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In my area there is a saying like "it takes a village to raise a child". i believe that a good social network is not only important for the kid, but for the parents too. it helps so much to have a partner, grandparents, aunts/uncles, who can look over the kid just for a hour or 2, so you can get your rest. And its usually fun for the kids too. Now that i have 2 kids, a loving wife and 2 families around me, i have the highest respect for all the single moms/dads out there.
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As immigrants with no local network, having kids is basically putting yourself under house arrest for a decade or so. You can post bail (pay a babysitter) for occasional reprieve. I mean sure you can go do outings with kids, but for most of them, do you really want to? I know mine aren't particularly enthralled by trips to the Rijksmuseum.

I don't think this is how humans usually raised kids...

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We're in the same boat. Feels like mostly our society doesn't value having children - it's by and large not a very well supported activity. Even more so if you don't have immediate family to help support you.
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Where’d you go? We were told Ireland values children but that didn’t match our experience (we moved to the Netherlands which has been better at least)
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Dont go to Switzerland. I can sing praise on this country for hours, but supporting families with kids aint one of the positives, in contrary.

So far the worst aspect of being and staying here (apart from one specific immigration bureaucrat in Geneva, but thats a long and very specific story). Even rather backwardish France has this aspect figured out much better.

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If you go to the third world kids are all running in the streets while both parents work and grandparents not doing fuck all to watch them either. The most practical answer is to relax negligence laws back to a sane level where as long as you're not torturing them and they are fed, "society" stays the fuck out of the punishment process.
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I’d rather they not get run over… but generally agree with you
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There is no nuclear family required anymore,

My parents are the village, and the village is the law.

https://youtu.be/skUUVejxDZc?si=unPgT-01QLAQ-lZB

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This is why people critique the nuclear family—the degenerate village around the children that just consists of the parents, maybe grandparents at holidays. It’s a recipe for overworked adults.
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I've got a Mexican American friend that lives multi-generationally and loves it. He's a few years out of high school with a good job in management and a nice car, money in the bank. His older brother gets help parenting from Tio and the grandparents, and generally everyone gets along well. He's almost kept up with me in savings for property and I'm married (our pay is pretty similar, but I have dual income). American culture optimizes for wastefulness and puts too much of an emphasis on independence, especially when arrangements like this exist that actually can lead to greater individual freedom in the long run.
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> and generally everyone gets along well

That's a very important statement

I couldn't live with my grandma and couldn't live with my mom anymore. I needed space.

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> This is a bug in the universe!

Is it? Couldn't it be a bug in our society/economy instead? What if nature wanted us to take some naps through the day and not just one period of sleep in the night? Waking up multiple times at night wouldn't hurt too much then.

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It's also a fairly recent phenomenon that we expect small children to sleep all alone in a big room without anyone else around them. Nature tells them they are small and the world (and the dark) is full of danger. Our biology doesn't give a damn if that is no longer true.
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FWIW, and understanding that individual babies do differ, most babies can sleep through the night (10-12 hours) by 3-4 months old. Check out the books "Twelve Hours' Sleep by Twelve Weeks Old" or "Precious Little Sleep" for guidance.

In my case where n=2, naps during the day are/were not all that consistent but at night (unless they are very sick or something) the kids sleep.

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3 for 3 sleeping through the night by 60 days. All we did was have a feeding schedule that we stuck to pretty closely, and around week 2 started intentionally delaying our response to night-time crying, gradually increasing how far we stretched it (start with maybe a minute, increase over time). They wake up at night and don’t know how to self-soothe back to sleep if you always jump in the second they make a sound, they don’t actually need night time feedings past the first few weeks, responding immediately trains them not to fall back asleep on their own if they stir at night (and everyone does). Down to one feeding at night by a month or so, none past two months.

Can’t say many other things worked equally well for all three kids, but that did.

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Love to hear it, thanks for sharing. I only wish there were more parenting "tricks" like this that gave similar quality of life improvements.
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I’m convinced that 1 of 100 babies sleeps miraculously, magically, the true sleep of the just, right out of the box. Some lucky parents of those genetic freaks think, “Our sleep technique works! We should write a book!”
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In our case(s), it was something that required conscious effort. And when we did that... it worked. It honestly didn't seem like it would at first, but then it does.

Again, n=2 for me personally but as I mentioned in my reply to another comment we also had a friend with a "baby who won't sleep" and when they tried it also worked for them.

I don't make a habit of recommending this to people unless I'm close with them, bc I know that some people may take it personally or believe they are an exception. And I'd bet money that there are plenty of exceptions. But I also think they're exceptions rather than the rule. Whenever I've seen parents who believe that their baby can sleep through the night and work towards that goal, they seem to get there pretty quickly.

Edit to add: To put it in engineering terms, I think part of the problem is that you have to escape a local maximum of baby sleep. You may suffer several nights (possibly a couple weeks) that are worse than what you're used to in order to get to a place that's significantly better than what you're used to. When you're already sleep deprived, that can feel like a big hump to get over.

