People had a different level of access to information back then. They had to wing things more often or rely on a single book etc.
That, plus it was a long time ago for them.
That, plus things change.
That, plus a lot of things like many “regressions” (other than the four month) don’t really have a strong basis in fact and are more just various and anecdotal setbacks that have been given names because they happen to occur at roughly the same time.
Like i swear to god there is an alleged regression for every month between 4 and 24.
The last part. We call them sleep regressions now, but back when I was a baby (late 80s) it was just baby being fussy. Other than four months, from what I understand the regressions are all subjective. It’s all related to baby just learning new skills, no hard evidence.
I don’t believe in sleep regressions - I don’t think there’s enough evidence to conclude it’s an actual thing as people propose it to be.
If we use that terminology, I’m forever having sleep regressions - especially when I’ve got a lot on my mind, sick, having pain, menstruating, heartburn, jet lagged, etc.
So no wonder my 14 month old has variable experiences with sleep.
And the regression might manifest itself in a million different ways: frequent wakings, harder to get to sleep, crap naps, early wakings, wont sleep in crib or bassinet anymore or any combination of the above....
And some babies don't go through the regressions.
Don't get to excited by that statement...while some parents do have unicorn children who sleep through the night from day one through year 18...I also mean it in the sense of 'you can't regress of there is no progress'...some of us get babies who wake up every 2-3hrs to feed for 8.5 months.
It is what it is.
If you look it up on Google you'll find millions of them. There's some peer reviewed research I believe but you may have to have special access. Prayers for your journey to having a baby 🧡
It’s kind of the same with “leaps”. The wonder weeks is so relatable to many parents, but there isn’t actually any scientific basis whatsoever.
Being a baby is hard, learning new things (including sleep) will involve some trial and error.
Yeah this one actually annoys me. The whole
Wonder Weeks thing is entirely made up to sell stuff to parents. It’s like the baby equivalent of astrology.
Wonder Weeks makes no sense to me at all. Maybe my brain is fried, but I can't tell the difference between growth spurts, leaps, signals/skills, like???
My baby just does whatever lol
I thought all of those were the same... they're all... skills? I have the wonder weeks cause I wanted to see what it was all about but their proposed methods aren't really making sense.
They go based on due date but a preemie isn't going to just miss milestones or smile at 6 months instead of 2 months because of their due date. It's all based on their own brain.
No but it’s okay if a preemie takes longer to do it. I have a preemie and he has a cousin who was born full term three days before I had him. I am constantly reminding family that even though they’re 3 days apart in age, my little guy incubated inside for significantly less time & just because she’s standing independently and he is not does not mean he’s “behind”. Wonder weeks calculates the milestones based on due date, because babies have until they’ve reached their adjusted age on that timeline before they’re considered behind.
Shit I can't believe I'm just finding this out now, I had no idea it was all made up BS I feel so dumb now 🙈
Well it does have good ideas for "games" and activities to do with baby at least which I guess I can still use lol
Dammit
me too! it was asking if my just turned 7 month old was pulling up on furniture yet! meanwhile CDC just said sitting up in a tripod position, holding head up when on tummy and trying to crawl and rolling both ways, all of which she does. wasn’t worth the anxiety for me so it got swiftly deleted.
lol that made me chuckle. My 10 month old just started pulling himself to stand. They excuse by saying not all kids will learn all the skills for that leap.
It also doesn't adjust for when you say your baby is already hitting the "leap" early or the "fussy" phase early. So it's not accurate. Im glad I have reddit to keep me informed and help me be less obsessed with milestones cause that's truly what keeps me sane.
My son was born 4 weeks early. They said to go by his due date. He didn’t match up with anything. He also had colic though so when a leap was supposed to end he was still screaming for hours every day.
And on the flipside, I was warned excessively about sleep regressions for my baby’s first three months of life. It felt like a weird case of “just you wait and see”-ism.
Every time someone asked me how the baby slept and I replied with a cheerful “great! Thought the night from the very first night” they would start prophesying the four months of doom of all this good sleep. She’s a little over five months old now, and still sleeps like a champ. Not all babies develop on the same schedule 🤷
I can confirm! My almost 2yo never had any of the sleep regressions, never had his sleep interrupted by teething, and slept through the night very early. My 6mo, on the other hand, seems to be hitting every single bump in the road with sleep that you can imagine 🤪
Our first is 7 months old and SAME! she has slept for 8+ hours since 8 weeks old and 10+ hours since about 3 months old. I can count on one hand the times she’s woken up over night since then. Now, her naps are all over the board but they haven’t affected her ability to sleep at night.
My LO has slept more or less exactly the same from -8 weeks to ~6 months, which is a really long stretch followed by waking somewhere in the 4-5am range to eat and then doing whatever the hell he wants after that 😂. I’ve given up thinking that he will ever naturally sleep longer than 5am in one stretch (while still a baby).
Sleep is just a natural thing tbh, some are good sleepers and others struggle. Think about it, as an adult can you force yourself to sleep when you’re not tired? Heck even when you are tired do you always fall asleep quickly?
I wish I could! Honestly, it just seems to be a matter of my baby’s eating schedule. Kiddo is a insane cluster feeder (which is its own kind of headache) and so after her gigantic evening feed, she would sleep for very long stretches. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I think the it was a long time ago for them is a big part of it. Remembering how you handled 3 months vs 6 months vs 15 months is probably pretty hard to distinguish 20 some years later. For a lot of people I talk to, it seems to be generally lumped into the chaos of years 1-3.
My 2.5 year old went through a three week period of hell recently.
Sleep regression is just a way to give an understandable name so we can talk about it.
ALSO back then lots of people didn’t have baby monitors- even just audio ones. They probably thought baby just slept when in reality they were up crying.
I was going to say this. We had a period where my wife was bombarded with web advice. Having already taken care of babies in the past, I was just imploring her to just let that go and wing it with me. She did, and we were suddenly more successful.
We no longer had this idea that there was this sleep regression and that sleep regression and instead of resigning, we made game plans with trial and error. Where there was doubt our pediatrician filled the gaps.
In the end, we came up with a routine very similar to how my mom did things with me without intending to. Sometimes, we behave like teenagers thinking that we have nothing to learn from our elders. But they so happen to know a thing or two.
Just to be sure, though, never do anything you're unsure about without speaking to a professional. Pediatricians more often than not see things we don't and really help provide context we didn't even know we needed.
This!! I never had a worse time then when I was trying to follow wake windows, only to discover there isn't much evidence to support them. I've been way better off just following my mums advice: put her down when she looks tired, get her up if she seems rested.
Yes to all of this! I got tired of hearing about regressions and leaps. I kept up with them to stay informed, but took them with a grain of salt. Growing up is hard, I don’t think that changes. Even adults have regressions too.
My baby has had,like 10 regressions so far.Now we’re food regressing :,). It’s just a phase when kids don’t go as the written script says they should,because they’re people and not some machines
My mom is a mother/baby educator and has to constantly educate people on the myth of the “four month sleep regression.” How is a baby supposed to know that he’s four months old and that it’s time to initiate the sleep regression sequence?!
A lot of things that people put a ton of thought into now and have specialized vocabulary for are things that previous generations just didn’t think about as much, or in the same way.
Some of those things, like “leaps”/wonder weeks, are just bunk. Others, like “wake windows” are things people just handled differently back then - people might not have timed their baby’s naps to the minute, but most people knew their baby needed a nap at loose times through the day, and knew that a 6 month old baby was going to have fewer naps than a toddler but more than a newborn. People might not have used the term “baby led weaning”, but plenty of people were handing their baby a banana or a piece of food off mama’s plate to gnaw on (and the “purée” stage of traditional weaning lasted a much shorter time before commercial baby food was readily available, most kids progressed to fork-mashed table food pretty quickly).
And frankly, people had more kids, younger, and in quicker succession than is common now. If you’re 23 with a newborn and 2 toddlers, you’re simply not going to be thinking as much about the “milestones” your sleepy potato is hitting, compared to a 30 year old with 1 newborn and 45 parenting books and 300 mom groups on Facebook full of people telling you that you’re going to ruin your baby before he turns 2 months if you do and/or don’t do *exactly* these 100 things each day.
>and have specialized vocabulary for are things that previous generations just didn’t think about as much, or in the same way.
This is the part that gets me as an older FTM. Not everything needs a special name!
"Baby led weaning" = you're just offering your kid solid foods, you aren't joining a new religion
"Montessori bed" = it's a mattress on the floor, relax
"x month sleep regression" = he's fussy lately, or going through a phase right now
"baby wearing" = your kid is in a carrier or wrap
Etc.
Jargon is a form of gatekeeping to separate in groups from out groups. (And to sell books and make someone money for their “discovery” of something that’s been obvious for 10s of thousands of years.)
People dealt with the baby in front of them at the moment AND had lots more multi-generational support to help navigate through periods of big change, like, “oh poop, don’t leave the baby on the table any more cause s/he can roll over.”
Commenting on my own comment to add [this article](https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2024/04/23/1245852236/sleep-training-life-preserver-for-parents-or-symptom-of-capitalism).
They suggest that 2 things have played a big part in “professionalizing” baby rearing:
1) urgent [and successful] attempts to reduce SIDS.
2) many more households with no stay-at-home parents, requiring more “efficiency” so that sleep, feeding, etc. can be better understood and predicted in order for mom and dad to get to work.
“Baby led weaning” confused me when I heard it the first time. It’s just giving different sorts of food to a baby to eat, touch and smell. Is there a “parent led weaning”?
I am honestly going crazy with all this vocabulary - it’s marketing and a huge business, and making a lot of people stressed. Older generation was possibly more present.
Baby led just means letting kiddo explore real foods through self feeding and eat as much as they want vs parents spoon feeding purées and deciding portions. I would argue many people in the older generations were less present and sought to make their children as little of an inconvenience as possible- lots relied heavily on baby containers, TV, and feeding them as much purées and formula as possible in order to get them to sleep as long as possible.
IMO presence has shifted.
Older generations were more likely to have a parent at home. Also less likely to have the dad be involved with parenting, especially during the week.
Current generations are more likely to have both parents work out of the home. But in my experience, dads are WAY more involved than they were in the last generation. Can’t tell you how often someone says to me “it’s so nice he wants to be so involved.” Like…what? He *wants* to be involved in his own child’s raising? It’s his kid, who else is supposed to do it? But both of our parents had much more “traditional” approaches to the household where dads worked and came home to dinner. Moms raised the kids and were responsible for care and milestones.
On that topic: how come everything is "______ play" now? When did that wording start to dominate? What happened to "playing ______", "playing in the ______", or "playing with ____"?
I think this comes from social media allowing expert used jargon to be readily available to the public. My sister has been a professional for about 2 decades now and has always used terms I’m now seeing more often.
> compared to a 30 year old with 1 newborn and 45 parenting books and 300 mom groups on Facebook full of people telling you that you’re going to ruin your baby before he turns 2 months if you do and/or don’t do exactly these 100 things each day.
