Great if it works for you, but for those who are dealing with babies, I wouldn't beat myself up if this advice doesn't apply. The parenting advice world is chock full of people who found something that worked for them and who then made the unwarranted conclusion that it is universal truth. For example, their techniques that "always work" definitely do not always work. Maybe they always worked for their particular babies, but I have been in situations with my kids where neither shushing and patting nor holding and walking worked to stop crying.
My general feeling is that you can drive yourself nuts trying to figure out why your baby is crying, and, as the blog author mentioned in his conclusion, you may still be unable to figure it out. IMO this is a great time of one's life to discard the illusion of control.
Every child is a whole new world, a whole new potential, and a whole new problem.
1. My first child couldn't be calmed easily, although I found a song that somehow worked. [0]
2. Second child could be soothed by slowly rubbing from his temple down past his eye to his cheek.
3. Third child hated that, but loved having her forehead rubbed slowly in a horizontal manner.
4. Fourth child just wanted a firm pressure on the top of his head (e.g., a palm, he'd also burrow up into your armpit for comfort sometimes, which was awkward when I hadn't showered that day)
5. Fifth child didn't need any of the above, just lots of hugs and kisses at bed time. Bless her.
The only generally applicable rules I found are:
* Sleeping on your chest when young where they can hear your heartbeart (I found it works best with Dad when breastfeeding, as the smell of Mom's milk tended to stir them up for a feed, even if they're struggling with wind and not able to feed) can be very calming. Ideally done skin to skin.
* Slow rocking while making a continuous "sssshhh" noise often helped - the fact I'd become a human white noise generator amused me.
* Patiently, calmly, love them. It's most important to do this when it's hardest to love them. Knowing that they can be total assholes and you'll still love them is what grows secure kids.
* Ask for help when you're struggling! A lot of your friends and family are probably desperate to help you, but they don't want to appear condescending, or to intrude. So give them permission, explicitly invite them to help, and your sanity will return, which will make you a much better parent for baby.
That's it. That's all my parenting advice after five babies.
Yeah, I always find it funny when someone who has themselves only been a parent for 3 months feels they can now dispense sage advice. Sorta like someone going through bootcamp giving advice about programming.
We thought we were terrible no good parents with our first child, who is a little bit more on the sensitive and emotional side, with quite a bit of anxiety also.
None of the advice from anyone worked, friends, family, parents, siblings, internet.
Still not the easiest child at 5, but easier.
Second child arrived, mentally prepared for the same challenges… and what a textbook kid, three years on.
Super chill, knocked all the milestones out of the park, easy to console, cheerful, little peacemaker, apple of big brother’s eye, makes us look like amazing parents.
I don’t give anyone any advice now other than … it can be hard, love your child, and spend a lot of time with them.
It’s amazing how much pressure first time parents can put on themselves. The number of expectations is insane and impossible, and makes an already stressful situation worse.
Our first was difficult as well and advice never really applied. As a baby heavy metal actually worked well, which horrified my mother - but it’s all about finding something that works to calm them.
Great closing sentiment, so I’ll paraphrase: it will be hard to love your child sometimes. Love them always, keep them safe, treat them well, and show them the beauty in the world. What seems hard will get easier.
I give one piece of advice, heavily caveated, that running a vacuum cleaner helped calm my newborns when we brought them home from the hospital (advice from nurses line when our oldest was inconsolable at 4 days old). I then follow up that everyone parent is going to have advice that worked for them and their baby, and it can be tiring to hear but typically comes from a place of love. The parent-to-be will figure out what works for them. Reach out for help, they aren't alone, and so on.
The best time to give advice about the first 3 months is when your kids are 3 months old. After that, the kids change and parenting changes too and you're likely to forget what worked at age 3 months. Someone with 10 year old kids has probably forgotten a lot of what they figured out when the kids were babies.
You may also still be too close to it to realize some things you will later figure out with introspection/hindsight/some things not being apparent as having been a good or bad idea until a later age. And if it's your first kids you are also likely to overgeneralize what worked for your kids to a generic advice that works for everyone.
10/12 years in and sometimes I still feel like I have no idea what I'm doing. One thing I know is that what works for one of my children probably doesn't work for the others let alone for other people's children.
It's like someone going through bootcamp giving advice (actually just describing their experience) about the first months of bootcamp - a perfectly sensible thing to do.
My childhood heavily featured Dominion Road as my grandparents lived nearby so I had to recheck I opened the right link when I saw that song appear.
Now I'm wondering why 20 years ago I thought the music video for that song featured a cameo of the black panther statue that to me represents that road...
Meh. Advice I got from other parents or on parenting forums were those actually most likely to work.
What does not work is advice from "parenting experts" or doctor talking about non medicine etc. And of course advice people trade on forums non parenting forums (like HN) - too much of it is from people who don't interact with kids actually.
If say don't ignore other parents advice, except the one I'm replying to. ;-)
I think it's reasonable to survey a dozen parents to get a bunch of different opinions and recommendations of what worked for others, so you have enough things to try if you got a situation, and don't just panic.
There are definitely a lot of families with sleep problems that could be solved if they read "Solve your child's sleep problem" by Richard Ferber (not just the famous two pages about baby sleep training). Many parents I talk to spend years dealing badly with sleep problems.
Not ignore, that's the other extreme. Take it with a grain of salt instead of as a bible. Experiment in a non-harmful way. Try things out, see what works. Every child is different, even from same gene pool.
> For example, their techniques that "always work" definitely do not always work.
Among parenting social media influencers, this is a gamble for building rapport among an audience:
Make some extreme claim that may or may not work for some portion of people who hear it. People who hear it, try it, and find that it works will vividly remember the influencer as being correct. People who try it with no results will quickly forget it about it.
Repeat across several claims and eventually some percentage of them will be correct for the audience.
Often the followers seem to self select. If someone’s advice was crap/didn’t work for you at all, you stop paying attention to them - if it worked you might think they’re a genius
Here's one that always worked for me from about 6mo to 18mo: If she was crying and I played Hamilton on my phone, she'd immediately stop crying. Then I'd figure out that had been wrong and solve the actual problem for her.
This was a 100% thing, it felt like magic, but of course I'm not gonna dole it out as even remotely likely to work with another baby.
For my oldest child, it was Dominion Road by the Muttonbirds[0], that calmed him, and only that. It was sheer luck I found that out.
But, after having more children than you could fit in a regular car, I've realised that each child is an entire bag of quirks that don't apply to others.
My daughter had 3 different cries that I learned when I was left alone with her for 1 week when she was 3 weeks old.
Hungry. Wet. Tired. When I learned these she was easy to take care of.
The night terrors tho. That phase is soooo hard. 3 weeks walking up in the middle of the night screaming for no reason. Hours to get her back to sleep. Then just stops…
Our 10 month old son is still waking up every 1-2 hours at night screaming at the top of his lungs, for absolutely no reason at all. Not hungry, no wet nappy, sometimes hugging and talking/singing helps, sometimes it doesn't. Me and my wife are just 100% exhausted and I can't wait for this to end - but at 6 month mark everyone was telling us "oh this will only last another few weeks, don't worry" - it's 4 months later and he still does it. I'm losing hope slowly.
Unsure if it's night terrors. We went through it twice. Both times lasted 3-4 weeks.
Daughter would go to bed, fall asleep, all happy, full belly etc. At around 2am, wake up screaming at the top of her lungs. I would pick her up and hold her and pace back and forth for about 2 hours while she sobbed. If my wife tried to touch her the crying would go back up full blast.
After the 4th night on the first time I just threw her over my sholder and hummed to her until she fell asleep, then wife got her blanket and pillow and put it in our bed between us and i would slowly move to the bed, gently put her down trying not to wake her (she woke easy a few times doing this) and then that was usually it for the rest of the night.
1st time was at about 20 months, second time at about 28 months. Bar none the WORST experience we've had so far.
In terms of sleeping through the night, she took ~18 months before not waking for milk in the middle of the night. In the early days I had her crib next to my bed and if she began to stir I would instantly wake, make a bottle. (we did formula for the whole thing, kept a flask of warm water and pre-measured milk powder next to the bed). Change her nappy, feed her, and put her back to sleep. I would be awake for 10 minutes and back to sleep.
I consider myself very lucky in this regard because I've heard horror stories.
Edit: Oh, the other thing with the night terrors, one thing the internet told us to do was get a night light. And don't turn the room light on when they wake. Makes getting back to sleep much harder.
