[Kid's name], stop exercising and get down here and eat some cake!

Which they’ve now decided they don’t like any of the food we make even though it’s exactly the same stuff that would be at daycare.

Are you judging this based on dinner? Ask any pediatric dietician and they will tell you that toddlers and preschoolers are quite likely to skip dinner. It might not be the food but the fact that there is a meal at that hour which is the issue. The recommendation is to serve a full meal afternoon snack and then consider dinner a bonus meal if they even eat it at all.

Which then prolongs the cycle of not eating enough and needing night feeds and then not eating much because there was milk overnight. I feel like we have to cut the night feeds somehow but it feels really cruel to starve them when they’re used to it…

Trust your instincts. It is biologically normal for children to have one or two night feeds up until age 3. Though at some point you can start leaving "the offering" (a bowl of food you are comfortable cleaning up left in their room for them to eat from overnight without waking you, such as a bowl of cheerios).

The sleep is a little better but still not sleeping through the night

Unless you get extremely lucky, plan on your child not sleeping through the night until age 3. Instead, focus on teaching them what is appropriate for them to do by themselves when they wake in their room. You'll sleep through the night and they will wake, play with some toys, and put themselves back to sleep and everyone will thrive and be happy.

As a long term nanny and now a parent myself, I've had exactly ONE charge out of 22 + my own child who can sleep 8 hours with no bottle. He stirs but puts himself back to sleep silently and if you aren't watching a video monitor, you'd have no idea that he had stirred.

But if you ask The Mister about our own child, he'd swear our own kid sleeps twelve hours with no bottle and no stirring. That's because THE MISTER sleeps twelve hours and wouldn't hear a smoke alarm, much less the child stir. So I agree with you to consider the source and that it is very likely fantasy talk.

• most babies do their highest caloric intake at night because it is the lowest stimulation time. While it is possible to have them fast all night long, it isn't in their best interests because their stomach has a fixed size and simply cannot hold enough calories to get them through the nightly brain growth without a meal. Can vs should. And also, that pediatrician needs to attend some continuing education.

• the fact that children sleep less well in the room with the parents is EXACTLY WHY roomsharing is recommended to prevent SIDS. Cannot die in deep sleep if you never get to deep sleep. Sleep apart at your own risk. And on that note, almost every single SIDS prevention tip is designed to give your child sh-tty sleep in order to prevent sleeping deeply because you cannot die in deep sleep if you never get to deep sleep; it is by design. Ask me sometime how I feel about that.

• sleep training doesn't teach them that their bed is safe to sleep in. It teaches children that parents don't want to hear them cry. There have been objective studies that find that children night wake the exact same amount whether sleep trained or not. Absolutely no difference whatsoever. But the sleep trained children wake silently. So this one is one where the benefit is to the child from having a well rested adult caregiver. But the child doesn't learn anything from it other than to shut up.

My 11 month old drank from a water fountain. We expected him to play in it, but he leaned in like a school child who had been doing it all their life and pursed his lips and took a slurp.

Not one a child threw recently, but still by far my most favorite tantrum came when I was chatting with a young boy who I cared for about the very large salad bowl he had found in the kitchen and was playing with.

"It salad bowl," he proudly said, and then as he attempted to fit inside of it he declared, "I salad."

His older brother then came up and said, "You are not lettuce."

The younger boy absolutely completely and totally lost it and melted all the way down, repeating the phrase, "Yes, lettuce. Am a lettuce."

Of course we all ought to know that nothing about this meltdown was specifically due to the fact that the boy was not in fact a green leafy plant. It was due to the fact that he'd had it up to here with his brother trashing on his play and needed to release some of that irk.

How I handled it: I held space for his big feelings. I let him cry and fuss and kick and yell. So long as he wasn't hurting himself or others, he needed to process the injustice done to him by his brother and he needed to feel the feelings caused by it. I made sure he was in a safe place and let him become a little adorable ball of emotions and waited for that change in cry, you know the one, where the anger changes to sadness. When we got there, I came over and gave voice to his feelings ("You felt undermined and invalidated. Your brother wasn't invited into your play but he interrupted in order to destroy it, anyway. That made you mad.") He came in for a hug, feeling seen and understood. I offered that I could help him come up with some ways to approach his brother about the situation if he wanted. He didn't want. And so that was that. Within 5 minutes of the start of sad-cry, he was off on another game, this one trying (and failing) to levitate his hotwheels cars.

it’s been 13 years lying, deceitful and sneaky behavior, provable fabrication of events, and denials of truths

Okay, but that's just typical child-with-ADHD. Show me a child with ADHD and I'll show you a liar who fabricates events and denies truths.

Would you like to know why? Read on!

Because the child with ADHD has been held to standards that are absolutely completely out of whack with who they are biologically (yes ADHD is a biology condition which is why medication is effective). But being children, they aren't able to articulate. So they lie because it 'makes the problem go away'. What problem?

