What age does parenting get easier?

"NL" wrote in message
...
schrieb:
Here is a question I have. At what age can we expect parenting to get
easier? I mean, when can we expect to have better sleep at night, more
time to get things done around the house, and not being stressed out
all the time? Have dinner without crying spells?

When they have moved out I think.

We have a 8 month old, and he seems to be your average 8 month
old....But I'm not sure about having a second child, I'm afraid of
changing our lifes from barely managable to chaos.

Funny, isn't it? Just a few months ago you came here talking about how
perfectly wonderful children are and how you can not understand how
parents could possibly feel overwhelmed enough to (accidentally) kill
their child ;-)

My wife and I see other couples with two, three or more kids and
wonder how do they do it??? My sister and her husband have two
kids...an infant and a 3 year old, the only thing we can think of,
perhaps couples with more than one child perhaps have more energy?
They're the type that can can function fine on 5 hours of broken
sleep, unlike my wife and I.

Young mothers should sleep when their babies are sleeping. Take naps,
recharge your batteries whenever you can. Co-sleep, learn to nurse laying
down and you'll get to a point when night feedings won't even fully wake
either of you...

But maybe what he's thinking is that this is not possible when you have a
toddler running round too.
I never needed to nap during the day with #1-she slept 12 hours at night
from 2 months. With #2 I'd have loved to nap during the day as she could
wake 4x during the night until she was over 2yo. Saying "nap when your baby
naps" irritated me because I had an older one who didn't nap. Yes, she used
to go to her room and have a "quiet time" for a couple of hours but I never
felt relaxed enough to sleep when she was awake as sometimes she needed me
urgently.
Debbie

snip

"Anne Rogers" wrote in message
. ..
The hard physical grind does end, eventually they do sleep and you don't
have to change nappies etc. But honestly, listening and watching mums who
have children much older than mind it doesn't seem like it does get
easier, only different, you switch getting up in the night for waiting up
for them to get home, worrying something has happened to them!

Personally I found having a 2nd child wasn't a big change, we were very
lucky in having a super chilled baby, it was almost as if the baby books
had been written about her! Right now they are 4.5 and 2.5 and I really
think that either of them on their own would be harder, e.g. right now I'm
typing this message with no distractions, I'm just listening out for them.
If one of them is alone with me, I'm less likely to be able to do that.

Everyone tells me 2 to 3 is a hard jump though, but reflecting on it, they
often then follow it up by none to one was actually harder, so you may
well be just at a challenging time, 8 months can be a very hard time, they
may sleep no better than a newborn, but have so many more demands, they
may be crawling and you have to keep saying no. Feeding solids can be hard
work, often making something different for them, fighting them over their
attempts to self feed versus your attempts to not get food everywhere!

grin My #3 is the laid back one. 2 to 3 was easy. 1 to 2 was harder as #2
was a more demanding baby. I sometimes wonder if the stress I had during her
pregnancy effected her.
Debbie

Maybe it would help you right now to work through a list of what makes
mornings difficult. Sometimes five minutes the night before, or changing
the time of day you do things can make a huge difference. For example,
it's always my intention to have clothes ready for me and the children, I
don't always manage it, but when I do, it does make life easier. I have a
set of cubbies by the washer/dryer and when I fold laundry I pop complete
outfits for each child in the cubbies. If, say, emptying the dishwasher is
challenging with a crawling baby, then you may need to switch when it gets
turned on, so it can be emptied at a different time but you still have
clean dishes when you need them. Maybe you need to change when you shower,
having a morning shower in this house is almost unheard of now, I shower
at the gym, or in the evenings. So children on top of your preimposed
structure can be complete chaos, but not insurmountable.

Anne

Welches schrieb:
"NL" wrote in message
...
schrieb:

My wife and I see other couples with two, three or more kids and
wonder how do they do it??? My sister and her husband have two
kids...an infant and a 3 year old, the only thing we can think of,
perhaps couples with more than one child perhaps have more energy?
They're the type that can can function fine on 5 hours of broken
sleep, unlike my wife and I.
Young mothers should sleep when their babies are sleeping. Take naps,
recharge your batteries whenever you can. Co-sleep, learn to nurse laying
down and you'll get to a point when night feedings won't even fully wake
either of you...

But maybe what he's thinking is that this is not possible when you have a
toddler running round too.