Hang in there mate -- I would suggest just making your peace with it, and not getting your hopes up in expectation of a fix coming in at a particular milestone/age/time. Hope is just bad for your mental health at this stage.
I went through the same thing with my now-13-month-old son. Literally every single month N someone would tell us, "Oh don't worry, this will go away once he turns N+1 months old." AND IT NEVER DID.
Until about a month or so back, that is. Just completely randomly -- I don't think we did anything different to the usual routine, he just started sleeping big 7-9 hours stretches as night with one brief screamy wakeup, and sometimes even 10-11 hours.
Up until then we'd attempted everything -- sleep training, white noise, blackout blinds, rocking, not rocking, singing, calming music, EVERYTHING -- and at some point just decided if he's going to sleep terribly and scream anyway, there wasn't much point beating ourselves up over it and just made our peace with it, and stuck to the same routine that seemed to get the best (VERY RELATIVELY SPEAKING) results.
Babies cry because they're new to the world. They have not yet grown the moderating influence of context provided by experience. Every baby is unique, with a different emotional balance.
A big chunk of parenting is figuring your kids out, and balancing that with the set of experiences they need to have in order to grow. Many of those experiences are painful, which means you also need to figure out the balance of "let them cry" and "comfort them", which also changes drastically over time.
That's where having both parents really matters, as the tension between them is essential in finding that balance.
yup.my son slept through at 6 weeks, but refused to sleep at all during the day. My daughter slept happily during the day and didn't start to even attempt to sleep through the night till after week 9... never consistently sill after week 12
This. My wife went half crazy from sleep deprivation when our baby was about 1 month. One time both she and our daughter fell asleep after late night feeding. I went to make a sandwich, and when I came back my wife was crying in bed trying to wake the sleeping baby because she thoght she had been sleeping for 5 hours but in reality it was more like 20 minutes. She was desperate because the baby wouldn't wake up and eat.
After that we realized that we were heading in a dangerous direction. We started the baby on formula instead of breast milk (at the time there was a somewhat agressive push from the baby doctors to keep breast feeding as long as possible).
This meant we could share feeding duties. When she was comfortable with formula we actually left our (about 2 month old at that point) with my parents for 1 night a week so we could both sleep.
Grandparent help would have been far more common in the past due to shared living arrangements. Makes you think it might be harder today when coupled with both parents working.
I agree, but this also in opposition to the prevailing (maybe cultural) drive for everyone to live their own life. Most people I know wouldn't want to live with their parents or their inlaws. Most parents don't want their grown up kids around.
So we build kindergardens and other social services to help with that. And underfunded schools somehow gets stuck with actually making functioning adults out of kids. In Sweden, where I live, stay-at-home parents don't get a full share of the pension funds so the system discurages staying at home with kids. So much for the vote-yourself-rich democrazy.
It's a mess. It should be noted though: The small family unit came first, with industrialization. The social network is there to support the industry, not the family.
A few years ago here in Argentina the advice from many/most doctors/nurses was to wake up the children and breast feed her/him every 3 hours, even if the kid was sleeping. It was insane, because the mother could not do anything and barely sleep. Not every doctor agreed with that, and I'm not sure if they changed it.
And there is also a lot of peer pressure. Other women put a funny face when someone discuss not 100% breast feeding.
My wife tried breastfeeding, it was too much for her and wasn't really working how much she tried.
We had all the pumps, techniques, just wasn't worth the stress.
The important thing is your child is being fed.
There have been multiple cases where infants have starved to death after being born because the mothers were convinced only to give breast milk, and couldn't produce enough.
We switched from 50% formula/breast milk to strictly formula.
If u aren't giving breast, there's additional vitamins you need to give aswell
Do what works best... In many cases it's not breast milk for everyone's health and sanity.
When we switched to ready made Enfamil, that was such a lifesaver for me and my wife
I always figured a baby could just have a headache or other painful/uncomfortable issues that show no symptoms and you've just got to accept that you can't always determine what they need to stop crying. I think it helps me have more sympathy and patience for them when I look at it that way.
You're absolutely right. Nevertheless it helps to have a finite list of priorities: If it's not cold,heat,hunger, discomfort,illness,tiredness (in no particular order) it's good to know that you didn't forget anything important and your baby is crying for no reason you are responsible for.
Btw. What the author calls "wicked hour" we used to call "brain pain" - like aching muscles after training, just with the developing brain. One kid wouldn't calm down after being held very tightly for minutes in a dark room and having a screaming tantrum. Once this was over, she was absolutely peaceful again. Other kid didn't need to scream to cope with the day, but had difficulties at the same time of day.
Babies only have a single mechanism of communication and it takes a while to debug it.
Imagine you had a computer that would crash every time something went wrong. You would develop a checklist for that computer to help with debugging it. That’s the exact same thing with kids.
>IMO this is a great time of one's life to discard the illusion of control.
Became a first-time parent back in 2020, and couldn't agree more.
The trend of slowly increasing personal freedom/control suddenly stops, and your freedom is reverted back to near-zero. As in, you will become completely dependent on your spouse and cannot even piss or shit alone when bubs is awake.
The best thing to do is just acknowledge that this is life now (and more than that, the type of life that human beings have evolved to live in), and the past few years of unrestrained personal freedom were a dream that you needed to wake up from.
Especially since the author has twins, and it's really easy to think you have two independent samples when you really have two very similar ones (in both genetics and shared environment)
> The […] world is chock full of people who found something that worked for them and who then made the unwarranted conclusion that it is universal truth.
If being a parent taught me anything, it's to trust my instincts - go with your gut, as the parent(s) you understand your baby better than any other parents, friends or healthcare workers.
It's a long story, but we could have saved our family a lot of grief if we knew that from the start - but of course, as first time parents it's not easy to trust your guy.
Very true, I was going to make a similar statement but you said it perfectly. Infants do follow some common patterns, but what works for YOUR infant might be completely different that what you’ve read, been told, or even experienced with prior children. I don’t think there is any shame in doing what works as long as it is safe.
Of kids I've always thought "maybe one day". I can see how it'd be a tough, but extremely rewarding and meaningful endeavor.
But reading this article made me think for the first time "actually, I think I don't want kids."
So many "mental CPU cycles" spent learning about pregnancy, babies, why they cry, how to care for them. It just doesn't appeal to me at all - I think it'd resent it taking me away from spending time on the topics that legitimately interest me - stuff like space, technology, fiction, stocks, politics, philosophy, hobbies. (I realize how much this comes off as a young white tech nerd... But that's exactly what I am!)
And all this just of the knowledge gathering. We haven't even touched on the truly hard part - executing it!
I guess this article made raising a kid real in a way that none other have before. Took the high ideal of "raising a family" and shined light on all the tough, hard realities.
Of course this is all from my current perspective. I'm sure it all totally changes in ways I just can't conceive when it's your own kid.
Open to any insights from others who may have been here before!
Your opinion may shift naturally. I’ve started noticing as I get older that, despite my career, social life, finances etc being better than some close friends with kids - they are much happier. Even the people who’ve struggled financially because of it. The joy of a child, the constant challenge of raising it, and the constant change as it grows, seem to provide much more happiness than I can get from doing the “new cool thing” in the city or travelling or anything else. It also depends how early you are in your career but most people end up doing relatively meaningless work and having a kid will provide incredible meaning to your life comparatively. Finally, if you choose not to have kids your limiting your pool of potential partners and for most people being single forever is lonely.
This doesn’t apply to everyone. There are exceptions. And maybe I’m wrong and my opinion will shift again as I age further but I think as you see peers have children and the meaning it brings to their lives your opinion will change.
This is such a cliche that it almost meaningless but the JOY of a child is just insane. To have some around who is almost always happy to see you (and super pissed when you go away), initially at least, is just wonderful to be around.
To me at least parenting is one of the most complete human experiences. It's joyous and terrifying, exciting and mundane, just all of the things at once.
It's not for everyone sure but one thing I would say is that it's much easier to describe how hard it is, than it is to describe how amazing it is.
Everyone understand that having to wipe someone else's ass for years isn't fun (tho it's not actually that bad) but it's difficult to put into words just how much joy there is.
I agree and think there’s definitely some receptor or activation in the brain for happiness or cuteness that happens that wasn’t available before having children. We had cats when our first daughter was born and coming home from the hospital it’s like what was previously a 10 in cuteness (our cats) became like a 7 and our kids cuteness level was an 11. It was bizarre and amazing and immediately noticeable to me and my wife. It really felt like a new part of my brain function unlocked.
