Thank you for talking about bed sharing! I think you told a clear story about your worries and experiences, without claiming it was proof of anything. You also spoke very well on the research you have found and what conclusion that research may point to. Personal experiences are one of the most common things to give ideas for areas of research and is necessary for knowing to ask the right questions.
When it comes to SIDS - I know this is horrible, but I feel I must point it out - some babies will always die. No matter how perfectly we care for them, infancy is a risky period. In nature, the majority of all animals do not reach adulthood. Death mustn't always be blamed on someone. It can be purely tragic and sad, we don't need to be angry, our "rights" haven't been violated, no evil entity has specifically targeted us. Neither should it be blamed on the family. In a very great majority of cases, the family has done all they could to help the deceased.
I work as a physician, and the longer I work, the more I think our view on death is absurd and causes suffering. This is not mostly about children, of course, but it certainly affects my view on SIDS and health risks in general. We will all die eventually. I hope I will die quickly, outside the hospital, preferably having been healthy until then. A death like SIDS would be a wonderful death, if only it happened around 85 years of age.
Have you read The Comfort Crisis? I have not but people keep recommending it and apparently it talks about our inability to accept death as part of the modern ailment.
I never comment online but I want to thank you for sharing your story around bedsharing with your daughter and not your son. I have a 3 year old son and 1 year old daughter and I can identify with every word you said on this episode. I also feel robbed of the experience of co-sleeping with my first. Just hearing you say it out loud brings tears to my eyes. Thank you for speaking about this important topic so eloquently. I wish I had better information when I was going through this with my son. I will also never know how much of his personality has been effected by not bedsharing. My motherhood experience was made infinitely harder by the current (and very loud) anti bed sharing sentiment out there in North America.
Thank you for saying so. Like Tiffany says, you have to forgive yourself. You were doing your best. And maybe it really didn't matter. But I think it's important to share our honest stories.
I really responded to this because I tried Sleep training for one night, my daughter screamed all night, and the next day I was completely non functional and emotionally upset. The only reason i tried it was because my husband was getting his sleep interrupted and needed to be fully functional at his high power job. Intuitively, I felt that bed-sharing was the way to go and it worked for me and my two kids. I am surprised to hear the establishment is still pushing sleep training so heavily.
Just wanted to drop a few thoughts as I have been an avid reader and paid supporter of your content. And I plan on continuing. I currently bed share with my 6 month old and I bed shared with my 3 year old for long stretches. That being said, I felt uncomfortable with your claim that a child’s anxiety can be linked to sleep training with your anecdotal experience as proof. That’s just not true and it’s a dangerous claim. It’s one thing to advocate for safe co sleeping. It’s another to be too ideological about the practice. I just thought you’d be a bit nuanced here. And speaking of nuance, I am definitely interested in learning from hunter gatherers but don’t want to put everything they do on a pedestal but feel your content can sound a bit like the latter. Again more nuance here please. We can certainly as a society improve upon old ways.
Gabor Mate's book on ADD, Scattered Minds, has lots of research showing that early childhood experiences of attunement (having biological/physiological needs met) has a direct impact on neurological development. There haven't been many (any?) studies on the neurological impacts of sleep training but there's lots of good research out there on the impacts of not receiving timely responsive care from caregivers in the early years. Curious why you think linking anxiety to sleep training is a dangerous claim?
As for putting hunter gatherers on a pedestal, I don’t, but my point of view as an evolutionary biologist is that when a trait is universal among all mammals, and among all cultures where the expertisation of parenting has not exerted it’s influenced - when something has a million year or more evolved history - then the burden of proof is on the newer approach or intervention. In Europe this is known as the precautionary principle. And I don’t think we respect it enough in American culture. We think we know better than nature. Maybe we do. Maybe we don’t.
Final thought. In Hunt Gather Parent Michaleen Doucleff has some interesting thoughts on the science of parenting. She interviews an expert who says studying the effects of parenting interventions is basically harder than rocket science. This is part of why she finds that studying HG societies may be - in some cases - more valid and evidence based than the social science studies on parenting. I kind of agree with her. But that’s my bias! Obviously someone like Oster thinks very differently. These are tricky subjects to navigate. Maybe I should not have shared so much of my own personal experience - but I was trying to be honest and thought it might help people. Anyway, thanks for being a paid subscriber. We don’t have to agree on everything!
As for the “claim” that sleep training is linked to anxiety, I did not make that claim. I’m sorry if it seems like I did. All I said was that in my experience, given my son’s temperament and neurodivergent tendencies, CIO at 6 months was not the right choice. I thought it was, given the information I had at the time. I did not even consider bed sharing because I did not think it was an option. This was my personal experience and these are my honest feelings, though it will not be everyone’s experience, and I was careful to say that we will never know whether some of the differences in emotional regulation I see between my daughter and son are due to this or something else. I thought I also gave fair consideration to sleep training (mentioning that Australian RCT and that the data is good, although there is some nuance about it that Oster and others gloss over) and even discussed using a hybrid approach with Tiffany at the end of the episode.
