Dear XYZ,

I recall a few years ago, I would come across friends and acquaintances with children who would be married to their baby’s schedule. They would turn down invites, or say sorry, that’s past my baby’s bedtime even if it’s (what I would consider at the time) early evening. I would think to myself that they may be spoiling their kids or making them too inflexible by their strict adherence to rigid routines.

Well that was before I had a child myself, and my perspective on it has changed since.

I’ve come to realize that keeping to these routines is, for a large part, an act of self-preservation. There’re a lot of unknowns unknowns while raising a baby. Plus, they can’t communicate exactly what they want or are uncomfortable with by telling you. Their main mode of communication are crying, making non-verbal sounds, and physical gestures. These are by no means as information-rich as they primary mode of adult communication, language.

Often times being a parent involves a lot of guessing, attention, and learning from previous experience. All of this involves time and energy. And when a baby is often waking up in the middle of the night, both are scarce in a baby parent’s life. The routine helps cut down the number of variables that a parent needs to reason through their baby’s behavior. And the routine helps the baby, especially those younger than 3 months, understand daily rhythms because their body aren’t able to properly make out night and day yet. A departure from these imposed schedules could cause their rhythms to go out of tempo, which then results in a disrupted sleep for their parents.

Reduced sleep can have a wide range of detrimental effects for people. Loss of patience, frustration, reduced ability to think and manage emotions, and the list goes on. This could in turn lead to poorer parenting decisions, and possibly cause a bad spiral, riddled with guilt and self-doubt.

So next time your baby parent friend is keeping to a rigid schedule, try to understand that they’re not necessarily doing this for their baby, but for their own sanity.

xoxo,
K