Did toddlers actually sleep better in the '90s – or were we less obsessed?

It’s 5 a.m. and I hear crying through the monitor. My son is standing up in the crib, fully energized, ready to start his day like a tiny CEO with a packed schedule.

Immediately, my brain starts spiralling.

“Oh no, he was overtired. That’s why he woke up early. We were 17 minutes past bedtime. Seventeen!” I thought to myself.

At some point during early parenthood, after months of sleep deprivation that made me feel legally unfit to operate a toaster, I hired a sleep consultant. And honestly? Some of the advice helped. But it also unlocked a new level of obsession I didn’t know I was capable of.

I started tracking wake windows like I was coordinating air traffic control. Did he eat enough? Was the room too bright? Too dark? Did I accidentally create a “sleep association” because I hummed one extra verse of Twinkle Twinkle?

I became deeply invested in phrases like “eat, play, sleep” and “independent sleep skills.” My Instagram feed turned into a nonstop stream of babies peacefully sleeping 12 hours while mine woke up screaming like he had urgent thoughts to share.

And the thing is, the internet always makes it sound fixable. If your child isn’t sleeping, it must be because you’re doing something wrong. Too much soothing. Too little soothing. Too early bedtime. Too late bedtime. Undertired. Overtired. Somehow both at once.

Then teething would hit. Or a cold. Or a regression. Or a leap. Or Mercury in retrograde. Suddenly we were back to square one, and I’d panic that I had created irreversible bad habits because I rocked him for six minutes.

Meanwhile, I was surviving on caffeine, leftover Halloween chocolate, and doomscrolling. It felt like dark days.

Then a few years later came my second child, and honestly, she completely dismantled the illusion that sleep could be fully optimized if I just followed the right system hard enough. Sometimes we were successful but it often felt like a vicious cycle of tracking, tweaking, troubleshooting and starting over. Eventually, I realized it was a cycle I simply didn't want to be part of anymore, which made me wonder: did babies actually sleep better in the ’90s, or were parents simply less consumed by sleep?

Back then, there were no apps generating sleep scores. No TikToks warning you that your baby was awake 11 minutes too long. No monitors tracking room temperature, breathing patterns, and your own emotional stability in real time.

There also seemed to be less pressure to achieve the mythical “7 p.m. to 7 a.m.” schedule that Millennial parents obsess over.

Maybe parents in the ’90s just accepted that babies are, at times, chaotic little humans. Some nights they slept. Other nights they didn’t. Maybe people complained to their friends instead of searching “8-month-old split nights HELP” at 3:12 a.m. Or maybe parents in the '90s just took Bobby McFerrin's catchy lyrics to heart and told themselves, "Don't worry, be happy."

To be fair, today’s parents also have access to genuinely useful information. We know more about safe sleep. Babies in the ‘90s slept with cribs full of sheets, stuffed animals and crib bumpers. Today, we have tools that can help exhausted families. There’s comfort in feeling supported when you’re deep in the fog.

But sometimes I wonder if all the optimization has made it harder to simply ride out the unpredictability of it all. The truth is, some weeks are amazing. Other weeks feel like sleep has permanently left your home and taken your sanity with it. And maybe that’s normal.

What I do know now is that none of it lasts forever. One day, these same children who treated 5 a.m. like a reasonable start time will be teenagers I can’t drag out of bed before noon. In the meantime, I’ve made peace with the fact that sleep and I have gone our separate ways. But I’m confident we’ll find our way back to each other eventually.