Parent Thread

There definitely was a correlation between sleeping position recommendations and an increased prevalence of SIDS when they recommended all of us kids sleep on our stomachs, but that doesn't give us causation. Without a doubt more kids died from suffocating on the various apparatuses designed to keep kids whichever sleeping position was currently recommended. Fact of the matter is, kids die of SIDS while sleeping on their stomach, kids die of SIDS while sleeping on their backs. You know who doesn't die from SIDS, 99.95% of all babies.

Point is, you lose enough sleep as a new parent as is, I don't think allocating even more sleepless nights to fretting about SIDS is worth it. If you can get your kid to sleep on their back that is great, if you can't, well they need sleep more than they need a 0.1% potential reduction in SIDS risk (yes, that is the actual figure).

If your kid has risk factors, born prematurely, exposed to alcohol and/or tobacco during pregnancy, etc. I might think about being a bit more diligent about trying to force the issue a bit more on the back sleeping. Also, if your kid failed their first hearing test (but passed further tests) I might be inclined to be a bit more concerned about SIDS as well, as there is somepromising researchon the subject coming out of Seattle Childeren's showing that many SIDS cases might be related to an often undetected inner ear issue. Otherwise, I think a little CTFD parenting goes a long ways. Don't get me wrong, I'd recommend making the effort to get your kid to sleep on their backs, but in the end just make sure your kid gets some sleep.

He does sleep on his back but 50% of the time that is after he falls asleep on us on his stomach. Once he's asleep he'll stay asleep on his back for hours, but if we lay him down directly on his stomach he usually falls asleep on his own as long as he's actually tired.

You're lucky, we're having trouble getting our kid to fall asleep on his own. It's a slow process.

My wife had trouble dealing with the kid sleeping on his stomach too, but I told her if the dude can crawl around and move his head he isn't going to sleep face first and stop breathing.

Because of the warnings we made sure my son slept on his back, and he did it without any problems but then ended up with a flat spot on his head. Not severe enough for the re-shaping helmet or anything so it's not a big deal, but if your infant is sleeping on his/her stomach you can at least look forward to a nice round noggin!

Or a very flat face, I suppose.

Eyashusa_sl said:

He does sleep on his back but 50% of the time that is after he falls asleep on us on his stomach. Once he's asleep he'll stay asleep on his back for hours, but if we lay him down directly on his stomach he usually falls asleep on his own as long as he's actually tired.

Click to expand...

If he's sleeping on you on his stomach that is fine. When a baby is sleeping they have a little internal mechanism that tells them to slightly readjust their position if they aren't getting enough air. In cases of SIDS for "reasons" that internal mechanism doesn't quite work properly, kids don't readjust themselves and they suffocate. If they kid has fallen asleep on you and doesn't readjust you are most likely going to notice that they stopped breathing and readjust them yourself.

Now if you are co-sleeping you obviously run the risk that won't notice if your kid stops breathing. I'm not going to debate the merits and pitfalls of co-sleeping other than to say that you do increase your child's risk of suffocation by co-sleeping, and often they attribute co-sleeping suffocation deaths as SIDS or SIDS related.

I'll admit I still get a little bit nervous when the little man appears to sleep face straight down

Tuco_sl said:

SIDS scared the hell out of me. I always wonder how many of the ~2500 SIDS deaths a year were misattributed. I can imagine a lot of parents co-sleeping, waking up to find themselves laying on a corpse and calling it SIDS. Or finding their dead baby with a blanket wrapped around their head like Dick Cheney just got done water boarding them.

I wish I could affix a monitor onto them and have an app on my phone that would freak out if their oxygen levels dipped. Cyborg babies can't come soon enough.

Click to expand...

You can get little things that clip to them that will beep if they stop breathing or pads that go under the sheet that detect movement. I'm with you on being freaked out, my kid is 14 months old and I still get nervous if I wake up before him. I have to at least check on him through our monitor. Not sure when that feeling will go away.

a_skeleton_03_sl said:

Trust me you don't want that. Due to our twins being 3 months early my son had a machine to do that. It would screech in the night because of random little things and wake us up in a cold sweat.

Click to expand...