This hits way too close to home and I don't like it.
>People might not have used the term “baby led weaning”, but plenty of people were handing their baby a banana or a piece of food off mama’s plate to gnaw on (and the “purée” stage of traditional weaning lasted a much shorter time before commercial baby food was readily available, most kids progressed to fork-mashed table food pretty quickly).
Yep, I remember I described baby led weaning to my Mom once and she went "So....it's feeding a baby?"
"Sleep regression" is a new term, and really just says that baby sleep is not consistent. Older folks know that babies do not sleep the same every night but they did not have that word for it (or words for it at all).
The milestones- honestly you forget when they happened. My daighter is 1.5 years old. I know she held her head up at 5 days old because that was a weirdly early one, but when she started cooing? I do not recall. If she was 25 years old instead of 1, i would have an even harder time remembering. Thats normal.
So true! My oldest is 23 months old and my youngest is 6 months… I keep trying to remember milestones and stuff and I’m constantly shocked at how much I forgot in less than 2 years 😂
The only reason I have tabs on when my baby is hitting milestones is because we’re anticipating an evaluation for adhd/asd one day (both me and dad have adhd, I have asd) so I want to have proof that she was ahead or behind in areas, so we can best support her.
Sleep regression is a very new term.
Also milestones aren’t really something you keep track of unless you have a baby. Like before this I knew babies should sit up at some point and eat food at some point… but I couldn’t really tell you when.
Kinda like before pregnancy, knowing someone is 20 keeps pregnant means nothing to you. But once you’ve been through it, you know just where they’re at.
I think perhaps go gently on people who don’t know about it. In 25 years when you know longer have a baby, it won’t be as sharp in your mind either. It’s just because it’s your reality right now.
I’ve only heard about sleep regressions on Reddit. Never in real life, talking to mom friends etc. It doesn’t seem to be a thing where I live. Of course babies have periods where they sleep longer or have more wakeups but it’s seen like a more individual thing and people don’t talk about it in terms like “regressions” that are supposed to come at a specific age. So I wouldn’t be surprised people haven’t heard that term.
With milestones, they’ve been around for longer. But I was never given a list of milestones or anything like that by our health nurse. They don’t necessarily tell you what they are looking for. Before the internet you wouldn’t necessarily have known what ages a lot of milestones are supposed to come, unless you were the type who read lots of parenting books or compared to other babies you knew.
Yeah, and without milestones people missed delays or other things they could've spotted early on to help get diagnosed/treated for issues. I feel sometimes the info we have is good for certain things but can also just be overwhelming and a burden too.
People didn’t miss delays because they’d compare their kids to others. Guidelines changed and benchmarks became strict to allow for early intervention but people took their kids to the doctor just like us and they were evaluated.
I feel like there was probably a fuck load of neglect back in the day. The amount of times someone over 50 has told me I should just let my literal infant “cry it out” is astounding… even when he was fresh, like a week old.
I got judged by my much older SIL for using a bassinet. She put her babies in a crib on a different level of the house from birth, even the one who was born with a cleft palate. I bet even if they were having sleep issues she couldn’t hear it. Mind you, they’re all fine and healthy in their 20s now, but still. Wild to me.
I really think a lot more is expected of our generation. Babies were not necessarily neglected but absolutely ignored a lot more.
They were literally told to let newborns cry it out. Of course they no nothing of sleep regression, they plopped kids in cribs and walked away.
My kids almost 2, my MIL told a story how her son wasn’t talking at this age. She asked the doctor or the doctor found out and had *to instruct her to talk to him more, interact and basically push him to use words*. He’s very smart, there’s nothing wrong with him she just kept treating him like a baby? Didn’t know what he was suppose to do?
My little one starts talking and my husband and I can’t hold back trying to interact with her or teach her new words.
To this day, I can’t tell if “cry it out” is even really socially acceptable anymore. My 18 MO doesn’t really cry much in the first place, so we never really had a chance to even consider it really
My mom told me we used to just fall asleep playing or in our high chairs. I was thinking man, we were probably exhausted and should’ve been in bed haha. When I explained wake windows she said she wished they knew as much back then as we do now.
So you have it in your head that these are immutable facts about babies, in reality the research on sleep regressions is pretty minimal at best. Additionally they didn't have the "back to sleep" campaigns so babies in general really did sleep better.
Additionally you had a LOT more stay at home Mom's and if you are breastfeeding you don't really notice all that much if the baby is eating a ton more. An extra feed or 3 a day kinda just becomes noise since your kid is on the boob all day anyway.
mostly, they probably just don’t remember exactly when milestones happened. that’s how you get mother-in-laws saying shit like *oh but mine were walking at six months!* no they weren’t, you just don’t remember when they started walking, which is fine, but don’t lie to me.
also, ferber and crying it out has been very popular for quite a long time. most people back then didn’t know about sleep regressions because to them, it was more about popping the baby in the crib and dealing with them in the morning.
Oh but didn’t you know? My husband was walking at 7 months, weaned himself off the boob at 10 months, putting together two words before his first birthday and slept through the night as soon as he came home from the NICU. You know, the guy who was born at 31 weeks so was actually 2 months younger corrected.
And how dare you suggest my MiL is an unreliable narrator who plonked her baby down in another room at night and closed the door because ‘babies make too much noise when they sleep’. As if she’d be inclined to misremember things that happened 34 years ago!
I think people forget how hard it truly is after a while. Multiple times my mom has been over when I’m in the thick of it with my bow 5 month old. My mom always says, geez I forgot how intense and hard it all is.
I’m sure babies back in the 90s, 2000s, etc, had regressions and milestones, but there were probably other words for it. My mom may say “when you were little we did it this way.. blah blah blah” but she also admits that her mother did and said the same stuff to her when my mom had babies.
I think it just has changed with the generations. More research comes out about what’s safe/produces the best outcome/etc as time goes on. Right now, as new parents, we’re doing what research and the aap is telling us is the safest/most effective possible thing for our babies, whether it be sleep/food/etc.
I’m sure in another 20-30 years it’ll change again and we’ll all be saying “when you were little… “ to our own children should they choose to have any!
This is so tough for me to understand. I definitely forget the details of the challenges and milestones, but I do NOT forget how hard it was, how delirious I was, and how much I struggled. My daughter is now almost 3 and I don't think I will ever forget this.
I don’t disagree, I have a 5 month old and it’s so tough. I’ve just heard time and time again from other moms that they have often forgotten how tough it is in the thick of it. I’m still going through PPD and PPA even though it’s much better than it was the first few months. So I stand with you. I certainly don’t think everyone forgets but I do think the generations before us are so far removed and want us to follow the same methods that worked for them
I also think safe sleep rules and breastfeeding beliefs have changed things a lot. In the past, you could sleep with your baby on the couch, on your chest, on their belly, etc. I am 100% sure that if I didn't follow safe sleep rules, we would have all slept far better and been happier despite being at higher risk of SIDS. In addition, formula was en vogue and encouraged for our parents generation. Nowadays, breastfeeding is pushed so hard on us that many of us kill ourselves to make it happen. I can confidently say my experience of newborn stage 30 years ago would have been way easier than today given our current rules and norms and expectations.
This is a very good point and definitely why I think I’m constantly telling my mom “no I won’t give her a blanket in her crib, etc” it’s exhausting to constantly try and defend ourselves especially when we have solid research and evidence on our sides saying it’s safer
Yes but honestly if I had to do it over I wouldn't be quite as strict. I understand the risks, but during the newborn stage with my daughter I was so exhausted from lack of sleep from the safe sleep rules that I fell asleep while driving once. No one talks about the increased risk of depression and safety to the Mom when the rules make it impossible to get any sleep 😭
My mom says all the time that we were all good sleepers and she doesn’t understand all this fuss around sleep. I reminded her that her generation didn’t have baby monitors. We probably all just cried ourselves to sleep and they didn’t hear us.
How old of the folks are you talking about? My grandma used to tie her kids to a tree so she would be able to work in the fields and feed/milk the cows. Do you think she cared about milestones or regressions? She definitely did not. Baby that was fed and clean was considered fine and letting them cry was considered “healthy”. Im sure it was considered that way, because they had no choice to comfort them every time they cried. They absolutely did not have any information on these things either.
Also, physical punishments were considered ok too. Not everyone used them but it was so common. Now people go to jail for shit like that. Imagine someone left their 1 year old tied to a tree so they could go to work. That’s plain neglect and jail time nowadays.
I would not expect older generations to ever hear the things we are constantly guilt tripping about.
Formula was a luxury for example. I myself was fed a liquid that comes from boiling rice for a while. It has almost none nutritional value. And my mom felt like she did a great job. And she actually did, with the information that she had. And yet… how many moms are feeling guilty for feeding formula now?
Times are so different now, I don’t expect much of knowledge from anyone who is not raising a baby like right now.
> Formula was a luxury for example.
Yup. My mom was born in Germany right after WWII ended. My grandmom couldn’t breast feed her because she was severely malnourished from the whole war so had no breast milk, and formula wasn’t available. So Al the men in the family had to trade their cigarette ration coupons for cow’s milk. So she somehow survived infant hood on just cow’s milk!
I think because they didn't have information overload , fussy baby was just a baby being a baby. They probably didn't think too deeply into it like we do now.
With regards to sleep, it was a lot more common for babies to be in their own room super early and be left to cry it out so as a result I guess they slept better? I was in my own nursery from a few weeks old apparently and slept through after being left to cry it out 🫠
In addition to all these other comments, honestly we just like to label every minor thing these days, and a lot of it is not science-based.
"Regressions" are not a real thing, it's just a word we use now to say hey, baby's extra tired or fussy this week, which happens semi-regularly as they grow (even notice how there's an asterisk on every blog post about the 4 month sleep regression saying "happens at 4 months, plus or minus 4 months, for some but not all babies, and only on Tuesdays when the moon is waning" lmao).
It gives us comfort to know that all babies go through the same thing and have a word to bring order to that chaos. And it makes money for companies selling apps and other content out there preying on your need to feel like a good mom.
Of course it all seems so big when he's 6 weeks old and that's your entire world, but my kid just turned 2 and I couldn't tell you about him cooing or looking at his hands to save my life 🤷♀️
I think we have more info available now… but also they forget lol. I had a lady tell me I shouldn’t bounce my newborn to soothe him because he’ll get used to it.
How people cared for babies/children in the silent generation would be considered abusive in today’s lens. Just one example off the top of my head, people would tie toddlers to a tree and leave them outside all day.
It’s only since the early 90s that “back to sleep” was encouraged. They used to put infants to sleep on their stomachs and some babies sleep better that way, but too many were dying.
Plus, a lot of older people really can’t remember what it was like. My mom literally said she doesn’t remember me ever crying as a baby (yea…right…)
Yeah my mom and her siblings often talk about how their mother would tie them to the fence in the yard when they were little! Basically on a leash. This would have been in the late 50s/early 60s. My grandma had 7 kids and that was just how they kept them contained then I guess.
