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Comment by JeffRosenberg | Hacker News Reader

This was really interesting, but I admit I bumped on this throwaway detail:

> Our sleep consultant's plan arrived as a PDF full of conditional logic: wake windows, nap caps, what to do when a nap fails

Every so often, you get a glimpse into a whole world you never knew existed.

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> Every so often, you get a glimpse into a whole world you never knew existed.

I had no idea that people did this. This sounds expensive.

Just like other people have no idea that we (Scandinavia) let babies sleep outside in a baby carriage wrapped in a tiny sleeping bag. Fresh air is awesome. Cold air is even better.

This works for some babies and is not universal in any way.

Awesome. How cold?

There is no limit really. The baby is in warm clothes and in a sleeping bag during winter. Less clothes when its warm.

My children slept outside while it was below zero C. The only time they were not sleeping outside was while they were ill.. having a cold or something.

Edit: the limit is -10 C according to https://www.sst.dk/vidensbase/graviditet-og-smaaboern/barnet...

This is well known around here:

https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-21537988

I've been living in scandinavia for several years and I've never seen this happen in person. Just on reddit and now here.

I kinda doubt it's something widespread.

Around here (Northern Jutland, Danmark) this is the norm.

But do doubt away. :)

Please see the official guidelines: https://www.sst.dk/vidensbase/graviditet-og-smaaboern/barnet...

Perhaps just say "here in northern jutland" next time?

No one knows where that is. I've also heard this is very common in the northern Scandinavian countries, there are even little "houses" you can buy.

my friends in Boston do this where their baby. They call it “Nordic baby training” or something like that. They aren’t Scandinavian so the practice has at least some reach

> No one knows where that is.

Why not just say "europe" directly then? Everybody knows about that, and you don't seem concerned with correctness anyway.

I should have provided a google maps link, but I was afraid to. I don't trust the Google map sharing. :)

I will do better next time. :)

This person seems insane. You don’t need to pay a “sleep consultant” to make a plan for your child’s nap times. It’s really not that complicated.

If you want to optimise and have the money to spare, I think it's fine. There are going to be people in the world that are better than you at most given tasks, and if working on those tasks is not fun for you and delegation is not a net negative, why not? It's why personal trainers exist (though I don't like them for separate reasons)

Its clearly a net negative, though, because missing a nap is now causing tremendous anxiety to the point where they'd rather spend a week chatting with Claude to build an app which handles the consequences of missed naps than just spending some time with their infant, maybe reading to them so they fall asleep.

The best comment in the whole discussion yet.

You chat with Claude while the infant is asleep in your arms, not instead of holding the infant.

In Precious Little Sleep the writer says some half of babies sleep well and some half require help. We must have had the former and so there’s no advice to give. If you were in that set it’s possible that your actions changed something or it’s possible it’s just what it is.

Have you raised kids? This is the least shocking expenditure I've heard of; if this had existed when my kids were born I might have shelled out for it.

it's sleep training

it is insane and unnatural but it is also common

fundamentally capitalist concept

contact napping to beyond 1yo is deeply natural and special

Let me share an anecdote from my soviet childhood.

Like most soviet children of the 80s, I was outsourced to my kindergarden each mom's workday.

I abolutely loathed everything about it, but the most fascist thing to my infant mind was the post-afternoon nap.

For the life of me, I just couldn't make myself fall asleep, and had to pretend, making extraordinary efforts to really look like sleeping.

We were literally scanned crib by crib, aisle by aisle by the surveilling nanny to detect sleep pretenders.

Those offenders of Morpheus who were caught red-handed, were routinely ordered to step out in front of the entire dorm, which of course was instantly awake and gleefully staring through eyelashes now, and do 20 humiliating squats.

Needless to say, that resulted in nothing but fierce hatred towards the soviet system, which treated children as future soldiers, and oppresion in general.

So let me disagree with you on day napping being a fundamentally capitalist thing, haha :)

The only difference is that it plants the seeds of hatred towards different entities - either the system or the parents.

it's interesting that the cult of work common to capitalism and communism has no appropriate "ism" by itself

I guess the real thing here is society takes parents away from their children because those parents need to be used for value

I suppose there are babies with some kind of pathology in this area although I'm not convinced that is what this is.

For some it is and some it isn’t. My eldest was always a terrible sleeper.

My partner is a sleep consultant, and most of the time the families she works with are at their wits end and their marriage is hanging by a thread. Having young kids is incredibly hard on people and relationships.

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