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Yeah. My wife was breastfeeding and she could do that half-asleep. Barely any sleep was lost.
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To be clear, they don't eat/feed at night either. The baby is in a separate room from us and we don't see or hear him most nights (95%+) between 7pm-6am. He's around 8.5 months old now and this has been the case for 3-4 months, although that percentage was a bit lower at the beginning.

I'm emphasizing it bc many people are surprised by this, but if you know it's possible, you can start to work towards it. My partner's coworker has a ~1 year old who was still waking up (maybe multiple times?) each night to eat. She introduced them to one of those books (the 12-by-12 one) and they were very grateful.

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4 month old should eat every 3-4 hours. You mentioned sleeping for 10-12h and this sounds almost harmful for the baby. I don't think I'd like that.

Thanks for your recommendation anyway. I'm sure that there are many science-based techniques to "tame" children and make child care as atomic family bearable.

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If you saw our baby, you wouldn't be worried at all that he's being underfed. Maybe the opposite. They'll want to eat every 3-4 hours during the day for sure; at night they can and do just sleep through it (same as me or you).

We didn't force anything or ignore him. And you don't have to believe me, but I'd encourage you to research more for yourself if waking up at night to feed a baby is something you're currently dealing with.

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Half asleep definitely doesn't sound like good quality, restorative sleep.
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Last month there was a heartbreaking news about a < 6 month old baby being snatched away by a leopard while the baby was sleeping next to the parent and the parent realized her baby was missing only much later.

I imagine the predator situation would have been much worse during the early human evolution years. I don't know if that was a beneficial trait or not in that environment.

As a parent, I just wonder what-if.

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How do I explain this to 15yo teenager?..
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Wait 10 years. Minimum.
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Part of this is also our culture that somehow decided kids need their own bed, and it's easy to get baby formula.

So the kids are not sleeping in our beds, where they feel 100% secure, getting to the breast whenever they want (and they quickly will want it at a lesser frequency). The woman will feel this, but hardly has to wake up, me... I slept right through all that. Fwiw, we had a bed for the baby that attached to ours.

In our time everybody advised us: Give the bady a load of milk at 23:00 just before you go to bed! We never did, just stuck to about did 20:00, or just when baby cried, both babies took about 2 months to sleep for about 12 hours straight (although soon after the second one developed reflux which had me watch Rick and Morty in its entirety somewhere between 2 and 4 for some time).

Anyway, not saying everybody is that lucky, just saying sometimes it's good to questions things that are given in one's culture. Worst advice imho is "let the baby cry" which was common on our days. How nice to let a baby cry alone in a room, not understanding anything about what happens...

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I coslept, but I had shit milk production. Without formula my kid would be dead. My friend breastfeeds, but is an active danger when asleep, so without a crib, she'd have crushed her child.

It turns out that safe sleep rules and the availability of formula exist for a reason. Safe sleep rules exist in the west because pur beds are fundamentally different (and more dangerous) than in places here cosleeping is more common. Tp cosleep you need a certain situation that many people are not prepared to deal with.

There's literally nothing you can do about low supply at all. It's not a matter of trying for me. My body never made more than an ounce even with weeks of attempts. This is even setting aside that some people would like assistance so they can sleep and breastfeeding means dad can't take on night feeds, which is what another friend is experiencing and the child is having a bad time from her severe sleep deprivation.

And even more complications of small child. It's not as simple as "let's go back to the old days". The great days when kids died at much higher rates remember.

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Sorry, I did not mean it like that, formula is fine. We also hated the breastfeeding mob.

And you're right about the rules they exist for a reason, but I think we should as parents take our space to try what works for us and our kids and what feels right.

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Sometimes I just can't grasp how cruel nature is. Imagine no formula -> baby starving and you just have to accept it. When the tribe grows in numbers the baby is safe. When the tribe grows in numbers like mankind, you get cheats like formula and polio vaccine.

We're just replaying the life game on easier mode.

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I can relate to this. Got two kids and I must say if someone told me that it will be this hard I wouldn't believe it.

Raising kids is the hardest and most fulfilling job.

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Same for me and I just got the one. It's so incredibly hard, I was not ready for it at all.
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Somehow, neither schools nor parents prepared us in any meaningful way for the hardest challenges in our lives. School curriculums are next to useless beyond basic reading/writing/counts.

Where is self sufficiency, team work, communication, taxes, relationships, understanding various addictions, understanding other people, good nutrition, savings and retirement, and of course having and raising kids?

I get they dont want to scare shit out of clueless young, its certainly easier to let them hit walls of life and see who can swim and who goes down. But, as a preparation for life, school is useless and I believe it shouldnt be. I would love to see teachers having doctor's or wall street salaries but be proper experts and psychologists, all of them. Thats the future of given nation.

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