Sleep Training vs. Co-Sleeping Is the Final Boss of Mom Discourse

Let's chalk it up to extreme sleep deprivation, but moms are losing it.

Before we begin, I’m once again reminding everyone that my book, Will There Be Free Food?, a series of comedic personal essays about being socially inept, having OCD, and working in the chaotic 2010s San Francisco tech scene as a young married woman who is bad at all jobs, is launching as a paid series of chapters on my Substack. You can access all chapters here. Chapter 1 is free!

---

This article was actually something I wrote a few weeks ago, and I kept putting it in the backlog because other topics were more relevant to the weekly discourse. But of course, baby sleep came up again (as it always does) with this tweet:

My first thought was: yeah, of course it was fine for you, men always sleep through the crying (or pretend to be asleep, anyway.)

I’m actually pretty fortunate in the sleep arena, but many other parents popped up to inform Santi that actually, the sleep deprivation isn’t fine. For some parents, it’s a few rough months, for others it’s years.

Even though I was lucky with baby sleep, I still had a few nights with either kid where I muttered to myself that I “couldn’t do this anymore” (do what?! I don’t know!) In hindsight, it was all very silly, but in the moment I was stuck between the very natural urge to sleep for more than an hour at a time, fear that if I fell asleep while nursing that I could suffocate the baby (same goes for bringing the baby into my bed) and then the fear that if the baby cried for more than a few seconds they would be irreparably traumatized. There were no good options!

And this, everyone, is why sleep is the final boss of mom discourse.

If you’re on a mom group, most likely two topics have been banned: any debates about vaccines, and circumcision. This is probably for the best, as I’ve never seen a thread on those topics go well, unless everyone is in agreement.

One controversial thing that is not banned, however, is sleep. And it would be silly to ban discussions about sleep because that’s basically all we talk about for the first year and maybe even the second year. None of us are getting enough sleep, and most likely, neither are the babies. Everything revolves around when the babies sleep (before I had kids I never understood why parents insisted on eating dinner at 5 PM), where the babies sleep (a million posts per day citing that a baby will only sleep while being held, or in an unsafe vibrating sea creature inspired swing, etc.) and while adults might react to tiredness by yawning and well, uhhh…falling asleep…many babies react to tiredness by screaming hysterically, arching their backs and refusing to sleep. Sure, baby. Too tired to sleep. Makes sense to me!

Anyway, unless you have a perfect sleeper, you will ultimately find yourself having to pick between two things: letting your baby sleep in an environment that is not the AAP-approved safe sleep environment (alone in a crib on their backs on a firm mattress in a 68-degree room, which of course is the least comfortable experience for the baby) or sleep training (a process which typically involves leaving a baby alone in their crib before they fall asleep, and often results in at least some crying.)

To make matters more complicated, these are issues which, according to the most neurotic parents out there (it’s me, hi! I’m the problem, it’s me!) are extremely high stakes. If you let your baby sleep in any environment other than what is currently considered safe sleep—especially if you bring your baby into bed with you—they could suffocate (even if you don’t roll over on the baby, the softness of the mattress can lull them into a deeper sleep, which is a risk for SIDS). But if you leave your baby in the crib, awake, for any amount of time, they will develop life long trauma and abandonment issues, have an insecure attachment to you, and ultimately wind up with a personality disorder (and let’s be real, with your genetics, they’re going to wind up with some anxiety issue already.)

Most moms fall somewhere in between the extremes. Maybe they have some concerns about the safety of bed sharing, and they have concerns about what would happen if a baby cried hysterically for an hour straight, but they acknowledge that every situation contains nuance. Unfortunately, these moms are not on Reddit or Facebook mom groups, where the most unhinged sleep debates live.