Also, first kid was a breeze to take care of and we weren’t sleepy because we coslept. If you don’t drink or do drugs (which is what causes kids to get smothered) I highly recommend. Mom was amazed baby would sleep through the night and not fuss or ask for milk, and I said “honey she made noise several times you’d just roll over naturally and pop a boob in her mouth”. Our second one is physically disabled in some pretty profound ways (which I’ve talked about at length in other comments on HN so won’t go into here) so she’s way more of a pain, but I highly recommend cosleeping to anyone who will listen (which honestly isn’t most people).
I didn’t keep her on my side of the bed because we noticed I slept much more deeply than my wife did. However, my wife was still waking up well rested despite being relatively alert with the infant, breast feeding ad libitum. I’ve heard that this is a problem with women who have to go back to work though as the bottle feeding and such preps the child for day care. Our daughter got the majority of her calories from breast milk the first year and we were fortunate to have the luxury of being a single income family. Obviously this would be much more complicated with a two income earner situation.
I wouldn't say it's impossible to understand. Imagine having a dog or other pet that you love ridiculously. Then one day the pet starts talking, reading, doing math homework instead of chewing your shoes as often.
I agree it's a hard comparison, but in my mind it's a difference of degree rather than class. Familial love is an awesome thing. It's lack in a person's life, when desired, can be heart breaking.
Just to follow up on this a little, I want to give an example:
When my kid started trying to stand up, they were SO excited about it. I mean they would try and stand up, stand for about 2 secs, be wildly excited, fall over and go through the whole thing again. That sort of joy and happiness is just infectious and so much fun to be around.
My wife and I laughed to the point of crying the other day at our kindergarten aged daughter’s absolute stubborn insistence that we read her “letter” from school, and that we should text her teacher to ask her what it said, and her insistence that it was her teacher that had written it, when it literally was just the letters “sm sm sm” and “oa oa oa” obviously in a child’s handwriting over and over again. It turned into this weird exercise in absurdist humor (she wasn’t upset about it or anything, it was all in good fun).
I also had the most fun in a game of Sorry ever yesterday with my wife and two girls. Hearing your three year old make a smarmy “sorry” voice and laughing as she knocks her sister back to the start is comedy gold.
Totally agree. I think the shift came for me cause of feeling lonely and wanting someone to be happy when I open a door. A dog or something. At some point I realized, having a relationship with a woman can truly be deep and a kid is a kings crown. This is called growing up I think :)
Conversely, people can have kids for the most selfish reasons:
- Keep trying until they have a male (I have a friend with 5 girls so far).
- Trying to "strengthen" a troubled relationship.
- Planning to use them as a pension.
- Vicariously living the things they couldn't achieve themselves.
- and a long, long etc.
Even if almost anyone can reproduce, raising kids is not for everyone.
As I sit here watching my 2 year old try and figure out what the hell a helium balloon is and why does it float when everything else falls, it is quite fun and enjoyable. They surprise you and they give a lot of affection and love back.
It is true that you will miss out on "me time" for several years, but that changes eventually. It is not hard work, just relentless at times.
For me, I don't think I would ever have been "ready" until it would be too late. The longer you leave things, the less time you have to sort it out. People assume that fertility issues only happen to other people, but there is a surprisingly high number - something like 25% of couples face issues conceiving one way or another. If you don't even start until late 30s or early 40s, you are at the tail-end of fertility (especially for females as there is a finite number of eggs). Sure there is IVF etc but it is not an emotionally simple process.
This is true especially if you want to watch your child develop into adult AND have grandparents alive AND not to have huge generation gap between you.
Yes. I love my own father, but being the youngest of parents who started late (by their time's standards!) there's just such a generation gap. He grew up during WW2 in an occupied country, and in the fifties. He is - and always was - mystified by the popularity of most books, films, let alone things like computer games, despite having used computers since the fifties and having been a CS lecturer for his entire working life.
I think I have a better understanding of the world my own son grows up in. Not just in the big, generational sense, but in practical ways like remembering a lot about schools, curriculums etc. that is still relevant.
For most of history having children wasn't much of a choice. It just happened and you dealt with it. Now we have the opportunity to think about it and choose.
Having kids almost never makes sense though. You are never "ready". If you think about it much, you're much less likely to choose to do it.
(Context: Am dad. Love kids. Find parenting super tough. No regrets.)
How's this for a rule of thumb: if you can be happy without having kids, don't have kids. They're very hard work, expensive, and often bad for your mental health. But, if like a lot of people you know you will always be sad if you don't have kids, have as few as you need to scratch the itch.
I might go the other way: if you can’t be happy without kids, maybe don’t have them. I love my kids, but they’re not some magical antidote to sadness or malaise and trying to raise them while you have underlying issues of your own is likely to be brutal. (Naturally, if you’re “happy except want kids”, this doesn’t apply.)
I’m glad I took the time to find out what I wanted to be before that was just “a good dad”. I feel fortunate that I found that out, met my wife, and we were able to have healthy kids at the tail end of our 30s.
In my view, it's a kind of mental paradigm shift. Before you have your own kids, they're an abstraction. Afterwards, they're people, and in fact they're your family.
I love my own kids, but I'm not sure I love kids. I don't choose to hang out in places where there are lots of kids. Nobody goes to a children's music recital or sports game unless their own kids are involved.
For many, that shift is not a hard edged step function. For instance if people grow up in large, tight knit families, then they've experienced kids and the relationship with family, before having their own. They may have participated in raising little kids. So they might not have fully experienced the paradigm shift, but have learned from cultural immersion that the shift is usually manageable and desirable.
Another paradigm shift is that before having kids, it's hard to judge whether articles like TFA are insightful, or twaddle. After having kids, you quickly learn that all parenting articles are twaddle. ;-)
What the other folks on this thread have said about the magic of kids is absolutely right. I’ll add a few things, when you have young kids (especially more than one for the first 5 years or so) it is difficult to have hobbies (and be a good partner/dad) because the kids can be all consuming. This transition can be hard. But, I have never grown so much as a person, or found so much meaning and joy from anything else I have ever done in my life.
> I think it'd resent it taking me away from spending time on the topics that legitimately interest me
oh, this one is kinda easy to prepare for: just forget about having time for this at all in the first couple of months. First 3 months you're not doing anything but caring for the baby, deal with that. Well, ok, you may have time to watch youtube or other videos while feeding or so.
Around 1 year old, the kid can become real fun though.
It’s not really that bad for every baby. I have a 4 month old, and I’ve managed to get a few chapters of a technical book I’m writing and illustrating done during the last month on paternity leave.
After a month or so he started mostly sleeping at night with 2 or 3 feedings needed. Then during the day he started napping for 1-2 hour stretches.
Concieved first kid at 43. Kid is now 14 months and I am 44.
Sometimes I do feel I should’ve shaved off a year or two, just because of general energy level and wanting to have a long life with my child.
With that said, I am also glad I waited. Besides above, it’s the right time in my life for me. I actually never thought it would happen, but as I got older A feeling slowly crept up on me.
Dying without leaving anything important behind. What is life, if not to pass it on.
You may be weird. That’s ok. Live that life. You may not be weird. Ok too. But you will become weirder by choosing not to have children. Don’t take my word for it.
The people you know over 40-45, are there more with than without children? Those without, do they seem a bit off the beaten path? Not implying they can’t be happy, I’m not correlating.
Having a kid is hard. Stupid hard. Lot’s of responsibility and you can wave bye-bye to oh so many things you are used to. But by some magic, even after hours of crying, being fussy and the biggest pain in the ass, a little laugh and a 5 second smile can erase all the days hardships.
This is HN, so lots of logic, rationality and reasoning. But with i child, magic does exist.
Leave the world alone as you entered it, and everything you accumulated through life will be lost… like tears in rain.
The flip side though is that you are likely to feel more pressure to accumulate enough wealth in order to leave something behind for your children. Personally I have to shake off this instinct that I should take the more stable career choice rather than the interesting one.
That’s probably both a cultural (especially if you are from the US - which I am not) and personal “issue”. I actually do feel like that sometimes though. Not in the sense that I need to leave a big inheritance. Just make enought o help my kids out when they need it, as my parents helped me.
But in the end, the only thing you need to leave behind, is love. That’s the pressure I think one should feel. No child needed money more than a loving parent who was attentive and a caring presence. Sure, if you can be that and leave some $$ after you pass, good on you. But money comes at a price, and only lottery winners get that ride for free.