That might be the case, but from his message I'm getting that she's not
even taking those naps now, while theoretically she could because they
do not have a toddler running around.

cu
nicole

Everyone tells me 2 to 3 is a hard jump though, but reflecting on
it, they often then follow it up by none to one was actually
harder, so you may well be just at a challenging time, 8 months can
be a very hard time, they may sleep no better than a newborn, but
have so many more demands, they may be crawling and you have to
keep saying no. Feeding solids can be hard work, often making
something different for them, fighting them over their attempts to
self feed versus your attempts to not get food everywhere!

grin My #3 is the laid back one. 2 to 3 was easy. 1 to 2 was harder
as #2 was a more demanding baby. I sometimes wonder if the stress I
had during her pregnancy effected her.

Definitely possible! There are a gazillion studies looking at levels of
the stress hormone and various pregnancy outcomes. Obviously it's one of
those things you never know on an individual basis, but really needs to
be considered more in the way doctors and midwives practice.

Cheers
Anne

wrote:

Here is a question I have. At what age can we expect parenting to get
easier?

What happens when you have more than one is that
you relax your standards as well as your hyper-
focusing on the one child. With my two, I stopped
jumping at every little squeak and I developed
the ability to ignore the noise and chaos. I am
actually a lot calmer with two than I was with
one.

Also, babies are really easy. With your first,
you are totally overwhelmed. But when you have
your second baby, you start to understand that
really, an infant is tremendously and you can go
places and they don't talk back and say "no" all
the time and you can do all the things you want.
Except, you didn't know this when you had the
first - you were just overwhelmed!

-- Anita --

wrote:
Here is a question I have. At what age can we expect parenting to get
easier?

Heh - I felt for you when I read the title of this post. ;-)

My opinion is that parenting doesn't so much get easier as get
differently difficult. It's always going to present problems and
challenges, but these will change as the months and years go by.

The way I can see it, I can either get depressed over this ("The
difficulties are never going to stop!") or I can regard it as a positive
("These particular difficulties will stop, so soon I'll be able to enjoy
their absence - and the ones that replace them will present a new and
interesting set of challenges"). I try to stick with the second
viewpoint. ;-)

I mean, when can we expect to have better sleep at night, more
time to get things done around the house, and not being stressed out
all the time? Have dinner without crying spells?

I found that the better sleep and peaceful dinners came after I found sa
gentle way to do some sleep training that I was happy with trying. I
did this when he was just over a year, and he's been a brilliant sleeper
since then. That made a huge difference. Which I needed, because the
stress actually got worse in the second year (I know you don't want to
hear that...) He was into everything and couldn't be left for five
minutes. But it gradually got a bit easier over the second half of that
year, and by the time he was two I found myself feeling I was really
enjoying parenting. He was a bit more manageable, and much more fun and
interesting (he started talking shortly after he was two, and hearing
his opinion on everything was such fun it made up for a lot!)

We really don't know the answer for this as both our families have no
kids, expect for my sister. Our neighbors (who have a 5 and 9 year
old) say things get better around after a couple years, but then we
hear about the "terrible twos and threes" and at four expect tantrums,
etc.

It's worth remembering that 1. all kids are different, so at any age
you're going to get sweet little angels and hellions (and kids change as
they get older, so a sweet little angel may have become a hellion by the
next age along and vice versa), and 2. as Kate said, parents vary in
what they can cope with. I hate sleep deprivation and I hate having no
time to myself, so I found the first two years stressful. On the other
hand, I'm pretty unfazed by tantrums and disciplinary issues, so the
hassles of two and up haven't bothered me as much as they might someone
else. A different parent might feel completely the opposite.

What all this means is that, for *any* age, you'll find parents willing
to swear blind that it was a terrible age (because, for them, it was).
Of course, you'll also find parents who loved that age, whatever it is,
but somehow they don't seem to speak up as much. And, once you start
listening to everyone with an opinion on how awful such-and-such an age
was, it'll have you addled. Take each age as it comes and see how it
works out for *you*, with *your* child.

We have a 8 month old, and he seems to be your average 8 month
old....But I'm not sure about having a second child, I'm afraid of
changing our lifes from barely managable to chaos.

