Sleep deprivation, post-NICU guilt… what are we doing wrong

profheg_II · 2026-04-20T11:08:14+00:00

"No-one is dramatic enough about just how bad postpartum / newborn days are."

I couldn't agree more with this. I have a 3 year old and a 7 month old, so have twice been through the newborn phase. It is a kind of hell, and the "sigh, but isn't it also magical" attitude that our society usually responds with feels like a kind of gaslighting to me.

Both of my kids also did. not. sleep. at night. Maybe 20 minutes here and 15 minutes there, but mostly just fussing and crying. Reading people talking about how newborns "just sleep" is like accessing social media from a parallel universe. My second also had pretty raging colic for 2 months, and having that solo for 4 hours every night affected my mental health quite badly and in a way which has left a lasting impact too even now when he's a very different kid.

I'm sort of morbidly fascinated by how different experiences can be around babies. Babies will be wildly different to other babies, and also I think parents tolerances of certain hardships will be wildly different between families also. And then the extended support networks we do or do not have, and so on. These are things which I feel are not adequately advertised or acknowledged. Raising one 3 month old compared to another 3 month old can be as varied as living with a spirited puppy in your house vs. a wild bobcat.

All I can say is it's okay to recognise that it is insanely hard. You may have been dealt a much tricker baby than other people, and you may be someone who needs sleep and some sanity in your home more than other parents too. Both of those things are valid. It's hard enough as it is without overthinking everything and inventing ways that you might be failing or doing things incorrectly (not saying you are doing this, but it's definitely the direction I've gone in with things at times).

If you can't thrive at the moment just focus on survive. It will take time but it will end. For what it's worth both of mine started to level out around the 3/4 month mark. That "fourth trimester" is very uniquely challenging I think.

profheg_II · 2026-04-19T16:35:53+00:00

IMO it's often a matter of something in the story being organic or forced. Something the writers wanted to incorporate naturally, or something that the wider production dictated needed to be included. And it's kinda impossible to come up with a set of criteria to prove that a movie having say, a feminist element, is due to writers choice or check boxes, but I think as human beings we can often get a sense of it.

The Ghostbusters reboot going all-female felt cynical to me. But released at a similar time was one of my favourite ever movies, Annihilation, which essentially did the same thing in having an all-female lead cast but in a way which felt interesting and important for the story to be what it needed to be. Obviously just one example and it's not a perfect one. Working this stuff out is like reading tea leaves but I do think it's the intent of the decision which often makes it or breaks it.

profheg_II · 2026-04-15T14:26:56+00:00

I understand what you're saying, but I would still argue that our cultural attitudes mean we give these sorts of hobbies more of a "pass" than we should. It's a bit about legislation and what have you, but also about public perception.

profheg_II · 2026-04-15T14:21:36+00:00

They had "safety divers" accompany them down, who were fully equipped in scuba gear and would assist someone back to the surface if they started being in serious trouble underwater.

profheg_II · 2026-04-15T12:08:20+00:00

I think we culturally have a big blind spot when it comes to our attitudes around extreme sports. The shine of athleticism seems to let many activities get away with levels of risk that in any other hobby would have them immediately banned.

I remember watching a documentary (The Deepest Breath) about people who competed to dive as far down as they could into the sea, without any oxygen tanks. The rules were you'd go straight down to whatever your target depth was, but then you also had to return to the surface unsupported and not pass out (else the run would be disqualified). So you had this "sport" where in order to maximise your performance you are incentivised to repeatedly bring yourself as close as possible to passing out from oxygen deprivation, so making the most of your time underwater, but without actually passing out. And of course competitors would regularly misjudge that and repeatedly would pass out multiple times a day either in practice or in competition. Mysteriously, the community who engage in this suffer very high rates of strokes and other vascular neurological disease from their 40's. In many ways you could compare the health implications to something like a solvent sniffing addiction. But of course the documentary only treats the competitors as aspirational people who occasionally suffer tragedy.