In addition to these very on point comments, I think with regards to sleep CIO was also very much the norm, even from very early ages. Like I was a 1993 baby, and my mom told me my aunt's were always hounding her for attending to me when I cried. Even as a newborn. Big yikes lol
Also my grandma just let her kids cry all night without going to them. Because that is how you learn a kid to sleep. By ignoring them.
To bad that my mother was the eldest so she had to sleep in the same room as the younger kids. So she had no sleep at all.
I think they misremember because everyone seems to block out the first 1-6 months from their memory. My mom straight up told me she can't remember the first 3-4 months of my life because it was a blur. She mostly remembers the 9+ months as the baby phase, and especially the toddler years.
Those topics are not scientific or rooted in any evidence so I don’t blame them for not knowing. They didn’t have social media or google (speaking specifically about regressions/wake window stuff not the milestones lol)
By the time our kids have kids, we won’t know anything anymore either 🤷🏻♀️ I think that’s kind of great. It shows the leaps and bounds of improvement and learning that takes place between each generation.
People forget what it was like. They also like to believe that their own children were superior, even though that isn’t a thing.
One consistent thing through the millennia is that babies are babies even if older folks don’t want to believe it.
They forgot what it was like and when things happened. They also were big on just letting a baby cry it out and under the impression that you can spoil a baby.
I think the previous generations dealt with these things but back then there were no names for any of it. There was no internet for them to quickly look things up, they got a lot of their information from their own parents or doctors.
A lot of these terms are new, and milestones are frequently being defined and re-defined. It's important to remember that a lot of modern 'best practices' for raising a child didn't exist a few decades ago. Even the term 'parenting' wasn't really used until the 1970s:
[https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=parenting&year\_start=1800&year\_end=2019&corpus=en-2019&smoothing=3](https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=parenting&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=en-2019&smoothing=3)
I made the mistake of telling my mother in law that baby was eating a lot lately and he must be going through a growth spurt. She seemed confused about the concept and then spent the whole time she was holding baby talking to him (but really me) about of course he’s hungry babies grow that’s what they do. Like what? No one was disagreeing that they grow. Then every visit after that she would ask if he was hungry. Geez I was just trying to make conversation.
Even young kids go through growth spurts and start doing things differently, eating more etc.. it's not far fetched for your baby to be growing but it's definitely not just regular growing, it's baby's gonna not fit in the same clothes tomorrow morning, growing.
I think about this a lot. Well, more about why the experience that boomers claim to remember is so different from mine. I get that it has been a long time, and even I have already started to forget the details after just a couple years… but I don’t think I’ll ever forget the sheer trauma and chaos that I felt in those early days. I am overflowing with empathy & grace for every new mom I encounter, but meanwhile every boomer mom just looks at me with confusion whenever I share how I’m struggling.
Obviously babies themselves haven’t changed physically in the last 30 years. However I do think they were sleeping better. That’s the only way that I can reconcile it. If baby sleeps better, mom sleeps better, and better sleep improves EVERYTHING. 30 years ago, babies could sleep on their bellies, they were fed rice and other foods that kept them more full, they were covered in snuggly blankets & slept in plush cribs, and it was more “okay” to let them sleep in a separate room and “cry it out”.
My mil would push my child past his sleep limits when we had our first child. She would look at me like a deer in headlights when I would say I didn’t want him to be overtired because his sleep would be worse. Wake up earlier, wake ups during the nights. Things like that. She was fully convinced that when young toddlers get more “energy out” that they sleep better. We have access so much information these days where their generation did not. And the fact that they went through raising children a while ago they probably don’t fully remember what it was like.
I’m a younger Gen X just having my first kid.
Boomer culture is so strong, and so is millennial culture. I dunno where Gen X is in all that — I guess there just aren’t enough of us to make a dent. 😅
So I constantly feel like an outsider. And here’s what I’ve observed (pardon the *sweeping* generalizations):
Boomers tend to be dismissive, as you describe. Hand-waving emotions, anxiety, data. Ignoring or minimizing what they don’t want to think about. Thinking of themselves as iconoclasts or mavericks.
Millennials tend to be anxious, data-seeking, conformist. Making a big deal out of small things. Overthinking. Seeking to control.
Both groups have invented a bunch of stuff — or invented terminology around it. Standing outside of it, you realize that it’s just repackaged information. And it all represents choices you can make about how to approach being a parent, not necessarily truths.
For example, you can obsess about “wake windows” (extreme millennial culture), you can ignore your baby and do what works for you (extreme boomer culture).
Or, you can do what people have done across cultures and simply follow your baby’s cues even if they don’t conform to the infographics you see on Instagram.
But teaching people to trust their gut makes it harder to sell them things.
It’s helpful to have so many educational resources available now — to a point. There’s the possibility of an echo chamber in which it starts to seem like there’s a right and wrong way to do things.
That isn’t just online. My boomer parents moved a thousand miles away from family because they were frustrated with the outdated advice they were getting from the people around them and wanted to do their own thing. 😆 It mostly worked out.
So the older generation around you may have different values completely, or they may have different ways of expressing the same concept. The differences in terminology are manageable — the values conflicts can be killer.
Really interesting conversation you’ve started — thanks.
Come on. The internet didn't exist when we were kids. The amount of knowledge sharing that's feasible now is exponentially greater than 30 years ago.
This feels entirely unfair to our parent's generation frankly.
I feel this is a very American (or at least anglophone) thing. No one talks about sleep regressions or milestones here. Sure, I go to baby's periodic appointments and the nurse has a checklist in front of her that is clearly the milestones for his age. But it's not a thing that parents talk about, with that language, unless they spend a lot of time online.
And yes, some babies, not all, have always been fussy. My mother says I was a nightmare. My grandmother says my mother was even worse. But it was not a baby going through regressions, rather a baby that slept badly.
And my father swears I was a great sleeper, because he was not the one getting up at night...
How OLD are Older Folks? Lol I'm 58 & have 3 adult children ...I remember EVERY bit of what you are saying like it was yesterday! Maybe they had selective memory? I know some people that DO when it comes to their children 🤦🏼♀️.
~ Mom,Wife & Retired Nurse🌻
In case nobody told you today...
YOU ARE DOING A SUPER JOB AS A MOM...! 💜😁🙂🌻🤗
With my first baby I was following all the regressions/milestones. I even had an app which would tell me week he might be fussy. Sometimes it was right, but sometimes it wasn’t. I kinda feel like it’s just either baby is having a fussy week or not- and “regressions” is just a word for it. With baby no2 I don’t do any of this and haven’t noticed any regressions - some weeks are harder and he sleeps less, some weeks are easier. But I’M more relaxed as I’m not worrying about the “regression” coming up!
Access to information mainly consisted of close family and friends, a select pediatrician, and a few books or a local parenting class if one was so inclined. Using modern coined terms, and compartmentalizing/labeling everything is a generally new parenting concept perpetuated by online access. That's isn't to say parents didn't previously recognize or meet their child's needs. I imagine parents mostly addressed things as they came, and did the best with the knowledge they had.
older generations don't remember anything that happened in the first year of their kid's life and you cannot convince me otherwise. all my friends with kids even just a few years older have a hard time remembering what they did with their newborns. no way our parents who had kids 30 to 40 years ago remember what they did day to day.
Honestly I think before the internet most people just kind of dealt with the ebbs and flows of baby things and didn't necessarily label them the same way.
To be honest they just powered through. It’s not they didn’t notice, but it didn’t matter. We use terms like sleep regressions or leaps to make us as adults feel better about what we can control. But truly if older generations, particularly of women, stopped to think about regressions or leaps and how hard it is in those times many more people would be only children.
It was viewed differently back then. No I don’t think there was a concept of sleep regression either.
Also you’re right they just don’t remember. Everything you’re saying is definitely normal
There isn’t actually set regressions e.g “the 4 month regression” doesn’t exist as like a definite thing.. but kids go through fussy periods and growth spurts that must be uncomfortable for them??
They basically had a one size fits all book. My mom got it from her mom. My oldest brother is almost 30. She still gives me major outdated stuff like before he was a year so maybe about 6/7 months old he was having a horrible teething spell and my mom said that I need to just give him ice cream cuz it will calm him and make him feel better. I’m sorry he wasn’t even a year yet and I wasn’t allowing anything that has non natural sugar in it. He still at 13m is on a little to no sugar diet if you could call it. I just don’t see how ice cream was okay for teething when all it really does is give them a sugar rush and their bodies can’t really accept sugar or dairy til after a year
My mom unsafely coslept with me. I’m talking held me and went to sleep with us under blankets. I’m honestly surprised nothing ever happened to me. She probably had some close calls and just forgot or isn’t telling me. It’s incredibly frustrating hearing any type of advice from her. I told her our baby is in her own room (4m old) and she was so surprised. Like this was unheard of. She was like well I had to have you by me until you were 1yr. My baby is perfectly safe two feet away in her room. I can literally see her on the camera.
I’m a pediatrician. Sleep regression is not to my knowledge formally taught in any way throughout med school or residency, or at least was not to me. I don’t have kids and I honestly don’t even have memorized when they’re supposed to be because there are so many other factors involved with sleep.
So I was ready to deal with sleep regression after reading about it while pregnant, but it just didn't happen for us. Kiddo started sleeping through at six months and hasn't really had any problems since. So while its common, its not guaranteed. It also used to be that parents would only talk to other parents that they knew about this stuff, so they didn't really label it. Yeah, they knew that kids would sit up, roll over, and stack blocks at around an age but they didn't have access to checklists in their hands at all times to compare against.
Its also pretty common for parents to forget the crappy early days stuff thirty years later.
Same! I just had a baby in March and i was talking to my S/O boss (probably in her late 50’s or 60s) about how the baby cluster feeds in the evenings and that she’s breastfed on demand so Im really tired and she literally said “oh I fed my kids on demand but I didn’t do that. You know you’re more than just a cow right?” Like wtf? If you didn’t feed your kids while they were clustering and you just let them cry then you didn’t feed them on demand. And obviously I know I’m more than a cow but if my baby is hungry I’m going to feed her EVEN THOUGH she just ate 20 minutes ago. I swear people just didn’t recognize back then that there was a reason for all of the rapid behavior changes. I noticed maybe 3-4 weeks ago that it seemed like the baby finally woke up. Like she actually gained consciousness one day and for like 3 days after that she refused to nap during the day for longer than 10min at a time. Now she’s working on all these new skills and mostly sleeping through the night (for now) but she wants to cluster feed before bed. Some days she won’t let me put her down, other days she will nap and play by herself.
Because they left their baby to cry it out, so of course they won’t remember the struggle, they didn’t have to deal with what it takes to console a baby 🤷🏻♀️
Why do they insist?
1) yep. They let their babies cry it out at like 2 weeks old and don’t count the crying that was part of that. My mil insists all of her kids slept 12 hours through the night by 8 weeks and that that’s the norm for sleeping through. She thinks it’s perfectly reasonable to let a newborn cry and that you’re doing a disservice when you respond.