I wouldn't have wanted them that close together, either. My husband and
I decided that three years was the minimum spacing we felt we could deal
with. Since we had other practical reasons for not wanting them too far
apart, three years was what we aimed for and three years is what we got.
At that stage, I found it more like going from pretty manageable to
barely manageable. I should say that I'm still on maternity leave and
my husband is the full-time at-home parent, so currently there are still
two of us at home with the two kids - I anticipate that when I go back
to work it will get *much* harder, and am braced for the next several
months to be really exhausting. But I'm a lot more laid-back about
parenthood than I once was - much more prepared now just to take it all
as it comes, take one day at a time.

My wife and I see other couples with two, three or more kids and
wonder how do they do it???

With difficulty. ;-)

My sister and her husband have two
kids...an infant and a 3 year old, the only thing we can think of,
perhaps couples with more than one child perhaps have more energy?
They're the type that can can function fine on 5 hours of broken
sleep, unlike my wife and I.

So far, that spacing is working for us. But, as I say, it'll get much
harder when I go back to work. But... then it'll get easier again as
they get older and better able to entertain themselves and less likely
to get up to mischief and Jamie spends more time at nursery. Then
different problems will arise as they get older... but I'll deal with
those as they come.

What I've concluded is that, although having two kids is definitely more
work, it's less than twice the work and more than twice the fun. When I
find it a bit overwhelming, I remind myself that that's a pretty
worthwhile trade-off. ;-)

I don't want to sound mean, and my son is a real joy to be around, but
honestly, my patience wears thin at times (esp early in the morning),
more often then my wive's. So, it would be nice to know what to expect
down the road. More chaos or an easier time?

Yes to both. And also more difficulties that you don't currently have,
but fewer of the ones you do currently have. And an enormous amount of
fun and excitement and interest. I can't tell you that there'll ever be
a time when you think "Hey, parenting's no big deal" (not for more than
a few hours maximum, anyway). But I can tell you that I wish I'd known,
when my son was eight months old, just how good life would be a couple
of years or less down the road, how much I would be loving parenthood,
how lucky I would feel to be a parent.


All the best,

Sarah
--
http://www.goodenoughmummy.typepad.com

"That which can be destroyed by the truth, should be" - P. C. Hodgell

Sarah Vaughan wrote:

I found that the better sleep and peaceful dinners came after I found sa
gentle way to do some sleep training that I was happy with trying.

Can you elaborate on your method?

Thanks, Karen

Karen wrote:
Sarah Vaughan wrote:

I found that the better sleep and peaceful dinners came after I found
sa gentle way to do some sleep training that I was happy with trying.

Can you elaborate on your method?

Thanks, Karen

My son was around a year old when I started this. He nursed to sleep,
would nurse for ages even once asleep, and was difficult to put down
without waking him. This was OK during the night, because we co-slept,
but it was really awkward during the evening - I couldn't put him to bed
until I was ready to go to bed myself. This is what I did. It didn't
start off as this organised Step 1, Step 2 plan - this is just how it
worked out in retrospect.

Step 1 - When I was sure that he'd reached the stage in his bedtime
nursing where he was comfort nursing rather than taking any more milk in
(you can tell the difference by looking at whether the chin is going up
and down or just quivering on the spot - however, the latter can happen
when the baby is just working on getting another let-down, so do leave
it a few minutes before concluding things have got to the comfort
nursing phase, and if in doubt try switching sides), I gave him a dummy
(pacifier) so he could learn to get his comfort sucking on something
apart from me. He took to this very easily - fussed for a few seconds
the first few nights I tried it, accepted it with no fuss after that,
and by the time a few more nights had gone by he was actually unlatching
of his own accord and looking around for the dummy himself (which was
very cute, BTW - he would have this indignant expression of "So where's
that dummy, then? Hurry up with it!").

Step 2 - This was something I read about in "The Baby Whisperer Solves
All Your Problems" by Tracey Hogg, & is called PU/PD, which stands for
Pick Up/Put Down. The idea is that you go through all the bedtime
routine stuff, get the child all ready for bed and to the wound-down
relaxed sleepy stage, and put them in the cot. Then, instead of walking
out and leaving them alone to cry, you stand by the cot and give them a
cuddle each time they're getting upset/trying to get out. There are
slight variations with age - for the age Jamie was at (just over a year)
what you're meant to do is pick them up but then *immediately* put them
down again. (At younger ages you hold them until they've stopped crying
each time, at older ages you're meant to just put them down without
picking them up first. Below three months she advises not to use it at
all. The book has the details, although unfortunately it requires
ploughing through her usual irritating drivel about how the situation is
all your fault in the first place because of Accidental Parenting.
Yeah, right.) So, I was putting my arms around him as he tried to get
up and then literally lying him straight down again even as my arms went
round him. I felt comfortable with this in a way that I didn't with just
walking out of the room leaving him to cry. It wasn't that I thought
leaving him alone was this huge trauma that would scar him for life,
just that I knew he wouldn't understand what was going on and that would
upset him. With PU/PD, I would be right there *showing* him what he was
meant to do (lie down in his cot) rather than leaving him to figure it
out. So, it isn't a no-cry method, but a no-leaving-them-alone-to-cry
method, which I was OK with.

