Helper doing the Night Shift / sleeps with toddler?

T

tenten

Registered User
In the last 3 weeks, my almost 9mth old has been acting up a lot during bedtime and naptimes - refuses to lie down in her crib, pulls up immediately and starts shouting for attention after a bit. She has also been waking up in the middle of the night, sometimes for 2-3 hours and refuses to go back to sleep. I find myself sleeping in her room, on a spare bed most nights. Needless to say, am exhausted by all this.
Question - does anyone have a helper that does the night shift or sleeps with the baby? I'd like to broach this with my helper but don't think she will like it. To be fair, she has a fair bit to do in the day. It she were to do the night duty, I'd prob need to hire a part time helper to pitch in in the day. Anyone in a similar situation?
Does anyone know a good part-time helper?
And yes Carang, I know hiring a part-time helper is illegal :)
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I have never asked my helper to do "night shift". Personally, I just feel that it is my responsibility. I would rather have my helper watch the kids first thing in the morning so that I can sleep in, or during the day so I could have a nap. That said, I know MANY people who have their helpers do the "night shift" - and I think that IF you can work it out so that the helper gets enough time off during the day, it could work... I think that if you overwork your helper though, it could lead to other problems or sour the relationship between you so it's in your own best interest to treat her good :)

I have a baby a similar age and what I do is if/when she is like that, I co-sleep so she will wriggle around our bed but we can at least rest while she does so. I think that by getting up or turning the lights on or interacting with her or feeding her, we'd be giving her REASON to wake up. So instead we just keep her with us in our bed and she's happy enough and falls back to sleep by herself eventually. It's not a major issue - although it does still happen. I think it's just a phase they go through at that age. My older daughter started it at 7 months but she'd go back to sleep easier than my 2nd...
 
Agree with you Nicolejoy - I feel my daughter is my responsibility so am the main caregiver. My helper is rarely tasked with baby duty although she is great with my daughter.
The reason I say she's unlikely to like the sleeping with daughter idea is because she does not like to work with another helper, and that is prob what will have to happen if I need her to do the night shift. Very aware that it will be too much to expect a helper to do household work in the day and the night shift after.
Very early on, my helper told us that she'd prefer not to be in 2 helper households ( too much drama she says). She works very well with us so am happy to respect her wishes. Just that I'm missing my sleep and would love to get back to my room!
And co-sleeping...she's never slept in our room so am not willing to start that - petrified she will never leave after!
I guess a lot of households have helpers sharing the children's room from lack of space, no? Wonder how that works....
Anyone with this set-up at home? Does your helper take her rest in the day then?
 
tenten - about co-sleeping, what we do is that our girls MUST go to bed in their own beds, even if it takes us 3 hours to get them to sleep there (and on the worst nights, it has). But if they wake in the middle of the night, we find it easier to just sleep with them rather than to go through all the effort of putting them back in their own beds. I feel like we get the best of both worlds!! Our 2.5 year old ends up in our bed around 3am maybe once or twice a week, and often she crawls in without us noticing her until morning. Our 11 month old is a better sleeper throughout the night and only wakes at night maybe once every two weeks. It works for us - and both our girls are great independent sleepers who just enjoy a bit of a cuddle in the middle of the night every now and then - and we actually enjoy it too :) Anyway - that's way off topic, sorry!!
 
I'm with the posters above, we always did the night shifts mostly because we felt that we should be doing it as parents and also because she needed to look after them during the day when we were both at work. We wanted to make sure she was well rested to take care of them when we weren't there.

Maybe you could nap during the day and have your helper take over (with or without a part timer out (if needed))?
 
My helper does sleep with my baby and gives him one feed at night. Actually, I was determined for this not to happen as I felt my helper needed a good night's sleep to care for my baby in the day when I was at work. So when I went back to work, I soldiered on with the baby sleeping in our room and waking for his feed, even though it meant not getting a good night sleep because everytime my baby stirred I'd be up checking on him. After two weeks of this, my helper came to me and offered to have the baby in her room. She said she wouldn't wake up with his little noises and could rest in the day when my baby napped if need be and that she was used to waking up at 4 am in the Philippines. I was so zombied out I decided to try it for a week... after the week, I asked my helper if she was okay, feeling tired etc, and she said she was fine. I encourage her to take a nap in the day but I know she doesn't because she has told me she is incapable of napping in the day. She is also incapable of sleeping longer than 6 am, even on Saturdays when I would encourage her to sleep till at least 7. However, my baby takes a good 2-3 hour nap in the afternoon and although she doesn't nap, my helper sort of chills out then, watching TV etc. Recently, when my husband asked her if she found the work too tiring she said no and added that her previous employer never let her sit for a minute, so maybe that's why she's ok with this. She is also very patient and fond of my son so that helps.

Not sure if I would have broached the topic if she hadn't volunteered. However, if it was getting too tiring for me I might have asked if we could do alternate nights and discuss extra pay for that service. I am not too sure of this, but I think the contract we signed with the helper (standard one from immigration?) mentioned "midnight feed" and when we signed my helper we discussed with her whether she was ok with helping at night, and she said 'yes, yes, midnight feed I know'. However, since my son tends to wake at 2 am and not midnight, not sure if that counts as midnight feed or not.
 