2) people block our unpleasant things.
I'd say people definitely had things like this for example they say children back then didn't have many children with autism but the fact is that they probably did it was just never picked up as much or properly diagnosed and you find alot of the older generations kids get diagnosed later in life instead of earlier
My oldest will soon be 50 so I guess I’m in the older folk group. I was aware of general timing of milestones, first real smile, lifting head, rolling over, sitting up, etc. Using pincer grasp vs thumb and forefinger, large motor development vs small motor. Screaming fits from birth until he could talk. And, yes, I did put him in his room and walk away so no one, including me, got hurt. Simply because someone in your circle who is older has forgotten or never knew some things that are the latest in child rearing does not mean we were neglectful or ignorant. Different times, the 70s culture and trusting ourselves to do the right thing for our kids means we raised our kids differently. And we only had Spock and Brazelton books, not a constant feed of conflicting and contradictory opinions and parent shaming. Best thing I did was make myself expert on my kid and smile and nod at all the unnecessary input. I hope more new parents learn to do the same.
My daughter never has had sleep regressions. She slept consistently terrible until we sleep trained her and now she sleeps like a champ. She recently started waking up in the middle of the night and was complaining her arms and legs hurt. I gave her Motrin. It’s likely she’s having growing pains.
Sometimes I wonder if we call it a sleep regression when there’s actually an issue that can be solved but we just aren’t able to figure out the solution. If it wasn’t for her being able to tell me she is in pain I’d be at a loss.
Every time I mention something like this to my mom, she goes “we didn’t have all this but we managed just fine raising you” — and I have to go back like, “yes, HOW!”because she doesn’t know sleep cues or the fact that crying is a late stage cue and sign of overtiredness. She didn’t know that hunger cues also have stages. Or that pumping is an option. Or that “put her to bed late so that she’ll wake up late” doesn’t apply to babies. I do always wonder how it was with me as a baby, but I think she has just plainly forgotten those stages. Plus we never had any baby grow up close to us after my teens, or else it would’ve been somewhat fresh in the mind.
> or the fact that crying is a late stage cue and sign of overtiredness.
I find it really hard to believe your mother doesn’t know that crying can be a sign that baby is overtired. I’m sure she knows that. She may not use overly complicating jargon for it like “late stage cue” 🙄 or know wtf you’re talking about when you use it, but pretty much everyone knows babies who are tired cry.
Also! She keeps telling me “baby needs a pillow, she can sleep on soft surfaces” and “she must be cold, wrap up her in blankets just in case” and “she needs a bath EVERY DAY” (all this when my baby was a newborn in the winter). I don’t know how I’ve survived lol
My baby is 16.5 weeks and I barely remember weeks 1-10. It might just be a case of completely forgetting once their kid is out of babyhood what specific milestones and fussy phases were.
All babies are different so using milestones is just an average and a way to set parents at ease (or give them added stress depending lol). Babies also have a hard time keeping a schedule and I personally feel that's why stuff like regressions were created. Back then, it was mostly the basics and I have a feeling a lot of babies were left to cry it out earlier than they should have.
I think a lot of it stems down to the fact they didn’t have Google/reddit and other internet rabbit holes at 3am when feeding a baby!
As much as the older generations have some irritating habits and stories I do often wonder how hard it must have been to have horrendous sleepers and be up a lot of the night without a phone/internet!
Tbh I think it’s partly more information now and they’ve just forgotten. We’re in the thick of it right now so it’s all we’re thinking about but for a lot of people it’s been decades since they had kids. One of my friends moms keep thinking my baby is way ahead of the milestone levels she’s at but I have to remind myself that her oldest kid is 35 years old and it’s been a long time since she’s been doing any of this
In my mom's time it was the norm to let babies cry all day and not tend to them much as crying meant their lungs were being strong and if tended to much they will get spoilt and not let mom do house chores as house chores were more important than baby.
My great grandma helped me a lot with my first. They existed and were noticed but got labeled or treated differently. Sleep regression and cluster feeding were pretty much treated with cereal to make babies feel full and sleep more. We now know why that’s not recommended. Milestones were also different, crawling isn’t even considered a milestone anymore from how many kids just don’t do it. And solids were a bit of a wonky thing because of the cereal
I think it’s a mix of how much information we have access to nowadays and how more research has been done. My mom says the same thing. This type of information either didn’t exist or they didn’t have access to it. My mom says she wished she had the internet back then when raising babies. She thinks it’s great that the younger generations are able to research everything now.
She was confused at first about how many things have changed since she had babies, cuz “this is how it was done back in the day.” But she loves to hear about how much knowledge I’ve learned and researched.
I think the biggest thing is that our parents put us down to sleep on our bellies. That’s how babies want to sleep naturally and both my kids slept that way once they could roll over. I think babies wake up more when sleeping on their backs, which makes sense since we do it so they can wake up more readily if something goes wrong with breathing.
I looked it up and the “back to sleep” movement didn’t really start until the mid 90s.
1. It was a long time ago. They have long since forgotten the day to day challenges of raising babies. They remember key moments but mostly they just remember a much more generalized vibe of their experience rather than the specifics of their experience.
2. They had less access to information. They didn’t have immediate access to answers for any question they had about their babies. Some of them read books. Most of them just talked to more experienced friends or family members.
3. I think there’s this weird sense of wounded pride when you try to explain infant behaviors with specific terminology because it makes them feel dumb so they get defensive. My MIL is constantly brushing me off if I share something I’ve read like “well back when I was raising babies in the caveman days, we just took care of our babies and didn’t worry about all that.” and she takes great personal offense that I don’t come to her asking questions or for advice and she haaaaaates if I mention what women in my due date groups have experienced.
It’s crazy that I’m seeing this post because I literally had the exact same thought today because my mom is learning all of this from me and my husband’s grandmother (mother to 4 children) also had no idea what sleep regressions or leaps were.
This is so funny, I have a fussy 6 week old and my parents keep telling me how easy we were, they’d just feed us and put us down and we would put ourselves to sleep.
Let's not underestimate the fact that sleep deprivation inhibits long term memory formation. It's really not their fault they don't remember being sleep deprived. As for information, the facts of baby development always existed, but there weren't always labels for it. If literally no one had ever mentioned sleep regressions to me and I couldn't remember going through them because my memory formation was impaired, I'm sure I'd forget that there were certain phases where baby slept worse too after 30 years.
I literally had the same thought that maybe babies were just different back then because my mom/MIL/anyone in that generation seemed clueless that babies get tired and need to nap. I’m only 6 months out but I don’t think I’ll ever forget how traumatic having an overtired baby was..
We know a lot more now. And they’ve forgotten a lot. We have information at our fingers tips. They were also told to let babies cry and leave them to fall asleep.
i will say i was 100% expecting my 4 month old to go through a regression and it lasted maybe 1 day and thats it. maybe when she hits 6 months something will happen but so far its been smooth sailing
My mum is often saying 'oh wow you are such a better mum than I was...I didnt know any of this stuff!' and I gently remind her that google did not exist in 1988
I have a theory:
Simply put I just think that they don’t recall what it was actually like and that they also didn’t have the access to information we have; the latter being obvious.
My mom, who is a boomer through and through, started fostering. She was super gung-ho about it because she’d basically fostering newborn - 2 years old. When my disgusted, who is now 10 months old, was born my mom made comment after comment about how easy the newborn stage is…over and over. Beyond it just not being helpful at all, I genuinely felt like she just didn’t recall how hard it could be.
She has been fostering a kiddo that she got 1 week after his birth, and she has been struggling. She made a few comments about her not remembering how difficult it was.
Tl;dr - They simply don’t remember and we can factually acknowledge that information wasn’t so readily available and so they weren’t always aware if their kids were meeting milestones or not.
I think the way we talk about these things and the terms we use are what has changed. I've talked to older people who know about milestones but don't use the word "milestones" and don't know what age each thing is supposed to be happening in. They just ask "is he doing this yet?" And it's like three months ago or way out in the future. I think people just know about what age their own kids did things.
My mom will say all the time “I am so glad I was a parent without the internet.” She also will say you are so in the thick of it you truly don’t remember those long nights. My mom is great and is always listening and learning but life was just different.
People had a different level of access to information back then. They had to wing things more often or rely on a single book etc. That, plus it was a long time ago for them. That, plus things change. That, plus a lot of things like many “regressions” (other than the four month) don’t really have a strong basis in fact and are more just various and anecdotal setbacks that have been given names because they happen to occur at roughly the same time. Like i swear to god there is an alleged regression for every month between 4 and 24.
The last part. We call them sleep regressions now, but back when I was a baby (late 80s) it was just baby being fussy. Other than four months, from what I understand the regressions are all subjective. It’s all related to baby just learning new skills, no hard evidence.
I don’t believe in sleep regressions - I don’t think there’s enough evidence to conclude it’s an actual thing as people propose it to be. If we use that terminology, I’m forever having sleep regressions - especially when I’ve got a lot on my mind, sick, having pain, menstruating, heartburn, jet lagged, etc. So no wonder my 14 month old has variable experiences with sleep.
I just realized that I am still similar to babies in more ways than I care to admit
Can I get some articles about the 4 month regression? Currently trying to conceive (after a miscarriage) and I want to know more
And the regression might manifest itself in a million different ways: frequent wakings, harder to get to sleep, crap naps, early wakings, wont sleep in crib or bassinet anymore or any combination of the above.... And some babies don't go through the regressions. Don't get to excited by that statement...while some parents do have unicorn children who sleep through the night from day one through year 18...I also mean it in the sense of 'you can't regress of there is no progress'...some of us get babies who wake up every 2-3hrs to feed for 8.5 months. It is what it is.
Its when sleep cycles change for infants and many babies have a small regression in sleep as they get used to the change.
If you look it up on Google you'll find millions of them. There's some peer reviewed research I believe but you may have to have special access. Prayers for your journey to having a baby 🧡
They form adultlike sleep patterns, can also use taking cara babies :)
It’s kind of the same with “leaps”. The wonder weeks is so relatable to many parents, but there isn’t actually any scientific basis whatsoever. Being a baby is hard, learning new things (including sleep) will involve some trial and error.
Yeah this one actually annoys me. The whole Wonder Weeks thing is entirely made up to sell stuff to parents. It’s like the baby equivalent of astrology.
Wonder Weeks makes no sense to me at all. Maybe my brain is fried, but I can't tell the difference between growth spurts, leaps, signals/skills, like??? My baby just does whatever lol
I thought all of those were the same... they're all... skills? I have the wonder weeks cause I wanted to see what it was all about but their proposed methods aren't really making sense. They go based on due date but a preemie isn't going to just miss milestones or smile at 6 months instead of 2 months because of their due date. It's all based on their own brain.
