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#12
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What age does parenting get easier?
"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 |
#13
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What age does parenting get easier?
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 |
#14
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What age does parenting get easier?
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 |
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What age does parenting get easier?
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#16
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What age does parenting get easier?
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 |
#17
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What age does parenting get easier?
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 |
#18
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Sleep training methods (was What age does parenting get easier?)
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 |
#19
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Sleep training methods (was What age does parenting get easier?)
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 |
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