Desperate, sleep-deprived parents will try almost anything. But it’s normal for babies to be waking multiple times overnight for the first year

Due to a chaotic toddler, it has been many months since my partner and I have had more than two consecutive nights of solid sleep. Given research that suggests just two nights of broken sleep are enough to make people feel years older, we are positively decrepit.

New parents face up to six years of sleep deprivation – a depressing statistic to consider when your infant has woken up for the millionth time overnight. No wonder we look, as Chappell Roan has put it, like we don’t have light in our eyes. Bone-tired parents can get desperate enough to try anything: $2,000 app-controlled self-rocking bassinets, sleep courses sold by influencers with questionable credentials – even, as a disconcerting number of TikToks suggest, spoon-feeding babies chunks of butter.

Donna Lu is an assistant news editor at Guardian Australia and the sleep-deprived mother of a one-year-old

Antiviral is a fortnightly column that interrogates the evidence behind the health headlines and factchecks popular wellness claims