The parent asking them if they've done their homework. They say yes instead of -- No, I haven't done my homework yet because despite wanting to, I cannot get my body to cooperate with my desires. I absolutely intend to have it done by the time it is due, I'm a good child who enjoys homework and wants to meet those expectations. I'll do it as soon as my body starts following my brain's directions and sits down/picks up a pencil. If I tell you I haven't done it yet, you'll ask me, "Why?" and I just cannot explain to you because though TheInfamousJ is able to type all this out, that's because she's 22 years my senior so has learned a lot of metacognition I don't have seeing as how my brain isn't even finished developing yet. I don't have the words. So yes, Dad [or whatever parent you are], I've done my homework because by tomorrow afternoon this statement will be true anyway and it saves me from having to deal with your ish about me, my brain, and how completely unacceptable it and I am to you. ...... except that time where my body starts following my brain's directions? It never came before the homework was due. I need help. But you are punishing me rather than assisting me.

and so it goes

The only thing I can offer you is that motivation isn't the currency of the ADHD brain. Importance isn't the currency of the ADHD brain. The only currency of the ADHD brain is INTEREST. As in, "Oh, this is interesting to me."

It sounds as if school isn't capturing their interests. Can changes be made so that school is interesting? Harder classes? Different electives? Anything?

And trust me, you don't want unmanaged ADHD behind the wheel of a car. There's a reason we of the ADHD brain have a shorter life expectancy on average, and that's because the deaths that bring down the average are almost all vehicularly related. I'd back off that expectation until the ADHD is under control.

Is there a psychiatrist in play? Medication ought to be lowering the activation energy/removing or easing the barrier-to-action between your child and the things they are interested in and actually want to do, and it sounds as if that isn't happening.

As a parent with ADHD and a parenting coach with lots of experience parenting ADHD children (though none my bio kids; my own bio kid is too young for their ADHD to be any of the known struggles) -- You have to back down, not ride harder. Sure, one of the ways to overcome the barrier-to-action is unholy terror which puts in place fight-or-flight and can get one over the barrier BUT existing in that state endlessly is super duper bad and leads to serious hard burnout and trauma from constantly being The Problem. I know that riding them has been effective thus far, but under the hood, the way it has been effective has done long term harms. As a family, you all need to learn new management and coping skills. You need to stop overfunctioning. Family therapy (which is different in nature than couples therapy or individual therapy) is the direction to go here. ADHD isn't a person's problem, it's a family problem. Especially when it involves a child who need parents to teach and guide them in to how to exist as prosocially as possible with the brain they never asked for but nonetheless were given. You aren't teaching them how to exist with their brain, you are teaching them how to exist with your brain; they don't have your brain. ADHD isn't a malfunctioning neurotypical brain any more than neurotypicality is a malfunctioning ADHD brain. Both are okay and both are different. Think horses and zebras - both okay, both different, both rideable, both with manes and tails, both with hooves, both about the same size, but a zebra is not a malfunctioning horse nor a horse a malfunctioning zebra. A horse cannot teach the zebra how to horse, it would be bad for the zebra.

My own Mother called my ADHD Father some names (deadbeat is the one you chose to call) and when I realized I related to my Father due to same neurotype, I realized two things: (a) my mother would call me a deadbeat too simply because she doesn't know how to coexist with a neurodivergent person and so her response is disgust and shaming and (b) living in the house with her was going to be supremely traumatic to me because she's going to take out her discomfort and ignorance on me in the worst ways. I got out of the house. Your child has not.

Might I suggest that your education come from ADDitude Magazine's webinar series? It is free as a podcast. And I would like to extend an invitation to you to join the How to ADHD Discord as there is a whole parenting section for advice on parenting ADHD children as well as another section called "Hearts asking Brains". You, not having ADHD, would be a heart. And the adult ADHD brains can offer insights you might not otherwise have been exposed to.

Having to do the work to learn healthy techniques to healthily regulate one's own emotions so that one can coregulate small humans who are just learning how to do the alive thing and then actually putting into place what one has learned is a challenge vs not doing any of this? You don't say. /s

These preliminary findings, which will be submitted soon for publication, should be interpreted with caution since the diversity of our sample was limited.

The authors polled 100ish parents across the country; just 100ish parents. Are any of you all family studies scholars? Is this really something which would be published with this kind of study design simply due to the inclusion of the "should be interpreted with caution" caveat? Like, in a reputable peer-reviewed journal, published? My background has me completely flabbergasted that something of this nature would come to be and I need reassurance that it is okay in its field.

a 36-year-old mother of two children under 5 reflected that she often feels like she “has nothing to give” and gets “easily overstimulated and overwhelmed all day every day.” She ended her reflections with the simple confession: “I often feel out of control.”

Oh lovely woman, you've skipped a few grades in Gentle Parenting. The first steps are to learn effective and healthy techniques to regulate one's own emotions. You, my darling lovely woman with two under five, have not. You are burned out, overstimulated, and overwhelmed because you haven't. One cannot pour from an empty teacup and no teacher was ever deemed effective who taught from the textbook without having a deep understanding of the material.

