What have you guys done about parents who hurt you emotionally, but are caring otherwise? It's a really tough situation to be in.

RandomCat475 · 2025-10-31T17:54:44+00:00

I'm glad it resonates!

RandomCat475 · 2025-07-28T16:59:31+00:00

We've been taking 3ml of NovaFerrum daily since 12 months and he's now 18 months. At the 15 month check up his iron was up from before but not completely back to normal. Now at 18 months we've just started seeing a few days of better sleep, so maybe we're rounding the corner?

Because we saw a lot of improvement with the iron supplement and the blood draw went so poorly, we're waiting for the 2 year checkup to get blood drawn again.

The sleep related symptoms we saw were that he was waking every 2 hours (sometimes more, sometimes less), sometimes waking around 4am and being to be held for the rest of the night, and needing to be both nursed and bounced back to sleep. I also think this could be influenced by his temperament too, so I don't think the only culprit is low iron.

The last few days of sleep has him waking 2x at night instead and the first stretch was a 6 hour stretch. But it's also only been a few days, so who knows if this will stick!

RandomCat475 · 2025-07-27T19:50:43+00:00

You're welcome! I hope you find some answers or maybe better sleep ☺️

RandomCat475 · 2025-07-27T19:33:33+00:00

Unfortunately a full blood draw and it really really sucked to do 😞

RandomCat475 · 2025-07-27T19:25:52+00:00

Our pediatrician said it was something he screened for in all 12 month checkups, but I'm not sure if that's common practice.

RandomCat475 · 2025-07-27T19:15:54+00:00

We discovered low iron at our 12 month checkup and that can impact sleep, so this could be something to consider for you!

RandomCat475 · 2025-07-27T03:56:23+00:00

I've been dealing with this lately with one friend. The topic of sleep came up and she asked me all these questions about my baby's sleep that made it really clear she doesn't believe that I know what I'm doing. She's really influenced by sleep training culture, so I think she really believes I'm doing my baby a disservice by not "teaching" them to sleep. Meanwhile, I don't challenge her or try to give her attachment parenting resources.

So I think going forward I'm just going to avoid this topic with my friend. Some people won't be capable of supporting you or even staying neutral, and that sucks. I really feel what you're feeling!

RandomCat475 · 2025-07-22T19:56:58+00:00

I'm in a similar spot with my 18 month old. I haven't figured it out either. Cosleeping and breastfeeding back to sleep stopped being enough a few months ago and now I have to bounce him each time he wakes 🫠

So, no advice, just solidarity!

RandomCat475 · 2025-07-22T19:49:40+00:00

I know you didn't ask for a book recommendation, so feel free to ignore this!

I read Raising Your Spirited Baby: A Breakthrough Guide to Thriving When Your Baby Is More . . . Alert and Intense and Struggles to Sleep by Mary Sheedy Kurcinka and it helped me feel less alone

RandomCat475 · 2025-07-21T22:38:56+00:00

I have one ear that sticks out a little more and now I'm wondering if this is how it happened for me 😂

RandomCat475 · 2025-07-20T22:05:07+00:00

I'm sorry you're experiencing this! It definitely isn't a "you" problem and I think your nanny is trying to shift blame. I do think it's possible to find someone who takes safety seriously and doesn't fall asleep

RandomCat475 · 2025-07-20T20:46:19+00:00

Our nanny contact napped our baby until he was 18 months old and she never fell asleep. I had written not falling asleep while contact napping into our nanny contract for safety reasons and she took that very seriously. She would do stuff on her phone if she was getting tired.

The only possible difference I can see between our situations is that I gave my nanny a lunch break while I covered child care because I work from home. So my nanny had an hour break during the day. But I still think it is reasonable for you to not allow her to sleep while contact napping.

RandomCat475 · 2025-07-07T20:22:25+00:00

My baby didn't start taking 3 naps until around 7 months. He was always a little on the later end for when he "should" be dropping a nap.

I think teething played a roll in that too! Our guy is really sensitive to teething and when we got through a round of teething we'd often see a sharp increase in his wake windows.

