Sleep. Before you become a parent, it only affects you, and of course many people (even non-parents) suffer from various types of sleep problems - but the discussions about it are rarely very long-lived. The second you become a parent, sleep takes on a whole new meaning.
It provokes. Saying "He sleeps well" about your newborn baby can be an effective way to make enemies. Or at least skeptical looks. Because it can't be that someone else has a secret recipe for sleep that I've missed...? (It must be a coincidence!)
There are, of course, a million things to say about how to do. There are also millions of different children. In other words, it is not at all strange that the sacred sleep works differently in different families.
But we might still be doing something wrong. As with so much else in parenting, we often get stuck thinking that there is a solution, a universal truth - something that is applicable to everything and everyone. If you do just that, you have accomplished the task.
At the same time, we know (because we've all experienced it) that it's never as difficult to sleep as when we feel we have to. But sleep is not a task to complete, there is no one way to do it. However, there are approaches that work in one family - but not at all in another. As with everything else, we usually know a fraction of what life looks like at the neighbor's, but we are quick to judge based on the fact that we know everything.
Sometimes you do things in a certain way because you have to - the life you live works that way. Sometimes you have the opportunity to float along without relating to, for example, the clock. Imagine if we could meet there, listen and remove our persistent search for right and wrong. Talk and be allowed to wonder (and maybe learn) without being in opposition.
Making parenting a competition probably only creates losers.