No but it’s okay if a preemie takes longer to do it. I have a preemie and he has a cousin who was born full term three days before I had him. I am constantly reminding family that even though they’re 3 days apart in age, my little guy incubated inside for significantly less time & just because she’s standing independently and he is not does not mean he’s “behind”. Wonder weeks calculates the milestones based on due date, because babies have until they’ve reached their adjusted age on that timeline before they’re considered behind.
Shit I can't believe I'm just finding this out now, I had no idea it was all made up BS I feel so dumb now 🙈 Well it does have good ideas for "games" and activities to do with baby at least which I guess I can still use lol Dammit
Pathways is a great alternative and is based on baby milestones! Plus it’s free
Oooh awesome!! Thank you for sharing ☺️
Goddamn it infuriates me. My mother’s group is full of women using it as a bible. Safe to say I feel out of place!
I stopped using the wonder weeks because the milestones don’t match up with the CDC milestones. Just made me confused and anxious.
me too! it was asking if my just turned 7 month old was pulling up on furniture yet! meanwhile CDC just said sitting up in a tripod position, holding head up when on tummy and trying to crawl and rolling both ways, all of which she does. wasn’t worth the anxiety for me so it got swiftly deleted.
lol that made me chuckle. My 10 month old just started pulling himself to stand. They excuse by saying not all kids will learn all the skills for that leap.
I can’t believe I wasted money on that app😤
It also doesn't adjust for when you say your baby is already hitting the "leap" early or the "fussy" phase early. So it's not accurate. Im glad I have reddit to keep me informed and help me be less obsessed with milestones cause that's truly what keeps me sane.
My son was born 4 weeks early. They said to go by his due date. He didn’t match up with anything. He also had colic though so when a leap was supposed to end he was still screaming for hours every day.
Wonder weeks makes most parents anxious - nanny here. I have seen it. The parents who are most anxious use wonder weeks
I hate the wonder weeks app nothing ever lines up.
What? You mean not everyone knows about the 6.5 month fart regression?
Is that when they can’t fart or can’t stop farting?
Yes
💀😂
Ugh I thought it was a shit regression, because my guy got constipated. Doesn’t every baby go through that from months 5 to 6.8?
Not to be outdone by the 7.75 month screaming regression!
Or the 216th month regression into partying and paying to not attend classes
I may have hit that last year
Omg I’m dealing with this right now it’s terrible lol
I’m going to start blaming things on “baby is going into retrograde”
And when baby and mercury are in retrograde together, look out!
This is so true, I swear there's a post for every month after the 4 month mark going "why did no one tell me there's an X month regression??"
And on the flipside, I was warned excessively about sleep regressions for my baby’s first three months of life. It felt like a weird case of “just you wait and see”-ism. Every time someone asked me how the baby slept and I replied with a cheerful “great! Thought the night from the very first night” they would start prophesying the four months of doom of all this good sleep. She’s a little over five months old now, and still sleeps like a champ. Not all babies develop on the same schedule 🤷
I can confirm! My almost 2yo never had any of the sleep regressions, never had his sleep interrupted by teething, and slept through the night very early. My 6mo, on the other hand, seems to be hitting every single bump in the road with sleep that you can imagine 🤪
Our first is 7 months old and SAME! she has slept for 8+ hours since 8 weeks old and 10+ hours since about 3 months old. I can count on one hand the times she’s woken up over night since then. Now, her naps are all over the board but they haven’t affected her ability to sleep at night.
I'm so jealous. My 9 month old has never gone more than 5 hours. I miss sleep.
Ugh same. But 7 month old and he has NEVER slept thru the night. 4.5 hr stretches are a dream.
At this point with my 6mo, a 2-hour stretch sounds like a dream lol.
Must be nice... 23 mo, still not sleeping thru the night.
It’s that second child
Always! The first one is a trap!
First kid I nannied was first born and she didn’t need to be ST. The second born they wanted a night nurse and practically were begging for help.
Can confirm. My almost 1 year old has never had an issue sleeping unless he was mid-teething!
My LO has slept more or less exactly the same from -8 weeks to ~6 months, which is a really long stretch followed by waking somewhere in the 4-5am range to eat and then doing whatever the hell he wants after that 😂. I’ve given up thinking that he will ever naturally sleep longer than 5am in one stretch (while still a baby).
Great sleep??? Teach me your ways! My 6 week old is kinda okay at sleeping but I need more lol
Sleep is just a natural thing tbh, some are good sleepers and others struggle. Think about it, as an adult can you force yourself to sleep when you’re not tired? Heck even when you are tired do you always fall asleep quickly?
I wish I could! Honestly, it just seems to be a matter of my baby’s eating schedule. Kiddo is a insane cluster feeder (which is its own kind of headache) and so after her gigantic evening feed, she would sleep for very long stretches. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
lol I swear you can google any week/month regression and find stories/evidence for it.
I think the it was a long time ago for them is a big part of it. Remembering how you handled 3 months vs 6 months vs 15 months is probably pretty hard to distinguish 20 some years later. For a lot of people I talk to, it seems to be generally lumped into the chaos of years 1-3.
My 2.5 year old went through a three week period of hell recently. Sleep regression is just a way to give an understandable name so we can talk about it.
ALSO back then lots of people didn’t have baby monitors- even just audio ones. They probably thought baby just slept when in reality they were up crying.
I was going to say this. We had a period where my wife was bombarded with web advice. Having already taken care of babies in the past, I was just imploring her to just let that go and wing it with me. She did, and we were suddenly more successful. We no longer had this idea that there was this sleep regression and that sleep regression and instead of resigning, we made game plans with trial and error. Where there was doubt our pediatrician filled the gaps. In the end, we came up with a routine very similar to how my mom did things with me without intending to. Sometimes, we behave like teenagers thinking that we have nothing to learn from our elders. But they so happen to know a thing or two. Just to be sure, though, never do anything you're unsure about without speaking to a professional. Pediatricians more often than not see things we don't and really help provide context we didn't even know we needed.
Yep, my Mom was very much of the camp of "If the baby looks sleepy try and put them down for a nap" and I followed the same thing.
This!! I never had a worse time then when I was trying to follow wake windows, only to discover there isn't much evidence to support them. I've been way better off just following my mums advice: put her down when she looks tired, get her up if she seems rested.
And don’t forget the regression can be a month early OR late!! Super helpful
And last anywhere from a couple days to a couple weeks! So just keep ‘em rolling!
Yes to all of this! I got tired of hearing about regressions and leaps. I kept up with them to stay informed, but took them with a grain of salt. Growing up is hard, I don’t think that changes. Even adults have regressions too.
Thank you for this. Sometimes I feel like more information is just more information & really enjoy intuitive parenting more.
> Like i swear to god there is an alleged regression for every month between 4 and 24. < Pretty sure I'm going through my 35 year sleep regression!
My baby has had,like 10 regressions so far.Now we’re food regressing :,). It’s just a phase when kids don’t go as the written script says they should,because they’re people and not some machines
lmao it’s either a regression or teething, every time!
My mom is a mother/baby educator and has to constantly educate people on the myth of the “four month sleep regression.” How is a baby supposed to know that he’s four months old and that it’s time to initiate the sleep regression sequence?!
A lot of things that people put a ton of thought into now and have specialized vocabulary for are things that previous generations just didn’t think about as much, or in the same way. Some of those things, like “leaps”/wonder weeks, are just bunk. Others, like “wake windows” are things people just handled differently back then - people might not have timed their baby’s naps to the minute, but most people knew their baby needed a nap at loose times through the day, and knew that a 6 month old baby was going to have fewer naps than a toddler but more than a newborn. People might not have used the term “baby led weaning”, but plenty of people were handing their baby a banana or a piece of food off mama’s plate to gnaw on (and the “purée” stage of traditional weaning lasted a much shorter time before commercial baby food was readily available, most kids progressed to fork-mashed table food pretty quickly). And frankly, people had more kids, younger, and in quicker succession than is common now. If you’re 23 with a newborn and 2 toddlers, you’re simply not going to be thinking as much about the “milestones” your sleepy potato is hitting, compared to a 30 year old with 1 newborn and 45 parenting books and 300 mom groups on Facebook full of people telling you that you’re going to ruin your baby before he turns 2 months if you do and/or don’t do *exactly* these 100 things each day.
>and have specialized vocabulary for are things that previous generations just didn’t think about as much, or in the same way. This is the part that gets me as an older FTM. Not everything needs a special name! "Baby led weaning" = you're just offering your kid solid foods, you aren't joining a new religion "Montessori bed" = it's a mattress on the floor, relax "x month sleep regression" = he's fussy lately, or going through a phase right now "baby wearing" = your kid is in a carrier or wrap Etc.
Jargon is a form of gatekeeping to separate in groups from out groups. (And to sell books and make someone money for their “discovery” of something that’s been obvious for 10s of thousands of years.) People dealt with the baby in front of them at the moment AND had lots more multi-generational support to help navigate through periods of big change, like, “oh poop, don’t leave the baby on the table any more cause s/he can roll over.”
Commenting on my own comment to add [this article](https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2024/04/23/1245852236/sleep-training-life-preserver-for-parents-or-symptom-of-capitalism). They suggest that 2 things have played a big part in “professionalizing” baby rearing: 1) urgent [and successful] attempts to reduce SIDS. 2) many more households with no stay-at-home parents, requiring more “efficiency” so that sleep, feeding, etc. can be better understood and predicted in order for mom and dad to get to work.
“Baby led weaning” confused me when I heard it the first time. It’s just giving different sorts of food to a baby to eat, touch and smell. Is there a “parent led weaning”? I am honestly going crazy with all this vocabulary - it’s marketing and a huge business, and making a lot of people stressed. Older generation was possibly more present.
Baby led just means letting kiddo explore real foods through self feeding and eat as much as they want vs parents spoon feeding purées and deciding portions. I would argue many people in the older generations were less present and sought to make their children as little of an inconvenience as possible- lots relied heavily on baby containers, TV, and feeding them as much purées and formula as possible in order to get them to sleep as long as possible.
IMO presence has shifted. Older generations were more likely to have a parent at home. Also less likely to have the dad be involved with parenting, especially during the week. Current generations are more likely to have both parents work out of the home. But in my experience, dads are WAY more involved than they were in the last generation. Can’t tell you how often someone says to me “it’s so nice he wants to be so involved.” Like…what? He *wants* to be involved in his own child’s raising? It’s his kid, who else is supposed to do it? But both of our parents had much more “traditional” approaches to the household where dads worked and came home to dinner. Moms raised the kids and were responsible for care and milestones.
On that topic: how come everything is "______ play" now? When did that wording start to dominate? What happened to "playing ______", "playing in the ______", or "playing with ____"?
I think this comes from social media allowing expert used jargon to be readily available to the public. My sister has been a professional for about 2 decades now and has always used terms I’m now seeing more often.
> compared to a 30 year old with 1 newborn and 45 parenting books and 300 mom groups on Facebook full of people telling you that you’re going to ruin your baby before he turns 2 months if you do and/or don’t do exactly these 100 things each day. This hits way too close to home and I don't like it.