You may think of it as a cognitive CPU cycle now, but when you’re actually a parent that’s not the experience at all. A lot of it just falls back on instinct right away, you use skills you didn’t even know you had, and before being put into that experience it probably seems like a steep learning curve, but the actual experience of living through it is different.
Trying to expain the joy of children is like recommending to read a book about the joy of swimming. You simply have to make the experience to understand.
For long periods of my life I felt detached from the world and from myself. With our two children I feel a deep and satisfying attachment unlike any other feeling. Reading a lot about puppies in the comments. Would sacrifice our beloved cat without blinking for our children if it were neccessary. Sorry Merlin, you are not only not in the same league, you are not in the same universe.
The whole thing about loosing your freedom when having kids is taking it the wrong way. Your life is not about your ego any more, not about your comforts, your desires. Its about your child. You become the path and the foundation. There is something deeply satisfying being there for them.
It's not actually that hard. It's time consuming and it can be all consuming if you let it. Or you can start cutting things out of your life that don't really matter. Having kids showed me how much of my life I was wasting.
I’m not a “kid” person, basically never held a baby before we had our first this August.
As the child bearing person in this equation, I also did the most research on pregnancy, birth, subsequent baby stuff. (My partner did do some reading too, but not the same extent of feeling like he needed to figure it all out.)
One thing that’s interesting is that in many ways, even the pair of us who knew nothing about babies have pretty good instincts for what they need. We got some help from a post partum doula to show us baby care, since we figured you can’t learn all that from reading.
We did read some books. I tried to stay away from articles because they are incentivized to act like there’s conflict or “new” stuff to talk about to keep engaging readers. The most useful resource has been a private Reddit forum of other people who had babies the same month, so we can compare what’s worked for lots of people, what popular info seems totally wrong to lots of us, etc.
Kids aren’t easy, but they are not hard the same way our knowledge-worker jobs are to learn.
I was on an eight year run at Burning Man. Have the cool cat, sold a SaaS I built, could do and just about did anything.
Had our first born this past June, I see now how much more there can be.
I still do much of what I did before (BRC excepted). But there’s more gravity to my existence.
PG has an essay that describes having kids that you should read. It may not make an impact but perhaps it will join the chorus of replies here.
I’d say stay open to the possibility. Yes, you learn a lot. But if you enjoy knowledge, skill building and life experiences, having a kid is just as fascinating as any of that other stuff.
HN people are overachievers... So invariably your approach to child rearing is going to be reading a lot and being informed. It's helpful to do so to know what's coming. But in reality you don't need to. A lot of learning will be on the job.
Yes, your free time disappears completely. But there is an upside. Watching a human being grow and learn is fascinating. Plus that human is a part of you in a sense. That is also beautiful and hard to describe in words.
I dunno man, it was all pretty natural for me. My first wife, not so much. Her only real solution was to stuff a boob in my oldests mouth. My 2nd wife, with my youngest is also a natural, and my youngest was pretty easy. Until he wesponized the high chair to do things like get into the chocolate (was hilarious when he got a block of unsweetened baking chocolate).
People change and you may evolve your views. I know I have, esp when facing my own mortality. Turning back the time not possible, which makes such decisions very consequential.
Nothing gets easier as you get older, kids or not. You just get better.
This is true for entrepreneurship, and kids.
Kids are the closest thing to experiencing actual magic.
It’s the most stupefying technology you get to witness every day. Everything I write here won’t explain this but I’ll try anyways.
Late nights, pushing, juggling, constantly learning is something entrepreneurs do and transfers well.. but maybe not as common as it should be. Learning how to learn is a highly transferable skill.
There’s also not knowing what you don’t know until you get into it.
I’m a first time dad to twins. It was like waking up a part of myself when I didn’t know I was asleep. It’s hard to wake up someone who doesn’t know they’re asleep.
There are some interesting biological changes that open up in your brain, energy and other things after having kids, not just for the mother but the partner too. Fun research and reading for your interests, but it literally activates more of your brain. I see a new world of more opportunities and understand people better than ever have.
Super helpful in building product. I had no idea what the experience of many people are and it helped me simplify even more what I build.
To my earlier self I’d say..
Kids were not as much of a shock because of the fun stretches of startups I’ve been through, and all the interests I’ve been through in the past.
Having kids helps cut off any unnecessary entanglements, especially ones we’re not aware of.
Theres a chance to finally prioritize better than ever. The decisions make themselves, it’s a super power.
There’s a chance to become a morning person to have even more time.
There’s a chance to think about problems away from a keyboard that has build up the mental muscles again.
There might not be a better motivator and creator of discipline than having kids. Instead of scrolling motivational insta.
It’s true it can be hard work. 1 kid is nothing compared to having twins. I could do 1 kid in my sleep alone, but it’s only because I had to expand to the demands of twins. That’s what parenting does for some, increases their capacity.
Yes there can be late nights if you choose not to learn and put in routines.
There’s a chance of realizing what kind of memory you will be for your kids might be more important than you ever thought.
The mental cpu cycles aren’t that bad. There’s pretty good books and apps now (wonder weeks is one) that keeps things on the radar. Knowing your kid is going to have a growth week before they do is so helpful. You don’t feel as helpless.
My wife and I weren’t sure if kids would be in the cards for us, between life, work, our interests.
We did pretty much everything we wanted including sleeping in until we got bored of it.
We said to ourselves if we’re not 1 million percent sure we don’t want kids we should leave the door open or try for a family to be sure. There are some health issues before we began that were discovered that likely saved my wife’s life. Life seems so random, and then not it seems sometimes
Rather than have a fixed mindset in our 20s of having kids or not and hanging onto it for dear life we tried to stay open to possibility. I really recommend it. It turned out we’re not the same people in our 20s that we are in our 30s. Knowing is delusion sometimes, yet it’s all we seek.
You can change and grow - many things you believe turn out to be a bookmark to go open up again and update. It’s everything.
The work is intense when they are young since they can’t do much on their own and need help very often. But this doesn’t last for too long. Most parents exaggerate this phase since it is very intense from their otherwise happy days without kids. I had enough nephews and nieces around that I helped with so my kids are not the first time I am doing something this intense.
Toddler phase
They are very manageable because of their size. Not those helpless poor little things any more. But they need to be entertained. Having others kids help a lot here. One more reason to have more than one kids. Only kids can match kids energy level.
Beyond infants
This is when things get interesting they start engaging with you a lot with words and actions.
Most of the problems with millennials for fear of having kids got to do with not having much experience before having their own. So they get overwhelmed, this is very specific to societies with lack of communities (western urban societies).
Once your friends have kids they are out of your circle since they cannot come out and do as much as they used to do.
With medical advancements and tools available to raise a child it is lot easier to raise kids than before. Over focusing on parenthood is also another issue. This is product of abundance of time and money. My mom of 3 children didn’t have tools and time to engage with us like our generation do. She did exceptionally well without over indulging in the name of parenthood.
Note: I am leaning game development and reading books while having full time job and having twins as my first children on my own at 40.
It’s totally doable. Try being around your friends with kids, that’s helpful for them as well as you.
Most rewarding thing and easily attainable for most of us is to raise children never forget the entertainment and stress buster aspect of having kids as well.
Once a wise women from the east said to us raised in the west: If you can have pets I don’t seem to understand your issues having kids. Kids are Pets+++
A lot of people will roll their eyes and yell it's not the same, but you're right - depending on how much you care about puppies dying, I guess.
Caring for a < 2 month old puppy with parvo is a literal nightmare. Force feed it Pedialyte every single hour, watch it puke and crap its guts out, and pray it doesn't die. Basically 5 days without touching REM.
I found this to be quite accurate based on my experience, and I have written things very close to this to my personal contacts that are entering this phase.
The most important thing to internalize, is that the baby is crying for a reason, and your life will go a lot better if you figure out how to solve their problem immediately, rather than ignore or get upset about it yourself. I can’t tell you how many people have told me that that their babies cry all night, expecting to find common ground in the complaint.
And to add to both the tired cry, and the witching hour, I would say that the baby wants to sleep, but needs to ascertain safety/physical comfort first, which usually means being held, and some kind of movement.
Think about evolution. Humans are migratory. The greatest danger to a primordial infant is being left behind. The solution to this is to cry until someone picks them up and carries them along the path. This crying for attention has to be more advantageous than the obvious danger of alerting predators.
