What does that even mean?
Apparently it means slightly different things to different people. I work in the software world, and as a programmer I would sum it up as something like this:
A deterministic system is one where given the same set of inputs, the outputs will be the same.
– Me
A non-deterministic system, then, is one where you get a different result, even if you feed in the exact same inputs. I.e. The output is has some randomness.
What does that have to do with babies?
Pre-fatherhood I had kind of thought that settling a baby was just a matter of technique, that you would know what your baby likes or needs to get to sleep, and you just apply that method and your baby would sleep. Easy.
How wrong I was.
I was describing this revelation to my colleague by explaining the difficulty in settling. It went something along the lines of this:
You have a crying/screaming 3 month old blob that you are trying to settle to sleep. You have a bit of a list of things to try to settle the baby, starting with the essentials:
- Clean nappy?
- Eaten?
- Burped?
- Hot/cold?
We’ll assume they’re all taken care of.
Still crying. So I’d start to think, “for the past few days my daughter has liked when I held her like this and swayed like that”. Hmmm, not working today, strange. Last week I held her like this and just bopped up and down gently, worked like a charm, give that a try. Not working either. What if I lie her in the pram and gently rock it? Worked a few days ago – why not today?
I found myself looping through a bunch of things that worked in the past, but none of them work anymore!
So I go back up to the the top and try the first method yet again. And what do you know, it works instantly! Asleep!
After explaining this, my colleague just looked at me and said:
Ah ok, so babies are non-deterministic…I guess that makes sense.
– Louis
And for some reason it resonated with me.
Sure it seems like your baby really likes one thing, and for a couple of days maybe they do. But in reality, what they want is mostly random. You just keep feeding in different inputs until the random number generator in your baby’s brain decides that sleep is the correct output for the current input you’re giving it.
This realisation saved me a lot of frustration, or maybe just let me set reasonable expectations. Don’t expect that any settling technique will work, some days they will, some days they won’t, just hope that today is one of the good ones!