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I have a very very heartwrenching experience in this field.

I’m in the middle of this little nightmare, and I’m sitting here at 12:30 am because I simply don’t want to go to bed.

My wife and I have a 20 month old baby, who has yet to ever sleep by herself. In fact, when you stop touching her she will immediately wake up.

The longest she has ever slept on her own, without holding our hands is 20 minutes. This is not an exaggeration, this is not a cry for attention.
We log it.
We record it.
We are serious. She never sleeps for more than 20 minutes and most of the time never makes it past 5 minutes.

We have our mattress on the floor, and her matress next to ours. Throughout the night we switch sides and continuously attempt to get her to sleep without holding our hands.

We had tried “cry it out” once, waiting around the corner to the advice of our award winning pedriatician (The 4th of 9 pediatricians we’ve consulted) and she cried non-stop for 4 hours and 23 minutes before we gave in. We were crying more than she was.

this topic strikes me as more than a “child abuse” sort of thing. This has tickled divorce. This has tickled suicide. This has tickled some very, very damaging thoughts.

Now before any ass wants to lecture me about those statements, this is 2 years of no sleep. This is lost clients. This is lost money (I can’t function. I’ve lost clients, and I’m struggling to stay ahead at work. I work at home now at a dramatic cut in pay and I’ve sold everything)

You may recall me from years ago talking about my successful I.T. business. It’s gone. Everything is gone. And it’s gone because of this.

My baby daughter sleeps for about 5 to 7 hours out of every 24 hour period. She’s fine - alert and happy when she’s awake. I wish I could say the same for her parents.

We don’t really speak to each other anymore. When one is awake, the other is sleeping. We both now work from home trying our best to keep food on the table and heat radiating throughout the house.

So i am here to tell you, that as someone who is going through this - after a few months of this you’ll try anything. And you won’t consider it “abuse”. You’ll do whatever you can do to get your baby to sleep.

Right now we just promised to stick together for a few years and see how it works out. But the fights and friction between us is overwhelming.

There is, of course, more to this story. But I am here to tell you that this is not a case of child abuse. It’s a case of “doing what your pediatrician tells you to”.

And without an answer, I’ve forfeited my life in the pursuit of raising a daughter until she gets to an age where she understands the idea of letting her parents sleep.

Right now, she has utterly no concept of what we ask of her. She doesn’t understand that we’re not there not because we’re abandoning her. She lacks this communication.

So my wife and I have literally put up or shut up. And we’ve decided to continue muscling down this path until she’s about 4 or so and can understand discipline, and getting to sleep on her own.

And we will not be having a second after this. We simply can’t survive such an experience.

I may sound “matter of fact” about this, but my psyche is literally dead. I have no actual emotional response anymore and all I know is deep depression and anxiety. And yeah, I have to hide it and convert it to happiness when “its my turn”. I power through that quite well because it’s that important to me - and she does really make me happy when she’s awake.

But without me leaving my job we would have been divorced by now. No doubt about it.