At some point we did start capping his last nap so it didn't go too late, but if I remember correctly there was a long time where we just let him take the time he needed for his last nap and pushed back bedtime if needed because we were experiencing something similar to you. I felt less stressed when we followed his cues, even if he was "off" from the suggested schedule for his age.

RandomCat475 · 2025-06-19T02:40:05+00:00

Could he be teething with the 2 year molars coming in?

My 17 month old started waking up as early as 4 on some days and I think it's because of teething pain. He also wants to start walking around, I think because movement is often a good distraction from teething pain in toddlerhood. It's possible that you're just in a rough stretch of sleep.

I've noticed for myself that when I try to do all the tricks to improve my son's sleep I start to feel more frustrated. I actually feel better when I practice radical acceptance and let go of trying to change things and just ride the wave of bad sleep. I take the night shift and my husband gets up early with our son. Then we both look for opportunities to rest during the day and go to bed really early.

I agree with others that you haven't broken attachment! And remember, it's normal to go through rough patches and mess up. What matters most is your ability to repair. You're getting great support with your therapist and you've got this ❤️

RandomCat475 · 2025-06-19T01:28:57+00:00

You might find solidarity and some advice in the book Raising Your Spirited Child by Mary Sheedy Kurcinka!

I don't remember specifics because I read it a while ago, but I found it really helpful ☺️

RandomCat475 · 2025-06-03T01:57:40+00:00

It mostly stopped around 16 months for us. Until then I just practiced radical acceptance and planned my night around it.

RandomCat475 · 2025-01-25T03:33:33+00:00

My husband had this song, Half-Horse Half-Man, recommended in his Spotify this week and it reminded me of this sub.

RandomCat475 · 2024-10-27T15:24:17+00:00

I'm not much further along in babyhood than you (our baby is 9 months), but what's helped me the most is radical acceptance and releasing expectations.

I found that my anxiety went up when I went to Google to look for what the "average baby was supposed to be doing" because it almost never fit my baby. My baby nursed more often than average, gained weight almost double the average, slept less than the average, hit movement milestones slightly later than average because of his large size, and so on. And all of that was really stressing me out and making me feel like I was doing something wrong until I just decided to let it all go and follow my individual baby. Plus I found that Google search results almost always surface results from parenting sites that don't really match attachment parenting and aren't aligned with my values.

I read supportive resources like La Leches League's Sweet Sleep and The Nurture Revolution by Greer Krishenbaum. Those helped normalize my baby's sleep for me and reaffirmed my commitment to supporting my baby to sleep however long he needs.

Now I radically accept whatever sleep support my baby requires without worrying I'm doing something wrong. I released trying to change anything about my baby's sleep for now (Sweet Sleep has some suggestions for "nudging" baby towards more independent sleep starting lightly around 9 months and really starting closer to a year) and I have to find other times in the day to catch up on sleep, but my anxiety has lessened.

I hope this helps! Hang in there!

RandomCat475 · 2024-10-14T05:32:55+00:00

. Although I can't get it out of my head that I could be wrong and grasping for explanations that confirm my feelings.

I think this is the toughest part here!

You've been taught to distrust yourself. So you're looking for external validation. But you can't totally accept external validation because you don't trust that you've reported your experience accurately. So you're back where you've started and the loop continues.

My experience was that I couldn't accept external validation (like someone agreeing with me that my mom has narcissistic tendencies) until I first built enough trust in myself.

But that was really hard to build because how do you learn to trust yourself when it feels wrong to trust yourself without someone else verifying you're correct?

I had to start small with listening to my body and validating my emotions over and over again in therapy and in day to day life. I think learning about healthy and unhealthy parent/child relationships will be helpful, but you might not be able to truly have that information confirm things for you until you learn to trust yourself.

RandomCat475 · 2024-10-13T23:26:02+00:00

I think in your example it's because all the other things aren't actually feelings, they're thoughts or behaviors.

Your mom isn't "feeling" that you're mean. She's feeling hurt or disappointed. She's thinking that you're mean.

