which have shown this is an ever-increasing, world-wide issue, regardless of available parental support and avoidance of social media and other triggers.

Let's not over simplify this as you appear to be; it's not simple and it's dangerous to think it is.

What do you suspect is the root cause of the anxiety and depression he is experiencing?

No idea; I'm not a doctor/specialist in this area so my opinions are largely irrelevant. I choose to lean on those who are specialists/doctors to give guidance on treatment of the symptoms while other smart people attempt to figure out the root cause.

Wow. You’re granting that complete deference a few centuries too early.

The corpus of medical knowledge available to experts is profoundly more rigorous that two centuries ago but nonetheless remains extremely shallow. Inventing a new culture of health management is an unfathomably large human effort and we’ve barely started.

And on the practical scale, the corpus that exists is informed by population averages not individual responses. When a study determines that a diagnosis or treatment is effective or not, it’s almost never establishing such as a universal truth, but instead informing clinicians as to what may most reliably help some statistical share of their patients.

As all throughout history, and for at least the next few centuries, yielding all care insight to somebody else is deeply irresponsible. You need to include your own curiosity, determination, and judgment if you want to take optimal care of yourself and your family as individuals.

This sounds like a lot of justification for "do your own research," and, in my case, I don't prescribe to that--at all.

Hey, by all means, you go ahead and use whatever tools you have available to you to make determinations about your and your family's well-being, but I'm going to trust the opinions of those who work with and treat these sorts of issues day in and day out for decades and avoid the opinions of those I do not deem to have appropriate credibility.

Sometimes it really is simple though. Anyone that is letting their child have drinks or foods containing caffeine, but then treating them for a sleep disorder with drugs or things like melatonin, is making a big mistake.

Whoa. 10mg is a ton! I take 0.5mg on occasion (maybe once every two months), and it knocks me out immediately, and I'm a 180lb adult male.

It has been posted here before[1] that, 0.3mg of melatonin is the "best" dosage

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17632668

This number is often cited on reddit too. It's only true if you cherry pick studies.

There are countless unemployed, underemployed, and reasonably employed adults who ostensibly have plenty of bandwidth for responsible parenting.

Two parents working four jobs between them is a tragedy of its own, that needs to be addressed, but it’s not the norm by any means. There aren’t even enough jobs for that.

What actually seems to missing for parents is insight into how to find wellness within what they have. Traditions that allowed for finding joy and contentment in modest lives with some discomfort have been supplanted by a fantasy that we should all have all the cool toys and do all the fun travel and never feel sad and that if we’re not receiving that life we should either feel ashamed or take a pill.

People are buying melatonin for their sleepless kids because they take pills for their own sleepless nights, and they have sleepless nights themselves because many of their parents forgot to teach them that it’s important to just chill the fuck out and quietly unwind without a lot of stimulation as evening comes on.

We do need social effort to rectify all this, but it starts with re-teaching people how to find ease and acceptance in their inevitably modest lives, an education that most can start to find by just looking backwards a few generations in their own family. Those lives didn’t embody aristocratic fantasies either, and included plenty of discomfort, but you don’t find the anxiety and chronic misery people feel crushed by now, nor the troubling and incorrect idea that all discomfort must have an easy remedy in the form of a pill or whatever.

> Traditions that allowed for finding joy and contentment in modest lives with some discomfort

Where is the scientific evidence for that claim?

To me it sounds like an un-rovably subjective rosy-tinted assumption of a idealized past, where Daddy always smiles because the depression mainly manifests away from home at the bar.

Much like how every aging generation in history seems to whine that "youth these days" don't have the manners they had when they were young.

> People are struggling to get by. Overworked, underpaid, lonely.

Well, maybe the last one.

I get what you are trying to say, but we still live in better conditions than humanity has for 20,000 years. Like people were literally starving to death, or being beaten to death by their neighbouring tribe.

Lonelyness - perhaps. There definitely seems to be less community now, less support, etc. But is that really the issue?

Would a tribesman 3000 years ago have given melatonin to their children to get them to shut and sleep? Probably. Would they have taken cocaine before battle? Probably. Would the women have taken contraception if it was available? Probably. (I bring up contraception because people seem to complain about not having children because they don't have enough money - yet people were way poorer and had many children for all of history).

Frankly, I think most of these things people are doing now are probably done just because they are available and they make life more comfortable.

But life definitely isn't worse in many many ways than it was before. So just because you're overworked and underpaid isn't a satisfactory explanation.

> I get what you are trying to say, but we still live in better conditions than humanity has for 20,000 years.

That is irrelevant. The situations are completely different.

The U.S. social support structure for the lower and lower middle class doesn't exist. There are many kids whose only meal is the potentially free but terrible meal at school. Many moms have effectively the same if not worse healthcare as a tribeswoman during pregnancy due to lack of insurance and affordable access to healthcare and reduced social support.

Times are very rough for a lot of people out there. Your comment is frankly flippant and removed from reality.

What are you on about? Do you know how many women died in childbirth for the last 20,000 years?

They don’t have the same healthcare as tribeswomen during pregnancy, they have multiple times better chances of surviving.

You’re delusional. I know life is hard, but it’s just not as hard as anyone has had it before the 1800s.

Not having social security is not the hardest humanity has had it. Get real

If I am a to-be parent working 2 jobs and can barely afford food and shelter and the first time I see a doctor when pregnant is at the emergency room when delivering and the only paternity leave I get is some paltry wage from the state, in what universe does it matter that some women died of childbirth in the past 20,000 years? Like I said, it doesn't.