One thing I thought was interesting that came out of the AAP book, "Caring for your Baby and Young Child," was that sometimes babies cry to just to get energy out before getting to a more contented state.
It's not always something that needs to be "fixed" right away. It also mentions, as do several other sleep books, that many babies need to cry as part of going to sleep (after the newborn phase).
Consider getting a good pair of sound isolating earphones, or even ear defenders!
Not to neglect your child; but to reduce stress levels so you can problem solve effectively.
The cry of your baby is one of the most emotionally powerful sounds there is. You'll experience extreme stress if you can't calm them down quickly.
Probably for good evolutionary reasons, so the parent doesn't ignore their child.
But sometimes there's a problem you just can't instantly solve.
If you find yourself getting really stressed, and losing your ability to act effectively, being able to put something on your ears and reduce the volume while you, e.g. change the nappy/diaper, can reduce stress and help you be a better parent.
I only had to do this a handful of times for each of our kids, but when it was helpful, it was really helpful.
This is a really important point - your own mental state is so crucial. Kids are hard, they can’t communicate well (or at all), and it’s the parent's job to figure out. It’s easy to get overwhelmed and consumed with emotions. Being ok with taking a break given everyone is safe helps rebuild energy and perspective.
Especially true for new parents - after the first you become more intuitive and understand the grind.
I have a 4 month old and my Apple Watch kept warning me to move to a quieter ___location while I was changing his diaper. Eventually it started aggravating my tinnitus.
Now I have 2 pairs of sound dampening earmuffs like you’d wear to a gun range for diaper changes. 1 pair upstairs and 1 downstairs. I highly recommend it.
We had to wear those, too. Our son is deaf, so he would just scream as loud as he possibly could. I knew that I would end up with hearing loss also if I didn’t protect myself.
1. I printed and laminated a card listing the reasons the Baby could be crying. And tied it to the side of the crib. When you’re sleep deprived it can help to have this list available to you.
2. #7 on my list was “sometimes babies just need to cry.”
My family swore that the witching hour was consistent with the sun rising or setting. And that the fix was to be outside with the baby.
Think about all the headaches a baby is likely to have with a soft skull and a rapidly growing body. I think sometimes they just hurt and there's no way for you to remedy it. They just need to cry it out.
Breastfeeding is hard. A lot of moms try and have a hard time getting through “the wall” of the first week or two. Taking nothing away from them, it’s very hard, more so if the difficulty wasn’t anticipated ahead of time.
I’ve watched my wife do it three times, with the 3rd time being right now with a 6 week old.
The U.S. doesn't have guaranteed maternity leave. Even 4 months is considered generous. Many people will pump breast milk during the day, and deliver it to the baby in a bottle.
Yep. Around the 70's or 80's, there was a reversal of the consensus of whether formula is just a good as breastfeeding. Personally, I think even pumped breastmilk isn't as good either because it lacks the psychological effect of skin-to-skin contact, the exchange of smells, and the immediacy of breastfeeding. I can't imagine leaving a 1-3 month old screaming every time its hungry while the parent spends 10 minutes gently thawing some milk. What if he develops some sense that food and security is scarce forever suffers some emotional damage?
If you believe the consensus of medical professionals, then yes there is. In my country, Infant formula comes with a government-mandated warning on the tin recommending you not to use it. Maternity wards won't give it to newborns unless there's a medical need, and if the mother can't produce enough milk, they work hard to ensure that she can. That's the "appeal to authority" reason. How wrong it is, and even how sure we are of that, I have no idea.
Studies have found correlations between breastfeeding and later outcomes. But those studies have a bias. For example, mothers who graduated college are more likely to breastfeed, and their children are more likely to go to college.
The only way to factor out the biases completely is with a twin study: same mother, same environment. That's what they did with the "Twins Early Development Study." This study found no correlation between breastfeeding and IQ after the age of 2.
There’s a good study out there that used parents that couldn’t breastfeed. Some used donated milk and the other group used formula. There was a correlation for IQ, though it was pretty small.
In the PROBIT trial, "13 percent of the children of mothers in the group that wasn’t encouraged to breastfeed had at least one diarrhea episode, versus only 9 percent of those whose mothers were encouraged. The rate of rashes and eczema was also lower in the group whose mothers were encouraged to breastfeed: 3 percent versus 6 percent."
"In this particular study, we cannot reject the possibility that breastfeeding could matter in either direction—that it could decrease or increase respiratory infections. What we can say is that the data doesn’t support the claim of a reduction in respiratory infections as a result of breastfeeding."
"These researchers have continued to follow the children in the trial through the age of seven. They find no evidence of any long-term health impacts: no change in allergies or asthma, cavities, height, blood pressure, weight, or indicators for being overweight or obese."
Quotes from Crib sheet by Emily Oster. On the other hand, one compelling reason to breastfeed is for the mother, not the child. Breastfeeding lowers risk of breast cancer.
We learned the hard way that baby could be colic (with increased crying during evening hours) due to intolerance to cow’s milk/soy (via mother’s milk). It took us couple of months to get there (first stopped milk products and subsequently soy) and I wish we had known earlier. I’ve been meaning to write a blog post with the hope to help someone run through these possible causes as part of diagnosing the colic crying early on.
When I was an infant in the 70s my mom, a RN, went with the fad and switched me to soy milk, away from dairy. I started becoming sick all the time and having issues. One day my dad, who took care of me most of the time, got sick of it and switched me back to cows milk. I got better and became normal. The soy went in the trash. Even now I can't tolerate soy protein. I'm not allergic, I just can't seem to digest it. I still love cows milk though.
Colic is really bad, it hurts the baby quite a bit, so they'll cry non-stop, which makes the adults crazy. If you have such a baby, it helps to remember how badly it's hurting them.
Have you ever had really bad heartburn? Now imagine that for hours on end, with no ability to do anything about it.
The child is screaming 12-16 hours a day, for in our case 9 months on end. It nearly resulted in divorce of a couple that had been through a lot with strength. It's hard on the child but it's also genuine torture to scream at someone 12-16 hours a day from the bottom of your lungs, in fact I'd call it domestic violence to torture others in this manner. Unless you've experienced this for 6+ months at a time, nothing but insane screaming every waking hour of the worst possible character (a child that sounds like they're dying it is so loud and painful), it's hard to convey the deep desire to just give up and leave the country or something. It's not he days that are hard but MONTHS of unending insane and constant screaming. Being tortured is not something that you can just get over just because the torturer is also feeling bad.
Yes we had doctors check it out. No there is no known exact cure for colic, we tried everything in the book (changing milks, diets, motion, burping, everything). Some forms of colic are simply incurable by any means. Our child was born RIGHT after covid broke out, so everyone (including medical workers) were scared shitless to be around us, there were no offers of relief from family or anyone. Pure hell.
On plus side, it magically went away when she was almost one.
Let me throw out another potential cause that worked for my parents: baby with a small butthole. They used lube and their fingers and gradually stretched it.
That baby may or may not have been me. The doctor our baby has had never heard of such a thing, so maybe it’s just hooey.
>The cause of colic is generally unknown. Fewer than 5% of infants who cry excessively turn out to have an underlying organic disease
Could be small asshole, but the thing about colic is usually there's simply NOTHING that can be fixed.
People want to think you can fix something, or that there is some underlying disease. With colic that is rarely the case. That's the maddening thing about it, there's nothing wrong per se with the child, nothing to fix, no cause to be found. People offer solutions constantly, you keep trying to solve it, but at the end of the day the child simply acts like they hate life and everyone in it and there's simply nothing you can do but wait it out for months. You can drive yourself mad trying to find something wrong when there simply is no curable solution but time.
Our baby had colic for the first three months. Nothing worked, as you said. Felt like it would last forever. Then one day she stopped. And at 3 months she started sleeping through the night.
Then vaccines, teething, a virus, etc. At 7 months this is the first time we have a baby that isn’t crying all day long.
Well, I don't think people need to try every random trick in the hopes that one magically works, but all the basic options, yea, especially holding them against your body. The main aim should be to prevent lifelong emotional damage, not to help the parents get some sleep. Some parents try to train them not to cry by leaving them alone! That apparently even works but it's pretty horrifying since if it's done wrong, it also trains them to be incapable of maintaining secure adult relationships later in life.
> That apparently even works but it's pretty horrifying since if it's done wrong, it also trains them to be incapable of maintaining secure adult relationships later in life.
do you have any data or clinical trials to substantiate this? Seems pretty bold claim.