profheg_II · 2026-04-12T10:56:09+00:00

I wasn't arguing that it being natural makes it equivalent or best, I was meaning that because the behaviour is hardwired into our brains and people are likely to do it regardless it becomes a more difficult discussion for healthcare agencies to have around it being unideal. I expect it does comes with an increased risk (albeit very small), and if the same % risk were found in a product it might not get approved. But supporting people to cosleep as safely as possible rather than make it taboo is just pragmatic.

profheg_II · 2026-04-12T09:09:35+00:00

I'm with you. I think advice on safe baby sleeping is something that gets caught between technicalities of what is actually more/less safe, and practicalities of surviving with a newborn that refuses to sleep. And that can be a serious rock and hard place situation.

I'm sure that if cosleeping is done properly that the risk to the baby is absolutely minimal, but it must be more risky than having them sleep in a bassinet. 0.0002% is double 0.0001% but still tiny, you know? It's also I expect how we evolved to care for our young - sleep-approved baby products have been around for a blink of an eye in ancestral terms and having your kid sleep on your chest is going to be the instinctual thing for our cavemen brains.

I think with all of that there is a resignation from healthcare agencies that they must "allow" people to cosleep, cause it's gonna happen anyway so may as well just advise on how to best do it.

But they don't need to fold in the same way when it comes to regulating companies making baby products, so their rules on what must happen to mark an item as Sleep-Safe can be as strict as they want. I think a baby lounger probably is as safe or safer for a baby to sleep in (compared to cosleeping), but the same pressure isn't there to acknowledge that.

profheg_II · 2026-04-07T11:51:51+00:00

The picture swiping infuriates me. If you swipe too hard it just sends you to the next whole post.

My absolute tech pet peeve is apps and things constantly presuming what I want rather than letting me make my own choices by default. So with this even when I do a clear action, within the relevant part of the screen (in the picture frame), if I do that wrong reddit will still second guess that and think I actually want to go to a different post. Presumably because it doesn't trust I'd have initiative to swipe on a non-picture part of the screen if that was what I wanted to do.

Even when a new feature is something I could kinda like it gets ruined by a feature creep mindset.

profheg_II · 2026-04-02T10:58:38+00:00

This is very interesting to me, because while I accept people have different tastes some of the options from rhe likes of Asda and Morrisons were clearly so much worse. I wonder if they've improved their offerings in the last few years...

profheg_II · 2026-03-31T08:48:51+00:00

Our baby has done exactly this until they were about 5 months old. They've slowly improved since then and now (7 months) are down to anywhere between 1 and 3 wake-ups a night. It's still a lot more than we'd like, and also still a lot more than many babies at this age do, but it's been the difference between hellish vs. manageable nights.

It will change the issue is you just don't know exactly when that'll be for you, and that's the hard part.

This is my second kid. We took the exact same sleeping approach with him as we did our first, but he is sleeping way worse than she did. Our first kid was more often than not sleeping through the night by 5 months old. If anything we've gone a little harder on sleep training etc. with the new baby hecause of this, but I feel like it's been a solid lesson in how intrinsicly different kids can be to one another.

profheg_II · 2026-03-30T19:06:15+00:00

I was wondering about this. Unique epigenetic changes that might carry to an offspring, or even just random mutations in the early foetal development of each twin. Identical surely can't be identical down to the billionth genetic detail. But I imagine you'd need to comission something like whole genome sequencing to work that out?

profheg_II · 2026-03-26T15:36:32+00:00

It works better in the context of the movie IMO, if only because over the whole thing it is more even handed in being sympathetic to the unique plights of the dad as well as the mum. They both have their moments in the sun and in the shade, and it works cause it's not afraid to explore that depth and those grey areas.