The difference of availability of support between the lower class and even the upper middle class is staggering and probably the widest it ever has been in human history. That's the point. Take a look at child mortality rates. They are much higher for the lower class and are part of the reason why the U.S.' rate is so low compared to other countries.

If you're comparing the suffering of the lower and middle classes to any other time in the past 20,000 years, do you not understand how little that makes sense? Of course it's better if you set the bar so low. And again like I said, you really can't compare. The mental and emotional stress that people experience today is of a different nature that hasn't existed before.

> Not having social security is not the hardest humanity has had it. Get real

No one said that. And both the question and answer are immaterial to the discussion.

> If you're comparing the suffering of the lower and middle classes to any other time in the past 20,000 years, do you not understand how little that makes sense?

My point went completely over your head. That's why it doesn't make sense to you. The only lense you can see the world through is classes and oppression and inequality.

There are a few other ways to look at the world.

I think calling this reprehensible is a bit over judgemental. Melatonin is pretty safe.

For example, there's melatonin in both human and cow milk (more in evening milk, because infants don't have a day night cycle yet, and giving rise to the belief that smells like an urban legend that the old timey advice to drink warm milk if you can't sleep originally came from drinking night time milk fresh from the cow for the melatonin).

Also, you know what causes us to make less melatonin? Light. Blue light especially. Is it equally reprehensible to allow children to exist in houses with led light bulbs, which affects their bodies just as much as a pill?

It seems likely to me that the addition of a small amount of melatonin to replace that lost due to nighttime lights is a reasonable parenting decision. Of course there's uncertainty, but there's uncertainty about everything, can we please stop freaking out as much as we do, as easily as we do?

No, the vast majority of parents are and always have been lazy and willing to take the quickest shortcut to avoid the hard work of parenting.

Ipads for children took off because it lets parents avoid parenting for hours a day. Melatonin took off because it lets parents avoid enforcing bedtime and sleep hygeine.

It's not about stress, most people are just lazy af and this is a quick fix. That's human nature.

(And to be clear I'm not saying it's some novel cultural failing. If iPads had been available in the 1400 toddlers would have had screen addiction in the 1400s. We're setting parents up to fail by giving them "solutions" and then expecting them to exert superhuman willpower to avoid using them as a crutch. But it's dumb to pretend that this is because parents are more overworked now than throughout history.)

Reprehensible? Wow, that's a strong statement. I give my kids melatonin. Do I know for sure it doesn't harm them? No. But when I take into account the fact that most kids eat a ton more sugar than my kids, I see other kids their ages drinking caffeinated drinks, not eating vegetables, etc, I think I am way ahead. And sleep is insanely important for brain development. My kids get a ton of exercise, they eat well, but going to bed at night has been a problem for them. They have an insane amount of energy, but when they don't sleep well it affects everything they do.

Is it the easy solution? Yes. Does it work? Also yes. Do I worry about it? Absolutely, and I am open to suggestions for alternatives. Is it reprehensible? Not according to any doctor I have talked to, and maybe there are others like you up on your high horse, but none has said that to me before. But yes, let's fix all of society so I don't have to give my kids melatonin anymore. Great idea.

[ADDING MORE] My kids don't have ipads or phones. We limit their screen time much more than most. My guess is you don't have kids, or else you would realize that there is no perfect way to raise them, and you stop judging others for doing so the best way they can.

> Parenting is an extremely draining and time-consuming job.

People (on HN) keep insisting that I voluntarily start doing this extremely draining and time-consuming job for some reason.

The warm hug my daughter greets me with in the morning, the giggles of my kids playing together in the afternoon, or the beaming smiles they wear as I toss them into piles of pillows at night are just the beginning. There are new stressful things to learn and deal with, but there are also unique moments you get to have. Having kids is by no means the only way to find joy in life, it can be one of many.

if you're not working or building something for the future then you're just living to get by. in that case, why chase a better paying job? why do anything?

the future belongs to kids, and their kids. if you're not having kids then you're tacitly agreeing to the future that they'll be creating.

And if you don’t believe in the Bible then you’re probably a murder and arsonist. Why try to be a good person except due to outside controls?

This is a very generalized statement. I think you’re feeling down and projecting those feelings into all of society.

Projecting the feeling of not having enough money or social safety net? That’s got to describe the vast majority of parents.

> fixing our broken culture and allowing the average parent the time, financial security, and social connections to cultivate a meaningful, fulfilling life

why focus on parents? People who became parents have supposedly already reached a baseline of stability and security (otherwise they wouldn't have the resources to have children). There are plenty others who are struggling without a partner (or children).

>People who became parents have supposedly already reached a baseline of stability and security (otherwise they wouldn't have the resources to have children).

"Supposedly" is doing an awful lot of heavy lifting in that sentence, as is your parenthetical note.

And we're focusing on parents because this article is about melatonin use in children.

This appears to be the whole point. The think tanks agreed half a century ago that humanity poses the greatest threat to itself, and that the best way to save humanity is to drastically limit reproduction. The simplest way to do this is to make it unaffordable.

https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/

Unfortunately, this disproportionately discourages the most responsible people, with the best long term planning, from reproducing.

(At least, among those who are financially struggling. You could also argue that those who can't get out of poverty don't deserve to reproduce (and many in those think tanks appear to share similar views), but (1) that's reprehensible and (2) it doesn't work anyway since there's always a subset that just doesn't care and reproduces anyway.)

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