pulling my hair out

Okay so not saying anything new here but have to say it anyway. I already posted the majority of this as a comment on another post, but am feeling re ‘inspired’ (?) to share it again after talking to a friend who recently did ‘light sleep training’ for their son and is ‘pinching herself’ cause after it being ‘really hard’ for a while now they can just put him in bed and he falls asleep on their own and they are down at the bar below getting a drink while their baby sleeps. Mind you this was after she was asking me about naps and stressing out about wake windows and sleep during the day cause her 6 month old wasn’t doing 2 hour naps every day🫠

I know they are in general great parents, and I really don’t mean to sound judgy, but it just makes it seem like these sleep trained babies were just a burden to their parents before being ‘trained’ and suddenly their world is so much better and their baby is better.

I can’t help but think how do they know he stopped crying cause he ‘figured out how to sleep independently/self soothe’ or if he just gave up and lost hope they were going to come??

Okay, enough of that…now Enter original comment:

‘I just can’t help to think that all this obsession about sleep is so unnecessary and created by a consumeristic / capitalistic world to try to make money off of worried parents by making them think they’re doing something wrong. A world so disconnected (in general) from our intuition and self-trust and in CONSTANT comparison. Like come on and think about it for a second…sleep is the most NATURAL thing we do (aside from breathing lol). When we are tired we sleep, when we aren’t, we don’t. Obviously there is an aspect of learning and nervous system development, but sleep is biology. There are adults that sleep less and sleep more. There are adults who suck at sleeping and some that sleep great. Even I have nights where my nervous system is whacked and I sleep like shit 😂

Once I let go of schedules and worrying about sleep and just started learning baby’s cues and helping her sleep when I saw she was getting tired, our entire life shifted and everything became so relaxed. We have harder days and easier days, but all normal. Sometimes she sleeps 10 hours at night, sometimes 12. Two nights ago she slept 13 hours. She’s also 8 months old for context. I’m so tired of seeing the sleep training industry try to convince me my baby is a machine that needs calibrating 🫠😂 and I need all these outside ideas in order to be a better mother/parent.

All this to say everyone is different, every family is different, every situation is different, but the mentally induced stress we as parents can succumb to so easily because of comparing and questioning our innate intuition makes me so sad sometimes. Why aren’t people sharing ways for us to connect more deeply to our own intuition and our babies signals?? Oh yeah…cause there’s not much money in that 🥴

Rant over😮‍💨 ‘

All THIS to say that in the end I’m just learning that this stuff ‘works’ for some people, but it is not for me. I just wish people would stop shoving this sleep training regimenting shit in everyone’s faces and ask maybe more questions other than ‘how is she sleeping’ lol😅😂