No, sorry. It's something I read about while researching insecure attachment styles of adults. They attribute it to neglectful or inconsistently caring parenting. Research might be poor quality because it's social science but it's probably there somewhere if you look for it.
Though this isn't convincing, on a common sense level, I imagine if you locked up an adult in solitary confinement every time he expressed some emotion like anger or sadness, you wouldn't be surprised to find that he developed some kind of lasting psychological problems.
Every midwife and doctor always told us "every baby is different" which is infuriating when you just need some advice or reassurance, but probably accurate.
There certainly are different cries, but from experience I don't think there is a universal "language" of sounds.
As a parent you'll work it out for your kid fairly quickly. Just go down the checklist of needs and you'll work it out for each baby: hungry/thirsty, needs changing, needs attention/comfort, needs sleep.
Advice and rules rarely seem to apply anything but pressure to parents. The real solve is building connection to and understanding of your children. Likely this won’t come from a template - although it can be a good framework to understand the possibility space and have ideas. Expect to try variations, and don’t ignore the pressure of ‘perfection’.
The only statement I’ve found true is: Whatever is hard now will go away - but it will be replaced with something harder. Parenting is a grind. Love your kids especially when it’s hard, learn your emotional responses and hang ups, let go of perfect.
I had twin daughters in 2019 and was given 3 months of paternity leave, and I don’t know how we would have survived without it. I did a 12 hour shift at night, and fed them and changed their diaper on a schedule (every 2 hours iirc)
This reduced a lot of the whining because they were always clean. I also had a swing to put them in when they were upset, and that handled most of those issues. Overall it was tedious but not very stressful because I could do it full time.
Anyway establishing a consistent routine really helped me. I wouldn’t wait until they’re starting to get fussy over something if it can be avoided.
This is a great article covering the basic "tricks", that might work in many cases. Babies are still always individual having some things that only work for them (like a hairdryer calms them down) and some general tricks, that don't. Even in the same family their brothers and sisters might behave totally different.
I enjoyed reading Dr. Spock's Baby and Child Care, 10th [1], which goes a lot more into detail about these basics and health, while still mentioning, that only some things might work and that there is not a silver bullet.
In my expierience, it was a lot like in this article. What also often worked out, if nothing else does: Getting into the car and driving around the block leads to sleeping.
I think the most important part at that age is being there for your child. A trick that worked for us and might sound strange: Breastfeeding till the age of 2 or 3 seems to be the best that can happen to the immune system and giving your child to nursery before reaching 2 1/2 seems to be not a good idea. Our daugther has no allergies and intolerances. As well the obvious stuff also worked, like healthy food (vegetables, no sugar), being outside and moving as much as possible and letting her go sometimes, but that comes later on.
1) pacifier. Holy hell those things are life savers. As my kid got older he would sometimes lose the pacifier in his sleep and start crying. We just bought 10 of them and sprinkled them theoughout his crib at night
2) driving. Driving your kid around will often soothe them. I had a particular route I would take down the highway that would guarantee put him to sleep.
To echo the other commenters on this article, all babies are different and there are fairly few universal truths to soothing newborns. For example neither a pacifier nor driving worked for mine.
My only advice is to try everything until you find something that sticks.
A lot of the techniques, such as these, really seem to be just imitating what a fully attentive mother without modern parenting aids would be doing. ie. carrying the baby on her body all day, and allowing it to breastfeed at will. Pacifier = artificial nipple, isn't it?
> driving. Driving your kid around will often soothe them.
Same here. Doing a walk with the stroller and I'd be looking at 45 minutes before the kid would fall asleep. Taking the car and driving once around the block and my kid was sleeping. I don't know if it's the movement, the fact that it's faster than walking, the vibrations, the engine noise (I wonder if parents with electric cars use that trick too) or something else: but for me and for many others the car trick simply works. Not the most ecological thing to do but, well, I was lucky in that mine would fall asleep in the car nearly instantly.
Same for my 2.5 year old. She still won't nap at home. FYI we have a Tesla and it works just as well as our gas SUV.
Trouble I'm having now is she wakes up the second I pull into the driveway. Somehow she knows we're home even if she's fast asleep. I back into a parking spot? Doesn't wake up. I back into our driveway? Wakes up if she's been asleep for 10 minutes or 50 minutes.
In the category of “no universal truths for babies”… my partner and I were hesitant to use pacifiers due to some of the negatives around jaw and mouth development (zero judgement for people who do use them). We agonized over whether we were overthinking it, whether it would help him sleep… but eventually we broke down and gave our kid one. To our surprise, he hated it. Wouldn’t keep it in his mouth at all, and all our thinking was for nothing.
The only pacifiers my baby liked were the Tommee Tippie Featherlights.
Unfortunately this is also the only pacifier he could CRAM COMPLETELY INTO HIS MOUTH by ten months.
Fortunately he took confiscation pretty well, and didn’t revert to wanting one when he started daycare and saw all the other little kids running around with them
This is somewhat inaccurate. Babies only start producing melatonin around the third month - until then their sleep patterns aren't necessarily correlated with the time of the day.
Bright lights in general obviously prevent them from going to sleep.
Great write-up. Great reading if you're a dad to be. But don't fret, if you don't get a chance to read something like this, eventually you learn all the nuances of child rearing in due course while you're on the job.
Thank all you parents for the work that you do raising the next generation. It must be soooo difficult.
When I read articles like this, I feel an intense anger and disgust for the children. I rationally know it’s not their fault; they’re helpless and didn’t choose this. When I have had to care for a child in distress, I don’t have the feeling. It’s only when I read about it or hear a neighbor’s child wailing. Maybe it reflects some neglect I experienced. Regardless, it is one of the many reasons I don’t have kids.
But anyway, thanks to those of you who can manage it. Somebody needs to raise the people who will be changing my diapers soon enough.
At four months old my infant was crying because, and I kid you not, she wanted me to take her to the kitchen and hold her up where she could watch mom cooking. How do I know this? Because she would do nothing but cry until, by accident, I went to say something to mom in the kitchen and instantly the infant stopped crying and stayed happily quiet for about 15 minutes thereafter. Who knew that four month old infants are thinking things like that?
Do the infants (less than a year) sleep automatically as in, you put them down on bed when they are tired and they go to sleep by themselves? Or do you have to make them sleep with lullabies, holding in arms, rocking them, humming, white noise, on your belly, etc etc until they finally fall asleep?
My 7mo son slept all by himself only twice in his lifetime. I wonder if everyone has to make their babies sleep like we do or they sleep by themselves.
Our 7mo old will sleep with a bottle of milk in the cot with her propped up by a blanket, which is our night time routine. Or with a blanket on her cheek. Or she’ll fall asleep in my arms while watching TV, but will wake up immediately and dance a jig if I try to put her in the cot. She also falls asleep in the baby carrier after 10mims if walking around, after which I can put her in the cot most times.
She’s fallen asleep while sat by herself about 4 times.
I heard white noise can mess with their development—it’s important to be able to sleep with random background noises like a door opening or a pencil dropping, so we never used it much.
When my wife went back to work and I took over taking care of our 2 month old, I decided to do the whole “cry to sleep” thing. I put her down when she was close to sleep but not there yet, and basically let her cry. If in ~10 minutes she wasn’t asleep I’d go pick her up and try again.
Full on crying fits were rare. She usually squawked and did some light cries. Within 2 or 3 days not only was putting her to sleep way easier but she started sleeping a full 11 or 12 hours through the night.
We still use a white noise machine, dark room, and a sleep sack (sometimes a weighted one). I think I’m going to start cracking the shades to her window during naps so she is better at napping in homes without a dark room.
All that said, there’s a reason I had to do that and not my wife. I could tell she was itching to go in at her distress, to the point where I would take the video monitor away from her. From what I read we also had better luck with it than most in that usually it takes a good week or so for it to work.
TLDR: Stop being such a millennial and let the baby cry ;)
Thanks for the tip. I have a hard time letting him cry. That's why I became very good at making him asleep. Wife gives up early and passes him to me. I use white noise as final resort which almost always works.
Right now, after your comment, I didn't struggle too much and after a little tapping went for white noise and he is now asleep. I will lower the volume and turn it off in a while. It should slowly develop into new habit.
Bottle feeding infants is a tragedy as it deprives them of an essential emotional experience they are intended to receive. Also, breast milk has miraculous healing properties and immune support functions.