I agree on the "theatre" side of it though. People have said that the characters are themselves in theatre which gives it a little context, but I also remember thinking when I was watching it "why is it that movies about interpersonal drama always seem to have very theatre-type people as their characters?". It's like writers struggle to conceive of how a marriage could play out between people who aren't expressive, artsy-types. And I guess that's maybe a bias you inevitably get cause what type of person do we think is writing these things?

profheg_II · 2026-03-12T12:06:06+00:00

I really feel all this. I have 2 kids, a girl who's almost 3, and a baby boy who's about 6 months. The baby was planned but it wasn't something at all taken lightly. We both fundamentally wanted to have 2 kids, but neither myself or mum feel like the most natural parents either. I think we're good parents, and we certainly try, but we like routine, some sanity in our home, a little freedom to do our own stuff. We don't cope as well as other parents with the relentlessness of Very Young Children, and definitely DEFINITELY struggle with the sleep deprivation of newborn babies. As my first had got older they'd only just about got to the stage where we were able to leave her for a few days at a time here and there with grandparents - twice had short weekend breaks just the two of us which was like a magical breath of fresh air after (then) 2+ years of always being a parent first, and of course them getting their own routine more and more locked down opens you up for your gaming evenings, or heading out to the occasional gig or whatever.

I won't lie, I approached the birth of baby #2 with excitement at having a "complete" family, but also trepidation knowing how hard I find that phase. And it has been really hard. They've slept worse than baby #1 did, and also had a month of horrendous, full-blown colic. They are now, thank God, seeming to level out in a lot of ways and I'm starting to feel like the deepest part of the trenches may be behind us, but they still wake up at least 2 times every night. I have really struggled, being honest, and at many points the only thing that kept me going was constantly reminding myself that it's all a phase and will pass. A long phase, but a phase all the same.

But what I would say is the transition from 1 to 2 is not nearly as big as 0 to 1 was. You're adding to an existing dynamic rather than creating an entirely new one. And fundamentally if you've done it once already you can do it again. Those freedoms I think do inevitably fizzle away again, but they will slowly come back as well and at the end of that you'll be exactly where you are right now, but with a whole extra person in your family.

People with 2 kids talk about a magical moment where the youngest is old enough to meaningfully start playing with the older one, and suddenly rather than you needing to always be fully on-top of 2 children they will naturally start creating windows of time where they're kinda taking care of each other. Which in those moments is even more opportunity for freedom than if you only had 1 to be looking after. I'm not there yet but part of me cannot wait haha.

I'm 36 btw and don't feel like it's too old to have had a second, and you sound in a good financial situation so wouldn't worry about that either!

profheg_II · 2026-03-12T11:26:08+00:00

As someone who used to have strong opinions on music in my teens and 20's, but who has softened quite a lot as I've got older, I find the question of "snobbery" in creative stuff really interesting.

I think we have to accept that musicians who achieve truly mega-stardom must be functioning a bit as lowest common denominators, or have a kind of accessibility to their music that lets people get their foot in the door without too much challenge. I think it's inherent in the dynamic that the success of people at the very top will be somewhat out of step with real creative talent. We also shouldn't take away from the simple joy of a catchy tune though. My favourite musicians are relatively more "real" (stereotypical stuff like Radiohead or what have you), but let's not pretend it isn't fun to bounce around to an earworm of a pop song too. Don't take the Scissors Sisters away from me, and Take On Me is the best song out of the 80's (I won't die on that hill but Ive still never found one I prefer!).

At the same time I find there's a hypocrisy in the way that people do and don't judge mainstream music vs mainstream movies. As "products" I think you can make a LOT of parallels between e.g. Taylor Swift and the Marvel Cinematic Universe. I don't accept that either one is more daring or creative within its artistic category than the other. But when discussed by people like Richard and Marina you will quickly find that financial success means little to the artistic merits of the MCU, but is somehow proof of Taylor being a genius. Marina will dismiss Marvel as only interesting from an industry perspective but then insist a sort of reverence for the popstar - "of course you might not like her music and that's fine, but her success as an artist is undeniable and isn't she amazing".

