The Only Thing I Love More Than The Snoo Is Snoo Reddit

This is only my second rodeo, but, best I can tell, parenting in the first year of a child’s life is a succession of preoccupations that are as all-consuming as they are fleeting. Latch, supply, weight gain, suspected intolerance (?)4, wake windows, back-to-stomach rolling, sleep regression, solids. It’s hard to overstate how important these things feel, or how briefly they feel important. A friend who gave birth just six months earlier is no help. She is in the throes of a subsequent fixation. You bore her.

“None of you remember what you did,” one friend said when it was time to sleep-train her infant. She was right. At the time, I had a toddler, and the newborn days were an intense dream that I had woken up from. The feelings lingered, but the details were long gone.

Now that I am back in newborn land — sleep-deprived and desperate for shoptalk amid the brain-breaking tedium — I can see that Reddit is the friend I need. Reddit was with me in my Bravo and NFL phases, and my skin care, knitting, and gardening eras, and it was a comfort during my first pregnancy, at the lonely height of the pandemic. The social network’s quirky video game sensibility might make me cringe, but each time I find myself there I am reminded that there is no better place on the internet for indulging in short-term obsessions. On Reddit, you do not have to make your petty concerns interesting or funny. You do not need to downplay your victories. Your freak, as they say, is matched.

I aspire to approach many aspects of baby care more intuitively as a second-time parent. But not sleep. Sleep is the container into which I have chosen to pour all of my anxiety, because it is everything to me. I begin looking forward to my own bedtime around 3 p.m. My toddler is a good sleeper. “Sleep is a pillar of our family’s culture,” I started telling my newborn when he was still in utero.

The newborn has yet to assimilate, and I have begun lurking on r/SnooLife. It is not the only baby sleep subreddit out there. For those who need sleep training courage, there is r/SleepTrain. For those who need permission not to sleep train, there is r/Cosleeping. But those who want to micromanage their child’s sleep down to the minute — and have about $160 per month to spend on the hobby — are at a high risk of acquiring a Snoo, the auto-rocking bassinet with a built-in white noise machine.

“Sleep is a pillar of our family’s culture,” I started telling my newborn when he was still in utero.

The Snoo did an incredible job training me to trust that my baby will live even if I don’t rush to him at the first sound of his dissatisfaction. Invaluable stuff. But the robot bassinet leaves plenty of variables in the sleep equation for me to tinker with. There are responsiveness settings to consider, and countless modifications for the Snoo-brand sleep sack. Zip first or clip first? The effects of these permutations are reflected in the nightly log, a horseshoe graphic that shows how much time your baby spent sleeping (blue) and being soothed (red). Unless, of course, the baby slept/did not sleep for reasons that have nothing to do with the Snoo: illness, vaccination, growth spurt, the human condition.

Maddening! And dull. Unless you are in it too, in which case sleep is a high-stakes game you play nightly. I can, and do, spend all day mulling strategic questions like, “Should we swaddle the baby with his arms in or his arms out tonight?”

My husband thinks the baby prefers his arms free. The baby naps with his arms up, he points out. He believes the baby appreciates the cooling effects of having one’s extremities uncovered at bedtime.

But I believe the swaddle is a “protect me from what I want” situation. I think the baby deserves to know the narcotic power of a weighted blanket. Convinced, after a pleasant struggle, that he doesn’t have to think about his arms at all.

When I took the question to Snoo Reddit, I found dozens of threads on the topic, going back years, written by parents who share my exact sliver of life, and responded to by people willing to troubleshoot a stranger’s baby’s sleep. I found recommendations for off-brand, arms-up swaddles to pair with Snoo ones. I was invited to consider how the strength of the baby’s startle reflex might impact his sleep. I was persuaded that nobody appreciates the difference between a 3-week-old and a 5-week-old like someone with a 7-week-old.

On Reddit, you do not have to make your petty concerns interesting or funny. You do not need to downplay your victories. Your freak, as they say, is matched.

The best posts recall a wartime diary excerpted from a biography of a general. “Not sure if we can Mimic this result without tight & leg wrapped swaddle by just tightening the snoo chest strap and wail tail but for now the difference is profound,” goes a recent one. “As I am writing this it is 8:43am and he went to sleep at 5am.” My favorite responses honor these feelings, in their psychedelic vividness, without attributing too much agency to their author. Like all the most addictive games, newborn sleep hacking requires a small amount of strategy and a large amount of luck.

Unlike other online communities that form around health and self-quantification, Snoo Lifers will not insist that your infant’s sleep problems are caused by insufficient commitment to Snoo Life. Nobody has time to become an extremist about infant sleep; the bassinet only fits babies under 6 months and, besides, we’re too tired. Snoo Lifers will admit that one of their kids never warmed up to the Snoo, or confess that they think they would have had an easy sleeper either way. We in the community like to say, “the Snoo is a robot, our babies are not.”

Maybe that’s why Snoo Reddit has such a high tolerance for bragging. Parents love to share before-and-after screenshots — the red-hashed, chaotic sleep of the cluster-feeding days, followed by the serene, uninterrupted blue horseshoe of a sleep-trained 5-month-old. Right now, I would pay hundreds of dollars for one such night. Yet these posts fail to trigger me. I recognize the impulse from other corners of Reddit, where you can find posts from amateurs who have just blind-baked a bubble-free pie crust, or power-washed their house to a new, less gray color, or grown their first, sad little tomato. Visual evidence of progress is so powerfully satisfying that we can’t help but try to capture it.

And, as I keep reminding myself, in the case of newborn sleep, progress is inevitable. Despite the time-bending repetition, and the recursive milestones, children learn to sleep. I may win a few hours on the margins, that will have been worth it to me. But, in six months, I won’t remember whether we swaddled arms in or out. From my sleep-deprived present to the internet strangers who have already passed through it, all I can think to say is, here, have my upvote.