Yeah, when we were in the NICU for 2 months, and the nurses were telling us about those machines and how we would probably have one when we went home. We thought it sounded like a good idea, would stop us from worrying so much at night, but pretty much every nurse let us know that we do NOT want the thing if we can help it. It'll screech like a smoke alarm multiple times a night giving everyone in the house a heart attack. Thankfully we were able to eventually go home without one, but it was close, our kid was barely under the threshold for needing one.

Arative_sl said:

You can get little things that clip to them that will beep if they stop breathing or pads that go under the sheet that detect movement. I'm with you on being freaked out, my kid is 14 months old and I still get nervous if I wake up before him. I have to at least check on him through our monitor. Not sure when that feeling will go away.

Click to expand...

I don't think that feeling ever goes away, only thing that changes is what you are worried about possibly killing your kid.

My daughter, as soon as she could roll over, slept on her face. She would root around the crib, but you could look at the monitor and she would be face down not moving and it freaked the fuck out of us. Doctor said she was fine due to normal growth rate and development, but my wife had that bad feeling so we took it further. They gave us sleep monitor that had leads to a strap on her chest that would monitor heart rate and breathing. Problem was, she would move around and the strap would move down around her tummy and the alarm would go off like she was dieing. That BS lasted two nights before I said no more. We bought a device that sits under the mattress to detect breathing movement. All is well. She sleeps fine now she is in a real bed.

14-month old up at 6am new years morning wanting to play.

#thelittlethings

Yeah my son has 5 teeth coming in at once. Fell "asleep" at 4am and was back up at 6. I feel like a zombie. He did this yesterday too.

I'm at my wits end. So the wife and I were trying cry it out with our 1 year old daughter, because we had created some bad habits that we were trying to fix. Our daughter sleeps upstairs, and for a while whenever she would fuss, one of us would run upstairs and comfort her. If she had gotten super upset, we would bring her downstairs and "reset" her, as we called it. She would run around, play, get bites of treats, and then after a bit, we would bring her back upstairs and she would go to sleep immediately. Well then she got smart, and realized if she freaks out, she gets rewarded by going downstairs. Bad habits, and that's what we are trying to correct.

So we try cry it out for a week, with zero progress, which is frustrating. Then she gets sick, so we have to stop for the most part. Week later, we try it again, and she gets upset so fast, screams so bad, she pukes. Sometimes within minutes. Last night, it happened so fast, I went downstairs to get Mom to go upstairs to comfort her, and before Mom could even get up the stairs, she had puked. So then she gets to snuggle with Mom while everything gets cleaned up, and so I feel she kind of gets rewarded either way. I don't think a 1 year old knows how to puke on command to try and get attention, so we've tried things like making sure she eats normal time, so nothing is left to puke up by bed time.

Is there anything else we can do? This near instant puking is terrible.

I'm sorry Crone, that sounds very frustrating. I wish I had some great advice for you but I got very lucky with one of those easy-mode sleeping babies.

I'll just add the every-baby-is-different caveat I guess. When I was a baby I also was an easy-mode sleeper. No issues being in a crib, slept through the night starting at a very young age, when I did wake up I put myself back to sleep, etc. My parents were like "cool, we got this parenting thing down, it's pretty easy actually, let's have more!" Then they had my brother. Same genes, same parenting method, nightmare baby who would scream and cry throughout the night, never sleep on his own, hated naps, you get the picture. They called it quits after him. Good news is that both of us turned out mostly normal.

There is no shortage of sleep-training methods/advice out there so I'd just keep trying different things and see what sticks. The puking thing, might put a phone call into your pediatrician about that, he/she may have some more insight and might want to double-check just to make sure it isn't something medical.

Our daughter got a real bad illness last year which completely destroyed her sleep pattern. After she got better we tried Cry It Out which had worked in the past, but was just completely unsuccessful after over a week. Exhausted I discovered an alternative method called camp it out where you basically just lie down in their room until they fall asleep and then you are free to leave. You slowly move further from them til you are out of the room and then you are done. This worked for us, you might try it. Disclaimer, my daughter is a bit older than one year and was able to understand when I was explaining what was going on.