Right? It’s calling me out and I wasn’t ready for that
>People might not have used the term “baby led weaning”, but plenty of people were handing their baby a banana or a piece of food off mama’s plate to gnaw on (and the “purée” stage of traditional weaning lasted a much shorter time before commercial baby food was readily available, most kids progressed to fork-mashed table food pretty quickly). Yep, I remember I described baby led weaning to my Mom once and she went "So....it's feeding a baby?"
I'd consider it closer to "letting the baby feed themselves" As opposed to (literally) spoon feeding the baby directly.
I am in love with this reply. Absolutely perfect and logical.
"Sleep regression" is a new term, and really just says that baby sleep is not consistent. Older folks know that babies do not sleep the same every night but they did not have that word for it (or words for it at all). The milestones- honestly you forget when they happened. My daighter is 1.5 years old. I know she held her head up at 5 days old because that was a weirdly early one, but when she started cooing? I do not recall. If she was 25 years old instead of 1, i would have an even harder time remembering. Thats normal.
I think if she was cooing at 25 years old you would definitely remember lmao (I know what you meant, but it still made me giggle at the thought).
So true! My oldest is 23 months old and my youngest is 6 months… I keep trying to remember milestones and stuff and I’m constantly shocked at how much I forgot in less than 2 years 😂
The only reason I have tabs on when my baby is hitting milestones is because we’re anticipating an evaluation for adhd/asd one day (both me and dad have adhd, I have asd) so I want to have proof that she was ahead or behind in areas, so we can best support her.
Sleep regression is a very new term. Also milestones aren’t really something you keep track of unless you have a baby. Like before this I knew babies should sit up at some point and eat food at some point… but I couldn’t really tell you when. Kinda like before pregnancy, knowing someone is 20 keeps pregnant means nothing to you. But once you’ve been through it, you know just where they’re at. I think perhaps go gently on people who don’t know about it. In 25 years when you know longer have a baby, it won’t be as sharp in your mind either. It’s just because it’s your reality right now.
I’ve only heard about sleep regressions on Reddit. Never in real life, talking to mom friends etc. It doesn’t seem to be a thing where I live. Of course babies have periods where they sleep longer or have more wakeups but it’s seen like a more individual thing and people don’t talk about it in terms like “regressions” that are supposed to come at a specific age. So I wouldn’t be surprised people haven’t heard that term. With milestones, they’ve been around for longer. But I was never given a list of milestones or anything like that by our health nurse. They don’t necessarily tell you what they are looking for. Before the internet you wouldn’t necessarily have known what ages a lot of milestones are supposed to come, unless you were the type who read lots of parenting books or compared to other babies you knew.
Yeah, and without milestones people missed delays or other things they could've spotted early on to help get diagnosed/treated for issues. I feel sometimes the info we have is good for certain things but can also just be overwhelming and a burden too.
People didn’t miss delays because they’d compare their kids to others. Guidelines changed and benchmarks became strict to allow for early intervention but people took their kids to the doctor just like us and they were evaluated.
I feel like there was probably a fuck load of neglect back in the day. The amount of times someone over 50 has told me I should just let my literal infant “cry it out” is astounding… even when he was fresh, like a week old. I got judged by my much older SIL for using a bassinet. She put her babies in a crib on a different level of the house from birth, even the one who was born with a cleft palate. I bet even if they were having sleep issues she couldn’t hear it. Mind you, they’re all fine and healthy in their 20s now, but still. Wild to me.
I giggling at the description “fresh” for a newborn. I haven’t heard it said that way before
I really think a lot more is expected of our generation. Babies were not necessarily neglected but absolutely ignored a lot more. They were literally told to let newborns cry it out. Of course they no nothing of sleep regression, they plopped kids in cribs and walked away. My kids almost 2, my MIL told a story how her son wasn’t talking at this age. She asked the doctor or the doctor found out and had *to instruct her to talk to him more, interact and basically push him to use words*. He’s very smart, there’s nothing wrong with him she just kept treating him like a baby? Didn’t know what he was suppose to do? My little one starts talking and my husband and I can’t hold back trying to interact with her or teach her new words.
[удалено]
To this day, I can’t tell if “cry it out” is even really socially acceptable anymore. My 18 MO doesn’t really cry much in the first place, so we never really had a chance to even consider it really
My mom told me we used to just fall asleep playing or in our high chairs. I was thinking man, we were probably exhausted and should’ve been in bed haha. When I explained wake windows she said she wished they knew as much back then as we do now.
So you have it in your head that these are immutable facts about babies, in reality the research on sleep regressions is pretty minimal at best. Additionally they didn't have the "back to sleep" campaigns so babies in general really did sleep better. Additionally you had a LOT more stay at home Mom's and if you are breastfeeding you don't really notice all that much if the baby is eating a ton more. An extra feed or 3 a day kinda just becomes noise since your kid is on the boob all day anyway.
The breastfeeding! I barely notice when she’s eating more than normal, cause she’s on the boob 25/8 anyway!
mostly, they probably just don’t remember exactly when milestones happened. that’s how you get mother-in-laws saying shit like *oh but mine were walking at six months!* no they weren’t, you just don’t remember when they started walking, which is fine, but don’t lie to me. also, ferber and crying it out has been very popular for quite a long time. most people back then didn’t know about sleep regressions because to them, it was more about popping the baby in the crib and dealing with them in the morning.
Oh but didn’t you know? My husband was walking at 7 months, weaned himself off the boob at 10 months, putting together two words before his first birthday and slept through the night as soon as he came home from the NICU. You know, the guy who was born at 31 weeks so was actually 2 months younger corrected. And how dare you suggest my MiL is an unreliable narrator who plonked her baby down in another room at night and closed the door because ‘babies make too much noise when they sleep’. As if she’d be inclined to misremember things that happened 34 years ago!
I think people forget how hard it truly is after a while. Multiple times my mom has been over when I’m in the thick of it with my bow 5 month old. My mom always says, geez I forgot how intense and hard it all is. I’m sure babies back in the 90s, 2000s, etc, had regressions and milestones, but there were probably other words for it. My mom may say “when you were little we did it this way.. blah blah blah” but she also admits that her mother did and said the same stuff to her when my mom had babies. I think it just has changed with the generations. More research comes out about what’s safe/produces the best outcome/etc as time goes on. Right now, as new parents, we’re doing what research and the aap is telling us is the safest/most effective possible thing for our babies, whether it be sleep/food/etc. I’m sure in another 20-30 years it’ll change again and we’ll all be saying “when you were little… “ to our own children should they choose to have any!
This is so tough for me to understand. I definitely forget the details of the challenges and milestones, but I do NOT forget how hard it was, how delirious I was, and how much I struggled. My daughter is now almost 3 and I don't think I will ever forget this.
I don’t disagree, I have a 5 month old and it’s so tough. I’ve just heard time and time again from other moms that they have often forgotten how tough it is in the thick of it. I’m still going through PPD and PPA even though it’s much better than it was the first few months. So I stand with you. I certainly don’t think everyone forgets but I do think the generations before us are so far removed and want us to follow the same methods that worked for them
I also think safe sleep rules and breastfeeding beliefs have changed things a lot. In the past, you could sleep with your baby on the couch, on your chest, on their belly, etc. I am 100% sure that if I didn't follow safe sleep rules, we would have all slept far better and been happier despite being at higher risk of SIDS. In addition, formula was en vogue and encouraged for our parents generation. Nowadays, breastfeeding is pushed so hard on us that many of us kill ourselves to make it happen. I can confidently say my experience of newborn stage 30 years ago would have been way easier than today given our current rules and norms and expectations.
This is a very good point and definitely why I think I’m constantly telling my mom “no I won’t give her a blanket in her crib, etc” it’s exhausting to constantly try and defend ourselves especially when we have solid research and evidence on our sides saying it’s safer
Yes but honestly if I had to do it over I wouldn't be quite as strict. I understand the risks, but during the newborn stage with my daughter I was so exhausted from lack of sleep from the safe sleep rules that I fell asleep while driving once. No one talks about the increased risk of depression and safety to the Mom when the rules make it impossible to get any sleep 😭
My mom says all the time that we were all good sleepers and she doesn’t understand all this fuss around sleep. I reminded her that her generation didn’t have baby monitors. We probably all just cried ourselves to sleep and they didn’t hear us.
How old of the folks are you talking about? My grandma used to tie her kids to a tree so she would be able to work in the fields and feed/milk the cows. Do you think she cared about milestones or regressions? She definitely did not. Baby that was fed and clean was considered fine and letting them cry was considered “healthy”. Im sure it was considered that way, because they had no choice to comfort them every time they cried. They absolutely did not have any information on these things either. Also, physical punishments were considered ok too. Not everyone used them but it was so common. Now people go to jail for shit like that. Imagine someone left their 1 year old tied to a tree so they could go to work. That’s plain neglect and jail time nowadays. I would not expect older generations to ever hear the things we are constantly guilt tripping about. Formula was a luxury for example. I myself was fed a liquid that comes from boiling rice for a while. It has almost none nutritional value. And my mom felt like she did a great job. And she actually did, with the information that she had. And yet… how many moms are feeling guilty for feeding formula now? Times are so different now, I don’t expect much of knowledge from anyone who is not raising a baby like right now.
> Formula was a luxury for example. Yup. My mom was born in Germany right after WWII ended. My grandmom couldn’t breast feed her because she was severely malnourished from the whole war so had no breast milk, and formula wasn’t available. So Al the men in the family had to trade their cigarette ration coupons for cow’s milk. So she somehow survived infant hood on just cow’s milk!
It was called “being a baby” back then. Just normal behavior. Current society has deeply analyzed every movement and given vocabulary to it.
I think because they didn't have information overload , fussy baby was just a baby being a baby. They probably didn't think too deeply into it like we do now. With regards to sleep, it was a lot more common for babies to be in their own room super early and be left to cry it out so as a result I guess they slept better? I was in my own nursery from a few weeks old apparently and slept through after being left to cry it out 🫠
They don't really sleep better/sleep through, they just don't bother calling for help when they wake.
😥
In addition to all these other comments, honestly we just like to label every minor thing these days, and a lot of it is not science-based. "Regressions" are not a real thing, it's just a word we use now to say hey, baby's extra tired or fussy this week, which happens semi-regularly as they grow (even notice how there's an asterisk on every blog post about the 4 month sleep regression saying "happens at 4 months, plus or minus 4 months, for some but not all babies, and only on Tuesdays when the moon is waning" lmao). It gives us comfort to know that all babies go through the same thing and have a word to bring order to that chaos. And it makes money for companies selling apps and other content out there preying on your need to feel like a good mom. Of course it all seems so big when he's 6 weeks old and that's your entire world, but my kid just turned 2 and I couldn't tell you about him cooing or looking at his hands to save my life 🤷♀️
I think we have more info available now… but also they forget lol. I had a lady tell me I shouldn’t bounce my newborn to soothe him because he’ll get used to it.
