> But driving isn't the only problem. Parents are more irritable, less present, and just generally worse, when they aren't sleeping.
This.
It's hard to not laugh at a remark like "the reason parents do it is for their own benefit". Of course we do it for our own benefit. Because our benefit is the benefit of the child as well.
Temporary attachment or emotional issues, if they happen, can be fixed. Worst case, the parents may need some external guidance from a specialist in children psychology and emotional development. Keeping the parents sleep-deprived for months can cause them to become depressed (or exacerbate mother's postpartum depression - a very important topic that's not being talked about enough), or lose their jobs, or make them hate their own child, or hate each other and ultimately lead to divorce/broken family. All these consequences are orders of magnitude worse for future prospects of a child than anything a botched sleep training can cause.
Thanks! We've had a lot of good luck so far. In fact, the child psychologist we went to proactively, to talk about how to help a 1 y.o. child handle moving to a new home in a different city, approved with the way we handled both this and other issues, and with our approach in general. But hey, N=1, it's always possible she is wrong.
> The entire psychology science and discipline was still not able to solve it. But your optimism is encouraging.
The issue isn't with psychology, the issue is with people treating an entire spectrum as one bit "is or isn't" boolean. It's good for writing outrage-inducing stories to maximize revenue. It's good for winning arguments despite being wrong. It's not good if you actually care about the outcome.
The kind of issues we're talking about here are mostly the psychological equivalent of a bruised knee. Meanwhile, the commentariat and the pundits selling books want to round everything up to emotional abuse, as if letting a child cry for 15 minutes was as bad as leaving them to live on the street. Unfortunately, some of the HN comments seem to go this way too.
This.
It's hard to not laugh at a remark like "the reason parents do it is for their own benefit". Of course we do it for our own benefit. Because our benefit is the benefit of the child as well.
Temporary attachment or emotional issues, if they happen, can be fixed. Worst case, the parents may need some external guidance from a specialist in children psychology and emotional development. Keeping the parents sleep-deprived for months can cause them to become depressed (or exacerbate mother's postpartum depression - a very important topic that's not being talked about enough), or lose their jobs, or make them hate their own child, or hate each other and ultimately lead to divorce/broken family. All these consequences are orders of magnitude worse for future prospects of a child than anything a botched sleep training can cause.