I second trying for sleeping training at this stage. Once your child becomes used to the night wakings and the attention, it becomes a cycle - one you must eventually break with sleep training regardless. You might lean on your helper, however, to help with the sleep training, as that alone is tiring - involves going into the room and comforting in increasingly longer sessions. Sleep training is also related to what happens during the day, so your helper will need to be on board with naps, bedtime routine, etc.

Also, I don't think a part-time helper is illegal, I think it's a part-time foreign domestic helper that is illegal? You can hire locals via a government program for part-time cleaning and child-minding. I think it is HK$50-70 an hour.
 
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Thanks everyone for the suggestions and comments. I hear you on the sleep training - for what it's worth, my daughter was a perfect Gina Ford baby up till abt a mth ago. Slept on schedule, by herself in her cot, slept throu the night...knew it was too good to be true!
I chalk it down to teething, her starting to cruise and also just generally being an older, more aware and social little one. I know I shouldn't be in her room, picking her up at night etc but she is just so darn loud and insistent - abs does not back down. And we're due for a long summer trip to the US soon so am wary that any sleep training done now will just be unwound in a few weeks. Sigh....crossing fingers it's a phase and that she'll snap out of it before the bad habits
get truly ingrained.
Btw, it was 220-520am this morning - exhausting!!
 
It sucks, but I guess it's part of parenthood. My parents seem to have made it through with full time work and no helpers...I guess they were lucky to have my grandparents help with childcare. I feel fortunate here that I can even have a helper live in. I couldn't imagine her having to get up in the night and do a full day's work in the daytime too. It's up to you and your helper though.
 
I can't comment on Gina Ford, as we followed Healthy Sleep Habits Happy Child. What I would try if I were you to put your child down earlier. You're saying a lot is happening in her life with regards to development, but does she get sufficient sleep? My children at that age were going to bed at 6 pm. I would move back and forth depending on their behaviour and sleep pattern, but with early bed times I never had problems waking up during the night at a later age. Overtired children have more trouble falling and staying asleep, and I couldn't agree more.

With regards to working double shifts, I agree with the others, you just got to get through this (possibly the hard way) and catch some sleep during the day if needed but I wouldn't ask my helper for night shifts AND working during the day. If we're having trouble doing that, how can we expect them to do it?
 
I would do the pick-up/put-down method to get her back on the sleeping schedule. (That comes from Secrets of the Baby Whisperer which I really enjoyed and which helped me a lot when my older child was a baby. I've never read Gina Ford so I have no comment on it.) I think if you indulge it too much (the night-time waking) it will solidfy this temporary shift in the sleep schedule and could set you up for a longer battle.

My infant daughter is a solid sleeper once she goes to sleep. We don't have my helper do "night duty" but we have come up with a plan of "shift-work" on nights when we need more sleep and the baby is going to bed later. We take the baby for a shift and then the baby goes to the helper's room for a shift. The shifts are about 90 minutes each. It has worked for us but also once my daughter really falls asleep, she's really asleep for the night...usually that's around at the latest midnight.

Nowadays, in our household we're all a bit worn out and exhausted and she just accepts it along with the rest of us that this is how things will be while the baby is young but we're carrying our share of the load--it's a cooperative arrangement. This is because of our full-time work. If we had the option to stay home and nap in the afternoon or sleep in to make up for a poor night of rest we likely wouldn't have the helper working late at all.

And I second what another poster wrote about being able to hire local help which is NOT ILLEGAL and the going rate is about $50 HKD/hour if you find that you really need it. I had a local helper (I'm not Chinese, though) when my firstborn was little and I had back problems...she was one of the best helpers I've encountered actually--she came at 10 am and left at 5 pm. It was a huge help.
 
thank you..... i have never said that part-timers are illegal. i've said it is illegal to hire FDHs as part-time.

for your question, though, i always went with the "whatever works" mentality. at one point when #2 came along and #1 started to wake again, i asked hubby and helper to alternate with me as much as possible so that none of us ever had to do it "all the time". this worked to a certain extent, except that i was breastfeeding, so i always had to do that... but the other two would alternate with the changing, comforting of the older one and also the nappy changing of hte younger one, so that ALL i had to do was breastfeed.

it only lasted a couple of weeks, so i was ok with it.
 
Tenten -- Just a question. Are you working? Or a FT mom?
If you're FT mom, can't your helper do night duty, and you do day duty, or vice versa? Not to sound unsympathetic, but there are many FT moms in the West with no live-in help, and they find a way to juggle -- though it is very hard.

Thanka is right. You can get legal PT help -- and this arrangement might be less threatening to your FT.
If it's just a matter of several more hours of housework done during the day, while your helper takes a break after night shifts, consider something like Merry Maids.
I used them before -- when my PT was on vacation, my FT hadn't arrived yet, I was working and I was going through a tough period of pregnancy.
I didn't think they were great, but it was worth it to spend a couple hundred HKD for someone to come in and clean my house for a few hours.
 
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