Thank you for talking about bed sharing! I think you told a clear story about your worries and experiences, without claiming it was proof of anything. You also spoke very well on the research you have found and what conclusion that research may point to. Personal experiences are one of the most common things to give ideas for areas of research and is necessary for knowing to ask the right questions.
When it comes to SIDS - I know this is horrible, but I feel I must point it out - some babies will always die. No matter how perfectly we care for them, infancy is a risky period. In nature, the majority of all animals do not reach adulthood. Death mustn't always be blamed on someone. It can be purely tragic and sad, we don't need to be angry, our "rights" haven't been violated, no evil entity has specifically targeted us. Neither should it be blamed on the family. In a very great majority of cases, the family has done all they could to help the deceased.
I work as a physician, and the longer I work, the more I think our view on death is absurd and causes suffering. This is not mostly about children, of course, but it certainly affects my view on SIDS and health risks in general. We will all die eventually. I hope I will die quickly, outside the hospital, preferably having been healthy until then. A death like SIDS would be a wonderful death, if only it happened around 85 years of age.
Have you read The Comfort Crisis? I have not but people keep recommending it and apparently it talks about our inability to accept death as part of the modern ailment.
No, but I will look for it! Sounds like something for me.
I never comment online but I want to thank you for sharing your story around bedsharing with your daughter and not your son. I have a 3 year old son and 1 year old daughter and I can identify with every word you said on this episode. I also feel robbed of the experience of co-sleeping with my first. Just hearing you say it out loud brings tears to my eyes. Thank you for speaking about this important topic so eloquently. I wish I had better information when I was going through this with my son. I will also never know how much of his personality has been effected by not bedsharing. My motherhood experience was made infinitely harder by the current (and very loud) anti bed sharing sentiment out there in North America.
Thank you for saying so. Like Tiffany says, you have to forgive yourself. You were doing your best. And maybe it really didn't matter. But I think it's important to share our honest stories.
I really responded to this because I tried Sleep training for one night, my daughter screamed all night, and the next day I was completely non functional and emotionally upset. The only reason i tried it was because my husband was getting his sleep interrupted and needed to be fully functional at his high power job. Intuitively, I felt that bed-sharing was the way to go and it worked for me and my two kids. I am surprised to hear the establishment is still pushing sleep training so heavily.
Just wanted to drop a few thoughts as I have been an avid reader and paid supporter of your content. And I plan on continuing. I currently bed share with my 6 month old and I bed shared with my 3 year old for long stretches. That being said, I felt uncomfortable with your claim that a child’s anxiety can be linked to sleep training with your anecdotal experience as proof. That’s just not true and it’s a dangerous claim. It’s one thing to advocate for safe co sleeping. It’s another to be too ideological about the practice. I just thought you’d be a bit nuanced here. And speaking of nuance, I am definitely interested in learning from hunter gatherers but don’t want to put everything they do on a pedestal but feel your content can sound a bit like the latter. Again more nuance here please. We can certainly as a society improve upon old ways.
Gabor Mate's book on ADD, Scattered Minds, has lots of research showing that early childhood experiences of attunement (having biological/physiological needs met) has a direct impact on neurological development. There haven't been many (any?) studies on the neurological impacts of sleep training but there's lots of good research out there on the impacts of not receiving timely responsive care from caregivers in the early years. Curious why you think linking anxiety to sleep training is a dangerous claim?
As for putting hunter gatherers on a pedestal, I don’t, but my point of view as an evolutionary biologist is that when a trait is universal among all mammals, and among all cultures where the expertisation of parenting has not exerted it’s influenced - when something has a million year or more evolved history - then the burden of proof is on the newer approach or intervention. In Europe this is known as the precautionary principle. And I don’t think we respect it enough in American culture. We think we know better than nature. Maybe we do. Maybe we don’t.
Final thought. In Hunt Gather Parent Michaleen Doucleff has some interesting thoughts on the science of parenting. She interviews an expert who says studying the effects of parenting interventions is basically harder than rocket science. This is part of why she finds that studying HG societies may be - in some cases - more valid and evidence based than the social science studies on parenting. I kind of agree with her. But that’s my bias! Obviously someone like Oster thinks very differently. These are tricky subjects to navigate. Maybe I should not have shared so much of my own personal experience - but I was trying to be honest and thought it might help people. Anyway, thanks for being a paid subscriber. We don’t have to agree on everything!
As for the “claim” that sleep training is linked to anxiety, I did not make that claim. I’m sorry if it seems like I did. All I said was that in my experience, given my son’s temperament and neurodivergent tendencies, CIO at 6 months was not the right choice. I thought it was, given the information I had at the time. I did not even consider bed sharing because I did not think it was an option. This was my personal experience and these are my honest feelings, though it will not be everyone’s experience, and I was careful to say that we will never know whether some of the differences in emotional regulation I see between my daughter and son are due to this or something else. I thought I also gave fair consideration to sleep training (mentioning that Australian RCT and that the data is good, although there is some nuance about it that Oster and others gloss over) and even discussed using a hybrid approach with Tiffany at the end of the episode.