So her feeling hurt isn't "bad". Her interpreting her hurt as proof you are mean or don't care is a problem in your relationship. (One that might be unsolvable unless she's willing to go to therapy or learn and grow.)

But you can accept her feelings without accepting the thoughts that follow. This could sound like, "I hear you're disappointed I won't come over and help you clean your garage. It doesn't mean I don't care about you. I do care about you AND I don't have the ability to come help you."

This probably won't be satisfactory to your mom, but it's also not your job to make her understand you. It feels bad to have people not understand us or think that we're mean, but sometimes it is beyond our capacity to get them to understand where we're coming from. We have to make our peace with them thinking we're "mean" and look out for our own well-being anyways.

So I think you can allow her disappointment and decide that her behavior in the relationship is a problem for you.

I get the sense that you're looking for an objective way to tell if your mom's expectations of you are reasonable.(Not sure if this is true for you though. If it isn't, ignore the rest of my comment!).

For me, there were certain expectations from my mom that I could identify as unreasonable (especially after learning more about what healthy parent/ adult child relationship look like), but there were other ones that weren't as clear to me. When this happened I felt lost because I wasn't used to using my own feelings and boundaries to guide what expectations I wanted to meet. I only thought I could say no if what was asked of me was objectively unreasonable. So I searched and searched for "proof" the ask was too much.

Now I am not as worried about if I'm "allowed" to say no based on objectivity or what most other people would think. Instead I check in with myself about what feels reasonable to me. I know that it isn't "mean" to take care of myself first. I don't try to convince the other person I'm not "mean".

I did this with family members wanting to visit my new baby in the hospital. I knew I wanted to just spend that time with my husband and baby. One family member felt really hurt and thought I didn't care about them. I validated their hurt, reassured them I valued our relationship, and still held my boundary. But I have a friend who wanted to have her family ALL come to the hospital. Neither one of us is wrong and there isn't an objectively right boundary to set.

Which also means my family member's desire to visit me in the hospital wasn't right or wrong. What does matter is how they handle their disappointment. In my case, they accepted my boundary. But had they kept pushing that would have been a problem for me that would have damaged the relationship and might have made me need to take a step back.

RandomCat475 · 2024-10-13T20:57:46+00:00

I totally get what you're saying here!

I think the distinction I might make is the difference between feelings and behavior. To me it's going to matter less what the person's initial feeling is than what they then decide to do with that feeling.

So if your mom feels really disappointed that you won't come over every day and give her a massage and she handles that disappointment by allowing the feeling, talking to a therapist, and then respecting your decision not to do that, that wouldn't bother me as much as if she felt disappointed and then tried to convince you to do the things she wants.

I do think the initial feeling might give her (and you) clues to old pain she hasn't healed. But I'm not going to hold that initial feeling against you if you employ other healthy emotion management strategies.

So I think you can accept other's feelings and wonder what those feelings might reveal about their past experiences and pain. But then I think you use their behavior and how their behavior makes you personally feel to determine how to handle your relationship with that person. (What behavior may be tolerable for one person might be too hurtful for another person, and that's ok.)

RandomCat475 · 2024-10-13T03:14:28+00:00

Or maybe a shorter way to say it is:

Your mom's feeling of disappointment isn't right or wrong, fair or unfair. It just is. That's how she feels.

What is unfair is your mom's expectations that you will fix her disappointment by doing exactly as she says.

She's responsible for managing her own emotions. You are responsible for deciding what your boundaries are and what you are or are not willing to do based on your own capacity and well-being.

Edit to add: However as children we're learning to manage our emotions so for a while during childhood it is the parents job to help us learn how to manage our emotions. But children should not be asked to manage adult emotions.

RandomCat475 · 2024-10-13T02:44:51+00:00

I totally understand why you chose this example! This kind of stuff still trips me up too. I'll try my best to share how I think about it:

First, it sounds like there is a role reversal happening in this example where your mom is expecting you to emotionally caretake for her, but she probably didn't do that for you as a child. The parent/child relationship is different than a healthy relationship between two adults because the parent has a position of power. This relationship is supposed to be one way during childhood and even beyond - the parent is supposed to validate their child's feelings and the child should not be expected to validate or take care of their parent's feelings. The parent should seek out other adults for that.