While we're on the topic, breast milk can be squirted on wounds or irritated tissues for instant relief.
I encourage everyone to disregard this article completely. A parent gets to know their baby’s cries naturally and instinctively. There’s no need to use cheats from some other parent’s experiences that really have a little value to the distinctiveness of your own child.
not sure how it works with twins quantity wise, but I see "bottle" being mentioned for the 3 mo babies - afaik best to get mother's milk as much as possible in the first 6 months
I had to give up on direct breastfeeding and switch to the pump with mine when at five weeks, he wasn’t gaining weight. Exclusive pumping for a week showed that I wasn’t producing nearly enough, so we supplemented with formula to get him back gaining weight. With a strict pumping routine, I was able to get him off formula after a few weeks.
I ended up mostly pumping until he was about four months, then completely - he was never that great at nursing. Yes, I tried lactation consultants. Helped a bit, but thank god for modern pumps and formula. And Baby Buddy (made sure he was getting enough in - he would go eight hours without complaint at one month, which is obviously a problem)
As to twins, breastfeeding one infant is a full time job requiring both hands - I can’t imagine having to feed two at once only from breast! Some supplementation is probably necessary for most of them.
Negative. There is very little good scientific evidence that it is important to breastfeed. But even if we stipulate that mothers must breastfeed, many working women pump milk during the day if they don't have unlimited paid time off after birth. In such cases bottles must obviously be used. And many women cannot produce enough breastmilk, and must supplement with formula. And many other possible reasons why bottles must be used.
Anyway, one thing we can say for sure: if it's not your kid and you weren't specifically asked for advice, don't tell someone they should have been breastfeeding.
> There is very little good scientific evidence that it is important to breastfeed.
I wish you would back up such a strong statement. In medical school we were taught the complete opposite. From my notes:
- there's a x36 decreased risk of Sudden infant death syndrome if the child has been breast fed a single(!) time compared to no breast feeding.
- no breast feeding vs only breast feeding: x15 risk of pneumonia, x11 risk of diarrhea
- x14 lower risk of premature death compared to no breast feeding
Other pros include: optimal composition of nutrients, doesn't constipate, creates a connection between the mother and child.
While formula may be nutritionally complete, it does not include immune component. Breast milk literally contains antibodies that a new born is able to pick up and use.
Emily Oyster wrote good books about how a lot of the popular claims around giving birth / raising children have quite a severe lack of data that supports those claims. For breastfeeding in particular there isn't much data to separate whether breastfeeding is actually helpful at all vs being in an economical position that would allow someone to breasfeed.
> In the first camp — the randomized trial camp — we have one very large-scale study from Belarus. Known as the PROBIT trial, it was run in the 1990s and continued to follow up as the children aged.
And then later
> The researchers analyzed the impacts of breastfeeding on allergies and asthma; on cavities; and on height, blood pressure, weight and various measures of obesity. They found no evidence of nursing’s impacts on any of these outcomes.
If you go to the PROBIT trial, you see it clearly stated that they did find an impact from nursing:
> Conclusions: Our experimental intervention increased the duration and degree (exclusivity) of breastfeeding and decreased the risk of gastrointestinal tract infection and atopic eczema in the first year of life.
> Infants in the treatment group — who, remember, were more likely to be breastfed — had fewer gastrointestinal infections (read: less diarrhea) and were less likely to experience eczema and other rashes. However, there were no significant differences in any of the other outcomes considered. These include: respiratory infections, ear infections, croup, wheezing and infant mortality.
Apparently so, did you read the post you are criticizing?
The author made it seem like breastfeeding had no impact, but rather they just cherry-picked the conditions to look for from the study, making no mention of things that were impacted.
The author did not make it seem like that, they explicitly pointed out otherwise, the 5th paragraph:
> This is not to say that there aren’t some benefits to breastfeeding. In poor countries where water quality is very poor, these benefits may be very large since the alternative is to use formula made with contaminated water. In developed countries — the main focus of the discussion here — this isn’t an issue. Even in developed countries, there are a few health benefits of breastfeeding for children in the first year of life (more on this below).
They literally linked to a study, said "this is the best study", then said "this study didn't show benefits in [any] these areas", without mentioning the benefits the study did show. Belarus is/was not a country at risk of contaminated water, even after the collapse of the USSR.
Huh? That's consistent, isn't it? No impact on cavities, height, blood pressure, etc. but an impact on GI tract infection and eczma. Well, those don't sound like serious problems so maybe it's not worth it.
I think the general consensus (WHO, CDC, American Pediatrics, etc) is that breastmilk is beneficial and reduces the risk of things like asthma, digestive issues, SIDS, etc, but there are a lot of questions of whether it needs to be exclusive and for how long it needs to be to get the benefits.
> there's a x36 decreased risk of Sudden infant death syndrome if the child has been breast fed a single(!) time compared to no breast feeding
I'm a supporter of breasfeeding but there's approximately a 100% chance that this is correlational and not causal; wealthier parents with time and resources to breastfeed also have lower SIDs prevalence because they drink less, smoke less, are less obese, have less drug use while pregnant and generally practice safer sleep habits.
Which of the stats do you think sounds ridiculous? SIDS for example is pretty rare to begin with (33.3 deaths per 100,000 per Google). At the end of the day I'm guessing the advice maybe saves a few lives on a population level, but only gives a slight statistical advantage to a proactive parent.
I wish I had links to actual publications. I copied the numbers from a lecture given by a senior obstetrician.
The effect sizes are implausibly large. Breastfeeding would not be a live debate if the causal effect was that large. For example, a 36x risk of SIDS is really just too much to believe. This lit review:
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdfdirect/10.1111/apa.13...
Doesn't mention any studies with effect sizes larger than 4x. And it is concerning habitual breastfeeding or other feeding treatments. If breastfeeding a single time provided a 36x safety factor, these kinds of results would be impossible. A 14x reduction in infant mortality is similar far beyond the reasonable belief.
Personally I wouldn't toss out a claim like that without strong evidence to cite.
Breastfeeding once reduces SIDS risk by 36 times? If that’s even remotely accurate, which I doubt, I’m 100% sure it’s correlation not causation. People who breastfeed are much more likely to be higher income, more informed about keeping toys and blankets out of the crib, have baby sleep on their back, etc.
> People who breastfeed are much more likely to be higher income.
The median income of a breastfeeding mother is probably at least 1/10th of US median per capita GDP. E.g. Rwanda has some of the highest breastfeeding rates in the world.
I'm neither an obstetrician nor a researcher in that field. But if I had to guess, this Wikipedia paragraph sumarizes things nicely regarding infection:
"Passive immunity is also provided through colostrum and breast milk, which contain IgA antibodies that are transferred to the gut of the infant, providing local protection against disease causing bacteria and viruses until the newborn can synthesize its own antibodies."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_immunity
I'd have to read up to even speculate about the SIDS risk.
Do you have a source for the claim that breastfeeding is no better than formula? I don't have a study to the contrary off hand, but everything I've read/studied has agreed conclusively that breastfeeding is the preferred option and has tangible developmental effects. Multiple books and a couple of college courses on early human development.
The conclusion that formula is for sure just as good as breast milk would also be shocking given that breast milk was designed by evolution over millions of years to be exactly what the developing baby needs. The human body does a lot of miraculous things that our technology isn't yet quite capable of matching (or even fully understanding).
The second article you linked cites several studies. I looked at each of them and pretty much all of them conclude that breastfeeding is better than bottle, except the childhood obesity one, which found no effect (I wouldn't expect breastfeeding vs bottle to have an effect on weight or height).
The first study cited only looked at height, weight, and blood pressure after breastfeeding, which are not the variables I would expect to see gaps in for breast fed vs bottle fed (other metrics are much more important, in my opinion)
The second study cited concluded that breastfeeding "had a significant reduction in the risk of 1 or more gastrointestinal tract infections (9.1% vs 13.2%; adjusted OR, 0.60; 95% CI, 0.40-0.91) and of atopic eczema (3.3% vs 6.3%; adjusted OR, 0.54; 95% CI, 0.31-0.95), but no significant reduction in respiratory tract infection (intervention group, 39.2%; control group, 39.4%; adjusted OR, 0.87; 95% CI, 0.59-1.28).".
The third study had similar results: "Our experimental intervention increased the duration and degree (exclusivity) of breastfeeding and decreased the risk of gastrointestinal tract infection and atopic eczema in the first year of life."