First night I tried this, it took 47 minutes to get him to sleep, which
I think is about par for the course, although she says some babies take
over an hour. He was crying for most of this time but not all of it.
Naptime the next day it took 8 minutes, and in retrospect I think the
only reason it took that long was because I was trying to do it without
the dummy in hopes that I could get rid of that as well - when I decided
it wasn't worth the bother and gave it to him, he fell asleep very
quickly. Within a few days, I could get him to sleep in his cot just
with a few minutes of standing by the cot and patting him to settle him.

I would have been absolutely delighted to keep going with things like
that, but over the next few weeks he started fighting against sleep more
and more and refusing to go down no matter how long I patted him for.
So, eventually I went to Step 3 - leaving him alone and checking him at
five-minute intervals to comfort him. I felt OK about doing this at
this stage because a) I knew that now he *did* know that what he was
meant to be doing was falling asleep in his cot, so I knew that while he
might not like the situation at least he wouldn't be hopelessly
bewildered by it, and b) we'd tried just about everything else, so I
knew something really needed to be done. The first night he cried for
about twenty minutes. The second night, I realised there was one more
thing I hadn't tried, which was sitting by the cot instead of standing
over it patting him and then moving gradually further away on successive
nights. I know this works well for some people, but it was completely
hopeless for us. He cried for longer than the first night I'd done
PU/PD. Eventually I gave up and went back to walking out of the room,
and this time he literally stopped crying within *seconds*. Same thing
the next night. Within a few nights, he stopped even that brief amount
of crying. I realised then that the problem had been not that he was
afraid of being left alone (the way all the AP books say) but that he
just didn't want to go to bed - he wanted more playtime. Staying in the
room actually made him more upset because it was giving him a mixed
message - hey, maybe it is still playtime after all! So, in that case,
just being clear about walking out turned out to be the kindest thing to
do. But I'm glad I did the PU/PD first, as an intermediate stage.

BTW, during all of this we were still co-sleeping when he woke up during
the night after I'd gone to bed - I simply pulled him straight into bed
and nursed him. It was just at bedtime that he had to go to sleep
without this.

HTH. Fire ahead with questions if you have any.


All the best,

Sarah
--
http://www.goodenoughmummy.typepad.com

"That which can be destroyed by the truth, should be" - P. C. Hodgell

Sarah Vaughan wrote:
Karen wrote:
Sarah Vaughan wrote:


HTH. Fire ahead with questions if you have any.

Yes, that really did help. Thank you very much for your detailed
response, Sarah!

I expect we'll have to try something similar at some point. We used to
be very disciplined about getting our daughter to sleep in her moses
basket/cot, but recently it's developed more and more into full
co-sleeping. She will only fall asleep on our arms or while nursing. At
9.5 months, it will soon become a problem, as she's getting heavy and
mobile. So far, she has never rolled over more than half a turn, and she
can't crawl or stand up on her own, but she'll soon be in serious
danger, as our bed is on stilts (c. 80 cm high). I usually nurse her to
sleep lying down, she pops off when she's done, or sometimes I help
unlatching her - luckily she's not insisting on too much comfort
sucking. We then let her fall into a deep sleep before moving her to her
cot or joining her in bed.

Not surprisingly, she sleeps a lot better in our bed than in hers, so I
dread having to change this pattern. At the same time, we're looking
forward to having the bed to ourselves again, as at 1.35 m, it's not
wide enough to accommodate the three of us comfortably.

Sorry for the rambling, and for taking so long to finish this post. I
suppose I don't have any specific questions after all, just a bit
concerned how we'll progress from here. So far the three of us have
pretty much figured everything out as we went along, and DD couldn't
have been a more wonderful kid.

Karen