"My daughter woke up every three hours for a bottle"
I wonder if it's possible to automate night feeding of small children without waking anybody up. Sounds like a good idea for a startup.
I wonder if it's possible to automate night feeding of small children without waking anybody up. Sounds like a good idea for a startup.
When my kid was in this stage I'd stumble in and give him a bottle, but I was always aware that I wouldn't be doing it forever, and someday soon I'd miss holding his little warm body against my chest every night in the darkness. I don't miss the exhaustion, but I do look back warmly on that middle-of-the-night time together.
I'm all for automating and using technology to make difficult situations better, but this is really something where you do want human interaction every time.
Which you won't check if you happen to have a quiet child that doesn't wake up during the night.
To investigate the debate, Dr. Harlow created inanimate surrogate mothers for the rhesus infants from wire and wood.[5] Each infant became attached to its particular mother, recognizing its unique face and preferring it above all others. Harlow next chose to investigate if the infants had a preference for bare wire mothers or cloth covered mothers. For this experiment he presented the infants with a cloth mother and a wire mother under two conditions. In one situation, the wire mother held a bottle with food and the cloth mother held no food, and in the other, the cloth mother held the bottle and the wire mother had nothing.[5]
Overwhelmingly, the infant macaques preferred spending their time clinging to the cloth mother.[5] Even when only the wire mother could provide nourishment, the monkeys visited her only to feed. Harlow concluded that there was much more to the mother/infant relationship than milk and that this “contact comfort” was essential to the psychological development and health of infant monkeys and children. It was this research that gave strong, empirical support to Bowlby’s assertions on the importance of love and mother/child interaction.
Seriously, it's not for disappearing mother from their child's life, just back up during the inconvenient nighttime.
Quiet children miss this in the first place because they don't wake up during the night. And they're fine.
If you have the money to afford automatic feeding you probably have the money to afford an Au Pair or similar to help in the short term.
On the other side, I don't see how you can die from a soft rubber nipple.
"Au Pair" I would actually pay quite some money to avoid interacting with unrelated human beings.