I fear that situations like the above will lead to mass impressions on the youth that respectful, emotionally intelligent parenting is useless simply because children are not unaware of burned out, tapped out, stressed out, touched out, and overstimulated parents. They are more attuned than we know.

It took me twenty years, a lot of therapy, several post graduate degrees, and twenty one children raised from bottles to backpacks as the AIC (adult in charge) during weekday daytime hours as a nanny to dial in my ability to healthily regulate my own emotions and sensory needs without disadvantaging any children who came into my area of effect. Save the Duggars, I don't think any actual parents (note, gentle reader, I am also an actual parent of a darling son) will have the opportunity to go through 20+ children as part of their learning curve. I think that Gentle Parenting is a fabulous and delightful ideal to aim for, but perhaps more realistic is Good Enough Parenting where you sometimes let them be angry without having to tell them that they are angry (footnote), while you go sip your tea in another room while it is still hot.

(footnote) Telling someone the name of their emotion in the moment without, you know, helping them with what to do with it, is unhelpful but it makes for great Instagram reels. Imagine yourself, very, very, very, very thirsty and unable to get a drink. Along comes someone who can provide you with a drink. Instead, they turn to you and say, "You are thirsty." And then they sit with you in your thirst. Rather than, you know, getting you a drink or anything. You'd gain a vocabulary word, but no skills. Same here with naming emotions. Magda Gerber was on the right track but she didn't get to the station, if you follow my analogy. And "Good Inside" can be summarized on a fortune cookie as: "They aren't giving you a hard time, they are having a hard time. Your experience is accidental." This, too, isn't the station.

I'm reading this from my laptop in my bed with my baby tucked up in his bassinet within arm's reach (which, amusingly enough, is the product name of the bassinet as well). My goal is to co-sleep in the roomsharing sense for the first year since I am breastfeeding.

Have I fallen asleep with him in the same bed as me? Absolutely. Did it the first night after he was born, in the hospital, even. I was in labor for over 24 hours and was knackered. The nurse came in and gently took him from me and put him back in the plastic box by my side. Hospital was big on "rooming in".

So, because I knew I absolutely could involuntarily head off to slumberland while breastfeeding, I took care to set my bed to be as safe as possible should this occur. It's like wearing a seatbelt in a car -- no plans for an accident, but just in case.

And let me tell you, my mental health is great! I know enough about me to know that my mental health would be far worse if I had to trudge down the hall in order to breastfeed at night or chastised myself for sharing a bed at such times as my body desperately needed sleep so took it. And with me sane in the membrane, I'm the kind of parent kiddo deserves in terms of personal quality. He doesn't deserve me loopy from sleep deprivation; so I'm not, mostly.

When did this become a contentious topic.

When people decided to make the perfect the enemy of the good. I don't know what concise term it is that is happening here, but it is the same as Time Out. So before Time Out was a thing, parents would assault their children simply because they, the parents, felt upset or frustrated with their children existing as new people who were still learning. In order to keep children from being hit so hard they'd welt or bruise, the public health authorities convinced parents that Time Out was by far more effective -- go sit in a corner by yourself! The only thing it was more effective at was getting that child out of the walloping range of an emotional parent; the goal. But if the public health authorities told those parents that, they'd keep hitting their kids. Time Out is not actually an effective teaching tool and for parents who aren't inclined to beat children, it's actually a poor choice to make vs taking the teachable moment to teach. So it isn't really A Good Thing as it has been branded. But if it saves even one child from harm, let's spread the good word.

Same with this one. Some children were overlaid by inebriated parents. Saying that children in the bed is A Bad Thing will save the lives of children whose parents are prone to inebriation and would otherwise have bedshared with them. And since it saves even one child from harm, we spread the good word. However, much like the parent who isn't going to beat their child above, there is also the parent who avoids intoxicants.

Yet people like hard and fast rules and like sanctimony. So they'll stan No Kids in the Bed under all circumstances without noting the nuance.

Personally, we follow the Safe Sleep 7, though baby spends more sleeping hours in his own bassinet than in our bed. Yet sometimes, only proximity to parents will do at night and so we make it as safe as possible so we can all get some much needed sleep.

Some of this yes. Some of this no.

Every arm and leg wiggle, every eye blink, every coo and fart and startle.

This is the no. First of all, at this phase the child is a synesthete. The arm and leg wiggles are not communication but stimulus response. Espying the color red may be why the leg wiggled. While delightful to a parent, don't make more of it than it is.

Also, they cannot coo at this stage. You may have confused the social smiling/cooing phase for what the OP is commenting on. The OP is referring to far earlier in development.

The startles are reflexive. The Morrow reflex. It is also not communication. It is just an instinct hardwired in to a primate brain to prevent newborn death by putting the primate newborn in a position to grab on to an adult's body fur and thus prevent falling to their death.

I find this phase personally delightful because you get to see the human BIOS on which their person operating system is shortly to be installed, but it is absolutely okay for people not to, just like some computer enthusiasts love a BIOS and others don't. So long as one isn't neglectful, it is okay to not be enthralled.