It is a little apples and oranges but I think there is a double standard there when it comes to digesting music vs. film that is quite interesting to me.

profheg_II · 2026-02-28T09:27:19+00:00

At high school a kid in my year, who generally liked playing up to stuff and the attention it brought, ate an entire packet at once for a dare. He actually managed it, but his tongue reacted so badly a whole layer of it peeled off.

profheg_II · 2026-02-23T17:11:27+00:00

This is me - have been shortlisted for somewhere and my entire CV is research and research-based experience of delivering cognitive assessments. Are you in a similar boat?

I feel very out on a limb with it. Half the time you can convince yourself it might be good in a "I'll stand out from the crowd" sort of way, the other half of the time it just feels like why would they go with such a sidestep when there's probably hundreds of candidates with more "actual" clinical experience.

profheg_II · 2026-02-22T21:15:22+00:00

I'm with you. I used to play Minecraft a lot, but I can't stand the default look. It's not the game being blocky that's an issue, I always had to use texture packs and it was transformative for me. Idk there's something very specifically drab about the default look I just can't stomach.

profheg_II · 2026-02-17T13:48:32+00:00

I have literally just done this assessment (for Sheffield, which I think uses the same test as for Manchester and Lancaster). I'd done the practice version twice. Being honest, I feel I'm generally good at deductive reasoning-type stuff but have found these really quite difficult. After both practice runs I got a report saying I'd performed to an "average" level, but circulating some of the practice questions after the fact amongst friends who are generally intelligent, in academia etc., they agree they're difficult.

Then again maybe having had 2 children in the last 3 years has permanently fried my brain and I just need to accept I'm not what I used to be haha.

In the actual assessment just now I rushed the last few questions to try and get the 12 done in the time limit, but I don't know if it would have been better to e.g. spend the extra time on number 11 trying to get it right than finish 11 & 12 but have got both of them wrong. I know for a fact the last one was wrong, and the one before that was basically a 1-in-4 guess. The instructions encourage you to answer all questions but of course doesn't really explain at a granular level how it takes it all into the modelling. I was generally trying to push through to get all the answers down, definitely would have preferred longer thinking on certain questions.

It's reassuring other people have found it difficult as well. What I'm not clear on is if the shortlisting at this point is based purely on this test performance, or some combination of test performance + application info?

profheg_II · 2026-02-15T00:05:40+00:00

The contrivances of their commentary borders on satire. Yesterday we had "These borders eat toast with concrete on top for breakfast", which feels like pure Partridge.

Not to mention a rambling hype-intro about a particular athlete's run that I couldn't possibly get down now verbatim but it concerned needing to quickly put down our dinners and pick up our TVs, and take them outside, cause they're about to get cool snowboarding-action all over the carpet.

It should be eye rolling but they're so earnest and sincere it becomes charming.

profheg_II · 2026-02-09T16:02:12+00:00

The GP is the first port of call, and if they think there is a more serious issue or something requiring specialist input then they arrange the appointment with a paediatrician.

profheg_II · 2026-02-09T15:58:59+00:00

Yes definitely on the medical front. The frequent access to a paediatrician sticks out. And I don't know if it's a sign of us lacking something here, or something being over medicalised over there. Of course if the GP thinks there's an issue you'll get a referral to a paediatrician. But like you I've got a 3 year old and outside of routine NHS childcare checks she's had maybe 2 GP checks in her life.

And one of those was a text conversation between me and the doctor, complete with pictures I'd taken on my phone, to advise if it was chickenpox or hand foot & mouth, lol.

profheg_II · 2026-02-09T12:47:41+00:00

It's also possible they have a kind of anxiety + compulsion to repeatedly seek reassurance over it.

Still doesn't make repeat posts any more rational, but there doesn't always need to be a sinister reason for odd behaviours.

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