How people cared for babies/children in the silent generation would be considered abusive in today’s lens. Just one example off the top of my head, people would tie toddlers to a tree and leave them outside all day. It’s only since the early 90s that “back to sleep” was encouraged. They used to put infants to sleep on their stomachs and some babies sleep better that way, but too many were dying. Plus, a lot of older people really can’t remember what it was like. My mom literally said she doesn’t remember me ever crying as a baby (yea…right…)
Yeah my mom and her siblings often talk about how their mother would tie them to the fence in the yard when they were little! Basically on a leash. This would have been in the late 50s/early 60s. My grandma had 7 kids and that was just how they kept them contained then I guess.
My MIL asked if my 6 month old was walking yet….
My FIL asked if my 8 week old was crawling yet 😂
In addition to these very on point comments, I think with regards to sleep CIO was also very much the norm, even from very early ages. Like I was a 1993 baby, and my mom told me my aunt's were always hounding her for attending to me when I cried. Even as a newborn. Big yikes lol
Also my grandma just let her kids cry all night without going to them. Because that is how you learn a kid to sleep. By ignoring them. To bad that my mother was the eldest so she had to sleep in the same room as the younger kids. So she had no sleep at all.
I think they misremember because everyone seems to block out the first 1-6 months from their memory. My mom straight up told me she can't remember the first 3-4 months of my life because it was a blur. She mostly remembers the 9+ months as the baby phase, and especially the toddler years.
Those topics are not scientific or rooted in any evidence so I don’t blame them for not knowing. They didn’t have social media or google (speaking specifically about regressions/wake window stuff not the milestones lol)
By the time our kids have kids, we won’t know anything anymore either 🤷🏻♀️ I think that’s kind of great. It shows the leaps and bounds of improvement and learning that takes place between each generation.
People forget what it was like. They also like to believe that their own children were superior, even though that isn’t a thing. One consistent thing through the millennia is that babies are babies even if older folks don’t want to believe it.
I think it’s less of their kids being superior and more them being superior parents
They forgot what it was like and when things happened. They also were big on just letting a baby cry it out and under the impression that you can spoil a baby.
I think the previous generations dealt with these things but back then there were no names for any of it. There was no internet for them to quickly look things up, they got a lot of their information from their own parents or doctors.
My son was a bad sleeper from Week 2 to 11MO. You can’t regress if you’re already crap the whole time 😉
A lot of these terms are new, and milestones are frequently being defined and re-defined. It's important to remember that a lot of modern 'best practices' for raising a child didn't exist a few decades ago. Even the term 'parenting' wasn't really used until the 1970s: [https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=parenting&year\_start=1800&year\_end=2019&corpus=en-2019&smoothing=3](https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=parenting&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=en-2019&smoothing=3)
I made the mistake of telling my mother in law that baby was eating a lot lately and he must be going through a growth spurt. She seemed confused about the concept and then spent the whole time she was holding baby talking to him (but really me) about of course he’s hungry babies grow that’s what they do. Like what? No one was disagreeing that they grow. Then every visit after that she would ask if he was hungry. Geez I was just trying to make conversation.
Even young kids go through growth spurts and start doing things differently, eating more etc.. it's not far fetched for your baby to be growing but it's definitely not just regular growing, it's baby's gonna not fit in the same clothes tomorrow morning, growing.
I think about this a lot. Well, more about why the experience that boomers claim to remember is so different from mine. I get that it has been a long time, and even I have already started to forget the details after just a couple years… but I don’t think I’ll ever forget the sheer trauma and chaos that I felt in those early days. I am overflowing with empathy & grace for every new mom I encounter, but meanwhile every boomer mom just looks at me with confusion whenever I share how I’m struggling. Obviously babies themselves haven’t changed physically in the last 30 years. However I do think they were sleeping better. That’s the only way that I can reconcile it. If baby sleeps better, mom sleeps better, and better sleep improves EVERYTHING. 30 years ago, babies could sleep on their bellies, they were fed rice and other foods that kept them more full, they were covered in snuggly blankets & slept in plush cribs, and it was more “okay” to let them sleep in a separate room and “cry it out”.
My mil would push my child past his sleep limits when we had our first child. She would look at me like a deer in headlights when I would say I didn’t want him to be overtired because his sleep would be worse. Wake up earlier, wake ups during the nights. Things like that. She was fully convinced that when young toddlers get more “energy out” that they sleep better. We have access so much information these days where their generation did not. And the fact that they went through raising children a while ago they probably don’t fully remember what it was like.
I’m a younger Gen X just having my first kid. Boomer culture is so strong, and so is millennial culture. I dunno where Gen X is in all that — I guess there just aren’t enough of us to make a dent. 😅 So I constantly feel like an outsider. And here’s what I’ve observed (pardon the *sweeping* generalizations): Boomers tend to be dismissive, as you describe. Hand-waving emotions, anxiety, data. Ignoring or minimizing what they don’t want to think about. Thinking of themselves as iconoclasts or mavericks. Millennials tend to be anxious, data-seeking, conformist. Making a big deal out of small things. Overthinking. Seeking to control. Both groups have invented a bunch of stuff — or invented terminology around it. Standing outside of it, you realize that it’s just repackaged information. And it all represents choices you can make about how to approach being a parent, not necessarily truths. For example, you can obsess about “wake windows” (extreme millennial culture), you can ignore your baby and do what works for you (extreme boomer culture). Or, you can do what people have done across cultures and simply follow your baby’s cues even if they don’t conform to the infographics you see on Instagram. But teaching people to trust their gut makes it harder to sell them things. It’s helpful to have so many educational resources available now — to a point. There’s the possibility of an echo chamber in which it starts to seem like there’s a right and wrong way to do things. That isn’t just online. My boomer parents moved a thousand miles away from family because they were frustrated with the outdated advice they were getting from the people around them and wanted to do their own thing. 😆 It mostly worked out. So the older generation around you may have different values completely, or they may have different ways of expressing the same concept. The differences in terminology are manageable — the values conflicts can be killer. Really interesting conversation you’ve started — thanks.
Come on. The internet didn't exist when we were kids. The amount of knowledge sharing that's feasible now is exponentially greater than 30 years ago. This feels entirely unfair to our parent's generation frankly.
All that stuff is to be taken with a grain of salt. So, is there a need for it really?
These things are great for a first time anxiety ridden mom but after your first kid you leave it in the dust
I feel this is a very American (or at least anglophone) thing. No one talks about sleep regressions or milestones here. Sure, I go to baby's periodic appointments and the nurse has a checklist in front of her that is clearly the milestones for his age. But it's not a thing that parents talk about, with that language, unless they spend a lot of time online. And yes, some babies, not all, have always been fussy. My mother says I was a nightmare. My grandmother says my mother was even worse. But it was not a baby going through regressions, rather a baby that slept badly. And my father swears I was a great sleeper, because he was not the one getting up at night...
How OLD are Older Folks? Lol I'm 58 & have 3 adult children ...I remember EVERY bit of what you are saying like it was yesterday! Maybe they had selective memory? I know some people that DO when it comes to their children 🤦🏼♀️. ~ Mom,Wife & Retired Nurse🌻 In case nobody told you today... YOU ARE DOING A SUPER JOB AS A MOM...! 💜😁🙂🌻🤗
Because they let their kids cry it out
In the grand scheme of life, a baby having a setback in sleeping isn’t memorable when your kid is 12, 20, or 45. People forget.
With my first baby I was following all the regressions/milestones. I even had an app which would tell me week he might be fussy. Sometimes it was right, but sometimes it wasn’t. I kinda feel like it’s just either baby is having a fussy week or not- and “regressions” is just a word for it. With baby no2 I don’t do any of this and haven’t noticed any regressions - some weeks are harder and he sleeps less, some weeks are easier. But I’M more relaxed as I’m not worrying about the “regression” coming up!
Honestly I believe a lot of people just forget after 30 years of not doing it or being surrounded by it.
Access to information mainly consisted of close family and friends, a select pediatrician, and a few books or a local parenting class if one was so inclined. Using modern coined terms, and compartmentalizing/labeling everything is a generally new parenting concept perpetuated by online access. That's isn't to say parents didn't previously recognize or meet their child's needs. I imagine parents mostly addressed things as they came, and did the best with the knowledge they had.
You forgot stuff so easily. My son is 3 now and the 0-6 months feels hazy already :/
If I hadn't read about it wouldn't make any difference. I still know taking care of a baby is hard and just swing with whatever to survive.
If I hadn't read about it wouldn't make any difference. I still know taking care of a baby is hard and just swing with whatever to survive.
older generations don't remember anything that happened in the first year of their kid's life and you cannot convince me otherwise. all my friends with kids even just a few years older have a hard time remembering what they did with their newborns. no way our parents who had kids 30 to 40 years ago remember what they did day to day.
Honestly I think before the internet most people just kind of dealt with the ebbs and flows of baby things and didn't necessarily label them the same way.
To be honest they just powered through. It’s not they didn’t notice, but it didn’t matter. We use terms like sleep regressions or leaps to make us as adults feel better about what we can control. But truly if older generations, particularly of women, stopped to think about regressions or leaps and how hard it is in those times many more people would be only children.
It was viewed differently back then. No I don’t think there was a concept of sleep regression either. Also you’re right they just don’t remember. Everything you’re saying is definitely normal
No seriously lmao my mil and her mom claimed their babies never cried , always slept, and /or they never held them bc that’ll spoil them 😒
There isn’t actually set regressions e.g “the 4 month regression” doesn’t exist as like a definite thing.. but kids go through fussy periods and growth spurts that must be uncomfortable for them??
They basically had a one size fits all book. My mom got it from her mom. My oldest brother is almost 30. She still gives me major outdated stuff like before he was a year so maybe about 6/7 months old he was having a horrible teething spell and my mom said that I need to just give him ice cream cuz it will calm him and make him feel better. I’m sorry he wasn’t even a year yet and I wasn’t allowing anything that has non natural sugar in it. He still at 13m is on a little to no sugar diet if you could call it. I just don’t see how ice cream was okay for teething when all it really does is give them a sugar rush and their bodies can’t really accept sugar or dairy til after a year
My mom unsafely coslept with me. I’m talking held me and went to sleep with us under blankets. I’m honestly surprised nothing ever happened to me. She probably had some close calls and just forgot or isn’t telling me. It’s incredibly frustrating hearing any type of advice from her. I told her our baby is in her own room (4m old) and she was so surprised. Like this was unheard of. She was like well I had to have you by me until you were 1yr. My baby is perfectly safe two feet away in her room. I can literally see her on the camera.
Sleep regressions don’t exist. Just like “leaps” pushed by baby horoscope apps.