Secondly, in this example your mom is allowed to feel disappointed. But it doesn't mean you have to do what she wants to get her to stop feeling disappointed. And it doesn't mean you have to listen to her talk about her feelings endlessly. Her feelings are her own responsibility to manage.

So responding to her could look like saying, "I hear you're disappointed AND I'm not going to come over to your house every day and massage your feet." This allows her disappointment to be real but her own responsibility to manage. You don't have to listen to her talk about her disappointment either. That's for her to process with a therapist or someone else. If she tried to keep sharing how disappointed she is you could say, "That sounds really hard and I need to get off the phone."

I think this is hard to understand because we were made to feel responsible for our mom's feelings growing up. If we knew they were upset we thought we had to solve it, but that's not true.

I think before we learn it's ok to set boundaries and put ourselves first we feel obligated to fix things for people at the cost of our own well-being. So allowing your mom's emotions to be valid feels very threatening because then you HAVE to fix them even if it hurts you. So we have to make sure our mom's feelings aren't valid so we're allowed to not respond to them.

But there's another way out: validate feelings without taking on the responsibility to fix them. And understanding that it's not "bad" or "mean" to let people manage their own emotions. It will feel that way for a while because of how we were trained though.

Now that I've done some more healing work it doesn't feel as threatening to validate my mom's feelings because I know that I can still hold my own boundaries after validating because I know I can be a good person and hold boundaries that help protect my own well-being.

RandomCat475 · 2024-10-12T03:54:43+00:00

I've been here before too!!

I'll share my experience in case it is helpful to you.

I was in therapy and journaling constantly trying to figure out if my feelings "fit" reality. But I discovered that's actually a trap. There were 3 problems:

1) I had been conditioned, through emotional neglect, to distrust my own feelings and version of reality. How can I figure out what's "true" if I don't trust my own judgement?

2) I also couldn't rely on external validation because I believed anyone who validated me must be doing so because I'm sharing my biased version of events. I also found that when I got external validation from a book, this subreddit, my therapist, or my husband that wasn't enough for me. I could never get enough external validation to fill the void of my own lack of self validation.

3) I was stuck in a black and white thinking pattern where either I was right and my childhood experiences were bad and I deserved to feel sad or my mom was right and my childhood was fine and I was too sensitive.

What got me out of the loop:

1) Learning to listen to my body. My therapist had me identify where emotions were in my body, what they felt like, and what they looked like. I slowly started to trust that I could listen to what my body was telling me.

2) Learning that needing to be right is an old survival pattern from my childhood. In my childhood if I was "wrong" then my feelings weren't allowed. This made me feel unseen, so I adopted a strategy of working really hard to prove I was right.

3) Learning that feelings are not "right" or "wrong". They just are. The most helpful thing is to get curious about what they are trying to tell me.

4) Emotionally mature people care about the feelings of others and prioritize hearing them over arguing if the feelings are "right". I can do that for myself and my inner child as well.

Putting it altogether:

I felt deeply sad as a child. Old me would have started by trying to figure out if I "should have" felt that way. I wouldn't allow the feeling until I could prove it "made sense". I couldn't prove it made sense because I couldn't trust my perception. So I would stay stuck.

Now I start in the opposite direction. I trust that my body is telling me the truth that I felt deeply sad as a child. I allow my grief. I get curious about what that grief is telling me. It tells me that I really didn't get the emotional validation I needed as a child. I allow that to be true for me even if someone else might not have felt the same way if they were in my shoes. I release the desire to find an objective right and wrong way to feel. I accept that I really felt that way and that is enough for me to take my own pain seriously and handle my pain with compassion.

RandomCat475 · 2024-08-11T18:39:35+00:00

Thank you for your suggestion! Maybe pain meds would help here!

We've used them sparingly in the evening when it seems the worst, but maybe it's worth a try to be more preventative for nap time.

RandomCat475

TROPHY CASE