The fourth linked study on IQ concludes: "These results, based on the largest randomized trial ever conducted in the area of human lactation, provide strong evidence that prolonged and exclusive breastfeeding improves children's cognitive development."
If these are the best studies that an article whose goal is to debunk the breastfeeding narrative can find, it looks like a clear win for breastfeeding to me.
In most cases, I wasn't able to tell which study you were referring to. I was able to correlate study 4 tho:
> The fourth linked study on IQ concludes: "These results, based on the largest randomized trial ever conducted in the area of human lactation, provide strong evidence that prolonged and exclusive breastfeeding improves children's cognitive development."
The study was cited with criticisms of its method and strong reason to believe the study result is implausible. The effect size is far too large: there is no way that EBF causes a 24 point jump in IQ, when observed correlated effects are so much smaller. That effect is so large that it would be immediately and apparently obvious who was breast fed. In fact, you could guess someone's EBF status simply by knowing how smart they are. Intelligence would be multimodal around who was breastfed and not.
I'm not sure exactly what they screwed up when running the study. Possibly an overreliance on the power of random cluster trials? After all, if you run 31 clusters in total, then it wouldn't be too surprising that you find weird statistics, since N=31, not the number of human participants. But whatever the case, the whole thing is completely compromised because the result is so implausible.
Anyway that's the best and only random study of EBF and intelligence if 538 is to be believed. Which means we essentially have no randomly controlled evidence at all that EBF improves intelligence.
Ah, fair enough. I was mostly skimming the linked article and clicking through to the referenced studies. You're right, you'd certainly have to throw out that particular IQ study in that case.
Given the lack of adequate maternity leave (along with the lack of other worker protection stuff common in civilized countries) it is understandable that a ideology of the bottle would be very popular in the good old US.
My wife breastfed both our kids. We have plenty of maternity leave. I have no "ideology" of the bottle, nor anything against breastfeeding -- if you like it, go for it. I just happen to have a considered opinion about the scientific evidence available.
> There is very little good scientific evidence that it is important to breastfeed.
American scientists in the 1950s pushed all manner of highly-processed food products on the public because they had "figured out" nutrition.
Except for micronutrients, probiotics, most of what we understand now about biological pathways, etc.
Barring overwhelming evidence from replicated experiments -- "peer review" is and has always been garbage -- I bias hard to "what we have evolved to do by instinct is probably the best course of action".
That'd be breastfeeding. It's counterproductive to shame mothers that use formula for any number of legitimate reasons, but "prefer breastfeeding if at all possible" is an entirely reasonable statement.
It would also help if infant formula in the US wasn't absolute garbage by law, compared to what's commonplace in Germany and Japan.
Quality infant formula is also cheap in Germany compared to the US. I thought it was just having a decade of being a dual engineer couple before baby that made me wonder why on earth there are formula theft rings in the US, but no, a box of the brand-name stuff (Hipp) capable of feeding a baby for 5-7 days is about 12 EUR not on sale.
There's quite a lot of evidence that breastfeeding improves health outcomes for newborns. Reduces the rate of gastrointestinal infections, etc. Regarding the probable mechanism of action for that, breast milk provides an ongoing source of antibodies from the mother to baby. You won't find that in formula.
That said, evidence about the benefits of exclusive breastfeeding, is much weaker. And a fixation on breastfeeding exclusively can easily result in underfeeding if formula isn't used when all signs suggest it should be. A hungry baby is the worst outcome here, of course.
Kinda weird place and context to ask, but... OK look I'm not an academic. I have my degrees but for the most part it was "use APA/MLA/etc. for full points". Nothing published, plenty researched enough to publish if the circumstances were better. That said, I don't know enough about how much weight is given to biological history. Breastfeeding was not an option for the vast majority of mammalian history, as far as I understand. Wet nurses or surrogate mothers notwithstanding, babies of all kinds have needed and thrived on a mother's milk. Just because we cleverly figured out alternatives in the last 0.0001% of human history doesn't mean it's better, to me. Maybe I'm wrong. I don't know.
I’m only replying on the Internet, I’ve never given anyone baby advice (or any other, for that matter) I wasn’t asked for.
That said, breastfeeding is the only way babies were fed for almost all of our species time here. IMHO, if anything needs scientific evidence in its favor before I believe it’s good are alternatives to breastfeeding.
To be fair, high infant mortality was a sad fact of life before modernity, and it wasn’t all diseases. “Failure to thrive” was a common cause of death.
My aunt, born in 1941, was switched to formula after failing to nurse well. Despite those infant formulas being nowhere nearly as good as modern ones, she still grew up to be academically bright and athletic, and her younger sister, my mother, was witty and socially gifted.
If my grandmother hadn’t had that option, maybe my aunt would have eventually gotten the hang of it before my grandmother’s milk dried up, but being undernourished for however long that took might not have led to a woman who could get a geology degree - or any child who survived to adulthood.
Interesting response. Let me just say that in general I would prefer the people around me to mention an alternative way of doing things (related to raising babies or anything really) along with some reasons if available. Not preach, just mention. So that they make sure I am aware of it. Maybe there is that one case where I find out about something I wasn't aware of.
And then I wish we could all say "yes I know" or "I wasn't aware of that, will dig" or "that's a myth, here's why" and continue either on that topic or change the subject with no harmed feelings.
No mother in the United States is unaware that other people would prefer her to breastfeed. In general, what you say is true, but only for alternatives you haven't already considered thoroughly.
And it will become annoying to be constantly confronted with a viewpoint about your most intimate choices. Like relatives repeatedly asking an intentionally childless couple when they will have kids.
Or possibly worse: asking a childless couple who desperately want kids but haven’t had it work out when they will have kids.
I’ve had to train a couple of young men to never ask a follow up question to a “no” when they ask if a female colleague has kids (and that actually, that’s a risky question to begin with.)
Nothing burns it into their little brains quite like hearing, “don’t ask anything that could be translated as, ‘so what’s your sex life like?’”
Worst: when a slightly older new male colleague, within 15 minutes of meeting me, asked if I had kids, then upon a negative answer, replied “why not?!”
we had a child, was breastfeed for a long time but also had to supplement with formula very early on.
yes we dealt with other people's as well of each of us' differing opinions on every matter under the sun related to how to raise a baby. I still want to know all the information available, so that I can make informed decisions.
There is good evidence that breastfeeding is protective against Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. There is a dose-response relationship, which is good evidence for causality.
The risk is cut by about half, depending on how long breastfeeding continued for. This effect is not explained by socioeconomic factors.
Is there? How were the controls selected in that study? Were they from people who were called on the phone, meaning the controls were from a group of people willing to talk to strangers about something as as deeply personal as having a child die of SIDS?
It seems to be the case that some breastfeeding is beneficial. However, I’ve been unable to figure out where the line is drawn after much internet research.
Some places say six weeks gets you most of the benefits, others say twelve years minimum. You’re right though that the studies are less conclusive than some would like you to believe.
Please don't post like this to HN. It poisons the ecosystem and destroys what HN is supposed to be for. Someone posting an incorrect number through what was most likely a typo or transcription error does not deserve to have a ton of internet bricks dropped on them, which is basically what you did here. You can provide correct information without treating others that way.
It can be both simultaneously true that breast milk is better than formula, but that formula is also fine. This is obviously traumatic to hear if you are a woman who cannot breastfeed, but that doesn't make it less true.
My point is that folks should consider their tone and words carefully on this topic.
There are a great many women out there who would like to be breastfeeding, but can't, for various reasons. And the amount of guilt and shame experienced by many in this group, because of the glib culture surrounding breastfeeding, is doing severe and lasting damage to many parents' mental health.
While not optimal, formula is a healthy and viable alternative. That's really all that needs to be said about this.
I agree with all of this. Luckily I have observed that there is a growing pushback against "breast is best" militarism and shaming of mothers who cannot (solely) breastfeed. The new slogan I have heard is "fed is best".
When you’re at your most emotionally vulnerable due to a seething mixture of hormones AND having primary responsibility for a tiny, helpless human, it’s a bit harder to do that.
Oh, and everyone feeling entitled to, nay, obliged to tell you how to do your job.
Rising baby right now, every tip was familiar, yes we go trough debugging baby cries too. I would only add - white noise. Sometimes it helps soothe baby.
My general feeling is that you can drive yourself nuts trying to figure out why your baby is crying, and, as the blog author mentioned in his conclusion, you may still be unable to figure it out. IMO this is a great time of one's life to discard the illusion of control.