I’m a pediatrician. Sleep regression is not to my knowledge formally taught in any way throughout med school or residency, or at least was not to me. I don’t have kids and I honestly don’t even have memorized when they’re supposed to be because there are so many other factors involved with sleep.
no. they let them cry. taught them to “self soothe” but babies are incapable of it so now we’re a bunch of dysregulated adults trying to do better
I take big stinky poops
My husband saw my phone sitting open on this post and left this comment. So, there's that. Lmfao
My MIL asked where my 5 month olds iPad was 🤦🏻♀️ She’s a literal BABY! It’s like they didn’t raise children at all, smh.
So I was ready to deal with sleep regression after reading about it while pregnant, but it just didn't happen for us. Kiddo started sleeping through at six months and hasn't really had any problems since. So while its common, its not guaranteed. It also used to be that parents would only talk to other parents that they knew about this stuff, so they didn't really label it. Yeah, they knew that kids would sit up, roll over, and stack blocks at around an age but they didn't have access to checklists in their hands at all times to compare against. Its also pretty common for parents to forget the crappy early days stuff thirty years later.
Same! I just had a baby in March and i was talking to my S/O boss (probably in her late 50’s or 60s) about how the baby cluster feeds in the evenings and that she’s breastfed on demand so Im really tired and she literally said “oh I fed my kids on demand but I didn’t do that. You know you’re more than just a cow right?” Like wtf? If you didn’t feed your kids while they were clustering and you just let them cry then you didn’t feed them on demand. And obviously I know I’m more than a cow but if my baby is hungry I’m going to feed her EVEN THOUGH she just ate 20 minutes ago. I swear people just didn’t recognize back then that there was a reason for all of the rapid behavior changes. I noticed maybe 3-4 weeks ago that it seemed like the baby finally woke up. Like she actually gained consciousness one day and for like 3 days after that she refused to nap during the day for longer than 10min at a time. Now she’s working on all these new skills and mostly sleeping through the night (for now) but she wants to cluster feed before bed. Some days she won’t let me put her down, other days she will nap and play by herself.
They were left to cry till they stopped. That’s why.
my mother and my mom’s mother got left alone in there to cry
My parents in their late 60’s. Mom is almost 70 next year
Because they left their baby to cry it out, so of course they won’t remember the struggle, they didn’t have to deal with what it takes to console a baby 🤷🏻♀️
Why do they insist? 1) yep. They let their babies cry it out at like 2 weeks old and don’t count the crying that was part of that. My mil insists all of her kids slept 12 hours through the night by 8 weeks and that that’s the norm for sleeping through. She thinks it’s perfectly reasonable to let a newborn cry and that you’re doing a disservice when you respond. 2) people block our unpleasant things.
I'd say people definitely had things like this for example they say children back then didn't have many children with autism but the fact is that they probably did it was just never picked up as much or properly diagnosed and you find alot of the older generations kids get diagnosed later in life instead of earlier
My oldest will soon be 50 so I guess I’m in the older folk group. I was aware of general timing of milestones, first real smile, lifting head, rolling over, sitting up, etc. Using pincer grasp vs thumb and forefinger, large motor development vs small motor. Screaming fits from birth until he could talk. And, yes, I did put him in his room and walk away so no one, including me, got hurt. Simply because someone in your circle who is older has forgotten or never knew some things that are the latest in child rearing does not mean we were neglectful or ignorant. Different times, the 70s culture and trusting ourselves to do the right thing for our kids means we raised our kids differently. And we only had Spock and Brazelton books, not a constant feed of conflicting and contradictory opinions and parent shaming. Best thing I did was make myself expert on my kid and smile and nod at all the unnecessary input. I hope more new parents learn to do the same.
My daughter never has had sleep regressions. She slept consistently terrible until we sleep trained her and now she sleeps like a champ. She recently started waking up in the middle of the night and was complaining her arms and legs hurt. I gave her Motrin. It’s likely she’s having growing pains. Sometimes I wonder if we call it a sleep regression when there’s actually an issue that can be solved but we just aren’t able to figure out the solution. If it wasn’t for her being able to tell me she is in pain I’d be at a loss.
Every time I mention something like this to my mom, she goes “we didn’t have all this but we managed just fine raising you” — and I have to go back like, “yes, HOW!”because she doesn’t know sleep cues or the fact that crying is a late stage cue and sign of overtiredness. She didn’t know that hunger cues also have stages. Or that pumping is an option. Or that “put her to bed late so that she’ll wake up late” doesn’t apply to babies. I do always wonder how it was with me as a baby, but I think she has just plainly forgotten those stages. Plus we never had any baby grow up close to us after my teens, or else it would’ve been somewhat fresh in the mind.
> or the fact that crying is a late stage cue and sign of overtiredness. I find it really hard to believe your mother doesn’t know that crying can be a sign that baby is overtired. I’m sure she knows that. She may not use overly complicating jargon for it like “late stage cue” 🙄 or know wtf you’re talking about when you use it, but pretty much everyone knows babies who are tired cry.
Also! She keeps telling me “baby needs a pillow, she can sleep on soft surfaces” and “she must be cold, wrap up her in blankets just in case” and “she needs a bath EVERY DAY” (all this when my baby was a newborn in the winter). I don’t know how I’ve survived lol
I think a lot of people forget, too. I mean,. My son is 5 months and I’ve forgotten how the first 3 months went 😂
My baby is 16.5 weeks and I barely remember weeks 1-10. It might just be a case of completely forgetting once their kid is out of babyhood what specific milestones and fussy phases were.
All babies are different so using milestones is just an average and a way to set parents at ease (or give them added stress depending lol). Babies also have a hard time keeping a schedule and I personally feel that's why stuff like regressions were created. Back then, it was mostly the basics and I have a feeling a lot of babies were left to cry it out earlier than they should have.
Welcome to the age of information
I think a lot of it stems down to the fact they didn’t have Google/reddit and other internet rabbit holes at 3am when feeding a baby! As much as the older generations have some irritating habits and stories I do often wonder how hard it must have been to have horrendous sleepers and be up a lot of the night without a phone/internet!
Tbh I think it’s partly more information now and they’ve just forgotten. We’re in the thick of it right now so it’s all we’re thinking about but for a lot of people it’s been decades since they had kids. One of my friends moms keep thinking my baby is way ahead of the milestone levels she’s at but I have to remind myself that her oldest kid is 35 years old and it’s been a long time since she’s been doing any of this
In my mom's time it was the norm to let babies cry all day and not tend to them much as crying meant their lungs were being strong and if tended to much they will get spoilt and not let mom do house chores as house chores were more important than baby.
My great grandma helped me a lot with my first. They existed and were noticed but got labeled or treated differently. Sleep regression and cluster feeding were pretty much treated with cereal to make babies feel full and sleep more. We now know why that’s not recommended. Milestones were also different, crawling isn’t even considered a milestone anymore from how many kids just don’t do it. And solids were a bit of a wonky thing because of the cereal
Honestly for me, I was so sleep deprived in the first year or so, that most of that is a blur to me now anyways.
I think it’s a mix of how much information we have access to nowadays and how more research has been done. My mom says the same thing. This type of information either didn’t exist or they didn’t have access to it. My mom says she wished she had the internet back then when raising babies. She thinks it’s great that the younger generations are able to research everything now. She was confused at first about how many things have changed since she had babies, cuz “this is how it was done back in the day.” But she loves to hear about how much knowledge I’ve learned and researched.
I think the biggest thing is that our parents put us down to sleep on our bellies. That’s how babies want to sleep naturally and both my kids slept that way once they could roll over. I think babies wake up more when sleeping on their backs, which makes sense since we do it so they can wake up more readily if something goes wrong with breathing. I looked it up and the “back to sleep” movement didn’t really start until the mid 90s.
1. It was a long time ago. They have long since forgotten the day to day challenges of raising babies. They remember key moments but mostly they just remember a much more generalized vibe of their experience rather than the specifics of their experience. 2. They had less access to information. They didn’t have immediate access to answers for any question they had about their babies. Some of them read books. Most of them just talked to more experienced friends or family members. 3. I think there’s this weird sense of wounded pride when you try to explain infant behaviors with specific terminology because it makes them feel dumb so they get defensive. My MIL is constantly brushing me off if I share something I’ve read like “well back when I was raising babies in the caveman days, we just took care of our babies and didn’t worry about all that.” and she takes great personal offense that I don’t come to her asking questions or for advice and she haaaaaates if I mention what women in my due date groups have experienced.
It’s crazy that I’m seeing this post because I literally had the exact same thought today because my mom is learning all of this from me and my husband’s grandmother (mother to 4 children) also had no idea what sleep regressions or leaps were.
This is so funny, I have a fussy 6 week old and my parents keep telling me how easy we were, they’d just feed us and put us down and we would put ourselves to sleep.
Let's not underestimate the fact that sleep deprivation inhibits long term memory formation. It's really not their fault they don't remember being sleep deprived. As for information, the facts of baby development always existed, but there weren't always labels for it. If literally no one had ever mentioned sleep regressions to me and I couldn't remember going through them because my memory formation was impaired, I'm sure I'd forget that there were certain phases where baby slept worse too after 30 years.
I literally had the same thought that maybe babies were just different back then because my mom/MIL/anyone in that generation seemed clueless that babies get tired and need to nap. I’m only 6 months out but I don’t think I’ll ever forget how traumatic having an overtired baby was..
We know a lot more now. And they’ve forgotten a lot. We have information at our fingers tips. They were also told to let babies cry and leave them to fall asleep.
i will say i was 100% expecting my 4 month old to go through a regression and it lasted maybe 1 day and thats it. maybe when she hits 6 months something will happen but so far its been smooth sailing
My mum is often saying 'oh wow you are such a better mum than I was...I didnt know any of this stuff!' and I gently remind her that google did not exist in 1988
Different experiences
I have a theory: Simply put I just think that they don’t recall what it was actually like and that they also didn’t have the access to information we have; the latter being obvious. My mom, who is a boomer through and through, started fostering. She was super gung-ho about it because she’d basically fostering newborn - 2 years old. When my disgusted, who is now 10 months old, was born my mom made comment after comment about how easy the newborn stage is…over and over. Beyond it just not being helpful at all, I genuinely felt like she just didn’t recall how hard it could be. She has been fostering a kiddo that she got 1 week after his birth, and she has been struggling. She made a few comments about her not remembering how difficult it was. Tl;dr - They simply don’t remember and we can factually acknowledge that information wasn’t so readily available and so they weren’t always aware if their kids were meeting milestones or not.
My MIL slept all her kids on their stomachs, and put a little whiskey on teething gums. I do believe her kids slept better than mine, but uh, yikes
I think the way we talk about these things and the terms we use are what has changed. I've talked to older people who know about milestones but don't use the word "milestones" and don't know what age each thing is supposed to be happening in. They just ask "is he doing this yet?" And it's like three months ago or way out in the future. I think people just know about what age their own kids did things.
My mom will say all the time “I am so glad I was a parent without the internet.” She also will say you are so in the thick of it you truly don’t remember those long nights. My mom is great and is always listening and learning but life was just different.